Surreptitious Opinionation

It’s hard being an upper middle class white male with an excess endowment of congenital brains…

Okay, so really, I’m just a whiny bitch

I just discovered sherlock on my mac. It seems like an “Excellent idea, but needs alot of work” sort of thing. The inability to control its search radius for movie theaters, or the phone book, for instance. The need to register with some service for the flight information. It’s good that they have it all in one place (though it does tickle my “who is selecting the search space” paranoia), but still needs some work in control. The fact that it misinterpeted my zipcode as a street number for somewhere in hawaii, another downside.

So, there’s this music video associated with Yossi and Jagger. The singer is hot, and bears a strong resemblance to . It’s also kinda weird to hear pop music with the phlegm gathering noises in hebrew, but strangely cool. Or maybe I’m just letting his pecs get to me, but I don’t really care. =)

On valentine’s day (singles awareness day) with the many unpaired whining about our lack of pairedness, it brings to mind the ranking system that society tells us we ought to have. Romantic love above familial love above love of one’s friends. Except possibly for love of one’s children, that may be the trump suit of love, though it’s possible that that applies mostly to women.

Ranking these things on this basis is rather silly to me, but I definitely feel the force of this frame of mind.

Friends rock. And I appreciate y’all.

So, let’s say that some people are “creative”. And creative people enjoy generating IP. They do it for fun and financial reward is essentially irrelevant, beyond the extent to which it allows them to create the IP. Their creativity can be developed to improve the quality of the output, etc. Practice, education, crosspollination of ideas among creatives.

But no story can be appreciated for its brilliance without being read. No schematic will compute pi to some absurd number of decimal places. Music can only go so far without amplification, and so on.

Large corporations are highly sensitive to financial reward. And they know that IP leads to financial reward. So, they pick and choose creatives, elevate them to the minimum state necessary to retain them, then harvest their ideas, their artworks, and their inventions. They prepare them for easy digestion and ready use by the public.

The creatives not so cultivated still produce things, but they rarely go widespread or highly profitable. Not because corporations never pick badly, but because the good ones left behind rarely have the resources to actualize their ideas.

In an ideal economy, corporations would bid for the creatives bringing them up to their true worth in compensation. And when one creative got too expensive (superstars), they’d go to a slightly less expensive one. But frequently, creatives simply don’t care about fiscal rewards.

The important note here is that there are many ideas which don’t get developed, some of which may well be profitable, but due to a[n artificial] shortage of bullhorns to put in front of creatives, many valuable ideas never go anywhere, so that the big movers and shakers can capture the market for themselves. And if there is an up and coming star, the corporations would seek to acquire it, and incorporate its ip stock into their own, using it if that would be most profitable, and gradually sabotaging it, preventing it from competing if not.

It’s a plausible story, but plausible stories are easy to come by.

Just a thought that occurred to me the other day, dunno why.

The trip to ohio was good. Got alot of time with dad.

Told them about the upcoming surgery. They didn’t flip, though dad did say that if I wanted them to, they’d come out for it, which was very thoughtful, but I declined. I helped dad change the battery on his truck. I introduced him to Bujold (with Cordelia’s Honor. He seems to like it). A couple long walks with alot of talking. Indian food (pretty good indian food, actually. In zanesville. Will wonders never cease). It was short. Time is a precious resource, and even more than money, I simply wish I had more time.

I think this article on the language used in political debate, another refrain of the great framing epic makes an excellent point. I also like its use of the obvious (and marginalizing) “regressives” as the opposition to “progressives”.

Another interesting political thought for you. The incoming freshmen this fall were born before the challenger disaster. How long will it be before the soviet union and the cold war are nothing more than history text material to graduating college students? (It wasn’t much more than that to me).

How far off is 2020? The year when US children born after september 11, 2001 will start populating the halls of higher education. Do you ever wonder what we’ll look like to them?

So, here’s my more organized thesis for that paper, in more understandable language. I think that after the development of the T and the east busway in pittsburgh, there was likely a turnover of residents and an intensification of development within “walking distance” of the service points. I think that more, smaller units were built (converting houses to apartment buildings, say), that the minority/poverty demographic of the neighborhoods increased. Though I think that demographic changes in the T neighborhoods would not favor minorities as heavily as the east busway neighborhoods would.

I think I can find out whether or not I’m right with census data.

It feels like a silly question that someone living in the area at the time could better answer than census data. But if it makes a paper, so be it.

There are a huge number of speculations about what happens if/when we build robots ‘smarter’ than us. Among the minority in which they don’t exterminate our species or get destroyed trying, some have proposed that human labor would become obsolete. Robots could mine better, for cheaper. If they type like Commander Data, stenographers would be out of work too. So what role for humans? Well, assuming we aren’t turned into sex slaves, or living batteries (depending on which painfully unscientific science fiction vision you turn to), many think we’ll be kept around for our wacky, unpredictable creativity. Like blogs. Or music. Or tinkering. And ya know what? I think that would totally be the life.

1) Being attracted or not to people of particular races, either in that race’s entirety, or just veering in that direction does not make one racist. Similarly, attraction or its lack to flamers, femmes or butches, doesn’t make one sexist or a homophobic.

2) I’ve noted a couple friends I identify with my earlier “fashionista” category who have expressed interest in sex while (mostly) clothed. At first, I found it kind of bemusing, but the whole “fashionista” thing puts it in a new light.