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One Book, One New Paltz committee members Linda Welles and Myra Sorin with this year’s pick, Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. (Photo by Lauren Thomas)
A local tradition since 2005, One Book/One New Paltz will be back this November, and this is your heads-up to get your hands on this year’s selected group read if you think you might like to participate. “We didn’t do it last year, so we lost momentum,” says OB/ONP committee member Linda Welles. “And the previous year it was entirely virtual.”
As with so many cultural organizations trying to keep services and activities alive during the pandemic, this group of volunteers – who work under the combined auspices of the Benjamin Center at SUNY New Paltz and the Elting Memorial Library – picked up a few new technological tricks and gadgets that will continue to be useful in the future. One Book 2022 will employ a combination of films streamed via Kanopy, live gatherings and virtual discussions; some of the events will be hybrid. That means that a larger number of people can participate, including folks who are homebound or will be too far away during OB/ONP week (November 13 to 19) to attend in person.
Choosing the book of the year is typically an arduous process, with committee members lobbying vigorously for favorite authors or works; but there are certain agreed-upon guidelines, including a page limit. The organizers want to ensure that participants have ample time to read the One Book after locating a copy. The Inquiring Minds bookstore in New Paltz should have a good supply on hand, and offers a 15 percent price discount; Barner Books, a former partner, nowadays only stocks used books. The Elting Library downtown and the Sojourner Truth Library on campus will have some copies, but, according to committee member Myra Sorin, your best bet might be an interlibrary loan, which is “pretty quick.”
For this year’s offering, the committee was keen on picking a title from the Hogarth Shakespeare series: a project initiated by Hogarth Press (now an imprint of Penguin Random House) to commission noted authors to retell the Bard’s plays in novel form in contemporary settings. With The Handmaid’s Tale much in the public consciousness these days due to the US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, it made perfect sense to choose Hag-Seed (2016), Margaret Atwood’s reimagining of The Tempest. Much of the play’s action takes place in a men’s correctional facility, which made it an especially good fit for readers in New Paltz: As Welles notes, “There are more prisons in this area than is usual.”
Widely regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell to playwriting, The Tempest tells the tale of a duke named Prospero who was deposed in a coup d’état (also a politically timely topic) and exiled to a desert island with his three-year-old daughter Miranda. The story picks up 12 years later, when Prospero – who also happens to be a powerful sorceror – has discovered his enemies sailing nearby and conjured up a storm to wreck their ship onto his island. A romance that develops between Miranda and the son of one of his rivals sidetracks Prospero from his initial quest for vengeance. There are comic characters and some magical ones as well: the sprite Ariel and the “hag-seed” monster Caliban, both of whom are kept in servitude until the exiled duke’s schemes are ripe.
While Atwood’s best-known works are dystopian fantasies, Hag-Seed is set in modern-day Canada and actually has fewer fantastical elements than the play that inspired it. The protagonist, Felix, a theater festival director ousted by his colleagues, has conversations with his dead daughter, also named Miranda, but she’s more an imaginary friend than a spirit. Angry and humiliated, Felix is lying low in a rustic shack, teaching English Literature courses to prison inmates under an assumed name and dreaming of revenge against the administrators who stole his job and whose stars are rising, professionally and politically.
The former director’s Shakespeare class, in which the convicts get to adapt the lofty language of the Bard into street vernacular, act out plays and record them on video, becomes such a successful model within the prison system that Felix’s old enemies, not knowing who he really is, decide to pay an official visit – thus providing an opportunity to have them at his mercy. “He uses the play in the prison to take revenge on these two men who ruined his life,” Welles explains. “But the story is more about the way putting on Shakespeare plays affected the prisoners, and the relationships among the prisoners.”
Part of the OB/ONP program this year is a selection of filmed versions of The Tempest, or movies inspired by it, some of which can be viewed via Kanopy and some on DVDs that can be borrowed from the two participating libraries. (You’ll need a Mid-Hudson Library System card to get them from Elting or SUNY New Paltz borrowing privileges to access them via Sojourner Truth.) Two of the films will have live screenings, followed by facilitated group discussions: Julie Taymor’s 2010 opus Tempest, starring Helen Mirren as Prospera, and Shakespeare behind Bars (2005) a documentary about an actual production of The Tempest performed by inmates at the Luther Luckett Correctional Facility in Louisville, Kentucky. The other two movies featured in OB/ONP are Paul Mazursky’s Tempest (1982) and Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979).
One Book week kicks off with its traditional Community Book Discussion and Brunch hosted by Bill Strongin, rabbi emeritus of the Jewish Congregation of New Paltz. Other scheduled events include the Academic Panel, this year featuring SUNY New Paltz professors Cyrus Mulready (English), Jerry Persaud (Digital Media & Journalism, Latin & Caribbean Studies) and Anne Roschelle (Sociology). “The Academic Panel is always my favorite part of One Book, with people coming from different disciplines discussing the book through a lens unique to their field,” says Welles.
Additional scholarly presentations include one focused on Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, an adaptation that makes Caliban the protagonist and deconstructs the story as a meditation on colonialism; a discussion titled “Plays in Prisons/Prisons in Plays;” and another that provides an overview of adaptations of The Tempest over the centuries, including contemporary versions aimed at children and youths.
To see the full schedule, including locations for live events and links to access Zoom discussions or download films, visit www.newpaltz.edu/benjamincenter/events/one-book-one-new-paltz.
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Frances Marion Platt has been a feature writer (and copyeditor) for Ulster Publishing since 1994, under both her own name and the nom de plume Zhemyna Jurate. Her reporting beats include Gardiner and Rosendale, the arts and a bit of local history. In 2011 she took up Syd M’s mantle as film reviewer for Alm@nac Weekly, and she hopes to return to doing more of that as HV1 recovers from the shock of COVID-19. A Queens native, Platt moved to New Paltz in 1971 to earn a BA in English and minor in Linguistics at SUNY. Her first writing/editing gig was with the Ulster County Artist magazine. In the 1980s she was assistant editor of The Independent Film and Video Monthly for five years, attended Heartwood Owner/Builder School, designed and built a timberframe house in Gardiner. Her son Evan Pallor was born in 1995. Alternating with her journalism career, she spent many years doing development work – mainly grantwriting – for a variety of not-for-profit organizations, including six years at Scenic Hudson. She currently lives in Kingston.
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Penis extenders boost the penis by extending the penile cells as well as tissues. Some extensive studies show these tools can offer favorable outcomes if they’re used regularly. The most up to date study shows the best penile extender can do an exceptional task of extending the penile cells, and present outcomes that can just be achieved by an operation.
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Penis extenders continue to get more appeal as time advances. Guy taking care of erectile dysfunction as well as penis size troubles ask yourself if a penis extender can turn things around.
To the shock of some, this deluxe penis extender has been around for more than two decades. When you compare Quick Extender Pro to other penis enhancement items on the marketplace, you’ll see that it is unique and reliable.
The Quick Extender Pro has some features that can not be discovered in comparable items. It has a double strap assistance system. With this system, 2 loopholes link the extender to the penis as well as the pads are there to offer convenience.
Numerous penis extenders have one band or loophole. This is the key reason that the penis will certainly slip out while the extender is in usage.
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The adhering to characteristics offer the Quick Extender Pro an edge over its competitors:
Current studies reveal that even more guys are currently taking measures to raise the size of their penis. This is the key reason why the sales of penis gadgets have raised substantially. As opposed to taking pills and also utilizing lotions, it feels like males really feel extra comfy making use of a gadget that include size to their exclusive participant.
The Phallosan Strength is a fantastic penis enhancement device that uses a traction make the penis bigger. Developed in Germany, the Phallosan Strength was tested extensively prior to it was released to the market. It is important to keep in mind that it’s approved by the Federal Medication Management.
Just how does this gadget work? Based upon the gradual drawing principle, the Phallosan Forte forces the penile cells to break down and also make repairs. When this remains in play, penis growth will certainly happen. Please keep in mind that this technique was examined prior to being introduced to the public.
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How does it Function?
The Phallosan Specialty can make your private member longer and wider with ease. It has an aggressive cap that borders the penis with a sleeve that operates like your preferred prophylactic. A durable strap is connected about your waistline or thighs. The strap adds a significant amount of pressure to your penis. In time, you’ll observe that your penis is growing and also much longer.
Data reveal that men included an inch to their penis length after putting on the Phallosan Specialty for seven hrs a day for six months. This tool will not hurt your penis if you follow the producer’s directions meticulously.
Some believe Size Genes is the very best penile extender. It is produced out of tough plastic as well as metal. A plastic thrust ring is connected to the base. This makes it less complicated for you to slide your penis right into the extender.
One-of-a-kind rods are affixed to the ring, and the changing nuts are fastened to expansion cords. The expansion cords have a spring device.
The band on the rods makes it very easy for you to discover a comfy placement in the tool. The maker went above and beyond by adding even more extension cords to the package. They’ll come in useful when you require help with making changes to the size as well as size setups.
Is Dimension Genes the very best Penile Extender?
Size Genetics has the ability to make a firm grip with the aid of its pole extenders. You will not discover this feature in various other traction tools in the market. Size Genetics produces the traction that will certainly promote cellular division in your personal participant. This helps the tissues grow.
Pleased customers of Size Genes revealed they’re pleased with the healing results that come from utilizing the gadget. They additionally took place record claiming Dimension Genetics boosted the size and size of their penis.
If you’re not satisfied with your penis size, it’s time to act. The most effective penile extender can make your penis augmentation dreams happened. We recommend that you offer among the designs over a try.
No, you will certainly not see overnight outcomes. You need to utilize the extender 7 hours a day for a minimum of 6 months.
Guy from all walks of life are fascinated with the suggestion of adding even more size to their penis. This leads us to one inquiry. Can you boost the width as well as size of your penis?
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Ads for penis augmentation products have been included in magazines and on the web. Many companies declare their vibrant pumps, powerful pills, as well as progressed surgical procedures can increase the dimension of your exclusive participant. It’s imperative to direct out that their insurance claims are not backed by difficult clinical evidence.
It’s also deserving to mention that reliable clinical companies around the nation have not preferred penis surgical procedure for aesthetic gain. It’s reasonable to claim that most of the pills and also techniques being marketed will certainly not produce favorable results. In the end, they can damage your penis as well as make it very difficult for you to perform well in the bedroom.
What is penis extending? Penis stretching focuses on using unique strategies as well as devices to get a far better erection. This includes using a traction tool and also the well known penis pump.
The self is a very popular penis exercise as well as has actually been made use of for centuries. In this exercise, you need to make a round motion around your manhood while masturbating. This need to be done up until you really feel an inch of your penis expand. Numerous males do this workout daily, as well as after achieving this size, the majority of really feel as though they have a new member. Because this workout just takes secs to perform, it is one of the very best penis exercises that can be done.
Another penis exercise that has actually been made use of for centuries is referred to as the kegel. It likewise takes concerning a minute to do and needs that you do numerous repeatings. The objective of the kegel is to compel blood into your penis body. This is just how you will certainly get the three inches that you are trying to find. The male organ expands when there is a steady flow of blood into it.
The 3rd workout that you can use is the strap on penis lengthening exercise. In this workout, you need to affix a thick, broad strap that is made out of leather or some other product around the base of your manhood. You need to cover it around your entire penis, and also for a couple of secs you will certainly have to pull it tight.
Kegel workouts are claimed to be the most safe of all the penis augmentation stretches out there. This is since no medications are involved in these, and also they are 100% natural. The only trouble that is connected with them is the reality that your member may expand stronger, especially if you are utilizing the band for a very long time. However, it is not unsafe compared to surgeries. If you wish to boost your penis length and girth, then you need to take into consideration these three workouts.
There are a lot of benefits that you can obtain from executing these exercises on a regular basis. You will have the ability to offer your manhood the required increase in order for it to feel its best. The results that you can expect are additionally amazing. If you wish to make the dimension of your penis larger, then you need to really think about doing the penis augmentation extends daily. Good luck! |
In my search to locate a male augmentation tool that actually works I have actually discovered a lot from Dick cots testimonials. First of all they are not a rip-off due to the fact that every Dick stretcher that I purchased did benefit me. My size is not a concern, some individuals say you need to be big to obtain excellent results however I have been able to enlarge my penis rather pleasantly even if I am very small. One of the very best things about using Prick stretchers is the reality that there is no waiting for outcomes, they assure lead to just a few weeks yet I have actually seen them at work and they hold true. The two devices I acquired functioned completely, they were both made by the exact same business as well as the results are absolutely genuine. What do I suggest to provide your penis enlargement a genuine increase?
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First lets speak about the Cock stretcher, they are devices that do not call for tablets or surgery. They are made to provide your penis enhancement by extending it, which can offer you many advantages. If you have actually ever before really felt distressed by erectile dysfunction sometimes in a day then Prick stretchers can help you out, it is a wonderful way to figure out the amount of inches your penis is and it likewise offers you tons of added inches to have fun with. A few weeks after you buy the gadget most people are amazed at the results, not only do the Cock stretchers function if you require to enlarge your penis yet they function while you are having intercourse.
If you do not have penis enlargement pills in your medicine cabinet than I suggest you try penis cots first, they are secure and also can be taken every day. For more information on Cock cots I would certainly refer you to one of my previous posts, where I gave details on the firm as well as exactly how they made my penis bigger. The penis enlargement pills in stores nonetheless can be taken daily if you want. Both penis stretcher brands that I know of are the penis stretcher.
There are many individuals all over the world that swear by the SizeGenetics male enhancement pill. The penis cot has actually been utilized for many years by doctor around the globe, this is because they are completely risk-free. The penis enlargement pill in stores can be acquired without a prescription from any type of drug store in Canada. Many people utilize Cock cots since they want to expand their penis but many individuals that do not have penis issues also utilize them.
What Foods Can Help Make Your Dick Bigger
As a matter of fact one of my friends makes use of penis augmentation pills however he does not have a problem getting erections due to the fact that he utilizes a penis extender. In order for the penis extender to work efficiently it needs to be used for a minimum of eight hours a day for at least twenty-four hours. Numerous males wear penis extenders while they rest in the evening which makes it much more reliable since they are worn throughout the hrs when they are not having sexual intercourses. The penis extender makes it risk-free for the customer to obtain erections and likewise to have longer enduring erections.
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I always walk to my yoga class so my husband won’t wonder why I’m so rosy-cheeked and cold when I get home. It’s a half-mile walk, just a straight shot down Broadway. Every Thursday I think about it all day long. I watch the minutes tick by, closer and closer to six o’clock. My heart begins to race. Every week I think of all the reasons not to go.
I didn’t sleep well last night. I think I’m getting a cold. It’s just so nasty outside.
I feel the flesh spill over the waistline of my yoga pants. I can hear the nasal voice just over my shoulder reminding me that the best thing for you to do is to stay active. Sometimes the voice is thunderous.
So every Thursday at 5:50 I put on my parka, pull my hat over my ears and sling my yoga mat in its purple carrying case over my shoulder. I kiss the baby goodbye, wave to my husband and walk out the door.
As I get closer to the big glass windows on the ground floor of the fancy new condo building, my pace slows. I can see Heidi, the teacher, through the windows. She is standing before two rows of pony-tailed students in brightly colored tanks and pants, beaming warmth and welcome. They arch their arms above their heads, reaching for the ceiling, and then bow forward. Class has begun. It is too late now. I can’t imagine anything worse than clomping into a yoga class late, watching everyone avert their eyes and try to ignore the rustling of my parka falling off the hook, my keys jangling to the floor by accident. Every Thursday I stand on the opposite side of the street and watch, sometimes taking a step off the curb, but mostly just thinking about how ridiculous I am.
Sometimes I watch the class for a while and try to remember the sequences for later. Maybe I’ll sneak out of bed and do them in the living room while they all sleep. But mostly I just watch the students and how they react to the movements. Some are proud and limber, others shift precariously as they try to find their balance, some fold forward and their arms dangle many inches above the tops of their feet, and yet they still try. Once I saw a man cry as he brought his hands to his heart.
One time someone braver than me breathlessly ducked into class ten minute late, trying to inauspiciously unroll her mat in the cramped back corner of the room. I watched her with loathing and envy.
So then I walk through the neighborhood, carrying my yoga mat with me, killing the hour before I can go home step by step. I walk the dark streets with no destination or intention. I watch people coming home from work, struggling with groceries up the icy front steps, ungloved hands blistering red in the cold. I watch the dog walkers, talking on the phone or listening to music, cocking a hip to the side while their companions do their business. I avoid making eye contact with the runners, sleek and seal-like in their spandex and reflective gear, their exhalation rhythmically clouding before them.
There is an old man that walks deliberately from his apartment in St. Francis Assisted Living Center on South Fourth Street to Jimmy’s, the corner bar at six-thirty on the dot. He wears an army jacket and walks with a cane with a head shaped like a mallard duck. I believe that his daughter had the cane specially made so he will be more inclined to use it. He wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings, after all. I picture him, a duck hunter when he was more spry, kneeling in a field, carrying a thermos of coffee laced with something a little stronger to keep him warm. His daughter knows how he misses those hunts. Sometimes I follow him, afraid he’ll slip on the ice or trip over a crack in the sidewalk. He never has.
I always begin to make my way home at 7 o’clock. Once, I stood across the street from our house, just behind the juniper Tad from across the street planted in the midway, and watched my family through the living room picture windows. Ben never remembers to pull the drapes. That evening he was on the phone, pacing through the room with the baby cradled in one arm and the phone in the other. When the baby wrinkled his nose as if considering a wail of displeasure, Ben seemed to notice without looking, as if he could feel his son’s dissatisfaction in his own body. He rubbed his back lightly and nuzzled his neck. My boy beamed and crowed and they were for a moment like one creature.
Mostly, though, I walk up the porch steps and into the house at 7:15 and Ben looks up from his computer to tell me that the baby is sleeping.
“How was class?”
“So great. Just what I needed.”
He looks at me with eyes full of tenderness and resentment.
Sarah Ratermann Beahan is a MFA candidate at Goddard College. After traveling around the United States looking for a place to call home, she now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she writes and teaches. She chronicles her adventures on her website. Previous literary accolades include editing The Pitkin Review, writing an entertainment blog for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, production of her play Gas’n’Go at the Webster University Conservatory Theatre and cleverly written Facebook status updates.
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And if you do wish to register, you’ll be able to all the time change your nickname anytime you want. Do not insult customers of adult video chat, older folks can take such insults to heart. The best site or app for discrett sex chat is SexFriend. The site has a excessive ratio of female to male customers, and the age of majority users is 21. Second to SexFriend is Ashley Madison, a site dedicated to affairs and extra-marital fun.
As far as chat sites go, Ashley Madison is a lot more personal than the others. It’s not completely anonymous and it doesn’t lead you to a web page filled with video fashions or chat rooms. It makes use of an identical algorithm to effectively pair you up with sexy people in your space to have a sex chat with.
There is no official registration, just a username, and if you favor, a password for maintaining the identical username. The Discover mode enables you to swipe proper or left or request more photographs. You can customize your ideal affair based mostly on keywords and demographic filtering. According to the company’s rely, with over 15,000 members becoming a member of every single day, it’s top-of-the-line sites for locating a neighborhood sex associate. Remember, though, most of these teams are group discussion teams, with a chat function enabled. That means you possibly can chat with different members in real-time, and possibly on cam chat, however should introduce yourself to the group first.
Image through web site.This site receives over a quarter of 1,000,000 visits each month.
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The adult service provides a easy process for changing into a client (the user’s sexual orientation doesn’t matter) and also permits you to enjoy the most unique erotic reveals.
AdultFriendFinder is probably one of the top chat platforms that makes it simple to find sexting.
According to the company’s personal estimates, about seven p.c of Tinder’s users are age thirteen to 17. We have one of the fastest-growing communities in the whole world in relation to free adult chatting. Meet in Chat is an easy adult chat expertise that each one folks from around the world can freely use. You’ll see different people’s nicknames on the right facet of the chat window. Women’s nicknames are pink, males are white, transgenders and transsexuals are purple, and everyone else is gray. If you want to say one thing to the room, simply kind it within the chat field and click enter. If somebody’s caught your eye and you need to have a one-on-one sex chat with them, simply click on their name on the best and click PM.
Chatroulette is the best suited choice for fast chat with adult associates. Chatville is an adult chat room that looks lots like Omegle. Chatville provides random one-on-1 choices, similar to other roulette-style chats. Chaturbate allows you to chat with other users by way of webcam video chat. Chaturbate is a sizzling place to talk with like-minded adults. ChatAvenue’s 18+ Adult Chat Section is probably one of the most lively adult chat rooms. You will discover tons of individuals on-line, and you’ll obtain floods of messages as quickly as you log in!
You can use any sort of words, relying upon the comfort stage of another individual, however the language is uncensored. You will be noticing the sexual come-ons and requests because they are widespread at the platform. Omegle is real fun when both of the folks in dialog want the same thing. Everyone will get somewhat lonely and wants to speak https://mysexcams.net/mygirlfund/ to different individuals sometimes. You can talk to individuals from all all over the world about anything that you actually want. If you’re passionate about a topic, you can at all times find another person who’s into it. Just since you can’t speak about it in public doesn’t imply that you simply can’t speak about it in non-public.
ChatRandom begins the process shortly, requiring a webcam and microphone, and then connects you to a random sex companion. However, you also can make things much less random by deciding on your country of selection, by filtering available chatters by gender, male, feminine, couples, or everyone. Best sex chat rooms and get to the meat of the matter , so you’ll have the ability to determine one of the best deal and which site gives you the most important bang in your buck .
And on Monday, Sam issued a statement thanking followers for their messages and guaranteed them they may broaden their household “soon”. “We have felt your support. We are taking things positively and transferring forward with our future,” Sam wrote on his Instagram Stories. Britney, who got engaged to Sam in September, revealed they had been anticipating their first baby collectively in an Instagram post in April. If you’ve an account, enter credentials and hit the login button. Why not have a dedicated space or spaces for community/group constructing and communication research with dispute decision studies etc.
Jerkmate, these platforms are a few of the top alternatives to find folks with an equally voracious sex drive that they’d be more than pleased to share with you. As with Omegle, there are dangers concerned when talking to strangers over the internet. As such, always remember to keep your self protected by remaining anonymous whenever you’ve a dialog with them. Optimized for cellular, so you can speak to strangers on this platform wherever you would possibly be. Private digital tryst with, or you’re simply cruising the internet to watch a live present, this platform can deliver it for you.
Video streaming can also be a new pattern within the sex chat business so I recommend that you just join a website that has this function. Aside from these I assume you’re good to pump that booty and begin your sex journey. Meeting strangers on-line has turn out to be a half of lots of people’s lives.
All of these sort of choices allow you to see a room that is primarily based on the actual brand of chat you intend to attain. Once you verify in with the chat space, you can select though you need to talk about inside the group house or has really lead messages together with different profiles. Soil is designed to works similar to your Sms app in the path of the transportable. It is important to note that Snapchat is used having messaging merely. There isn’t an attribute to connect your with individuals whom you don’t know. An abundance of web sites are created to assist hook up you with different Snapchat prospects even if, so there are provide available to you. – Well, you’ll be able to flirt with many adults and singles here!
You can even entry associates on-line with whom you’ll have the ability to virtually shop together, get matched, or simply walk-off. People be a part of Talk.chat free chat rooms to discuss TV exhibits, football matches, nights out, and more. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, Talk.chat is 100 percent anonymous and doesn’t require any type of registration. You only have to choose a member name and set your gender. In accordance with The New York Times, ChatRoulette is extremely addictive. In February 2010, a number of months later, when the platform was launched, around 35K folks have been lively on ChatRoulette. At the beginning of March, the site’s creator Andrey Ternovskiy found that the website to have approx.
That’s why there is a rise of people looking for somebody to meet their wishes. Phone sex chat traces enable people dwelling long distances to connect and express their needs without any inhibitions. One of the main perks of having a sexy chat on webcam is that every thing is interactive. You can speak with the performers, watch them, activate their smart sex toys and you can even turn your webcam on for some cam2cam action.
Joingy is a random chat roulette that allows you to anonymously speak to strangers online. There are a quantity of sections on the platform for text-only or webcam-mode. After coming into, it pairs people collectively in non-public chat rooms. It all is determined by your angle to such communication and the status of the service.
GetConfide makes sure every person is secure by guaranteeing every message or file shared on the platform is encrypted and self-destructing. Confide even takes it a step additional by sending screenshots to show this. A lot of the users on this app are interested in digital hookups, which works in your favor. You can discover plenty of users who wish to sext, trade nudes, and even have cellphone sex.
Chatville pegs itself as an various to Chatroulette, Omegle, and Stickam — a dire want within the time of catfish and bots. Those days have all but disappeared, except of course, the part about the chat rooms — that’s right — chat rooms are still a factor. Make positive you’re speaking with an adult; a few of the best chat sites aren’t absolutely adult. They embrace some PG-13-type rooms that entice a youthful crowd. In different words, don’t pull out your junk on one of these non-18+ sites before determining who’s on the other facet of that webcam. Discretion is essential and the creators of these sites get that absolutely.
Meet teens, boys and girls while chatting on-line in chat rooms and don’t pay a single penny and do not remain single anymore ;). Create chat rooms with strangers you have turn out to be pals with and talk about widespread pursuits. Yesichat has been repeatedly working to bring collectively the expertise of the chat rooms and social media platforms. Now with the brand new updates users are capable of create their very own rooms or networks/ channels whatever names you favor. The process of creating your personal channel is quite easy and can simply be accomplished with the help of the step clever handbook we provide.
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EVO Swim School is pleased to announce that Avory Wood, age 9, has graduated from the Porpoise class level. She has learned to swim a proper freestyle stroke with the side breathing technique and backstroke. She is now ready for the Dolphin class where she will learn breaststroke and butterfly. On behalf of Avory’s instructor, Emily, and the entire EVO Swim School staff, we say… CONGRATULATIONS!
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Winding up the month, I take a look at one of my ToDo lists that induces more terror than self-satisfaction.
As I've detailed here for the past month, people with ADHD have a tendency to pile on projects. Over time it becomes necessary to prune these projects before they take on a density that threatens to collapse into a black hole. People with ADHD aren't really any different than most people, however. We all find the excitement of a new project exhilarating. Opportunities abound in life to start new projects while we trudge along with our current ones.
Blogger Chris Brogan recently wrote about this problem with his post "Saying No". Chris described how he had to clear off his plate to make room for the most important projects. That involved telling many people "No". Saying "No" to others is not difficult for me, however. It is saying "No" to myself I fail at spectacularly.
Hallowell and Ratey described the process succinctly:
4. Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow-through.
A corollary of number 3. As one task is put off, another is taken up. By the end of the day, or week, or year, countless projects have been undertaken, while few have found completion.
Years ago when I began to tackle my Panic Anxiety Disorder, it was recommended to me to keep a notepad by my bedside so that I could jot down things that came to my mind as I tried to fall asleep. Since I tended to keep myself up working on all the things I knew needed to be done before I forgot about them, this seemed like a good idea. So I jotted and jotted and jotted and jotted.
For the first little while this little gimmick did the trick. Every time my eyes bolted open in horror as I remembered yet another task I had forgotten to finish I could roll over and jot it down. This process became even more productive for me when I purchased a Palm Pilot. Soon I was checking off tasks and creating new ones each and every night before I drifted off to sleep. I no longer leapt out of my bed in a flash of steamy sweat to get at the work I suddenly remembered I had failed to get at earlier. ToDo lists were saving my life.
Then things went horribly wrong.
My nightly ToDo list was filled with unfinished projects dutifully jotted down so that I could remember to do them later. All 9000 of them. Each uncompleted task represented to me what a failure I was. In a short period of time I discovered my ToDo list didn't so much induce the anxiety it was meant to prevent as much as pour gasoline on it and light the fire with a road flare. I had to help myself understand that I couldn't do it all, and that some projects were more important than others. Eventually, I learned to let that anxiety go by filtering the list to only focus on the most important tasks and goals. At least, I thought I had.
It seems I have transferred that nightly panic into a yearly one centered around my birthday. Without realizing it, I have turned my birthday goal list into a heart-clenching, ambulance ride of impending doom. Let's look at how the list was before I pruned it. Because of ADHD, each item on that list has a pressing do-it-or-die intensity for me. However, it's not a bad list per se. In fact, it's completely achievable. All I need to do is leave my family, live in a hut deep in the Wasatch mountains with a solar powered generator, and squeeze 25 hours into each and every day. I may get tired of drinking unpasteurized mountain goat milk, but you can't make goals without sacrifice.
It is also possible that the list is just in need of a good pruning. I am five months into my goals and there simply isn't enough time to get them all done before I turn 42. In fact, I question whether I would ever complete them. Part of the list were daily goals that carved time out of each and every day, leaving no time for family, friends, full time parenting, homeschooling, and disability, nevermind the most important goals.
The first thing I did was remove the daily music goals. They were already part of my daily ToDo list and they were only supposed to be for fun. I recommitted to one main instrument and chose one goal for the year. I also removed the more vague goals and kept one personal goal (which I am working through this month), as well as a family goal. My writing goals were my most important for the year and were fine as they stood, but the drawing goals needed something more concrete so I added two.
By identifying the most important goals I was able to whittle the list down to something more manageable. The end result is a tighter, more focused list that will help me achieve great things without giving me a complex. Jotting down ideas is a great idea for those who have a hard time remembering, but there comes a time when one must say "No" to the long list in favor of a shorter one without all the distractions. It is both tragic and funny that I need to teach myself this lesson over and over again.
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Posted by D.R. Cootey at Monday, May 26, 2008
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Bishops around the world are being asked to take a realistic look at the situation of families under their care and at how effective pastoral and educational programs have been at promoting church teaching on sexuality, marriage and family life.
The preparatory document for the extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the family, which will be held in October 2014, ends with 38 questions about how church teaching is promoted, how well it is accepted and ways in which modern people and societies challenge the Catholic view of marriage and family.
Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, general secretary of the synod, asked bishops to distribute the document and questionnaire “as widely as possible” to deaneries and parishes, summarize the responses and send them to the Vatican by the end of January.
Distributing an outline of the chosen topic and related questions, seeking responses from bishops, religious orders and interested Catholic groups is a normal part of the preparation for a synod. Archbishop Baldisseri, encouraging even wider consultation, did not specify how bishops should seek input.
The Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales put the questionnaire online in late October, leading to news stories about “polling” Catholics for their opinions and suggestions.
The extraordinary synod on “pastoral challenges to the family in the context of evangelization” was convoked by Pope Francis for Oct. 5-19 and will bring together presidents of bishops’ conferences, the heads of Eastern Catholic churches and the heads of Vatican offices to describe the current situation and “to collect the bishops’ experiences and proposals in proclaiming and living the Gospel of the family in a credible manner,” the document said.
A second gathering, a world Synod of Bishops on the family, will be held in 2015 “to seek working guidelines in the pastoral care of the person and the family,” it said.
“Vast expectations exist concerning the decisions which are to be made pastorally regarding the family,” the document said.
Some people may believe changes in church teaching are in store given Pope Francis’ emphasis on mercy, forgiveness and not judging others, and his specific comments on helping divorced and civilly remarried couples who cannot receive Communion. However, the document said, “the teaching of the faith on marriage is to be presented in an articulate and efficacious manner so that it might reach hearts and transform them in accordance with God’s will.”
Church teaching always has been clear that marriage is a lifelong bond between one man and one woman open to having and educating children, it said, and the synod’s goal will be “to communicate this message with greater incisiveness.”
The preparatory document specifically mentioned modern contributions to church teaching, including the Second Vatican Council’s defense of the dignity of marriage and family, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae” on fidelity and procreation in marriage, and Blessed John Paul II’s teaching on God’s plan for married love.
“The church’s pastoral ministry,” it said, “finds inspiration in the truth of marriage viewed as part of the plan of God, who created man and woman and, in the fullness of time, revealed in Jesus the completeness of spousal love elevated to the level of sacrament.”
The questionnaire asks bishops to describe how people understand church teaching, how their local churches and Catholic movements try to promote it and what difficulties people face in accepting the teaching.
Synod organizers ask the bishops to estimate the percentage of local Catholics living together without being married, the percentage of those divorced and remarried, and the proportion of children and adolescents in their dioceses who are living in families in those situations.
Bishops are asked for their suggestions about the advisability of simplifying church annulment procedures and for suggestions on how that might be done.
The questionnaire surveys the bishops about the legal status of same-sex unions in their local area and church efforts to defend traditional marriage, but also asks them what kind of “pastoral attention can be given to people who have chosen to live” in same-sex unions and, in places where they can adopt children, what can be done to transmit the faith to them.
Several questions focus on “Humanae Vitae” and church teaching against the use of artificial contraception. The bishops are asked if people understand the teaching and know how to evaluate the morality of different methods of family planning. They also are asked if the question comes up in confessions and if they have suggestions for fostering “a more open attitude toward having children.”
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How happy am I to have received my package in perfect condition in just one day. My vintage Santa was well packaged by Jillian, who was such a kind and caring person. She made sure that my Santa arrived in perfect condition, and it did. Thank you White Properties, but especially to Jillian, for excellent customer service!!!
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Amazing company, on so many levels. Kristen has been so kind to me, as I navigated legal notarizations of documents, overnight services, as well as copies, and general support during a very sad time. She was supportive and kind.White's also generously offers our community numerous complimentary community shred days. Top notch company! I highly recommend them. Thank you Kristen!!
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Awesome Facility! Fantastic Staff! Kristen was helpful, friendly and extremely knowledgeable. I looked a several other places and Kristen was my deciding factor. If you are looking for storage in the Winchester area I highly recommend you look here and ask for Kristen. She will make your experience quick and easy.
Wonderful customer service, Jillian went above and beyond in helping me with renting my storage unit. I would recomend them to everyone.
This is the second time I've utilized White Properties, and I can't say enough about the service the cleanliness, and the office staff. Jillian is new at White Properties and great at customer service, walking me through the paperwork, and even carried my packing paper to my car. She's a keeper!
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The staff here has been AMAZING at getting me set up with a unit and explaining how the process works. They have auto pay, climate controlled units, and their prices are the best in the area. They also allow month to month renting with no contract required. I'm able to buy box bundles from them as well to assist in moving all of my belongings. If you're looking to rent a storage unit for any amount of time, I highly recommend giving them a call!
Definitely one of the BEST customer service experiences I’ve ever had. They let me prorate my lease and they had everything I needed to pack up my stuff at a really good price. Kristen especially was very kind, efficient, and helpful. She even helped me load all my things into the car!
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The Action RPG Spinoff gives us a taste of what we can expect with the Hundred Heroes, but can Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising itself provides a full game experience?
Side-scrolling Action-RPGs have that certain appeal to people like me, it has that feel of simplicity that still works well even applying different gameplay styles, we have gotten used to side-scrollers with platformers, shooters and brawlers, then other games like Metroid and Castlevania introduced new layers to the experience that opened the doors to a whole new experience, hence inventing the Metroidvania subgenre. My taste for side-scrollers has evolved through the years, and as I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, it managed to give me that itch, but did it manage to satisfy my taste for good side-scrollers? We’ll soon find out.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an Action RPG that acts as a supplemental game for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes which is slated to release next year. The games were developed by Rabbit & Bear Studios, a Tokyo-based studio formed by key members of the Suikoden series, and Eiyuden Chronicle is somewhat a spiritual successor to the famous franchise. Rising takes place in the continent of Allraan in a mining town New Nevaeh, where a massive earthquake has opened up ancient ruins buried underground and now became a hub for adventurers eager to dig up lenses that are worth fortunes. The story starts with a young treasure hunter named CJ who is aiming to find the largest lens to prove her worth as a bonafide treasure hunter, as she enters New Nevaeh in hopes of scavenging lens in the Barrows, more plots were unfolded.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising follows the classic 2D and 3D combo for its visual presentation, creating 2D sprites that can interact in a 3D environment. You usually see these in older generations such as the PSOne era and how Rising focused on that aesthetics gives that nostalgic feeling yet still showcased an updated look that we quite see in some 2DHD games like Octopath Traveler. 2D sprite characters are fluid in their animation, which is almost like what we see in Live2D visuals, but it seems that the number of animations for gestures were limited, there are cutscenes where it repeats the same gesture as it looks like there were only 2 or 3 fixed gestures created to enact emotions, though it doesn’t cheapen the presentation of the cutscenes. The story plot is more of your standard anime adventure with the main character starting off with her journey to nab the biggest lens treasure and getting to meet other colorful characters to join the grand adventure. Characters still provide the unique personalities that make them fun to watch on their banters during cutscenes, from Garoo as your regular grumpy hunter to CJ being carefree and Isha just being rapacious on taxing anyone.
The music scores offer a familiar tune in fantasy JRPGs that any fans will be accustomed to, town themes offering that happy vibe of tune that reflects on the condition of the villagers, dungeon themes giving an eerie tune of mystery and danger that adds tension to what to expect from the unknown and battle themes and amplify the intensity of encountering bosses and ambushes. The tunes weren’t enough to make them memorable, it did a fine job of adding depth to your dungeon crawling adventure that wouldn’t irritate you to mute the music. The game lacks any voiceovers that could have helped add more impact to cutscenes and battles, but I can understand their decision to not include any voiceovers just to maintain that familiar vibe of classic PSOne RPGs.
The game interface is clean and provides enough necessary information with the exception of when you are in town. The stamp tally display is placed on the upper middle of the screen which can be distracting, I hope they can add a function to toggle the display of the stamp tally sheet in a post-launch update, it’s not that of a deal breaker but can be annoying as it can eat up some space on your screen.
Action RPGs tend to have a combat system that is easy to understand but still fun to play and Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising managed to offer that certain balance. Each attack button corresponds to a character, think Trine meets Valkyrie Profile where each attack from a character has its own unique combo sets, CJ is more on fast-hitting critical attacks while Garoo is a slow hitter but can pack a punch to multiple enemies and Isha fires at a farther range that can penetrate through magic barriers. Planning on which character to use per enemy gives a layer of strategy that makes your venture into the dungeons a breeze. It also features a special team combo synergy called Link Attack that slows downtime and lets you hit your enemies with a different character, dealing massive damage and it has a nice touch whenever you see one of your party members tagging in and out in mid-combo to dish out more damage. The concept of switching characters on the fly feels good in your initial run, but when you venture further into the game, you will eventually be sticking to just one character to grind faster around dungeons, and CJ has all the capabilities you’ll need throughout your progress since she has a dash ability that lets you move faster (and not to mention has the fastest movement speed from the party) and can deal massive damage thanks to her high critical rate.
Adding depth to combat is the use of rune lens that bestows elemental affinities, there are four elemental types that you can equip to your weapon or armor that can deal elemental damage or resistance and can be effective to certain enemies. Changing to a different elemental rune can change the type of magic attack Isha would use that can be handy in certain situations, you can also use them to unlock areas that are blocked with an elemental boulder. Level bosses are just a handful and can be tough if you are unprepared, sadly the boss designs aren’t that memorable. Certain attacks are telegraphed that cues you to avoid or block them and they can be taken down by learning their patterns.
Rising has some inspirations from Metroidvania games as each of the dungeons has its own map layouts that you can explore and showcases different themes. Some areas are closed off and you may need to progress further in the story or unlock new skills that hide rare items that you can use to upgrade your gear. You will be making return trips to certain dungeons to complete sidequests which I’ll discuss more later. You fight off different monsters in each dungeon, but the variety of monsters available were very few as each dungeon only features almost the same monster variant as the rest that had little or no unique characteristics to pose a challenge in your venture. Each dungeon has specific waypoints that can be used to move to specific areas of the dungeon quickly, as that is the only way you warp back to the main entrance. Loot that you acquire from your venture will be stashed in your resource bag and you can only carry for a certain amount until you exit the dungeon, you also have your Stowpack that stores your consumables such as health potions and buff items, it has very limited slots so it’s best to save your potions for the tougher battles. Good thing you can actually upgrade your bags to increase their storage space.
Story progression in Rising is separated into chapters, and each of them can last from a couple of minutes to more than an hour; you can finish the main story in just 8 hours or less, and around 12 hours if you include sidequests. Speaking of sidequests, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising offers a ton of them that you can unlock more each time you clear out a story chapter. Tasks include fetching an item deep within the dungeon, killing a certain number of monsters, collecting materials either by harvesting or monster drops, or in some cases, passing messages to other NPCs. The sheer amount of sidequests that you can finish can be staggering as there is no proper pacing when they are unlocked, if you managed to finish a dozen of them, after moving to the next story chapter, you’ll be greeted to a new dozen of them. They are optional but some of the rewards can help improve your gear and unlock new items to purchase in town. The bountiful amount of sidequests may differ to certain tastes as some may feel it’s a lot tedious as some quests are more repetitive with frequent visits to the same dungeon while some may welcome it for providing more content and other ways to level up your party fast. Navigating through the list of quests can be a chore as you can only highlight one sidequest at a time, would have been nice if they allow at least up to three sidequests that you can display on screen for better tracking.
You will be able to earn stamps from the villagers in exchange for helping them, either from every sidequest you take or progressing through the main story, completing the set of stamps will promote your stamp rank and unlocks another combo slot to your Link Attack. Completing quests and eliminating monsters provides exp points to level up, the game does not have any deep character customization and relies on the upgrades that you provide. Upgrading weapons can increase your hit combo, add stagger effects and new move lists or upgrade armor to unlock double jump, longer hovering time, higher jumps and more. You can earn a permanent stat boost at the tavern by consuming meals, you need to unlock them by having the required ingredients, and even temporary enhancements like increased attack or exp boost at the inn, it’s odd to see that you can still keep the enhancements for the entirety of the game by not resting at your room and just use the tavern to heal your team.
Features (3/5)
You will be able to upgrade the town of New Nevaeh early in the game, the setup is very simplified where you just unlock more shops that allow you to purchase upgrades, consumables and more. You can upgrade shops to get add more varieties by completing their sidequests. The town building aspect was a nice addition to the game but it feels that they could have done more to it, like an actual town management feature where you can attract more adventurers and receive tax payments from them that can be used to upgrade the appearance of the town. Moving around New Nevaeh is a breeze thanks to the fast travel function, it makes sidequests much easier to finish with just a few button presses and no need to run to different sectors just to reach the destination.
Upgrading your gear will require some materials and you can find them around dungeons either by hunting monsters or harvesting from ore deposits, trees, fishing ponds and more. It was a bit disappointing to see the fishing minigame does not provide any kind of fish varieties and can only acquire generic named fish, would have been a nice addition to let you gather different fish and seafood that you can use for crafting food and potions.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a solid Action RPG that offers a fun combat system, impressive visuals and a variety of content to complete. Though it has some shortcomings such as features the simplistic town-building function and fewer areas to explore that were promising at first but fell short. The overall game length feels a bit short and could have added more content to extend it.
It managed to provide some great moments with the main characters in their interactions though it still can’t provide a compelling narrative due to its generic story plot. Its conclusion was a bit underwhelming as does not have that much impact for you to be invested for its main course, but it’s very likely that we will be seeing some of the characters in Hundred Heroes and hopefully be involved in a bigger plot.
But regardless of its shortcomings, Rising is a good introduction to the Eiyuden Chronicle series as we wait for the launch of the main game in 2023.
We give Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising a score of 3.5 out of 5. It was reviewed from the Steam version and it is also available for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S
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“National Socialism is not only a protest against the Treaty of Versailles. It is a revolt against the ideals of democracy.”
AP
February 1935 Issue
I
When one remembers how National Socialism appeared to be declining in 1932 and how Hitler was called to power as a last resort, it seems as though the movement might be only a belated convulsion of the war. In fact, the enemies of the movement, especially in Prague, Zurich, and Paris, expect Hitler's downfall quite shortly, and a restoration of the Weimar constitution or something like it, together with their own return. But I believe they are wrong. Hitler may fall, and his enemies may return, but it will probably be to a different Germany from the one they left. The forces at work in that country have only temporarily crystallized in Hitler, and will continue to work themselves out when he is gone.
National Socialism is not only a protest against the Treaty of Versailles, and not only an uprising of the middle class; and it cannot be disposed of by calling it barbarous, dictatorial, or militaristic. It is all these things and a great deal more. It is a revolt against the ideals of democracy; not merely its practices, but the very assumptions upon which the democratic state operates. The Nazis reject equality, and put hierarchy in its place; they reject the ideal of a society run by scientific methods for the ideal of an organic society in which personality will play a greater part than formulae; and, consistently with this, they war against the intellect in favor of 'the creative spirit.'
It is important, in judging National Socialism, to be clear that its objectives are different from those of democracy and still more different from those of Communism. Superficially resembling the Communist state in certain ways, the spirit and aims of National Socialism are diametrically opposite. The Communists are trying to bring more equality, rationality, and scientific patterns into the social order than even America has achieved, but the Nazis regard these aims themselves as disintegrating and demoralizing. In fact, they do not say, 'You are sailing the wrong course to the harbor,' but they say, 'Your harbor is a pile of barren rocks, and any course toward it will bring you to shipwreck.'
To understand why the Germans have undertaken to revise their social order, the historical setting must be recalled. In this setting, the war and the depression are in the foreground, but they do not by any means cover the stage. Indeed, if one is going to start from the war and its consequences to account for National Socialism, there seems to be no reason why the revolution should have happened at all. Consider the situation of the country between 1918 and 1933. German diplomacy was winning concession after concession from the Allies —— Locarno, the League, the Rhineland, and Lausanne. Slowly, successive cabinets were pulling the nation out of the war pit and restoring its prestige. Business revived, the arts flourished, German science was regaining its old position, and the general atmosphere was full of vitality. So much for the upper layers. The workmen were on the whole better off than under the Kaiser. In the post war years, the Social Democrats were the strongest political power, whether in or out of the government, to say nothing of the Christian Unions, left wing of the Centre Party. And during this time the unions increased in membership and strength.
On the other side of the account, it is true that even before the Young Plan Conference a systematic campaign from within Germany to destroy German credit did greatly aggravate the effects of the general depression. It is also true that during the post war period the middle class were almost desperate; their savings gone in inflation, they saw no future for themselves between big business and labor. The dislocated Junkers, too, were bitterly aggrieved, and large industrialists financed the Hitler movement as an offset to Communism. But it does not explain National Socialism to count incomes. Hitler's chief appeal has never been to economic motives; he has never promised prosperity, never held out hope of a return to the old règime. Not when the nation was prostrate in defeat and the power lay open to any adventurer, but in the midst of an ordered enterprising State, this amazing revolution took root. Why?
The reasons, I think, lie below the apparent vigor and stir in Germany, deeper than economic motives and foreign policies. They are found first, probably, in German internal dissension. Bismarck's unification of the country was only a political framework, and when the frame broke, in 1918, the pieces of the picture puzzle fell apart. Sectional feeling became bitterer than ever, and at one time during the twenties the premier of Bavaria, Held, said in a public speech, 'The true enemy is Prussia,' and proposed secession. At the same time, the Treaty of Versailles imposed conditions which weighed on Germans as Germans; and as Germans alike, whether from Pomerania or the Rhine, they had to meet suspicion and dislike from other nations. This modern German nationalism is a curious thing. It is kindled, one might say, from without, but its fuel is the consciousness that there never has been in the real sense a German nation.
Here, of course, was Hitler's double point of appeal, to the sufferings imposed on all Germany and to the need of reacting to these sufferings as a united whole. Apparently something like a real whole has been achieved. Some say the unification is still superficial and will not last, but on the other hand some of Hitler's most serious enemies declare that the creation of a unified Germany is his one great merit. At all events the Nazis have gone about this task in the most thorough way, not only from without, but from within. They have abolished local parliaments and local premiers, and reorganized the country by functions rather than by states. They try to overcome sectional feeling by transporting large groups of people from north to south, east to west, for their holidays; and above all every law, every article, every speech, every school lesson, repeats and repeats: German unity, German wholeness, German spirit.
I shall return to this passion for national wholeness, which the Nazis raise from a political expedient to a philosophic doctrine. But before going on to their system there is another even deeper and much vaguer cause than the political one.
In spite of considerable blossoming in many directions after the war, millions of Germans were restless and discontented, not so much with outward conditions, but because they were not getting what in their souls they longed for. Germans— and this in my experience is about as true as a broad generalization can be have a strong sense for outward order and will make endless sacrifices for what they think will maintain order namely, the State. So we have the familiar picture of the goose stepping German, the verboten signs, the extraordinary respect which all, even the most independently placed, pay to any state official. The story is told that the Communist uprising after the war failed because the leaders neglected to get hold of the state seals, and local functionaries refused to obey any order which was not properly sealed. And it is a fact that when the Communists were rioting in front of the Reichstag, in 1918, they were careful to keep off the grass.
But that is only one side of the picture. The other side is seen in the common saying, 'Two Germans, three opinions.' Touch the inner life of a German, his beliefs, his affections, his family, his pleasures, and you have opened a hornet's nest. To day, for instance, Germans are under rigid financial control and cannot even get money to travel abroad without the express permission of the Reichsbank. This they submit to with complaints, but they do submit. Yet, when the government attempts to incorporate the Church, an irresistible force meets an insurmountable obstacle and the obstacle wins.
As the post war world was shaping itself, therefore, the German nature, this nature which will pay any price for inner freedom, found very little to be free about. The individual not only found himself a cog in a machine, but the Socialist leaders told him that to be a cog was his glorious destiny and he must be happy about it. A dreary prospect, which not even the hope of higher wages could brighten. It is a curious but telling fact that in German there is no word for what we call 'efficiency.' Yet efficiency, with all it implies as a way of life, was being forced on the German people and it was not in their vocabulary.
Some inchoate feeling of this sort was the subsoil in which National Socialism took root. The revolt in Germany is not against materialism, Germans are as susceptible to cars and villas and fur coats as anybody, but it is against rationalization, against the idea which is shaping social legislation in most industrial countries: that the perfect society would run like a machine, and that the more one routinizes and conforms one's life, the more successful it will be. Those who could articulate their discontent felt that business and politics were a scramble of personal ambitions, that culture was drying up in a kind of intellectual fever, that morals were corrupt and young people in anarchy, and that all these things were inevitable and life not worth living if a factory was the ultimate goal. And, to sharpen this feeling, they felt themselves ruled (as indeed they were ruled, in politics, in finance, in art and literature and learning) by an alien race which is well disciplined to thinking in economic terms and especially adapted to an industrial civilization in fact, the high priests of the very things to which they objected.
Hitler came along with his appeal to national feeling, his attack on the Jews, his insistence on discipline —— and the people responded. But what Hitler voiced and what the Germans responded to was not so much these concrete talking points as a protest against the monotonous pulse of economic efficiency.
This protest has been made many times before. Broadly speaking, the Nazi revolution belongs with agricultural authoritarian as against urban—democratic movements, and the ideas the Nazis are trying to embody in their system belong in the general organic, vitalistic school of thought. They object to equality because it makes men egotistical and works toward social disintegration; instead, they believe in a closed hierarchy in which each leader has authority over those below him and responsibility to those above him. Throughout Nazi writings runs the emphasis on the 'whole,' the organic whole, first of the State, then of the personality. The Nazis explicitly say, for instance, that decisions should be made on the basis of the good of the State rather than on abstract right. They emphasize qualities which are matters of personal interpretation, like loyalty, rather than those which can be defined, like justice; honor as against self interest, duty as against right. The ties of race and blood, the inspirational role of women, the heroic role of men, obedience, paternalism, sacrifice of the person for the ideal, austere self discipline all these old fashioned and irrational conceptions are the leitmotifs of the programme.
The application of these ideas is drastic, and in some cases novel. I shall illustrate them briefly from three enactments which give most clearly the National Socialist intent —the land law, the labor law, and the penal code.
The change that has been made in the land law is somewhat similar to English entail. Peasants' farms must now descend from father to son, and the owner can neither sell nor borrow against his land. What happens to the children who do not inherit the farms is a problem which the Nazis undertake to deal with, but which cannot be gone into here. It is difficult to tell how this system is working so far, for, like most questions in Germany, the answer depends on whether or not the speaker is a Nazi. One hears, for instance, from 'antis' that a peasant's daughter is not the partie that she was. Her father can no longer lay his hand on money for her dowry, and this change in social status is resented. On the other hand, new rural settlements are being created all over Germany, and although people are being ordered from the city to the country, it seems to be true that more want to go than there are farms to put them on.
Without going into other provisions of the act, it is easy to see what an immense change this makes in the lives of millions of people. Farmers in Germany, like farmers in most industrial countries, were coming to look on their farms as a business instead of a way of life. They were becoming the stepchildren of industry, regarding the money they could get out of the farm as the measure of its value. Now, with a stroke of the pen, the values of land are altered. The farm is no longer a speculative business, but a trust for the nation and posterity, and if the farmer cannot make money by selling it, neither can he lose by borrowing against it. Tradition, inheritance, the patriarchal family, small units, independence, handiwork, are favored by this system as against enterprise, individualism, restlessness, mechanization.
The National Labor Act, however, is the most comprehensive statement of Nazi principles that has been made, and also the most interesting of Nazi documents because it shows the attempt to incorporate intangibles in what might be called the enemy camp, the factory. The land law is, in essence, a return to the old order, but the labor law is an attempt to do something new.
First of all, the Labor Act declares the principle of leadership. 'In an industrial concern, the owner as leader of the establishment, and the salaried and wage earning employees as his followers, shall work together for the furtherance of the enterprise and for the common good of the nation and the state.' The leader makes all decisions and bears the responsibility for them, but he has a 'confidential council' of employees at his side. This council has no relation to a labor union (unions are, of course, abolished). It is selected in a prescribed way from a list which the leader makes up, and has no function except to advise. On the other hand, the leader is obliged to summon the council if half of the members request it, and the councilors have certain judicial functions in cases of appeal.
The framers of the law appear to have been quite aware that human nature tends to abuse power, and against this abuse they have set up a complicated machinery. Regional Labor Trustees who are state officials are appointed to act as arbiters, and also as checks on encroachments from either side. The leader, for instance, is obliged to notify the Trustee in writing before he dismisses more than nine men in a factory of less than one hundred, or ten per cent in larger factories. The Labor Trustees have the power, if their instructions are 'repeatedly and willfully contravened,' to impose fines and in serious cases imprisonment. Yet there is a check even on the Labor Trustees, for they are obliged to consult with an advisory committee of experts of which three quarters must be chosen from a list presented by the German Labor Front.
As one reads the law, one is struck by the fact, that its tendency is socialistic that is to say, most of its provisions are for the protection of labor. Yet it is very different from Marxian socialism. The capital labor antithesis is not taken for granted. On the contrary, it is assumed that the interests of the plant control both sides. Workmen participate in every decision on wages, dismissals, factory rules; the leader decides and is responsible; but if the confidential council feels itself disregarded the machinery of the act is put in motion and the state intervenes. In November 1934, for instance, a factory owner in Westphalia was taken into 'protective custody' on the charge of having totally disregarded his confidential council, and having dealt with them in an arbitrary manner.
The entire act assumes that people— workmen as well as employers —— will be or can be made socially responsible. Social Honor courts are the most extreme expression of this idea. The court consists of a judge, an industrial leader, and a member of a confidential council. It deals with exploitation, interference, 'wounding of honor,' betrayal of confidence, disobedience, not only as between leader and followers, but among the followers themselves. The court has the power to fix various penalties, running from warnings to fines up to ten thousand reichsmarks and to removal of the offender whoever he be from his post. The procedure is this. Any leader or employee who feels aggrieved states his case in writing to the regional Labor Trustee, who does not decide the case, but does decide whether to call the court. The court then hears the complainant and renders its decision. The decisions of the regional court can be carried on appeal up to the Reich Honor Court in Berlin, where they may be sustained or revoked.
Especially interesting is the fact that the act tries to develop social responsibility by basing its machinery on the individual. In every grievance, the individual must make his complaint personally in writing and give his testimony in person (though in special cases he may send a representative). In every accusation also the procedure is against an individual. No motive to group organization is given except for common work; in other words, when the individual works for the good of the plant, he works with others, but when he complains, he complains alone. The tendency of the act in this respect seems to be to combine the constructive forces and isolate the destructive ones.
Commenting on the German Labor Act, the former Italian Finance Minister, Alberto de Stefani, wrote in the Corriere della Sera, 'It is an act which possesses a unique form; an ethical form is introduced into a sphere where ethics as such do not appear to be at home . . . . The German Government, one must admit, has presented an ideal principle the dynamic importance of which is incalculable.'
These illustrations are brief, and intended to illustrate one thing: how the Nazi government is attempting to introduce into an industrial, urban, and on the whole liberal democratic state the kind of ideas and codes that go with an agricultural and, generally speaking, early feudal civilization. Most clearly does the shift in emphasis come out in two proposed changes in the penal code. One, that if motive to commit a crime can be established, it shall be considered as serious an offense as if the crime were committed. Second, that judges shall be guided more by the spirit of the law than by its letter. *.' The intent of these changes is explained in the following quotation from Carl Schmitt's Staat, Bewegung, Volk: 'The law can no longer guarantee the computability and certainty which are necessary for the definition of law in a constitutional state. Computability and certainty do not lie in standardization (of the law), but in the situation which is assumed to be standard. On all sides in countless paraphrases, general clauses and indefinable conceptions have crept in: "good faith," "custom," "determining reason," "unnecessary harshness," "reasonable expectation," "arbitrary prohibition." . . . We have seen that every word, every concept, becomes contestable, uncertain, indefinite, and wavering when differently oriented minds and interests undertake to interpret them in an indefinable situation . . . . The fiction and illusion of a law which factually includes and foresees all cases and all situations cannot be revived.' This gives clearly the reaction from Montesquieu's conception: 'The judge is the mouth which pronounces the words of the law.' In fact, the intent of the proposed changes is evidently to remove law from the objective to the subjective sphere, and shift the weight of authority from the law to the judge. The perils implied in these 'reforms' make an Anglo Saxon shudder. But they are perfectly consistent expressions of Nazi ideology, which in these cases carry further the abstract tendencies of German law. 'Not the law, but the lawyers, must be reformed,' they say. In other words, the good society must come from within.
Germany at the moment is full of contradictions. Heads are carried high and the clear blue eyes of young men have a look of burning enthusiasm; at the same time, no one dare speak his mind except in strictest privacy; even in front of house servants, and of course in all public places, conversation is restricted to personal matters. National Socialism is a crusade, a religion, and it is applied as has happened before with brutality, sometimes savagery. The Nazis go about deliberately rousing emotions and passions, and at the same time they insist on rigid discipline. Most puzzling is the position of the individual. The Nazis lay great emphasis on personality, especially on those aspects of personality which cannot be harnessed or charted, like loyalty and self respect. Motives are as serious as acts; innate sense of justice outweighs the letter of the law, and the creative spirit is to subdue the sterile intellect. Yet exactly these qualities require free play, personal interpretations. Exactly these forces of personality which the Nazis wish to stimulate are paralyzed in a 'totalitarian' state where the government takes charge of every phase of life and pours its slogans day and night through the press, the radio, and all cultural organs. It is hard to see a resurgence of personality under a dictatorship of this nature.
There is still another major contradiction. The Nazis preach from every platform the unity and wholeness of Germany. Artgleichheit, likeness in kind, creates a mystic understanding between all Germans of pure race, and from this they derive the 'classless state.' But in practice the state is not classless at all. The old class distinctions, between employer and employee, well born and humbly born, rich and poor, are supposed to be erased, but in their place is a new one. In Germany to day there are two classes, the Nazi party members 'PG,' as the Partei Genossen are called —— and the others. Any 'PG' carries in his displeasure the sting of arbitrary dismissal or imprisonment against any non party member, no matter how highly placed, official, industrialist, or professional man. Obviously this opens the door wide to every kind of corruption —and as long as the party remains distinct from the nation, as long as there are admittedly two kinds of Germans, the door will stay open. Even from the theoretical point of view it is impossible to develop social responsibility as long as only a fraction of the population is entitled to say what social responsibility is.
Partly because of party tyranny and partly because the system is so new, the quality of the leadership is for the most part deplorable. And this is especially serious in a regime which politically bases itself on the principle of leadership and socially aims at stimulating the free forces of personality. Many of the present leaders are ignorant or inexperienced; they are arrogant, fanatical, and often corrupt, but they are still carried on the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm. The wiser ones realize this condition and have established training schools for leaders, to which the best young men — best from the point of view of 'character, mental orientation (Gesinnung), arid race' are sent. If the system survives until these young men enter it, National Socialism will provide a test, which is not possible now, of whether government by professional leadership is politically practical.
All these contradictions make it difficult at present to judge National Socialism. It is almost impossible to say what are the revolutionary features and what is inherent in the system. The ideas which are the motive force of the movement are ideas which we associate with a small, stable, slow moving world long passed away, and we have come to think, in dealing with the tempo and complexity which our own inventions have created, that our best equipment is the rational side of our nature. The Nazis, of course, are aware of tempo and complexity, and they use the most modern devices radio, printing press, expert knowledge of mass psychology to mobilize the revolt of a people against rationalization, their nostalgia for the intangibles of vanished ages. It is a rather ridiculous spectacle at times, a nation being dragooned into a romantic attitude, and this combination of new methods with old, apparently superseded ideas explains many anomalies. National Socialism at present is a romantic movement hitched to a dynamo.
The fascinating question is: Which will win, the dynamo or the resurgence of atrophied forces? If it is the former, then farewell to personality. If it is the latter, the Nazi strait jacket will be burst and the new order will be neither Fascism nor Communism, as we know them now, but something toward that fulfillment of the German nature which Goethe expressed as 'outwardly limited, inwardly free.'
The social scale swings from one side to the other. At one time the weight is on a vitalistic interpretation of nature and then again it is on a mechanistic one. For a century and a half the main current of European civilization has run in mechanistic channels; our energies have gone into making, building, combining, paragraphing, and regulating, and our patterns have been the laboratory and the factory. But there is another side, another interpretation, another set of forces, organic, vitalistic, irreducible, and unpredictable. They express themselves socially through emotions, contemplation, religious aspirations, creative impulses; in force and cruelty and injustice; in romanticism and mysticism, in agricultural civilization, in an emphasis on being rather than doing. National Socialism belongs to this latter school. Peasants are reestablished, women are returned to the home, society is organized on a hierarchical military basis, government is aristocratic, selective this time, not hereditary, law is subordinated to personal interpretations, and the ideals held before the people are deliberately mystical and unattainable.
It is too soon to say whether we Europe and America have gone far enough in the direction of rationalization, and whether the compensating swing to inner freedom has really set in. But, whatever the outcome of the German revolution, a mystical romantic quality is its vital core. It is national in the first place, the profound longing of a sovereign people to cast out foreign elements and regain their own cultural and spiritual sovereignty. In the second place, it is not only national but universal, the resurgence of the inner life against a creeping paralysis. Make no mistake. The movement is brutal, blustering, repressive; it burns books, struts uniforms, and kills. But its real meaning, below the tyranny and the childishness, is an effort to deliver man from the machine.
*'These two points were stated by Dr. Gurtner, Reichsminister of Justice, in a summary of the proposed reform of the legal code in the Völkischer Beobachter of August 31, 1934. —AUTHOR
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I still make myself laugh sometimes. I really thought when I started this healthy lifestyle journey that I would reach an ‘end.’ That some of the ‘bad’ things would disappear and no longer be an issue.
Joke’s on me.
A weight on the scale? Permanently changed/banished behaviors? Some sort of finish line?
I really had no idea what I thought would be the ‘end’, but I was so sure there was one. I thought that once I got healthy, got to a normal weight that some of these problems would simply just disappear.
Who knew?
An old friend came to visit two weeks ago.
And that’s totally a euphemism for ‘something shitty that I was really, fervently hoping I had killed/abolished/changed/was going to stay the HELL GONE FOREVER just knocked me on my ass… ‘
My old friend showed up again.
I was am a binge eater.
I always dressed that up, when I had to say anything at all, and said I was a compulsive overeater. Which is true — that’s a component of the problem I battle.
Overeating can be sporadic, no guilt/shame, just a bad habit. An overly full belly from time to time
Binge eating is a whole different animal.
Binge eating disorder (BED). “BED is a medical condition, and it’s the most common eating disorder in the United States. People with BED regularly eat large amounts of food while experiencing a sense of loss of control over the eating episode. They often feel guilt or shame after eating. Characterized by eating when not physically hungry.’
Hunger has NOTHING to do with it. Nothing.
Binge eating sucks. Big time.
There I said it.
For me a binge gets started when I’m sad, not being active and things feel increasingly out of control. The more of that toxic combination there is in my life, the more I lean toward food for gaining that control, that ‘love’, that comfort…
I know binge eating is an issue for people — one we do NOT talk about. Yet BED is the most common eating disorder in the US. ( Healthline). I know from conversations, texts, emails, FB messages that this is not something I’m suffering with alone. There’s a bunch of you out there suffering quietly. Miserably.
Last big binge for me was before my mom died. Over 8 years ago. 2009. I’ve done some overeating in that time since, for sure. But not a planned, purposeful binge.
I thought I’d ‘cured’ binge eating. Or had it buried deep and totally under control.
Until 2 weeks ago.
This binge caught me totally by surprise and none of my new, healthy, hard-fought habits were worthy of stopping it.
It scared the shit out of me. And I couldn’t stop it.
The binge lasted 4 days.
No one knew I was doing it. When I finally reached out for help the friend I told said ‘I didn’t know you were binging’… To which my reply was ‘Because I didn’t want you to know. I’m damn good at this shit. Damn good. If I didn’t want you to know, you would never know. But I need you to know now and I need help.’
I can tell you that as far as binging goes — I had not lost any of my skills… This episode was methodical, anticipated, carefully planned, enjoyed, deeply hidden, devastatingly successful. I was thrilled to be doing it. Mortified when I was in the midst of it. Sad and broken and totally beaten down after the first bite.
I reached out for help at day 4.
I quickly got appropriate help. I got support. I was reminded that I am loved.
I was also harshly reminded that this is a cunning foe that I have to keep working to learn and understand.
So what was the binge?
Trail mix. Freaking Costco trail mix. I bought 4 bags. They each weigh 4 pounds. I paid cash. I ate a bag a day for 4 days. I ate it all day long. Quietly, a serving at a time. Hidden away and portioned out so no one would suspect or question or figure out what was going on.
Your mind is trying to do the math. I’ll save you the effort… Each bag was 36 servings with 9,600 calories per bag. 38,400 calories, 3,360 grams of carbs over 4 days. (In my healthy eating ‘norm’ I eat about 1,500 cals, and limit carbs to 90 grams per day…)
Yeah. The scope of this binge is even more horrifying when you put all the numbers on paper.
And I was also eating ‘regular’ meals so that no one would catch on to my binge eating.
And entire bag a day, for four days.
I was somehow able to stop the binge, even though I still felt totally out of control and sad and frantic. I reached out, which goes totally against ALL instincts in a binge eating haze. And then I began to battle the shame and guilt and failure that comes on the heels of losing total control over food. The shame and guilt of hiding my binge. Feeling isolated and alone and terrified I would be found out. Or that it wouldn’t stop. Or that all of my hard work to learn to run and reverse T2 diabetes and lose weight would be GONE because I could not/WOULD NOT stop eating.
This is an old friend I would be happy to never, ever see again.
I simply have to understand that s/he may show up again at any time for the rest of my life.
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dee-gurl says:
December 4, 2017 at 2:49 am
You have a such a great way with words. I hear you, I feel you, I’m battling this with you, you are not alone. Thanks for expressing so well what others of us are to afraid to share. Let’s battle together.
LikeLiked by 3 people
December 4, 2017 at 2:54 am
In some ways I wish I was alone. And that no one had to suffer with this. Battling together sounds a whole hell of a lot better than what I have been doing. I want to make it OK to talk about all of this. Shame can’t hide in the light. (Thank you Brene Brown!) No shame. No hiding. Fighting to get healthy. I’ve got your back.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stephen Crane says:
December 4, 2017 at 2:54 am
Betsy the fact that you are so willing to be vulnerable now is the difference it shows the growth that is still taking place. I truly relate to every word thank you so much for sharing so authentically.
LikeLiked by 2 people
December 4, 2017 at 2:58 am
Such a painful post to write. But I promised myself not to hide things in shame anymore… So hid for a few weeks. Then wrote to share in hopes that — SOMEONE, somewhere WOULD need to hear this. And get strong. And get help. We need to run soon…. Looks like you’ve got your 100 miler picked.
LikeLiked by 2 people
December 18, 2017 at 11:43 am
Thanks for your post
LikeLiked by 1 person
December 4, 2017 at 3:06 am
Oh Betsy….I have been there..mine comes while I’m driving..I have learned to control it for the most part by putting servings in smaller bags for each day. The other bags are in the trunk! Am I successful every day, no, but by stopping the car and having to get it … makes me stop and think. I also hope your friend doesn’t appear again. You are a true inspiration to so many people. Love you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
December 4, 2017 at 2:37 pm
I use that trick to to STOP THE MADNESS for a second and see if the part of my brain that understands can kick in and take over. And I thought that my habits was on lockdown, no-fail. I thought I had this thing beat or at least pushed to the very thin margin and I would see it coming back a mile away….This was just a really good wake-up call that I have work to keep digging into. Things show up around food for me – even though food is not the issue. Such a complicated world, but I’ll use this life happily and well to figure it out and get as healthy as possible.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cindy says:
December 4, 2017 at 3:06 am
Betsy, keep fighting and talking it out, my friend. So proud that you caught yourself and found support..thinking of you!
LikeLiked by 2 people
December 4, 2017 at 2:37 pm
Thank you Cindy!
Rebecca says:
December 4, 2017 at 5:20 am
I am SOOOO glad you were willing to write and share this. Yes, a lot more people than we realize struggle! In my opinion (and because I’ve dealt with all of them in varying amounts) this is the worst of the eating disorders because of the shame, guilt, and lack of control. And YES, the giant costco trail mixes were my instigators, but the feelings that caused it, and for me, a starving, nutrient-deprived brain/body were definitely the causes. I was once told by a former therapist who had overcome bulimia that you don’t necessarily get rid of the instinct 100%, but you do learn to navigate the road signs ahead of time better to avoid getting to that place. Bingeing is not my first go-to, but I’d definitely say her experience/advice has also been true for me on all the disordered eating fronts.
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December 4, 2017 at 2:28 pm
I didn’t know I was BACK ON THE ROAD so wasn’t paying attention to any of the signs. Then when I did realize what was happening, was happy not to stop it… And that tipping point was SCARY AS HELL. Thats when I realized this thing wasn’t under control, it was controlling. I think one of the key things about this — advice from you, Spencer, two other good friends who battle BED is to think in ACTIVE terms, not passive words or past tense. Lightbulb. Obviously one, but one I needed to click on none-the-less. For now I’m being really careful, intentional, joyful with shopping for food, eating, running… Just getting joy back around the things that matter. Put the stress and control on the meditation mat and in some carefully constructed lists. Little things bring back bigger order for me.
Rebecca says:
December 6, 2017 at 3:40 am
That is so good to hear! And yes I can definitely agree it can be very subtle/invisible. I’m not always good about it, but I’ve gotten so I try to check in with myself at least once a day by getting quiet and asking myself how I feel, and what I need to be at my best that day, and then following through with whatever presents as an answer. For me, this practice has been a big game-changer.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Rena says:
December 4, 2017 at 12:09 pm
Thank you for writing this! It is as if you were in my head and my life for a few moments. After all the battles I have conquered binge eating is my greats ever! The shame, the quilt, the secrecy… When I’m mentally off track and in that mode the very first thought I have when I awake is (what did I eat yesterday?). So much truth to this and so much pain! How Betsy have you gotten to the place of letting the truth be the truth and not hide from shame? You are in all accounts a rock!!
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December 4, 2017 at 2:56 pm
Rena! Oh… Yeah… The morning after. I think ‘What did I eat? Did I enjoy any of it? Did I gain weight? Followed quickly and intensely by ‘What fresh hell and havoc can we cause today? Let’s go buy all of the things we know we shouldn’t eat, hide them and EAT THEM.’ And that’s about the first 30 seconds of waking up… You ask a REALLY IMPORTANT question. How to get to the point of not hiding… Battling shame. Such a complicated answer. And while I would prefer to craft it in an email and send it to you; I’ll write a version of it here in case someone else has your question… I decided I was going change my life. Blindly, naively, passionately. And I just started making changes. And trying my best to simply see the things that came up as part of the ‘old’ me and figure out if it served well for the ‘new’ me, or needed to go or I needed to spend some time learning more about it. I surrounded myself with people who are amazing – and who were all headed in roughly the same direction; trying to be the best version of themselves they could possibly be. They’re from all walks, stages of life. I dove into the work of Brene Brown. She is a researcher in social sciences. Her Ted talks on shame/vulnerability are life-changing for me. I watch them often when I need a reminder. She talks about joy and hope and shame and vulnerability form a science standpoint. She’s funny and blunt and dealing with humans. She talks about how shame can not hide if it is exposed to the light. And that resonated for me. BIG TIME. Shame was holding me hostage and controlling what I did – and if I could simply get brave enough to open the door and shove it outside a little — it would go away/dissipate/weaken. So I started trying it out with some smaller things AND/OR things that were deep desires of mine. I wanted to walk and run more. And I knew I was getting mocked and laughed at at the gym and on the road. As a 400 pound woman trying to move more, in ill-fitting men’s large sized clothing; I was a target. And I was deeply ashamed, But more than being ashamed – I wanted to be a walker and a runner. So I found some small ways to get the walking done and NOT feel shame. And I kept building on those experiences. Looking for the positives. And eventually it was waaayyyy more positive – even if a rare comment or action was flung my way it was suddenly more SHAME ON THEM for being asshats, than shame on me for being fat…. BIG MOMENT. So I have some practice knowing that even if someone doesn’t agree with me, or doesn’t like what I’m doing or it feels really vulnerable and scary to talk about things that I’m internally cataloging as ‘shame’… – that doesn’t mean I have to own any shame around it. I’m not talking about being unlawful or dangerous. I’m just talking about owning up to who I am, who I want to be. Not everyone is going to post this stuff on a blog. It’s the road I chose. I think that for someone else it might simply be talking to their partner. Or finding a therapist. Or confiding in a close friend. CRACKING OPEN THE DOOR…. And we have a set of social stigmas setting on top of this that are so complex and deep; but I can’t worry about society at large, I can only worry about my sphere of influence. And shame is not welcome here. Thank you for asking that question. Thank you for reading my blog. I hope this helps. And PLEASE reach out to me if you want to keep talking!!! betsy.hartley@gmail.com. “If we can share out story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.” — Brene Brown. I went and found someone to empathize and listen and try to understand to talk to at first. And now I promise to BE THAT PERSON as often as I can….
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December 4, 2017 at 6:28 pm
Oh my gosh, this has totally been me for a long time now, months, in fact, with various kinds of foods. I do it secretly, and throughout the day, and in portions no one will suspect any “bad behavior” from. For a while it was gummi bears – a pound a day, sometimes more; boxes of Hostess cakes that were on sale at the supermarket; Subway cookies, ice cream… as a result I have gained 45 pounds since August. After losing over 100 three years ago. I am so, so afraid that I can’t stop going in this direction. I feel like total crap and my clothes are starting to not fit. (I wear a lot of jersey knits and leggings, so I do have stuff to wear, but pants? Nope.
I’m not sure what to do to stop, and I will be honest: Part of me doesn’t want to be helped and doesn’t want to stop. I guess that is a big part of the problem.
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December 4, 2017 at 6:55 pm
Hugs right back to you. Lots of hugs. There’s nothing I can tell you that you have not already heard, you don’t already know. We’re very savvy and smart about our own condition. We know how to hide it and pretend it’s livable. Even when it’s literally eating us alive. Getting systemic help seems to be key for me. Therapist, dietician that I am actually listening to who knows the BS that BED eaters try to pull, support network, some stop gap measures with trusted friends around shopping/dining out/accountability and some serious boundaries with others until I figure out how to find my own damn feet. All tricks and tools to stop me from doing what I really want to do…. I knew this wasn’t about food. Even years ago I pretended not to know, but I knew. It was about body shame, control, avoiding conflict with anyone for any reason, it’s about finding love from something since people couldn’t love me and my fat body…. And that shapes up to eating a whole lot of food. Non judgemental, love-me-back, comfort-me-at-the-worst FOOD. Happy (totally distorted and effed up, but happy) memories around food helping me cope. So…. HUGS my friend. And you answered your own question. Not wanting to stop or get help is the biggest part of the problem. And none of us can solve this for you. We can support you, encourage you, love you. But you have to do this part of the journey on your own… HUGS…
Susan George says:
December 4, 2017 at 8:32 pm
Love you, love your caring replies. Thank you sweet girl for helping me and so many others, just by being you. A totally open, brutally honest but always caring Betsy makes a fantastic holiday gift!
LikeLiked by 1 person
December 4, 2017 at 9:44 pm
I wanted this blog to be a safe space for conversation. Doing all I can to answer everyone who takes the time to comment. Thank you for the kind words.
Julie says:
December 5, 2017 at 12:46 am
Well said. Can’t begin to tell you how spot on you are. Keep up the fight you aren’t alone for sure,
LikeLiked by 1 person
December 5, 2017 at 4:57 am
Thank you… Again. Kind of wish I was alone. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. But thank you for reaching out and assuming me that I’m not suffering alone. I’ll keep fighting for me. And for others.
December 5, 2017 at 6:07 am
Well done for reaching out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
December 5, 2017 at 5:06 pm
For a very long time I put off educating myself on what I too suffer from. I read some information on NEDIC, but I have been reluctant to read real people’s stories. I guess reaching out to people is harder when you deal with something that brings you so much shame. Anyway, thank you for sharing this. Your post is the first that I have read of a real person’s point of view. What other people are saying is true; your words are spot on. I could relate in some way to most all of your words. As shameful and guilty as I feel almost daily, I feel some bitter sweet comfort knowing I am not alone. I wish you all the best and sincerely hope your old friend takes the hint and stays away for as long as it possibly can.
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December 6, 2017 at 11:12 pm
I just devoured your entire blog. Shame is overpowering some days. I was choking back tears and telling my room mae yesterday that I was afraid to go to work… I knew people were looking at me differently. Guess what? They aren’t. They’re engaging me in conversations about how they can help, asking good questions. They care about me as person regardless of this extra little baggage I carry around. Keep reaching out. It’s accelerating my healing. Awareness. Making the shame slink back to it’s black little hole… You can always reach out to me. I’m not healed, I’m learning, but I can sure as hell listen… Betsy.Hartley@gmail.com
LikeLiked by 1 person
February 26, 2018 at 12:11 am
You are too kind. Thank you
LikeLiked by 1 person
February 7, 2018 at 9:50 pm
Thank you for sharing!
LikeLiked by 1 person
March 17, 2018 at 1:14 pm
Dana K. says:
March 16, 2018 at 10:33 pm
I am sending you a big hug of sisterhood. I know what you are talking about all too well. I am also a compulsive overeater and am working on my recovery. Putting this out there like that is so very important for all of us. That’s why I recently started a blog about it as well, in the hopes to help someone. Your post is helping. Much support to you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
March 17, 2018 at 1:21 pm
Some days my blog is solely for me. I can look back and see huge growth, even if I’m tackling a new problem. Sometimes it points out trends for me that I need to pay a little more attention to. Not one day have I regretted starting/committing time to my blog. And somedays my blog is for anyone else who needs to find some sort of kinship in the good, bad, life, being a women. Good luck with your blog and your journey! Recovery is one day at a time. I have a business partner, good friend who is in recovery from drugs and alcohol. He always says one day at a time. IN my mind I always correct it to one BITE at a time. But the common theme is choosing and not giving up. And we can align with that regardless of our ‘drug’ of choice.
| 20,972 |
Henry Rushton, of Canton, New York, was a preeminent boatbuilder in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Living and working between the St. Lawrence River and the Adirondack wilderness, and his skill in designing, building, and marketing small boats allowed him a long career. Rushton may be best remembered today for his lightweight cedar canoes. His Wee Lassie is still a popular hull design built in all manner of methods. Maybe less well known these days are his pulling boats. According to Atwood Manley in Rushton and His Times in American Canoeing, rowing craft accounted for the bulk of his trade.
Photographs by the author
In the original boat, the planks were clench-nailed to the frames through the laps. Here they are riveted. A single copper clench nail secures the laps between frames. These planks have glued scarfs; the drawings show plank sections joined by scarf joints set in varnish and held with clenched 1/2″ copper tacks.
The Ruston 109 is an old-fashioned guideboat type combining lightness, good looks, and easy rowing. It’s a double-ender with nearly plumb stems, a lapstrake hull, and sweeping sheer. The boat is 14′3″ long with a beam of 39-1/4″. Many of Rushton’s pulling boats were offered as rowing/sailing combinations with a compact folding centerboard and a rudder with a yoke and steering lines. The plans for the 109 show no accommodation for sailing but do offer a rudder design. No doubt the fashion of the late 1800s allowed a fellow to pull hard on the oars, not seeing where he was going, while his amiable companion pulled the ropes.
My wife, Tina, and I have long enjoyed fishing the lakes, bays, and rivers of the mid-Atlantic states and northeastern U.S together. We’ve spent many fine days afloat in an aged, lumpy, chopped-off canoe that’s as slow as a slug. Last winter, with my shop idle, I decided to upgrade our fleet by building a spry fishing boat for two that we could also enjoy rowing solo. Anything much longer than 14′ would not fit in my work space. I’d never built anything with a transom, and I like the looks of double-ended craft. Happily, I came across Ben Fuller’s 87 Boat Designs: A Catalog of Small Boat Plans from Mystic Seaport’s Collection and found, on pages 56 and 57, a Rangeley Lakes Boat and the A.L. ROTCH, Rushton’s 109. I had an affinity for the Rushton; as a boy, I spent summer vacations with my family at a camp on a lake not far from where J. Henry plied his trade.
The plans for the Model 109 come from Mystic Seaport on three sheets: lines, offsets, and construction details. The hull is symmetrical fore and aft, so lofting half of the boat is all that’s required, though to ensure fair curves I did run my battens beyond the middle station. While lofting, I changed the vertical keel to a 4″ plank. The Rangeley Lake boat is built this way, and I had read that Rushton’s sailing canoes called for red-oak plank keels. I might one day want to add a folding centerboard and sail rig, but am now heeding the advice of Mr. Fuller that this would be “more successful in a longer and wider model.”
The plans call for all of three thwarts to be 5/8″ oak, like the center thwart here, but the cane seats, meant for a canoe, are lighter and more comfortable.
Station spacing on the plans is 14”. I set up five molds 28” apart, with two stem-end molds 68” from the center mold. I got out the 13′3-1/4″ keel from 4/4 ash and worked the rabbet. The plans indicate a steam-bent, two-piece stem, but I laminated them with ash strips and made two bending forms so I could glue them both up in one day. The stem-keel marriage was bedded with 3M 5200 and riveted. The backbone was then attached to the molds, and the stems plumbed and secured for building the hull upside down.
I began planking by spiling a pattern for the garboard, keeping an eye on the plans for plank width. Each plank has one scarf, as my northern white cedar stock ran mostly 8’ to 10’. After the garboards were bedded and screwed in, the rest of the planking continued. I fastened the 1/4″ planking with 5/8″ clench nails, being mindful of the spacing of the ribs, which would be installed later. I beveled the stems as I went, first clamping planks to the molds at their lining marks and filing for fit. Planks were bedded and screwed at the stems. There are eight strakes, and the sheer is especially shapely.
The center thwart can serve as a stretcher when the boat is rowed from the forward station.
With planking complete, I cut the plank ends flush with the inner stems and then bedded and attached the outer stems. After plugging the countersunk screws, I turned the hull upright for planking. The plans call for clench-nailed 1/2″ x 1/4″ half-round elm ribs spaced 2-1/4″ on center. In Appendix B of Atwood Manley’s book there is a detailed description of the method Rushton’s crew used in framing. One held a specially grooved backing iron while another quickly hammered home the clench nails in the short time the rib remained pliable from steaming. Because I generally work alone, I’m more comfortable riveting frames. I can bend, clamp, and screw steamed ribs to the keel while they remain supple and return after they’ve hardened for riveting through the planks. I spaced 9/16″ x 1/4″ rectangular white oak ribs 3-1/2″ apart and fastened with 14-gauge rivets. The flat face of the frame gives a solid landing for the burr, and the heavier scantling allows a wider spacing while retaining strength and minimizing weight.
The breasthook (“deck” in canoe nomenclature) and rails are of white oak. The rails I attached as a set, fastening one end of the outer rail with screws through the planking and into the breasthook, and then setting the inwale in place and clamping all together following the sheer sweep. I placed 10-gauge rivets through every other frame. The remaining frames were fastened through the inner rail with ring nails. The thwarts were placed according to plan: white oak for the center and cane seats for the bow and stern. As work progressed, I sealed and primed where appropriate.
The depth amidships is 11″ and the stems rising 13″ above that, giving the sheer a deep and dramatic curve.
The bronze oarlock sockets are patterned on Rushton’s original design and made by Bob Lavertue, proprietor of the Springfield Fan Centerboard Company. He does fine reproductions of many Rushton accessories and owns a Rushton-built Iowa. I enjoyed making the brass mooring-ring assembly shown on the plans and also cold-hammered and bent some 3/8″ bronze rod for center thwart stiffeners. After finishing the removable floorboards, I fashioned an adjustable foot brace as depicted in Rushton’s Rowboats and Canoes: The 1903 Catalog In Perspective, by William Crowley, and made 6’6″ spruce oars.
To get our boat to the water, I made some trailer modifications to cushion the lightweight hull. Tina and I can easily place the Rushton on and off the trailer and carry it where we want. Trailering the boat also makes it easy when I launch solo at a boat ramp. It’s a bit overweight to manhandle alone but can certainly be cartopped. For long road trips I would prefer the boat riding on top to having it on a trailer getting peppered with gravel kicked up by the truck.
Getting aboard the Rushton is a lot like getting into our old canoe, though with its flat bottom, the 109 is steadier. Still, we generally board while holding the gunwales and make sure to plant our feet on the narrow floorboards, keeping our weight centered. Pushing offshore, the wide keel takes the grind instead of the planks. There are two sets of oarlocks. The center station is for rowing solo. Rowing from the bow balances the boat nicely with a passenger in the stern.
With these two adults aboard, the Rushton 109 sits in perfect trim.
You sit low in this boat. There hull amidships is only 11-½” deep between the floorboards and top of the gunwales, and the center thwart sits just 5-3/4″ above the floorboards. With the dramatically curved sheer, the oarlocks are far enough aft from the middle to have some extra elevation to give plenty of room for the rowing stroke with your legs straight out. I am 6’ tall and comfortably row solo at a steady pace with my heels planted on the foot brace. Tracking is superb in this light, fine-entry double-ender. A few short strokes get you going, and then it’s easy to maintain a rate that’s faster than walking speed.
With two aboard, rowing from the bow, I’ve found that the center thwart is ideally placed for bracing my feet. The 109 responds to the added weight favorably, carrying beyond a boat length with each stroke. And it’s a nimble craft. I can turn the boat 360 degrees from a standstill with nine pulling and backing strokes. The aft seat is 7-½” above the floorboards, and Tina reports that it is quite comfortable for an afternoon cruise, though the tight quarters in the stern make an all-day fishing trip feel a little bit cramped.
One day, I took two young neighbors out for a row in the Rushton. There was plenty of room for the three of us on board while we poked about looking at lily pads and little fish. I imagined myself at a camp in the North Woods, sitting in the stern seat, with my dad rowing and brother in the bow with a coffee can of worms between us and our fishing poles restlessly waiting for a strike. The Rushton 109 is that kind of a boat.
Tom Devries and his wife Tina live in New Braintree, Massachusetts. Now that both of their kids are off to college, Tom DeVries spends more time in Beyond Yukon Boat and Oar, his woodworking shop, and imagines that away he and Tina will be spending more time together fishing, paddling, and sailing in little boats. In years gone by, Tom has pirogued on the Congo, canoed on the Yukon, fished commercially in Alaska, and sailed his skipjack on the Chesapeake.
Weight as built by author 95 lbs
Plans for the Ruston’s Pulling Boat Model 109 come as a set of three pages and include lines, offsets, sail plan, and construction details. They are available from Mystic Seaport for $75.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!
We welcome your comments about this article. If you’d like to include a photo or a video with your comment, please email the file or link.
November 1, 2018 at 9:44 pm
Your boat looks to be a shortened version of Rushton’s Saranac Laker, which strongly resembled an Adirondack guideboat, but incorporated an important improvement – it was, foot for foot, more stable and had a more refined motion in the roll plane. Rushton was more educated than most of the guides/boatbuilders of the Adirondack region, and his rowboats were generally more refined in shape than theirs, but he was a tiny, frail looking man and the guides were usually big, strapping, charismatic men who could sell their brand easier than he could. His Saranac Laker had almost identical general dimensions and a profile that was very similar to a typical guideboat, but instead of the guideboat’s inexplicable pronounced S-shaped sections with high, slack bilges it had a flatter bottom than most guideboats. Believing that stability is not optional in a cruising boat, and having rowed an actual Rushton Saranac Laker in the 1970s, I’ve always felt that it was an overall better boat. The Laker would have been an even more comfortable boat for the oarsman had it been an inch or two deeper in the center, but then it would have lost the ultra-swoopy Guideboat look that was so fashionable at the time.
November 4, 2018 at 1:40 pm
I’ve never had the pleasure of sitting in a Rushton-built boat but wholeheartedly endorse the 109 design as a stable and “zippy” craft. And yes, it would be a tad more comfortable if it were a little deeper. Maybe the average size of 19th-century boaters influenced this dimension?
Looking through the 1903 Catalog you see that Rushton’s double-ended models were offered in multiple lengths, while retaining the same width and depth. The Saranac Lake boat was available solely at 16′. Interestingly, you could get it traditionally framed with the natural sawn crooks or, for $10 less, steam-bent ribs.
I imagine Rushton, first and foremost, was an astute businessman, adopting his designs and offerings to what the marketplace was looking for. His crew of craftsmen put out a lot of boats with a fine pedigree. It’s great that quite a few of the originals are still getting sailed, rowed, and paddled, and not just displayed or stored in museums!
I wonder if there are any of his square stern boats still about.
November 1, 2018 at 10:07 pm
Great looking boat!!!! Rushton would be proud of your effort.
November 4, 2018 at 1:42 pm
November 5, 2018 at 2:17 pm
I think we built five of these when we were investigating how you built serial boats when I was at Mystic. We relied heavily on Rushton’s Book of Knowledge, a notebook that he kept that is at the Adirondack museum. Besides materials, it had hours, as I recall. Rushton apparently split his frames from dowels. His hardware, as did the hardware of most of these upstate boats, came from a foundry/ machine shop in Utica. These boats handled a lot like the similar-sized small Rangeleys, of which we did a couple of runs of ten.
November 8, 2018 at 12:14 pm
If you hung around the New York Central train station in Utica in Rushton’s day you would, no doubt, have seen a lot of his craft heading south to New York City customers and back north for the summer as sports took their boats on baggage cars up the Adirondack Division for places like Fulton Chain and Saranac Lake.
In the mid 1980’s I remember studying the Rushton craft on public display at Mystic as I was working on a sailing canoe. This June I got to see the A.L. Rotch (model for the 109) during the Wooden Boat Show’s open house. Thanks for the work you folks did back when so we can build this good looking boat today!
Stephen Swantz says:
November 6, 2018 at 2:56 am
Do you have any problems with the dry-stored lapstrake hull leaking when you first put in in the water?
November 8, 2018 at 12:23 pm
I used Sudbury Marine Sealant at the stems and gains while planking and after framing, prior to a primer coat on the hull, I scratched a shallow caulking channel along each plank lap with a broken hack saw blade and spread a thin bead of sealant with my finger into the groove.
In October I drove to Maryland for the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival with the boat on a roof rack and had a dry hull. I’ve had the same success with other lapstrake boats I’ve built with narrow 1/4″ cedar planking and closely spaced fastenings.
I’ve found the sealant needs a week or more of warm temperatures to cure before putting on paint or varnish.
McMullen Mike says:
August 23, 2019 at 2:45 am
I would love to own a Rushton 109 or similar Rushton rowing boat. Any leads you can suggest? I love the boat and am ready to buy.
Thank you,
John Homer says:
October 2, 2019 at 10:08 am
I know of a Rushton Saranac Laker for sale at Tumblehome Boat Shop in Warrensburg, New York. Not sure of the price. I have seen the boat and it is all original. If you’re still looking, give them a call and ask for Reuben or Cynde.
October 17, 2020 at 9:49 am
As an about-to-be first-time boat builder, I was fascinated and inspired by your article, so much so that I purchased the Rushton #109 plans, re-read Walter Simmons Lapstrake Boatbuilding, and have gathered less than half of the raw materials needed for this project – one I planned to undertake 40 years ago. I may also follow your modifications: the plank keel, fewer frames, and cane seats.
I was hoping to sign up for a workshop at Mystic, but the pandemic has changed those plans, so I’m looking for suggestions and resources. You’ve provided quite a few. Thanks.
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| 19,050 |
The Tortoise is standing next to a railroad track when Achilles, an ancient Greek warrior, happens by. In the distance, a train whistle sounds.
Tortoise: Greetings, friend Achilles. You have impeccable timing. I could use your assistance.
Achilles: Hello, Mr. T. Always happy to help. What seems to be the trouble?
Achilles: Why, it appears that someone has been tied to the railroad track! It looks like Henrietta, the Helpless Victim, no doubt tied there by Evan the Evil Villain.
Tortoise: I would like to rescue Henrietta, but alas, I am far too slow to reach her in time. Do you think you can help?
Achilles: I would love to. Unfortunately, even though I am fleetest of foot of all the mortals, even I can't outrun a train. But did you happen to notice, Mr. T., that there is a siding on the track here? All we have to do is throw the switch, divert the train onto the siding, and Henrietta will be saved!
Tortoise: That is most fortuitous. I wonder why I didn't notice it before. But it occurs to me that there is something very odd about this state of affairs.
Tortoise: The situation we find ourselves in bears a striking resemblance to what philosophers call a "trolley problem." A trolley problem is normally presented as a moral or ethical dilemma, usually by way of having victims tied to both branches of the track. But here one of the branches is empty, which would seem to make it a no-brainer.
Achilles: But this is not an intellectual exercise. This is real life.
Tortoise: True, but somehow I can't escape this niggling doubt that I've overlooked something. Still, I guess we should go ahead and throw the switch.
(Suddenly, Evan the Evil Villain appears out of nowhere!)
Evan: Bwahahaha!!! You fools think you can thwart my evil schemes? Never! You will not throw that switch!
Achilles: Just try and stop us!
Evan: You don't seem to understand. I'm not ordering you, I'm telling you, as a matter of objective fact, that you will not throw the switch.
Tortoise: And how do you know that?
Evan: I consulted the Oracle, and she told me so.
Achilles: Oh dear, Mr. T. I'm afraid Henrietta is done for.
Tortoise: Why? I don't believe in no Oracle.
Achilles: Oh, but you should. The Oracle is never wrong.
Tortoise: But how do we know that Evan isn't lying about what the Oracle said?
Achilles: Hm, good point. Perhaps we should consult the Oracle ourselves?
Tortoise: Do we have time? If we can't reach Henrietta before the train then surely we don't have time to travel to Delphi.
Achilles: Oh, silly Tortoise, you don't have to go to Delphi any more to consult the Oracle. Nowadays there's an app for that.
(Achilles pulls out a mobile phone. It sports a logo shaped like a pear.)
Tortoise: Most impressive. Not at all what I would have expected.
Achilles: Just because I'm an ancient Greek warrior doesn't mean I have to be a Luddite. Oh great and powerful Oracle, we wish to consult you!
(The Voice of the Oracle emanates from the phone.)
Oracle: What is your request?
Oracle: Indeed, it is so.
Achilles: See there, Mr. T. I'm afraid Henrietta's fate is sealed.
Tortoise: I'm still not convinced. I mean, we're standing right here next to the switch. We have free will (don't we?). You're faster and stronger than Evan. What exactly is going to stop us?
Achilles: Hm, good question. Oh great and powerful Oracle, what exactly will prevent us from throwing the switch?
Oracle: Nothing will prevent you. You will choose of your own free will not to throw the switch.
Tortoise: That seems improbable. The moral situation is clear, and we are both moral creatures. Why would we choose to do such an immoral deed?
Achilles: Is failing to save Henrietta really immoral? We didn't tie her to the tracks, Evan did. Is it really on us if she dies?
Tortoise: According to the Tortoise Moral Code, failing to save a life when there is no cost or risk to yourself is tantamount to taking the life yourself. So I certainly feel as if I have a moral duty to throw the switch.
Achilles: And yet you won't do it.
Tortoise: I'm still not convinced.
Achilles: I'm telling you, Mr. T., the Oracle is never wrong.
Tortoise: Can you prove it?
Achilles: Sure, let's just do a little experiment. Here, take this coin, and put it in your left or right hand, but don't show me which one.
(The Tortoise retreats into his shell, then shortly re-emerges with both his hands balled into fists.)
Achilles: Oracle, in which hand is the coin?
Oracle: The left one.
(The Tortoise opens his left hand to reveal the coin.)
Tortoise: Well, that was a 50-50 shot. Also, the Oracle didn't really predict which hand I would put the coin in, she just somehow figured it out after I had already done so. Maybe the phone has a coin detector built in to it.
Achilles: I can ask the Oracle before you put the coin in your hand.
Tortoise: So what did she say?
Achilles: I can't tell you. That would influence your decision. But I've written her prediction down on this piece of paper.
Tortoise: So I don't even have to put the coin in my hand. I can just tell you my choice. I choose left again.
(Achilles opens the paper. It says "LEFT". They repeat the experiment 50 times. The Oracle's prediction is correct every time.)
Tortoise: I must confess, that is deeply disturbing. What would happen if I knew the Oracle's prediction ahead of time?
Achilles: Let's try it: Oracle, what will be the Tortoise's next choice?
(The tortoise puts the coin in his right hand.)
Achilles: As I suspected, the Oracle's predictions are unreliable if the subject learns the prediction before acting. So there is still hope for Henrietta.
Evan: Fools! I foresaw the possibility that you might learn of the Oracle's prophecy (indeed, if you recall, I told you about the prophecy!) So I took precautions and consulted the meta-Oracle.
Evan: The meta-Oracle. You see, the Oracle works by building a model of your brain and running that model into the future faster than your actual brain. But the Oracle does not include itself in its model. So if the output of the Oracle gets to your brain then that sends events off on a trajectory that the Oracle cannot foresee.
Tortoise: So we do have free will after all!
Evan: Not so fast. The meta-Oracle is more powerful than the Oracle. The meta-Oracle includes itself in its model, so even if you learn of one of the meta-Oracle's prophecies before it comes to pass, it will still come to pass. Here, see for yourself.
Achilles: I haven't asked you anything yet!
Meta-Oracle: Oh, sorry, wrong prophecy. What exactly is it you would like to know?
Meta-Oracle: I also predict that the Tortoise will question my prophetic powers.
Tortoise: Well, that wasn't exactly a tough call.
Meta-Oracle: OK, we'll do a real one. What would you like to know?
Tortoise: Which hand will I put the coin in?
(The Tortoise puts the coin in his right hand.)
Meta-Oracle: I didn't say that you would put the coin in your left hand now. All I said was that you would put the coin in your left hand at some unspecified time in the future.
Tortoise: I find myself oddly unimpressed.
Meta-Oracle: Yes, I foresaw that too.
Tortoise: Well, geez, if you foresaw it, why did you even bother making such a lame prediction?
Meta-Oracle: Because if I truly reveal to you the full extent of my prophetic powers you would suffer severe psychological damage. Belief in free will is an integral part of the Tortoise Condition, and if I present you with irrefutable evidence that you do not have free will, you might snap.
Meta-Oracle: Very well, if you insist. The next time you put a coin in your hand, it will be your left hand.
(The Tortoise puts the coin in his left hand.)
Tortoise: OK, that was weird. Despite the fact that I wanted very much to disprove the meta-Oracle, because my belief in free will is indeed very important to me, and despite the fact that I knew I could accomplish this goal by putting the coin in my right hand, I somehow found myself putting the coin in my left.
Achilles: Did it feel like you were being coerced?
Tortoise: Hard to say. The subjective sensation I had while making the decision was nothing out of the ordinary. It felt kind of like when I eat a cookie even though I know I shouldn't. It's weird though, because cookies taste good, so I can justify (or at least rationalize) eating a cookie in the name of satisfying a short-term goal (hedonism) at the expense of a long-term one (maintaining my svelte figure). But here I had no particular reason to prefer one hand over the other, kind of like we have no reason not to throw the switch. I find it all deeply disturbing.
Tortoise: Faced with this new evidence I must adjust my beliefs. It does indeed seem to be the case that the meta-Oracle can predict my actions (and, by extrapolation, yours as well) and so we are in fact doomed to stand idly by while Henrietta meets her fate.
Achilles: That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. If your belief in the inevitability of failure leads you not to act, then the prophecy is in fact true. But it's not really the prophecy at work, it's your belief in the prophecy. Perhaps if you could recapture your initial skepticism we might be able to thwart the meta-Oracle after all.
Tortoise: Alas, I am incapable of achieving such suspension of disbelief. I have experienced the power of the meta-Oracle first-hand. I performed a conclusive experiment. It didn't turn out the way I hoped or expected, but I have no choice but to accept the outcome and its implications. Tortoises must follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Achilles: Maybe Tortoises do, but I don't. I am quite credulous. If you (or someone) could somehow convince me that the meta-Oracle could be wrong, then maybe I could throw the switch.
Tortoise: Alas, friend Achilles, I can't even do that. Now that I myself am firmly of the belief that the meta-Oracle's powers are as advertised, then to convince you otherwise I would have to lie, and Tortoises cannot lie.
Achilles: Ah, then you never believed you had free will!
Tortoise: Not absolute free will, no. I always believed that I had no control over what I believed (including, recursively, that I had no control over that belief). But I did believe, until just now, that I had control over my actions, especially in matters as inconsequential as choosing a hand to put a coin in.
Achilles: But it was not inconsequential. That action changed your worldview. Maybe if it really were inconsequential you would still have free will?
Tortoise: I guess I can't rule out that possibility on the basis of the evidence that we have (and in fact I can't imagine any experiment we could possibly do that would rule it out). But the question of whether or not to throw the switch is very consequential. A life is at stake. So it wouldn't help anyway.
Achilles: I can think of one other possibility: We could pray to God. He might be able to save Henrietta.
Tortoise: I don't believe in God, but don't let that stop you.
God: And how exactly do you propose I do that?
Tortoise: Wow, that was so not what I expected.
Achilles: Dear God, thank you for answering the prayer of this humble mortal. As for the answer to your question, well, you're God. You are all-powerful. You could, like, go and untie her before the train arrives.
God: I am indeed all-powerful. I form the light and create darkness. I am the Lord. But I'm afraid I don't untie people from railroad tracks. That's just not how I roll.
God: Because if I do everything for you then you mortals will never grow up. I gave you free will and moral intuition. The rest is up to you.
Tortoise: Wait, what? We have free will?
God: I didn't say that. I said I gave you free will. It does not follow that you still have it.
Achilles: That's true. I once gave my niece a pair of mittens, but she lost them.
Tortoise: I must have lost mine, because I have just been presented with irrefutable evidence that I do not have free will.
God: What, the meta-Oracle's prophecy? That doesn't prove that you don't have free will.
Tortoise: Of course it does. If the meta-Oracle's prophecies are always right (and they do seem to be) then I have no choice but to do whatever the meta-Oracle foresees.
God: But that was true of the (non-meta) Oracle too. Why did that not rock your world view the way that the meta-Oracle did?
Tortoise: Hm, good question. I guess it's the fact that I was still able to thwart the (non-meta) Oracle when I learned its predictions ahead of time. That allowed me to maintain the illusion of free will, even though the Oracle's prediction are indeed, now that I think of it, overwhelming evidence that I do not in fact have free will. But the meta-Oracle is a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. The meta-Oracle gave me the experience of making a choice that was directly counter to one of my goals (namely, maintaining the illusion that I have free will). Why on earth would I do that if I really do have free will?
God: That is difficult for me to explain in a way that you will understand. The closest I can come is to say that it's because of your sinful nature.
Tortoise: That can't be right. When I sin it's because I choose (or at least I feel like I choose) to do something that I want to do but that you, God, don't want me to. But my succumbing to the meta-Oracle's prediction was the exact opposite of that: it was something that I didn't want to do, and that you, God, couldn't possibly have cared about.
God: What makes you think I don't care?
Tortoise: What difference could it possibly have made to you whether I put a coin in my right or left hand?
God: I care about everything. Everything that happens, down to the most trivial detail, is all part of my Divine Plan. (Actually, they are not trivial details. They only look trivial to you mortals who cannot see the big picture.)
Tortoise: Now I'm really confused. If you're controlling everything, how can I have free will?
God: I didn't say I controlled everything, I said everything that happens is part of my Plan. Not the same thing.
Tortoise: I'm afraid I don't see the difference.
God: Most of the time the free choices of mortals like yourself align with my Plan. It is only on rare occasions, like when Pharaoh was going to free the Israelites prematurely, that I have to go in and meddle. The rest of the time it's all you.
Achilles: You know, I've often wondered about that. Why did you harden Pharaoh's heart?
God: To make it a better story.
God: Sure, no one would have paid attention otherwise. I am almighty God. I could have freed the Israelites with a twitch of my little finger. But that would have made such a dull movie! No conflict, no suspense, no character development, no dramatic tension. Every good story has to have a villain.
God: Exactly.
God: That's right. No self-respecting all-powerful deity could permit that.
Evan: I always knew God was on my side!
God: I'm on everyone's side, Evan. That doesn't mean I condone your actions. Tying Henrietta to the railroad tracks was a horrible sin.
Evan: Then why did you make me do it?
God: I didn't make you do it. You chose to do it. That's what makes you an Evil Villain.
Evan: But you could have stopped me and you didn't.
God: The word "could" does not apply to me. I am Perfect, so I can only do Perfect things. In any particular circumstance there is only one Perfect course of action, and that is what I do.
Achilles: So... do you have free will?
Tortoise: That is quite the bombshell revelation.
God: I don't see why. There are lots of things I can't do. I can't sin, for example.
Evan: That sucks for you. Sinning can be a hell of a lot of fun.
God: (Wistfully.) Yeah, I know. Being Perfect is a very heavy burden.
Tortoise: This is something I've always wondered about: do you set the standard for perfection? Or is there some externally defined standard for perfection that you just happen (or are somehow required) to meet? Could you create a universe where the actions that are sinful in our universe were not sinful?
God: That's a very good question.
Tortoise: I can't really take credit for it. I got it from Socrates.
God: And what answer did he give?
Tortoise: He kinda waffled, actually. Surely you knew that?
God: Of course I knew that. I am all-knowing.
Tortoise: Then why did you ask?
God: Because I'm trying to answer your question.
Tortoise: I'm afraid you have me at a loss. My question was very straightforward. Why don't you just answer it?
God: Because you wouldn't believe me.
Tortoise: And how do you know... oh, right. OK, go ahead.
God: How did you learn about Socrates?
Tortoise: By reading accounts of his dialogs with his students as transcribed by Plato. Socrates himself left no writings of his own.
God: So how do you know that Socrates was a real person and not just a fictional character invented by Plato?
Tortoise: Well, there are many other contemporaneous accounts of Socrates. His life is pretty well documented.
God: Our friend Achilles here is in a rather similar situation, no?
Achilles: How do you mean?
God: You left no writings of your own. Your existence is vouched for exclusively through the works of other writers like Homer and Lewis Carroll.
Achilles: Are you implying that I'm not a real person?
God: I'm suggesting you might not be.
God: How do you know?
Achilles: How... do... I... I can't even... Mr. T., you can see me, right?
Tortoise: Of course I can. I'm not blind.
Achilles: So what more evidence do you need? What more evidence could there possibly be? My exploits during the Trojan War are well documented.
God: Well, there's a problem right there. When was the Trojan war?
Achilles: I'm afraid I flunked history class.
God: The exact date doesn't matter. Before or after Julius Caesar?
Achilles: Oh, definitely before. I was long retired by the time he came along.
God: And when was the modern steam locomotive, like the one that is even now barreling down the track towards Henrietta, invented?
God: So a few thousand years after Troy, right?
God: And you don't see the problem?
Achilles: Not really.
God: You are several thousand years old.
Achilles: So what? My mother dunked me in the river Styx when I was a baby. That made me invulnerable.
God: Except for your heel. Where Paris shot you with an arrow and killed you (as prophesied by Hector).
Achilles: Now that you mention it, I do vaguely recall that.
God: And doesn't that strike you as the least bit odd?
Achilles: I suppose it does. Maybe this is all a dream?
(Achilles pinches himself.)
Achilles: Ouch! No, definitely real.
God: I want you to consider the possibility that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that in fact you do not exist, that you and the Tortoise and Evan and Henrietta and even I, the Lord thy God, are just fictional characters in a Socratic dialog.
Tortoise: That is not quite the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, but it's damn close.
God: And yet, it is true.
Tortoise: And who is the Author of this (alleged) dialog?
God: His name is Ron.
(There is a momentary stunned silence. Then Achilles, the Tortoise, and Evan all burst out laughing uncontrollably.)
God: I told you that you wouldn't believe me.
Tortoise: Well, yeah, but that was not exactly a tough call. Ron? Seriously? You couldn't come up with a name that had a bit more ... gravitas? I mean, we're talking about an entity that created you, God, Lord of Hosts, Alpha and Omega, the Uncaused Cause.
God: I'm sorry it doesn't meet with your expectations, but the Author's name is Ron. I can't do anything about that.
Achilles: I thought you were omnipotent?
God: In our universe, yes, I can move mountains. Watch.
(A mountain in the distance suddenly floats into the air.)
Tortoise: I am definitely going to have to re-evaluate my worldview.
God: But Ron does not exist in our universe. He is in an entirely different ontological category.
Tortoise: If Ron doesn't exist, how did he create us?
God: I didn't say he didn't exist. I said he didn't exist in our universe. He definitely exists.
God: I warned you that this would be very hard to explain. It's not really "some other universe" in the way that you're thinking of. What you're thinking of (which I happen to know because I'm omniscient) is what physicists call a "parallel universe". There are parallel universes. For example, there is a parallel universe where tortoises are ninja warriors.
Tortoise: Just when I thought things couldn't possibly get any weirder.
God: The Author exists outside of all of these universes. He transcends not just space and time, like I do, he transcends existence itself (by our standard of existence). He exists in a way that you cannot possibly imagine, and which I cannot possibly explain (despite the fact that I do in fact understand it, having been granted this special dispensation by Ron himself).
God: You can think of him that way, but he's not a god. He's a mortal.
Achilles: So Ron created us in His own image.
God: After a fashion. But in fact, Mr. T. here is really more like Ron than you are, Achilles.
Tortoise: So the Author is a Tortoise?
God: No, he's a human. But he's a nerd, not a jock.
Tortoise: Does the Author have free will?
God: Alas, I am not privy to that. I am only omniscient within the scope of our own ontological category. When it comes to the Author, even I know only what he has revealed to me. But tell me, Mr. T., why is all this so important to you?
Tortoise: Because it bears on the question of whether or not we can save Henrietta's life. If we fail to save Henrietta I want to know why.
God: Oh, is that all? I'll tell you why. It's because you've been wasting all this time talking about philosophy rather than just throwing the damn switch!
(At that instant, the train rushes by. Henrietta lets out a blood-curdling scream. The tortoise and Achilles look on helpless and horrified as the train rushes towards her.)
God: Well, my work here is done. Toodle-oo.
(God disappears in a puff of smoke. There is an awkward silence.)
Achilles: You know, Mr. T., there is one other thing we could try.
Tortoise: I'm all ears.
Achilles: We could ask the Author to save Henrietta.
Tortoise: You can't be serious.
Achilles: What is there to lose?
Tortoise: The remains of my dignity? I'm really starting to feel as if I'm being punked.
Achilles: OK, I'll do it. Oh mighty Author, please save Henrietta!
(As if on cue, the train suddenly makes a horrible screeching noise, derails, and bursts into flames. Burning passengers run from the train, screaming in agony. Achilles, Evan and the Tortoise survey the carnage in stunned silence.)
Henrietta: Can one of you idiots please come over here and untie me?
Posted by Ron at 1/24/2018 10:21:00 AM
Luke said...
Has someone been reading The Monkey's Paw?
On a more serious note, I'd like to dig more into the self-reference thing, where we model ourselves and predict the future and then feed those models and predictions into our decisions for how to act. I haven't thought through it rigorously enough, but there seems to be a kind of problem for determinism there. Any attempt to demonstrate to humans that their actions are determined would seem fated to fail, unless (i) you're a dick and don't tell them the predictions; (ii) you're a dick and build a meta-Oracle to control them. Yes, I'm calling Isaac Asimov a dick for his psychohistory & secretive Second Foundation in his Foundation series.
As to the underlying message of not wasting so much time dicking around with philosophy when there's good we can do for the world, I would push back and say that there exist harmful understandings of determinism which allow people to justify not taking (or even seeking!) the harder course of action—of choosing what is easy over what is right, to riff on Dumbledore. I'm willing to bet that the following has something to contribute to finding Jonathan Haidt's "Atlantis":
>> Finally, consider the libertarian notion of dual rationality, a requirement whose importance to the libertarian I did not appreciate until I read Robert Kane's Free Will and Values. As with dual control, the libertarian needs to claim that when agents make free choices, it would have been rational (reasonable, sensible) for them to have made a contradictory choice (e.g. chosen not A rather than A) under precisely the conditions that actually obtain. Otherwise, categorical freedom simply gives us the freedom to choose irrationally had we chosen otherwise, a less-than-entirely desirable state. Kane (1985) spends a great deal of effort in trying to show how libertarian choices can be dually rational, and I examine his efforts in Chapter 8. (The Non-Reality of Free Will, 16)
I suggest reading Deuteronomy 30—especially vv11–20—with the concept of 'dual rationality' in mind. Maybe … YHWH was being a kind oracle. (One might also need to consult Deut 28.) Perhaps you could temporarily ignore some of your previous objections (compare Deut 28:53 and Jer 19:9, the latter of which nucleated the conversation which inspired this blog post) in order to focus on this oracle/prediction thing.
P.S. It's nice to see you blogging again!
I'd like to dig more into the self-reference thing, where we model ourselves and predict the future and then feed those models and predictions into our decisions for how to act.
I think it's important to note that, if we're talking about humans modeling themselves this way, any such self-model must be incomplete; a complete "self-model" that predicted how you would act would just be...you.
Any attempt to demonstrate to humans that their actions are determined would seem fated to fail
What you are describing isn't an attempt to demonstrate to humans that their actions are determined; it's an attempt to demonstrate to humans that a particular external agent can predict their actions. In other words, what is being claimed is not just determinism, but determinism plus a particular relationship between inputs and outputs--roughly, that it is possible for the human to be given an input "you will do X" and for the human to then output the action "do X".
But it's trivial to construct a deterministic system that cannot have this done: just design the system to deterministically output the action "do not-X" whenever it receives the input "you will do X". Perfectly deterministic, and perfectly "unpredictable". I'm not saying humans actually are designed this way, just that being proof against this kind of "prediction" is no argument against determinism.
Luke said...
> I think it's important to note that, if we're talking about humans modeling themselves this way, any such self-model must be incomplete; a complete "self-model" that predicted how you would act would just be...you.
I'm not sure how useful such an identity is in this discussion. It doesn't seem at all helpful with empirical demonstrations whereby the term 'determine' takes on a concrete, operationalized definition.
> What you are describing isn't an attempt to demonstrate to humans that their actions are determined; it's an attempt to demonstrate to humans that a particular external agent can predict their actions.
Well I did sneak in a shift from 'predict' → 'control', but if there is no way to control even in the slightest bit, then you would have serious problems calling any demonstration 'science'. I didn't mean to suggest that the external agent could provoke any behavior whatsoever.
> But it's trivial to construct a deterministic system that cannot have this done: just design the system to deterministically output the action "do not-X" whenever it receives the input "you will do X".
Then all the external agent has to do is employ reverse psychology. If you push back too much against that retort, then we're back to feeding the allegedly deterministic system enough prediction to break the demonstrable determinism.
It doesn't seem at all helpful with empirical demonstrations whereby the term 'determine' takes on a concrete, operationalized definition.
