Pepin

Interesting. Something I find interesting is that these wage increases tend not to benefit the people in the city as much as the people outside. High wages will attract more outsiders, and since there is a bigger pool outside the city than inside, it is more difficult for the people in the city to compete. Where I live, the wages more towards the big city of Boston two hours are much higher, but the living costs here are much lower. There are many people who drive the two hours a day to get the best of both worlds, though honestly all that driving may not be worth it.

The super ultra hidden secret that nobody ever talks about is: most employees don't really care about the business they work for. The majority of the people who work at Wal-mart don't care how much the company makes, how much they are losing, or even about their competition. Most employees have no problem referring customers to other stores because there are very few incentives for them to maximize the store's profit. The goals of the business and the employees are pretty opposed. The business wants to maximize profits and for workers to be as productive as possible. Employees on the other hand don't really care that they company makes enough for them to keep their job and they want to do as little work for the company as possible. The people who do care about how much the company makes and are very productive will tend to be promoted. To put it this way, most employees will switch to higher paying jobs despite how it affects the company. People complain that businesses can give you two weeks notice for most anything, well you can just stop showing up at any time no matter the circumstance. Have a better job lined up? Want to start now? Well you can start on that now as opposed to later and leave the business you work at understaffed and in a rough spot. Plenty of people have done this where I work without any guilt. Worse is you get those people who will give their two weeks, but won't do anything for those two weeks to get an easy paycheck. Certainly there is such a thing as brand loyalty, but in general customers don't care. If possible, most customers would rather not pay anything. If a customer can get an equivalent product for just a little cheaper, they will switch without even thinking about how it affects the other company. With the exception of just leaving a workplace, there isn't much wrong with this. It is just an incentive asymmetry. Businesses care a whole lot about their customers, and the customer doesn't really care about the business. Employers care a lot about their employees, but employees don't really care about their employers. It just drives me a little crazy when people point out over and over that companies are out to make money. Yeah, and you are out to get things for free.

I get ya. Unfortunately, there are just far too many of hippy memes in meditations at the moment. A large part of it of course is its origin. Headspace has been one of the least hippie quality sources I've found for meditation, which doesn't mean that it isn't there, but much less so than other sources. I haven't been told once to feel my quantum vibrations. The creator of headspace is actually criticized a decent bit on a number of mediation forums for being hypocritical with the "purpose" of meditation. A big problem that people have is that he charges for the product and that he makes a lot of money. What is interesting is that since meditation is becoming very popular among professionals, there is a lot more catering towards people with a capitalistic mindset. There are already two kind of distinctions being made, that between meditation and mindfulness. Meditation seems to have more connotations with inner peace, selflessness, giving up on material possessions, and helping others; mindfulness seems to be more about being more aware of yourself, your decisions, and the effect you are having in your everyday life. Personally, I use meditation to describe taking time out of your day to be mindful, and I use mindfulness to describe the attempt to be more aware. So when you are meditating, you are being mindful. When you are waiting in line at the coffee shop and start to focus on your breath, you are being mindful, but your aren't meditating.

I'm on day 33 and I'm not too sure what you mean by the altruistic approach. I have heard that it gets a little more hippie a bit later on, which perhaps is the altruistic approach you are talking about. If not, could you clarify? I found the "think about how your meditation affects your friends and family" to be a bit off putting at first, but I've found it is a good way to bring more awareness to my relationships.

