Posts by BenWilson
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He’s an easy act to follow, but a hard act to beat.
Y'know, I being wondering for some time how long Ian would be able to keep it up. I really appreciate what he was trying to do, but found it very difficult to say so. His poetry was often amusing playful asides, but also he tried to engage the main discussion stream too, and also sparked off many a thought for me, but it was difficult to engage it in this forum. Poetry is by nature mind opening, direction opening, and I think it withers under the storm of heavy argumentation, which is usually seeking to pin down, to tighten, to lock in, to get specific. Isn't that what you're reacting to, recordari? Too many black thinking-hats? Too little ability to just chuck an idea down, and see if it grows, because such attempts are weeded out the moment the sprout shows? I know you are not alone in feeling this way.*
*Edit: I don't really have a solution, though. I don't think we should ban black thinking-hats, which do, after all, drive in quality. But I think I can say to you that it would help a lot to meet the people, and for them to meet you. Tory my arse.
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I was wondering when this discussion would turn to "what is Art?". I know exactly where Lilith is coming from, too. I'm from the school that art has an extremely wide range, although I can see that does rather degrade the term itself. To me, art is the way something is done, not what it is that is done. Most trades seem to have artists, the way I see it - carpentry can be an art-form, not just architecture. But that's not what something like PACE is for, it's for recognized art-forms. As such, it can shoot itself in the foot, because anyone who is really avant-garde is pushing the boundaries of the art-forms endlessly, and will not only struggle to find paid employment, but will also struggle to prove to any board that they're really doing art at all.
Sometimes I wish artists were seen now as we were in medieval times - as tradespeople doing a job.
I kind of see it backwards - I wish that the art in trades could be more widely acknowledged. And not just tradie trades, but professions too. It's always struck me that a lot of artists in established "arty" fields are rather patronizing about the level of creativity to be found in the general population. People come up with incredibly creative solutions every day, doing the most mundane things, or highly technical things. Often those things are only appreciated by their colleagues, but that's exactly like "high" art, which so often has very little wide appeal.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
so you can't beat it out of them
No, but it could be cheaper to break into that room than break the encryption. There might be a few beatings along the way.
Of course the terrorists don't care - they can use 1-way pads distributed by the world's music industry (the LSBs of CDs) ....
LOL yup, they can use completely unbeatable encryption. Or they can do what most people do who want to pass secrets on - meet the other person, talk to them, and hand them something. The main security there is obscurity, and I'm willing to bet it was most of what was used during the assaults of 9/11. Obscurity is still a pretty good form of security - if the interrogators don't even know the questions to ask, the data crackers don't know where to find the data, the agency has no idea who the people they're dealing with are.
A finance wizard friend of mine in Australia reckoned that the reason so few people (well at that time in Australia it was actually none at all) get busted for insider trading is because few people involved in it are stupid enough to keep any records. They meet some manager they know in a company for lunch, and find out something that will impact the stock price. They then tell a friend of theirs about it, who creams a profit. Later on, their friend does the same for them with some stock that they know an insider in. Pretty hard for ASIC to track that, and there's so much plausible deniability. They don't use the phone, because the calls are all recorded. They don't use email because there's so many traces left by that. They don't use encryption, could you think of anything more suspicious to worry about? They use the oldest form of communication - person to person voice in a trusted network of friends.
This is probably how most crime is organized, really.
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I'm not sure that's even eccentric - aren't writing books and engaging in public promotional jaunts two entirely different sets of skills?
It's not entirely on account of that that I call her eccentric, and I certainly mean nothing bad by the term. I consider myself quite eccentric too. As far as I'm concerned, it's who I am, and I hold onto it quite tightly.
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Most people on disability benefits are not "barely functioning".
I didn't say they were. I was saying barely functioning people would be better off there than on some system that's trying to force them to work, even in the arts. Or they're wards of the state, as in the case of the totally insane or those with massive loss of brain function. That's what I think of as "barely functioning human beings".
But it's an imprecise term that Gio raised, and I notice he's come back to address that. I'm presuming he meant "not socially functioning". Which is much wider and does suggest that they could even be highly appropriate for work that is not especially social. I think that's what Islander was getting at, that she found cranking out books to be within her powers right up until publishers started insisting that she be torn from her comfort zone and shoved in front of crowds. There's no way I'd call her "barely functioning". She's extremely high functioning, just eccentric*.
*Inspiringly so. When I'm finally allowed to be eccentric, I'll be following some of her model, I'm sure. Well, put it this way, me and the boys will be doing a lot more fishing.
Edit: And not carrying on like the guys Steve was listening to. That's a different kind of "not socially functioning", a kind which I really want to avoid if possible.
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Really, really, really weak response.
Simmer down, just even throwing the idea of computer security in there leads to thinking about alternative angles to the problem. Computer security is, after all, mostly about secrets, and how to keep them.
Although, as in "meat space", even computer security is not entirely digital. The cheapest cryptographic attack is very often the "rubber hose method", in which you beat the keys out of some poor miscreant. When decent computer security is circumvented, that's very often how it's done, usually by governments.
