Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The Takeover Took Place A While Ago

Now it's a question of whether they can lock it down or not.

And by they, I certainly do not mean any one fruitfully profitable company... Well... Not necessarily anyway.

What I mean is by augmented reality taking over; and in this case, unfortunately, it is a commercialized takeover, running the infosphere, and all of the channels getting amped up, by various ways of amping. And in this, equally unfortunately, is the great possibility that it will be fantasy, wielded at the behest of profit, that will drive the direction, and thus lack of balance, this takeover will proceed along. We've already been seeing some of the crazy that creates. And still they want to create more.

And they wonder why it cannot hold.

Augmented Reality Apps Will Change the Way You Use Your Phone








Sunday, August 27, 2017

Thinking And Feeling With Only Money Involved...

...Will Not Make Surviving Severe Weather Very Likely.

You know how this goes, because in that frame of reference the main things the folks who make our nation's biggest choices worry about is "whose bank account will it come from. How will this set back our profit picture this quarter, and how is this going to make things worse in Washington, because gods know, we're pissing money there like the humans were pissing lead in defense of Zion, and things are only getting worse."

Ordinarily, of course, everyday folks would be thinking of things like getting to people in immediate need. Moving those still in harm's way to safer ground. Tending to those already found, and moved; making sure they have not only what they need materially, but also, just by responding as a community, giving them what they need in the first steps of reassurance, and a sense of hope.

And then there would be the natural call to organize and figure out what to start fixing first. What to provide for short term shelter and support for the many who will undoubtedly be homeless. There would be further organizational efforts to find the necessary supply stocks, secure transportation for same, and then figure out how to start getting it in without that effort tripping all over itself, or allowing the logistics to trip up in process, direct action, response efforts.

If you step back and consider this for a while you begin to see how the money response, and the other response described below it, have their own, unique, application of the meaning spaces of Cosmolosophy. In my opinion, one is healthy, and should be continued, and one is not.

It is my belief, and you do have to recognize here that I am biased, but it is my belief that my plan to take us in a new direction would allow us to respond as I described for what ordinary folks would do. It's up to you to see if it makes the kind of balance of sense that Cosmolosophy tries to describe. I of course think it does but that's a dedicated dreamer talking. Just sayin.

Make no mistake, though. The choice is yours, if you are willing to organize to take it. And also in this, remember as well that not choosing is a choice as too, distinguished only by the lack of involvement it suggests.

Capitalism is broke. You cannot fix it. You must do something different. Time is not on our side.



See Also: 

Harvey Threatens to Tip Houston’s Working Poor Into Destitution





[Post Note: Ok. This time I'm not including a link on purpose. Don't think I need it here. The other times, of course, have been me just being the too focused on what I'm thinking, and feeling, to remember minor little details... Like the convenient links that might actually let you see what I want you to link to. Sorry about that guys. Will try to do better]

Friday, August 25, 2017

This Is Why Severe Weather And Economic Instability Go Hand in Hand.

This is also why Capitalism is not equipped to deal with a new reality of severe weather; because it's not just unstable markets (as in skill prices made even more problematic, among other commodities as depicted in the linked article below) that matter, but that someone has to pay someone else to do anything about either dealing with it beforehand, or after; and no one, it seems, in Capitalism, wants to pay for anything that might benefit another, at least in the kinds of sums we're talking about here.

Eddie Seal / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
Gas Prices Rise as Hurricane Harvey Catches Oil Companies by Surprise


See Also:
First Water, Then Red Ink: The Cost of Recovery When Most Are Uninsured

Harvey Hitting Motorists in the Pocketbook






Sunday, August 20, 2017

What Is A Journalist But A thoughtful Interpreter Of Events

In a way, obviously, as responsible citizens, we should all be such individuals. We should all try to be thoughtful interpreters of events because we are supposedly in possession of the power of the vote of the majority. Not so easy, though, when you already have a day job (that wants to cut you away from all of this outside stuff and focus on some, usually meaningless in the grand scheme of things, process to make somebody else a lot of profit), of course, and are pulled in a dozen directions at once every day to meet the responsibilities of that job, in addition to whatever things you still do to have a life, and still find time to catch up on events; and the real miracle, of course, is that many millions of us try to do just that, as much as we can in our spare time. Which is, naturally, why we have journalists around to help out; just like we keep other specialists around to help do not only what we will never have the time to do, but also do what we are not nearly so deeply trained to do; however that training was obtained.