A good meditation program is Headspace. It costs money, but the guided meditations are very well done and how it builds on each day makes it a lot easier to stick to it. Meditating is pretty great because it allows you to see the separation between you and your thoughts/parts. To communicate with a part, it is very important to not become blended with it. When meditating, you'll find that your thoughts often take over your seat of consciousness, and in a way: you become your thoughts. But with some practice, you'll be able to see the thought or emotion rise without seeing it as you. I'd pretty glad I haven't run into overly angry or mean parts of my psyche. What I run into more are the "does it even matter?" type parts and thoughts. What I both love and hate is that these thoughts are pretty spot on in their assessment. I have two sorts polarized parts, one where I want to strive to change the world and be the best person I can be, and the other pointing out that everyone is going to die and none of that is going to be matter. It's like I want to ensure the environment remains healthy for future generations, but then again I also don't see the point in doing this for people I will never see. And what will my actions achieve, another 50 years of sustainability? And there is the "who am I to decide what people want?" type part. Eh, I am getting carried away. Having done some of this work, I don't understand how people can have such firm convictions or how they can think so easily. I have many many conflicting beliefs and opinions for almost any topic, which I think is healthy. There is a bit of a paradox though, despite the issue becomes extremely clear to me, I have become very sensitive to the subtleties of many different positions. It may be one of those "the more you know about a field the less you feel like you know" things. There are certainly many things I know and understand very well. But there are others topics that seem very simple, but wreck my brain.

Not really an environmentalist, but I do think breakthrough and advancements in energy conservation are great. There is a lot of potential for creative destruction with energy tech. Though I may be wrong on this point, I'd argue that non-renewable energy has been hampered by the state. Gasoline is heavily subsidized and made artificially cheap, making alternatives less profitable. Chris Martenson has some pretty good material on this. Either way, gasoline is going to become unprofitable eventually, and well have a lot of of advancements in new technology which I see as a great opportunity for market competition. There is actually a youtuber I used to follow who made some sort of battery for his home. He'd charge it during the day during the low rate hours, and use it at night during the high rate hours. I guess it made a huge difference in his electric bill.

That's pretty interesting. Certainly an effective way to demonstrate the concept. If I was the teacher, I think I'd experiment with the numbers to see what would be needed to get a particular result.

1. A symbol is an existent to which a person projects abstracts properties. For instance, on my sink I have two handles, one with a blue symbol, the other with a red symbol. In my mind, I have abstracted the concept of heat, and subdivided it into the ranges of: hot, cold, and warm. I take this abstraction of hot, and for whatever reason decide that the color red will mean hot within the context of the sink. Likewise, I decide that the color blue will represent cold. So now when I come to that sink and am wondering what side is hot and what side is cold, I look at handle and recall the mental association I made, and I can figure out what side is what based off the association. When many people agree on the same association, the symbol can be used widely. Most everyone goes with the hot and cold symbols and will assume that they apply when going to just about any bathroom. 2. It is certainly in the realm of philosophy, read An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology for more on that. A symbol is sense data which the mind perceives as a discrete entity. All this means is that it is something we can isolate from everything else. Letters are a good example of this because they are a basic unit which can be individually identified. I don't have to put much work into seeing the letter 'a' and telling it apart from everything else. 3. If you are trying to ask if the ascription of properties and behaviors is arbitrary, well it can be, but it doesn't really matter. For instance, we ascribe the property of "hot" to the color red. This isn't exactly arbitrary as there are many hot things which are red. Likewise, cold things are often blue, such as water and ice. It doesn't mean that "all hot things are red" or that "blue things can't be hot", but it does mean that those colors work a bit better than others. In other cases, it is completely arbitrary as to what symbol is chosen to represent something. What symbols we use to represent numbers is completely arbitrary, there is just as much reason for 'e' to mean 7 as 'i'. This doesn't mean that the symbol can't affect the viewer. A mathematician who works with a particularly badass looking number for instance might start to feel badass. 4. It can be determined that a symbol has a particular meaning for a particular person, but there is no objective meaning. For instance, we can easily establish that for me, red means hot. We can also establish that for the majority of the population, that red means hot. But this doesn't mean that there is any objectivity in the association, as the symbol is somewhat arbitrary. Getting to the topic of flags, it can be objectively determined that the majority of people associate the swastika with genocide. Some people might associate it with other things, such as the buddhist symbol for peace. Despite there being no objective meaning, it does not mean that it would be wise to get a swastika tattooed on your forehead, because even if you project something else onto a symbol, it is essential to know how other people to perceive it. I don't perceive the confederate flag as anything positive. 5. This gets into a weird area because of social norms. I don't like a lot of social norms, but I follow them because I understand that this is how the perception of the general population. I might disagree about tipping (which I don't), but I realize that I am going to come off as an asshold if I don't tip, so I follow the convention anyway. Though I think racial slurs are idiotic to find offensive, I still refrain from saying them because others find them offensive. My own pet peeve is the word "cunt". This is a word that people have projected so much disgust and horror onto, and I can't even to start to understand it. I think cunt is a beautiful word. It has this squareness to it, and even better, it has a punch to it. It is a word that have to put at the end of sentence just because of how it sounds. There is satisfaction to saying it, just like the word "alliteration". Yet despite this, I don't go around saying cunt because I acknowledge the general consensus about the word where I live. TLDR: Cunt is my confederate flag.

