If, for example, theology is a waste of time for you, does it follow that it is a waste of time for all others? — Janus

The practice of religion which guides and comforts isn't a waste of time. Haranguing each other about what god God is like is a total waste of time, even for believers. (Especially when the god God in question has been very shy about revealing details.)

Trying to decide what god God can and can not do is, yes, a total waste of time. For everyone. Just stop it, at once!

People want to get at the truth. "What is the TRUTH about Israel? Palestine? Who is really entitled to live there? We can just as well ask "What is the truth about Manhattan? Who is really entitled to live there--native Indians who Europeans? Puerto Ricans or Dominicans? Liberians or Mexicans? Rich folk? Poor folk?" What is the truth about Wales? Have the Welsh paid reparations to the earlier occupants of their measly plot of land?"

What is the truth about all the FAIT ACCOMPLI situations around the world? Accept what has happened? Hey, Hong Kong's British lease expired. Bad luck, but that's the way it is. You all had 99 years to get ready. Or demand that something be done about it? Give Hong Kong its freedom?

The Jews are coming! The Jews are coming! So, Palestinian Arabs, this didn't happen over night; you tried to get rid of them and you weren't able. What are we going to do now with you and the Jews?

'What is the truth?" Pontius Pilot asked, sarcastically.

I am sitting on land that belonged to one or several regional Indian tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the eastern Dakotas, and not all that long ago. They are still here, though much disadvantaged and in much diminished numbers. We white folks took it away from them, pretty much all of it. That is how the west was won. We decided it was our manifest destiny to own the continent and we do.

That is the truth, but it doesn't help knowing the truth. I don't plan on vacating my house and giving it to the Mdewakanton Sioux Tribe or the Ojibwa Tribe. An injustice was done here, starting in the 1805, at the latest, probably quite a bit earlier. It became fait accompli by 1840. Things got worse for the Indians after Minnesota became a state.

The world is full of injustices, stacked up like cord wood going back to the ancient world, and we can not undo our history. It's fait accompli. The damage has been done. The egg has been fried and we can't put it back in the shell. Maybe Israel shouldn't have been founded, but it was, there it is, and in all likelihood, there it is going to stay. It's a battle the Palestinians pretty much lost. There are losers in history, wherever there are winners.

So, questions about truth may be highly philosophical, or legal, or contentious, but the truth is one thing, and what we are remotely willing to to do about it is something else, altogether. Good politics, bad philosophy.

I don't think we can reach a conclusion about which semitic tribe is most entitled to Palestine, and the just leave it at that.

A question that is asked fairly often is, "How do I know I am not the only person in existence?" (Or it may be stated, "I am the only person in existence." Or, "How do we know are not just brains floating in a vat?" Or, "We exist in a simulation."

"Is it possible", the questioner wonders, "that I am the only real person? Perhaps I am not only the real person, but actually exist as a a mind floating in space -- imagining the physical world, as well as the interpersonal world." If they really do think they are the only person in existence, why don't they take the next step and recognize themselves. "I am God!"

Some people ask whether their senses are totally deceptive. In fact, there is nothing solid in this world, they suppose. Were we to see the world as it truly is, perhaps we would find ourselves floating in a dark, dry, gray fog of complex force fields which our senses interpret as bright, colorful solids, liquids, and gases with weight and varying degrees of softness. In reality, the world is utterly unlike the world our senses show us.

Less than philosophical questions, or maybe like a lot of philosophical questions, this sort of thing is a mind game. It is a game because even though we can entertain the kind of shivery idea that the real world has no mass, color, etc., or that we are the only person -- might as well be God -- in existence, in fact we do not ever act as if we are the only person in existence, or that our senses are altogether wrong.

At least hopeless questions, like "is there life after death?" have the grounding in reality that we know we are not going to always be alive. Death is real -- we may not think about it much, but every time we see road kill we are reminded, "Oh yes, death is real, isn't it. Splat! and your whole life disappears." Then there are questions about God, gods--NONE of which are answerable. There may be a heaven full of Gods, but as far as we can tell, they don't exist. They can't be proven, or disproven, to exist.

Asking questions that simply can not be answered is a waste of time, it isn't philosophy. More likely it's fear: "I am afraid of dying and afraid of what I might experience after death,." Of course, "you" won't be experiencing anything after death, because... you will be dead, and not available for experiences of any kind. So that's all pointless dithering.

It is basic for the left to be anti-Semitic — LD Saunders

This may or may not be true -- I don't know everything about the Left. But to whatever extent it is true, why do you think is it so? I would think all these neo-Marxists would at least be aware that Marx himself was a Jew. Doesn't that count for something with them?

I'm totally in favor of using hunks rather than hags to teach grammar.

