Against ranting

This blog was taken down by comment spam, hence the lack of entries recently. I’ve now installed new blog software (MT 3.12) which helped me to get rid of those ****ers. Unfortunately I also got rid of all the other comments that had been made. I’ll try and enter them back in manually some time when I have time.
I’ve kind of gone off the process of ranting recently. Sometimes I feel strongly about something, but then I think – well what’s the point in posting this on the internet. Some of the stuff I feel really strongly about is stuff I couldn’t write about anyway.
Of course I wanted to write something about the US elections – I had my impressions – but they were all taken from the media so who’s to say that they have any validity. Did Bush rig the voting machines – I really I just don’t know. Other stuff is coloured by my internal biases – entrenched resentments and hatreds that have less to do with their objects than with my own blind-spots.
Maybe it would be better to post the open questions I come across and I wonder about. I was going to post a great bit of Solzhenitsyn, but then I worried about copyright. It’s only one page. Maybe I will.
So here’s a question. What are the roots of evil? Clearly it’s not the fact that evil hasn’t yet been stamped out or destroyed. I absolutely don’t subscribe to the view that if you get rid of the evil people, evil will go away. There’s a great bit of Solzhenitsyn which says that there is a line between good and evil in the heart of every person, and the line shifts constantly throughout the life of the average heart – or something to that effect. So if you accept the assumption that you can’t deal with evil by “eliminating” its symptoms, then what is the treatment? Passivism and being nice to people who commit evil probably wouldn’t help much either. Very few people do bad things because they like being bad. Usually there is some kind of ideology which allows people to do really nasty things while still believing that they are doing something good, honourable, that they will be rewarded for eventually. So what conditions lead to the absense of this factor?

Some arguments in favour of legalising all drugs

I’ve never been a drug addict, or worked as a policeman but here are 10 arguments which make a lot of sense to me. NB I am not advocating any kind of drug taking.
1. If all drugs were legal, drugs would lose their glam image. They would perhaps be associated more with hospitals, doctors and rehab clinics than hip cool rebellion, cult movies & discoteques etc…
2. They would (presumably) be a lot cheaper so people wouldn’t have to steal to get them.
3. They would be regulated so that the large number of deaths from dodgy fixes would be reduced a lot. I believe that the majority of drug deaths come from this cause.
4. The economy would benefit because drug money would flow through legitimate revenue channels.
5. Drug dealers would not be demonised so they wouldn’t be part of an underworld gangland subculture.
6. People would be more willing to seek help when they were addicted.
7. Look at what the prohibition did for alcoholism in the states.
8. Heroin and most other drugs have been around for centuries but have only been a big problem since they were banned. We all know the story of the origins of coca-cola for example.
9. All the huge amounts of money which get spent on fighting drug related crime could go to other causes.
10. People could talk openly about drugs without fear of being a social outcast. This would probably make them less disposed to becoming part of drug culture, because it wouldn’t be such a black and white thing. It would also foster an open exchange of information which would probably make the real effects of drugs more widely known. Nobody believes a parent who has never seen a spliff in their life or a junkie…

How to find out who lied to you about your privacy

How to find out who lied to you about your privacy
We are protected by lots of laws against people misusing our personal information, which in practise means spamming us. But the problem is – it’s very annoying when someone sends you spam, but how can you ever know which of the hundreds of web sites you have given your email address to and clicked the “do not use my address to send me marketing information” didn’t keep their promises?

Here’s how: all you need is control over a space of email addresses (which you will usually get if you manage your own domain/web space). Then you need to set up your email settings so that any email sent to your domain but to an unknown address gets forwarded to a predetermined box. For example you can set it up so that if someone types in xxads12123@gilestv.com, it gets forwarded to spamcatcher@gilestv.com. Then – now here’s the clever bit – whenever you sign up to a web site, you put the name of the company in the email address you give. For example spammercom_1@gilestv.com. Then if you need to collect a password or something, just go to spamcatcher@gilestv.com and pick it up. After that, keep an eye on your box and see how many of them keep their promise. The “to” address in the emails in your spamcatcher box will give away the source of the offending mail. Then if you can be bothered, you can even sue them. Or if you can be less bothered, you could report them to the register of spammers
If your mail server doesn’t have a default address (most do), you can acheive the same thing by adding a series of rules “if TO doesn’t contain x, forward to spamcatcher” for all names in your list of addresses (a bit of a pain I know, but….)

War on terror

It just struck me what the whole problem with this terror business is. The aim of terrorists is to frighten people as much as possible with the minimum of effort. They’re probably not really that bothered about killing people, perhaps they don’t even like it (although my guess would be they probably do a bit). I think they just want to cause panic and get maximum attention for their cause. So by getting in a big flap about the whole thing, and by this I especially mean the press and government reactions, we are actually giving them exactly what they want, and in a sense encouraging them to do more. I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of those involved, but seen on a macro scale, the response is really disproportionate to the events. In the last 4 years, about 10 islamic terrorists have killed a total of about 5000 people (if my figures are correct). For instance, compare the reaction of the press and government to the war on terror to their reaction to say road deaths, which kill millions of people worldwide, or chemical factory disasters such as Bopal, or wars, genocides, smoking, alcohol, global warming to name a few. The reaction is totally out of proportion and it is playing into these people’s hands.
Sometimes, perhaps even mostly, macropsychology is an exact parallel of micropsychology. When children have tantrums it’s best not to give them attention for it, even negative attention, because it teaches them that they can get your attention by playing up. I’m not hoping to change the worldwide reaction to it, just pointing out why our measures seem to be making the problem worse rather than better. Why the war on terror has made the world a more dangerous place.

