success with the router...

a small victory in a weekend of bad news.

deathtokoalas
i know they're indignant over an act of barbarism, but why aren't these protest movements seizing factories and farms instead of getting beat up by riot cops in downtown parks?

Michael IV
That would be the best option if their aim was to start a civil war but it isn't. They simply want to be heard by their government, not create a new one on their own. 

deathtokoalas
yeah, there's this impossible problem we've created by not educating our citizens. as a result of living in almost total historical ignorance, they grow up thinking ridiculous ideas, like that there's some kind of culture of democracy in the western world. this leads them into protest movements that demand change from this inane, supernatural force they call 'government' - rather than realizing that government is they themselves, and their inaction (a function of their terrible education) is a function of the system's planned failure.

a better education would teach them that the class war is perpetual. the civil war is not determined by dates and events, but is always carried out between those who own capital and those who do not. there is consequently no solution other than to attack those who own property, and redistribute it to the people.

yet, so long as we are kept ignorant, we will gather in squares and chant slogans instead.

Abayarde718
Yo bro you're the fucking man. That was brilliant. If we gathered to grow public gardens and make abundance the norm it would be 10000X more effective than shouting words in anger. If we grew food and cannabis, our own medicines, to become independent of the need for so much capital and consuming, we could crash the economy. People Dont want real change. They want nanny states. Peave to u.

deathtokoalas
i think it's worse than that, actually. they seem to legitimately want things to change (or, in the case of turkey and many other places, perhaps not change), but they're fundamentally incapable of carrying out that change, which is by design. a big part of the problem is that we're taught all kinds of lies about how our governments represent us, rather than the truth, which is that they represent the interests of capital (banks and big corporations, still mostly resource and extraction based at this high a political level). this leads us to the delusional (religious, really) belief system underlying these demonstrations - prayers to the state will be heeded if they are loud enough and targeted enough. that's less a desire for a nanny state, and more blowback from social engineering.

in truth, demonstrators are doing precisely what they're taught to do, and being beaten up by a demonstration of state force like they're supposed to be. cries of "human rights violations!" exist in some parallel universe, full of rainbow unicorns prancing through fields of money trees. you've all confused the state for an entity that actually gives a fuck.

the handful of examples of large scale successful demonstrations have not been peaceful. in actual fact, gandhi was demonstrating to the british authorities the size of a potential army (and the hopelessness of their position, tactically). it was the threat of force that won him his aims (which were full of far more fail than win). likewise, the civil rights protests would have been entirely useless if the demonstrators weren't armed (they don't teach us that). in order for "non-violent protest" to be effective, it must come with the threat of imminent violence. that is to say that, when effective, it is not truly non-violent at all, but merely a more enlightened type of violence.

but, it's the government's desire to keep us ignorant and stupid that is both at the core of these protest movements and the reason they offer no hope for the future. the reason they sit in squares and sing songs isn't that they don't want to improve their own lives, it's that they don't know how to. they only know how to ask their state deity to solve problems for them - just as they're supposed to.

these protests are consequently the exact opposite of a hopeful youth movement. rather, they are evidence of the impending doom that we face as a consequence of not educating our young people.

"you mean, you shouldn't put gatorade on the crops?"

Michael IV
The people will always be ignorant, there's is a slow change. It's the leaders that are the ones who can bring true change and quickly. Therefore people should study for themselves and learn for themselves and then lead their people. Instead of teaching the whole populace, which seems quite impossible.

deathtokoalas
ach, no. no gods, no masters. smashing the state is the only possible way to bring back history....this just isn't the way to do it.

leaders never represent people. they always represent capital. putting hope into leadership is only possible through not understanding the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism.