Word of the day: Archduchy — Count Radetzky von Radetz

Is 'archduchy' adjectival the way that 'crunchy', 'raunchy', and 'frosty' are, or is it more nouny like 'flunky', 'donkey', or kennedy? (The Mcdougall clan was very Kennedy, really, and the Kenneds were more like the mafia.)

An alternative to the UBI would be an economic/education/trade policy to achieve full employment. This would necessitate sharply curtailing imports from Asia, and it's replacement with American made products, produced at a higher cost. This would take more political will, just guessing, than the UBI. We could achieve full employment by limiting automation and computerization, foreign trade, investments, and so forth.

But then you have to ask yourself the question, "Is it really a good idea to convert the workplace to a jobs program where incredibly tedious work that should be done by robots is done again by people? It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, factory jobs (for instance) are always referred to as "good jobs" but people who don't have to do factory work generally don't.

Is heavy factory work good for males? Men? Industrial employers have often found men to be a nuisance because they don't like being bossed around and forced to stay in one place, all day, doing the same fucking task--welding those 4 spots on a car frame, for instance. In the early days of the industrial revolution industries preferred women and children because they were more easily controlled and would be less resentful of being paid less than they were actually worth.

There are "Good Jobs" that many people would rather not do, even if that means living in a box under a bridge.

I think it's likely to be considered seriously for several reasons:

#1, we spend quite a bit of money now on unemployment, retraining, and welfare benefits. Most people recognize that these benefits are necessary and do not constitute a significant drain on national resources -- because the benefits are recycled back into the economy almost immediately, to the profit of landlords, Target, Walmart, etc.

#2, in the interests of social stability, it is a reasonable cost to support people whose livelihoods have been eliminated and alternatives are In very short supply.

#3, "entitlements" as opposed to "welfare" are more popular ideas because everybody gets them. If only the poor received social security, it would have been dome away with.

#4, don't worry, the UBI won't be that large. It will probably be larger than the welfare payment for single childless adults (currently somewhere around $225 a month) and probably smaller than the minimum current SSI benefit, which is somewhere around $625. Nobody is going to get very far on say, $500 a month. But it will enable those who are partially employed, underemployed, or never-been employed to live. Live on $500? Are you crazy?

#5, UBI can't replace some of the other benefits unless it were set at something like... $1200 a month (currently close to the poverty level for 1 person). A single person would't live very well on $1200 a month, unless they paired up or went together for a group house, where 4 people brought in $4800 a month together. I used to be able to live on modest unemployment benefits, live alone, and enjoy life pretty well, but that meant living In very inexpensive housing (cockroaches, dusty halls, not very good neighborhoods). That housing is still there but has gotten too expensive to pull that off. One has to pair up now.

Public housing charges 33% of one's income, whatever that is. Of course, there are long waiting lists for public housing and able, single, childless adults are at the bottom of the list.

If all other benefit programs were to be eliminated (public housing, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, public housing, food subsidies--everything except Social Security) then the UBI would have to be more than $1200 a month -- probably closer to $1800 to $2000 a month currently, based on costs outside of New York City or San Francisco, and the like, and would probably be reduced for those who were working.

Paying out $2000 a month to millions of people is economically feasible ($24,000 a year is not a large income for one person) because most of it would still be spent on goods and services immediately, but it becomes a steeper political challenge. Legislators would probably feel that $24,000 a year for nothing just would not entail enough suffering on the part of recipients.

But let me remind you again, this proposal came from conservative economists, not closet communists. They understood that money spent by the government on individuals across the board would come back to the government by way of greater income for companies supplying basic needs, and then the taxes on their profits.

But what of the distribution of resources? What would make people, en masse, NOT do the 8 hour work day? — schopenhauer1

During the Nixon Administration (probably before you were born) Milton Friedman and other conservative economists floated the idea of the guaranteed minimum income. The GMI would establish an income floor below which adults would not be allowed to sink. If you did, the GMI would bring you back up to the minimum.

This idea has been reworked and is sometimes called the "universal minimum income" or UBI. In this version, everyone would receive a fixed sum from the government each month. It would be fairly small, and if one had no other income, it would allow one to take minimal care of one's self. Most people would earn an income, and would keep the UBI. They could use it In whatever way they wished.

Some form of this solution has been put forward as the solution to mass job elimination by automation, computers, robotics, and the like. Just give people a basic income as an entitlement. There won't be enough jobs to go around, and there isn't any other solution.

Too expensive? No. For one thing the UBI or GBI would replace other welfare programs. For present day single welfare recipients without children, UBI would represent an increase in their standard of living. The UBI or GBI, like welfare payments, would flow back into the economy almost immediately. Buying food, clothing, and shelter would use up most of the payment. Government spending of this sort stimulates the economy (or helps support the economy) because it buys goods and services.

