All People are Good
PrevNode LinkNextI never met a monster I didn't like.
( Vincent Price on The Muppet Show )
Even though I tried to find truly malevolent people per Neo-Tech and some possible interpretations of my Israeli-taught mostly-Tanakh Judaism, I was unable to run into a truly evil person. Even historical mass-murderers (e.g: Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Alexander of Macedonia, even Nebuchadnezzar) provided some redeeming actions or wisdom. See for instance "Top 10 reasons why Darth Vader was an amazing project manager" with an easy (but tabooed) "Darth Vader"⇒"Nazi Germany's leadership" substitution.
Since I have at least subconsciously (and lately consciously) believed everyone can improve and change, and grow (see the Pygmalion effect vs. the Golem effect ) and treated them like that, they eventually usually did improve.
My mother told me once "There are no bad people - only bad actions". Moreover, the iconic Israeli homeless man, "Ayalon Dude", (see an interview with him in Hebrew) once proposed her to marry him, because she treated him with respect and friendliness. She naturally refused because she was and still is happily married (to my father).
As a result, I don't think that Hollywood producers, executives, lawyers, directors, and other workers are evil (or alternatively USA/etc. government, parliament, legal system, etc. workers are) - just possibly misguided.
Moreover, changing your future is often easy given free will and refusing superior orders and hacking around the guidelines (even "rules" or "laws").
Businesses Being Starved of Competent Employees
Node LinkNextEric S. Raymond and I have a hypothesis that Microsoft wishes to deprecate the original Microsoft Windows Internals, and gradually replace them with an open source reimplementation based on Linux, GNU, and Wine. That is because optimising, refactoring, or otherwise enhancing them, have been made more and more discouraged due to the (possibly justified) policy to not break legacy 3rd-party applications (including many old ones or ones with no source available). Programmers and other software developers who wish to work on them, whether young, old, experienced, or inexperienced, are thus frustrated at the process' lack of flexibility and agility that they become unhappy, aggravated and complain. Other obstacles are the iffy legal status of the codebase, which prevents opensourcing it like .NET Core, and its reported lack of elegance.
Given these developers can easily find many other openings as software developers or other high paying jobs (including on different teams within Microsoft) and increasingly wish to enjoy their work (being geeks or "amateurs"), the team is starved of competent, and enthusiastic workers. Even if Microsoft still sells Windows copies, they are being starved of employees.
Another note about Microsoft Windows is that I suspect, that in their “Professional”/“Server” sub-line of Windows (such as Windows Server 2003 , Windows Server 2008, or Windows Server 2019), Microsoft has disabled, either in runtime, or in compile-time ( #ifdef/etc. ) compatibility code. As a result, misbehaving legacy applications will not run there, while properly-coded-or-fixed ones will run faster and with fewer quirks.
Note: Microsoft has many other products and services, many of them are Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and/or provide important services or infrastructure for open source, open/free content, or otherwise geeky, hackery or important projects. So I do not wish to completely demonise them. In fact, I make use of some of the Microsoft-owned GitHub infrastructure for many projects of mine, including my home-site, and it seems the user experience of GitHub improved since the acquisition by Microsoft, and I am also a fan of TypeScript.
Lawyers have been demonised, but I think most of the lawyers employed by the offenses in the Smartphone patent wars asked for a reassignment or quit in disgust, or they will. These "Smartphone wars" are a rerun of the "Jennens vs. Jennens" court case which gave many lawyers more work to do and made them a little richer, but made them more miserable:
William Jennens (possibly Jennings) (1701–1798)… was a reclusive financier who lived at Acton Place in the village of Acton, Suffolk, England. He was described as the "richest commoner in England" when he died unmarried and intestate with a fortune estimated at £2 million, which became the subject of legal wrangles (Jennens vs Jennens) in the Court of Chancery for well over a century until the entire estate had been swallowed by lawyers' fees.
There is a reason that most lawsuits are settled out of court: the reputation, angst, and happiness losses involved in them are too paramount.
A capable geek and hacker, will quickly enter clinical depression when working on destructive tasks, and this includes lawyers and politicians and clergymen and socialites - even accountants. Someone told me of a documentary showing almost empty Silicon Valley office spaces of patent trolls as most of their workers quit in frustration (also see karma / "what goes around comes around"). Even if a firm doing destructive tasks is not starved of customers, they will be starved of employees.