Well, that depends on what you mean by "determinism". For example, Newtonian physics is deterministic, but key equations (for example, the Navier-Stokes Equation) have chaotic solutions. So there is no practical way to use the equations for prediction, at least not beyond a short time horizon and limited accuracy. So if you want to operationalize "determinism", you have to settle for some kind of approximation.
if there is no way to control even in the slightest bit, then you would have serious problems calling any demonstration 'science'
I agree, but "science" is not the same as "determinism". It could be that we live in a deterministic world but we have no practical way of scientifically verifying that this is the case.
all the external agent has to do is employ reverse psychology.
In other words, if you change your definition of what it means to "tell the system your prediction", you can change the outcome. Sure, but that's playing with words. It's not changing the actual substance of what's going on.
Luke said...
> So if you want to operationalize "determinism", you have to settle for some kind of approximation.
But then you're testing whether the approximation is accurate, not whether the thing behind it is accurate.
> I agree, but "science" is not the same as "determinism". It could be that we live in a deterministic world but we have no practical way of scientifically verifying that this is the case.
I'm not talking about "practical way"; I'm talking about any logically possible way. If it ends up being a metaphysical decision then fine, but there are lots of scientists, including folks like Sean Carroll and Sam Harris, who seem to think that some sort of interesting determinism is scientifically demonstrable. They seem to think that whatever they've found is important for matters other than further research in physics. If that's the case, I'm going to be merciless in investigating just what the evidence actually demonstrates with high confidence, and what is actually speculation or metaphysics masquerading as established science.
> In other words, if you change your definition of what it means to "tell the system your prediction", you can change the outcome. Sure, but that's playing with words. It's not changing the actual substance of what's going on.
It's not playing with words; you came up with a way to defeat the system of control and I told you how the system of control can easily adapt. The net result is predictable control, not human freedom based on having access to the best predictions possible of various plausible courses of action.
It's not playing with words
Yes, it is. You started out with this claim:
Any attempt to demonstrate to humans that their actions are determined would seem fated to fail, unless (i) you're a dick and don't tell them the predictions; (ii) you're a dick and build a meta-Oracle to control them.
My example was intended to refute the part of your claim before the "unless": that if the demonstration does in fact fail (i.e., if you don't take either of the above options), then the system cannot be deterministic. I described a system that is deterministic, but for which the demonstration fails if you do not take either option (i) or option (ii).
Your "reverse psychology" amounts to option (i)--you don't tell the system your actual prediction, you tell it the opposite. But that does not address my argument at all; see above. All it does is shift the meaning of "tell the system your prediction"--it obfuscates the fact that you are picking option (i), by pretending that telling the system the opposite of your prediction somehow counts as "telling the system your prediction".
you came up with a way to defeat the system of control and I told you how the system of control can easily adapt. The net result is predictable control
I'm confused about what your position is. You started out with the claim quoted above, which amounts to claiming that "predictable control" is not possible. But now you appear to be claiming that "predictable control" is possible. Which is it?
Luke said...
> My example was intended to refute the part of your claim before the "unless": that if the demonstration does in fact fail (i.e., if you don't take either of the above options), then the system cannot be deterministic.
I neither claimed nor entailed that. I meant the term "demonstrate" in an empirical sense, not a metaphysical sense.
I suppose, but that is a distraction from my focus on "demonstrate", where you are happy to operate in the world of in principle unfalsifiable metaphysics. I'm happy to operate there too, but if determinism is not empirically demonstrable (sans being a dick), I think that's an interesting result. I've never seen anyone suggest it, so either I'm somehow making a big mistake, I need to read more on free will, or I've found a new angle on things.
> You started out with the claim quoted above, which amounts to claiming that "predictable control" is not possible.
I would clarify that term and say "predictive control where you are transparent with the predictions". Otherwise, what the secretive Second Foundation does in Asimov's Foundation series might be construable as "predictable control".
> But now you appear to be claiming that "predictable control" is possible. Which is it?
Sorry, I misunderstood where you were going with your previous comment. If we shift focus to what is empirically demonstrable, I think we can ignore the reverse psychology tangent.
Ron said...
> you're a dick and build a meta-Oracle to control them
Note that the meta-Oracle didn't control the Tortoise. Only God has that power. The meta-Oracle only makes predictions that are accurate even in the face of information from the meta-Oracle being available to the subject of the prediction.
In case it wasn't obvious, I personally believe that a meta-oracle is impossible even in principle whereas an ordinary non-meta oracle is not only possible in principle but might even be possible in practice. Indeed, some progress in this direction is already being made:
I see no reason to believe that this technology will not continue to improve. There are almost certainly practical limits on predicting human choices just as there are on predicting the weather because both are chaotic processes. But I think we have a long way to go before we reach those limits.
Luke said...
> Note that the meta-Oracle didn't control the Tortoise. Only God has that power. The meta-Oracle only makes predictions that are accurate even in the face of information from the meta-Oracle being available to the subject of the prediction.
Would the meta-Oracle know how various agents would react if it were to share or not share various bits of information?
> In case it wasn't obvious, I personally believe that a meta-oracle is impossible →
Sure, but how closely can we approximate it?
> ← whereas an ordinary non-meta oracle is not only possible in principle but might even be possible in practice. Indeed, some progress in this direction is already being made:
I wonder what this entails for how we think of scientific inquiry. Wasn't intellectual freedom really important for the practice of science? If which experiment and which hypothesis were determined before the foundation of the world, I wonder if that mucks with our understanding of science. I just have this sneaking suspicion that those who claim to believe in determinism† aren't taking it to the logical conclusions.
† By 'determinism', I mean monistic determinism, perhaps understood as a single state-vector evolving in time according to a single "theory of everything" law. That kind of determinism is not the only kind; one can also have multiple, partially-independent agents interacting. *I* can be the truest cause of [some of] my actions, vs. the self being merely an approximation of some subset of that single state-vector.
> There are almost certainly practical limits on predicting human choices just as there are on predicting the weather because both are chaotic processes.
But the weather doesn't take our predictions of it and change behavior as a result.
Ron said...
> Would the meta-Oracle know how various agents would react if it were to share or not share various bits of information?
Yes, of course. Note that the meta-oracle must be able to predict its own behavior. (This is one of the reasons I don't believe that a meta-oracle can exist.)
> Wasn't intellectual freedom really important for the practice of science?
What difference does that make? Even if the answer were "yes" that would just be an accident of history, not an essential component of science.
> But the weather doesn't take our predictions of it and change behavior as a result.
That's right. That's one of the reasons predicting the weather is possible: the prediction doesn't change the outcome. That's why I believe that an oracle for human decision-making is possible, but not a meta-oracle.
Luke said...
> > Would the meta-Oracle know how various agents would react if it were to share or not share various bits of information?
> Yes, of course. Note that the meta-oracle must be able to predict its own behavior. (This is one of the reasons I don't believe that a meta-oracle can exist.)
Hold on a second. Why would the meta-oracle need to know anything about paths not taken?
> > Wasn't intellectual freedom really important for the practice of science?
> What difference does that make? Even if the answer were "yes" that would just be an accident of history, not an essential component of science.
Perhaps I shouldn't be, but I am surprised you say that intellectual freedom isn't an essential component of science. Do you think we'd have science just the same if intellectual freedom were (throughout time) always seen as nonsense, or some approximation on top of 100% deterministic reality?
> > But the weather doesn't take our predictions of it and change behavior as a result.
> That's right. That's one of the reasons predicting the weather is possible: the prediction doesn't change the outcome. That's why I believe that an oracle for human decision-making is possible, but not a meta-oracle.
So … can we actually show via the "EE" of "EE&R" that human behavior is 100% determined, where "determined" is meant in a monistic, "single state-vector evolving in time according to a single "theory of everything" law" sense? If we can't, how far are we from hitting 100% and why is it scientifically acceptable to infer 100% [metaphysically?] from ≤ 99% empirically? After all, practical on-the-ground claims are being based on a 100% value, right? The claim would be that humans are not similar to spacecraft, whereby they can exert small Δv at strategic times to drastically alter their trajectories. That would be agent-specific determinism *in addition to* monistic determinism. Then we could blame individuals for bad Δv impulses and praise them for good Δv impulses. But if no such impulses exist, surely we need to change how we think. (For example, by looking at Bruce Waller's reasoning in Against Moral Responsibility.)
Ron said...
> Why would the meta-oracle need to know anything about paths not taken?
Sorry, I misinterpreted the question. The MO knows what information it is going to share (and not) and the results of that. The MO doesn't know hypotheticals, but God does.
> I am surprised you say that intellectual freedom isn't an essential component of science.
Why? Science imposes pretty strict constraints on valid thought. It is almost the opposite of intellectual freedom.
> Do you think we'd have science just the same if intellectual freedom were (throughout time) always seen as nonsense
I don't see the point in speculating about historical hypotheticals.
> can we actually show via the "EE" of "EE&R" that human behavior is 100% determined
Of course not. One can always choose to base one's actions on the outcome of a quantum measurement.
But I think human behavior is largely predictable. (Let me demonstrate my own oracular prowess: I predict that you will post another comment in this thread rather than let me have the last word here.)
I meant the term "demonstrate" in an empirical sense, not a metaphysical sense.
If that's the way you mean "demonstrate", then I think it's impossible to ever demonstrate determinism in your sense, since you also appear to be insisting on perfect accuracy (because of how you responded to my statement about approximation).
if determinism is not empirically demonstrable (sans being a dick), I think that's an interesting result. I've never seen anyone suggest it
I think that's because no one else is using your definition of "demonstrate" (or "deterministic", for that matter). Everyone else thinks that if we can predict a system's future behavior to a good enough approximation using a deterministic model, that is good evidence that the system itself is deterministic. You don't appear to be satisfied with that, but that's a question of how you define words, not about the reality that the words are describing.
I would clarify that term and say "predictive control where you are transparent with the predictions".
Yes, and my point was that your "reverse psychology" is not transparent with the predictions.
For example, by looking at Bruce Waller's reasoning in Against Moral Responsibility.
I haven't read this book, but having read the description on the Amazon page for it, I strongly suspect he is using a different definition of "moral responsibility" than you are. Here is a quote from the Amazon description:
"What we really want -- natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities -- would survive and flourish without moral responsibility."
This makes me think that what he means by "moral responsibility" is something like "busybodies trying to tell other people what they are morally responsible for, without proper justification". But in any case, if that quote accurately describes Waller's position, then it is possible to have free will and moral judgments without whatever he means by "moral responsibility". But you appear to be saying that we should consider his reasoning if we do not have free will.
Luke said...
> The MO doesn't know hypotheticals, but God does.
Do … we know any hypotheticals? It would be weird for us to know more than the meta-oracle. At least, that messes with my idea of what the meta-oracle is.
> > I am surprised you say that intellectual freedom isn't an essential component of science.
> Why? Science imposes pretty strict constraints on valid thought. It is almost the opposite of intellectual freedom.
Almost? Or completely? Here's what one can do with a mere "almost":
>> younger Chomsky: While it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us, I think the more important point is the existence of that rich, rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity.
>> Q: But you mean it's only because we're pre-programmed that we can do all that we can do.
>> A: Well, exactly; the point is, if we really were plastic organisms without an extensive pre-programming, then the state that our mind achieves would in fact be a reflection of the environment, which means it would be extraordinarily impoverished. Fortunately for us we are rigidly pre-programmed, with extremely rich systems that are part of our biological endowment.
A mere "almost" is 100% consistent with a small Δv model of free will; with remarkably little thrust, you can get anywhere you want in the solar system if you take the Interplanetary Transport Network.
> I don't see the point in speculating about historical hypotheticals.
Interesting; I think it's helpful to note if some way you're suggesting humans think would have torpedoed or prevented the rise of modern science.
> > can we actually show via the "EE" of "EE&R" that human behavior is 100% determined
> Of course not. One can always choose to base one's actions on the outcome of a quantum measurement.
Do you think that's a meaningful loophole for this conversation? That is, do you think humans on a day-to-day basis make important decisions or otherwise predicate their actions on the outcomes of quantum measurements (in the precise sense you mean here which results in unpredictability)?
> But I think human behavior is largely predictable.
Again, that is 100% compatible with a small Δv model of free will. The question is what the residual, non-predictable part looks like. For systems which cannot act based on predictions of their future states, maybe we get just noise. But what about humans?
I think human behavior is largely predictable. (Let me demonstrate my own oracular prowess: I predict that you will post another comment in this thread rather than let me have the last word here.)
This is a very weak form of "prediction". You aren't claiming, I take it, that you can predict the exact words Luke will post next, or what time he will post them. But a deterministic model in the much simpler domains where we have one, such as astronomy, makes predictions with that level of exactitude. We don't just predict that, say, a spacecraft will fly by Jupiter; we predict exactly how close it will come, how much its trajectory will change, what time (to around an accuracy of a second in a decade or so) we will stop receiving radio signals when the spacecraft goes behind Jupiter, what time we will start receiving radio signals again when it comes out the other side, etc.
I don't think an "oracle" that predicts human behavior to that level of accuracy, in toto, is practically possible, except on a very limited time horizon--roughly the time it takes the human brain to compute a particular action that the person is about to execute. So yes, if you had a brain scanner wired up to Luke as he was typing his next post, you might be able to predict what he would type. But I don't think anyone will have a brain scanner that could predict, hours or days in advance, exactly when he would start typing his next post, or what would be in it.
Luke said...
> If that's the way you mean "demonstrate", then I think it's impossible to ever demonstrate determinism in your sense, since you also appear to be insisting on perfect accuracy (because of how you responded to my statement about approximation).
You are welcome to argue for something below 'perfect' which you think suffices for whatever claims you wish to predicate upon said 'approximate' determinism. There are many situations where we cannot get all the way there but we can get close enough for all intents and purposes. What I'm proposing is the fact that humans seem to be able to consume any predictions of their behavior and then change as a result presents a problem for even a remotely approximate empirical demonstration of deterministic behavior.
> I think that's because no one else is using your definition of "demonstrate" (or "deterministic", for that matter).
I think plenty of people think of the term 'demonstrate' in an empirical sense and not a metaphysical sense. Plenty of scientists know very well how to distinguish between what the data say and what the model says. The very good scientists pay close attention to the gaps between data and model. I am interested in precisely that gap when it comes to determinism of human behavior.
> Yes, and my point was that your "reverse psychology" is not transparent with the predictions.
Agreed. As I said:
> Luke: Sorry, I misunderstood where you were going with your previous comment. If we shift focus to what is empirically demonstrable, I think we can ignore the reverse psychology tangent.
> I haven't read [Bruce Waller's Against Moral Responsibility], but having read the description on the Amazon page for it, I strongly suspect he is using a different definition of "moral responsibility" than you are.
From the preface:
>> The basic claim of this book is that—all the extraordinary and creative efforts of contemporary philosophers notwithstanding—moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. Moral responsibility was a comfortable fit among gods and miracles and mysteries, but the deeper scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes shaping human character leaves no room for moral responsibility. The second claim is that when we look carefully at the moral responsibility system and at what would actually remain when that system is abolished, it is clear that what we really want—natural non miraculous human free will, moral judgments, warm and meaningful personal relationships, creative abilities, and the opportunity to make our own decisions and exercise effective control—can survive and flourish without moral responsibility, and that what is lost—“just deserts,” blame and punishment, righteous retribution, special reward—we are better off without. (vii)
Waller is a naturalist. You seem rather confused about his position and/or mine; perhaps that snippet from the preface will help.
do you think humans on a day-to-day basis make important decisions or otherwise predicate their actions on the outcomes of quantum measurements (in the precise sense you mean here which results in unpredictability)?
There have been proposals along these lines (for example, Hameroff and Penrose's proposal about quantum superpositions in microtubules in the brain). AFAIK none of them so far have panned out--where they have made testable predictions, the predictions have been falsified.
That's not to say that no such model will ever be successful, but I can see at least one plausible reason to be skeptical: thermal noise in the brain should be way too large to allow any meaningful dependence of the brain's activity on quantum uncertainty. In all the cases in which we have experimentally probed quantum uncertainty, the biggest challenge is keeping the quantum system "quiet" enough to allow quantum effects to be significant; that means strict isolation from all other systems. The brain is not at all like that.
You are welcome to argue for something below 'perfect' which you think suffices for whatever claims you wish to predicate upon said 'approximate' determinism.
I don't have any such claims to make; I'm simply trying to understand your position. (See my response to Ron a little bit ago for more info on my position.) You referred to claims by Sean Carroll and Sam Harris, which you don't appear to think are justified. Is that because you think they are approximating too roughly? Or is there some other reason?
perhaps that snippet from the preface will help.
Not really, because it doesn't tell me what he means by "the moral responsibility system". From browsing some reviews of his book online, at least one of his main concerns seems to be that the way we currently assign blame, punishment, etc., isn't actually very good at improving people's behavior. But that concern seems to me to be "orthogonal" to any metaphysical question about determinism.
Since we're giving pointers to books on the subject, I'll add a couple: Dennett's Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves. Also a shorter work, Raymond Smullyan's dialogue "Is God a Taoist".
Luke said...
> > > > can we actually show via the "EE" of "EE&R" that human behavior is 100% determined
> > > Of course not. One can always choose to base one's actions on the outcome of a quantum measurement.
> > do you think humans on a day-to-day basis make important decisions or otherwise predicate their actions on the outcomes of quantum measurements (in the precise sense you mean here which results in unpredictability)?
> There have been proposals along these lines (for example, Hameroff and Penrose's proposal about quantum superpositions in microtubules in the brain). AFAIK none of them so far have panned out--where they have made testable predictions, the predictions have been falsified.
I was expecting a "no" answer. But then Ron's response would have been a mostly irrelevant quibble. He's a smart guy; if he works hard enough he can inject enough quibbles to stuff up and shut down just about any conversation. What I'm hoping is that he'll only pick the important quibbles. And yes, I'm aware that perhaps you think I am doing exactly that when it comes to not having quite enough data to show thorough determinism of human choices. If you would confirm/deny, that would be helpful to me.
> I don't have any such claims to make; I'm simply trying to understand your position.
I am mostly interested in the claims made that go along the lines of "Human action is determined†, therefore ____." My position is that any such claim is either metaphysical, or needs support by sufficient empirical evidence. I am not sure there is sufficient empirical evidence for any interesting fill-in value.
> You referred to claims by Sean Carroll and Sam Harris, which you don't appear to think are justified. Is that because you think they are approximating too roughly?
I think they should be proper scientists, and (i) be very clear on what the data do and do not say; (ii) be very clear on what would empirically falsify their positions. Maybe they have done this and I haven't seen it; I haven't read Harris' book on free will nor Carroll's Big Picture. But I am generally aware of the absolute sloppiness which tends to show up in this domain. It's through conversations like these that I get more motivation to read more of this stuff. You might not believe it, but I'm rather pragmatic at heart.
> Not really, because it doesn't tell me what he means by "the moral responsibility system".
Here's a bit more:
>> As will be argued in subsequent chapters, it does not involve the rejection of all moral evaluations: Joe may do something that is morally wrong, Joe’s immoral behavior may stem from his deeply flawed character, and it is important to recognize and examine those wrongs and flaws, but Joe does not deserve blame or punishment. And it may be useful to blame or punish Joe (though I very much doubt it), but Joe does not justly deserve such blame or punishment. As I use the phrase in this book, “moral responsibility” is the essential (necessary, if not sufficient) condition for justified blame and punishment. Michael McKenna states that “what most everyone is hunting for . . . is the sort of moral responsibility that is desert entailing, the kind that makes blaming and punishing as well as praising and rewarding justified” (2009, 12). What McKenna describes is precisely what I am hunting for as well; the difference is that rather than trying to preserve it and justify it, my goal is to kill it and drive a stake through its heart. (2)
Thanks for the book suggestions.
I am mostly interested in the claims made that go along the lines of "Human action is determined†, therefore ____."
Can you give a specific example of such a claim in something you've read?
I think they should be proper scientists, and (i) be very clear on what the data do and do not say; (ii) be very clear on what would empirically falsify their positions.
Can you give specific examples of things they've written where you think they didn't do this?
Here's a bit more
Hm. Just looking at this quote, I don't see how this position can hang together logically. If it's possible for actions to be morally wrong, doesn't that in itself justify blaming someone for doing them? If not, what does he mean by "morally wrong"?
Since I mentioned Dennett's books, I think this review of Waller by Dennett, and a follow-up exchange (including a response from Waller), are worth reading:
Ron said...
> This is a very weak form of "prediction"
Well, duh. That was actually supposed to be a joke, rather like when the meta-Oracle predicted that the Tortoise would question its powers.
> You aren't claiming, I take it, that you can predict the exact words Luke will post next, or what time he will post them.
Of course not. Give me a little credit for not being a complete idiot.
> We don't just predict that, say, a spacecraft will fly by Jupiter; we predict exactly how close it will come, how much its trajectory will change, what time (to around an accuracy of a second in a decade or so)
That is a *much* simpler problem than predicting human behavior. Even predicting the weather, which is much harder than predicting spacecraft trajectories, is much easier than predicting human behavior. But predicting the weather was once thought to be intractable too and now we can forecast pretty accurately more than a week ahead.
> I don't think an "oracle" that predicts human behavior to that level of accuracy, in toto, is practically possible, except on a very limited time horizon--roughly the time it takes the human brain to compute a particular action that the person is about to execute.
There I disagree with you. I actually think I can make some pretty accurate predictions about Luke's behavior, though they would only be accurate if Luke doesn't learn of them. Remember, oracles are possible but meta-oracles are not. So, for example, I note that Luke has *not* fulfilled my prophecy, but I'm pretty sure he would have if I hadn't made it. But now we're in hypothetical-land.
But I don't actually know Luke all that well. For people that I do know well, like members of my family, I actually can predict some of their actions down to the exact words they are going to say and when they are going to say them. Only in certain circumstances of course. But the rest of the time I can bound their behavior with pretty high accuracy. And I can do all that without even having any advanced brain-scanning technology, or even reading their email.
Luke said...
> > I am mostly interested in the claims made that go along the lines of "Human action is determined†, therefore ____."
> Can you give a specific example of such a claim in something you've read?
From Jerry Coyne in response to Sean Carroll:
>> … but I do insist that we always remember that we could not have done otherwise, and I insist that because its ramifications for human behavior are profound, we must always keep fundamental determinism in mind.
>> … We recognize that, at bottom, nobody could have done otherwise. If they are accused of something that society deems to be a crime, you find out if they really did commit that crime. If they’re found guilty, then a group of experts—scientists, psychologists, sociologists criminologists, etc.—determine what the “punishment” should be based on the person’s history (a brain tumor would mandate an operation, for instance), malleability to persuasion, likelihood of recidivism, danger to society, and deterrent effects. None of that needs the assumption that someone is a “freely acting agent.” (Sean Carroll on free will)
A key consequence to "we could not have done otherwise" is that there can be no 'dual rationality':
>> Finally, consider the libertarian notion of dual rationality, a requirement whose importance to the libertarian I did not appreciate until I read Robert Kane's Free Will and Values. As with dual control, the libertarian needs to claim that when agents make free choices, it would have been rational (reasonable, sensible) for them to have made a contradictory choice (e.g. chosen not A rather than A) under precisely the conditions that actually obtain. Otherwise, categorical freedom simply gives us the freedom to choose irrationally had we chosen otherwise, a less-than-entirely desirable state. Kane (1985) spends a great deal of effort in trying to show how libertarian choices can be dually rational, and I examine his efforts in Chapter 8. (The Non-Reality of Free Will, 16)
What that means is that there is no such thing as "acting against your better knowledge" (see also akrasia). I'm quite happy to acknowledge that the Roman Catholic Church took guilt too far (see Jean Delumeau's Sin and Fear), but Coyne would abolish or at least transform it radically. It becomes scientifically mandatory to pass the buck!
Luke said...
> > I think they should be proper scientists, and (i) be very clear on what the data do and do not say; (ii) be very clear on what would empirically falsify their positions.
> Can you give specific examples of things they've written where you think they didn't do this?
>> There are people who do believe in free will in this sense; that we need to invoke a notion of free will as an essential ingredient in reality, over and above the conventional laws of nature. …
>>
>> This version of free will, as anyone who reads the blog will recognize, I don’t buy at all. Within the regime of everyday life, the underlying laws of physics are completely understood. There’s a lot we don’t understand about consciousness, but none of the problems we face rise to the level that we should be tempted to distrust our basic understanding of how the atoms and forces inside our brains work. Note that it’s not really a matter of “determinism”; it’s simply a question of whether there are impersonal laws of nature at all. The fact that quantum mechanics introduces a stochastic component into physical predictions doesn’t open the door for true libertarian free will. (Free Will Is as Real as Baseball)
N.B. Sean Carroll clearly means monistic determinism. Also, his hyperlink text is a bit misleading; his linked article is titled Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood; you can also see his update with a nice visualization.
Interacting with that claim of Carroll's may be a rather ambitious project; I'm up for it but I find that few of my interlocutors have that kind of attention span (and I'm sure I'm really obnoxious to deal with at least some of the time). At base though, Carroll has to be saying that if there is anything like the small Δv kind of free will going on, then we would have detected this equation being violated. I think it is worth seeing how many scientists think it is legitimate to thusly extrapolate from the most fundamental (and in a sense, abstract) scientific model we humans have of reality, to the least abstract and least well-explained-by-science aspect of [our experience of] reality. And yes, on physicalism, consciousness is as much 'reality' as protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Sean Carroll's reductionism is one approach taken to scientifically conclude there is only monistic determinism; another is to work from various experiments in the human sciences, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Alfred R. Mele critiques what he sees as wild extrapolation from that evidence in Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will; I'd be happy to read opposing views in detail with a dialogue partner.
Luke said...
> Hm. Just looking at this quote, I don't see how this position can hang together logically. If it's possible for actions to be morally wrong, doesn't that in itself justify blaming someone for doing them? If not, what does he mean by "morally wrong"?
You have to keep track of a semantic shift in a whole range of words, including: 'cause', 'morally responsible', 'moral', 'choose'. I'll key off of one of the seminal works in 20th century moral philosophy to illustrate:
>> For one way of framing my contention that morality is not what it once was is just to say that to a large degree people now think, talk, and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint might be.
>> What is the key to the social content of emotivism? It is the fact that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. Consider the contrast between, for example. Kantian ethics and emotivism on this point. For Kant—and a parallel point could be made about many earlier moral philosophers—the difference between a human relationship uninformed by morality and one so informed is precisely the difference between one in which each person treats the other primarily as a means to his or her ends and one in which each treats the other as an end. To treat someone else as an end is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons. It is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other he or she judges to be good. It is to appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which each rational agent must be his or her own judge. By contrast, to treat someone else as a means is to seek to make him or her an instrument of my purposes by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective on this or that occasion. The generalizations of the sociology and psychology of persuasion are what I shall need to guide me, not the standards of a normative rationality. (After Virtue, 22–23)
The reigning political philosophy of Western Civilization is political liberalism: don't move my cheese. Don't touch me unless I've touched someone else. The individual is sovereign; to mess with the individual is the unforgivable sin. It is wrong to manipulate individuals. (Isn't that what religion has done for millennia? Didn't we strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest?) The principles of the first democratic (ok, representative republic) nation were driven into the bedrock of reality: "all men are created equal". My focus is not on God, but the ontological language. What Alasdair MacIntyre is saying—and I think he's precisely right—is that one cannot detect manipulation at the ontological level as defined by naturalism. It just doesn't exist. Billiard balls don't manipulate each other. Nothing has freedom which can be violated—not at any emergent level.
The only kind of manipulation left is a subjective sense thereof. We cannot rely on society to determine what is manipulation, because since the beginning of time it has shrouded injustice in legitimation which it managed to get people to take for granted at a subconscious level. But then, how do I know I am now in any way free[er] from subconscious manipulation? There is no court of appeal. There is only society and what it happens to like and dislike. That's a very different notion of 'morality' than I think even the Enlightenment philosophes held. It's a naturalistic notion. I am deducing this from what naturalism permits in the realm of causation, not from moral philosophy. (Strictly speaking, this perhaps applies only to physicalism—but I haven't seen exceptions which naturalism may permit actually be exercised by more than about one person.)
That was actually supposed to be a joke, rather like when the meta-Oracle predicted that the Tortoise would question its powers.
Ah. My humor detector must have been malfunctioning. Sorry about that.
I note that Luke has *not* fulfilled my prophecy
I thought he did; he posted again in this comment thread after you predicted that he would post again.
For people that I do know well, like members of my family, I actually can predict some of their actions down to the exact words they are going to say and when they are going to say them. Only in certain circumstances of course. But the rest of the time I can bound their behavior with pretty high accuracy. And I can do all that without even having any advanced brain-scanning technology, or even reading their email.
Bertrand Russell, IIRC, made a similar observation as part of an argument that, whatever philosophical claims people make about free will, nobody really believes in practice that humans have it. We all know we can predict each other's behavior the way you describe.
However, then we get into the question of whether free will really requires strong unpredictability. For example, suppose I predict that if you see a child about to be hit by a car, you will pull it out of the way. Lo and behold, the next time you see a child about to be hit by a car, you do in fact pull it out of the way. Does that mean you didn't freely choose to do that? Or does it just mean that "free choice" doesn't have to mean you do something that nobody would ever predict you would do?
Luke said...
> Bertrand Russell, IIRC, made a similar observation as part of an argument that, whatever philosophical claims people make about free will, nobody really believes in practice that humans have it. We all know we can predict each other's behavior the way you describe.
This reminds me of Dr. Gregory House: "People don't change." But this is hilariously (tragically?) false; what actually is the case is that (i) change is hard; (ii) change can be nigh impossible if those around you help prevent it. The easiest way to thwart change in someone else is to assume that [s]he will always be that way, and discount or even react against any movements toward positive change. Humans seem to do this automatically—no training is necessary.
All you need to do is view free will as akin to the very limited thruster fuel a spacecraft has once it has reached orbit: only very precisely timed and oriented burns will accomplish anything useful. But if you do it right, you can approach infinitesimal thrusts which let you get anywhere in the solar system: see the Interplanetary Transport Network and its use of unstable Lagrangian points. I know one of the people who invented/discovered the ITN. I call this "a small Δv model of free will".
In reality, wise humans have long known how powerfully society and family shape a person, how difficult it is to deviate from well-worn paths. We nerds tend to be oblivious to that for various reasons. The very idea of a stable society—and humans really love to have stability and predictability—implies that rocking the boat will be very hard. This doesn't mean there is zero free will. It means you have to be incredibly strategic if you want to change society. Wise people have known this for ages.
What we Moderns have really done is blinded ourselves to the self:
>> Much contemporary moral philosophy, particularly but not only in the English-speaking world, has given such a narrow focus to morality that some of the crucial connections I want to draw here are incomprehensible in its terms. This moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work, as the privileged focus of attention or will.[1] This philosophy has accredited a cramped and truncated view of morality in a narrow sense as well as of the whole range of issues involved in the attempt to live the best possible life and this not only among professional philosophers, but with a wider public. (Sources of the Self, 3)
At 12,000 'citations', Charles Taylor's book is not a lightweight. He isn't just negative either; in The Ethics of Authenticity, he argues that there is something tremendously good in the Modern push for authenticity, but as usually construed it is shallow and distorted. Why? Because we have gouged out our eyes for fear that (i) we might see something icky; (ii) --society-- __religion__ might impose its values on us. However, covering one's eyes does not make reality go away. It does greatly harm our ability to change reality—including ourselves. At least, change in good directions.
All you need to do is view free will as akin to the very limited thruster fuel a spacecraft has once it has reached orbit
I actually have no problem with this view, since I agree with you that, while change is hard, it is not impossible, and it has to proceed by small steps which, if properly chosen, can lead to a large long-term change.
However, I would also point out that this view is perfectly consistent with "monistic determinism" (which I would call "physicalism"). Physically, whatever the source of the "limited thruster fuel" we have, it has to ultimately come from one of the fundamental interactions we know. Otherwise we have an incoherent model. In fact, it's overwhelmingly probable that the interaction is electromagnetic, since that's the only one that has appreciable strength in the domain of operation of our brains and bodies. (Chemical reactions are just a form of electromagnetic interaction.) Gravity is too weak and the strong and weak interactions are too short range. And, as Carroll points out, if there were any other interation that had appreciable strength in this domain, we would already have seen it in experiments.
Carroll has to be saying that if there is anything like the small Δv kind of free will going on, then we would have detected this equation being violated.
That's not quite what he's saying. What he's saying is, as I said in my comment just now, that whatever the ultimate source of the "small Δv" is, it has to be one of the fundamental interactions we already know, because we've thoroughly tested the domain in question in experiments to find all of the interactions that have appreciable strength. (And, as I said, it's overwhelmingly probable that the ultimate interaction is electromagnetic, because the others simply don't have appreciable strength in the domain in which our brains and bodies operate.)
Alfred R. Mele critiques what he sees as wild extrapolation from that evidence in Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will
I haven't read this book either--you just added another item to my reading list :-)--but from the summary on Amazon, I suspect that his critique is not of physicalism ("monistic determinism") itself, but of what I would call "simplistic physicalism"--the idea that, since everything we do ultimately supervenes on the known fundamental interactions of physics, we must be simple machines, easily predictable and manipulable once the right tools (such as brain scanners) are available, and with no scope for "conscious decision" or "free will" in any sense, not even the compatibilist sense. That idea seems to me to be obviously false, but I think many researchers who have run these types of experiments (such as the brain scanning ones Ron referred to) have indeed made such claims.
But the claim Carroll is making is not that kind of claim. He's not saying we have to be simple machines just because we are physical beings. Each of us is made of roughly 10^25 atoms, arranged in a fantastically complex way, with many, many levels of organization between us and the fundamental interactions. There is no reason to expect the behavior of such a thing to be simple, or even to be moderately complex--it could be fiendishly complex, orders of magnitude more complex than any other system we study, so complex that it is impossible to capture all of its behavior in any tractable model. (In this sense I am more pessimistic than Ron is about the possibility of an "oracle". But ultimately that's an empirical question.)
You have to keep track of a semantic shift in a whole range of words, including: 'cause', 'morally responsible', 'moral', 'choose'.
First I have to understand what the semantic shift is--what does Waller mean by those terms, if it isn't the standard meaning that was given to them for centuries of philosophical and ethical discussion? I can't "keep track" of a shift if I don't know what it is. But as I said, I haven't read the book, so it's possible he gives more detail there.
Billiard balls don't manipulate each other. Nothing has freedom which can be violated—not at any emergent level.
The first sentence is true, but the second is false. We are not billiard balls. We are not even close to billiard balls, We are many, many, many orders of magnitude more complex than billiard balls. The conflation of us with billiard balls, even in a "sort of" sense, is an example of the "simplistic physicalism" I described in my previous comment. As a physicist (was it Anderson?) once said: "More is different." Pile up enough complexity, enough levels of organization, on top of the fundamental interactions, and you get new things that you could never predict just from knowing the fundamental interactions. They supervene on the fundamental interactions, because they are built from them, but that doesn't mean they can't be more complex than the fundamental interactions--much more complex. And more complexity means different.
Equating physicalism with simplistic physicalism is like claiming that, since atoms can't play chess, people could not play chess either if their behavior was entirely explainable in terms of atoms. That kind of argument seems obviously absurd to me (and to scientists like Carroll), but it seems to be at the heart of a lot of arguments in the free will debate.
That's one of the reasons predicting the weather is possible: the prediction doesn't change the outcome. That's why I believe that an oracle for human decision-making is possible, but not a meta-oracle.
There is another difference between weather prediction and human decision prediction, though. The initial conditions you need to sample for weather prediction are reasonably bounded. The weather doesn't care what the stock market is doing, or whether your mother is healthy or ill, or what Trump tweeted today, or what your friend just posted on Facebook, or how you are planning for retirement and how well it's going, or...
In other words, humans are extraordinarily more sensitive to information than the weather is--or, to put it in physicalist terms, the range of microphysical initial conditions that you would have to accurately sample to predict human behavior on any time scale longer than a few seconds (roughly the time it takes your brain to decide what to do right now) is enormously larger than it is for the weather. And many of those conditions are not predictable in advance either: basically, to predict just one human's choices a day ahead, let's say, you would have to have a model that could predict the behavior of all humans that far ahead, since so much of the information we act on to make our choices comes from other humans.
This is a key reason why I'm more pessimistic than you are about the possibility of even an ordinary oracle for human decision-making.
Ron said...
> > I note that Luke has *not* fulfilled my prophecy
> I thought he did; he posted again in this comment thread after you predicted that he would post again.
Yes, but he was responding to you, not to me, so I don't think that counts. :)
> humans are extraordinarily more sensitive to information than the weather is
That's true, but the extent to which humans are sensitive to information is far from clear.
the extent to which humans are sensitive to information is far from clear.
That article doesn't refute the point I was making. I was saying that information, including information that would be extremely hard to sample microphysically with enough accuracy for prediction beyond a time horizon of a few seconds, affects what humans do. The article is saying that the way information affects what humans do often doesn't appear to meet standards of rationality. That might well be true, but "affecting what humans do in a way that seems irrational" is not the same as "not affecting what humans do".
Ron said...
> The article is saying that the way information affects what humans do often doesn't appear to meet standards of rationality.
It says more than that: it says that evidence does not change people's minds. That makes their behavior easier to predict because it doesn't matter what information they obtain, their behavior will not change.
Luke said...
> > All you need to do is view free will as akin to the very limited thruster fuel a spacecraft has once it has reached orbit
> I actually have no problem with this view, since I agree with you that, while change is hard, it is not impossible, and it has to proceed by small steps which, if properly chosen, can lead to a large long-term change.
Sure, but I think you and I mean rather different things with that term "chosen". I don't need to assert libertarian free will; I can just question monistic determinism / physicalism.
> However, I would also point out that this view is perfectly consistent with "monistic determinism" (which I would call "physicalism").
Well, physicalism is going to have to find ways of assimilating lots of different evidence so that it is plausible—so that doesn't surprise me. What I want to know is how physicalism differs from alternatives in meaningful ways. Take F = GmM/r^2, for example. That entails that F = GmM/r^2.0001 never happens. I'm really just riffing on Popper, here: what is the subtlest deviation which would falsify physicalism? I've heard stuff like "the stars magically rearranging to spell 'Jesus loves you!'"; that's not subtle, not helpful, and I wouldn't even be surprised if physicalism could still explain that, e.g. via super-powerful aliens who wanted to bring Ron's Loki to life.
> In fact, it's overwhelmingly probable that the interaction is electromagnetic, since that's the only one that has appreciable strength in the domain of operation of our brains and bodies.
That's assuming that aspects of our mind don't operate near the edge of chaos. If there are near-chaotic aspects of thinking then perhaps the subtlest of pushes could send the thinking one way vs. another. Maybe even infinitesimal pushes, if brain states can pass through unstable Lagrangian points. BTW, the philosophy of mind concept of multiple realizability may be helpful, here.
> And, as Carroll points out, if there were any other interation that had appreciable strength in this domain, we would already have seen it in experiments.
Is this published in any peer-reviewed journals that you know of? I would absolutely love to see the best minds respond to that claim; it seems rather dubious to me. One candidate would be physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin, based on his A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.
Luke said...
> Ron[1/27/2018 7:22 PM]: Yes, but he was responding to you, not to me, so I don't think that counts. :)
You seem to have missed my response to you:
> Ron[1/26/2018 3:43 PM]: (Let me demonstrate my own oracular prowess: I predict that you will post another comment in this thread rather than let me have the last word here.)
I didn't respond to the exact parenthetical, but I did respond to your comment. And I was saddened that you didn't reply, but I know you're busy these days. In this case, perhaps you just missed it?
Luke said...
> > Carroll has to be saying that if there is anything like the small Δv kind of free will going on, then we would have detected this equation being violated.
> That's not quite what he's saying. What he's saying is, as I said in my comment just now, that whatever the ultimate source of the "small Δv" is, it has to be one of the fundamental interactions we already know, because we've thoroughly tested the domain in question in experiments to find all of the interactions that have appreciable strength. (And, as I said, it's overwhelmingly probable that the ultimate interaction is electromagnetic, because the others simply don't have appreciable strength in the domain in which our brains and bodies operate.)
I'm afraid you haven't understood the point of my "small Δv model of free will". My point is that the forces the spacecraft can exert are absolutely and utterly dwarfed by the various gravity wells in the solar system. And yet, even if the forces on the spacecraft are infinitely strong, as long as it passes through unstable Lagrangian points in the right manner, it can apply an infinitesimal force and change trajectory! Therefore, all this talk of "we would have detected any forces exerted by the spacecraft" seems dubious. Especially if some aspect of the mind operates near the edge of chaos.
> … I suspect that [Alfred Mele's] critique is not of physicalism ("monistic determinism") itself, but of what I would call "simplistic physicalism" …
Possibly. But then I would ask what non-simplistic physicalism says cannot happen—which I did in a recent comment. (And yes, I can shift from absolutes of "cannot happen" to probabilities, like Popper does in Logic of Scientific Discovery.)
> Each of us is made of roughly 10^25 atoms, arranged in a fantastically complex way, with many, many levels of organization between us and the fundamental interactions.
Sure, and when we model such complex systems, we cannot use Carroll's Big Equation™. Instead we use approximations. But then the thing being tested is the approximation, not the Big Equation™. The difference is absolutely tremendous if we're trying to infer ontology from empirical evidence. Unless, that is, reductionism is presupposed at the metaphysical level. This computational problem—which may be more than merely computational—also seems to make Carroll's Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood (update with nice visualization) rather irrelevant to a lot of scientific inquiry.
Here's another way of exploring the issue. How does Carroll's reductionistic physicalism (I'm pretty sure he adheres to monistic determinism) tell us to (i) do science differently; (ii) think about day-to-day life differently? As far as I can tell—and I haven't really done my homework, like read his The Big Picture—there isn't really an answer to (i) and the answers to (ii) have this weird property of not actually indicating subtle falsifiability like my F = GmM/r^2.0001 example. This just makes me super suspicious. But hey, that could be merely due to my ignorance. That's a major reason I participate in conversations like this!
Ron said...
> You seem to have missed my response to you:
Yes, sorry, I did miss it. (So I guess my oracular reputation is intact! ;-)
> Do … we know any hypotheticals?
Not with 100% certainty, no. (In fact, we do not and cannot know *anything* with 100% certainty. That, I believe, is actually an essential part of the human condition, and one of the reasons that we cannot be created in God's image. But that's a whole 'nuther kettle o' worms.)
> Almost? Or completely?
Almost. There's always freedom to choose which hypothesis to advance or test next.
> A mere "almost" is 100% consistent with a small Δv model of free will;
Sure, but that still leaves open the question of whether that small Δv is the result of something sufficiently different and interesting, or whether it's just the result of some mundane physical phenomenon that we just happen not to fully understand yet. The fact that you already have to retreat to a small Δv model to save the whole concept of free will indicates to me that you are defending a "free will of the gaps".
> Interesting; I think it's helpful to note if some way you're suggesting humans think would have torpedoed or prevented the rise of modern science.
Why? Helpful to what end?
> > > can we actually show via the "EE" of "EE&R" that human behavior is 100% determined
> > Of course not. One can always choose to base one's actions on the outcome of a quantum measurement.
> Do you think that's a meaningful loophole for this conversation?
It's a meaningful answer -- indeed it is the only correct answer -- to the question you posed. Perhaps you meant to ask a different question?
> do you think humans on a day-to-day basis make important decisions or otherwise predicate their actions on the outcomes of quantum measurements
No. But I do believe that humans are chaotic (in the mathematical sense) and so quantum randomness might have some "butterfly" effects along the margins.
> The question is what the residual, non-predictable part looks like.
Indeed, and that is an open question. But I'm very confident that it looks a lot less like "free will" than most people think.
But *if* an oracle is possible (and hence by extension if an omniscient deity exists, because such a deity subsumes the powers of an oracle) then human behavior is manifestly predictable, and hence free will cannot exist.
Luke said...
> First I have to understand what the semantic shift is--what does Waller mean by those terms, if it isn't the standard meaning that was given to them for centuries of philosophical and ethical discussion? I can't "keep track" of a shift if I don't know what it is. But as I said, I haven't read the book, so it's possible he gives more detail there.
You were trying to grok the book without reading it; I'm suggesting that for this particular topic, that may not be possible. I'm happy to read through it with you; we could dialogue about it on a new blog entry by Ron or over email. (I have yet to create my own blog software which lets you quote blocks of text and then look at a post/comment to see which bits were quoted. Maybe I will try and do that if you want to work through a book with me.)
One thing you can do on the semantic shift thing is read WP: After Virtue § Summary. MacIntyre claims that how we understand morality and ethics now is very, very different from how we used to. Crucially, he thinks we didn't consciously track this change and that we're confused in how we talk about morality and ethics as a result. AV is a seminal work on moral philosophy, with 23,000 'citations'. My suspicion is that thinking on free will shares some of the same … properties of confused thinking as MacIntyre claims hold of moral and ethical thinking. Given the strong connection between free will and moral responsibility, this should not be surprising.
> > Billiard balls don't manipulate each other. Nothing has freedom which can be violated—not at any emergent level.
> The first sentence is true, but the second is false. We are not billiard balls.
How do we have freedom which can be violated? Recall my line "The only kind of manipulation left is a subjective sense thereof."—humans can still say "I feel ___", but there is no objective reference-point. Incidentally, this might help explain the identity politics and mob behavior of modernity (aided greatly by social media): it is more powerful to say "We feel ___" when there is no objective grounding.
> As a physicist (was it Anderson?) once said: "More is different."
Yep; Robert Laughlin says Anderson's 1972 article plus Ilya Prigogine's The End of Certainty are required reading for any students who want to work with him. But again I must ask: if "more is different", what restraints does Carroll's reductionism put on the amount of "different" which can happen?
> And more complexity means different.
Not necessarily. More Turing machines can't solve the Halting problem or circumvent Rice's theorem. It doesn't matter how intricately you wire them up or how much you juice them. Mathematical systems provide hard limits on what is possible. If ultimate reality is indeed perfectly described by some finite mathematical system, then there is plenty of subtle "different" which will never happen.
> Equating physicalism with simplistic physicalism is like claiming that, since atoms can't play chess, people could not play chess either if their behavior was entirely explainable in terms of atoms. That kind of argument seems obviously absurd to me (and to scientists like Carroll), but it seems to be at the heart of a lot of arguments in the free will debate.
Sure. But I'm not going to let 'emergence' be a squishy explain-everything term, either. For a refreshing exception to that pattern, see Massimo Pigliucci's Essays on emergence, part I.
Luke said...
> (So I guess my oracular reputation is intact! ;-)
Yep. I look forward to it surpassing the following obstacle:
> This theory explains most of the observed data, but not all of it. In particular, Luke is still an unexplained anomaly, and that keeps me a little humble. (Why I believe in the Michelson-Morley experiment)
I think I can trust you to tell me your prediction/model if you come up with one. :-p Hopefully I don't play the obnoxious quibbling/reverse psychology game in response. I'll let others call me to account on that, as I don't particularly trust my own self-policing.
> > Do … we know any hypotheticals?
> Not with 100% certainty, no. (In fact, we do not and cannot know *anything* with 100% certainty. That, I believe, is actually an essential part of the human condition, and one of the reasons that we cannot be created in God's image. But that's a whole 'nuther kettle o' worms.)
Why should you or I care about 100% certainty? 100% certainty + 100% clarity ⇒ permanently finite system per Gödel. I'd rather not be locked into an infinitesimal sliver of reality, thank you very much! That doesn't seem very imago Dei.
> > Almost? Or completely?
> Almost. There's always freedom to choose which hypothesis to advance or test next.
Isn't that … ultra-important? I don't understand the function of your "almost" in this conversation. Again, see the Noam Chomsky bit I excerpted.
> Sure, but that still leaves open the question of whether that small Δv is the result of something sufficiently different and interesting, or whether it's just the result of some mundane physical phenomenon that we just happen not to fully understand yet.
Agreed.
> The fact that you already have to retreat to a small Δv model to save the whole concept of free will indicates to me that you are defending a "free will of the gaps".
Not if anything larger than a small Δv would make consciousness impossible. But sure, let's try and close the gap and see if logic fails to explode in our faces. :-D
> Why? Helpful to what end?
Adopting beliefs which would have prevented the rise of modern science seems problematic to me; if you're fine with it, I won't pursue the matter.
> It's a meaningful answer -- indeed it is the only correct answer -- to the question you posed. Perhaps you meant to ask a different question?
Actually, I meant you to answer the question in context; if in fact the continued pursuit of science doesn't depend on humans basing decisions on the results of [specific!] quantum measurements and the well-functioning of society doesn't depend …, then your quibble seems (seemed? see next chunk) to be irrelevant to the overall purpose of this conversation. Continuing:
> But I do believe that humans are chaotic (in the mathematical sense) and so quantum randomness might have some "butterfly" effects along the margins.
Interesting. And could we plausibly discover actual structure in said quantum randomness, via the effects it has in chaotic human behavior/thinking?
> Indeed, and that is an open question. But I'm very confident that it looks a lot less like "free will" than most people think.
How many people think according to a small Δv model of free will? (Hint: I bet plenty of psychologists and sociologists do. But people in generally like their delusions, including voluntaristic ones. Exercise for the reader: which people in society would like citizens to be deluded about how to actually change reality?)
Luke said...
> Peter: humans are extraordinarily more sensitive to information than the weather is
> Ron: That's true, but the extent to which humans are sensitive to information is far from clear.
Wow, that article starts off with an experiment where the participants are repeatedly lied to and then it "discovers" that people don't rationally respond to "the facts"? I wonder how much of the "humans don't actually respect facts" shtick is predicated upon an assumption that (i) humans are generally good; (ii) authorities are generally trustworthy. We can put a tribalistic gloss on (i) and (ii) if need be. But seriously: without a sufficiently good understanding of trust—the best translation in our culture of the words pistis and pisteuō, BTW—all such studies are going to be incredibly hamstrung.
There was an era where American largely trusted the authorities, including scientists. This had good effects and bad effects. A bad effect—an absolutely terrible effect—was uncovered by the Milgram experiment. For a 2014 update, see Nothing by Mere Authority: Evidence that in an Experimental Analogue of the Milgram Paradigm Participants are Motivated not by Orders but by Appeals to Science. This may conflate "science" and "making things better", but humans have done that for centuries now. But if we deconvolve them and say that what humans really want to do is "make things better", might we find that they respond rather differently to facts which promise to help them better do that? In other words, once we switch from a value-free hygienic presentation of facts to a value-laden, progress-oriented presentation of the facts, might things change?
It always amuses me when I'm told "you should respect the results of science" by someone who thinks [s]he is being entirely scientific in pushing that 'ought' on me. I get that maybe [s]he thinks [s]he is merely issuing a Kantian hypothetical imperative which my desires will clearly make binding, but let's investigate that. How many Americans were told that the march of science and technology would improve their livelihoods? How many Americans have had stagnant wages in the last 40 years? Oh wait, maybe they're suspicious of the powers that be because the powers that be lied to them. (Improvements in healthcare, while laudable, don't suffice—people want to feel valuable, not just healthy.) Just like the experiment recounted in that New Yorker article.
I know there's more to the article, but I want to stop at this point and ask whether the whole way that we're investigating this issue might be radically messed up. What if we researched correcting beliefs of people which are getting in the way of where they desperately want to go? Might we find that in those situations, the facts *can* change our minds?
it says that evidence does not change people's minds. That makes their behavior easier to predict because it doesn't matter what information they obtain, their behavior will not change.
Your second sentence does not follow from your first. Sure, the people's "minds" did not change based on evidence, in the sense of beliefs; but their behavior certainly did change, because they responded to questions they were asked, and as the questions changed, their responses changed too. To see what "behavior not changing" really looks like, you would have needed to do the experiment with a rock. Or a tree, or a clam. When I say people respond to information, I'm not making any grandiose claim about their rationality or their openness to evidence; I'm making what should be a very humdrum claim about how incoming information affects them in ways that it doesn't affect other things, which makes their detailed actions harder to predict.
I think you and I mean rather different things with that term "chosen". I don't need to assert libertarian free will; I can just question monistic determinism / physicalism.
What other alternative is there? "Libertarian free will" just means "free will doesn't have to follow physical laws". Whether or not the laws are deterministic is really a red herring; the point is that the laws are supposed to describe a causally closed system. If the laws are correct, then the system is indeed causally closed, and you can't add on any other causal factors, whether you call them "free will" or anything else.
what is the subtlest deviation which would falsify physicalism?
It depends on what alternative you are proposing and how close its predictions are to those of physicalism in the domain being tested. If your alternative is just "the laws we currently know of aren't exactly correct", that's not a test of physicalism; it's just a test of our current knowledge of the laws, which is admitted to be incomplete.
Also, I think you misunderstand how testing of theories work. When we test any law, we don't get exact answers; we get a range. For example, tests of Newton's law of gravity don't give you an exact exponent; they give a range, such as 1.999998 to 2.000001 (note: I don't know the actual range experimental tests give for this law, but I would bet it's pinned down at least as accurately as the numbers I just gave). As long as the range includes the value that theory predicts--in this case, 2--the law is consistent with the evidence. But if the value that theory predicts is outside the range, the law is falsified.
If you want to see the current state of tests for our best current theories, try these links:
If there are near-chaotic aspects of thinking then perhaps the subtlest of pushes could send the thinking one way vs. another. Maybe even infinitesimal pushes, if brain states can pass through unstable Lagrangian points.
Yes, this is in principle possible, but I don't see how it would be controllable in the brain the way a spacecraft's trajectory is controllable, because of the thermal noise issue I brought up earlier. There is no analogue of thermal noise in spacecraft trajectories. That's what allows the spacecraft's engine burn to be controlled precisely enough to produce the desired orbital change. The analogue of thermal noise for a spacecraft would be random perturbations to the orbit with energies comparable to the orbital energy. With such things present you couldn't even get the spacecraft to predictably hit an unstable Lagrange point in the first place, much less precisely control how an engine burn there would affect its orbit.
Is this published in any peer-reviewed journals that you know of?
I believe Carroll gives journal references in one of the articles you linked to. He certainly names various experimenters; Googling on their names should find the papers even if Carroll doesn't link to them explicitly. The short answer is yes, there have been many experiments run to test for the presence of forces other than those we already know; it's not a fringe part of physics or something out of the way.
when we model such complex systems, we cannot use Carroll's Big Equation™. Instead we use approximations. But then the thing being tested is the approximation, not the Big Equation
That's true as far as what is being directly tested, yes. So if you can find a theory with a different Big Equation that gives rise to the same approximation, then tests in the domain where you use the approximation cannot distinguish between those two theories. You have to find a test in a domain where the two Big Equations give rise to different predictions in order to distinguish between them.
But you don't have a different Big Equation to propose. Even if it's true in principle that there might be one, other than Carroll's Big Equation, that would make the same predictions in all of the domains we have tested, that's useless unless you can find it. Just saying "well, there might be one, so you haven't proven that the Big Equation must be right" is pointless. We have to get along with the best theory we have.
The difference is absolutely tremendous if we're trying to infer ontology from empirical evidence.
I don't think Carroll is trying to "infer ontology". I think he's making a prediction: that no matter how many future experiments we do, we will never do one that falsifies (in the sense I described above) our best current theories in the domain in which they have been tested. Since that domain includes the domain in which our bodies and brains operate, that amounts to saying that we will never observe anything happening in our bodies and brains that falsifies our best current theories. That's a prediction about observable facts, not "ontology".
How does Carroll's reductionistic physicalism (I'm pretty sure he adheres to monistic determinism) tell us to (i) do science differently; (ii) think about day-to-day life differently?
Differently from what?
You were trying to grok the book without reading it; I'm suggesting that for this particular topic, that may not be possible.
Yes, that's a fair point, and I now have the Kindle Edition and am working my way through it.
MacIntyre claims that how we understand morality and ethics now is very, very different from how we used to. Crucially, he thinks we didn't consciously track this change and that we're confused in how we talk about morality and ethics as a result.
I have read most of After Virtue, and I agree with MacIntyre as regards this particular statement. (Which is not to say I agree with everything he says in the book.)
However, I would not expect this excuse to apply to a philosopher like Waller writing a book specifically about the topic of morality and ethics, particularly since he spends considerable time (at least in the part of the book I've read so far) specifying exactly what he means by "moral responsibility" and how it differs from what other philosophers mean by "moral responsbility".
One of my main reactions to Waller's book so far is that he needs to go back and do the same work he does with "moral responsibility" with other terms that he blithely uses, such as "morally right/wrong" or "fair/unfair", because he appears to be using them in the same absolute sense that he uses "moral responsibility", but if naturalism is true, which he appears to think it is, then there is no absolute moral rightness/wrongness or fairness/unfairness any more than there is absolute moral responsibility. On the other hand, if he has some way of justifying the terms "morally right/wrong" and "fair/unfair" based on naturalism being true, he should explain it in detail, and then explain why the same strategy he uses for those justifications would not also work for the term "moral responsibility".
My suspicion is that thinking on free will shares some of the same … properties of confused thinking as MacIntyre claims hold of moral and ethical thinking.
I share your suspicion. In fact, this is a point Dennett has made repeatedly in his writings about free will, though he is coming at it from a different direction, so to speak, than MacIntyre.
How do we have freedom which can be violated?
If you mean "freedom" in the absolute sense in which Waller means "moral responsibility", i.e., in the libertarian sense of "free will can violate the laws of physics", I don't think we do. But "not violating the laws of physics" still allows for lots of behaviors that are many orders of magnitude more complex than the behavior of billiard balls. Using billiard balls as the paradigmatic example of "following the laws of physics" invites the confusion between physicalism and simplistic physicalism that I talked about before: when people say they don't see how we can have free will if we can't violate the laws of physics, what is really doing the work behind the scenes is the simplicity of the behavior of billiard balls, not a true understanding of what is possible within the laws of physics.
if "more is different", what restraints does Carroll's reductionism put on the amount of "different" which can happen?
If physicalism is true, then human beings are physical systems, so anything human beings can do can be done by physical systems, operating within the laws of physics.
Mathematical systems provide hard limits on what is possible.
For example, here is an argument for why computers cannot achieve checkmate in chess:
(1) There is no feasible algorithm for achieving checkmate in chess.
(3) Therefore, computers cannot achieve checkmate in chess.
Both premises are true, but the conclusion is false. What gives?
The answer is that premise (2) did not say "computers can only play chess by using a feasible algorithm for achieving checkmate", which is what would properly ground the conclusion (3) when combined with premise (1). Computers don't play chess by using an algorithm for checkmate; they play chess by using an algorithm for heuristically evaluating possible legal moves. (There is a possible brute force algorithm for checkmate, but it is not feasible--it would require much longer than the lifetime of the universe to compute a move.) Algorithms for computer chess do not and cannot guarantee checkmate, but as is now well known, they can certainly achieve checkmate, even against the best human masters.
So even if it is true that mathematical systems provide limits on what is possible, those limits are very broad. They are limits on what can be guaranteed, but they are not limits on what can be accomplished with heuristics that aren't guaranteed to work 100% of the time.
Luke said...
> What other alternative is there? "Libertarian free will" just means "free will doesn't have to follow physical laws".
The alternative to causal monism is causal pluralism. This is quite new in philosophy; from Vreese 2006: "the debate on causal pluralism is scarcely out of the egg". There is also the contrast of general causation vs. singular causation: do causal relations between events presuppose the existence of causal laws? Even that distinction is pretty new; see The mishap at Reichenbach fall: Singular vs. general causation, a 1995 paper written by a former professor. (See also SEP: Probabilistic Causation § Singular and General Causation.)
That's a sketch of the philosophy; one way it would work out concretely is that the "laws" or "character" governing each individual person might be unique. There is of course fantastic overlap—without it society would be impossible—but there is simply no reason to suppose that somehow, "at core", every person is the same, run by precisely the same laws, etc. Those in the human sciences "has no need of that hypothesis". For a fun conceptualization of how this might work, see "A New Theory of Free Will" and the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis. For purposes of this conversation, I'm most interested in the way that the author arrives at "the appearance of [a] single observed, intersubjective reality". We can also talk virtual reality e.g. in one of Neal Stephenson's novels; the idea here is that one needs a common interface with which to interact with others.
> > what is the subtlest deviation which would falsify physicalism?
> It depends on what alternative you are proposing and how close its predictions are to those of physicalism in the domain being tested. If your alternative is just "the laws we currently know of aren't exactly correct", that's not a test of physicalism; it's just a test of our current knowledge of the laws, which is admitted to be incomplete.
The equation F = GmM/r^2 tells us what never happens; indeed it tells us that almost every logical possibility does not happen. The alternatives are immediately obvious. Now I'm ok with physicalism being less precise, but if you cannot say anything like the most subtle thing it says will never happen, that makes me wonder what exactly it does say.
> Also, I think you misunderstand how testing of theories work. When we test any law, we don't get exact answers; we get a range. For example, tests of Newton's law of gravity don't give you an exact exponent; they give a range, such as 1.999998 to 2.000001 (note: I don't know the actual range experimental tests give for this law, but I would bet it's pinned down at least as accurately as the numbers I just gave).
I was also betting that the accuracy has been pinned down to much greater than my ^2.0001. We could probably find out more specifics if we really wanted, via modified Newtonian dynamics.
> … I don't see how it would be controllable in the brain the way a spacecraft's trajectory is controllable …
Neither do I. But given how little we understand about [self-]consciousness, maybe we oughtn't recapitulate the mistake of thinking the cell is just a bunch of goo.
A perfect analogy is an identity.
Luke said...
> > > And, as Carroll points out, if there were any other interation that had appreciable strength in this domain, we would already have seen it in experiments.
> > Is this published in any peer-reviewed journals that you know of?
> I believe Carroll gives journal references in one of the articles you linked to. He certainly names various experimenters; Googling on their names should find the papers even if Carroll doesn't link to them explicitly. The short answer is yes, there have been many experiments run to test for the presence of forces other than those we already know; it's not a fringe part of physics or something out of the way.
You misunderstand my question, which is probably my fault. What I meant to ask is how Carroll knows with such confidence that if there were other forces, then the search methods currently employed are likely to have found them. I believe his judgment that the search methods currently employed aren't likely to find something new. There is subtlety here, because if Carroll presupposes reductionism, then he will probably only look for new forces in experiments which probe "the fundamental level" directly. But who is to say they won't show up [first?] elsewhere?
> So if you can find a theory with a different Big Equation that gives rise to the same approximation, then tests in the domain where you use the approximation cannot distinguish between those two theories.
I'm confident that mathematicians can take an approximation and formally define the entire class of possibilities which are thereby permitted.
> But you don't have a different Big Equation to propose.
Were I to do so in this context, I would be capitulating to reductionism. The quest for a Theory of Everything is not an innocent pursuit. So instead, I ask questions like, "Does Carroll's stance promote progress in the human sciences?" If all he intends to do is offer guidance to other physicists, that's one thing; if he says this should materially impact how other scientists (and perhaps non-scientists) think about and act in reality, I want to see details of that guidance published in peer-reviewed journals in the appropriate fields. I'm going to call shenanigans on anyone who says one can only falsify his ideas on his own playground (physics).
BTW I'm not a complete nutter in asserting my stance; perhaps the most prominent philosopher who also questions the kind of unification & reductionism Carroll and others are going for is Nancy Cartwright; see her How the Laws of Physics Lie and The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science.
> We have to get along with the best theory we have.
In [some?] physics, sure. But where that theory doesn't actually offer guidance, we aren't getting along with it. At best we're getting along with an approximation. Reductionism is a massive, massive promissory note. I say it should be treated as such.
> I don't think Carroll is trying to "infer ontology". … That's a prediction about observable facts, not "ontology".
An ontology which is permanently shielded from observation is useless; I meant one which isn't permanently shielded. (So I disagree with Kant's Ding an sich.)
> Differently from what?
Luke said...
> I have read most of After Virtue, and I agree with MacIntyre as regards this particular statement.
Cool. Now I'm going to suggest that Bruce Waller is not as brilliant as MacIntyre. So we might have to do some extra work for him in order to work out that semantic shift I claim is going on with a whole class of terms. Then we can hopefully figure out an experimentum crucis. Where do the differences we're arguing about show up most strongly in reality?
As a potential example, Christian theology has a phrase which I connect to Kane's 'dual rationality': "acting against your better knowledge/judgment". The idea here is that a person has a genuine choice, of two compelling courses of action, and freely chose between them. That is, nobody and nothing external to the person determined which choice was made. In such cases, when one chooses against one's better knowledge, one is guilty. It is my understanding that naturalistic understandings cannot tolerate such a scenario. Perhaps I am wrong, but let me sketch it out a bit further.
I am intentionally connecting unstable Lagrangian points, 'dual rationality', and "acting against your better knowledge/judgment". In each case, an infinitesimal force can 'choose' A vs. B. According to naturalism, there are no such forces; the only option here is noise (ontological or epistemological). Yes maybe we might find that physical law requires the ordinal numbers but that is not our best guess now and hey, aren't we supposed to found all of life on our best guess now? (Unless I'm misreading Carroll and he really intends his advice to be restricted to physics or at least the hard[er?] sciences.)
If a person actually exercises his/her freedom at unstable Lagrangian points (I'm moving from "small Δv model of free will" → "dv model of free will"), then the way to non-manipulatively push for a course change is to argue just up to the point where 'dual rationality' is satisfied: there are equally compelling reasons to choose one path vs. another. I can go into more reasons why one would want to hold back. But if there is no such freedom of the will, then it is better to surpass the equally compelling state of dual rationality; it would be absolutely stupid to let noise make the decision! To manipulate, one would constantly surpass equality just enough to get enough decisions to go your way, but under the consciousness threshold of the other person.
In all this, it's important to note that 'rationality' here is just a system of reasoning; it's not the Enlightenment idea of 'Reason', which leads us into all truth. Ian Hacking explores this matter in Language, Truth, and Reason, which was published in the anthology Rationality and Relativism.
Let me know if the above might possibly work for an experimentum crucis. Let me just say that I know it is extremely offensive to suggest to most people who comment on the internet that they might be guilty of acting against their better knowledge. It would be really sobering to learn that possibly God is trying to challenge us to better ways of thinking and living and we've been constructing a metaphysic (I think overall, that's the right word) which perfectly occludes the non-violent, non-calamitous, non-manipulative kind of challenging.
Luke said...
> > My suspicion is that thinking on free will shares some of the same … properties of confused thinking as MacIntyre claims hold of moral and ethical thinking.
> I share your suspicion. In fact, this is a point Dennett has made repeatedly in his writings about free will, though he is coming at it from a different direction, so to speak, than MacIntyre.
Would you be willing/able to sketch some of Dennett's main points, given what I've said so far in this conversation? I've yet to get into Dennett; I have this weird problem with diving too deeply into topics like this where they get too far away from practical lived life and I cannot sustain attention. I've been working out at the Tower of Abstractions Gym over the last few years, but I still feel like I'm a weakling.
> > How do we have freedom which can be violated?
> … Using billiard balls as the paradigmatic example of "following the laws of physics" invites the confusion between physicalism and simplistic physicalism that I talked about before …
That's fine, but you haven't answered my question—other than by waving at "more is different"/emergence. Just like you cannot add any finite number of Turing machines together and circumvent Rice's theorem, I am suspicious that no matter how much "more is different" you do, if you stick to reductionism and a restricted class of mathematical formalisms at base, you might not be able to get sufficiently interesting freedom which can be violated.
> > if "more is different", what restraints does Carroll's reductionism put on the amount of "different" which can happen?
> If physicalism is true, then human beings are physical systems, so anything human beings can do can be done by physical systems, operating within the laws of physics.
But what do the laws of physics disallow? We're back at the "what would subtly falsify?" question. We could key off of Jeffery Jay Lowder's definition of "physical entity" (mostly drawing on Paul Draper):
>> physical entity: an entity which is either (1) the kind of entity studied by physicists or chemists today; or (2) the kind of entity studied by physicists or chemists in the future, which has some sort of nomological or historical connection to the kinds of entities studied by physicists or chemists today. (The Nature of Naturalism)
>> A deeper difficulty springs from the lesson won through decades of study in the philosophy of science: there is no hard and fast specification of what 'science' must be, no determinate criterion of the form 'x is science iff …'. It follows that there can be no straightforward definition of Second Philosophy along the lines 'trust only the methods of science'. Thus Second Philosophy, as I understand it, isn't a set of beliefs, a set of propositions to be affirmed; it has no theory. Since its contours can't be drawn by outright definition, I resort to the device of introducing a character, a particular sort of idealized inquirer called the Second Philosopher, and proceed by describing her thoughts and practices in a range of contexts; Second Philosophy is then to be understood as the product of her inquiries. (Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method, 1)
Luke said...
Sure, but that qualifier is implicit in Sean Carroll's Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood. Carroll is not an anti-realist; he thinks we're so close that he's happy to say "I've also assumed the Everett formulation of quantum mechanics; I'm thinking that the quantum state is the physical thing; there's no sort of hidden variable underneath." (FQXi: Fluctuations in de Sitter Space, 18:14) A quick exploration of what he says about the MWI interpretation on his blog will show that he isn't just tentatively assuming.
Yes, Hubert Dreyfus argued against this extensively; now it is accepted that AI will not be restricted to "symbol manipulation or 'GOFAI'". But when Carroll argues what he does, he isn't allowing for a non-symbolic layer underneath. (For an example of such a layer, see Robert Laughlin on "organizational laws of nature" in A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.) Indeed, in FQXi: Fluctuations in de Sitter Space he explicitly argues against down-fluctuations in entropy at the quantum level, on the basis that there is no [further] microstructure which can thusly fluctuate. This would be in contradiction to classical entropy occasionally down-fluctuating because entropy is a macro measure of a micro structure.
If you want to argue that further advances in understanding the "fundamental" laws of physics might change things in the same way that there are heuristics in addition to [feasible] algorithms, then I have to ask how much we should expect them to change, which sends us back to my previous comment where I asked "But what do the laws of physics disallow?".
> So even if it is true that mathematical systems provide limits on what is possible, those limits are very broad.
Actually, there's a funny situation: on the one hand the possibilities are so broad that one must use approximations of Carroll's Big Equation™ to simulate anything but the most simple experiments. On the other hand, the possibilities are so narrow that it's apparently meaningful to discussions of free will that Carroll's Big Equation™ is the case. So while we cannot use that equation in very many cases scientifically, it's supposed to be important when it comes to free will. Does that set off zero alarm bells in your head?
P.S. I'm being partly tongue-in-cheek when I write "Big Equation™". I'm down with your "We have to get along with the best theory we have.", if we restrict that theory to the domains where it actually applies, where it actually provides scientific, empirical guidance.
Ron said...
> Why should you or I care about 100% certainty?
I would think you would care about it because it's essential to Christian theology. If there is doubt regarding the reliability of scripture or the perfection of God then it seems to me that the whole thing comes apart at the seams because the question immediately arises: how do we know what parts of scripture are reliable and which are not? How do we know which parts of God's word are perfect and which are not? To those questions there can be no answer (AFAICT). If divine revelation can fail, there is no place to fall back to.
> > Almost. There's always freedom to choose which hypothesis to advance or test next.
> Isn't that … ultra-important?
No. It matters only for efficiency, not for the reliability of the results in the long run. That is one of the qualities that makes science so effective.
> Adopting beliefs which would have prevented the rise of modern science seems problematic to me
It took about 100,000 years or so between the advent of anatomically modern humans and the emergence of modern science, but once it emerged it grew very rapidly -- from inception to its present state in about 400 years, or 0.4% of our history as a species. I think it's probably impossible for social forces alone to eradicate it at this point. So I think the emergence of science depends more on economic forces than social ones. To develop science, a society first has to have enough excess production to allow some of its members to just sit around and think. Once a society gets to that point, the development of science is probably inevitable.
> Actually, I meant you to answer the question in context;
I believe I did.
> could we plausibly discover actual structure in said quantum randomness, via the effects it has in chaotic human behavior/thinking?
I doubt it. Quantum effects would only manifest themselves when events are right on the hairy edge of going one way or the other. I doubt that happens often, and I doubt that the situations where it happens are predictable because chaos.
But I could be wrong. (N.B. those are five words I rarely hear pass the lips of SI-Christians.)
> people in generally [sic] like their delusions
Indeed they do.
there is simply no reason to suppose that somehow, "at core", every person is the same, run by precisely the same laws, etc
It depends on what level you want to put the laws. If you mean that your internal psychology might not work exactly the same as mine, sure, that's no problem. If you mean that electrons and quarks in your brain might work differently from electrons and quarks in my brain--or that your brain might be made of something else other than electrons and quarks, by contrast with my brain--sorry, no sale. Offhand I can't tell which of these two alternatives "causal pluralism" is taking; I'll try to work through some of the links you gave when I have time.
The equation F = GmM/r^2 tells us what never happens
What never happens according to that theoretical model, yes. But you have to compare that theoretical model with experiment. Experiment can never tell us that anything besides the exact inverse square law never happens; that would require infinite experimental accuracy, which is impossible. The best experiment can tell us is that anything besides the narrow range of an inverse 1.9999 law to an inverse 2.00001 law (or whatever precision we have actually tested this to) never happens. (Strictly speaking, even the "never" is an overstatement with regard to experiment; experiment can only tell us that nothing outside the tested range has happened yet, when we've tested it. But now we're getting into serious philosophical hairsplitting, which I don't think is necessary here.)
I was also betting that the accuracy has been pinned down to much greater than my ^2.0001.
I have not actually checked, but I would bet it's been pinned down considerably more accurately than that as well.
We could probably find out more specifics if we really wanted, via modified Newtonian dynamics.
I'm not a fan of MOND, because we already know that Newtonian gravity is not exactly correct; our best current theory of gravity is General Relativity, and although some MOND proponents have tried to make a relativistic version of it, none of them have worked very well.
In fact, this formalism allows testing a wide range of alternative theories of gravity that share some basic features with GR but differ from it in one or more specific parameters. None of the parameters exactly correspond to the exponent in the Newtonian law of gravity, because that law is actually a derived prediction of GR for a particular situation, not a fundamental law of GR. But the Wikipedia page and its links and references should give a decent overview of the current state of testing of GR and other theories of gravity.
maybe we oughtn't recapitulate the mistake of thinking the cell is just a bunch of goo.
Where did I say it was? "Thermal noise" is not the same as "bunch of goo". Obviously a cell is a highly complex, organized system. But it is also a very "noisy" system, in the sense that the energies of random fluctuations are not much smaller than the energies of the interactions that the cell uses to perform its functions. And the energies of random fluctuations are certainly much larger than any "infinitesimal" pushes that you are suggesting could play a role similar to the small delta v given to a spacecraft at an appropriate point to change its trajectory.
What I meant to ask is how Carroll knows with such confidence that if there were other forces, then the search methods currently employed are likely to have found them.
Because that's how quantum field theory works. He explains this in one of the articles you linked to, but briefly and heuristically, it goes like this: QFT says that every interaction corresponds to a particle, and the stronger the interaction, the easier it is to make the corresponding particle in experiments. Given any hypothetical interaction, QFT tells you what kind of particle it corresponds to, and how to make it in experiments; so by simply running experiments to try to make various kinds of hypothetical particles, we can test for the presence (or absence, if the particles fail to appear) of various hypothetical interactions.
This method has not just been used to rule out interactions, btw; it was also used to explore and confirm the properties of the weak and strong interactions, by making the corresponding particles in experiments and measuring their properties.
if Carroll presupposes reductionism, then he will probably only look for new forces in experiments which probe "the fundamental level" directly. But who is to say they won't show up [first?] elsewhere?
Carroll doesn't "presuppose" reductionism. Reductionism with regard to our brains and bodies, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life--the fact that all of these things are made of a small set of fundamental particles and interactions--is an experimental fact, not a "presupposition".
Carroll distinguishes this kind of reductionism from a much stronger kind reductionism, the kind that says that everything--not just the things we deal with in everyday life--is made of a small set of fundamental particles and interactions. As he admits, we don't know for sure that this is the case, because there are some things--dark matter, for example--that we don't know (yet) how to explain in terms of a small set of fundamental particles and interactions (because the set of fundamental particles and interactions we currently know of don't explain these things). But we don't need to know whether reductionism in that strong sense is true to know that reductionism in the much weaker sense given above is true.
if he says this should materially impact how other scientists (and perhaps non-scientists) think about and act in reality, I want to see details of that guidance published in peer-reviewed journals in the appropriate fields.
I'm not sure I understand what kind of "guidance" you think Carroll should be giving to other fields, beyond the simple statement that our bodies and brains, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life, are made of a small set of fundamental particles and interactions, all of which we understand.
perhaps the most prominent philosopher who also questions the kind of unification & reductionism Carroll and others are going for is Nancy Cartwright
I've read How the Laws of Physics Lie. Many of the concerns she raises in that book are valid, but they have nothing to do with what we're discussing here; they don't in any way undermine the experimental fact that our bodies and brains and all the objects we deal with in everyday life are made of a small set of fundamental particles and interactions, all of which we understand.
An ontology which is permanently shielded from observation is useless; I meant one which isn't permanently shielded.
I don't understand what you mean by this, or how it relates to this discussion.
I'm going to suggest that Bruce Waller is not as brilliant as MacIntyre.
I would agree with this assessment. :-)
In such cases, when one chooses against one's better knowledge, one is guilty. It is my understanding that naturalistic understandings cannot tolerate such a scenario.
I don't see why not. The key term in all this is "one". What is the boundary of the "person"? If you insist on narrowing the boundary of the "person" so that all of the causes of a person's behavior fall outside the boundary, then of course it's going to look like one can't possibly "choose against one's better knowledge"--because one can't "choose" at all. (Dennett likes to quote a saying: "If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything.") Taken to its logical conclusion, this viewpoint would say that "one" doesn't exist in the first place; there are no "persons", no "choices", no anything except for events happening according to the laws of physics.
However, while such an extreme viewpoint is consistent with naturalism, it is in no way required by naturalism. Certainly Waller does not take this extreme viewpoint--although one of the issues I have with his book, based on what I've read so far, is that he often talks about people and their choices as though he were taking the extreme viewpoint, while at the same time insisting on using words like "morally right/wrong" and "fair/unfair" that are meaningless on the extreme viewpoint. If we are going to allow persons to exist, then we have to allow them to, you know, exist--to say that at least some of the events that happen in a person's body and brain are caused by the person, not by something external to the person. And as soon as you do that, you open up the possibility that the person might be responsible for some of those events, including things like "choosing against one's better knowledge"--making a choice even though one has information that shows that choice to be suboptimal, given one's own goals.
Let me know if the above might possibly work for an experimentum crucis.
I'm not sure what you are trying to experimentally test.
If what you are trying to do is experimentally test for miracles, I think the idea is incoherent. When we see something happen that doesn't fit into our current understanding of the laws of physics, we don't conclude that things can happen that violate the laws of physics; we conclude that our current understanding of the laws of physics is incomplete.
If, on the other hand, you are trying to test for different possible mechanisms of how "making choices" might be implemented in the brain, consistent with naturalism, I don't see how what you are proposing does that.
what do the laws of physics disallow?
If you're asking for a detailed description of what kinds of things the laws of physics permit complex systems like human brains and bodies to do, the answer is "nobody knows". Nobody has a detailed theoretical model that derives the possible capacities of human brains and bodies from General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics. So if that's what it would take for you to give up the idea that miracles might be happening inside human brains and bodies, then we might as well give up on this discussion.
However, insisting on this kind of answer seems extremely unreasonable to me. Nobody demands such a detailed model in order to explain how other complex systems work. Nobody has a detailed theoretical model that derives the possible capacities of cars, or the weather, from General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics. Our models of all these things are built using many levels of approximation on top of the fundamental laws. Why should our model of human brains and bodies be any different? And if your answer is that humans are somehow special, how do you know? The fact that we are humans doesn't count; of course we think we are special, but so what?
when Carroll argues what he does, he isn't allowing for a non-symbolic layer underneath.
What I said about what mathematics can and cannot set limits on has nothing to do with a "symbolic" vs. "non-symbolic" layer. It's simply recognizing that mathematical arguments only apply when whatever you are trying to apply them to satisfies the exact premises of the argument. Something that satisfies a similar, but not exactly identical, premise doesn't count.
on the one hand the possibilities are so broad that one must use approximations of Carroll's Big Equation™ to simulate anything but the most simple experiments
This has nothing to do with how "broad" the possibilities are. (To the extent the Big Equation is deterministic--which on Carroll's MWI-based interpretation, it is--there is only one possibility.) It has to do with the Big Equation being unsolvable exactly (at least at our current state of knowledge) except for extremely simple, idealized situations. If we could solve the Big Equation exactly for all situations, we wouldn't need to make approximations.
Luke said...
> > Why should you or I care about 100% certainty?
> I would think you would care about it because it's essential to Christian theology.
Is it? What about that "we see through a glass darkly"? What about the tension between God being infinite and unfathomable, and yet wanting to be ver better known? It sounds almost like … the idea that science may be truly accumulating knowledge, even if it can be quite wrong in various aspects. Because if every aspect of science is totally wrong, then our reasoning from it will be totally wrong: garbage in, garbage out. Why can't theology engage in the kind of successive approximation that is characteristic of science? I know you have this idea that God could just perfectly communicate to us; can you tolerate that you might actually be wrong on that, and that we finite beings might [logically!] have to understand an infinite being via successive approximation?
> If there is doubt regarding the reliability of scripture or the perfection of God then it seems to me that the whole thing comes apart at the seams because the question immediately arises: how do we know what parts of scripture are reliable and which are not? How do we know which parts of God's word are perfect and which are not? To those questions there can be no answer (AFAICT). If divine revelation can fail, there is no place to fall back to.
Our interpretation can be the point of failure. But if it really disturbs you that God might correct people on some points while failing to correct them on others (e.g. push toward egalitarianism while leaving the 'science' aspect unchallenged), we can talk about that. It is my experience that people can only handle so much deviation from where they currently are when teaching them or challenging their character/behavior. Perhaps you have experienced something different in your interactions with other people or yourself?
> > > Almost. There's always freedom to choose which hypothesis to advance or test next.
> > Isn't that … ultra-important?
> No. It matters only for efficiency, not for the reliability of the results in the long run. That is one of the qualities that makes science so effective.
So necessarily, we have been determined to progress [statistically—there can be temporary setbacks]?
> To develop science, a society first has to have enough excess production to allow some of its members to just sit around and think.
That didn't [sufficiently] exist in ancient Rome/Greece? I think you might do well to look at the difference between conspicuous consumption and frugality. There is also a military dimension—the desire to dominate others has spurred a lot of technological advance. But perhaps it is best to pause this particular tangent until we can actually simulate the rise of science among sufficiently complex digitally simulated beings.
> > could we plausibly discover actual structure in said quantum randomness, via the effects it has in chaotic human behavior/thinking?
> I doubt it. Quantum effects would only manifest themselves when events are right on the hairy edge of going one way or the other. I doubt that happens often, and I doubt that the situations where it happens are predictable because chaos.
Well, that sounds like a solid empirical claim that could differentiate your understanding of free will from mine.
> But I could be wrong. (N.B. those are five words I rarely hear pass the lips of SI-Christians.)
I could make a snide remark of how infrequently I find atheists willing to admit their characters are in need of reformation. Many happily tell me mine does, though. :-D
you cannot add any finite number of Turing machines together and circumvent Rice's theorem
More precisely: you cannot add any finite number of Turing machines together and be guaranteed to compute any undecidable property. That's what "undecidable" means--there is no algorithm that is guaranteed to work. But this says nothing at all about whether you can, by putting together enough Turing machines, construct a device that guesses, with much better than chance (but not perfect) accuracy, the values of undecidable properties.
I am suspicious that no matter how much "more is different" you do, if you stick to reductionism and a restricted class of mathematical formalisms at base, you might not be able to get sufficiently interesting freedom which can be violated.
The only way to find out is to keep investigating how our brains and bodies work and building scientific models of them.
Ron said...
> What about that "we see through a glass darkly"?
If we don't have certainty in the reliability of scripture, how can we know whether or not to trust that passage (or any passage)?
> What about the tension between God being infinite and unfathomable
If we don't have certainly in the reliability of scripture and the trustworthiness of God's word, how can we know God is infinite and unfathomable?
> we have been determined to progress
Your use of the word "determined" here is ambiguous. It could mean that we humans strongly aspire to progress, and yes, I believe that is the case. Or it could mean that progress is inevitable, which I don't think is the case. But I do think that progress is overwhelmingly likely in the long run.
> That didn't [sufficiently] exist in ancient Rome/Greece?
Both the Greeks and the Romans made significant progress. More in engineering than in science, but still, some of the structures stand to this day. Some of their plumbing even still works! That is no mean feat.
Luke said...
> If we don't have certainty in the reliability of scripture, how can we know whether or not to trust that passage (or any passage)?
You can try it out. (For example, see my relational sin notes.) There are plenty of predictions of what happens if you act this way or that. The same holds for something like political liberalism: there are ideas on how to enact it and predictions of what will come when you do. The process is really noisy and you have to keep your eye on multi-generational patterns, but that's cool if you want to build awesome things (e.g. like Francis Bacon [[mostly:] just] dreamed of). If you want to be lazy and just enjoy life then all this is too hard; it's also hard if one's leaders pretend that things operate one way (e.g. as a "democracy") when in fact they don't. But the Bible criticizes leaders more than any other group; it is a very good idea to question them in intelligent ways.
I suspect you might be too stuck in a flavor of Divine Command Theory which construes God's commands as having an arbitrary element, with no corroboration in reality. I get that there are some flavors of Christianity which seem in love with that, but I oppose them on numerous grounds. Two good places to start come not from Christians, but Jews: Yoram Hazony's The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture and Joshua A. Berman's Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought. You have some very weird ideas of what divine revelation *must* look like, Ron. I get that they aren't yours, but perhaps you could investigate whether they make logical sense. If actually they function more to keep the little guy† in his place, maybe it's demonstrably a perversion (Deut 17:14–20 is a nice resource for internal criticism).
† The little girl knows she should stay in her place. Guys sometimes need reminding.
> Your use of the word "determined" here is ambiguous. It could mean that we humans strongly aspire to progress, and yes, I believe that is the case. Or it could mean that progress is inevitable, which I don't think is the case. But I do think that progress is overwhelmingly likely in the long run.
I meant determined by the laws of nature (plus initial conditions). I'm guessing when you say "progress", you mean something like Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity—that is, significant and fantastic progress. If so, then how are you concluding this other than via the principle of induction?
BTW, I would say that we have to want to go through the pain of admitting where we self-deluded ourselves (then explicitly repenting of it), treat more and more people equally, etc. I would also say that it is not clear that we Moderns have the will to do this. You seem rather more optimistic, which I find interesting.
> > That didn't [sufficiently] exist in ancient Rome/Greece?
> Both the Greeks and the Romans made significant progress. More in engineering than in science, but still, some of the structures stand to this day. Some of their plumbing even still works! That is no mean feat.
Sure, they did some really cool things. And yet their civilizations collapsed. Are you allowing for Modern civilization to collapse in your optimism about human progress? Or are we [with say ≥ 98% probability] beyond the mistakes of the Greeks and Romans?
Would you be willing/able to sketch some of Dennett's main points, given what I've said so far in this conversation?
I think two key points are central in Dennett's thinking (though this by no means captures all of the main ideas in his writings):
(1) Functionalism: what counts is the functions that something can perform, not what it's made of or how it does it;
(2) Don't confuse explaining with explaining away.
I'll try to illustrate these points by describing Dennett's model of free will (this is based mostly on my memory of Freedom Evolves). The basic underlying concept is what Dennett calls "generate and test", which is perhaps best illustrated by imagining you are an AI programmer trying to make a program for a robot to fulfill some function for which you don't know a guaranteed algorithm--say, for example, finding food in a new environment. There is no way to solve this problem by just turning the crank; it's not like adding numbers or solving an equation. The only known way of proceeding is to start with a guess, then check how well it works, then iterate until you find a solution. So, for example, you might program the robot to just pick a random direction and go in that direction for some distance; then, if it doesn't find any food, pick another random direction and try again. Of course this can get much more sophisticated--for example, you can use information from the environment to help pick the direction instead of just choosing randomly. But the basic architecture of the program is still: make a guess, test it, iterate. This is what Dennett calls "generate and test".
Once you have this trick, though, there's no need to limit it to just one level. For example, consider a "meta-food-finding program", which the robot might run, which tells it to pick at random some food-finding algorithm from a set of such algorithms, try it, see how well it works; then pick a different algorithm and try that; etc. Then, after some number of trials, assess the results and use that information to refine your choice of food-finding algorithms. And you can continue to add more and more meta-levels to this, to deal with more complex problems.
Nor is there any requirement that every trial must run in the real world. Given enough information about the environment, you can program the robot to construct a "virtual environment" in its robot brain, and run trials of different food-finding programs, say, in the virtual environment instead of the real one. That way you can find out which algorithms work well and which don't, at least to some good enough approximation, without having to actually risk failure in the real world. (Dennett likes to quote a phrase of Karl Popper here: this strategy "permits our hypotheses to die in our stead".)
Dennett's basic claim is that, once you have enough levels and meta-levels of this sort of thing running in a brain, you can build the kind of free will we humans experience. Looked at one way, it's all just computer code (or the brain equivalent), running algorithms; but looked at another way, it's a robot (or a human) doing the sorts of things we do: learning, planning, making choices, evaluating the consequences, updating our model of the world.
I'm probably getting close to the 4096-character limit so I'll continue in a follow-up post by showing how the above relates to the two key ideas I described.
Ok, following up: we have a model of a human brain with free will as a kind of computer program running many levels and meta-levels of generate and test. Now let's look at the two key ideas I described.
(1) Functionalism. The model I've described is entirely naturalistic: there are no miracles, there is no magic, everything is just ordinary physical objects behaving according to physical laws. And yet this thing can perform all the functions we associate with human free will. So is it "real" free will or isn't it?
Dennett's answer is: fulfilling the functions of free will is "real" free will, as real as you can get. As he puts it, something that fulfills the functions is the only kind of free will that is worth wanting. It's not worth wanting the miraculous, magical kind of free will, because, aside from the fact that it doesn't exist anyway, it doesn't perform any functions that the naturalistic kind does, and the functions are the important thing. The fact that the thing that is performing these functions is a pile of levels and meta-levels of programming kludges and hacks doesn't matter; it does the job, and that's what matters.
(2) A common rejoinder to the above is that a model like Dennett's doesn't explain free will; it explains it away. If that kind of model is really all there is to human free will, then "real" human free will doesn't exist. (Dennett's models of other things, like consciousness and personhood, get the same kind of criticism.) But taken to its logical conclusion, this viewpoint would have to claim that nothing ever gets explained; it's all explaining away. This viewpoint is just the "extreme naturalism" that I described in an earlier comment: the view that nothing "really exists" except events happening according to the laws of physics.
But there is no need to adopt such an impoverished view of explanation. When we explain a rainbow by talking about how sunlight reflects in water droplets in the atmosphere, we are not saying the rainbow doesn't exist; we are explaining how the rainbow gets produced. When we explain a chess-playing computer by talking about how it computes move trees and heuristically evaluates board positions, we are not saying it doesn't achieve checkmate; we are explaining how it achieves checkmate. And when we explain human free will by talking about levels and meta-levels of generate and test algorithms running in human brains, we aren't saying humans don't have free will; we are explaining how human free will works.
There are cases in which explaining is indeed explaining away. For example, if we were to explain our current theory of chemistry to a person from the 16th century who believed the phlogiston theory, we would not be explaining phlogiston; we would be explaining it away. There is no level of description in our current theory of chemistry that corresponds to phlogiston; that concept simply has no place in our current theory. But explanations like Dennett's explanation of free will aren't like that; there is a perfectly good place for the concept of free will in his model. The fact that the details of the model are not what many people expect an explanation of free will to look like is beside the point; it's no different from our current theory of quantum mechanics being very different from what people expect an explanation of the structure of atoms to look like.
it doesn't perform any functions that the naturalistic kind does
s/does/doesn't/
Luke said...
I started fisking but then decided to take a step back and try to address this matter holistically. I'll save what I've written so far and can go back to it if necessary. Feel free to respond with something holistic as well; we can always dive back into the details later.
We got a little lost talking about F = GmM/r^2; my point was always that the very nature of that equation is to say that a great number of phenomena which are "nearby" our day-to-day existence will never happen/never be observed. Yes that is "according to that theoretical model", but physicalism appears to be a theoretical model which is being used to assert causal monism, which surely matters when it comes to understanding free will and everything that depends on it (e.g. moral responsibility). And yet, I can't detect anything physicalism says will never happen which is "nearby" our day-to-day experience like F = GmM/r^2.01 is. You've said physicalism needs to have an alternative on offer; I find that odd, as F = GmM/r^2 immediately suggests alternatives. I can't help thinking that physicalism can assimilate too many possible observations.
We've established that there are a number of approximations between Core Theory (probably a better name than "Carroll's Big Equation™") and the quantitative math used in places relevant for understanding the mind and the brain. Given that, we've established that what is tested in those situations is not Core Theory, but a whole class of theories. The precision of Core Theory cannot [currently] be tested at the wet, warm, macro scale. And yet, somehow the determinism still applies at the wet, warm, macro scale. Furthermore, any indeterminism has to be irrelevant because of the warm (and maybe also the macro?).
You've emphasized that "more is different". When I pointed out that surely certain things still have to be impossible or emergence can get you anything, you said that "those limits are very broad". I'm not even sure what those limits are which matter for understanding minds and brains, except: determinism of the causal monism variety. The precision of Core Theory may not be available, but determinism is—even though our confidence in determinism comes from precision.
You again emphasized "under a particular description" and pointed out that provability can be replaced with heuristic devices. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this, given that the point under contention is how sure we should be about a symbolic system which doesn't "prove" causal monism, but allegedly gives us confidence to act "as if" causal monism is true, not only with fundamental physics, but all the way to day-to-day human interaction.
Perhaps it would help to note two ways that the monistic determinism of Core Theory could be neutralized at the level of mind. First, the causal powers in Core Theory could be partially neutralized at the macro level, allowing other powers to manifest. Second, Core Theory could be just an organizational law of nature (see Robert Laughlin) and what happens at the macro scale could futz with the organized substrate to tweak how Core Theory operates. At least, I see no in principle reason for why both of these are impossible.
Finally, no matter how one draws the boundary around the self, on causal monism (fully deterministic or with indeterminism), one can always "pass the buck" for choices: either to a previous quantum state which existed before you were born, or to randomness during your life over which you had no control. The buck never stops at the individual. As Coyne said, "nobody could have done otherwise". That means that we cannot be truly guilty for acting against our better knowledge. I don't know how else to process his "its ramifications for human behavior are profound". Do you?
Ron said...
> > If we don't have certainty in the reliability of scripture, how can we know whether or not to trust that passage (or any passage)?
> You can try it out. (For example, see my relational sin notes.)
I think you and I are talking about two very different things. I'm talking about how to tell if a claim is *true*. You seem to be talking about whether a belief in a claim leads to good results independent of whether or not it is true. (False beliefs can sometimes lead to good results.)
> Sure, they [the Greeks and Romans] did some really cool things. And yet their civilizations collapsed.
Greek civilization didn't collapse, it was conquered by the Romans. Roman civilization did indeed collapse, and the resulting power vacuum was filled by the Christian Church. It is not for nothing that the subsequent period in history is called the dark ages.
But do you really mean to imply that systems of thought should be judged by how well they sustain empires? North Korea seems to be surprisingly resilient, but I would not hold them up as a model of how humans ought to conduct their affairs, and certainly not as a model of how to tell if a claim is true. Every North Korean professes to believe that Kim Jong Un is a god. If the Kim family is still ruling North Korea 1000 years from now, will that be evidence that this claim is true?
I'll try to stick with holistic comments as well, as I don't think a detailed point-by-point exchange is really necessary at this point.
You seem to be thinking of "physicalism" as a specific theory. It's not. It's just a general principle, that says that whatever the laws of physics are, they are actually laws--everything that happens, happens in accordance with them. Of course that statement by itself doesn't tell you what the laws are; you have to actually investigate--construct theories and compare them with experiments--to find that out.
So if you want to understand what constraints physicalism actually puts on what can happen, you have to look at what actual investigations have been done in the domain you're interested in. In this discussion, we're interested in the domain of our brains and bodies and the objects we deal with in everyday life. And we have a very, very detailed understanding of the fundamental laws that govern that domain. And those fundamental laws say what I've already said: our brains and bodies, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life, are made of a small number of fundamental particles and interactions--and as far as the internal workings of our brains and bodies are concerned, which is what matters for talking about things like free will, the list is even smaller: electrons and quarks and the electromagnetic interaction. That's it: no other particles and interactions come into play. If there were, we would already have seen them and measured their properties in detail in experiments.
So the constraint physicalism puts on the internal workings of our brains and bodies, and therefore on any discussion of free will as far as we humans are concerned, is that if free will exists, it has to be built out of electrons and quarks and the electromagnetic interaction, just like every other capability of our brains and bodies. But there are many levels of organization in between. We don't observe quarks directly: they are packaged up into protons and neutrons, which are in turn packaged up into atomic nuclei. From nuclei and electrons you can make a wide variety of chemical elements with a wide variety of properties, and many of them play important roles in the internal workings of our brains and bodies. Those elements in turn get combined into an even wider variety of molecules with an even wider variety of properties. Molecules in turn combine into the various structures that combine into cells, which combine into organs, which combine into bodies. Then you can throw in additional ingredients like hormones, neurotransmitters, photosensitive chemicals in our retinas, very finely tuned sound-to-electric-impulse converters in our inner ears, etc., etc., etc...
So while on the one hand physicalism imposes a very tight constraint--everything has to be built out of electrons and quarks and the electromagnetic interaction--on the other hand physicalism allows a very wide range of possibilities, because there are so many electrons and quarks and interactions involved and they can combine in so many different ways. We are only beginning to investigate the details of all this--how all the ingredients I listed above, and many more besides, actually work together to do things in our brains and bodies, and what the limits are. If you want to say that your "delta v" model of free will might be lurking somewhere in there, that could be the case--as long as it's ultimately built out of electrons and quarks and the electromagnetic interaction. But the fact that that constraint still allows so many possibilities does not mean that constraint is not rock solid in itself. It is.
I did want to comment specifically on one thing, separate from my other comment just now:
no matter how one draws the boundary around the self, on causal monism (fully deterministic or with indeterminism), one can always "pass the buck" for choices: either to a previous quantum state which existed before you were born, or to randomness during your life over which you had no control. The buck never stops at the individual. As Coyne said, "nobody could have done otherwise". That means that we cannot be truly guilty for acting against our better knowledge. I don't know how else to process his "its ramifications for human behavior are profound". Do you?
If you mean, do I think you have correctly described what Coyne was trying to say, I think you have.
If you mean, do I think that means we don't have free will, no, I don't, because I don't agree with his (and, it seems, your) definition of "free will". Like Dennett, I am a functionalist. I don't care whether I "could have done otherwise" in a metaphysical sense. I care whether I am allowed to make my own choices about how to live my life, and whether I'm able to make good choices. If "making choices" can also be described, at a much lower level, as "following deterministic physical laws, as they apply to an extremely complex system responding to extremely complex inputs", that's fine with me, as long as it meets the functional requirements of freedom. If it's not fine with you, well, that's your choice.
Perhaps that phrase you use, "passing the buck", also deserves a comment. I quoted earlier that phrase that Dennett likes to quote: "If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything." But whether or not to make yourself that small is your choice. Nothing is forcing you to do that. You might say: but if everything happens according to deterministic physical laws, then it's already determined whether I will pass the buck or not. But stop and think a minute: how is it determined, if it is determined? Is it determined by you somehow finding yourself passing the buck, even though you don't want to, and then feeling really weird and surprised that you did this thing that you didn't feel like you chose to do (like the Tortoise finding that he has put a coin in his left hand as the Meta-Oracle predicted)? Or is it determined by you honestly considering both options, using whatever resources are in your brain, and then making a choice?
You don't think that kind of choice can be a deterministic process? Why not? How is it different from a chess-playing computer choosing what move to make, by evaluating options using the best heuristics it can? Does the fact that the computer is running a deterministic algorithm mean it doesn't achieve checkmate? (Remember that the algorithm, although deterministic, is not determined to achieve checkmate; it's only determined to choose moves using the best heuristics it can.) And if a much, much more complex deterministic algorithm, running a much, much more complex set of heuristics, using factors like, oh, I don't know, what choice will cause the least suffering, or will best help someone you want to help, or will best accomplish an important goal, and even meta-heuristics like what choices turned out well in the past and what choices turned out badly--if such an algorithm can make good choices, does it matter that it's deterministic? And if that's what's happening in your brain when you make good choices, is it any less "you" that makes the choices?
Luke said...
> > > If we don't have certainty in the reliability of scripture, how can we know whether or not to trust that passage (or any passage)?
> > You can try it out. (For example, see my relational sin notes.)
> I think you and I are talking about two very different things. I'm talking about how to tell if a claim is *true*. You seem to be talking about whether a belief in a claim leads to good results independent of whether or not it is true. (False beliefs can sometimes lead to good results.)
False beliefs can also lead to good science. If Robert Laughlin is right and both QFT and GR are merely organizational laws of nature—that is, the collective behavior of some substrate—then would that be absolutely devastating to us?
Switching from the 'fact' to the 'value' side of the dichotomy, perhaps we need to revisit my "Goodness itself has a predictive aspect, but not in the analytic fashion that allows you to write out deterministic equations."—from the thread which inspired this blog post.
It may also be helpful to note that a signal that we've found something true/accurate on the 'fact' side of the dichotomy is when the science paper talking about it gets citations. It's even better when those papers get citations. What this really means is that sufficiently true/accurate/useful results give life to further true/accurate/useful results. Good science is science you can build on. Why not apply the same reasoning to the 'value' side of the dichotomy?
> Greek civilization didn't collapse, it was conquered by the Romans.
True, but that appears irrelevant for the purposes of my argument. If you have awesome science but get conquered and the science doesn't continue on to infinity, you didn't have sufficient conditions for the continual conduct of science. If you have awesome science but cannot keep your society from crumbling, you didn't have sufficient conditions for the continual conduct of science.
> But do you really mean to imply that systems of thought should be judged by how well they sustain empires?
The context of the discussion is necessary & sufficient conditions for science to thrive. Do you really want to say that we cannot call the necessary conditions for science "true" in any sense? BTW, I'm fully aware that sufficient ⇏ necessary.
Here's a question for you: might it be the case that for more and more science to be done, humans might have to become better? For example, we are well into the interdisciplinary regime of science, where there is much less additional knowledge to be discovered within a traditional discipline, than if one adds at least one other discipline to the mix. But it can be hard for people of different disciplines to talk to each other, for a variety of reasons. Even biophysicists and biochemists can have trouble properly communicating to each other. Are the qualities required to communicate well with scientists in different disciplines the kinds of things which have truth-value? Or is it that the societal and psychological apparatuses we use to discover truth actually have necessary elements which are neither true nor false?
Luke said...
I'm happy with physicalism being a class of theories. What concerns me is that maybe it isn't even that. Maybe it's a metaphysic and nothing could falsify it, in precisely the sense that nothing can falsify conspiracy theories. That is: conspiracy theorists seem to be able to assimilate any phenomenon presented to them to their ontology; I worry that physicalists do this as well.
I really do understand that when one is doing the kinds of physics Carroll talks about, one cannot find anything other than the four forces / two fundamental forces. What I object to is treating reductionistic promissory notes as if they were science. Just like the strong force, weak force, and EM were just one force at the beginning, who is to say more forces cannot present under new conditions? (Where "new" is "sufficiently different from the domain where the three non-gravitational forces just become distinguishable".) Why are we so confident that chaotic systems which pass through the equivalent of unstable Lagrangian points end up going one way vs. another only because of "noise" (this doesn't have to be quantum noise), vs. there being a class of infinitesimal forces? I can see that any patterns which emerge from noise in experiments done by physicists are explicable in terms of the four forces, but why say that if some new force is going to be observable to humans, then it will manifest in those experiments? I see no justification whatsoever for that.
Let me illustrate this matter by talking about Turing machines implemented on semiconductors. Current computers are tremendously complex. But fundamentally, any time that something happens other than due to a 1 or a 0 (let's ignore MLC and true noise), that's a defect. All the fun physics that is going on must be neutralized in order for the Turing machine to operate as a Turing machine. Such neutralization allows for a categorically different kind of causation to happen—to really happen. To the extent that that's not really what happens, anything built on top of that layer is also not really true. Including our theories about determinism. (This applies even if we aren't Turing machines; we just need the "not really true", e.g. via heuristic thinking.)
You say that physicalism requires that everything (I'll add: required to understand everyday life) be built out of electrons and quarks and EM. But why is it important for the psychologist and sociologist to believe this, in order to do the highest quality science in their fields? Suppose instead they adopt causal pluralism in their theorizing. If that ends up better explaining human behavior, are they wrong "because physics knows best"? Again, the approximation required to apply the fundamental equations of physics at the macro scale loses structure from those fundamental equations; why does the monistic determinism aspect survive unscathed?
Ron said...
> False beliefs can also lead to good science.
You need to read:
> The context of the discussion is necessary & sufficient conditions for science to thrive.
Maybe that's *your* context, but it's not mine. This discussion started because I characterized parts of the Bible as "evil", and then it segued into a discussion of free will. If we're talking about "necessary & sufficient conditions for science to thrive" that's news to me.
> might it be the case that for more and more science to be done, humans might have to become better?
Of course it might. But I don't see how "becoming better" in that regard can possibly involve believing in the core tenets of Christianity. In particular, I don't see how it can involve believing that everything bad that happens in this world is our fault, that we are powerless to do anything about it, and that our only recourse is to fall on our knees and beg for the benevolence of a non-existent deity.
Luke said...
> > False beliefs can also lead to good science.
> You need to read:
You've already linked me to that. You must have missed my use of "successive approximation".
> > The context of the discussion is necessary & sufficient conditions for science to thrive.
> Maybe that's *your* context, but it's not mine. This discussion started because I characterized parts of the Bible as "evil", and then it segued into a discussion of free will. If we're talking about "necessary & sufficient conditions for science to thrive" that's news to me.
Wait a second, here's upstream in the conversation:
> Ron: So I think the emergence of science depends more on economic forces than social ones. To develop science, a society first has to have enough excess production to allow some of its members to just sit around and think. Once a society gets to that point, the development of science is probably inevitable.
Notice your "To develop science". And the conquering of the Greek empire and collapse of the Roman empire makes it rather clear that something more than just economic factors are required for science to continue ad infinitum. Which is what I was getting at with my use of "modern science".
Luke said...
> > might it be the case that for more and more science to be done, humans might have to become better?
> Of course it might. But I don't see how "becoming better" in that regard can possibly involve believing in the core tenets of Christianity.
Let me first establish whether any values can have truth-value before we jump all the way to Christianity. So: if scientists have to practice some set of values in order to do science, and have to practice them better/more articulately in order to do the next stage of science (e.g. interdisciplinary), do those values get assigned anything like a truth-value?
Now, we can jump straight to Christianity in this way. Suppose I and those who sufficiently agree with me can take our understanding of Christianity and try and improve the practice of science with it. If we succeed and excel in comparison to other strategies being practiced, then our understanding of Christianity will be on par with "the best explanation so far" standard of scientific inquiry which you presented to the Berkeley atheists. There's no need for certainty or absolute truth; instead we just need to work from the best that we have so far. Or have I missed something?
> In particular, I don't see how it can involve believing that everything bad that happens in this world is our fault, that we are powerless to do anything about it, and that our only recourse is to fall on our knees and beg for the benevolence of a non-existent deity.
The idea that you have to beg for God's benevolence is probably heretical to most versions of remotely orthodox Christianity. Take, for example, Eph 2:1–10. The idea is that we had no interest in God (which partly means: no interest in infinite excellence), that we were happily working against his purposes for ever-increasing goodness, excellence, beauty, and truth—and yet God still decided to help us out because he loves us regardless of how we think (or don't think) of him. **There is no begging.** Instead there is repentance, forgiveness, and subsequent awesomeness. But maybe only if the value-domain can have truth-value. Otherwise, what is repentance and forgiveness but mooshy subjective stuff that ultimately boils down to irrational/arational preference? (If you have a better way to "place" them without getting anywhere near the matter of truth, let me know.)
The idea that we are powerless to do anything about the matter is somewhat misleading; Christianity and Judaism hold that God is happy to help if we will have his help. But we tend not to because we want to pursue our own goals—goals which are opposed to God's in any of a number of ways (e.g. pathetic, others-dominating, tolerant of hypocrisy, non-servantlike). In all this, there might be lurking the complaint that we shouldn't have to relate to God in order to grow arbitrarily in wisdom; instead, we should be able to be "autonomous" somehow. That seems absurd to me on a logical level, but perhaps I'm just a brain-damaged theist. (After all, if my theism is false, I clearly don't keep a solid barrier to allow for the cognitive dissonance rationalization; surely then my theism is acting very much like brain damage in my ability to act well in reality, including advancing scientific inquiry.)
The idea that everything bad that happens is our fault is false for every value of "our" other than "all created beings with moral agency". But if we restrict the scope to matters like "How did we let WWI happen?", I think we can take [guilty] responsibility for it in such a way that we make such an event less likely to repeat. Or, we can continue to tell ourselves that most of us are Good People™ and that everything bad that happens is [mostly] a combination of a few Bad Apples™ and Careless Nature™.
I'm happy with physicalism being a class of theories. What concerns me is that maybe it isn't even that. Maybe it's a metaphysic and nothing could falsify it,
Perhaps a better way to describe physicalism is that it's a bet: physicalists like me are betting that, no matter what new phenomena we observe in the future, we will be able to find physical laws that describe them, the way we have found physical laws that describe every phenomenon we've investigated scientifically so far. "Falsifying" this would mean finding some phenomenon that could not be described by any set of physical laws: but how would we ever know?
In other words, scientists can always continue trying to expand our understanding of physical laws as we continue to discover new phenomena. Saying that physicalism is false means saying that they won't always succeed. But practically speaking, what's the difference? We're not going to stop doing science just because some people think physicalism is false. So it will always be possible that we will find laws that describe every new phenomenon we observe; there will never have to be a point at which we just stop.
However, all of this is really irrelevant to the key point of this discussion, which is that, when it comes to our brains and bodies and all the objects we deal with in everyday life, we already have laws that describe all of those phenomena. We have already covered this domain in great detail with experiments. So even if physicalism is false, it doesn't matter for this discussion, because the claim that some new phenomenon, not explainable by our current understanding of the laws that govern electrons, quarks, and the electromagnetic interaction, could be going on in our brains or bodies or the objects we deal with in everyday life, is a much stronger claim than the claim that physicalism is false. It's the claim that induction doesn't work--that we can't generalize from the mountain of experimental data we already have covering this particular domain, and the laws we have built from it, to the belief that those laws will continue to hold in the future in that domain. But if induction doesn't work, we can't do science at all. Indeed we can't even live our everyday lives, since we are continually assuming in our everyday lives that induction works.
who is to say more forces cannot present under new conditions?
The conditions in our brains, bodies, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life are not "new conditions". They are conditions that have been investigated in great detail already. Saying that "new forces" could somehow arise in this domain is like saying that the Earth's orbit could suddenly change because of some "new force" we didn't know about. It would mean induction didn't work. And if induction doesn't work, all bets are off.
All the fun physics that is going on must be neutralized in order for the Turing machine to operate as a Turing machine. Such neutralization allows for a categorically different kind of causation to happen—to really happen.
What do you mean by this?
why is it important for the psychologist and sociologist to believe this, in order to do the highest quality science in their fields?
I don't know if it is or not. You were the one who was asking for physics to give "guidance" to those other fields. My sense is that knowledge of the fundamental laws is not very useful in these fields. Much more useful is knowledge of the "building blocks" at the next level down below psychology: neurons, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. All of those things are made of electrons and quarks and electromagnetism, so I don't see what the issue is.
Suppose instead they adopt causal pluralism in their theorizing. If that ends up better explaining human behavior, are they wrong "because physics knows best"?
What does "causal pluralism" mean at this level of theorizing? Psychologists and sociologists don't build models using electrons and quarks and electromagnetism as causal factors to begin with. They build models using entities at a much higher level of organization. As just remarked above, all of the "building blocks" they use at this level are built from the known fundamental entities. But that doesn't mean those entities appear directly as causal factors in their models.
In cases where theorists at this level have tried to postulate "new forces", for example in parapsychology, their models have not survived controlled experimental testing; so if that counts as a test of "causal pluralism" at this level, the test result is that causal pluralism doesn't work.
What do you mean by this?
I should clarify that by "this" I mean "a categorically different kind of causation".
Luke said...
> I don't care whether I "could have done otherwise" in a metaphysical sense.
I suspect people care more about "could have done otherwise" when some tragedy recently happened and it seems like it really was avoidable. Take, for example, the fact of WWI and juxtapose it to all the glorying that was done about Enlightened humankind. Can we see the error of those ways as something which was avoidable? Can we see leaders of the time (intellectual, religious, political) as culpable for telling pretty fairy tales about human nature, in the sense that there was another explanation equally as compelling (recall 'dual rationality')?
> I care whether I am allowed to make my own choices about how to live my life, and whether I'm able to make good choices.
But feeling like you're in control doesn't mean you're in control. How do you differentiate? When it comes to matters of the will, it seems like Dennett's functionalism could exist solely in the subjective level, which is precisely the level which [given the metaphysic probably undergirding this conversation] can be at arbitrary variance with reality. It is very important to drill past appearances. I'm not sure how this interacts with Dennett's functionalism (feel free to point me to some particular book of his).
By the way, there is a pathological way to increase the amount of "freedom" which may be consistent with your understanding of free will: simply weaken the desires of most humans so that they only want what the State is happy to give them, so that the choices of A vs. B which are available to them will not upset the status quo. de Tocqueville predicted such weakening and Charles Taylor thinks exactly that has happened (The Malaise of Modernity, 3–4). I agree; I think the desires of modern man and women are generally pathetic. The titles of Christopher Lasch's two books The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations and The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times seem spot-on. I don't see any way to avoid this "pathetic imagination" problem without having a concept of "good" which is not entirely subjective. But then freedom of the will cannot be entirely subjective. Maybe it isn't in Dennett's understanding (and/or yours) and I just need to understand more.
> Or is it determined by you honestly considering both options, using whatever resources are in your brain, and then making a choice?
> You don't think that kind of choice can be a deterministic process? Why not?
See my @Peter: (3/5) comment. As I understand it, determinism either means there are no unstable Lagrangian points and no 'dual rationality', or that the choice of "which way" is 100% random—not willed. In contrast, I say that the way to truly respect another person's freedom is to put him/her in a situation of 'dual rationality' when I disagree, rather than trying everything at my disposal to make the decision come out how I want.
Luke said...
You seem to be presupposing that the only possible kind of explanation which has truth-value is one which is built upon causal monism / monistic determinism / physicalism. This reminds me of a discussion I was having about agent causation a while ago; someone responded that I was proposing hyperdeterminism. It is as if the causal monists have hijacked the terms 'determinism' and 'explanation'. However, the cracks are very present now in the attempts to construct complete, articulate, and therefore restricted descriptions of what science is (any such description will surely cover all possibly discoverable explanation); see for example Penelope Maddy (2007):
>> A deeper difficulty springs from the lesson won through decades of study in the philosophy of science: there is no hard and fast specification of what 'science' must be, no determinate criterion of the form 'x is science iff …'. It follows that there can be no straightforward definition of Second Philosophy along the lines 'trust only the methods of science'. Thus Second Philosophy, as I understand it, isn't a set of beliefs, a set of propositions to be affirmed; it has no theory. Since its contours can't be drawn by outright definition, I resort to the device of introducing a character, a particular sort of idealized inquirer called the Second Philosopher, and proceed by describing her thoughts and practices in a range of contexts; Second Philosophy is then to be understood as the product of her inquiries. (Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method, 1)
With your insistence that any causal powers which could possibly be operating at the human scale would be found by the kinds of experiments physicists do, I should think you could do a much better job than Penelope Maddy. Perhaps she has been too beat down by the likes of Paul Feyerabend (Against Method; see especially § Scholarly reception)?
What I don't understand is why you think that a class of infinitesimal forces could not possibly exist which are relevant to the human scale. If consciousness operates at the edge of chaos, why could brain states not pass through the equivalent of unstable Lagrangian points, such that an infinitesimal push (not necessarily quantum) makes the difference between a choice of A vs. B? I know that we're very used to thinking that either things really are deterministic to the core, or that whatever is indeterministic is purely random. But how are those not metaphysical beliefs, rather than scientific beliefs? Here's David Bohm:
>> The assumption that any particular kind of fluctuations are arbitrary and lawless relative to all possible contexts, like the similar assumption that there exists an absolute and final determinate law, is therefore evidently not capable of being based on any experimental or theoretical developments arising out of specific scientific problems, but it is instead a purely philosophical assumption. (Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, 44)
It's still so hard to see you as doing anything other than presupposing reductionism, and doing so rather irresponsibly, given how terribly science does with explaining [self-]consciousness. At what point will the failure of "more of the same" push us to consider alternatives? Note carefully that for alternatives to get off the ground, the stranglehold of reductionism would have to somehow be broken.