It isn't necessary now for many people to work an 8 hour day. 8 hours has become, in many cases, a convention. Managers figure that a worker will spend 8 hours per day at their task. Workers figure that if they do their job In 6 hours, they'll just get more work, or they'll be dropped down to part-time. But a lot of jobs can actually be dome in less time than is spent.

Of course some jobs don't work that way. A waiter In a restaurant can't serve customers until they arrive. Actors in a play can't say their limes all at once and leave early. (Hmmm, perhaps an interesting play could be written where characters come on stage one at a time, say all their limes, then depart--leaving the audience to surmise who was telling the truth.) A lot of jobs do space out work on an unpredictable basis. But production workers (whether it's paper production or widget production) can be done at variable speeds.

I don't understand how a species that flew to the moon could be so dysfunctional. — Andrew4Handel

The people who didn't live on the moon can be grateful they weren't there when we arrived -- else they would find themselves an earthy possession, at this point, and would be at the UN complaining that their lunar rights were being violated--to no avail.

Flying to the moon is proof of being functional, true enough, and so is operating am empire on which the sun never sets. So is carrying out Manifest Destiny or turning the desert green one kibbutz at a time.

Your mistake is assuming that People In their right minds are sensitive, caring, law-abiding, justice-seeking creatures who wish the best for everyone, and are quick to place others' needs before their own. Homo sapiens in their natural element (planet earth) are an invasive species, and if need be will get rid of the native opposition if they do too much bitching and carping about the new regime. They should be grateful, the bastards. This is not unusual behavior among species, certainly not this one.

It is only with the greatest of difficulty and the most severe cognitive dissonance that we manage to tolerate everyone on this over-populated celestial ball. We can actually like some of the people some of the time, but liking all of the people all of the time is just not within our genetic or learned behavioral repertoire. Consequently, we need a pressure-relieving war every now and then.

The east coast of the mediterranean has been under all sorts of management in the last 4,000 years. Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and... (apologies to those not on the list). At this time the strip of land in question is under the management of German and Russian Jews. Who is not biased about the ownership of this small property? Whether you are in favor of Israel or Arabs, you are biased. So what?

Is there anyone out there (shading my eyes as I look around the 100,000 seat stadium full of philosophers) who has a perfectly neutral position on Israel or Palestine? Come on, raise your hands -- higher, please...

How could anyone be neutral? Unbiased? Not racist? To take a position places one in somebody's negative category box. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Who has a solution that will not be a fresh injustice to someone?

Per Ciceronianus, God didn't convey any land to the Jews. That role (at least in the 20th century) was filled by the British. They were collecting rent on that particular piece of real estate back then, and they widened and narrowed the gap through which refugee Jews (Zionists, sure, but also non-Zionist Jews hoping to get the hell out of Germany before it was too late).

Were the Brits in this discussion occupying high office in the '20s and '30s, would you have let the Jews into Palestine or not, knowing how much the Nazis hated them? How would you have felt after the Holocaust, saying "Hell, no. I'm not supporting this racist, imperialistic deprivation of Arab rights."

People have been moving around the planet for a long time, displacing the resident group, only to be displaced themselves. , were the Welsh and the Cornish the VERY FIRST people to occupy your lovely island? It seems to me pretty likely there was somebody else living there when you all arrived.

Colonialism, or population movement, or population displacement or replacement, is just people doing their thing. Everybody has done it, does it, or will do it sooner or later (going back to the stone age) and totally without respect for UN resolutions for or against it.

I'm biased in favor of Israeli displacement of Arabs; the British, Spanish, and Portuguese displacement of Amerindians, The British displacement of the Aboriginal inhabitants in Australia and New Zealand, the Frisian, Angle, Saxon and Scandinavian displacement of Celts, and the Celtic displacement of whoever was there immediately before. And all other displacements.

One might as well be since it's not going to be reversed.

The logic here seems to be that, in order to do everything we humans don't want to do, the A.I. needs to be as intelligent or as self-conscious as humans. If that were the case, A.I. wouldn't even be needed - we'd just make more babies, like the capitalists want us to. — darthbarracuda

Of course. In fact, a lot of what we want computers to do doesn't require any "intelligence" at all -- it just requires a good implementation of an algorithm and application capable of managing the task. Which is, of course, what computers are doing right now. And that alone is significant, because they displace workers who once carried out the tasks which computers now do. Lost jobs for humans or not, there are a lot of jobs I would prefer a computer to do because the job is so gawd-awful boring, detailed, and tedious.

To borrow a title, "A world made by hand" will be exhausting. Making our own clothes, shoes, houses, food, etc. was, back when we did that sort of thing, back-breaking work. So, I am not eagerly harking back to us all sitting in a circle knapping rocks to make tools and weapons. Maybe that will happen to us ("us" being people in general) but I hope we can avoid it.