The problem here, though, is that trying to keep tabs on things these days is fundamentally unique as a task area in commercial life now, which is, unfortunately, most of daily life for most Americans. And that uniqueness stems from the fact that "what's going on" is part of the total immersion environment that is the electric age of experience retrieval. And this is so because the many means to spread this saturation out are becoming actual parts of what we wear, what we carry every day, in every interaction we have, and what surround us in more and more of the places where we do the actual interacting. We might eventually even incorporate translative interface tech directly into our bodies so that a great deal of what we know will be via digitizations (by various means) of the things our biological sensors have been responsible for in the past (which may well put a hard to foresee strain on the current trifecta of meaning spaces we have now -- Physical meaning space. Mind meaning space. And body meaning space); perhaps even creating an altogether new meaning space all its own; a name for which I hope does not include the word "virtual;" and for reasons for which I honestly cannot, as yet, articulate properly enough). And the big part of the reason for this is so that this mammoth, commercial enterprise monster, we call an economy, can continue to sell to the same level that it is able to produce.

Another unique aspect of what these people face is the fact that what they are trying to get at, as well as what they are then trying to transmit, which we typically call information, is also, unfortunately, indistinguishable from money; because money and information are literally, and figuratively, the same thing (the result of the electrification of Capitalism). As such such, somebody, just as with the rest of us, has to be making a profit from their specialized task in delivering said, thoughtfully collected, and interpreted, new thing that might actually be critical to be aware of, information. And that means these people have to work a nearly impossible balancing act of trying to make, that thing that might actually be critical to know, be both true to its needed intent, but also be true, to whatever degree possible, to being a sellable commodity. No profit no message after all.

Then there's the other thing.

Yes, unfortunately, there is another thing.

More and more of what we are being made aware of is, in and of itself, making us crazy. And for numerous reasons.

1. There are complex problems that new events constantly remind us of, but for which, it now seems, a regular pattern of "nobody has any solutions for" has emerged; at least for which our established "deciders" can agree upon as pertains to who is going to pay for it.

2. Great need around the planet accelerates almost daily it seems. So much chaos exists in so many places that desperation forces civilians to risk even more peril as refugees, collecting here and there, and nobody knowing what to do with them, as the deprivation, and starvation continue to worsen.

3. So many belief systems, whose particulars in attitudes, behavioral norms, and perhaps even overall cultural/structural makeup, are offensive, in a wide variety of ways. So offensive, in fact, that many combinations automatically form where one sees the other as completely intolerable; so much so even to place violence against other belief groups into a part of their belief systems, at various times. And because we have the event collection, and dissemination systems we have; some of which have no qualms whatsoever as to how, high fidelity graphic, they may resort to in accomplishing that delivery; because of that we have this massive new matrix, of things we thus have a figurative sense of; of everything that might be offensive from others, seeming to be pushed into our faces; having, continuing the metaphor, our noses rubbed in the awful parts of frames of seeing things that obviously make no sense to us.

And that's just the first part of the "other thing."

The second part of the "other thing" is why those three items I just listed impact us so devastatingly. And that reason is that our new operating environment necessitates a very different kind of sense strategy for a sentient meaning processor. And this is, of course, where the theories of Marshall McLuhan come in.

He talked a lot about the differences between old oral cultures, and then the typographic, literary cultures that followed. The ways they literally saw and conceived of the world differently. Now, unfortunately, we have all types of possible sensibilities at play at the same time. Now you can be either in an extreme alignment with one or the other, or you can try to work a synthesis of several at the same time. As such, not surprisingly, I tried, originally, to create Cosmolosophy as a synthesis of Mind meaning space, and what I now think of as Body Meaning space, because that's where most of the feeling side of things comes from. That this also includes physical meaning space as well, was in the meaning system of Cosmolosophy by default, naturally, because this has been the point of whole endeavor; namely that this has been an exercise in understanding not only our place, but my place, in particular, in existence. Having a chance to articulate this in greater detail, though, is an integral part of how I understand more of what it is I'm feeling; giving me, then, even more opportunity to articulate in even more detail yet (and of course more things to feel).