Having done a lot of research into fallacies in the past, I would conclude that they are only useful for learning logic and argumentation. That is not at all to say that knowledge of them does not come into play during discussion or debate, but it is more to say that you have to look at the argument as a whole rather than pick it apart to find a supposed fallacy. When I was a little younger, I made the mistake a lot of people make of finding fallacies in arguments that weren't actually there. I understood the form of the fallacy, but not why it was a fallacy. Part of why I think this happens to so many people is because of how it is taught. Teaching valid and invalid uses of logic I think is critical. Like when an argument from authority is valid or invalid, what makes an ad hominem argument work or not work, and just being able to identify argument forms in general. The most interesting argument form to me is the slippery slope. If you are to describe historical events, it all feels like a slippery slope, yet it actually happened. If someone were to have lucky foresight and to predict those events, they would rightly be called "wrong because each event is dependent on the previous which decreases the probability of any of it happening", which is of course true, but out of all the chain of events you can predict, one of those sets is going to be true. I don't think I quite conveying that last point well enough, partly because I am trying to make dull insight shine bright, but it really fascinates me.

I think music can tell you something about yourself, but it is better to be careful. Though it is possible that your musical taste is guided by your past, your taste in music may also be like your taste in food. Sure, it has been culturally conditioned to some degree, sure, your parents might have had some influence, but there may not be anything deeper to your like or dislike of spinach. Music is clearly a super-normal stimuli, and some music will stimulate us more than others. In these cases, there isn't anything more to it than "I like this". With that said, a lot of the music I listen to is a result of my brain. I tend to listen to music with patterns and themes I don't really understand, and my goal is to understand them. There are some bands and albums that I will listen to when I am in a certain mood. In the past there were certain songs that I listened to because they related with my circumstance. Some Pink Floyd and System of a Down is certainly in that category, though with SOAD my interest was more this perspective that I hadn't been familiar with and grasping what it was about. But more often than not, I ignore the lyrics and go more for the instrumentals. I am a bit of a musician and big into playing guitar, so some good riffs and great solos is what I go for.

No idea what the philosophy of life is. If it has to do with the meaning of life, or of some inherent purpose, well that's quite the subject. I'd argue that the idea that life has meaning is faulty, not because life has no meaning, but rather because meaning isn't applicable to the concept of life. It is a bad question. It is like asking "what color is the number 2?". Certainly you can answer "it has no color" and this would be true, but it would be more accurate to call out the question on account of implying that numbers can have color. If someone you asked you what emotion your fork was experiencing, you could say that it is emotionless, but it would make more sense to say "given what a fork is, that question makes no sense". Life is a high order concept describing entities which self-replicate. This class of entities have done so for billions of years, and the theory of natural selection describes the various forms we see. The start of the replicators, that is a molecule that could self-replicate and successful did so, was just a physical process. There is no meaning in physics, there is explanation, we can explain the physics of self-replication and how it can create life through the generations, but there is no purpose. Some may say that the meaning of life is to reproduce, but that is incorrect, reproduction is simply the result of self-replicating molecules in conjunction with natural selection. There is no meaning or purpose to reproduction, just as there is no meaning or purpose in the formation of elaborate crystal structures. It is just particles behaving according to the laws of physics. With that said, why not drop the idea of there being some higher purpose and instead look to yourself. The capacity to derive meaning comes from the control of your mind and body. It is the capacity for your thoughts, for your desires, and for your wants to manifest themselves into reality. Imagine living as a ghost, unable to interact with the world. You try to talk, and nobody hears you. You try to touch the bark of a tree, and your hands fades through. You are simply an observer, unable to change anything. What makes life worth living is the ability to manifest your will into the world. If I want to make a song, I can do it. If I want to talk to a person, I can do it. If I want to attempt to create political change, I can do it. Point is, my will which is of my own choosing is capable of having a relation with reality, and that its relation is based on the actions I choose to take. To not take action is to live as a ghost.

