Wednesday, December 12, 2018

City Park Lighting


 Lighting city parkways is critical for the people using the park; however it can be harmful to the fish, wildlife, and vegetation that make the park attractive to those users.  Modern LED lighting can be directed to specifically light certain areas and avoid spillover to other areas.  Modern auto headlights can light the lane ahead of the vehicle without spillover to an adjacent oncoming lane, and with just enough vertical spillover to illuminate overhead reflective signs.  Any lighting design for a city park should be used to control usage to public use areas of the park.  An additional virtue of this kind of lighting plan is that any person not in the lighted areas could be considered suspicious and treated accordingly.

Friday, September 7, 2018

Personal Principle Management.

From Facebook:   How do you tell the difference between betraying your principles and learning new ones? 

 Principles are your guide for interactions with your chosen society which is a pretty small group.  Your monkeysphere, if you will, whose names or at least faces you know well and consider to be important influences  As your society adjusts its mores, and it does as it collectively learns to coexist with the rest of the "right thinking" people you will probably have to reexamine your principles to conform or lead your chosen society.

 As  an example suppose your principles support the "Me Too" movement, but your monkeysphere is essentially tenured academics.  Is there an exception for long term apparantly consentual relationships between academics of unequal power?  An advisor and a student, an adminstrator and a professor, or other equivalent situations?  As you reexamine your principles do you differentiate between long term apparantly consual relationships and short term adventures? Does the power relationship change anything? If so how much power difference is the red line? Does the fact that all are highly intelligent, highly socialized people matter?  Assuming your examined principles are still out of line with monkeysphere, do you adjust them to conform or try to lead the monkeysphere to the correct principles as you see them?

Friday, August 31, 2018

The Two Bums

The Two Bums
The bum on the rods is hunted down
as an enemy of mankind
The other is driven around to his club, 
is feted, wined and dined
And they who curse the bum on the rods
as the essence of all that's bad
Will greet the other with a willing smile
and extend a hand so glad
The bum on the rods is a social flea
who gets an occassional bite
The bum on the plush is a social leech,
bloodsucking day and night
The bum on the rods is a load so light
that his weight we scarcely feel
But it takes the labour of dozens of folks
to furnish the other a meal
As long as we sanction the bum on the plush
the other will always be there
But rid ourselves of the bum on the plush
and the other will dissappear
Then make an intelligent organised kick
get rid of the weights that crush
Dont worry about the bum on the rods
get rid of the bum on the plush

Monday, July 30, 2018

On Nounig

http://www.shakesville.com/2009/01/nouning-considered-harmful.html

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Customs Discussion: Beyond This Horizon, RAH


To believe you can live free of your cultural matrix is one of the easiest fallacies and has some of the worst consequences. You are part of your group whether you like it or not, and you are bound by its customs.

Don't belittle customs.  It is easier to change Mendelian characteristics than to change customs.   If you try to ignore them, they bind you when you least expect it.

Don't break them--avoid them.  Take them into your considerations, examine how they work, and make them serve you.

Claude Morden, Beyond This Horizon, Chapter 15 147 NAL, Robert A. Heinlein.  

Thursday, May 24, 2018

You Asked, She Said "No," Now What?


 The first thing you need to internalize is that you are just another dick in that small majority of the population that has one.  The next thing you need to understand is that she is definitely not interested in your dick contrary to all that you have been told by your locker room buds, and most of your male mentors.  So forget the dick pics and anything else that focuses on sexuality.  She is not interested.  

  The one thing in your favor is that she is a human mammal and therefore interested in sexual activity of some sort, provided that the mating dance is conducted in a way that she finds interesting.  Your problem is that most of the traditional mating dances are no longer relevant to many women's interests, require resources that most men these days don't have, and/or stink of patriarchy which most women have learned only gets them fucked.

 The key word in the previous paragraph is "human" and by focusing on human needs for respect, good relationships, companionship, common interests, and old fashioned clean fun, you might just be able to create a mating dance that will work within your means.  It is by no means a sure thing, some women have opted to avoid the mating dance floor and found other ways to satisfy their mammalian urges, but in the worst case you have helped satisfy your own human needs for companionship, and/or good clean fun.

 The mating dances fall roughly into three categories:

 Hookups.  Not much dancing here.  Ranging from on-line hookup sites to alcohol lubricated parties with trusted groups.  The object is one time sexual gratification and negotiations generally revolve around types of sex and consent issues.  Note that the male partner's needs are irrelevant in the negotiations you might as well realize that any dick will do.  It is probably a sexist assumption but the gratification needs of the female are the only important part of the dance.  It is generally accepted that no relationship status is generated by the sexual activity even if the results were wonderful.  At best a future hookup might be negotiated. 


