DW_a_mom wrote:
I have to say you are a contradiction. You work hard to make things that will improve lives and then complain about someone wanting to make them more widely available?
I'm having a hard time finding the contradiction that you're complaining about. The only things that I've suggested making less available are luxury services. What's moral about taxing the poor to pay for that? Even people who don't pay income tax still pay sales tax. The US took on a few trillion in debt to stimulate an economy that was still meeting people's basic needs (things like food, clothing, housing or medical care, which we were still over-using even at the peak of the "recession.") We bailed out people who bought McMansions while there were still homeless people on the streets.
DW_a_mom wrote:
I don't commoditize my efforts to make the world a better place. I give them away freely of my choice. There is nothing wrong with commoditizing if your talents create a marketable product, of course, but then you do have to understand that your motives will always be mixed.
Are yours pure? You seem able to look the other way on the issue of where taxes come from, and to whom they go. That should be pretty glaring stuff to someone who genuinely cares about helping the less fortunate.
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I see the higher education debate in that link.
The numbers that I gave there were low-ball. Total education spending in the US is about a trillion a year. It works out to $3,300 per citizen, per year. For people currently paying income tax, it might be closer to $4,000 or $6,000. A lot of that spending is on programs that have been shown to not work.
Even Dick "Halliburton" Cheney killed defense programs (like the F-14) when he thought that they did more to prop up aerospace contractors than to protect the country. It's not too much to ask that education meet the same low standard that defense contractors were held to by one of their own cronies.
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We were talking about the simple fact that no one is entitled to sex. They simply aren't...
And you're not entitled to more than the core needs that I mentioned above. If you want more, learn how to make it. Alternately, you could trade something that the people who make it want or need, but that loses legitimacy when you use obvious negging (
gender biased definition) to get them to give it up cheaply. (See bottom.) Ditto for using STEM programs to flood the job market and drive down wages. It wouldn't kill you to pay fair market prices for other people's labor.
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...Largely because acquiring requires involving someone else in a highly emotional and personal way that "work" can never come close to emulating.
How would you even know? We start grooming kids to work for other people when they're five or six. Boundaries are what you're used to. Lose them that early, and you're unlikely to know what you're missing.
Hopper wrote:
It is commonplace that for love and sex to become commodities is a bad thing. Their meaningfulness relies on their being freely given.
Work can be meaningful, too. I've gotten to work some projects that made a real difference to a lot of people. That's a much better way to live than slaving for 'the man' (or woman). How much time do you spend on work vs. romance, anyway?
Passion at work is much more meaningful than passion in bed. Two examples:
I knew the guy who invented ultrasound. Without it, there's no way to save people with aortic aneurysms. There's also no real prenatal screening.
On one occasion my dad and a colleague were consulting on a patient who had uncontrollable seizures. The first thing that they noticed when they walked into the room was the the fluid in the urine bag was purple. That was a dead giveaway that the patient had porphyria. He'd been given barbiturates, which are great anti-seizure drugs, but they happen to make porphyric attacks much worse. Each dose made him better for a bit, and then suddenly much worse. By the time they got there, he had so much brain damage that he was discharged to a nursing home. He probably never left it. That's the human cost of treating work as a commodity.
Great sex won't save my life. It won't make up for the fact that I'm scheduled to die in a few decades, and maybe earlier. Technical excellence could push that back a decade, and let me be comfortable well into my 80s. No girl can do that, no matter how hot she is.
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I can tell a negative, self-absorbed guy within a few sentences of a conversation.
Wow. That's a heck of a negative attitude.
Huh? Or were you asking her if that's the kind of thing she says but forgot the '""' and '?'?
Hopper, I get (from your many posts here) that you'd judge another person negatively on just a few sentences. If you were half as quick to judge them positively, it wouldn't say so much about who you are.
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So just being quirky and stupid about dating (which he most definitely is) aren't enough to create a complete shut out, either.
Do you really talk about your son that way? Wow. He could do better.
Cos his mom talked about him with affection?
Casually calling your own kid "stupid" behind his back is affection? In that case I probably don't want to know what she does to people when she
doesn't like them. It was also gratuitous. There are a lot of ways to say the same thing (if it's even true) without using paint-roller pejoratives.
My mother would say things like that all the time, and I wish that someone would have called her out on it. Parents and other authority figures set the standard for how kids are treated. The principle was covered here:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt256382.html
Last edited by NobodyKnows on 27 May 2014, 1:49 am, edited 14 times in total.
26 May 2014, 9:12 pm