Though I hate to say it, revealing clothing is distracting, but not just for men. I mean I suppose if you are all half naked, maybe you don't notice, but almost all of the females I've talked to have the same issue. It isn't even a matter of if you want to look or if they are attractive, there is just this pull. It is like once your eyes travel onto the path of the neckline, you can't help but get lost in the valley of boobs. Seriously, put this girl into a class where there happens to be a stereotypical plumber with half his ass hanging out fixing something in the background and see if she can pay attention to the teacher. But ignoring that, this whole being comfortable with your body and "objectification" crap is lying. You wear revealing clothing to cause sexual attraction. You aren't displaying that you are comfortable with your body, you are instead conveying to others that you are of sexual maturity and that you are interested in sex. I will often wear tight fitting clothing to show off my muscles. Larger women will tend to show a lot of cleavage because they tend to have huge breasts. It isn't that it isn't possible that you can't be conveying that you are comfortable with your body. My coworker used to be 190lbs and she is not down to about 135. She recently wore some sort of slightly revealing clothing. She was doing this to break the unhealthy relation she had with her body previously, where she was embarrassed to show any skin at all. Certainly everyone has insecurities about their body, but the majority of people who show off skin are doing exactly that: showing off. It has nothing to do with insecurity and everything to do with sex. There was something my therapist told me that I think is quite vital to understand. Society is structured almost entirely around sex. Sex is almost inescapable.

I think particle physics would be invested in quite heavily in a free society. Many people claim that modern physics has brought very little good to market, which isn't true as there are far too many now commonplace technologies that utilize modern physics. It is a risky field because since it is science, nothing may turn up. You also can't really have a directed search, you rather just use your findings as tools. People didn't discover the positron so they could scan the body, rather they discovered antimatter and how to make it, and then someone realized that they could use it to scan the body. It is similar to researching drugs in that you are always kind of gambling. The question of "what benefit does this have?" is simply unknown until it is studied in detail. It may be found to have interesting properties, but to not have much use at all. Or like with the transistor, it might lead to a huge revolution in everything. People don't like that there is risk and no obvious immediate benefit, but that is science. With that said, my case is obviously not to defend taxation or any particular project, but rather to argue that physics is a science that many people would invest heavily in.

Now that I have a decent amount of muscle on my frame now, my dating pool is more limited, but perhaps in a good way. I think I'd try to get my partner to go to the gym all the time, and I would probably blather on about exercise form and progression schemes, and not everyone can deal with that. I would have trouble dating someone who was fat. I talk about it with my coworkers and friends a decent amount, and most aren't that interested, though they like hearing me talk about what I am doing on more of a surface level.

I'm not really sure what method they used to estimate the figure, but I can imagine a couple of methods. You don't have to calculate who the father is, as we don't know any particular individual from +10,000 years in the past and because it is not important. I know they use these methods for other species. I'll try to find a source. I've seen this on a few science news sites, and discussed in depth on a podcast a few months ago, but I'm having trouble finding the right words to search. Of course I might be off on the exact figure as I am recalling this from a few months ago, but it is something in that ballpark.