Michael IV
There will always be leaders in this world, that's an inevitability. There are those who follow and those who lead. The only chose we have is who are the ones to lead.

deathtokoalas
see, michael is terribly brainwashed. he thinks there are only those who follow and those who lead. that allows him to internally validate an authoritarian system as irreplaceable in one form or another. it may convince him, one day, to pick up a gun to protect a flag, rather than attack those who handed him the gun.

leaders are those who follow from the front. the quality that defines a good leader is an ability to understand the tendencies in the herd, then repeat it back in a way that justifies their use of power. there is consequently no real difference between a leader and a follower, except where they exist in the hierarchy. if we are to be reduced to only leaders and followers, we're destined to stumble around in circles. only the blind may lead, and only the deaf may follow.

there is, however, a difference between those who engage and those who do not. rather than thinking in terms of this silly leader/follower distinction, it would rather behoove you to conceive of situations in a philosopher/actor sort of distinction. actors are leaders and followers - people who take part in the group. philosophers are those who sit back and watch the leaders follow themselves around in circles. from this point of abstraction, they are able to conceive of problems in the way people behave.

it's not that we need more philosophers. we have plenty. it's that we need to start listening to them.

Michael IV
We've had plenty of Scientific revolutions and extreme changes in knowledge over the years. We've all listened to plenty of philosophers and learned from them, but much of the world is deaf to sense and reason. That is why we still have wars, that is why we still have strife, because the populace fails to listen. Like Sun Tzu said, deception simply has a bad connotation. If the deaf populace is led by an enlightened leader, then there is no need to fight the redundant battle of trying to convince everyone of "the right way to think". Only one person has to understand everything, and that is the leader.

deathtokoalas
you're deifying your government leaders; the concept you seek is called "god", and the system you envision is called "fundamentalism". it's the kind of thing that exists in iran, and that once existed in rome. there are three reasons why these systems fail. the first is that human wisdom is not only finite but bounded much lower than our imagination would like. we're dumb apes. the second is that power corrupts; there is no enlightened sage that will reform a corrupt system, it is the system itself that needs to be abolished. removing bush did not end targeted assassination programs. removing yanukovich will not end endemic ukrainian corruption. removing erdogan will not dismantle the turkish military-industrial complex.  the third is that society is collaborative by definition and must function through consent to be stable. hierarchical, authoritarian societies are constantly in rearrangement, perpetually on the brink of implosion and collapse. it's these shifting class divisions, and desires to maintain power within them, that are the reason we continue to fight. there is no way to abolish conflict (this, again, is delusional religious thinking), but only a way to abolish want, making conflict difficult on an organized scale. so long as leaders may raise armies, they may start wars.

i don't wish to write off the masses. i am a member of these masses. i stand with them. rather, i point out that we are losing the fight against the leaders that wish to enslave us by reducing us to ignorant fools that are dependent upon them for survival. this is a created condition, not an endemic one.

i don't wish to continue this discussion.

scrbble
I haven't read a well thought out comment on youtube in a while, thanks for that.

Kim Jong-un 
deathtokoalas please marry me!

deathtokoalas
i'm the biggest loner in the world, it wouldn't work out.

Kim Jong-un
I'd make it work. Just text me if you change your mind.

Cristian Sosa 
I wish people could start to seize government buildings around the world, and rise in an utopian anarchism. But sadly mankind is eons behind to be ready to leave in peace without the need of a government.  And a change of politics in the government, say from Capitalism to Socialism for instance, would be like placing a band aid on a major laceration. We are broken, and fixing our entire society must be one of the hardest things humanity has yet to face.

deathtokoalas
i'm not really in agreement with the idea that we're centuries away from actual freedom. if there's a temporal component, it's in the technology and i actually think that automated production has the potential to revolutionize the mode of production within our lifetime, and the social system will have no choice but to adjust to that extreme economic reorganization.

but, if it's true, the end point can only be accomplished by failing dozens or hundreds of times. there's no teleology in history - not marx' teleology of historical materialism, nor hegel's end of history, nor the dreaded orthogenesis that came out of trying to reconcile darwin with genesis. we will not get to an end point as a function of time, we need to push our way there. and there may be a few messes along the way...

so, venezuela has an excess demand for milk and butter, driving street protests. if you just decrease the demand (by increasing taxes and reducing imports), inflation will go down, thereby stopping the protests.

brilliant!

i'll keep that in mind if we ever have a problem with inflation in the price of water.