I suspect the recent RIAA (= "Recording Industry Association of America") takedown request against youtube-dl's GitHub repository was done by a techsavvy lawyer employee of the RIAA, who had the legal capability to file it on behalf of the RIAA as a whole, and hoped to save future work this way. This is given the RIAA foolishly sends takedown notices to many publicly accessible web sites that host media files downloaded using youtube-dl and similar tools ( Piracy, motherfucker! Do you speak it? Arrrrrr!! ), and they are kept being protested and challenged.
He or she may have been scolded by their executives, but do note Quark's approving reaction to Rom (= his brother and employee) having attempted to murder him in a Star Trek DS9 episode. I think the real solution is to completely stop sending these takedown notices and accept piracy as a necessary "evil" (and possibly sponsor better user interfaces for file sharing sites and practice less censorship).
There is an ongoing transition to the geeks and hackers' culture, which no one can stop ( see Summmerschool at the NSA ) and a trend towards openness, freedom, and sharing of cultural / code / scientific / tangible works. Thus, the film industry is starving itself, both of competent screenwriters and individual screenplays, and of attractive and competent actors, both male and female, and both those that haven't yet appeared in any major roles as well as experienced and highly acclaimed ones.
Organisations being better - by choice
PrevNode LinkNextOne reason the RIAA member companies embraced YouTube and other media sharing sites as distribution channels for their songs, was that there were enough independent musicians who provided (sometimes not too inferior and often superior) covers of the songs and didn't care too much about getting direct ad revenue. It's not as if one gets penalised for getting a million views (or many more) rather than a mere one hundred. Furthermore, to quote Tim O'Reilly The greatest threat to authors and creative artists is not piracy — it’s obscurity.
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The RIAA member companies are happy now providing legal or financial services to signed artists and lately even actively promoting them and YouTuber singers (and the line between signed and independent artists has been getting more blurry).
As an analogy, The Roman Catholic church used to burn at stake girls who admitted to having premarital sex even once. On the other hand, Madonna, who identifies as a Catholic, and boasted of having had premarital sex with dozens of willing men, (and I have no reason to doubt her) was not only left unharmed, but was welcome in some of the holiest churches in Israel and the Palestinian Authority during her visit there. If you ask a Catholic clergyman if she or similar "sin"ful women should be killed again he'd likely say: Dear Lord no! 'Thou shall not kill'. It's up to God to punish them if he sees fit, but we should not act as his agents.
. So the Roman Catholic church now is more benevolent - by choice.
More recently, the "Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate" captioned image, has stopped many preachers from using the shopworn "omniscient, omnipresent, deity [who cares about your sex life]" argument. However, to be frank, it was neither effective, nor desirable. I think there are far better insights and memes in the Hebrew Bible, than that (despite being a non-observant agnostic).
Similarly, the RIAA is not going back to the pre-YouTube / pre-"piracy" days, because even if it could, it would rather not. We need to be more creative and resourceful when reforming the fiction/drama/Hollywood/film-industry world, but I think we should try, and we likely can succeed.
Taking Guidelines as Dogma is the Problem
PrevNode LinkNextIntroduction
Node LinkNextI've heard a Jew and a Muslim argue in a Damascus café with less passion than the Emacs wars.
— Ronald Florence
The main issue is people treating rules / laws / "orders from above" / what other people think / social norms / scientific 'facts' - even religious decrees or the American Constitution or the laws of Logic or those of maths as absolutes and dogma rather than as mere guidelines.
I met open-minded, enlightened, even self-critical, observant Jews, Christians, or Muslims (and a Sri-Lankan woman, who took care of my grandmother during her later years, identifies as both a Christian and a Buddhist). I also met close-minded and "professionally fanatic" xkcd fans, or My Little Pony fans or haters (see this thread for instance), and professional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans. And this is to say nothing of fanatical fans or fanatical foes of Apple Inc., rust-lang, git-scm, the Emacs text editor, FSF/GNU, pro/anti-Israel (or pro/anti-"Zionism"), Python-Lang, and the BSD family of operating systems - all of which have or had notoriously ardent zealots.
I decided to try and (at least passively) incorporate memes from other idea-systems or franchises even if they have some fanatical zealots.