In any case, though, the bottom line here is that the sensory strategy of the time when Capitalism was formed is not the one we have now. And one of the main upshots of this new sensory conglomeration is that it demands both deep connection, as well as deep texture to the meaning systems that would make deep connection a positive thing both in practical, and physical space terms, but also in the meaning spaces of the body; which, in my humble opinion, is where most of spirituality lies.

This means folks, whether you realize it or not, that those three problems I listed are going to affect you at the deepest levels precisely because you want to be connected into a meaningful way to respond to them. Because that's human nature now. That's the very nature that makes us appreciate nature in the first place. Also the human nature that wants real community, where everyone feels that they have a meaningful role to play in being a part of it. All of which, I hasten to point out, staying with Capitalism will not provide us with.

So the bottom line here might be that our journalists are the canaries in a very importing form of mining operation. A mining operation that, we as citizens should be more aware of, and directly involved in. And the thing we need to ask ourselves is this: If these tweeties stop tweeting; stop baring witness to the things that must be born witness to, and are getting burned out in the process, what is one to expect to happen to the rest of us? Nothing very good I can assure you.

Being a Journalist is Terrible for Your Mental Health










Friday, August 18, 2017

If Concentration Of Media Ownership Reaches Critical Mass...

...Do you seriously believe you would ever hear the full truth of it?

Do you seriously  believe that you would ever hear much of anything of the whole truth again in what's going on around you?

Think about it. If one group could stay on message by having majority control over most of the  means to deliver message, do you think they wouldn't use it? Seriously?

This is Sinclair, 'the most dangerous US company you've never heard of'







Thursday, August 17, 2017

Another Mainstay In The Fabric Of Community Life Is Pulled Apart

Simply because a skill can't be compensated the way it used to be. And it really doesn't matter how "objectively" necessary the particular skill in question is, or of how much training had to go into attaining it. The mere fact that it was part of the community; that it allowed significant segments of that community feel like they had meaningful purpose in regards to the ability of things in general to continue, that was the truly important part. And if a community had pride in itself; how it looked, how it presented itself to the rest of the world, it wouldn't matter if it was just sweeping streets, washing dishes, or cleaning public toilets, every job would have value and respect; precisely because of the pride and the sense of everybody working together as a team.

From my perspective this needs adjustment only in the sense that nobody should be forced to stay stuck in any one of the more difficult, or untasteful, types of "chores" that a community needs to get done on a daily basis. That we all should share at least some the hard part of doing daily life, even as we might want to gravitate to the, perhaps, more interesting tasks that have the higher profiles, and garner the most attention, because of various aspects of what they are, and what they deal with.

And further, that, as an ongoing commitment, the community just naturally accepts the ever present task of making everyone generally more capable; so that learning gets seamlessly integrated into daily life as well, and not just the sitting away for a while, in some learning factory, trying to absorb new sets of skill facts for a skill you'll probably unlearn only a few short quarters later anyway; abandoned because somebody else was made desperate enough, some place else, to do it a great deal more cheaply than the people in our community can and still have a living wage in the bargain.

The bottom line then is that there just has to be a better way to preserve community. A way that allows us to define work as simply our mix of "it takes an entire village." I think I have found it. And whether it actually is, or not, hardly matters. It is, at the very least, a place to start the discussion.


End of the checkout line: the looming crisis for American cashiers

Donald Trump is fixated on a vision of masculine, blue-collar employment. But the retail sector has long had a far greater impact on American employment – and checkout-line technology is putting it at risk




And If We Were All Involved In Running Our Own Communites...

...In the same sense of "it takes a whole village" to do a lot of important things (at least in terms of human need), maybe we'd have more structured opportunities to understand just how important compassion can be; for both the individual, and the greater community.

Just a thought.


ANIMAL COLLECTIVE


Why humpback whales rescue seals and why volunteering for beach cleanups improves your health.






He's An Idiot If He Thinks Declaring Economic War With China Is Going To Accomplishing Anything...