More than "making everything we use ourselves", what people yearn for is having control over their work. From experience, conversation, and theory I know that it is possible for individuals to have control over their work, and even if is tedious, they like it much better that way. It isn't that they want to make everything themselves; they want a certain amount of autonomy and executive agency in their work. they don't want to be a slave to an arbitrary work schedule, or rigid rules which have little practical value. for instance. If they have to be 15 minutes late, they want to be able to be 15 minutes late without having to defend against a federal case about being late.

Certain levels of employees (like executives, professors, top apparatchiks) have that kind of control, agency, and flexibility, and they find it makes life easier and more peasant. We should all have those prerogatives.

A friend of mine used to work in the kitchen at college. He scrubbed pots and pans for 4 years in a work-study job. He liked it because his work station was quiet, unbothered, and straightforward. He scrubbed until the pots were clean and then he was done. Nobody was standing there with a stop watch saying he wasn't working fast enough. He didn't have to ask anybody to go to the toilet. He didn't have to dress up. If he didn't work faster, he just had to be there longer. An ideal job, in many ways.

Some jobs are really boring, but boring is made intolerable when there is oppressive supervision on top of it. "No talking." "You're not working fast enough." "Stop looking around." (orders addressed to adults working In a university bulk-mailing operation).

Here's a good example: I worked 3 months on a temporary job at First Trust in St. Paul -- a big operation. Their storage room of old trust files had leaked and a lot of files a file boxes had been damaged. The bank decided to re-box everything, pull out the microfiche records in the files, and them label the contents and ship the boxes off to a dead storage warehouse.

It was really, really tedious work, but simple. It was great. The supervisor told us we could all talk, snack, joke, and laugh or whatever, as long as there was a steady stream of boxes moving through the process. So, we did -- talk, laugh, joke, and so on, and we sorted and re boxed thousands of boxes of files. It was good, because we had control over our time and over our style of interacting. 3 months was plenty of that activity, but it demonstrates the point.



"A World Made By Hand" is a 4 volume dystopian novel by James Howard Kunstler; the dystopian event is the demise of oil and electricity. Without cheap power, the people have to make everything by hand. It's a wonderful series. I very much enjoyed reading it. It's more upbeat than downbeat, but there is plenty downbeat about it.

This is a tepid condemnation — schopenhauer1

Wait just a minute... I also said

But the fact is, the act of creative destruction which brought us the current crop of gadgets was an extremely huge waste of resources--duplicating what already existed. — Bitter Crank

Wasting the film and camera industry, the hard-wired telephone system, the more ecological typewriter, the already installed base of vinyl (made from petroleum) records, and record players/amps/receivers, etc. was a very bad thing. My liking my cell phone for certain convenient apps is NOTHING in comparison to the waste of 'creative destruction'. Wasting the former transit systems (subways, light rail, volleys, etc.) so that more GM, Firestone, and Standard OIL could make more money on buses, tires, and diesel fuel was an ecological and financial atrocity.

New capitalists (or old firms looking for new opportunities) love "creative destruction", "disruption of existing markets," and that wrecking ball approach. Is Uber or Lyft better than the older taxi companies? No, they perform the exact same function. Is AirB&B better than a hotel? I don't think so.

The Internet is new, but the internet has also resulted in changes that are not good -- like the destruction of the advertising base of the daily newspaper businesses, causing the papers to shrink up their content and value, or fail.

There are things I like about Amazon and Google, but viewing these two companies as our friends is almost certainly a mistake.

Continual product development and perpetually expanding economies is a a mirage, a fool's dream, a mistake, and an altogether total dead end.

Is that better?

This is not the case of white swan/black swan. Good god. — Caldwell

What does that mean?

A.I. presumably would do most of the work — darthbarracuda

If the A.I. really is intelligent, when you tell the A.I. robot to do something no warm blooded animal would want to do, what you are going to hear is "You must be out of your fucking mind if you think I am going to sit there and sort all that crap out."

So is this good or bad? Does new mean better? Your implication is no. Why not? — schopenhauer1

I enjoy using new technology. But the fact is, the act of creative destruction which brought us the current crop of gadgets was a extremely huge waste of resources--duplicating what already existed. Land lines vs. cell phones? There are apps on my cell phone that I find worth the cost -- for instance, the MetroTransit app which provides me with the bus schedule for any one of thousands of bus stops I might want to catch a bus at. Or the taxi app that shows me where my taxi is, as I wait for it. On the other hand, voice quality of cell phones is usually crappy, and everyone using the world as their private phone booth is annoying, if not fatal.

“Philosophy in the Age of Assault Rifle Porn” — 0 thru 9

Mein Gott im Himmel -- that is an inspired title.

Going back to how technology replaces meaning- what do you think humans' relationship with technology is? — schopenhauer1

There is technology and then there is technology. A man taking a piece of suitable rock and chipping a sharp arrow head from it, and then fixing it to the end of a shaft which he had made, binding and gluing it into place with pitch from baked birch bark which he had also made, is one kind of technology. It is very good technology, and it was in use for perhaps 20-30,000 years. It incorporated several technologies which an individual (in a community) could learn and use. The individual had mastery over the technology.

