I have slowing been scanning the nearly 1000 35mm slides my father took throughout his slide taking career. And in one sense these from the 250 slide marker are less emotionally rewarding. The 1964 trip to California took us by the Grand Canyon there there are dozens of landscape pictures. But what is the most fun is pictures of people, maybe in funny costumes. But I am sure at the time my dad felt it important to take pictures of these majestic rock formations.
But I am struck by the the picture above. I think it is packed full of meaning, both personal and sociological.
From 1964, my dad is taking a picture of his family where my mother taking a picture of the two children, posed in front of a natural wonder that took millions of years to develop.
I am certain my father did not appreciate the "meta" aspect of him capturing my mother taking this picture. But in a simpler consideration it is one of the few really natural pictures there is of our family. Even though my mother staged it, the fact that he is taking a picture of the setup is very cool.
You plop two baby boomer kids in front of sight with a geologic scale, and a picture of a picture by a couple who rode the post WWII economic wave yet both came from inauspicious economic upbringing.
That is the basis for mutli-genarational novel or the measuring stick of a mid century sociology text.
I watched the pilot episode of Mr. Robot
and really liked it. It scratches an entertainment itch that rarely
gets attention.
So, I'm digging it but there is a part
where Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) is talking to the main character
Elliot about the nature of money and says
“Money hasn't been real since we got
off the gold standard. It's become virtual.”
The point being modern business is
built on something that is “UN-real”. And as much as I like the
show, I'm calling bullshit on this point. Mainly because it buys into
a knee jerk libertarian talking point. That money “meant something”
when we were on the gold standard and now it is all messed up and any
moment we will be using wheelbarrows of money to buy a loaf of
bread.
Two things, the moment you start using
paper money all of business is dealing with “virtual” money. It
is just paper. Very nicely printed paper, but it is is virtual
representation of something of value. It IS NOT REAL, and never was.
But more importantly, even if everyone
walked around with gold coins in their pockets and we only bought and
paid with gold, that too is not real.
WHY is gold considered, well, the gold
standard? It is only because a bunch of people decided “Hey, we
value gold and want some more”. Gold is just a metal that by itself
does nothing. It is horrible for tools or weapons. And really for all
the gold jewelery in the world, they are only worth something because a
bunch of people decided it looked nice. But looking nice doesn't
increase crop yield or bring rain when there is a drought, or stop
rain when there are floods.
Gold is only of value because of
desire. The desire for gold has caused oceans of blood to be spilled
and killed millions of people. Continents were crossed and civilizations
were destroyed just because people decided “I think gold is
important”.
So back to using the gold standard, in
1860 why would a human being be accurately worth $800 or at the same
time a months rent was $4? Or anything? It is just because people decided on those
numbers and used them. Supply and demand is just about desire, NOT
about real value. Money is desire, and desire has no stable gold
standard, desire always wants more. So even if we were on a gold
standard or non-gold standard, it is all just a way for people to
place a dollar amount on human emotions and desires.
The universe did not start like a board game where bits of gold were passed out to everybody and the rule book assigned them a value. So please, for the love of God, stop
thinking of the gold standard as anything approaching a "real" and stable way to think about life.
Last fall after a System update to my 2012 Nexus 7 tablet, it was un-usable ever after. And there was no good way to downgrade.
To try and find some use for this tablet coaster, this week I installed Ubuntu touch on it. BUT that was never really developed for that model so it was VERY beta, and only slightly better than the lag-ey tablet it had become.
For the record this was the most helpful for installing Ubuntu Touch on the Nexus 7 from an Ubuntu machine, after I rooted it from my windows machine
However when I first started the Ubuntu tablet adventure I ended up using Windows to install the Skipsoft Android Toolkit on my Windows laptop. Which I found to be a very easy way to unlock and root a Nexus 7 tablet.
So After the Ubuntu touch tablet fail I looked for a way to install a working Android OS back on the tablet. Here is how I had to restore to a more primitive Android OS
Even though was able to use the Windows software to root my Nexus 7 I had to use an Ubuntu OS to install the Ubuntu touch on the tablet. And I also found that to put it back to Android it was dependent on having a Ubuntu boot OS, for the Android OS re-install.
Image
will download into the downloads folder. Go to the Downloads folder,
and extract the files to the same directory, and then run the following
commands on your Ubuntu Terminal:
1-) cd nakasi-jzo54k (make sure you get the right file name) 2-) sudo ./flash-all.sh Watch the show, and you will be done in less than 5 minutes.
So it is pretty weird that a company would force a download on a tablet that made it useless. AND made it impossible to downgrade.
