When I got my first corporate job, I was placed in a group of 20 trainees in a rigorous COBOL course. We were given assignments and a schedule to complete them.
Most of us read the specs, then raced into the coding phase, hands to IBM mechanical keyboards. One guy took a different approach. He took a legal pad and pencil, and wrote his whole program on paper before he ever approached a terminal. He’d do his own bug checking and syntax checking, instead of having the compiler do it ( compiles took longer in those days, and required JCL ). He avoided the entire compile/wait/read-with-dismay/quickly-try-again loop.
He was one of the top students, of course. And a lot less stressed, as I recall.
What about when you reach retirement age? Will you consider medical care, a new house, or a cruise to be siphoning off of money that presumably belongs to someone else?
The money is theirs to use as they see fit. Maybe they earned it, maybe they inherited it. It doesn’t matter. You make your own fortune in this world, and then you get to decide how to spend it.
I’m a bluegrass jam player and am at the stage where I want to improve my singing/playing and my ‘first time I heard that song’ breaks. Both of those require a fair amount of judicious use of ‘autopilot’ while the brain caches lyrics and chord progressions. The article gave me some ideas, I’ll try to work them into my practice.
“As though my body’s inability to keep pace with capitalism says something fundamental about who I am.”
What would his body’s inability to keep pace say under socialism or something else? In any case, he is unable to provide for himself and must rely on others. In the case of capitalism, there is less contribution from the general public and more from personal sources ( I.e. his mother ).
Thinking altruistically, it’s more fair to share the burden across all society. But that introduces a danger— bureaucracies lack the accountability that private sources automatically provide. That system will be less efficient and more costly to run, it’s a matter of degree.
It’s a hard problem. Perhaps over time, as we become more and more prosperous, the cost of the inefficiency will be less relevant and we’ll default to the more balanced version.
Totally decided against vandalism. Violations of the social contract suck.
Edit to invite explanations.
If you approve of vandalism to flock cameras, what are your feelings about vandalizing abortion clinics, mosques or opposition political headquarters?
I would also ask, what are your feelings on vandalizing concentration camps? It's about authoritarian control, not bodily autonomy, or religious freedom.
Concentration camps were obviously against international law. Flock cameras are not.
When people decide they get to decide what’s allowable and what’s not, they break the social contract that says the will of the people will prevail. They are acting selfishly, and are damaging society.
No, it does not. Social contract allows cigarettes, alcohol, pornography, etc. These are not overall beneficial to society, yet we allow them, by law.
When individuals decide they alone get to decide what’s allowable and what’s not they are proving themselves anti social. The civilised way to make that decision is with the help of the rest of the citizens at the voting booth.
There's no question that, in general, people expect businesses to provide a valuable service that does not harm society in the process. Of course, the consensus as to what things are valuable and what things cause harm changes over time (as is clearly the case for cigarettes). As well, when people sense a violation of their expectations, they should certainly take their outrage with them to the ballot box.
But when people sense that the ballot box isn't listening; that the government is both in bed, and emboldened, by the very thing that violates their sensibilities, they often step outside their part in the social contract and do things that speak louder than simply voting, like destroying property. If you are a US citizen like I am, you will know very well that this method of "discourse" is a foundational and often celebrated act in American history.
These people destroying a few cameras here and there aren't solving the problem of invasive and unaccountable government surveillance. But they are speaking their passion about it, not just to the company or the government but to their fellow citizens. And it looks like some people are starting to listen.
Just because you think the government isn’t to your liking you shouldn’t declare yourself the implementir of justice and start vandalizing things.
Study American political history, the pendulum goes back and forth. After one sides in power for a while, the other side wins. It happens every time. You shouldn’t act like an impatient child and start breaking things because you imagine the system is broken. It isn’t.
You can insist otherwise, but I suspect that so long as the government continues to ignore people's basic need for privacy, things will continue to get broken.
40 years ago I was exiting the US Air Force and selected the University of Minnesota at Morris as my college. It’s a tiny campus, they advertised themselves as a ‘small college, like a mini Ivy League school’.
I went, and enjoyed a semester there, but then fate intervened when my father died. I went home, got sidetracked a while and eventually returned to school at the University of Minnesota at Mankato, chosen because they had an active bowling team. ( I wanted to go pro, but later found out I probably wouldn’t make much money at it. Reality set in. )
“ The man has some time and uses it in a non destructive manner to do what he thinks will help his community rather than just posting nonsense online “
The US can't force China do what they want and China can now also prevent the US doing whatever it wants to third countries too. Not all of them but definitely some.
Most of us read the specs, then raced into the coding phase, hands to IBM mechanical keyboards. One guy took a different approach. He took a legal pad and pencil, and wrote his whole program on paper before he ever approached a terminal. He’d do his own bug checking and syntax checking, instead of having the compiler do it ( compiles took longer in those days, and required JCL ). He avoided the entire compile/wait/read-with-dismay/quickly-try-again loop.
He was one of the top students, of course. And a lot less stressed, as I recall.
reply