...Other than create more fault lines of crisis, dispute, and ramped up probabilities for the start of hostilities no one may be able to stuff back in that big bad box of "it's too late now."

One cannot help but wonder if, not being so ignorant of media studies, as they pertain to social development, and developing forms of economies (from people McLuhan, Innis, Boorstein etc), he might have a better sense of just how profound a change it can be when you start, say, with tablets, to keep track of things. Then move to scrolls (selecting arbitrarily here), then to the repeatable type of the printing press. And then to electrons, photons, total quantum states, and perhaps even gravity at some point, to store, retrieve, and utilize information, over both space and time. But these things do have great effect, and he would know that if he took the time to look into it.

The thing is, recognizing that big changes have occurred in how we perceive, and conceptualize things, now would give us the opportunity to not only find a better direction to go in, and a better way to organize ourselves to be in alignment with that direction, but the possibility as well that, as a part of going down that path, having a good portion of the assumptions that put us at odds with others in the first place, simply go away; or at least become a great deal easier to negotiate the, "tolerable for both sides," accommodations to allow us to work together for goals that I think will then become much easier to see as a common good for all parties.

This is, of course, why I'm trying to integrate a number of specific lines technological development; especially as they revolve around the creation of hydrogen as the main, renewable fuel of choice, for the planet, and the much more aggressive development of in-solar-system automation infrastructure. Setting it up at the get go as something that we will work to include every nation, and belief group to be part of; to the best practical degree that human ingenuity, and creativity, can manage, balancing our own needs within this effort, certainly, as we proceed.

It is a new operating environment. With new technology and new kinds of instrumentality. Try to get that through your heads. It absolutely demands a new way of doing things. We don't do this we will simply be indulging ourselves in falling back on old habits. Habits (horribly distorted now that a mutated operating system has had a chance to irradiate them for at least the past five decades) that have already amply demonstrated the fact that they just don't work anymore.

This is the way it is. The only question now is if the majority of you will either face the issue openly, and honestly, or if you will just go on distracting yourselves, ever so entertainingly no doubt, down a very ugly spiral of increasingly chaotic decline.

Steve Bannon Says U.S. in Economic War With China









Friday, August 11, 2017

Market Concentration May Have Provided Cheap For The Time Being Here...

...But everything changes eventually. And "cheap" is a relative term; especially when you usually don't know until years into the full life cycle of a system, what the true costs will end up to be.

And the more you resist holistic thinking the longer the time it can take for that true cost calculation to take place. As in, what good does it do to continually make things cheaper when, as demanded by cold considerations of cost, you either can't pay human workers very much for their labor at all, or you simply don't use them any more in the first place?

Thus, with everything else in life they have to pay for, and for which profit to somebody else is expected, discretionary spending is going to continue to spiral downward, because human skill as competitive commodity can't keep up.

Eventually, one supposes, the only hard copy output as commodity will be as items for the upper middle class, and the rich. The rest of us will be forced to make due with subsidized food concentrates, and VR. Which is, by the way, the basis of the dystopia my one work of fiction depicted in "The Light Of Creation."

In that story a bioelectric matrix, to do digital to nerve pulse translation, was developed that could be grafted to the spinal column, thus making it possible to do true plug in VR, only without having to plug anything in at all; accessed instead merely by laying on a properly configured bed, or reclined chair; and in this case that was limited very specifically to the one, completely free, VR internet that people got to join into, with unparalleled sensory fidelity. "America Net" it was called, and it was maintained, with a wide range of entertainments, and distractions, by one of the surviving corporate dynasties now ruling America. A net completely cut off from what was going on in the rest of the world of course, and how bad things had gotten there now that we were living "Fortress America" physically and informationally.

The point here, long term, being that this kind of concentration is quite unlikely to turn out well for the rest of us. Quite unlikely indeed.

JEFF BEZOS WILL CRUSH YOU


The implosion of the retail economy is a "silent crisis" sending shockwaves through the US economy. The culprit? Amazon.






You Have To Be Very Careful How Much You Allow Dreamers To Manage...