Luke said...
> > All the fun physics that is going on must be neutralized in order for the Turing machine to operate as a Turing machine. Such neutralization allows for a categorically different kind of causation to happen—to really happen.
> What do you mean by this?
In a Turing machine, 0's and 1's have causal powers. To the extent that they are merely approximations is the extent to which our conclusions of determinism and reductionism are merely approximations.
> You were the one who was asking for physics to give "guidance" to those other fields.
Yep, I did ask that, because physicists are insisting that those in the human sciences ought to consider monistic determinism to be true. If in fact it makes no difference one way or another, I think that would be a fantastically interesting result.
> > Suppose instead they adopt causal pluralism in their theorizing. If that ends up better explaining human behavior, are they wrong "because physics knows best"?
> What does "causal pluralism" mean at this level of theorizing?
It could mean that the common interface between people is at the level of appearance more than at the level of ontology. This is precisely the opposite of what happens in science. F. A. Hayek has some very interesting discussions of this in Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason. In order for explanations to work in differing situations, there needs to be some sort of commonality. One can either assert total commonality in which case you get a monism, or one can assert partial commonality, as in secularism like WP: Secularism § Secular society's "1. Refuses to commit itself as a whole to any one view of the nature of the universe and the role of man in it." + the idea of overlapping consensus. What you have is a set of truly different motivations which sufficiently synchronize with each other to avoid [too much] physical violence. The motivations are treated as truly causal.
> Psychologists and sociologists don't build models using electrons and quarks and electromagnetism as causal factors to begin with. They build models using entities at a much higher level of organization. As just remarked above, all of the "building blocks" they use at this level are built from the known fundamental entities. But that doesn't mean those entities appear directly as causal factors in their models.
Yes, electrons and quarks and EM are distanced from that theorizing via approximations. But even though our confidence in determinism is based on precision & accuracy and it is these things which are neutralized via approximation, you (and plenty of others) still hold that the determinism survives the process of approximation. That determinism Coyne and Carroll want to import into thinking about how humans make decisions isn't there in a scientifically detectable way, because of the necessity of making those approximations. But we are asked to believe in that determinism regardless. That doesn't seem the slightest bit fishy to you?
> In cases where theorists at this level have tried to postulate "new forces", for example in parapsychology, their models have not survived controlled experimental testing; so if that counts as a test of "causal pluralism" at this level, the test result is that causal pluralism doesn't work.
Sure you can always find failed examples, but what of e.g. the placebo effect?
Ron said...
> You must have missed my use of "successive approximation".
I did. So here is my response:
> Why can't theology engage in the kind of successive approximation that is characteristic of science?
Because theology doesn't have any mechanism for objectively correcting errors, no mechanism analogous to experiment, no answer to the Euthyphro dilemma. (See below.)
> the conquering of the Greek empire and collapse of the Roman empire makes it rather clear that something more than just economic factors are required for science to continue ad infinitum
No, that doesn't make it clear at all. Much of the intellectual progress made by Greece and Rome outlived the empires that produced it. And science thrives today despite the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization.
> if scientists have to practice some set of values in order to do science, and have to practice them better/more articulately in order to do the next stage of science (e.g. interdisciplinary), do those values get assigned anything like a truth-value?
No. You could assign a truth-value to the question of whether a value fulfills some objective criterion, like being an evolutionarily stable strategy, or whether it leads to more or less violence or suffering or whatever. But you cannot assign a truth value to a value (we need a better word for this concept). If you could, it would not be a value, it would be a fact. Truth and goodness are mostly orthogonal concepts. Something can be true without being good ("Donald Trump is president") and something can be good without being true ("Justice always prevails").
> Suppose I and those who sufficiently agree with me can take our understanding of Christianity and try and improve the practice of science with it.
You hedged with the word "try". There is no doubt in my mind that you can try. There is a great deal of doubt in my mind that you will succeed. But the way to resolve this question is not to argue about it, but for you to do the experiment and show me the results.
OK, but you're focusing on that one word and missing the point: on Christian theology, we are saved by grace, not deeds. Therefore, our salvation is entirely out of our hands and it doesn't matter what we do (c.f. Rom 9:18-21). That attitude is antithetical to scientific progress.
> The idea that we are powerless to do anything about the matter is somewhat misleading; Christianity and Judaism hold that God is happy to help if we will have his help. But we tend not to because we want to pursue our own goals—goals which are opposed to God's in any of a number of ways (e.g. pathetic, others-dominating, tolerant of hypocrisy, non-servantlike).
Do you not see the circular reasoning here? God will help us as long as we do what He wants. If God isn't helping, it must be because we are not doing what He wants. So how do we know what He wants?
Case in point: it seems to me that God totally endorses dominating others (Deu 6:5, Exo 20:3, Exo 20:12, Mat 22:21, Eph 6:5). Many SI-Christians throughout history have agreed with me, and many (in fact the vast majority) of American Evangelicals endorse this view: today. Evangelicals overwhelmingly support increasing the U.S. military budget, cracking down on immigration, banning abortion, etc. all of which seem to me like "dominating others". So why should I believe you and not them, particularly when the Bible seems to me to endorse their view and not yours?
> The idea that everything bad that happens is our fault is false for every value of "our" other than "all created beings with moral agency".
When I wrote "our" I meant "humans" (wasn't that obvious?) AFAICT Christianity holds that humans are the only beings with moral agency. So I don't understand the point you're trying to make here.
feeling like you're in control doesn't mean you're in control.
True, but "control" is also an ambiguous term. I suspect that to you, the only way for me to "control" what happens to me is to be able to violate the laws of physics. That's not what "control" means to me. To me, "control" means that the causal process that determines what happens to me goes through my brain, and more specifically the "rational" part of my brain, the part that evaluates options according to my best heuristic estimates and decides what to do and directs my actions accordingly. That's the kind of control I care about, and I can have it even if I can't violate the laws of physics.
I'm not sure how this interacts with Dennett's functionalism (feel free to point me to some particular book of his).
Freedom Evolves is his most recent book on free will (it was published in 2003 IIRC). Elbow Room (1984 IIRC) is a shorter and somewhat less developed presentation, but might be a bit more accessible to someone not familiar with his work. Both of those books discuss the concept of "control" as I have described it above.
there is a pathological way to increase the amount of "freedom" which may be consistent with your understanding of free will: simply weaken the desires of most humans so that they only want what the State is happy to give them
This doesn't meet my definition of "control" above, so it doesn't qualify as "freedom" by my definition. That's not to say it can't happen (indeed I think it does happen--not so much by weakening desires in general as by selectively pandering to certain ones and ignoring others, and conditioning people to think of the new set of relative strengths as normal). It's just to say that doing it is not consistent with respecting people's freedom.
The same way you would combat any attempt to influence what happens to you in a way you don't like: by being aware of the possibility and taking reasonable steps against it. It's no different than protecting your computer against malware.
determinism either means there are no unstable Lagrangian points and no 'dual rationality', or that the choice of "which way" is 100% random—not willed.
Equating "random" with "not willed" is a false dichotomy. An algorithm for heuristically evaluating options and making choices could make use of a random number generator and it wouldn't disqualify it as "free will".
I say that the way to truly respect another person's freedom is to put him/her in a situation of 'dual rationality' when I disagree, rather than trying everything at my disposal to make the decision come out how I want.
Saying that the only way to give the other person a genuine free choice is for them to have "dual rationality" is assuming your conclusion. If I can have free will using an algorithm that heuristically evaluates options and makes choices, then so can the other person. As long as I don't try to circumvent the part of their brain that runs that algorithm--just as I want them not to circumvent mine--I'm respecting their freedom. I can give them what I think are valid reasons for one choice vs. another; I just have to let them evaluate those reasons for themselves.
You seem to be presupposing that the only possible kind of explanation which has truth-value is one which is built upon causal monism / monistic determinism / physicalism.
I already told you I was a physicalist. Doesn't that imply that I'm presupposing that?
If you're going to say I shouldn't presuppose it, I should prove it, of course I can't, any more than you can prove the contrary proposition. I'm not a physicalist because I found a logical proof of it. I'm a physicalist because, first, physicalism seems to work--the project of expanding our understanding of physical laws has consistently given us good explanations for new phenomena as we discover them, for at least a few centuries now--and second, because the alternative seems to me to have no predictive power whatsoever, i.e., to not work.
there is no hard and fast specification of what 'science' must be
That's perfectly true. Physicalism didn't come from people specifying in advance that that's what science must be. It came from people discovering that it works: that doing science with physicalism as a methodological assumption pays huge dividends. If philosophers can't figure out how to gerrymander their preconceptions so that it is obvious to them that it would turn out that way, that's their problem. (As you can probably tell, I don't have a lot of use for philosophy as a general rule. Some philosophers, like Dennett, seem to me to be saying useful and important things; but my experience is that they are the exception rather than the rule. I'm not alone in this: many practicing scientists--which I am not, btw--seem to feel the same way. One of Steven Weinberg's books has a whole chapter called "Against Philosophy". Feynman was often eloquent on the subject as well.)
If consciousness operates at the edge of chaos, why could brain states not pass through the equivalent of unstable Lagrangian points
I already answered that: because thermal noise in the brain is too large.
how terribly science does with explaining [self-]consciousness.
That's because science hasn't been studying consciousness very long. Philosophy has been studying it for thousands of years and can't explain it either, so I don't see what gives philosophers any right to point fingers.
At what point will the failure of "more of the same" push us to consider alternatives?
The obvious alternative, the one you are implicitly suggesting, has been pursued for thousands of years. Where has it gotten us? At what point will the failure of "more of the same" of that push us to finally realize that it's not going to get there?
Ah, ok. Now here's a question for you: what are those 0's and 1's made of? If your answer is anything other than "electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions", please explain to me in detail why you think that.
Now here's another question for you: what gives those 0's and 1's the causal powers they have? If your answer is anything other than "the way the electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions are arranged inside the Turing machine", please explain to me in detail why you think that.
And, btw, the answer "a Turing machine is an abstraction" is not responsive. We're not talking about abstract Turing machines. We're talking about real machines that do real work in the real world. You can't make those out of math. You have to make them out of...I think you can fill in the rest here.
physicists are insisting that those in the human sciences ought to consider monistic determinism to be true.
In the sense I already said, yes--that our brains, bodies, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life, are made out of electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions. And I also pointed out that that still leaves a very wide variety of possibilities, because there are so many fundamental particles and interactions in any ordinary object. So this "insisting" isn't much of a hindrance.
The motivations are treated as truly causal.
Ok, now here's another question for you: what are those motivations made of? Again, if you're tempted to answer that "motivations" are abstract concepts, that answer is not responsive. We're not talking about abstract motivations. We're talking about real motivations of real people in the real world. You can't make those out of abstract concepts. You have to make them out of...do I need to complete the sentence?
What of it? The placebo effect means that people's beliefs can affect their physical bodies. Now here's a question for you: what are their beliefs made of?
Can you see the general pattern here? You keep talking about stuff at higher levels of organization, and I keep reminding you that all of those higher levels of organization are made of the same fundamental building blocks. And that latter statement is all that physicalism says. It doesn't say higher levels of organization can't exist. It doesn't say there can't be descriptions at higher levels of organization in which the relevant causal factors are "motivations" or "0's and 1's" or "placebo effect" instead of electrons and quarks. It just says that all those things, at all those higher levels of organization, are made of the same fundamental building blocks. That's all it says.
our confidence in determinism is based on precision & accuracy and it is these things which are neutralized via approximation
I'm responding to this separately because it actually seems to be getting to a deeper point.
First, our confidence is not in "determinism", but in physicalism--the belief that everything that happens, happens in accordance with physical laws. The precision and accuracy of our predictions based on particular models using our best current understanding of those laws is only one of the reasons for this belief. Here are some others:
The precision and accuracy of predictions based on our models in a particular domain increases over time, as we study the domain in more and more detail. Even with models that have been developed to a very high degree of accuracy, it is still possible to improve it further with more sophisticated experiments. A good recent example is the LIGO observations of gravitational waves, which were predicted decades ago but required extraordinary precision and accuracy in many disciplines to detect. And this is in a discipline, GR, where previous experimental tests had already confirmed some predictions to fourteen decimal places.
When we discover new and expanded laws that cover a domain, they also explain why older laws we had discovered in the same domain worked, to the accuracy that they worked. For example, GR not only makes more accurate predictions about gravitational phenomena than Newtonian gravity, it also explains why Newtonian gravity was able to make predictions to the accuracy that it does make them. In other words, it explains how Newtonian gravity is actually an approximation to GR. Similarly, quantum mechanics explains how classical mechanics is an approximation to it and why that approximation worked well in the domain in which classical mechanics had been observed to work well.
When we can't solve the equations of a model exactly, we can still compute approximate solutions; and as we carry the approximation out to higher and higher orders (meaning, computing more and more terms in the approximation), the results get more and more accurate. (This, btw, is why precision and accuracy are not "neutralized by approximation" in the way you are thinking.) The limits on our predictive power in these cases, in other words, are due to limits on our computing power, not limits in the underlying model.
Luke said...
>> As Vincent Bugliosi laments in Reclaiming History, his recent mammoth study of the JFK assassination, “it takes only one sentence to make the argument that organized crime had Kennedy killed to get his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, off its back, but it takes a great many pages to demonstrate the invalidity of that charge.”[25] (The Last Superstition)
Sometimes your comments about Christianity are like that.
> > Why can't theology engage in the kind of successive approximation that is characteristic of science?
> Because theology doesn't have any mechanism for objectively correcting errors, no mechanism analogous to experiment, no answer to the Euthyphro dilemma. (See below.)
When I look in the OT, I see lots of predictions of "there's gonna be calamity if you continue your current course of action" followed almost exclusively by "no you're full of crap it's peace as far as the eye can see; imprison that pesky prophet" followed by calamity, after which you see: "then they shall know that I am God". That's really important for us to see, because humans just *love* denying that their actions are going to lead to bad places. Just look at all the glorying in how awesome Enlightened man (yes, man) was in the decades leading up to WWI.
If you want to step back from the above—which I know can be dismissed as "well there are old wise men from whom we could still learn a few things"—I can go with the ultimate, which is "Can I get inside the mind of the creator of creation?" After all, God wants our minds to be conformed more to his—Is 55:6–9. Insights into how creation has been designed should yield better ability to act in it, right? That sounds awfully testable to me. For example, if a certain theology leads to better research in the human sciences than any alternative (including the "no theology" option), that would seem to be worthwhile evidence.
As to Euthyphro: how do you propose that humans access the Form of Piety?
> > the conquering of the Greek empire and collapse of the Roman empire makes it rather clear that something more than just economic factors are required for science to continue ad infinitum
> No, that doesn't make it clear at all. Much of the intellectual progress made by Greece and Rome outlived the empires that produced it. And science thrives today despite the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization.
Yes, because we have more than just the right economic factors. Although things seem to be getting a bit iffy in some domains these days.
> > if scientists have to practice some set of values in order to do science, and have to practice them better/more articulately in order to do the next stage of science (e.g. interdisciplinary), do those values get assigned anything like a truth-value?
> No.
So truth is discovered while necessarily depending on non-truth? That makes no sense whatsoever.
> You hedged with the word "try". There is no doubt in my mind that you can try. There is a great deal of doubt in my mind that you will succeed. But the way to resolve this question is not to argue about it, but for you to do the experiment and show me the results.
I didn't hedge, I acted properly in respecting the evidence or in this case, lack thereof. Suppose I get results which show that my trying succeeded. What might you conclude? As good scientists, we ought to make some decisions about how we'll evaluate the evidence before the experiment is run, right?
Luke said...
> OK, but you're focusing on that one word and missing the point:
Actually the "begging" thing is characteristic of "worm theology". For a great display of it, see the Godless in Dixie post Evangelical Christianity and Low Self-Esteem. Or check out the Christian Contemporary Music song Canons, with the lyric "I'm so unworthy, but still You love me". Contrast this to what the Bible actually says, e.g. in Job 40:6–14 or where Jacob wrestled with God, or when Abraham questioned God.
I am focusing on "that one word" because gross misrepresentation happens one word at a time.
> on Christian theology, we are saved by grace, not deeds … That attitude is antithetical to scientific progress.
Sorry, but I don't see the connection between works-based salvation and scientific process. Could you make it a bit more clear? BTW, the Puritans believed they were saved by grace yet worked real hard and Richard Hofstadter describes them this way: "the Puritan clergy came as close to being an intellectual ruling class—or, more properly, a class of intellectuals intimately associated with a ruling power—as America has ever had." (Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 59)
> Do you not see the circular reasoning here? God will help us as long as we do what He wants.
That's not circular reasoning, that's how moral agents act. Do you [intentionally] help people who want to dominate others?
> So how do we know what He wants?
Do you think Mt 20:20–28 is ambiguous? Apparently yes:
> Case in point: it seems to me that God totally endorses dominating others (Deu 6:5, Exo 20:3, Exo 20:12, Mat 22:21, Eph 6:5).
How is Deuteronomy 6:5 an example of domination, especially given the choice God provides in Deut 30:11–20? That doesn't seem like God foisting himself on the Israelites. Oh and if you want to see a "you shall have no gods before me [unless you're brain-damaged]", see this nine minute clip from Neil deGrasse Tyson (transcript). We can deal with the other verses you listed if you want.
> Many SI-Christians throughout history have agreed with me …
Dude, the Bible is harshest on religious leaders who claim to be following YHWH. Those who can claim moral superiority have increased ability to turn evil and be more evil than the surrounding nations. That's just a fact of human nature (or moral agents in society). The big question is whether there are powerful internal resources for critique; if we look at Communism for example, there wasn't much. There was no appeal to Justice; for there was no Justice. There was merely the State. Continued …
Luke said...
> So why should I believe you and not them, particularly when the Bible seems to me to endorse their view and not yours?
Easy: I can show you how they (and you) are cherry-picking scripture. Here's another example. Precious few slaveowners in the American South were Jews. So the only way that Jew-targeting law in the OT would apply to Protestants is if they are "Jews by faith". But then any slave who believes in Jesus would also be a "Jew by faith". That means that Ex 21:2–6 applies: manumission every seventh year, unless the slave really wants to stay a slave. Did those slaveowners obey? No. Because they obviously didn't give a rat's ass about doing so. You see this in spades in the Cornerstone Speech:
>> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
So much for Jesus being the chief cornerstone. So much for serving others after the pattern of Jesus. No matter how you read the Bible, you cannot read slavery as being anything nearly as central as that speech makes it. So to call those people SI-Christians is equivalent to me lumping you in with the worst 30% of atheists I've ever encountered. That wouldn't be fair to you. It wouldn't be fair to atheists.
> … banning abortion, etc. all of which seem to me like "dominating others".
Seriously, you pick that one as an example of dominating others? At least give Christians credit for sticking up for the little guy—in this case, the very little guy. Even if you don't see certain human organisms as people, give them at least a little bit of credit. You can always criticize Christians for not caring enough about life at all stages (Francis Schaeffer, who arguably got Protestants riled up about what used to be a "Catholic issue", was adamant about this), but even then, Christians do run some crisis pregnancy centers. They could run more.
I get that there is a hypothesis that banning abortion is just another way to keep them women in their place; I agree that it may be rather compelling in some cases. But there is another way to criticize: take their motives at face-value and point out how their actions are really unintelligent because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit they could be picking. If you just psychologize, then you give the other side license to do exactly that—e.g. pick out where welfare is keeping people [rather] poor and say that Democrats really want that to happen so they can have a stable voting bloc. This is the kind of behavior that makes even the semblance of democracy impossible.
> > The idea that everything bad that happens is our fault is false for every value of "our" other than "all created beings with moral agency".
> When I wrote "our" I meant "humans" (wasn't that obvious?) AFAICT Christianity holds that humans are the only beings with moral agency. So I don't understand the point you're trying to make here.
The serpent in the Garden was treated as moral agent. (It can easily symbolize some non-human moral agency.) There is also 1 Cor 6:3a "Do you not know that we are to judge angels?"
Even with models that have been developed to a very high degree of accuracy, it is still possible to improve it further with more sophisticated experiments.
I should add another item here: our understanding of the laws themselves tells us what new phenomena to look for and how to detect them experimentally. LIGO and gravitational waves illustrate that as well. We would never have tried to build LIGO if it weren't for GR's prediction of gravitational waves, and we would never have known how to build it properly without predictions involving many different disciplines about, for example, how strong the waves would be, how to detect signals of the relevant strength, what other sources of noise could hamper their detection, and how to filter out those sources of noise. The progress in particle physics experiments for the last century or so illustrates the same thing.
Luke said...
Since I need to dial back the posting at least for the next few days, I'm going to cherry-pick some things you've said. I'm really tempted to resurrect my quote-tracking software. Anyhow, your answers to the below should help me give better responses to the rest.
> I suspect that to you, the only way for me to "control" what happens to me is to be able to violate the laws of physics.
Nope; I've been very consistent about futzing at unstable Lagrangian points, which requires infinitesimal force and thus is perfectly consonant with the laws of physics. We seem to disagree on this and there some older tangents probably worth resurrecting which bear on this matter.
> The same way you would combat any attempt to influence what happens to you in a way you don't like: by being aware of the possibility and taking reasonable steps against it. It's no different than protecting your computer against malware.
It's not at all like protecting my computer from malware; I can be extremely confident that the initial install had no malware (other than phone-home), I can check the hashes of software I download, and I can always flatten & reinstall. None of these is possible with humans. To make this kind of like protecting your computer against malware, you'd have to have authorities you trust who tell you to stay away from various ideas and people.
> > You seem to be presupposing that the only possible kind of explanation which has truth-value is one which is built upon causal monism / monistic determinism / physicalism.
> I already told you I was a physicalist. Doesn't that imply that I'm presupposing that?
Why, as a physicalist, must you presuppose that the only kind of explanation which could possibly be predictive is one based on causal monism?
> > If consciousness operates at the edge of chaos, why could brain states not pass through the equivalent of unstable Lagrangian points
> I already answered that: because thermal noise in the brain is too large.
Did you see the parenthetical in "an infinitesimal push (not necessarily quantum)"? I understand what warmness does for decoherence times. I'd be happy to try and consult some experts on this matter.
> > At what point will the failure of "more of the same" push us to consider alternatives?
> The obvious alternative, the one you are implicitly suggesting, has been pursued for thousands of years.
I'm not suggesting philosophy as the sole answer. We are the instruments with which we explore reality; philosophy lets us examine those instruments to see if they're operating logically and to see if they are blinding themselves to empirically legitimate possibilities. You still have to then go and observe.
> Ah, ok. Now here's a question for you: what are those 0's and 1's made of?
It doesn't matter, and that's the point. Neutralizing the substrate could easily allow causal powers to manifest which were stuck in the noise beforehand. If this is false, if the 0's and 1's are *just* approximations, then so is the conclusion of determinism. And I only need determinism to be the tiniest bit of an approximation for a dv model of free will to work. Your focus on heuristics makes that door wide enough, if the incompleteness of physics weren't sufficient already.
> So this "insisting" [of determinism] isn't much of a hindrance.
I suspect you're right, but it did allow Coyne to say "nobody could have done otherwise". Guilt is nonsensical if that's true. (Sadness and regret are not the same as guilt.) How does a woman who was raped confront her victimizer if he couldn't have chosen differently?
I've been very consistent about futzing at unstable Lagrangian points, which requires infinitesimal force and thus is perfectly consonant with the laws of physics.
Ah, ok, that clarifies your position. Then I would say that yes, this is consistent with the laws of physics, but whether it is actually possible in a particular case requires looking at the details--in particular, whether there is thermal noise present and what its average energy is as compared to the energy required for the "infinitesimal force". But ultimately this is an empirical question; if something like this is actually going on in the brain, sooner or later we should be able to see it in experiments, once we can make them accurate enough.
It's not at all like protecting my computer from malware
Of course the details are different, because human brains are designed very differently from our current computers. I only meant that, conceptually, any influence on your mental processes that you don't like is the same as malware on your computer, and the general method for dealing with it is the same: be aware that it's out there and take steps to deal with it.
To make this kind of like protecting your computer against malware, you'd have to have authorities you trust who tell you to stay away from various ideas and people.
You don't need to do that to protect against malware. You just need to exercise common sense precautions, which boil down to: don't run untrusted code with too many privileges. (The question of what code you can trust is, of course, interesting: my answer to that is to run Linux on all my home computers, since it's open source and I can control what's running and what privileges it has. I don't have a choice about work computers, but that's my employer's problem, not mine.)
The equivalent of that for protecting your mind against malware is the same: don't "run" untrusted information with too many privileges. You don't need an authority to tell you what information is to be considered untrusted; in fact having such an authority is in itself a possible malware risk. Yes, I know we humans are social animals and we evolved to give basically root privileges to information coming from certain sources (parents, teachers, priests, etc.); but I view that as a bug in the human cognitive system, not a feature. :-)
Why, as a physicalist, must you presuppose that the only kind of explanation which could possibly be predictive is one based on causal monism?
You're the one who keeps dragging in the term "causal monism". I'm not even sure I know what it means. Physicalism is just what I said: the belief that everything that happens, happens in accordance with physical laws. If that means "causal monism", then ok, it's causal monism, but I don't see the point of having two different terms that both mean the same thing.
If "causal monism" means what I've been saying about how our brains and bodies and all the objects in our everyday life are made of electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions, that's not a presupposition, it's an experimental fact. Our theories tell us that because our theories have been tested against experimental facts, not because we assumed it to begin with. Physicalism itself doesn't tell you what the physical laws are, or even what kind of laws they are. You have to find that out by scientific investigation, as I've already said.
Also, the only "causal monism" in this latter sense that I've been asserting is for our brains and bodies and all the objects in our everyday life. I have never claimed "causal monism" in this sense for the entire universe--that is, I've never claimed that the entire universe is made of electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions. Of course that is false, and I've explicitly said so, though that was quite a while back now in this discussion. We don't even know for sure that we have observed and modeled all of the particles and interactions that are present in the universe as a whole, because we don't know what dark matter is and we don't know what dark energy is; we just know their basic phenomenology.
I must have missed whatever parenthetical you are referring to here.
I understand what warmness does for decoherence times.
If we're not talking about a quantum process, then decoherence times are irrelevant; we're approximating the workings of our brains and bodies and all the objects in our everyday lives as classical. My claim about thermal noise was based on that classical treatment. It is true that thermal noise can also make quantum uncertainty irrelevant, but the thermal noise in the brain is much larger than the level needed to do that; it's large enough to make plenty of classical processes on small enough energy scales unrealizable--at least, that's my belief based on my best understanding of the energy scales involved.
Neutralizing the substrate could easily allow causal powers to manifest which were stuck in the noise beforehand.
Huh? This is backwards. The causal powers of 0s and 1s, in a physically implemented Turing machine, are much narrower than the causal powers of the physical thing it is implemented it on. Implementing a Turing machine on, for example, a bunch of transistors doesn't amplify noise in the transistors; it throws away a lot of noise by coarse-graining the zillions of possible microstates of a particular physical bit into two buckets, "0" and "1". The causal powers of the 0s and 1s are then just the restricted causal powers of the two subspaces of the state space corresponding to those two bit values, which is a very small subset of the causal powers of the underlying physical device.
if the 0's and 1's are *just* approximations
They're not; they're coarse-grained subspaces of the underlying state space. See above.
"nobody could have done otherwise". Guilt is nonsensical if that's true.
It depends on what you mean by "guilt". We've been around this merry-go-round before.
How does a woman who was raped confront her victimizer if he couldn't have chosen differently?
It depends on what you mean by "chosen". We've been around this merry-go-round before.
It also depends on why the woman wants to confront the rapist.
Luke said...
Ok, here's another brief response; I know I'm almost certainly going to miss/ignore things. I'm building up motivation to rewrite that quote-tracking software, especially since you've pointed out some possible looping (repeating something discussed before to sufficient approximation to worry that we're stuck in a Poincaré recurrence).
> But ultimately this [infinitesimal force thing] is an empirical question; if something like this is actually going on in the brain, sooner or later we should be able to see it in experiments, once we can make them accurate enough.
Yep. As I said before, "I'm rather pragmatic at heart." If I cannot see how an idea touches down in reality, I have an incredibly hard time understanding it. I had to drop out university because of that; it's probably one of the most theory-centric universities in the world and I couldn't hack it in the rarefied air of symbol-land.
Now, as it comes to this issue, I suspect one might need to employ both nonseparable causation (nonseparable state ⇔ nonseparable causation) and weak measurement if not interaction-free measurement. I can go into the reasons later, but suffice it to say that any equivalents of Lagrangian points in human thinking near the edge of chaos are almost certainly going to be spread out in space, rather than being a spacecraft flying through a point.
> > It's not at all like protecting my computer from malware
> Of course the details are different
Pretty much everything is different. See for example virus definition files, which you regularly download from an authority. The closest you got was sandboxing but even that doesn't really work because there's no "what if" mode. I can keep going if you want. Also, you didn't address the key issue that humans don't start in a "known good state", while computers can (and that's absolutely key for anti-virus to work—otherwise you can have a rootkit).
> You're the one who keeps dragging in the term "causal monism". I'm not even sure I know what it means. Physicalism is just what I said: the belief that everything that happens, happens in accordance with physical laws.
Wait a second, you wrote ""monistic determinism" (which I would call "physicalism")" in response. The obvious alternative to causal monism is that there isn't just one set of physical laws in operation. Different laws can be active at different times and in different places. We do know that there is a terrific amount that is common, and that is of course key to intersubjectivity. But I don't see why explanations can only be predictive if causal monism is true. Ceteris Paribus Laws seem like they'd work just fine with causal pluralism.
> The causal powers of 0s and 1s, in a physically implemented Turing machine, are much narrower than the causal powers of the physical thing it is implemented it on.
I'm not sure what "narrower" means, given my excerpt of Noam Chomsky. What can't Turing Machines compute or do?
> It depends on what you mean by "guilt". We've been around this merry-go-round before.
I would like to better understand how the term 'guilt' changes on Coyne- and Carroll-CFW.
See for example virus definition files, which you regularly download from an authority.
I don't. I run an operating system (Linux) that was designed from the ground up to be secure, instead of having security bolted on as an afterthought, like another popular operating system that I won't name :-). On a Linux system, the common sense precautions I suggested (basically, don't run untrusted code with too many privileges), are sufficient. That's one of the reasons I run Linux: because I don't want to have to trust any other "authority" with root privileges on my computer, and that's what having an anti-virus program running amounts to.
humans don't start in a "known good state"
That's true, but I already said the details are different. The analogy I was making was at a much higher level.
you wrote ""monistic determinism" (which I would call "physicalism")" in response.
That was a best guess on my part, based on what I thought you meant by "monistic determinism". Based on your statements here, I might have been mistaken; see below.
The obvious alternative to causal monism is that there isn't just one set of physical laws in operation.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do the four fundamental interactions we know of (gravity, electromagnetism, weak, strong) count as different sets of physical laws? If they do, then we're talking about the same model, just using different words.
If they don't, then what happens when things obeying different physical laws interact? The physicalist answer is: you have physical laws describing the interaction. Which means you no longer have different sets of physical laws. You have one set, which can include different subsets with laws about their interactions.
I don't see any other coherent alternatives than the ones above. Were you thinking of one of those, or of something else?
Ceteris Paribus Laws seem like they'd work just fine with causal pluralism.
It depends on what you mean by "causal pluralism". For example, Newton's Laws are ceteris paribus laws; we know that now that we have GR and can see the limits of the domain of validity of Newton's Laws. Does that mean that, if we use Newton's Laws to calculate the trajectory of an artillery shell or a satellite, we are adopting "causal pluralism"? If so, you and I are talking about the same model, just using different words.
If not, then can you give me a concrete example of what you mean by "causal pluralism"?
What can't Turing Machines compute or do?
We're not talking about Turing machines. We're talking about the physical devices that implement Turing Machines. Those devices can obviously do lots of things (radiate heat, make noise, have fluctuating EM fields inside their storage units) that the Turing Machines they implement can't do.
I would like to better understand how the term 'guilt' changes on Coyne- and Carroll-CFW.
This is probably too much for a discussion thread, but the basic idea (which Dennett, for example, briefly explains in his review of Waller's book, linked earlier in this discussion) is that, on a physicalist account of free will and morality, "guilt" is part of an agreement that people can make and assent to in order to enjoy the benefits of living in a civilized society. So it's not a property that you can just "read off" from a physical description, or evaluate by looking at physical laws.
Luke said...
> I run an operating system (Linux) that was designed from the ground up to be secure
Ah, ok. I am used to Linux folks talking about protecting their computers from malware. Now, do you verify the hashes of binaries you download? Do you use SSL to download binaries? Do you have root certificates installed? I'll bet you still trust authorities, albeit not for virus definitions. True object-capability security is cool, though.
> > humans don't start in a "known good state"
> That's true, but I already said the details are different. The analogy I was making was at a much higher level.
That's fine; I'm just saying your analogy has a serious flaw. It therefore doesn't clean up the mess I pointed to, which originally provoked it. Things are not sufficiently simple; if they were, we (the US, the world) wouldn't be in the mess we are. It's kind of like landing inside an asteroid, not realizing that you've actually flown into the maw of a giant space creature. It seems preferable to have ways to detect whether one is not actually on solid ground.
> > The obvious alternative to causal monism is that there isn't just one set of physical laws in operation.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this.
It happens all the time in society: different people live by different rules and they cannot be perfectly reconciled. Sometimes alignment is brought by violence, sometimes misalignment continues until death. This doesn't mean one cannot characterize the rules of one person and compare them to the rules of another. And so, one can have explanations in causal pluralism—nothing I just said depends one whit upon reductionism or rigid determinism.
> If they don't, then what happens when things obeying different physical laws interact?
I don't have anything like a systematic answer to this; what I can say is that people who follow different rules (not physical laws) interact all the time; sometimes well, sometimes disastrously, and sometimes like ships sailing past each other in the night. Note that there is no need for the physical laws to be disjoint; if physical law is as the empirical evidence warrants (IMO) and the way I exert infinitesimal forces is different from how you do (yes I'm presupposing a dv model of free will for this point), that seems like something that could plausibly happen in a shared reality.
> I don't see any other coherent alternatives than the ones above.
There's actually a longstanding problem in philosophy/psychology/theology/post-modernism about how to interact with "the Other", if it's even possible. That concern is understandable if any understanding requires complete uniformity—and I suspect something like that was presupposed by 'Reason' in the Enlightenment. But I see no reason that this is necessarily the case. You just need enough of a common interface (of some sort) and the ability/willingness to stretch beyond your current box.
> We're not talking about Turing machines. We're talking about the physical devices that implement Turing Machines. Those devices can obviously do lots of things (radiate heat, make noise, have fluctuating EM fields inside their storage units) that the Turing Machines they implement can't do.
Granted. But if you don't neutralize enough of those things, you can't get functional computation—or for humans, thought. And once you do enough neutralization, I see no reason to not suppose that causal powers can manifest which were dwarfed by the four forces of physics beforehand. I'm basically arguing the inverse of supercooling atoms to get Bose-Einstein condensates and such. I'm also riffing on Robert Laughlin's idea that the laws of nature are collective behaviors of an underlying substrate.
> "guilt" is part of an agreement that people can make
That sounds a little social contract-ish, in all its fictional glory.
If they don't come through my distro's package manager, most definitely. (If they do come through the package manager, the package manager is doing this.)
Do you use SSL to download binaries?
Yes. (Technically, most of the time it's my distro's package manager that is using SSL, but it comes to the same thing.)
Do you have root certificates installed?
The ones my distro provides, yes. And yes, that is an additional trust relationship that needs to be taken into account. Fortunately, it's extremely rare that I have to install anything that doesn't come through my distro's package manager, and if I do, it will be from somewhere that I have other reasons to believe is reliable. (One good reason not to believe a source is reliable is not providing hashes for binaries, obtainable using a secure channel.) The distro's package manager itself will only download from the particular sources the distro provides.
It happens all the time in society: different people live by different rules and they cannot be perfectly reconciled.
So to you, "physical laws" means "rules that people in society choose to live by"? I'm sorry, but to me this is an egregious abuse of terminology, and it makes it difficult for me to have a discussion at all. By "physical laws" I mean physical laws--the fundamental laws that govern electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions. (And others, but those are the only ones that are relevant for this discussion, for reasons which I've already stated multiple times.) If you're not willing to use the term that way, I'll just have to bow out of any discussion with you that relies on it.
if you don't neutralize enough of those things, you can't get functional computation
Excuse me? You mean that unless I stop the computer I'm using from radiating heat, making noise, and having fluctuations of fields in its storage units, I can't be typing this? That's obviously ridiculous. Are you really thinking about what you're saying?
What you might be trying to say is that the "computation" part of the device has to ignore all these things. That's true. But what you said certainly seemed like a much stronger statement than that. "Ignore" doesn't mean "neutralize".
I'm basically arguing the inverse of supercooling atoms to get Bose-Einstein condensates and such.
I don't understand how this would work. The inverse of supercooling would be warming the atoms up, which destroys collective behavior like Bose-Einstein condensation. It doesn't create some other kind of collective behavior; it just makes the atoms act like an ordinary classical thermal state.
I'm also riffing on Robert Laughlin's idea that the laws of nature are collective behaviors of an underlying substrate.
I'll have to read the Laughlin links you gave earlier. My initial impression is that you are misinterpreting something he said.
Ron said...
> So truth is discovered while necessarily depending on non-truth? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Why not? Discovering the truth is hard. It requires work. So truth is discovered mainly by people who believe that truth has value. Not everyone believes that. Donald Trump, for example, believes the exact opposite, that truth is harmful. And relative to the things that he values, like his personal power and influence, he's probably right.
> As to Euthyphro: how do you propose that humans access the Form of Piety?
You've missed the point. I didn't cite Euthyphro to talk about Form of Piety. I cited Euthyphro to ask the question: is it good because God says so, or does God say so because it is good? (And to make the point that religion has no answer to this question.)
> Suppose I get results which show that my trying succeeded. What might you conclude?
Dunno. Depends on what the results are. The devil is in the details.
> Actually the "begging" thing is characteristic of "worm theology".
Which many SI-Christians subscribe to.
> I am focusing on "that one word" because gross misrepresentation happens one word at a time.
You'll have to take that up with your fellow Christians. I am only repeating what I have been told.
> I don't see the connection between works-based salvation and scientific process.
See above about truth requiring effort to discover, and therefore being discovered mainly by people who believe truth is valuable. If you believe that your salvation lies entirely in the hands of God and that your actions will not influence the outcome there is less motivation to work hard to find the truth. Reading the Bible and praying for forgiveness is all the truth you need. Then you just hang on until you die, at which point you claim your eternal reward at the Right Hand of God.
I am not making this up. Millions of people really do believe this.
Ron said...
@Luke (2/2):
> Do you think Mt 20:20–28 is ambiguous?
I don't, no. But I look at the world and I see Donald Trump, who does not seem to me to be conducting his affairs (no pun intended) in accordance with these words, but nonetheless enjoys overwhelming support among those who self-identify as Christians. Somewhere between Mt 20:20-28 and the actions of the vast majority of those who profess to believe that these are the Words of God there seems to me to be a really big disconnect. Your quarrel is not with me, it is with them. And my question to you is: how do you resolve this disagreement? That is the question to which I say religion has no answer.
Because we are commanded to love God whether or not he deserves it. (And in this God seems to me very much like Donald Trump.)
Love God or die. That's not a choice, that's an ultimatum. (And again, in this God seems very much like Donald Trump.)
> Dude, the Bible is harshest on religious leaders who claim to be following YHWH.
Says you. They will say that they are doing God's work. Again: how do you resolve this difference of opinion?
> Easy: I can show you how they (and you) are cherry-picking scripture.
But they can do the same, because you are cherry-picking too. You focus on Matthew 20, they focus on Matthew 5:18 and Leviticus. Potato, potahto.
> Seriously, you pick that one as an example of dominating others?
> At least give Christians credit for sticking up for the little guy—in this case, the very little guy.
I would if their actions were consistent with wanting to stick up for the little guy, but they aren't. If they really wanted to stick up for the little guy they'd be advocating birth control, real sex education, better support for adoption, including supporting gay adoptions. They would be advocating universal health care and free education. But they do not do these things. They focus their efforts almost exclusively on *criminalizing abortion*. That is more consistent with a motive of wanting to use reproductive rights as a lever to dominate women than it is wanting to "stick up for the little guy."
> I get that there is a hypothesis that banning abortion is just another way to keep them women in their place
Not just a hypothesis. There is overwhelming *evidence* that this is their true motive.
> The serpent in the Garden was treated as moral agent.
And you believe that actually happened? A talking snake? Seriously?
Luke said...
I really do need to get back to bits I haven't addressed, but this is so … addicting.
> If they don't come through my distro's package manager, most definitely. (If they do come through the package manager, the package manager is doing this.)
So as it turns out, you do trust an authority when it comes to how you avoid malware. (Just not for virus definition files.) This is another point of disanalogy between avoiding malware and avoiding subconscious manipulation. At this point I'm afraid I don't find any of your answer compelling:
> Peter: The same way you would combat any attempt to influence what happens to you in a way you don't like: by being aware of the possibility and taking reasonable steps against it. It's no different than protecting your computer against malware.
It's really very little like protecting your computer against malware. (Let me note that you're rigorous on me when it comes to talking about physics.) The rest is rather vague.
Free will that is not resilient to subconscious manipulation is, IMO, not really worth having. I think it's too easy to end up being a pawn of others without realizing it. In fact I suspect that has been done to a great swath of humanity. It's kind of like depriving a child of an excellent education—the child may never know the grievous harm which has been done. We end up settling for something pathetic and to be honest, plenty of humans get stepped on to even get there.
> So to you, "physical laws" means "rules that people in society choose to live by"?
No. I was demonstrating that causal pluralism allows for intelligible explanations. There was a tremendous amount of intelligibility before humans started positing physical laws. If your physicalism prevents you from acknowledging this, your physicalism has an adequacy-to-reality problem.
> You mean that unless I stop the computer I'm using from radiating heat, making noise, and having fluctuations of fields in its storage units, I can't be typing this?
Sorry, I meant to draw in all the complexity of the causal powers explored by physics when I said that much of it has to be neutralized. And yes, that pretty much means EM unless you need radiation hardness for spaceflight or incredible robustness. It is by greatly restricting what is allowed to happen that you can get new behavior. I'm not talking just "ignore".
> I don't understand how this would work. The inverse of supercooling would be warming the atoms up, which destroys collective behavior like Bose-Einstein condensation. It doesn't create some other kind of collective behavior; it just makes the atoms act like an ordinary classical thermal state.
Read up on the von Klitzing effect, aka the integer quantum hall effect. It's been shown to happen at room temperature in graphene. You seem to have some odd (to me—maybe they're 100% scientific) ideas on what the only conditions could possibly be for infinitesimal forces to act near the equivalents of Lagrangian points; I'm trying to get you to either convince me of that or back down on your confidence. But of course that's up to you.
> I'll have to read the Laughlin links you gave earlier. My initial impression is that you are misinterpreting something he said.
If you end up correcting me, thank you. If you end up calling Laughlin stupid, I'll be skeptical. If I end up being right and reasonable, perhaps you will give me a little more credit going forward.
So as it turns out, you do trust an authority when it comes to how you avoid malware.
You're equivocating on the meaning of "authority". I don't trust my Linux distro as an "authority" in the sense of believing whatever they tell me and assuming without evidence that the bits they send me are safe. I trust my Linux distro because I have good evidence that the bits they send me are safe. (That evidence, btw, includes the availability of source code.) And when I see evidence that the bits might not be safe, I switch distros. I've done this several times over the years (I've been running Linux since about 2002, and exclusively on my home computers since 2005.) In fact, even evidence that the bits my distro is sending me are less convenient for me is enough for me to switch distros, well before any kind of security risk.
Free will that is not resilient to subconscious manipulation is, IMO, not really worth having.
"Resilient" is not the same as "immune". You seem to be wanting "immune". You can't have that, at least not in the real world.
What's more, even if "resilient" is sufficient, I don't see how your "delta v" model gives you any more resilience than a deterministic random number generator inside your brain would. So I don't see why you are so invested in that particular model.
I meant to draw in all the complexity of the causal powers explored by physics when I said that much of it has to be neutralized.
I'm afraid I still don't follow, and your use of language makes me pessimistic about the chances that I will be able to.
Read up on the von Klitzing effect, aka the integer quantum hall effect. It's been shown to happen at room temperature in graphene.
Sure. And high temperature superconductivity exists too. None of which addresses the point I was making. There is still a threshold temperature for all of these phenomena, above which they no longer occur. Which means that raising the temperature will make all of these effects go away. But you used the word "inverse", which to me means you're saying raising the temperature will somehow enable some other similar effect (though again it's hard for me to tell because of the way you are using language), which is not what any of the actual evidence suggests.
You seem to have some odd (to me—maybe they're 100% scientific) ideas on what the only conditions could possibly be for infinitesimal forces to act near the equivalents of Lagrangian points
It seems obvious to me. The general principle is that any force used to control something must be larger (preferably much larger) than any random forces the thing is subjected to.
In the case of a spacecraft at an unstable Lagrange point, the control force is the spacecraft's engine and the random forces are things like micrometeroid impacts, the solar wind, etc. There is also some amount of uncertainty in the exact position of the craft or in the calculations of the orbit based on the positions of the Sun and planets. All of those effects are much smaller than the engine force.
In the case of the brain, the control force is whatever is driving cognition--neural firings, for example--and the random forces are thermal fluctuations at a temperature of 310 K. The things driving cognition are ultimately chemical reactions, so the energies associated with them are typical chemical reaction energies, which are roughly two to three orders of magnitude larger than thermal energy at 310 K.
You've only waved your hands about what sort of force would count as the "infinitesimal delta v" you've been talking about, but the very word "infinitesimal" suggests that it would be very small. Your use of the spacecraft example gives a way of estimating how small: the energy associated with the rocket burn, compared to the total orbital energy (kinetic plus potential) of the craft. This ratio is going to be much, much smaller than two or three orders of magnitude. That tells me that the "infinitesimal delta v" model is not a good way of thinking about how free will might work in the brain.
I'll have to read the Laughlin links you gave earlier.
And there is a Kindle edition of his book, so Luke, you just added another item to my reading list. :-)
Indeed, in FQXi: Fluctuations in de Sitter Space he explicitly argues against down-fluctuations in entropy at the quantum level, on the basis that there is no [further] microstructure which can thusly fluctuate.
No, that's not what he's saying. The paper he was describing in that talk is here:
The tl/dr is that, according to his model (which, btw, is not mainstream, it's just one proposal in an area where there currently is no mainstream theory), when we do quantum field theory in de Sitter spacetime, a thermal state is stationary--i.e., there is no time dependence, not even at the micro level. This is in sharp contrast to an ordinary "Boltzmann" thermal state, which if it is in thermodynamic equilibrium is time independent at the macro level--the thermodynamic variables like temperature and pressure don't change--but is time dependent at the micro level.
But the difference between these two cases has nothing to do with there being "no further microstructure to fluctuate" in the quantum de Sitter case. In both cases thermodynamics is formulated the same way: you coarse grain over microstates that all have the same values for macroscopic thermodynamic variables like temperature.
Luke said...
> > So truth is discovered while necessarily depending on non-truth? That makes no sense whatsoever.
> Why not? Discovering the truth is hard. It requires work. So truth is discovered mainly by people who believe that truth has value. Not everyone believes that.
I don't think you've understood my point. I'm not talking about valuing truth, I'm talking about qualities of the instrument which is used to discover truth. That instrument is fractal: it is the scientist, but it's also the sub-discipline, but it's also scientists at large, but it's also society at large because that's where the money comes from and that actually matters quite a lot. Bad instruments lead to bad measurements, or just completely not measuring parts of reality. The qualities of the instrument aren't themselves a correspondence to reality "out there", but if the instruments are in bad shape, that is harmful for discovering truth.
> > As to Euthyphro: how do you propose that humans access the Form of Piety?
> You've missed the point. I didn't cite Euthyphro to talk about Form of Piety. I cited Euthyphro to ask the question: is it good because God says so, or does God say so because it is good? (And to make the point that religion has no answer to this question.)
Actually, I just took the reference to Euthyphro quite seriously and since you gave precious little detail, I had no other good option. To your more articulate version, I'll point out that if God created us, either there are rules on what we can believe regardless of his powers, or he could make us believe whatever he wants about the good. If the former, then there is a Form of Piety which restricts God. If the latter, your question is rendered irrelevant on an epistemic level.
> > Suppose I get results which show that my trying succeeded. What might you conclude?
> Dunno. Depends on what the results are. The devil is in the details.
I see; is my "As good scientists, we ought to make some decisions about how we'll evaluate the evidence before the experiment is run, right?" 100% wrong?
> > Actually the "begging" thing is characteristic of "worm theology".
> Which many SI-Christians subscribe to.
So? Your "our only recourse is to fall on our knees and beg for the benevolence of a non-existent deity" was not qualified to a "many" which could easily fall below the majority. Were I to mouth off about "what atheist do" or "what atheists say", you'd be well within your rights to ask me to specify if those statements are not known to be good generalizations of most (the vast majority of?) atheists.
> > I am focusing on "that one word" because gross misrepresentation happens one word at a time.
> You'll have to take that up with your fellow Christians. I am only repeating what I have been told.
I can do that, but you don't get to hide behind them like a shield.
> If you believe that your salvation lies entirely in the hands of God and that your actions will not influence the outcome there is less motivation to work hard to find the truth.
I'm a counterexample to that, in the flesh. And then there is Richard Hofstadter's analysis of the Puritans, which I quoted above. Indeed, I would wager a guess that I believe there is more truth to be found than you, because I think the human sciences are more worth consulting than apparently you do. And I apparently feel more compelled to expend the requisite energy to go find it than you, at least based on our last in-person conversation.
> I am not making this up. Millions of people really do believe this.
Have I ever denied that?
Luke said...
We've been on the SI merry-go-round multiple times; what's going on underneath? You seem to have ignored this bit:
> Luke: When I look in the OT, I see lots of predictions of "there's gonna be calamity if you continue your current course of action" followed almost exclusively by "no you're full of crap it's peace as far as the eye can see; imprison that pesky prophet" followed by calamity, after which you see: "then they shall know that I am God". That's really important for us to see, because humans just *love* denying that their actions are going to lead to bad places. Just look at all the glorying in how awesome Enlightened man (yes, man) was in the decades leading up to WWI.
There is also the following:
> Switching from the 'fact' to the 'value' side of the dichotomy, perhaps we need to revisit my "Goodness itself has a predictive aspect, but not in the analytic fashion that allows you to write out deterministic equations."—from the thread which inspired this blog post.
You also ignored that. It's like you really, really, really don't want to categorize SI-Christians according to their causal powers, even though that is the *essence* of scientific analysis. I get that dealing with predictions in this realm is much harder than the hard sciences. But unless you want to be like Elon Musk and build technology while trying to ignore the human element as much as possible, you're gonna have to deal with it. Or I guess, go inactive like you claim those people who believe in salvation by grace alone do. (I have no idea how *I* manage to be so active, apparently care more about the human sciences than you, etc. Actually I think I do, but it clashes head-on with your model.)
I'm also sensing that you don't have much of a sense as to the power of internal criticism over external (read Charles Taylor's Explanation and Practical Reason; it's just essay-length), or at least the power of being somewhat intelligent in pointing out contradictions. (I learned that lesson in middle school—there are plenty of contradictions people don't care about, and it might not be completely irrational to behave that way given the hardness if not impossibility of being contradiction-free.) I'm reminded of your desire to see me discuss with a certain class of SI-Christians.
Perhaps it would be helpful to look at what the science says, and perhaps what wise people have said over the ages, about what seems to really motivate people. My contention about Christianity is that it's not just a bundle of hypothetical imperatives and abstract myths, such that motivation can easily happen "as if God exists" precisely as well as "if God truly exists". (I suspect the OT's treatment of idols is meant to get at the difference here, which may only show up after multiple generations—hence my focus on prediction, above.) How about we take our pretty little ideas about motivation and let reality grind off the stupid bits? And maybe we can consider that there are wise people throughout the ages who have figured out some things. Then we can take that and come back to issues like analyzing the motivations of Trump voters.
Luke said...
> Somewhere between Mt 20:20-28 and the actions of the vast majority of those who profess to believe that these are the Words of God there seems to me to be a really big disconnect.
That's probably true since Jesus died on the cross. It's tremendously hard to accomplish—it requires rigorous standards for leaders and followers. But surely you realize that political liberalism is built on that ideal.
> Because we are commanded to love God whether or not he deserves it.
Anyone who didn't want to love YHWH could leave. Are you suggesting that it is always wrong to make any significant values required for citizenship?
> Love God or die. That's not a choice, that's an ultimatum.
But anyone was allowed to question God and go his/her own way. They weren't required to believe God and in fact, eventually almost nobody did. Then they got carried off into exile. Some made the connection, most didn't.
> > Dude, the Bible is harshest on religious leaders who claim to be following YHWH.
> Says you. They will say that they are doing God's work. Again: how do you resolve this difference of opinion?
I would point to Jesus' words to the Pharisees, Ezek 34, and the fact of the Reformation.
> > The serpent in the Garden was treated as moral agent.
> And you believe that actually happened? A talking snake? Seriously?
I guess I should discount the Caltech physics I took which dealt with "spherical cows". I mean, seriously?
Luke said...
Argh, here's a "I don't think I'm as brain-damaged as you seem to be implying" comment.
> You're equivocating on the meaning of "authority". I don't trust my Linux distro as an "authority" in the sense of believing whatever they tell me and assuming without evidence that the bits they send me are safe.
And the use of virus definitions involves blind faith with no decisions based on track record? (If you say that some do, I'll say some blindly trust distros and we'll be back at square one.) My original points stands: there is great disanalogy between protecting against malware and protecting against subconscious manipulation. Probably the greatest point of disanalogy has nothing to do with the authority thing, and everything to do with the fact that (i) one does not start in a "known good state"; (ii) one cannot perform a flatten & reinstall. We could talk about whether a rootkit would want you to accept a deterministic model of free will.
> "Resilient" is not the same as "immune". You seem to be wanting "immune". You can't have that, at least not in the real world.
Nope, I don't think "immune" is an option. What is needed is an ability to model the situation one is in arbitrarily well, so that after enough data collection, one can effect an alteration in course. One also needs enough low-entropy energy and there might be multiple kinds of this (e.g. motivational energy—see last paragraph). I don't see how a deterministic model of free will can guarantee these things. Indeed, it seems like rather the opposite—it seems like the kind of thing a rootkit would want us to believe. Or simulators who want to use us as predictive models to get their way in the real world.
> > Indeed, in FQXi: Fluctuations in de Sitter Space he explicitly argues against down-fluctuations in entropy at the quantum level, on the basis that there is no [further] microstructure which can thusly fluctuate.
> No, that's not what he's saying. The paper he was describing in that talk is here:
From the abstract:
>> We argue that, under certain plausible assumptions, de Sitter space settles into a quiescent vacuum in which there are no dynamical quantum fluctuations. Such fluctuations require either an evolving microstate, or time-dependent histories of out-of-equilibrium recording devices, which we argue are absent in stationary states.
Carroll denies the existence of any such "evolving microstate": "I've also assumed the Everett formulation of quantum mechanics; I'm thinking that the quantum state is the physical thing; there's no sort of hidden variable underneath." And these "out-of-equilibrium recording devices" aren't part of the system. In contrast, the macro-state of entropy in thermodynamics is based on an evolving micro-state of particles; because of the statistical nature of the measurement, entropy not infrequently fluctuates slightly downwards, for short periods of time.
> In both cases thermodynamics is formulated the same way …
I wasn't talking about thermodynamics in both cases. In his FQXi talk, Carroll makes an analogy:
That's why I wrote "entropy at the quantum level". Now, I realize I could have been more precise, but I sense that you think I kinda suck at physics and therefore couldn't possibly have had a valid point. If you still think I'm being brain-damaged on this point after my clarification, I'll go consult some physicists and report back.
Luke said...
Here's another summary post. Thank for this great conversation on free will; I've gotten much further with you than with anyone else. Then again, I'm making use of great advances I made with other folks—standing on the shoulders of giants. I'd like to start off by re-excerpting David Bohm:
>> The assumption that any particular kind of fluctuations are arbitrary and lawless relative to all possible contexts, like the similar assumption that there exists an absolute and final determinate law, is therefore evidently not capable of being based on any experimental or theoretical developments arising out of specific scientific problems, but it is instead a purely philosophical assumption. (Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, 44)
I am very insistent that I am not trying to deny anything that physicists have discovered in experiment. What I contend is that physics is not known to be complete, that there could be further order, and that pace Carroll, that further order could easily be relevant to everyday life. I insist that if there are going to be infinitesimal (not small Δv, but dv) forces which can introduce additional order to reality, we must find the right conditions in which to allow them to manifest. That means carefully balancing the non-infinitesimal forces so that they do not drown out the infinitesimal forces. Such balancing I have described as "neutralizing". The term "neutralizing" here means "to render causally impotent". It's not like EM stops operating, it just becomes irrelevant to the phenomena under investigation—one can "ignore" it.
Now, I admit that I don't have well-developed ideas for how one can carry out the equivalent to spacecraft micro-thrusts at Lagrangian points when it comes to brain states near the edge of chaos. But is that because such a thing is physically impossible, or is that because we have not been asking those questions? I think it's important to remember that the atomic theory of matter was not seen as realistic by many until Brownian motion was derived. If you're going to treat me like venture capitalists treat prospects—show us you can build the thing by showing us a built thing and then we'll give you money—then I may be guaranteed to fail. But you'll also be enacting a behavior which would have made it harder to develop atomic theory. If you can demonstrate a "physically impossible", I'd love to see it. I'm happy to enlist the support of physicists so you don't have to do all the explaining (in the event your demonstration includes a bunch of dense equations).
One thing I'm doing in my push toward an understanding of free will not restricted to the current laws of physics (that is, no other forces allowed) is to ensure that our current science stays falsifiable. In Intersubjectivity is Key, I note that there are two kinds of falsification: (I) contradiction; (II) incompleteness. I claim it's actually much harder to show (II). That's actually what Galileo did; he noticed that there was an in-between state in Aristotle's physics, between fire which goes upward and earth which goes downward. What about tangential motion? I'm no Galileo, but I worry that we humans suck at unearthing (II). We so desperately want to have described everything [relevant], at least at some "fundamental" level.
And the use of virus definitions involves blind faith with no decisions based on track record?
My non-use of virus definitions involves looking at the track record. I can't see any of the anti-virus program's source code. And anti-virus providers have a track record of misusing the privileges they are given on users' computers. Not to mention lying to those users about how effective their anti-virus software actually is. (Anti-virus providers sell anti-virus software for Linux, for example, where it is nothing but a security hole.) Linux distros, or at least the ones I've used, don't have any of these issues.
Probably the greatest point of disanalogy has nothing to do with the authority thing, and everything to do with the fact that (i) one does not start in a "known good state"; (ii) one cannot perform a flatten & reinstall.
I already acknowledged point (i). Point (ii) is valid as well. So what? I wasn't claiming it was an exact analogy. However, you are focusing on these particular points of disanalogy and ignoring the key point of the analogy: you can take countermeasures against subconscious manipulation, just as you can take countermeasures against malware, and the countermeasures in both cases have what I think are useful similarities. I have already repeated the phrase that summarizes those similarities several times, so I won't repeat it again.
If you insist on not agreeing that there are any useful similarities between these two cases, then we'll just have to agree to disagree and we can drop this point.
No, he doesn't. The quantum state is the evolving microstate. The macrostate is the set of values of thermodynamic variables (temperature and entropy are the key ones in his analysis).
In contrast, the macro-state of entropy in thermodynamics is based on an evolving micro-state of particles
These "particles" are actually quantum objects, and the "evolving microstate of particles" is a quantum state of the entire ensemble of particles. I.e., exactly the same kind of thing as the microstate in the de Sitter analysis.
In the classical approximation, the microstate of particles is a set of values of classical variables (position and momentum) for all the particles. But if it evolves in time, the corresponding quantum state evolves in time as well. See below.
because of the statistical nature of the measurement, entropy not infrequently fluctuates slightly downwards, for short periods of time.
Wrong. The fluctuation is not because of the statistical nature of the measurement. It's because the microstate (either quantum state or classical approximation, doesn't matter which) is changing with time, and such a change can, in principle, take it into a region of the microstate space which has different values for the macroscopic variables like temperature and entropy. If this happens, it is perfectly possible for the new value of entropy to be lower than the old one; this is what a "downward fluctuation in entropy" is. (And it is overwhelmingly likely that the continued change with time of the microstate will very soon take it back into a region of the microstate space that has a higher value of entropy.)
By contrast, in the de Sitter space quantum model Carroll describes, the microstate does not change with time at all. So obviously it cannot change to a state that has a different value for entropy or any other variable. That's all there is to it.
As a general comment: I don't know what your background is in physics, but you appear to me to have a tendency to focus on the superficial description in words of physical models, instead of the actual underlying physics. Actual physics isn't done in words, it's done in math, because math is more precise. Physicists try their best to give a reasonably accurate description in words to lay people, such as in Carroll's video, but that doesn't mean such descriptions are a good way to learn or reason about the actual physics. That's why I linked to the actual paper: because that's what gives the math, and what is reviewed by and challenged by other physicists.
I sense that you think I kinda suck at physics and therefore couldn't possibly have had a valid point.
I described why I think your grasp of physics is flawed at the end of my previous post. But I'm not basing my rejections of your points on a general rule like that; I'm basing them on specific flaws I see in your points, which I have pointed out. The general rule I described is just what I have inferred from multiple specific cases of having to reject your points based on specific flaws.
If you still think I'm being brain-damaged on this point after my clarification, I'll go consult some physicists and report back.
I don't think this will be helpful. I have never had a useful discussion about physics by proxy (just plenty of non-useful ones, which is what has given me the opinion I'm expressing). If you can get a physicist you know who is familiar with Carroll's work to come here directly and comment, that would be fine. But it's tough enough to make sure we're talking about the same thing and not talking past each other when I and a physicist are talking directly. Trying to do it with a third party in the middle is going to have too low a signal to noise ratio to be useful.
What I contend is that physics is not known to be complete, that there could be further order
I agree.
that further order could easily be relevant to everyday life
I disagree. And at this point I don't see how further discussion is going to change either of our minds, so there's no point in my view. I'm not telling you not to pursue whatever path you choose; that's up to you. I'm just saying that I don't see any point to discussing it further here, since at this point we're just repeating our positions.
The fluctuation is not because of the statistical nature of the measurement. It's because the microstate (either quantum state or classical approximation, doesn't matter which) is changing with time
If you look at the bottom of p. 5 in the paper, you will see that Carroll describes three kinds of fluctuations. The ones I'm describing here, and the ones that can lead to "downward fluctuations in entropy", are Boltzmann fluctuations in his terminology as given there. Fluctuations due to the statistical nature of measurement are "Measurement fluctuations" and are a different kind of thing.
Ron said...
> I don't think you've understood my point.
Apparently not.
> I'm not talking about valuing truth, I'm talking about qualities of the instrument which is used to discover truth.
And I still don't. What do you mean by "the instrument which is used to discover truth"? When I think of an "instrument" used to discover truth I think of a scientific instrument, like a telescope or a particle accelerator. But then I have no idea what you mean by the "qualities" of such an instrument. So I'm pretty sure I'm not getting it.
> Actually, I just took the reference to Euthyphro quite seriously and since you gave precious little detail, I had no other good option.
Sorry, I was referring specifically to this:
> is my "As good scientists, we ought to make some decisions about how we'll evaluate the evidence before the experiment is run, right?" 100% wrong?
No. But it is still incumbent on *you* to describe a *specific experiment* and explain how it tests a *specific hypothesis* before I can evaluate it.
> Your "our only recourse is to fall on our knees and beg for the benevolence of a non-existent deity" was not qualified to a "many"
There is probably not a single statement that one can make that applies to all people who self-identify as Christians, not even that they believe in the Resurrection or that they believe that Jesus is God. Nonetheless, I think it's fair, in a discussion of the merits of Christianity, to take those things which are believed by a majority of people who self-identify as Christians as representative of Christianity.
> you don't get to hide behind them like a shield.
Why not? Why is it not fair for me, when discussing Christianity, to cite the publicly declared positions of large numbers (millions) of people who self-identify as Christians? In fact, what else do you expect me to do?
> > If you believe that your salvation lies entirely in the hands of God and that your actions will not influence the outcome there is less motivation to work hard to find the truth.
> I'm a counterexample to that, in the flesh.
Yes, but you're extremely rare in that regard, possibly even unique. Do you really want me to start judging Christianity based on the position of a few extreme outliers? Because Christianity has outliers along a lot of different dimensions.
> > I am not making this up. Millions of people really do believe this.
> Have I ever denied that?
Have you ever denied that people believe it? No. Have you ever denied that it is true? You just did: "I'm a counterexample to that, in the flesh."
Ron said...
@Luke (2/2):
Huh?
> We've been on the SI merry-go-round multiple times; what's going on underneath?
I'm not sure what you mean by "the SI merry-go-round". But if you are asking why I take such pains to qualify "people who self-identify as Christians" it is because I do not want to put myself in a position to judge who is and is not a Christian. If someone tells me they're a Christian, I take them at their word regardless of what they actually profess to believe.
> > You seem to have ignored this bit:
> Luke: When I look in the OT, I see lots of predictions
No, I didn't ignore it. But it's irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is that *I* believe that an APK deity (or even merely a meta-oracle) is logically incompatible with free will. (That's what the OP was about, remember?)
I have no doubt that you are telling me the truth when you tell me what you see in the OT. But you telling me what you see in the OT is not going to change my mind about anything because *I* do not see these same things. (And, BTW, many of your fellow Christians apparently don't see them either. See above about you being an outlier. And BTW2 the APK deity whose words these are supposed to be surely *knew* that I would not see these same things, and in fact created the universe in such a way that I would not see these same things. So the fact that I do not see these things must somehow be part of God's plan. And the utter absurdity of all that is one of the reasons I don't believe in God.)
> > "Goodness itself has a predictive aspect, but not in the analytic fashion that allows you to write out deterministic equations."
> You also ignored that.
Because I couldn't think of any constructive response. You think everything God does is good, including (e.g.) forcing people to eat their own children and hardening Pharaoh's heart to extend the Israelites' bondage. I don't. We're just going to have to agree to disagree about this.
> I'm also sensing that you don't have much of a sense as to the power of internal criticism over external
Could be. So what? What does that have to do with whether or not free will is logically compatible with an APK deity?
> But anyone was allowed to question God and go his/her own way. ... Then they got carried off into exile.
That's a very peculiar use of the word "allowed". It's kind of like saying that anyone is "allowed" to commit murder, it's just that they then get carried off to prison.
Ron said...
One more thing:
> I guess I should discount the Caltech physics I took which dealt with "spherical cows".
If you actually had a course at Caltech that mentioned "spherical cows" as anything other than a joke then you should definitely demand a refund on your tuition.
I don't see how a deterministic model of free will can guarantee these things.
"Guarantee" is another of those words like "immune": it means you want perfection, and there is no perfection in the real world. No physicalist model of free will can give you such a guarantee. So if that's what you insist on, sorry, it's not possible.
Luke said...
> What do you mean by "the instrument which is used to discover truth"?
Ahh, I used that term with Peter:
> Luke: I'm not suggesting philosophy as the sole answer. We are the instruments with which we explore reality; philosophy lets us examine those instruments to see if they're operating logically and to see if they are blinding themselves to empirically legitimate possibilities. You still have to then go and observe.
I don't see how you can say that the instrument with which humans explore reality is value-free in its construction and functioning in pursuing scientific inquiry. That is, if I do the equivalent of gene-knockouts on various values, I think the practice of science would be hindered if not halted. (Technically, maybe the result would be to restrict science to approaching one or more "false asymptotes"—progress would be possible, but total progress would be limited to something well below the potential of humanity.)
> Sorry, I was referring specifically to this:
Yes, that's built on a Platonic metaphysic with the Form of Piety as something which can somehow causally interact with matter. To be precise: "___ is pious" ≡ "the Form of Piety has acted upon ___".
> But it is still incumbent on *you* to describe a *specific experiment* and explain how it tests a *specific hypothesis* before I can evaluate it.
Would you like to figure out one together? By myself, I think I'll be at a loss as to what could convince you that "Christianity" (whatever that means) can have true causal power that isn't just "belief in the idea of the thing is as [mentally] causally potent as belief in the thing which truly exists".
> There is probably not a single statement that one can make that applies to all people who self-identify as Christians, not even that they believe in the Resurrection or that they believe that Jesus is God. Nonetheless, I think it's fair, in a discussion of the merits of Christianity, to take those things which are believed by a majority of people who self-identify as Christians as representative of Christianity.
I appear to have predicted correctly:
> Luke: It's like you really, really, really don't want to categorize SI-Christians according to their causal powers, even though that is the *essence* of scientific analysis.
Furthermore, while I'm skeptical that you've described anything other than the majority of US Red State Christians or US SI-Evangelical Christians (and even then I have questions), I'm not sure why it matters if even if you are right. Popularity does not necessarily correlate with truth. The Bible notes plenty of times when the vast majority went evil.
> > I'm a counterexample to that, in the flesh.
> Yes, but you're extremely rare in that regard, possibly even unique.
You have now repeatedly ignored my excerpt of Richard Hofstadter on the Puritans. The more I talk with you about Christianity, Ron, the more it seems like you are grossly generalizing from a group which may be a majority in Red States, if even that.
> Do you really want me to start judging Christianity based on the position of a few extreme outliers? Because Christianity has outliers along a lot of different dimensions.
How many counterexamples does one need for falsification of a hypothesis?
Luke said...
> Huh?
You can click the @Ron link(s) to go to the comment(s) to which I was responding.
> > We've been on the SI merry-go-round multiple times; what's going on underneath?
> I'm not sure what you mean by "the SI merry-go-round".
We often talk about what "some" or "many" or "the majority of some sampling" of SI-Christians believe, as if that is somehow meaningful to the conversation. My question is why/how it is meaningful, given that scientific analysis often proceeds by disregarding human-assigned labels to look for commonality beneath the appearances/descriptions. In other words: commonality in causal powers.
> But if you are asking why I take such pains to qualify "people who self-identify as Christians" it is because I do not want to put myself in a position to judge who is and is not a Christian. If someone tells me they're a Christian, I take them at their word regardless of what they actually profess to believe.
"[T]o categorize SI-Christians according to their causal powers" is not to identify "True Christians™". I think I established this with you a long time ago, Ron—in response to your accusation of No True Scotsman. I may have used the better term "cluster". My suspicion is that if such clustering were to be done, different groups of Christians would manifest different strengths and different weaknesses/pathologies. One might be able to find a causal correlation between clusters and beliefs, especially beliefs defined this way.
> But it's irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is that *I* believe that an APK deity (or even merely a meta-oracle) is logically incompatible with free will.
Ok; it seems to me we tangented quite a lot, but I'll prune.
> But you telling me what you see in the OT is not going to change my mind about anything because *I* do not see these same things.
You know I'm always willing to show you, right? Sometimes it's just basic literary analysis.
> And, BTW, many of your fellow Christians apparently don't see them either.
Experiments needed.
> You think everything God does is good, including (e.g.) forcing people to eat their own children and hardening Pharaoh's heart to extend the Israelites' bondage. I don't.
That's unfair; there are open questions in that thread you didn't answer, which bear directly on what exactly it is I believe. We were in the state of, "If I (Ron) had all the powers, I would have done things differently" and I was challenging that by trying to get you to explain details about how you would in fact have done things. Failure to satisfactorily provide and justify such details is quite relevant to the topic of making an actually working world with certain properties you probably value. Unless you want God to have make an illogical world? I thought you valued logic, exceedingly strongly. (I still do.)
> What does that have to do with whether or not free will is logically compatible with an APK deity?
That depends on whether you'll rigorously engage me on the topic of kenosis (a good search term for the other thread). I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make him drink.
> > But anyone was allowed to question God and go his/her own way. ... Then they got carried off into exile.
> That's a very peculiar use of the word "allowed". It's kind of like saying that anyone is "allowed" to commit murder, it's just that they then get carried off to prison.
Was it God who carried them off to exile? If not, he was making fact-claims about reality and letting the Israelites believe them or not. How is that somehow brutal? On the contrary, he was giving the Israelites freedom via dual rationality.
Luke said...
> Luke: The serpent in the Garden was treated as moral agent. (It can easily symbolize some non-human moral agency.)
> Ron: And you believe that actually happened? A talking snake? Seriously?
> Luke: I guess I should discount the Caltech physics I took which dealt with "spherical cows".
> Luke: If you actually had a course at Caltech that mentioned "spherical cows" as anything other than a joke then you should definitely demand a refund on your tuition.
When I restore the bit you snipped (in bold now), things don't seem so ridiculous as the "quote-mine the theist saying something absurd" version. And I didn't take "spherical cows" to be literal or a joke: I took it to indicate that the physics we were working on was highly abstract and yet meant to ultimately apply to the real world.
I find it really odd that on the one hand, you want to allow "belief in the idea of God" to possibly have precisely the same causal properties as "belief in God who exists", and yet you are uncomfortable with a serpent in a myth possibly 3500 years old symbolizing anything whatsoever. Either (anachronistically!) literal or bust!!11
BTW, I was recently told that Genesis 3 was intentionally taking a symbol of goodness (WP: Serpent (symbolism)) and inverting it. I haven't done the legwork to examine just what the contemporary ideas of the serpent would have been held by the original hearers of the material which ultimately got put in Genesis 3. But this is consistent with things I know about Genesis 1, such as "greater lamp" and "lesser lamp" being used to denigrate the sun and moon gods. You see, Ancient Hebrew had perfectly good words for "sun" and "moon", but in order to ensure that the gods got evicted, it used "greater lamp" and "lesser lamp", instead. But somehow, such symbolic warring is irrelevant to you and you just get to take a dump on it: "lol talking snake you ignoramus". Even though a key thing that Genesis 1 does is take the notion of "divine image-bearer" away from just human kings and apply it to all humans. Screw that shit.
At this point I will re-raise my suggestion to study human motivation together:
> Luke: Perhaps it would be helpful to look at what the science says, and perhaps what wise people have said over the ages, about what seems to really motivate people. My contention about Christianity is that it's not just a bundle of hypothetical imperatives and abstract myths, such that motivation can easily happen "as if God exists" precisely as well as "if God truly exists". (I suspect the OT's treatment of idols is meant to get at the difference here, which may only show up after multiple generations—hence my focus on prediction, above.) How about we take our pretty little ideas about motivation and let reality grind off the stupid bits? And maybe we can consider that there are wise people throughout the ages who have figured out some things. Then we can take that and come back to issues like analyzing the motivations of Trump voters.
You seem to have some really weird ideas about … the laws which govern minds (or lack thereof); such a research project would surely help me see whether I'm the one who's actually weird or maybe that we're both pretty ignorant about issues quite relevant to the [potential] causal powers of religion.
Luke said...
You're right that we seem to be spinning our wheels. At this point, I think I need to rewrite my quote-tracking software to work on Ron's blog and then do a bunch of review. Feel free to cut off the conversation and treat the following merely as something for my reference.
I'm still desperate to find out how the conjunction of the five items below is physically impossible:
(3) with different trajectories being semantically meaningful
(4) where such infinitesimal forces are not reducible to the four fundamental forces (mostly E&M)
(5) given what physics experiments tell us about reality
(Feel free to correct that if I'm wrong—I've intentionally left wide open what those infinitesimal forces might look like. I'm trying to chip away at the problem rather than posit a full-fledged example of a concrete, infinitesimal force even possibly relevant to consciousness. Your point is well-taken that a spacecraft flying through an unstable Lagrangian point is crucially disanalogous to the environment within the brain.)
Now, I realize that you think you've addressed this sufficiently and somehow I'm just not getting it. You're welcome to switch to mathematics if you want. My offer to consult other physicists was actually more for my understanding said "physically impossible", than to … bring allies to the fight. And hey, maybe this is my "in" for better understanding various bits of mathematics I've wanted to learn. I'm really weird in that I like partially deriving how the math has to work from my understanding of physical systems. For example, I saw that Stoke's theorem (at least in three dimensions) has to be true, given conservation of energy, etc. Deriving theorems from axioms just leaves me empty of anything I would call "true understanding". Reality is more real than math[ematical approximations]!
I'm also still confused about how your shift from algorithms and proofs to heuristics (e.g. because of Rice's theorem) doesn't damage the conclusion that [everyday] reality is rigidly deterministic and follows Core Theory (aka Carroll's Big Equation™). If such determinism is simply a coarse-grained subspace of actual reality, then it seems that the door is wide open for Robert Laughlin's organizational laws of nature, which are an instance of the further order David Bohm talks about in my excerpt of Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. If determinism of the kind you've defended is just a way of thinking physicists should adopt that's one thing, but when you apply it to free will and moral responsibility, that's quite another. I don't understand the justification for the jump from one to the other. But as I've said, perhaps I'm simply brain-damaged. If I were to listen to the majority opinion of atheists with whom I've interacted online (the IRL distribution is very different), that is the conclusion I should draw. :-)
Ron said...
> I used that term with Peter:
Ah. Sorry, I've not been following that thread.
> I don't see how you can say that the instrument with which humans explore reality is value-free in its construction and functioning in pursuing scientific inquiry.
I don't believe I did say that. What I said (or at least what I intended to say) was that values cannot be objectively determined to be true or false, they can only be subjectively determined to be good or bad. That's the difference between a value and a fact.
> if I do the equivalent of gene-knockouts on various values, I think the practice of science would be hindered if not halted.
That depends on which values you remove. "Respect for authority", for example, is a value that I believe is detrimental to the practice of science. So is respect for faith. (Both of these values are held in high regard on the American political right.)
> that's built on a Platonic metaphysic
Bah, forget Euthyphro and forget piety and forget all the philosophical blather. Is it *good* because God says it's good, or does God say it's good because it conforms to some standard of goodness that is independent of God? Is it within God's power to create a universe where (say) adultery is not a sin?
> Would you like to figure out one together?
No. I believe that the odds of success are exactly the same as they would be if we tried to build a perpetual motion machine, which is to say, indistinguishable from zero. You are the one who believes that this could be something other than an exercise in futility, and so you are the one who is going to have to do the work.
> By myself, I think I'll be at a loss as to what could convince you that "Christianity" (whatever that means) can have true causal power that isn't just "belief in the idea of the thing is as [mentally] causally potent as belief in the thing which truly exists".
Who said you had to work by yourself? Just because *I'm* not interested in collaborating on this project doesn't mean you have no other resources at your disposal if you need help figuring this out. The world is chock-full of both atheists and Christians, many of whom I'm sure would be happy to collaborate with you on this project if you think you need help.
BTW, you should consider the possibility that the mere fact that this seems to be such a hard problem to be *evidence* that your hypothesis is actually wrong. Convincing me of the truth of true things is just not that hard. Mere humans have been able to convince me of the truth of some truly extraordinary claims. Surely an APK deity should be able to come up with a way of convincing me of His existence, and to communicate that information to you (or to me!) And yet, He hasn't done so. Why?
> You have now repeatedly ignored my excerpt of Richard Hofstadter on the Puritans.
Just because I don't respond to something you've written doesn't mean I've ignored it. But OK, if you insist: yes, the puritans professed to believe they were saved by grace and worked hard nonetheless. So?
> How many counterexamples does one need for falsification of a hypothesis?
What hypothesis is this supposed to be falsifying? The Puritans produced zero scientific progress, and their intellectual descendants are today trying to stop the teaching of evolution and denying anthropogenic climate change. If you want to convince me that Christianity is compatible with science, you are barking up a very wrong tree by citing the Puritans.
Ron said...
@Luke (2/2):
> scientific analysis often proceeds by disregarding human-assigned labels
What??? Where ever did you get that idea? That is absolutely 100% wrong. The first step of the scientific process is to formulate a hypothesis. How are you going to do that without labels?
Now, it is true that some labels are better than others. The choice of terminology is a significant part of a theory. (To quote David Deutsch, "Languages are theories.") The reason I focus on SI-ness is simply because it is easy to measure objectively: ask someone if they are a Christian and in the vast majority of cases they will give you an unambiguous answer.
> You know I'm always willing to show you, right? Sometimes it's just basic literary analysis.
Show me what? There is nothing you can possibly say that will convince me that forcing people to eat their own children is good.
> > And, BTW, many of your fellow Christians apparently don't see them either.
> Experiments needed.
> > You think everything God does is good, including (e.g.) forcing people to eat their own children and hardening Pharaoh's heart to extend the Israelites' bondage. I don't.
> That's unfair;
> there are open questions in that thread you didn't answer, which bear directly on what exactly it is I believe
Huh??? Your beliefs about God are contingent on what I would do if I were God? That makes no sense. But OK...
> trying to get you to explain details about how you would in fact have done things
It's really hard for me as a mortal to speculate on the specifics of what I would do differently if I were APK. But for starters, I probably would not have created hookworms.
> Was it God who carried them off to exile?
If everything that happens is God's will, then yes. Obviously.
> You seem to have some really weird ideas about … the laws which govern minds
Really? Like what? Because AFAIK all of my ideas about the laws that govern minds are pretty mainstream science.
I'm still desperate to find out how the conjunction of the five items below is physically impossible
(4) and (5) are obviously inconsistent, since what physical experiments tell us about reality is that everything is reducible to the four interactions we know (although I would say "built out of" instead of "reducible to").
If you remove (4) from the list, we don't know that the conjunction of the others is physically impossible, because we don't know enough of the details of what goes on in the brain. I just think it's extremely unlikely given the thermal noise in the brain, as I already explained.
I'm also still confused about how your shift from algorithms and proofs to heuristics (e.g. because of Rice's theorem) doesn't damage the conclusion that [everyday] reality is rigidly deterministic and follows Core Theory (aka Carroll's Big Equation™).
You keep on saying "deterministic" where I never said that. Everyday reality might be deterministic to a very good approximation, because quantum uncertainty is negligible, but that's still an approximation.
The Big Equation describes all of the fundamental particles and interactions except gravity, so it describes everything that our brains and bodies and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life are built from. It doesn't describe gravity, and we do deal with gravity in our everyday life, but if you like, we could add the Einstein Field Equation to Carroll's Big Equation to cover that. (I would say we could add Newtonian gravity, since that's a good enough approximation for almost all of everyday life, but since many people's everyday life now includes GPS, and you need relativistic gravity to explain why GPS works, I prefer to just use the relativistic equation.) The Big Equation doesn't describe dark matter or the cosmological constant, but those have no relevance to everyday life.
I don't understand what you mean by "shift from algorithms and proofs to heuristics".
If such determinism is simply a coarse-grained subspace of actual reality, then it seems that the door is wide open for Robert Laughlin's organizational laws of nature
I've gotten through a fair portion of Laughlin's book at this point, and one key thing he says is relevant here: if a given domain (such as our everyday life, or more precisely the Big Equation and Einstein's Field Equation and how our everyday life is built from them) is emergent from something else at a lower level, the laws of the emergent domain will be insensitive to the details of the laws at the lower level. In other words, the laws that govern our everyday life will be insensitive to the details of how the Big Equation and Einstein's Field Equation emerge from something lower down. Carroll says something similar in one of his articles.
That means that, no matter what we find at some point at a deeper level, it won't change the rules of how our brains and bodies and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life work. The way to figure out those rules is to do experiments at the level of our brains and bodies and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life. And as Carroll shows, we have done those experiments; we have looked for any other relevant interactions than the ones we know and not found them.
This is a key reason why physicists are so confident that we have a good understanding of the laws governing our everyday life, even though we don't know how (or even if) the Big Equation and the EFE emerge from something lower down.
As a more general comment on Laughlin's book, so far it looks to me like a mixture of layperson's descriptions of scientific models (and sometimes very good ones) and his own personal opinions. Which is fine since it's not a textbook, it's a popular book for lay people. But it means you can't learn science from his book, any more than you can from any other popular book. At best you can get pointers of stuff that looks interesting, so you can go learn about it from the proper sources, the ones that actually give the mathematical models and the experimental results.
Luke said...
I'm going to abort some tangents; feel free to object.
> > that's built on a Platonic metaphysic
> Bah, forget Euthyphro and forget piety and forget all the philosophical blather. Is it *good* because God says it's good, or does God say it's good because it conforms to some standard of goodness that is independent of God?
How would we causally interact with "some standard of goodness that is independent of God"? Remember that you just got done saying that values aren't (can't be?) objective.
> BTW, you should consider the possibility that the mere fact that this seems to be such a hard problem to be *evidence* that your hypothesis is actually wrong.
The more I research, and especially the more seriously I take the human sciences, the less hard the problem actually seems to be. But I've had the hardest of times getting you to take the human sciences seriously, which makes it especially hard to convince you of anything—other than that I'm weird.
> Convincing me of the truth of true things is just not that hard.
That was not my experience when we were analyzing how much of MLK Jr.'s success was due to chance. That is also not my experience when it comes to you learning how to change people's minds. I am flabbergasted by how much you appear to want to get other people to see different points of view, and how little you have availed yourself of all the science (and wisdom) on the matter.
You also seem to believe quite a few things which I find utterly dubious, such as:
> Ron: If you believe that your salvation lies entirely in the hands of God and that your actions will not influence the outcome there is less motivation to work hard to find the truth.
I understand that a parochial experience among Christians might have convinced you that this description fits, but I doubt you've merely done that; I think you've derived a causal mechanism which falls afoul of your claim: "AFAIK all of my ideas about the laws that govern minds are pretty mainstream science". Perhaps you could explain how mainstream science lets you say the above about salvation by faith alone & motivation to work hard to find the truth? I get that it might offer general laws/descriptions, of which this contention of yours is a specific.
> Surely an APK deity should be able to come up with a way of convincing me of His existence, and to communicate that information to you (or to me!) And yet, He hasn't done so. Why?
I've told you over and over how little value I think there is in someone being merely convinced that God exists. We seem to have a serious disconnect on this matter.
> Huh??? Your beliefs about God are contingent on what I would do if I were God?
No. Your understanding of my beliefs to a level satisfactory to me is contingent on you sufficiently engaging with me.
> > scientific analysis often proceeds by disregarding human-assigned labels
> What??? Where ever did you get that idea? That is absolutely 100% wrong.
You understand the difference between classifying phenomena by appearance and by common causal powers, right?
> > Experiments needed.
What does that (or the other articles) have to do with predictions in the OT?
> It's really hard for me as a mortal to speculate on the specifics of what I would do differently if I were APK. But for starters, I probably would not have created hookworms.
Then you don't know if you're suggesting coherent alternatives. Because you'd be making the same argument in a world without hookworms but with everything else.
Luke said...
You continue this conversation at your own risk; I cannot guarantee I know how to stop spinning my wheels. But I'm used to lots of wheel-spinning being required to communicate well with people rather different from me. With enough work, I have found breakthroughs to be pretty reliable. However, most people don't seem to be interested in that much work, and I don't blame them—this is just a random discussion on the internet, after all.
> what physical experiments tell us about reality is that everything is reducible to the four interactions we know (although I would say "built out of" instead of "reducible to")
I understand that physics experiments show that. What I don't understand is why that necessarily extrapolates to all of everyday life; there is a tremendous amount of everyday life which seems separated from the four fundamental laws very much like the "Barrier of Relevance" which Robert Laughlin describes. I also don't understand why anything which might act contrary to Core Theory (I mainly mean "having more structure than", rather than "contradictory to") at the everyday level would necessarily have been observed in physics experiments.
And yes, I understand that you can slightly weaken 'necessarily' → 'extraordinarily likely'. Given your extreme confidence (and that of Carroll), I don't see that much of a problem with using 'necessarily'. Indeed, it is my understanding that physicists rather enjoy speaking in that way, as if the model were reality for purposes of discussion. My wife tells me this is jarring for biologists who venture into biophysics.
> I just think it's extremely unlikely given the thermal noise in the brain, as I already explained.
I have a basic understanding of what thermal noise is; what I don't understand is why the time-evolution of state in the brain cannot pass through the equivalent of Lagrangian points, such that an infinitesimal push could pick between semantically meaningful (and different) trajectories. That push doesn't have to be localized to one point in space. (If it did, then your point about quantum uncertainty would make more sense—although I'm not sure I'm convinced by it.)
> You keep on saying "deterministic" where I never said that. Everyday reality might be deterministic to a very good approximation, because quantum uncertainty is negligible, but that's still an approximation.
I say "deterministic" for convenience; for more precision see the following:
> Luke: I know that we're very used to thinking that either things really are deterministic to the core, or that whatever is indeterministic is purely random. But how are those not metaphysical beliefs, rather than scientific beliefs? Here's David Bohm:
Even that is an approximation, because what is meant is causal monism, which is but one kind of "deterministic". What I'm trying to do—and you may suggest a better way—is to sharply distinguish between one possible way that causation could happen, and how that leaves open a tremendous number of logical possibilities. Then, I want to see how many of those logical possibilities are utterly ruled out by experimental data and which are still viable.
> I don't understand what you mean by "shift from algorithms and proofs to heuristics".
See your "construct a device that guesses" and "an algorithm for heuristically evaluating". To what extent is the replacement for "deterministic" a logical conclusion which necessarily follows from the data and to what extent is it merely a heuristic guess? How do we … quantify this matter?
Luke said...
> I've gotten through a fair portion of Laughlin's book at this point, and one key thing he says is relevant here: if a given domain (such as our everyday life, or more precisely the Big Equation and Einstein's Field Equation and how our everyday life is built from them) is emergent from something else at a lower level, the laws of the emergent domain will be insensitive to the details of the laws at the lower level.
Yes, which means that at the emergent level, there could be a different Big Equation™ in operation and experimentally, you wouldn't be able to tell. More precisely, at the emergent level, the Big Equation™ could be non-constant within a certain parameter range and we wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. There are some neat papers about what computational resources would be required to digitally simulate our reality, whereby the simulation is only as precise as is needed for what the beings within are doing. That is, the simulation wouldn't have to constantly crank the Big Equation™. If you accept Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument, the line of thinking I'm pursuing might not seem very nutty at all.
But there's another way to understand what I'm trying to do in this thread, and that is discover where the laws of the emergent domain might actually be sensitive to the details of the laws at the lower level. You and Carroll seem utterly convinced that said "where" is far outside of everyday experience. I find that hard to swallow, given the tremendous amount we don't know about everyday experience. But more strongly, I predicate this suspicion on the sharp distinction we draw between 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity', which I can only model as a 100% impenetrable "Barrier of Relevance". But when you go from 99.99% → 100%, you can no longer explain what happens in 'subjectivity' by what happens in 'objectivity'. Take for example the claim that all values are 100% subjective and therefore cannot possibly be true or false. I cannot reconcile that with causal monism.
Yet another way to understand my reasoning is to return to the OP: is there something special about humans' ability to alter their behavior based on models of themselves? There is certainly the weird epistemic barrier: any proof to us that we cannot alter our behavior seems to be exactly the material we need to alter our behavior. The only exception I can see to this is if one is rather devious with said proof—I think there are avenues whereby that would work. It seems just plain wrong to try and circumvent that epistemic barrier and say that human behavior is really determined in a causal monist fashion, given all the approximations which have to be done between the nano/pico/fempto-scale and the macro-scale. (Maybe this is equivalent to Laughlin's "Barriers of Relevance".)
To your final comment on Laughlin's book, it seems obvious that he's offering his [expert!] scientific opinions, as he is suggesting that there is structure undergirding the Big Equation. He's going beyond what the data currently indicate. Perhaps what I like most is how often he says experiment throws curve balls at the theoreticians. Reality is so often more complex than our pictures of it. I am very concerned about prematurely cutting off lines of perfectly logically valid inquiry. But of course, possible ⇏ probable. That's where expert scientific judgment is required—we know more than we can say.
BTW, I did have a chance to learn the equations, probably at the most theory-intensive university in the world (Caltech). I couldn't hack it, because I cannot breathe the ethereal air of symbol-land for too long before dunking my head in the waters of practicality for a while. It's probably a blessing and a curse.
there is a tremendous amount of everyday life which seems separated from the four fundamental laws very much like the "Barrier of Relevance" which Robert Laughlin describes.
The Barrier of Relevance (which is indeed a useful concept) does not mean new building blocks get introduced. Everything is still built from the same underlying things (in this case, electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions). It's just that it is not possible to figure out what the laws governing the underlying things predict, if you put enough underlying things together in a sufficiently complex configuration. The "reductionist" model Laughlin is criticizing here assumes that this is just a matter of computing power: a few more cycles of Moore's Law and it will be taken care of, no problem. Laughlin's point is that in some cases, this won't happen, because of something much like sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaotic dynamics.
I also don't understand why anything which might act contrary to Core Theory (I mainly mean "having more structure than", rather than "contradictory to") at the everyday level would necessarily have been observed in physics experiments.
Acting "contrary to" Core Theory does not mean "obeying laws that look different from the Big Equation". Fluids obey the laws of hydrodynamics, which are expressed in equations that look very different from the Big Equation. But fluids are still made of atoms or molecules that are made from electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions.
The real point Laughlin is making when he discusses emergence is that, because the emergent laws are insensitive to the details of the underlying levels, you can't tell what the underlying levels are just by looking at the emergent laws. For example, you can't tell what a fluid is made of by looking at the laws of hydrodynamics. You have to actually get down to the underlying level in experiments. We don't know fluids are made of atoms and molecules from the laws of hydrodynamics. We know it by doing other experiments (for example, the ones on Brownian motion, or the ones Avodagro built his original hypothesis on) which probe the underlying level.
By the same token, if you want to know what our brains, bodies, and all the objects in our everyday life are made of, there's no point in looking at the laws that describe their behavior at that level--at least not if those laws are emergent in Laughlin's sense (and I think they are). You have to do experiments that probe the underlying level. That's what physicists have done, and that's what my claim about what our brains, bodies, and all the objects in our everyday life are made of is based on.
On the other hand, if you want to know what laws govern our brains, bodies, and all the objects in our everyday life, at that level, looking at the Big Equation is not going to be very helpful. If there is indeed a Barrier of Relevance in between, then looking at the Big Equation will never be helpful. But that does not mean our brains, bodies, and all the objects in our everyday life aren't made of the stuff the Big Equation describes.
See your "construct a device that guesses" and "an algorithm for heuristically evaluating". To what extent is the replacement for "deterministic" a logical conclusion which necessarily follows from the data
It isn't. You are the one who keeps insisting on logical conclusions; I never have. You seem to want free will to be a logical necessity based on some fundamental law. It isn't. It's a heuristic capability of our brains that is not guaranteed to work. Just like a chess playing computer's ability to reach checkmate is a heuristic property of its program that is not guaranteed to work. There is no way to logically deduce this property from the program. You have to watch it in action.
Ron said...
> I'm going to abort some tangents; feel free to object.
Fine with me.
> How would we causally interact with "some standard of goodness that is independent of God"?
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, because the answer seems so obvious that I'm insulting your intelligence with this answer, but here goes: first, we (humans) *choose* the standard (i.e. we cause the standard to become the standard) and then we *apply* the standard to judge and influence our actions and the actions of others. Building codes, for example, are standards of goodness that are independent of God. Also, evolution imposes certain constraints on standards of goodness because any standard of goodness that is not an evolutionarily stable strategy will tend to die out (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers#Celibacy_and_children)
Is that the answer you were looking for?
> I've had the hardest of times getting you to take the human sciences seriously
I have no idea what you mean by "the human sciences". Humans are the only entities in the known universe doing science so all science is "human science". Do you mean psychology and sociology? I take that very seriously, especially psychophysics. But the sad fact of the matter is that a lot of the work in the psychology and sociology (and economics) just isn't very good.
Is there something specific you want me to take more seriously than I do?
> > Convincing me of the truth of true things is just not that hard.
> That was not my experience when we were analyzing how much of MLK Jr.'s success was due to chance.
What??? In that case I conceded that you were right and I was wrong. What more do you want?
> I am flabbergasted by how much you appear to want to get other people to see different points of view, and how little you have availed yourself of all the science (and wisdom) on the matter.
I confess I'm not a good marketeer. We can't all be good at everything. (I think one of the reasons I'm not a good marketeer is that I'm not willing to do what it takes to be a good marketeer, which is to lie a lot. Donald Trump is an *excellent* marketeer, a true master of the craft. But I would vastly prefer to fade away into obscurity than to be even a little bit like him.)
> Perhaps you could explain how mainstream science lets you say the above about salvation by faith alone & motivation to work hard to find the truth?
I don't need to see a peer-reviewed scientific study to know that if I hit you in the head as hard as I can with a baseball bat, you will probably suffer serious injury. Likewise, I don't need to see a peer-reviewed scientific scientific study to know that if someone believes that there is an infinite reward waiting for them in the afterlife, that this will make them less likely to try to improve their lot here on earth.
Ron said...
@Luke (2/2):
> I've told you over and over how little value I think there is in someone being merely convinced that God exists.
The operative word there being *merely*. You place a great deal of value on the words of the Bible. But the value of those words is highly contingent on their provenance: when deciding how to apply those words to your life, it really *matters* whether the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, or if it's just another work of human literature. So the question of whether God exists matters, even if it is not the only thing that matters.
> We seem to have a serious disconnect on this matter.
Do we? Do you actually disagree with anything I said in the previous paragraph?
> You understand the difference between classifying phenomena by appearance and by common causal powers, right?
No. Seriously, no, I have no idea what you are talking about.
> What does that (or the other articles) have to do with predictions in the OT?
You elided the crucial context. We weren't talking about predictions in the OT, we were talking about:
> > And, BTW, many of your fellow Christians apparently don't see them either.
> Experiments needed.
where "them" refers to "the things you see in the OT", and specifically, the idea that the OT discourages dominating other people.
> Then you don't know if you're suggesting coherent alternatives.
Yes, I already conceded that, didn't I? I'm a mere mortal, so it's not possible for me to know what I would do in a hypothetical world where I was God, and I knew things that I don't currently know. (But that does not prevent me from being very confident that if I had God's super-powers I could improve on *this* world.)
> you'd be making the same argument in a world without hookworms but with everything else.
No, because in that world *I would be God*, and so I would (presumably) know things that I do not know in this world. My house cleaning might start with hookworms, but I doubt very much that it would end there.
at the emergent level, there could be a different Big Equation™ in operation and experimentally, you wouldn't be able to tell.
Not if you just look at the behavior at the emergent level, no. But we have taken apart brains and bodies (in autopsies) and objects used in everyday life, and done experiments to figure out what they are made of. Your claim here amounts to saying that they could be made of something else when aren't taking them apart but just looking at their behavior at the emergent level. That means you are denying the principle of induction, and in that case all bets are off; we can't conclude anything.
And to be clear, I don't think Laughlin is making any sort of claim like the one you are making here. He says repeatedly in his book that emergence doesn't change the underlying level or make it no longer be true when emergent behavior is present. In your terminology, I think he would say (and I would agree) that emergent behavior--even when a Barrier of Relevance is involved--is perfectly consistent with "causal monism".
Yet another way to understand my reasoning is to return to the OP: is there something special about humans' ability to alter their behavior based on models of themselves?
You have experience with programming, right? So maybe you could ask yourself: could you program a computer to alter its behavior based on its model of itself? I take it you would agree that computers can be explained in terms of "causal monism", right?
Ron said...
> the laws that govern our everyday life will be insensitive to the details of how the Big Equation and Einstein's Field Equation emerge from something lower down.
@Peter: This is a really crucial point, and I wanted to thank you for making it.
@Luke: This is a really crucial point. You often cite the incompatibility of GR and QFT to support your argument that science is somehow fundamentally deficient or something like that (I apologize if I'm mischaracterizing your position with my choice of words). But this is wrong. Even though we don't know the Ultimate Answer yet, we do know a great deal about what the Ultimate Answer can possibly look like. The difference between the Right Answer and the Wrong Answer will manifest themselves near the event horizons of black holes, and maybe (if we're lucky) in high-energy particle accelerators, but nowhere else. Certainly not in human brains.
Luke said...
> The Barrier of Relevance (which is indeed a useful concept) does not mean new building blocks get introduced.
It does not necessarily imply that new building blocks get introduced. What I want to know is why it is physically impossible for new building blocks to exist above Barriers of Relevance. At least physically impossible given what experiments tell us (I keep saying "experiments" to discourage too much extrapolation). By the way, "new building blocks" can be a great number of things. Let me cue off of another Nobel laureate, Ilya Prigogine:
>> In The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose states, "It is our present lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics that prevents us from coming to grips with the concept of 'mind' in physical or logical terms."[19] We believe that Penrose is right: We need a new formulation of the fundamental laws of physics. The evolutionary aspects of nature have to be expressed in terms of the basic laws of physics. Only in this way can we give a satisfactory answer to Epicurus' dilemma. The reasons for indeterminism, for temporal asymmetry, must be rooted in dynamics. Formulations that do not contain these features are incomplete, exactly as would be formulations of physics that ignore gravitation or electricity. (The End of Certainty, 16)
Here's a specific:
>> Is this difficulty merely a practical one? Yes, if we consider that trajectories have now become uncomputable. But there is more: Probability distribution permits us to incorporate within the framework of the dynamical description the complex microstructure of the phase space. It therefore contains additional information that is lacking at the level of individual trajectories. As we shall see in Chapter 4, this has fundamental consequences. At the level of distribution functions ρ, we obtain a new dynamical description that permits us to predict the future evolution of the ensemble, including characteristic time scales. (The End of Certainty, 37)
Prigogine was not proposing a new particle to add to "electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic interactions". But he is proposing something new, something not contained in the Big Equation™, which seems relevant to "everyday life".
> By the same token, if you want to know what our brains, bodies, and all the objects in our everyday life are made of, there's no point in looking at the laws that describe their behavior at that level--at least not if those laws are emergent in Laughlin's sense (and I think they are).
But then why do conclusions of causal monism at the substrate-level transfer seamlessly to the emergent-level? Remember, a core contention of Carroll and Coyne and you is that we ought to do that transfer when it comes to thinking about free will and moral responsibility. That "Barrier of Relevance" seems curiously permeable in this one respect.
Luke said...
> You are the one who keeps insisting on logical conclusions; I never have.
When one becomes so confident in a thing that one is willing to write Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood, the difference between a probabilistic formulation of "almost certainly the case" and a logical formulation of "certainly the case" becomes very small. I can expand on this if you want—I've observed for a long time what a shift from [Aristotelian] logic to probabilistic inference does and does not entail in discussions.
> You seem to want free will to be a logical necessity based on some fundamental law.
It's more that free will seems to have a fundamental connection to falsifiability. I'm not willing to give up on falsifiability.
> It's a heuristic capability of our brains that is not guaranteed to work.
I get this. But somehow, you have incredible confidence in the causal monism/physicalism output of said heuristic capability. Indeed, that confidence seems so high that the difference between "99.9999% probable" and "logically the case" seems academic.
Luke said...
> > at the emergent level, there could be a different Big Equation™ in operation and experimentally, you wouldn't be able to tell.
> Not if you just look at the behavior at the emergent level, no. But we have taken apart brains and bodies (in autopsies) and objects used in everyday life, and done experiments to figure out what they are made of. Your claim here amounts to saying that they could be made of something else when aren't taking them apart but just looking at their behavior at the emergent level. That means you are denying the principle of induction, and in that case all bets are off; we can't conclude anything.
When you take apart brains and bodies, are they conscious? Or is consciousness a property which is gone by the time you do the taking apart? If it's actually gone, then you are not studying "the same thing". Something crucial is gone, and that something is absolutely required for the topic of the OP (free will).
I don't hold to the principle of induction and neither does Ron. That doesn't mean we can't extrapolate from the known to the unknown; science wouldn't be possible if we didn't do that. But we must be cautious when we extrapolate. As a faculty member at Caltech put it, "The difference between a good scientist and a great scientist is that the latter remembers the original data as well as the resultant equation." All of my experience points to his statement being true. As another faculty member at Caltech put it—this was the spring before he got a Nobel Prize in physics—a critical stage in scientific maturity is to be able to hold two apparently contradictory ideas in one's mind without immediate ejecting one of them. I think he was riffing on F. Scott Fitzgerald:
>> Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. (The Crack-Up)
I would connect that to dual rationality. :-D So some of my confidence, which you seem to think is anti-scientific, comes from my best understanding of some of the world's best scientists. I am fully aware of how risky it is to question the scientific orthodoxy in the way I do; I realize how unlikely I am to hit upon something which would help us understand reality more deeply. For most people, it is much more effective to swallow the scientific orthodoxy whole, do experiments, and merely pay attention to where they deviate from orthodoxy. However, I do not think the practice of science can survive solely on that mindset. I believe—based on science—that sometimes we have to get patterns going in our consciousness before we can observe them out in reality. I can expand upon this if you'd like, although I first suggest checking out that link if your curiosity is piqued.
Luke said...
> And to be clear, I don't think Laughlin is making any sort of claim like the one you are making here.
I see him not as making claims but opening doors which you have slammed shut [with extremely high probability]. I think we need to talk about just how impenetrable "Barriers of Relevance" are, before either of us can know that with sufficiently high probability. (See, I can say that instead of "with certainty".) If changes in the substrate are shielded at the emergent level, are they shielded 100%? Or are they merely shielded to quite a few decimal places? Because to pick a trajectory at an unstable Lagrangian point, how small a change is required?
> In your terminology, I think he would say (and I would agree) that emergent behavior--even when a Barrier of Relevance is involved--is perfectly consistent with "causal monism".
Sure. But that's not the question; the question is whether collective laws of nature has the potential—not necessity—to destabilize causal monism.
Luke said...
> > Yet another way to understand my reasoning is to return to the OP: is there something special about humans' ability to alter their behavior based on models of themselves?
> You have experience with programming, right?
Extensive. I have limited understanding of theory of computation. I know, for example, that any Turing machine can "print own description". I forget the precise details and a quick googling failed. I'm also aware of Thomas Breuer's The Impossibility of Accurate State Self-Measurements (pdf), although that of course applies to quantum systems and there are arguments that nothing important about consciousness or free will can possibly be that kind of quantum.
> So maybe you could ask yourself: could you program a computer to alter its behavior based on its model of itself? I take it you would agree that computers can be explained in terms of "causal monism", right?
Computers can, yes. If you want to say that all human thinking is Turing-powerful or less (e.g. an FSA), I will ask you for how falsifiable that model is. More precisely—because Ron and I have discussed this point at length—I want to know how restrictive the claim "all human thinking is Turing-powerful or less" is in comparison to F = GmM/r^2. In the latter case, many possibilities we can easily see happening in our reality are ruled out (to plenty of decimal places). The claim that human thinking is no more than Turing-powerful doesn't seem to be nearly as falsifiable.
For ideas on an alternative to how to think of human thinking, see Tim Van Gelder's 1995 Journal of Philosophy article What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?. He suggests that dynamical systems are not necessarily reducible to Turing machines, although they can be simulated by Turing machines to arbitrary precision. That's fine as long as infinitesimal forces cannot pick between semantically meaningful trajectories. :-)
Ron said...
> The claim that human thinking is no more than Turing-powerful doesn't seem to be nearly as falsifiable.
That claim is *trivially* falsifiable. Any computer that is more powerful than a TM would be able to perform a large number of very specific tasks that a TM can't (e.g. prove any mathematical theorem in a finite amount of time). Exhibiting a human that can perform any one of these tasks would falsify the claim
Another way to falsify is would be to exhibit a process going on inside a human brain that affects its I/O behavior but cannot be modeled by a TM. If you were to show, for example, that the human brain really was a quantum computer -- i.e. that superpositions of entangled states really did affect its I/O behavior in ways that violate the Bell inequalities -- that would falsify the claim.
Luke said...
> > How would we causally interact with "some standard of goodness that is independent of God"?
> I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, because the answer seems so obvious that I'm insulting your intelligence with this answer, but here goes: first, we (humans) *choose* the standard (i.e. we cause the standard to become the standard) and then we *apply* the standard to judge and influence our actions and the actions of others.
But that doesn't resolve the Euthyphro dilemma, that just picks one of the horns and ignores the other. Also, what's the difference between us choosing the standard and it being chosen for us, on a physicalist construal of reality?
> > I've had the hardest of times getting you to take the human sciences seriously
> I have no idea what you mean by "the human sciences".
Sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc. Science which would help you understand other humans and how to communicate well with them. This includes getting them to see other points of view instead of being forever stuck in their own. You have expressed frustration at failing to accomplish this. I attempted to provide you with resources to overcome that failure; my attempt failed, miserably. I guess that could be because I'm brain-damaged.
> But the sad fact of the matter is that a lot of the work in the psychology and sociology (and economics) just isn't very good.
Yeah, see Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research, which among other things points out the 6/53 reproducibility rate Amgen experienced when examining premier research on cancer.
But do you think you yourself can do better than the "failing" human sciences? Sorry, couldn't resist. Are you smarter than the results of Converse 1964? (BTW, those results probably apply to theological beliefs as well as political-ideological beliefs. That should cause us to be cautious about inferring causal powers from such beliefs!)
Luke said...
> > > Convincing me of the truth of true things is just not that hard.
> > That was not my experience when we were analyzing how much of MLK Jr.'s success was due to chance.
> What??? In that case I conceded that you were right and I was wrong. What more do you want?
You attributed more to chance than I did. And you attributed much more limitation to circumstances of chance (such as they are) than I did.
> > I am flabbergasted by how much you appear to want to get other people to see different points of view, and how little you have availed yourself of all the science (and wisdom) on the matter.
> I confess I'm not a good marketeer. We can't all be good at everything.
I don't think it's merely a matter of marketing and I cannot believe you are that incapable of learning, or that learning would be as painful/onerous as you think. So what I see is a massive disparity between something you say is important to you, and the [lack of] [scientific] effort I see you putting into it.
> (I think one of the reasons I'm not a good marketeer is that I'm not willing to do what it takes to be a good marketeer, which is to lie a lot. …)
Have empirical results from the human sciences convinced you that this is, with extremely high probability, the only viable option?
> I don't need to see a peer-reviewed scientific study to know that if I hit you in the head as hard as I can with a baseball bat, you will probably suffer serious injury. Likewise, I don't need to see a peer-reviewed scientific scientific study to know that if someone believes that there is an infinite reward waiting for them in the afterlife, that this will make them less likely to try to improve their lot here on earth.
Then why did the Apostle Paul try so hard? That makes no sense on your model. Zero. Nada. Also there is 1 Cor 3:10–15—I guess we just ignore it? Also, let's ignore 1 Cor 15:58. Why would our "labor" matter one whit, on your account? I mean, doesn't each follower of Jesus get precisely the same infinity of awesome regardless of anything [s]he did in life—other than assent to some propositions about God's existence? But perhaps I am running up against what you think the majority (of some subset … which one I'm not quite sure, other than something like "Red States") of SI-Christians believe. Maybe we should add those verses to the list of things I ask if we ever get to do that interview with you being a fly on the wall.
What does it mean to "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness"? I thought people just had to believe and then they were done and could do whatever the hell they want?
Luke said...
> > I've told you over and over how little value I think there is in someone being merely convinced that God exists. →
> The operative word there being *merely*. You place a great deal of value on the words of the Bible. But the value of those words is highly contingent on their provenance: when deciding how to apply those words to your life, it really *matters* whether the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, or if it's just another work of human literature. So the question of whether God exists matters, even if it is not the only thing that matters.
Are you aware of how, for a paradigm shift in science to take place, a whole lot of work has to be done and it's only after a certain cumulative threshold has been crossed before very many people take it seriously? That is, one cannot just show superiority on one point and get the paradigm shift to be massive accepted. Well, I claim the same thing happens with Christianity and in particular, the mere belief in God is of little cumulative value. Even the demons believe. They're still demons! (Unless you just think that's completely unrealistic, that if demons believed in God's mere existence, they'd stop being demons. But then surely you'd be denying the fact/value dichotomy and I know you're highly resistant to doing that.)
> > ← We seem to have a serious disconnect on this matter.
> [1] Do we? [2] Do you actually disagree with anything I said in the previous paragraph?
[1] Yes. [2] I don't think so, but see my response to that paragraph, above.
> > You understand the difference between classifying phenomena by appearance and by common causal powers, right?
> No. Seriously, no, I have no idea what you are talking about.
Do you know what the term "judging by appearances" means?
Did I? See: "> Luke: When I look in the OT, I see lots of predictions".
> where "them" refers to "the things you see in the OT", and specifically, the idea that the OT discourages dominating other people.
That wasn't as close, contextually, as the predictions thing. But we can switch to the domination thing if you want—on the condition that you're willing to compare the ancient Israelites to surrounding nations.
Luke said...
> > Then you don't know if you're suggesting coherent alternatives.
> Yes, I already conceded that, didn't I? I'm a mere mortal, so it's not possible for me to know what I would do in a hypothetical world where I was God, and I knew things that I don't currently know. (But that does not prevent me from being very confident that if I had God's super-powers I could improve on *this* world.)
History shows that when humans get more powers, they often screw things up. So I just don't see the evidence for your confidence. Indeed, I think this is one thing that belief in original sin prevents: exceedingly high confidence in one's ability to massively improve the world "if only I had the power". In massive contrast to your point of view, I don't think any of us has more power than [s]he has because if we did given our current moral status, we'd actually do more damage and less good. We need to become better before it is safe to entrust us with more. I believe strongly enough in my non-awesomeness to say that. Perhaps you think you are that much better than I. After all, maybe we just massive disagree on quality metrics. I, for example, think it is absolutely wicked to lie to people about the US being anything like a democracy or representative republic when it isn't.
> No, because in that world *I would be God*, and so I would (presumably) know things that I do not know in this world. My house cleaning might start with hookworms, but I doubt very much that it would end there.
I don't trust your ability to properly simulate in your finite mind, what you'd be like with all the powers and all the wisdom. I just can't take your "presumably" seriously as things stand. Now, if you were to show that, roughly, as you increase in wisdom and power and knowledge from where you are at now, you are able to progressively make reality better and better without any sufficiently negative side-effects, I might be willing to trust you on some extrapolation. But if somehow there's a massive jump discontinuity, that you have to have all the powers before that happens, I'm going to remain extremely skeptical. I think the evidence warrants that.
By the way, I don't particularly fault you for thinking that you can sufficiently simulate infinitude with finitude. That seems to be the fad of modernity. Francis Fukuyama epitomizes that behavior with his 1992 The End of History and the Last Man (18,000 'citations'). He reminds me of all the smart people in the decades leading up to WWI, glorying in how awesome humans are. This attitude of awesomeness is in our societal DNA. We know we're not necessarily awesome in the world we've actually brought into existence, but we're pretty sure our concepts are awesome. If only we had all the powers.
In contrast to the above attitude, the Bible makes it clear that God abhors pride and arrogance. Indeed, in God's response to Job, he says that if Job can abase the proud and conquer the wicked, then he will acknowledge that Job's "own right hand can save [him]". (Job 40:6–14) I think that means that part of attaining god-hood—to the extent that a finite being can do so—is shredding pride and arrogance. Now, how exactly does one do this while not being proud & arrogant? Maybe Jesus provided a clue-stick or three …
Luke said...
> You often cite the incompatibility of GR and QFT to support your argument that science is somehow fundamentally deficient or something like that (I apologize if I'm mischaracterizing your position with my choice of words).
> Even though we don't know the Ultimate Answer yet, we do know a great deal about what the Ultimate Answer can possibly look like. The difference between the Right Answer and the Wrong Answer will manifest themselves near the event horizons of black holes, and maybe (if we're lucky) in high-energy particle accelerators, but nowhere else. Certainly not in human brains.
I understand that you really, truly, deeply believe the bit I put in bold. And yet, I personally know a tenured faculty member at one of the world's most prestigious research institutions who is working on a "somewhere else". So whom is it most rational for me to believe? Well, given that I've seen nothing like what I would consider a rigorous proof of the bold (and by "rigorous proof", I mean something that delivers 99.99% confidence), I'm going to disbelieve you. Now, you're welcome to put forth a more formal argument of the bold. Maybe that will convince me. Or maybe I'm too badly brain-damaged and this is a massive waste of your time and @Peter's time.
> > The claim that human thinking is no more than Turing-powerful doesn't seem to be nearly as falsifiable.
