Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Sacha,
I'll give you that. Pricing complex things like employees is notoriously subjective.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I think the counter example might be WipeOut. The balls are enormous. It can make amusing television though, so that does put it above golf.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Marbles on par with paintball? Also, that means playing with Bonks is the superior kind of marbles.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to James Butler,
I'm not even sure if we're arguing at all. I was just saying how market models set price. I don't think it's the best way to organize things.
I actually think nearly everything about capitalist organization is bad. It predicates itself around the value of work, when in fact work is not in itself good. Only the outcomes of the work are, like the production of products. If a machine could do everything that the people in a factory do, then it probably should. The question is then about how the people who did work there can survive. From a social perspective, the creation of a machine should be fantastic, because it removed the need for dehumanized labour. But what ends up happening is that the machine is used to make the humans redundant, and having been made redundant, they have no means to survive, while at the same time, the owner of the machine gets richer than he ever could have before. So the end result is that he worked some people hard, profited from them, then replaced them and cast them out, like an old machine.
It's madness that such growth should be so harmful to the bulk of the people responsible for making the growth happen.
I don't really know the solution, at least not coming from where we are now. Essentially, it boils down to ownership of the means of production, just as Marx said. If the workers owned the factory, then their redundancy in favor of a machine that could continue to deliver them profits without requiring them to work in the factory, would be all good. But this collectivized ownership model has never really risen to high levels of popularity, so far as industry is concerned. I think this is because ownership of capital is simply one of those things that tends always towards concentration, when left to its own devices. That's why the power structures of the ancient world were almost always absolute monarchies. Power concentrates, and eventually turns into a strict hierarchy. Capital is power, and does exactly the same thing. The top is seldom stable, because the powerful are surrounded by other powerful people snapping at their heels, but the bottom stays pretty stable, unless it gets seriously out of whack, and actual revolt is caused, beyond the power of leadership to rapidly suppress.
My favored solution is to legislate good capital management onto everyone. To quite literally force people to invest wisely in their own futures. If we did this, I think that class differences would very quickly start to melt, because the actual ownership of production would very rapidly push its way towards the workers.
It's still a capitalist model, but it's taking social reform from a whole different angle, to raise the bottom rather than pull down the top. I don't object to the existence of very rich people. What I object to is very poor people, who have to work like slaves to get fuck all.
How is it different to simply taxing and having welfare? Well, for starters, it's planning for a much longer term. It stops such planning from being a political football, subject to the whims of whatever crazed government we have. Right now, National could sell off all of our hydroelectricity. I highly doubt, given that we're supposedly sitting with our backs against the wall of bankruptcy, that we will get a good price for these assets that we spent decades paying off. If we actually already owned these assets as actual shareholders, then it would be impossible for the government to do this.
If the Nats had a shred of decency about this, they might realize that since the debt problem they claim to be trying to solve is a private one anyway, and since the taxpayers of NZ purchased these dams over many years already, then if they must privatize them, they should do that by issuing equal shares in these dams to every taxpayer. Then we could sell them off as we saw fit, to pay off the debts we have, or we could keep them, make money out of them, and since we have to buy the power from them, would demand efficiency from them too, as shareholders, with the actual power to hire and fire the management.
But my point about forcing good money management would actually take this further and deny NZers the right to sell their shares, unless they took out shares in something else in NZ with the same money. So the only money they could draw from the shares would be dividends, and even then, they'd be required to reinvest some fraction of these.
They should also be forced to save money. Actual cash. This should be for retirement, but I think that destitution would also be a good excuse to access it, and should be allowed. It just shouldn't be easy. We should make it harder for people to fuck up their lives economically. In the end, it should be totally impossible, and the entire country would be like trust fund kids, doing nothing but what pleases them, which, on the whole, does seem to turn out to be what they are actually good at. It should be institutionalized to the point that no powerful person or interests could do a damned thing to stop it, and they would hopefully start to see why they shouldn't.
