Fleshing out connections, here’s a set of data points:
Question: We can create as many connections as we wish but how many of them are real?
Question: How many of us will live to be centenarians?
* called East Tennessee State Normal School at the time.** called East Tennessee State Teachers College at the time.
In what has been labeled as the Presumptuous Journalist Act, lawmakers approved a convoluted batch of legislation aimed to clarify the rights of meateaters, vegetarians and gun owners.
From now on, at least once a year meateaters must kill their own food, using guns or other means at close quarters.
Vegetarians who refuse to eat meat, let alone kill an animal for food, must pay tolls for the use of anything — every road, building or other infrastructure; any product, including food, medicine, and/or clothing; any ideas, such as business, technology, arts, science, and/or sports — that was designed, financed, built and/or maintained by meateaters.
Meateating gun owners who kill their food more than once a year are given exclusive rights to own as many guns and as much ammunition as they want.
Vegetarian gun owners are allowed to own up to as many guns and as much ammunition as they can carry to a knife fight at a broccoli slaughterhouse.
In addition, submitted at the last minute in tiny print buried deep within the Presumptuous Journalist Act, any human killed by a gun, whether through acts of war, property protection, self-defense and/or domestic violence, must be used to feed the homeless, the malnourished and/or refugees without a reliable source of food.
A rally was planned for protestors on all sides of this issue but was delayed until this year’s harvest has been brought in, counted, graded and sent to market.
CORRECTION: The rally was canceled. Everyone sat down at the tables for the Harvest Festival and resolved their differences, agreeing that meateaters, vegetarians and gunowners can exist, if not always peaceably, in the same society.
POST-CORRECTION: A family quarrel broke out at one of the tables and a gunfight ensued, offering opportunities for more presumptuous journalists to jump up and down, getting attention for themselves and the advertisers who support them.
How many people work for a structured organisation?
My brain is fuzzy this morning so I’m just making this blog entry a thought experiment.
Corporate organisational charts are typically hierarchical, especially viewed from a monetary compensation viewpoint.
The higher up the chart you go, the fewer the people but the more they’re paid.
People (employees, consultants, etc.) are just one cost of doing business.
What if we redefined the cost of working for a structured organisation?
What if we told employees that part of their pay was tied to profit sharing?
What if every minimum-wage job taught employees not only how to work together with other people as a team but also how the risks and rewards of running a company are shared so that it’s not just the CEOs and executives who get bonuses but also everyone else on the organisation chart?
What are the costs and benefits for such a program?
Could we remove the necessity for minimum wage and unions if we as a nation said that all employees were entitled to sharing the profits for a job well done as a team?
Would employees feel a better sense of ownership and pride in their work?
How could such a plan be integrated into early childhood education?
How do we instill into children that every one of us is a profit center?
Some of us profit monetarily and some of us profit emotionally/spiritually; some both; some neither.
How does this apply to people who are congenitally unable to grasp the concept of teamwork?
The power of the people is in the Internet.
Having worked for a telecommunications equipment designer/manufacturer, I’m familiar with the “secret,” “behind doors” negotiations that define the high-level specifications for internationally-connected technology.
Although, sometimes, the definitions might as well have been written in gibberish, hieroglyphics or undecipherable cryptic code as in so-called plain languages like English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic and Japanese.
Many a technology geek, political wonk and freedom lover impatiently wait while committees and subcommittees meet to discuss changes to the ITU Code of Business Ethical Conduct.
In other words, a few select people decide the fate of our social lives, both formal and informal, as it pertains to communicating across a substrate we call the Internet.
Even fewer of them might actually understand the underpinnings — the bits, bytes, frames, error correction and other terminological terms of endearment — that make popular tools like the World Wide Web more useful than gossiping about the latest celebrity scandal.
Do you understand some of the potential consequences?
Information = knowledge = monetary transactions
To be sure, putting up imaginary tollbooths on the information superhighway allows tracking of who passes through the tollbooth, which can be abused by arresting those whose actions are deemed a danger to political entities in power.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING!
I agree we should avoid clamping down the freedom that the Internet provides us as a species.
But do you understand another argument for tollbooths?
Capturing income streams that have eluded local governments which have seen their tax revenues drop while virtual marketplaces allow the exchange of goods and services without collecting taxes from local/visiting citizens.