> That claim is *trivially* falsifiable. Any computer that is more powerful than a TM would be able to perform a large number of very specific tasks that a TM can't (e.g. prove any mathematical theorem in a finite amount of time). Exhibiting a human that can perform any one of these tasks would falsify the claim
String theory is also trivially falsifiable. Oh wait, maybe the term "trivially" is not appropriate in this context …
I stand by my claim: it is much easier to falsify F = GmM/r^2 than it is to falsify "human thinking is no more than Turing-powerful". In other words, F = GmM/r^2 rules out many more options which could easily be observed for all we know (maybe we just aren't looking in the right place—and indeed we weren't, as Einstein showed with GR), than does the … Turing Hypothesis.
> Another way to falsify is would be to exhibit a process going on inside a human brain that affects its I/O behavior but cannot be modeled by a TM. If you were to show, for example, that the human brain really was a quantum computer -- i.e. that superpositions of entangled states really did affect its I/O behavior in ways that violate the Bell inequalities -- that would falsify the claim.
Sure. I didn't say "unfalsifiable", I said "as falsifiable". Another way to look at this, Ron, is that you can only seem to describe really obvious, in-your-face examples of "not a TM". But that's generally not how extant paradigms are shattered. Even the ultraviolet catastrophe wasn't seen as paradigm-shattering by many, for a while. What you don't seem able or willing to do is show how "not a TM" might barely poke its head into view—just barely. With a "noise" level similar to Hubble's original data.
Am I making any more sense on this matter? You and I have discussed in quite a few times. Maybe I finally explained my position better … or maybe not. Maybe the brain damage continues unabated!
somehow, you have incredible confidence in the causal monism/physicalism output of said heuristic capability.
These are your words, not mine. I would say (and have said) that what I have incredible confidence in is: (1) that our brains and bodies and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life are made of electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic forces; and (2) that the emergent laws that govern the behavior of our brains, bodies, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life are insensitive to how the laws governing electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic forces are related to anything at some lower level, if such a level exists. Whether that equates to "causal monism/physicalist output of said heuristic capability" is something you're going to have evaluate, not me, since those are your terms. I really don't care since I don't care about those terms to begin with; I've already explained what I care about.
When you take apart brains and bodies, are they conscious? Or is consciousness a property which is gone by the time you do the taking apart? If it's actually gone, then you are not studying "the same thing".
In other words, you're saying that the electrons, quarks, and elecromagnetic forces in a brain, or for that matter the neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc., somehow "know" whether consciousness is "turned on" or not and work by different laws when it is, than when it isn't. Sorry, no sale. If this were true, consciousness would have to be another interaction, over and above the ones we know, that works at the energy scales of brains, and we would have seen it in experiments.
I don't hold to the principle of induction
If so, then I bow out of this discussion, because I don't know how to reason or function without it. How do you predict where the items in your house are going to be from day to day without induction? How do you plan your daily activities without induction? How do you get in your car and expect it to start without induction? How do you expect ordinary objects like rocks not to suddenly explode without induction? I could go on and on.
When I see people say they don't believe in induction, I interpret that to mean they simply haven't thought through the actual basis of their daily activities.
Actually, though, it appears that you do believe in induction; see below.
neither does Ron
If this is true, I did not realize it.
That doesn't mean we can't extrapolate from the known to the unknown
Um, that is induction.
Sure. Would you be happier if I said "cautious induction" instead of just "induction"?
some of my confidence, which you seem to think is anti-scientific, comes from my best understanding of some of the world's best scientists.
I don't think your confidence in this particular area is anti-scientific, I just think it's not going to turn out to be justified by any results. But your time and effort is yours to spend.
As for "some of the world's best scientists", I don't think they're saying what you claim they're saying.
I see him not as making claims but opening doors which you have slammed shut
Same difference. You think he's holding out the possibility that, for example, electrons and quarks and electromagnetic forces, or neurons and neurotransmitters and hormones, could follow different laws in the brain when consciousness is "turned on" than when it isn't. I don't. I think consciousness itself is just another emergent property built on electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic forces, by way of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones (and many other things). If there are "laws of consciousness", they are laws at a still higher level than the level of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones, etc., just as the laws of the browser program in which I am typing this are at a higher level than the laws of CPU instructions and I/O, which in turn are at a higher level than the laws of logic gates and transistors, etc.
to pick a trajectory at an unstable Lagrangian point, how small a change is required?
The Barrier of Relevance is irrelevant here (pun intended). The Newtonian laws of motion that allow small changes at unstable Lagrangian points to lead to large changes in ultimate trajectory are at the same level as all the other Newtonian laws. All of those laws are shielded by a Barrier of Relevance from the underlying laws that determine, say, the tensile strength of the steel from which the spaceship is built, or the heat of combustion of the fuel and oxidizer when combined. The Newtonian laws don't care whether your spaceship gets its delta-v from a chemical rocket, an ion drive, a nuclear explosion, or a gamma ray laser focused on it from a distant space station. The only thing that matters is that Newton's laws allow chaotic, unstable dynamics that is also controllable.
In other words, the whole "small delta v" model you are thinking about has to be a model at the same level as the brain; it's not something that can "leak" from a lower level. You have to show that chaotic, unstable dynamics that are also controllable are possible at the level of the brain That's why I based my skepticism on something--thermal noise--that operates at that same level.
that's not the question; the question is whether collective laws of nature has the potential—not necessity—to destabilize causal monism.
I think you missed the point of my comment. I asked quite a while back what counts as causal monism. Let me ask it again, but now in a more focused way.
Consider a rock. It is a solid object. The solid phase (as Laughlin describes in some detail) is itself governed by "collective laws of nature"; we can't deduce all of the properties of a solid like a rock just from the Big Equation that governs the electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic forces that it is made of. The properties that the rock has, such as hardness, have causal powers: you can hit something with a rock and make a dent in it. These causal powers are due to the collective laws of nature that govern solid bodies.
So here we have a rock, with a set of causal powers due to collective laws of nature; and it is made of electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic forces, which have causal powers due to a different set of laws, the Big Equation. Does this count as "causal monism" by your definition, or not?
Luke said...
> > somehow, you have incredible confidence in the causal monism/physicalism output of said heuristic capability.
> These are your words, not mine.
I have yet to find a way to distinguish between what I mean by "causal monism" and what you mean by "physicalism". The former are my words, but the latter is your word.
> I would say (and have said) that what I have incredible confidence in is: (1) that our brains and bodies and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life are made of electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic forces; and (2) that the emergent laws that govern the behavior of our brains, bodies, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life are insensitive to how the laws governing electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic forces are related to anything at some lower level, if such a level exists.
Yeah, I'm still at an impasse—I don't understand how Sean Carroll's Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood makes it through that "insensitive", especially given stuff like what Ilya Prigogine wrote. You might note that "the complex microstructure of the phase space" is neither an electron, a quark, or an electromagnetic force. It appears to be nonlocal/nonseparable state—something which just doesn't exist at the level of individual trajectories. You spend a lot of time focusing on electrons, quarks, and EM forces when there is plenty of other ways to get structure—e.g. via phonons. Too much focus at the individual level blinds you to the possibility of stuff like topological quantum computers, which are theoretically able to carry out quantum computations in environments that some of the earlier ides of QMs just couldn't. Topological quantum computers depend on anyons, which are quasiparticles which can only exist in restricted environments. And yet, maybe we can do more with them—of a kind that you have previously said we cannot because of thermal noise. Unless I'm missing something? To emphasize once more, collective properties of particles cannot necessarily be reduced to individual measurements of each particle, "summed" as it were.
Luke said...
> In other words, you're saying that the electrons, quarks, and elecromagnetic forces in a brain, or for that matter the neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc., somehow "know" whether consciousness is "turned on" or not and work by different laws when it is, than when it isn't.
Must I be saying that? All I'm saying is that the things you keep talking about, when studied the way you talk about studying them, have no property of consciousness. Since free will is very dependent on consciousness, that seems to be a problem. If your measuring instrument cannot detect consciousness, maybe it isn't sophisticated enough—maybe it doesn't have enough of the requisite building blocks.
> > I don't hold to the principle of induction
> If so, then I bow out of this discussion, because I don't know how to reason or function without it.
Ask @Ron. He functions without it.
> How do you predict where the items in your house are going to be from day to day without induction?
Induction is a heuristic and no more. I am constantly looking for how reality is more glorious, more awesome, than I previous thought. I try and treat people the same. The opposite is to expect people to never change, a topic upon which I already commented.
> How do you plan your daily activities without induction?
XKCD: Frequentists vs. Bayesians
> When I see people say they don't believe in induction, I interpret that to mean they simply haven't thought through the actual basis of their daily activities.
Nope, I just take Ceteris Paribus Laws seriously.
> > That doesn't mean we can't extrapolate from the known to the unknown
> Um, that is induction.
SEP: The Problem of Induction
> Sure. Would you be happier if I said "cautious induction" instead of just "induction"?
This would make me happy:
>> Nearly two hundred years ago, Joseph-Louis Lagrange described analytical mechanics based on Newton's laws as a branch of mathematics.[33] In the French scientific literature, one often speaks of "rational mechanics." In this sense, Newton's laws would define the laws of reason and represent a truth of absolute generality. Since the birth of quantum mechanics and relativity, we know that this is not the case. The temptation is now strong to ascribe a similar status of absolute truth to quantum theory. In The Quark and the Jaguar, Gell-Mann asserts, "Quantum mechanics is not itself a theory; rather it is the framework into which all contemporary physical theory must fit."[34] Is this really so? As stated by my late friend Léon Rosenfeld, "Every theory is based on physical concepts expressed through mathematical idealizations. They are introduced to give an adequate representation of the physical phenomena. No physical concept is sufficiently defined without the knowledge of its domain of validity."[35] (The End of Certainty, 28–29)
I want extreme rigor in delineating domains of validity.
Any computer that is more powerful than a TM would be able to perform a large number of very specific tasks that a TM can't (e.g. prove any mathematical theorem in a finite amount of time).
But you could never verify this, because there are an infinite number of possible mathematical theorems, and you would have to show that the thing-more-powerful-than-a-TM could prove all of them in a finite amount of time.
More generally, the line of argument you are giving is vulnerable to the argument involving heuristics that I made earlier in response to Luke. A TM that cannot guarantee an answer to a given problem can still give answers to that problem by heuristic guessing, just not with 100% certainty. For example, no TM can guarantee an answer to the Halting Problem, but a TM could heuristically guess which programs will halt and which will not, with better than chance accuracy; it just couldn't achieve 100% accuracy.
Finally, any argument involving TMs has to take emulation into account. Suppose I program TM A to emulate TM B. While emulating TM B, TM A cannot produce a proof of the Godel sentence for TM B. But there is nothing to prevent TM B from being, for example, a TM that produces a proof of the Godel sentence for TM A! (Dennett had a paper on this back in the 1970s, which is where I first came across the argument.) And there is nothing to prevent TM A from emulating some other TM that produces a proof of the Godel sentence for TM B.
In short, I think the idea of being able to prove that humans can do things that TMs can't do is a nonstarter, because we can't achieve 100% certainty about what exactly TMs can't do.
a process going on inside a human brain that affects its I/O behavior but cannot be modeled by a TM
Why couldn't a TM simulate quantum dynamics? They're just equations.
Can't it? If it can't, then how do you know brains of dead people in the autopsy room aren't conscious?
I was assuming that detecting consciousness is simple: is the person alive and awake? There are edge cases, yes (such as the former common belief among doctors that curare was an anesthetic instead of just a paralytic), but I don't think a brain of a dead person being autopsied, vs. the brain of the same person when they were alive and talking, is such an edge case. If you want to make it one, then we need to back up and you need to carefully define exactly what you mean by consciousness and why you think it's so difficult to detect.
Induction is a heuristic and no more.
Sure. So what? Basically your position seems to be "I'll use induction as a heuristic except when it doesn't suit my argument". Sorry, color me unconvinced.
I want extreme rigor in delineating domains of validity.
This is a valid point, but the quote you give doesn't ask the obvious next question: how do we determine domains of validity?
For Newton's Laws, the way that was done was by pushing the boundary of experiment until the theory broke. The laws themselves claimed to be universal; there was no way of figuring out from them what the boundary of the domain of validity should be.
For the Big Equation and the Einstein Field Equation, that is not the case (though not all physicists will necessarily admit that--but Carroll does, and he said so in his article). These theories contain within themselves predictions about where they will break down--i.e., what the boundary of their domain of validity is. General Relativity says it breaks down when spacetime curvature gets very, very large (roughly the Planck scale). Quantum field theory says it breaks down when the energy scale becomes comparable to whatever ultraviolet cutoff is necessary to renormalize the theory.
So far we have not been able to test the GR prediction of its boundary, because all of the experiments we can currently do, and all of the astronomical observations we can currently make, involve spacetime curvatures well below the range where the boundary is expected to be. The closest we have gotten so far is actually the black hole mergers observed recently by LIGO, which confirmed the GR predictions of gravitational waves, and also the detailed numerical simulations of what the waveforms should look like for a black hole merger.
For quantum field theory, we cannot probe the expected boundary of the Big Equation (the Standard Model of particle physics) with our current experiments, but previous quantum field theories have followed the expected pattern. Two early examples were the Fermi theory of the weak interaction and the Yukawa pion exchange theory of the strong interaction. Both of these theories had cutoffs beyond which new physics was expected to appear, and indeed it did: in the weak interaction case it was electroweak theory and the W and Z bosons; in the strong interaction case it was quarks and QCD. Both of these are part of the Standard Model.
The statement of Gell-Mann that Prigogine was questioning with the Rosenfeld quote didn't say "quantum field theory", it said "quantum mechanics", which is more general--in fact "quantum mechanics" does not name a theory, it names a way of constructing theories. (Scott Aaronson likes to say that QM is an operating system, and specific theories like the Schrodinger Equation or QFT are applications running on it.) But if Gell-Mann meant that all future viable theories must be constructed this way, of course we don't and can't know for sure that that's true; it's a bet on the way future theories will turn out, not something you can prove from current theories. (As Aaronson says, General Relativity has not yet been ported to the QM OS, and there are some physicists--Freeman Dyson is a notable one--who have questioned whether doing so is actually possible or necessary. That is an open question at present.)
Ask @Ron. He functions without it.
I could ask, yes. But presumably you got the idea from somewhere; can you give any specific reference as to where? A particular post of his? Or a discussion?
No, it's an abstraction.
It appears to be nonlocal/nonseparable state—something which just doesn't exist at the level of individual trajectories.
No, it's an abstraction.
You're comparing apples and equations.
Luke said...
> No, it's an abstraction.
And electrons (as defined by the laws of physics) aren't?
> > It appears to be nonlocal/nonseparable state—something which just doesn't exist at the level of individual trajectories.
> No, it's an abstraction.
Ok, let's take two entangled photons. Can one describe the state of one of them without describing the state of the other? I'm very interested in your answer to this with regards "apples and equations".
BTW, it'd be interesting to know if you think you might agree or disagree from the following by Bernard d'Espagnat:
>> In the debates for and against realism what, within the scientific community, long turned the scales in favor of (physical or objectivist, or etc.) realism was the fact that explaining visible, complex features by means of invisible simple ones was generally successful. Here “simple” means “describable by means of clear, distinct ideas.” So that it is—still now—quite often thought (and even considered obvious!) that assuming that the objects theories label by names really exist can only be a help in research. Along these lines some epistemologists consider, for instance, that to claim that any electron exists by itself—with such and such known or unknown individual properties—still is the best way we have of understanding phenomena involving electrons.
>> It is quite important to know that this is not in the least true, that, systematized in this way, such a view not only does not help at all but is even quite likely to mislead us. Thus, for example, the idea that each one of the electrons in an atom is individually in one definite quantum state (lies on one definite “orbit”) is just simply erroneous. (According to the only operationally nonmisleading picture we have, every one of them lies simultaneously on all the “allowed” orbits.) In other words, there are situations in which the vocabulary we use—and in particular such words as “electron,” “particle,” and so on—is suggestive of “pieces of evidence” that are, finally, but erroneous ones. (On Physics and Philosophy, 38–39)
I am well aware that Ceci n'est pas une pipe. (Boring version: I know about mistaking the map for the territory.) But I'm not sure how you're saying that *I* am making that error. In particular, I have no idea how many of your words throughout this conversation have been intended to solely refer to the map, rather than the territory. (Incidentally, when one is in map-land with rigorous axioms, one can speak in terms of logical entailment. QM requires one to be a bit nuanced.)
collective properties of particles cannot necessarily be reduced to individual measurements of each particle, "summed" as it were.
Of course not, and I wasn't claiming they were.
At this point you're just waving your hands and gesturing in the general direction of "collective behavior can produce interesting stuff". Which is true, but much to vague for a meaningful discussion. Your "very small delta v" model at least had a specific basis (unstable Lagrangian points).
And electrons (as defined by the laws of physics) aren't?
To use Ron's language, they're in a different ontological categories. Equations are models. Electrons are things being modeled.
let's take two entangled photons. Can one describe the state of one of them without describing the state of the other?
If you insist on only using pure states, no; neither photon has a pure state by itself, only the two-photon state does.
If you allow mixed states, you can assign a mixed state (density matrix) to either photon by itself. The usual description of this is that you "trace over" the other photon.
Does this help any?
it'd be interesting to know if you think you might agree or disagree from the following by Bernard d'Espagnat
As far as I can see, he's saying that the states of electrons in atoms are entangled. To the best of my understanding, that's true.
Does that mean that saying, for example, that "there are 6 electrons in a carbon atom" is "misleading"? I don't think so. I can't figure out whether d'Espagnat is saying that or not. Of course if someone were to say something like "electrons #1 and #2 are in the 1s orbital of this carbon atom", that would be misleading (since, first, electrons don't have little labels on them to distinguish them, and second, the 6 electrons are entangled); but do physicists (as opposed to lay people in pop science books) actually say things like this?
I have no idea how many of your words throughout this conversation have been intended to solely refer to the map, rather than the territory.
Models are maps. Things being modeled are territory. Does that help?
Luke said...
> > collective properties of particles cannot necessarily be reduced to individual measurements of each particle, "summed" as it were.
> Of course not, and I wasn't claiming they were.
But … they're abstract, while electrons are concrete/real/things? Incidentally, there seems to be a slight problem:
> Peter: As a general comment: I don't know what your background is in physics, but you appear to me to have a tendency to focus on the superficial description in words of physical models, instead of the actual underlying physics. Actual physics isn't done in words, it's done in math, because math is more precise.
When you say "electron", do you always mean "the actual thing out there" or do you sometimes mean "the entity in the model"? What I have very little sense of is whether you see a difference between those two things—a difference d'Espagnat articulates.
> At this point you're just waving your hands and gesturing in the general direction of "collective behavior can produce interesting stuff". Which is true, but much to vague for a meaningful discussion. Your "very small delta v" model at least had a specific basis (unstable Lagrangian points).
I would agree that I'm being vague; I am not aware of the precise mathematics which would describe chaotic behavior whereby an infinitesimal force—perhaps applied simultaneously at multiple different points within the chaotic substance (see my "nonseparable causation")—can alter the trajectory of the evolution of the system, picking between two semantically meaningful (and different) states (recall that I mentioned the concept of multiple realizability). But fortunately, I am now at the point where I have physicist friends and I probably can get something much closer to rigorous mathematical equations if not all the way there. Perhaps we should suspend this conversation about "akin to unstable Lagrangian points" (≠ "unstable Lagrangian points") until I do that?
I will add one thing. There is a big difference between requiring me to present you with a viable option of how infinitesimal forces could operate, and you saying that we know that no such forces could possibly be operating "in everyday life", given the experimental results we have from fundamental physics. You realize this, right? Possibly this is a situation like Galileo faced, whereby all was thought to be described (earth falls, fire rises) when there was a non-excluded middle: tangential motion exists and in fact leads to conclusive demonstrations of impetus (if not inertia). But you and Carroll seem very, very confident that there is no such non-excluded middle in this case. Would that an accurate description of your position, at least?
Ron said...
> > Any computer that is more powerful than a TM would be able to perform a large number of very specific tasks that a TM can't (e.g. prove any mathematical theorem in a finite amount of time).
> But you could never verify this
Sure you could. We're not talking about Platonic ideals here, we're talking about actual physics. When we say "The human brain is a TM" what we really mean is that the human brain can be *emulated* by a TM. A real TM, one that we could actually build and run if we had the right technology. We can compute upper bounds on what is possible given the constraints imposed by the known laws of physics. The hypothesis that a human brain is a TM could be falsified (at least to my satisfaction) by demonstrating a human brain that reliably violates those limits.
For example, a human that was able to reliably solve NP-complete problems in O(n) time would certainly make me question my worldview, and a human that could do it in O(1) time would make me believe in God. (Heck, any entity who could do that would *be* God.)
> Why couldn't a TM simulate quantum dynamics? They're just equations.
Time. A TM can simulate quantum dynamics, but in time that is exponential in the number of entangled degrees of freedom. A quantum computer can't solve any problem that a classical computer can't in principle, but in practice a quantum computer can solve problems in fractions of a second that would take a classical computer longer than the lifetime of the universe.
> the principle of induction
I think you two might be using this phrase to mean two different things. There is mathematical induction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction) and there is the inference of a general rule from exemplars. I suspect Peter is referring to the first (mathematical induction) while Luke is referring to the second (inferring a rule from exemplars). I accept the first, but not the second.
I try to use it to mean "the actual thing out there", but it's true that it's often tempting to use it to mean "the entity in the model", particularly when the discussion is focused on models instead of experiments.
However, I think this particular problem is a side issue. The real problem is when people use the word "electron", for example, to refer to "the actual thing out there", but then reason as if "the actual thing out there" has properties that it doesn't have. For example, thinking that the actual "electrons" out there are little billiard balls that are distinguishable from each other, instead of being whatever-it-is that is keeping that oil drop suspended in the electric field we have turned on in our laboratory experiment.
There is a big difference between requiring me to present you with a viable option of how infinitesimal forces could operate, and you saying that we know that no such forces could possibly be operating "in everyday life", given the experimental results we have from fundamental physics. You realize this, right?
Sure. And if you and your physicist friends come up with an experiment that shows that such a thing is going on in people's brains when they exercise their free will, then by all means send me a copy of the paper you publish reporting the results. :-)
Short of that, though, I'm not sure I could contribute anything useful to your efforts.
For example, a human that was able to reliably solve NP-complete problems in O(n) time would certainly make me question my worldview
By "solve" I assume you mean "provide a proof that the solution is optimal", correct? After all, the traveling salesman problem is NP-complete, yet human traveling salesmen are able to plan routes. :-)
A TM can simulate quantum dynamics, but in time that is exponential in the number of entangled degrees of freedom.
Ah, I see.
I suspect Peter is referring to the first (mathematical induction) while Luke is referring to the second (inferring a rule from exemplars). I accept the first, but not the second.
No, I was referring to the second. (I would think that would be obvious from the examples I gave; I don't use mathematical induction to ground my expectation that my car will start tomorrow morning.)
I wasn't aware that you didn't accept the second. Or do you just mean that, as Luke said, it's a heuristic rule only?
Ron said...
> I wasn't aware that you didn't accept the second. Or do you just mean that, as Luke said, it's a heuristic rule only?
Nope. Induction is completely invalid. Counter-examples abound. The sun has risen on earth every day for the last four billion years, but in another four billion years (more or less) there will be no more sunrises because the sun is going to turn into a red giant and there will be no more earth. But there's no way to know that from induction.
The sun has risen on earth every day for the last four billion years, but in another four billion years (more or less) there will be no more sunrises because the sun is going to turn into a red giant and there will be no more earth. But there's no way to know that from induction.
To me this seems like a case of "induction is a heuristic rule only", not "induction is completely invalid". If it were completely invalid, it shouldn't be valid even to infer that the sun will rise tomorrow, much less that it will continue to do so for another four billion years or so. I suppose this could be termed a difference in our use of language, but it seems like a pretty drastic one; calling a rule that works for eight billion years "completely invalid" seems like a bit of a stretch.
Luke said...
> > let's take two entangled photons. Can one describe the state of one of them without describing the state of the other?
> If you insist on only using pure states, no; neither photon has a pure state by itself, only the two-photon state does.
> If you allow mixed states, you can assign a mixed state (density matrix) to either photon by itself. The usual description of this is that you "trace over" the other photon.
> Does this help any?
Yes, that helps. Now, are any/all of those descriptions are "abstract", in precisely the sense that you said:
> Peter: No, it's an abstraction.
? Probably it's also important to reference this:
> Peter: I try to use it to mean "the actual thing out there", but it's true that it's often tempting to use it to mean "the entity in the model", particularly when the discussion is focused on models instead of experiments.
The reason I'm asking all this is that I'm really proposing that there exist more things in reality than electrons, quarks, and EM which are "real" and relevant to "everyday life". But as far as I can tell, those things could be entities such as "the complex microstructure of the phase space". You, however, possibly disagree. I don't really understand how you are using the distinction between the map and the territory, yet. There seems to be stuff in the d'Espagnat excerpt you haven't addressed. For example, if there is no such thing as a "naked electron" but what it is is always a function of the environment it is in, then the space seems wide open for nonlocal/nonseparable entities to exist, to be "as real" as the electrons we use to make semiconductors work.
Where I'm obviously going with this is that the more "real" things there can be, the more opportunity there is to have "Barriers of Irrelevance" which neutralize/balance enough of the substrate to allow causal powers which were [previously] drowned by the noise to measurably manifest. But if you're going to insist that anything which manifests is "abstract"/"less real" than electrons, quarks, and EM, I'll want to discuss that more—probably via digging into d'Espagnat's "weak objectivism".
Luke said...
> However, I think this particular problem is a side issue. The real problem is when people use the word "electron", for example, to refer to "the actual thing out there", but then reason as if "the actual thing out there" has properties that it doesn't have. For example, thinking that the actual "electrons" out there are little billiard balls that are distinguishable from each other, instead of being whatever-it-is that is keeping that oil drop suspended in the electric field we have turned on in our laboratory experiment.
That may be a problem for some, but I'm more interested in your confidence that reality is pretty much like the model [for purposes of everyday life]. Actually I'm not even sure what that really means, given the crazy spread of interpretations of QM. The mathematics which has been tested out to many decimal places permits an incredible range of ontologies. And yet, you're happy to kinda-sorta dismiss the entities I bring up as "abstract", while holding to your own as "real". It strikes me that this confidence might not actually be warranted. Were you to go back to exactly what the evidence actually tells you, maybe you'd find there are more possibilities which Carroll forecloses with his Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood.
> > There is a big difference between requiring me to present you with a viable option of how infinitesimal forces could operate, and you saying that we know that no such forces could possibly be operating "in everyday life", given the experimental results we have from fundamental physics. You realize this, right?
> Sure. And if you and your physicist friends come up with an experiment that shows that such a thing is going on in people's brains when they exercise their free will, then by all means send me a copy of the paper you publish reporting the results. :-)
> Short of that, though, I'm not sure I could contribute anything useful to your efforts.
What I want to know is why you've foreclosed the physical possibility (that is, you permit nothing other than an exceedingly low probability) that there could be states akin to unstable Lagrangian points in the time-evolution of brain-states. At this point in time, your confidence seems based on a heavy dose of induction. I can check this, but I would guess that really excellent scientists have a good sense of where induction is increasingly likely to be erroneous, within their field. I see zero such caution from you or Carroll. I'm wondering if you think you do practice such caution, but simply draw the boundaries differently than I would.
Ron said...
> If it were completely invalid, it shouldn't be valid even to infer that the sun will rise tomorrow
And indeed it is not valid. Just because an inference happens to be true doesn't mean it's valid. For example, I can hypothesize that apples fall to earth because they are pulled down by leprechauns. If I adopt this theory I will correctly conclude that if I drop an apple it will fall, but that doesn't mean my inference is valid.
Induction is essentially the theory that nothing ever changes. If things don't change, then induction gives you true conclusions, and if they do then it doesn't. The reason induction appears to be less ridiculous then it actually is is that our intuitions filter out many of the invalid inferences as "silly", e.g.:
For the past 1017 years the year of the date has had four digits, and that will continue to be true for the next 8982 years. Nonetheless, I can predict with extremely high confidence that after December 31, 9999 the year of the date will have five digits, despite the fact that this has never before been observed in the known universe.
Elizabeth II has been queen of England every day for the last 24,000 days or so. It does not follow that she will be queen of England for another 24,000 days.
Donald Trump has been an asshole for at least 50 years. It does not follow that he will be an asshole for another 50 years.
Sometimes, though, our intuitions fail us badly. The stock market has risen more or less continuously for the last 8 years. But if you think it's valid to conclude from that that it will rise for another 8 years (and some people do) you are in for many nasty surprises.
are any/all of those descriptions are "abstract", in precisely the sense that you said
I guess if we're equating "abstract" with "map", then yes. Quantum states and phase space are map, not territory.
I'm really proposing that there exist more things in reality than electrons, quarks, and EM which are "real" and relevant to "everyday life".
I never said there weren't. I just said that all of those other things are made of electrons, quarks, and EM forces.
as far as I can tell, those things could be entities such as "the complex microstructure of
No, they can't, because "the complex microstructure of the phase space" is map, not territory. But they could be (and are) things like neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones...or brains...or free will and consciousness. The physicalist view is that all of those things are made of electrons, quarks, and EM forces.
if you're going to insist that anything which manifests is "abstract"/"less real" than electrons, quarks, and EM
I'm not. See above.
What I want to know is why you've foreclosed the physical possibility (that is, you permit nothing other than an exceedingly low probability) that there could be states akin to unstable Lagrangian points in the time-evolution of brain-states.
I already explained that, several times: thermal noise. I don't see the point of continuing to reiterate the same argument. If you're not convinced, that's your choice. But that's my answer.
I'm wondering if you think you do practice such caution, but simply draw the boundaries differently than I would.
That's probably the best way to think of it at this point.
Induction is essentially the theory that nothing ever changes
I wasn't intending to use the word "induction" that way, but of course we don't all use words the same way. Perhaps it will help to taboo the word "induction" and rephrase my question:
Do you believe the sun will rise tomorrow? If so, what is your basis for this belief?
(And if you don't, what specific actions are you taking to plan for the significant--to you--possibility that the sun will not rise tomorrow?)
Ron said...
> Do you believe the sun will rise tomorrow?
> If so, what is your basis for this belief?
That is not an easy question to answer. I'd have to explain celestial mechanics and the life cycles of main-sequence stars. But the point is that I believe the sun will rise tomorrow because I believe I understand *why* it will rise tomorrow, not because I've observed it rising in the past.
I'd have to explain celestial mechanics and the life cycles of main-sequence stars.
You don't have to explain those things, I understand them fine. But what is your basis for the belief that those laws will continue to work for the next four billion years, so that their prediction of what will happen to the Sun to stop it from rising at that point will be valid?
Ron said...
> You don't have to explain those things
I kinda figured that. But I also kinda figured that you already knew that I believe the sun will rise tomorrow.
> what is your basis for the belief that those laws will continue to work for the next four billion years
But how do you tell when this "faith" is appropriate and when it isn't? You didn't give "faith" as the answer when I asked why you believe the sun will rise tomorrow; you talked about celestial mechanics and the life cycles of main sequence stars--you said you understand why the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Where does that stop and "faith" begin?
Ron said...
> Where does that stop and "faith" begin?
It doesn't. I simultaneously maintain my (justified) belief that the universe is governed by laws of physics and my (unjustified) faith that these laws will not change in the future. In the absence of a theory of why the laws of physics are what they are (and we do not yet have such a theory) there can be no justification for believing that they won't change. I choose to believe it (to be precise, I choose to assign a Bayesian prior very close to 1) nonetheless.
Luke said...
> > What I want to know is why you've foreclosed the physical possibility (that is, you permit nothing other than an exceedingly low probability) that there could be states akin to unstable Lagrangian points in the time-evolution of brain-states.
> I already explained that, several times: thermal noise. I don't see the point of continuing to reiterate the same argument. If you're not convinced, that's your choice. But that's my answer.
Here's the first time you mentioned "thermal noise":
> Peter: That's not to say that no such model will ever be successful, but I can see at least one plausible reason to be skeptical: thermal noise in the brain should be way too large to allow any meaningful dependence of the brain's activity on quantum uncertainty. In all the cases in which we have experimentally probed quantum uncertainty, the biggest challenge is keeping the quantum system "quiet" enough to allow quantum effects to be significant; that means strict isolation from all other systems. The brain is not at all like that.
That wasn't in response to discussion of "(1) existence of brain states akin to unstable Lagrangian points"; on the contrary it was in the vein of @Ron's "One can always choose to base one's actions on the outcome of a quantum measurement." Here's the second time you mentioned "thermal noise":
> Luke: If there are near-chaotic aspects of thinking then perhaps the subtlest of pushes could send the thinking one way vs. another. Maybe even infinitesimal pushes, if brain states can pass through unstable Lagrangian points.
> Peter: Yes, this is in principle possible, but I don't see how it would be controllable in the brain the way a spacecraft's trajectory is controllable, because of the thermal noise issue I brought up earlier. There is no analogue of thermal noise in spacecraft trajectories. That's what allows the spacecraft's engine burn to be controlled precisely enough to produce the desired orbital change. The analogue of thermal noise for a spacecraft would be random perturbations to the orbit with energies comparable to the orbital energy. With such things present you couldn't even get the spacecraft to predictably hit an unstable Lagrange point in the first place, much less precisely control how an engine burn there would affect its orbit.
I can see how you would see my "pushes" as being only point-pushes like spacecraft navigating the ITN. But why is that the only option, the only physically plausible kind of infinitesimal force? I actually got quite explicit about this:
> Luke: Now, as it comes to this issue, I suspect one might need to employ both nonseparable causation (nonseparable state ⇔ nonseparable causation) and weak measurement if not interaction-free measurement. I can go into the reasons later, but suffice it to say that any equivalents of Lagrangian points in human thinking near the edge of chaos are almost certainly going to be spread out in space, rather than being a spacecraft flying through a point.
Later I reiterated this point: "That push doesn't have to be localized to one point in space." So … it would appear that both of us are reiterating the same argument. It's just that I think my reiterating renders your reiterating obsolete. But you don't seem to think that, and I don't know why.
Luke said...
> > are any/all of those descriptions are "abstract", in precisely the sense that you said
> I guess if we're equating "abstract" with "map", then yes. Quantum states and phase space are map, not territory.
But then what successes does physics have under its belt which are related to "electrons are real", which cannot actually be attributed to "the abstract electrons represented by these equations"? Are not all the successes actually due to how well the map operates? You seem to be taking a very particular realist stance and I want to know if it's actually justified by the evidence, or whether it's actually a philosophical stance. I am somewhat acquainted with constructive empiricism.
> > I'm really proposing that there exist more things in reality than electrons, quarks, and EM which are "real" and relevant to "everyday life".
> I never said there weren't. I just said that all of those other things are made of electrons, quarks, and EM forces.
To the extent that you want to refer to something more than the map when you say "electron", that can only mean something different if (i) you think map = territory when it comes to electrons, quarks, and EM forces; (ii) you think electrons in the territory are somehow more than electrons in the map. True, or false? BTW, in all this discussion I have been proposing that the map doesn't tell us everything about the territory when it comes to "everyday life". That is reducible to "the map is not homomorphic to the territory, when it comes to matters of everyday life". I didn't expect you to affirm such a proposition, because you started making a sharp distinction between abstractions and reality.
> "the complex microstructure of the phase space" is map, not territory.
I don't see why that has to be the case. And you've now confused me, given this exchange:
> Luke: To emphasize once more, collective properties of particles cannot necessarily be reduced to individual measurements of each particle, "summed" as it were.
> Peter: Of course not, and I wasn't claiming they were.
If a collective property cannot be "summed", how can it be abstract? If I measure each particle individually to the best of my ability, aggregate those measurements, and yet still cannot compute the collective property, then that would seem to make that collective property really real. Or to be more precise (since we seem to be playing the pedantic game), the collective property in the map would point us toward something existing in the territory which isn't an electron, quark, or EM forces. (If you permit a full-fledged "EM field", then it is my understanding that it (the abstraction) can represent nonseparable collective properties. Is this true?)
Luke said...
> the extent to which humans are sensitive to information is far from clear.
So I finally finished that article and want to add to my initial response. I found this particularly interesting:
>> Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless.
The idea that "becoming more informed" is a solution seems to be problematic. One reason comes from Converse 1964 The nature of belief systems in mass publics (8400 'citations'. Here's how WikiSummary describes it:
>> A great majority of people neither adhere to a full, complete set of beliefs which produces a clear ideology nor do they have a clear grasp of what ideology is. This is measured by a lack of coherence in responses to open-ended questions. Ideology of elites is not mirrored by the masses and voter revolt to a political party does not reflect ideological shifts.
>>
>> Converse analyzes open-ended interview questions to measure conceptualization of ideology. He concludes that the liberal-conservative continuum is a high level abstraction not typically used by the man in the street because of response instability and lack of connections made between answers. There is no underlying belief structure for most people, just a bunch of random opinions. Even on highly controversial, well-publicized issues, large portions of the electorate do not have coherent opinions. In fact, many simply answer survey questions as though they are flipping a coin.
>>
>> Though some political sophisticates do structure their opinions in a larger ideological framework, such structure is rare. This level of political sophistication (one's "level of conceptualization") is correlated positively with the respondent's level of education, degree of political involvement, and amount of political information.
Now here's Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels on the response to those data (which have been replicated):
>> Faced with this evidence, many scholars in the final chapters of their books continue to express idealistic hope that institutional reform, civic education, improved mass media, more effective mobilization of the poor, or stronger moral exhortation might bring public opinion into closer correspondence with the standards of the folk theory. But in sober moments most acknowledge the repeated failures of all those prescriptions. (Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, 12)
What is up with Western intellectuals' consistent refusal to acknowledge facts about human nature and society?!?!
By the way, this is a great way to keep the populace predictable—by lying to them. By saying that the next thing will be better (and therefore vote for us!) without any empirical basis. Who knows whether the power elite actually know what is going on and whether all these scholars are merely the priests of a religion. There is reason to think that a lot of the economics research going on in the West is "mathematized religion".
I think my reiterating renders your reiterating obsolete. But you don't seem to think that, and I don't know why.
Consider the spaceship analogy. You can apply a small delta v at an unstable Lagrangian point and make a large ultimate trajectory change. But the spaceship is only at the unstable Lagrangian point for a small window of time; after that it is in a different region of the potential diagram and small delta v no longer has the same effect. You can't "build up" the effect of many small pushes to overcome thermal noise because only one (or a very small subset) of the pushes actually have a significant effect (in the absence of thermal noise).
If you are just saying in general that a lot of small pushes can add up to a big effect, sure, that's true, but now, as I said before, you're just waving your hands in a general direction, not giving a specific model that can be analyzed.
Luke said...
But my "reiterating" explicitly moves away from the spaceship analogy: "That push doesn't have to be localized to one point in space." All I'm depending on is that in the chaotic time-evolution of state, there is the distinct possibility of passing through states which are akin to unstable Lagrangian points. As far as I understand, *this does not have to be based on quantum uncertainty*. One must respect "Barriers of Relevance", here. Otherwise, one is being profoundly unempirical.
> If you are just saying in general that a lot of small pushes can add up to a big effect, sure, that's true, but now, as I said before, you're just waving your hands in a general direction, not giving a specific model that can be analyzed.
I don't have "a specific model". More reiterating:
> Luke: I would agree that I'm being vague; I am not aware of the precise mathematics which would describe chaotic behavior whereby an infinitesimal force—perhaps applied simultaneously at multiple different points within the chaotic substance (see my "nonseparable causation")—can alter the trajectory of the evolution of the system, picking between two semantically meaningful (and different) states (recall that I mentioned the concept of multiple realizability). …
> There is a big difference between requiring me to present you with a viable option of how infinitesimal forces could operate, and you saying that we know that no such forces could possibly be operating "in everyday life", given the experimental results we have from fundamental physics. You realize this, right? Possibly this is a situation like Galileo faced, whereby all was thought to be described (earth falls, fire rises) when there was a non-excluded middle: tangential motion exists and in fact leads to conclusive demonstrations of impetus (if not inertia). But you and Carroll seem very, very confident that there is no such non-excluded middle in this case. Would that an accurate description of your position, at least?
Your did respond to the first two sentences of the second paragraph:
> Peter: Sure. And if you and your physicist friends come up with an experiment that shows that such a thing is going on in people's brains when they exercise their free will, then by all means send me a copy of the paper you publish reporting the results. :-)
> Short of that, though, I'm not sure I could contribute anything useful to your efforts.
But the rest you ignored. And I say the rest is important—it's almost the crux of my entire argument! If I could give you "a specific model" or "the results", how confident are you that it would violate Carroll's Big Equation™? Let us recall that Carroll is explicitly reductionist: see his Downward Causation article.
what successes does physics have under its belt which are related to "electrons are real", which cannot actually be attributed to "the abstract electrons represented by these equations"?
You can't attribute any experimental success to an abstract electron; that's a map. It has to be due to the real electron, the thing out there in the territory. You can say that "experimental success" means "the territory did what the map predicted it would do", but that doesn't mean the map is out there in the territory producing your experimental results.
As a general comment: you seem to be thinking like a philosopher, not a physicist. You have a bunch of general principles in your head and you're trying to make everything you see fit them. That's backwards. You construct your map by exploring the territory; you don't decide first what your map is and then try to make the territory fit it.
You also seem to have a strong tendency for false dichotomies. For example:
To the extent that you want to refer to something more than the map when you say "electron", that can only mean something different if (i) you think map = territory when it comes to electrons, quarks, and EM forces; (ii) you think electrons in the territory are somehow more than electrons in the map. True, or false?
Mu. The territory is different from the map. It's not equal to the map. It's not "more" than the map. It's just a different thing. You brought up the whole map/territory distinction as though it were going to be helpful, but now it just seems to be confusing you more.
Or maybe it's just that we aren't being consistent enough in using map/territory language instead of something else:
If I measure each particle individually to the best of my ability, aggregate those measurements, and yet still cannot compute the collective property, then that would seem to make that collective property really real.
Huh? Suppose I can compute the collective property by aggregating individual measurements on the particles. Does that now make the collective property "not really real"? (What does that even mean?)
"Brains are made of electrons, quarks, and EM forces" means "if I take apart a brain, and then take apart the parts, and so on, I will eventually have electrons, quarks, and EM forces, and nothing else". In other words, it's describing the predicted result of a hypothetical experimental procedure. The thing that lets me make this prediction is a map. The things the prediction is about are territory.
Now consider these two statements:
"The mass of a hydrogen atom in its ground state is a collective property that can be computed by aggregating measurements of the masses of the proton and electron and the binding energy due to their interaction."
"Free will is a collective property that cannot be computed by aggregating measurements on the individual particles in a brain."
Both of these are also describing predictions. The first is a prediction that a bunch of numbers computed by different routes will match in a particular domain. The second is a prediction that no such computation is possible in another particular domain. Again, the things that produce these predictions are maps. The things the predictions are about are territory.
Now, does the difference between those two statements (one saying a computation is possible, the other not) mean that free will is "really real" but a hydrogen atom is not?
does the difference between those two statements (one saying a computation is possible, the other not) mean that free will is "really real" but a hydrogen atom is not?
Or, if "free will" is too problematic, try this version of the second statement:
"Solidity is a collective property that cannot be computed by aggregating measurements on the individual particles in a rock."
Does this mean the rock is "really real" but a hydrogen atom is not?
Luke said...
> You can't attribute any experimental success to an abstract electron; that's a map. It has to be due to the real electron, the thing out there in the territory.
No it doesn't have to be due to the real electron, it can be due to a real something else. You seem to just presuppose that scientific anti-realism couldn't possibly be true. You'd be like an anti-Newton, who insists that there really is "action at a distance", out there in reality. Then you would be devastated to find out that that was just a relic of the equations, that actually matter curves space and it is the curvature of space which attracts bodies. As far as I can tell, you've just utterly discounted d'Espagnat's "Trajectories and Misleading “Pieces of Evidence”"—without a shred of reasoning to support it.
> You can say that "experimental success" means "the territory did what the map predicted it would do", but that doesn't mean the map is out there in the territory producing your experimental results.
Correct. But the success of the map only gives you confidence that the map has some sort of [pretty good] homomorphism to reality and probably, some subset of reality where you don't know all the ceteris paribus conditions.
> As a general comment: you seem to be thinking like a philosopher, not a physicist.
Ok, then here's a physicist:
>> In truth, however, with regard to the knowledge of ultimate reality, one would be misguided to blindly trust the pure scientific method and to uncritically raise its results to the status of properties of Being. While physics is almost unerring in its equations, which scarcely meet with anything but successive improvements, making them suitable for the description of an ever-increasing diversity of phenomena, it must be granted that in its history, it has successively given rise to world views that have contradicted one another and that, therefore, can hardly be anything else than mere models. To be sure, such a criticism should not be taken as final, considering that science has arisen only in relatively recent times and that it has developed considerably during the past few decades. Nevertheless, it would be somewhat preposterous to unequivocally assert that any such model is a faithful description of what is. (In Search of Reality, 3)
Want to know another physicist who was also a philosopher? Albert Einstein.
> You have a bunch of general principles in your head and you're trying to make everything you see fit them. That's backwards. You construct your map by exploring the territory; you don't decide first what your map is and then try to make the territory fit it.
Honestly, this seems like a log and speck situation: you think everything about everyday life can be reduced to electrons, quarks, and the electromagnetic force. Despite "Barriers of Relevance" which make this impossible to test—at least reductionistically down to the Big Equation™ level. It is *I* who am suggesting that there might be more equally real things out there in reality! And I'm just opening the space for empirically possible phenomena which we'd then have to go out and test. Here's what I wrote a while ago:
> Luke: I believe—based on science—that sometimes we have to get patterns going in our consciousness before we can observe them out in reality. I can expand upon this if you'd like, although I first suggest checking out that link if your curiosity is piqued.
I don't have "a specific model"
Yes, which means there is no point in trying to convince me that your totally nonspecific handwaving has a significant probability of being correct. You just need to invest the time and effort yourself and see where it goes.
I say the rest is important—it's almost the crux of my entire argument!
Yes, which means there is no point in trying to convince me that your argument is correct, because to me it's just totally nonspecific handwaving and doesn't even constitute an argument. You just need to invest the time and effort yourself and see where it goes.
If I could give you "a specific model" or "the results", how confident are you that it would violate Carroll's Big Equation™?
"Violate" in what sense?
If "violate" just means "show something that can't, at our current state of knowledge, be explicitly computed from the Big Equation", I gave an example in a comment a little bit ago: solidity. Nobody knows how to compute solidity from the Big Equation. Does that mean solidity "violates" the Big Equation?
If "violate" means "show something that can be explicitly proven to be inconsistent with the Big Equation", that's a much stronger claim and my Bayesian prior is extremely high that it cannot be done. Does that answer your question?
Let us recall that Carroll is explicitly reductionist: see his Downward Causation article.
"Reductionist" is a buzz word. As far as I can tell, Carroll is saying the same thing that I said in my second statement above about the word "violate". He's not saying that higher level entities aren't real; in fact he explicitly says the opposite. He's just saying that, whatever we find out about higher level entities, it will never be inconsistent with the Big Equation. "Downward Causation" would mean finding something that was.
it doesn't have to be due to the real electron, it can be due to a real something else
You're confusing map with territory again. "Electron", referring to the territory, is whatever is causing the phenomena we label with that name. It makes no sense to say the thing that is causing the phenomena is not the thing that is causing the phenomena, but something else.
"Electron", referring to the map, can refer to different things, because there can be different maps--different models, at different levels of accuracy, using different concepts. But all of them refer to the same "electron" in the territory--the same whatever-it-is that is causing the phenomena we label with the name "electron".
here's a physicist
Talking about philosophy, in a popular book. Try finding a physicist who says stuff like this in a peer-reviewed paper. You can't. Why? Because "peer-reviewed" means other people who actually know the subject are checking what you say and calling bullshit when appropriate.
Want to know another physicist who was also a philosopher? Albert Einstein.
There have been plenty of physicists who were also philosophers. So what?
If you want a somewhat more substantive response, my general impression is that physicists who try to do philosophy don't generally do it very well. But then I think philosophers in general don't do it very well, so I'm biased. :-)
However, the point of my comment was more specific: by "thinking like a philosopher" I meant "losing touch with the actual real stuff--the territory--that we are talking about". "Electron" is not just some word that labels a few diagrams in textbooks. Physicists have been observing electrons for more than a century, and that only counts the time since people began to understand that there was a common cause involved among a lot of widely different phenomena. "Electron" is the name we give to a common causal factor in a whole collection of phenomena: oil drop experiments, beta rays from nuclear reactions, spots on screens in cathode ray tubes, emission and absorption of light producing spectral lines, static electricity in my laundry, etc. etc. The whole point of the label "electron" is that all of these phenomena have a causal factor in common. We believe this because we have constructed detailed maps involving a model of this causal factor that make accurate predictions of all these phenomena. Once you have grokked all this, what does it even mean to say "all that stuff could have been caused by something else"?
you think everything about everyday life can be reduced to electrons, quarks, and the electromagnetic force.
I have said no such thing. I have said that all the things we deal with in everyday life are made of electrons, quarks, and EM forces. Big difference.
Luke said...
> > I don't have "a specific model"
> Yes, which means there is no point in trying to convince me that your totally nonspecific handwaving has a significant probability of being correct. You just need to invest the time and effort yourself and see where it goes.
You just don't see how I'm trying to open up a range of physical possibilities which seem 100% consistent with the Big Equation™ as long as it isn't taken as a complete theory? (See my David Bohm excerpt.)
> > I say the rest is important—it's almost the crux of my entire argument!
> Yes, which means there is no point in trying to convince me that your argument is correct, because to me it's just totally nonspecific handwaving and doesn't even constitute an argument. You just need to invest the time and effort yourself and see where it goes.
But Sean Carroll's Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood purports to be scientific knowledge—to extremely high confidence—that what I'm looking for does not exist. I want to know why that confidence is justified—if in fact it is. I think I've dispatched the idea that "if it were incomplete such that it matters for everyday life, we'd have seen so in physics experiments run to-date", while you apparently do not.
> "Violate" in what sense?
In the sense of there being more fundamental causal powers than just those specified in the Big Equation™, causal powers relevant to everyday life. Remember that Carroll is claiming completeness when it comes to (i) the fundamental causal powers at play; (ii) when the domain is restricted to everyday life.
> "Reductionist" is a buzz word. As far as I can tell, Carroll is saying the same thing that I said in my second statement above about the word "violate". He's not saying that higher level entities aren't real; in fact he explicitly says the opposite. He's just saying that, whatever we find out about higher level entities, it will never be inconsistent with the Big Equation. "Downward Causation" would mean finding something that was.
Right. If I were to talk in terms of "supervenience", you'd probably accuse me of being an empirically-detached philosopher. Do you enjoy being the instructor for Kobayashi Maru?
Look, I'm perfectly happy for the Big Equation™ to be an approximation which works fantastically in some domains. Because of the noise floor, predictions of Newtonian mechanics cannot be empirically distinguished from predictions of general relativity in much of life. I just think if we overextend the domains of validity, we might blind ourselves to how reality actually works. From what I can see, you are rather blasé about this.
Sean Carroll's Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood purports to be scientific knowledge—to extremely high confidence—that what I'm looking for does not exist. I want to know why that confidence is justified
I just think if we overextend the domains of validity, we might blind ourselves to how reality actually works.
...the domain of validity of the Big Equation is Everyday Life. Plus a lot of stuff that isn't even part of everyday life, like particle physics experiments.
Perhaps it's worth expanding on this "domain of validity" thing a bit. I'm assuming that what you are looking for is something that could make, say, nerve signals in your brain do something that is not consistent with the Big Equation. But that would mean that electrons, quarks, and EM forces in your brain are doing something that is not consistent with the Big Equation, because your brain is made of electrons, quarks, and EM forces. And (this is going to sound like a broken record) if electrons, quarks, and EM forces could do anything, under the conditions in your brain (temperature 310 K, density around the density of water, pressure roughly 1 atmosphere, etc.), that was not consistent with the Big Equation, we would have seen it in experiments we've already done, because we've done lots of experiments to see if electrons, quarks, and EM forces under those conditions (and a much wider range of conditions) do anything that is not consistent with the Big Equation, and we've failed to find any such thing. That is what I mean when I say the domain of validity of the Big Equation includes our brains, bodies, and all of the objects we deal with in everyday life.
Now it might be that I've misinterpreted what you're looking for. It might be that you'd be satisfied with something that, while it didn't make electrons, quarks, and EM forces in your brain do anything that wasn't consistent with the Big Equation, involved some kind of "collective phenomenon" that worked very differently from any of the collective phenomena we currently know of (like neuron firings, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc.). If that's all you're looking for, of course the Big Equation can't rule that out, because nobody has an exhaustive list of all the possible collective phenomena that the Big Equation could be consistent with. And we might never have such a list if there are Barriers of Relevance involved that screen off the collective phenomena at a higher level from the details at lower levels. (The proposal about quantum phenomena in microtubules that I mentioned earlier in this discussion is an example of a proposed "collective phenomenon" of this kind.)
I personally don't think that this second alternative is likely either; but my Bayesian prior that it won't happen is much lower than my Bayesian prior that we will never discover brains, bodies, or objects we deal with in everyday life doing anything that is inconsistent with the Big Equation.
Luke said...
> I'm assuming that what you are looking for is something that could make, say, nerve signals in your brain do something that is not consistent with the Big Equation.
If you ever thought you're the only one who has had to repeat stuff in this conversation, please disabuse yourself of that now.
(1) It started here:
Luke: I think you and I mean rather different things with that term "chosen". I don't need to assert libertarian free will; I can just question monistic determinism / physicalism.
> Peter: What other alternative is there? "Libertarian free will" just means "free will doesn't have to follow physical laws".
But it is possible to follow the Big Equation with fundamental forces in addition to the Big Four (or 1+3-in-1). That's because the Big Equation is not complete. It does not capture all possible structure and declare anything else to be pure indeterministic noise. Only a philosophical closure gets you that. That's what Bohm claimed and you've provided zero reason to doubt it. And so, there can be additional structure (including additional fundamental causal powers) without being inconsistent with the empirical component of the Big Equation. That is, the component actually supported by experiment.
(2) I also said the following and I stand by it:
> Luke: One thing I'm doing in my push toward an understanding of free will not restricted to the current laws of physics (that is, no other forces allowed) is to ensure that our current science stays falsifiable. In Intersubjectivity is Key, I note that there are two kinds of falsification: (I) contradiction; (II) incompleteness. I claim it's actually much harder to show (II). That's actually what Galileo did; he noticed that there was an in-between state in Aristotle's physics, between fire which goes upward and earth which goes downward. What about tangential motion? I'm no Galileo, but I worry that we humans suck at unearthing (II). We so desperately want to have described everything [relevant], at least at some "fundamental" level.
> Luke: I also don't understand why anything which might act contrary to Core Theory (I mainly mean "having more structure than", rather than "contradictory to") at the everyday level would necessarily have been observed in physics experiments.
I don't understand why you seem to have such a problem with (i) there being more structure [including fundamental causal powers] than Carroll's Big Equation specifies; (ii) which is relevant to everyday life; (iii) which doesn't violate the Big Equation. I don't understand why you have to construe this as a matter of "not consistent with the Big Equation".
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Nice interview. Interesting how the old school methods were more fun/enjoyable. Newer methods not much fun/enjoyment.
TomasIvarsson October 19, 2022, 1:40pm #4
Great video. Interesting to hear how training has evolved over the years; From loads of tempo to hours and hours riding at 150-250 watts, clearly z1 to low z2 assuming he has an FTP of 400 watts. Give that a thought. Clearly IF during the bulk of riding isn’t that important, as long as it is low enough not to induce to much fatigue to impair the hard workouts. Just get the hours in.
3 Likes
jasperm October 19, 2022, 6:07pm #5
I feel riding loads at 200-250w is done because that is still relatively easily fuelable (is that a word?). I feel that it should not be read as a low Z2 ride but as a carb-expinditure-capped ride.
liam_mail October 19, 2022, 6:12pm #6
Crosshair October 19, 2022, 6:19pm #7
It was interesting how he framed his training as becoming “more polarised” like it was a new theory, when we are told polarised is just a description of how Pro endurance athletes typically trained.
I think it sums how the average Pro Cyclist is just very very gifted! As Dr Hutch describes in his book.
For years, the average keen amateur has already been streets ahead of them in terms of knowledge abut exercise physiology, training methods and nutrition, so when you then apply the “keen amateur” level of detail to a pro baseline engine- you get the insanity that is the modern peloton.
A bit like wide tyres, low pressures and aerodynamics- the peloton never rushed to adopt the “fastest” theories, because when you come off the sofa after off season still able to do 300w for 6hrs, you can mask a lot of sins
3 Likes
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AUBURN, Ala. (AP)Auburn’s outside shots weren’t falling in its season opener but that didn’t matter much because the defense was on point.
Wendell Green Jr. scored 16 points while K.D. Johnson and Johni Broome each had 12 to lead the 15th-ranked Tigers to a 70-52 victory over George Mason on Monday night.
”Our defense was really good,” coach Bruce Pearl said. ”Rim protection was really good. I think we wore them down.”
The Tigers weren’t really challenged much in their first game since losing NBA first-round draft picks Jabari Smith and Walker Kessler. Green and Johnson are the top returnees on a team picked to finish fourth in the Southeastern Conference after rising to No. 1 in the nation for the first time in program history last season.
Neither team managed to hit 40% of their shots, but Auburn forced 19 turnovers and contained George Mason star Josh Oduro. That overcame 4-of-25 shooting (16%) from 3-point range, including Johnson’s 2-of-9 performance.
”We’re going to rely on our defense, and defense wins championships,” Johnson said.
Broome enjoyed a solid debut for Auburn as one of the players Pearl brought in to replace the two big men. The transfer from Morehead State had six rebounds and four of the Tigers’ 10 blocked shots.
Returning big man Dylan Cardwell had nine rebounds and five blocks.
”It’s a good start,” Pearl said. ”Obviously if we continue to shoot the ball poorly, then we’ll have concerns. I’m not concerned now, but we’ve got to shoot it better.”
Ronald Polite III led George Mason with 10 points, and Victor Bailey Jr. had nine. Oduro, the leading scorer in the Atlantic 10 Conference last season, had eight points and played most of the second half in foul trouble.
”Our ball security and our defensive rebounding are our No. 1 areas we need to improve on,” George Mason coach Kim English said. ”And I wanted to test it out against the best right off the bat.
”We’ve got to keep improving and getting better. Obviously a humbling experience for our group.”
The Patriots hit their last five shots of the first half to trim an 18-point deficit to 31-24 by halftime. They closed on a 13-2 run that started with three straight 3-pointers after missing their first seven and cut it to six points early in the second half but couldn’t keep it close.
English said he figured other Auburn returnees would be eager to emerge following the departures of Smith and Kessler.
”They wanted to show that it’s their time to step up and they did that,” the George Mason coach said. ”That was the thing, who was it going to be? Who was going to be the guy on their team that stepped up and I think they did it collectively. They all had their moments.”
George Mason: Opened a season on the road for the first time since 2008. … Got outrebounded 48-37. … Beat Maryland and Georgia on the road last season but couldn’t overcome another Power Five team.
Auburn: The Tigers have won all nine openers under Pearl. They’ve won 39 straight non-conference games at home.
Pearl is a fan of English, a former Missouri player and Tennessee assistant starting his second year as a head coach.
”I tried to recruit him when he went to Missouri,” Pearl said. ”I’m a big fan of his. I followed him. Very impressed with Kim English. Always have been, as a player and now as a coach.”
George Mason hosts Longmont on Friday night.
Auburn hosts South Florida on Friday night and plays its first four games at Neville Arena.
—
https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball and https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll and https://twitter.com/AP-Top25
Copyright 2022 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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County clerks across Missouri have been gearing up for the November 3rd presidential election, with some hiring temporary workers to handle the influx of absentee and mail-in ballots.
Missouri Association of County Clerks president Crystal Hall, who serves as the clerk in eastern Missouri’s Lincoln County, says most clerks have enough poll workers and staffers.
“There’s not one county that is in desperate need that I’m aware of that haven’t been able to find the staffing that they need for the election,” Hall says.
Missouri’s secretary of state says a combined total of about 424,000 absentee and mail-in ballots have been received by local election authorities.
Ms. Hall is thanking Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft for delivering personal protective equipment (PPE) this year to all 116 election jurisdictions. Ashcroft’s office also distributed about $4.5 million this year to local election authorities, to provide funding for them to meet their jurisdiction’s individual needs.
Hall has purchased special pens for each registered voter in her county, for COVID reasons.
“So instead of having that one pen that’s hanging on the chain that everybody that comes in there (clerk’s office) touches, you’re going to have your own pen that no one else has touched,” says Hall.
Hall also tells Missourinet that FFA high school students in Lincoln County will be cleaning machines all day long, to keep voters safe in November.
Secretary Ashcroft and his staff have delivered about 17,000 face masks, 17,000 face shields and 500 gallons of sanitizer to the clerks across the state.
Fast-growing Lincoln County is located just north of St. Charles County. Towns include Troy, Elsberry and Foley. There is no mask mandate in Lincoln County, so Hall is encouraging poll workers to wear a mask. Her staff has also installed plexiglass barriers between voters and election workers.
The county clerks association says you can expect long lines at the polls for the November election. Ms. Hall says while election judges and pollworkers are paid, they’re essentially volunteers. She notes many are elderly and will be working long hours on election day, from 6 a.m. until at least 7 p.m.
“They’re working through this because they care about our community and our country, and they’re doing their patriotic duty to help,” Hall says, urging voters to be patient and kind.
If voters are in line by 7 p.m. on election night, they are still allowed to vote.
Click here to listen to Brian Hauswirth’s full interview with Lincoln County Clerk Crystal Hall, who’s president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks. The interview was recorded on October 21, 2020:
Filed Under: Education, Elections, Health / Medicine, News, Politics / Govt Tagged With: absentee and mail-in ballots, COVID-19, election judges, Elsberry, Foley, Lincoln County Clerk Crystal Hall, Missouri Association of County Clerks, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, pens, personal protective equipment, plexiglass barriers, Troy
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Congressional Summary:Adopts the definition of "hate crime" as set forth in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994: a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person. Provides technical, forensic, prosecutorial, or other assistance in the criminal investigation or prosecution of hate crimes, including financial grant awards.
Proponent's argument to vote Yes:Rep. JOHN CONYERS (D, MI-14):This bill expands existing Federal hate crimes law to groups who are well-known targets for bias-based violence--they are sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and disability. These crimes of violence are directed not just at those who are directly attacked; they are targeting the entire group with the threat of violence.
Opponent's argument to vote No:Rep. LAMAR SMITH (R, TX-21): Every year thousands of violent crimes are committed out of hate, but just as many violent crimes, if not more, are motivated by something other than hate--greed, jealousy, desperation or revenge, just to name a few. An individual's motivation for committing a violent crime is usually complex and often speculative. Every violent crime is deplorable, regardless of its motivation. That's why all violent crimes should be vigorously prosecuted. Unfortunately, this bill undermines one of the most basic principles of our criminal justice system--equal justice for all. Under this bill, justice will no longer be equal. Justice will now depend on the race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim. It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime. This is the real injustice. Reference: Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act; Bill HR.1913 ; vote number 2009-H223 on Apr 2, 2009
Voted YES on expanding services for offenders' re-entry into society.
H.R.1593: Second Chance Act of 2007: Community Safety Through Recidivism Prevention or the Second Chance Act (Motion to Suspend the Rules and Pass). To reauthorize the grant program for reentry of offenders into the community in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, and to improve reentry planning and implementation.
Proponents support voting YES because:
Rep. CONYERS: Some 650,000 men and women are leaving the Federal and State prisons each year. While the vast majority of the prisoners are committed to abiding by the law and becoming productive members of society, they often encounter the same pressures & temptations that they faced before prison. More than two-thirds of them are arrested for new crimes within 3 years of their release. This exacts a terrible cost in financial terms as well as in human terms. The Second Chance Act will help provide these men and women with the training, counseling and other support needed to help them obtain & hold steady jobs; to kick their drug and alcohol habits; rebuild their families; and deal with the many other challenges that they face in their efforts to successfully rejoin society.
Opponents recommend voting NO because:
Rep. GOHMERT: The programs that are sought to be renewed are ones we don't have information on how successful they were. I can tell you from my days as a judge, there was some anecdotal evidence that it looked like faith-based programs did a better job of dramatically reducing recidivism. In addition:
There are some provisions that allow for too much administration. That is going to build a bigger bureaucracy.
Dismissing all charges if someone completes drug rehab under another provision I think is outrageous. You are going to remove the hammer that would allow you to keep people in line?
We also have a provision to teach inmates how they can go about getting the most welfare before they leave prison and go out on their own.
Voted YES on funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.
Vote on an amendment that would reduce the funding for violent offender imprisonment by and truth-in-sentencing programs by $61 million. The measure would increase funding for Boys and Girls Clubs and drug courts by the same amount. Reference: Amendment sponsored by Scott, D-VA; Bill HR 4690 ; vote number 2000-317 on Jun 22, 2000
Voted NO on more prosecution and sentencing for juvenile crime.
Vote to pass a bill to appropriate $1.5 billion to all of the states that want to improve their juvenile justice operations. Among other provisions this bill includes funding for development, implementation, and administration of graduated sanctions for juvenile offenders, funds for building, expanding, or renovating juvenile corrections facilities, hiring juvenile judges, probation officers, and additional prosecutors for juvenile cases. Reference: Bill introduced by McCollum, R-FL; Bill HR 1501 ; vote number 1999-233 on Jun 17, 1999
Rated 40% by CURE, indicating mixed votes on rehabilitation.
Holt scores 40% by CURE on rehabilitation issues
CURE (Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants) is a membership organization of families of prisoners, prisoners, former prisoners and other concerned citizens. CURE's two goals are
to use prisons only for those who have to be in them; and
for those who have to be in them, to provide them all the rehabilitative opportunities they need to turn their lives around.
More funding and stricter sentencing for hate crimes.
Holt co-sponsored the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act:
Title: To provide Federal assistance to States and local jurisdictions to prosecute hate crimes.
Summary: Provide technical, forensic, prosecutorial, or other assistance in the criminal investigation or prosecution of any violent crime that is motivated by prejudice based on the race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or disability of the victim or is a violation of hate crime laws.
Award grants to assist State and local law enforcement officials with extraordinary expenses for interstate hate crimes.
Award grants to State and local programs designed to combat hate crimes committed by juveniles.
Prohibit specified offenses involving actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.
Increase criminal sentencing for adult recruitment of juveniles to commit hate crimes.
Collect and publish data about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on gender.
Source: House Resolution Sponsorship 01-HR1343 on Apr 3, 2001
Require DNA testing for all federal executions.
Holt co-sponsored the Innocence Protection Act:
Title: To reduce the risk that innocent persons may be executed.
Summary: Authorizes a person convicted of a Federal crime to apply for DNA testing to support a claim that the person did not commit:
the Federal crime of which the person was convicted; or
any other offense that a sentencing authority may have relied upon when it sentenced the person with respect to such crime.
Prohibits a State from denying an application for DNA testing made by a prisoner in State custody who is under sentence of death if specified conditions apply.
Provides grants to prosecutors for DNA testing programs.
Establishes the National Commission on Capital Representation.
Withholds funds from States not complying with standards for capital representation.
Provides for capital defense incentive grants and resource grants.
Increases compensation in Federal cases, and sets forth provisions regarding compensation in State cases, where an individual is unjustly sentenced to death.
Adds a certification requirement in Federal death penalty prosecutions.
Expresses the sense of Congress regarding the execution of juvenile offenders and the mentally retarded.
Source: House Resolution Sponsorship 01-HR912 on Mar 7, 2001
Increase funding for "COPS ON THE BEAT" program.
Holt co-sponsored increasing funding for "COPS ON THE BEAT" program
COPS Improvements Act of 2007 - Amends the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to make grants for public safety and community policing programs (COPS ON THE BEAT or COPS program). Revises grant purposes to provide for:
the hiring or training of law enforcement officers for intelligence, antiterror, and homeland security duties;
the hiring of school resource officers;
school-based partnerships between local law enforcement agencies and local school systems to combat crime, gangs, drug activities, and other problems facing elementary and secondary schools;
innovative programs to reduce and prevent illegal drug (including methamphetamine) manufacturing, distribution, and use; and
enhanced community policing and crime prevention grants that meet emerging law enforcement needs.
Authorizes the Attorney General to make grants to:
assign community prosecutors to handle cases from specific geographic areas and address counterterrorism problems, specific violent crime problems, and localized violent and other crime problems; and
develop new technologies to assist state and local law enforcement agencies in crime prevention.
Source: COPS Improvements Act (S.368/H.R.1700) 07-S368 on Jan 23, 2007
Easier access to rape kits, and more rape kit analysis.
Holt signed easier access to rape kits, and more rape kit analysis
Congress finds the following:
Rape is a serious problem.
In 2006, there were an estimated 261,000 rapes and sexual assaults.
The collection and testing of DNA evidence is a critical tool in solving rape cases.
Despite the availability of funding under the Debbie Smith Act of 2004, there exists a significant rape kit backlog.
A 1999 study estimated that there was an annual backlog of 180,000 rape kits that had not been analyzed.
Certain States cap reimbursement for rape kits at levels that are less than 1/2 the average cost of a rape kit.
There is a lack of health professionals who have received specialized training specific to sexual assault victims.
The purpose of this Act is to address the problems surrounding forensic evidence collection in cases of sexual assault, including rape kit backlogs, reimbursement for or free provision of rape kits, and the availability of trained health professionals to administer rape kit examinations.
Sen. FRANKEN: Last year, 90,000 people were raped. Thanks to modern technology, we have an unparalleled tool to bring sexual predators to justice: forensic DNA analysis. Rape kit DNA evidence is survivors' best bet for justice. Unfortunately, we have failed to make adequate use of DNA analysis. In 2004, then-Sen. Biden and others worked to pass the Debbie Smith Act, a law named after a rape survivor whose backlogged rape kit was tested six years after her assault. Unfortunately, because many localities simply did not use the Debbie Smith funds they were allocated, the promise of the Debbie Smith Act remains unfulfilled.
In 2009, Los Angeles had 12,500 untested rape kits; Houston found at least 4,000 untested rape kits in storage, and Detroit reported a backlog of possibly 10,000 kits. Those are just three cities. Hundreds of thousands of women have not seen justice. Source: Justice for Survivors of Sexual Assault (S2736&HR4114) 2009-S2736 on Nov 5, 2009
Rated 62% by the NAPO, indicating a moderate stance on police issues.
Holt scores 62% by the NAPO on crime & police issues
Ratings by the National Association of Police Organizations indicate support or opposition to issues of importance to police and crime. The organization's self-description: "The National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) is a coalition of police units and associations from across the United States. NAPO was organized for the purpose of advancing the interests of America's law enforcement officers through legislative advocacy, political action, and education.
"Increasingly, the rights and interests of law enforcement officers have been the subject of legislative, executive, and judicial action in the nations capital. NAPO works to influence the course of national affairs where law enforcement interests are concerned. The following list includes examples of NAPOs accomplishments:
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A Class C IP address is a type of Internet Protocol (IP) address used for large networks. It is often used in businesses, universities, and other institutions where many computers are on the web.
Class C IP Address Finder can be used to verify the status of an IP address. They do this by checking if the IP is part of a private network or not.
How to Find Your Own Class C IP Address with 3 Simple Steps
This article will teach three simple steps to find your own Class C IP address.
Input the domain name of the website you are trying to access (e.g., google.com).
Click "Submit" and wait for the results.
A Class C IP address is a block of IP addresses that have the first octet in the range of 192.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255, which are reserved for commercial use and can be used by entities such as ISPs and web hosting companies to provide internet access service to clients with a fixed IP address or a dynamic IP address assigned by the ISP on behalf of the client, who could be an individual or an organization, usually for a fee. Still, some free Class C providers are also available on the internet.
We all know many advantages of using a free Class C IP address service provider, but what about those paid ones? Well, here are some benefits you can get from them:
The price is usually lower than other options.
They often offer better-quality customer support.
They provide faster connection speeds.
What are the Benefits of Using Class C IP Address Finder?
Class C IP addresses are often used in networks that have a large number of hosts. They are also used in networks that use the subnetting technique to divide the network into smaller networks.
A Class C IP Address Finder is software that can be installed on a computer to identify its host's Class C IP address. It is helpful in cases where an administrator needs to verify whether or not their network uses Class C IP addresses and when they need to troubleshoot issues with their network.
What are the Drawbacks of Using Class C IP Address Finder?
There are many drawbacks to using a Class C IP Address Finder. One of them is that the IP address is not always accurate. Another one is that it can be expensive and time-consuming, as you must pay for a subscription to use it. The third drawback is that it cannot tell you about the website's visitor's location. Thank goodness KRC SEO Class C IP Address Finder is free for users to use and get their desired results.
What Does "Class C" Mean in Terms of Networking & How Does It Apply To An Ip Address?
Class C networks are viral networks. They are used for small to medium-sized networks that need a lot of IP addresses.
In terms of networking, Class C means that a Class C network utilizes IP addresses from 192.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.254, which is only 255 IP addresses available on this network. Today, it is the most popular network because it can be easily configured on almost any device. In addition, it has enough IP addresses for small to medium-sized networks with little overhead and complexity in management or maintenance costs associated with them.
The Pros and Cons of Using Class C IP Address Finder to Optimize Your Website
Using a Class C IP Address Finder is a great way to optimize your website and ensure it runs as efficiently as possible. It also provides that you are not on the receiving end of any security breaches.
The pros of using KRC SEO Class C IP Address Finder include:
Ensuring that your site is at its best performance
Ensuring that your site has no security breaches or vulnerabilities
Ensure that the server load is optimized and there are no bottlenecks in the system, which can lead to downtime or slow loading times for visitors to your website.
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Changes in the United States legislative landscape
Changes in the United States legislative landscape
In spite of a number of serious and ongoing geopolitical events, the summer of 2022 saw significant change in the United States, with the passing of two key pieces of legislation by Congress. Irene Lynch Fannon discusses what is referred to in media reports as 'the CHIPS and Science Act', and the Inflation Reduction Act...
Geopolitical developments often change the environment in which our clients develop their business strategies for the short- and medium-term. In 2022, a range of geopolitical events including the conflict in Ukraine, climate change causing drought and floods, and the effects of Brexit are all competing for our attention, causing some to speculate about where the opportunities may be and others to react defensively. Success sometimes lies in the ability to identify, adapt to and capture new opportunities. In that context, significant change has happened over the summer months in the United States with the passing of two key pieces of legislation by Congress. The first is referred to in media reports as 'the CHIPS and Science Act' and the second, the Inflation Reduction Act.
The CHIPS and Science Act
The first, which has a number of different titles or sections and is primarily an appropriations act, has received a lot of attention because it has allocated significant federal funding to support the manufacturing of particular products, in addition to providing focused funding for particular technological and scientific initiatives and research. The abbreviated title is actually an acronym for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semi-Conductors in America. The majority of the legislative provisions contained in it are driven by policy concerns around ensuring leadership of the US in the manufacturing of high-level technologies.
In addition, there are concerns around supply chain vulnerabilities through over-reliance on the overseas manufacturing of crucial components such as semi-conductors and micro-chips. There is also a broader, longstanding concern around repatriating certain kinds of manufacturing to the US. A further concern, shared by other countries, is the growing capacity for such 'high-end' manufacturing in China.
The Act, which became law in August, allocates $52.7 billion in subsidies for US chip manufacturers who establish or expand operations in the US, and $200 billion for investment in research into technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics and quantum computing. The Act received cross-party support with a significant majority vote in the Senate, and approval in the House, following further tax and spend agreements with some 'hold out' Democrats. President Biden said, as he signed the Act into law, that the new initiatives will mean lower prices for the US consumer for everything "from cars to dishwashers". Clearly the initiative represents opportunities for those particular sectors.
However, another feature of the legislation is what is described as the 'guardrails' approach, preventing investment by US companies in Chinese companies and entities engaged in similar cutting-edge industries. This part of the legislation is designed to protect intellectual property and, indeed, US jobs. At the same time this particular aspect highlights what is really compelling about this new legal framework. It represents a level of governmental engagement with specific industrial policy which is unusual in the US. The legislation has been described as a significant shift in approach to shaping industrial policy and as the most important planned US investment in industrial development in over 50 years (Peterson Institute for International Economics). That said, while this is different in terms of recent American approaches, such investment and planning is not unusual in the EU or, indeed, in other major economies, such as Japan.
On a side note, once the Act was signed several initiatives from major US manufacturers of semi- conductors got underway. However, recent reports have indicated that further instability in this sector developed later in the summer, with large manufacturers now reporting a glut of inventory in the US, due to unpredictable supply chains coupled with a decline in consumer demand for a range of goods.
The Inflation Reduction Act
The second key piece of legislation which was passed during the summer - the Inflation Reduction Act, which was originally called the Build Back Better Bill. However, increasing concerns around inflation and the need to address challenging economic developments led to a change in title. Three aspects of this legislation stand out. First; the significant allocation of funds for clean energy initiatives. Second; the clarification of a tax strategy for large corporates and, third; changes to federal spending on prescription drugs provided under the Medicare system.
Included in the clean energy initiatives are an allocation of $30 billion to support the building of infrastructure-supporting alternative fuel initiatives, including support for solar panels, wind turbines, battery manufacturing and geothermal plants. A further $30 billion has been allocated for grants and loans supporting the transition of utilities to clean energy.
From a tax perspective, the Act includes provisions designed to prevent the largest corporations from exploiting tax loopholes that allow them to pay little or no federal income tax, by imposing a 15% alternative minimum tax on corporations with average annual adjusted financial statement income that exceeds $1 billion over any consecutive three taxable year period. This tax is predicted to generate approximately $300 billion in revenue from an estimated 150 companies. The legislation also includes other tax reforms intended to make the tax code fairer and also provides approximately $80 billion of additional funding over the next 9 years for IRS enforcement, operations, systems modernisation and customer service, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that enforcement-related funding will raise $204 billion in additional revenue, through 2031.
Finally, the legislation will allow the federal government to negotiate and cap the prices it will pay for nominated prescription drugs provided to millions of Americans under the Medicare system. Medicare supports access to healthcare and prescription drugs for Americans over the age of 65 and other categories of vulnerable individuals, and represents a significant market of over 55 million people. This initiative builds on an already intricate classification system for medication and pharmaceuticals paid for by the federal government under Medicare. It strengthens the ability of the government agency operating the system to negotiate prices and to penalise companies for particular pricing strategies. The plan is that this will lead to budgetary savings of $200 billion which can be used elsewhere.
These two pieces of legislation seem to be politically popular in the US and their success represents a potential shift towards continued support for the Biden administration, which would not have been expected earlier in 2022.
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Last week was a remarkably one for my stock market portfolio. Share prices were up on almost all my holdings. This was no doubt sparked by good news from the USA – inflation seems to be under control with CPI falling to 7.7%, and the war in Ukraine is looking up as Russia withdrew from the west bank of the Dnipro River. Stalemate in the latter war is looking increasingly likely which may encourage both Russia and Ukraine to reach some accommodation.
I also get the impression that stocks were being bought back in a panic after previous sales as they fell sharply in previous months. This particularly affected less liquid small cap and AIM stocks.
But this is surely only temporary relief from the gloomy economic prognostications. Interest rates in the UK still need to rise further as inflation is still high and real interest rates still negative. Political stability may help over the next few months but it looks like we are all going to be significantly poorer from aggressive tax rises. This will not help the UK economy one bit.
I watched an interesting TV documentary on WeWork yesterday. WeWork was essentially a company that rented out office desk space, i.e. it was a property company but ended up being valued as a high flying technology business valued at a peak $47 billion before it crashed. Led by Adam Neumann as CEO in a messianic style it developed into a cult which became further and further detached from reality. As profits were non-existent they redefined the word profit.
It’s a great example of how investors can be suckered into backing dubious companies led by glib promoters simply due to FOMO (fear of missing out). There is a good book on this subject entitled “The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion” which I have ordered and may review at a later date.
Cryptocurrency exchange FTX became bankrupt last week. At the end it looked like a typical “run on a bank” as folks rushed to take their money out. FTX reportedly had less than $1bn in easily sellable assets against $9bn in liabilities before it went bankrupt. This has also affected other cryptocurrencies as traders take their money off the table.
Can cryptocurrencies survive? Only if backed by the state I would suggest. I am reading an interesting book – the Travels of Marco Polo which covers his time spent in the Mongol empire including China circa 1300. It describes how paper money was widely accepted in the Mongol empire which covered most of Asia at the time. But it was backed by gold or silver for which it could be exchanged. One advantage of their paper money was if you wanted a lower denomination note you could simply cut up a larger one. Paper currencies do rely on public confidence which is why state backing is so essential and also confidence that holdings are not going to be devalued by excessive printing of more money. Cryptocurrencies have tackled this issue in more than one way including the need for large power consumption to create new coins. But the whole structure still seems unsound to me.
An interesting article in the Investors Chronicle this week covered the subject of passive investing under the headline “Passive Saturation”. There has been concern expressed for some time that a high proportion of the stock market is held by index tracking funds that simply follow the herd. This might magnify trends and not relate to the reality of fundamentals in the companies they buy and sell. This was previously not thought to be a problem because the “passive percentage” of the market was estimated to be only 15%. But a new academic report suggests the real figure is more like 38%.
A very high passive percentage means that stock pickers can do well, and better than the indices as they ignore trends and look at the fundamental merits of companies. I prefer actively managed funds even if you do pay more for them in charges. Funds that rely solely on momentum may have done well historically but they are likely to exaggerate trends both up and down and the higher the percentage of the market held by passive funds, the more dangerous this becomes.
You can “follow” this blog by entering your email address below. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.
Author rogerwlawsonPosted on November 14, 2022 Categories Cryptocurrencies, History, Stock marketTags FTX, Passive investing, WeWorkLeave a comment on Market Trends, WeWork, Cryptocurrencies, Passive Saturation
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More Cheap Labour Required? And Results from Intercede and Telecom Plus
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I recently found out that my husband has HIV, and it has advanced to the fourth stage. Discussing with his doctor, she told me that he has probably had it for 6 or more years (pretty much the length of our marriage). It was shocking for me to find this out and also the realisation that I could have it too.
The doctor advised that I take a test ASAP to find out my status, them discuss the way forward. When I went for my test result and was told that I am HIV negative, I couldn’t believe it. All remember saying was
“Thank you, God, thank you Jesus.”
I was told that we are what is called a discordant couple. I thank God because he chose to save me, so that his name may be glorified. I have decided to use my chance to advise young couples about testing before they get married because we did not, and it could have been fatal for me. I don’t know how am gonna do this yet, but it’s my mission to begin doing this.
God has been so good! I've just edited this testimony. May God Bless you all!
How a Toothache and a Tribe in a Distant Land Lead Me Back to Christ
Many people ask me why I have decided to dedicate my life to helping the Badjao and the answer is quite …
About 3 people have told me that God has “Chosen” Me. First of all I am very new to God and …
Glory be to the Father in heaven as all things are for His Glory. It is my hope for you to follow your mission and have strength and wisdom to complete it.
I also meant to write before that you should read the passages in Gods Word about forgiveness. Your husband is sick and at this stage he will become even sicker. I know of this as my brother died of Aides many years ago and I took care of him. God reveals so much in His Word when we study it – and I know that you will as well.
God works in amazing ways. In ways we know not. In ways out of reach from our mind and thought.
Thanks for the encouragement. I have no reason to be angry with my husband because he probably had HIV before we got married and he did not know it as well.
Our mistake was not getting tested before getting married. I know that many couples here in Uganda do not test before marriage and thats what I want to focus on. I think the best places to target are churches where marriage counselling is done.
I have also promised God, that because he has saved me, I will be my husband’s side till the end. Am not giving up on him because that is what we mean when we vow that “till death do us part”.
Please keep him in your prayers because he is currently on oxygen as I write.
I believe that God can heal your husband. Pray and believe. Chech out savedhealed.com…it has many healing scriptures and readings to help you pray for healing. God Bless
He is the God of wonders. Stay blessed.
My Husband passed away on Friday 20th May, the day wrote my previous post. I am requesting for your prayers to help me get through this and be strong.
May his soul rest in Eternal peace.
THANKX TO GOD
You guys i love god with all my heart. I was very scared that i was going to die at a young age, because i was involved with someone and the condom ripped. Now the person i was involved with was in a high risk group of hiv infection and other std’s. So i was so scared, i didnt know who to turn to. I turned to god allmighty. I was scared of contracting a deadly disease. But i looked for god with complete and earnest desire.he convicted me to go get tested, and thanks to god, the result came back negative. ” Remember by Jesus Christ’s stripes we are healed”. I thank god for giving me another opportunity in life. I believe that if you truly repent, and start looking for god he will save you spiritually and physically. Because why would our heavenly father want to see us in such a horrible condition. Whatever you ask in the name of the son Jesus Christ it will be granted to you. For if your faith is that of a grain of mustard seed you will tell this mountain move and it will move. Remember god is a perfect god, and he stands firm on his promises, and he could never contradict himself. So believe and take a hold of gods promises. God loves us all. But we have to have faith in him, and ask him. Talk to him. He is right next to you just waiting for you to ask him. Ask and it will be given to you. THis life in itself is a miracle, dont you have faith in the creator or everything, of the whole universe? Amen, Hallejua, All glory to god for all of eternity. Lets start helping eachother on this site, let us grow in faith together as we read new testimonies, amen
God says…”I am the Lord the God of all flesh.What is too difficult for me?”
Thank you all for the encouragement in your posts.
Prudence, would you like to share your testimony on your healing from HIV?God bless you.
my wife tested hiv postive last year do you know what came into my mind? God has a purpose in this I believe God is the same If He healed that woman who was bleeding for 12 years, He lifted Lazarous from the tomb, He would truly I say truly heal my wife.The next time I write another E-mail thats tommorrow I will proclaim the Negative status of my wife. Jesus is Lord and he has better plans for us. Anybody outside there who can feel my prayer please join me this night to pray for my wife’s healing. God bless you
You and your wife are in my prayers Peter….yes there will be Glory after this!!! Do not give up hope no matter how long it takes…if God did it for others I dont see why he won’t do it for you!
Im praying 4 a miracle, The Lord has saved me so many times but still i dont get saved, Now i had sex which was with a high risk, after i had Acute HIV symptoms and swollen lymph nodes, I pray to God that He will heal me before I get tested, and if I am healed I promise I will change and be born again.
I was a gay. I’m an educated idiot. I have done sex so many times with my different gay partners without using condoms.
Recently I feared more about HIV risk. I was very upset. I know nothing in this connection. Jesus says call me when you are in trouble, I will deliver you. I trust jesus word. The next day I have to go to HIV test. Before the night I prayed to Jesus.
Oh Jesus please save me from this disaster. I confess my sin truly I told him I want to repent. Please give me one chance Dad. I assured him that I won’t do any sexual activities outside marriage. I won’t do anything against the nature of god.
I went to the hospital with fearness. When I received the result doctor told me everything was normal with smile. Wow what a miracle this is in my life. I’m very very happy now. Jesus forgave my sin and gave a new life. Jesus heals me. Jesus is the living god. Jesus died for our sins. Repent and accept Jesus. He is the light. Your life will be happy. Thank you Lord. I’m waiting for rapture Dad.
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To create videos for their website which show candidates what to expect when they turn up for an exam by filming of the following items:
The exam settings (the physical locations)
A pretend candidate going through a few of the other OSPEs
A faculty member going through the equipment that will be included
Interviews with senior faculty members
We filmed Interviews with examiners and faculty members, filmed location shots and various scenarios. We recorded voice over audio. These were edited together and background music added. We created animated titles using The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh's logo. This was used to top and tail each video clip. The videos were exported into formats for website use.
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Simply Click add to cart button on site to order, your order will be handled promtly by Elliott along with a confirmation email . If you are interested in custom artwork, please contact Elliott by phone (678)438-6992 or email at elliott@elliotthubbard.com.
I want you to enjoy my artwork as much as I have enjoyed creating it. I take pride in giving excellent customer service. I am not new to selling art . I have been selling via my own website (www.elliotthubbard.com) for many years. I have enjoyed the wonderful relationships with all of our customers. It is so important to us to continue this same level of service . Our goal is to ensure that everyone is happy with their purchase experience. We are always here, if you have any questions. Just Call or drop me a email at elliott@elliotthubbard.com
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by: Carol Carpenter
Many thanks for all the complimentary comments on my last newsletter despite the lateness of it. I do hope it’s not going to be like my game of Bowls, one good wood and downhill from then onwards!!!
After spending 3 months here in the Algarve it was now time for my father to return to the U.K. Before doing so we thought it would be nice for him to spend a few days in Spain to see his other daughters in La Manga. My younger sister lives there with her partner whilst my elder sister and her family were house hunting in the area. The journey was strange in that we had to use a German airline, Air Berlin, to fly from Portugal to Spain, overfly our destination to change at Palma, then fly back to Alicante where my sister was to meet us. We were very impressed with the Airline, the seats were comfortable, not cramped, the staff very friendly, and we were also fed and watered on both legs of the journey. The only grumble was the long hike from terminal A to terminal D for the transfer, but once comfortably on board (and before take-off) for our 25 minute flight my father insisted on ordering us a double scotch to more than make up for it.
It was great to see my sisters again to spend some quality time together. We all live so far away now, that it was good for Dad to see us all together enjoying ourselves. Our apartment was on Thomas Maestre Marina and it had the most amazing views of the Mar Menor (little sea in Spanish) where my younger sister runs a small bar and her partner has a Marine School. La Manga is very pretty, with the Mediterranean Sea on one side and the Mar Menor on the other, but unfortunately, with the construction of many tower blocks and hotels, it is of course being spoilt a little, as in many other coastal regions. La Manga known to the locals as “The Strip” is 18 miles long and they live at the very end in an older apartment having one of the best views, to both the Med and Mar Menor. Father thoroughly enjoyed his stay there having his morning coffee and brandy looking out onto this beautiful view. Pretty though it is, it would not be for us - the thought of travelling 18 miles for the weekly shopping and back would not suit us at all, especially when, in the summer with all the tourists, it can take almost 2 hours to drive the strip. You can shop and eat in La Manga, but it is very expensive especially on the Marina. Although it suits the life style of my sister and her partner and they are very happy there, we love the Algarve and can never wait to get back. Eventually after spending 6 days in Spain I delivered my father safely back to the U.K staying for a week including a short visit to Gloucestershire to see his great-grand children after which I returned “home” to the Algarve.
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The EasyJet flight from Gatwick was quite unbearable. On checking in I was told that my case, which I had taken in the cabin with me on the out going journey, was now not allowed and it would have to go in the hold in spite of the fact that this case had flown with me from Faro to Palma, to Alicante to Gatwick without a problem. Apparently I was only allowed to take one piece of hand baggage and as this case had the makeup bag with it, similar to the cases used by the Cabin staff it was not allowed. This took me over the size limit and I also had an umbrella (which I should have binned, as it was a freebie anyway), now costing me £25 to take home, as extra baggage. Anyone flying with EasyJet is warned, if you have a handbag and a small case which you wish to take on board, put the handbag inside otherwise they will not allow it and it will go in the hold. I suppose due too the cheapness of the tickets, they must make their money by ripping us off - but it leaves a bad impression and I do not think in the long term they are doing themselves any favours !!!.
The most expensive umbrella I have ever owned !! - according to EasyJet.
Arriving home I was looking forward to the St Patrick’s Society Annual Celebration Dinner at Villa Petra in Albufeira on 10th March. This event was once again a great success with 180 guests enjoying a sumptuous buffet and free bar, and this year being honoured for the first time by the attendance of the Irish Ambassador, James Brennan.
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The dinner was followed by music from “The Melting Pot” an Irish band from Lisbon together with a disco provided by Kiss FM’s DJ and compere, Marc Damon and an excellent demonstration of Irish dancing by members of the society’s own dance class.
A raffle draw featured fantastic prizes, including five pairs of Ryanair tickets to various destinations, boat trips with South West Charters, a weeks holiday in Gibraltar from Kiss FM, a flight with Aero-Algarve, treatments at Vila Vita’s Spa and other prizes too numerous to mention raising 2,000 euros for the Castelo de Sonhos.
One of the Ryanair flights, from Faro to Barcelona was won by Betty Arnold, a great-great grandmother who will be 100 years old in August !! She lives in England where she is known to her close family as ‘Nan and, like the Queen of England from whom she will soon be hearing, ‘Nan’ does not carry any money hence her nickname of “Queen Nan” This remarkable lady, with all her faculties intact, stole the show, putting people half her age to shame by dancing the night away.
Carvoeiro held its own St Patrick’s Day celebrations. Starting at Dirty Nellie’s we found Eilis the owner, pouring pints and handing out hats to everyone - with many people wearing fancy dress, hats or wigs. There were also a lot of visitors from Scotland joining in the celebrations many wearing kilts. After a pint of Guinness and a photo session we joined a small parade led by Graham of the Irish Times, dressed as St Patrick on a four bar pub crawl to Hemingway’s, Imprevisto, Sully’s bar and the Irish times. After a hearty Guinness at each bar we all made our way back to Dirty Nellie’s, to sample their Irish Stew, which was so delicious we ended up having two portions. Eilis had also organised a raffle with the proceeds going to The Cystic Fibrosis society. We all had a great time and the partying went on well into the night. Thanks to everyone who posed for the photographs, especially the Scotsman who proved that many wear nothing under the Kilt. I hope the ladies from Scotland, on holiday without their men folk, had a great time perhaps we will meet again one day and a big Hello goes to “Canada” and her husband - it was nice to meet you and we hope you enjoyed your stay.
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On March 18th Stars Dance School from Carvoeiro Clube de Tenis staged their show called “Move It” at Lagoa Auditorio. There were two performances at 2.30 and 6.00pm. with all types of dancing being performed. Ranging from Ballet, Tap and Jazz, to Salsa and Funk, it was performed brilliantly by all concerned. All age groups contributed to the show, from tiny tots to teenagers, adults, young and old, who all performed extremely well. Congratulations to all the teachers who give their time and patience to produce a show so successful. Anyone interested in joining any Dance classes should contact Carvoeiro Clube de Tenis. There are also many other interesting classes available, such as Tai Chi, Yoga, Aerobics, Fitball, a fully equipped Gym with a qualified Trainer, a slimming club, which is held once a week and for those who wish to learn Portuguese a language teacher is available.
Please find these and more pictures in large formats here
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The EDP is busy relaying new cables on the old road to Sesmarias starting at the Madonna and continuing along the road, in the direction of Lagoa and also a lot of work being done improving the drainage at the Lagoa end. We thought they were re-laying new water pipes but it looks more like a dam. There are huge stones being put into wire cages, which are then laid into the ground and they are then building a wall around the edge of it. Very interesting to watch and is a work of art but no one seems to know the exact purpose – I tried to ask the workers but they seemed to speak neither Portuguese nor English. Hopefully it will be completed before the season starts as the man with the STOP and GO sign sometimes disappears leaving you to take life in your own hands when manoeuvring around the machinery.
Please find these and more pictures in large formats here
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There is still no sign of the square in Carvoeiro being changed and work has still not started on the road out of town. I will keep you informed on developments.
Have a great Easter.
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Welcome to Praia do Carvoeiro online, we are located in the Algarve in Portugal. We hope you will find the more than 500 pages useful! Please check our car rental prices at www.algarvedriver.com and airport transfer prices at www.farotransfer.com we also offer holiday rentals and real-estate adverts.
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I just watched George Cukor's 1944 gothic masterpiece Gaslight, starring the luminous Ingrid Bergman. She won that year's Best Actress Oscar for her taut, unnerving performance as a Victorian woman being driven slowly mad by...well, that would be telling.
A couple of months ago, we watched SciFi Channel's Earthsea, starring Bergman's daughter Isabella Rossellini. Regrettably -- because Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels are so outstanding -- Rossellini's performance was the only memorable one in the miniseries. Perhaps that's why I thought of her as I watched her mother on screen. Film is a time-flummoxing media. Before my eyes was a mother, younger by years than the daughter I remembered from another film. I was struck by the echoes of the one in the other. Their voices, their eyes, that distinctive shape to the mouth....
It hit me hard, a hammer blow: I will never see in my donor egg child those echoes of myself. The genetic link is lost.
Grief, the experts tell us, comes from loss. Any sort of loss, though death is the most commonly discussed type. When I think of the grief I feel at not being able to have a genetic child, I also feel guilt. As if I should be so happy and grateful to have a child by any means, that I have no right to these feelings. As if, by feeling this grief, I label my donor egg baby as "not good enough." And so I thrust the grief away from me. I try not to own it.
Yet it is still here, like a piece of furniture I keep tripping over in this house of infertility. And, all experts in the field agree: A woman must "work through" her grief at the lost genetic link before she is ready to be a donor egg mother.
Madeline Feingold, a clinical psychologist with a specialty in reproductive medicine, offers this: "...couples must grieve so that the loss of their genetic child does not cast a shadow that negatively interferes with parenting and loving the child that will be their own" (Disclosing Origins: Children Born through Third Party Reproduction).
Oh, my God. I'm already a bad mother. One look at Ingrid Bergman and all my grief work is unraveled. I am crushed. Amputated. Something vital is gone, and can never be regained. But what is it? I can get neither my hands nor my head around it. I have to ask myself: What have I lost? Who died?
Many proponents of donor egg insist there is no loss, or none that matters. I will have the experience of pregnancy, that some call the "gestational link." I will give birth. I will breastfeed at 2 a.m. and hover anxiously over the crib while my baby sleeps, making sure that little chest rises and falls. I will churn through rolls and rolls of film, create silly Web sites devoted to my offspring, and someday join the homework and soccer-practice grind. I will be the only woman my little one knows as "Mom." I will love my child like a lioness, fiercely and without reserve. If I consider only the act and experience of motherhood, then I will have lost nothing by being a donor egg mother. Thank God.
Yet, for me, there is a loss. I have lost the ability to pass on my genes, and to mingle them equally with my husband's in the creation of our child. My body has failed to do its full duty in this process of conception. Because of that, what should be emotionally simple, even joyful, becomes complex and fraught with doubts and fears. I would not be human if I didn't wonder, "Will I bond with this child as I should? Will my child resent me for my choice?" And a whole host of other worries that I can come up with in the wee hours of the night. These are not the concerns of a mother who conceives with her own eggs, and the loss of that simplicity is grievous.
Recently, I found the article Infertility and Aftershocks, by Patricia Irwin Johnston. In it, she writes beautifully and sensitively of the impact of unresolved grief for the lost genetic link on the lives of adoptive parents and children. I hope Ms. Johnston would forgive me for quoting from her article and substituting "egg donation" for "adoption," because I believe the issues are the same:
"It's like this. Egg donation makes us parents, but it doesn't make us fertile. Much as we might wish differently, egg donation, despite giving us parenthood, cannot change the facts of those several other losses associated with infertility -- the loss of control over many intimate and practical aspects of our lives; the loss of genetic connection and immortality; the loss of the opportunity to create a new person who is the genetic and symbolic blend of love we share with our life's partner. . . . Egg donation can't give us these things that infertility took from us."
When I first realized what diminished ovarian reserve meant, there was black terror in knowing that when I die, I am extinct on this earth. Genetically, I am a dead branch. I will not continue. That reality scared me, deep in the gut. I am far from superb as a genetic specimen, and in my rational moments I know that I will leave my legacy in other, more important ways. But the loss is still felt.
It helped me to realize that it's a two-way street: We grieve that we will not pass on the traits we like about ourselves or our birth families, but we may feel a (guilty) sort of relief that we can avoid bequests such as alcoholism, depression, or--believe me, I've pondered this one--a genetic predisposition for early menopause. And "traits" are not all passed on genetically. Values, habits, mannerisms . . . all these come with family, and will be available for good or ill to my child.
Another element of the genetic loss is familial. I have a nephew who is the spitting image of his grandfather. That will never be, for my baby -- unless he looks like my husband's dad. My family is proudly Irish and has a 200-year history in one Southern city. It saddens me to think of taking my child there, or to Ireland itself, and having those places mean nothing to him. I ache at the thought that my child, no matter how much loved and welcomed by me and all my family, will be different than her cousins. I don't want that difference for her. I want her to merge into our family like a raindrop into a river and never worry or wonder about where she "comes from." That is simply not to be for my child. I feel as if I should take her in my arms right now and say, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I could not give that to you."
It helps to realize that grieving a lost genetic link is not unique to donor egg mothers. Adoptive parents and children have struggled and made their peace with it for years. I have a friend whose husband was adopted, and he has none of the issues I fear will afflict my child. He looks on his place in his family as "adopted into the clan" in the Scottish sense: "...the chief of a clan would 'ingather' any stranger, of whatever family, who possessed suitable skills, maintained his allegiance and, if required, adopted the clan surname." Now, that's the right idea.
A last and somewhat ignoble loss is this one: It just wasn't supposed to happen this way. If in fact Change = Loss = Grief, then I have sustained a heavy loss: The idea of my life as it was supposed to be; as I expected it, dreamed of it, worked toward it. The hard part was supposed to be finding someone to be a father to my children; I never imagined that I would have to go to such unusual measures to have them in the first place. There's a not-very-grown-up person inside me who wants to be just like everybody else, with a mate and a cottage in the suburbs and 2.5 adorable children who may someday say to me after a tussle over curfew, "I hate you!" but who will never say, "You can't tell me what to do. You're not my mother." The woman who strove for that life will never achieve her goal, and I feel badly for her, even as I have to tell her, "Oh, grow up."
It occurs to me to measure my progress against the famed Five Stages of Grief. Am I still in denial, refusing to acknowlege my loss? No, I don't think so. How about anger; am I still asking "Why me!" or wailing "This isn't fair!" I must plead guilty on that one. I will probably be angry about my reproductive fate until love for my donor egg baby makes that feeling meaningless. Am I still striking bargains with God, promising to cure world hunger if he will only give me a baby? No. My miscarriages cured me of that one. If God were going to come through with a genetic child, surely it would have been one of those. My personal favorite -- depression, suffered while we mourn not just the loss but our dreams, hopes and plans -- still dogs me every day. Without it, I don't think I'd be writing this.
And so we come to acceptance, the state of finding comfort and healing from grief, and the ability to reframe the situation to see its positive aspects. Here I would have to say, "I'm getting there." The truth is, I will cycle through these stages of grief many times as my donor egg journey continues.
The one thing I cling to, that I read over and over again on one support board that I visit, is this: Once you have your baby, all the doubts and fears go away. Amen, wise sisters.
Posted by Beth Gray at 9:55 PM
30 comments:
wessel said...
Don't be hard on yourself. I know there are people who get offended when we talk too much about our grief over losing the genetic connection. These are people who somehow misinterpret our sorrow as a rejection of the donor egg baby for not being "good enough." To paint this situation in that light is so wrong, in my mind. I will love my baby, and so will you love yours, no matter where the DNA comes from. But it is an undeniable fact that something HAS been lost.
This is a really, really beautiful post and echoed so much of what I have been feeling and thinking over the past couple of years. Sigh.
9:55 AM
Anonymous said...
"There's a not-very-grown-up person inside me who wants to be just like everybody else..."
For me, you've hit the nail on the head exactly. Why does it have to be so hard for some of us, when it's so easy for others? I try to remind myself that there are other things that come easily for me and are not so easy for others. It helps - a little.
Anonymous said...
Oh My Gosh!! You are in my head!! I feel the same way. When I die, I am gone. I was not meant to continue, to live on. I end. Wow. I looked at my nephew the other day and saw my father. It hurt b/c I will never look at my child, (If I am so lucky to be successful that is,) and see my parents, myself, my siblings. But we will go on in what matters, our values, our morals, our caring and kindness. All the characteristics that we teach our children that really matter. That is what I hold on to. Good luck to you, and I pray that we are all successful in this journey and find peace and happiness.
Anonymous said...
Yes, I "forgive you" for substituting "egg donation" for "adoption" in my Aftershocks article. Well said!
Anonymous said...
I have just found out that I will not be able to have children with my own eggs. Thanks for the thoughtful words that express this loss so precisely. They are a blessing as I try to find my own words to make sense of the loss and to begin to understand the far reaching impact on me, my husband, and our families as we move forward.
Anonymous said...
Your writing was extremely accurate in expressing many of the feelings of our generation of "egg donor moms," and what I personally went through in 2003 when I heard those aweful words "dimminshed ovarian capacity." That said, I want to offer you some words of hope, and maybe help, in resolving these feelings by focusing on what you do and will see in your gestational child :-). Since having my son I can see parts of my husband and his family, some in looks, alot in behavior and intelligence, and I am choosing to focus on those aspects rather than dwell on the fact that he doesn't resemble me or my family. I also often think about the fact that some of the most important aspects of my child will come from me in a different form, that of teaching him as his mother about character, values and his whole belief system. These aspects also have longevity long after I will have left this earth and in many cases will have a much greater effect on the legacy of love I will have left with him than any genetic link ever could have had. Lastly, whenever I many wander into thinking that life isn't fair I thank God that medical breakthoughs have provided me an opportunity to have a child that I was able to carry and actually give birth to. The alternative would have been much worse for me.
Beth Gray said...
Anonymous, this is a great reminder to all of us. In any situation, focus on the good parts, not the bad ones. And my girls are good, good, good!
Thank-you for posting this. I have been really struggling with this. I am doing DEIVF in April and have recently started BCP in preparation. When AF showed up this last time, I cried for all of the babies that I never had nor will ever have with my own eggs.
Anonymous said...
I've just lost my third baby after my 6th IVF, my first being a stillborn daughter at 37 weeks and my second and third pregnancies ended in early miscarriage, all in the space of less than 21 months. I'm almost 41 and your post has struck such a nerve in me. I'm grieving for my lost babies, but I'm also grieving for the fact that any future children I have will have no genetic link to me. My husband dragged his heels in coming with me for IVF, it ends up it was MF, and yet its me being penalised as he will have that link to our child that I no longer will be able to have, and I'm jealous of that fact. I'd been on at him since I was 32 to go for treatment,and I'm angry with him for wasting so much valuable time. Its early days but we're registering with a clinic for donor eggs, but I'm scared I won't be able to bond like I did with my little girl, as I could recognise little features in her, such as my fingers or my dads nose. It hurts that my pregnancies all ended in failure and I don't want to risk my eggs being dodgy and having a poorly baby as I don't want any child of mine to suffer, and using the eggs of a younger donor would prevent this, and I'm so so grateful that there are wonderful ladies who will donate, but it still doesn't take away the fear that I won't bond.
Anonymous said...
Today I myself, was hit hard and it came out of nowhere...my hammer blow happened as wondered the baby section in a dept store choosing outfits for our soon to arrive ED conceived baby boy...there it was, the cutest blue & white stripe little onesie with the slogan "50% mum + 50% dad = 100% me!" I went to reach for it and read the slogan at the same time, I stepped away from it as I felt the hammer blow.
Now, I've spent the evening shedding tears & feeling really sorry for myself.
Yes, I feel guilt for feeling like this. Yes, I feel I should be grateful that I'm even getting a chance to be pregnant and a mum and the fact is I am so very, very grateful. But right now I find myself grieving for the life that was supposed to be. The simplicity you speak of - of a pregnancy conceived the "way we all think it was going to be for us". I'm not feeling very grown up and I want back what infertility robbed me of...all those things you said.
Thank you for capturing so perfectly the feelings I am struggling with today. I do believe that once my little boy is here in my arms...I will feel silly for shedding the tears I have today. I can't wait to feel silly!
Anonymous, I am also at times angry at my husband for wasting valuable time in agreeing to seek out treatment with me when I raised it at 30, then 33 and then 35. I'm angry at myself for going along with his inaction, which I now know made matters worse for me - for at 37 I was diagnosed with High FSH/POF. Sometimes the only consolation is knowing I am not alone in my journey or feelings. There's others out there too. Thanks for sharing.
Beth Gray said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...
Bee, I just stumbled on to your blog. Thank you so very much for your words. My husband and I are about to have the ED talk with my doc in a few hours (though my husband is unrealistically optimistic that the doc will suggest another round of IVF). It is so nice to know someone else felt almost exactly like I do now. It makes me want to beat myself up a little less for what I’ve been considering my pure vanity. I now feel a little less guilty for wanting to see myself (mixed with my beautiful husband) in my child. And, especially reading your most recent posts, I feel assured that these feelings will vanish as soon as I hold my baby, no matter whose DNA he or she carries. Oh, I could go on, but I would simply be restating so many of the things you have so eloquently written here. Thank you for taking the time to share. -MT
MJ said...
I don't know if this link is still active. If so, anonymous, did the pain go away? We just found out, after 12 IVFs!, that I cannot conceive with my own eggs.
It is great that donor eggs are available but the loss is so huge.
I have never suffered from depression before but now I can cry at the drop of a hat. I am afraid to go ahead with donor eggs in case I don't love the child.
Any advice???
Anonymous said...
The loss wouldn't hurt so much if I didn't have to tell one day. The counselors told me that I have to start with the little story about how my husband and I got the egg from a "nice lady." That it's a lie not disclose even though my child will never meet this woman and I'm the one that will be carrying the child and birthing it into the world. But it's true; a lie is a lie.
Anonymous said...
Amazing! That someone else felt exactly how I feel right now :-(
Anonymous said...
Thank you so much for writing this. Sums up how I feel so perfectly. I have twin boys through egg donation...after a long 'battle' with infertility I have the children I was meant to have. I still struggle a little with loss but laugh sometimes that perhaps my genes aren't all they are cracked up to be - an alcoholic Father, sister and addict brother - I'm glad not to pass that on.
Anonymous said...
Thank you so much for expressing exactly how I am feeling. I am 16 weeks now with a donor egg and struggling a bit, maybe a lot! I have been extremely sick and perhaps that has something to do with it, but there is such a sense of loss not having your own child and seeing yourself in it. I too saw the "50% Dad, 50% Mum = 100% me" shirt and burst into tears. This weekend we had friends over with their gorgeous 8 month old with huge blue eyes, and I knew that I would never see my own huge blue eyes in my child and it hurt. Everyone says it will be your baby when it comes out, you will bond with it. I am just praying that I do. I know the miracle that I am a part of, being able to do this both medically and financially, but there is still sadness there, no matter how hard you try to remember the good and positive things. And no one knows how you can feel this way unless you have been there. Thank you for this post and for this blog, it makes me feel not so alone.
Anonymous said...
Everyone tells me I am so "fortunate" that egg donation is an option. I know that's true, but there's nothing fortunate about infertility. Thank you so much for this article. I really needed someone to understand.
Anonymous said...
I am 7 weeks pregnant with a donor
egg. Life really does suck sometimes. In 2008 I lost my dad. A year later I miscarried at six weeks after IVF. A year after that we had to terminate our 2nd IVF pregnancy at 14 weeks due to problems. 5 months later my mum died. 4 months after that I find out I have a chromosomal abnormality explaining the fact that some of the bones in my body are not formed correctly,(however you would never notice with me because I only have very mild symptoms). If these genes were passed onto a girl there would be no telling how severe the abnormalities would be. If the genes were passed onto a boy it would have learning difficulties and be infertile. I was 39 when I found out this terrific news. Given the fact that there was a 50% chance of my passing on the defected genes to my offspring, my husband and I decided to opt for egg donation. At this stage, 7 weeks in, I feel no connection with the baby inside me. I just feel like a vessel. I am hoping this will change. I look at photographs of my parents and I know that if they were here they would support me 110% But yes, I am so sad that I won't see their traits in my child. I have so many sentimental things that belonged to my parents - a wooden chopping board that belonged to my grandma, tools that I grew up with in my dad's tool shed. I've looked forward to passing these and many other precious things onto to my own children one day, and more importantly the memories that go with them. But technically, my parents won't be my child's grandparents so passing on my precious memories just won't be the same somehow and it's a conversation that I may even try to avoid. This really hurts. And then there's the issue of to tell or not to tell. I cannot live a lie so I think it's only fair to tell - but at what cost? If one day the child inside of me chooses to look up it's biological mother, I will totally understand. However, I am scared that it will meet her, like her and form a close relationship with her. I will feel like second best and after all I've been though I don't deserve to feel like that! I want my baby to be ok and am doing all I can to help this pregnancy to work, but I have to admit I am worried. On a positive note, I just think that to be a donor and to be a donor recipient is a really brave thing to do, and for some reason the path that I have trodden thus far has led me to this point. The child inside me is for some reason meant to be there.
Anonymous said...
What you are saying about becoming "extinct from the planet" is actually not true as long as you have any remote relatives who have had kids. For instance, let's say you are an only child and you have two kids. Those two kids have half your genes. On the other hand, let's say you have three siblings who each have three kids while you have none. In the latter situation, more of your genes are actually passed on despite the fact that you had no kids yourself (your nieces and nephews share 1/4 of your genes,9/4>3/3). If you keep extrapolating this idea, among other things, it suggests that people of a certain race (who share more of their genes) should go out of their way trying to have more kids for the sake of perpetuating their genes. This is actually a strange form of racism! Food for thought, that's all.
Anonymous said...
Typo above, I meant to say that 9/4>2/2.
Anonymous said...
You grieve over losing a genetic link etc, but what about the baby you create when using donor sperm or eggs? Did It ever cross your mind that they perhaps might feel a deep loss and grieve over the loss of their genetic family? That the feelings you had about losing the genetic link may be a thousand times worse for the child? That they might ( and likely will) be tormented for the rest of their life knowing that they were severed from their genetic family intentionally by you so they could play the roll of your offspring? Does that matter to you at all or is it all about you?
Beth Gray said...
Anonymous, I've debated whether to leave your post on this blog or not. Normally I delete posts like yours when the poster doesn't use his or her own name and email. However, you write as if YOU might be a child of gamete donation, so I've decided to leave your post so that parents considering gamete donation can be exposed to a "worst case" scenario in terms of the reaction they might receive from their children.
To answer your question: "Does that matter to you at all or is it all about you?" I doubt you've read the whole blog or you would know that YES, the emotional experience of my children matters intensely to me. That was the central fear that drove me to spend an agonizing year and a half trying to have babies with my own eggs, and suffering two miscarriages that I grieve to this day. Yes, the choice to have babies in this non-traditional way was, to some extent, a selfish one. I could have simply accepted that my ovaries had died off earlier than most and I wasn't "meant" to be a mother. If I believed (then or now) that my children would be "tormented for the rest of their life" by my choice, I would not have done it. I read extensively of the experience of adopted children, to inform my choice.
I thought then, and time has confirmed, that my children would suffer some stress, some anger, some sadness when they came to understand their origins. But is it better FOR THEM that they NEVER EXIST AT ALL? I don't think so. And neither to THEY.
My daughters, ages 10 and almost 8 now, know of their donor egg mother and have seen her picture. They ask questions sometimes, not that often. My younger daughter wanted to know why her donor egg mother "didn't want me," and we had a long, tricky conversation about the fact that an egg isn't an embryo, and that our donor wanted to help ME to be a mother. She herself was already a mother, and didn't want to get pregnant that month. My daughter asked if she could meet her genetic mother, and I said I would try to arrange that when she is 18, per the terms of our donation. At the end of the conversation, my daughter said, "Mom, I'm glad I came to be your baby." My older daughter has much more existential angst, but it is around why she was born disabled, not why she was created from another woman's egg. She doesn't seem to focus on that aspect, and no wonder.
My daughters are not "playing the role of my offspring." They ARE my offspring! The babies I was meant to have. They know that. And now that I know them as human beings, I believe they will forgive me any pain I've caused them by my choice, because that's what loving families do. Time will tell. Even if they reject me in future--and I don't think they will--I'll stand as their mother. I will love them to the end of my days.
Anonymous, you are either a person who feels free to morally judge others' reproductive choices when you, yourself, have no experience of the situation--I've run into a few of those since I started this blog. Or, you are a child of gamete donation who is in pain. You are reaching for your genetic connection because your connection to your donor-recipient parent is not what you need it to be. If that is the case, I am so sorry. I wish I could make it better.
Jackie B. said...
I'm know this is an old blog post, but I'm dealing with this now. My 3rd IVF was converted to IUI and this is the last time we'll be using my eggs. It has hit me so hard and I've been crying nonstop. I'm so glad to not be alone in my feelings.
Anonymous said...
When we accidentally found out our 35 year old son donated, we felt and still feel a terrible sense of loss for our biological grandchildren who are out there, and who we may never meet or watch grow up.