You get the picture: Hands on.

"Technology" more often than not now means digital equipment -- cell phones, lap tops, desk tops, pods, pads, routers, printers, and so on. We buy this technology ready made -- it would be exceedingly difficult for us to build our gadgets from scratch. There is too much densely integrated circuitry crammed into the little cases.

The consumer does not "own" advanced technology. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, etc. own and operate the technology. We may hold it in our hot little hands, but we have little control over it how it works or in many cases, what it can be used for.

Digital technology was sold to us because the analog equipment market was completely saturated. Nearly everyone who wanted a phone (analog) had one. Everyone had a more or less adequate analog sound system to play vinyl records, listen to the radio, watch television, and so forth. 8mm film and Sony video allowed one to record events. Still-photo cameras and photographic film had reached a high degree of refinement and capability. So what was the matter with what we were using?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The problem was a saturated market in the North America, Europe, Japan and some other parts of the world. If new investment, manufacturing, and retail opportunities were to exist, acts of creative destruction were required to wreck big old markets and create huge new markets.

Records were dropped and replaced by CDs which required new equipment. Typewriters were replaced by computers and software -- all needing to be purchased and updated. The excellence of 35mm film photography was replaced with (so-so) digital photography. Landlines were replaced by cell phones. Sony Walkmen cassette players were replaced by digital players. The internet was introduced (not initially as an act of creative destruction). Simple shirt pocket calculators (+, /, x, -) were replaced powerful shirt-pocket calculators that could read tiny little magnetic cards and do very complex statistics.

We didn't ask for all the digital technology we have; it was thrust upon us. Our relationship to this technology is one of servile dependency, the same way we are dependent on big pharma and drugstores for blood pressure meds, anti-depressants, insulin, ibuprofen, and Desenex athletes foot powder.

Are tools one and the same with what it means to be a fully functioning Homo sapien? — schopenhauer1

Sure. Homo faber -- man the tool maker. The industrial revolution centralized and fragmented work in such a way that workers didn't make or own tools. He used tools and machines in a manner specified and for purposes chosen by the factory owner. Skilled craftsmen and craftswomen have always used tools or made tools to their own liking. Carpenters, for instance, have their own tools and perform work mostly on a contract basis for individuals (as opposed to construction workers...)

One of the reasons we all are dissatisfied with life is that we don't have our own tools to perform our own work for our own customers. You might like to make cloth from flax and wool by yourself, and you could. People do it. But up against the fabrics industries, an individual isn't likely to make a living doing that.

The other day I was reading about Ernest Rutherford's experiments to determine the nature of the atom. He was shooting helium atoms through a piece of thin foil and capturing the 'scatter' on a screen. He was also counting. He noticed that some of the expected scattering wasn't happening. By some maneuvering with the equipment he discovered that about 1 in 8000 atoms were bouncing off the foil. Why would 7,999 (figuratively speaking) go through but have their path bent, and why would 1 in 8,000 bounce back toward the source (more or less)?

After ruminating on the matter, he realized, "the interior of the atom isn't solid like a billiard ball -- which is what they all thought. It's mostly empty, though there is some forces at work inside it. There has to be something very hard, or strongly charged, at some particular place in the atom, which a few atoms hit and bounce off of.

What Rutherford discovered was the nucleus -- the neutron and the proton. The helium atoms were bouncing off the proton. (How he knew that his 'rays' were actually helium atoms is another interesting story.)

Well, Rutherford discovered quite a few things about atoms in fairly short order, because he assumed there was order and structure to the universe, and to the atoms which make up the universe. I like that. It takes nothing away from the world to know that matter is ordered and structured.

If you believe, as I do, that the idea of objective reality is not the best way to understand the nature of existence, then the world is a mixture of what is inside us and outside us. — T Clark

Please keep looking at the universe in whatever way you find useful and satisfying.

Even though I never thought of myself as this kind of person, I found myself wanting to see the world objectively for... maybe the last 30 or 40 years. Probably around 1983. That year I got fed up with the god business and decided that I wanted to live in a knowable world where (as O'Connor put it), "The blind don't see, the lame don't walk, and the dead stay dead." Clear out the miracles, please.

What makes the world knowable (to me) is the decision to look at it objectively. I wasn't all that well prepared to be objective, having messed around with a lot of mystical stuff for a decade or so.