less sardonically, this is what happens when you approach economics as applied algebra.

if you ignore the prevalence of the black market (which seems to be the creation of government policy), it might be more effective if the demand for milk and butter was more elastic. but, then there probably wouldn't be a problem in the first place. it's hard to imagine people attacking cops over the price of computers.

as it is, decreasing demand for food sounds like an algorithm for depopulation.

maybe the solution is that venezuela needs to focus more on domestic production of food, including reducing exports? the root cause of the problem seems to be their dependence on food imports.

now, if you could just get somebody out there explaining to people that seizing farms and factories and building networks of food distribution is a better idea than throwing molotov cocktails at riot police...

alas, such a prophet escapes us, the world over.

hundreds of thousands of people on the street there, and in brazil, and in turkey, and in ukraine, greece, egypt and spain - and i'm not convinced that the thought of seizing production even entered anybody's minds.

i have these strange straight edge behavioural remnants that i've never really gotten over.

i won't take anything for headaches, ever. not aspirin, not acetaminophen, not ibuprofen and certainly not codeine. i'll get moderately intense migraines, too: blurred vision, vomiting.

i'll actually mostly just ignore it.

"j, you don't look so good".
"yeah, i'm having a migraine."
"you look like you need some help."
"nah."
"i really think..."
"i'm fine."

in truth, i'm in horrific pain, but it's the kind of pain you get used to. i mean, the only other way to deal with it is to go fall asleep somewhere dark, and that's not always an option.

i'm glad it's an option right now, though, because i'm still refusing myself aspirin.

some bad news with my hard drive, if you follow the comments.

i'm kicking myself for not backing up when i had the opportunity. in fact, i was actually going to do it right at the very moment i discovered the last blue screen. just a few hours too late. ugh. *bashes head against wall*.

i've had a little time to think about it. there's an off chance that i may be able to recover parts or all of the install partition because i was moving a lot of files around from drive to drive. if i can do that, i can reinstall the machine, and i will.

if i can't, i'm not sure if i'm going to let it sit and hope i can recover the data by bringing it to a store, maybe read a bit instead, or if i'd rather upgrade to 64 bit vista (which is what i have sitting around). see, it's going to take probably close to a week to get it up and running. given that reality, waiting might be a better plan.

pretty depressed about it, though. that's pretty much everything i've done since i moved here - as well as the culmination of eight years worth of scripting - that is possibly just kablooey.

well, it connects with a vanilla sp3 install, but i can't run that on the living room machine, it's too old. the image is designed to run a static ip. it worked with the old router, so i'm hoping i can just modify a few things to align it, but it didn't work the first time so i may have to reimage it for dhcp....

minor. it'll be working in a day or two.

turkey is a nato member, us ally and supposed democracy. that's very different than the other countries that have seen protest movements. egypt is the closest comparison, but it's not close.

it'll be interesting to see how this works out, but it's not likely that american or eu interests will side with the protests.

ok, so this is a losing battle.

a winning battle may be to convince local governments to create contracts for flood walls, indoor food growing and other adaptations.

sucks, but that's capitalism.

i like how the russian and ukrainian representatives have equally unhappy looking thugs behind them. really plays into bad stereotypes about political slavic mafia groups.

deathtokoalas
i know it's hugely counter-intuitive, but what the saudis actually want is to prevent democracy in syria. this is the reason they're trying to oust assad.

--

commandoslayer
First they are saying they want Assad out of power and let the people elect a new leader now they dont want an election to be held in Syria.

deathtokoalas
the saudi aim has always been to prevent democracy in syria. that's what this conflict is actually about.

it's the same reason they have a hate-on for iran, and that they engineered the coup in egypt. before the shit hit the fan, assad had been trying to engineer an orderly retreat from power for several years (that's all changed now, as he can hardly hand over power to extremists). the saudis want to get in there and take over the government before populist forces do, so they don't have "another iran" causing destabilization and giving their own people any ideas. the americans and israelis are going along with it because british imperialism has always preferred dictatorships over democracies in the region, for a broadly similar set of reasons. democracies are unstable. properly bribed dictatorships are easy to control - so long as they control their own people in return.

the propaganda is just that. america never fights for democracy, but always in opposition to it.

commandoslayer
The syrian people have two choices a dictator who has a secular government or terrorists who want to impose sharia law. Who would you prefer to run the country?