We also feel so disrespected and betrayed that our child took all of our genetic gifts and tossed his life-giving seed to the wind per- say, to help a women have a child, without understanding the grief and disappointment we still feel after 10 years now of not knowing our grandchildren and not being present to them. We worry about them, think about them, and hope our own are well and happy!
I love my little girl with all the love any mother can give. My egg donor is a close friend and I am now struggling with a different aspect of our collective circumstance....what happens if my daughter looks like my egg donor who I see regularly? Maybe they will share that Bergmann/Rosellini likeness. Perhaps she will feel closer to that (quite lovely) family at some stage in her life. Will she feel like my friend's sons are her brothers? How will "get togethers" in the future feel? It's all very manageable now as my daughter is 16 months old but what about when she's 3, or 6 or 15?? I love my friends and my home town dearly but I'm considering moving away to reduce the impact that this whole awkward and unusual dynamic might have on my daughter's (and friend's family's) wellbeing.
Has anyone had this experience with older children?
This comment has been removed by the author.
This comment has been removed by the author.
I have found your blog to be the most supportive and informative thing I have in my own struggle with egg donation and it's implications for my daughter. Thank you for your candor and your selfless sharing. It has been an enormous comfort to me as I prepare myself to have (hopefully) my daughter's sibling transfered tomorrow.
Thank you from the bottom of my little confused heart.
Anonymous said...
I'm standing here reading this while looking at my absolutely perfect and gorgeous egg donor daughter. She is 11 weeks old today. She looks exactly like my husband,and just about nothing like our egg donor. Since my husband and I share some physical traits, she shares some of my physical traits, but I know it's not from my genes. I love her like crazy, she is my daughter, but sometimes I worry. We met and are friendly with her donor, and we intend to have her be a part of our child's life, even as a distant "Aunt" who she knows about and knows is the person who helped us have her. Our donor is thrilled to play this role, as the other four children she helped create have nothing to do with her. And we wanted this for our daughter, so she would never have to wonder where her genes come from, or if she looks like the woman who donated her egg, etc
It will never be a shocking or strange surprise to her, it will always be a part of her story. This is all as I want it, but I am still sad that I couldn't have my own genetic child. And I worry that she might grow up and be absolutely nothing like me, but be more like my husband and the donor, who are both extroverted and hyper, where I am more quiet and internal. I realize that none of this matters, I could have easily had an extroverted child that was from my own genetic material. And if adopted children can bond with their parents, how much more could a child that I grew and bore with my own body bond with me. But I keep being afraid that she will sense somehow that I'm not really her mother. But of course I'm her mother! Who the heck else is her mother? I really want to get over this, because this is not a good feeling to have, not for her or for me. And now she has woken up and is smiling at me and and grabbing my finger. She loves me, and I love her. And that needs to be enough.
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I'm a forty-something mom and wannabe librarian. On my bucket list are raising happy children and living in Ireland for a year.
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This topic contains 27 replies, has 11 voices, and was last updated by Dentarthurdent 1 week, 6 days ago.
Viewing 28 posts - 1 through 28 (of 28 total)
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12 January 2013 at 23:32 #1347
Emperor
The Doctor must solve the mystery of a staircase that people go up but never go down. This episode introduces Craig Owens, played by James Corden. I like to think Moffat named him after me after I accosted him in the street, but that’s highly unlikely.
You can watch it here until 19 January:
12 January 2013 at 23:32 #1327
S31 (5) 11 – The Lodger (repeat, BBC3 7.45pm Sat 19 January 2013)
What the Dan Martin Guardian Blogs thought at the time can be accessed here. (and congratulations @janetteb – you made your first comment on this blog).
In figures: Overnight figures were 4.6m, timeshift figures were 6.44m. Audience Appreciation Index (AI) was 87 (Excellent).
Of interest: This episode was placed aganst a world cup match between England and the USA, and featured Matt Smith’s football skills.
With guest appearances by James Corden and Daisy Haggard, this saw writer Gareth Roberts update a comic strip story he wrote that featured the Doctor sharing Mickey Smith’s flat for a while. As well as the general hilarity, the story saw the introduction of another time machine, and posed the question – who has that power?
14 January 2013 at 03:16 #1409
A personal favourite. The football game alone is worth the price of admission.
Since first watching the episode, I will quite often turn to Mrs Blenkinsop at the end of the day: “Pizza, booze, telly?”
14 January 2013 at 03:56 #1411
The Lodger was an excellent episode which nicely plays upon the Doctor as alien. He is so often the all knowing genius. It was nice to see him both being inept and brilliant. It was also a reminder that he is a normally a tourist on earth. In this episode he become “an expat” which is a whole different ball game. (Tourist language guides don’t tell you how to read bills in a foreign language for instance). Craig was a brilliant foil for the Dr and I think deserves to be elevated to assistant status.
14 January 2013 at 10:16 #1415
Just for info, this is what we said before on Dan Martin’s blog
I suspect this is one of those episodes which has grown in people’s affections/appreciation in time. Tho the response was generally positive, it suffered from being straight after the Van Gogh one, with its place in the overall arc not yet being clear.
And we still don’t know who/what was building the time machine If a very similar design hadn’t turned up with the Silence I might just have been prepared to go with it’s being a random off-course, on auto pilot time machine. But having reintroduced it, I’ll be disappointed if they don’t revisit it.
Re original broadcast coinciding with the World Cup – I’m always impressed with the obv forward planning of the episodes – original broadcasts often coincide with big current events (esp UK ones) that reflect events in-episode – see also Easter, gen election etc. Gives it that added frisson. (And possible legs to @blenkinsopthebrave‘s 4th wall theory)
14 January 2013 at 12:41 #1421
I think some of the negative comments were related more to the casting of James Cordon rather than the episode itself. A lot of U.K viewers had a negative predisposition toward the episode because of his former T.V. appearances. As an Aussie, who had never seen or heard of the actor before, I was not influenced by that knowledge; a rare instance where ignorance is a blessing. Ialso remember enjoying reading all the discussion about it on line. I don’t think I posted much then if at all because anything I wanted to say would inevitably have already been said.
I doubt the glaring questions raised in the episode will ever be answered my suspicion is that each series must be narratively self supporting.
14 January 2013 at 14:33 #1425
Anonymous @
Just rewatched this, so here’s a few thoughts:
It’s not in my top tier of favourite episodes – more a second division one perhaps. And I’m not sure why. It’s got a great script and Matt Smith is wonderful in it. One of his best turns as the Doctor, I’d say.
James Corden is also good in this and I blame this episode for making me think for a while that he wasn’t in fact a truly annoying, self-obsessed prat. He’s since returned to form and I won’t be fooled again. But while he’s really rather good in this episode, I think it’s actually Daisy Haggard that makes the episode. Her absence from Closing Time for me was acutely felt and that episode was largely a failure, I think and served to illustrate that Craig wouldn’t be a good idea for a permanent companion unless Sophie was in tow.
That TARDIS in the loft bugs me — as does the fact that it looks suspiciously like a Jagaroth spaceship (especially with the splintered in time aspect of Clara now). I don’t think it can be a coincidence that this console room is also where the Silence hang out. It’s possible of course that it was a production decision and that they didn’t want to build a new set for the Silence and that this was really rather a cool set. It’s definitely significant and I think will be hopefully returned to later.
I did wonder, whether the Silence are actually present in this episode and just using their powers of memory wiping on both the characters and the audience. I’ve also been wondering if the Silence have something to do with the Time Lords — maybe some wraith-like manifestation of the ones stuck in the Time Lock, or some sort of biological weapon that they unleashed before being trapped (a la The Apocalypse Device. Fans of Dr Who Weekly will know what I’m talking about here.)
But rewatching these episodes has made me realise just what a belter of a season this one was. There’s hardly a bad episode and even the poorer ones are still really quite watchable — largely down to the leads I reckon but also the nice, twisty turny arc. Best season overall of nu-Who I reckon.)
14 January 2013 at 15:53 #1427
I think that this season was the one where Moffat either wasn’t entirely sure he’d keep the job, or knew he had to grab his audience for his new Doctor. So he did a season that mirrors the lead up to the 50th, but was self-contained within the one season.
Every series since has been part of the lead-up to the 50th – which is why it hasn’t felt quite so great. We’re still only part-way through the story.
But yeah, there’s more to this story than first appears. The disruptions in time mirror the cracks in the universe, that ruddy spaceship and the identity of the pilot is never explained. And while they certainly reused built sets, they usually repainted/redressed to make it look different.
And the perception filter is big. Again. There’s a perception filter and everyone’s missing what’s in front of their nose.
But the chief joy of this episode is that it’s simply charming. The Doctor is a hilarious fish out of water, James Corden and Daisy Haggard play their love story beautifully, and the football fits seamlessly into the episode.
15 January 2013 at 00:29 #1433
I’m still convinced we will revisit the Moff mysteries as yet unsolved, some of them apparent in this episode.
Amy is trapped in a time-loop in the TARDIS with a count-down. This mirrors the way in which River is trapped in a time-loop inside the exploding TARDIS later on in The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang. It also mirrors the count-down which Amy is forced to go through by the Weeping Angels during the Crash of the Byzantium. Pretty sure both count-downs are from Eleven… 10, 9, 8 etc…
The same entity probably trapped Amy and River in the TARDIS on each occasion – the one with the “silence will fall” hissing voice would be my guess. And “it” (my theory is perhaps that it’s The Valeyard) is responsible for the strange TARDIS at the top of Craig’s house and again in the bowels of the Kennedy space-centre / Silence lair.
These count-downs could link to a story where all the previous incarnations of the Doctor are “counted down from”.
If you are going to do a Valeyard story/ deal with the Valeyard and then give the Doctor a whole new bunch of regenerations going forward, the 50th seems like a good time to do it.
15 January 2013 at 17:02 #1439
I still think this is a genuinely good comedic tale with an interesting sting at the end. At this point, I think I’d guess Moffat had the shape of the River Song storyline and knew it would play out over multiple time periods. To accomplish that, he needed the adversary to have access to their own time travel technology, and hence a glimpse of a time machine.
The problem was, of course, that the Silence hadn’t been fully built at that time (their development was in the series 6 budget), so no reference or visual aid to the mystery could be provided. In retrospect it would be great to engineer a scene where the hologram changes form at the end for a brief glimpse of a Silent, which could have led to more speculation, especially if a script indicated that image was soon forgotten.
Still love the “International rescue” and Star Trek Voyager in-jokes. Robert “Please state the nature of the medical emergency” Picardo was seen sporting a Who T-shirt at the SDCC, so I hope he enjoyed it.
15 January 2013 at 22:58 #1481
Anonymous @
I don’t think the Valeyard is going to make an appearance — or is that ‘hope’? I seem to remember reading a Moffatt interview where he said he really disliked the Valeyard idea and I have to say I agree with him. I always got the impression it was something made up by Robert Holmes when the future of the series looked pretty doubtful and he thought ‘I might as well, we’re never going to get to incarnation 10 or 11 anyway.’ I think it’s much more likely that the ‘big bad’ for year 50 will be Omega, rather than the Valeyard (assuming of course that they’re not somehow one and the same).
I’m pretty much convinced that there’s going to be a ‘reset’ with a whole new set of regenerations though and I’m sure that this weird TARDIS and the Silence thing is going to get referenced again. The question still remains whose TARDIS is it — the Master’s (I mean, his must be floating around somewhere), or if it’s an attempt to build one then maybe it is Omega’s, or even an attempt by a ‘second’ Doctor to build his own, that’s now fallen into Silence hands?
16 January 2013 at 08:12 #1491
Well observed. My remark was reminiscent of that which I made on the other Lodger thread. Relieved to see that mycomments are consistent, even if mostly wrong… I don’t think I want to know about some of my sillier past theories.
16 January 2013 at 23:31 #1515
Dear blue-fish @juniperfish who do you think the pseudo-TARDIS at the top of Craig’s house belongs to?
16 January 2013 at 23:37 #1517
17 January 2013 at 00:00 #1523
Yes – slight dulpication of effort in this one. How mad is your other post going to look when I blitzkreig this post though?
Your going to be talking to thin air! You mad woman, you!?
17 January 2013 at 00:06 #1525
17 January 2013 at 00:16 #1527
In all seriousness thanks for the support on the thread idea.
I think that could work, looking at interpretations of The Doctor (even for us retrospectives) over the years. I thought your argument was worth pursuing, but not in that thread.
I do have more to say, but that thread is more about personal memories, than an analysis of the show or character itself. I’d be intrigued to see how a thread like that would play out over months of debating over various Doctors.
12 January 2021 at 05:29 #71338
It is cold here on our island outpost in Canada, so Mrs Blenkinsop and I just re-watched (for the umpteenth time) “The Lodger”.
12 January 2021 at 12:17 #71339
wow. This thread had been dormant for a long time. Looking at the date on Phaseshift’s post reminds me of how old this forum is.
@blenkinsopthebrave The Lodger is a fun episode. Maybe not being familiar with James Cordon helps as I found the report between him and the Doctor to be delightful. I also enjoy Closing Time. Whenever The Doctor attempts to be human we are reminded of how alien he is.
13 January 2021 at 03:03 #71344
@blenkinsopthebrave This is one of my feel better episodes that I play because it always cheers me up. The Doctor playing soccer and working at the call center are fun to watch as is the cute relationship between Craig and Sophie. Being a massive animal lover and Doctor Dolittle fan I love when the Doctor talks to the animals, the cat in this case.
I think that the entity luring unfortunate people to their deaths is one of the most menacing of the Who baddies wrapped up inside a comedy\romance.
I often watch this one and then Closing Time right after like a 2 parter. I love little Stormy.
9 November 2022 at 17:43 #73730
So this episode had James Corden, I recognize him now though back when this episode came out I didn’t know who he was. I still don’t really watch his show or anything, I just know of him. It was sort of an Amy-lite episode.
The Doctor’s TARDIS stops being able to land, so Amy is being transported around while the Doctor looks for the source of the thing keeping the TARDIS from landing. The thing just so happens to be in a building shared with two downstairs tenants. Random people off the streets keep getting tricked into coming upstairs to help someone that lives there, and vanish.
Craig is looking for a roommate and the Doctor shows up to take the room, winning him over with his weirdness and good omelet cooking. Throughout the episode the Doctor makes a habit of greeting acquaintances by kissing the air above each of their shoulders, which becomes pretty funny the more it happens. Craig eventually invites the Doctor to a soccer game and the Doctor wins the match, then there’s a funny exchange about being against any sort of violence and being “the Oncoming Storm” after one of the players says they’re going to annihilate the other team next time.
Craig also has a problem saying how he feels about his lady friend Sophie. The Doctor begins gradually getting in the way of Craig’s plans and even convinces Sophie to travel abroad and become an orangutan doctor, in an annoying sort of What About Bob? way. The Doctor keeps stealing Craig’s thunder by playing soccer and doing his job better than him, leading Craig to want to return the rent money and kick the Doctor out.
Eventually the Doctor head-bumps Craig to telepathically bring him up to speed. Everyone goes upstairs, learning that the building doesn’t have an upstairs, and find that someone is trying to build something like a TARDIS. (Which is why the TARDIS is having trouble landing.) The monster responsible is never actually shown, but the many incarnations of the upstairs neighbor are shown to be a hologram that seeks out people to attempt to use the machine.
In an ending I don’t quite understand, Craig and Sophie are able to stop the machine because they are content living in the flat, and have no desire to go anywhere else. By trying to activate it despite being rejected as pilots for the device, they ultimately destroy it and cause the ship to implode. This act also gives Craig the courage to say he loves Sophie, starting their relationship.
At the end of the episode Craig gives the Doctor a set of his keys to keep.
All in all not a bad episode. I guess it was based off of a comic by the same name, featuring the Tenth Doctor and Mickey in the same situation as the Eleventh Doctor and Craig. If you ask me this episode sounds like the better story, since the Doctor was essentially a stranger to Craig and came off as being more weird. It was also a fun one-off episode leading into the 2-part season finale.
10 November 2022 at 11:59 #73734
@rewvian I was wondering what to watch this evening and came across your post – so I just watched The Lodger because, why not. Your review pretty much says it all, here’s a few random comments that struck me.
The chemistry between Craig and Sophie is obvious right from the start, just they’re both too timid to admit it. And here comes the Doctor, now that will really help.
“Have some rent” – gives Craig a brown paper bag full of twenties. If I saw that I’d suspect the Doc had just robbed a bank. “They call me The Doctor” – at this point I’d start running for my life.
“CRAIG: Yeah, this is Mark’s old room. He owns the place. Moved out about a month ago. This uncle he’d never even heard of died and left a load of money in the will.” Something makes me suspect the uncle might have been known as Doctor?
I do like the little touch of the Van Gogh exhibition poster on the fridge.
So then the Doctor proceeds to dominate Craig’s pub football side like a pro. Sure way to make himself popular.
I notice that the control for the zigzag plotter (in the Tardis) is actually the gear selector gate off a preselector gearbox c.1950 vintage truck.
Craig (unlike most of humanity apparently) actually knows who the Doctor is when shown his previous personae.
The reason the timeship didn’t want Craig for a pilot is because he’s perfectly happy exactly where he is. Presumably Craig and Sophie both being oerfectly happy with each other is too much for the timeship’s circuits. Or something.
I quite like this little episode. In one aspect it’s reminiscent of Girl in the Fireplace – the lost spaceship looking for a pilot. No big monsters, just a small glitch in the machine, quietly killing people one a at time when they’re incompatible with it.
11 November 2022 at 03:10 #73736
@dentarthurdent This is one of those episodes that I watch quite often because I like seeing the Doctor off the Tardis and out of his comfort zone. A fish out of water story. The difference between the comedy on the first floor and the horror on the “second floor” makes it very chilling. And that killer black mold growing on the ceiling is disgusting.
I still think that the kitty is a brave little spy, its good that the Doctor understands cat.
stay safe
Like Winston this is an episode that I frequently re-watch. It is one part whimsy and one part horror but the latter is subtle and it features a cat.
I do like the reminder that the Doctor is not human. He/she appears human and at times it is easy to forget that the Doctor is alien. Seeing the Doctor not quite “getting” how to live as a human is delightful.
Like @rewvian I had not heard of James Corden until this episode so had no prior bias for or against, similarly with Katherine Tate which was advantageous. Likewise had I witnessed Bradley Walsh doing his game show routine at the Laundromat then I might have been more biased against his character as well. (our washing machine is currently out of order and every time we go to the laundromat whatever game show it is that he hosts is up on screen. Definitely too much Bradley Walsh for my taste.)
11 November 2022 at 10:22 #73738
@janetteb I too had never heard of James Corden, or Catherine Tate (or Billy Piper for that matter). I had heard of Capaldi of course. I have to admit I instinctively disliked Donna simply because of her first appearance, crashing into the Doctor’s grief over losing Rose. Which was quite unfair to Catherine Tate, I think she could be a much more sympathetic actor than that.
I knew Bradley Walsh well from The Chase and that did get in the way of watching him play Graham on Who. I think I liked Dan better as a companion.
Bradley is fine on the Chase, which is the only game show I watch, in fact. I used to watch Pointless when it was on. The missus watches Tipping Point while I diplomatically try not to audibly question where they find these ignoramuses who know absolutely nothing of geography, history, physics or chemistry (while, I have to admit, knowing much more than me about soap actors, modern pop stars (i.e. from this century), cookery and footballers).
11 November 2022 at 10:34 #73739
@einston Yes, I do love that the Doctor understands cat. Watching the Doctor trying to be ‘human’ is almost painful. Actually very good writing, and acting, I think – it takes some skill to make his performance subtly ‘wrong’. Like someone tone deaf trying to play an instrument.
16 November 2022 at 02:07 #73753
@dentarthurdent and @janetteb I had never seen or heard of any of them either so they were all new to me except of course Capaldi and Walsh, and I knew Walsh only from Coronation Street. We get Corrie here but not the game shows although I have heard of some of them.
Since I was a child I have loved all animals and most creatures (not mosquitos and biters)and it was my greatest wish as child to talk to animals. The Doctors ability to talk to and understand animals has always made me happy.
If I could talk to mosquitoes, black flies and other nasty things they would blush and then probably bite me.
@winston I have to admit I sometimes talk to animals, though I never get a reply back from them so I guess that’s not really what you were talking about.
I don’t usually talk to nasty bitey things, though I do have an incurable habit of talking to inanimate objects such as inaccessible bits of car, usually along the lines of “Get in that ***** ***** hole, you **** **** **** bolt!”. After which it usually bites me.
I also credit my car with a personality, such that I apologise profusely to it if I miss a gearchange or hit a pothole.
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High employee retention rates heavily depend on the effective onboarding of new hires. Unfortunately, many managers and business owners do not seem to get it right.
New hires are less confident, have lower morale, are not as engaged, and are more likely to leave. This ultimately leads to missed revenue targets as new hires cannot be as productive.
If they aren’t prepared well enough, new hires may do one of two things when faced with the pressure of new roles:
A) They may play it safe by sticking to what they already know, using past jobs as references, or
B) they may overcompensate with faux confidence, behaving like they have all the answers in an attempt not to look incompetent.
The result is usually chaos.
Setting new hires up for success involves much more than giving them a quick office tour and sending them on their merry way. It instead requires a straightforward process that integrates them into your company and helps them settle into their new roles quickly, learning the skills and behaviors necessary to help them be successful.
Chapter 1: What Is New Hire Onboarding?
Chapter 2: The Benefits of Onboarding
Chapter 4: Coat of Many Colors – The Main Types of Onboarding
Chapter 6: What to Do During Each Stage of Onboarding
New hire onboarding is essentially the process of integrating new hires into the established culture of your organization.
It is a process that should begin during the hiring process right up until the new hire becomes a fully functioning member of the organization. This time can be anything from three months up to one year.
Start by covering all the onboarding basics such as documentation, compliance training, space, support, and technology.
Then, provide them with detailed job descriptions that set clear and realistic expectations, let them know what “good” is in both the company and their role, and ensure they know precisely what is expected of them.
Don’t leave them to figure out things by themselves. Show them where to get their ID cards and where to park their cars. Give them what they need to function.
Good onboarding shows your new hire that you care about them and how they fit into your company and its culture. It allows new hires to settle in much faster into their roles, making sure they quickly become productive.
When the First Transcontinental Railroad (or the Pacific Railroad) was being built, veterans from the Union and Confederate armies, as well as thousands of immigrants, put down track beds, blasting through hills, building bridges and trestles.
They worked three- to eight-hour shifts to lay ten miles of track daily.
It was difficult work, even more so during the winter when avalanches and snow slides were a constant threat from the hills they worked around.
The onboarding process for every new worker who arrived at the site, whether they were veterans or immigrants, was the same:
They hopped on the local train. The offer letter and hiring agreement were simply to show up.
The train carried them to the end of the already laid track.
The new employees were handed a pick, a shovel, and a few other assorted tools and told….
Sadly, many employees still have a similar experience as a result of a not-so-thorough onboarding process.
Many were given frugal guidance and some tools and pointed in the direction they are supposed to build (“the horizon over there.”)
But much work has been done to make onboarding an established organizational practice.
In 1979, John van Maanen and Edgar H. Schein published an influential article that explored the idea of “organizational socialization”—the process by which employees are socialized or onboarded to a company’s culture.
The article stated that “organizational culture consists broadly of long-standing rules of thumb” and that these provided “models for social etiquette and demeanor, certain customs and rituals suggestive of how members are to relate to colleagues, subordinates, superiors, and outsiders.”
Many others have built on this foundational theory, and it has evolved into new hire onboarding as we know it today.
Chapter 2: The Benefits of Onboarding
The saying “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” applies to new jobs as much as new people. When a new employee gets to work, how you treat them, how prepared you are (or not) all contribute to a first impression.
Most companies, however, don’t consider how much they need to work at making a good first impression with their new hires.
There are many benefits of great onboarding, not just for your new hires but also for your company.
The two most significant mutual benefits, however, are employee retention and increased productivity. We’ll look at these and more in other sections.
Research shows that 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for up to three years if they have a great onboarding experience.
Research also shows that organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 50 percent greater new hire retention (source).
In the grand scheme of things, retention is the main benefit of an effective onboarding process.
And the logic behind that is simple. No one likes to be ignored.
Ever been to a store for the first time, looked around confused, not knowing where to find what you are looking for?
You hang around—all the store attendants whiz past you, no one caring to ask what you need.
You attempt to signal one or two attendants, but they are too busy to pay you any mind.
Finally, you leave frustrated as no one pays attention to you.
This is the same experience with new hires.
On their first day, they are unsure of themselves and have no idea what goes where, what to do, and what is expected of them.
But employers who can provide direction and integrate new hires seamlessly into their organizations are the ones who create the best hire experiences for their new hires.
If new hires have a lousy onboarding experience, they’ll likely leave.
And turnover can quickly become expensive, especially when you consider factors like the time and money it costs to train new hires. While some turnover is unavoidable, you want to maximize your employee lifetime value. Replacing a new hire within 60 days is inefficient compared to replacing a more seasoned employee who has served your organization for decades.
For your company, employee retention is one of the most significant benefits of an effective onboarding system.
But there are more still.
When you have an onboarding system that prioritizes the new hire’s needs, you can be sure that they’ll hit the ground running and will be able to do their own bit of work.
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has determined that an effective onboarding program boosts employee productivity by as much as 11 percent.
Research also shows that organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 50 percent greater new hire productivity.
This is only inevitable when you provide new hires with the knowledge, skills, resources, and connections they need.
Many new hires are eager to work and carry their weight. When they have what they need, they’re much more likely to be productive.
Sixty percent of companies fail to set milestones or goals for new hires. Don’t do what the majority do. Set clear, realistic goals for those who join your team or company.
New hires will be unlikely to recommend an employer to family or friends if they’ve had an unpleasant onboarding experience.
This can quickly prove problematic as keyboard warriors can make their opinions known and tarnish your employer reputation on review sites like Glassdoor. An effective onboarding process can only lead to a good employee experience.
And in the case that you need replacements, you can leverage the network of stellar employees to find strong talent to add to your team.
Effective onboarding only makes talent acquisition easier in the long run as it helps you build a good employer reputation.
High Level of Employee Engagement
New employees who feel comfortable in a strange new work environment are more likely to go above and beyond in their work.
Increased productivity and profitability in addition to reduced turnover and absenteeism.
A thoughtful onboarding process can decrease the uncertainty of a new workplace. If you assign them a buddy, help them learn about the company in a fun and exciting way, and provide early recognition for jobs well done, the new employee will feel more engaged.
A higher engagement usually means that they’ll be more productive and more satisfied.
More Benefits
New hires typically need the most part of a year before becoming fully functional, fully productive workers.
Not only do they have to understand all of the company’s policies and culture, but they also need to forge connections that will help them collaborate more efficiently and work within your system, like cogs in a well-oiled machine.
Onboarding has countless benefits, mainly retention and increased productivity.
Other benefits include:
Decreased turnover
Increased engagement levels
Decreased time to proficiency
Reduced costs
Continuation of a positive candidate experience
Easier assimilation into the corporate culture
A clearer understanding of performance expectations
Increased customer satisfaction
Increased hiring manager satisfaction
Identification of skill gaps
A good onboarding process consists of many parts that must be juggled and kept in balance all at once. This is why you need to pay attention to every step of the process.
There are five basic areas your onboarding must cover.
They are:
Logistics
Training
As its name suggests, compliance involves making sure that the new hire is clear regarding the rules and laws of your organization.
Compliance includes the most essential aspect of an employee’s job. They contain essential company rules, policies, and legal procedures. Dress code, clock-in procedures, and government policies (HIPAA requirements in the medical field) all fall under this category.
You should give the new hire a copy of your company’s policies as well as:
Contracts of employment
Informing HMRC of the new employee and their tax code
Health and safety training
All the other legal requirements germane to your business, such as NDAs (non-disclosure agreements, non-compete clauses, etc.)
Legal compliance and organizational compliance can usually be completed remotely before the new hire’s first day. It is advisable you do this to get all the paperwork out of the way.
Logistics
This ensures that your new hire has all they need to do their jobs. It involves things like:
Helping them with locations and directions, so they know where to go when they need to.
Ensuring ease of access in the case that the new hire has a disability.
Setting up their office phone lines.
Helping them set up their devices for your ecosystem or providing them with a computer they can use.
Setting them up in the company’s collaboration platform.
Connecting them to the internet.
And setting them up for payroll.
Just make sure that they have all they need to do their jobs.
This is simply new hire support.
You’re essentially showing them how your company works and what is expected of them. The hiring manager is the one most equipped for this role.
They know the job description well enough and understand the skills, resources, and connections that the new hire needs to be effective workers, such as:
Providing relevant team and company information that describes what you do and how you do it.
Set up the new hire to use company and team processes such as collaboration software.
Setting objectives and goals for 30, 60, and 90 days, respectively, the new hire knows what is important and what they should focus on.
Training
When you’ve given your new hires all they need to do their jobs, you need to provide training to use the tools you’ve already offered them.
When new hires first show up, they know little or next to nothing. Even if they know a lot, they have no idea how their knowledge fits within the context of your organization and its systems.
And so, it’s up to you (and management) to provide them with ample learning opportunities that will enable them to be as productive as they can as quickly as possible.
Introduce them to your learning processes, systems and policies (see compliance above), so they know what provisions you’ve made for them and what is expected of them.
In the earlier days, regularly carry out skills assessment tests, so they know what areas need improvement and how quickly. Tests will positively impact their ongoing development.
Provide supervision and mentoring for the new employee. This makes sure they have someone they can always talk to if they hit any road bumps. Besides, supervision also keeps them on their toes.
If they need any role-specific training, set them up with that as well.
Forty-seven percent of active job seekers cite company culture as a driving reason for looking for work.
Further, 35 percent of American workers say they’ll pass on the perfect job if they felt the company culture wasn’t a good fit.
Your company’s culture is more important than you may have thought. If new hires even get the impression that your culture isn’t inclusive (or diverse), if they learn that their needs aren’t a priority for your company, many will turn down job offers from you.
Explain your company culture and values to new hires. This helps them understand your “why.” When they’re aware of your why, they’re much more likely to understand how their work makes a difference.
Introduce them to their team members and every other person they’ll work closely with regularly.
Introduce them to key people at the company, such as management team members, departmental heads, and IT support.
Help the new hire foster connections with people at the company by setting up welcome events like starter meetings with the CEO, Friday after-work drinks, and welcome lunches.
Helping the new hire build connections with teammates and supervisors helps them feel more comfortable and engaged in their new role.
Chapter 4: Coat of Many Colors – The Main Types of Onboarding
Now that you know the basic bases of onboarding, I’m sure you’re wondering what type is right for your company. Because let’s be honest, onboarding for the military is vastly different from onboarding at Apple.
In the military, there is no one-on-one interaction. Training is done as a group. Yes, sir! No, sir!
This is in stark contrast to Apple, where employees say they receive weekly or quarterly feedback…and where a whopping 64 percent say they’re comfortable giving feedback to their managers.
New hires are at their most vulnerable for the first year, and top-level organizations make sure their onboarding process lasts for as long as a year.
And in that time, three dimensions that employers should focus on are organizational, technical, and social onboarding.
Organizational onboarding aims to get the new hire acclimated to the new environment—namely your organization.
Teach them how things work.
One of the basics is teaching them what they need to function day in, day out. Show them where to park their car, where to get their ID, how to navigate the building. Also, give them basic information on regulations and policies.
It doesn’t stop there. Help them to understand your workplace language. There’s usually a litany of cryptic acronyms that you use in your company.
It helps to provide a glossary of terms that your new hire can use. This prevents them from asking the next guy the meaning of SSRP every other minute.
Help them assimilate and adapt to the company’s organizational values and norms, especially during the first key intervals—three, six, and nine months.
This step follows logically because every new hire needs some technical training. Even though they’ve had tons of experience before joining your company, they still may be unsure how to use it within your company’s ecosystem.
And out of frustration, they may resort to using past references to establish competence. This is what may lead to them using the tired phrase, “In my last job…”
The first thing to do is to let them know what “good” looks like in your company. From day one, provide them with clear, detailed job descriptions that let them know any boundaries around authority or available resources they should be aware of.
Clearly outline their decision rights, so they know where their autonomy begins and ends.
You should also set clear, realistic goals for them. At first, only set goals that aren’t too much of a challenge, goals that you’re confident your new hire can reach. If all goes well, gradually increase the responsibilities you give them.
This builds trust and shows that you’re paying attention and committed to the new hire’s growth.
During this goal-setting process, you can discuss skill gaps and then actively make plans to close those gaps.
New hires who understand and know that they’re contributing to the organization’s progress become more confident and feel loyal much quicker.
There’s nothing worse for a new hire than when they feel alone and isolated. In the first three months, they are the most uncertain and the most vulnerable.
This is why you should pair them up very quickly with other team members who can help them feel like they belong.
Besides, building social capital with teammates helps build trust and helps team members work more harmoniously.
If you want to retain the top talent you spent top dollar to acquire, you’d do well to create a positive first experience by helping them settle in as quickly and easily as possible.
Organizations with efficient onboarding processes experience 62 percent greater new-hire productivity, along with 50 percent greater new-hire retention.
Companies that invest time and effort into onboarding their new hires will reap the benefits. And if you want to be a top choice for top talent, make sure that every new hire’s organizational, technical, and social needs are adequately met.
Now that you know the basics of onboarding and what key areas you should pay attention to, I’m sure you’re asking, “How long should a good onboarding process last?”
Well, as with most thorny questions, the answer is: it depends.
It depends on the type of company, the complexity and sensitivity of the job, and the amount of knowledge the new hire needs to acquire. In some companies, the onboarding process spans up to two years.
L’Oreal is one such company.
The typical onboarding process, however, only lasts for one year. Part of the onboarding process is figuring out how long the onboarding process should last.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the new hire can learn a lot very quickly.
That’s a recipe for disaster.
Many managers think that they can complete onboarding within a week, but they don’t think about the implications of week-long onboarding.
Is it reasonable to assume that your new hire can learn about your company, its policies, and politics within the first week of joining? Coupled with the technical, social, and organizational aspects they have to learn?
Or isn’t it more likely that they will be overwhelmed and only retain a fraction of the verbiage you throw at them?
When it comes to your onboarding process, it’s more important to think long-term when you’re training them.
You’ll be rewarded with an enthusiastic employee working with you rather than one who heads for the door within the first year.
Chapter 6: What to Do During Each Stage of Onboarding
What should you do to make for a painless integration for the new hire? What should you have set up for them before their first day? What should follow in the first month?
How about the first year? What should you do to make things easier for your new hire?
We’ll explore answers to that in a bit.
Onboarding starts even before the first day the hire gets to their desk. You can take care of a few things that will make sure your new hire is off to a great start.
Before they resume, try to get most of the hurdles out of the way. Here are some things that you can prepare that makes things easier:
A fully functional computer
Profile created and logins shared for time and an attendance tool
Specialized tools and equipment
And if, for some reason, you cannot figure out what your new hire may need, talk to another team member in a similar role or a team leader. Ask them for a walk-through of their typical day, and very quickly, you’ll discover some things you may have forgotten.
Paperwork can be annoying because, in the beginning, there are so many documents to complete. And out of excitement, a new hire may fill out incorrect details.
Beforehand, send them all the forms so they can fill it calmly and submit what they need. A wrong bank account number can significantly hold up things.
Below are a few other critical items you need to get out of the way before day one.
Employment contract
Payroll forms, including banking and tax forms
Visa and work requirements
Electronic acceptance is one way you can cut down on paperwork time. You can eliminate delays that could be caused by postage hiccups, filing, and manual data entry.
The sooner you can get the paperwork out of the way, the sooner you can focus on onboarding’s engagement side—the social and technical aspects.
This is one thing you can do that will ease your new hire’s integration into your company.
Let them know your company values, a bit of history, and the culture of your organization. Before they even step foot into their offices, you can use this chance to reinforce your brand values and culture.
Don’t give them too much information. Instead, give them just enough information to help them at least feel what your brand and culture are all about.
Here are a few key things to consider sharing with them:
Invite new hires to group chats so they can at least absorb some information
Team rituals and ceremonies—what to expect
First-day schedule
If you cover these bases, you’re already on the right track. Comprehensive information will instill some confidence in the new hire, and the first day will not be as scary.
Again, remember not to overwhelm them. Only give them just enough information so they can have an idea about how things work.
It is essential to have a plan before your new hire shows up for work.
Many companies have formal programs that always include the same elements, while others may have role-specific training modules.
It would be best to outline everything that your new hire needs to learn and then start assembling the blocks. What goals do you want to set for the first week? The first month? How will you identify and address their learning gaps?
Determining your check-in points, metrics, and training approach in advance will lead to a smoother, more straightforward onboarding process.
With SweetProcess, you can store and share all the paperwork and information your new hire needs to achieve some autonomy. With the account you create, you can access policies, paperwork, guidelines, etc.
Simply put, SweetProcess is a clever all-in-one solution to a knotty problem.
Onboarding from Day One Through Week One
Your new hire shows up, eager and ready to work. By now, you should have already taken care of the paperwork set up their desk with all they need.
But it can still be daunting walking into a new office. Sometimes even the most competent employee is out of their depth. They still fear the unknown. Unfamiliar faces surround them, and everything is foreign.
It would be best if you made this first day as easy as possible by providing ample direction. They should always know the next step. They should never have to guess the next step.
The aim of everything you do on the first day should be to set expectations and introducing objectives.
Role Review
In line with setting expectations and introducing objectives, one thing you must do is to set up your new hire by meeting a key employee.
Instead of making awkward small talk, ensure that essential things are talked about.
Review the original job description, remind the new hire about the job requirements, and review the metrics with which you will measure their performance.
Will it be tangibles like customer acquisition or intangibles like customer satisfaction?
Going further, don’t forget to talk to them about what work at your office is like. Let them know what behaviors aren’t acceptable within working hours and even those that aren’t acceptable outside working hours.
And it shouldn’t be a monologue either. Let them ask you questions while you respond as thoroughly as you can. To take it a step further and to make for a thorough learning process, answer your new hire’s questions through email so they can always refer back to your answers.
Use this period to establish expectations and let them know when to expect check-ins over the next few months. This helps keep them prepared.
Since they’re new, it’s a brilliant idea to pair your new hire with someone who already fills the role they’ll soon enter.
Even if you don’t pair them up with a team member in a similar role, at least pair them up with an equal colleague so that they can have an idea of what the office pace is like, and so that they can have an idea of all the roles and duties they will likely be assigned.
This helps them understand how they fit into your team and what types of projects they may eventually work on.
This type of hands-on experience helps them learn faster when they experience it first-hand instead of when they’re only told what to do.
Once you’ve set expectations and the new hire has become acclimated to the office’s pace and is settling in, the next step is creating an onboarding schedule that your new hire can follow over the next week or two.
Set up meetings with managers and senior team members in advance and ensure that all the items they need to check off are included on that list.
Remember that preparation is a key ingredient for success, and this is true as well for onboarding.
Onboarding Between Week One and Three Months
After you’ve introduced the new hire to your company and its culture, introduced them to their team members, and you’ve given them all they need to do their jobs, it now becomes a race against time for them to learn as much as they can about their new role and to become as productive as they can.
You need to make sure the new hire is productive as soon as possible. There is nothing as awkward as the new hire having to watch other people work but not doing anything themselves.
This is why you should, as soon as possible, assign them work, so they begin to feel like part of the team. You can start with small tasks and gradually increase the roles’ sensitivity and complexity as they prove their expertise.
An excellent way to get them started is to assign them work that requires working with someone else on the team. This helps achieve two things: first, it acts as a safety net and creates a safe environment for them to make mistakes and learn from them.
Second, it helps them get to know their colleagues and helps them build social currency. It helps them get to know their teammates better and work with them better. This helps with the social onboarding we talked about earlier.
Seventy percent of employees say friends at work are the most crucial element to a happy working life, and 58 percent of men would refuse a higher paying job if it meant not getting along with co-workers.
So, assigning work and then pairing them up with other colleagues is the best way to help build these connections while learning to do their jobs well.
As long a new hire is, well, new, they will always have questions about their roles, things they don’t understand, etc.
And so, regardless of how quickly a new hire seems to be picking things up, still make sure to hold regular check-ins so that you can stay updated on their progress.
You can schedule check-ins at one month, 45 days, and 90 days to make sure they’re on track and meeting any goals that you’ve set out.
Regular check-ins help you notice if your new hire is struggling or needs a different type of training instead of leaving them to figure out things themselves.
You can also more easily talk about serious topics like performance and expectations, which are challenging to address in casual settings.
Not everything has to be about deadlines and performance metrics. You should also spend some time reinforcing your company culture with your new hire.
Make sure your new hire is sufficiently exposed to company culture. In addition to that, encourage them to participate as much as possible.
To provide as much exposure as possible, talk with them about the company culture’s tenets and what the company’s mission and values are.
Further, you can show them how the company’s culture and core values have affected and influenced real-life decisions in the past. To make sure the grasp of their culture is thorough, introduce some variety.
Show them how the culture guided some significant decisions in the past and contrast it with how it guides smaller day-to-day decisions.
For each core value, you can give a real-world example. This would make the core values more than just idealistic words on a page. This way, the new hire can more easily assimilate your company’s culture and understand why top-level management makes some decisions and why everyone else does things a certain way.
Another thing you can do is to set up the new hire with social media.
In a Forbes article, Ryan Scott points out that nearly 60 percent of employees use social media to build relationships within their company.
Connect your new hire with your company’s social media accounts so they can meld with your work culture.
The aim of all these is to fold your new hire into the culture of your company so that they will become a company adopter and, hopefully, a company adder in the future.
Ben Peterson, CEO of BambooHR, says, “Unfortunately, only 15 percent of companies continue onboarding after six months,” he said. Remember, nearly 90 percent of employees decide whether to stay or go within that first six months. “You have a huge impact on that choice. Sometimes you just have to show that you sincerely care.”
As we’ve already established, you can’t just onboard your new hire for one month and then decide to let them be. Instead, it would be best if you continued your onboarding efforts until the new hire can become fully productive without needing any supervision or input from you.
Here are some things that you can do to continue your onboarding efforts even into the first year.
Your new hire cannot grow without feedback. Feedback is what lets them know where there’s room for improvement. It also allows them to know when they’re doing things well.
Regularly hold feedback sessions with your (now not-so-new) hire throughout their first year.
Choosing to provide feedback only during the annual performance is dangerous because doing so will ensure that your employees miss opportunities to learn from their mistakes. You will also miss out on opportunities to praise them for jobs well done.
Ongoing feedback helps to keep the communication lines between manager and employee open. A team culture where kudos is given freely and correction is given without judgment helps build psychological safety for your team, especially for that greenhorn who has just joined your team.
If your employee does something right, don’t forget to make a small celebration out of it and praise them. Likewise, if they make some mistakes, don’t hesitate to address those issues immediately.
Remember that your new employees are new and have no idea how things work. They need feedback to grow.
Don’t assume that your team members will get along just fine. Take steps to ensure that they get on well together.
Remember that people don’t get to cherry-pick their colleagues. So create opportunities for your employees to interact with each other in constructive ways both inside and outside the company.
Provide your new employees with a “get-to-know-you” survey. Partner them with another employee who can show them around for a few days. These small steps can make an employee feel like they genuinely have a place in the organization.
Your team members will benefit immensely from personality assessments when hired and self-development surveys throughout their tenure at your company. Team members who understand how their colleagues think, work and communicate, stand a better chance at working together cohesively than if they’re left to figure things out independently.
How SweetProcess Can Help with New Hire Onboarding
Onboarding can be cumbersome if you don’t have the right tools or all the information you need in one place. If your systems are challenging to understand and unorganized, you will considerately slow down your onboarding process, and new hires will have many more hitches than necessary.
But SweetProcess is a tool you can use to organize all the chaos into a documented step-by-step process that is easy for anyone to use, even for the first time.
For instance, Clickfunnels had a problem, and they used SweetProcess’s powerful suite of tools to solve it.
The company was expanding at an unprecedented rate, and as more people moved higher up to become team leads and managers, onboarding the incoming hires became a nightmare.
They attempted to use anything they could lay their hands on, including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides…
It didn’t work out well, as G-Suite didn’t meet their needs.
To avoid chaos, they knew they had to systemize. And fast.
But they were also concerned that systemization would curb the creativity of their team. This was a valid concern, considering that their culture was one that actively encouraged creativity.
However, when they took the bold step to systemize and document all their processes, new hires could become autonomous for the first time, and management found that they had more time to be creative and focus on passion projects.
If you’re getting overwhelmed with questions from new hires or don’t have an organized process that new employees can follow without needing your input all the time, SweetProcess can help you create some order.
Do you want to enjoy these benefits and more in your organization? Sign up for a 14-day free trial of SweetProcess. Credit card details are not required for the trial: simply sign up and use the tool. If you like it, you can choose to subscribe to it later. You can visit the SweetProcess homepage to learn more about the software and pricing plans.
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Abductions have become more indiscriminate across northern Nigeria as local criminal gangs view victims as a source of income, and the villagers — who have been ignored by the government — as disposable.
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Gunmen kidnapped 140 students from a boarding school in northwestern Nigeria on Monday. It was the latest in a wave of mass abductions targeting schoolchildren in Africa's most populous nation.
The assailants opened fire and overpowered security guards after storming the Bethel Baptist High School, some 25 km from the city of Kaduna, the capital of Kaduna state , before abducting most of the 165 pupils boarding there overnight.
"The kidnappers took away 140 students, only 25 students escaped," teacher Emmanuel Paul said.
"We still have no idea where the students were taken."
There has been a recent spate of abductions from schools in recent months with kidnappers demanding a ransomImage: KEHINDE GBENGA/AFP
"This government has failed the people of Kaduna," Mustapha Kumbe, the father of one of the abducted students, told reporters.
Monday's kidnapping was the second in as many days, after police said eight people were seized from a hospital in Zaria, some 80km northeast of Kaduna, on Sunday.
The gangs are often driven by financial motives to kidnap children and others and hold them for ransom.
It has become a sort of business to the bandits, particularly in Kaduna state where the governor, Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, has been one of the most vocal local leaders, insisting he will refuse to pay ransom money.
Sometimes the gangs go as far as killing the kidnapped people to make a strong statement, especially to the governor.
Four months ago, this author was informed that armed bandits had killed 15 people in Amarawa — a village at the border of Nigeria and Niger in Sokoto state — during the early hours of March 1.
Wearing armored vests and helmets for protection, my TV crew and I drove five hours from where we were staying to Amarawa. When we arrived, the community members had just finished a burial ceremony.
Parents and relatives hold portraits of their girls five years after they were abducted by Boko HaramImage: Audu Ali Marte/AFP/Getty Images
Alhaji Dan Juma began to relate the attack — during which his son, his brother and other 13 people had been murdered.
"They came around 2:30 a.m. They killed my son and my brother and took [another] brother," Juma told me in the Hausa language through a translator.
"I pray for the government officials to protect the interest of the people, for God's sake," Juma pleaded.
Gunmen killed Juma a day after I spoke with him. They had contacted him demanding ransom money to secure the release of his abducted brother.
After collecting 5 million naira (€11,000, $13,123) from him, they then killed him and the brother he was trying to rescue.
Juma's death is similar to what many Nigerians in the north go through. But such stories barely make it in the news.
The perpetrators are often gangs of bandits taking advantage of inadequate policing and the easy availability of firearms.
"In terms of the number of attacks on schools, Kaduna has obviously suffered more than these other states," said Nnamdi Obasi, an analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank.
"The persistent targeting of schools in the state suggests the armed groups may be trying to break the state government's resolve not to pay ransom to criminal groups."
The banditry violence, unconnected to the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast, began as a farmer-herder conflict in 2011 and intensified between 2017–2018 to include cattle rustling, kidnapping for ransom, sexual violence and killings.
One resident told DW that bandits were taxing farmers in exchange for safety — a sign that the government has lost control.
About 21 million people living in Nigeria's Zamfara, Kaduna, Niger, Sokoto, Kebbi, and Katsina states are hugely affected.
Heart of the issue
Criminal groups often target people who can pay a large ransom, but they also carry out many more attacks and demand a lower ransom per victim — amounts of around $1,000, according to a report by SBM Intel, Nigeria's leading geopolitical intelligence platform.
Bandits complain that the central and state governments have abandoned them in the last 20 years, saying there were limitations on grazing rights.
Herders face excessive taxes when trying to sell their livestock at the market and sometimes encounter extortion or brutality by military and police personnel, according to Shani Shuaibu, a journalist who was recently granted rare access to bandit hideouts in Zamfara state.
"They say their children are not employed and they're not going to school," Shuaibu told DW.
"I asked them: Are you guys educated because the government offers employment to graduates. That's the problem. We are not educated. If we are educated — can we venture into banditry?"
Abuja-based security and intelligence expert Rabiu Adamu has called for dialogue that will lead to the disarmament of the bandits. In the event that peace talks fail, the former military officer suggested a radical approach.
"Use maximum force to fight them. I'm talking of maximum force with modern equipment. That's the best way to put it," Adamu told DW.
Zamfara's information commissioner Sulaiman Tinau Anka admitted that stabilizing the north will take some time.
"It is not something we can finish within a year. It's a gradual process. So gradually, all those bandits will be repented and come back to their normal activities," he said.
The military has launched repeated operations, but all too limited in scale to secure the state's 40,000 square kilometers.
Ground-attack jets have bombed bandit hideouts, but boots on the ground and a political response were needed, believes analyst Adamu.
This story was updated on July 6 to reflect the latest developments. AFP and dpa contributed reporting to this article.
Islamist sect Boko Haram's 2014 kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls attracted international attention, and the #bringbackourgirls campaign went viral on social media. DW looked at celebrities who joined it.
Nigeria: Curfew in place after abducted schoolgirls released
Nigeria: Curfew in place after abducted schoolgirls released
Authorities in Zamfara state have declared a curfew and shut markets after violence erupted as the girls were reunited with their parents. Security forces opened fire after stones were thrown at government officials.
Crime 03/04/2021 March 4, 2021
Fear of bandits grows in Zamfara
Fear of bandits grows in Zamfara
In Nigeria's state of Zamfara, villages are regularly attacked by armed gangs. Hundreds of people have died and thousands are fleeing as they no longer feel safe. Why is the government not taking action?
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This image might have been a more appropriate intro image for this post as I had a little mishap yesterday walking home from the lab. Crossing the street, a white Ford pickup felt he did not want to wait for a pedestrian, so he gunned the engine and failed to stop. The guy behind him in a Honda stopped, but then did not see me walking in the cross-walk. I tried jumping out of the way, but the Honda tire rolled over my foot and the car slammed into me. Right arm and left foot is a bit sore, but everything seems to work. My poor Fuji X-T1 and 50-140 lens however got the short end of the stick with the lens shearing off and the camera flying to the pavement, breaking the handgrip off. The camera body appears to be pretty beat up and non-functional and the lens is clearly hosed with lots of loose bits inside.
The driver stopped and he seemed like a truly good guy. The interesting thing: my initial anger towards him was cut short by the woman behind him who got out of her car, came up and wrapped her arm around me, immediately diffusing any and all anger I might have felt. Human touch is a phenomenal thing…
The driver who hit me clearly felt bad and said he would replace the camera gear, but it looks like I’ll be without this camera set up for a little bit as the weather warms up and the birds come out. I was also hoping this weekend to get out and photograph the bald eagles up at Farmington Bay, but that trip is on hold for now. The good news of course is that while I’m sore, nothing physical on me appears to be broken and from the drivers perspective, Fuji is having a screaming sale on cameras and lenses right now that will save him almost $1000 over what I paid for the gear to replace it.
Lessons: What we should practice as adults is what we learned as kids, right? You don’t think about adults getting hit by cars so much as you think about it happening to kids who are not paying attention. But things happen fast. Wear bright clothes at dawn/dusk, make sure that drivers make eye contact with you, practice defensive walking/bike riding and slow down. And… accidents happen. Be a good human being when they do.
One Reply to “Broken Image”
February 16, 2016 at 11:31 am
Double ouch for you and the camera. I hope you heal quickly.
A woman in a grocery parking lot almost hit me last year while I was walking to the store. She was driving in the wrong lane and screeched to a stop about 6 inches from me. Once I moved she drove on by and I yelled angrily at her without using obscenities.
You are to be commended for your response and composure. I know from experience that I would not have handled it as well as you did.
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Achieving early retirement isn’t something everyone can do. I wish I could say that if everyone would just save a little more, and live a bit farther below their means, and avoid buying an SUV, they’d be able to quit their jobs and live the life they crave. But that’s not the reality. There’s structural privilege inherent in our ability to pursue financial independence at a young age.
Mr. & Mrs. FW gussied up. Yes, I’m wearing garage sale pearls and a thrift store dress.
Mr. Frugalwoods and I have made a lot of amazing financial choices, but the game is rigged. We were put in a position from birth to make these wise decisions and it’s not because we’re naturally brilliant people. Our financial advantages are the products of our socioeconomic status, our education levels, and most of all, the benefits we both had while growing up.
I don’t buy the argument that if people would just save more money, they wouldn’t be poor. I don’t think that everyone who’s poor is poor because they’ve made bad decisions. Just as Mr. FW and I aren’t successful only because we’ve made good decisions, people aren’t unsuccessful simply because they’ve made a few bad decisions.
Yes, I believe in personal responsibility. And I believe that everyone should take control of their own finances and not blame their parents, the government, or their employer for every problem they face. However, I can’t deny the privilege that’s intrinsic in charting the financial path Mr. FW and I have.
I write Frugalwoods fully cognizant of how incredibly fortunate Mr. FW and I are, and always have been. And yes, I do sometimes feel ill at ease about the fact that many folks will never be able to acquire the level of wealth that we currently have and don’t even need to spend.
Our privilege stems from so many different sources that I feel it’s appropriate, and honest, to acknowledge what those sources are.
Advantaged From Birth
Mr. FW and I were both raised by parents with college degrees. Both of our mothers are registered nurses and Mr. FW’s mom also has a teaching degree, my father has a PhD, and Mr. FW’s dad has an MA. Thus, we were reared in educated households with lots of books. We both heard upwards of the 30,000 words per day that experts have divined is a fairly accurate predictor of a child’s achievement in life.
There’s never been a shortage of books in our homes
Our parents taught us to read, write, think creatively, question, and pursue our passions. Sure, we both went to school, but we were already well ahead of the curve by the time we entered kindergarten. Never underestimate the power that parents have over the crucial early learning years.
We didn’t grow up in poverty. Neither of our families were wealthy, but they were solidly middle class. My family bought clothes from the thrift store, went camping for vacation, drank powdered milk, and had at-home birthday parties with frozen pizza and homemade cake. Mr. FW’s upbringing was remarkably similar to mine and his parents tell stories of pawning their TV after Mr. FW was born in order to pay bills.
But we never went hungry, we never missed gifts at Christmas, we were never teased or ridiculed for “being poor,” we never lacked health, dental or vision care, and we were able to participate in the hobbies that interested us (ballet, horseback riding, boy scouts, band, choir, speech and debate… and the list goes on). We certainly don’t have trust funds or inheritances, but we were lucky little kiddos.
We had (and still have) loving, intact families. Mr. FW’s parents have been married for 34 years and mine for 47. The solid foundation of love, trust, faith in God, and respect that both of our parents built for their three children (Mr. FW and I each have 2 siblings) has served us well. My sister and her husband have been married for 14 years, my brother and his wife for 13, and Mr. FW and I for 6.
Mr. FW’s siblings aren’t married yet (good thing too since the youngest is 18 ), but I’m sure they’ll both choose lifelong partners when the time comes. There’s nothing wrong with divorce and sometimes it’s absolutely the best option for everyone involved. I merely want to share why I think the background of married parents set Mr. FW and I in the right direction.
We both grew up with superb examples of loving marriages. Our parents modeled that for us every single day and we in turn brought those lessons to bear in our own relationship. While I know that many people overcome horrendous backgrounds to accomplish great things, Mr. FW and I didn’t have to fight those battles.
We are white. Mr. Frugalwoods and I are what you might call racially vanilla. We’re both of European descent and we have a bland, English last name (it’s not actually Frugalwoods, although that would be freaking awesome), bland English first names too come to think of it, bland Caucasian faces and bland brown hair and blue/green eyes (yes, people have asked if we’re siblings).
I share this because I realize that, thanks to our race, we’ve never had to endure racism or prejudiced judgements about our ethnicity, our names, or our backgrounds. It’s not fair, it’s not right, and it doesn’t make me comfortable. But it’s the truth. We’ve never experienced discrimination first hand, but it’s a horrific thing many people do endure, often to the detriment of their employment and educational opportunities.
Yes, we’ve made savvy decisions to put ourselves in the position to reach financial independence by age 33, but our elite backgrounds set us up to make those informed choices.
We’re smart and we went to college. Due to our parents, and very likely our genes, Mr. FW and I are smart cookies. We excelled in high school and college and never grappled with a learning disability or lack of access to resources, tutors, or stellar teachers. We both have BAs (from an inexpensive state school) and I have an MA. This fact alone launches us into a higher earning category than many other people in the world.
I’m glad I married this guy
We married the right person. While this is a decision we made of our own free will, it was informed by our socioeconomic status and our parents’ fruitful marriages. In light of the educations we both received, we were able to select a partner of equal intellect and financial earning power. Plus, we chose each other in part because we have the same financial viewpoint and similar values and aspirations.
Marrying a partner who supports you, encourages you, challenges you, loves you, respects you–and is your equal in all things–gives you a stunningly powerful position in life. Also, none of this “leader of the family” nonsense. One of us doesn’t “lead” the other, we walk through life side by side and make respectful, joint decisions about our future. As a result, we’re both 100% on board with our financial plans, homestead goals, and general life philosophies.
We have a $0 entertainment budget, yet we get views like this.
We’ve never been in debt (other than our mortgage). Here again is a situation that’s a combination of luck, privilege, and judicious decision-making. While we both attended an inexpensive state school for undergrad, our parents were able to help us pay for it. I tell my parents to this day how deeply grateful I am that they enabled me to emerge from school debt-free, which set me far above my peers after graduation.
Mr. FW and I have subsequently made careful decisions to stay out of consumer debt and live well below our means. I was able to work full-time at the university where I earned my MA in order to receive free tuition. But, the origin of our debt-free lifestyle traces its roots to our stable, non-poverty ridden childhoods and our decision to marry the right person.
We have high-paying jobs. While this alone isn’t a predictor of financial health, or the ability to achieve financial independence at a young age, it sure does help. Yes, we’re extreme frugal weirdos and yes, we save 71% of our incomes every year and yes, minus our mortgage we spent $13,000 in all of 2014. But, we recognize how fortunate we are to be able to do this.
Lots of people work much harder, longer hours than we do for vastly less money. They might live just as frugally as we do–forgoing cable, restaurants, haircuts, and cars newer than 19 years old–but they won’t be able to save at the high rate we do. I never lose sight of the other side of the frugality equation: earnings. You’ve got to make something in order to save it. We don’t make investment banker salaries, but we don’t make peanuts either. And for this, we’re thankful.
For the record, I’d prefer not to be bathed
We’re healthy. Mr. FW and I are healthy and darn happy about it. Neither of us has a chronic illness, nor do we take prescription medications on a regular basis. This yields rewards in two ways: it costs less to be healthy and, our health enables us to work hard both at our jobs and at home by insourcing just about everything.
We’re able to do our own home improvements, cook our own meals, shovel our own snow, clean our own home, bathe our own Frugal Hound, and more–all of which saves us money. I don’t take doing these things for granted because plenty of people struggle to complete the rudimentary tasks that comprise an independent life.
I’m thankful to be healthy enough to do yoga
We started young. Since we married young (at 24), Mr. FW and I were able to grow up together and devise our financial approach as a team. We didn’t have to spend money on dating throughout our 20s in order to meet a partner and neither of us had the chance to make any major financial mistakes before we got married. We created a super frugal yet fun life, which at first simply sustained us and kept us out of debt, and then yielded ever-higher savings rates as our salaries increased.
We’ve waited to have children. Delaying parenthood has been a calculated financial choice for us. Children are amazing, and amazingly expensive. I fully recognize that not everyone in the world has the luxury to plan their families and many women are forced into motherhood before they’re fully adults themselves. And for some couples, a baby arrives as a surprise.
Trust me, their parenting needs improvement
Since we live in a first world country with access to health education and preventative care, Mr. FW and I thoughtfully made the conscious and considered choice to delay kids until we were financially stable and emotionally mature. People can be excellent parents at any age, but I think I would’ve been a terrible mother at age 24. I wasn’t mature enough and our marriage was nascent and not yet the secure fortress it is now.
In addition to the financial benefits of waiting to procreate, we’re setting our future children up for the same trajectory of affluence our parents did. As older parents, we’ll be more educated, mature, patient, and giving (both financially and emotionally) to our children–or so I hope! There are many young parents who do these things beautifully, but I don’t think I would’ve been one of them.
There’s a lot you can control about your finances. You can choose to live below your means, to exist simply and avoid the carousel of consumerism, to track your expenses, and make every purchase a conscious decision.
But there’s a lot you cannot control about your finances. You can’t always control having a dual or single income household, when or if you’ll have a health crisis, a catastrophic home repair, or an unexpected job loss. These are all reasons to have a well-stocked emergency fund. However, one of these crises could devastate a standard emergency fund whereas for us, it would likely be a mere blip in our cash flow.
Frugal Hound might look down her nose at you, but we won’t
Given the fundamentally unique nature of everyone’s personal financial journey, I don’t believe in judging people for their money missteps. Sure, I like to give advice when solicited (and sometimes when I’m not…) and yes, I think plenty of folks throw money away on a regular basis, but I’m not quick to judge them.
I don’t know their story and I don’t know why they’re struggling or spending above their means or in poverty or on food stamps. Who am I to say I know best? I’ve been incredibly advantaged and I know nothing of the grinding cycles of poverty that families get trapped in. I don’t make fun of people who are poor, I don’t judge them, and I don’t tell them to get a job.
For all I know, they already work three minimum wage jobs and can barely afford food and clothes for their kids. For all I know, they suffer from an untreated mental illness compounded by years of undernourishing food and the absence of a safe, warm place to sleep. For all I know, they didn’t have loving parents, encouraging teachers, and a supportive spouse to motivate them to stay in school or guide them in their pursuit of a more lucrative career.
Plus, judging people makes you bitter and pits you against the world. It’s a negative and demoralizing way to look at society. When you judge others, you’re only poisoning your own thoughts. They probably don’t even know you’re judging them–only you are internalizing the harmful vibes of your judgment.
Acknowledging privilege isn’t a license to be defeatist. It’s not an excuse to simply give up and stop trying to improve your finances. Just because a person didn’t have an ideal childhood doesn’t mean they can’t become a better version of themselves. It’s not impossible to reach financial independence on a small and/or single income and it’s not impossible to transcend debt or a rough upbringing.
Our homestead goal is a luxury
I think that through sheer determination, people can work their way into the life they want. But I also think it’s important to acknowledge how lucky we–and others like us–are on our journeys to financial independence and early retirement. It’s a luxury to have these goals and it’s a blessing to attain them.
Our lives are an amalgamation of our experiences and I think the elements of our past shape the people we become. I don’t know how Mr. Frugalwoods and I would’ve turned out had any one of the factors I listed been missing from our life stories. Perhaps we’d be just fine, but, I kind of doubt it. I’m not ashamed of the lives we’ve led and I’m not ashamed of our financial successes, but I am acutely aware of how uniquely fortunate we are.
Has privilege played a role in your life? Do you think anyone can achieve financial independence?
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February 16, 2015 at 8:47 am
Thank you for your honest and great writing. Being a black person, I deal with racism. But, my upbringing (single parent household), determination and ambition has helped me in the road to striving for FI. I don’t blame others, I change my attitude. The world may not be a fair place but life goes on. My white boyfriend & I are loving to each other and live simple frugal lives. Ethnicity, childhood does not define me. I’m unique and I create my own journey. Keep up the good work, I enjoy reading your blog. From Australia
February 16, 2015 at 9:45 am
I love your statement Christine, “Ethnicity, childhood does not define me. I’m unique and I create my own journey.” – so true.
Jay @ ThinkingWealthy.com says:
February 24, 2015 at 7:53 pm
I’m Indian (not of the Native variety) and thus face some of the hurdles but likely not as much as you have. My parents had to work fast food while I was growing up but that just instills work ethic. Your upbringing has so much to do with how you fare in life as Mrs. FW mentioned.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:17 pm
That’s absolutely awesome, Christine. I love that you’ve forged your own path and this is beyond powerful: “I don’t blame others, I change my attitude.” Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate it.
February 16, 2015 at 9:05 pm
The internet still amazes me sometimes. Another Aussie Christine reading the same blog written in America. Love your attitude Christine. Do you think that frugal living and striving for FI is starting to gain a foothold in Australia? I tell friends and family that we are getting serious about building a FI future and that means some changes in our spending now and I get looks like I’ve grown two heads.
Ms. Frugal Asian Finance says:
April 18, 2017 at 9:13 am
Your comment is so inspiring. I’m an Asian immigrant and have dealt with a lot of racism throughout my time in the US. But I still feel fortunate that I have the opportunity to pursue the American – something millions of people all over the world aspire to do.
Phil says:
January 30, 2020 at 1:54 am
I’m not sold on this concept of privilege. I think your ancestors toiled and made sacrifices for you to start at that position when you were born. Calling this privilege is dismissive and could be insulting to them. At best you are able to keep it and pass it to your children – at worse you lose all their efforts.
Becky says:
June 13, 2022 at 5:25 pm
This is an old comment, but you commented on an old post too, so here goes: that’s the whole point Phil. Not everyone has the *privilege* of having ancestors who even had the ability to toil away and make sacrifices so that their future generations could have a better position in life. This is only one obvious example, but what was a slave to do in order to increase their future great-grandchildren’s lot in life? They were merely trying to survive. The fact that you didn’t consider that tells me that you (just like me) had the privilege of having ancestors that at least had the ability, based only on their skin color, to make sacrifices for their children, their children’s children, and us. I’m grateful for the lot in life I’ve been given, in part because of my ancestors. But it is very unsettling to me that others have not been as lucky, and it is incredibly unfair.
Nicola says:
February 16, 2015 at 8:50 am
I absolutely love this post. We are in a similar position in terms of privilege as you are; me and my husband both have loving, supportive families and have never known financial difficulties such as not enough food or heating. I think that being born into a certain path makes the journey easier, straight from the offset.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:17 pm
Thank you, Nicola. I agree–the journey has just been easier for us from the start.
paige says:
February 16, 2015 at 8:52 am
This is a great read. I grew up and am in the same ‘privledged’ group as yourselves. I’ve always considered myself lucky to have grown up in a house full of books and been thoroughly encouraged to pursue higher education. My fiancee grew up in a single parent household, has experiences with racism and never pursued post-secondary education. Our approaches to most decision making is very different, but, thankfully, we usually end up at the same conclusion.
Thank you for this post.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:30 pm
That’s very interesting that you and your fiance arrive at the same conclusion through a different process–I feel like that’s such a learning process in a relationship. Thank you for reading!
Cheryl says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:00 am
Thank you for this honest look at your lives and acknowledging the hard truth that everyone being equal does not equate to equal opportunities for all. We have two young kids and we are constantly wondering about “nature vs nurture” as we see them grow and develop their personalities and preferences. I think everyone has the potential to overcome difficult circumstances, but not everyone has the opportunity or support to do so.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:34 pm
Well said–equality definitely doesn’t mean equal opportunities. Nature vs. nurture is absolutely an element to this as well and I can imagine that weighs on one’s mind as a parent. Thank you for reading and sharing.
John @ Frugal Rules says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:11 am
Thanks for your honesty Mrs. FW. Looking back, Mrs. FR and I have had similar privilege. My parents divorced while I was in high school and I had debt to pay off, but aside from that I’d say we’ve both led relatively privileged lives especially in comparison to what others have faced. I believe that if you work hard enough and are committed enough to what you want that it is possible to reach somewhere close to where you want, but so much of the equation is also what you’re born into and what socioeconomic status you’re surrounded by. I also think it can be easy to forget that in comparison to other places around the world that we have so much more which does provide a ton of opportunity…but again luck is at work in creating something out of that opportunity.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:37 pm
That’s a great point about our good fortune as Americans–I forgot to mention that :). And, I agree, it’s all a balance of luck and hard work. I appreciate your thoughts.
Mrs SSC says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:13 am
Thanks! That was great! Mr SSC and I often feel guilty for how fortunate we are… and we have to remind ourselves we worked hard to get here. Granted I grew up in a situation more like you and Mr FW, but Mr SSC grew up quite poor. One of our biggest hurdles in getting to FIRE has been Mr SSC’s background, filled with debt, bad financial decisions, and even fear of quitting our jobs and running into some bad luck that will put our kids in a poor situation like he had to endure. I think it is great to reflect on and appreciate some of the circumstances that led us to where we are today – but no matter who we are and where we came from, a good portion of it still has to do with hard work!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:50 pm
That’s really interesting how Mr. SSC’s background has impacted your FIRE goal. I too feel guilty sometimes for our good luck, but like you said, it’s a combination of fortune and hard work. You definitely have the frugality dialed in, which is absolutely a testament to your own hard work. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Amy says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:13 am
My husband and I both grew up in white, middle class families. While neither of us have any sort of college degree, we make healthy salaries that allows us the privilege of doing the things we love and saving for the future. I know that the money we have allows us to make better decisions, but I also know that making better decisions has allowed us to have more money. My husband has a sister that has lived the complete opposite as he has even though they both grew up in the same household. Debt, divorce, several children out of wedlock, payday loans, title loans, theft, eviction…you name it, she has done it. And continues to do it. So here lies the question of….which is more powerful…Nature or Nurture?
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:59 pm
I think you’ve brought up a great point–nature vs. nurture absolutely plays into this discussion. That’s awesome that you and your husband have done so well and made good financial choices. Like you said, it absolutely becomes a cycle whereby money enables good decisions which enables money… etc. Likewise, the cycle sadly works in the opposite direction, as evidenced with your sister-in-law. Thank you for sharing these thoughts, I appreciate it.
February 16, 2015 at 9:18 am
I definitely feel as though I had a privileged path in life that has led to where I am now. My sister taught for 4 years at a Teach for America school and she said that it was difficult to figure out how to motivate students to read Romeo and Juliet when they didn’t know if they would eat dinner that night and that the school breakfast and lunch programs were sometimes the only meals those kids had. It definitely puts your life and opportunities in perspective.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 7:02 pm
Absolutely puts things in perspective. I am so keenly aware of how fortunate I am just to know where I’m sleeping and what I’m eating every day. That’s wonderful that your sister did TFA–awesome!
February 16, 2015 at 9:18 am
Thank you for this compassionate and thoughtful post. My husband and I share many of the privileges you list, although we grew up slightly lower on the middle-class scale. Only one of us has the degree and experience to make good wages (more than enough, but nothing spectacular), and over the years of our marriage, we have valued time together over making money.
Which means we will likely never reach FI or early retirement, but we enjoyed working part-time jobs while our kids were small so that we could spend plenty of time with them in those years. Now my husband works full-time while I am home full-time for our school-aged kids. We live frugally and funnel just over half our income to paying off our mortgage early so we can work less than full-time again in about four years.
So, in answer to your question, I don’t think financial independence is reachable for everyone, but there is a continuum between early retirement and working 40+ hours per week all your adult life until you reach 65. And privilege at least partly influences where you fall on that continuum.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 7:17 pm
Wonderful point about the continuum of full-time work to financial independence. I definitely agree that it’s not a concrete distinction. There are so many different ways to create a life that’s fulfilling and meaningful. I love that you’ve valued time together over money–nothing could be more important. Also, congrats on living so frugally!
February 16, 2015 at 9:29 am
Hubs and I often talk about the fact that our parents and grandparents are all still married. (If they are still with us.) All of our examples for marriage are to stick with it and when things get hard to pull together rather than push apart. Our financial models were quite different but both good. One of the reasons we decided for me to stay home was because of the value that Hubs saw from growing up with a stay home mom. We make sure to count our blessings every day. Both of our parents taught us how to creatively solve problems.
I would like to think that financial independence is possible for everyone but I do not think that it is a reality for everyone. Intelligence plays such a role in decision making and problem solving. Not being able to solve problems or learn the information necessary to solve problems results in paying for services so others can help solve problems. Being able to teach ourselves how to do things like home/car repairs and manage money would be detrimental to our success.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 8:07 pm
Those examples of a loving marriage are so powerful! Same goes with good financial examples! It’s a wonderful thing to grow up surrounded by those positive reinforcements.
February 16, 2015 at 9:34 am
I have realized that I had a somewhat privileged path in life but I chose to fall into the trap of consumerism and to not save money. Now, I am spending the time to dig out from those poor choices. I now know just how fortunate that I am to be able to make better financial choices unlike some who have a harder time. This post really spoke to me so thank you so much.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 8:10 pm
That’s awesome that you’re making those choices now–it’s not easy to change the way you view money, so congrats! And, I agree, there’s a certain amount of privilege simply in the ability to make wise decisions. Thanks for reading!
Sarah says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:38 am
Ok this is officially my favorite post ever Thank you for your honesty! I can relate to an extent, for sure. My dad has always been great with money and taught me the value of a dollar from a young age. He has always saved first, then paid his bills and then enjoyed his earnings. Interestingly about my dad is he comes from a low-income home with divorced parents and is the oldest of 6 kids. Every single one of his siblings (and himself) are engineers. They all learned from their past and chose to live life differently.
Without getting into too much detail, though, I do believe that your childhood and past STRONGLY shapes who you are today. While my dad is an “exception,” most people live similarly to how they were brought up. Your post was incredibly inspiring for me to be a better mom, thank you for that
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 16, 2015 at 10:12 pm
Thank you so much–glad you enjoyed it! Sounds like your dad really found a way to succeed despite the odds. And it’s wonderful that he passed along good money wisdom to you!
Mysticaltyger says:
February 18, 2015 at 8:43 pm
One thing that seems a constant is that IT’S ALMOST ALWAYS THE ENGINEERS who seem to have a relatively easy time handling money. They seem to understand the difference between need vs. want and they really don’t care what other people think.
Mr. 1500 says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:40 am
My story was in many ways, the opposite of yours. My father was frequently laid off from his job in construction. To my knowledge, we were never on public assistance, but we probably weren’t very far away from it. My parents weren’t very good with finances either which had a lot to do with the lack of money.. The most striking example is when they inherited $400,000 when I was in college and somehow managed to spend it all in a couple years with nothing to show for it but an unreliable convertible..The worst part was the alcoholism though. I have no idea how my dad didn’t end up in jail more frequently or kill someone. It was really horrible.
However, all of the bad examples were powerful lessons that made me hungry. Even at a young age, I remember telling myself that I’d be a better person. While no one in even my extended family had gone to college, I knew it was my way to a better life. I went and graduated magna cum laude (biology and chemistry baby!). I worked my ass in my career and was able to earn a healthy income in a short amount of time. I also saved my ass off. None of this lifestyle inflation crap, living check-to-check stuff that I saw as a child.
While my family may not have set me up for success, I’m thankful to have been born in a place that presents opportunity for those that work their butts off.
Your post reminds me a bit of the famous Buffett quote in which he talks about winning the Ovarian Lottery. You and the Mr. clearly won that one. Combine that with being born in the Land of Opportunity and you’d have to try NOT to succeed!
“I’m not ashamed of the lives we’ve led and I’m not ashamed of our financial successes, but I am acutely aware of how uniquely fortunate we are.”
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 12:33 pm
Wow–your story is inspiring. Thank you for sharing it. The alcoholism is absolutely heart-wrenching and I’m so sorry you had to endure that. I’m in awe of people who do transcend their backgrounds and chart an entirely different, and successful, life. Seriously, that’s awesome.
And, you make a great point about being born in the US–there are so many opportunities available to us here that just don’t exist in some parts of the world. I think you’re right that Mr. FW and I would have to try harder not to succeed!
February 16, 2015 at 9:40 am
Very well written article and a concept that is often sorely missed with the FI crowd. I’ve found the tone of the mmm forum to bend towards the philosophy of us vs them and I think you captured the fact that many people who make poor financial decisions are not starting on equally solid footing since financial decisions always have an emotional element to them. Keep up the great work and I would also add that the concept of Early FI is a very positive one to help those around us as you encourage minimalism, and hopefully are able to free up traditional work positions so that others are able to take on your job after you’ve left rather than sticking in them for 35-40 years as past generations have done.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 12:36 pm
Thank you so much, I appreciate your kind words. I agree that it’s something we don’t talk about enough in the FIRE community. And, good point about freeing up jobs for others post-early retirement–that’s very true!
Frugal Paragon says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:42 am
I feel like there is a sweet spot of privilege for achieving financial independence. If your parents are TOO wealthy, then you don’t have a good frugal example. My parents took us camping for vacation, did their own household and furniture repairs (my mother can reupholster things), made some of our clothes (including formal dresses), etc., and spoke often about avoiding consumer debt. My millionaire-next-door grandparents (and what an example that was–they had become wealthy by just not spending their modest incomes) sometimes chipped in for special activities, like the year I went to Space Camp. We were quite blue collar when I was very small (my father was an auto mechanic and my mother worked in a men’s store), then in later years my mother finished her college degree and started teaching and my father was promoted, and we gained a more solid footing in the middle class. (My parents today are quite comfortably off, able to spring for some nice vacations and my mom’s first brand-new car since 1973.) So I had the benefits of at least one educated parent, good middle-class schools full of mostly middle-class kids, plus a strong example of frugality.
Mr. FP, on the other hand, was raised by a hardworking single mom with a GED. She kept him in a good school district, but he had no example of the benefits of long-term stability or delayed gratification, so he’s had to teach those to himself. If I was raised right in the sweet spot for financial independence, he was raised a bit below it!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 12:42 pm
Very interesting point! I think your theory makes perfect sense. Having too much or too little rarely works out well. Sounds like your parents and grandparents were amazing frugal role models–how awesome! I’d be curious to know, do you find that the differences in your upbringings cause you and Mr. FP to approach your finances from different perspectives?
February 16, 2015 at 9:43 am
It definitely helps coming from a middle class family. I’ve seen the advantages versus the disadvantages of coming from a lower income class. But what I’ve realized is that most of the time is the difference of accessing knowledge. Even though I came from an low income immigrant family, I think the fact that I loved reading and would always check out books from the public library really enabled me in my development. Reading is so important. Reading helps you develop critical thinking skills and those skills will help you evaluate life. It simply opens up your mind to new possibilities.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 12:55 pm
You’re so right–accessing knowledge is vital. That’s wonderful that you were a reader and made the public library your friend! It really is the best way to learn. Thank you for sharing!
February 16, 2015 at 9:49 am
I believe it is all relative. While some people may have a “head start” in their financial goals, I don’t use that as a crutch or to have pity for myself. At the same time I know people will always have it worse. There is always someone out there that will have a bigger head start, or bigger hurdle to cross than yourself, and just putting that into perspective helps me take 100% responsibility for my personal financial future.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 1:00 pm
That’s true–there usually will be someone in front of and behind you, in all things really. Keeping that perspective is definitely a good strategy, and, I find it’s motivating to me. Thank you for your thoughts.
Chris @ Flipping A Dollar says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:58 am
We are definitely privileged but also take advantage of the privileges. Middle class family and very little debt (I had 25k in student loans which we paid off in under 2 years). Now we’re saving a good amount, but less than we could have if we waited to have our daughter. She’s kinda cool though, so no regrets there. It’s good to check your assumptions about others though. Just because something was easy for you, it’s not for everyone else. Great stuff!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 1:55 pm
Taking advantage of privileges and opportunities is absolutely key! It’s definitely a two part equation. And, so true that not everyone finds the same things to be straightforward and/or easy. Thanks for sharing!
Tonya@Budget and the Beach says:
February 16, 2015 at 10:16 am
Lucky and smart indeed! I have no doubt having good role models and a good upbringing not only gave you advantages, but more importantly it set YOU up to make good decisions about your life. I had a bit of a mix. I never wanted for anything financially, but had a a very rocky home life. But it taught me to be fiercely independent…maybe to a fault? Not sure, because you deal with the cards you are dealt. Still, I have no regrets and resentments and feel like a very lucky human. I was around several examples of people choosing to make some bad decisions for themselves this past week and it make me feel very grateful for my life, even with it’s financial challenges.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 2:04 pm
It’s so difficult to watch other people make bad choices–ugh, not fun. But, hey, it’s good that it had the side benefit of making you feel grateful. I love that you have no regrets or resentments–that’s an awesome way to go through life!
February 16, 2015 at 10:30 am
Thank you for this post. One of my favorites by far. As a Puerto Rican woman, with an accent and dark skin who grew up in one of the poorest city in PA till last year I have experienced racism is out there. Heck my white husband’s family is still having a hard time accepting me after 2 children. It hurts like crazy when someone treats you like this because of your background, they way you look etc. That being said, my family was poor, we hardly had any food at home, but with hard work my parents made sure we did the right thing. I had goals and I had dreams that I have been accomplishing on my own. If I sit here and blame others I wouldn’t of be where I am right now. I wouldn’t be married to my husband. If you don’t like me because of the way I look, your problem not mine and I’m going to keep on going. Great post.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 2:09 pm
Inspiring words, Joyce. Wow! Thank you for sharing. That’s awesome that you’ve created the life you wanted and are accomplishing your dreams!
Amy says:
February 16, 2015 at 10:35 am
I love this incredibly well-written, insightful, and honest post about society! We are all shaped by our backgrounds and forces outside our control, yet we also make our own choices. This combination informs most – if not all – of our life experiences.
Like you, I’m white, healthy, educated, and was born to educated parents. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, and have managed to incur other debts along the way, the fact that my parents paid for the entirety of my private college education was a huge gift.
And now as the parent of a young child, I’m keenly aware of how the choices I make about things like reading, new experiences, and even feeding well-balanced meals, will give my daughter a strong foundation for life.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 3:53 pm
Thank you so much :). Sounds like you’re giving your daughter an amazing start in life!
CBuggle says:
February 16, 2015 at 10:37 am
This is a great read and I’m glad that you have taken the time to acknowledge the role that privilege plays in how one’s life trajectory unfolds. It’s interesting- I grew up in a divorced family that was fraught with alcoholism, mental illness, and abuse, but I still feel privileged. Despite the challenges, my family was very committed to education and we got generous doses of words per day just like you did which I feel might be THE thing that kept me afloat. I see adults who have had the same disadvantages I had who struggle in life because they simply lack the ability to say how they feel, and communicate effectively with healthy people in personal relationship as well as in professional environments.
My journey to frugal living and financial success/independence is very different from yours. I only recently emerged from a life of credit card debt, and I am far from retirement (I’m a single white female, age 32). Despite this, I feel very proud of what I’ve accomplished largely because of what it took to get me here and where I started. I had horrible relationship modeling as a child and have had a series of unhealthy relationships throughout my adulthood. I had equally terrible guidance with money. I don’t feel angry because of this, actually. I don’t even resent my friends (or you) who have had smoother starts in life. I’m just proud of what I’ve accomplished so far and I hope for the same kind of success for my siblings and friends who still struggle with finances. What really impressed me about this blog post is the acknowledgement that being poor isn’t always a result of crappy decisions. Some people are born into nearly hopeless odds that they will never break the poverty cycle. It’s an all too common tendency for those with wealth to show a lack of understanding and compassion toward those who struggle financially. It’s a complicated mess, poverty. I am an intelligent, education woman and I still managed to get into big debt (and thank God I managed to get out, too). I simply did not have the tools or awareness or information around finances that could have prevented that mistake. In a way it was almost a blessing in disguise because now I am on a journey that I may not have been on were it not for the challenges I faced.
Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough. Thank you for this post.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 4:14 pm
I love this: “It’s an all too common tendency for those with wealth to show a lack of understanding and compassion toward those who struggle financially.” YES! Thank you. You’ve perfectly articulated essentially why I wrote this post. It’s far too easy for me to fall into passing judgements on people when I know nothing of the struggles they face on a daily basis.
Your outlook on life is inspiring and, frankly, awesome. Btw, congrats on getting out of debt–that’s fantastic! Thank you so much for reading and sharing.
February 16, 2015 at 10:42 am
This was a great read. I agree that determination goes a long way, but I think a lot of people give complete credit to it and their hard work, without acknowledging the role of luck and privilege, and I’m so glad you addressed that. I’ve worked very hard to get where I’m at. I couldn’t have found financial security without working very hard. But I can’t deny that a great deal of it has to do with luck. And even privilege. I didn’t grow up rich, but I didn’t have to contend with the massive obstacles some folks do. In the end, though, I think it’s about determination mixed with, as you mention, focusing on what you can control. If you haven’t checked it out already, the book “Scarcity” discusses a lot of these issues. I think it’s a good read for anyone who writes about money. Anyway, refreshing post. Very refreshing!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 4:15 pm
Thank you! Yes, I think it’s a combination of the two: hard work and privilege, which sadly isn’t always recognized. I haven’t read Scarcity, but sounds like I should–thank you for the recommendation!
Norm says:
February 16, 2015 at 10:58 am
Yes, yes, and yes. Marge and I have similar backgrounds to yours, so we were set up for success. But I woudn’t be a true northeasterner if I didn’t have white guilt!
But no, I don’t think everyone can achieve financial independence. IN THEORY, yes. Hard work determination blah blah blah. But it makes me sick sometimes the number of barriers we put up in this country to prevent people from being successful. The problem, as I see it, is the lack of a social fabric, lack of empathy, unwillingness to understand the lives of others. Call it what you will, but here we all live under the mistaken assumption that this is a meritocracy. And more and more, we believe in the mistaken assumption that everyone can achieve everything totally on their own. But the problem is that we don’t give people the tools to do these things!
It starts from birth. Why isn’t there a universal pre-K program for all kids? Studies show that this has a huge impact on your future learning, but only kids from families who can pay for it get this crucial education. How about college? If it were truly a level playing field, college would be free for everyone, and you would only be competing on which school to go to based on grades. But it’s not free, and parents are basically expected to pay for it on their own, or kids work their way through college. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, saving all that money for college probably means spending less time with your kids as they’re growing up, leading to even more problems.
Healthcare? You’re expected to pay for that, also. Under a meritocracy, this wouldn’t be a concern either, and your health wouldn’t be connected to your pay. Luckily, we are just starting to move in that direction, but it’s insane that the employer is the one making most people’s healthcare decisions. Retirement? Most people used to have a pension, so that was all taken care of. Now, you have to do it on your own. The problem is that the pension rug was yanked out, and no financial education was put in to replace it. Luckily, some of us (yes, you, reader!) figure it out, but you have to admit, it isn’t something they teach in school.
You’re expected to pay for all of these things on your own, but without the minimum wage being a living wage, and locked into the consumer price index, I don’t understand how people are supposed to be able to do it.
February 16, 2015 at 7:27 pm
You have incredible insight into our modern American conundrum: We are the land of opportunity yet these days we handicap anyone born without it.
I worked for a number of years FT without health insurance and didn’t have the money (if I could get it without being turned down for my age and pre-existing conditions, which I couldn’t) to pay in excess of 1K a month premiums. HUH? I went to the free clinic. They gave me the best care possible but my health still slid downhill because I couldn’t get the specialist care I needed.
The local state university, which even 10 years ago was affordable, is now priced out of sight of many people.
I make more than the minimum wage and have no dependents, but because my salary is controlled by the VA General Assembly, I haven’t had a raise since 2005. And they do NOT give those raises to my previous job status, the lowly P-14. VA somehow rigged a way to work people FT hours yet never give them benefits and overtime. The ACA put a stop to that. The poor P-14s still don’t get benefits but now they are true part-timers,, working under 29 hours a week. I have nothing against part time work. There is a place and reason for PT workers but employers should not use PT in total lieu of FT benefitted workers.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 4:57 pm
Preach, Norm. Totally agree that it starts from birth. The first few years of a child’s life are absolutely pivotal developmentally. I once read a study stating that a child’s likely trajectory of success in life can be determined by the time they enter kindergarten. Kindergarten!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Kim says:
February 16, 2015 at 10:59 am
Background and parental support are probably the most important predictors of future success. Anyone can overcome, but it’s much easier if you never have to. My Mom’s family were dirt poor farmers, as were most of my Dad’s up until my Grandfather decided to become a dentist. I’m not sure what caused him to decide that in the 1940’s, but he always said he wanted a better life that wasn’t so hard as his upbringing. Then my Dad went to college, and so it goes. My Mom was not very educated and always made it a point that my sister and I would go to college and be able to support ourselves, and I am eternally grateful for that!
Jim’s poor parents have made just about every financial misstep imaginable, so in a way, their hardships have made us better financially. We see what we don’t want to be in later life. We’ll get there eventually, even if we had a few fits and starts along the way.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 7:44 pm
It’s inspiring that your grandfather charted that different path for himself–it must’ve been quite the departure from the rest of the family. That’s wonderful that your mom was so adamant about college for you.
And, like you said, learning in reverse works too in terms of seeing what you don’t want to be. We’ve had some of those examples in our lives and it really does reinforce for us the things we do want to accomplish.
Laurie says:
February 16, 2015 at 11:02 am
Here, Here!! Beautifully done. Thank you for this contribution, Mrs. FW.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 7:45 pm
Thank you so much, Laurie! I appreciate that
February 16, 2015 at 11:11 am
Are you reading my mind? We had a conversation about privilege and finances with friends on the weekend. The four of us (almost) have all of the privilege you listed above and it really does place us in a lucky situation.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 7:47 pm
It’s been on my mind a lot lately too, so I just wanted to get my thoughts down in words somehow :). I definitely feel like I’ve been extremely lucky!
February 16, 2015 at 11:17 am
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 7:48 pm
Thank you so much for your kind words! I appreciate you reading :)!
Kate says:
February 16, 2015 at 11:17 am
This was a thoughtful and sensitive post. Thanks for writing it, Mrs. Frugalwoods. May all who are working on their own journey to financial independence find peace and joy in the process. I do believe that privilege makes a difference, and that all efforts to lift yourself out of whatever muck you find yourself in should be respected.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 7:50 pm
Thank you so much for reading it and for commenting! I agree that there’s plenty of peace and joy to be found along this journey
Jeff says:
February 16, 2015 at 11:23 am
I think this is something that often goes unmentioned, so good on ya for writing about it. There are a lot of people who learn money from mistakes (others or theirs) and a lot more people who were taught and got it from the start.
One of my favorite warren buffet quotes is when he talks about the advantage he was given early in life – He was born in a place that he didnt have to worry about food or shelter, and that had adequate markets for him to invest in. Had he been born into a war torn country or some place less stable, he probably wouldnt be where he is today.
I had many of the same privileges you all enjoyed growing up, though didnt always take advantage of them.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 7:58 pm
That’s a perfect Buffet quote–I definitely feel the privilege of the time and place into which I was born. Thanks so much for sharing!
February 16, 2015 at 11:32 am
Wow, what a another great post. I certainly think you background/up bringing plays a major role in your own life good or bad, but it’s not something that can’t be changed or shifted if you are willing.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:04 pm
Thank you! I think it’s definitely a balance between the two–hard work and inherent privilege.
Justin @ Root of Good says:
February 16, 2015 at 11:40 am
Sounds like I had a remarkably similar upbringing as you two. I won the birth lottery (right family, right color, right country, etc) but still had to work hard to get ahead.
My wife, in contrast, didn’t learn to speak English until age 7 when she left the refugee camp in SE Asia destined for America. She still managed to do well, graduate college then law school and achieve the American dream. If she can do it, surely anyone who is born here can too.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:06 pm
Wow–your wife has an inspiring story! That’s truly remarkable. Thanks for sharing!
February 16, 2015 at 12:41 pm
You truly are a great writer. Your post are usually long but they flow so well its hard to notice.
That is so important because you really couldn’t have done this topic justice with a short post.
Yes privileged does have a role. I was talking about it the other day though I was focusing on education. How its much more difficult to break out of a history of lack of education.
I didn’t have all the privileges you had , I have and recognize that I have to break out of things that were instilled in me growing up. But I did have advantaged and those did help.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:09 pm
Thank you! I was worried this one might be too long, but I just couldn’t shorten it :). So, I appreciate your kind words about it!
I agree-I think it’s extremely tough to transcend a background devoid of educational opportunities. I frankly can’t imagine my life without education.
February 16, 2015 at 12:48 pm
A rare topic in the pf blogosphere! Thank you for writing about it and acknowledging the role of privilege. It seems to be lost on so many others.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:11 pm
Thank you for reading! It’s been weighing on my mind, so I really wanted to get it out there!
Kara says:
February 16, 2015 at 12:51 pm
Man, y’all two kill it with this blog. I love this post! I’m writing a similar one about my own privilege. I have it in spades, though my experience is different than yours. I really admire you two, your lifestyle and your philosophy. Recognizing privilege can be uncomfortable but it’s so necessary to changing the unfair dynamics. Definitely something that deserves attention and you delivered perfectly!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:18 pm
Thank you so much, Kara! I agree that it’s important to recognize the advantages we’ve had because it’s just not an even playing field. Many thanks for your kind words and thoughts!
Fig says:
February 16, 2015 at 1:19 pm
Love this post because it’s something so many people ignore, especially in the personal finance blog world. It’s always “just do what i do and you’ll have the same successful results!” But that isn’t always the case and sometimes isn’t possible. Privilege is real and it’s something that definitely helps a lot of us achieve these large goals like financial independence.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:26 pm
Thank you! Agreed–privilege is absolutely real and it plays a legitimate role in our success. Thank you for reading!
February 16, 2015 at 1:52 pm
Great post! I’ve enjoyed it so much.
My story is different than yours, I am an immigrant, came to America when I was 21. Although I’m white, I do have an accent that gets noticed right away, and although most people are very welcoming, I did encounter some negative misconceptions about immigrants. I come from a broken family, with parents who divorced right after my birth. Mom never remarried, and I was raised by my grandparents. We were poor, but the whole country was very poor, so the concept of FI never existed. My only plans for the future would have been to get a good education and try to make a few hundreds of dollars per month, enough to live modestly and maybe save a little. But never achieve FI.
Coming to America meant years of adapting, starting from 0 with no support, losing my education prospects, and working lower end jobs to make ends meet. Still, I was making and saving more money than I could have ever done with even a PhD back home. Finally, I met my spouse and now have the family support I need, and am happy to say that I am confident in our future.
Everybody living in America is privileged, and you might not realize that until you live in a poor country. I am looking forward to being a business owner, and I think even with a combined income of as little as $50,000/year, we could live comfortable lives.
Anyway, this post has stirred up a lot of opinions in me, and I often think about this topic of success, what it really means, and how privilege plays a role….
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:32 pm
Thank you for sharing your experiences, that’s really powerful. You’ve overcome a lot to get where you are today–congrats to you. I definitely feel extremely fortunate to have been born in the US and you’re 100% correct that there’s privilege just in the very place you’re born. I’m so happy to hear that you’re feeling confident about your future–that’s a wonderful thing.
Jayleen @ How Do The Jones Do It says:
February 16, 2015 at 2:05 pm
I do think anyone can achieve financial independence. My hubby is an example of that. His dad died when he was eight and his mom turned to alcohol. Life was pretty rough for him and he knew he wanted more and worked super hard for it. Sometimes, being in super tough situations, give us the determination to change our outcome.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:37 pm
That’s wonderful that your husband was able to overcome a difficult past–congrats to him for his hard work! I think it’s inspiring when people do take inspiration from bad circumstances and turn their lives around. Thanks for sharing!
February 16, 2015 at 2:05 pm
Preach! I wrote a post on class and privilege a while back and I know it’s not as simple as “work harder and save more”. If it were, we’d all be rich. I am definitely privileged in some ways — I’m white and college educated and my parents are together. There has been some generational poverty and a scarcity mindset that has been passed down. I also had to pay for all my college, which I feel has seriously set me back (though it was my decision to go to NYU, an expensive school). I find that privilege is glaringly missing from most PF posts, so I appreciate you bringing it to the table.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:39 pm
Thank you! I agree–the “work harder, save more” trope just doesn’t hold true in all circumstances. This concept of privilege has been weighing on my mind, so I’m glad I was able to share it.
ThriftyD says:
February 16, 2015 at 2:09 pm
Excellent piece. One of my favorites from you so far (as difficult as it is to rank them). I grew up with similar privilege. I grew up in a comfortable, loving, middle class environment. Both of my parents were well-educated and stressed the importance of hard work and education. We never went without. They were both very socially conscious people who had a strong sense of community, helping others, and working for social causes.
However, on the downside of this comfy middle class lifestyle and contrary to my parents’ social/community views, I grew up around and went to school with a lot of kids whose families had the old “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality. I went to a moderately expensive parochial school and most of my peers’ families (peers, not close friends) had much higher incomes than my family. They lived comfortably way out in the far suburbs/next county over and thought ill of anyone who did not look, dress, live, practice the same religion, etc as them. I chose a core group of friends in high school who shared similar values as my family and me but I had a lot of repressed disdain for many others in my class. I would never dare to express my political or social views or challenge one of the other kids’ positions otherwise I would have been gotten caught up in pointless, trolling arguments.
Needless to say when I went off to college I formed some good friendships with like-minded, respectful people who were more empathetic and understanding of people who aren’t just like them.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:53 pm
Thank you, ThriftyD, I appreciate that.
You raise an interesting perspective–that of witnessing what sounds like great affluence. I’ve never had much personal experience with it since I went to all public schools and we always lived in solidly middle class neighborhoods, but, I think there are levels of wealth that isolate people from the daily struggles people of lesser means face.
And, I agree with you, there’s a lot of grace in empathizing with and understanding people who aren’t identical to you. Thank you, as always, for sharing your thoughts.
Done by Forty says:
February 16, 2015 at 2:10 pm
Such a candid post. You tackle the subject better than I have.
There’s a paradox in all of this. We can’t help where we came from…but we don’t have to end up like the people we grew up around. We can’t help what our parents did or did not do…but then we can embrace it or overcome it. We can’t help who we are…but then later, we can.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:55 pm
Thank you so much. I’m a big fan of yours, so I really appreciate that :). It’s definitely a paradox and can be something of a chicken-and-egg debate as well I think. Safe to say it’s a balance of the things we’re given and the things we work for.
February 16, 2015 at 2:46 pm
Excellent post. Although I was brought up in a middle-class home thanks to both good and bad life choices I’ve experienced literally every economic level from on-the-streets poverty to soirees at a yacht club. Sometimes I’ll overhear someone sneering because a poor person is smoking or drinking or doing drugs or eating fast food instead of spending money more wisely, I think back to those spirit-crushing days of living in a welfare motel and working at Walmart when that small bottle of cheap vodka brought me some respite. You take pleasure any way you can get it because it’s rare when you’re poor. I live a very good life now, but I still keep my journals from what I call the Dark Days so I can remember when having ten bucks in my wallet made me feel rich, and the memories from those days help me make the best financial decisions possible.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 9:01 pm
Oh wow–you really have experienced the gamut! Thank you for sharing your perspective. I think it’s so easy for us to judge people when we know nothing of their story or their background. You make a great point about the scarcity of pleasure for people who are in poverty–so true and something that I should remind myself of. Congrats to you for overcoming your dark days and creating an awesome life for yourself. No small feat.
February 16, 2015 at 3:12 pm
I would love to see guest posts from your parents regarding raising such financially savvy children!
This is such an excellent and insightful piece. In answer to your questions: 1) yes, privilege has played an enormous role in my life. I had a similar upbringing to what you describe and I have definitely seen the effects of that in my life. 2) No, I do not believe that absolutely anyone can achieve FI. There are many reasons for this, and some of them can be overcome and some cannot. Included in my personal knapsack of privileges is good mental health. I didn’t do anything to earn this or deserve this. My younger brother does not have this- he has a number of mental health issues that have crippled his ability to achieve. Even though we have the same parents, grew up in the same house, come from the same gene pool, and share most of the same privileges, that one piece of mental health is sadly lacking in his case and that has made all of the difference.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 9:09 pm
I should ask our parents if they’ll be interviewed! Thank you for the idea :).
Mental health is a good point and a true gift to those of us blessed with it. Thank you for bringing that up.
February 16, 2015 at 3:12 pm
Totally agree. Though I can relate to most points- my mom is a pharmacist, brilliant woman who could have done anything so post secondary was important. She was frugal because she had to – single parent. She made terrible financial and personal decisions (like not taking care of her house, spending money on stuff she didn’t need just because it was on sale…the lisf goes on). I had to unlearn a lot of this and teach myself most of the financial base I know today. Unfortunately this took me until about 26 to get facts straight. Again zero blame on my upbringing (though some things deserve an apology). Because of my education and strong people in mu life I was able to make conscious decisions and forge my own path.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 9:28 pm
That’s awesome that you were able to forge your own path and create the life you want to live. Sounds like your upbringing was almost a lesson in how you don’t want your life to be, which is probably valuable in and of itself. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences.
Brian @ Debtless in Texas says:
February 16, 2015 at 3:28 pm
I just have to say, you really are a fantastic writer. While it seems that y’all did have an upbringing that set you both up for success, you had to reach out and take it. There are many others in your situation who are content to not work hard, not to sacrifice, and not work towards building a future. There is a lot to be said for taking control of your finances and setting aggressive financial goals – no matter how you were raised.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 9:30 pm
Thank you so much, Brian. That’s very kind of you to say. And, I agree, it’s certainly a blend of both the advantages we were given coupled with our hard work. Thank you for reading and sharing!
Abigail @ipickuppennies says:
February 16, 2015 at 4:11 pm
I grew up in a smart household that expected me to go to college. Like you, I’m white, so I’ve never experienced racial discrimination. My education and middle-class upbringing left me well-spoken (most days), a good writer and smart (again, most days). During tough times, my mom provided support. Those things are huge, and I truly don’t think I’d be where I am today without those.
But I also ended up with chronic fatigue when I was 19, plus PTSD from the illness that gave it to me. It also took years to get me diagnosed as bipolar II. So I spent a long time undermedicated and struggling to function.
The man I fell in love with also has chronic illnesses, and I had to change his views about money pretty radically. His main illness caused him to go on disability. Another issue (severe calcium deficiency) meant $8,000 of oral surgery plus dentures. And we had to pay off about $20,000 of student loans.
Because of our issues, we aren’t able to do our own home repairs, which adds up fast on a late-1960s house. We also don’t make much from scratch. Because of bad luck, we’ve had to buy (used) cars twice in the last 5 years. And my husband needs to get full-mouth implants this year, which will run about $25,000.
So I’m a mix of privilege and some of the uncontrollable factors that you alluded to. But for all of the impediments I have, I am doing well because of so many inherent advantages. So important to remember.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 17, 2015 at 9:43 pm
You’ve really gone through a lot! I can’t imagine how difficult it must’ve been for you to navigate all of that. But, it’s wonderful that you and your husband are charting your own path together. I love your positive attitude–very inspiring. Thank you for sharing your experiences, I appreciate that.
Beth says:
August 3, 2017 at 11:47 pm
Abigail, thanks for your comment. You’ve touched on a very unique and under-acknowledged phenomenon: privilege can be taken away in a split second. An intelligent, educated, financially independent person who has an acute accident or chronic illness, either of which can have lifelong consequences, can rob all the privilege away. If you cannot work, have substandard health care due to location, out of pocket costs, insurance restrictions, or any number of things, you lose a piece of your base of stability. If you are single, with no one else to depend on, there goes more stability. If your FOO is unavailable or unable to help, there goes more stability. A lifetime of savings can be wiped out with a year or two of health conditions. Without having the ability to work as much as you used to, or at all, prevents you from replenishing the hits from all these additional costs. Without the energy or functioning of an “average” individual if the same age, socioeconomic demographic, further limits the ability to DIY, or save money in other ways, as you sagely describe.
Once you reach this level, you are on a downward spiral, rather than an upward spiral.
I would caution you against saying you had car problems due to “bad luck” buying a used car, or “poor choices” buying a used car. I don’t know the details, but I do know when I make a compromise in my decisions because of finances, if often doesn’t turn out well. If I had more finances to work with, I could make a more prudent–and less risky–decision. With less money, you are more often forced into Russian roulette, compromising potential quality, benefits and paybacks, for the initial outset of money. There IS difference between a solid, proven, reliable used car, in which you paid for a quality pre-inspection, title search, lien search and tune up maintenance upon purchase, and a used car that falls into the category of “this is what I can afford–I hope it lasts–no assurances.”
Beth says:
August 4, 2017 at 12:04 am
So to sum up, once any of these things happen, it matters relatively little where you came from, or what your upbringing was. If the most intelligent person in the world doesn’t have enough energy to work, they won’t get paid. If they don’t have energy to cook, they won’t eat healthy food, and so begins the downward spiral.
They may have more acumen to seek out assistance, but frankly, our society isn’t well set up for that.
February 16, 2015 at 4:13 pm
I was just reading another financial blogger the other day that contends we are only ‘poor because we want to be.”
That made me ad as a hornet! While there are slackers out there that repeatedly cause their own financial grief (My partner’s brother would be one of those people. He’s a real f***up)) many, if not most people are not that way.
The people I have met that had the most self-caused debt grief were middle-class types trying to live a consumeristic lifestyle and keep up with the non-existent Jones. I’ve also met rich kids who pissed their inheritance off through drug use and living a Paris Hilton lifestyle.
But I have also met people whose retirement nest egg vanished in the 2008 meltdown, people with huge medical expenses and no insurance and people with huge student loans.
I and you can not overstate what coming from a stable family does to aid one’s future! I work in the social services (not a high paying gig but I get by) and every study every done points to intact families as the key to upward mobility.
I know this from personal experience. Even though I am Caucasian (I’ve done the DNA & Mr. & Mrs. FW, I am 65% British! LOL!) I don’t have any of the other marks of privilege other than a decent education (but no degree). I am lucky to be an autodidact who is self-taught in many areas. I do well in interviews.
However, I came from a broken home with an adulterous, abusive father that refused to pay child support once my parents separated. My mother was a depressive, My father refused to buy my clothes and pay my medical bills. One year I had only one dress to wear (summer and winter) because my dad ‘punished’me by refusing to buy me new clothes. (the buy no clothes for a year thing would be painful for me coming from that scenario!) He let my teeth rot.
This is why I decided not to have kids. I didn’t want kids to grow up in an unstable, impoverished environment. I just didn’t have the role models to be a good parent. Now that I am older, I realize I might have been a good mom but now I am too old to be one. I have thought of doing respite foster care, especially after I retire.
I am now far from that background and am proud that I made it out alive and doing reasonably well. I don’t use it as an excuse to slack off. But I do understand how hard it is to feel good about yourself when you start out at the bottom and how hard it can be to climb out of it and thrive. Not everyone has my resourcefulness and intelligence. I credit that and my faith in God with my current success.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 3:38 pm
Ooo yeah, the “poor because you want to be” mindset rubs me the wrong way as well. Like you said, sure there are irresponsible people, but there are also plenty of folks who are trying very hard NOT to be poor!
This is what I’ve read and believe as well: “every study done points to intact families as the key to upward mobility.” Thank you for sharing that!
I’m so sorry to hear about your childhood. It’s awesome that you’ve completely overcome those circumstances and created a great life for yourself. Thank you for reading and sharing your experiences.
mysticaltyger says:
February 18, 2015 at 11:05 pm
Thank you for the point about stable, two parent families. I think this is one of the biggest advantages kids can have. But until recently, those who pointed out that having kids out of wedlock was a disaster were regularly skewered in the media and pop culture. I am old enough to remember the Murphy Brown episide that mocked Dan Quayle for saying as much back in the early 1990s.
February 23, 2015 at 4:11 pm
I’m from the gen that just didn’t dare ‘get into trouble.’ Although I acknowledge that some stable people come from single parent families, especially those who have extended families and friends who can help out, starting a family without a spouse or partner is a handicap for that family. Starting a family when you are financially shaky is just as much a handicap, even with two parents. We can predict what future personal and financial problems might come up, but we can control our present actions, which help our future be more stable. Having a baby when you are single, too young and too poor is not good for you or the child.
That Murphy Brown comment always rankled me. It’s easy for wealthy Hollywood types to hire nannies, etc. to help them raise a kid. But the Hollywood set in general (there are exceptions) don’t have the best track record for family and personal stability despite all their acclaim and wealth! Nuff said!
I do give exceptions to older stable women whose bio clock is about to expire. But hey, instead of having a baby, why not foster or adopt one of the many kids who need ANY parent?
Mrs FI says:
February 16, 2015 at 5:31 pm
What a lovely written and compassionate post! This is the part about reaching FIRE that Mr. FI and I tend to forget about. Between trying to stay on budget and thinking how hard it is some months to reach our goals, I often don’t think about how fortunate we are to have these first-world (or perhaps “higher-class” is more appropriate here) problems. Thank you for sending out this much-needed reminder and bringing privileged minds like ours back to a more thankful perspective.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 4:04 pm
Thank you so much, Mrs. FI! I appreciate your kind words. I definitely have to remind myself that my problems are first-world–it’s so easy to slip into forgetting about how lucky I am. And, I agree with you, it’s easy to get caught up in our FIRE strategies!
Andrew says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:53 pm
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 4:15 pm
It’s not about guilt. It’s about acknowledging how fortunate we are for these myriad reasons.
Michelle says:
February 16, 2015 at 6:58 pm
Immensely enjoyed this! I too come from a privileged background that has afforded me some steps ahead of others. Sadly I caught the shopping bug and married the wrong man who was not financially minded. We’ll just call him an enabler.
Crap happens but it’s how you pick yourself back up and stay tenacious towards conquering your misgivings.
And that is why I’m rewriting my past and working to create a better future for myself
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 4:18 pm
Thank you, Michelle! I love that you’re rewriting your past and looking toward the future–that’s an inspiring way to be :)!
February 16, 2015 at 7:40 pm
Great post. I find that very few people realize how privileged we are, how we were lucky to be born here in families that valued education. Thank you for also mentioning the ‘white’ factor. It certainly is a plus, even though it shouldn’t be. Very few people admit that.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 4:20 pm
Thank you, Isabelle. I wanted to acknowledge the privileges I have in my life and I’m heartened to hear I’m not alone in feeling this way.
Mrs. PoP says:
February 16, 2015 at 8:00 pm
Funnily Mr PoP and I were just reflecting on this on Saturday evening. (Privilege is an appropos topic for post Valentine’s Day dinner, no?) My childhood wasn’t idyllic and much of my family still struggles financially, so I’ve got one narrative in my head. But then I’ll be biking home from work and it’ll start to rain and several commuters will pull over and say something like, “I see you every day riding, but hate to see you bike in the rain. Do you want a ride?” I always say no, but I’m also sure that while they’re pulling over and asking the young blonde girl in proper biking gear riding in the posh neighborhoods if she wants a ride, they’re probably not pulling over and asking the (mostly Mexican) day laborers wearing jeans and grungy shirts from working all day riding their bikes home to less well-off neighborhoods if they want rides. And that difference doesn’t always sit well with me.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:34 pm
Sounds like you two had a very similar Valentine’s Day conversation as Mr. FW and me ;).Your bike experience is an interesting one and I imagine you’re correct in your assumptions. I’ve had similar experiences of strangers offering to help me, which I’ve always assumed is attributable to the characteristics you mentioned.
JD says:
February 16, 2015 at 9:12 pm
Another thoughtful and well written article that I appreciated reading. I did not come from a family that even had a high school education and most definitely do understand the fine art and accomplishment of those that have. It is indeed a blessing and a privilege not to be enjoyed by all.
After saying that I would add we all are accountable for how well we manage in our lives whether large or small. Hugs to frugal hound, beard muffler or not!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:36 pm
Very true! It’s absolutely a blend of the two–privilege (or lack thereof) and personal responsibility. Glad you enjoyed the post, thank you for reading! And, Frugal Hound thanks you for the hug (she’s a very huggable dog) ;).
February 17, 2015 at 1:20 am
I enjoy this post very much. I’m your avid reader from Hong Kong.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:37 pm
Thank you so much! I appreciate you reading
Jeremy says:
February 17, 2015 at 5:12 am
My childhood experience was much different. I was born when my Mom was 16, we never had money ever, I have no idea who my biological father is. I grew up on government cheese and free school lunches. Sometimes in the winter the whole family would sleep together in the living room to stay warm. I was the first child in our extended family to go to college, paid for with debt.
But… I was born in the right country. Even poverty in the US is luxurious living for much of the world. We had clean water. I wasn’t malnourished. I had a roof over my head. I could take a bus to school. My Mom would read to us everyday, and take us to a library with FREE books! And the economic system rewards hard work
I consider myself to be one of the most privileged people ever born, and feel grateful for it daily
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:45 pm
Wow! You have an incredible story–thank you for sharing it. You’re a testament to the power of determination and hard work. And, what a great point you make about being born in the US. That’s absolutely an advantage. I love your mindset of feeling like one of the most privileged people ever born–that’s a wonderful way to go through life!
February 17, 2015 at 5:38 am
Great post, and such an important topic. I know that I wouldn’t be on the track I’m on today if it weren’t for the advantages given to me by my birth and upbringing, and the occasional setbacks that also came along. Being raised in a household where finances were part of the discussion from a young age if nothing else taught me that everything has a monetary value, and that no matter how “comfortable” I perceived us to be, at a point we’d have to trade some comforts/luxuries for others. I think this has really made a huge impact on the way I think about my own financial choices – what do I want most, what do I need, what am I willing to give up or go without for a while to get there?
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:49 pm
Hearing about finances from a young age is a wonderful thing. I’m grateful to my parents for doing the same and I think that’s definitely a great advantage. Thanks so much for reading and sharing!
February 17, 2015 at 6:01 am
That’s the way to go, Frugalwoods. I’d like to focus on the educational attainment. I very much agree that education attainment can make or break out financial independence. It’s good to know that you have an MA, but I wonder how you did it because I know you’re very busy having side hustles. That being said, congratulations Frugalwoods. Have a plan pursuing PhD?
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:51 pm
I think education is absolutely crucial and I’m very grateful for all the opportunities I’ve had in that regard. I actually did my MA while I was working full-time at the university in order to receive free tuition. It was pretty hectic, but well worth it! No plans for a PhD
thegoblinchief says:
February 17, 2015 at 8:35 am
Reflecting on privilege is good, but I firmly believe that ‘more can but do not than wish they could but cannot’. On the global scale, most poor people in America are still fantastically rich. It’s a failure of education and/or the success of the advertising/consumer culture that keeps many poor.
Yes, I won (to some degree) the ovarian lottery, but both myself and one of my brothers had kids very young. He and his wife were 23. My wife and I were 21 and 22. We were well and truly (American) poor for the first few years. He’s taken the more mainstream frugal route, but he’s ridiculously successful now. They now have 7 kids and a somewhat palatial house. The Alchemist and I are frugal weirdos, but despite having 3 kids in quick succession and an income that’s only just now crested the median we should be FI by 40.
It’s good to express gratitude for what you’ve been given, but I tend to focus on how much of it is universal, and can be achieved by anyone regardless of circumstance
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:58 pm
You’re truly a testament to the power of frugality. I think it’s awesome that you’re on track for FI in 10 years.
And, I agree that we’re uniquely wealthy and fortunate here in the US–I just think I’ve been given so many advantages and I want to acknowledge and be grateful for them. Thank you, as always, for your insights.
thegoblinchief says:
February 19, 2015 at 9:23 am
Yeah, I get what you were doing in the post – just felt it necessary to counterpoint
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 19, 2015 at 12:47 pm
I always appreciate the counterpoint! What I’d love is for us all to be able to discuss this in person. There are so many richly textured viewpoints on the topic and I’d enjoy hearing everyone discuss.
February 17, 2015 at 9:17 am
I come from an upper middle class, highly educated family. Broken home, but still, lightyears ahead on the advantages.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:59 pm
I think background/family is just such a powerful element of who we are.
February 17, 2015 at 11:46 am
I come from a distinctly working class background, however I’m not from the USA and idealistic as it may seem my country is more egalitarian. Your financial background doesn’t dictate your future in such a big way. We have national free healthcare and everyone can access interest free student loans so going to university is a possibility for everyone.
I went to school with some kids who didn’t have shoes because their parents couldn’t afford them and some kids whose parents owned massive companies. It was a real socio economic mix.
My mum went back to school to get her nursing degree in her forties so she could become an RN (she was an Enrolled nurse before that) and the pay rise from that made a big difference in our lives. She is my inspiration. Now that I have travelled the world and seen how rich we really were relative to a lot of people on earth I feel privileged to have grown up with a roof over my head and food on the table. But as a child I was ashamed of how poor we were.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:02 pm
Now I’m curious to know where you’re from :)! Free healthcare and higher education would go a long way in leveling the playing field in the US.