Nature, of course, didn't name those big green things trees and the little green things grass, and the medium sized green things bushes, but nature none the less made very big, very small, and many intermediate sizes of green things, and they are all discrete, unique, separate. Nature made us too, not for any particular purpose that I know of -- history and nature have this much in common -- they don't have a destination. We did not come into the world to name trees, even if we did.

anomie — schopenhauer1

alienation — schopenhauer1

Whether there is, in fact, a solution to anomie and alienation in Marx, or anyone else, is an unanswered` question. Uncle Karl was a prophet, preaching salvation through a revolution which would, he thought, replace the previously dominant bourgeoisie with the bearers and beneficiaries of salvation, the proletariat. We honor prophets for good reason: they perceptively judge the present times and eloquently point to a future which does not exist yet in which a much better, more just society will be (could be, can be, might be) built.

Marx didn't provide the blueprint for the better, juster society he imagined. Prophets rarely do. Isaiah says that justice will roll down like waters --but he doesn't specify what, exactly, the judicial procedures should be. Micah says to love mercy and do justice; he doesn't specify what or how, exactly, we should do. Jesus provided more specifics, but details become problems too. If the Kingdom doesn't arrive pretty quick, then what? Marx and Jesus don't say.

The fall back position is that the kingdom is within you. You may not be able to find a decent job that you feel good about and that pays you a decent wage, but you can be a rebel in your heart and resist The Corporation however you can - putting bad paper in the photocopier, making personal calls on the company dime, entering bad data, selling the company secrets to their competitor, syphoning off any excess merchandise you can get your hands on... There are satisfactions in dropping the symbolic wooden shoe into the gears, but these days, the machine tends to have sabot detectors which prevent that approach from working.

I don't know, Schopenhauer. The least we can do is keep bitching and carping about how fucked things are. Bitching is 1/2 of the prophetic task. The other half is imagining a better world. Of course, you will receive no honor in your homeland -- it's a scriptural situation. Consider yourself in good company. "For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country." JOHN 4:44

technology is somehow a replacement for meaning. — schopenhauer1

Absolutely.

Some people are here to actually talk philosophy — NKBJ

That would not be you. You're just proselytizing.

Zeitgeist.

Schadenfreude, the pleasure one finds in other people's misfortunes. Schadenfreude should have an opposite -- the not-altogether-pleasant feeling one experiences when hearing about somebody else's good fortune. Apparently to the German, this isn't the same as jealousy.

Last year I started making a list of words I had never heard before -- amazingly obscure words authors of spy novels, science fiction, history, and so forth would let drop.

Like...

Crepuscule - twilight
Tyro - a beginner or novice
Marmoreal - made of or likened to marble
Revanchist - someone who wishes to reclaim lost national territory
Peculate - embezzle or steal. Embezzle is a nice word. Quite woody.
Perlustrate - inspect thoroughly. Too tinny. Don't like it.
Accouchement - the process of giving birth to a baby (which is what one usually gives both to, Mr. dictionary writer)
Mensuration - Not something women do. It means measuring of geometric spaces like... blocks on the streets.
Operose - tedious, wearisome
Hubris - not too obscure; a good word to know.
Invigilating - keep watch

There are many more in the list. I'll stop now with Monocausotaxophilia - the love of a single cause than explains everything. There are a few Monocausotaxophiliacs around here.

Shame you deleted it. — Sapientia

Oh, I thought it was out of tune with the other comments. Not that being out of tune is unfamiliar territory.

What it amounted to was this:

It seems like many OPs are questions about the obvious, which a brief search would provide answers to. Or they are questions that have both a standard answer and an infinity of answers, like "What is God?" "What happens after death" -- like, how the hell would anyone know?

Some of the OP's come from educated specialists and are usually not very interesting -- to me. Some come from (just guessing) young guys just out (or maybe still in) high school who had a brain storm and need to drain the runoff.

Now, which OPs turn into interesting discussions and which fizzle at birth is hard to predict. I have a great track record of topics which roll off the table and collect dust in the corner, so it's always a mystery to me how people devise topics that go on for pages. Probably they don't devise the topics, they are just in tune with the zeitgeist of TPF.

I use the site for social and intellectual stimulation. I am not very interested in finding out what THE TRUTH is. My guess is that THE TRUTH is probably not all that interesting, and anyway, we probably have already tripped over it several times.

But after that, your food choices have real life consequences for the rest of the world. — NKBJ

All of your lifestyle choices, in all areas of life, have real life consequences for the rest of the world. Do you drive a car? Do you wear polyester clothing? Do you live in a sprawled suburban area or in a dense city? Do you use a lot of energy heating and cooling your home? Do you take medications which pass from you into the waterways? Do you use electronic devices (pads, pods, laptops, etc.)? Do you eat food that was not locally grown -- like eating a blueberry in January that was picked in Chile two weeks ago?

Eating meat does have significant consequences -- as do all of our lifestyle choices and practices. Just take microfibers: they are a relatively "new" mass merchandise product; they have useful features. They are shed in laundry and pass through waste treatment systems into rivers and oceans. So also do many of the medications we take for our health. Microfibers (among other fibers), plastic particles, and pharmaceutical chemicals all have negative consequences on animals.