...The enterprises created to make their dreams happen (myself being no exception). This most especially so now in a mutated economic operating system. Also most especially when you try to turn a dreams into a money making commodity at all in the first place. But then that's just another part of why things have gotten as messed up as they have.

My fear here is that his dream filled expectations, and the harsh realities of commodities and markets, are going to collide and leave more than one community high and dry. And the larger problem we face, of course not address in the least


RED TAPE AND SLOW DRILLS


"We have no idea what we're doing" are not words that reassure city planners, let alone the folks elected to represent the people of Hawthorne, California.






Thursday, August 10, 2017

I Dig Digg, And You Should Too


THE RICH KEEP GETTING WAY RICHER


This chart captures the rise in inequality better than any other chart that I’ve seen.

In Capitalism If Money Can Be Made, It Will Be Made

Whether CVS did so here as alleged we will have to wait for a court to decide.

The larger problem a society faces with situations like this is a more fundamental one; especially for Capitalism. The problem you see is that to stay vigilant for such transgressions is also a cost factor. That this usually gets placed on government, who must then try to work that cost through via taxes, puts it into the same area of difficulty all such things have for a government. And of course it places such types of vigilance into easy reach of those who have had great success in depicting taxation as theft no matter if it is for a true public good or not. And they can do this even as they continue to claim that it is not Capitalism that has made efforts at publicly provided health care unsuccessful, but rather government waste.

That government can be wasteful is certainly no shocker, but that fact by itself is not why we do not have affordable health care. The bigger fact, it seems to me, is that there are just too many points of transaction, and interaction, within the vast multi dimensional matrix of transaction flow that is our economy, where profit gouging of one form or another can occur. And the thing is, any particular economic entity that didn't take the opportunity to take advantage of such opportunities, when presented with them, probably wouldn't last very long otherwise in the vast scheme of things; the simple logic being you have to do what you have to do to in order to survive, or what's the point in being in business in the first place? And of course for government to try and be vigilant against this across the boards creates an absurd picture of the armies of investigators, and accountants, and lawyers etc, who would have to be paid to keep them at it.

Just the oppressive flow of information required to feed this interactive beast, let alone the wages require by the direct participants, would represent forms creation processes, filling out processes, preservation processes, and retrieval requirements of staggering proportions. And at every turn, certainly, is another cost source.

This is another way of saying that the bigger problem truly is the system itself. And the fact that this system is now under the influence of the movement of electrons, as opposed to having things be manipulated only in terms of the movement of people. Several hundred years ago, seeing this primarily as the movement of people made perfect sense because other than the manipulation of a limited set of draft animals, fire, and taking what little advantage they could from the movement of water, there wasn't much else available for them to work knowledgeably with. But boy things have certainly changed now, haven't they.

This is the fundamental problem humanity is faced with now. It is a problem based on the fact that certain accumulations of change must be met by completely rethinking how a process is to be accomplished, and what the organizational parameters must now become to do that in the new realities a new situation must necessarily place you in. These are relationships that everybody in business, and government know already. Which of course makes it all the more perplexing why there is so much resistance to see this reality in this larger context.

And unfortunately the many clocks of ticking problems not addressed still wind inexorably down to the point where they will be ignored no longer. All because people seem to perversely enjoy ignoring the obvious, as things get crazier and crazier. That might be precisely because we're so entertainingly distracted these days, or it might simply be one of those quirks of madness sanity will never be able to figure out completely. In any case, though, sanity better wake up soon, or there won't be any sanity left to be woken at all.

CVS Charges More for Generic Drugs Paid for With Insurance, Lawsuit Claims






Wednesday, August 9, 2017

In The Age Of Electrified Facade What Else Would You Expect?

The real worry now is that this way of doing "representational government" will become institutionalized beyond our ability to demand otherwise.

The moral of this story is that a mutated economic operating system is bound to create mutations in the subsystems that operate within it. The question then becoming: What are you going to do about the larger problem then?


TWO LIES AND A TRUTH


President Trump is not the first president to be caught in lies. But the degree to which he has trafficked in falsehoods is raising questions about whether standards for veracity have eroded.





Monday, August 7, 2017

And How Will A Cost Based Economy Factor These New Charges Into A Competitive Pricing Structure?