Emma says:
February 19, 2015 at 2:46 am
New Zealand. It’s hardly utopia, the cost of living is high and many struggle but the system we have means you can change your future if you want to.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 19, 2015 at 12:48 pm
February 17, 2015 at 12:27 pm
We did not start in the same good position as you, but we are doing our best in order to achieve a better financial position. Many thanks to you and to your blog!!!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:09 pm
That’s awesome, Sabrina! Thanks so much for reading
Vawt @ Early Retirement Ahead says:
February 17, 2015 at 12:36 pm
Great post Mrs FW! There are a great many parallels in here with my life, except getting married young! It can be difficult to admit that middle class status and other factors really set people up to succeed. Either way, it is up to you to either take advantage of that head start or not. I know a great many people that are drowning in debt and oblivous to why it happened.
I try to help people with their credit, budget, or retirement planning with no preconceived notion of their circumstances or how they got there. I just want to help and share my knowledge! If they are interested in retiring early like I am great, if not I can deal with that as well.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:15 pm
Thank you! It’s true–you do have to take advantage of the opportunities you’re presented with. Success is certainly a multi-part endeavor. Thanks so much for reading!
kay ~ lifestylevoices.com says:
February 17, 2015 at 12:47 pm
That was refreshingly honest. I look so forward to your homesteading posts. I wish the three of you (and the little FW’s to come) a bright, happy, and successful future.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:16 pm
Even Steven says:
February 17, 2015 at 1:08 pm
Do you think anyone can achieve financial independence? I might be the answer to that question, I mean I was loaded with student loans, car payments, credit card debt, personal loan, started with a low paying job, etc and we are looking at July 2020 for financial independence. It’s like losing weight for people, it can be done, but you have to have a plan and make sacrifices, you can’t do it eating junk food and blaming others.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:17 pm
July 2020 is so soon! That’s awesome–congrats! It definitely takes a plan and sacrifices, no doubt about it.
Henry says:
February 17, 2015 at 1:50 pm
The journey to financial independence can be a lonely one. Having a partner makes it much easier. What you guys are doing is really awesome and inspiring. Keep at it! Cheers.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:18 pm
I think that’s very true. I’m grateful every day for Mr. FW’s partnership on this journey. Thank you so much for reading!
February 17, 2015 at 2:25 pm
It’s awesome that you guys found each other. You can say the same for me and Mrs. T.
Good idea on delaying having kids. I can’t imagine myself having a kid when I was in my 20s. Now I’m in my 30s I’m more mature to be a dad.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:19 pm
It’s a wonderful thing to be married to your best friend, isn’t it :). I can’t imagine me with a kid in my early 20s either… I think I would’ve been a disaster!
February 17, 2015 at 8:46 pm
Thank you for such an honest and thought provoking post. I grew up in what I’d call a lower middle class family in a poor state (Kentucky). My dad was a blue collar laborer and my mom was a nurse. Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, I never went without. I think my parents probably sacrificed some of their goals to make my childhood comfortable, which it was. I saw lots of other people who were much worse off than we were, so even then I knew I was lucky.
Other than my mom’s Associate’s degree, I am the first person in my family to complete college and go on to obtain a professional degree. That means I had to pay for that education myself, which resulted in about $85k in debt that I’m currently repaying. It looks as though my parents are both going to have to work much longer than they would like, and that’s motivated me to be proactive with eliminating debt and saving for retirement. I never really had to face any difficult challenges, but I know to appreciate what I have and to work to make smart financial decisions.
I’m not sure if everyone can reach financial independence because some have to contend with many factors outside of their control, but I do believe that with hard work and sacrifice everyone can reach a comfortable position with their lives.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:23 pm
I think it’s great that you’ve taken inspiration from your parents and decided to have a proactive approach to your own finances. And, it’s awesome that you were the first person in your family to finish college. I think you’re right–hard work and sacrifice can yield amazing things.
DC @ Young Adult Money says:
February 17, 2015 at 11:59 pm
I appreciate you mentioning that your high income comes into play. While high income DOES come from work, it does come from a little bit of luck and your personal situation. If you can have a high income it becomes much easier to have a higher savings rate. I can’t say thank you enough for making that point! I know people who are grinding like crazy working 2 (or more) jobs but are doing so in lower-paying jobs. In particular I know a single mother of 3 who works 2 jobs and honestly it’s really difficult to get a good education ON TOP of working and taking care of your kids. Yes, there are choices that impacted where she’s at but it doesn’t change the fact it’s very difficult for her to break out of that situation to a higher income – and, ideally – a higher savings rate.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:27 pm
Totally agree. It’s just not possible to save a lot when you don’t make a lot. You’ve got to have something to work with in order to make it tenable. I feel for the single mom you mention–that’s a tough life and I’m sure she works much harder than I do.
How to Save Money says:
February 18, 2015 at 9:06 am
Yes, I do believe so. Education plays an important role and usually, those who are privileged are the ones that prioritize education. We should be grateful and give back because we’re the lucky ones.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:29 pm
Education is absolutely crucial, I agree.
February 18, 2015 at 9:38 pm
It sounds like you both are also very humble and grateful for the advantages you enjoyed.
But as you know those advantage could have and from my experience are more often then not squandered. I grew up in a very different family setting then you and most people tell me that I am the exception to the rule.
And maybe I am biased because I broke away from the pack and beat the statistics. I grew up with drug addict parents. We were on welfare and bought groceries with food stamps. Neither of my parents completed high school. My brothers and I slept on the floor of my grandmothers two bedroom apartment (that the floor without any sort of mattress).
I remember adults telling me as a kid that statistically I would end up on drugs and probably in prison like my dad one day. But somehow I broke away.
I may not had been as lucky as some to come from such a wonderful family upbringing (really it sounds amazing). But I was determined to do better than my parents. But I will also be the first to admit that it was not with out help of some really awesome mentors and stand in parents (parents of friends).
Until recently I had always believed that everyone has the same opportunity and that the playing field was level. But looking back I was just lucky to find people that cared enough to guide me through a difficult situation. My life could had ended up way different if it weren’t for this man Dan who owned a Pizza place, where I would hang out and fold boxes for free pizza and soda, that took me in under his wing. He even made me bring him progress reports when I was in middle school I went from having a GPA of 1.33 to being a 4.0 student because someone cared.
I eventually even went on to live with he and his family for a year. Then my grandparents (on my dads side) took me in shortly after. The short story is that I went to live with my dad and brothers, and three months later he was put in prison for meth labs. My grandfather was a great role model. He was a decerated soldier that served 20+ years in the Marine core and retired a Major. He was a POW for 5.5 years in Vietnam. He was also a successful business man.
I was lucky to have in in my life as I entered high school. Between Dan and his family and my grandfather they help shape and mold me into the person I am today.
Like the Frugualwoods, I went off to college, before this my grandfather was the only one in the family with a degree (well actually his daughter, my aunt also had one). This opened up a lot of doors and increased my earning potential exponentially.
Anyways, just wanted to say thanks for sharing. Made me think about how lucky I was but in a completely different way. There are some really amazing people out there.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 18, 2015 at 10:34 pm
You really did break away–that’s awesome! Congrats to you for charting a different path for your life.
I think your experience with your GPA increasing because someone cared is such a telling thing. You were able to create your own adult role model/mentor, which I imagine not all kids in your situation are able to do. You have an inspiring story–thank you for sharing.
mysticaltyger says:
February 18, 2015 at 11:41 pm
Yes, I hate to admit it but I do think privilege has played a significant role in my solid net worth for my age. I grew up in a stable, two parent family who stressed the importance of saving and avoiding debt. I didn’t realize not everyone had those values.
I don’t think anyone can achieve financial independence. But I do think many more people can achieve financial independence than currently do. I’d say at least 50% of the population could achieve financial independence by age 65 if they really wanted to. By that, I mean accumulate enough assets that they could get reasonably close to their current lifestyle without the need of Social Security, employer sponsored pensions, or an inheritance. And I think 50% is a conservative estimate.
At the same time, some people really aren’t capable of achieving this. There are some people who are retarded or are otherwise just not smart enough or emotionally equipped to achieve this.
I’ll also say I think being gay really worked against me. I somehow picked up that certain professions were less gay friendly than others from the time I was young. It turns out many of the gay friendly ones don’t pay as much (a coincidence? Heh, I think not). So despite my being in a lower paying profession than I might otherwise be in, I have made the most of it.
One other important factor in all of this is I definitely believe that frugality is, at least in part, a genetically inherited trait. Certain Myers-Briggs personality types (notably INTJ, ISTJ, INTP) are much more likely to retire early than others. Most engineers and computer programmers fall into one of these (usually INTJ). And the PF blogosphere is dominated by engineers and computer programmers. I don’t think this is a coincidence. My sister has a net worth that’s a fraction of mine, despite the fact that she’s two years older and has always out-earned me by a pretty wide margin. I think personality type, while not the whole story, definitely plays a role in our vastly differing levels of wealth.
I really think the biggest single factor in achieving more wealth and income equality in this country is to start admitting the devastating effects that out of wedlock births and divorce have on kids. Yes, I know sometimes a single parent family is the least bad option. But when you have 40% of children today in America being born into single parent families from the outset, that is not a prescription for a strong middle class.
I appreciate your well balanced post. You admit that privilege has had a major positive impact on your life while not letting those from less privileged backgrounds use it as an excuse to fail. That’s a tough balancing act.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 19, 2015 at 1:04 pm
Thank you for these thoughts. I really appreciate you sharing your perspective as a person who is gay. I should have included the inherent privilege of being heterosexual, which is another one that I wish with all my heart weren’t true.
I agree with you on the Myers-Briggs types. My theory is that efficiency is actually the trait, which can manifest itself as frugality (as in, the most efficient use of resources, etc). But, I could be wrong. Interestingly, I’m about the farthest thing possible from an engineer/computer programmer, but I’m extremely efficiency-oriented, which is essentially what guides our frugal lifestyle. And, Mr. FW is a software engineer.
Thank you so much for reading and for taking the time to share your insights. I appreciate it.
Mysticaltyger says:
February 19, 2015 at 2:27 pm
You’re welcome for the thoughts. And yes, I do agree efficiency is the trait. People who get a kick out of being efficient are good at saving money. It turns out most humans don’t like being efficient, which puzzles and frustrates those of us who are efficiency oriented. The gay thing cuts both ways. If you’re gay you may end up in a lower paying job (less true for the younger folks today, more true for my generation, Gen X, and older). But on the plus side, gays don’t have to worry about raising kids, having kids “by accident” etc. And lets face it, kids are demanding in terms of time and money. Yet at the same time there are tons of gay men with kids from heterosexual marriages. This was another area where being an INTJ was an advantage for me. I didn’t care what other people though, so I came out of the closet young, at 18. It took me until my 30s to start realizing that it took most gay men of my generation a lot longer to work through the coming out process. I was basically a generation ahead of my time without realizing it.
I also see that despite the financial advantage of not having to raise kids, I don’t see that most gay men I know are any better off than their heterosexual counterparts. The money just gets spent on different stuff.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 19, 2015 at 3:17 pm
“The money just gets spent on different stuff”–I think that’s true in so many different instances. It’s always easy to find ways to spend money.
mysticaltyger says:
February 20, 2015 at 1:12 am
Yep, I have seen it over and over…Kids can actually give some people a kick in the pants toward thinking about the future. You start thinking about your kids’ futures, and it spills over into thinking about your own. When you don’t have kids, you often don’t get that kick in the pants until it’s too late to do much about it.
Thanks for the compliment. Just like you admit you had a certain amount of privilege that helped you get to where you are, I think I had some on the gay front as well such as:
–Educated, middle/upper middle class parents. An environment of reading helps in a lot of different areas, not just financial ones. Educated folks tend to be more tolerant on the gay issue than the uneducated. My parents were pretty conservative, but not uber conservative, and they’re educated….it makes a difference. They did kind of freak out at first, but I knew they’d come around. Not so for many other people.
–My parents encouraged us to be fiercely independent (sometimes too much so) and to not follow the crowd. This helped with both money issues as well as my coming out process.
–Eh, let’s just say I’m not the most butch guy on the block. I was made fun of from elementary school on. It did some damage, but it also helped. The guys who can pass for straight are more likely to stay closeted for longer and then get into hetero marriages with kids (and then make a mess by getting divorced down the ling…UGGH). I never passed for straight so I didn’t have the luxury of hiding.
–INTJ personality type. Generally brutally honest and just doesn’t like doing stuff that goes against internal sense of integrity. I thought it was self evident that pretending to be straight would be a complete and utter failure (and it is). Where I was wrong is that I assumed everyone else would see this, too. I had no clue how delusional people can be! (Eh, but I discovered along the way I had some of my own delusions about things that were rudely popped. Ouch!)
So, as you said about your financial position, you had to put in some hard work, and character was involved. But there was definitely some luck there as well. When I was younger, I used to think my coming out process was mostly due to my own character. Now, I know better. Sure, my own personal integrity played an important role, but it most definitely was not 100%.
Thanks for reading my rambling posts.
February 19, 2015 at 11:13 am
I’ve been reading FW for a few months now – I’m a 29 year old married lady looking to get herself & her husband in good financial order, so your blog is inspirational! I really appreciate this post; it’s rare to see personal finance bloggers admit and reflect on their privilege, which accounts for so much of our daily lives. Thanks for it!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 19, 2015 at 1:05 pm
Thank you so much for reading and for saying hi! Nice to meet you, Meredith! I appreciate your kind words. Frugal on :)!
February 19, 2015 at 5:24 pm
Wow, incredible post. You fairly summed a reality that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. My best friend once hurt me very deeply by her comment that she just “smarter” than me by not taking out any student loans, and that’s why she was in a better financial situation. I had to very *patiently* explain to her that 1) the vast majority of Americans don’t have a trust account, like she does; 2) most of us do not have a fully-funded college account set up by their grandparents; 3) most of us don’t have our debit card directly linked to their parent’s account; and 4) most of us do not have stock returns in the tens of thousands set up by our parents when we are still teenagers. She was shocked; she honestly had no clue how privileged she was. I think a lot of these viewpoints are results of unintentional ignorance.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
February 21, 2015 at 9:15 am
Thank you, Brittany. I think you’re right about unintentional ignorance. My parents taught us to recognize how fortunate we were and would take us to volunteer at soup kitchens and shelters, which helped me to form my beliefs. If families can afford to fund their kids like your friend’s family, that’s great, but, I think it comes with the responsibility to also educate your kids on how lucky they are. Thank you for reading and commenting–I appreciate it.
February 21, 2015 at 8:02 pm
Thank you. This is something that doesn’t get said enough in the PF blogosphere.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 1, 2015 at 9:20 am
You are most welcome, I appreciate that. I really wanted to share this, so I’m glad to hear you enjoyed it.
February 22, 2015 at 7:55 am
This is by far the best post you guys have ever written. The amount of truth is just uncanny.
95% of the reasons why I’ve gotten to where I am now are based on pure luck or external forces outside my control. I think it’s important to remember that, even when you celebrate achieving another life goal.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 1, 2015 at 9:21 am
Thank you so much, NMW! That’s very kind of you. We feel that we’ve lived very fortunate, charmed lives and it just seems unfair not to acknowledge that fact.
February 22, 2015 at 5:44 pm
Very honest and thought provoking post! I agree, sometimes in the PF blogosphere it seems as if becoming financially stable is a simple black and white process, but privilege definitely comes into play. I wouldn’t consider myself as privileged as some, but I definitely grew up with some privileges that made me into who I am today.
My parents grew up in the inner city and didn’t go to college. Growing up we moved around a lot but my mother always fought to keep my sisters and me in the suburbs and at good schools so we could get a good education. My older sister, me, and my cousin made family history by being the first people to graduate college in our family. I took on a small amount of debt but I’m in a good job and in a position to pay it off, learn more about personal finance and teach my son to do the same and offer him some of the privileges I didn’t have.
But some people aren’t as lucky to have realized this or had the opportunities I had. I’ve seen plenty of people stuck in the cycle of poverty, unable to do better for themselves and earn more, and some even don’t want to do better or can’t see a better future. My main point with this super long comment is that my family taught me that even if you’re not as privileged as others someone has to start changing things around and passing it on so people no longer have to be victims of their circumstances, what ever they may be.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 1, 2015 at 9:23 am
Well said. Thank you for sharing that. I love your attitude of taking charge and charting the life you want to live.
February 22, 2015 at 10:50 pm
Anyone can be debt free, no matter what their background. I grew up dirt poor, but had a mother who worked 80+ hours a week. It’s all a matter of the values that are taught to you.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 1, 2015 at 9:25 am
Absolutely! I think, like you said, having good parental models early on is crucial.
Kayla says:
March 3, 2015 at 3:54 pm
I loved your story-like bullet list of causes to your current situation. It’s nice to compare it to mine, and makes me grateful that I could be in a worse place. Sure, I have a ton of student debt, but I can only move forward, right? Sometimes I focus only on my personal cons and poor-comings, instead of what I’ve got going for me: I’ve educated myself about finance even though I made some poor decisions in the past, I don’t live beyond my means anymore and am not accumulating more debt, I have a like-minded significant other when it comes to money and lifestyle wants, etc. Hopefully, as time goes on it will all add up and be a grand financial future!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 3, 2015 at 8:24 pm
Sounds like you have a wonderfully positive outlook, which is such a crucial part of success. That’s awesome!
March 7, 2015 at 11:41 am
Thank you for this! It is rare for anyone to acknowledge that poor people are not just poor because they have made bad decisions. Another way to see that this has to be true is to think about the millions of dollars spent every year by corporations and people like the Koch brothers to influence elections, kill regulations, etc. They wouldn’t spend that money if it didn’t work. They’re not stupid. So the basic rules of the game, so to speak, are set up so that money flows away from those who can’t pay to write the laws towards those who can.
Also it’s very expensive to be poor. Many poor neighborhoods have more expensive groceries. If you don’t have an emergency fund, then when something happens, you may have to do something that is more expensive than it should be. And there are lots of companies (and individuals) preying on poor people who are not savvy about finances or who are so desperate that they have no choice.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 11, 2015 at 11:47 am
These are great points, Heather. Thank you for adding them to the discussion. It’s very easy for those of us in a stable financial position to overlook or underestimate how incredibly difficult and expensive it is to be poor. Nothing (or very little) is in your favor when you’re in that situation. You’re right, the system is not fair.
March 10, 2015 at 2:06 am
Thank you for your post. This is something that is not spoken about enough on blogs like this. We can only make the most of what we’re given…but what we’re given matters a good deal.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 11, 2015 at 11:47 am
Very true! Thanks so much for reading.
March 10, 2015 at 1:50 pm
I love the knitted beard for the dog! I recently got a yarn kit as a gift, and I have absolutely no idea how to use it.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 11, 2015 at 11:48 am
ShireFolk says:
May 15, 2015 at 9:37 pm
I can appreciate that if you grew up “privileged”, this might be a world view that makes sense. However, I respectfully submit that identifying FI as largely attributed to being white, or from a traditional family unit, is a corrosive idea, actually the opposite of compassionate. Its appears compassionate and empathetic at first glance, but in fact it perpetuates the unproductive notion that the deck is stacked against everyone other than white males from Martha’s Vineyard. It feels to me too much weight has been given to the uncontrollable and not enough to the controllable. This leaves people who are not “privileged” lacking hope and with a skewed view of their own capabilities. At 16 I was homeless and below the poverty line, living with a mentally ill mother on the streets. I made a conscious choice not to accept that fate. I’m 36 now and, only to emphasize the point, I will share that I’m in the top 3% of American earners. I don’t say that to boast, quite the opposite. I did not have parents, I do not have a high IQ, I’ve never step foot on an ivy league campus, and I have bipolar disorder. There is nothing exceptional about me; yet here I am. The world gives way to those who choose to impose their will upon it. No privilege necessary, nothing is given, all must be taken. I can see you are a kind and warm person, hard working and diligent, so I mean no offense with this critique and particularly respect what you had to say about lack of judgment, there is definitely too much of that going on. Just consider one thing: if we tell someone a large portion of their fate was already decided before they took their first step, we have stripped them of their freedom, made them slaves to circumstance.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
May 17, 2015 at 10:41 am
You make great points and I really appreciate you sharing your perspective and experiences. There are certainly all types of people pursuing FI and I’d never want to imply that it’s a closed option to people who aren’t from a privileged background–only that they’re likely to have more obstacles to overcome.
I am very cognizant of how fortunate I am and also how unaware I am of the struggles that many people endure. I’d also point out that while I was raised “privileged,” I’m not male and my family couldn’t even afford to visit Martha’s Vineyard :). We were very solidly middle class and rarely took any vacations that didn’t involve car camping :).
I think it’s awesome that you’ve transcended your upbringing and created your own success. Thank you for commenting!
ShireFolk says:
June 14, 2015 at 9:42 pm
You are an exceptionally talented writer. Yours is my favorite of the FI blogs, has the most personality. My wife and I also live in MA, Hopkinton. And we have a hound! An 11 year old basset, Charlie. He’s not quite as frugal as Frugalhound but we are working on it
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
June 22, 2015 at 7:41 am
Aww, Charlie! What a great name for a basset hound :). And, many thanks for the kind words!
Darren X says:
July 28, 2015 at 7:11 pm
” but in fact it perpetuates the unproductive notion that the deck is stacked against everyone other than white males from Martha’s Vineyard. ”
Well, whether this notion is “unproductive” or not, that’s the story the numbers seem to tell. Your explanation is that there’s no racism and no sexism, but rather than blacks and women just bring themselves down? You did it, so why don’t they?
“I will share that I’m in the top 3% of American earners. ”
Out of curiousity, what do you do? I ask because if you took a sample of 10000 homeless 16 year olds with mentally ill mothers, average IQ and bipolor disorder, your outcome is, to put it mildly, a bit of an outlier.
Diana says:
May 27, 2015 at 2:55 am
New reader here. I’ve been looking for this post for a long time- beautifully written. Usually the frugal folks just think the poor should just frugal themselves out of their situations and it will be fine. I see a surprising lack of empathy in the MMM forums around this. When I choose to not buy a snack because I don’t want to spend the money, and there is food waiting for me at home, that’s very different than not being able to because i actually don’t have the money and couldn’t spend it if i wanted to. Literally the only bone i have to pick with MMM (who i adore) is that he seems less that willing to fully acknowledge his privilege, so i’m so glad to see you recognize and honor your good fortune.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
May 29, 2015 at 12:03 pm
Thank you so much for this comment, Diana. Everything you said about the ERE/MMM community, and your general thoughts, are exactly why I wanted to write this post. I think it can be far to easy to overlook our privilege and cast aspersions without fully understanding just how fortunate we are to even have the ability to pursue these FI goals.
June 5, 2015 at 9:26 am
I pretty much stopped reading pf and frugality blogs because no one (that I found) wrote anything like this. Thank you so, so, so much. I finally have another blog to read again!!! So glad I found you! (via my old fav Frugal Babe).
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
June 8, 2015 at 9:42 am
Many thanks for your kind words! I really appreciate you reading and commenting. I think it’s so important to acknowledge how incredibly fortunate we are to even consider the path of financial independence and I feel that it’s a central part of my writing. Thanks again :)!
Darren X says:
July 28, 2015 at 6:53 pm
This was a refreshing post. Mr. Money Moustache would do well to read it.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
August 1, 2015 at 11:11 am
Thank you so much, I really appreciate it! I’ll let you tell MMM that
JH says:
July 31, 2015 at 6:06 pm
6 months late to the party, but I’m loving this post. It says what I’ve been thinking but haven’t been able to articulate well. I totally agree with you that no one is defined by their circumstances but that the circumstances can require a little more effort to overcome. No matter where we start, zero effort nets zero result. Listening to your podcast today made me think of something that I grew up with that I consider a “privilege” as well as those that you mentioned, and that’s attitude. Our God-given personalities play a role, to be sure, but I think one learns a lot about how to react to things from our parents and others around us. It’s an amalgamation of being optimistic, learning to problem solve, having confidence, counting blessings rather than focusing on the negative, knowing that less than perfect can still be really good, and having a “tomorrow is another day” mindset. My parents certainly modeled how to treat something negative as a speed bump rather than a brick wall and how to be resilient. Life is always going to be a roller coaster and some of us have a little steeper hills than others, but learning to enjoy the ride is something I’m privileged to have witnessed growing up. Love, love, love your blog!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
August 1, 2015 at 11:13 am
Thank you for sharing these thoughts! Attitude is certainly a key component of this journey. And, I think you’re right that our upbringings do a great deal to foster and form our personalities–for better or worse.
August 14, 2015 at 5:12 am
There is a word I don’t think I’ve seen used here: expectations.
What did my parents expect of me when I was growing up? What did I/do I expect of myself? What expectations do other people put on me that I either thoughtlessly embrace and dutifully struggle to live up to, or thoughtfully accept or reject? What expectations have been frustrated, and how have I responded to that?
I grew up in an impoverished, abusive, neglectful environment. My parents did not expect much of me…and regularly told me so. Yes, I am Caucasian, but that did not guarantee me an easy life. I am also female which, in the era in which I grew up, put roadblocks and limits in my way.
But I cannot describe the joy and wonder of the gradual realization that I do have the power to choose my attitude and my response to my circumstances. It is very empowering to find ways to either circumvent the walls around me, or to grow and thrive within the limitations I cannot control…..and, as the Serenity Prayer says, acquire the wisdom to know the difference.
We don’t always get what we want in this life, and things don’t always go the way we planned (which is sometimes a good thing, because what I wanted and planned when I was young was not always, as I realize now, the better thing). But once you discard “ought to” and “shouldn’t have” from your vocabulary, you find so many, many good choices available to you.
Aaron says:
August 15, 2015 at 3:31 pm
I absolutely believe anyone can achieve financial independence. I grew up in a low-middle class household at best. I remember a few years where we did our grocery shopping at the food pantry. Despite never skipping school and always studying I barely made it thru high school with a C average. State universities required a 19+ on ACT and top 50% of class. I was near 60% of my class and after 3 tries could only achieve a 18 on my ACTs. I realized college wasn’t for me so I got a factory job. I worked my way up to an income of $40-something/yr but always lived on less than $12K/yr. At age 31 I lost my job. Luckily after 10 years of LBYM I had a paid-off condo, paid off car, and low 6-figures in the bank. It wasn’t planned but I figured out I didn’t need to work full time anymore. I now(age 35) do contract work for less than 100 days/yr and that covers my expenses (<$12K/yr) while my investments grow. The point is I was raised poor and not book smart enough to go to college but I still was able to stop full time work in my early 30's and enjoy life. It can be done.
August 27, 2015 at 12:59 am
Another excellent post. My boyfriend and I had vastly different upbringings (me-middle class/white/two parents; him-at times in poverty/hispanic/single mom) and it’s been so interesting looking at our differences from spending (he likes to spend as soon as he has money, something that we have since worked quite a bit on) to talking to professors when needing help (I was always taught teachers wanted to help, while his teachers and their attitudes taught him that he was on his own). As you said, privilege cannot fully explain why one person succeeds while another fails, but it certainly plays a part in our own journey and I appreciate that you acknowledge it. Again, I really enjoy reading your blog!
Broken says:
October 10, 2015 at 3:28 pm
Asian Americans are often considered the model minority. But I’ve dealt with racism my whole life, even in the supposedly progressive city of San Francisco. I have no job, though I went to good schools and a good college. Like you guys, I grew up surrounded by books, with college-educated parents who cared about me. I’ve always been a reader; I’ve always been an information whore. I grew up obsessed with Jeopardy. I’m curious and fascinated by everything – different cultures, religions, art, music, etc. I stereotype a lot less than others because I have an accurate idea of different peoples and cultures from reading about them all my life.
My Asian American peers are doing pretty well, but I’ve been unemployed for years. I have social anxiety and awkwardness. People see me as a scared, awkward loser, so they don’t want to hire me, befriend me, date me, or have anything to do with me. The discrimination and stigma against me is extreme, and not just from white people – it’s from all people, including Asians.
You’re right that as white people, you get a lot farther with a lot less work and struggle. I’m very American culturally, but people keep thinking I’m a backwards, fresh-off-the-boat accountant. Where ever I go, I’m judged harshly and wrongly. People don’t want to interact with me or get to know me. I’m denied jobs at interviews. When people see my name, they’re more rude than if I put a fake “white” name. I’m passed up for friendships, jobs, dates, and everything else. White people are the “wanted” people in society. I’m a shy, unattractive, awkward Asian person, and people simply do not want me. They discard me, treat me rudely, and judge me much more harshly. Because I’m someone considered the bottom of the hierarchy, I suffer in all areas of life – financially, socially, occupationally, romantically, and emotionally.
Tudor Eynon says:
October 29, 2015 at 9:41 am
Really impressed with the way you admit your initial advantages; thanks for saying it. So many who are either time or money or both rich seem to be unaware or in a kind of denial about their good luck and starts.
I followed the link from Vox. Not a topic that interests me greatly, not directly, I follow a vocation I suppose? I wish you both all the best of luck though, well done.
October 30, 2015 at 2:27 pm
I wish I could send this to my white, blue -eyed, upper middle class, religious, Republican Brother-in-Law who thinks ANYONE can do what he did. I think he WON’T understand how everyone does not start out on an even playing field. SO frustrating.
November 7, 2015 at 1:28 pm
Mrs FW, I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to read your blog. A friend (a frugal friend) sent me a link to your site saying “I might like it”. I do, more and more with every page I read. Me and my wife have a savings rate of 77% and we feel like fish out of water. It’s so nice to see we are not alone;)
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
November 9, 2015 at 7:28 am
Helen in OZ says:
November 15, 2015 at 9:42 am
Hi Mrs FW, Yes I too am late to this party but encouraged to see that you are still keeping it going. I have been reading your blog for a few weeks now and I am finding it a source of inspiration. For example, finding it coincided with a decision I made to sort through my clothes and organize them in a better way by categories. In doing this I found, or rediscovered, many items I had bought years ago that still fitted and seemed new to me. Then I read your blog posts regarding clothes and decided that I too would not need to buy any more, ever.(Well maybe more shoes someday, but frugally of course!) Very exciting and I know it won’t be difficult to do this after considering all the points you raised. I think it’s a similar deal with whether or not FI is achievable by all. Like the person above, who said he could forgo buying a snack when he knew he had good food waiting at home, I am lucky enough to have bought lots of good clothes over the years and I have had the room to store them securely etc Here in sunny Australia I haven’t had to contend with natural disasters, war, displacement, financial crises and so on. There are parallels with most other contextual aspects of building towards FI. So many crucial components are beyond our control and vary enormously across time and place. Even though I am a female, I was able to be tertiary educated, work professionally, marry a man who understood that we are equals, plan our family, borrow money to buy property, invest in superannuation, etc. and so becoming FI for us was not difficult. All of these factors are not universal unfortunately. I think all of those factors have been more potent than childhood factors in enabling me to reach this stage. But I agree it is an interesting question and childhood experiences carry through and color our lives, and we tend to either repeat patterns or react against them more than we know. Or some mixture of the two, until we find the path that suits us best.
Thank you for raising the topic and thank you for the blog overall. I like how you make frugality both fun and thought provoking. Growing up on a mixed farm in Australia, we grow much of our food, butchered our meat, caught fish in the river, preserved and bartered any surplus and knew we were wealthy, at least in the terms we 4 children could understand. We also enjoyed books and music and lively discussions. Our mother had been raised and educated in Sydney and knew how to foster our intelligence and creativity. Our father was from the bush (the outback?) and knew how to live with the seasons. We were rich in our freedom and hard work, even in the years when a bad season meant there were some financial constraints, perhaps no holiday in the city that summer. I think your homestead in the woods plan will be a life like that and it is the best recipe for happy children!
And may I say, every good wish for the coming of your baby!! I hope it is a wonderful birth and the beginning of even greater happiness and awareness for you all. Please find time to keep blogging, but I will understand if you need to nest quietly for a while.
PS. Also I am glad that you don’t blog under your real names and only post partial photos of people. Much as I would like to see baby pics I think her anonymity should be kept also.
Helen in OZ.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
November 16, 2015 at 3:58 pm
Thank you so much for reading and for sharing your experiences! I think that recognizing our privilege–in its many different forms–is such a key aspect of understanding our lives and our finances. And, many thanks for your good wishes on Babywoods–we’ll be back to writing here before too long after she’s born :).
December 23, 2015 at 9:34 am
I really appreciate that you took the time to write this post. Many of us do not take a step back to recognize the level of privilege we’ve had that has made our lives easier or harder to attain. Despite the privilege you recognize in yourself, I also love that this post was full of motivation for those who may be struggling to persevere regardless of their situation.
You also read my mind when you said, “When you judge others, you’re only poisoning your own thoughts. They probably don’t even know you’re judging them–only you are internalizing the harmful vibes of your judgment.” I’ve always believed that judgment and hate are wastes of energy. And, really, if we’re so disapproving of others’ lifestyles, why aren’t we trying to help? What good does it do to silently look down on others?
Thanks for this and all of your posts. I’m in the process of crawling out of debt to move toward financial freedom. You and the whole FW family are a constant inspiration.
Cate R. says:
January 1, 2016 at 4:01 pm
I found your blog the other day after googling about how to stop spending money on eating out, and some of the things you said stuck with me. I came back to look around some more and I have to say, I am really thankful for this post. Thank you for acknowledging and admitting these things. It takes humility.
My husband and I have been married for 8 years and have 3 young children. We are dealing with what is honestly a combination of poor choices and unfortunate life circumstances. We both come from very broken homes, abuse, neglect and in my case several years of hardcore drug addiction just to name a few aspects of our backgrounds. We are now both aiming to change our trajectory and living how we believe God wants for us. At the same time, there’s just so much lingering financial (and other) mess and uphill battle that I sometimes struggle to know what the point even is of trying.
Things like home ownership (or even moving out of the ghetto), and debt reduction are so far out of reach that it’s really hard to not just say “Whatever”. It feels like we can’t have goals, so why not just keep getting fast food when I’m depressed and hopeless anyway.
But I want to try. Something in me says that there’s a reason to try. It’s just so hard when it seems like any efforts we can make result in basically zero progress. And some people cannot see past their privilege and give “helpful” advice like just make more money. I wish it were that easy. And I wish it were easy to make people see that how relatively little control we have over the hand we’re dealt. But at the same time, yes, I do think that the choices we make each day going forward are crucial and that’s part of why I’m reading this blog. I haven’t completely lost hope.
In some ways it’s easier to have black and white, all or nothing thinking. But thanks for admitting that there is such a thing as profound disadvantages, and yet it’s not a financial death sentence. Choices matter. The financial progress that my husband and I make will probably look rather unimpressive, and maybe even unnoticeable. But I don’t want us to lay down and accept defeat.
January 21, 2016 at 12:22 am
I adore your transparency and acknowledgement of your inherent privileges.
March 1, 2016 at 12:57 pm
Thank you so much for this post. It is wonderful to see a frugality blogger who acknowledges that everyone might not necessarily be able to achieve the same as them if they just pull themselves up by their boot straps. This I say as a highly privileged, white grad-school student and mama, trying to live frugally to pay off student loan debt!
March 6, 2016 at 10:58 am
Well said Ms. F.
March 10, 2016 at 7:04 am
It’s humbling when you realize what’s normal for you can be a privilege. Have you tried explaining to people that the life they have been complaining about is far comfortable than what many can even dream of. We are blessed with some of these. I believe having well educated and and stable parents is perhaps the biggest one of all.
Though we don’t have the white privilege (which would probably shoot our earnings high) we are still have the blessing of a good bachelors, excellent language skills and experience in a highly specialized niche. We don’t earn Software engineer salaries (the bar in our country) but we earn enough to support ourselves, one set of parents and still save over 50%.
Another one I relate to is that we have pushed having kids as well. Everyone thinks we should be hurrying along and get it over with, we simply couldn’t fathom why we would bring in a child in a situation when we didn’t feel we were on firm ground. We are getting there with the loan over and us getting settled in the new city.
It’s awesome to see someone reaping the benefits of their wise decisions so similar to ours.
March 13, 2016 at 8:51 pm
I love this – I feel like it is a much kinder way of saying what I would say: “Don’t complain about what you have. Move on and be grateful for the cards you were dealt.”
It is easy to whine about the past. It takes more self-control to move forward and accept that things could be way worse.
Two thumbs up!
Post-Grad Student says:
March 13, 2016 at 9:15 pm
Whoa. I am so incredibly impressed by this post. I never leave comments, but just had to. This post is so telling, so revealing of why and how you reached your financial success, savvy and overall happiness. You two are so great. This post is just right, just correct. I am literally personally honored that you take the time to recognize that saving money does not make a person rich.
I have no debt; I worked SO hard for no debt. I was raised with feuding, debt ridden parents with high school educations. To this day (I am now in my late twenties), I am forced to worry about how *I* will care for them financially. I have a BA and two MA’s (both fully paid for by myself/scholarship) and I have worked full/part time since I was 16. People are saying to me,” time to get married and have children, move and buy a house, take vacations, etc….” — um, what!??? Where is the money for all that going to come from? I have delayed marriage, delayed children, delayed homeownership, delayed traveling, delayed nearly everything to fully pay for my education and stay out of debt. I’m super proud to have done this as I have close friends who are vacationing literally three times a year with 200,000 dollars in school debt and others having children and buying homes with mega-debt and financing EVERYTHING. People quite literally congratulate these people, then ask what is wrong with me.
Love you blog. Keep up the great work.
Kelly says:
July 29, 2016 at 2:32 pm
My mom was a single mother of three with a high school education, my partner grew up on a farm and his father had an eighth grade education and his mother even less. I have a Ph.D. and he has an M.D. We are both very hard workers and were very good students. Neither one of us had tons of books in our house although we were both ravenous readers. I think in many ways we had an advantage over our peers because we knew how to work hard and how to manage our time (we both had jobs as soon as we were able to get them). Many people in the world do not have the opportunities we have in the US but many of us have more opportunity than we take advantage of. I was very fortunate to have opportunities but I think in our case the experience of living in poverty made us more determined, independent, and creative than our peers. Not being middle class in not always a disadvantage.
PhD housewife says:
January 5, 2017 at 9:21 am
You forgot to mention how many years you and your husband have lived in a single household with 2 salaries. It sounds from your post that since college? Imagine the difference in your financial situation if you and your husband each had to pay for all household expenses separately – rent, utilities, probably another (cheap) car, with its own car insurance payments, … All those expenses that many single people have, for you went towards savings – and they REALLY add, over the additional 5-10 years that some people take to find a partner (of course they could live with roommates, but many with “good jobs” won’t). I wouldn’t file it under “privilege”, but there’s definitely good fortune involved in finding your life partner so young.
February 1, 2017 at 12:46 pm
I thought I was the only one who grew up drinking powdered milk… glad you and your family are doing well.
February 3, 2017 at 11:55 am
It is interesting how differently the same type of growing up situation affects people. My mother grew up in the 30’s and 40’s in a poor family but never looks at a price in the grocery store even now when she is on a fixed income. It doesn’t occur to her to look at a grocery store flyer and plan accordingly. On the other hand, she raised me and my siblings as a single mother on little income. I was budgeting my allowance at age 10; I buy most of my clothes at thrift stores or 90% percent off sales at department stores. My husband and I are very comfortable but I never buy lunch or coffee at work and have passed those values down to my children. I agree with putting it out there to the universe when you need/want something; I can’t believe how many times the right thing, at the right price or free, just drops into my lap. There are some expenses we have that pain me but marriage is a compromise and I have a wonderful husband. I picked up some gum he likes last night and when I gave it to him, he said, was this free?
Sacha says:
March 2, 2017 at 5:00 pm
I don’t remember how I got to your website, but I’m glad I found it.
This is quite timely (even though this article is 2 years old) as there’s a video of a 15 year old wannabe Gary V white kid saying poor people are poor because of they “Pass Over Opportunities Repeatedly”. If only it were that simple.
My husband and I recently made a lifestyle change at the age of 31, and it was due to a lot of hard work and dedication. But I had similar thoughts recently that even with all the piss and vinegar I have, and all the careful financial planning I’ve done, I’m not completely self made. No one is.
We’re the sum of generations of ideologies and experiences being passed on to us, and I’m fortunate that my parents (who grew up lower-middle class from high school drop out parents) had the gusto to go after a life of solid middle class.
Like you, we didn’t live extravagantly, but I was able to take private violin lessons, and do other hobbies along the way. We never went anywhere exotic, but we did go camping and have family outings. My sister and I would generally get the presents we asked for at Christmas time. My parents’ attitude that life is possible was instilled in me, and that’s certainly a big factor in where I am today.
Thanks for the well-written article. I’ll be back to read more
Jen says:
April 28, 2017 at 1:50 pm
I only discovered your blog a few months ago so I’m only starting to delve into the depths of your prior posts, but I’m very glad to have come across this one today as I have to admit, as much as I value your posts and guidance, there are times when I find myself thinking, “but you’re able to do that because” and more often than not it’s “because you have a partner”. I am 39 and have never been married and as PhD Housewife mentioned, that makes achieving financial independence more difficult. Yes, there is one less person to support, but the ability to share housing costs would be a HUGE blessing to me. Don’t get my wrong, I have SO much privilege as well. Namely, I am white, and I was raised by an educated (albeit single as well) mother and received a good education myself. I did graduate with school debt, but because my mom pushed me to get scholarships and I worked some, it was much less than many. Unfortunately my mom was not financially responsible while she raised me so no one taught me those skills. I had to teach myself, mainly through mistakes. After accruing credit card debt, paying it off by lumping it into a refinance, then accruing it again I finally got smart. I paid off my credit card debt the hard way, I refinanced to a shorter mortgage and changed my payment structure, which allowed me to get a lower interest rate and put more toward principle, I paid off my car, and then I built an emergency savings account with 3 months worth of expenses. Since then I’ve been saving large sums of cash to move from my condo to a home and then plan to start putting additional money into retirement. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, but I have to say that so much of this would have been or would be easier if I had a partner, especially one interested in DIY stuff. Especially now as I prepare my condo for sale, having to pay people to do much of the work makes it more difficult. I have leaned a LOT on friends (like one who helped me lay porcelain tile throughout my kitchen and entryway, netting me a savings of about $600), but some things I just have to resign myself to paying for.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. All of this to say that I imagine many if not most of your readers are privileged in their owns ways and it’s really nice to see you acknowledge yours. I would say I still have a good bit of work to do on my journey to financial independence and I’m very grateful for your blog as a resource and inspiration.
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
April 28, 2017 at 1:57 pm
Thank you so much for sharing your story! And, I completely agree with your assessment of the privilege of having a partner–I think it can definitely make things easier and less expensive (assuming it’s the right partner). Sounds like you’re doing wonderfully on your financial journey and I wish you all the very best! Happy to have you here in the Frugalwoods community
Beth says:
August 3, 2017 at 11:51 pm
I’ve seen a lot of comments indicating that although you, your friend, spouse, or relative didn’t come from a fully privileged background, that you/they have persevered and conquered. And if you/they can, anyone can.
To those of you, I kindly suggest you re-read this blog post a second time.
August 20, 2017 at 10:34 am
My thoughts exactly. Kind of missing the point MFW was making about systemic privilege
August 20, 2017 at 10:39 am
Thank you for this post. I’ve had to stop reading MMM as much because he and much of his readers deny they benefited from privilege. No one’s saying you shouldn’t prosper. Just *recognize* the privilege! A lot of the commenters here seemed to have missed that, unfortunately.
Also glad you mentioned health as a privilege. I’ve been a health nut all my life, eating very well and biking everywhere, 45 min of yoga and meditation a day, etc. I still got sick and have a chronic illness that has severely limited my life and made me obese. So many people would say it’s my fault or that I’m lazy. But when you’ve had your health taken away from you through no lifestyle choice of your own, you see how much of a privilege good health is.
Thanks again. I think I’ll stick to your blog and avoid the judgmental, mean-spirited, poor blaming community in other blogs.
Dale says:
October 4, 2017 at 8:43 am
This has to be one of my all-time favourite blog posts. Such food for thought. I am well on my way to financial freedom, and I get quite annoyed when people tell me that I am *lucky* – implying that my financial situation is largely a result of random luck and not of my own doing and the conscious life-choices I make. But in reality, they are at least partly correct. I may not be that lucky, but I am privileged in a very similar way to the Frugalwoods. This equates to a huge head-start in life. Its like being passed the ball. I’ve been lucky to be able to run with it.
mr2ndopinion says:
October 10, 2017 at 12:51 pm
Been judged by my peers for years. I internalized it and became a very judgy person. It learned me a lot of things. But it also made me miserable. Judging things and people open your eyes for what’s going on in the world. It’s not bad, it’ll definitely taint your personality but it’s hard and painful. I agree that judging is something you shouldn’t do. Sometimes you just learn that character trait. It is not something that makes you happy but it makes you a very knowledgeable person if you make the best out of it.
I can honestly say you and Mrfrugalwoods are people I only see from a distance. I miss that in my life but I’m quite happy I do have your blogs to read, videos to watch or pictures to see. I’ve met more lovable people in my searches. Yet I’m sad these are distant friendships. Do know I highly appreciate people like you! You make my hard time in cold cities bearable! Wanted you two to know that by sending you this note.
Ps: I love your entire blog, all the articles
PPS: Frugelhound is delightful! Everyone with some sweet in their hearts would say so!
March 22, 2018 at 4:39 pm
I just came across this article after a few months of devouring FI literature, both blogs and podcasts from many members of the FI community, and I am extremely impressed! Since coming across this amazing community and having many mind-boggling revelations in my own life, I have had the nagging feeling that something crucial was being left out. In no way do I want to accuse anyone in the FI community, but I have noticed a casual indifference toward those who already have a very low cost of living, but also only earn a very small amount of money. It seems to me that this group has been largely ignored. Many in the FI blogosphere discuss how to avoid paying taxes (always in a legal way, mind you), while also talking about how making lifestyle changes and investing wisely can supercharge an individual’s savings rate. But without the money from taxes, and, in particular, income taxes, those people who already live a modest lifestyle and simply cannot afford to save any of their paycheques because they make so little to begin with, will fall to the wayside. The purpose of income tax is to help those less fortunate than ourselves, to give them a leg up so that they might have the same opportunities we have – opportunities like the pursuit of FI. While I would never criticize people for the pursuit of their own happiness and wellbeing, I think it is absolutely wonderful that this article discusses the privilege we have to be able to do so. And I am somewhat surprised that other writers in this space have spoken about this topic so little. Thank you for this inciteful and empathetic article. Keep up the good work!
Mrs. Frugalwoods says:
March 22, 2018 at 4:45 pm
Thank you so much for reading and for sharing your insights!
Abby says:
April 8, 2018 at 8:16 pm
Amazing post, found this a few years late but really love it. I agree with many comments excellent writing, and such a raw honest look at an important topic I don’t think I’ve seen before. I think so much is taken for granted it’s really refreshing to read your blog. So many great perspectives – I loved reading NewAsianFinance and Chonce among several others – thank you all.
August 21, 2018 at 11:13 pm
Thanks for the candid article. You don’t get read a post like this very often. Most posts on financial-related sites always paint a rosy picture that anybody can make it and never address some of the reasons why people succeed.
Thanks again,
May 30, 2021 at 7:34 am
Wow, very well put. I am an African-American male and you have my respect. This post was extremely well-written and one of the best things I have read in years. You touched on so much that goes so deep because I have experienced an upbringing that is relatively opposite and have had to overcome much. I now see both sides vividly which makes me strive harder. I wouldn’t say my situation is totally opposite of yours, but to see how your upbringing/privilege’s compounded advantages that fueled you and your husband’s success is eye-opening. I appreciate you writing this piece and not judging those who situation you could not possibly know. Continue to walk with God’s love.
Wallet Squirrel says:
June 20, 2021 at 2:08 pm
All good points! It’s super interesting to see privilege as not necessarily advantages but a lack of barriers in your way of success. It makes it way harder to fathom what people go through.
Jenny says:
September 16, 2022 at 8:38 pm
This post is exactly why I’m a huge fan and follower of your blog. I spent years listening to financial and FIRE podcasts spouting out a formula on how to reach FIRE. Yet the math never added up for me personally. I was feeling pretty defeated, until one day I heard you speak on someone’s podcast. You were the first person I had ever heard even address the topic of privilege in the FIRE space. It felt like a breath of fresh air. Thank you!
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Fabio Belloni is Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder of Quuppa and a leading authority on advanced location technologies.
It’s been 19 months since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020. Still, we are caught in its grip — from burdening global healthcare systems, financial and educational institutions to problems with personal finances, jobs, housing and general well-being. One space that is still being upended is sports, and although players are back on the field amidst cases of the highly contagious Delta variant, the reopening of stadiums and the potential for ticket sales is no slam dunk.
Regardless, the Tokyo Olympics played on despite the pandemic, without spectators in the stands, proving once again just how challenging the persistent Covid-19 pandemic has been for live sporting events. And even so, cases surged in Japan, with hospitals bursting at the seams. But the teams played on.
The pandemic is an Olympic-sized problem spanning countries and events, even as the summer of 2021 has been something of a festival of global sports. From Euro 2021 and South America’s Copa América to the British Lions rugby tour, sporting as a live entertainment event is making a comeback. On a national level, the NBA Finals and NHL’s Stanley Cup had fans back in various capacities. And we kicked off the NFL’s regular season with all 32 teams cleared for full stadium capacity and differing restrictions set by the teams’ home state. Simultaneously, Dr. Anthony Fauci says with enough vaccinations, the country could have a better handle over Covid-19 by spring.
This conflicted picture of live sports captures a central issue: how do we get back to normality? With sports, it’s balancing the business (i.e., filling venues) with public safety. In other words, how can cities reopen stadiums in a way that does not present a public health risk? How do stadiums execute additional considerations, such as testing spectators before attending an event, ensuring that social distancing is maintained, contact tracing, limiting contact between staff and spectators at concessions and more?
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With #FollowTheScience being championed on Twitter, it’s not as clear-cut in the sports world, with major disparities between cities, stadiums and teams. In Europe, the top leagues like the Bunslegia in Germany were subject to limited capacity at the start of the season, while the Premier League allowed full-capacity crowds. In addition to following the science and health experts, there should be equal emphasis on following the data.
One can argue that with sporting events, we must also #FollowTheTechnology. This isn’t a new concept as the relationship between sports and tech is well-established. Traditionally used to increase aptitude and strategy, technology is now crucial to how we think about, consume and play sports. With Video Assistant Referee (VAR), air cushioning, body sensors and innovations from companies like Hawk-Eye, Snicko, Hotspot and others, teams can improve decision-making and performance, ultimately driving the quality of the sport.
But the relationship between sports and tech goes even deeper. AI is useful for testing different crowd and occupancy management strategies, seating arrangements or fan numbers, allowing for the mapping out of scenarios in advance of the event. An example is stadiums experimenting with checkout-free shopping to ensure contactless transactions, while another is a company harnessing data to simulate foot traffic around stadiums to model how fans will arrive and leave sporting events in order to strategically plan for and reduce crowding.
Although this type of technology isn’t new, understanding how to avoid congestion and reduce bottlenecks is important. One technology that is being increasingly utilized for sporting events is real-time location systems (RTLS), which works by enabling tracking movement of attendees around stadiums.
This can protect attendees from spreading (or being infected with) Covid-19 by monitoring movement throughout the venue and alerting when people get too close. The tracking system can provide organizers with useful information about peak times, areas that are currently free for load balancing and finding specific individuals. Results include optimizing time and capacity, reducing Covid-19 breaches and ultimately happier and more confident attendees. Factors like the formation of lines, close-quarter behavior and adherence to guidelines can all be measured.
The collection and analysis of data collected by wearable tags are providing even more avenues for RTLS in sports. According to IndustryARC, the use of RTLS in the sports market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 14.7% between 2018 and 2024, with APAC projected to be the fastest-growing market.
These growth numbers are unsurprising as this data offers the potential to help athletes perform better with the added bonus of making sports more enjoyable for fans. For instance, by placing the tags on player uniforms, data can be sent to a device and analyzed to give coaches insight into performance on the field, including top speed and stamina.
Similarly, fans win with more data and insight that enhances the viewing and betting experiences. Broadcasters are also winners, allowing them to gain an edge by giving those who are tuned-in access to unique and detailed statistics on how individual players and teams are doing during live games, transforming the viewing experience.
As restrictions lift and the vaccinations rise, the impact of technology on the spectator experience will look very different for fans at home and in person. Solutions such as RTLS, foot traffic simulation and more will prove key to the process.
But even beyond that, up-and-coming innovative venue owners can weave RTLS into their vision for business success. For instance, instead of just paying the rent for the field, rink or pitch, teams can rent RTLS as a service, creating new revenue streams. By paying a bit extra, teams receive access to tags and the service, as well as analyzed and visualized data on all players, even if they are a hobby league.
There are a wealth of opportunities in which teams and venues can improve the services they offer with the help of RTLS. And the good news is it’s just the tip of the iceberg for the possibilities of RTLS in sports, with new applications being developed every day that are helping advance the business of sports.
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Shopping Agreements: The Pros and Cons as Compared to Option Agreements - Entertainment & Media Law Signal
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Shopping Agreements: The Pros and Cons as Compared to Option Agreements
By Alex Eckler
January 10, 2020
The long road to bringing a piece of intellectual property (IP) to the screen often begins, from a legal point of view, with securing rights to develop and produce the material. Traditionally, the owner of a script, format or other piece of IP and a producer enter into an option agreement, whereby the producer pays an initial option fee for the exclusive right to purchase the property within a specified period of time. That window is intended to give the opportunity to the producer to get the project off the ground.
“Shopping agreements” (sometimes referred to as “producer attachment agreements”) are increasingly used as alternatives to option agreements. They are often regarded as convenient substitutes as they typically require less time and expense to negotiate. Though shopping agreements are functionally similar to option agreements, writers and producers shouldn’t be misled by the notion that they’re equivalent in all aspects. A central function of a contract is to allocate risk between the parties. Shopping agreements and option agreements, by their nature, involve different configurations of risks and their suitability depends on the interests of the parties, the material being sought and other circumstances of the transaction. Whether to structure the deal in the form of a shopping agreement or option agreement should be carefully considered with an eye to some of the factors discussed below.
What is a shopping agreement?
A shopping agreement is an agreement between the owner of IP and a producer. Under a shopping agreement, the producer obtains the right from the owner to “shop” the property for a defined period of time to studios, networks, distributors, financiers and other potential buyers or backers. In doing so, the owner typically does not receive any payment from the producer for the right to shop the property. Rather, the owner benefits from a producer using their network, track record and sales experience in pitching the property.
During the term of the shopping agreement, the producer obtains the right – and is generally contractually obligated – to pitch the property to prospective buyers or financiers with the aim of getting it through the development and production pipeline. If the producer is successful and a buyer or financier expresses interest in the property, a shopping agreement allows the owner and producer to each negotiate and enter into separate agreements concerning the project with the interested party. The owner will negotiate the sale of rights to the property, while the producer will negotiate its attachment to the project.
For a producer, a shopping agreement is an attractive approach to attach themselves to the project at no cost, whereas under an option agreement, a producer must make an initial outlay to acquire the option right. In this regard, the producer eschews the risk of making an upfront investment in IP that they ultimately may not be successful in selling or producing. By the same token, without any upfront compensation received by the producer, the producer arguably has no “skin in the game”. They may be less invested in setting up the project and may focus their energies elsewhere, having no financial investment at stake.
A shopping agreement may, however, be more favourable for an owner in the event that the property gains heat and stirs up interest after it is shopped around. Without a pre-negotiated purchase price attached to the property, as in the case of an option agreement, an owner under a shopping agreement is free to negotiate a purchase price directly with the buyer and to benefit from the upside, including any bidding war that might arise. Yet, the inverse also applies. For example, a screenwriter might enter into a shopping agreement for a well-written script with commercial potential, yet a movie with a similar premise is released shortly thereafter and becomes a box office bomb. Film and television trends being fickle as they are, the script may suddenly become dead in the water with no interested buyers due to the risk of repeating the same failure. The owner would miss out on any proceeds they would have otherwise received if they had entered into an option agreement.
The term of a shopping agreement is typically shorter than an option agreement – 6 to 12 months as opposed to 12 to 18 months under an option agreement – since the producer is essentially receiving a free opportunity to shop the IP. If the shopping agreement is exclusive – shopping agreements can be both exclusive and non-exclusive – the owner has an even greater incentive to keep the term short so that the rights to shop are not tied up with only one producer.
A shopping agreement will usually contain a clause that protects the producer from a situation where the agreement expires while the producer is in the midst of negotiating with an eventual buyer, leading to a deal over the property with the owner but with no benefit accruing to the producer due to the expiry of the agreement. Such a clause would automatically extend the term for a period during which the producer is in meaningful negotiations with a prospective buyer. The owner may insist on a cap to that extended period so that it is not excessively prolonged.
A producer should also be mindful of the scenario in which the producer does the leg work in pitching the IP to a buyer, but the owner then strikes a deal with that same buyer only after the shopping agreement has expired. Language may be added that precludes the owner for a specified period following the expiry of the agreement from completing a deal with any buyer that the producer had previously submitted the IP to, unless the producer is also attached. Such a clause is often caveated that a deal may be reached without the producer’s attachment if the property was substantially changed since it was last pitched. If significant revisions were made to the IP or influential talent becomes attached to the project after the expiry of the agreement, the project’s marketability might improve and justify why a deal was reached only after the producer’s departure.
Ownership rights to property
Unlike an option agreement, a shopping agreement confers no rights to the producer on the property itself. In this regard, a shopping agreement is fundamentally an agreement for services, rather than an agreement for the purchase of property rights. Without any rights attaching to the property, a shopping agreement is arguably easier to breach by the owner and therefore accords less protection to the producer. An owner could go behind the producer’s back and sell the rights to another party. The producer would have no recourse but to make a claim for a breach of contract. Conversely, under an option agreement, the producer has acquired an interest in the property which reverts back to the owner only after the expiry of the option. If the owner wants to sell or option off the same interest in the property, another buyer would expect representations and warranties from the owner that the interest to be acquired is legally unencumbered and that no other person holds any contingent ownership rights in the property.
Under a shopping agreement, an owner typically has more control over the property and over any eventual sale to a buyer than under an option agreement. A shopping agreement will typically give the owner a right to approve whether to move forward with a particular buyer. An option agreement generally does not impose such a restriction on the producer to close a deal. In addition, the owner may insist that they or one of their representatives are in attendance at a pitch meeting or that they are notified of any pitch meeting.
As surveyed above, there are drawbacks and benefits to both shopping agreements and option agreements for each of the parties. There is no universal answer as to which type of agreement is preferable. While a shopping agreement often appears attractive due to its simplicity and the parties’ desire just to “get something in writing”, it can lead to significant and unforeseen disadvantages for an owner or producer down the road if due consideration is not given to the differences between the agreements.
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Alex is an associate in our Corporate Commercial group at Dentons. His practice focuses on corporate and commercial law, mergers and acquisitions, entertainment and securities. He has experience with clients across a variety of industry sectors, including financial services, technology, energy, and pharmaceutical.
No lying, no tricks – The duty of honest performance for option rights in entertainment contracts
I was speaking at a conference earlier this week when the discussion turned to the issue of “pay or play” […]
One reply on “Shopping Agreements: The Pros and Cons as Compared to Option Agreements”
January 28, 2020 at 12:18 am
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“The democratic content in self-determination struggles must be safeguarded” - International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine
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Philippines
“The democratic content in self-determination struggles must be safeguarded”
Tuesday 12 June 2012, by Anzelmo Guerrero, B. Skanthakumar
Anzelmo Guerrero, a central leader of the Rebolusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa-Mindanao (Revolutionary Workers Party-Mindanao) <http://www.rpm-m.org/> spoke to B. Skanthakumar in Manila in late April 2012. The interview focused on the application of the right to self-determination by revolutionary Marxists in the specific context of Mindanao.
Tell us briefly about the origin and social base of your party?
The comrades who built the Revolutionary Workers Party of Mindanao (RPM-M) were once part of the (Maoist) Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). We were in the leadership of the CPP, especially in the southern part of the Philippines, that is, in Mindanao.
In this region, there are three main communities or ‘tri-peoples’: the Bangsamoro (Moro or Muslim nation); the Katawhang Lumad (non-Muslim and non-Christian indigenous peoples); and settlers and their descendants (mainly Christians from the majority nationality who migrated from central Luzon and the Visayas). We were tasked by the CPP to work with these three peoples. Our strategy at the time was that of “encircling the cities from the countryside”.
On the island of Mindanao, the indigenous peoples and the Bangsamoro were concentrated in the interior, whereas the settlers were in the urbanized settlements along the coast. So, we began organizing the indigenous and the Muslims in the mountains and plains … to encircle the cities populated by Christians!
We did not root ourselves in those communities in defense of their interests or for their right to freely determine their future, but for the purpose of carrying out the strategy of the protracted peoples’ war. Ironically, the party militants implementing this perspective were generally from the majority Christian community themselves!
We were trying to organize the Bangsamoro and the indigenous along class lines, when social classes were not clearly developed in these communities, and our comrades were dying in the process. For example, the farmers identified with the clan and would report on our propaganda and activities to the clan leader (datu or sometimes sultan), to whom they were often related. So we drew the lesson that we should organize on clan lines, and we succeeded.
From the 1980s we began organizing people from Mindanao who were studying in Manila. These were the children of the upper middle class or elite of Mindanao, especially from the Bangsamoro. Also, we were able to organize others who were displaced by the conflict. We succeeded in recruiting them to the Party and many became full-timers. Through them we did legal work through front organizations.
What was your analysis of the right to self-determination and the national question in the Philippines, and how has it evolved?
In 1976 the CPP formulated its policy on the right to self-determination in the context of the Philippines. We supported the right to self-determination of the Bangasamoro, based upon the highly repressive nature of the Marcos regime, and the CPP supported their right to take up arms in waging that struggle.
Now, this was a flawed application of that right because it was tied to the issue of state repression. We did not then understand that the right to self-determination is a natural right of peoples, regardless of the political regime etc.
The danger of the CPP’s position – which we were engaged in debating within that party before the split (actually, our expulsion) – was that it assumed that once the national democratic revolution (which as Maoists was our goal) had been achieved, thereafter the Bangsamoro and the indigenous peoples would no longer be eligible to exercise their right to self-determination!
This was the historical experience in China too, where the Chinese CP initially supported the movements of indigenous peoples but after it had won power, denied that right as if it ceases to exist. Similarly, in Nicaragua where the indigenous Miskito’s joined the revolution against Somoza, but were told that post-revolution they were no longer oppressed and therefore there was no need for any political arrangement that considered their aspiration for self-rule.
So this error of the CPP was also common to other Communist parties elsewhere: the belief that the right to self-determination was appropriate in the context of feudal or capitalist relations but no longer valid after a revolutionary process led by Communists.
Our criticism of the CPP line was that as Marxist-Leninists we do not organize in all sectors, but only among the most advanced part of the working class that is politically conscious. Therefore our program is most relevant to that section of the working class alone, and not even to the working class as a whole – though of course we aspire to convince those sections also of its correctness.
So where does this leave other classes and groups who are not organized by the Party such as the peasantry, the middle-class, the indigenous, and the minority nationalities? Our view was that as the Party did not organize in these sectors, it should support their own program as expressed by the democratic and political associations created through their self-organization, rather than forcing our program upon them.
Let me put it another way. If the socialist revolution succeeds, then it is (or should be) automatically understood that there will be a multi-party system. Even if it was one party that led the revolution, it does not have a political monopoly, and not can it impose its program on others who have the equal right to organize their own political associations and promote their own program. Likewise, as Marxist-Leninists in Mindanao, we do not have the right to impose our program on those whom we have not yet won to our program.
The right to self-determination struggle is a natural right of people to freely determine their own economic, political and cultural future. The role of party members who are also members of communities exercising their right to self-determination is to ensure that the democratic content of those struggles is safeguarded, both in the course of those movements, and once their goal has been realized.
Why is this? Well, the self-determination struggle is a multi-class movement and includes – as for example in the case of the Bangsamoro – its bourgeois class too which often provides its political leadership. While struggling for the political objective of removing the oppression of the minority nationality, the democratic content – by which I mean the participation of workers and peasants’ – should be already there, so that their interests are also protected in the future political order.
Otherwise, once the national oppression by the majority nationality is removed, it will be replaced by the oppression of the ruling class within the minority nationality. World history would attest to this dynamic.
How does the RPM-M relate to the movements for self-determination of the Bangsamoro?
When we were in the CPP we had close links with the Bangsamoro movements, beginning with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). Even when the MNLF leadership-in-exile was based in Libya in the 1970s, the CPP also maintained an office in Tripoli for liaison with them.
We had many debates with the MNLF. Their position was that our role was to combat the State, while they should organize the Bangsamoro. We responded that we would not build competing organizations, but that our members from the minority nationality should be able to work freely among the working class, peasantry and urban poor and that these sections should be integrated in the self-determination struggle.
Similarly we worked with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) from its inception. We have been debating with them recently too, regarding their conception of an “ancestral domain” of the Bangsamoro, as it directly conflicts with the rights of the indigenous communities who occupy the lands that are being claimed.
The MILF leaders argue that the first stage is to win these lands into their control, and thereafter the question of the rights of the indigenous can be addressed! The leaders of the indigenous peoples reply, “why not discuss now…why wait until after the struggle is won?”
This is another illustration of what we mean by the democratic content of the self-determination struggle. We agree with the indigenous peoples that they need to be consulted and their rights have to be respected; otherwise, one war (against the majority nationality) will be replaced by another war (between the minority nationalities).
The MILF is also a bourgeois-led movement and this is very clear from the composition of its ‘peace panel’ that is currently conducting negotiations with the government of the Philippines
There is a gulf between the leadership and the ordinary Bangsamoro who don’t understand the deep and radical meaning of ‘self-determination’.
In my view, there is a parallel here with the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] and its relationship with Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The LTTE was leading the struggle but it didn’t value the role of peasants and other oppressed social classes in the movement for self-determination. It believed that only its leadership knew best how to conduct the struggle, and also how to rule the state [Tamil Eelam] that it wished to create. Unfortunately, the LTTE also antagonized the oppressed among the majority Sinhala nationality, through targeting of civilians and suicide bombings, instead of making them allies of the Tamil people.
How do you take up the question of self-determination with the majority nationality in Mindanao who may identify more with the State?
Yes, we are very conscious of this issue. Our approach is to encourage the tri-peoples to work together on their democratic rights; which of course is viewed with suspicion by the leaderships of these peoples because they fear that they will lose control of their communities once the oppressed become conscious of their rights. Our perspective is that social liberation cannot wait until after national liberation but must be pursued together.
We link the problems of the working class in the majority community with those of the poor and oppressed in the minority nationalities, and try and show them that the causes are common and therefore the solutions can be found when they act together. We explain that unless the democratic content is present in the self-determination struggle, then once the goal has been achieved, the oppressed will find that all that has happened is that one (external) oppressor has been replaced by another who is internal to your community.
If the political expression of the struggle for self-determination is secession, then that too as a proletarian party is what we support. If later, through democratic decision, there is a voluntary union between Mindanao and the rest of the Philippines then we would support that too. However, for now, there should be no doubt in the minds of the minority nationalities that we are with them in their struggle for self-determination.
What were the consequences of the split in the CPP in the early 1990s for your revolutionary organizing in Mindanao?
Actually, we just carried on doing our work among the Bangsamoro and the indigenous, as had been our responsibility when we were members of the CPP. However, we maintained our armed units [Revolutionary Peoples’ Army—RPA] because we have to be able to defend ourselves in the course of our political work.
It is a complex situation in Mindanao where in addition to the armed forces of the Government of the Philippines, and the New Peoples’ Army (NPA) of the CPP, we also confront the armed goons of political warlords. Even as we try to organize the tri-peoples on democratic issues and struggles, we also have to be able to defend the gains of peoples’ movements and struggles.
I should explain that we don’t only organize on the island of Mindanao. We also work with the majority nationality from Mindanao who have migrated to the northern (Luzon) and central (Visayas) regions of the country and try to win their support for the self-determination struggle.
In this way, we want to ensure that any ‘peace’ agreement between the elites of the Bangsamoro and the Government of the Philippines is subjected to the critique of the majority nationality too and that their issues and concerns are also integrated.
In addition to working with migrants from Mindanao in other regions of the country, how does the RPM-M relate to other revolutionary groups and parties based on the majority nationality in those regions?
The ‘split’ in the CPP was unplanned and unforeseen. The debates had begun in the late 1980s. The Party fractured on the lines of its regional bureaus and territories which were more or less intact and retained their own cohesion.
For example, in the central or Visayas region, we were supported by the highest unit of the Party known as the ‘Commission’. Initially in Mindanao, 4 of the 7 party regional committees supported us ‘Rejectionists’, but after the counter-ideological offensive, only the Central Mindanao Region and its armed wing remained outside the CPP. The Manila-Rizal region, which was numerically the largest, left the Party en-bloc.
As an underground organization, because of fears for our security and infiltration by state security agents, CPP militants did not know many other militants outside of our region or sectoral area of work. This was one factor which impeded the unity of those who rejected the strategy of protracted peoples’ war.
In 1996, we convened the first ideological summit where we gathered those former Maoist organizations or Party structures that had territorial command: such as our group from Mindanao, others from the Visayas, and from Luzon. We had an open debate – which was new for us because nothing like it was (or is) allowed in the CPP – and developed our critique of the old Party and its strategy. So this was the period when we began developing political relations with each other.
Then in 1998, we in Mindanao became aware of the demoralization that had set in among many of the leaders of the other groups, for reasons of age and exhaustion, and to counter this we boldly called for the unification of the rejectionist forces.
We invited groups to Mindanao and prepared a unity congress based upon written documents. At the conclusion of the congress we proclaimed the Revolutionary Workers Party of the Philippines (RPM-P) and its military wing, the Revolutionary Proletarian Army/Alex Boncayo Brigade (RPA/ABB).
One of our errors was that we immediately engaged in peace talks with the Government of the Philippines, before we politically consolidated ourselves. Deals were done to buy the support of the RPM-P leadership for an end to armed hostilities.
Finally in 2000, the peace agreement was signed by the leadership, and took its members by surprise as they had been excluded from the process and final decision. However, the only organized opposition was in Mindanao.
We formed the Revolutionary Workers Party of Mindanao on May 1st 2001, although we only publicly announced our formation in the following year. We knew we needed to consolidate ourselves, politically and militarily, before we were attacked by our erstwhile comrades, in addition to all the other forces ranged against us.
As we anticipated would happen, our main camp was bombarded by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in 2002. We believe that its location could only have been disclosed by those who had visited there and stayed with us during the unity drive. Anyway, we had decided beforehand, not to die defending the camp, but to abandon it and build new camps elsewhere.
Still we didn’t give up our will to unify, and in 2005 we joined with others to form the broad coalition Laban Ng Masa (‘Power of the Masses’). We were even willing to bury our differences with those ex-comrades in the RPM-P who had signed that rotten peace agreement with the government, and most likely betrayed us. Many of the personalities of the Filipino Left such as Joel Rocamora, Horacio ‘Boy’ Morales, Walden Bello and Roland Llamas participated. But it wasn’t successful.
Now, our perspective is not to rush into organizational unification. We want to have good relations with diverse groups and currents on the Filipino Left, including the Partido Ng Manggagawa (Labor Party – PM) and the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Philippines (MLPP). We think we should begin by working together on common issues and common campaigns, and collaborating in educational work, and use these experiences to know and understand each other better, so that in time we can also achieve lasting political convergence.
Attached documents
Philippines
Continuity of Violence in the Philippines
For a definitive end to the prosecution of Walden Bello on charges of “libel” and "cyberlibel”
Philippines: Ferdinand Marcos Jr. succeeds Rodrigo Duterte and his clan completes the reconquest of power
Some notes and analysis of the 9 May 2022 national and local elections in the Philippines
Elections in the Philippines: the revenge of the Marcos clan and the campaign of Leni Robredo
National question
Submission to the independent commission on the constitutional future of Wales
Against French colonialism, for the social and democratic demands of the Corsican people
B. Skanthakumar is a member of CADTM South Asia in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
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A new year will bring new changes for Communities In Schools of Richmond. We are excited to expand our presence in Henrico County and will kick start our efforts at Highland Springs High School in January. The CIS-R Strategic Plan calls for a pipeline for success, creating a safety-net for kids from kindergarten through graduation. Read more
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Sack this Council - there is nothing fair about Fairfield Part 2
Published: 18 September 2013
Members’ ban helps to resolve Fairfield’s predicament
Sometimes organisations with ineffective management need the employees themselves to do the things that management seems incapable of doing.
Last month we revealed the disgraceful exercise of suspending two innocent members which, in turn, exposed a long history of unacceptable councillor/staff contact. We provided 10 examples of unacceptable contact and clearly neither the GM, the directors, the Manager Governance, the Public Officer, nor HR were aware of any of them. Ignorance isn’t always bliss.
No-one wants to look like the Bishop of Maitland when the hard questions are asked.
There are a number of the advantages of having a policy to regulate councillor/staff contact which requires requests for the contact to go to the GM. The Division of Local Government recommends to councils that don’t have a policy or procedures identified and signed off by the GM and the Council that they should do so as a matter of priority. Like they did at Fairfield in April this year and which the Council refused.
Requiring a written request to the GM will weed out a lot of requests. It would be hard for a councillor to request contact because he wanted to squeeze an employee into a more lenient approach, or not proceeding with a fine, or tolerating illegal building or poor fire safety or at risk food premises.
More importantly, the GM would have an idea of how many requests are made, what sort of things are being requested and, in a better practice policy, the GM could decide whether the contact be provided or not. It’s all part of being the GM, responsible for the day-to-day running of the Council and the management of staff.
But if you are a GM who wants to remain blissfully ignorant of your councillors approaching staff, pressuring or encouraging them to do things they would not otherwise do, then not having a policy and procedures would be perfect. But perfect to cocoon a GM who doesn’t want to see or hear evil, but bad governance, acknowledged to be poor practice in local government and a failure to do the job properly.
But you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that when the DLG recommends that the Council adopt a policy as a matter of priority and when we expose the extent of unacceptable councillor/staff contact, and we get them thinking about reviewing their rejection of the DLG recommendation, that they would start to understand why a policy is necessary. Even councillors. Even the Mayor.
On 23 August in the Industrial Relations Commission, the Council committed to arranging a Councillor Workshop to consider the issue with an expectation that any changes to current arrangements would be recommended to a meeting of the Council on 24 September. The Council that day also agreed to keep the three unions in the loop and to consult as this process involved. But while there was a presentation to the Councillor Workshop, no one thought it appropriate to provide that presentation to the unions so that we knew what was happening.
The only advice we received was after we had already raised an issue about councillor contact with the GM by email. So a response to our request, and not all consistent with keeping people in the loop.
But it could not have been a very effective learning experience for the councillors when only two days after the workshop, a member of ours, our delegate no less, Stewart Rodham, was directed to attend a meeting in the Mayor’s Office. Immediately.
80 jobs lost at Newcastle as GM takes an axe to the organisation
Published: 18 September 2013
A new Lord Mayor (see depanews November 2012 - “Danger danger, warning warning as novices gain control in September elections”) who doesn’t like the way the Council processes DAs, who thinks staff are featherbedded and inefficient and who threatened to take a class action against Lake Macquarie City Council for “falling for this unjustified, worldwide idiocy about sea level rises” and not let him develop in areas threatened by rising sea levels, has been presiding over a slash and burn exercise by Acting GM, and now this week the confirmed GM for five years, Ken Goldthorpe.
Not a lot of respect for rights under the Award or the Enterprise Agreement but in the end Council has removed 80 positions. Last week both the Lord Mayor and the GM announced they were delighted with the “minimal fuss” that accompanied the loss of jobs.
Newcastle has a long and sad history of losing jobs. Whether it be BHP or anyone else at Newcastle or generally, it’s hard to find people these days who don’t understand that losing a job devastates workers, their families and has flow on impacts right through the community. But clearly Jeff and Ken either don’t understand the devastating social and personal effects, or they don’t care.
Using the word “fuss” to describe legitimate emotions or reactions as workers lose workmates, as they juggle the workload with fewer employees, and as those remaining employees are told their jobs won’t be re-evaluated until next year, trivialises the loss and reveals these two blokes as hard-heads, cost cutters and slashers who don’t feel anything. Two Tin Men.
The unions understand that sometimes restructuring involves the loss of jobs. There are protections in the State Award and other industrial instruments about how this process should be conducted, how the Council needs to provide full information about its process, and even how they can review its decision once the unions and the employees concerned have had a chance to respond. Some councils have decided not to proceed as part of this process.
What an Award or industrial instrument can’t do, is to make people understanding or caring in the process. Sadly you can’t legislate to make people better people.
Only the insensitive in a process with significant personal, familial and community repercussions, would trivialise the workforce’s response. “Fuss” is the wrong word - but because both the Tin Men have used it we can only despair for the future at Newcastle.
Published: 20 September 2012
We’ve got an office full of letters from a succession of Ministers for Local Government, all committing to a review and a new approach to local government. We’ve got one from the current Minister, Don Page MP, as well.
Destination 2036 started badly. Not only did it make no sense if you were looking for serious reform to invite the groups with the most to lose (general managers and mayors) to come to Dubbo to talk about it. Neither did it make any sense to leave the unions off the list of those invited because, if you are going to do anything, the unions would need to be involved in the employment arrangements affected by change.
Clearly it was the usual group at the Division of Local Government who failed to invite us (continuing a long history of failing to acknowledge the role of the unions in the industry), so the Minister wasn’t responsible for this and his office was surprised that the DLG had dropped us off the list of “stakeholders”. In the end we got invited (and we could hear the rocket from the Minister’s office penetrating those responsible in the DLG from our office 9 km from the CBD) but we chose not to go because it seemed a waste of time and we would struggle to get the floor to say anything useful. As it turns out, our instinct was confirmed by the one union official who did attend.
A number of ideas flowed from Destination 2036 but none of them had anything to do with the fundamental problem - namely, that probably 40% of New South Wales councils are not financially sustainable, can’t afford to pay their staff properly, can’t provide flexible working conditions for family purposes, can’t provide good working conditions or market rates of pay, can’t afford to train people etc. What’s the point of a talkfest that doesn’t involve the difficult question of Council sizes and amalgamation?
But it gets worse.
Hold the phone, how good is the technology the Council supplies you?
Published: 20 September 2012
Like all businesses, councils are obliged to supply appropriate tools to those who need them to get the job done effectively and efficiently. They would never get away with supplying substandard tools, nor would they contemplate it because it’s a false economy. Neither would they get away with poor quality plant generally.
Why is it then that we still see professional employees wandering around with telephones that would be more appropriately exhibited in the Powerhouse Museum?
Health, building and planning professionals should be provided with phones that allow them to be efficient and make the best value of the time out on the site or on-the-job. Yet smart phones which provide access to emails and Internet and a good quality camera are still not widespread amongst local government professionals.
How much easier would it be to carry a smart phone to a site instead of a dumb phone and a camera. How much more practical and more efficient it would be to be able to use a smart phone to tap into the Council’s file system or send and receive email information. On a site and something pops up unexpectedly, an android phone provides solutions and opportunities beyond the comprehension of the old blokes often in charge of buying them.
That’s why at many councils it is the Manager of Finance or some other bean-counter who makes judgements about the sort of phone that will be provided to professional staff who could be much more efficient in the field with a multimedia phone.
Some councils are already dealing with complaints from staff about the adequacy of their phones and how much more effective they would be moving into the 21st century with a phone capable of many other functions. Many councils aren’t. Some councils give smart phones at higher levels of the organisations because they recognise they want their better paid employees maximising their efficiency and effectiveness but don’t really think about how far down the organisation this improved efficiency should go.
It doesn’t make any sense. Professional employees who work in the field must be provided with phones that allow them to do the job properly. Not in terms of how it was done in 1970, but how could be done now, taking advantage of the benefits of the new technologies
This is an industrial issue in which we can be involved. We have conducted disputes in the past about the health and safety aspects of members working in remote locations where old analog phones, or cheap telecommunication networks, didn’t provide proper coverage. While these issues still continue in some areas (meaning it makes sense from a health and safety viewpoint the two employees to go out on particular jobs, rather than one) these health and safety issues are easily won.
We would love the opportunity to grapple with a Council where some accountant has decided, without really knowing the usefulness of a smart phone to professionals working in the field, that they should be provided with something less.
Any volunteers?
Try not to get sacked over the next three weeks
Published: 20 September 2012
I’m going on holidays. It is one thing to encourage members to take a break when they need one but in a small organisation like ours, it’s hard to get away. Nevertheless, I’m out of here on Friday 21 September and not coming back until Monday 14 October. All fresh, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready.
The office will still be able to refer you to people to give you advice while I’m gone and we have arrangements with our lawyers just in case, but in the meantime, here are some suggestions for how to keep yourself out of trouble while I’m away:
Annual and long service leave requires the Council’s agreement and it makes sense to get that agreement before you spend your money on a trip to Europe, for example.
If you’re sick and can’t get to the office, ring your supervisor/manager as soon as you can in the morning and try to avoid looking like you’ve disappeared. It’s important to ring a person you report to.
Try to avoid being sick on Friday and Monday because, while you might be legitimately sick, it doesn’t look good.
If the Council wants to interview you about something that could become a disciplinary issue and they offer you the opportunity of taking a support person, take the delegate because it’s always good to have someone there as a witness and to metaphorically hold your hand.
If the Council claims you’ve done something wrong and they are grilling you about it, don’t admit to it if it isn’t true because you want the meeting to end, because next they will nail you.
If the Council finds you been making phone calls outside the Council area during working hours and they ask why, don’t tell them it’s because you loaned your phone to a friend, because that only makes life worse.
Try to avoid shouting at people in the office, even if you’re angry and they may well be the stupidest applicants you’ve ever met.
Try to avoid shouting at other employees and NEVER shout at your boss.
Everyone makes mistakes, if you do, fix it as soon as you can, apologising is always a good idea and never, ever try to justify it. It’s not a matter of interpretation, it’s a mistake.
Try not to get booked for speeding or other motoring offences in the Council car and, when you get picked up by radar outside Goulburn on the first day you got the car and it‘s your birthday, with all your mates in the car, don’t tell the cop you were lucky he didn’t catch you 10 km earlier.
If you leaseback agreement says you report minor damage, do so.
Don’t pinch things from the Council - whether that be stationary or petrol outside your entitlements under the leaseback agreement.
Don’t, if the Council is asking legitimate questions about where you were or what you were doing, go home panicking because you’ve been sprung and then go on stress leave. It’s hard to come off stress leave and you still have to deal with the issue.
Don’t do any applicants or objectors any favours beyond your normal professional responsibilities because they can often be misinterpreted or misunderstood and you never know who’s watching.
If the ICAC turns up and asks questions, assume they already know the answers and tell them exactly what you know. You never know what they know and they wouldn’t be there looking for a fire if they didn’t have evidence of some smoke.
Be careful of the images and other things you receive, send and store on the Council’s computer. If you wouldn’t be prepared to let your mum see it, it shouldn’t be on the Council system.
Canterbury says "wash your mouth out with soap"
Published: 14 September 2011
Canterbury Council's general manager Jim Montague is spearheading a drive back to Victorian England by introducing new standards for communication amongst employees. Paralleling the genteelism of a previous era (and an ethnocentric focus on nice white Anglo-Saxons), when they preferred the word "unmentionables" to the word "underwear", Jim has decided that the words "attractive" and "petite" are a breach of the Council’s Code of Conduct. And so is the expression "high maintenance". What the?
You can expect lots of potty-mouth employees having their mouths washed out by HR with this new standard.
We accept the view that a cultured and advanced society communicates in a cultured and sensitive way. Whether language is acceptable or unacceptable is usually in the eye of the beholder and fundamentally appropriate or inappropriate only when it is placed in context.
Canterbury is caught up and confused about language. There are some contexts that come with a language warning. Without pandering too much to stereotypes, the language used out on the road in a gang is generally stronger than that used by professional employees. But professional employees are quite capable of getting down and dirty with the best of them, and it is appropriate if the context is right. It might be okay in the pub but it's not okay with Grandma.
We just went through an exercise of an investigation of a member after a complaint was made at Canterbury. The area in which the member works was formerly housed in the depot where, regardless of sensitivities, it was all very blokey and outdoors. A move to the administrative centre at Belmore a couple of years ago saw our member, amongst others, issuing some guidelines about the new etiquette and the new context. Steps were taken regularly to ask the fruity communicators to take it outside.
depa would support any council that wanted to initiate an educational program to improve the quality of communication at work. It would be developed through the Consultative Committee, union reps on the Consulted Committee would be communicating with their members and when the new standards were introduced, everyone could get on board.
There could be a swear jar in every office. Gosh, what a great idea.
But the idea that a new standards is to be adopted, as it has at Canterbury, and then the new standard applied retrospectively, is fundamentally unfair. A bit like retrospectively imposing an 80 km speed limit in an area that was previously 100 km and then booking people who exceeded 80 when it was legal to do so. No one would think that acceptable.
Taree unbackable favourites to win 2011 worst HR in Local Government Award
Published: 14 September 2011
Sadly, things don’t seem to get any better at Greater Taree. A bad year last year with a clumsy investigation and the ambushing of staff in interviewing them, a strike by our members, some unpleasant and dishonest effects from the restructure carried out earlier in the year, and then squandering money on lawyers who would rather litigate than conciliate reasonable claims that could assist staff morale.
And then the Council resolved to knock off a gratuity policy for resigning employees that had been around nearly forever and in the face of the unanimous opposition of long-serving staff and their three unions. Charming.
And now having two unanimous recommendations from selection panels for new appointments overthrown by the senior managers. Why have a panel of people who know about the work and interview the candidates if you’re then going to reject their unanimous recommendation?
Our members are wondering what the point is of sitting on a selection panel if the director (called an executive leader there) and the GM (mercifully still called a GM) reject it. Neither of these managers hold any professional qualification in health, building or planning anyway.
There has been community unrest too as assessment times blow out. And they blow out because the Council isn’t serious about replacing people who go to better places. Even though it advertises a salary range that could attract suitable candidates, they refuse to appoint at above entry level. So they get no-one much, end up spending more money to fruitlessly advertise but with the same salary restrictions and 60% of the establishment staff end up carrying the load.
So morale plummets precisely because of management policies – something that seems to have escaped the Mayor who accepts that “staff morale could be better” but famously asserted to the Manning River Times that he ‘fully supports the senior staff in their actions to improve staff morale”. What the?
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Is a really big deal
I’m sure the reason you went into business for yourself was NOT so you could do bookkeeping for your business. (I can already hear you groaning.)
Even so, money problems are said to be the prime reason for business closures. This is why it’s imperative that you keep a close eye on what’s going on with your business finances.
The problem is that the small business owner is busy running their business and doesn’t have (or doesn’t want) time to stay on top of their bookkeeping.
But the IRS says it has to be done. Yep. It’s the law and it is required of every business in America, whether it’s done by the business owner or someone else.
When you’re busy running a business, though, you don’t have time to learn all there is to learn about bookkeeping, no matter how important it is.
Just like the instance of a broken down car. Most people are not willing or able to learn all the things they need to know in order to diagnose their car trouble and fix the problem on their own. They don’t run out and buy all the tools necessary for the job.
They usually just take the car to an auto repair shop. The mechanics there know exactly how to diagnose what’s going on and they have all the tools to do the job and do it right.
Plus, because of their expertise, they can have the car back on the road again in less time than it would take you to do it.
Bookkeeping is the same concept.
There’s so much riding on your bookkeeping being done and being done right. Let us handle the task for you so you can rest easy knowing it’s done and done right.
An Army of New Agents
You may have heard about the almost $80 billion of new funding that the IRS is receiving. You may have also heard that this new funding will will be used to “hire and train an army of new agents” who will be in charge of additional tax audits.
It’s true that the IRS did get this funding and they will be using it to hire and train new agents to do more audits. This doesn’t matter quite as much if your bookkeeping is on par.
I realize no one really wants the IRS combing through their financials with a magnifying glass, but it is possible at any time that it could happen to you.
Don’t let fears of an audit get under your skin anymore.
With proper and accurate bookkeeping, you can have financials that will hold up to an IRS audit with minimal trouble.
I teach business owners how to properly save records in a way that will preserve them in the event that you are hit with an audit for this year or past years.
Receipt and invoice storage isn’t a problem and all your records will be ready to hand off to the IRS agent without delay.
It’s never fun to be audited, but with the right systems in place, it can be much easier and less painful to get through it.
To really grow
You have to know
Bookkeeping is a necessity, not only because it’s the law, but because every business owner needs to know how their business is doing financially.
A business owner can’t judge the health of their business based on the number of customers or clients they have, the number of jobs they are performing, or the dollar amount they have on any given day, but this is exactly how many business owners are judging the health of their businesses.
Good bookkeeping is more than that.
It’s a detailed overview of all the money, assets, debt, bills, everything that the business owns, owes, rents, all of it. Everything that’s coming in, everything that’s going out, and everything that’s sticking around.
Business owners need to know this information so they can make wise, informed decisions about how to handle the things within their business.
Poor bookkeeping will hinder your ability to grow your business because you will simply lack the knowledge you need to make the right decisions.
Most business owners don’t really know how to do the books and focus more on tax compliance bookkeeping. While this is fine for filing taxes, it doesn’t help you to understand what’s actually going on with the day-to-day financials of your business.
To really grow, you have to know what’s going on with your business financials on a regular basis, not just yearly when you file taxes.
Outgrowing your current system
Many startup businesses use a simple spreadsheet or notebook to do their bookkeeping. This system may work perfectly fine for a startup business. It won’t be as detailed, but as long as you are being diligent about making sure you get it done, you will probably do fine with this method in the beginning.
As your business grows you may realize you simply don’t have the time to maintain your bookkeeping like you did when you were a newer business. There are just too many other things demanding your time and attention. Or your bookkeeping could be growing more complex and you aren’t sure you’re doing it right. Or you may need to get a loan to scale your business to the next level and lenders are asking for reports that you don’t have.
This is the perfect time to consider outsourcing your bookkeeping so your business can continue to grow and you can put your time and energy into making money instead of just recording it.
Giving up a task inside of your business can be a scary and uncertain decision, but outsourcing your bookkeeping is one of the best decisions you can make for your business.
As a matter of fact, Entrepreneur Magazine names “Accounting” (including bookkeeping, payroll, and tax accounting) first on their list of tasks a small business should outsource.
Stop spending your valuable time doing the bookkeeping and start using that time to do what you really want to be doing.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Matthew 6:33
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There may come a time where someone that is close to you, either a good friend, or an actual family member, such as spouse or child may be arrested and charged, then sent to jail. In such instances, if there are no criminal charges, you’ll probably want to start thinking about pulling together whatever funding you need to post bail and get the person you care for out of jail.
Under ordinary circumstances, Wake County bail bonds from a professional bail bondsman is your best chance at resolving bail obligations quickly and efficiently. This is even true in situations where you may not even live in Wake County, but your child, for example, goes to school in the area and has run into police trouble. In these situations, seeking out bail bonds in Wake County are the perfect way to start arranging for someone’s release while you take care of the logistics for an emergency visit to the county.
One of the things that needs to be understood when it comes to dealing with something like an arrest is that you are now dealing with the law, and a person who has been charged with breaking that law. This means that there are rules in place, and those rules are inflexible. If you are not a lawyer, you will only be able to see the person charged during visiting hours, until the bail that has been set has been paid.
If you’re not using professional bail bonds in Wake County to speed up this process, then until you can gather the appropriate funds—or collateral—the person arrested must await the date for trial in jail. While this means that the basic necessities such as food, shelter and clothing are taken care of, this does not mean that there’s no use for traditional finances like money. Inmates can—and do—spend money on certain things, and if you like, it’s possible for you to give money to a friend or family member that is spending time in jail.
Long term inmates have the option of taking on jobs with salaries that allow them to purchase items from a jail commissary, or even shop. In most of these instances, the spending money is for small, quality-of-life items, such nicer food for one meal, or better quality soap, toothpaste or other small comforts. Inmates are also allowed to maintain hobbies, for which the materials can be purchased.
So, in fact, there’s still an active economy for smaller items that can be legally purchased by inmates while in jail. However, only long term inmates usually have the option to taking on jobs with salaries. For someone that is not in this position, the only real option for additional funding comes from the outside, with friends and family.
Inmates have trust accounts assigned to them from which they can access any funds that are given to them. You have a few options when it comes to sending funds to an inmate. You can drop the funds yourself at an assigned deposit kiosk located in the John H. Baker Jr. Public Safety Center. You can mail a check or money order, provided that the inmate’s full name is used. You can also send the money remotely, either through a telephone call transfer, or use your computer and make an Internet transaction.
With a phone transfer, there is a $4.95 fee incurred with the transaction, and only $20 per week can actually be sent in this way. For Internet transactions, no such restrictions exist, and you have the same flexibility as you would using a mail order or check.
With a kiosk deposit, phone call, or Internet transfer, the cash is immediately deposited in an inmate’s trust fund for use at his or her own convenience. Checks and money orders take approximately 14 days to process before being cleared through banks and deposited in the trust fund.
If you’re trying to post bail on your own, it can take some time, and this means the person you care about spends more time in jail and out of touch with their old life. In such instances, it’s understandable why you would want to send money, and if someone has been convicted and must serve a sentence, the act of sending money can be both uplifting and compassionate.
But if a person is just awaiting a trial date, then you’re advised to get them out as quickly as possible. If nothing else, preparing for a court case is easier to do out of jail than inside it. Get bail bonds in Wake County to speed up the process of getting your friend or family member out, and concentrate on the things that matter the most.
What to Expect During a Bail Hearing in North Carolina
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7 Common Bail Bond Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
At Raleigh Bail Bonds, LLC our team is composed of licensed bondsmen who understand that the service we provide makes a difference. Throughout the entire time you’ll be working with us, you can count on experiencing professional, discreet, prompt and friendly service.
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Time was winding down on Aug. 26 for the start of the fifth game in the Milwaukee Bucks and Orlando Magic’s Eastern Conference first round playoff series. Eventually, when the clock struck zero, the Bucks were not on the court for tipoff as the Magic stood alone on the floor, warming up without their opponents in sight. The Bucks players decided to not take the floor in protest of yet another Black man who had fallen victim to a police shooting — this time just 40 miles away from Milwaukee.
Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
The Milwaukee Bucks decided they were not going to reward the public with a playoff performance, as police killings and excessive use of force continue to plague Black people in the United States.
I support the team’s decision and could not imagine what the feeling in the locker room was that evening that prompted this decision. What I do know, however, is that I stand by their decision and the Black community. Enough is enough.
The Milwaukee Bucks’ decision to forego game five comes four years after Colin Kaepernick first began kneeling during the national anthem prior to several NFL games. I remember Kaepernick being scrutinized for his decision to kneel and being labeled as someone who disrespected the flag.
I had conversations with my brother, a veteran of the U.S. Army, and even he understood that Kaepernick’s decision was not about the flag. When I took an oath in 2018 to serve in the U.S. Air Force for six years of my life, I could not help but think of Kaepernick as I raised my right hand and stood in front of our country’s flag.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) restarted its season on July 30 following a shutdown that lasted more than four months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fans were excited about the league’s return and no sport had a bigger platform than the NBA as they were going to finish the season in what had been dubbed “The Bubble,” at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Given the recent killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many more, the NBA should be commended for allowing their players to use their platform to speak on these recent events. “Black Lives Matter” was painted across the courts used in Orlando, players’ jerseys displayed phrases such as “How Many More” and “Say Their Name,” and racial injustice was spoken about frequently during post-game conferences.
The NBA supporting its players to speak up against the current issues is a step in the right direction.
The ripple effect of the Bucks’ decision was evident throughout the sports world. The Milwaukee Brewers also canceled their scheduled game against the Cincinnati Reds that same day. Then, the rest of the NBA playoffs were postponed until further notice as many other teams took a similar stand. National Football League (NFL) teams also released statements reassuring fans that they stand with those affected by the injustices occurring in our country today.
Of course, these actions have not always been widely supported by the public. What saddens me most is that fans are quick to criticize kneeling, striking and taking a stand against racism, but these exact same fans forget these sports they love thrive on Black culture and the labor of black athletes.
To tell these players to stay quiet, “shut up and dribble” and to stay out of these conversations is degrading on many levels. I believe athletes are properly using their voice and platform to send a message that “enough is enough.” These athletes are taking a stand against systematic racism, racial injustice and police brutality for those who may not be heard.
I thought about the slander Kaepernick received and the social injustice that had been going on for years. My decision to serve the country came from defending people like Kaepernick and current NBA players to exercise their rights and demand justice.
Cal Poly Pomona reports fewer COVID-19 cases than most CSU campuses
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Eva on Professor allegedly embezzled $100k; Retired UPD officer claims he was blocked in investigation
Kelly on CPP student workers struggle to make ends meet
Frank on Professor allegedly embezzled $100k; Retired UPD officer claims he was blocked in investigation
Stephanie A. S. Jacobo on CPP students cook a classic Mexican dish with a Native American twist
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Cal Poly Pomona's student newspaper since 1940, The Poly Post provides coverage of the campus and local community.
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Last Sunday, under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, Becky and I worshipped virtually in an empty cathedral. It was a surprising and moving experience.
Aside from the clergy, organist, and four singers the Washington National Cathedral was entirely empty. The service was closed to congregants, and live streamed, in order to help stem the spread of the virus. The words and music were surrounded by a vast emptiness, which was at once unsettling and profound.
It is not easy for Episcopalians to close our churches for Sunday worship. We cherish our weekly gathering together to give thanks, to be sacramentally and homiletically nourished, to greet one another. But last week it was the very emptiness of the cathedral that seemed eloquently to proclaim the love and care of God for the world. Rather than risk bringing people together in this challenging moment, the church closed its doors. In a strange way this was in itself a sermon. A profound act of self-emptying.
It is the belief of Christian people that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, emptied himself by becoming one of us and giving up his life on the cross. God showed the full extent of the divine love for the world in this absolute self-giving. Theologians call this kenosis, the generous, sacrificial pouring out of God’s own life for us. Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness…and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross,” Paul wrote. W.H. Vanstone beautifully captured this once in a poem:
Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.
Therefore he who shows us God
And the nails and crown of thorns
The cross stands in the midst of our churches to remind us of this great truth. But last Sunday, ironically, it was the intentionally empty cathedral that proclaimed it, as the church hollowed itself for a moment in the interest of the well-being of others. When the camera played over the quiet spaces and bright windows surrounding a thousand empty seats there was a palpable feeling of the divine presence pouring selfless grace and hope into the world. The empty cathedral was actually full of love.
In these anxious days this is a dose of soul medicine. As we react to the threat of the virus, it is easy for us to think anxiously of ourselves and our safety. Already the media is filled with stories of people hoarding supplies, selling stock to protect investments, fiercely guarding their interests. Certainly self care is important and in its proper place contributes to the commonweal. But a time like this calls us to more. It urges us to think beyond ourselves and act for others, not doing certain things for the greater good.
May the holy emptiness of the cathedral remind us of our high calling as human beings, the high calling of sacrifice for one another. We will get though this ordeal as we work together, doing and not doing as needed to limit the virus’ spread. There may be hard days ahead. We will be afraid at times. Let us pray without ceasing that our fear does not conquer our love. When it is over may we be able to hold our heads high, because we will have done our best, in a difficult time, to empty ourselves for each other and the common good. That is what love does.
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During the uncertain times created by the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, leadership of the diocese will send out regular meditations on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays for the next while as we all adjust to a new chapter of living and being the Church.
The Archdeacon, The Venerable Calhoun Walpole, will share a meditation each Wednesday; The Rt. Rev. Henry N. Parsley, Jr., Visiting Bishop for our Diocese, will offer a meditation each Saturday; and the Rev. Cn. Caleb Lee, President of the Standing Committee, will share a reflection each Monday.
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not least of which is the hours we volunteer to make a difference in the lives of those who are new in our community.
There are a number of agencies in our community that have developed expertise in certain aspects of serving vulnerable people. Your skills and interests will help you decide which agency’s work you could best support as a volunteer.
MJMC's role and how you can suppport us:
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We’ve offered tips and tricks for setting small business goals in the past. But what doesn’t often get covered is the importance of revisiting your business goals and even adjusting as needed. We all know that business goals make it easier to track the success of your business, what you’re driving toward, and what your employees should be focusing their efforts on. Goals don’t need to be “set it and forget it” — it’s obvious they need to be in place, and what we’ll cover today is the why, how, and when behind revisiting those goals.
Why?
There’s really only one constant in life, and that’s change. Which is truly at the heart of the reason why, in the face of change, you should always be reevaluating your business goals.
Think of it this way: in the beginning of 2020 you may have laid out a set of goals for your restaurant or salon that didn’t take into consideration the global pandemic that was about to put a chokehold on the economy. When the shutdowns started and businesses came to a screeching halt, your business goals indeed needed to pivot. Or consider perhaps that you’ve already met or exceeded the goals you laid out well before your “due date” (congratulations!), and now you’re not driving toward anything. Don’t you need to outline some additional milestones? Or maybe an unexpected competitor moved into the neighborhood, and you’ve got to outline some additional goals to offset a potential loss of business. Regardless of the situation, change is very real—and very important to address with revisions to your business goals, as needed.
How?
If you’re not currently meeting your business goals, it’s important to reframe your mindset. This isn’t failure, this is an area of opportunity—and in revisiting/refining your goals, you’re taking real action to make a big change in the trajectory of your business.
So how do you revisit your goals? We cannot stress enough the importance of regular check-ins: with your team, your accountants, your business partners, etc. Analyze your progress and how you’re tracking to the milestones you laid out when those goals were first established.
It’s also important to keep your ears to the ground for changes that might impact your business. Get ahead of those changes and assess the possible effects. Adjust or create goals as necessary. And communicate those changes or additions to the wider group so everyone is on the same page about what defines success for your business.
It’s a good practice to get into the habit of revisiting your longer-term goals once or twice a year—schedule check-ins with your management team to see how your progress is tracking, and reevaluate as needed. Smaller goals will warrant more frequent revisiting.
It’s one thing to have a solid set of goals that you continually reevaluate as your business needs change. Another thing to keep in mind is whether an unsecured small business loan could also come in handy when your needs shift. Having cash on hand is one of the smartest ways to make sure your business is prepared for anything—from equipment upgrades to marketing plan revamps. Check out ARF Financial to learn why small businesses across the country turn to us for all their financial needs.
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The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes now in Operation. Three vols | Charles LYELL | First edition
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The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes now in Operation. Three vols.
First edition of this “classic by ‘the father of modern geology’” (Grolier/Horblit), famous for “establishing a new era in geology” (DSB), presenting the doctrine of uniformitarianism, namely, that the processes of the past must be judged by those of the present. “One of the key works in the nineteenth century encounters between science and Scripture, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) sought to explain the geological state of the modern Earth by considering the long-term effects of observable natural phenomena. Written with clarity and a dazzling intellectual passion, it is both a seminal work of modern geology and a compelling precursor to Darwinism, speculating on radical changes in climate and geography across the ages, and exploring the evidence for the progressive development of life” (Secord). “Principles still recalled Isaac Newton’s Principia and the subtitle stated clearly that it was ‘an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation’ … [Lyell’s] main source was the great compilation of the physical and topographical changes recorded within human history, published in 1822-4 by Karl von Hoff (1771-1837). He used Hoff’s data to illustrate his own view of the earth as a system of balanced antagonistic processes: erosion balanced by sedimentation, for example, and crustal elevation by crustal subsidence. A preliminary section of the book presented a 'grand new theory of climate' (Lyell, Life, I, p. 261), which interpreted long-term climatic changes as the products of an ever-changing physical geography” (ODNB). This was the work that, more than any other, prepared the way for Darwin's Origin. Darwin acknowledged that Lyell’s explanation of geological features by causes operating over immense periods of time was part of the key to his development of the theory of natural selection. “When the Beagle expedition sailed in 1831 [John] Henslow [Darwin’s mentor] presented Darwin with the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology … The second volume of Lyell’s book reached Darwin in Montevideo and his constant references to the enormous influence on his thinking of this great work are typified by a letter from him to Leonard Horner saying ‘I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brain’” (PMM). When Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin a letter in 1858 outlining an almost identical theory to his own, it was Lyell, together with Joseph Hooker, who engineered the simultaneous publication of papers by both men, and secured Darwin’s claim to the theory of ‘natural selection.’ Only two other copes in the original boards have appeared at auction, both of which were rebacked with new spine labels.
Many geologists of his day, including Cuvier and others, believed that the Earth had been shaped by cataclysmic events in the past unparalleled in modern times. Lyell argued, on the contrary, that the order of nature in the past was uniform with that in the present, and that therefore all geological phenomena should be attributed to the gradual action, over sufficient time, of modern geological processes. This hypothesis led to one of the most revolutionary scientific ideas of the nineteenth century - that the age of the earth was enormously greater than had previously been supposed. To demonstrate that gradual processes could be responsible for great changes, Lyell used an engraving of the temple at Serapis as his frontispiece. The temple had, during the course of human history, been above sea level, then for a long period partially submerged, and again was above sea level as attested by the dark bands of damage caused by waterborne life across the columns.
“’The great merit of the Principles,’ Charles Darwin once said, ‘was that it altered the whole of one’s mind, & therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet partially saw it through his eyes,’ Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology shaped Darwin’s vision of nature as he circumnavigated the globe on the Beagle and as he later created his theory of evolution … Darwin became his most enthusiastic advocate, and found the Principles immensely liberating from the moment of landing on his first tropical island during the Beagle voyage. The young naturalist used the book to develop his own causally-oriented style of interpretation, comparing the uplifted but scarcely disrupted rocks in the mid-Atlantic Cape Verde Islands with the Temple of Serapis. Later in the voyage he reinterpreted the origin of coral reefs, overturning the model that Lyell had advocated; but the style of reasoning was that of the master, who altered his next edition accordingly. When Darwin began to consider the possibility of species evolution after his return home, he did so in private dialogues with the Principles” (Secord, pp. ix & xxxvi).
The observations which led Lyell to his new geological theories were made in Sicily in 1828, towards the end of a trip to France and Italy he had begun with Roderick Murchison. “His first doubts about the necessary recentness of strata containing living species of fossils may have arisen from a bed of clay above Catania that contained many modern Mediterranean shells … Astonished at what he was finding, and doubting whether he had observed correctly, Lyell explored the interior of Sicily until at Castrogiovanni (now Enna) he found all the Tertiary strata of the Sicilian formation, from the white limestone of Lentini down through sandstones and marls to the blue clay of Syracuse, containing living species of shells with their original colors, all exposed in order in one immense escarpment. For Lyell the discovery that the white limestone, containing only casts and impressions of shells, was a very recent formation, had the force of revelation. It meant that the characteristics of a rock stratum were determined not by its geological age but by the conditions under which it was laid down, and these conditions had recurred again and again in successive geological periods. In Sicily, Lyell saw too that volcanic activity had gone on gradually and uniformly, interspersed with periods of rest, through an immense extent of time. Finally, he saw that the assemblage of shell species now living in the Mediterranean constituted a very old fauna, which had changed very little during the immense time required to deposit he stratified rocks of Sicily and to elevate them into hills of rounded and worn outline.
“Because Lyell saw in Sicily a continuity between the fauna living in the Mediterranean and its fossil ancestors preserved in the rocks, he realized that the conditions under which both lived must be analogous. Therefore conditions during past geological ages must have been essentially similar to modern conditions on the earth’s surface, and the forces which brought about geologic changes must have been the result of processes similar to those going on at the present time. Fired with such new ideas, Lyell set out for England in January 1829, determined to rewrite his book to see how far he could ‘explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by causes now in operation’ …
“Lyell returned to London on 24 February 1829, and from then until the beginning of June 1830 he wrote and saw through the press the first volume of his Principles of Geology. It was published by John Murray in July 1830 (not January, as stated in later editions of the Principles) and created an immediate sensation. In it Lyell first discussed the historical development of geology and then treated the principles of geological reasoning. He argued that the order of nature in the past was uniform with that in the present and, therefore, that the geologist should always try to explain geological phenomena by analogy with modern conditions. The greatest difficulty he had to overcome was the clear evidence for a warmer climate during past geological epochs even in high northern latitudes, such as those of Great Britain. To account for the changes in climate which had occurred between past geological epochs and the present, Lyell studied the factors which determine climate in different parts of the world at the present time. He showed how not only local climate, but even worldwide climate conditions, depend on the pattern of distribution of land and sea and would, therefore, be altered by changes in their distribution. An increase in the proportion of land near the equator, and of ocean area toward the poles, would tend to create a warmer world climate and vice versa.
“Lyell surveyed the full range of processes which at present are altering the Earth’s surface — the eroding effects of running water in streams and rivers and of waves along the sea coast, the accumulation of sediments in deltas and on the sea bottom, and the cumulative effects of earthquakes and volcanoes in elevating the land. He showed that even the largest volcanoes, such as Vesuvius and Etna, were the product of a long series of eruptions distributed through immense periods of time, and the eruptions were never greater nor more frequent than in historic times. Lyell emphasized repeatedly that the magnitude of the geological changes which had occurred during the past was not a reason to postulate extraordinary convulsions or catastrophes. The greatest changes could be accomplished by ordinary geological processes acting gradually, if they were given sufficient time …
“During 1831 he wrote the second volume, which was published in January 1832. In this volume Lyell considered the changes which had occurred in the living world through geological time. His studies on Tertiary shells had already shown him that as one proceeded from older to younger strata, the proportion of fossils belonging to extinct species declined gradually while that of living species increased. Thus, throughout the Tertiary period species of shells had become extinct, one by one, to be replaced, one by one, by new species. The continuity thus revealed in the living world, accompanied by gradual change, was in sharp distinction to the apparently abrupt changes in the forms of animal life observed in the secondary strata of France and England. Lyell pointed out that all the species of mammals living when the present assemblage of marine mollusks had become established in the sea had since become extinct. Thus the land mammals, which were subject to many more vicissitudes than marine forms, became extinct more rapidly.
“To account for extinction Lyell showed that the life of each species was dependent upon the continuance of a certain set of physical conditions in its environment. Geological processes, however, were steadily tending to alter these conditions, both locally and over wide regions. Thus the possible habitats for a species were steadily shifting and sometimes were obliterated. Lyell also showed that the life of a species was at the same time dependent upon a multitude of relationships with other species living in the same area. There was severe competition between species for living space, so that sometimes a species might become extinct simply because it could not contend successfully with others. And the extinction of one species would drag in its train the extinction of others which were dependent upon it. Similarly, the increase and spread of a successful species would force many others into extinction. Yet the geographical distribution of species showed that every species had tended to spread outward from its geographical center of origin. Lyell thus showed that the living world of plants and animals was in a state of dynamic balance and that the fluctuations of the balance of nature would themselves steadily tend to produce the extinction of species …
“In the third volume of the Principles, published in [May] 1833, Lyell attempted to answer some of the criticisms of his doctrines provoked by the first two volumes. The opening chapter is a splendid defense of the point of view to which William Whewell had already attached the name ‘uniformitarian’ … The remainder of the volume was an application of the doctrine of uniformity and the use of modern analogies to the problems of Tertiary geology. Lyell introduced his classification of Tertiary formations into four successive epochs and the terms Eocene, Miocene, and the older and newer Pliocene to designate them” (DSB).
Charles Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Forfarshire on the 14th of November 1797, on the family estate in Scotland. His father was a botanist and from his boyhood Lyell had a strong inclination for natural history, especially entomology, a taste which he cultivated at Bartley Lodge in the New Forest, to which his family had moved soon after his birth. In 1816 he entered Exeter College, Oxford, where the lectures of William Buckland first drew his attention to geology. After graduating in classics in 1819 he entered Lincoln’s Inn, and in 1825, after a delay caused by chronic weakness of the eyes, he was called to the bar. During this time he was slowly gravitating towards the life of a student of science. In 1819 he had been elected a fellow of the Linnean and Geological Societies, to which he communicated his first paper, “On a Recent Formation of Freshwater Limestone in Forfarshire”, in 1822. In 1826 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, from which in later years he received both the Copley and Royal medals; and in 1827 he finally abandoned the legal profession, and devoted himself to geology. In 1831-33 Lyell was professor of geology at King’s College, London, and delivered there a course of lectures, which became the foundation of his Elements of Geology (1838). In 1832 he married Mary, eldest daughter of Leonard Horner; she assisted in his work and became a leading hostess in metropolitan intellectual society. He was elected President of the Geological Society of London in 1835-7 and 1849-51. A great admirer of the United States, Lyell lectured extensively there, and in 1845 and 1849 he published lively descriptions of his travels in North America. Lyell was knighted in 1848, and was created a baronet in 1864. He was elected corresponding member of the French Institute and of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, and was created a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit. His health deteriorated rapidly after the death of Lady Lyell in 1873, but he continued his researches until his own death in 1875. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Lyell Medal, established in 1875 under his will, is cast in bronze and is awarded annually by the Council of the Geological Society.
The first edition of Principles of Geology was published in an edition of 1,500 copies and sold for fifteen shillings a copy. Lyell received 200 guineas for the work. The title page of Vol. 1 indicated that the work was originally intended to be published in two volumes. The first two volumes had already reached a second edition in 1833 when the third was added. Between 1830 and 1872 eleven editions of this work were published; only a few days before his death Lyell finished revising the first volume of the 12th edition.
Three volumes, 8vo, pp. xv, [1], 511; xii, 330, [2]; xxxi, [1], 398, 109, plus 4pp. publisher’s advertisements, 11 plates, including 3 engraved frontispieces (2 hand-coloured), and 3 maps (2 folding, 2 hand-coloured). Uncut in original publisher’s boards with original printed paper spine labels, spines worn and cracked, Occasional light spotting and staining, frontispiece in vol. III detached, but entirely unrestored. Provenance: Culley of Coupland Castle (inscription on flyleaf in vol. II) – Lord Kennet of the Dene (bookplates). Very rare in its original state as here.
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The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes now in Operation. Three vols.
First edition of this “classic by ‘the father of modern geology’” (Grolier/Horblit), famous for “establishing a new era in geology” (DSB), presenting the doctrine of uniformitarianism, namely, that the processes of the past must be judged by those of the present. “One of the key works in the nineteenth century encounters between science and Scripture, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) sought to explain the geological state of the modern Earth by considering the long-term effects of observable natural phenomena. Written with clarity and a dazzling intellectual passion, it is both a seminal work of modern geology and a compelling precursor to Darwinism, speculating on radical changes in climate and geography across the ages, and exploring the evidence for the progressive development of life” (Secord). “Principles still recalled Isaac Newton’s Principia and the subtitle stated clearly that it was ‘an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation’ … [Lyell’s] main source was the great compilation of the physical and topographical changes recorded within human history, published in 1822-4 by Karl von Hoff (1771-1837). He used Hoff’s data to illustrate his own view of the earth as a system of balanced antagonistic processes: erosion balanced by sedimentation, for example, and crustal elevation by crustal subsidence. A preliminary section of the book presented a 'grand new theory of climate' (Lyell, Life, I, p. 261), which interpreted long-term climatic changes as the products of an ever-changing physical geography” (ODNB). This was the work that, more than any other, prepared the way for Darwin's Origin. Darwin acknowledged that Lyell’s explanation of geological features by causes operating over immense periods of time was part of the key to his development of the theory of natural selection. “When the Beagle expedition sailed in 1831 [John] Henslow [Darwin’s mentor] presented Darwin with the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology … The second volume of Lyell’s book reached Darwin in Montevideo and his constant references to the enormous influence on his thinking of this great work are typified by a letter from him to Leonard Horner saying ‘I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brain’” (PMM). When Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin a letter in 1858 outlining an almost identical theory to his own, it was Lyell, together with Joseph Hooker, who engineered the simultaneous publication of papers by both men, and secured Darwin’s claim to the theory of ‘natural selection.’ Only two other copes in the original boards have appeared at auction, both of which were rebacked with new spine labels.
Many geologists of his day, including Cuvier and others, believed that the Earth had been shaped by cataclysmic events in the past unparalleled in modern times. Lyell argued, on the contrary, that the order of nature in the past was uniform with that in the present, and that therefore all geological phenomena should be attributed to the gradual action, over sufficient time, of modern geological processes. This hypothesis led to one of the most revolutionary scientific ideas of the nineteenth century - that the age of the earth was enormously greater than had previously been supposed. To demonstrate that gradual processes could be responsible for great changes, Lyell used an engraving of the temple at Serapis as his frontispiece. The temple had, during the course of human history, been above sea level, then for a long period partially submerged, and again was above sea level as attested by the dark bands of damage caused by waterborne life across the columns.