So the work around is to "root" the device which is kind of hacking it, AND then to get one of their old images and set it back to a more simple OS. AND then you have to install "Disable Service" to stop any automatic ystem upgrades
I woke up at 4:00 AM this morning and
starting thinking.
Accept these suppositions.
All structures or organizations,
whether political, economic, religious, social, are man made and
somewhat arbitrary. It is only because of the vagaries of cultural
streams and accidental occurrences that cause them to the coalesce
and form as the mass of humanity moves through time and space.
Kind of like the cartoon view of Chaos
theory, where random events, or purposeful events with unintended
consequences, affect a million other events. And suddenly we have a
world with terrorists, crazy politicians, self righteous billionaires
on TV yelling about how paying people below a working wage is better
for them that being able to pay their bills. Something like that.
Beyond noticing how self serving, self
deceptive and hypocritical politicians and billionaires are, the
supposition implies all that could change. But probably these
cultural streams will simply move in a different direction and we
humans will be carried along in the torrent frantically grasping for
floating debris to keep us afloat.
That is what I think of when I wake up
at 4:00 AM. And the is pretty much the first thing that came to mind.
Now that I read this, there may be a reason I could never go back to
sleep.
---------------------------------------------
Afterthought,
This is not to say there may not be realities that come to bear on these man made constructions. Much like the idea of Mathematics as a human invention, as is revealed at certain crucial points (e.g. in why -1 x -1 = 1) , BUT if it did not work in the physical world of engineering we would not be using it nearly as much. And I guess that is were the arguments might start...but unfortunately the world of of human structures is much more open to interpretation of what "works" as compared to engineering. 7:00 AM
I remember this from a few years ago and wanted to pin it down while I remember it. It is from an All in with Chris Hayes with Chris Mooney and Haidt who, while having slightly different conclusions both agreed on camera that people decide first what to believe and then find the evidence to support it.
And a forum that articulated it well...
As the host explains, we don't reason in the way that we to tend to
believe that we do. We arrive at conclusions through values and
intuition, then use reason to construct a rationale.
There is a school of thought that, in order to live a fulfilled life, we humans just need to replace our bad habits with good habits and “BLAMMO” we are set for success. A pretty good introduction to this is The Book of Habit. His theory is our conscious mind does not determine how we live, rather it is our habits. And since we are driven by habits, we should find a way to harness them to our advantage. He shows how our behavior is usually determined by a simple stimulus-reaction- reward process and he proposes recognizing this and finding ways of accepting the stimulus but change the reaction and end up being rewarded with a more healthy or profitable reward. So a new beneficial habit replaces the tragic habit.
I see these poor lifestyle habits in myself, I can say I want to change something but I just can't seem to do it. Of course if someone has “good” habits they attribute their success to pure will power, but I don't buy it. At least not completely.
Observation 2:
Somewhere, some time, I read about an Aikido master who said something to the effect...”For the advanced Martial Artist getting rid of bad habits is easy, the difficult part is to eliminate GOOD habits”. Which if you know something about Aikido it makes sense. The idea is to use the most appropriate technique for the given situation. So even if you have a gift for koshi nage or iriminage and can usually make them work (especially at the dojo where uke is learning how to go with the flow ), those cool throws may not have actually been the most appropriate.
Observation 3:
I've been reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki...
A mind full of preconceived ideas, subjective intentions, or habits is not open to things as they are.
To be quite natural to ourselves, and also to follow what others say or do in the most appropriate way, is quite difficult....Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense.
Pg 88
Non-Conclusion
Sooooooooooooooo....One thing is, what if some theoretical person is doing quite well with their good habits and is very successful . Does it matter if they are actually driven by really empowering results of societal behavioral modification? Or if they are very committed, satisfied self righteous jerks? Or even committed, self righteous non jerks. Point being, they are driven by habits and not by a free, unfettered mind.
If it works for them they would look at me and say I was the one living a lie.
I think part of the answer, such as it is, is that most people simply never doubt themselves, the world, or anything. They have grown up accepting their worldview and that is pretty much it. But for some reason I just can't shake this gnawing felling that “the world” is simply not what we are told it is. And I seem to catch glimpses of “realness” in the oddest of places. In some random drawing, a photograph, a well executed irimi-nage, a shadow on the porch. Or a quiet half hour on a cushion.
But, maybe I am wrong on all counts and I am chasing my own shadow and foolishly asking it questions.
First-person singular (yo) conditional form of poder.
Formal second-person singular (usted) conditional form of poder.
Third-person singular (él, ella, also used with usted?) conditional form of poder.