By the only way open to them of course, get rid of the squishy, weak, and complaint prone wetware and go to properly mechanized software. Perhaps, then, the only make work jobs that might be left to us in the growing "barely habitable" zones will be hauling our own ice, from government distribution points, to the apartments that nobody else can stand to live in.

On the bright side, in all of that heat, is that the rents there will probably finally become affordable.


IF YOU CAN'T TAKE THE HEAT, WHAT'S NEXT?


Workers laboring outdoors in southern states are wrestling with the personal and political consequences of a worsening environment.




Sunday, August 6, 2017

I Also Hesitate On Posting On Jobs Numbers Anymore

The problem here being that, on the one hand it is undeniably true that it is a good thing that more people are gainfully employed. More to the point, though, that people deserve bits of good news to focus on as necessary counterweight to all of the bad news that predominates.

That being said, however, still doesn't change the fact that, not only are so few of those jobs paying anything even near a true living wage, so many other things are crumbling around us even as this one, isolated metric ticks up. Where our children, in fact, in increasing numbers, no longer see the point in living any more, even before they enter the ever more insane world of making your own way.

How do we hold on to the good bits, even as we recognize the continuing deficiencies? Hower we can I guess, because there are no simple, one size fits all answers there.  I guess it boils down to why you still keep going now in general. I keep at it because I still see hope in finding a new shared vision for this nation. As well as my firm belief that, if we can ever regain that shared vision, there isn't anything this nation can't accomplish.

U.S. Added 209,000 Jobs in July, Unemployment Holds at 4.3%







Can You Imagine Being A Kid Now?

When I see reports of health issues like this one (related to addiction, mental illness in general, or any debilitating disease), whether it involves children exclusively, or not, I always hesitate to say anything on an expressive channel that is, bottom line, advocating for something. That this can way too easily stray into uncomfortable realms of overexploitation (think of starving children on TV for a religious charity, or graphic pictures of animals being mistreated for donations to a political organization).

On the one hand, of course, if bad things are going on, we do need to know about it, and in measured doses, we also need to get a visceral sense of the tragedy; whereupon some photo, and video journalism, though heart renderingly stark in the physical reality of the tragedy in question, are needed so that both the rational mind, and the other half beyond rational, get the full, "this we cannot abide" message. And on the other hand the always possible falling to excess.

The tension between competing concerns here gets more complicated, obviously, when you honestly feel that you have discovered connections that lead you to believe these tragic events are related to the problem for which your advocacy is concerned.

One of the things I do now, especially when it involves children, is to take time, in my pause before writing anything, to imagine what it must be like now to be a kid.  Now that they are thrown into life these days in the predominant environment of unstable everything.

Because of that instability, how much of anything can be counted on now in a kid's life, and I mean for the majority of kids.

The really interesting thing here is that fate conspired, decades ago, to make sure that me, and my family, would be really early adopters of "not being able to count on much" as a growing up life style. To this day I don't know much of anything about my mother's parents other than her mother gave them up for adoption, leaving her, and her sisters, to live most of their lives in orphanages. And my father's family was almost completely destroyed by the Great Depression, putting his father in a bottle for decades, and his mother in charge of surviving. As such both my mother and father were two dysfunctional time bombs waiting to meet and create the inevitably dysfunctional family of Donald W., and Gloria, Vale

I mention all of this as prelude because I want to emphasize the fact that I have ample background, as well as a huge imagination, with which to proceed with here.

I hasten to add, however, that it is also, obviously, not just about the lack of stability. And that, also, was predicted early on by none other than John Goodman, and his book "Growing Up Absurd." A book that looked at the question of that day (why are young men resisting the normal socialization process of fitting into the new, post world war two, industrial economy of prosperity), by suggesting that the fault was not in worrying over how this fitting in process should be conducted, but rather to ask if there might be something fundamentally wrong with the life path this "fitting in" would require in the first place; noting along the way that there might, in fact be problems; assuming, of course, that your goal is a well adjusted, self motivated, individual who has been filled both with a broad sense of possibilities, as well as a confidence on their hold of knowledge, tools, and delayed gratification, so as to go forth and try to accomplish some things.