 Casual relationship building.  The dance here is to create a friendship that allows frequent interaction in a variety of situations up to sharing a residence.  Sexual activity is normally one of the interactions included in the mix but it is generally assumed that monogamy is not expected or even desireable.  Each partner is expected to provide a share of the common expenses, although strictly equal sharing is usually modified by unequal opportunities for women.  But the man's unequal share carries with it no special privileges. This is the most difficult dance for most men, as the paternalist ownership issues are hard to shake and are a major turn off for many women.  

 Long term commitment building usually involving shared resources and possibly reproduction.  The paternalistic variety of this dance is well known and there are women that know it well and have ways to use it to their advantage.  The non-paternalistic variety is becoming more common as men learn that it is the only way for the average man to create a household with shared long term plans and stability.  The first step in this dance is to recognise that the partner has herm own goals, capabilities, and resources that must be an integral part of the dance.  Traditional gender roles in these relationships are normally ignored in particular when the female partner has a full time job which is some cases is better paid than the male partner. Sometimes this requires recognition that the female partner must have the lead. A difficult step for many men to learn.  

  The incel phenomenon will only get worse as women indoctrinated into the patriarchal traditions discover that the Patriarchal mating dance is generally a losing proposition for women and they have many other options now that control over fertility is safe and reliable. 

 

Friday, May 18, 2018

UBI Transition Issues


 Transitioning to UBI could be as simple as transferring all welfare funding into the Social Security system along with the people administering welfare programs and providing social security benefits to all adults.  A reasonable monthly stipend could be determined, and the minimum Social Security taxes increased to cover the cost.  Employed people would pay a percentage over the minimum as now with no cap which would be placed in the trust fund for retirement benefits based on the 35 highest paid years earnings paid in addition to the UBI.

 The gig economy will ease the transition for all including the elderly who didn't earn enough to provide for non-essentials, and the UBI would eliminate most of the exploitation currently associated with gig work since gig work would truly be optional and employers would have to make working conditions and compensation good enough to clear the market needs.  

Dealing With "Isms"

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group.  A racial group.  Or a language.  Or anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.  Friday Baldwin in Friday. Robert A. Heinlein. 1982.

One of the unfortunate features of social media is that people are sorted out into groups based on one "ism" or another, usually on the basis of what they are against rather that what they are for.  Feminism for example has a package of male behaviors that they rebel against, Paternalism, privilege, Bro networks, sexism, (as defined by feminists) and others.   Many of these are justified, but men are judged by gender rather than whether they actually exhibit any of these behaviors. 

 Once an "ism" gains traction it generally fractionates into groups with agendas that are more important than the overall ideals of the nominally fundamental "ism."  In a few cases a charismatic leader can unify the groups under a larger tent and become a political or socially potent movement.  Charasmatic leaders generally are short lived, frequently literally, and their movement fractures once again into narrow interest groups.

 The most important way of dealing with isms is not to get sucked up into one.  The customs of your ism become a part of your cultural matrix.  
To believe you can live free of your cultural matrix is one of the easiest fallacies and has some of the worst consequences. You are part of your group whether you like it or not, and you are bound by its customs.

Don't belittle customs.  It is easier to change Mendelian characteristics than to change customs.   If you try to ignore them, they bind you when you least expect it.

Don't break them--avoid them.  Take them into your considerations, examine how they work, and make them serve you.

Claude Morden, Beyond This Horizon, Chapter 15, p 147 NAL, Robert A. Heinlein.  

 While I am an ally and active supporter of many isms, I am very selective in how I do so, and am very careful to avoid making the cultural matrix of the ism part of my thinking and behavior.  

 I was brought up by strong, independent women to believe that women were just as capable as men at anything they chose to do, and therefore chose to consider only such women as possible mates.  One would think that Feminism would therefore be a natural cultural matrix for me, but none of the strong, independent women I knew would have anything to do with Feminism as they were too involved in their own ventures to have any interest. I chose to do all that I could to support their ventures, at a high cost due to the cultural matrix of the Paternalistic culture I was part of as a child, and opposition from the cultural matrix of the feminists.  I expected the Paternalist opposition, and knew how to deal with it, the Feminists were a surprise. 
https://jcarlinbl.blogspot.com/2016/03/why-i-am-not-feminist.html
       

Monday, May 14, 2018

Jung, MBTI, Astrology and other Pseudoscience.


 Most of the innovations in science come from studying the tails of the “normal population” curves.  It can be easily proven that almost all inferences of innovators in psychology, including by the way astrologers, do not work generally with the 68% of the population in the two sigma area of the population curve.  The average person cannot easily be sorted out into the usual categories based on questionnaires, birth date, and clinical manifestations of disease paradigms. People in general are too complex to fit themselves into little ticky-tacky boxes, although the ticky-tacky boxes they choose tells more about them to the sophisticated and generally unscientific researcher than they would like to think. 