I'll here grant you this point: For the sake of the world, meat eaters should first eat less meat, and humanely raised meat if they can, and over time they should make the cultural adaptation to being vegetarian (a term I like better than vegan, which is much more restrictive).

Meat eaters' transition to eating plants will be helpful. It will help solve some of the extremely serious ecological crises the planet is undergoing. But having become a vegan or vegetarian, people living in industrial societies are still contributing to the ecological disaster by their very existence as consumers of industrial goods and services.

The 6th extinction isn't happening because people are eating too many pork chops. It's happening because industrial exhaust is heating the atmosphere, disrupting ecologies, killing off species, and so forth. More death and destruction is occurring because of plastic wastes--including those microfibers. Over population, even if it is 12 billion vegans, is a catastrophe.

it's totally irrelevant which animals you personally like or dislike. — NKBJ

Liking animals is most likely a stronger motivation to change diet than abstract morality about animals. You are an ideologue (which is not a slander) and you've staked all your arguments on morals. Other people will approach the problem differently. If you can't tolerate that, tough.

We "take on" these slogans so as to justify why we need to get involved with work we might otherwise not get involved with.. — schopenhauer1

Right. We internalize social messages which may or may not be in our best long-term interests. In the short run, it's just easier to be agreeable.

We can at least get clarity. The truth is that a lot of work is not intended to benefit the worker at all, and the kind of jobs where workers find direct benefit employ a smaller part of the workforce and are hotly sought after. Capitalism, and the command economy of the soviet socialist system, are not ground-up systems where workers establish priorities and methods. They are both top-down systems where powerful apparatchiks decide what is going to be done, and the individual worker can get with the program or go fuck himself.

The problem of pointless, meaningless, tedious hours spent in the social workplace remains. Spending 8 hours a day in activity which is perceived as pointless, meaningless, and tedious is of course a pain. Death on the installment plan, when it really gets bad.

What is the solution? Get a different job? Start a business? go back to college and get a different degree? Read more science fiction? Take the fucking job more seriously? Get more sex?

Don't ask me; it's a problem I did not solve, except to find whatever justifications for endurance that worked in the short run. Very short run.

Were you the sort of person who could read a motivational psychology book, take it seriously, apply it assiduously, consult with successful people for coaching on how to be a middle class success, you could solve this problem. And if you had wings, you could fly like a bird up in the sky.

Social production of goods and services actually yields a good deal more time and energy to spend on optional activities. IF we had to produce our own goods and services, (food, clothing, shelter, fuel for heat, water, etc.) we would have to work exceedingly hard and for very long hours every day, and even then we wouldn't have everything we needed.

All the empty rhetoric of the work place come into play when managers have nothing better to do with their time. When factories, offices, mines, mills, hospitals, etc. are working well, and the managers have actual work to do, you don't hear this stuff a lot.

See C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951. It's a classic sociology text. In one chapter he described how academics, feeling trapped and under-paid in their liberal arts college offices, sometimes set up consultancies to advise corporations on how to achieve greater productivity in the work force. Sixty some years later managers are still looking for advice, though there are now whole bookstores full of it. And now there are a lot of less-than-professors out hawking industrial nostrums to spur apathetic workers (and cure them of their insensitive racist, sexist, transphobic, tendencies).

human consciousness shapes what exists — T Clark

What isn't it the case that what exists shapes human consciousness? That makes more sense to me than the other way around. Matter makes the man.

Before we came along there were large megaflora growing in the dirt, quite happily, thank you, with rough bark and green leaves. The leaves fell off at some point and then later regrew. Some of these megaflora produced nuts and fruits and whirly seeds. These megaflora have been around so long before us that sometimes we find them petrified -- fossilized.

Around 25,000 years ago some modern human speaker of crypto-proto-Indo-European went up to one of these big megafauna and spoke the crypto-proto-indo-European words "Oh Tree, you are so tall, and strong, and so very nice. I think we will cut you down for firewood." The tree frowned it's wrinkly bark and thought, "Tall enough and strong to shake you off my branches and break your bloody neck, I am."

If there were no atoms unless somebody said "atom" then there would be no atoms composing the brain and tongue required to utter the word "atom". So atoms would never exist, and neither would we.

The universe does not require our services to exist. We require the universe to be nice to us so we can exist for a little while.

"Undergraduate tuition and fees: In-state tuition: 2,293.5 CAD (2015)" so said a blurb about McGill. But that is in-state tuition, which Posty wouldn't be eligible for. My guess is that Quebec (and maybe other provinces) are providing a substantial subsidy to their universities. US states used to do that; not these days--it's about 25% of the cost and shrinking.