House prices

If prices are fixed by supply and demand, then seeing as the population of the UK for example is stable, and houses last about 500 years and only cost about 100k euros to make, why should I have to pay for one at all let alone 3 times their material value. If we were talking about video players, once everyone has a video player, if video players don’t break and no more people come into the system, you can’t sell videos. This is the case with houses – houses don’t break irreperably and their maintenance costs are not a significant fraction of their purchase costs. So surely their market value should be virtually zero. In Italy, where the birth rate is 1.2 children per couple, people should start paying me to live in their house soon. So what is the economics behind that?

Musak rant

The musak/sensory pollution problem seems to have gone up a notch. On a recent trip involving plane, hotel, an interview and Eurostar, I had
a. TV while you wait at the plane gate, pushing ads at you.
b. Musak the entire plane journey not just the taxiing bit (Alitalia).
c. Musak in Brussels airport (even the toilets)
d. Musak in the hotel corridors. Actually it wasn’t so bad but it was so quiet you couldn’t hear it enough to enjoy it. (Marriot)
e. French tv in the waiting room for the interview while trying to prepare for an interview in English and Italian.
f. Very poor musak in the Eurostar waiting room, bathroom and platform. I went to the information desk to find out where I could complain and the guy at the desk said he was going through hell with it too and said “please please complain as soon as possible.”

I want a choice about what I put in my ears. What if you want silence or even to listen to your own mp3 player. Not possible…
Usually they try to find a music that is not going to offend anyone with the result that it is completely insipid and doesn’t please anyone either.

If I am going to advertise to you, there should be a choice to turn away, to switch off, etc… So often now I find myself being forcefed media. My mother was recently in hospital in the UK and she told me that there was TV at the end of her bed, with hospital TV including adverts, which she could not turn off. I’ve seen similar at the UK post office and in petrol stations – they put multiple screens so there is no way out – no position in which to avoid it.

Obviously you can’t go too far in controlling your sensory input. You can’t expect to go on a long journey without hearing people saying things you might not want to hear, loud and unpleasant noises and sights you might not want to see. But I am not suggesting we give the people a sort of virtual private residence in the realm of their senses. I’m just suggesting that we extend the same principle we already apply to spam and junk mail, to non-mail media that is the right to opt out of advertising and perhaps media content in general.

Maybe someone can be bothered

Transfunctional household objects. A fridge made from a TV. It looks exactly like a TV but you can open it and pull a cold beer out of it. A TV which looks like a microwave etc….

Asymettric clothes. Why have asymettric clothes never been in fashion? I went out wearing an odd pair of shoes the other day and it struck me that I had never seen anyone doing that before. Even the sort of people who try to do things that nobody has ever done before.

Flashmob government. If the internet can make Dean more money than Bill Clinton, couldn’t we move politics entirely to the internet. Why obey a national government other than because they have an army and a police force which would lock you up if you didn’t (and because anarchy is VERY BAD NEWS). But in theory you could abdicate from national control and subscribe to a worldwide internet government say. I’ve always thought it was shite that just because I was born somewhere, I have to agree with what Tony Blair wants me to do.

Programming: a program that will tell you exactly all the cookies that are used by an entire domain by spidering it.

Google of things. I put an RFID tag on all the things I normally lose. Then when I want to find my keys, my wallet, my shoes, my passport etc…., I just type it into a computer with an RFID sensor on it and the RFID attached to the object I’m looking for beeps.

How about an anti-science movement. It seems fairly apparent to me that science for the most part doesn’t make people any happier. Washing clothes by hand is probably better for your state of mind than watching violent movies for example. But nobody seems to question the need for putting lots of money into science.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could go skiing down an infinitely long slope. Really great. So if it were possible to create a realistic enough virtual ski slope this would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. No need to drive into the mountains. No need for expensive ski lifts or the pollution they entail. The problem is gravity as far as I can see it. It is very difficult to simulate acceleration. But here are some thoughts. First of all you can do it in space with the coreolis force (you can do this on earth but then it is always added to gravity which would disturb the illusion) – so if you lived in a space craft, a virtual ski machine with infinitely long slopes would be quite possible. Second, when skiing, the main sensations are the up and down of the bumps under you (easy to simulate) and the wind (also easy to simulate). So maybe all that’s needed is that and an ever increasing effect to simulate acceleration (or have I missed something?)

The screwy science of happiness

There is something particularly topsy turvy about this paragraph quoted in the Sunday Times article about the science of happiness (an up and coming field). Even if they had gotten it the other way around it would have been pretty bad.
“If someone is happy they are more popular and also healthier, they live longer and are more productive at work. So it is very much worth having”