There's something so very American about the idea of actually trying to decrypt infiltrated data, when infiltrating human networks is so much more fruitful. At least encryption methods don't involve putting an agent at risk. Poorer governments just wouldn't bother with that.
Indeed. A wise man once said "the real world cannot be reduced to a cryptographic style problem"
Currently most of our scientific modeling does do exactly that. Why? Because there aren't any other contenders. If we're going to model the world, currently, the dominant paradigm is to model it digitally. It's far more flexible than trying to build some kind of analog model. It's way, way faster than trying to work it out by hand calculations. It's less arbitrary than role playing. It's a weird modern phenomenon, that we almost don't believe that non-digital knowledge is possible. Knowledge is almost, by definition, digital. I've struggled with this idea forever, trying to think of how alternatives could be made, but reducing them to digital is always possible. It's the ultimate end-game of materialism as a philosophical standpoint, which seems to be by far the most dominant one amongst scientists.
I expect game theory could come up with some fairly interesting insights into the consequences of a no-secrets organization. If the leaders could not keep secrets, but it was possible for other people to, my gut feeling is that the organization would be subverted extremely quickly. Secrets are power. A secret clique could easily stage a coup, for instance. How could it be stopped, if the organization chasing them was not allowed to make any secret of trying to do so, or how they are doing so?
It's an age-old conundrum, how to best organize open societies. It struck me as a rather scary thing that Plato's ideal Republic was the exact opposite of an open society, because he considered anything else to be weak and inefficient. Only by power being concentrated into the hands of the most knowledgeable people, and deliberately withheld from the rest, with everyone serving their narrow function as ordained, could the unstoppable war machine that he seemed to find most perfect, function best. IOW, he modeled his ideal society around Sparta, which was currently giving his own town, Athens, the bash.
I guess that's something that makes more sense when you're getting the bash than it does now, but when we think back to the way in which our own societies were forced into building the most colossal war machine ever just to beat German and Japanese fascism, and that a number of the crucial victories that won that war came down to better kept secrets, it's no surprise that even an open society has to keep them. Imagine if the Americans had been required to tell everyone how they made nuclear weapons during the Manhattan project. The Nazis had quite a lot of uranium stockpiled, they could very well have cranked out a bunch of nukes and even if that didn't win them the war, it could certainly have killed untold millions more people, particularly if mounted into V2s.
These thoughts had me thinking that war is the greatest enemy of open society. A truly open government is inconceivable with our current nation-state setup. It might be more feasible if there were viable world-government. Indeed, if such a government weren't set up that way, I'd definitely be a partisan.
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Was it Mahathir who quipped that Paul Keating shouldn't be looking at a map to work out where his nation fitted into the world, but rather a mirror? Western might be a an overused, overloaded term, but I don't think it's without meaning. I remember a Japanese history professor who was always saying everything everyone thought here in NZ was "a western perspective". Considering that the views were often contradictory of each other, it seemed rather like an obsession of his, a way of emphasizing his difference by generalizing about NZers. The same guy told me I was "very religious" after discussing Japanese religion with him, which he insisted was not religion, which was a western term. It didn't matter at all to him that I was a professed atheist at that time. He lumped all western thought together, and anyone who studied western philosophy was simply a religious person. It was a very strange insight, I thought, and said more about him than it said about me.
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Dunno.
I'm pretty sure they'll like your writing better than your cooking. Which is not to say your fishnchips aren't nice, but your words will reach a lot more people. I hope you keep fishing, though. There's something very enheartening about the thought of you out there with a spear every morning.
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Speaker: What PACE actually does, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yup, any kind of benefit that's even basically aimed at being a stopgap between paid employment, isn't really for "barely functioning human beings" who are probably best on a disability benefit. If they're not already wards of the state.
In fact, some people are very good at that endless, mindless hard slog. They make it look effortless. Put that person behind a counter, and there'd be some problems.
They're in luck then, there's always plenty of mindless hard slog. Pity about the pay, but if they actually like it, that's got to count for something.
Actually, I have to agree with George that fifteen years of pursuing one's dream "job" without success is a very long time.
Well, there have been many well received pieces, and many short term paid contracts in that time, but it's never migrated into a going concern. I keep hoping it will.
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It pays to consider that some of any generation's most creative minds are often barely functioning human beings
The conundrum is that most of the barely functioning human beings of any generation are not it's most creative minds. The correlation between not functioning and being artistic is not really that strong.
But we have a duty as a rich country to look after our barely functioning folks, artistic or not.
we should strive to create a society where people can utilise their skills, as opposed to filling whatever available employment slot there may be at any one time.
For sure, and I've come across quite a few people outside of paid employment who actually work curiously hard, often at things they could be paid for too. They just can't stand to do it as a job.
I don't think we've got that society, though, where utilizing skills can be everyone's thing. There's not really many people so unskilled that digging trenches is all they can do. But someone has to dig trenches.
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