if you're going to title your talk "obama in china", i fully expect gratuitous use of airbrushed photos of obama's head on nixon's body, dancing provocatively in front of giant pictures of mao.

hey. the republicans would pay good money for it.

deathtokoalas
+jessica i've been waiting for years for the discourse to change to language that suggests that the problem is being taken more seriously, and if anything the language and consequent ideological approaches have only gotten worse. i actually read one report a little after paris that criticized the agreement for being too reliant on "20th century governing approaches" and not "implementing modern, incentive-based policies".

all that this language broadcasts is that the issue isn't actually being taken seriously - still.

i think maybe some of it might have to do with the way that wealthy people interact with the environment. it's seen as something in the realm of philanthropy. politicians treat it all as legacy issues. the result is that the upper class has this warped perspective - making space for a wetland is "giving something back", merely an act of unprovoked kindness, whereas destroying a wetland is just doing business. there's no sense of duty - either legally or morally.

from this warped concept, we get the idea of levying fines to address climate change. we give out fines for breaking rules that have few externalities, or largely meaningless ones. if you park your car on the side of the road, or cross the street away from the lights - that's a fine. and, if you dump acid into the river then that's a fine, too - because not doing so would be an act of kindness, of giving back.

we're never getting anywhere with this until we change our attitude. dumping acid into the river is a crime and should land you in jail. that's right. jail. down the river. cuffs.

you think that's too much? then you're not taking the problem seriously.

stop. shut up. you really aren't.

you would need to run super-computers in parallel, hillary. it needs to be brute force.

unless you think you can revolutionize number theory in ways that are widely considered to be impossible and have eluded mathematicians for thousands of years. can you find a pattern in the distribution of prime numbers, for example? these are very difficult, but very foundational, questions in mathematics. history has repeatedly presented answers to questions of these sorts in the form of accidents, and often from unknown prodigies. i'd love to see the money directed that way, but you're not going to get a better theory of arithmetic by increasing spending.

there's no royal road to geometry.

there's a sticker on my microwave that claims that the device is complaint with communications regulations. what that actually means is that it can be controlled remotely. this is true of almost any electronic device. if you can pass a law that says the government has the right to take control of your toaster, i don't know why it's considered so brazen to pass a law that says that the government has the right to take control of your phone.

i think people need to change their perspectives on digital privacy. it's not even a question of ideals, it's more of a question of being realistic. if you have a reason to not use a phone, you should really not use a phone. i don't mean to present that in your typical "you have nothing to hide" context, i mean to state that as a pragmatic directive: if you are an activist, and you have any legitimate concerns about privacy whatsoever, be it in the context of civil disobedience or perhaps corporate espionage, you should not use any telecommunications devices.

what you do through telecommunications - which travels in public through airwaves or cables - needs to be perceived as as public as what you do at a shopping mall. i guess the disconnect is that you were once on a computer in your living room, so people saw the internet as in the realm of your personal life. but, this collapses pretty quickly when you think about it. if you're walking around in public and sending signals through the air to towers then you're in public - and should behave as though you are.

if you're going to use their servers, you're simply naive to expect them not to snoop on you. this question of exactly what they're doing and exactly what they're not doing is not what you should be concerning yourself with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gph0CupQv0

i'm a little skeptical of the idea that light is the absolute limit, but i'm not at all skeptical about the idea of a boundary point occurring in mass-energy transfer. the reason light is claimed to be the speed limit is because it's assumed to be pure energy. no mass. there's no experimental support for this claim; rather, we have a particle-wave duality that ought to cast some questions on it. on top of that, the math makes more sense when you acknowledge the existence of the always present implied epsilon, rather than pretend it's not really there.

but, if light is not the fastest thing then the fastest thing cannot be much faster because light cannot have much mass. there is some space for the possibility of moving two or three times the speed of light, but not faster than that.

so, therefore aliens are impossible, right? no. because, you're making another assumption without realizing it: that aliens must have comparable life spans to humans. if an alien could live for tens of thousands of years, space travel would be an entirely feasible proposition.

some biologist will reject this offhand. but, the truth is that we seem to have taken a wrong turn on the evolutionary tree in terms of longevity, some time many millions of years ago. had we evolved from turtles, we would likely live for several centuries rather than several decades. there's no intrinsic requirement for cell death; arguments about the laws of physics on earth only apply to the earth. a different kind of environment may actually select for extreme longevity.

it seems to be clear that space travel is not something that humans will be possible of for many eons, if ever at all. we're running up against a biological limit rather than a technological one. now, there's abstract ways around this. we could consider cloning our consciousness to data storage and then reuploading it into a new clone created from scratch - that way we could exist in the computers for the thousand of years of travel time. but, that is not just solving the problem of space travel, it is solving the problem of mortality.

i think the key point in grappling with this is in realizing what the actual problem is in contemplating the likelihood of travel, and it's that our lives are too short.

Stone Pestal
Hey Justin I am a Canadian who cannot find a job ,along with 1,000,000 plus other Canadians .Your government just allowed 27,000 unknown Syrian refugees into Canada .Meanwhile Canadians are homeless ,living on the streets and short of food .You are paying $375 a month for rent to people on Welfare .You have just brought in refugees while Canadians are suffering and there is an affordable housing crisis .What ? Are you going to do for Canadians ?

jessica
+Stone Pestal
there's not really a reason why we have to choose between helping existing canadians and getting people out of a situation of imminent genocide. i don't want to stop the flow of refugees, but i would like to see more resources put into subsidized housing.

the thing you have to understand, though, is the way the division of powers in the country works. it's not 100% a provincial responsibility. but, it's about 90% a provincial responsibility. trudeau can basically do one thing, here, and it's write a check. if you're concerned about the low level of assistance, or the shoddy state of subsidized housing, you need to contact your mpp and your local city council representative. 

jessica
+Karl Hans
if the refugees we're admitting were in support of sharia law, they'd have stayed in the region.

the governments of syria and iraq, pre-catastrophe, were both secular. organizations that outlawed groups that supported sharia law. you could be executed for joining the muslim brotherhood, which is actually relatively moderate.

the historical roots of the assad and hussein regimes were in atheistic socialism, not islamic fundamentalism. this has been the conflict in the region for decades.

the refugees are more likely to be communists than fundamentalists.

Gravitating
To this day.. I have no idea what Michael Stipe is signing about.. I like to think, that he was singing about something, so Beautiful, it couldn't be expressed in words...

deathtokoalas
+Gravitating
he'd long grown out of mumbling at this point. and, in general, i don't think he's as hard to decipher as a lot of people claim. but, i think the general theme of this record is exasperation. there's a kind of process of accepting the futility of struggle that, in places, comes off as sort of absurdist.

i think this is the most important line on the record:

i know that this is vitriol. no solution, spleen-venting,
but I feel better having screamed. don't you?

the record exists in that space where you're done screaming. or, at least are for the day, anyways.

Peter Gray
+deathtokoalas ..true to the exasperation in point - but maybe it's a kind of maturity.. almost like Ghandi's non violence ethos .. accepting a higher (not particularly religious) plane, and way of thinking .. complete absurdity (?) - yet sublime (?) ..after the storm is always peace.

deathtokoalas
+Peter Gray
but, i think there's a difference between this kind of philosophical perspective that change is impossible in general and concluding, through observation, that change is impossible right now.

i didn't really understand stipe well until i read up a little on the beat poets. i mean, i got the themes, sort of, but i didn't really grasp it. i think there was a big buddhist slant in their writing, but i also think there was a big existentialist slant in it. stipe draws from both traditions, but i think he tends to lean more towards an existentialist concept of futility than a buddhist concept of release.