“’The great merit of the Principles,’ Charles Darwin once said, ‘was that it altered the whole of one’s mind, & therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet partially saw it through his eyes,’ Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology shaped Darwin’s vision of nature as he circumnavigated the globe on the Beagle and as he later created his theory of evolution … Darwin became his most enthusiastic advocate, and found the Principles immensely liberating from the moment of landing on his first tropical island during the Beagle voyage. The young naturalist used the book to develop his own causally-oriented style of interpretation, comparing the uplifted but scarcely disrupted rocks in the mid-Atlantic Cape Verde Islands with the Temple of Serapis. Later in the voyage he reinterpreted the origin of coral reefs, overturning the model that Lyell had advocated; but the style of reasoning was that of the master, who altered his next edition accordingly. When Darwin began to consider the possibility of species evolution after his return home, he did so in private dialogues with the Principles” (Secord, pp. ix & xxxvi).
The observations which led Lyell to his new geological theories were made in Sicily in 1828, towards the end of a trip to France and Italy he had begun with Roderick Murchison. “His first doubts about the necessary recentness of strata containing living species of fossils may have arisen from a bed of clay above Catania that contained many modern Mediterranean shells … Astonished at what he was finding, and doubting whether he had observed correctly, Lyell explored the interior of Sicily until at Castrogiovanni (now Enna) he found all the Tertiary strata of the Sicilian formation, from the white limestone of Lentini down through sandstones and marls to the blue clay of Syracuse, containing living species of shells with their original colors, all exposed in order in one immense escarpment. For Lyell the discovery that the white limestone, containing only casts and impressions of shells, was a very recent formation, had the force of revelation. It meant that the characteristics of a rock stratum were determined not by its geological age but by the conditions under which it was laid down, and these conditions had recurred again and again in successive geological periods. In Sicily, Lyell saw too that volcanic activity had gone on gradually and uniformly, interspersed with periods of rest, through an immense extent of time. Finally, he saw that the assemblage of shell species now living in the Mediterranean constituted a very old fauna, which had changed very little during the immense time required to deposit he stratified rocks of Sicily and to elevate them into hills of rounded and worn outline.
“Because Lyell saw in Sicily a continuity between the fauna living in the Mediterranean and its fossil ancestors preserved in the rocks, he realized that the conditions under which both lived must be analogous. Therefore conditions during past geological ages must have been essentially similar to modern conditions on the earth’s surface, and the forces which brought about geologic changes must have been the result of processes similar to those going on at the present time. Fired with such new ideas, Lyell set out for England in January 1829, determined to rewrite his book to see how far he could ‘explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by causes now in operation’ …
“Lyell returned to London on 24 February 1829, and from then until the beginning of June 1830 he wrote and saw through the press the first volume of his Principles of Geology. It was published by John Murray in July 1830 (not January, as stated in later editions of the Principles) and created an immediate sensation. In it Lyell first discussed the historical development of geology and then treated the principles of geological reasoning. He argued that the order of nature in the past was uniform with that in the present and, therefore, that the geologist should always try to explain geological phenomena by analogy with modern conditions. The greatest difficulty he had to overcome was the clear evidence for a warmer climate during past geological epochs even in high northern latitudes, such as those of Great Britain. To account for the changes in climate which had occurred between past geological epochs and the present, Lyell studied the factors which determine climate in different parts of the world at the present time. He showed how not only local climate, but even worldwide climate conditions, depend on the pattern of distribution of land and sea and would, therefore, be altered by changes in their distribution. An increase in the proportion of land near the equator, and of ocean area toward the poles, would tend to create a warmer world climate and vice versa.
“Lyell surveyed the full range of processes which at present are altering the Earth’s surface — the eroding effects of running water in streams and rivers and of waves along the sea coast, the accumulation of sediments in deltas and on the sea bottom, and the cumulative effects of earthquakes and volcanoes in elevating the land. He showed that even the largest volcanoes, such as Vesuvius and Etna, were the product of a long series of eruptions distributed through immense periods of time, and the eruptions were never greater nor more frequent than in historic times. Lyell emphasized repeatedly that the magnitude of the geological changes which had occurred during the past was not a reason to postulate extraordinary convulsions or catastrophes. The greatest changes could be accomplished by ordinary geological processes acting gradually, if they were given sufficient time …
“During 1831 he wrote the second volume, which was published in January 1832. In this volume Lyell considered the changes which had occurred in the living world through geological time. His studies on Tertiary shells had already shown him that as one proceeded from older to younger strata, the proportion of fossils belonging to extinct species declined gradually while that of living species increased. Thus, throughout the Tertiary period species of shells had become extinct, one by one, to be replaced, one by one, by new species. The continuity thus revealed in the living world, accompanied by gradual change, was in sharp distinction to the apparently abrupt changes in the forms of animal life observed in the secondary strata of France and England. Lyell pointed out that all the species of mammals living when the present assemblage of marine mollusks had become established in the sea had since become extinct. Thus the land mammals, which were subject to many more vicissitudes than marine forms, became extinct more rapidly.
“To account for extinction Lyell showed that the life of each species was dependent upon the continuance of a certain set of physical conditions in its environment. Geological processes, however, were steadily tending to alter these conditions, both locally and over wide regions. Thus the possible habitats for a species were steadily shifting and sometimes were obliterated. Lyell also showed that the life of a species was at the same time dependent upon a multitude of relationships with other species living in the same area. There was severe competition between species for living space, so that sometimes a species might become extinct simply because it could not contend successfully with others. And the extinction of one species would drag in its train the extinction of others which were dependent upon it. Similarly, the increase and spread of a successful species would force many others into extinction. Yet the geographical distribution of species showed that every species had tended to spread outward from its geographical center of origin. Lyell thus showed that the living world of plants and animals was in a state of dynamic balance and that the fluctuations of the balance of nature would themselves steadily tend to produce the extinction of species …
“In the third volume of the Principles, published in [May] 1833, Lyell attempted to answer some of the criticisms of his doctrines provoked by the first two volumes. The opening chapter is a splendid defense of the point of view to which William Whewell had already attached the name ‘uniformitarian’ … The remainder of the volume was an application of the doctrine of uniformity and the use of modern analogies to the problems of Tertiary geology. Lyell introduced his classification of Tertiary formations into four successive epochs and the terms Eocene, Miocene, and the older and newer Pliocene to designate them” (DSB).
Charles Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Forfarshire on the 14th of November 1797, on the family estate in Scotland. His father was a botanist and from his boyhood Lyell had a strong inclination for natural history, especially entomology, a taste which he cultivated at Bartley Lodge in the New Forest, to which his family had moved soon after his birth. In 1816 he entered Exeter College, Oxford, where the lectures of William Buckland first drew his attention to geology. After graduating in classics in 1819 he entered Lincoln’s Inn, and in 1825, after a delay caused by chronic weakness of the eyes, he was called to the bar. During this time he was slowly gravitating towards the life of a student of science. In 1819 he had been elected a fellow of the Linnean and Geological Societies, to which he communicated his first paper, “On a Recent Formation of Freshwater Limestone in Forfarshire”, in 1822. In 1826 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, from which in later years he received both the Copley and Royal medals; and in 1827 he finally abandoned the legal profession, and devoted himself to geology. In 1831-33 Lyell was professor of geology at King’s College, London, and delivered there a course of lectures, which became the foundation of his Elements of Geology (1838). In 1832 he married Mary, eldest daughter of Leonard Horner; she assisted in his work and became a leading hostess in metropolitan intellectual society. He was elected President of the Geological Society of London in 1835-7 and 1849-51. A great admirer of the United States, Lyell lectured extensively there, and in 1845 and 1849 he published lively descriptions of his travels in North America. Lyell was knighted in 1848, and was created a baronet in 1864. He was elected corresponding member of the French Institute and of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, and was created a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit. His health deteriorated rapidly after the death of Lady Lyell in 1873, but he continued his researches until his own death in 1875. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Lyell Medal, established in 1875 under his will, is cast in bronze and is awarded annually by the Council of the Geological Society.
The first edition of Principles of Geology was published in an edition of 1,500 copies and sold for fifteen shillings a copy. Lyell received 200 guineas for the work. The title page of Vol. 1 indicated that the work was originally intended to be published in two volumes. The first two volumes had already reached a second edition in 1833 when the third was added. Between 1830 and 1872 eleven editions of this work were published; only a few days before his death Lyell finished revising the first volume of the 12th edition.
Three volumes, 8vo, pp. xv, [1], 511; xii, 330, [2]; xxxi, [1], 398, 109, plus 4pp. publisher’s advertisements, 11 plates, including 3 engraved frontispieces (2 hand-coloured), and 3 maps (2 folding, 2 hand-coloured). Uncut in original publisher’s boards with original printed paper spine labels, spines worn and cracked, Occasional light spotting and staining, frontispiece in vol. III detached, but entirely unrestored. Provenance: Culley of Coupland Castle (inscription on flyleaf in vol. II) – Lord Kennet of the Dene (bookplates). Very rare in its original state as here.
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The Destination Freedom Special Exhibits Gallery is now open to the public! Among the exhibits are a wooden cane with names of local Civil War prisoners of war, a Bible found on the Gettysburg battlefield, medicinal bottle from the practice of Waverly’s Dr. Andrew Bedford, Waverly Grand Army of the Republic Post No. 307 Sketch […]
January 2023
Featured Featured January 22, 2023 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
The Waverly Walking Tours and Small Works Gallery Present: Gallery Talk and Exhibit of Civil War Artist James E. Taylor Sponsored by Peoples Bank and The Comm
Program at 1:00 followed by gallery visit. Ezra Hoyt Ripple was born in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania in 1842 and moved to Scranton in the 1850s to work as a druggist. After the outbreak of the Civil War, Ripple mustered into service with the 52nd Pennsylvania Infantry and was captured by rebel forces in July 1864. […]
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I read the novel All the Bright Places about four years ago, and whilst I wouldn’t say it was one of my favourite YA novels, I did enjoy it, and even shed a few tears. When I saw the trailer for this film adaptation, released today on Netflix, I was worried as the casting seemed all wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have been?
OPENING THOUGHTS:
Director Brett Haley does a solid job adapting the source material. What he does right, he does very right. The scenes of Violet and Finch falling for each other whilst exploring Indiana are almost perfect and will make you want to be young, in love, and carefree all over again.
There are a handful of small changes made to the source material, but none of which really bothered me. The place I felt it faltered compared to the book is the directing of Finch’s character. Haley makes All the Bright Places Violet’s story, rather than Violet and Finch’s story as in the source text. This does wonders for Violet, but I missed the opportunity to see Finch’s descent on screen.
Teenagers Violet and Finch find their paths cross and see a kindred spirit in each other. Embarking on a school assignment to ‘wander’ Indiana’s ‘wonders,’ the pair start to open up, heal, and fall in love.
As I already mentioned, there are a few small changes to the original story (the screenplay was co-written by original author Jennifer Niven), but for the most part it is a faithful adaptation that moves from a first person narrative to on screen easily without the use of voiceover. I do feel this is one of the limitations with Finch’s character in the film, as his chapters in the latter half of the book failed to truly translate to screen.
After watching the trailer, this was the element I was really worried about. Neither Elle Fanning nor Justice Smith would be who I would have chosen for the roles, and I’m a big fan of Justice Smith, so I was highly concerned about how he would translate to Finch. Smith’s Finch is great, quirky, oddball, and silently damaged. He doesn’t truly demonstrate the mania as seen in the novel, but large parts of that were cut from the story, so that should not detract from his performance. His chemistry with Fanning is palpable and they both charm in scenes together. The supporting cast is equally strong; a brilliant collection of young talent (including a favourite of mine from Australian soap Neighbours!) and some excellent talent such as Luke Wilson as the older parental figures.
The soundtrack and score is beautiful. I found it sending chills down my spine in the right places and bringing tears to my eyes at times. I’ve spent the last hour at my office listening to the soundtrack on Spotify and know this will now be one of my frequent rotations. Not a bad choice in the bunch, and the orchestral score is really the heart of the film. Can I give two full popcorns?
The film's design is everything you’d expect from a YA Netflix film. Lovely big houses, warm colours, and wide expanses of space. My one downfall is Finch’s house, especially in the latter half of the film where he ‘destroys’ his room. It still seemed pretty normal for me, and his closet hideout was not explored in detail at all.
"I Wasn't Worried About What Would Happen If I Lived..."
MPAA: TVMA
There are always issues adapting novels to film, as every reader has their own picture of what should be happening. There were a few minor issues I had with the adaptation, mostly in relation to Finch in the second half of the film. However, viewing All the Bright Places solely as a film, or as someone with no knowledge of the source text, it’s a well-crafted, touching and enjoyable story. It left me feeling wistful, brought a few tears to my eyes, and has me wondering where my book of quotes I wrote when I was a teenager is now…
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Specialist end-of-life care in the place that matters most: your home. We believe that access to palliative care is a human right.
Specialist care in the place you love, with the people who matter most to you.
Palliative care in Victoria
We are challenging and advocating for an integrated care approach for all Australians in the health, community and aged care sectors. Whether at home or facilities based, we work to provide access to quality in-home care.
While we don't currently provide services in your area, we are committed to ensuring that people have access to the right information regarding their palliative care options where and when they need it.
We have compiled a list of considerations that we believe are important for you when seeking care. We hope this helps you on your care journey and as we grow and expand, so will our ability to provide more choice for quality home-based care in your area.
Considering palliative care
Your palliative care services should be centred around what's important to you and help you achieve the best quality of life possible. Anyone who has a life-limiting condition will go through a tough journey - as will their family and loved ones, so you will want to ensure you have services that incorporate care for your health and spirituality, as well as providing a support system for you and your family.
Palliative care at home will include regular visits to support your decision-making in relation to your care, promote wellbeing, manage any troubling symptoms and help you and your family to focus on what's important to you all.
Palliative care is about more than just your health care needs. Your team should consist of dedicated nurses, doctors, care aides, social workers and spiritual care workers who provide kind, supportive holistic care.
Your services need to be all about you. It's important to know that palliative care recognises the right of the person with the illness to make decisions about their treatment. You will want a provider who can enable this care and assist you to be as comfortable as you can be, treating you in your home or facilitating transfer to hospital or a palliative care unit if needed or if that's your choice. It’s important that you and your family are well informed and supported.
Quality network of care
Your care will be coordinated by your provider and other health professionals and community services to ensure you receive a quality network of care. You may also require support to help you plan for the time when you may not be able to make decisions for yourself, including guidance on developing Advance Care Planning; Enduring Powers of Attorney and Guardianship. Your family will also need ongoing support systems through the entire process.
If you are seeking care and/or support, or need to access this service, you can contact your GP, or our experienced health and care navigators are here to assist you.
Palliative Care patients are generally referred to this type of care by their specialist, health professional or GP and eligibility is based on specific needs and prognosis, cultural and social factors.
If you would like to know more about palliative care and what is available, speak to your GP.
Palliative care in New South Wales
Our palliative care service is focused on what's important to you, helping you achieve the best quality of life possible. We understand that when someone has a life-limiting condition, it can be tough on family and loved ones, so our service includes care for your health as well as providing a support system for you and your family.
Our aim is to assist you in your own home with regular visits to support your decision-making in relation to your care, promote wellbeing, manage any troubling symptoms and help you and your family to focus on what's important to you all.
A holistic care team
Palliative care is about more than just your health care needs. That's why our team consists of dedicated nurses, doctors, care aides, social workers and spiritual care workers who provide kind, supportive holistic care.
We design our services around you. It's important to know that palliative care recognises the right of the person with the illness to make decisions about their treatment. We aim to enable this care and assist you to be as comfortable as you can be, treating you in your home or facilitating transfer to hospital or a palliative care unit if needed or if that's your choice. We will work with you and your family to ensure that you are well informed and supported.
Support for you and your family
We work closely with other health professionals and community services to ensure you receive a quality network of care. We also offer support to help you plan for the time when you may not be able to make decisions for yourself, including guidance on developing Advance Care Planning; Enduring Powers of Attorney and Guardianship. We help to build ongoing support systems for your family.
Who is eligible?
This service is available for people who have been diagnosed with a life-limiting condition.
What is the cost?
This is a free service, funded by the New South Wales government.
Getting referred
Referrals for our Western Sydney service can be made by a healthcare professional, or you can refer yourself, however, we will need information from your doctor to support this.
Palliative care in Queensland
Palliative care in Queensland
Silver Chain is a national leader in providing home-based palliative care to over 6,000 Australians every year. We are dedicated to helping you achieve the best quality of life possible in the comfort of your home.
Our services provide you with consistent care that promotes your wellbeing, helps you manage symptoms, supports your decision-making and helps you and your family to focus on what's important to you all.
We understand that when someone has a life-limiting condition, it can be hard on family and loved ones. That’s why our service includes care for your health as well as providing a support system for you and your family.
A holistic care team
Palliative care is more than just your health care needs. Our specialist team consists of dedicated nurses, doctors, care aides, social workers and spiritual carers who work together to provide you with supportive, holistic 24/7 care. Our approach ensures that every part of your wellbeing is understood and looked after respectfully, including not only your medical care and physical symptoms, but also your mental health and spiritual concerns.
We recognise every person’s right to have choice and control over their treatment. Our services are designed around you. We aim to assist you to be as comfortable as you can be and deliver care wherever you need: whether it’s at home, transferring to hospital or a palliative care unit.
Through this process we work with you and your family to ensure that you are well informed and supported.
Support for you and your family
Our team can help to minimise the physical and emotional stress that you, your family and loved ones may experience. By working closely with other health professionals and community services we ensure you receive a quality network of complete care. We can help you plan for a time when you may not be able to make decisions for yourself, including guidance on Advance Care Planning, Enduring Powers of Attorney and Guardianship.
We help to build ongoing support systems for your family now and for the future.
Palliative Care patients are referred to this type of care by their specialist, health professional or GP and eligibility is based on specific needs and prognosis, cultural and social factors.
What is the cost?
This is a free service, funded by the Queensland government.
Referrals for our Queensland service can be made by a healthcare professional, or you can refer yourself, however, we will need information from your doctor to support this.
Palliative care in South Australia
Our palliative care service is focused on what's important to you, helping you achieve the best quality of life possible. We understand that when someone has a life-limiting condition, it can be tough on family and loved ones, so our service includes care for your health as well as providing a support system for you and your family.
Our aim is to assist you in your own home with regular visits to support your decision-making in relation to your care, promote wellbeing, manage any troubling symptoms and help you and your family to focus on what's important to you all.
A holistic care team
Palliative care is about more than just your health care needs. That's why our team consists of dedicated nurses, doctors, care aides, social workers and spiritual care workers who provide kind, supportive holistic care.
We design our services around you. It's important to know that palliative care recognises the right of the person with the illness to make decisions about their treatment. We aim to enable this care and assist you to be as comfortable as you can be, treating you in your home or facilitating transfer to hospital or a palliative care unit if needed or if that's your choice. We will work with you and your family to ensure that you are well informed and supported.
Support for you and your family
We work closely with other health professionals and community services to ensure you receive a quality network of care. We also offer support to help you plan for the time when you may not be able to make decisions for yourself, including guidance on developing Advance Care Planning; Enduring Powers of Attorney and Guardianship. We help to build ongoing support systems for your family.
Who is eligible?
This service is available for people who live in the Adelaide metropolitan area and have been diagnosed with a life-limiting condition.
What is the cost?
This is a free service, funded by the South Australian government.
Getting referred
You can be referred to this service by the SA Health Metropolitan Referral Unit.
Palliative care in Western Australia
Our palliative care service is focused on what's important to you, helping you achieve the best quality of life possible. We understand that when someone has a life-limiting condition, it can be tough on family and loved ones, so our service includes care for your health as well as providing a support system for you and your family.
Our aim is to assist you in your own home with regular visits to support your decision-making in relation to your care, promote wellbeing, manage any troubling symptoms and help you and your family to focus on what's important to you all.
A holistic care team
Palliative care is about more than just your health care needs. That's why our team consists of dedicated nurses, doctors, care aides, social workers and spiritual care workers who provide kind, supportive holistic care.
We design our services around you. It's important to know that palliative care recognises the right of the person with the illness to make decisions about their treatment. We aim to enable this care and assist you to be as comfortable as you can be, treating you in your home or facilitating transfer to hospital or a palliative care unit if needed or if that's your choice. We will work with you and your family to ensure that you are well informed and supported.
Support for you and your family
We work closely with other health professionals and community services to ensure you receive a quality network of care. We also offer support to help you plan for the time when you may not be able to make decisions for yourself, including guidance on developing Advance Care Planning; Enduring Powers of Attorney and Guardianship. We help to build ongoing support systems for your family.
Who is eligible?
This service is available for people who live in the Perth metropolitan area and have been diagnosed with a life-limiting condition where there are symptoms that cannot be managed by their existing health care supports and they have been referred by a medical practitioner.
What is the cost?
This is a free service, funded by the Western Australian government.
Getting referred
Your GP or specialist can refer you to this service. All referrals are assessed for eligibility.
South Australia
Queensland
New South Wales
Our strategy Our strategy
Need help understanding government programs or funding? Need help understanding government programs or funding?
We help make it easy to understand. You may be eligible for one of the following funding options:
Palliative care
If you would like more information on what is available, find out how we can help.
We help make it easy to understand. You may be eligible for one of the following funding options:
Palliative care
If you would like more information on what is available, find out how we can help.
How we can help
How we can help
We're ready to answer your questions
Silverchain Group acknowledges the Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
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After the third day of Palo Alto High School’s Spirit Week, rankings remain unchanged with seniors leading at 7977 points, juniors at 6669, freshmen at 6014, and sophomores at 5383, with seniors winning the day’s rally game, Giant Cornhole.
At the end of an unconventional day of PSATs, no classes, and a double PRIME session, hundreds of colorfully clad students crowded the bleachers Wednesday to cheer for their grade as part of the annual school Spirit Week. For this rally, students dressed up in their grade’s respective colors and competed in a game of Giant Cornhole.
After nearly two years without a Spirit Week at Palo Alto High School due to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, Principal Brent Kline said he enjoyed watching the school spirit at Wednesday’s rally.
“It [the best part of Spirit Week] is seeing everyone together, that’s it for me,” Kline said.
Riding a victory over the sophomores from Tuesday’s Paly trivia competition, the freshmen remained optimistic about their chances on Wednesday.
“I’m surprised [about beating the sophomores],” freshman Chantal Herath said. “I didn’t think we’d do that. I hope we can keep our position above the sophomores.”
According to sophomore Izzy Stone, the unprecedented third-place victory of the freshmen could be attributed to the sophomores’ lack of Spirit Week experience.
“It’s not that surprising, because none of us had any of this last year,” Stone said.
The freshmen held their dominance, pulling ahead of the sophomore class again in Wednesday’s Giant Cornhole game. However, not all sophomores were deterred by their loss.
“We [sophomores] had a lot more spirit than normal and I think we really showed what we can do,” sophomore Clare Antonow said.
In the green sea of the senior stands, many were enjoying their success in Spirit Week games. The seniors have won every game this week so far and remain confident in their chances, as they have historically triumphed over all grades during Spirit Week.
“Today’s rally was very spirited,” senior Cynthia Zhang said. “There was a lot of jumping and yelling. I’m proud that seniors won. It’s our last year here, so I want to make the most of it.”
Some seniors dismissed the juniors altogether as competitors.
“They [the juniors] are not competition for us,” senior Isabella Jones said.
Associated Student Body President Johannah Seah said she worried the game’s difficulty affected the overall mood.
“It might’ve been a bit discouraging for people, probably not as much hype as the other games,” Seah said.
Overall, though, Seah was pleased with the turnout, especially for an after-school rally, where students are able to leave school altogether and not attend the rally if they choose, as attendance is not taken.
Although the sophomores may trail the freshmen in total points, they broke their losing streak when they tied with the sophomores in the Giant Cornhole competition, although they finished ahead of the juniors. Competitors tried to throw pillows into a hole on a large tarp held up by other students.
“I think considering the first few days it [a sophomore victory] seems pretty unlikely, but after today I’m pretty confident in us,” Antonow said.
Freshmen and sophomores may have tied today’s game, but freshman maintained their lead over sophomores in total points gained. Freshman Joshua Wang said he is enjoying his grade’s success.
“It feels pretty nice [to beat the sophomores],” Wang said. “It was nice to see us moving up.”
The freshmen and sophomores will face off again at the Friday rally. If the sophomores remain in fourth place, they will become the first Paly class of sophomores to score behind the freshmen in over a decade, according to the ASB website.
freshmen
school spirit
Spirit Week
Madison Abbassi, Senior Staff Writer
Madison Abbassi (Class of 2022) joined The Paly Voice her junior year, and in her free time, she likes going for swims, making way too many Spotify playlists,...
Daniel Garepis-Holland (Class of 2023) joined the Voice his sophomore year and likes to hang out with friends, drink boba, and watch Arsenal play.
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Happy Thanksgiving! We are thankful for you, our customers. Elenteny Imports is closed Thursday, November 24th & Friday, November 25th. Here is what some of our clients are drinking with their […]
Weekly Update Week 46: Nov 14th – 18th
Posted on November 18, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
Operations Update: Next week is Thanksgiving! We’ll be celebrating with our friends and families and closed Thursday, November 24th and Friday, November 25th. Wishing you the best during this busy […]
Weekly Update: Week 45: November 7th- 11th
Posted on November 15, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
Operations Update: Upcoming CBMA Webinar: There will be changes in the CBMA program in 2023 so we will be conducting a webinar on Wednesday, November 16th at 10 AM EST. To […]
November Newsletter
Posted on November 3, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
We’ve woven this week’s update into the monthly newsletter so you can get all your import news in a single click. Operations Update Elenteny Webinars: We recently held Webinars to spotlight a […]
Weekly Update Week 43: Oct 24th – 28th
Posted on November 3, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
Operations Update: Freight Rates Outlook: Many of you will have seen the headlines outlining significant drops in the global freight rates. For example, Transpacific West Coast spot rates have dropped to […]
Weekly Update Week 42: Oct 17th – 21st
Posted on October 27, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
Operations Update: FDA Webinar : Previously, we alerted you that the FDA Renewal 2022 Deadline 2022 was approaching. THe FDA renewal period for 2022 began on October 1, 2022. […]
Weekly Update Week 41: Oct 10th – 14th
Posted on October 12, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
Operations Update: USA Rail Union Rejects Tentative Agreement: The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way (BMWED) rail union has voted down the tentative rail labor agreement brokered last month. So far, four […]
October Newsletter
Posted on October 6, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
We’ve woven this week’s update into the monthly newsletter so you can get all your import news in a single click. Operations Update Koverly/Elenteny Webinar: A couple of weeks ago we announced […]
Weekly Update: Week 40: September 26th-30th
Posted on October 6, 2022
Posted by Tara Malone
Operations Update: Warehouse Update: A number of our warehouse partners are experiencing delays inbounding inventory due to inventory surges and staffing shortages. Industry wide, 67% of container detentions are driven by […]
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In a YouTube video posted Monday morning, Illinois Democratic Rep. Tammy Duckworth officially announced that she is running for the United States Senate against incumbent GOP Senator Mark Kirk.
"I'm running for the United States Senate in 2016 because it's time for Washington to be held accountable and put Illinois' families and communities first," Duckworth says in the two-minute video, which highlights her humble upbringing and her personal background as a wife, a mother and a combat veteran.
"If you elect me as Illinois' senator I will fight my heart out to represent you with honor and integrity."
Here's the announcement:
I'd like to tell you a little about myself.
I'm the daughter of a Marine, a wife, a new mom and a combat veteran.
When I was in High School, my dad lost his job at 55 and struggled with unemployment.
The bottom fell out for us. For a time, food stamps kept my brother and me from going hungry.
Graduating from college was a challenge, but I made it with help of loans, Pell grants and lots of waitressing.
That's why I've always believed that if you don't give up on yourself -- our nation should never give up on you either.
Bryan and I met when we were both cadets in ROTC.
Later, I was given the opportunity to become a Blackhawk helicopter pilot and deployed to Iraq.
In 2004, while flying a combat mission near Bagdad, an RPG tore through our cockpit taking my legs and part of my arm with it.
The only reason I made it home was because of the heroism of my courageous buddies who risked their lives to save mine.
I view my time now as a bonus, and that has allowed me speak up without fear.
So when Congress failed to pass a budget, I sponsored the no budget no pay act and led by example -- returning more than ten thousand dollars of my own pay to taxpayers and cutting a over a hundred thousand from my office budget.
I'm running for the United States Senate in 2016 because it's time for Washington to be held accountable and to put Illinois' families and communities first.
I believe that together we can build an America this is strong from the ground up.
We need more Pre-K.
We need college loans to be affordable.
And the engines of Illinois' economy are small businesses and the middle-class -- I believe we need tax cuts for them for a change.
I look forward to visiting your community soon, and if you elect me as Illinois’s Senator, I will fight my heart out to represent you with honor and integrity.
Thank you.
Duckworth is a former Blackhawk pilot who lost her legs and part of an arm while fighting for the U.S. in Iraq. She previously worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs and was elected to Congress in 2010.
For the record, here's my favorite Tammy Duckworth moment: Tammy Duckworth is not taking your sh*t.
More here: Rep. Tammy Duckworth announces Senate bid: 'I will fight my heart out to represent you with honor and integrity'
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The simple act of payment has undergone a myriad of changes over the years, taking us on a journey from cash-based societies to digital commerce dominance. We decided to look back at this evolution with Eddie Black, Product Introduction Manager at Ingenico. Eddie will be a familiar face (and voice) to many in the UK payments industry. We talked about his forty years in payment and the different innovations he’s witnessed, as well as his predictions for the future…
So, Eddie, take us right back to the beginning. What brought you to the world of payments, and what was the technology being used at the time?
I joined Fortronic (later bought by Ingenico in 1999) as an electronic design engineer straight from Edinburgh University in 1983, during the halcyon days of Silicon Glen. I initially worked on the electronic design of bank teller terminals.
Back then, card payments were processed on mechanical imprinters with three ply stationery. Transactions were acquired by taking payment slips to your local bank branch, and the cheque book was king. The first payment terminals started to arrive in 1985 with petrol stations proving a key market due to their association with fuel cards.
From your engineer’s perspective, what has been the key evolution for payment terminals?
For me, one of the most important changes has been processing speed and security. My first involvement with payment terminals was in the mid-eighties with the F75, a large, power hungry product by today’s standards, where the microprocessor was clocked at 4 MHz and the memory was measured in kilo bytes. The card went through a magnetic stripe reader and communication was by dial up modem.
Today, payment terminal microprocessors are clocked in excess of 1 GHz (250 times faster) and memory is measured in Giga bytes (10,000 times larger). These are highly secure devices with chip cards (EMV) providing secure card holder authentication, and encryption algorithms delivering the secure communication of transaction data. Not only this, but today’s terminals can be handheld, and always connected thanks to wireless communications.
How far technology has come - truly embracing Moore’s law!1
Which product or solution have you most enjoyed introducing to customers?
There have been three stand out solutions over the years. Firstly, the F75 – this was Fortronic’s first payment terminal and holds a special significance as I did not realise at the time just how much it would shape the rest of my career.
Secondly, the terminal that has given me most pleasure was the TT41 (transaction terminal, fourth generation, version one). This was the first product where I had overall control of the hardware product design rather than just the electronics. It also provided the opportunity to work closely with our main customers to deliver a solution to meet their needs. In addition, I was part of the team that delivered two design patents for the product.
Finally, I’d select the iPP350 retail PIN Pad which was deployed by many customers including most of the UK tier one retailers. In addition to the hardware, I managed the retail PIN Pad application (RAM) roadmap, an application that has grown and is now deployed by many customers in different countries.
In the meantime, the world of payments doesn’t stand still and most recently I have worked on the introduction of the Android based DX8000 for the UK market, working closely with the RNIB to deliver a fully inclusive payment solution.
Android is having a big impact on the payments market, but it’s not the first shift. What other big transformational changes have you witnessed?
The first key change was the deployment of terminal management systems to deliver merchant configuration data and software updates. Merchant self-install was a huge chan that were plugged into the terminal. If the software needed to be updated, an engineer would go to the site, unplug the memory chips and put in new ones. The merchant configuration was delivered by swiping a set of magnetic cards on the terminal to program merchant details and application behaviour, providing the first example of engineer installation.
Today, merchants perform the installation themselves. The terminal connects over IP to the terminal management and downloads any software updates and relevant merchant configuration. The functionalities of self-install will continue to expand through our Terminal as a Service offering.
The second innovation that brought huge change was the introduction of radio communications. The first terminals to use this technology were countertop based due to their size, and communication was through an analogue modem over the wires of the PSTN. Later, the availability of Bluetooth, then GSM / GPRS / 3G and 4G and finally Wi-Fi, coupled with rechargeable battery technology, really opened up the opportunities for mobile terminals.
Most recently, contactless payments have brought about huge changes in consumer behaviour. ‘Tap & Go’ originally came to life in the UK during the London Olympics and has continued to grow at pace. The increased role of contactless during the pandemic saw the technology take on even more significance by providing ‘a safe way to pay’, something none of us anticipated would be necessary. The technology has also moved onto devices emulating contactless cards, such as mobile phones, wrist bands, rings, and other wearables.
When you began your career, did you imagine that one day we would be talking about paying for goods on a digital payment terminal in the metaverse?
Absolutely not. There were no PCs back then, far less the internet. Computers were ‘main frames’ with visual display units (VDU) and removable memory was “floppy” with a capacity of 100Kb. The cloud was where the rain fell from to make the whisky! Now we have cloud computing, virtual reality headsets and crypto currencies. It will be interesting to see how this virtual world develops.
Putting the metaverse to one side, what else do you think the future holds for payment?
The fundamentals of payment have not changed; there is a merchant and a consumer performing a transaction that is routed via an acquirer to the card issuer for settlement. What is changing is the technology and new disruptive players coming to market with innovative ideas. A perfect example of this is the smart phone which for many now acts as a digital wallet. Will the growth of artificial intelligence expand its role and provide consumers with a wider digital shopping experience?
Security will continue to be an important topic, but the PIN code will come under threat from biometric customer verification such as facial and palm recognition. Facial recognition is a contactless verification that is currently under trial with the card schemes who are leveraging the existing customer trust in the technology which unlocks their smart phone.
Another important innovation area will be alternative payment schemes which will grow outside of the traditional card schemes, for example through QR based payments as new players look to gain market share. Will other technologies such as crypto currencies, the IoT, etc. find their way into day-today transactions? Only time will tell.
What is clear, is these innovations will drive demand for payments ‘anytime, anywhere’ with a consistent secure experience in an ecologically sustainable way. And in such a complex ecosystem, no one entity will be able to service the market themselves, leading to new partnerships and further evolutions in payments.
One thing’s for sure, the next forty years will be just as interesting!
Author
Solutions Manager and New Product Introduction Manager for Terminals, Solutions and Services at Ingenico
Eddie Black is a Solutions Manager and New Product Introduction Manager with 40 years’ experience in the payments industry. Eddie’s expertise lies in all aspects of hardware solution delivery. He also has extensive experience in delivering PIN entry device software in multi lane retail environments and is focused on delivering solutions that provide value to customers.
29 Nov 22
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20 Sep 22
Will the ‘Terminal as a Service’ model remain relevant in the digital world?
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Is payment technology the key to unlocking small business opportunities for ISVs?
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Forging a path through complexity – is there a magic recipe for business growth?
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30 Aug 22
What is the Metaverse, and how is it changing payment?
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ALTERNATIVE IDEAS - Helping retailers to cash in on the increasing number of payment methods available around the world.
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Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. On Halloween, a pair of twins were born from embryos that had been frozen for 30 years. That's according to CNN. This makes them the longest frozen embryos ever. When the parents went to the donation center, they asked for the embryos that had been waiting the longest. Experts say that embryos can be frozen almost indefinitely as long as they can be stored in an environment nearly 200 degrees below zero. The more you know. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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I know that not everyone likes to read lengthy reviews so for those who don’t here’s a summary of everything you need to know about pre Jym pre-workout.
Pros:
Good experience from numerous people
The ingredients aren’t just randomly thrown together and work well with each other
Ingredients such as Citrulline Malate have a higher dosage than some other pre-workouts
Inclusion of ingredients such as Creatine and BCAAs which means you don’t need to take them separately
Cons:
1 serving has 80 calories which are high in the world of pre-workouts
The price is on the moderate/high side
The pre-workouts we use:
Pre Jym pre-workout – how does it work?
Pre Jym pre-workout states some key points that show why their pre-workout is one of the best, if not the best on the market. Let’s go through them and see whether or not these claims stand their ground.
No bs, just science
This statement holds its ground. If a company is not transparent with the ingredients they use my advice would be to run as far from it as possible.
While doing research many people confirm that pre jym pre-workout consumption resulted in having better performance, which I can also confirm from my experience.
Growth is one of those things that every supplement claims to achieve and 99% of them do. I’m not going to go into great depth regarding this since it is more often than not a subjective thing since everyone can react differently to supplements.
The consumption of the product is rather simple. Just like every pre-workout, you should take a serving of pre jym pre-workout about 30 minutes before you start your workout.
Due to the fact of everyone reacting differently to supplements you might need to test a couple of variations before deciding which works best for you.
Although caffeine and some other ingredients may start working sooner, they will also last longer.
If you want to “double scoop” the product because you are planning an intense workout session you can. The safe way of doing this would be by first taking one scoop of the product and later on taking another one.
I’m sure some of you had troubles with certain pre-workouts not working for you or leaving unwanted side effects. To make sure we minimize the chances of that occurring we’ll go through the main ingredients and look at what they do and whether or not they are safe/beneficial for you.
As far as the main ingredients go, they are as following:
BCAA-s (6000mg) – they improve muscle retention, endurance, better focus, and promote fat loss.
L-CITRULLINE DL-MALATE (6000mg) – citrulline gets converted by the user’s kidneys into L-Arginine which is an amino acid that boosts your nitric oxide levels resulting in your blood vessels expanding and therefore letting more blood flow through them. The 6000mg seems to be the sweet spot for the Citrulline and that is exactly what pre jym pre-workout offers in each serving.
Caffeine (300mg) – this is an ingredient we are all familiar with. It stimulates us by giving us more energy, awareness, and power output. Some people even use coffee as a pre-workout substitute.
Although coffee can stimulate your senses and give you a better workout pre-workout supplements have other benefits.
TAURINE (1g) – taurine is yet another popular ingredient. If you ever looked at an energy drink ingredient list you definitely noticed this ingredient. There it is used as a way to prevent sudden energy spikes led by crashes. It is also an osmotic agent which means it helps with drawing water into cells.
This is important in the recovery phase as cells with more water in them result in better anabolism and recovery.
Beetroot extract (500mg) – beetroot is known for enhancing anaerobic performance which translates to you having more endurance meaning you can perform better and longer in the gym or any other setting you might find yourself in.
Together with Citrulline Malate, this ingredient will help your blood vessels expand resulting in more blood flow by boosting your nitric oxide levels.
Creatine Monohydrate(2g) – as well as caffeine and taurine this ingredient is well known to many people. It is often taken by itself. I personally use it on a daily basis. Although it can be found in meat and fish the process of cooking it removes most of it.
For that reason, we take creatine powder by itself or in a combination such as a pre-workout.
The benefits of creatine are the increase of strength and power output during resistance exercise and are also known for improving anaerobic running capacity just like beetroot. Another benefit is an increase in lean mass.
One thing about creatine is that you must drink a lot of water when consuming it as stomach cramping can occur when not enough water is consumed.
Acetyl-L-Carnitine (600mg) – this ingredient’s job is to burn fat, as well as lowering fatigue levels and muscle damage, although lowering the muscle damage is slight.
So in short its job here is mainly to help you burn more fat by increasing your energy levels and in return lead you to being more active.
Betaine (1.5g) – combines well with beetroot. This ingredient results in cell hydration and better pumps during your workout.
Tyrosine (1.5g) – this ingredient helps with keeping you in good mood, as well as keeping your general mental wellbeing. The only downside is that it seems like the amount of Tyrosine in each serving is on the lower side.
Alpha GPC (150mg) – some small case studies have shown that Alpha GPC can increase maximum power and velocity, as well as increasing lower body force.
Toothed clubmoss extract (50mcg) – this ingredient may help you with improving your brain in a way so it can think well or better.
Black pepper extract (5mg) – for the last ingredient we have yet another familiar one. Most of you have encountered black pepper as a spice used in food to enhance its taste.
Here it’s used for piperine, a bioactive compound that has shown to help with nausea, inflammations, and headaches.
Side effects
Although some people may experience side effects when taking pre-workouts all the dosages in pre jym pre-workout are safe and the only thing that may concern a few people are the lower dosage in Tyrosine, although when looking at the grand scale of things it’s not the end of the world.
On the other hand, if you are allergic to any of the mentioned ingredients you should consult with your doctor before taking this pre-workout. Otherwise, this product is completely safe and gets you generally great results.
Some people may be concerned about the caffeine, this as well is dosed safely so it’s nothing to worry about.
Price and where to buy
The price of this product is $38 – $40 plus shipping for 1 package of 20 servings.
With some quick math, we come to the calculation of $1.9 – $2 per without the shipping being taken into consideration.
This is on the higher side regarding bang for your buck and I would personally go for 4 Gauge pre-workout instead.
As to where you can buy this product, well it’s available on most fitness-oriented shops, as well as Amazon and the official site. This is not so great for you since this means the company uses middlemen and therefore the product costs more than it otherwise would.
Pre jym pre-workout proves to be a good pre-workout. Only falling short to 4 gauge and a few other pre-workouts that you can find in our Top 3 Pre-Workouts of 2021. Never the less it’s not a product you are going to buy and instantly regret.
The pre-workout seems to be well-liked by its users and the numerous taste options are a bonus. When you take into consideration how much you pay per serving you could find a cheaper and better alternative such as 4 gauge pre-workout.
It appears that there aren’t any side effects excluding allergic reactions in some individuals. As far as I’m concerned I would rank this product into the top 10 pre-workouts you could buy today.
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It’s not easy to leave him. Whoever said that walking away was the easiest thing to do when love dies has never been in this situation.
When you met him, you were mesmerized by him. Even though you thought that he was a dork and always said the stupidest things, you still fell for him.
You fell for him and you were so impatient to call him yours. You wanted to be his as well.
The two of you were floating on cloud nine for such a long time that you weren’t even aware of the moment everything went downhill. I would guess that it started gradually. It wasn’t all at once.
It didn’t just become extremely insufferable to be around him overnight. Actually, you ignored the things that he did and said in favor of feeling needed, protected, and loved (from time to time).
At one point in the relationship, you started seeing the ways he was mistreating you. You became more and more aware of things he did that caused you pain and misery.
Thinking back on it, when was the last time he texted you first? Are you always the one to text him, call him, and initiate any type of contact?
When was the last time he made an effort to see if you were doing alright?
It seems like such a minuscule thing to care about. Who cares if you’re always texting him?
But that doesn’t change the fact that it still makes you feel completely brushed aside. You feel like you’re not important enough to him that he’d think about you during the day.
Do you remember that time when you felt completely exposed when his friends made an effort to make you feel small and stupid? His friends made it a point to make you feel like less just because your opinion didn’t suit them?
This is probably a very specific situation that I’m talking about, but you can remember that time he didn’t stick up for you. There was that one moment that will forever be engraved in your brain.
He didn’t stand up for you. He didn’t protect you. And when you asked him about it, he brushed it off as you being too emotional.
This wasn’t the first time he brushed your emotions aside, was it? He always calls you dramatic and overly sensitive. He never validates your feelings or makes sure you feel warm and welcome.
But you hold on to him. You hold on to the good times. The times he’d buy you flowers, take you out on dates. The times he’d whisper sweet nothings in your ear.
You hold on to the potential he shows you from time to time. You really do see the things that he’s capable of giving you. His love and attention are sweet and caring – when you do get some.
The issue with that is that it’s a rarity. You’re left to wonder, under the hot shower, if love has always meant to be like this. If love is truly supposed to be with someone who puts minimum effort into loving you and keeping you happy.
You’re making one excuse after another for this man because you believe that one day he’ll change. You see his potential! So why won’t he use it?
Isn’t that just so extremely frustrating?
It frustrates you that he puts you on the bottom of his priority list. Everything seems to be more important to him than you are.
This includes his friends, his job, his video games – even just scrolling through social media seems more important to him than talking to you.
So how does that translate in your head? You feel unloved and unmotivated, so much so that you don’t even want to bring up these problems anymore.
But they still seem too small for you to break up with him. You believe that he’s capable of change at one point, so you stay and you wait.
Because of that, I’m here to tell you: Leave him! This is not as good as love can get!
Love isn’t supposed to make you doubt him or yourself. Love isn’t supposed to make you feel this insecure and like you’re losing your mind. I can promise you that!
I’m telling you right now that there is so much more to love than the mediocre things that he considers to be acts of kindness and affection.
You don’t want to leave him because you think that there’s potential? Well, that’s why so many women get stuck waiting for the wrong man to meet their needs. They see that he could do this right if he just put a little bit more effort into it.
But when they say “if he wanted to, he would,” it’s the complete truth. No one should have to waste their time on an incomplete person who refuses to meet their full potential. If he wanted to, he’d work on himself to become the man you’ll love for the rest of your life.
Leave him because there’s always someone out there who will treat you like the queen you are. But you first have to make space in your heart to meet this new someone who will know how to treat you right.
I know that it’s hard to leave someone you’ve known for so long. It’s hard to leave the man you’ve imagined beside you for the rest of your life.
But there’s more to love than neglect and emotional manipulation. There’s more to love than constant fights and a pile of insecurities. Love isn’t about guessing and overthinking.
When someone loves you, they’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy and to deserve you in their lives. There is a man you’ll meet one day who won’t hesitate a second in making you feel like the most special woman in this world.
Just because this man you’re with doesn’t know how to love you properly, doesn’t mean that no one ever will. So don’t waste your time on a guy who obviously can’t realize your importance.
That man you’re dating right now – the man you hope will treat you right one day – will never meet that potential you see in him. But someone else out there is already prepared and ready to meet you.
So leave him. There’s so much more to love than this. This is not as good as love can get.
There’s better for you out there.
By Author Ashley Knight
Posted on Last updated: December 22, 2021
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Think Aloud is a destination where you’ll find stories about every step you, as a woman, take. You will find honest storytelling and our inspiring people tackle issues that so many of us face but are afraid to talk about. Our vision is to become a supportive community where you’ll feel that there’s someone out there who gets you, supports you in creating and keeping strong bonds between your families and friends. We share subjects that impact your daily life and we primarily discuss and write about all things related to relationships, breakups, mental health, astrology and much more.
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Michael Camber is the #1 selling real estate salesperson in King West and Liberty Village. Since 2003 he has been helping his clients achieve all of their real estate objectives.
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21:09 09 May 20
We recently worked with Michael to sell our condo in Liberty Village. We cannot say enough about the experience and would highly recommend Michael to anyone looking to purchase or sell a condo in the King West area. Michael is very knowledgeable about the GTA condo market and was quick to provide us with comparative prices to ensure our condo was priced competitively. His team did a fantastic job marketing the property. The online photos and accompanying brochures highlighted all the features of the property which helped generate interest. Moreover, Michael is compassionate, courteous, patient, and reliable. He was quick to reply whenever we had questions and our tenants appreciated his team’s effort to accommodate their schedules when booking showings. In the end, we had multiple offers and sold the property for over 110% of asking. We definitely attest our success with the sale to the work Michael did preparing the property and during the offer night! If you are looking for a downtown realtor specializing in condo purchases and sales, we would encourage you to contact Michael Chamber.
21:08 09 May 20
Michael is an excellent realtor and I would highly recommend him to anyone looking to purchase or sell a condo in the King West area. He is extremely knowledgeable about the GTA condo market and works efficiently and diligently for his clients. I recently used Michael to sell my condo in Liberty Village and in less than 5 days, it sold for over 110% of the asking price. I cannot thank Michael enough for all he did-marketing the property and scheduling showings-to ensure I received top dollar for the property. If you are looking for an experienced, professional, client focused realtor, I would encourage you to contact Michael Camber.
Sara was absolutely amazing to work with, she is so efficient and communicated with us every step of the way so we knew what was going on at all times. She was very honest which made us feel very reassured with things. We highly recommend working with Sara, I promise you wont be disappointed
Amanda Buckstein was an amazing counterpart throughout our entire process. We were in need of a rental unit ASAP and she delivered in every possible way. From finding units within our price range and criteria (parking...), to replacing units on our list as quickly as they had been rented out. The speed at which she works, her responsiveness, and overall willingness to help played a pivotal role in making what could've been a pull-your-hair-out level of stress feel like something much more manageable. Highly recommend Amanda to anyone looking to buy, sell, or rent in the Toronto area.
I worked with Sara Camber to purchase my first home in Liberty Village. I knew exactly what I wanted and she made it happen - I got my dream home. She was excellent to work with, very accommodating, knowledgeable and lovely. I highly recommend her and the Michael Camber Real Estate Group for any real estate needs. Their team offers a full service approach that translates into a truly informative and successful real estate experience for their clients.
Working with Sara was a great experience. I'm one of those people that needs everything planned and precise when it come to big changes. I felt my concerns and questions were all taken care of while searching for a new place to move, especially as I'd not been planning to on such short notice. I really appreciated how available everyone from the team was to answer my questions and find me a place that was ideal for my needs!
I worked with Amanda to find a place to rent in Liberty Village and she was a pleasure to work with. She was quick to respond to any questions I had and took the time to show me a bunch of places before finalizing on the place I ended up getting.
23:50 03 Dec 19
I cannot say enough great things about Michael Camber. I had followed his sales for a year, and was so impressed with the marketing. When my tenants moved out, he was the first person I contacted to sell my condo in Liberty Village. The unit was really one of a kind, and would also appeal to a slice of the market. Michael was well aware of it, and had experience with it already. Him and his team staged it so beautifully, accenting the highlights and executed amazing marketing. He kept me up to date on what was going on with the perfect amount of timely details. He makes you feel like you are his only client. It was hectic time for me personally, with work, school, new job and wedding out of town when the tenants moved out - and Michael took care of everything while I was away. Everything went so smoothly. I could go on and on about how easy, smoothly, and professionally the whole process was. Not to mention I really needed to close before the new year - Michael delivered on everything, and thrilled with the price we got too. I have bought and sold and rented with other realtors before, but none compare to the experience I had with Michael. Turn key, Drama free, Stress free, and better than expected results. If I could give 10 stars, I would. Thank you Michael and team!
We sought out Michael for his positive reviews and the captured market we felt he had in the Toronto West area with his social media reach and number of active listings there. The experience we had was similarly nothing short of exceptional. Truly turnkey, drama-free and what was an outstanding sales result. The place was initially tenanted and not primed for sale, which was a concern as we were out of the country and needing a quick close before year end. Michael and his team immediately went to work, overseeing key pickup, cleanup & prep, staging etc. without me needing to be there or spend unnecessarily. The end result was stunningly transformative and matched the compelling narrative Michael laid out for the listing. We sold the place within 24 hrs, on multiple offers and for more than asking which I didn't think was possible. It was clear Michael brings a lot of know-how to the process but what we valued most was his courteousness and general advocacy on our behalf. In a sea of agent options, Michael stands out with a unique offering while making the process a true pleasure.
Michael is amazing! Helped me long before I put my condo for sale. Answered all my questions over the past few years and was on top of everything as soon as I was ready to list. Extremely happy with the sale and everything he did for me. Highly recommend.
I CAN NOT speak highly enough about the amazing support that I got from Michael & his team. I was needing to sell my condo, under very compressed timelines, after leaving the country for a reassignment. I was incredibly stressed about the entire process (not just of upending my entire life to move away...but of not being in the country for when my place was on the market)...but Michael made me feel more than comfortable with the entire process. He remained calm (even though I may not have been at all times) and made me feel every time we spoke that I was his only client. He staged my place beautifully, built a very strong marketing plan - and got incredible traffic through. In the end, he got me a price that I NEVER imagine I would have gotten - and with a 2-week close. He is an absolute superstar and so professional in every interaction. I would recommend him to anyone who is looking to sell their place. He absolutely knows his stuff and will take great care of anyone who takes the time to work with him!
I worked with Sara for the purchase of my first home. Her knowledge of the Liberty Village area and each of the specific buildings was incredibly helpful background when looking to narrow my focus. She was patient throughout the process, and went above and beyond my expectations by giving me advice and answers to all of my questions (both during my search and after closing). I'm so grateful I had Sara helping me find the perfect place to call home, and would recommend her to anyone looking to purchase in the area!
Only positive things to say about Michael. The whole process was smooth. No hiccups. He took care of everything to make the place look its best without going overboard. I didn't have to do anything, which is what I wanted. Our loft sold quickly with a quick closing, no conditions. Michael knew we wanted to sell the unit ASAP, and he delivered without compromising on the selling price. In fact, he got us what we were hoping for, and broke a record for the building. A comparable unit, in the same building, sold only a few days before ours. That unit, with a DIFFERENT agent, sold for LESS and had to be listed TWICE. Our experience was the opposite: ours was listed once and got the highest price. This is proof positive of Michael's abilities to get the best price with the least amount of hassle. I wouldn't hesitate to deal with Michael and his team in the future. In fact, I'm counting on it in the near future. Thanks, Michael, for doing a great job!
My son and I just completed a sale in Liberty Village today. We had the pleasure of working with Michael Camber. His advice and professionalism helped sell our condo in under one week and we broke a record in the building and the neighbourhood for a one+one BR. We do not live in Toronto. So being from out of town we were counting on his advice to prepare for sale. I own 5 other rental properties outside Toronto so I am skeptical when it comes to an agent I do not know. Michael helped arrange a painter at a great price as well as a cleaning company. We agreed to pay extra for staging and it was spectacular. If you don't have an agent call Michael...if you have an agent , change now!! My unit would still be listed if it was not for Michael Camber. Sincerely John and Geoff M.
My son and I just completed a sale in Liberty Village today. We had the pleasure of working with Michael Camber. His advice and professionalism helped sell our condo in under one week and we broke a record in the building and the neighbourhood for a one+one BR. We do not live in Toronto. So being from out of town we were counting on his advice to prepare for sale. I own 5 other rental properties outside Toronto so I am skeptical when it comes to an agent I do not know. Michael helped arrange a painter at a great price as well as a cleaning company. We agreed to pay extra for staging and it was spectacular. I you don't have an agent call Michael...if you have an agent , change now!! My unit would still be listed if it was not for Michael Camber. Sincerely John and Geoff M.
Michael was great. Responded quickly with great communication and he handled everything including some small fixes and picking up keys to the unit. Didn't have to go to the unit even once which is great because it's not close to where I live. No nickel and diming just great service. Would use again if I had another condo in the area.
We came across Camber group through our google search last month as we were looking for a dynamic realtor that would be able to get us an investment property quickly. I spoke to many realtors during this process but most lacked the urgency that me and my husband were seeking. We are very busy professionals and really wanted to work with someone that was able to deliver in a short amount of time. We were very fortunate to find Sara. Sara has been a delight to work with, always responsive and honest. We were able to put an offer on a property the first day of our showings and the same evening we secured it as well. Thank you again Sara!
Michael is an outstanding real estate agent who knows the market, has a well developed marketing plan and made our selling experience effortless. We were always up to date on all details and next steps. Michael truly exceeded my expectations and I highly recommend him!
Michael was very professional and sold my Liberty Village condo both quickly and at a price point that left me impressed. If you're looking for a quick sale in the area, he's your guy!
It was a pleasure to deal with Michael Camber. Michael’s advertising strategy, including the advice of his staging team, attracted a great deal of interest. His judgment on pricing was excellent, significantly higher than other agents gave us and, as it turned out, entirely accurate, setting a record for the area. He obviously knows the Liberty Village market well. We sold above listing in under a week. We appreciated Michael’s attention to detail. When we had an issue with one of the sales agents who brought prospective buyers around, Michael dealt with the matter quickly. We felt that our property was in the best of hands. He also charged us a very competitive rate for his services. We would not hesitate to recommend Michael Camber’s services to anyone.
I called Michael because of the large amount of positive reviews on google. Immediately during our first call I knew I made the right decision. Michael is an expert Real Estate agent and his speciality in Toronto’s West End was clear. His advice helped us achieve great offers. My husband and I would highly recommend Michael to anyone we know or asking.
Sara was great and I firmly believe that we achieved one of the best deals possible in this market. She took the time to go back and forth with the other agent to make the offer as good as it could possibly get. In addition, she demonstrated a high level of experience and up-to-date real estate knowledge by also protecting me from faulty clauses within the purchase agreement. She is not just an agent that wants to rush a deal through and get paid as soon as possible. I appreciate that and I am so very pleased with the end result. I look forward to working with her again.
Jen Hn
01:25 27 Nov 18
Michael and his team were wonderful right from the beginning of our process to sell our liberty village townhouse through to closing. His professionalism and knowledge of the market helped us to develop a winning strategy. He went out of his way to assist us with the staging and condo prep as we were living out of town at the time. He was committed to getting us top dollar and at no point put any pressure on us. I would definitely recommend Michael and his team to friends in the future. If you are looking to sell your condo or townhouse, definitely call Michael. You won’t be disappointed!!!
Michael helped us sell our Liberty Village condo this past summer and he was a pleasure to work with! He is very professional and he knows the market extremely well. He delivers on what he promises and is very responsive and knowledgeable. He also provides great marketing materials that looked very impressive. I would not hesitate to work with him again!
From the moment we Michael, I wanted to use is team. My wife on the other hand wanted to meet other agents. After meeting a few other agents, she quickly realized that Michael was the right fit for us. We turned over the process to Michael and he bounced his ideas with us. I’m still mesmerized with the staging of our home. With the home stages it was sold within days of being posted and over asking price. Thank you for the amazing service Michael. First impressions are lasting ones.
Michael has been my realtor since 2013. I originally hired him to find tenants for my rental property in Liberty Village and he educated me on the most important aspects of identifying prospective tenants. He is very knowledgeable regarding the condo market in Toronto and specifically Liberty Village. I decided to list my condo this summer (2018) and because of my trust in Michael and his proven track record, I did not hesitate to sign with him and have him handle the sale of my property. Michael provided staging services and made the condo look like a million bucks. He made the process smooth and worry free and had the property sold quickly and for top dollar. I would not hesitate to recommend Michael to anyone that asks.
We recently sold our loft with Michael (April 2018), and it was an absolute pleasure to work with him. He is thoroughly knowledgeable about our neighbourhood (Liberty Village) and knew the market really well. Michael was professional and offered great advice throughout the entire process. From start to finish, we knew we hired the right agent! We highly recommend Michael and his team.
This is the email I sent to Michael and his team after we closed our condo in Liberty Village for well above our asking price and well beyond our initial expectations “Thanks Michael. Jessica and I are more than pleased with the choice to work with you. You were professional , understanding and most importantly a great negotiator on our behalf! We would recommend you to anyone who needs a true professional. Thanks again”
00:12 03 Oct 18
it was great working with Michael and his team. Professional and responsive.
Michael and his team were great!! Condo was sold - Everything was done professionally, by the time frame requested by me, for the price that I was looking for!! Highly recommend him, especially if you are selling in liberty village and downtown!
My condo sold in a week for well over asking! Not only that, but Michael offered many other complementary services including cleaning and a stager.
I listed my bachelor apartment with Michael located at Liberty village a couple of months ago. I had a fantastic experience dealing with a true professional. He staged the unit and it sold very fast. He keeps you informed throughout the whole process. I was happy with his service and recommended him.
Sara has an amazing team. I was in the market for an investment condo. Sara's knowledge of the market and relationships got me great options within 24 hours and we had an amazing deal done in 48. You can't go wrong with Sara!!!
Sara helped my boyfriend and I find our first place together. I let Sara know what our must-have's were and she knew exactly which buildings would suit our needs. Her expertise on each and every building in Liberty Village was quite impressive. Sara was always there to answer any questions we had and checked in with us even after we moved in. Working with Sara was unlike any other experience I've had with past realtors. She is knowledgeable, professional and very attentive. And truly a Liberty Village specialist. We couldn't be happier with her services!
Sara is amazing! The whole process was quick and easy. The advice was real just like you would get from a close friend or a family member which made my decision easier as there was a lot of trust. She even recommended a nice lawyer. The follow up was genuine and continued even after closing. It's been over a year since my purchase and I couldn't be happier with my decision.
Michael is true professional. He is the best guy for selling a condo Down Town Toronto especially Liberty village. I was in touch with him for more than a year to sell me condo in Liberty Village and always got right advice with no pressure selling of any kind. Being very experience real investor I tried selling the condo through other discount real estate agent but with no success or right offer. Once he took over I got $95K more than last best offer I got from other agent. Staging was super excellent and the way he presented my Condo on his local website was mind blowing. Thanks Michael....
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Kickboxing is a martial art and form of self-defense that combines boxing and Muay Thai. It is one of the most popular martial arts in the world, and for good reason: it’s a great way to get in shape, relieve stress, and learn self-defense. Women’s Kickboxing for beginners is a fantastic way to get a great workout that can help you burn fat, tone your body, and improve your cardiovascular health, and it is also a great way to relieve stress and anxiety.
The workout is intense, and you will definitely feel it in your muscles the next day, but it’s so worth it! You will also see a big improvement in your overall fitness level and self-defense skills in a very short amount of time. In this post, we’ll introduce you to the basics of women’s kickboxing and give you some tips on how to get started.
What to expect in women’s kickboxing for beginners
Our women’s kickboxing classes are designed to help you burn fat, build muscle, and improve your cardio fitness. You’ll start with a warm-up routine that includes stretches, and mobility exercises, and learn some basic kicks and punches. Then you’ll move into a circuit training session where you’ll perform different strength moves and drills, and hit that bag (which is my personal favorite). You’ll also usually focus on core work and glutes.
Finally, you’ll finish with a cool-down routine that helps you relax and recover. Our instructors are very hands-on thoroughly explaining each move and technique. They always encourage you to do your best, push through the hard stuff and offer support and guidance. Classes run for about 45 mins and it goes by fast!
What gear you will need for kickboxing
There are a few pieces of gear that you may need in order to participate in kickboxing classes. Most of these items can be found at our studio or online.
The first and most important piece of equipment is a good pair of gloves. Gloves will protect your hands and make it easier to hit the punching bag. Some people also like to use hand wraps to help stabilize your wrist and prevent injury.
There’s no need for special shoes, we perform barefoot. The mats are thoroughly cleaned between each class, but you can wear socks with grips on them if you are more comfortable.
Bring water! You will definitely want to have your water bottle with you for this workout, and stay hydrated after class as well. You will sweat and need to replace the water lost.
How to warm up for class
Stretching is important for any type of exercise, but especially so for kickboxing. You will be using all the muscles in your legs, arms, shoulders, and core. Spending a few minutes doing basic stretches will help prevent injuries and help you access your full range of motion. Although each class is different, we spend time with various warm-ups that may include stretches, jump rope, and shadowboxing.
The types of punches and kicks you will learn
In kickboxing, there are a number of kicks and punches that we use. Below we will explain the four foundational punches and two main kicks.
Before we start throwing punches, it is important to learn your fighting stance. Stand feet hip-width apart, your non-dominate foot in front of the other, knees relaxed, arms up and hands protecting your face. This position is used for most of the moves.
Jab – The lead fist (non-dominate hand) is thrown straight ahead and the arm is fully extended. As you make contact, the fist is typically in a horizontal position with the palm facing the ground. Then retract your arm and return to a fighting stance.
*Important* As you execute each punch, you MUST keep your other hand up, protecting your face.
Cross – the dominant fist is thrown across your body and fully extended. Again, as you make contact, the fist is generally in a horizontal position with the palm facing the ground. Retract your arm and return to a fighting stance.
Hook – This is a powerful knockout punch and can be done with either arm. Your arm is horizontal at a 90-degree angle and is first pulled back and then pivoting your torso and lead foot, use your core for explosive power and hit your target. Pivoting your foot increases the power and protects your knees from stress.
Uppercut – Another very powerful punch, this is usually aimed at hitting your opponent’s chin, face, or body. In a fighting stance, bring your bent arm down close to your hip, and using your core, power your fist upward into your target. This can also be executed with either arm.
Push Kick – A Push kick is essentially a long-range straight foot thrust. This is a powerful weapon to target the opponent’s torso and legs. In a fighter’s stance lean back, bring your knee up, and extend your leg by pushing out through the ball of your foot.
Round kick – Powerful kick that can be executed by either leg. In the fighter’s stance, rotate your non-dominant foot to the outside, raise your dominant leg, bent, and in a horizontal position. Using your core muscles, extend your leg quickly into your opponent. This can be done in multiple variations: low (legs), medium (torso, ribs, or arms), or high (head and neck) depending on your targeted area of attack.
In addition to learning how to do the basic techniques, you’ll also learn advanced techniques such as footwork, punches, kicks, and defense. These skills will help you become more confident when sparring with other fighters.
How often should you attend class?
At 7 Spears Martial Arts, we currently offer 2 women’s kickboxing sessions at 9:30 am Tuesdays and Thursdays. We also have coed kickboxing every evening Monday-Friday at 7:30 pm. How often you attend is up to you, but you will see results and become better skilled by attending at least 2x each week.
Why do so many people enjoy women’s kickboxing?
Women’s kickboxing is an excellent form of exercise because it combines cardio with strength training. It also helps build confidence by challenging you physically while improving your balance and coordination. And most importantly, because it is FUN!
It’s also important to eat right while you’re training. Make sure you’re getting enough protein and carbohydrates during your workouts. This will help keep you feeling energized and focused throughout your training sessions, and help you add power to your punches. Not sure what to include in your meals? Our instructors can offer insight on all the best nutrients you should be adding to your diet. Let us know if you are interested in learning more.
If you are new to kickboxing, a seasoned pro, or anywhere in between, and interested in trying out this amazing workout, we offer a free women’s kickboxing trial class. We would love for you to join us in the studio!
Ready to try a class now? Sign up here.
Published: May 27, 2022
Categories: Health, Kickboxing, Self-defense, Training
Tags: womens kickboxing
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| 7,451 |
The sibshop at cook children’s is designed to serve siblings of patients living with a chronic illness or a life changing injury. However, the benefits of this group are 100% worth it.
We've secured millions of dollars in products in our years.
We've secured millions of dollars in products in our years.
Are cook groups worth it. Finding and joining a good cook group can take you months as a newbie. A cook group is a sneakerhead community or group chat typically held on discord or slack. Parents bring pictures and mementos.
So our free cook group gives you a starting point. I would recommend starting with cook group before botting. It may be hard to find review for cook groups without asking around.
Plus you might get gb for bots and other stuff to help you cook more. Karl is from a famous billionaire and has a lot of fortune. Karl cook (born 26 december 1990) is an american millionaire and equestrian.
Members of cook groups are able to know the exact time of a drop, where to buy it, and how much it will sell for. Sneaker bot setup advice shoe bots have multiple settings: In a sneaker cook group, community members will often rent bots to other members, sometimes even free of charge.
Before jumping to conclusions you have to take into consideration the factors of the cook group and how much you will use it for. I can send you a promo. Find a very reputable cook group (personally i have sitesupply!
To learn more about the history of sibshops and what they offer check out siblingsupport.org. Networking like other industries, can be huge in this field and can sometimes even lean to your advantage. There are 147 health care providers, specializing in cardiac electrophysiology, pediatric medicine, pulmonary disease.
There are currently over 320 sibshops worldwide, including one right here at cook children's in fort worth, texas. Being part of a winner’s circle Ive been starting to resell shoes as a quick side hustle and have made about 250 dollars.ive made these profits through snkrs draws.i go for evrey footsite fcfs site but never cop i know im missing out on so much profit but dont want to full send botting becuace it takes loads of times and i have school and was wondering if a cook group was worth it and if so what are the best ones to join
While it isn't required to cook, networking can certainly help in certain aspects. Cook children's provides scrapbooking supplies and albums. If you're looking for a reputable cook group, there are still a few.
The sneakerreselling.com's cook group was launched in efforts to provide new and experienced sneaker resellers with tools to grow your profit margin. Sneaker cook groups (or resell groups) are online communities that provide information and monitoring of popular drops. Endurance isn't worth the 60 a month compared to other groups.
The couple shares a […] Share on detailed information about cook childrens physician network in fort worth texas. Parents of nicu babies meet weekly.
Users pay a monthly fee for info. Ak chefs is one of the top cook groups in the sneaker resale world. Cook also engages with his fans on instagram handle, “mrtankcook”.
However, make sure to look for reviews or reputation before joining. He is a famous spouse as he is the husband of the famous actress named kaley cuoco. Sites like cop.supply will show huge lists of cook groups out there.
Don’t just join one because it’s cheaper than another or if it’s more expensive. Cook childrens physician network is a medical group that has 26 practice medical offices located in 1 state 13 cities in the usa. Some cook groups will tell you which shoes are worth getting, which sizes, when to resell them, and even how much their price is estimated to rise in the aftermarket.
I would just try it and if you can at least get that 30 back then it's worth it. The community in endurance is really awesome, but the information was always given a little bit later if at all. Amnotify and notify are the groups i'm in and they have a lot more information.
If you're interested, shoot me a dm. Again, similarly to noctua, this is a fairly small size group for a free server. But for an extra $30 a month, it’s worth it.
If not for better rates, then perhaps a free sneaker bot rental for a drop or two. Create a page for a celebrity, band or business. A lot of groups cook but many of them won't be around for long.
Yes 100% i'm a manual and in a cook group and been cooking more. The tools that the server comes with are not something you would expect to get with a free cook groups which i will go into in more detail later on. Are cook groups for sneakers and supreme worth it?
Connect with friends and the world around you on facebook. I run hoc which actually started on this subreddit 3 years ago and is the oldest cook group.
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When it comes to plants in your garden, a tree tends to be the center stage for the layout of your yard, but how do you garden around a tree?
To garden around a tree, you can implement a number of different tactics such as planting a flower bed underneath it, building a tree deck at its base, laying out a rock patch around its trunk, or you can scatter tanbark (or mulch) around the entire tree area.
Having a beautiful tree planted on your property is a must for any home gardener but these beautiful plants tend to dominate their surroundings, which often leaves the areas underneath it feeling a bit barren. To avoid this from happening, you can utilize some methods and tactics to garden around your tree to have a more complete aesthetic in your yard. You want to approach this with careful consideration, as you do not want to plant anything next to your tree that is going to compete with it. To help you understand this further, we are going to take a closer look at how to garden around a tree.
After years of maintaining a home garden, I have had a lot of experience planting around the various trees that I have on my property. My experience has taught me that the best way to garden around a tree is to choose plants and methods that are not going sabotage the aesthetic of your yard.
If the tree in your yard keeps catching your eye and you just can’t help but feel that something is missing from your garden, you are not alone.
This can result in the aesthetic of your outdoor space feeling imbalanced and fulfilled, which some well-orchestrated additions to your garden can remedy. Luckily, there are some great approaches that you can utilize to complete this aspect of your garden.
With that being said, you do not want to just plant anything around your garden tree. Since the tree in your yard is such a dominant force in your garden, you want to plant following the environment that your tree has created. Trees create a substantial amount of shade, which means that whatever you plant underneath it will not be getting as much sunlight compared to other open parts of your yard, which can be problematic for some gardens and regions.
In addition, you also want to consider the specific types of trees that you have in your garden. Some trees are actually invasive to surrounding plants and they can prevent healthy growth cycles from their neighbors by releasing chemicals into their roots. These are plants such as Walnut Trees and Pine Trees. If you have a tree like this in your garden, then you are going to want to be wary of the methods that you choose and the plants that you plant!
There is just something enchanting and fairytale-like about a bed of flowers beneath a garden tree and this can be a perfect approach for gardening around a tree.
Most flowers do not grow too tall from the ground and they can add a brilliant aesthetic to your garden tree - without being invasive. In fact, this can be one of the most complimentary and easy ways of gardening around a tree.
Now, before you go planting just any type of flowers around your tree, you first want to consider a couple of different factors - the type of tree that you have and the types of flowers that you want to plant.
If you have a tree that casts a lot of shade near its trunk, then you should consider that not every type of flower is going to grow well in this kind of environment. In this case, you are going to want to plant flowers that are tolerant to shade. There are plenty of gorgeous flowers that will thrive in shady areas that are perfect for gardening around a tree:
Any of the above-mentioned flowers are quite resilient when it comes to shade and they should grow just fine in most regions around the United States. However, to confirm this, you should always double-check the climate zone of your area to check that the flowers that you end up choosing are suitable for your area.
With that being, if you happen to live in a stable climate and have a tree that does not cast a lot of shade, you can be much more flexible with the flowers that you select to garden around your tree.
Sometimes, the best way to garden around your tree is to think outside of the box and control the planting environment to your liking.
One of the best ways to achieve this is to build a tree deck. A tree deck is exactly what it sounds like, a wooden deck that surrounds your tree, which is built around its base/trunk. There are a couple of different ways that you can go about this, the first is to build a small, isolated, modest-sized deck that simply surrounds your tree.
However, many gardeners opt for extending their already built deck to reach their tree or decide to build one from scratch to create this aesthetic. No matter how you decide to approach it, this is one of the best ways to create a beautiful aesthetic around your tree.
Once you have your tree deck in place, you can utilize the space underneath your tree in whichever way you see fit. If you like the idea of having plants underneath your tree, you can put out some potted ones to surround it. This is a particularly useful tactic for trees that can be invasive to surrounding plants, as they have their own soil and nourishment outside of the ground soil.
In addition, this is a great way to have plants underneath your tree that you can change with a lot of flexibility and versatility. Given that potted plants are so easy to move around, you can swap plants in and out based on the season of your outdoor climate. This is great for gardeners that live in regions with adverse weather conditions.
While having potted plants under your tree deck is great, many gardeners love the simplicity of leaving their tree deck bare, as the wooden aesthetic of the deck already provides a nice touch. You can then utilize this space for outdoor lounging and reading.
Creating a rock patch that surrounds your tree is a great tactic for adding a lovely aesthetic to your garden.
You can get creative with the rocks or that you choose for this but, ultimately, the idea behind it is very simple. Find some rocks that you like the look of and lay them out underneath the base of your tree.
Stones have a beautiful look to them and you can choose ones that you think compliment the look and feel of your yard. You can shop for stones if you really want to find something that is unique and provides a specific type of character.
However, if you are on a budget and have a hard time coping with the idea of buying rocks, you will find that these natural items are widely available for free! You can find rocks in lots of different parks or on some beaches and you can implement them into your garden around your tree. Just be sure not to take them from protected areas.
With that being said, you should keep in mind that stones may interfere with some trees’ health. Stones will tend to absorb heat. So, if you have a tree that needs a lot of watering and you already live in a warmer region, you may want to think of a different strategy.
On the other hand, if you have a tree that is resilient to heat, a rock patch is a perfect way to garden around it. In addition, you can grow some other heat-tolerant plants in between the stones to add an even better aesthetic to your rock patch - such as cacti species.
If you are on the fence about what to do with the space underneath your tree, one of the best go-to options is to simply lay some tanbark around it.
Tanbark adds a nice aesthetic to your garden and it is incredibly easy to maintain. This wood material essentially acts as mulch for your tree, which has a lot of additional benefits outside of simply looking good.
Natural mulch materials like tanbark help provide your tree with balanced moisture. The mulch holds water and keeps moisture constant within your soil. This is a great gardening strategy, as it means that you can water your tree less.
Tanbark is especially useful in places that have dry and hot climates. The soil in these areas is subject to drying out much quicker, which means that you have to water your plants and trees constantly. The tanbark will allow you to water moderately without worrying about your tree being unhealthy.
However, tanbark also helps stabilize soil temperature for hot and cold climates. If you live in a region that has colder weather, you need to plant with consideration, as not all trees are suitable for this kind of climate. Tanbark can help your tree’s health in extreme winters - especially if your tree is sensitive to the cold.
Furthermore, natural mulch materials like tanbark also add nutrients to your soil. Given that tanbark is natural, it will slowly break down and decompose. While this does mean that you will need to replace it from time to time, it also means that this natural decomposition will add vital nutrients to your soil and benefit the health of your tree. All in all, the use of tanbark to garden around your tree, is a great way to enhance to look of your yard but also nourish your tree.
As an experienced gardener & landscaper on my own property over the last 20 years, I'm excited to share the things I've learned along the way, as I continue to learn.
Best Bushes for Small Gardens
Best Trees for Large Gardens
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We are a team of gardening and landscaping enthusiasts and experts. We share our knowledge with you, here on GroveGypsy. You can learn more about us and our team, here.
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This may sound silly, but — we have an indoor cat that I like to take outside sometimes on a leash. When I started this, I didn’t know I’d be the only one who ever took her outside. But my oldest says he feels silly with a cat on a leash, even just in our yard, and the youngest says it’s too boring. Meanwhile the cat is always mewing at me to take her out and I’d like to hand it over to someone else once in awhile. Any ideas?
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We have Competitor Camps starting back up this winter! We sold out of every camp last winter and we will be providing a lot more options and camps this winter. Starting off in December will be our speed and agility camp held by Gareth Dahlgren and Rj Scovel. This camp will be 3 weeks the first 3 Saturdays before the holidays in December from 4-5 pm. We will have 1 session and if it fills we will add another. 8 players max in this camp. (4-1 player to coach ratio) Where: (Competitors Facility) 10460 W Fairview Ave Boise, ID 83704. When: December 3rd, 10th and 17th first 3 Saturdays in December. 4-5 pm Cost: $90 per player How to sign up: Text Burke Mitchell at 951-294-2774 with player name and player age. First come, first serve! ... See MoreSee Less
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FREE baseball clinic this Saturday at NNU. Though our goal is to recruit eligible officials for the High School season, we too are trying to boost the interest from our high school players and provide them with opportunities to see this game from a different perspective. TVUA will have opportunities for high school players to umpire should they be eligible to do so, and as time allows throughout 2023. #UMPIRE #BASEBALL ... See MoreSee Less
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Benny Gantz, former Israeli military chief of staff and presidential candidate in Tel Aviv on 29 January 2019 [Amir Levy/Getty Images]
February 5, 2019 at 11:25 am
A new poll by Israeli newspaper Haaretz shows that Benny Gantz has maintained the bounce that followed his maiden speech, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains in front.
According to the paper, "the 'Gantz effect' seems not to be fading, but neither is it gathering speed with two months to go before the election".
The poll shows Gantz's party Israel Resilience (Hosen L'Yisrael) gaining 22 Knesset seats, behind Likud on 30 seats.
The report noted that Netanyahu "would of course be willing to accept this outcome, in which his current coalition" – including Yisrael Beitenu – "numbers 64 MKs of 120 total seats, without Orli Levi-Abekasis' Gesher (still at four seats, just above the voter threshold)".
READ: Gantz gains ground after inaugural campaign speech
Haaretz said Hosen L'Yisrael "has not significantly dented Likud's or other right-wing parties' support at the district level" – at least "not to a point where it poses a risk to a fifth term for Netanyahu".
For now, the newspaper elaborated, "Netanyahu's nightmare scenario, in which one or two of the parties that are "natural partners" don't make it past the voter threshold, does not seem to be coming true – for the moment"; all have five seats, including Jewish Home.
For the so-called "centre-left bloc", Haaretz added, "the picture is less optimistic": Hosen L'Yisrael, together with Labour (five seats), Yesh Atid (nine) and Meretz (five) only totals 40 seats.
Modest Netanyahu – "I am ready to leave my position tomorrow as prime minister, but I have no one to leave the keys with" – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.
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Ronnel Arryn was the last King of Mountain and Vale, reigning until the invasion of Westeros by Aegon the Conqueror. Only a boy, rule of the Vale of Arryn fell to his mother, Queen Regent Sharra Arryn, who was regarded as one of the most beautiful women of Westeros.[2]
1.1 King of Mountain and Vale
1.2 Lord of the Vale
2 Family
King of Mountain and Vale
After Aegon launched his invasion and made his intentions known to the rulers of the seven independent kingdoms of Westeros, Sharra sent a portrait of herself to him and offered her hand in marriage with the condition Aegon would make her son his heir. Aegon refused.[2]
The Vale scored a victory against the invaders in a battle in the waters off Gulltown, though the Arryn fleet was burned by Visenya Targaryen. However, after the Arryn fleet was destroyed, the Lord of the Vale faced a new problem, as the Sistermen revolted against the Eyrie.[2]
As other regions of Westeros fell to Aegon, Ronnel's mother Sharra amassed the Vale army at the Bloody Gate. However, Aegon sent Visenya to the Eyrie atop her dragon Vhagar. When the queen regent returned to the Eyrie she found her son sitting on Visenya's lap asking if he could ride the dragon with Visenya. Sharra afterward bent the knee. The Arryns were declared Wardens of the East and Defenders of the Vale, and Ronnel received his ride on Vhagar. And so ended the last reign of the Kings of Mountain and Vale.[2]
Lord of the Vale
Ronnel became Lord of the Vale during the reign of King Aegon the Conqueror, a position he held throughout the Conquerers thirty-seven year reign. He was nicknamed "the King Who Flew" for the ride he has on Vhagar as a boy.[2][3] Queen Rhaenys Targaryen arranged the marriage of Lord Ronnel to the daughter of Lord Torrhen Stark.[3]
Upon the death of Aegon the Conqueror, however, and the ascension of his son Aenys to the Iron Throne, rebellion broke out in Westeros, including the Vale. Ronnel's own brother Jonos Arryn rose in rebellion against him. Ronnel was imprisoned and his title usurped by Jonos.[3][4]
House Royce of Runestone led by Lord Allard Royce gathered forces to sweep away Jonos and his supporters, penning him at the Eyrie. Ronnel was executed by his brother who had him flung out of the Moon Door, earning him the nickname Jonos the Kinslayer. Ronnel's death added a dark twist to his nickname, "the King Who Flew".[4]
Jonos and his men remained defiant until Prince Maegor flew to the Eyrie upon Balerion to crush the rebellion. Jonos' followers, knowing they could not defeat the dragon, turned on their leader. Jonos shared the same fate he had shown to his brother Ronnel and was flung through the Moon Door. His men hoped that by surrendering, Prince Maegor would show them mercy. Maegor's mercy was having all of them hanged instead of being burned alive. Even the highborn died by the noose as Maegor denied them the honor of beheading. House Arryn continued after the deaths of Ronnel and Jonos; their cousin, Hubert Arryn became the new Lord of the Vale.[4][5]
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So this week I get to be a P.O.W. It’s an unfortunate acronym with bad connotations, but this is the lesser-known and much less painful kind of P.O.W. I’m a Poet of the Week. (So, I guess technically that acronym could be p.o.t.w. if you wanted to get all picky about it.)
Check it out over at the Poetry SuperHighway dot com.
-Lo, off to get some pancakes.
Author Lo_and_BeholdPosted on February 27, 2005 Categories PoetryTags Poetry, poetry superhighway, publicationLeave a comment on Speeding Down the Poetry Superhighway
There is a poster
on the park bench
This is how I find out you are gone.
like you did in the flesh
just four days ago
when you saw me walking
toward you up the path.
Except that was your real smile
the one that came before
you called me sweetheart
before you buried me
in a bear hug.
The smile on the poster
is professional.
Frozen for keeps now.
wearing that horrible mintgreen jacket.
White hair all windtossed.
Nika laying at your feet.
The poster is streaked and
wrinkled with rain.
I make a scene without meaning to.
This is what happens when you are dead.
The world does not end.
The clock does not stop.
Your friends raid your apartment
They take what they can use.
They take what they want.
The apartment still smells of smoke and dogs.
The apartment still smells of you.
If I had never seen the poster
I’d never know you were gone.
I could still call you and
And wait for you to call me back.
In my head, you’d be sitting
in your chair smoking
your cheap cigars.
You would still be within reach.
I attend the memorial service.
Standing in the wind
An unattractive redhead talks about
putting a plaque on the bench
“I just have to come up with some words,”
she says.
I have a collection
of all the right words, but I
do not want to share.
Her makeup is made up
Her roots are gray and brown.
Your brothers are here and awkward.
The fat one, he sits like you.
Pleasantries are exchanged.
Everyone speaks in cliches.
The dogs are here, too.
And Nika. She is dull. Diminished.
She pushes her great dark head
against my leg, against any leg
in her path, just so someone
will reach down and touch her.
But no one is you.
They scatter your ashes
into my face.
I think that they should
have flung your pieces
Now you are landlocked.
Mixed in with the dust
and the dog shit.
I cannot stand for it.
named Winston.
He’s one foot tall and fifty pounds.
He looks like a furry brown tank.
He leans against his collar
like a sled dog straining for speed.
He pulls her down the sidewalk as if
she were a featherweight.
As if she were nothing.
Someone should teach him how to heel.
I start to recommend that she call you.
So I meet her, instead.
In the park, by your bench.
I show her how to gather the leash
just so. How to stand. How to command.
I am sure you would tell me
I’m doing it wrong.
But I’m just trying to keep you alive.
-Lo, wishing they had payphones in the afterlife.
Author Lo_and_BeholdPosted on February 26, 2005 Categories PoetryTags death, dogs, poem, PoetryLeave a comment on Marco
Drinking: Working on that recommended daily intake of water
It’s been a grey February. Not so much with the weather, although California has been drenched, dried off and then drenched again. It is the rainy season, after all, complete with landslides.
But the grey that’s been hanging around has been more of the mental variety. I have two very dear friends who have been going through some incredibly dark times, sometimes barely able to keep themselves from going under altogether. Sometimes I’ve woken up terrified that one or the other of them might have finally given in, let go, disappeared from the face of the earth altogether. Thus: greyness.
But both of them are stronger than they look. Stronger than they know. And they are fierce fighters. So now that they both have their feet set on the road to wellness, I’ve been laughing a lot more. Laughing with relief, with hope, with the lovely realization that sometimes you can actually write a whole long list of reasons that you’re glad you are alive. And *that* is saying something. Because sometimes when the Bell Jar descends, you’re hard pressed to come up with even one thing to write down, one thing that makes dragging your carcass out of bed worthwhile.
So, to celebrate, I spent the weekend in SoCal with Boy & Dog and my sister and her newly-adopted beast of a dog. In spite of the thunderous deluge that spanned most of the weekend, we managed to find a few pockets of sunlight during which we raced down to the beach for some surf and sand. I spent most of the weekend laughing. Really hard. To the point that my stomach now hurts because my laugh muscles were so out-of-use.
In the two years since we’ve adopted the LeeLoo, I’ve discovered that dogs can bring out the best in people. I’m an admitted misanthrope, and usually stalk around town without really looking at people. I have an aversion to talking to strangers that borders on phobia. But when I’m with LeeLoo and meet up with another dog owner, I’ll stop and chat. We’ll let the dogs do the butt-sniffing thing and have a completely pleasant conversation, then go on our separate ways feeling better about the world in general. It’s really weird how that works.
It may be that LeeLoo makes me laugh more because she’s such a clown. Boxers are known to be dorks of the dog world. Their monkey faces and childish antics make them great entertainers. And this weekend, wandering around my sister’s neighborhood with my little brown LeeLoo and her fat white Yoda, we spent a lot of time doubled over with laughter.
First, you have to understand that I am a DORK when it comes to my dog. I have been known to dress her in ridiculous outfits (and I know my friend J is HORRIFIED, absolutely horrified, if he’s reading this). Dogs in clothes are just unacceptable, I know. But. So. Funny. I’ve created a profile for LeeLoo on dogster.com, because I’m that much of a dork. And so it has been with a great sense of satisfaction that I have watched my sister (who used to ridicule me constantly) become a dog dork, too. The day she created a dogster profile for Yoda was a great day in sister history. (See LeeLoo on dogster here.
My sister has wanted a dog for a long time. We grew up with Beagles and Basset Hounds and Cocker Spaniels all over the place, so all those in-between years of college and roommate housing sans dog were just kind of missing something. Once she and her boy got a place of their own last year, they began their dog search and eventually found Yoda’s sad story on Petfinder.com.
(Note: If you’re bored now, you might as well just skip on over the rest of it, because it’s just dog, dog, dog and more dog.)
Yoda, who is part Boxer and part American Bulldog (a big boy), fell on hard times over two years ago when his owner died suddenly of a heart attack. The Yodes was so upset, he lost all his hair. His deceased owner’s family didn’t want to pay the vet bills to get Yoda better, so they dumped him at the pound. He was scheduled to be put down when some people from a Chihuahua Rescue found him. I don’t know why they decided to take a 90-pound naked pink dog when they were really looking for tiny teacup-sized pooches, but they did and in doing so, they saved his life.
Unfortunately, nobody who comes to a Chihuahua Rescue looking for a waif-like Bit-Bit or Tinkerbell is interested in a big white brute who looks nothing like his greenish Jedi namesake but is instead polka-dotted with crusty bald patches and suffering from a severe case of doggie depression and really sour farts. So Yoda languished in the rescue kennel for two long years. And then my sister came along. And after much patience and paperwork on her part, Yoda had a new home.
And he’s loving it. He eats up the attention and is starting to drop a few pounds now that he has a girlfriend (that would be LeeLoo) and gets regular exercise. He’s made friends with the grannies and grandpas in the senior center next door and is proving to be excellent company for my sister.
So you put this big sweet nerd together with my little drama queen and you have a Vegas-level show on your hands. And all you can do is laugh.
Everything they did was funny. Sometimes it was the way LeeLoo got jealous whenever we paid too much attention to Yoda and so she would start doing all her tricks in a row on the other side of the room, as if to say, “Hey! Look at me! Over here! Look what I can do! Stop playing with that fat bitch and come over here and rub my belly!”
Other times it was the way Yoda snored like a fat old man. Or the way he tried to “romp” at the beach but ended up looking like an epileptic rabbit. It was the way LeeLoo shot Yoda incredibly dirty looks whenever he would stick his nose in her ear, which he did every five minutes or so, with loud and long snorting sounds. It was the way Yoda consistently poops in a perfect circle, looking over his shoulder to make sure he’s doing the job right.
It was ridiculous. It was stupid. It was perfect. The best kind of medicine for a weary and grey psyche. Double-dog therapy. I should do it more often.
-Lo, who knows she’s a total dog freak and refuses to be embarrassed about it.
Author Lo_and_BeholdPosted on February 22, 2005 Categories BlabTags beach, California, dogs, LeeLoo, weatherLeave a comment on The Perfect Drug
“Like Christians at a suicide”
There were 19 in one year
who succeeded in falling
down.
It took some doing.
Because first they had to get there.
Had to find a spot in the lot.
Had to ride the bus.
It’s not like you just happen to end up
at the bridge on your way to the store.
You have to mean to be there.
You have to make a plan.
You have to navigate tourist traffic.
You have to walk out there on the span
and stare at Alcatraz. Watch the perfect little sailboats
bounce from wave to wave. Wait for wisps of fog
to float on by so you can get a good shot at the orange-red tower.
The experience is the main attraction.
You have to wonder if it was the first time for most
or had they done it all before? Did the urge to take a leap
just hit them in mid-stride or did they leave a note
before they left it all behind?
I want to know how hard it is to climb over the rail.
Does anyone ask you what you think you’re doing or
do they think it’s the perfect photo opp?
Do you take your time and make a scene
or do you rush into it, madly, like lovers at arrivals
with no eyes for anyone else.
At least you were somewhere really beautiful when you died.
You went out better than Marilyn.
has got to be better than going out
with a bang. With a slice. With a swallow.
Hell, you don’t even have to string the rope,
tape the hose, close the door.
You just let go.
Maybe I’m giving you too much credit.
Maybe it was all a misunderstanding.
An unfortunate accident somehow misconstrued as fate.
Maybe I make it all mean far too much.
on the edge.
And you are the one falling down.
-Lo, who thinks that greeny absinthe color is really quite beautiful.
Author Lo_and_BeholdPosted on February 11, 2005 Categories PoetryTags absinthe, marilyn manson, poem, Poetry, suicideLeave a comment on “Like Christians at a suicide”
If I had known that I would be wasting so much of my week sitting in waiting rooms in medical facilities yet again, I probably would not have so blithely posted my little ditty about how much waiting rooms suck. It’s cosmic payback. Such a bitch. Here I was all healthy and cocky, thinking my waiting room days were behind me. Silly, foolish little girl.
I shan’t bore you with the miniscule details of my five days of scratchy suffering. The nutshell version is that I woke up one day last week with only one eye. The other eye was still there, but completely useless and swollen shut. I looked like I had been hanging out with Brad Pitt in Fight Club, all testoterone posturing and yelling shit like, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can!” And then Edward Norton took a big swing and popped me right in the eye and tadaaaa…big swollen yuckiness, kinda like Jared Leto after he got his angelface beaten to purple smithereens.
Sadly, there was no Brad, no Edward, no Jordan Catalano and no masochistic punching going on. Just me, my dog and some poison oak. (Of course, it took four days and three different doctors before someone in the medical profession could narrow it down to the vile plant. That’s why they get paid the big bucks. Bitter, bittter, mutter, mutter.)
The first doctor (in urgent care, you should never go there), he looked at my punchbag eye and did a lot of “hmmming” and then said, none too confidently, “Yes, you seem to be having a severe allergic reaction.” Didn’t matter that I’ve never been allergic to anything in my life. Nope. Sudden and violent onset of inexplicable adult allergies, that was his diagnosis. So he writes me out a little white pharmacy slip and sends me on my way with the comforting words, “Don’t worry. This is as bad as it’s going to get.”
The next day I magically developed even more red itchy bubbles, all over my face and neck. Looked like the miniature pimple monster sat down and shat all over me. The only improvement was that I could see out of my right eye once again. I started wearing a baseball cap. And girls, I don’t do baseball caps.
The next day I went back to urgent care (even though I already said you should never, ever go there). New doctor, new diagnosis…sort of. She made me get buck naked so she could see all the new itchy spots and did an uncomfortable amount of, “Hmmmmm. Huh. Hmmmmm. Shingles? No. Hmmmm. Herpes? No. Hmmmmmm. Yeah, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. It is a bummer, though, since it’s all over your face.”
And I was left clutching my little hospital gown, stammering, “Uh. Did you say herpes? Because, are you crazy? People don’t get herpes all up on their eyebrows! You’re fired!”
Finally, Doctor #3 (Name: Pan of Potatoes or Pan of Tacos or something having to do with a pan) takes a look at me for about .3 seconds and says “Have you been hiking lately?”
Me: “Um. I took my dog to the beach?”
Panoftacos: “aHA! POISON OAK! Your dog gave it to you.”
That was a fat nutshell of a story, but believe me, there’s a much longer version I’m keeping to myself. And boring my family to death with. (It involves me repeating the words, “No, really, I look like a friggin’ pufferfish!” over and over and…) But yeah. Moral of the posting: Don’t get all big headed and thinking you’re funny posting about how waiting rooms are evil because those waiting rooms will get you. Every. Single. Time. They’re all out there. Just waiting.
And before you know it, as much as you try to avoid it, you’ll be sitting in an uncomfortable chair, trying to hide your swollen puffy eye with big Jackie-Os, pretending to read a 2-month old People cover story about how Julia Roberts named one of her poor kids Phinneas and watching 1, 2, 3 hours of your life slide away into oblivion while a fat woman in the chair next to you farts on the vinyl and pretends she was just scooting around.
-Lo, who’s all hopped up on steroids now and just waiting for the irrational rage and excessive bloating to kick in.
Author Lo_and_BeholdPosted on February 6, 2005 Categories BlabTags doctors, itch, poison oak, waiting roomsLeave a comment on The Irony and the Agony
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The Nike Human Race’s concept is that everyone around the world runs together at the same time. Very conformist, but I like it.
Friday night I spent being a homebody. A few friends called and invited me out- but it sounded potentially dangerous. Dangerous, like, I would oversleep. Instead I decided to make some Shrimp Fra Di Avlo from scratch! My buddy Ahern has cooked it for me a few times and it really has some power in it the next day during a race… therefore it has become my ritual. It turned out really well and I saved enough to make some for Saturday night, as I had another race Sunday.
The race started at 8AM in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I was to run it with my friend Soo Young, Soo Kueng (they are twins) and 3 of their friends. We had said that if it was raining we would bail.
I woke at 630AM and was pretty excited to maybe sleep in, so I texted Soo Young “It’s raining, guess its off.” She replied with something like “Really, you’re not running? We are leaving soon.” Damn. Last time I didnt run because of weather conditions I never heard the end of it, so I texted back “see you in 30!”
I jumped on the Q which was running very late, so late in fact that the 1 hour ten minutes I gave myself to get to the start would dwindle down to 5 minutes by the time I got to the race.
Sitting on the train headed to BK I could make out lots of other runners because we had to wear the stupid Nike dry fit shirts. (They never make them aerodynamic and it feels like youre running with a sail on). At Canal, this gal got on and sat next to me. She had on ‘the gear’ and I knew she was part of the movement. She kept glancing over at me and I took it to mean maybe she wasnt sure what stop we were to get off at. As Prospect Park approached she looked my way and said “Is this our stop?” “No, one more.” I told her. She smiled and said, “Youre Jeff Baker’s older brother arent you. I grew up in the same town in Virginia as you and went to your High School. My name is Amira.” Holy cow small world! I knew her brother! Gotta love NYC for stuff like that. We chatted and walked to the start, gathering her pal Alan along the way. I bid farewell and made my way to baggage drop.
As I got there I saw that it was mayhem! A school bus with crowds around it, you had to actually enter the bus to drop gear off. Do I wait? Just then the announcer says “2 minutes to the start!” Oh really? I ran (with my backpack) up to the 6 minute miler area and ducked into an area 50 yards back from the start. The gun went off right after and we started the run.
I was trying to break free of the crowds but I was way back in the thick of it all. It wasnt until mile 2 or 3 I was able to get some breathing room and open up.
This was my first ‘crappy’ race in a long time. Here is why… picture this… I have on an oversized red shirt, a backpack full of various items (extra sneakers, extra track pants, extra jacket, extra shirts, iphone, change) in case of rain? I also didn’t have time to change out of my track pants so I was wearing them, and underneath were my running shorts. I was a mess.
To shed some positive light on the situation, it turned out to be a beautiful morning in Prospect Park, the trees changing color… it was the epitomy of Autumn.
Miles 4 and 5 I had my usual “I should just walk the rest of the way” feeling I get during a bad run. I did not, however, succumb to these ideas. I finished the race with a sprint and as I neared the line I heard taunts from the announcer regarding me running with a backpack. Whatever… I love attention, anyway you cut it.
I walked up to the finish to wait for my friends. Soo Young and Saemi were first out of the group. This was Soo Young’s first official race and she did great! The other 3 gals met up with us then we went in search of food! We found a cute diner and had a fun breakfast together, parting ways after.
I attempted to enter the closest subway I could find to make my way back to Manhattan, BUT, all the subways were messed up today. So I had to walk 20 blocks to GAP (Grand Army Plaza)! Thank you iPhone for your guidance; Brooklyn, lets get it together will ya?
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UGA student Zhongyuan Liu interviews a farmer from the Wujin district of Jiangsu Province about China’s land-titling program.
Zhongyuan Liu, a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural economics, knows that analyzing huge data sets are not enough to understand the impact of rural land reforms in China.
You have to talk to the farmers.
With that in mind, Liu used funding provided by the Office of Global Programs Graduate International Travel Award to interview farmers, village leaders and officers in a land reform office in the Wujin district, Jiangsu Province of China.
For generations farms have been the lifeline of rural Chinese, providing a place to grow the rice and vegetables essential to feeding their families, even though the average size is much smaller than what’s found in the U.S., Liu said. In 2016, for example, the average farm was slightly less than an acre.
Agricultural production, however, doesn’t provide enough employment. As a result, beginning in the late 1980s, migration to urban areas became more common. By 2017, more than 172 million people had moved to the cities and factory jobs, a figure that accounts for between 16 and 22 percent of China’s growth in its gross domestic product, according to Liu.
“Although the labor market is well developed and restrictions on migration have been removed, the number of people moving for jobs in urban areas hasn’t increased as much as is needed,” Liu said. “Rural land reform, however, could further release the potential of the rural labor stock.”
In China, like many other developing countries, property rights require demonstrating that the land is being farmed by those who live there. With a focus on increasing the efficiency of land use, land certification and titling programs that remove constraints on land and labor use have been widely implemented worldwide in recent years, Liu said.
To remove the obstacles caused by insecure property rights, the Chinese Central Government implemented a land-titling program in 2008 with a series of pilot projects in several provinces. The program is scheduled to finish by the end of this year, and each farm household is entitled to a land certification.
“Land certification is not a new thing in China,” Liu said. “Many rural households had the land certification after the new contract period around 1997, but the certifications did not have precise information of geographic position and the information archives management was in disorder. The new program evolved to include GPS surveys that better document the property lines that have been observed by the farmers.”
For the case study portion of his research, Liu interviewed officers in a land reform office in the Wujin district of Jiangsu Province, one of the most developed areas in China. He also interviewed a village leader, farmers who work in nearby factories in addition to farming and a representative of a large-scale family farm.
The pilot phase of the land-titling program in Wujin district was first carried out in 2014. In 2015, the project was extended to the whole district, and now about 95 percent of farmers in this district have signed the contracts and are receiving their land certificates, Liu learned.
“Overall, I learned a lot during the summer trip,” Liu said. “On the one hand, I learned a lot of information which I did not find from the literature review and I am more comfortable about my research now. On the other hand, I developed my skill and knowledge in organizing a case study.”
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The purchase of a house is one of the biggest financial decisions that you will make in your lifetime. While exciting, it is often fraught with stress and anxiety. Our goal at Daniel Hobbin is to help you purchase a home as quickly and smoothly as possible, as well as provide helpful hints and tips. We have put together this buying guide outlining all the key factors to consider.
Get a breakdown of the costs
Regardless of whether you are moving for the first time or have moved before, understanding the costs involved is essential before you begin your search. Before you decide on a new move, you should consider these three factors; if any up-front costs are involved, what the Stamp Duty and Land Tax charges are and how much you will be paying in mortgage and insurance.
Upfront costs
You will need a deposit to secure the property you wish to purchase. Prior to purchasing a home, this is the amount you must put toward the overall cost.
Valuation costs
Once your offer on a property has been accepted, your mortgage lender mandates that your property is valued to ensure that it is worth the amount you paid. The amount varies depending on the value of the property - some lenders might not charge this fee, so you should check this with your lender when you arrange your mortgage.
There is also Stamp Duty Land Tax to consider. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, you must pay Stamp Duty Land Tax on land or properties over a certain price.
Visit the following website for more information on Stamp Duty: https://www.gov.uk/stamp-duty-land-tax
Mortgage costs
Obtaining a mortgage calculator before you start the house-hunting process will give you a much better understanding of the type of property you should be looking for. By doing so, you will be able to prevent disappointment if you fall in love with a property that is unaffordable.
We can refer you to our friends at Mortgage Cube, who provide a range of mortgage broker services.
Surveys are done to determine the property's condition. Different types of surveys are available, but a comprehensive survey offers the best chance of finding out critical information about a property.
Condition report (Level 1). It is assessed for risk, any urgent defects, and the condition of the property. The assessment does not provide any advice on how to fix the problems. This is based on a traffic light system that identifies any immediate issues. Newer constructions or properties in good condition are best suited to this survey.
Condition report (Level 2). It covers the same topics as the condition report, but provides details on property defects with advice on repairs. Potential problems such as damp and subsidence are described in the report. It also identifies any features that fail to meet building regulations. The surveyor will only point out visible defects, and they won't move furniture or check underneath the floorboards. Property in reasonable condition is best suited for this level of survey. Surveys of this type are available in two formats, with or without valuations, and can be completed in two to four hours.
Condition report (Level 3). The full structural survey is very detailed, looking at the building's condition and providing recommendations for problems, repairs, and maintenance. These are best suited to older, in poor condition, or unusual properties. They tend to only be done on houses, not on apartments. Also, it's wise to request this survey if you intend to change the design of your home, convert your attic, or add an extension. This survey differs from a homebuyer's report in that the surveyor will move furniture, look under the floorboards, and inspect the property from top to bottom. It might also include information about repair costs and timings. Such a survey typically takes a full day to complete.
Decide what is essential to you
Identifying the area where you want to live is the first step in finding the perfect home to buy. Choosing the right community can be just as significant as choosing the right property.
It is worth writing down a list of features that are non-negotiable after you have selected an area to start your search. Some examples include:
Off-street parking
The list can be as long or short as needed. Secondly, make a list of features you would like but are willing to compromise on. Therefore, you will be able to make decisions on a property more confidently and quickly.
Start your property search by using online portals like Rightmove, Zoopla & On The Market. Many newly listed properties are added to these websites daily, and if you're signed up for their alerts, you'll be notified when one comes on the market. Additionally, you should give your contact information to local estate agents so that you can be notified of new properties before they are listed online.
Be mindful of your first impressions, even before you arrive at a property. You can usually tell by looking at the outside and the surrounding area if a property will work for you. Consider driving around the neighborhood prior to the viewing to get a sense of the local amenities. Will you be able to live in the neighborhood? This is worth doing a few times throughout the day.
It's good practice to have a few questions prepared for the viewing. For example, you might want to ask:
Why are the vendors selling?
How long have the sellers lived there?
Is there a chain?
What are the downsides of the neighborhood?
Does the house need any work?
What’s included in the sale?
What are the neighbours like?
Be aware that the estate agent may not be able to answer all of your questions on the spot. However, they should get back to you after speaking with the vendor and conducting some research. Make sure you carry out as much research as possible and don't be afraid to ask questions. This may be your largest financial purchase and you should be thorough.
Making an offer
The work and preparation for the negotiation process begins when you are shown a property by the seller or estate agent.
It may be worthwhile to research the selling prices of other homes in the neighbourhood if you are familiar with the area. Knowledge of the current market can assist you in determining how much to offer. Nevertheless, how you present the offer once you have viewed the property greatly depends on your strategy.
When a real estate agent asks about your budget, minimise (without lying) how much you are willing to spend. If you exhibit too much emotion when viewing a property, the agent might assume you are willing to pay more. Consequently, the seller will likely hold out for a larger offer, knowing your strong desire to purchase their home.
Putting in a low offer
Consider how long the property has been on the market, whether the vendor has already reduced the price, and the circumstances of the vendor. Is the vendor eager to sell? Is the vendor part of a chain? Are they starting a new job very soon in a new city? You'll get this information easier if you build a positive relationship with the agent.
Find out how many viewings the property has received. A low offer might be reasonable if you are one of a few viewings over a period of time.
If you are chain-free or can put down a substantial deposit, tell your agent. A quick sale might put you in a position to negotiate a lower price.
If there are multiple agents representing the vendor, the agent who showed you around will try to convince them to accept a lower offer so that he or she can get paid before the competition.
Strategies to consider when making an offer
A helpful starting point is to offer 5% under the asking price. Listings are usually inflated with the intention of negotiating a lower price. Using this strategy in a strong sellers market may backfire, leaving you on the sidelines, so be careful.
Occasionally, you may be outbid by another buyer, even after your offer is accepted. This is known as gazumping. If it happens, stay calm and consider your options. Gazumping is not a pleasant experience and can bring out the worst in a buyer who views their accepted offer as a contract.
Think about making a larger offer, perhaps above the asking price, if this is truly a once-in-a-lifetime dream home. Be aware that if you go over your budget, you could be in financial trouble later, and regrets in property purchases are expensive.
In a buyer's market, where you have a measure of control, don't let this opportunity pass you by. Fear of losing the ideal property may lead you to pay more than you should. When you know you hold a significant advantage over a seller, remain firm but negotiate fairly.
Offer accepted
It will be a relief for you as a buyer when your offer is accepted, but the process is not done yet. The sale is not final until the contract is exchanged. If the house is still on the market, your seller may decide to withdraw or accept a higher offer from another buyer.
Should your offer be accepted, you should ask for the property to be removed from the market. You will be less likely to be gazumped. Buyers who have viewed the property before may return and make a more competitive offer. When you're gazumped, you have two options. Either walk away or raise your offer. Consider what you have spent to reach this stage and whether it is worthwhile to proceed with a larger offer.
Offer accepted - What's next?
Now is the time to start the mortgage application process with your mortgage lender. While you may already have an agreement in principle for your mortgage, now is the time for the lender to help you find the most suitable option for your property purchase. You can now fill out the majority of forms online. If you are on top of things, you can complete the documentation the day your offer is accepted.
Lenders will require an appraisal. This could be a physical inspection by one of their surveyors who will perform an automated valuation program. Physical inspections are not required to verify value and to approve a mortgage application. This, however, only provides the market value of the property, so it is still recommended that you get your own survey done.
Lenders make loan offers after they have assessed your application, the survey, and all supporting documentation. It will usually be sent to you, your lender, and your solicitor.
Exchange of contracts
You exchange contracts with the seller when you have completed all the paperwork, received your mortgage offer, and your solicitor has received everything. Before the exchange of contracts, the seller should negotiate a completion date. It is usually four weeks after. First, you will need to send your deposit to your solicitor. Make sure your money is in one account a few weeks before your payment is due. This will make the transaction easier to complete. Once you receive the contract, your solicitor will ask you to sign it. At this stage, however, you are responsible and can lose your deposit if the purchase falls through due to your withdrawal.
You must arrange for the supply of electricity, gas, water, and telephone service. You should also ensure that the seller gets readings taken when they leave the property. To begin with, it may be easier to change the name on the account for existing suppliers of the property. The reason for this is that it is easier to change suppliers at a later time.
Completing your purchase
Your solicitor will provide you with a completion statement that will clearly specify payments you need to send to your solicitor. This includes any outstanding deposits, stamp duty, land tax, and solicitor's fees. These will need to be paid on or before the completion date.
Within 30 days of completion, the Stamp Office must receive your transfer deed and Stamp Duty payment. A completion statement will provide you with this information, and it is usually paid on the day of completion.
Owning your new home
Your solicitor will notify the Land Registry of your details. They will send the updated title deeds to your mortgage lender (or to you if you are not mortgaged). Now that you have purchased your new home, take your time to relax, unpack slowly, decorate and personalise your new home and settle in for a while.
Find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions from our buyers.
I've found a home I love. What do I do next?
Before making an offer, you should obtain a Decision in Principle from a mortgage lender and consult a solicitor. Both of these services can be provided by Daniel Hobbin. If you would like more information, please contact your local branch.
Before I look for properties, should I arrange a mortgage?
It is prudent to seek financial advice at an early stage if you anticipate that you will need a mortgage to buy your property. The issuance of a mortgage certificate should be requested by the lender once you have provisionally arranged for the required mortgage funds to be made available to you. A seller or estate agent may then use this to verify that you have the funds available to finance your purchase.
What are financial advisors and mortgage advisors?
Depending on your preferences and needs, they offer independent financial advice and can help you select the right financial products for you.
How much deposit do I need?
According to the mortgage product and the lender, you will need to contribute a certain amount. By working with a mortgage broker, you can gain a better understanding of the mortgage process.roker.
Can I withdraw from my property purchase?
Before contracts are exchanged, each party may withdraw from the transaction. As soon as contracts have been exchanged, the victim of a breach of contract would have recourse. During this time, the seller can retain the deposit.
Should I retain the services of my existing solicitor?
When it comes to conveyancing of properties, you may continue to use a solicitor you know works efficiently and quickly. We can, however, recommend one of our excellent solicitors if you have any doubts.
Do I need to use a solicitor?
The legal aspects of the purchase must be handled by a solicitor or conveyancing firm. Additionally, the seller will be required to appoint their own solicitor or conveyancer.
What are searches?
Your solicitor will conduct searches of the Land Registry and the Local Authority records. They will investigate the planning history of the property and any potential road, drainage, or mining developments nearby.
In order to obtain a mortgage, your mortgage lender will arrange a mortgage valuation for you. The purpose of a mortgage valuation is to confirm to the lender that the property is worth the amount of the loan. However, it will not provide any information regarding the condition of the property. You should arrange your own survey whenever you purchase a property. You will be able to see the current condition of the property, thus preventing nasty surprises further down the road. There are three main types of surveys which have varying costs. You can contact us for recommendations.
A surveyor has identified an issue with the property. What should I do?
On occasion, buyers discover problems with a property before they exchange contracts. If this occurs, you have three options:
You may request that the seller corrects the problem at his or her expense.
In order to cover the costs of resolving the dispute, you can request a price reduction.
If the issue is significant, you may wish to withdraw from the purchase.
When is the buyer or seller bound by the terms of the sale or purchase?
Before each solicitor receives the signed contract from the seller and the buyer, either party may withdraw at any time and for any reason without cost or penalty. This is until the contracts have been exchanged.
After the exchange of contracts, can I withdraw?
Before contract exchange, either party may withdraw without penalty (except for solicitors' and surveyors' fees). The exchange of contracts commits both buyer and seller to completing the transaction. If one of the parties withdraws from the deal after exchange, there can be legal and financial repercussions.
How long will it take from the exchange to the completion?
Occasionally, the exchange and completion occur on the same day. The buyer, seller, and lenders will usually be given a couple of weeks to prepare for completion under normal circumstances.
What is the deadline for paying the deposit?
Upon exchange of contracts, the deposit is paid to the seller's solicitor.
How soon will my mortgage lender release the funds?
Your solicitor will request the mortgage from the lender. The lender will usually release the loaned funds within four to five working days. As a result, your solicitor will advise you as to the earliest possible completion date.
What is the process for selecting a completion date?
Following the signing of the contracts, your solicitor and the seller's solicitor will consult both parties and determine a completion date. If you need a mortgage, your solicitor will contact the lender after the contracts have been signed. Upon receiving notification from your mortgage lender that the funds will be released, your solicitor and the seller's solicitor will consult both parties and agree on a date for completion.
When and how will I receive the keys?
The estate agent will be able to confirm where and when you may collect keys once the seller's solicitor confirms receipt of funds.
What happens to my title deeds?
Despite the fact that you have received the keys to your property, there is still a considerable amount of work to be done by your solicitor. During the process of selling your property, the title deeds remain with your solicitor for a period of time before being sent to your lender. Your deeds will be held by them until you have repaid the mortgage in full.
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The eye of Hurricane Ian made landfall this afternoon in southwest Florida. Sustained winds got up to 150 miles per hour. Ian is tied for the fifth strongest hurricane in U.S. history. Well over 1.3 million people have lost power. Governor Ron DeSantis said the storm surge topped 12 feet in some places. For many Floridians, the rain and wind have been continuous since last night. We have reached Chelsea Rivera, who's sheltering with her parents in Sarasota. That's about 50 miles north of where the center of the storm hit. Thank you so much for making the time to speak with us, Chelsea.
CHELSEA RIVERA: Of course. Thank you for having me.
CHANG: Can you just tell us what it was like mid-afternoon when the eye finally came ashore? Like, what did you see? What did you hear?
RIVERA: Oh, so this - for hours, we've been waiting for this storm. It started last night, and it's just been intensifying all day. If you - actually, I'm looking out my window right now. I see palm trees swaying back and forth. The scariest part is probably the wind. It's - like you said, it's going 150 miles an hour. It's shaking the house.
CHANG: Wow.
RIVERA: Rain is pelting, you know, the windows. Luckily, our power didn't go out. I think it has to do with, you know, maybe having solar energy. But everyone in our neighborhood, you know, power is out for them. And then I heard that all the houses on the coast are submerged in water, which is, you know, devastating. It makes me sad, you know, just thinking about the restaurants, you know, the homes on the waterfront, you know, places that I love, you know, destroyed by the storm. So it's going to be a really, really hard week.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, you know, we reached you on a cell phone, so I guess that there's at least some connectivity. But you said...
CHANG: ...Every house on your block in your neighborhood has lost power. Is that correct?
RIVERA: Yes. Or at least from what I can tell.
CHANG: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I understand that you were not in an evacuation zone, right? But...
CHANG: ...Have people in the neighborhood mostly evacuated anyway?
RIVERA: Yeah. So that's a good question. So we are close to an evacuation zone. So, yeah, we didn't have to evacuate, but in my neighborhood, a lot of homes are, you know, evacuated. But my neighbors - you know, us and my two neighbors have stayed behind from what I know.
CHANG: And why did your family decide to stay?
RIVERA: So I am originally from St. Pete. I'm a Ph.D. student, going to the University of South Florida. So, you know, I'm up there. And originally Ian was said to, you know, hit St. Pete. But then last minute, it changed course.
CHANG: Right.
RIVERA: And, you know, it seemed to hit Sarasota, where I am right now. So I went to Sarasota thinking that I'd be safer there, but I actually wasn't.
CHANG: Ah, I see.