Assad has a secular government. I never said that he or his family were all good people and yes there are FSA soldiers who are against Assad and against the jihadist but the odds of them winning are very low. How do you expect them to win against Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra and at the same time fight Hezbollah and Assad? You are the one funny living in the fantasy world where the prince will rescue the princess from the dragon.

I thought the Kurds wanted an independent state in the Middle East, independent from Turkey and Syria. Anyway the chances of the YPG and Kurds in Syria winning is also low because they are not only fighting the FSA, Assad and the Jihadist but Turkey as well. The Turkish Government is allowing foerign jihadist to attack your people in Syria and if you dont believe me watch this video watch?v=p2zxlFQxkQ4

Just asking: So are ok with the Turkish government allowing Jihadist to kill your Kurdish brothers and sisters in Syria? The Kurdish are a beautiful people who I truly understand their cause.

I am watching moderate news and watch video footage and talking to people of Syria from all sides. Kurdish people are fighting the Jihadist and the FSA which part of it is allied with Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra who want the Kurdish people out of Syria, many Kurds have left Syria because of the ethnic cleansing commited by those forgein terrorists. If Assad loses it is high likley the civil war will continue with rebel factions fighting each other but the hatred towards your people will still continue.

Can you imagine they prefer foregin terrorists rather than the beautiful Kurdish who were born in those lands and have lived there all their lives?

Then you are the Sunni against Shia type? Because if i remember correctly Assad is an Alawite muslim.

I am not claiming anything I never claimed that Assad is a good choice seen in my first reply. What I am saying what will happen to the minorities in Syria like the christians, kurds and Alawites? Will the FSA be able to protect them if not will they join the jihadist to murder them? Will the Sunnis be stripped from their freedom and have a country with Sharia law? How will the FSA get rid of the Jihadist they let enter in the first place and who do you think the Saudis would support?

deathtokoalas
the old kurdish rebel trick, eh?

that's the oldest trick in the book.

not only do i not believe a word you say, i also think you're a cia agent. and am consequently blocking you.

2 million.

hrmmmn.

not sure it's well known.

i agree we need to be careful with assigning too much to monetary policy. but this guy's answer is some kind of ultra-paradoxical position.

there is no "natural cause" of an increase in the money supply. it's a decision made by a bureaucrat because.....who knows, really. it could be anything. a bribe. an academic policy. an electoral mandate. the point is that it's a deliberate decision made by a human, not some kind of naturalistic phenomena. it could be applied in a way that makes sense, or in a way that doesn't make sense - and consequently be either beneficial or disastrous.

now, it's reasonable to speak of things happening as a result of monetary policy. from where i'm sitting, i think debt is artificial, and so long as we have money at all (i am opposed to currency on a conceptual level, but i live in reality) we should be controlling how much we have centrally. simple demographic pressures are enough of a justification. as the population increases, the supply must increase as well. history teaches me that the thing we want to avoid at all costs is shortages, not surpluses.

but these decisions have an effect. that's why they're done. and one of them is possibly inflation, under the kinds of conditions greg points out.

that doesn't mean increasing the money supply will always turn us into weimar republic germany. it's not a single cause. but actions have effects. it's really head-scratching to deny that, then argue that conscious, human-produced actions have easily defined causes.

so, yes, boosting the money supply is a tool that should be used under the right circumstances, and we shouldn't allow people to scare us into thinking otherwise. but we also have to understand that it can be inflationary.

and we certainly can't be thinking that we're just automatons defined by pressures in the global economy, either.

and then there's the stuff about reducing excess aggregate demand by increasing taxes, which is just frightening.

so, venezuela has an excess demand for milk and butter, driving street protests. if you just decrease the demand (by increasing taxes and reducing imports), then the demand will decrease and inflation will go down.

brilliant!