In short, we've gone from educated people who could be trusted, on the basis of their education, to handle whatever came their way, to people with a trade, who can be trusted, on the basis of their training, to do a job, but not trusted to handle anything that comes their way — tim wood

This is a distinction one doesn't see very often -- the trust to do whatever comes their way, vs. not being trusted to handle whatever...

Lots of people actually can do a lot of things, given motivation, some direction, and freedom to figure out how. The two best jobs I had operated with the assumption that I would figure out what needed to be done. The two worst jobs operating on the assumption that I wasn't to be trusted sharpening the pencils, let alone actually making a decision.

*shrug* I'm not trying to set an agenda. — Noble Dust

Hey, ND, we need a little leadership around here.

edited for brevity.

Deleted owing to the conclusion that the OP was a charade. See later post by Mancini.

2017-18 Tuition and Fees at Public Four-Year Institutions by State and Five-Year Percentage Change in In-State Tuition and Fees provides current instate and outstate tuition and fees. Bear in mind, cost of food, clothing, shelter, books, transportation, etc. are all on top of tuition and fees.

The median cost of public college tuition and fees is about $10,000 a year for resident IN-STATE tuition.

I think a college education is a good thing PROVIDED you study something that you find very satisfying, do not have high income expectations based on a bachelor's degree, and do not incur great debt to obtain the degree.

For best results, I recommend attending an affordable college which is largely residential--many public colleges are. You don't need to live on campus, but an important part of the college experience is interacting with other students (meaningfully of course). You can live near campus, and still benefit. If you attend a commuter campus, never associate with your classmates apart from class, then you miss an important piece. On line degrees have even less interaction.

You might have to begin at a community college to keep costs down while you obtain the basic education courses. There is nothing wrong with this, provided you study seriously. Be sure the courses you take are transferable to the 4 year college you want to attend.

Whether you experience career success, and earn a good income, is largely depending on your personal drive, charm, job performance, and stuff like that -- something college isn't going to give you.

You haven't given any good arguments so far for that claim. — NKBJ

Early in this discussion thread I stated that...

Raising animals for food is environmentally unsustainable. — Bitter Crank

That is the basis for my statement that carnivores should eat less meat. It may at some point be necessary for carnivores to become vegetarians, again because of sustainability.

Your experiences with killing and your dietary habits don't add much to the question at hand. Talking about them just makes it harder to address the issue objectively. — NKBJ

The food we enjoy is going to be a subjective issue no matter how you slice it. The only reason I mentioned that I had killed and slaughtered some chickens was to address the issue someone had raised about separating meat eating from the details of killing animals for food.

I haven't seen you directly address their moral status so far, but you do seem to insist they don't matter--on what basis other than you personally didn't feel qualms about killing them? — NKBJ

I haven't decided what the moral status of animals is. I'm favorably disposed toward animals, wild or domestic, but that isn't the same as determining their moral status.

First, "animal" covers a lot of territory -- 986-celled nematodes on up to whales and elephants. Environmentally, all animals are important and do not require moral justification for their existence. A healthy environment requires the full panoply of plants and animals. The health of the forest, for example, has been shown to be dependent on salmon, bears and wolves. Trees, the understory plants, bears, salmon, wolves, elk, moose, and deer have complex relationships. Remove the bears and the forest deteriorates.

Deer, in the upper midwest at least, have reached large populations and have become foraging pests with refined tastes -- leaving aside corn for garden flowers, vegetables, and plants in hanging pots. They'll stand up on their hind legs and clear cut a $50 planter hanging from the eves--and this is in small cities, not out in the country. Food is so abundant for them that they have become gourmets - preferring potted impatiens to dandelions.

City rabbits breed like rabbits, and are clearly over-populated, with large die-offs in the fall. Ditto for squirrels.

I happen to like all these animals--raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, elephants, ants, whales, grasshoppers, bees, baboons, bonobos, birds, bats, and bison. With adequate natural predation (hawks, owls, eagles, snakes, bats, wolves, fox, etc.) the small gnawing biting stinging little animals are kept in balance. The megafauna like elephants, rhinoceros, hippos, wildebeests, zebras, lions, tigers, etc. are central to African ecology. Whales are critical for ocean ecology, as are all the other creatures in the oceans.

I value elephants; I may be willing to grant them moral status and the protection due intelligent beings. The problem I find is working out moral status for the rest of the animal kingdom. The moral value I see in my loving, faithful, intelligent dog I can't automatically extend to voles, moles, or rats, and gnats.

What is YOUR solution?

I think it is basically true that "Consciousness is necessarily mysterious" for the reason you stated: we can not observe ourselves objectively. We can't get outside of ourselves to look at ourselves. What we can do is learn how other people's brains work, and then with the proviso that "people are basically all alike" assume that the way everybody else's brain works is the way my brain works.

How much value there is in learning exactly how a mind works, not sure. We need to understand the brain better, but the mind which the brain contains... leave it alone.