There would still be crappy work to do. But people would only do it for good pay. Really good pay. And the good work, the work that makes us human, would be a reward in and of itself.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Well, that does involve a lot of hiking, which is healthy. But it's pretty dangerous.
I'd bet that Ardito was simply a fantastic specimen, and that's probably what made him a good mountain climber.
Mind you, one of the things that most appeals to me about gardening as a sport is the large number of long lived people who claim to have done nothing else for their exercise.
My experience is that it is indeed very good anaerobic exercise, when done with constant attention to your own body. If you do it like I did, you end up doing it to get it done, and that usually involves working out the most efficient way, which usually means treating your body like a machine. So I hurt myself by doing the same thing over and over exactly the same way, in some awkward position. I managed to work through this, but I don't garden for fun so much any more, having bad skin makes it quite unpleasant. Lots of irritants, including the sun. Still, it's a nice thing to do on days when the kids can be let out to play - really good OT for Marcus.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Mind you, I don't really know what I base either of those convinctions on.
Swimming is wonderfully low impact. It is excellent exercise, and develops good posture naturally, because it involves stretching out, and keeping your abdominals tight, and controlling your breathing. You can't fall over and break anything. You can go as hard or soft as you like, once you get a certain basic level of fitness under you. I have swum 10 kilometers in one go, and only stopped because I got bored and it was getting late. Just splatting along at about 70% of max heart rate.
I expect running becomes like this, again after a certain basic level is reached. But with running, as with cycling, there is a danger that your legs can overpower your heart, and you could run yourself to death. It seems to be one of those activities that really encourages pushing through pain, which I don't think is healthy. This is less of a danger with swim training, because your arms will give out before your heart does.
I'm not sure what you mean by mountaineering. If you mean hiking, or tramping as it's called here, then yeah, that's pretty damned healthy, until you twist your ankle 20 miles from the nearest road and cell-phone tower. Or get caught in a blizzard. But certain precautions make it very safe.
It's always struck me as a particularly spiritual kind of exercise. I think that's probably because it's about as ancient as anything humans have done. We're a walking species. Running is something we do in very short bursts. If it's any longer, then we're doing it wrong and should pop some arrows in whatever is chasing us, or let whatever we're chasing out of sight and just walk it down.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
You look great for it too, Jackie. Keep it up.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's why I cycle. It makes me feel good. It did take quite a few miles to get to that state, but now, even if I slack off for a few weeks, the cardio burn of the bike is good. I finally worked out that the idea of biking is to put it all on your heart, rather than your other muscles. Change down. Heart too high? Slow down. But that's another bad flow on from sports - so many trainings being pushed beyond limits, that I thought that was normal. When I first got a polar watch with the heart rate monitor in it, my immediate discovery was that I overtrained big time. The watch was shrieking at me to slow down. Of course I felt like slowing down, that pain in my chest was urging it too, but when you've pushed through that pain barrier a thousand times at the behest of a sadistic coach wielding a whistle for your 90th wind-sprint, you think it's normal. Now I don't need the watch any more. I just go off the level of exhaustion...keep it nice and even, and not that high, perhaps 70-80% of max for age, and exercise became pleasant. The watch taught me that I was not uncommonly pushing well over 100% of the max recommended for my age, and of course a likely outcome of that is that I could have just keeled over dead whilst exercising.
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Hard News: I have a feast for you, in reply to 3410,
Something like Reason?
Cheers. I'm not sure if getting a 349 USD piece of software to justify a $10 stick makes sense :-). It does look frikken awesome, though. I'll work my way up to that.
Have started my DJing app btw. All that Java I did with Leo is paying off now. Will probably pester you for some input soon.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Oh, you must feel so much less tired
Classic. I've never, ever felt less tired from weight training. Quite the opposite, I've never encountered any physical exercise that sapped the life out of me quite so much. Assuredly I got a hell of a lot stronger. But the cost was being so fucking tired, for several days after, that I could barely do anything. I expect I was overtraining, but weights do kind of encourage that.
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