 I say unscientific investigator since science by and large is a belief system not a neutral investigation into the basics of human behavior.  Or natural behavior but that is a different essay.  For most "scientists" Science is a belief system just like religion or politics. They search out and find published data that reinforce their confirmation biases and go back to the lab and run experiments based on those beliefs until they get a few that are statistically significant to publish. Then they are "outstanding in their field" and have published data to prove it.

  Psychology that begins and ends with controlled studies and no clinical observation is at best useless and probably dangerous.  You can learn more about the psychology of the general population from the tails of the psych curves, than from the academic studies of the general population 5% of which are statistically certainly wrong, and given the 3 sigma publication bias, I have seen estimates as high as 25% wrong, not counting fraud. Personally I rely more on good clinical psychologists and LCSWs than academics both for the general population and symptomatic subjects.  Most keep up with the academic publications, I won't comment on their opinions of them. 

  Intuitive data selection is fairly reliable, particularly in minds categorized as thinking and perceiving whether by MBTI or observation. 

 Innovators in science and most other creative fields, tend to focus on fringe effects and see if they can push them back into the mainstream. On the fringes MBTI is highly predictive of behavior.  Pushing it back into the mainstream population takes trained observers who have learned what to look for among the populations where there is no question of type.  


 The various questionnaires out on the web are almost useless and are the reason the MBTI is characterized as pseudoscience.  The questions are necesssarily ambiguous.  For the average person most can be truthfully answered as true for any choice depending on current mood and challenges. For those clearly one type or another the questionnaires are essentially redundant.  They can look at the definitions of the type indicators and assign a type quite reliably.  Note that the one word basis of the index is essentially arbitrary and must be accepted as is.  


http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/home.htm?bhcp=1

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extroversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Post office banking

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/bernie-sanders-lets-turn-post-offices-into-banks/411589/

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Social Group Dynamics

 It is important to  treat all people as individuals with the dignity and respect they have earned as a human being regardless of any group they may have been born into, chosen, or indoctrinated into at some point in their lives. Humans come with a lot of baggage some of which may not be functional in a modern society, but what the individual has unpacked from that baggage is important, not the baggage itself.  Many men and women from religious and social indoctrination carry a heavy load of baggage of xenophobia, paternalism and misogyny, but to the extent that they have or have not left some of it behind the response must be to recognize the progress and not resent the remaining baggage.


 The real skill in dealing with others is using behavioral cues rather than assumptions about the baggage that the person appears to be carrying in deciding how to deal with the encounter.  This is not to say that awareness of the baggage is unimportant in interpreting behavioral cues, but it is the cue properly interpreted rather than the baggage that should dictate the response.

 In dealing with a member of a discriminated against class one must be sensitive to any justified resentment, but accepts it as a reasonable reaction and tries to find commonalities to build a  relationship on.  Always with the recognition that triggers exist, and can be inadvertently used.  Accepting responsibility for not avoiding triggers is an important part of defusing them.   As an example if I am caught holding a door for a feminist, and she objects that she can do it herself* I simply apologize for being in her way.  I have stimulated conversations with more than one feminist non-acquaintance that way.
  
  Unpacking religious and social baggage is a difficult and frequently impossible human task.  Castigating all those who have not done so because of their baggage is just not functional.  Those who have managed to unpack and leave behind some of the more dysfunctional bags need all the respect and help from others they can get, and not be thrown under the baggage bus.  For those on the baggage bus education and ostracism are about the only options for effecting change but these options are generational in impact, and those individuals on the bus that have unpacked a bit are critical to the education role, and deserve all the dignity and respect they can find.

 Members of an identifiable group must also be aware of the baggage that they carry as a member of the group, even though they have done their best to unpack and discard the worst of it.  As an example I am a member of the white, male, privileged, MBA, financially secure group.  In other words the assholes that run the businesses that run the government and oppress the working class and the disadvantaged.  I have diligently tried to avoid the social disabilities that come with the class of privileged white males.

  • Sexism/misogyny. 
  • Patriarchal assumptions. 
  • Being a winner rather than a loser. 
  • Refusing to cooperate or collaborate as an equal.
  • Rejection of active parenting. That is marrying a woman to do the job and accepting the costs of child support as freedom to change my mind. Or simply fucking someone to "carry a seed" and not really caring about whether that seed grows properly or not as long as it is born.
  • Using material success a measure of worth. "He* who dies with the most toys wins." 
  •  Hiring, bribing, or intimidating others to cover one's ass in all of the above. 
I have also consciously used my privilege to help disadvantaged people rise above the disadvantage and at least move out of the disadvantaged group into a semblance of  "normality" if not true success.  This carries a high cost in status as one of the privileged class. We are expected to exploit those "inferior" to us to maintain the privilege of the group. 


 *Gender reference intentional.