And naturally, the harm done by overzealous xkcd fans (who usually at most can ban one from an Internet subforum) is small compared to the destructiveness of the Nazis, or early communists to say nothing of Genghis Khan's army. Note, however, that I believe later communists were reformed and that most of the best contemporary "alt-right" bloggers are parody ones, by inspiration from the Colbert Report.
Similarly, I suspect chapter I of Ezekiel was originally intended as an exaggerated parody of Polytheistic visions of revelation by Ezekiel who was a standup philosopher/comedian. Generations of scholars who considered it holy have tried to divine meaning from it, but it is pointless: Ezekiel was just making shit up.
I also suspect Plato’s "Republic" was similarly half tongue-in-cheek by Plato who described how he thought a country really should not be run. That was for the entertainment and education of the Greeks, who may have heard or uttered similar sentiments, and found them ridiculous when lumped together.
Challenging the Guidelines
PrevNode LinkNextAnyway, as humans, we are capable of challenging certain dogmata or taboos in certain cases. This includes: Peano's axioms of arithmetics:
For thousands of years, we have been plagued by mathematicians insisting that two plus two equals four. Who elected them? I, Stevie-O, am promoting an entirely new system, where two plus two equals FIVE ["2 + 2 = 5"]. Eventually, it will be extended to provide other stuff these power-hungry madmen kept hidden away for themselves, such as division by zero, cold fusion, the ability to solve the halting problem, and the secret to attracting hot chicks.
or Aristotlian Logic:
Is qmail open source? Yes, and no."
(That was written in a book I read before qmail's change of licensing.)
I believe in God, and I don't believe in God.
(As I overheard one local young school girl say to her friend a few weeks ago.)
And we can certainly challenge:
Real Person Fiction ( RPF ): never do that!
What about Last Action Hero, Chuck Norris factoids, and xkcd: "Venting"?
No one will read screenplays which are not written in the Hollywood-blessed format
( See above )
The redditesque "no self-promotion" (which was not enforced by Slashdot before reddit was conceived, and still is not enforced by Slashdot or by many subreddits).
Judges follow gut feeling
PrevNode LinkIf you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.
( Joel Spolsky )
I enjoyed watching the 1991 comedy film Nothing but Trouble, at the time (despite its vulgarity). It demonstrated that most judges (or juries for that matter) followed reason, gut feeling, prejudice, etc. rather than the letter of the bylaws, legal code, regulations, and legal precedents when formulating their judgements. This is given the complexity, volume, and the contradictory nature of the latter.
As hacker monarchs and action heroes, we should constantly challenge the 'rules' / 'laws' that we abide by to defy our fate. I do not encourage people to murder harmless people, vandalise property, rape, or steal for vanity (rather than for self-support like Disney's Alladdin) and you should try to "be excellent to each other", but there are many guidelines that were or seemed beneficial at the time that no longer are.
Guidelines are important for the philosophical processes of thought and communication. But they should not be taken as gospel or dogma.
Money can't buy you love
PrevNode LinkIt was commonly accepted that money brings power, but even though Apple Inc. reportedly has north of 100 milliards USD ($100,000,000,000) in the bank, and Steve Jobs and his successors wanted at the time to stop sales of non-iOS-based mobile devices in the United States for "intellectual property" infringement, they were unable to. That is partly due to most competent (and ergo honest, geeky, and hackery) lawyers refusing to litigate for them, and by most others getting bit by unhappiness ( e.g: clinical depression ), alienation from their friends and family, or by karma / "what goes around comes around".
Judges are forbidden to accept "bribes" by law, but even if they did, they are getting paid enough for it to not matter and even most rich people have enough sense to not be too needy and frivolous and as Richard Feynman pointed out, gifts may have an adverse effect.
As a result, I think the international financial bylaws should be changed to allow every legal entity to send any amount of money (assuming they have that amount in their balance) to any other entity, and for any purpose or reason (with a possible digital ledger for historical backtracking).
I started because my mother taught me a long time ago that even when you have nothing, there's ways to give back. And what you get in return for that is tenfold. But it was always hard because I couldn't do a lot. I couldn't do much more than just donate money when I was on [Buffy] because there wasn't time. And now that I have the time, it's amazing.
( Sarah Michelle Gellar as quoted on the English Wikipedia. )
Some people have a prejudice against donating money to corporations, especially large ones. But they and their shareholders (who receive profit dividends) are also good causes.