If you’ve never seen Legend of the Seeker before, a bit of backstory… Kahlan is a “confessor” which allows her to magically cause others to fall in love with her to the point of enslavement. In the course of her questing with Richard, they’ve developed a passionate romance, which remains unconsummated because the emotional intensity of lovemaking would surely cause Kaylan to lose control and accidentally steal Richard’s soul.
I really identify with him at that point about halfway though where you can hear the frustration in his voice at the disparity between the world he knows to exist and the way things are run.
According to the International Labour Office – Global Unemployment Trends May 2009 Update, unemployment has risen to an all-time high. But as we will discuss during this Webinar, there’s still hope for employment in Europe.
Key takeaways of this Webinar include:
Where are (still) opportunities and where are new opportunities emerging
Which countries in Europe offer the best chance
How best to make use of the available opportunities
What do you think would happen if someone created a site where users post videos like this one:
My name is blah blah. I live in blah and I think its time for a change in the the war on drugs.
Then they can bitch for a bit about their personal reasons why putting American citizens in jail for their benign hobbies is a crock of shit and they close with:
When some number of people post a pledge to some site, I will procure and grow a marijuana plant on my private property in a place inaccessible to children.
If anyone taking this pledge is is arrested for acting reasonably in their own home, I will go to the prison where they are being held, confess my crime and sit in front of the gate until I am imprisoned with them.
When someone adds their video, they put in the number they said and whenever there’s that number of pledges, they get an e-mail giving them the go ahead. There could also be a way for them to let their friends notify the other protestors in case the cops drag them away in the middle of the night.
For me, the number was 3000 people. How would the images of thousands of folks sitting in rows in front of the prison gates play out on the news? The government has to convincingly argue that all of these people were doing something wrong by growing a plant in their private homes that millions of adults, including our last three Presidents, have used responsibly.
The issue is close to tipping already and I think this could push it over the edge. If the government was bright enough to not to step into this tar pit, it would at least save a few thousand people from having to find a drug dealer.
I reread Stranger In A Strange Land last week. I read it in college as a story and this time as both a story and as a piece of literature that affected a society, and it was even better.
I was thinking about how to adapt his “Fair Witnesses” to a culture that doesn’t believe in objective perception, then I realized someone else has already figured it out.
I was sitting at lazing on the veranda here in Goa slowly getting baked in the noonday sun and contemplating just how fortunate I feel. Life has been good to me. It’s hard walking these streets and hearing the women beg me to just buy something for 20Rs ($0.40) so they can buy food for their family.
Fortunately, I’m pretty sure I’ve worked out a solution. I can feel OK about occasionally doing nothing more than lazing about if we just end poverty.
I think I can explain it simply enough that most people will understand. It’s not a complex idea, but it does require some understanding of Computer Science…
If you were dressed in the morning by reinforcement learning clustering algorithm you would arrive nude in a room with a deaf mute butler and a huge pile of garbage. He wanders over to the pile and returns with a banana peel. You scowl and throw it off to the side. He returns successively with a balloon, puppy and pack of gum which you throw away with derision.
“Some days it feels like I’m watching a house on fire. And one idiot wants to put it out with a machine gun. The other one wants to use grenades. And I’m standing there with a bucket of water and they look at me like I’m crazy.”
or
“When a government uses military personnel, equipment, and tactics against its own citizens, is it time to call it a Civil War rather than a Drug War?”
I’ve been thinking for a while that I would like to post something to Slashdot. I’ve been having a hard time figure out how exactly to describe what I wanted to do though. Last night I figured it out. I want to enact a social change in a short period of time, we have a word for that in English: revolution.
It sounds a little odd to say, but realistically what I am trying to do is start a revolution. ☺
So, I wrote up most of the major points in my plan. Before I submit it, I thought I’d run it by people I know and see if they have any suggestions. So tell me what you think of the presentation:
“Market” is just another word for “a set of selection pressures.” What we really want, ideally, is to live in a world where people’s success is tied to their capacity to be trustworthy.
There was a fashion editor from Vogue on All Things Considered this morning who said:
“Not shopping is not a moral act. When people don’t buy, other people lose their jobs.”
I’m glad to hear someone recognize the corner we’re painted ourselves into with the way we’ve structured our economy. The idea of a secular world is nonsense for a moral person. Where else do moral values take form but in day to day life?