I try to avoid the whole doomsday scenarios that others are hard-selling for their benefits.
I hope I’m a realist as much as a fellow member of our species can be.
I have faith in us and our place in the universe as sets of states of energy with short attention spans and selective memory.
How can we use these virtual tollbooths to police transactions without becoming thought police?
Policy. Polity. Politeness.
Look at an Ethernet frame, an IP address, a data packet, headers and footers.
Tell me what you see.
Do you know what a femtocell is?
Can you see a future where the restriction of the Internet as we know it leads to more innovation while temporarily stifling telecommunications as we’ve grown accustomed to over the last couple of decades (or the last few years for some)?
Unintended consequences…sigh…
I just want AT&T to get me, a loyal customer, the latest Android “Jelly Bean” update for my Samsung Galaxy S3 while deploying 4G LTE technology in my area at a reasonable monthly cost for my family.
Wouldn’t I like really-high-speed Internet at much lower costs like some regions of Europe and the rest of the world outside the U.S.?
Sure, but like many Americans, I’ve grown used to the fact that the lack of real competition in the marketplace has stifled innovation at the expense of greedy stockholders who demand high monetary return on their investments in exchange for poor service from the companies in which they invest.
The Internet — like physical highway systems — is a mix of freeways and toll roads.
Always has been, always will be.
Would more tollbooths increase or decrease the number of virtual highway robberies on the Internet?
Would they increase the number of jailed/tortured/murdered political objectors?
Can the ITU create a more just global society by tweaking the definition of the Internet?
Let’s hope so, even if they have to keep using complicated jargon.
If urbanalistic trends mean that a move toward higher population density as a…what? Defense against or positive move toward something that is less populated…
Then…
What makes you more or less tolerant or other people’s lifestyles?
Should we stop urban sprawl now in order to preserve subcultures like the Amish communities that aren’t as obviously dressed differently?
What if rural communities, en masse, seceded from their urban cousins?
How can citizens tell their community leaders that they don’t want to grow any faster/bigger?
What are the legal rights of a people to stop the suburban mallification/shopping centre/franchise homogenisation that flattens walls between subcultural beliefs/practices?
Some people actually put other idols on pedestals besides [the pursuit of] money…
Which is better for me: one, sitting on the sofa watching a succession of championship football games, or two, taking a walk in the woods looking at the random mix of nature’s wonders?
Which is more ridiculous: one, a career politician saying that government is good for me and has all the answers, or two, a person who inherited wealth and continues to grow richer without physical labour, never able to personally use all the wealth, saying that exploiting the physical labour of workers and the monetary credit of consumers is good for them?
In the religion we call the New World Order — the global marketplace, that is — adherents require the uninitiated to follow the same commandments regardless of their nonbeliefs:
In Europe, especially, we will continue to impose austerity hardships until morale improves and people break their dependencies upon government programs of social welfare as they find their faith in the only real religion available to all of us in any part of Earth — the New World Order of the Network, the Nodes be praised — enlightenment giving them the impetus to start their own businesses, investing the profit in the marketplace of the strong and efficient who may personally choose to support the meek and weak themselves rather than be forced to fund government support of the unprofitable meek and weak.
More and more, front yards are filling with inflatable Christmas figures.
In the past year, it seems people are getting creative with the use of their figures in adverts and dioramas.
Examples below:
The newly elected leader summoned his opponent to the government palace for the sole purpose of subtly implying that the leader was going to issue an edict to eliminate all white males and impregnate all white females by nonwhite males as part of a package of royal/dictator executive orders if the leader didn’t get cooperation from his opponent’s political cronies, the majority of whom are white males.
Of course, the cronies willingly sacrificed the opponent, saying one white male was sufficient sacrifice to prove they weren’t backing down to subtle, covert or overt threats. The only sacrifice they are willing to make is reduction of touchy-feely public/government social programs like food stamps, contraceptives, and theoretical science education.
Everyone agreed that spreading rumours and innuendo was vital to clouding the facts that the largest nation-based economy wasn’t doing badly compared to poorer/more polluted areas of the world, even though the global economy doesn’t care about nations except when laws impede trade/profits.
More as it develops…
treetrunkdings 