Because the economy was building back up so well at the time, certainly, Mr. Goodman's misgivings were not paid a huge amount of attention to. And there was still, because of that growth, a lot of wiggle room for creative people to grow up and still be creative people.

But now that technology has changed things so much. Now that global competition has become so intense, and speeded up. Now that production has reached such dizzying heights that the encouragement of consumption must be redoubled seemingly every quarter. Things are quite different.

And then there are all of the true costs of things we've been sold on for decades now that we didn't pay for when we purchased a product. All of the life cycle costs, as well as the corners cut up front during the completion of whatever process made the product. All of the things that have made for such a happy planet of late. And because of that, as well as the secondary competitions for dwindling resources, instability goes hand in hand with the building disparities of those who have, and those who do not; disparities that the fundamental principle of scarcity, that supports Capitalism, only severs to exacerbate.

And all of these increased discrepancies are in our faces. Just as the all of the possible abhorrent aspects of every other group of people around the world are now in our faces. Just as the increasing acts of rage thus engendered are in our faces. Just as the increasing acts of, seemingly pointless, self destruction are in our faces. Only there, in that situation, there is in fact a point, which is that these indirect, or direct, suicides are telling us that the people involved simply don't see the point in living anymore. Which is an expression of no meaning in one's life that should be like a lightening strike for a wake up call; a wake up call, at least, for those of us who still care about the heart and soul of a society.

So I ask you. Try to imagine being a kid now. Try to imagine especially being a young girl now. The probabilities are that there will be little parental stability, with either separation being involved as a part of relationship breakup, and/or a de facto separation by fact of underlying economic necessity; be that necessity the requirement of multiple jobs to make ends meet, or that the work itself is so professionly demanding. hardly matters; if you are unable to be there to provide important interactions with a child, the child will try to fill the void as haphazardly, and inappropriately, as you would expect of individuals whose brains aren't fully formed yet.

And then how do we keep them from swimming in the vast ocean now of total, multidimensional, message, that is the info sphere. That ocean where commodity sharks create currents of attraction that can plug one into channels of message whose only sense of inhibition is to do nothing to benefit the receiver.

Try to imagine being that little girl swimming in that ocean. Try to imagine keeping a good sense then of what a girl is, let alone what healthy body image is. Try to imagine how you would go about finding something of meaning that you could hang your behavioral hat on. Something that didn't involve selling yourself, in an almost infinite numbers of ways, that didn't make it all so confusing as to what gender was for in the first place, other than, perhaps only as means to power, and self gratification. And please don't hesitate to do the same imagining exercise for little boys as well.

Try to imagine that now and see if young suicides don't take on a disturbing connection to the way things are now. Other things are involved as well, certainly, but the way things are has to be quite prominent among them. That is my honest opinion.

What do you think?

Suicides in Teen Girls Hit 40-Year High






Saturday, August 5, 2017

It Is Extremely Complicated If You Think You Can Operate A Big Chunk Of Socialism...

...Inside of a Capitalistic economic operating system. So complicated in fact that you risk making things generally much worse over all. Most especially so now because we not only have an economic operating system mutated by the introduction of electrified experience retrieval, but also because it now winds along, in its chaotically accelerating manner, with the weight of at least one hundred years of laws, and regulations, and procedures, implemented to reform it from the viewpoint of a range of interpretive idea systems. As such, changes now, no matter the idea source, risk unintended side effects that are impossible to anticipate. Which is why even the best of very complex pieces of software have to be abandoned eventually.

The point here being that, eventually, you have to accept the fact that things have changed so much that it's time to start over. And by start over I mean time to both reassess not only the solution to addressing your requirements, but to also freshly assess what those requirements actually ought to be now, in that new environment. And the greater the change in the environment you operate in, from when the original system was first conceived, to now, then the more fundamentally important both sides of your reassessment must be.

Is this not obvious? Is this so hard to grasp?

I can tell you honestly, from someone who was involved deeply in the business of software development, as well as the mind set of systems overview, and analytical description, for more than twenty years, it sure doesn't seem so to me.


THIS SHIT IS COMPLICATED


The health-care debate is moving to the left. But if progressives don't start sweating the details, we're going to fail yet again.