regarding "luck"

some people really are luckier than others, and for these lucky folks things really are much more likely to go their way. however, "luck" only ever applies to one thing; being good-looking. if someone is lucky enough to be good looking, people are much more likely to listen to them, to want to be around them, to do what they want and try to help them however they can. this is then interpreted as the continuing influence of luck, when in fact it is just a reverberation of the interpretation of their physical form by their ambient society.

ANARCHY

Anarchists, like the black box, the kind that go to protests with socialists and have a vague luddite/marxist platform, seem to think that without corportate america there would be peace on earth. no wait, that's naive i have to give them more credit than that:

without any coroporate or government structures and without money, there would be peace on earth. or at least, what the young could build from the blank slate would be better than the built-up system.

when I was younger, stronger, and in better health i agreed with them. but i didn't think that there would be world peace, i thought that in the shuffle i could grab a bigger slice of the pie for less work by virtue of being fit and smart. i was probably wrong, but let me tell you what i would do if the world capitalist system collapsed along with all national governments and religions, tomorrow:

1. get together as much money as possible while the banks are going bust, convert it to gold, and bury it.

2. gather as many guns, body armour, and other weapons as possible

3. find some people i could trust, and arm them

4. find the most stable/promising rising warlord

5. pledge our support to him

6. help him sieze control of as large a territory as possible

who's with me?

the draft

so it was recently represented to me that i am too old for the draft and that the army wouldn't want me anyway because of a past instance of back surgery. i had been thinking, when they said "draft" that they were talking about me, but i think it's right to say that it would be 18 and 19 year olds. this is rather a change to my line of thought, and i find i don't really care what bush does nearly as much anymore. let him send himself to hell, i say.

the rule of expansion

i'm going to drop some knowledge here that you can chalk up with Murphy's Law, Moore's Law, and the Competitive Principle.

Expanding human systems are much easier to maintain and therefore more reliable and durable than equilibrium systems--as long as they can continue to expand. This is because as long as the expansion, or surpluss that is the goal of the system (the surplus that the system is designed to achieve--expansion systems tend to be designed to achieve as much as possible, as opposed to equilibrium systems, which try to NOT achieve surplus in order to conserve resources and achieve stability)--as long as this surplus is large enough to cover the vagaries of variation within the system and support structure (and in a large enough system this is very possible) the continuation of the system (give continued expansion) is virutally assured.

The classic example of this is the military empire. say you have one empire that is aggressively expanding it's borders by conquering it's neighbors. the goal of the conquering is to send the pillage from conquered provinces back to the capital to train new armies. In a stable empire the goal is to not incur expenses greater than your income to ensure continuous smooth functioning. However, if you have a few bad years, if your stable empire has a famine or is attacked by a neighbor, it could be possible for your resources to be depleated suddenly and for your empire to collapse. The expanding empire, however, always has surpluss flowing in that it can divert from creating new armies (capital investment) to disaster management. Not to mention that all those armies would come in handy in fending off invaders. Also not to mention that your neighbors can't suddenly attack you when you are constantly fighting them anyway. The expansion empire is unstoppable and immune to disaster or bad luck as long as it can find profitable new provinces to conquer.

This is qhy markets must expand--if they have stability as their goal the minuite something goes wrong they could completely collapse. the point is that the capital generated by the expansion continually outstrips expenses because the of continued expansion.

this is also the beauty in the military industrial complex because the ammount of goods produced can be continuously increased leading to greater need for increase (arms race).

This is also why we need to build space colonies capable of self expansion.

the skeleton and the fat man

when i am sick i often feel as though i have a fever when i don't. this has always caused problems for me as there is very little that i can describe to a doctor regarding my symptoms other than "feelings" (and starting to talk about "a feeling" is a good way to get ushered out of the doctors office very promptly). just yesterday i stayed home from work sick because i recognised that the deams i was having just before i woke up shivering and covered in sweat were "feverish". i dreampt that i was sick and wandering about the columbia freshman dorms in a dizzy and disroiented state. all around me were gangs of rude a bustling freshmen and i couldn't even stand up straight and when they bumped into me my head throbbed. i was supposed to meet steve and nate under the 125th st bridge but they didn't show and i was too fucked up to look for them very hard.

after making myself breakfast and drinking coffe to stave off the headache i felt a wave of a strange dizzyness creeping up on me. i thought that it must be over soon and that the fever was breaking. it wasn't just dizzyness but also extreme disorientation: my perceptions and my conciousness felt altered. i felt as though the room i was looking at was somehow different from the room that is my living room normally, that my body was different from the one i normally inhabit, that my personality was that of a stranger.

as i was walking back from the bathroom i thought, i won't be surprised to find myself suddenly on the floor right now.

i lay down and was sweating, could feel tears leaking from one of my eyes. then it was over. then it started again only worse. this time i went to bed and had the old physical hallucination that i remember from sicknesses in my early childhood: i keep imagining a clawed skeleton and a fat, rounded figure. these two images sickened me. they are my feeling of my skeleton inside my flesh--especially in my hands where the skin is so much closer to the bone, they feel like horrible claws weighing heavily against the bedsheets. elsewhere, where my limbs are thicker, they feel like get fat bulbous masses. this was accompanied by a perceeved shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and a feeling of panic. i thought that maybe i was having a stroke, i guess if i want to be taken seriously i should just call the whole thing a panic attack.

i also remember from the sickness of my childhood i was in this insane state again and couldn't stand to be around my father because i knew that he was the one who had stolen the blocks that we were going to use to build the great pyramid. in another instance i threw a fit because i thought that frog and toad from "frog and toad" were going out in toad's automobile and I knew that they were going to have an accident and that someone was going to die.

more notes on the salesman

the sales personality is never happy or kind except when it is trying to convince you of something. they get a pretty big rush just off of the attempt (which makes them glow and serves the purpose, see "sales"). but also, this is how they measure their self worth--by seeing how many people they can make "like them" emough to sell them on their message. this serves a very valid function in terms of telling them if they've "still got it" as anyone makeing a living exclusively on an elusive talent should certainly want to know. However, I think that they also determine their personal esteem on this measure, and so when they are not working their magic on someone they feel lost and uncertain and walk around looking gruff.

the greater the challenge the greater the rush, so maybe that's another reason for aggressive sales tactics that seek to lie as much as possible.

perhaps in their personal lives also they may resort to convincing people of things that aren't true just for the sake of it--it should be a short step from sales to at least mild pathological lying, once you associate lying with such a positive rush (as making a sale--the main way you get approval from yourself and others).

this is also why they "get hot" and "slump". when a lot of sales are going through, the salesman gets so giddy on his/her godlike powers of persuasion that they have redoubled energy to be even friendlier and more aggressive, make more sales. when serveral of their pitches go badly, they begin to doubt themselves, their abilities, their very worth as people, and so can barely smile at the next potential cutomer (who now looks rather like the next certain rejection).

I'm also sure the commision system arose because the sales personality is so imprecise (see "sales") that he/she would treat a verbal commitment to buy just like getting the dollars themselves, and so basing their pay on dollars received is the only way to get them to apply their powers to this comparatively mundate detail.

**as an addendum, i'm working with a salesperson now who i like and respect, who doesn't seem to be an idiot at all, and who seems to pretty much keep his word. lucky me.

The Future of Advertising

a few months ago i was on acid and i had the following epiphany

i saw the internet browser screen as a fountain of water, with two distinct streams. the first is the content, which flows down in the middle of the screen. the second is the advertising, which flows all along the edges according to the efforts of designers, advertising salesmen, and executives.

i have been thinking a lot lately about how crucial advertising is to a free internet and how i really want to embrace the fact that the advertising is what drives the content and makes it possible by fishing for the funds that pay for the server space. just as the content brings the readers that makes this fishing possible.

so anyway my vision of this symbiotic animal was of the rippling waves of advertising are constantly above and to either side of the content you are trying to look at, and as you scroll down the page the ads flash and change according to their own perverse logic. sometimes the ads even swell and splash to cover the content, but only for an amount of time just short enough so that you don't quit the page in disgust.

as long as we can get used to this frothing border we should be able to have just about anything be free and still profitable from the internet, from videos to books to music, computer programs, various administrative, organizational, and informative services.

in the eyes of the young, the two streams (content and advertising) are immediately distinct, but to those not raised to the new medium they seem hopelessly entangled.

google is trying to trick our young eyes by making the ads look almost as austire as the content, because the overt graphical aggressiveness of most ads is their deadist giveaway.

Damaged: I was a Child Victim of Liberal Moral Indoctrination

At this point in my life and especially around tax time i find myself yearning for more money. This tension has increased with the years of my independence and by all accounts in the wider world it seems that it will only increase further. I am chilled by cultural tropes that speak of the honest man being driven to lie and cheat for the money to maintain his family's lifestyle and status, with the cruel emotional necessity to maintain his status within it despite an impossible external financial situation. This trope is so simple, so aweful and entrapping and so often repeated that it seems to me that it must be at least as true as love (and i do believe that there's something behind love, that most common trope).

therefore, i look at my peers in a competitve light and i look at my past and i find that those young people who have set themselves up to pursue money from their early education have a vast advantage over we of the more artistic liberal arts, and i wonder how, when my fascination with things artistic has been worn out and frustrated that I could have been so foolish in the past as to waste my time in studies that are of no use to my current goals.

but this is unfair--i followed my heart, and it should have been up to my guardians to guide me into the correct path.

yet they have followed their hearts their whole lives and desired nothing more for me than that i do the same, i was left to wander through the landscape of knowledge with no compass save the one that shifts with the beating of one's heart.

and not my patrentis specifically but certainly the camp that i cound myself a memeber of prattled on about happyness and integrity and made wealth into a kind of anathma despite the comfortable ammounts that everyone already possesed. i don't like to make loosing bets and i don't like to be a member of a rebellious group that is rewarded with nothing but pain for their rebellion. it is a matter of psychological survival for most members but it is not for me because my psychology has always expected the worst: in democratic capitalism there is one virture respected above all others and that is wealth.