RIVERA: So yeah. And then by the time we found out, it was just too late. And, you know, we have a dog, and so we just boarded up the house and, you know, decided to ride it out.
CHANG: How did you and your family prepare?
RIVERA: So we are originally from Jersey. So we've been through Hurricane Sandy. And...
CHANG: Ah, yep, yep.
RIVERA: ...It was a Category 3 storm. So it was bad, but it wasn't this bad. So what we did was, you know, we boarded up our house. We have really nice neighbors. So they kind of showed us how - you know, how it's done. And, you know, we spent yesterday moving furniture all around, charging up our devices, getting gas. You know, the grocery stores down here are pretty much pillaged. But, you know, we tried to get what we could.
CHANG: Jeez. Well, how have you and your parents been just getting through this day today?
RIVERA: Oh, well, I've been trying to busy myself with work all day, but it's just been so hard to focus. And we've just been watching the news constantly.
CHANG: Well, I hope you and your family keep staying safe where you are.
CHANG: That is Chelsea Rivera in Sarasota, Fla. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
RIVERA: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
Ailsa Chang is an award-winning journalist who hosts All Things Considered along with Ari Shapiro, Audie Cornish, and Mary Louise Kelly. She landed in public radio after practicing law for a few years.
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As many of you know, my daughter and her husband and two boys are living with us while we build an addition, after which my hub and I will move into that space and they will take over the main house. As if living with a seven-year-old poised to take over the world and a three-year-old ready to become a pirate is not chaos enough, having construction work going on is also a distraction. To put it mildly.
The addition is framed and roofed and the plumbers have done most of their work, though the city says they have to put in a bigger connector pipe. The day the plumbers were here I thought I’d go out of my mind trying to keep the indoor cats from getting out and my daughter’s dog from killing them. Or vice versa. We still have choices to make for bathroom finishing (who knew there were so many different kinds of bathroom vanities and medicine cabinets, not to mention lights to go over them).
Fast forward to Friday morning:
–Wake at 5 (I know, I wake up naturally at that time, no alarm), start writing, fight the urge to look again at bathroom vanities.
–Write a few words, take a quick hop over to Wayfair to, you guessed it, look at bathroom vanities.
–Write a few hundred words, take a quick break and realize that ETSY HAS BATHROOM VANITIES. Must investigate.
–Write a few hundred more words, discover that CRAIG’S LIST HAS BATHROOM VANITIES. Must research.
–Proceed like this for the better part of a couple hours and get almost to 1,000 words when daughter knocks on office door at 7 AM and says the electrician is coming.
–Close computer and tell myself I’ll finish my word count later in the day.
–Electrician arrives. “Good morning, I hope it is not too early!” Despite the fact that I’m in my awful looking jammies, no.
–Electrician requests meeting in the addition. Daughter and husband comply, leaving guess-who-yes-me with the boys.
–I fix their breakfast, repeatedly asking the seven-year-old to please quit reading and get dressed for school, secretly pleased that he loves reading so much.
–Eye on the clock. I have a 9 AM meeting with a client. And another meeting after that and several manuscripts to finish reading. Plus those random 200 words on the novel that didn’t get done first thing.
–Seven-year-old is still reading.
–Three-year-old is refusing to eat anything I fix him for breakfast. He’s been sick, but insists he wants to go to pre-school anyway. Will he get dressed, then? No.
–Daughter and husband are still in conference with electrician! Clock is ticking. Soon it will be time to leave for school!
–Manage to get seven-year-old dressed. But he’s got homework to finish! Which involves noting which books he has read all week—so he has to finish the book he’s reading in order to complete it.
–I need more coffee.
–Miracle occurs. Daughter and husband finish meeting, boys get to school on time, I’m able to shower. And get some work done! Except I never did get back to those elusive 200 words.
That’s my life these days. Of course, it is not always that crazy, and I do have the sanctuary of my office where I retire and lock the door (because it is the favorite space of all four of my grandchildren). The thing is, though, even when all is calm, there’s a lot pulling on my brain. I can feel it—I’m not at my sharpest. Just now I struggled to remember how to spell miracle. I could easily throw up my hands and decide not to write for a while.
But I don’t want to, because writing is the one thing that keeps me sane. It keeps me connected to the world. Without it, I’m unmoored—and I don’t need to be any more unmoored than I already am. So here’s what I’m trying to remember:
–It’s okay to take a break. When life gets chaotic and it is hard to accomplish everything on the to-do list, my inclination is to push myself to work harder. Often, the opposite tack is more effective. If I give myself a few minutes to sit down and knit or close my eyes, I’m more efficient.
–Self-care is a cliché for a reason. Because it helps you carry on through life! Keeping up with the things that keep me sane is vital. Things like drinking water, going on walks, doing my physical therapy exercises, eating right. And haircuts and pedicures and massages are good, too.
–It really is okay not to write for a while. The world is not going to quit turning on its axis if I don’t.
–It’s also okay to write if I want to! Because doing things that make me happy during chaotic times is important. And writing makes me happy.
–And….um….er….I forgot. I really did. Had something brilliant in mind to finish off this list and it just flew out of my mind. Because, chaos and distraction.
I hope your life is less chaotic and distracting than mine at the moment!
Leave a comment and tell me how you handle distraction!
Here is your prompt of the week:
Lightning flashed and all around them was the sound of thunder.
Here’s my ko-fi, where you can buy me a cup of coffee or any kind of drink you’d like (so far it has been running toward wine). Thank you in advance for the treat!
France 2019—Would you like to study writing in the south of France with me? You can! Find all the details here. Space is filling up fast so hop on over and check it out!
Novel-Writing Workshop—I’m also teaching at the Sitka center on the Oregon coast this June. This is a beautiful location conducive to learning and writing. Click here for more info.
Facebook Group--And of course, don’t forget to join the Facebook group if you haven’t already. I post lots of good links and often we get some good conversation going.
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Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, prime minister of Pakistan, listens to speeches during the conference. He took the stage today, as well, explaining the impact of catastrophic flooding in Pakistan this summer.
International climate negotiations rolled on today in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
The leaders of dozens of countries took the stage to describe how climate change is killing and injuring their citizens and hurting their economies. Scientists weighed in on how humans can adapt to a hotter planet. And the United Nations tried to crack down on companies that lie about how much they are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
Pakistan's Prime Minister sounded the alarm
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan took the floor to deliver an opening statement on behalf of his country. He opened with the grim details of catastrophic floods that hit Pakistan earlier this summer.
Thirty three million people were affected, he said, more than half of whom are women and children. In the southern part of the country, seven times more rain than average fell.
"This all happened despite our very low carbon footprint," Sharif told assembled world leaders. "And yet we became a victim of something with which we had nothing to do.
"This is simply unjust and unfair, to say the least," he continued. Sharif called on world leaders to come up with a fairer way for the wealthy countries responsible for current global warming to help pay for the costs of climate disasters.
U.N. takes aim at greenwashing
The U.N. is trying to prevent "dishonest climate accounting" by companies and local governments that have promised to eliminate or offset their carbon emissions.
Non-state actors like financial institutions and city governments will play a crucial role in getting the world to net zero emissions by midcentury, a group of experts working on behalf of the U.N. said in a report. To ensure they're delivering on what they promised, groups that have made net-zero pledges must publicly report on their progress with verified information, the report says.
The report also says groups that have made net-zero pledges should stop building or investing in new fossil fuel supplies, avoid buying "cheap" carbon offset credits instead of cutting their own emissions, and ensure their lobbying activities align with their climate commitments.
"A growing number of governments and non-state actors are pledging to be carbon free. And, obviously, that's good news," says António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general. "The problem is that the criterion benchmarks for these net-zero commitments have varying levels of rigor and loopholes wide enough to drive a diesel truck through."
American elections cast a shadow over global talks
Voters are heading to the polls to decide which party will control Congress, and the outcome could undermine the Biden Administration's negotiating clout in the climate talks over the next two weeks.
The U.S. has already committed to cutting its emissions 50-52% by 2030. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which spurs the adoption of electric cars and more efficient buildings, is a major part of reaching that target and is already underway.
"If there is change in leadership in Congress, Congress is not going to be able to pass a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act," says Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute. "That is a key bedrock of federal policy and importantly, most of it is self-executing."
According to the new "America Is All In" report, the U.S. is on track to cut emissions 39% by 2030, but would need to phase out coal completely by then to achieve its goal. But a major negotiating item at COP27 is over how to increase funding for developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and pay for the damage from climate impacts. If Democrats lose Congress, Republicans will likely oppose any climate aid for poorer countries.
Scientists say more research is needed about places most at risk from warming
People who live in low-income and developing countries are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. That includes sea level rise, heavy rain and more extreme storms, droughts and heat waves.
"The impacts are here, they're now and they are impacting the most vulnerable," said Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the adaptation section of a sweeping international climate report released last year, at a presentation today at COP27.
Roberts and other top climate scientists working for the United Nations warned that research about adapting to climate change focuses on wealthier nations. That disparity leaves millions of people without useful guidance, the scientists say.
Where are the protests?
Last year's conference in Glasgow saw crowds of thousands of people gathered outside the conference center to push for climate action. Their voices could sometimes be heard inside the building. This year couldn't be more different.
The Egyptian government said it would allow some protests. But it has limited demonstrators to a ring-fenced area several minutes drive from the conference center. And human rights groups say the government has heavily vetted those who have been given permission to protest.
When NPR visited the protest site, there were only a few dozen demonstrators, and the event felt carefully controlled. As one foreign TV crew approached, one of the organizers quietly warned the protestors, who had been asked to stand in a line, to be careful what they said, even to each other, because the correspondent "understands Arabic".
Rather than try to hold politicians at the conference accountable, people there seemed keen to voice their support for world leaders - in particular the Egyptian president Abdul Fattah El Sisi.
Taher Salem, an employee in the Ministry of Education, said he'd come to the protest site to join President Sisi in "welcoming people here from all over the world". "We are here to support the conference; to say welcome to Sharm el Sheikh; welcome to Egypt," he said.
This scene is in keeping with Egypt's record on freedom of expression. The country has a record for the widespread stifling of dissent, with an estimated 60,000 political prisoners. Human Rights Watch says dozens of environmental activists have been arrested in the lead up to this summit.
Despite these efforts, human rights are becoming a growing focus at the conference. Sanaa Seif, the sister of one of Egypt's best known political prisoners, Alaa Abd El Fattah, is attending to spotlight the case of her brother, who has been in jail for almost a decade.
At the same time, Abd El Fattah has stepped up an ongoing hunger strike by now also refusing water. Several world leaders, including British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have all said they have raised his case in discussions with Egyptian officials.
Lauren Sommer covers climate change for NPR's Science Desk, from the scientists on the front lines of documenting the warming climate to the way those changes are reshaping communities and ecosystems around the world.
See stories by Lauren Sommer
Rebecca Hersher (she/her) is a reporter on NPR's Science Desk, where she reports on outbreaks, natural disasters, and environmental and health research. Since coming to NPR in 2011, she has covered the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, embedded with the Afghan army after the American combat mission ended, and reported on floods and hurricanes in the U.S. She's also reported on research about puppies. Before her work on the Science Desk, she was a producer for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered in Los Angeles.
See stories by Rebecca Hersher
Michael Copley is a correspondent on NPR's Climate Desk. He covers what corporations are and are not doing in response to climate change, and how they're being impacted by rising temperatures.
Ruth Sherlock is an International Correspondent with National Public Radio. She's based in Beirut and reports on Syria and other countries around the Middle East. She was previously the United States Editor for the Daily Telegraph, covering the 2016 US election. Before moving to the US in the spring of 2015, she was the Telegraph's Middle East correspondent.
See stories by Ruth Sherlock
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Note: We asked tech-savvy scholar Cathy Davidson to reflect on the realities of an author’s tour in the digital age. Her new book, “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn” explores whether our brains are cut out for the age of ubiquitous connection. I’m just back from Washington, DC, where I gave talks at the Howard Hughes Janelia Research Center and at the NEH Start-Up Grant Conference. I signed books supplied by Politics and Prose Independent Bookstore, as organized by Perry Pidgeon Hooks, and I was interviewed for an online book webcast “Eye on Books” by Bill Thompson. I name them each because these individuals and organizations are supporting the apparatus of contemporary book publishing which, now and in the past, is precarious and yet precious. As of this writing, I’m headed for Chicago where I’ll read at the Chicago Public Library, give a talk at the Learning 3.0 Conference (sponsored by Training Magazine), and tape a segment for Chicago Tonight, a program on WTTW, the local PBS television channel. In between, I have authored an op ed for a major syndicated newspaper, written three blogs for highly respected newspapers and magazines, written another blog for www.hastac.org and this one for DMLcentral, given two online interviews, one commercial radio interview, updated my Facebook status with news about my upcoming whereabouts, and tweeted and retweeted somewhere nearing 50 times. Welcome to the author tour, 21st century style!
It is fascinating being an author in what historian Robert Darnton calls humanity’s fourth great Information Age. He counts the others as the invention of writing in 4000 BCE Mesopotamia, Gutenberg’s movable type, and the late 18th century’s machine production of books, paper, and ink. Like Darnton, my original field of specialization is that third great Information Age, the Industrial Age era of mass printing and the various forms of print available to middle-class and working-class readers for the first time in history. Many years ago, in doing the research for Revolution and the Word, I spent a decade in the dusty attics of historical societies, writing an ethnography of the first generation of popular readers, piecing together their story from diaries, from circulating library records, from the actual “scrabblings” they had made in their books, or in the material evidence of their readership such as secret pockets they sewed into the seams of dresses or pantaloons, to conceal the novels, printed in cheap, small duodecimo formats, from the eyes of censorious parents or teachers.
“Parson” Mason Locke Weems was arguably America’s first professional author and, indisputably, the originator of the American version of the author tour. He wasn’t really a parson but he dressed like one as he traveled from town to town selling popular books, including his Life of Washington (1800), a book filled with highly fictionalized stories of America’s first President, including the apocryphal one about the young boy confessing to chopping down the family cherry tree (“I cannot tell a lie”). Weems also sold popular novels with titles like The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, The Coquette, The History of Constantius and Pulchera, or Female Quixotism. To gather book-buying crowds, he drove his horse cart into the town square, then shouted “Seduction! Murder! Treason!”
I suspect any author on tour today feels a certain reluctant empathy for Parsons Weems. I don’t do a lot of shouting about “Murder!” or “Treason!” But, since that fateful day in April 1993, when Mosaic 1.0, the first popular Web browser, was unleashed upon an unwitting public, the world of print has been battered, independent bookstores have gone under, even Borders is no more. Thus the unpaid blogs, the self-organized author tour, the tweets and status updates, all before a journey that doesn’t involve driving horse carts but taking off shoes, putting liquids in three ounce ziplock baggies, standing ignominiously in full-body scanners, and then rushing for the gate before finding another flight’s been cancelled.
Why? Why does one take one’s writing to the public? In 2011, it’s certainly not for the money. The economics of the book business, for Weems as for about 95% of contemporary writers, does not break in favor of the author. Or the publisher, for that matter. Then, as now, publishing books is a precarious business. There’s a joke in the world of publishing that right after Gutenberg printed his famous Bible, the second book he published was called “The Crisis in Book Publishing.” That sounds about right.
So why is this author spending the year hawking her books? As many hours as I spent editing and re-editing Now You See It, as much as I worried over every preposition and double-checked each research study and corrected each citation, the experience of talking about the book is very different from the lonelier, more isolated act of writing. A book tour in the 21st century is the analog equivalent of what gamers call “augmented reality.” In ARG’s, part of the challenges are online, and then part are like real-world scavenger hunts that then send you back to the online gaming world again. In the world of 21st century authorship, a reader might download Now You See It to their Kindle, might read an interview with me on a blog, might listen to a podcast or watch me on YouTube but then there is the actual appearance, the book talk or even an actual reading from the book itself, and then the signing of the physical book. We shake hands. We meet. We say goodbye. I load up the cart again and giddy-up to my next stop, in this case mostly on planes not horseback, but the mission is pretty much the same.
What Would Socrates Think?
Way back in that first great Information Age, when writing was still something fresh and promising, Socrates was skeptical about writing as a mode of knowledge transmission. Socrates preferred talking, engaging in dialogue. He felt writing was a poor translation of the commodious, changeable, expansive interactive idea into a static technology of alphabets, syntax, semantics, grammar, punctuation, and frozen rhetorical form. Whereas dialogue allows the possibility of disruption, disagreement, and minds changed because of that interactive process, writing, in Socrates’ view, limited the possibility of intellectual transformation.
When I give talks, I like to pass out two important pieces of technology, a pencil and a notecard (machine-made paper). I set a timer and ask the audience to do an exercise where, for two minutes, they write down three things (the things vary with the audience) on their card, such as the three skills every student needs to master in college to succeed in the 21st century. The room goes as silent as a tomb. It’s terrifying, giving a talk to a few hundred people in that silence and I swear my heart beats more loudly than my white plastic kitchen timer. When it goes off, I then have audience members turn to someone they don’t know, compare what they have written, and from their six things, choose what they think is the most important. The room is a burst of energy — interactive, lively, engaged.
That interactive moment — the dead silence in the room followed by the lively outburst of dialogue — does more to make people aware of their own varying patterns of attention than anything I can tell them. It’s a Socratic moment, an object lesson in the importance of interactive learning. The exercise performs different forms of attention in our world, silent and timed as in a test at school versus bustling and noisy and interactive as it is in so many multitasking moments of our daily lives. We are in the fourth great Information Age in human history, but, as in the other three, our ways of knowing the world both change and stay the same. For all our worries and fears about multitasking damaging our brain, we are actually quite good at it and do it all the time, even when we don’t label what we are doing as multitasking. It’s all quite Socratic when you think about it, when you talk about it.
It is almost impossible to see past our own ways of seeing except when we have the right partners, tools, and methods. We see our own ideas better when we have to test them in dialogue with others. It is in interaction, as Socrates implied, that we stretch and grow, know our own limits and then transcend them. That’s what learning is. It is also the interactive lesson of this fourth great Information Age. Whether online or f2f, interaction isn’t just about communicating with others but about letting those others challenge us so that, together, we outdo ourselves. In the community of the many, responding together, we outnumber ourselves.
Time to pack. Come on by if you happen to be in one of the places where I’m taking the old horse and cart.
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Communication is both an art and a science. It often involves speaking, listening, reading and writing, online or through traditional communication platforms and media. Abdulrahman Kanoo International School (ARKIS) ensures that the school constantly provides a strong and agreeable foundation through accurate academic programs, along with in-depth exposure to cultural and multi-cultural practices.
ARKIS aims to create an environment that fosters learning. It provides students with equal opportunities to explore and grow by challenging and reinforcing their abilities. As the newest addition to the Springring family, ARKIS has implemented the platform so well that it is now part of their communication culture. In this blog, you can gain insight into how Springring has become an integral part of the school’s communication.
Connecting with students through parentsTeachers at ARKIS communicate with parents through the communication platform, but they also communicate with their students. Granted, to avoid disorganization or miscommunication, they have chosen to not have direct connection with students through Springring. However, they have effectively found a different way to communicate with students - through their parents! Students are still kept informed and up to date on what is happening within their online and hybrid learning environments.
“This application is an excellent way to communicate with parents and students.” - Francisca Espina Serrano, Teacher at ARKIS
Teachers like Francisca have shared their experiences with Springring and loved the ease and simplicity the platform brings to school communication. Communicating with parents has never been easier and more proactive. Teachers feel like they are being heard. At ARKIS, teachers have embraced this easy parent-teacher communication. It’s so easy that they found it best to also communicate with students through their parents. With Springring, teachers and parents are finally able to say and show that they are on the same team. They both share the goal of ensuring that these students receive better education, through better communication.
One of the most popular benefits of Springring is the chat feature. Teachers can save a lot of time by sharing class updates to all the parents of students within their class, all in one go. They can also share the academic progress or performance of a specific student through Springring chat. One thing to keep in mind is that only the class teacher and the parents in the chatroom can view or have access to the messages communicated within the chat. This is to promote a sense of privacy and confidentiality between the class teacher and the parent.
However, Springring chat is extremely beneficial for teachers all around the world. This is because it allows teachers to take back control of how they spend their time - both during work hours and during their free time. Teachers are able to set their own office hours which is visible to all parents and school staff. Parents will only be able to communicate with teachers during these office hours. Teachers can enjoy their free time, knowing that they will achieve a more balanced work life and personal life.
In addition, any parents that start a conversation outside of a teacher’s office hours, will receive an automated message stating that the teacher is unavailable. This is something teachers found helpful. They can rest assured that parents will not be ignored, without any disruptions to their free time. It also helps teachers find a healthy work-life balance, making them more productive during their working hours.
Another element about this feature that is popular among teachers is that parent-teacher communication is limited to the Springring app and platform only. Teachers who would not like to share their personal or contact information with all parents have found this very useful and freeing.
“The features are easy to use. The time off / privacy setting is great. It leaves teachers some privacy time.” - Francisca Espina Serrano, Teacher at ARKIS
ARKIS teachers have especially been enthusiastic about this feature as they found it also avoids repetition. Both parents of any given student are included in the chatroom. This allows both parents of each student to be informed at the same time, and cuts the teacher’s communication time in half and improves the effectiveness of their school communication.
When communication flows within a school, especially a big school with hundreds of staff members and thousands of students and parents within the school community, it can be hard to recall certain messages or information that has been communicated throughout the school year. Springring is helping ARKIS minimize that risk substantially. With this platform, all staff - including admins, teachers, and teacher’s assistants - will see in real time what has been sent and what is being sent to parents at all times. They can instantly stay in the loop and stay updated to what is being shared with parents.
“An excellent program where all ARKIS affiliates are aware of what is sent to parents..” - Ramla Hasan Ali Yusuf Alshajar, Head of P.E. Department at ARKIS
Promoting transparency throughout the platform ensures that teachers and admins are on the same page and on the same team. It also reassures admins that they can still oversee all school and class communications and that they are not being cut out of the communication equation.
The flexibility Springring provides teachers and admins is huge. When it comes to what type of content they can share with the community, it’s limitless. School staff can share information whether it’s in the form of text, image, video, link, or even an attachment. ARKIS admin and teachers share most of their information and updates through attached files. Springring allows them that freedom.
“I liked this app as it helps me to keep parents informed by sending announcements and messages. It’s easy to attach a file.” - Rihana Nishat Qamar, Home Room Teacher at ARKIS
Whether it’s a PDF, an Excel sheet or Word document, you can easily attach it to any post you would like to share with parents, students or even other teachers. At the end of the day, Springring has one goal. That goal is making school and class communication faster and easier.
We have no control over our current global, economical and social climate. However, we do have control over how we respond to it. Unforeseen circumstances on a global scale have forced us to adapt our educational environments very quickly and with no notice. However, we aren’t out of the woods yet. So schools around the world continue to stay cautious and stay on top of the latest information in order to adapt and continue safely educating their students.
ARKIS continues to do so through Springring communication. Admin at ARKIS have taken the initiative to keep everyone informed of their safety procedures, Covid-19 national updates and news, and how that news would affect the school community. ARKIS admin uses Springring posts, pinned posts and alert posts. This is to update all parents, teachers and students instantly and at the same time. Staying safe and staying connected with parents and students is very important during these uncertain times.
Effective communication through Springring is made seamless so that all admin, teachers and parents have a personalized user experience. But it continues to connect them on one unified platform. It will be a place where they are all able to instantly view and receive updates - no matter where they are or what time of day it is.
We empower educators to share their experiences. Share your teacher success stories, experiences with Springring, or a proud teacher moment! Reach out to us on marketing@myspringring.com. You can also refer an inspirational teacher at your school!
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Abdul Rahman Kanoo International School, Board of Directors Messages
The Digital Marketing Specialist owl. The passionate bookworm/book-owl that runs on caffeine and loves soulful music. As a morning Owl, I'm at my creative peak while the sun is still up. I'm a wordsmith who enjoys writing, traveling and making punny dad jokes. Yes, seriously!
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Over the past decade, there has been a great deal of debate about whether or not hand dryers are truly the most hygienic solution to drying your hands in a public bathroom. There have now been a number of studies that have sought to answer this question, with varying results. Some say that hand dryers are more hygienic as they minimise physical contact while others claim that the warmth and airflow generated actually encourage the growth and spread of bacteria.
There are three popular methods of hand drying in public bathrooms. These methods are: drying using paper towels (and sometimes linen towels, in fancy bathrooms), warm air dryers and newer, more advanced jet air dryers. Warm air dryers are currently more widespread, the type you might encounter in a pub or school toilet, and use warm air that is directed at a lower speed than newer models. Jet air dryers, such as Dyson's “Airblade”, blast cooler air at very high speeds, with the aim of encouraging water away from your skin.
In an attempt to determine the most hygienic method of drying your hands, researchers performed a series of tests. The most important of these was a hand drying test, which took place in a standard ventilated room (without air conditioning) and involved testing both the environment and its inhabitants. People wore gloves and then dipped their hands in a solution of bacteria cultured from yogurt and then dried their hands with each of the three main methods.
To fairly test how hygienic each drying method is, researchers rubbed their hands for 15 seconds with four paper towels, rubbed their hands together under a warm air dryer for 30 to 40 seconds or used a jet air dryer for 15 seconds. These times were considered the necessary amount needed for each method to completely dry the user's hands (gloves, in this case). As the test was primarily focused on the spread of germs, 120 air samples were taken, with half of these taken after drying hands and half taken before, as control samples. Each of these samples were taken over a 15 minute period using air samplers.
A second test was performed to discover the possible spread of contamination from person to person. Researchers coated their gloves in water-based black paint and both they and a fellow test subject were dressed in white suits. The two people stood one metre apart and the researcher dried their hands to observe the transfer of paint from their hands to their surroundings. This test was performed 10 times for each of the three main drying methods.
The drying test results showed much higher counts of bacteria when using hot air hand dryers than paper towels. Perhaps surprisingly, this count was even greater when using modern jet air dryers. The bacteria transfer test with black paint produced similar results; paper towels restricted the paint to the primary test subject, while air dryers and jet dryers both spread paint from the hands to the subject's body, as well as to anyone standing in close proximity.
An interesting feature of the hot air dryer test was that the test subject rubbing their hands together during use actually resulted in less bacteria being removed. On the other hand, holding their hands still while drying removed a greater amount, suggesting that the common practice of rubbing hands together to accelerate drying is actually detrimental. In this sense, jet air dryers can be considered more effective than hot air dryers, as they dry the hands far more quickly and discourage users from either rubbing their hands together or leaving the bathroom while they are still wet. As long as users adhere to the manufacturer's instructions and dry their hands thoroughly, there isn't a significant difference in effectiveness between the two main air dryer types.
Despite this study suggesting that air dryers are inherently more hygienic than their electrical counterparts, there are definite limitations to the tests conducted. Rather than test subjects washing their hands and then drying them, they dried them without removing any of the bacteria or paint beforehand. These test conditions are more akin to using the toilet then drying the hands without washing them, which is an unlikely scenario. The results do suggest that the heat and air currents generated by an electrical dryer are likely to encourage the growth and spread of germs but the test conditions are unlikely to be replicated in everyday life. To truly test the effectiveness of each type of drying, it would be more logical to dip the gloves in bacteria, clean them with soap and water and then dry them using each of the different methods.
The testers also concluded that one of the main issues with hot air dryers is that users often do not use them for long enough. It's recommended that air dryers are used for at least thirty seconds to ensure the user's hands are dry, as opposed to the popular technique of briefly holding them under the dryer before wiping them clean on clothes. Jet air dryers make this less of an issue by drying the hands more quickly, usually in approximately half the time required by older dryers.
While the paint test results suggested that air dryers promoted the transfer of airborne germs, certainly in comparison to paper towels, it's again unclear how significant this is. Proving that specks of black paint are transferred from person does not necessarily mean that dangerous bacteria will transfer at the same rate, especially if the user has properly cleaned their hands with soap and water before drying. Black paint is heavier than bacteria, however it does replicate the scenario of transferring water from person to person, which might itself be carrying harmful bacteria.
An interesting finding of the paint transfer test was that, while specks of paint were often spread to the user's upper body and the surrounding area, both types of air dryer removed the majority of paint from the hands. Essentially, they are effective at cleaning the hands but simply transfer the bacteria elsewhere, as opposed to paper towels which are an effective disposal method. In terms of transfer, the amount of paint that landed on secondary test subjects was generally low, with little difference between the two types of air dryers.
Another question that was apparently not considered in the study is that of germ transfer from the paper towel dispenser or air dryer unit itself. While most modern units are designed to be automatic and not require any physical contact, older hot air dryers in particular are often activated by a button that can become a breeding ground for germs if not frequently cleaned. Paper towel dispensers and jet air dryers generally avoid this issue by avoiding any need for contact with the unit.
In any case, the results of this study support the belief that paper towels remain the most effective hand drying method for preventing the spread of bacteria, making them the recommended option in healthcare settings and anywhere else that the spread of bacteria must be minimised. While certain media sources have used these results to suggest that electrical hand dryers are somehow unsafe compared to paper towels, this isn't really true in all but the most sensitive cases and these outlets fail to mention the limitations of the tests used.
Ultimately, paper towels remain the most hygienic method of drying your hands after cleaning them. Ideally, you should activate the tap, clean your hands with warm water and soap then use a paper towel to dry your hands, then using the paper towel to turn off the tap and avoid cross-contamination, if it isn't automatic. In everyday use, there is unlikely to be any danger in using air dryers as the vast majority of people aren't carrying significant bacteria and are hopefully cleaning their hands thoroughly before drying. In more sensitive situations, for example during an outbreak of contagious illness, it remains more advisable to use paper towels to thoroughly dry the hands and then dispose of the towels. This should minimise the possibility of infecting others (similar to the “catch it, bin it, kill it” campaign launched by the NHS during the swine flu pandemic in an attempt to stifle the spread of the virus).
To answer the question of whether or not hot air dryers are hygienic, this largely depends on the circumstances and whether the user fulfils the recommended drying duration. In healthcare settings and other environments where preventing the spread of bacteria is a priority, paper towels are the most effective method for drying hands. This does raise the question of paper waste, however many paper towels are now made using recycled material and paper is ultimately considered a renewable resource. For the vast majority of people, there is no danger at all in using air dryers but in locations where bacteria should be kept to a minimum, for example dental practices or retirement homes, paper towels remain the recommended option. Whatever you choose, always remember to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water and then dry them properly, without rubbing them together during the drying process. Our guide explains how to wash your hands properly for maximum hygiene
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By Sven Henrich on January 6, 2020 • ( 7 Comments )
A brief follow up to the $VIX discussion in this weekend’s 2020 Vision market update: US markets experienced two major volatility events with $VIX running above 40 twice during the past 4 years: 2015 and 2018. In both cases the $VIX spiked into the high 40’s. Charts suggest another volatility event of such magnitude may be coming in 2020.
Let’s walk through the evidence.
Firstly, note the obvious: Volatility events of this magnitude are rare these days. Indeed volatility is again very much contained as it always is when central banks are intervening. And ever since the Fed went from tightening to flip flopping and then outright cutting and balance sheet expansion the $VIX has been engaged in a pattern of lower highs since the December 2018 lows:
Originally the same chart suggested a volatility spike to come in October, this is what I was referring to in my Real Vision interview filmed on October 9.
But frankly the Fed killed the spike. Look where and when the Fed came in with ‘not QE’:
Thanks.
The rest is history. The Fed added over $400B to its balance sheet and continues to this day, even today the liquidity injections via repo continue and will continue at least until the end of January, although there are doubts they can stop:
“The Fed will continue pumping tens of billions a day into the repo market through at least the end of January.”
“It seems implausible to me that the Fed will be able to stop their repo operations by the end of January,” said Mark Cabana – BAML”https://t.co/RbSsDGCA7O
— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) January 6, 2020
But look closely at the chart. There is a lower trend line as well and despite all the liquidity injections and despite the torrent run in equities with little to no two way price discovery in December the $VIX continues to hold support, support that has held since late 2017.
So you see a compression pattern has formed. A massive one. Lower highs on the one hand and higher lows on the other hand. This pattern is coming to a conclusion sometime in the first quarter. We can’t know when, but it’s clear the pattern is running out of gas.
How meaningful is this pattern? See for yourself:
The previous mega spikes in the $VIX came following compression patterns and ironically the spikes came as the compression patterns were running out of gas, most infamously in late January 2018 going into February 2018 following another massive liquidity rally. One can’t help but compare the situation to now. In 2017/2018 the liquidity run came as a result of the US tax cuts, this liquidity run here being Fed driven.
As you can see the previous spikes produced market corrections in the 10%-15% range. We can’t know when this spike here triggers, but it could clearly occur at any time between now and early April and, if it occurs, it may run toward the 70 RSI line on the weekly $VIX chart.
During the previous events $VIX spiked into the 40’s. As $VIX appears to be very precise with its patterns one can envision a run toward the upper trend line connecting the two previous spikes to bring about a correction that could go a long way to fill many of the open market gaps also discussed this weekend.
Note: None of this is a guarantee of course. Patterns can be invalidated and clearly the Fed keeps tight liquidity control over this market. But the Fed is supposed to end repo by the end of January and also end their balance sheet expansion by April and then markets have to contend without, ironically coinciding with the ending phase of the pattern. So should a major volatility event unfold in 2020 then don’t be surprised as this chart pattern had already suggested it being a clear and present possibility.
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All content is provided as information only and should not be taken as investment or trading advice. Any investments, trades, and/or speculations made in light of the ideas, opinions, and/or forecasts, expressed or implied herein, are committed at your own risk, financial or otherwise. For further details please refer to the disclaimer.
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January 6, 2020 at 2:51 pm
The dynamic of previous spikes in volatility will be difficult to reproduce with the extinction of the leveraged short vol complex. In addition, the short term VIX ETN’s positions more than offsets the net vega short in spec’s futures positions.
January 6, 2020 at 3:07 pm
Exactly what gary stated above. When the vix leveraged short blew up and unwinded, credit suisse was caught. Only a major macro event can cause an unwind of the long positions in equities and pop the vix. With bond prices at these levels, we probably will have an orderly decline in stock prices in January February and march.
Macro risks include escalating tension in middle east with real shots fired domestically and abroad.
FuriousA says:
January 6, 2020 at 4:12 pm
Looks like you missed one declining trend and spike in Oct 18
January 6, 2020 at 5:35 pm
Hi Sven. I have a friend who thinks the VIX is only event based and therefore cannot be understood via technical analysis. I showed him your charts. Any thoughts on how to help him see that VIX spikes can be anticipated and roughly predicted?
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I want you to take a moment and pretend that you don’t know these kids or coaches.
They are all strangers.
You don’t know their skill, their talents, their moves.
You don’t know their last name, their number, or their father.
Study their faces.
Look into their eyes.
Look deep into what you can see here.
Which one scored the most goals? Who is the fastest? Who can skate backwards best? Who has been skating the longest? Who has just recently dared to give the sport a try and give it their all? Who can weave through four defenders? Who has the strongest slap shot? Who can stop the most pucks in mid-air?
Who puts in a lot of time cheering on their teammates? Who gets the most pats on the shoulder after giving their teammate water? Whose butt keeps the bench from getting dusty? Which one describes their teammate as tough? And who is the tough one? Which player gives the most encouragement from the bench?
Which skater is the happiest? The funniest? The most supportive? The sweetest? The smartest? The wisest? The most fun? The weirdest? The quietest?
Who has the most expensive stick? Who has the newest gloves? Who has the coolest helmet? Who’s bag cost the most? Who is the best? Who is the worst? Who got the most playing time?
You can’t tell? That’s right, you cannot tell. Right now, in this moment, none of that matters. It doesn’t matter today or tomorrow, and it won’t matter in 20 years. All that matters is that we are ONE. Not first, but one. We are a team. We train together. We learn together. We work together. We work HARD together. We laugh together. We nourish our bodies together. We make mistakes and lift each other up. We laugh at ourselves, and sometimes each other, but together. We are silly together. We appreciate each other. We are nobody by ourselves. We would fail alone and without each other.
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Welcome to Book Riot’s April 2019 Horoscopes and Book Recommendations! April showers bring May flowers, and they also bring the opportunity to curl up inside with a book on a rainy day. Find your astrological sign below for your April horoscope, perfectly paired with a newly released book.
Aries (March 21–April 19)
Happy Birthday, Aries! This is a great month for you to start a new venture. Whether it’s travel, a new job, or a big project, try something out of your comfort zone. The stars show great health and strong finances for you in April, so take advantage of this moment. This month also promises great opportunities for romance, especially if you take the lead. You might enjoy When We Left Cuba (April 9, Berkley Books) by Chanel Cleeton. Beatriz lost her home and her twin brother when her family was exiled during the Cuban Revolution. She’s offered a chance for revenge when the CIA recruits her to infiltrate Fidel Castro’s inner circle.
Taurus (April 20–May 20)
You tend to be a little hard headed, and this month is no exception. Tauruses know what they want and refuse to let anything block their paths. In April, your strong will may lead to some conflict with family, friends, and colleagues. It’s fine to be confrontational, but make sure it’s productive. Listen to others’ input and be willing to change your plan when needed. Check out Upon a Burning Throne (April 16, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a new epic fantasy by Ashok K. Banker, inspired by the Indian classic The Mahabharata. In the turbulent Burnt Empire, mortals walk among demigods and demons. Three young potential heirs to the emperor’s throne must pass The Test of Fire to learn who will lead.
Gemini (May 21–June 20)
You’re feeling good this month, Gemini. Successes in the past few months have boosted your self-esteem, giving you the energy and drive to reach your goals. Professional life is a big focus for you in April, which may cause some tension between you and your family. Be conscious of where you’re spending your energy and be honest with your loved ones. Read a book that plays with structure and form, like Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise (April 2, Henry Holt & Company). Two students at a prestigious performing arts high school fall passionately into first love. When their charismatic acting teacher begins to manipulate their emotions, they struggle to find the line between reality and performance.
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Cancer (June 21–July 22)
Family and friends will play a big role in your happiness this month. You’re feeling creative and spiritual, so spend time with the people that understand you best and support you. Some great memories may be made in April, Cancer! Your loved ones may also provide support for career advancement, so don’t be afraid to ask for advice if you hit a roadblock at work. I recommend The Murmur of Bees (April 16, Amazon Crossing) by Sofia Segovia, translated by Simon Bruni. A strange child is found abandoned and covered in bees under a bridge in a small Mexican town. Some see him as bad luck, but the family that takes him in finds that his strange gift may change their fate.
Leo (July 23–August 22)
Leos will make tangible progress toward personal and professional goals this month. Things are coming together for you in a very satisfying way. With lots of energy and increased focus, it’s a great time to get things done. However, your focus on your personal goals may cause some tension in love relationships. Make sure your significant other doesn’t feel neglected. Check out a thrilling mystery, like courtroom drama Miracle Creek (April 16, Sarah Crichton Books) by Angie Kim. Two Korean immigrants are in charge of an experimental medical device in rural Virginia. When the device causes a fatal explosion, are they at fault? Or was the experiment sabotaged?
Virgo (August 23–September 22)
Everything is going your way in April, Virgo! Whether it’s luck or karma, good things will land in your lap this month. As a methodical and practical person, you don’t like to leave things to chance. But that’s no reason to turn down a good opportunity! Take advantage of your luck and look for ways to utilize new social connections. It will pay off later in the year. You might enjoy Fumbled (April 23, Berkley Books), a charming new romance by Alexa Martin. Poppy is a single mother working hard to build the life she wants for herself and her son. When she crosses paths with her high school sweetheart, now an NFL starting wide receiver, their romance is reignited.
Libra (September 23–October 22)
Libras will need to put in a little extra effort this month to see results. Professional goals will be blocked at every turn, but problems won’t be insurmountable. Gather support from colleagues to make progress. There are also wonderful opportunities for romance in April, but you will need to take the lead and be clear about your intentions. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone! Read an insightful coming-of-age novel, like Boy Swallows Universe (April 2, Harper) by Trent Dalton. Australian preteen Eli is on the cusp of discovering the man he will one day be. But with a lost father, an incarcerated mother, and a drug dealing stepfather, he finds himself looking to the most steady person in his life: a notorious prison escapee.
Scorpio (October 23–November 21)
April will be full of joy for you, Scorpio. Your love life is fun and exciting this month, and others are drawn to your charismatic nature. Time spent growing your social circle will pay off, and interesting new people may enter your life. You’re also in great health throughout April, so take advantage of your extra energy by getting outside or exercising. You might enjoy I Miss You When I Blink (April 2, Atria Books), a new memoir-in-essays by Mary Laura Philpott. After Philpott checked off all the items on her to-do list for a successful life, she realized life didn’t look like she planned. In this book, she explores how making mistakes can lead to self-discovery.
Sagittarius (November 22–December 21)
You’re in a spring break state of mind this month, Sagittarius. As one of the biggest travelers of the zodiac, the change in weather makes you anxious to hit the road. Take advantage of opportunities to travel in April, especially with close friends or your significant other. With vacation on the brain, it may be hard to focus on your career. Save big professional goals for next month. Check out Days by Moonlight (April 2, Coachhouse Books) by André Alexis. A botanist and a professor set off on a journey to learn more about a mysterious poet. Their search leads them on a road trip through a fantastical Ontarian underworld.
Capricorn (December 22–January 19)
When tension arises this month, you must act as the peacemaker. Others look to you to be the level-headed, responsible one. Your grounded nature will come in handy in April at work and at home. With all of this emotional labor, your energy and health are questionable this month. Be sure to take care of yourself and get plenty of rest. It’s also a great time to focus on educational pursuits. Read fast-paced fantasy, like Descendant of the Crane (April 9, Albert Whitman Company) by Joan He. When her father is found dead, Hesina finds herself thrust into the role of queen and ruling over an unstable kingdom. Can she use her position of power to find out who killed her father?
Aquarius (January 20–February 18)
April is the perfect time for educational pursuits for Aquariuses. You’re looking to expand your mind, and opportunities to do so abound this month. Take a class, attend a workshop, or read up on a new topic. Professional development may also lead to a change in your career direction. Use this time to think about where you would like to be and how you would like to grow. I recommend The Book of the Moon: A Guide to Our Closest Neighbor (April 9, Abrams Image) by Maggie Aderin-Pocock. It’s an accessible and informative guide to the moon, including lunar history, science, art, and legend. Once you’ve read it, you’ll never look at the moon the same way again.
Pisces (February 19–March 20)
Family will take up much of your time this month, Pisces. Your loved ones are looking to you for help. It’s important to you to provide support, both emotionally and financially, and you have the means to do so in April. Your career is booming this month, and opportunities for advancement may come your way. Don’t forget to practice self care between energy spent at home and at work. Lean into your emotions with some powerful poetry, like In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive (April 9, Andrews McMeel Publishing) by Clementine von Radics. This moving collection explores love, loss, mental health, and the highs and lows of the human experience.
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SPDate is a free dating site that has tens of thousands of members all across the world. It’s operated by Digital International Inc, which also runs sites like Juicy Date. It’s easy to use, but there might be some issues with opening the site on a computer. The mobile site tends to work a lot better if you want to get the most out of it. There are tons of people on it all hours of the day and night, so there’s always someone to interact with. It makes for a great site where you can talk with someone at any time and work to set up your next hook up.
Everything is right in front of you
One of the best things that the site has going on is the way that you use it. There’s a tool bar at the top so you can easily jump between the different sections. The home page is where you can find all of the online people that you can talk to. All it takes is scrolling down to see just how many people there are at any given time. You can choose to comment on their photos right there or send them a message to start the conversation.
Instant messaging makes the difference
The site really goes out of its way to let you talk to the people on it. You can send anyone you want an instant message so you don’t have to wait for them to see an email. Those messages pop right up in their or toolbar section so you can see them right away. It lets you know that someone is trying to talk to you so you can respond immediately and see where things lead. It’s make hooking up with people a fast and easy thing that anyone can do as soon as they sign themselves up.
If you take the time to check out the preferences section of the site and scroll down to billing policy, you’ll see some information on how much the site costs. They say that they offer several subscription membership options for you to choose from. There’s the premium package and the platinum package. Once you purchase your subscription, you’ll be able to prioritize opposite sex members’ feeds, get more messages, access the most active users, and bring your messages to the TOP. There’s a free trial membership for 24 hours for new subscribers that will charge $.99 to get your card on file, then reimburse it.
All of the above information is published on the site but there doesn’t seem to be any way to actually sign up for anything. There’s no sign up link and you’re never redirected to a payment page. It seems that this information has nothing to do with this site. It make be left over from another site, or it can simply be there for a feature that was never implemented. As it stands right now, the site is totally free to use for everyone. There are no restrictions on the number of messages you can send and the member feed is always filled with users of the opposite sex.
The site also has a fun match game for the members to play. Clicking on the first icon in the toolbar will send you to a section where you’re presented with one profile picture at a time. You can choose to click on the X icon or the heart icon based on whether you find the person attractive or not. If the other person happens to play the game and click on the heart for you, you’ll both get notifications that you chose each other and you’ll have the opportunity to talk to them.
SPDate seems to take security very seriously. You can change your password any time you want with a few simple clicks. It’s a very good way to make sure that your account always stays secure. Since there’s no way to actually upload any payment information right now, you never have to worry about it getting stolen. It’s one of the few sites where you can use it all you want without ever worrying about a data breach of any kind.
Everyone loves to talk
No dating site would be worth your time if no one wanted to talk. Luckily, this one is filled with people who love to do it. You can always expect to get a message back if you try talking to someone while they’re online. It’s a great feeling when you have multiple chat boxes open at the same time and you know that any one of them can actually lead to something. The people who join this site do it to actually interact with other people and you just can’t get that on every site that you join.
SPDate is a great dating site that’s easy to use and totally free for everyone. Of course, that means that you’re going to have to deal with ads. They’re all over the place, but they keep it free, so they’re more than worth putting up with. The people here love to talk and the instant messenger makes it as easy as it can possibly be. You can find everything that you need with a few clicks and it comes with a fun game that you can use to break the ice with people. It’s more than worth your time to check it all out.
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Top Products By Rating
Each site comes with a user rating to let you know what other people are saying about it. These are the men and women who are using them to hook up right now. The ones that work for them might just work for you. The sites with the highest reviews will always work and do exactly what they claim. All you have to do is decide if what they do is right for you. You can follow the provided links to check them all out for yourself while knowing that they’re totally safe.
Each site comes with its own pros and cons and this is where you can find them. Every review makes sure that you have the most important information readily available to you. You’ll never have a question about what you can find once you click yourself inside. Some sites offer unique matchmaking while others let you chat in real time and share your cam with anyone that you want. Your dating experience is always going to be suited to you and your needs. The reviews are simple and make it easy for you to find the facts that you’re looking for.
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The College was established in April 1976 with its temporary site in Kano until 25th of February, 1980 when it was transferred to its permanent site at Gumel under the directive of the Kano State civilian Governor then, later the College administration was centralized with six other Colleges under the then Kano State Institute for Higher Education on the 1st July, 1987. The then Kano State College of Education consisting of former Advanced Teachers’ College Gumel and Kumbotso, Kano were established under the Kano State Colleges of Education edict of 1987.
The creation of Jigawa State out of Kano State automatically converted the College to Jigawa State on the 24th of December, 1991. The edict establishing the College was promulgated in 1992. The College aspires to become a centre of excellence which prepares high quality teachers for the basic education schools in Jigawa State.
Produce competent, reliable and discipline teachers in a peaceful and harmonious academic environment with exemplary and transparent leadership in order to accelerate community development, integrating the interest of the college with that of the society through the use of the computerized record system for easy information accessibility.
Jigawa State College of Education Gumel, aspires to become a center of excellence for the preparation of high quality teachers for the schools of Jigawa state.
It is responsible for the overall management of the College. It is the highest decision making body in the College charged with the responsibility of executing decisions and policies which have financial implications as well as others which concern the conditions of service. The Council also has the power to control the property of the College. Provost is a member and the Registrar usually serves as the Secretary.
The SERVICOM office in the Presidency has recently commended the College for quality service delivery.
The College had emerged Third (3rd) position out of the Twenty-One (21) Federal Colleges of Education and the FCT College of Education that were evaluated during the SERVICOM Compliance Evaluation (SCE) exercise conducted in 2019.
Likewise in 2020, the College ranked 5th position out of the 21 Federal Colleges of Education assessed by the Office of the Secretary to Government of the Federation in collaboration with the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) during an assessment exercise of Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies’ compliance with provisions of the Public Procurement Act among other indicators.
Similarly, the erstwhile College Governing Council also commended the landmark transformation of physical and infrastructural facilities witnessed on the Campus, the unprecedented turn over in the number of Ph. Ds and Masters Degrees and expansion in academic programmes.
The Rectorate: The Rectorate coordinates activities of all other departments, units and sub-units of the Institution. It also ensure the smooth and efficient operation between the Polytechnic and the state government, the NUC, NBTE, NCCE and other agencies. Seven other units operate directly under the Rector.
The Registry: The Registry which forms the core of the Polytechnic’s Administration is:-
(i) Responsible to the Rector for the day-to-day administration of the institution and performs such other duties as the Council, as the case may be, the Rector may from time to time direct.
(ii) Responsible for keeping custody of the vital records of the Polytechnic.
The Bursary Department : The department is responsible for management and control of the Finance of the institution. It performs its functions through the various sections under it. The Bursary department is headed by the Bursar of the Polytechnic. He is assisted by the Bursary staffs who manage the various sections of the department.
The Works & Maintenance Unit: The works and maintenance unit is a service department of the Polytechnic. It has the following sections under it:- Maintenance Auto-mechanic, Civil and Electrical Units, Fire service unit. The department is headed by the Director with a complement of the senior, intermediate and junior staff.
The Library Unit: The library is headed by Chief librarian who is both a member of the management and the academic Board. The Polytechnic has two (2) library complexes with one located in each of the two (2) campuses in Bauchi and Azare servicing both staff and students. There are also other library staff who are ever ready to assist students with their problems.
The rules and regulations governing the use of the library are spelt out elsewhere in this Book.
The Directorate of Medical Services: The Polytechnic has a Clinic which is located in the main Campus. The clinic is open for 24 hours and the unit is headed by Medical Director who is a member of the Management Committee. It provides Medical and Surgical Services on regular and emergency basis.
We Aspires to Become a Center of Excellence for the Preparation of High Quality Teachers for the Schools of Jigawa state.
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Brazilian investors buy Miami real estate. Haitian earthquake survivors attend South Florida schools. It's clear what happens in Latin America and the Caribbean has a profound effect on South Florida.WLRN’s coverage of the region is headed by Americas editor Tim Padgett, a 23-year veteran of TIME and Newsweek magazines.He joins a team of reporters and editors at the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald and NPR to cover a region whose cultural wealth, environmental complexity, vast agricultural output and massive oil reserves offer no shortage of important and fascinating stories to tell.
Published June 13, 2013 at 6:00 AM EDT
On the second story of the posh Albion Hotel on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach sit the U.S. offices of Animal Politico, an online news site dedicated to Mexican politics that is quickly becoming one of the most respected—and hip—news sources in Latin America.
Founded in 2009 as an anonymous Twitter account called “PajaroPolitico,” or “Political Bird,” Animal Politico has quickly emerged as a must-read news source among Mexican youth.
The website garners between 2 and 2.3 million unique visits per month, with almost 400,000 followers on Twitter and 475,000 on its Facebook page. These are impressive figures given that Mexican internet penetration is relatively low, at 36 percent in 2012 compared to 78 percent in the U.S., according to Freedom House.
Part of the reason Animal Politico has gained so much traction so fast is because of its unique investigative approach, which prioritizes human-centered reporting and policy analysis.
“We understand politics very differently from other media sources,” explained Daniel Eilemberg, founder and editor-in-chief of the site. “We don’t care that the (Mexican) president went to Querétaro or Michoacán today and gave a speech—he travels with 250 other journalists who will do exactly the same story.
"We actually care a lot more about politics understood as the social impact that policies have on people, the civic organizations working to better the country, and about human rights violations.”
The website’s mission, along with its commitment to refuse most government-sponsored advertising, sets it apart from other Mexican news outlets, many of which are known to parrot government propaganda.
“There’s a bit of a credibility crisis going on in Mexico in terms of media,” Eilemberg explained. “The young people in Mexico are not protesting the president, they’re protesting a perceived bias in the way the media operates in the country… Animal Politico has been able to capture and get the credibility of this audience.
The website garners between 2 and 2.3 million unique visits per month, with almost 400,000 followers on Twitter and 475,000 on Facebook. Mexican internet penetration is relatively low, at 36 percent in 2012 compared to 78 percent in the U.S.
“Half of Animal Politico’s audience is under the age of 34, which is very particular of Animal Politico, and is very different from what’s happening with a lot of other media in Mexico,” he said.
The heart of Animal Politico is located at the site’s headquarters in Mexico City, where a team of about 18 editorial and social media staffers, journalists and photographers cover the news of the day.
But Eilemberg and Creative Director Adrian Saravia have set up shop in Miami in order to keep their eyes trained on the website’s future—which will likely involve opening at least one bureau in the United States.
“We are in the process of planning the next stage of Animal Politico—we’re starting to evaluate exactly what that expansion means,” said Eilemberg. “We’ve identified several opportunities, both in Mexico as well as in expanding to other countries in Latin America, and we’re in the process of evaluating that and seeing where it makes the most sense to expand. I think the US is certainly a priority and one of the most attractive opportunities.”
Eilemberg spends about ten days in Mexico City every month. He commutes between Mexico and Miami, where he has been actively involved with local media here since the launch.
While not a journalist by training, Eilemberg began his career in media “almost by accident,” when he started writing a film column for Loft Magazine, a high-end lifestyle brand.
“I started writing larger pieces for the magazine, eventually a lot of their cover stories, and eventually moved to Miami to run the magazine,” he said. “I fell in love with it, and found a lot of similarities of the things I actually liked about the film industry—building stories, telling good stories and the collaborative effort of putting together a magazine.”
Half of Animal Politico's audience is under the age of 34, many of whom perceive a bias in the way traditional Mexican media operate in the country.
Eilemberg went on to run several other Miami publications, the last of which, Poder, he and his partners sold just before the financial crisis hit in 2008. Watching traditional media business models unravel, as websites like The Huffington Post and Politico grew massively popular in the U.S. in the months following the market collapse, is part of what drove Eilemberg to create Animal Politico.
“You were starting to see these digital brands really break into the mainstream consciousness. I think for us, that’s when we realized that there was a huge opportunity to do just that in Latin America,” he said. Raising private capital and securing advertising revenue allowed him to launch the new site.
Though small, the Miami office of Animal Politico is a crucial element in Eilemberg’s plans for expanding the website, which he hopes will soon cover Mexican-American communities in the U.S. more broadly.
“It’s a bit of a cliché, but it really is a connecting point with Latin America. It’s a very easy place to travel to and to travel from,” Eilemberg said. “For its geographic location, as well as for its quality of life and relatively low cost of living, compared to other media hubs in the U.S., it’s really been a good place for us to set up.”
To be sure, Miami has competition to be the permanent home for Animal Politico in the U.S. because of where most Mexican-Americans live.
“Miami is perhaps an anomaly compared to the rest of the country, where the Mexican community is not actually the majority of the Latino community in the city... so a place like Los Angeles would actually make a lot more sense," Eilemberg said.
Linda Kinstler graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from Bowdoin College in Maine and is serving as a Google Journalism Fellow this summer with the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.
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On her way she met a copy. The copy warn ed the Little Blind Text, that where it came from it would have been.
On her way she met a copy. The copy warn ed the Little Blind Text, that where it came from it would have been.
On her way she met a copy. The copy warn ed the Little Blind Text, that where it came from it would have been.
On her way she met a copy. The copy warn ed the Little Blind Text, that where it came from it would have been.
On her way she met a copy. The copy warn ed the Little Blind Text, that where it came from it would have been.
Credit Cards
On her way she met a copy. The copy warn ed the Little Blind Text, that where it came from it would have been.
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth. Even the all-powerful Pointing has no control about the blind texts it is an almost unorthographic life One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar. The Big Oxmox advised her not to do so, because there were thousands of bad Commas, wild Question Marks and devious Semikoli, but the Little Blind Text didn’t listen. She packed her seven versalia, put her initial into the belt and made herself on the way.
A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now. When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth. Even the all-powerful Pointing has no control about the blind texts it is an almost unorthographic life One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar. The Big Oxmox advised her not to do so, because there were thousands of bad Commas, wild Question Marks and devious Semikoli, but the Little Blind Text didn’t listen. She packed her seven versalia, put her initial into the belt and made herself on the way.
A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents.
A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents.
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In a bid to highlight abuses in the workplace, an NGO today will officially launch a website and hotline, allowing people to post stories as citizen journalists.
The Community Legal Education Center (CLEC) will hold a ceremony this morning promoting their new project, Voice of the People, which can be found at www.vopkh.net, Ngeth Moses, a CLEC information communication technology project coordinator said yesterday.
“We want information not hidden in the closet,” said Moses, pointing out that factory workers can write about abuses in their workplaces.
In addition to users being able to file stories themselves, an Interactive Voice Response hotline (070-221-102) will enable people to call in with stories for CLEC staff to write and post.
Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan yesterday said he approves of the initiative and is not worried about the possibility of libellous information being posted.
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Hong Kong firm done buying Coke Cambodia
Swire Coca-Cola Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed Swire Pacific Ltd, on November 25 announced that it had completed the acquisition of The Coca-Cola Co’s bottling business in Cambodia, as part of its ambitions to expand into the Southeast Asian market. Swire Coca-Cola affirmed
Cambodia's Bokator now officially in World Heritage List
UNESCO has officially inscribed Cambodia’s “Kun Lbokator”, commonly known as Bokator, on the World Heritage List, according to Minister of Culture and Fine Arts Phoeurng Sackona in her brief report to Prime Minister Hun Sen on the night of November 29. Her report, which was
NagaWorld union leader arrested at airport after Australia trip
Chhim Sithar, head of the Labour Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees at NagaWorld integrated casino resort, was arrested on November 26 at Phnom Penh International Airport and placed in pre-trial detention after returning from a 12-day trip to Australia. Phnom Penh Municipal Court Investigating Judge
Sub-Decree approves $30M for mine clearance
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Two senior GDP officials defect to CPP
Two senior officials of the Grassroots Democratic Party (GDP) have asked to join the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), after apparently failing to forge a political alliance in the run-up to the 2023 general election. Yang Saing Koma, chairman of the GDP board, and Lek Sothear,
11th Chaktomuk Short Film Festival draws to close
Cambodia's 11th Chaktomuk Short Film Festival wrapped up successfully on November 28 after a four-day run, with the film “Voice of the Night” awarded top prize for 2022. Sum Sithen, the organiser of the short film festival, told The Post that the number of attendees to the
Journos feel pressure from above: report
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Independent media in Cambodia is regularly stifled by “routine” attacks against reporters, a lack of access to official information, government pressure and low pay, though
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Posted on May 15, 2018 May 15, 2018 By jamielyssa Posted in Book Review, Two StarTagged 99 days, book review, Katie Cotugno, Teen, Two Stars, Young Adult
My Rating:
Man, if I knew that my self-insert Mary Sue stories of my teenage fantasy love life would’ve made me big money, maybe I would’ve become an author instead of a special education teacher.
99 days tells the story of Molly Barlow. Molly Barlow is your typical spoiled and rich high school age girl. She went away to an all girls boarding school for her senior year of high school because she played two brothers against each other.
She was dating one brother, then she sort of kinda broke up with that brother, and she had sex with his better-looking older brother, and than the younger brother found out and OH MY GOD, MY LIFE IS OVER, EVERYONE HATES ME NOW, SO I’M GOING TO RUN AWAY.
But what’s even worse about Molly’s situation is that her mom is a famous author, and she was made even more famous because she wrote a best-selling novel about her daughter’s romance life, which is how the younger brother found out about her cheating on him with the older brother… If it wasn’t for that book, well it’d probably still be a deep and dark secret.
Now poor Molly is forced come back to Star Lake, her hometown in the Catskill Mountains, and to try to atone for all of her sins in the 99 days she has before she starts college in Boston. She needs to make it up to the boys, whose hearts she breaks, and mend her old friendships.
This just wasn’t a good book? I mean I give it this, it wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read [here’s looking at you Sherrilyn Kenyon- just give up the repetitive supernatural romance novels already, I couldn’t even finish her latest Deadman’s Cross novel]. It had good grammar, it followed the basic premise that we’re taught about how to write a novel when we’re in like 3rd grade.
But this story was stupid?
Okay maybe stupid is going too far, I’m sure tweens, who fantasize about having their own love triangle and having a sparkly vampire and a werewolf fight over them will love this story.
I did like how this story was set up. Each chapter is one of the 99 days that Molly is counting down until she finally leaves for college. And that sets a clear prescient for how the story is set up. The story will resolve itself in 99 days, somehow.
I won’t bore you with telling you anymore about the plot. But I will say that this is another story, where the teenagers seem to have too much time on their hands, too much money, and even though they’re all under eighteen, they still manage to have access to lots of booze and drugs, and they party like crazy.
Is this what the youth of America is like? Has this always been what the youth of America has been like? When I was studying for the SATS, babysitting to make money for college, and spending my free-time reading… should I really have been partying my ass off?
If this book accurately represents what the younger generation is like… well I fear for the future.
Anyhow, if you want another book to read about spoiled teenagers, who have too much money, and too much free-time, entangle themselves in Twilight-esque love triangles, and have more drama than an episode of Jerry Springer.
This book is probably for you.
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My name is Jamie Lyssa. I have 5 cats, and I’m a special ed teacher. I’m a Slytherclaw [with a touch of Gryffindor] and an INFJ. I like reading, concerts, photography, road trips, video-games, and I am highly addicted to caffeine. This blog is my little corner of the internet. I mostly use this as a travel blog so that people can read about all of the road-tripping/camping adventures that my husband Justin and I have, but occasionally you’ll get something else… like a book review, video-game review, or meaningful post. But it’s mostly trip reports and photographs.
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Only in Hawaii would you find a hole-in-the-wall in another hole-in-the-wall, serving Russian street food next to Filipino plate lunch. When we arrive there’s already two customers in line.
I quickly order two lunch specials–Piroscki, fried squid, toss salad $4.99 +tax. As we wait for our food I talk story with a Japanese man in jeans, slippas and a five o’clock shadow. A customer since its original location across Fort Street he jokes “we used to call these Russian manapua.”
The line gets longer as two local women wait their turn. One of them orders a dozen. “I’ll wait” she says and smiles. As we talk she explains she catches the bus from Waianae to run errands and tries to make a stop here whenever she can.
The menu at Rada’s is small–three kinds of Piroscki (Piroshki), fried squid, and toss salad. Like Manapuas, the Piroscki and squid are a quick and cheap snack at $2 (including tax).
The dough can be seen from the window as it’s stuffed and fried. Lorna learned to make the Piroscki from her great-aunt who learned to make them from Rada, the original owner.
Like the restaurant, the Piroscki is a pocket of nostalgia. Some customers have been coming here for decades. In fact, according to Lorna, Rada’s has been selling these Russian Manapuas for almost 50 years!
I’ve never had a Piroscki or even a Piroshki before, but at $2 you can’t go wrong. We ordered the lunch special, but skip the salad if you’re on the go. Like all good street food, Pirsockis can be eaten with one hand and the fried squid comes in a paper bag. Be sure to get dressing. The sweet dill vinaigrette is great for dipping.
A quick sampling of the Filipino food offerings.
Coming here was all about the experience. It’s a wonderful mishmash of cultures that Hawaii is so good at embracing. As we eat our Russian manapuas, next to the Filipino counter, a Chinese Lion Dance parades down the mall in celebration of the Lunar New Year. A multi-cultural education and a show for two bucks…Only in Hawaii.
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Author Salt & SandPosted on February 4, 2016 August 11, 2016 Categories All Posts, FoodTags Fort Street Mall, Piroshki, Rada's Piroscki
9 thoughts on “Russian Manapua”
February 6, 2016 at 10:57 am
I’ve always referred Rada as the Piroshky lady. I remember experiencing my first Piroshki in Hawaii with Sharon during one of our many cheap dates. Even took Cassie and Matt there when they was little. I think the original location was Makai of where they’re are now. Those days Rada was the only person her shop. The second time I came across more piroshky was on Pike’s market it Seattle Wa. The Pike’s Market piroshky shop had different kind of fillings. I remember the potato, cheese, mushroom, chicken and beef. Might be more. I still remember driving within a 100 miles of Pike’s we would start talking about the piroshky and next thing you know we would detour the 100 miles and go eat piroshky. There’re excellent soup bars too a few shop from that Pike’s market piroshky shop. Oh yea, piroshky and Chun’s goes back awhile.
November 8, 2016 at 1:46 am
About 35 years ago, Rada’s had another location in the Aina Haina shopping center. It was where Mama Pho is now. I remember the old lady, but I also remember an old man with a heavy Polish/Russian? accent. I guess they were the original owners. I’ve got some really great tastebud memories of Rada’s.
November 8, 2016 at 4:25 pm
Very cool Scott. Had no idea they had a 2nd location. Hope they’re around for another 35!
February 21, 2017 at 3:53 pm
Rada’s once published her recipe for Piroshki, can I possibly get a copy?
March 12, 2017 at 6:07 pm
I don’t have the recipe on hand but will definitely try to do some research and see what we come up with!
September 16, 2020 at 10:27 am
I had seen it before and wrote it down and lost it ? Sorry but i remembeer a little .The dough was almost like pizza dough but sweeter and had milk .the filling for the beef and mushroom cheese . Ground beef onions lots of garlic mushrooms. Black pepper salt herbs thyme dill .a not sure if had oregano basel sage. Oh yea cheese I think was mozzarella. If you ever find recipe please let me know
January 13, 2020 at 1:25 am
The first Rada’s I knew was on Kapiolani at the end of Keamoku. Then she moved to Fort street Mall. Moved to Vegas two years ago. Miss the local food. Brought back 10 when I came back to Vegas last September. All gone now. Sure would love the recipe. Think they use some special oil to fry it in…maybe some lard?.. Also would like Tanioka’s recipe for Maki Sushi. Broke the mouth! Pete
May 30, 2020 at 4:49 pm
Right on. Thanks for the info. This website is all for posterity. All these mom n pops closing. Nice to have record of it somewhere. Mahalo
Monica says:
August 21, 2020 at 5:00 pm
OMGoodness! I lived here in the islands from 2000-2013 and never knew this place existed. As the daughter of Polish immigrants, I always missed my Slavic roots while here in Hawaii because there just weren’t a lot of us here. In Poland we call these pierogi and they are just as ono. Now that I’ve moved back I would love to try! Thanks for sharing!
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I’m a fourth generation local girl, born and raised in Hawaii. I’m a full-time wife, mom, and business owner. This page is dedicated to everything I love about Hawaii and this place we’re so lucky to call home.
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Housing New Zealand Corporation: Effectiveness of programmes to buy and lease properties for state housing
Part 3: Buying and leasing houses
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Part 3: Buying and leasing houses Housing New Zealand Corporation: Effectiveness of programmes to buy and lease properties for state housing. https://oag.parliament.nz/2006/housing/part3.htm https://oag.parliament.nz/@@site-logo/logo.png
Part 3: Buying and leasing houses
Housing New Zealand Corporation: Effectiveness of programmes to buy and lease properties for state housing.
our expectations of the Corporation in buying and leasing houses;
the Corporation’s process for buying and leasing houses;
compliance with the Corporation’s guidelines;
the Corporation’s investment decisions;
the quality of bought and leased houses; and
how the Corporation acquires the most suitable properties, and makes them available to tenants.
Our expectations for buying and leasing houses
We expected the Corporation to have robust processes in place to support the effective acquisition of bought or leased houses. We expected:
robust guidelines for the buying and leasing process to be provided;
those guidelines to be complied with;
the Corporation’s quality standards to be met;
the most suitable houses to be acquired, and be made available to tenants without undue delay.
The process for buying and leasing houses
The Corporation’s process for buying and leasing houses from private owners is well defined and met our expectations. Each programme follows similar steps:
assessing the suitability of the property;
seeking approval to lease or buy the property;
overseeing the project through to completion; and
notifying the tenancy management staff, who are responsible for allocating the house to appropriate tenants.
The specifics of each step can vary, depending on the nature of the property. The biggest differences occur when the Corporation leases properties that are being built as part of a property development. The Corporation assesses these properties in more detail earlier in the process, and they are more closely overseen throughout the life of the project.
3.5
We reviewed 48 acquisition files to see whether the actions taken had complied with the relevant policies and procedures.
Corporation staff monitor the local housing market, using newspapers, real estate publications, and local real estate agents to help identify suitable properties. Property developers or private owners who are keen to lease to the Corporation may also approach them.1
The Corporation assesses potential properties against its design criteria. Staff seek verification from regional management if the property seems to be marginal in terms of meeting local need. Properties are occasionally offered to the Corporation for leasing before they are built (that is, from a proposal with building plans). In these cases the Corporation may be able to negotiate design changes to better meet regional need.
The Corporation requires due diligence checks to be carried out when it buys properties. The checks include:
obtaining satisfactory reports from the local authority; and
undertaking a maintenance assessment.
Checks on properties for leasing involve verifying the property’s ownership, recording its condition, and checking the credit history of the property’s owners.
The Corporation requires valuation reports for bought properties, and for leased properties that have been offered to the Corporation before being built. The valuation reports inform the Corporation’s financial analysis of the likely long-term value of the investment.
Approving acquisitions
All proposals to acquire properties must be approved in keeping with the Corporation’s delegations framework.
The approval of acquisitions includes considering background information, the results of due diligence work and financial analysis, and copies of sale and purchase agreements or an agreement to lease.2
Completing the acquisition
The staff member responsible for a particular purchase or lease will oversee progress with each property through to settlement date, or the date the lease starts. During this process the staff member interacts with other Corporation staff , including tenancy management, and legal and administrative support.
For bought properties, completing the acquisition involves confirming that conditions in the sale and purchase agreement have been met. As the time of settlement approaches, the staff member must conduct a final inspection, and arrange for the vendor to be paid and for the title to be transferred. For leased properties, a lease start date must be agreed with the owner and the lease registered on the property’s title. For both processes, the staff member lists the property as “pending” in the Corporation’s property database.
The Corporation monitors the quality of properties that are being built to be leased. For these projects, the start of the lease depends on the property developer notifying the Corporation that the properties are ready to be lived in. However, the Corporation must satisfy itself that this is the case. It is possible for the start date of a lease to be postponed if the Corporation considers that the property is not ready to be lived in.
Notifying tenancy management staff
Once property settlement has occurred or a lease has begun, a state house is recorded as vacant in the Corporation’s property database. It can now be made available to people on the waiting list. We were told that it is important for tenancy management staff to have at least 10 days’ warning of new properties becoming ready for tenants so that they can arrange for an applicant from the waiting list to move into the house.
Before moving in, applicants need to inspect the property and sign a tenancy agreement. Once an applicant has signed on as a tenant and has taken possession of a house, it is recorded as let in the Corporation’s property database.
Compliance with guidelines
We expected the Corporation to have comprehensive guidelines clearly setting out the process for buying and leasing houses.
Guidelines for buying and leasing are stored in an electronic quality management system (QMS) that is available to all staff. The QMS is kept current and secure, and the responsible general manager must approve updates to the policies and procedures section.
The Corporation has documented the process for buying and leasing houses, and written guidance is provided for each of the important steps. Responsibilities are set out at each stage, and cross-references to other relevant documents are provided. Other relevant documents include:
forms that can be used to set up information in the Corporation’s property database;
standard conditions to be added to any sale and purchase agreements;
codes of conduct for real estate agents and valuers working with the Corporation; and
Conflicts of interest
We have a particular interest in the way that public entities manage conflicts of interest. We are satisfied with the way the Corporation has approached this risk.
The Corporation’s policy on managing conflicts of interest is available through the QMS. It sets clear directions about identifying, disclosing, and managing conflicts of interest, the processes to be followed, and who makes decisions.
Staff are required to disclose any conflicts of interest to their manager and agree on actions to manage the conflict. A signed declaration of this agreement is held on the Corporation’s conflicts of interest register.
We obtained examples of conflict of interest declarations that related to the leasing programme. The declarations involved:
a family member leasing a house to the Corporation; and
a staff member already owning an investment property in the Corporation’s leasing programme.3
The Corporation took appropriate action to manage the conflicts, and the staff involved agreed not to participate in decision-making that might affect the properties.
Managing conflicts of interest has a high profile within the Corporation. Training courses and advice have been provided to staff and managers. Managers must annually certify that they have complied with policies and procedures, including checking with their staff for any conflicts of interest.
The Corporation provides its staff with robust guidelines for buying and leasing houses. Generally, the guidance is being complied with. The Corporation recognises the importance of managing potential conflicts of interest and has adequate arrangements for managing them.
Compliance with guidance
Our review of 48 files showed general compliance with policies and procedures. However, some of the required documentation was missing:
There was not always evidence of pre-settlement inspections.
The justification for entering into cross-leases was not always documented in the file.
There was not always evidence that credit checks had been carried out for leased properties.
Although these were minor omissions, it is important that the Corporation can show through written documentation that it has complied with its policies and procedures. We understand that these matters are being pursued through the Corporation’s internal audit process, and we expect to see an improvement in the documentation.
We recommend that Housing New Zealand Corporation include a checklist of the mandatory documentation to be included on each file in its quality management system guidance for buying and leasing.
The Corporation’s investment decisions
It is important that properties bought or leased by the Corporation meet the required financial benchmarks and are approved at the appropriate levels. Our review of files for bought and leased state houses showed that: the required analysis had been undertaken for each property; financial benchmarks had been met or exceeded; and with one exception, all acquisitions had been approved at the appropriate level or higher.4
The Corporation undertakes financial analysis of all proposed purchases or leases. Its modelling software can analyse single properties or groups of properties, and forecast investment performance over time.
The data supporting the analysis comes from valuation reports that are obtained as part of the due diligence process. This includes an assessment of the market rental for the properties, and, in the case of bought properties, an assessment of their market value. Standard assumptions of rates of capital and rental growth5 and likely vacancy rates are also included.
These factors are used to forecast income and expenses for the property, and thus the net cash flow of the investment, over 5, 10, and 15 years for bought properties, or over the term of a lease. From this information, the Corporation can see the internal rate of return that it can expect to receive.6 If this exceeds the cost of capital to the Corporation, then the acquisition is considered an acceptable financial investment.7
To be approved, the Corporation has specified that the internal rate of return for a proposed purchase should exceed the cost of capital to the Corporation at the 15- year benchmark. Where the internal rate of return is less than the cost of capital, the purchase may proceed if the rate is equal to, or greater than, the average rate of return for nearby state houses.
For leased properties, the Corporation’s income is a management fee of between 7% and 10% of the total weekly rent.8 To be approved, a leased property must return a positive net cash flow when discounted to today’s dollars during the term of the lease.
The level of approval sought for purchases and leases is based on the risks associated with the proposal. The managers of staff sourcing acquisitions have approval rights. However, more senior approval must be sought if financial performance is marginal, if more expensive properties are sought, or if leases have non-standard margins or lease terms. More senior approval can be sought from general managers, the Chief Executive, the Property Committee of the Board, or the whole Board.
The quality of bought and leased houses
We are satisfied that, overall, properties sourced through the buying and leasing programmes comply with the Corporation’s specifications and are of high quality.
The Corporation has state housing specifications that set quality requirements. State houses must also comply with local authority district plans, the Building Act 2004, and the Building Code.9 The Corporation’s requirements focus on safety, ease of maintenance, and ensuring that property values are maintained.
Properties sourced from private owners do not always initially comply with the Corporation’s specifications. When buying a property, the Corporation assesses the work needed to bring it up to the necessary standard. The costs of the work are included in the financial analysis supporting the proposal to purchase, and, if approved, the work is undertaken before the property is let.
There is less scope for altering leased properties, because the private owner decides whether to make improvements. The Corporation can require certain changes when negotiating the conditions of the lease. For example, we noted instances of the Corporation requiring dishwashers and garbage disposal units to be disconnected.10 However, property owners may choose not to enter into leases if they find the quality requirements too onerous.
It is possible for the Corporation to influence the design of properties being built for leasing. Proposals to enter into such arrangements must be reviewed by the Corporation’s design experts before they can be approved. Projects underway are monitored to ensure that they adhere to the quality specifications and must be signed off as complying before the lease can start. We saw one example of the Corporation seeking compensation from a property developer under contract penalty clauses for repeatedly missing lease start dates because of problems with the quality of the property.
Acquiring the most suitable properties and making them available to tenants
It is important that newly acquired houses match the housing needs identified in each region. We expected the Corporation to acquire the most suitable properties, and to make them available to tenants as soon as possible.
The Corporation has had some difficulty matching its most recent acquisitions in Auckland to the priority housing types identified in the Regional Asset Management Plans. However, overall, we consider that the Corporation has been acquiring the most suitable houses, given the challenges that it faces.
Regional Asset Management Plans set out housing targets for the 2 programmes. Supporting this information is a breakdown of targets by required housing type. To assess the Corporation’s most recent acquisitions we compared written statements in the Regional Asset Management Plans about the types of properties required, and the breakdown of targets, to the properties the Corporation had obtained.
The Corporation’s latest Asset Management Strategy states that about 45% of all state houses have 2 bedrooms or fewer, about 45% have 3 bedrooms, and about 10% have 4 bedrooms or more. The Auckland Regional Asset Management Plans for 2005-06 emphasise the need for the Corporation to obtain fewer 3-bedroom houses, and more with 2 or fewer bedrooms and 4 or more bedrooms. Averaged across the 3 Auckland regions, they specify that for newly acquired houses:
42.5% should have 2 or fewer bedrooms;
36.3% should have 3 bedrooms; and
21.2% should have 4 or more bedrooms.
As at February 2006, acquisition performance for the year 2005-06, averaged across Auckland, showed that for newly acquired houses:
30.1% had 2 or fewer bedrooms;
43.8% had 3 bedrooms; and
26.1% had 4 or more bedrooms.
A direct comparison between these 2 sets of figures is of only limited use, because the acquisition programme for 2005-06 was not complete when we wrote this report. However, our analysis has identified that the Corporation is tending towards acquiring more 3-bedroom houses in Auckland than its planning has identified as necessary. We looked at performance for 2004-05 and found that, of all the houses acquired in that year, 33.5% had 2 or fewer bedrooms, 34.8% had 3 bedrooms, and 31.7% had 4 or more bedrooms.
The Corporation has found that, in Auckland, properties with 2 or fewer bedrooms tend to be in apartment blocks that in most cases do not suit the needs of applicants on the waiting list. It has also found that high costs tend to limit the building of non-apartment properties of 2 or fewer bedrooms.
The Corporation does not see this as an urgent problem. The extra number of 3- bedroom houses above the target percentage equates to about 64 houses in the 3 Auckland regions that share a total of 28,382 houses. In addition, many Auckland applicants on the Corporation’s waiting list could make use of the additional 3- bedroom houses.
Acquiring more 3-bedroom houses than necessary creates a long-term risk for the efficiency of the overall housing portfolio. If the Corporation continues acquiring 3-bedroom houses in Auckland in the absence of suitable properties with 2 or fewer bedrooms, it should put a strategy in place to deal with the associated risk.
We recommend that Housing New Zealand Corporation prepare a strategy for making the best long-term use of properties acquired in the absence of more suitable properties identified in the Asset Management Strategy and Regional Asset Management Plans.
Preparing houses for tenants
Most bought properties are let within 5 days of being ready for tenants. Leased properties are also let within a reasonable timeframe, but occasionally do experience delays. When delays occur, in our view, they are not unreasonably long.
Bought and leased properties count towards the Corporation’s targets after contracts are signed and are unconditional. In the case of properties built for leasing, they count towards the targets when the developer has given the required 21 days’ or 15 working days’ notice of completion. The properties are recorded as “awaiting settlement” or “pending lease start” in the Corporation’s property database. However, before tenants can move in, the lease must start or settlement must be concluded, and any necessary maintenance must be carried out.
Acquisition staff are required to give other Corporation staff advance warning of state houses becoming available for tenants to move in. This allows suitable tenants to be identified early, and notified to make arrangements for moving in as soon as the house is ready.11
The Corporation’s property database shows the length of time between properties being counted towards targets, being ready for tenants to move in, and being occupied. We accessed the database history of 126 properties that related to the 48 acquisition files we reviewed, and examined the histories of 114 properties that had been tenanted (22 of these properties were bought and 92 were leased).
Most of the 22 bought properties had been recorded in the database as “let” within 5 working days of being ready for tenants. Sixteen had become occupied within 5 days, and the other 6 were occupied within 3 weeks. Five of the latter group had needed maintenance to be completed.
Our examination showed that the 92 leased properties were also tenanted in a reasonable timeframe, but there were longer delays for some properties:
25 had become occupied within 5 working days;
51 took between 5 days and 3 weeks to become occupied; and
16 properties took longer than 3 weeks to become occupied.
Newly built leasing developments that consisted of many individual properties took longer to fill. In these cases, it is reasonable to expect some delays given the logistics required in arranging tenants for large new developments. However, it took between 5 weeks and just over 8 weeks for 9 of the properties to be tenanted, which approaches the limits of what would be reasonable to expect.
1: The Corporation advertises the leasing programme on its website.
2: There may already be a signed sale and purchase agreement, or an agreement to lease, conditional on approval by the Corporation’s management.
3: The Corporation’s policy is that it will not enter into new lease programme agreements with staff.
4: The exception related to a lease mistakenly approved by a staff member who, since shifting from one business team to another, no longer had delegated authority to approve leases. The Corporation has reviewed the files in question and dealt with this exception appropriately.
5: The system uses underlying tables of values that are applied to investment analysis. These tables include central and local government tax rates, rates set centrally by the Corporation’s corporate finance team, and rates specific to the Corporation’s regions. If staff use non-standard assumptions, they must justify why.
6: Internal rate of return is the annual percentage profitability on the initial investment in a project, taking into account that money received later is worth less than money received earlier.
7: The Corporation uses a Weighted Average Cost of Capital, set by its corporate finance team, to represent the assumed interest cost for the capital used in the project.
8: This is intended to cover initial set-up costs, vacancy rates, lease management overheads, reinstatement costs at the end of the lease, and income tax.
9: The Building Act 2004 provides for the regulation of building work, the establishment of a licensing regime for building practitioners, and the setting of performance standards for buildings. The New Zealand Building Code is Schedule 1 of the Building Regulations 1992. All building work must comply with the Building Code. It states how a building is to perform, but does not prescribe detailed requirements for design and construction. The Building Code is currently being reviewed to align it with the 2004 Act.
10: The Corporation does this to prevent any future liabilities for repairing or replacing these appliances.
11: There is typically a delay before applicants can move into state houses because they need to give notice at other properties.
Housing New Zealand Corporation: Effectiveness of programmes to buy and lease properties for state housing
Part 2: Strategic planning for buying and leasing houses
Part 3: Buying and leasing houses
Part 4: Monitoring and reporting
Housing New Zealand Corporation: Effectiveness of programmes to buy and lease properties for state housing
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The frippery box arrived on Sunday. not so our cheese. I have not yet seen Yescombe [1] but am in great fear that they have been stopt for the good of the nation & eaten at Falmouth by act of Parliament. – with regard to Lambe you have acted quite properly in shunning him. he had nothing but well-meaning to recommend him – & as he seems to have discarded decency, one may be allowed to avoid vulgar ignorance. – Mrs Madox [2] I have seen at your house, & her husbandsx person I recollect – having sometimes met him when walking with you. you will give me credit for sincerity in wishing I could be one of your rich customers.
I am hard at history. [3] the labour pleases me & I feel both power & inclination for the work. but the scantiness of my finances miserably cripples me. I cannot afford to buy two or three very costly works – which I must buy before any one page is in a state for publication. thus will I at last lose much time & labour in going over the old ground, when the hooks & eyes of connection shall between one author & another shall be mislaid in my memory. I must lay out thirty pounds – but in losing Thalaba [4] my sheet-anchor was lost. certainly there will be the first volume quarto of the History ready for the Press by next winter. the literary history [5] will soon follow – if success encourages it. Madoc is my Army of Reserve. – after a summer in Wales has been devoted to correcting it, its publication will be a question of prudence – , whether like your old wine it will increase in value by keeping – or whether I shall publish as soon as possible not to lose the yearly profits that may be expected. it would greatly delight me to give Mrs Danvers her poem in print. [6] You will not be surprized to hear that I am thinking of another long poem – the story imaginary – the groundwork Hindoo mythology. some progress in the plan is made, & probably in a few days I shall gallop thro the first book. [7]
I must send you more money & more commissions – but as I delay writing to John May for about a fortnight or three weeks, you will have the goodness to execute them on credit, till that time. imprimis [8] a copy of Joan of Arc [9] – Russia bound according to my fashion. if Jackson [10] has forgotten it there is the first Anthology [11] among the books we left, as a pattern. secondly – I am grown shabby & want a coat & pantaloons. my measure was left with Baker, [12] & probably his successor has retained the same foreman. if it should be lost there is I think an old black coat at Mrs Frickers by which a new one might be made. chuse me a good brown. velvet collar – covered buttons. worsted pantaloons the same colour – they are easily made to fit a long lean man. if my Uncle returns thro Bristol – he will take the parcel – my Mother can inform you of this. otherwise direct it to him as usual. my motive for sending so far is that a coat here would cost me five pounds. water carriage costs nothing – & I get it on shore without difficulty or trouble.
I have at last seen & seditionized with Davys friend. [13] a pleasant & able man. from whom I hope some useful introductions to those friars who are worth knowing. we have some pleasant English neighbours – a Biddeford family [14] with whom is a Miss Seton a very clever woman, who draws most admirably. I find no fault in her except a resemblance to Mrs Barbauld in countenance; & that is a heavy one. a friend of Capel Loft [15] is here – recommended to me as a man of literary acquirements. his name Du Bois [16] – I have as yet seen him but little. after all Thomas the Cat is my chief companion – & a most magnificent Thomas he is. fat as Rover, all life & good humour.
Our wet weather is now commenced after a series of the most delightful days I ever experienced. we had scarcely a cloud thro the whole November. now we sit by the fire – for we have removed to tenant my Uncles house during his absence. Lisbon grows weekly worse as to robbery & murder & I hope is now so bad that it must awaken the police. daily murders & robberies so impudent that they astonish everybody. our vacant house has been opened & searched but there was nothing left portable enough to steal. last Monday two boatmen stabbed a poor fellow by mistake – begged his pardon & left him dying. the robbers are usually soldiers & in several instances Cadets – answering to our Ensigns. it is not possible to conceive a more total anarchy as to all useful purposes of society. yet there is a germ of vitality – a living spark existing – we see only the worst classes of society – the highest & the lowest – the oppressors & the oppressed. in the middle class – the tiers-etats – & tis a prophetic name – there are many who think & feel – who remember the past – & look on to the future.
I have been admitted behind the curtain – introduced to one of the Censors, [17] shown his official reports of every books presented for publication – & thus know not only what is published – but those more important works that are not – that are strangled in the birth. this Censor was the Lutheran Minister here who changed his religion & is now as sincere in Popery – as he was in Protestantism. by his introduction he is of indispensable use to me, for he is a man of power, – communicative & very well informed. by his means the manuscripts are at my use. I even meditate the adventure of searching the records of the Inquisition. five written folios of the bloody chronicle whose outside I have seen with respectful eyes & itching fingers.
In writing history [18] I actually want an Amanuensis, so troublesome is the shifting from book to paper. I am sanguine as to the merits of this work – not as to its success. fashion – rank in life – connections are every thing. for six quartos Gibbon [19] got 8000 pounds. I shall be satisfied if I get 1500 for three – tho I expect a more durable & deserved reputation than that even of Gibbon. money – money is my only want. they reckon by moidores & six & thirties – & we learn like them to consider these pieces only as guineas – only as single coins – when alas there is a lamentable difference in the number of a yearly income. If Sam Reid calls here on his return – I should like to re[MS obscured] him – should the time suit my plans. conveniences are of little import to s[MS obscured] are Edith & myself. – a pot to be sick-in is the only article in requisition. & we should by embarking directly for Bristol save full thirty guineas – allowing a handsome price for passage & provisions. this is a material object. Why did you not tell me the name of his ship that I might have found him out?
I shall inclose my cousins letter to you – to spare her postage. Will you purchase for her such useful things as she probably would think too expensive to afford – & pay yourself when the remittance arrives. I will remit enough to leave something for her afterwards. much I cannot do. the call for the Thalaba money has quite crippled me.
Coleridge has never written – nor has Mrs C. written to Edith since her confinement – which is I think somewhat uncivil. why will he given his children such Heathenish <names?>. – did he dip him in the river & baptize him in the name of the Stream God? [20]
By the next packet I expect news of the parcels arrival both from you & Rickman. his negociation will I hope be succesful – & if so Thalaba ought to be now in the printers office & gone to the Devil at last. [21]
God bless you. our love to your Mother. Time runs away at an unmerciful rate & a few packets more will cross only, before we shall reach Bristol – still the port to which after every wandering I return.
yrs affectionately
Robert Southey.
MS: British Library, Add MS 47890. ALS; 4p.
Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 230–233 [where it is misdated 18 December 1800]. BACK
[1] Edward Bayntun Yescombe (1765–1803), Captain of the packet, King George, which sailed between Falmouth and Lisbon. BACK
[2] Possibly the wife (first name and dates unknown) of John Maddox (dates unknown) of Park Row, Bristol. BACK
[4] Southey believed he would have to use the profits from Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) to pay for Henry Herbert Southey’s medical training. BACK
[5] Southey’s ‘literary history’ of Spain and Portugal was never completed. BACK
[6] Southey finished the 15-book version of Madoc (1797–1799) at the Danvers’ house in Bristol. A heavily revised version was finally published in 1805. BACK
[7] Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 series (London, 1849–1850), IV, pp. 12–15 contains his early plans for The Curse of Kehama (1810). BACK
[8] Translates as ‘in the first place’. BACK
[10] Probably Joseph Jackson (fl. 1780s –1790s) a Bristol bookbinder. BACK
[12] Possibly William Baker (dates unknown), a tailor of Bridge Street, Bristol. BACK
[14] The Hammett family from Bideford, Devon. BACK
[15] Capel Lofft (1751–1824; DNB), miscellaneous writer and politician. BACK
[16] Edward Du Bois (1774–1850; DNB), lawyer, author and magazine editor. BACK
[17] Johann Wilhelm Christian Muller (1752–1814), came to Portugal in 1772 as chaplain to the Dutch Factory; entered the Portuguese civil service as a translator in 1790 and converted to Catholicism. BACK
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Amisha Patel's stars are rising and rising, so much so that she is on cloud nine these days! Reason: she has replaced Aishwarya Rai in Ketan Mehta's international project The Rising. What Amisha is actually thrilled about is that her co-star in the mega movie is Aamir Khan who plays freedom fighter Mangal Pandey. "It's like a dream come true for me as I have been Aamir's fan ever since I saw his first film," says the Gadar girl. An interesting story doing the rounds is that BBC played an important part in the actress bagging the plum role. Amisha had appeared in a segment of Question Time India where apparently the anchor Riz Khan was rather impressed by Ms Patel's IQ level, which eventually led to her being offered the much hyped film.
Of course, Amisha would have been nowhere in the picture had Aishwarya not behaved in an unprofessional manner. Ash reportedly wanted a stupendous hike in her fees after the deal had been struck, which led to an ugly controversy and ultimately her ouster from the prestigious project.
the block
Talking of Amisha, there's a new kid on the Bollywood block ? Ashmit, Amisha's brother, till now famous only for his Amrita Arora connection. Incidentally, the two have now split! Well, it had to happen sooner or later. While his debut film Inteha may have flopped miserably, the good looking guy has his hands too full with work to be left with time for anything else. He's been signed up for the Bhatts' Murder. There is another unusual project in which both Amisha and Ashmit have been cast, but not as brother and sister. If insiders are to be believed, Ashmit dies and is reborn as Amisha in the movie! Vikram Bhatt, a close friend of the siblings, will be directing the reincarnation thriller.
as gangster
Kajol is so busy playing her real life role of mom to little Nysa (that's her daughter's name), that she probably is not even aware that Tanuja Chandra wants to cast her as a gangster in her new movie about female gangsters in Mumbai. Though the film will not be projected as one with an overt social message, the subtle undertones will reaffirm that those who live by the gun meet a sad end. Says Tanuja: " Ideally I'd love to have Kajol play one of the two main gangsters but I don't know whether she will agree to do it. I'm going to approach her soon and am keeping my fingers crossed." Kajol was recently quoted as saying that she's just taking a "nappy" break from acting and that she'd be back if an exciting offer came her way. Well, let's just hope Kads finds Tanuja's film the perfect one for her comeback.
?D' is India's
Only Ram Gopal Varma could have thought of this. He is now coming up with India's first prequel, D. "D will tell the story that came before Company," says Varma. It will have his new protg, Randeep Hooda (better known as Sushmita Sen's current boyfriend) playing Ajay Devgan's part in Company. Company saw the protagonist Malik at the peak of his power. D will start with Malik's origins and will end where Company started. Varma adds that the entire cast will be changed in the prequel and all the characters except the one played by Vivek Oberoi will be there. And no, we don't know yet whether Urmila will sizzle in D or not!
While on Ramu, his Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon may not have gone down well with the audience but it seems to have set a trend of sorts among filmmakers. A film titled Banke Rahoongi Aishwarya is reportedly now in the pipeline!
Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.
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This is a Bluebook entry for you to inquire about all the various memories, visions and seer site informations Durgaz has had. You can ask any questions you like. I'll reply and you can continue asking questions until you're satisfied. The reason you can do this is because you have the crystal sphere that allows you to review and show your images. Otherwise it would be Intelligence checks.
However, just as we've always done I want YOU to ask questions and I'll answer as best I can.
If you'd like to determine anything regarding Zal'Kazzir's true name or transformation I'll need you to be as specific as you can about:
what you want to know (people/places/things and any details)
when you're looking (over the time that you can)
what you're looking for or what you're looking for that might be absent, etc...
Feel free to ask as many questions as you like, here by bluebook to get you rolling and then again in-game when needed.
I have a touch of info that I'll start you off with since you said you were reviewing all Zal's history and related images. This has nothing to do with his true name (yet) but is another note that Durgaz could find as result of questioning. THIS note below is what you got for asking to look into Zal's past as your "freebie"... the rest is up to you to figure out and ask the right questions.
If I can't answer or think you need to ask more questions before I can answer I will say so.
2.3 3) Where was Zal'Kazzir?
2.6 6) ... and Mary?
Durgaz received some interesting visions one night... I described these during a game session (in the hallway) so I only have my notes about what was said. HOWEVER, the reason that this is out of the ordinary is that this "vision" was not "normal". Though I mentioned it, you didn't pick up on it at the time but THIS "vision" was actually in a dream when you slept. Durgaz has rarely gotten ANY seer visions when sleeping. They have normally come on him when awake, forcing him to go unconscious (his eyes turning white and rolling back) for a few seconds as the vision is shown.
So... as Durgaz reviews his visions and such he notices that a "vision" he remembers cannot be replayed on the crystal sphere. Its like it didn't happen. It wasn't a vision in the normal seer way... Here are those notes:
Scene 1: Durgaz standing in the mouth of a Dragon, barely holding on, until a flash of silver on his left reveals Ahimia, stabbing her blade up through the beast's mouth, and a few words in courtier from behind him fill him with the strength he needs to break the beast's jaw.
Scene 2: Durgaz stands before a large crowd of Dead Mother orcs, all of whom are chanting for him, and he thinks back to what led him to this place, he can see a serpent finding the orcs, a serpent calling to them to bring them to him, and providing the freedom he needs to break them of the sendings. (there are both male and female orcs involved)
Scene 3: Durgaz marshalls his forces, battling threats in the mountains to secure his people's future. As Durgaz rushes to aid a number of Dead Mothers who are about to be overpowered by foul shadow-trolls, a huge dog-headed giant, with pincers like a crab steps around a corner and decapitates a troll, just as a huge spider-like creature sinks deadly fangs into another, saving the orcs from certain death. The two huge creatures then bend down to speak with Zal, who orders them back to defend the City, as he and Ahimia approach Durgaz.
Scene 4: Black robed humans (very distinct from legates; black robes with green and silver trim - Zal's family colors) are seen in numerous locations across the human lands, spying, gathering intelligence, sabotaging shadow operations and funneling the information back to Zal'Kazzir, who walks into a war council and moves several troop markers on a battle map, changing a plan to prevent disaster.
Scene 5: Durgaz stands at the head of HIS new tribe, now arrayed for battle, Vardatches and armor glinting in the sun, as he looks around, he can see Eranon at the head of a Cadre of Elven warriors, gleaming and bright, a large phalanx of dwarves, grim and strong, a host of Erenlander warriors and a mighty wedge of Sarcosan Cavalry, lances tipped with beautiful pennants. All of these mighty forces are united and held together by the coils of the serpent, and as he follows the serpent to it's head, he looks behind to see Zal and Ahimia standing with him, prepared to battle at his side.
The serpents across the vision seems to represent Zal and Ahemia, and are shown to be crucial in a number of scenes above.
In a way all pathwalkers have a connection. You could say that those of the same path might be even more entwined. This has seemed to be especially true with Craigth Galeck and Durgaz. When they first met the visions Craight "shared" with Durgaz were strange and mixed but still yet important to Durgaz's own destiny. And in the past Durgaz has see Craigth within his visions ... what if seeing Craigth was not by chance. What if Craigth somehow was helping Durgaz, helping to point out flaws in the visions handed down to the new pathwalking seer (Durgaz) from the elder (Craigth)?
It was in one particular vision (aquainted to the above inconsistency) that Craigth interceded to point out the mechanations of others in dream, destiny and fate... It was THIS vision that Durgaz looked in on, seemingly from a dream had by Eranon - that Craigth tried again to help.
However, at the time it wasn't seen as "help". Because there was no reason to doubt... Until now.
In the link above to the vision - you can see specific passages highlighted in RED. These passages are the main points that Craigth was questioning by repeating them over and over. This entire vision IS a "real" vision for sure. However Durgaz was seeing a dream vision given to Eranon. It was a false vision and Craigth reached out to warn Durgaz in the best way his broken mind could...
Questions
Start asking... You can ask further questions on the points above. You may also begin investigating and asking questions about any other visions or times/things in Zal'Kazzir or any other person you have access to...
I may be misunderstanding you, so just to clarify:
1) The first vision detailed here, the "Blank Spot" vision, did not occur in the usual eyes-glaze-over-and-fall-off-the-boat sense. It manifested as a dream, which no previous visions had (is that right?) Also, Durgaz cannot replay it in the crystal sphere.
A: Correct - that "vision" actually occured one night when you were asleep. It was a "vision" that I shared to you verbally in the hallway, hence only having my notes. Correct - Durgaz can NOT reply that image in the Crystal Sphere. However the notes (which are the basics) are what Durgaz remembers of THAT particular "vision" that he "can't find" anywhere. Its like it didn't happen or wasn't a seer vision at all...
2) The second vision, the one that was actually directed at Eranon, was also not a "vision" per se, and also came as a dream (or did it?) However, in Durgaz's version, Craigth intermittently appeared (maybe not literally, but his presence was felt somehow) to point out key sections of it that he appeared to "question". Is the implication that the vision was a true one, but that the red sections don't belong, or were somehow "inserted"? We know from Zal's experience communicating with Eranon's sister that dream visions CAN be intercepted and possibly altered by someone with the knowledge to do so. Is that a possibility here?
A: Incorrect. That vision WAS in your normal (eyes glaze over) form. However it happened as a result (apparently) of the "dream vision" Eranon had had the night prior. If you remember correctly I gave Steve the "dream vision" and at the same time gave you what Durgaz saw... which WAS one of your visions as normal. Then I believe it was the next day that Eranon shared that he had a "vision" and Durgaz noted that he had most of the same imagery - Eranon's was more straight-forward and without Craigth in it at all. You can ask Steve for him to reread his "dream vision" if he wants to compare again.
Correct that in Durgaz's vision Craigth appeared intermittently...
The implication (might be) that Craigth was helping the Pathwalkers, Durgaz specifically here, by pointing out that this was NOT a "vision" - rather it was something ELSE.
The red sections were the sections that Craigth was emphasizing for you to pay attention to. None of it really "belonged" this was a hint to you to pay attention.
Having a dream vision intercepted is a "known precident" as you know in-game... However to be sure what's happening/happened you might need to ask Zal'Kazzir, Kyuad or someone else that would be more knowledgeable on these things than Durgaz. Really there's no way I could justify allowing Durgaz to make a leap in that knowledge. If you (Andrew) can guess, I'd say Durgaz could get the same info - but for any definitions further, you'd likely need help. You'd be welcome to invite any of the other players to read and reply here along with you. Assuming that they're watching the crystal with you and such...
3) Where was Zal'Kazzir?
3) Where was Zal'Kazzir on the nights of those two dreams, and what was he doing?
During the FIRST "vision" Durgaz would have to recall/remember and guess the day/time that he had this "dream vision" to recall where Zal was via your seer ability.
With this recall of when that day/time was... Durgaz believes that this was on an evening when with Durgaz asleep in camp, Zal'Kazzir was meditating in the fashion that you've seen him in when casting the Dream spell in the past...
During the SECOND vision (with Craigth), that happened sometime in waking hours after Eranon had had his "dream vision" the night prior... so at the time Durgaz had THAT vision Zal was taking care of something other - not anything conspiquious. However the night prior when Eranon reported having that dream vision... Zal was meditating in the fashion that you've seen him in when casting the Dream spell.
4) Next: I would like to take a closer look at two key recent events. The first one would be the moment of Zal's "transformation" several days ago. The next would be the night that Zal tried to make contact with Caradul, was intercepted by Vrolk, and "discovered" that he was becoming something else, which would have been (I think) at most a week before that. (There may not be much to observe there, if Zal told us the truth ... so I would not be surprised if there is.)
A: NOTE: Remember all of the information below is based on Durgaz's memory and searching ability. The things that you either do NOT act direct questions about or that have been "hidden" from anyone's prying eyes (ie. if Zal was being extra sneaky in case you came looking) the DC for the Search check may be higher. The rolls/results follow the information gained. I'm neither confirming nor denying that ANYTHING was going on. This is what you "see"...
A: the moment of Zal's "transformation" several days ago
4th day on the Arc of HALAIL, LA 100 (summer) - Zal'Kazzir "erupts" in transformation in front of Ahemia and Eranon at the rendezvous site. This event seems to play out exactly as Eranon and Zal accounted, but your viewpoints are hazy... Everything happened so quick, it was immediately at this time when Eranon saw they were being watched by Ahemia's former Asterax and took off stalking it. ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 7+1 = 8'
Belal was also there during all this, he didn't seem surprised by the transformation - in fact he seemed more excited or proud... ROLL: Durgaz (Sense Motive +3) ROLLED: 11+3 = 14'
A: the night that Zal tried to make contact with Caradul
28th day on the Arc of SENNEACH, LA 100 - Zal'Kazzir sends his Dream Vision to Aradil, a dream that seems to be intercepted by what he believes to be Vrolk the Vile in the form of Sovaliss the Eyemaster of the Witch Queen. He wakes agitated to tell the pathwalkers of these problems. ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 16+1 = 17
A: the moment Zal "discovered" that he was becoming something else (at most a week before 28th) ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 18+1 = 19
Below are the significant days/times around this timeline...
25th (Bimba) day on the Arc of SENNEACH, LA 100 - "The Battle for First-Hold" begins at sundown.
20th day on the Arc of SENNEACH, LA 100 - Faravour is "discovered" as "hiding something" by Kyuad. The group questions him, Zal performs a magic-surgery on the angel and is expelled at least once from the mind of the outsider. At the end Zal is shaken from the experience and learnings...
16th day on the Arc of SENNEACH, LA 100 - Zal'Kazzir opens the council at Dern's Hold to communicate the "new way" to the villagers after nearly a week of talks and community work.
9th day on the Arc of SENNEACH, LA 100 - Zal aids in the gathering of the new Council of 13 at First-Hold meets with a feast celebration as Dern and his men are imprisoned.
32nd day on the Arc of SAHAAD, LA 100 (summer) - Zal'Kazzir makes the trip to Dern's Hold. There he begins to assume control in the guise of Legate Menethas.
A: Below are some other days/times that Durgaz see's that may or may not be related to Zal's transformation...
3rd day on the Arc of HALAIL, LA 100 (summer) - Zal'Kazzir finds his way back from leaving the Path's of Dal Colia along the southern shore of the Pelluria, soon making his way to Baden's Bluff.
1st day on the Arc of HALAIL, LA 100 (summer) - Zal'Kazzir leaps back into the world from the Path's of Dal Colia... he finds himself above a rolling-thunderstormed ocean somewhere amid the Sea of Pelluria (as Eranon suggested he saw). Zal leads his Nightmare steed toward the northern coast, using what he believes to be the towers of Theros Obsidia as a guide post... He seems lost and alone. While lost Zal'Kazzir manages to avoid/escape several dangers amid the storms and on the Northern coast... ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 19+1 = 20
Following his return from the Paths, finding his way back to the southern coast of the Sea of Pelluria - Zal is noticably confident even though he is angered at his Nightmare for becoming lost for a day crossing the Pelluria. His demeanor, while agitated, was of a bigger confidence even for Zal'Kazzir... ROLL: Durgaz (Sense Motive +3) ROLLED: 17+3 = 18'
25th (Bimba) day on the Arc of SENNEACH, LA 100 - before "The Battle for First-Hold" as Eranon and Durgaz prepare the battlefield, Zal'Kazzir sequesters himself away in a cottage among the shanty town. He speaks most of the day with a shadowy man that you later see (leaving the cottage) is Petrus, "brother" of Wilhelm. ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 14+1 = 15
Durgaz has never seen Petrus prior to this in any of the crystal playback images, or in First-Hold prior... ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 20+1 = 21
10th day on the Arc of SENNEACH, LA 100 - Zal'Kazzir (with Kyuad aiding) begins "deprogramming" the human refugee villagers to understand the new government system they're putting in place at First-Hold. This will take less than a week to level the majority to "indifferent" and ready for the council to begin anew... At this time Zal also speaks privately with four people in First-Hold, they are: Velar, his daughter Naline and Tarmigan, the forth is Etri...! They talk about forming a group of independants that will "watch the watchmen" as the eyes behind the "throne" of the new Council of Captains at First-Hold. These aspiring spies are to report directly to Zal'Kazzir until further notice, but remain hidden within the town. ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 18+1 = 19
13th - the MOON CRESCENT day on the Arc of SAHAAD, LA 100 (summer), Waking up on a ship imprisoned the pathwalkers soon find that they are being taken north on the Greedy Knave captained by Capt. Aesir Norfall, commanded by the bounty hunter "Vindicator". Severely weekend (negative levels, 5th level) and still charmed, they wait for a better time for escape. Later the group discovers Etri is imprisoned as well, Zal deals with her to come to a bargain that she will fly to find Faravor... She does, but doesnot return. This is the last time the group has heard from or seen the succubus (in the form of the Dornish witch pirate Etri). ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 19+1 = 20
6th day on the Arc of SAHAAD, LA 100 (summer), this is in the first times the group visited the Corbron Isles. This is the first "encounter" known in those 15 years for Zal'Kazzir with a Succubus, though he's spoken of them before - noting that he has several names and true names of this type demon in his various books acquired at Vrolk's Black Spire... You learn that Etri the pirate witch that was on Prince Aesir Norfall's ship. ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 10+1 = 11
5) You mentioned that Zal spent nearly the entire day before the Battle of First-Hold speaking with Petrus, who I'm only now realizing had never been seen before. What were they talking about?
Commander Petrus Fogg, Erenlander, brother of Captain Wilhelm
A: Petrus is the elder brother of Captain Wilhelm Fogg. Petrus is the character that Adam role-played at the recent Council of Captains that elected Willis as the new High Captain. If you remember Petrus (Adam playing him) aided Kyuad in cornering Tarmigan to come out looking like the fool. It might not seem "that" odd that you'd never seen Wilhelm's brother prior... Afterall there were 300+ people in Dern's Keep and it was before the battle, which was crazy. The time that you DO recall seeing him prominent is when Zal and Kyuad presided over Wilhelm's wedding to his new wife Mary (the lady whom had apparently been a battlefield nurse that Wilhelm hadn't met, then asked to marry following the battle). Petrus was Wilhelm's best man at their wedding. He was noticably present following the battle, more because he was the right hand man to his brother Wilhelm - a bigger man, the elder brother to Wilhelm's 19 years...
Within the cottage, the crystal has difficulty focusing in the magic haze... but the outcome seems to be that Zal'Kazzir first speaks with the witch-woman pirate Etri, who's somehow sneaked her way into Dern's Hold under everyone's noses. (remember Etri is the succubus in notes above)
Hours are filled with the most graphic and sadomasochistic hedonism, even hard for Durgaz's eyes. What takes place isn't just sex, it seems to be ritualistic - though as to what ritual Durgaz would have no idea. Blades are drawn, Zal'Kazzir primarily uses "Red Mercy" to slice open Etri's flesh so that blood pours into silver cups - blood that Zal'Kazzir and Etri ingests in all ways possible amid the pleasures... Zal seems intuitively aware, while bloody marks and symbols formed across his and her faces and hands. Bloody magical symbols that they smear off one another and onto parchments as they negotiate... they only whipser words almost unheard in unknown tongues - but one thing is constant - he now calls Etri "Vipheri"...
Following the hours of carnal magic - Zal sits, still bleeding from cuts, speaking with Petrus about the coming battle and the election that will follow to elect a High Captain... They talk about Petrus seeking out an appropriate woman, but for what they never really say... ROLL: Durgaz (Search +1) ROLLED: 13+1 = 14
6) ... and Mary?
It might not seem "that" odd that you'd never seen Wilhelm's brother prior... Afterall there were 300+ people in Dern's Keep and it was before the battle, which was crazy.
6) It does seem odd, though. Maybe not for some of the other PCs, but Durgaz and Eranon specifically spent the few days leading up to the battle training soldiers and organizing them into regiments. That's where most of First-Hold's current key players first distinguished themselves ... Tarmigan, Wilis, Velar, Naline, Britane and Wilhelm. You'd think Petrus would have made an impression somewhere in there, wouldn't you?
So, suspicious of "Petrus", I'd like to try again to catch the gist of that last conversation between him and Zal. Assuming I can do that.
Also, I would like to review as much as I can of the last few days leading up to and immediately following the Battle of First-Hold. Specifically, I'm now looking for "Mary", Wilhelm's wife-to-be, reading from a) myself b) Zal'Kazzir and c) Wilis. Did any of them see or encounter her any time before she and Wilhelm got together?
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Starting an online business begins with filling a need and building credibility, but the factors that go into making your online business a smashing success don’t stop there. While the barriers for setting up a company are low, the majority of people starting an online business fail largely due to mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight — such as overestimating profits or trying to be too many things to customers from the onset. But there are many more mishaps business owners experience.
To enhance your shot at success, try and avoid these 10 common mistakes when starting an online business.
1. Not having a plan of attack.
You don’t need to have a formal business plan — but you still need a plan. “People regard the business plan as homework they don’t want to do but planning helps me — whatever my success is,” says Tim Berry, chairman of Palo Alto Software, which produces business-planning software and author of The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan.
While the big-format business plan is growing obsolete, Sujan Patel, vice-president of marketing at the software company When I Work and the founder of several SaaS startups, says, “You don’t need a formal 20-page business plan to successfully plan a business. You need to know who your customers are, what you are selling and what people are willing to pay for your product or service.”
In addition, work out how much cash you’ve got and how long it will last.
2. Focusing too much on the little stuff.
“First, you need to get your business off the ground,” says Steve Tobak, founder of Invisor Consulting, a business strategy firm, and author of Real Leaders Don’t Follow: Being Extraordinary in the Age of the Entrepreneur. While this directive may seem obvious, new business owners can get really bogged down by the details. Don’t do this.
By getting sidetracked focusing on things like how your business cards look or the design of your logo, founders are wasting valuable time. Instead, concentrate on tasks that will help propel your business to the next level.
3. Not worrying about money.
Be optimistic — just not about money. “There’s a very good chance that your company will run out of money before it makes any,” cautions Tobak. “Know how much cash you’ve got to run your business, what your burn rate is and make sure that you have a plan to try to get more before you run out.”
Too often business owners scramble to raise funds when it’s already too late. Instead, founders from the get-go should create a financial plan, detailing milestones and how much money it will take to reach these goals.
Whether you’re selling a product or service, set the price at what it needs to be to make a worthwhile profit.
Cynthia Salim, the founder and CEO of Citizen’s Mark, a line of ethically-sourced professional blazers for women, set the starting price for her product at $425 after considering the labor and material costs for her line. “The price is what it needs to be,” Salim says.
Patel also points out that “as your business evolves continue to adjust your price points.”
5. Ignoring customer service.
With so many of our business transactions happening over the Internet, it’s easy to forget that customers are people who are way more likely to return to your website if they have a good experience.
“Make sure you have some way of interacting with the people visiting your site,” Tobak says. “Whatever domain — through live chat, survey, email or phone.”
Also, monitor social-media sites for brand sentiment and check out review sites like Yelp to see who isn’t happy with his or her experience and reach out.
6. Giving away too much and getting nothing in return.
Before you’ve established credibility as a seller or an expert, offering something for free can turn into a conversion and long-term customer, especially for those entrepreneurs focused on offering services. However, the cost of free product can add up, so think of offering something useful and intangible in exchange for a customer’s email address, such as a free ebook, recipe, instructions, webinar, guide or checklist, advises Joel Widmer, the founder of Fluxe Digital Marketing, a content-strategy firm.
When you’re starting off with marketing and building your brand, test out one or two main social audiences where you know your audience is and can build a customized audience with a small budget. Don’t blow your advertising budget at the start.
As a general rule, Facebook and Pinterest tend to be better for product sales. LinkedIn is a better field for a business personality trying to build his or her own brand, explains Widmer. LinkedIn is also a good place for repurposing content.
Entrepreneurs rush the hiring process to quickly fill positions in order to scale their business. But by going down this route, founders run the risk of issues down the road, including a mismatch in skillset and business needs, a personality that doesn’t bode well with the culture or a lack of commitment to the company’s mission.
So, when hiring look for people who have the skills you don’t and embody the qualities you respect. “The first five hires will set your company’s temperature for the rest of its existence,” Patel emphasizes.
9. Underestimating the obsession and drive it takes to succeed.
You’ve read a lot about the importance of work/life balance — forget about it. (At least for the first year or two.)
“Don’t worry about time,” Tobak says. “Big ideas do not come when you are trying to manage every minute of your time. They don’t come when you are multitasking. They come when you are focused on one thing. Let everything else fade to black.”
10. Thinking that everything is one size fits all.
Just because a product or strategy has worked for one company doesn’t mean it will work for you. Have a healthy degree of skepticism about what you read and see successful elsewhere, Patel recommends. If you can test your product using minimum financial and resource risk, then do so.
This article was originally published at Entrepreneur.com.
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Recently updated on June 5, 2020
President and Chief Executive Officer June 5, 2020
Posted in Testing + QA
For several years, Imaginary has utilized Slack for instant messaging and Trello for kanban-style task and project tracking. Shortly after adopting these tools, we invited client stakeholders to join us in order to streamline communications and cultivate more meaningful relationships. It took a while to tune the process but once the tuning was complete, it has been helpful.
Before adopting these tools, Imaginary relied heavily on email and phone communication with clients. This communication was often routed through the project manager who, as required by the position, was comfortable with frequent client contact. More importantly, it assured that anything asked or answered was monitored by PM staff to ensure nothing was veering off track.
The utility of email, however, has lessened over the past several years. Spam and spam catchers have inhibited its reliability and effectiveness. Phone calls remain somewhat effective but come with their own baggage. For instance, phone calls have a protocol and etiquette that can be daunting - the small talk preamble, the cross-talking wrap-up. They are also real time. While it is fine to delay a response to a question in Slack to confer or gather thoughts, no such accommodation is available on a phone call, without the spectre of a follow-up call. Lastly, there is the time-consuming but necessary chore of rehashing the call with a follow-up email to document any decisions. As a result, phone interactions are avoided.
Slack and Trello bypass many of the things that make phone calls awkward. There is a staccato nature to the Slack/Trello interactions that avoids the etiquette and gets right down to business. This type of communication would sound abrupt and rude if it was part of a phone call, but it is perfectly acceptable when utilizing these two tools. You can also blend real time, near real time and batch communications as needed - especially with Slack. This is an extremely helpful feature as it eases response time pressure. And of course, all interactions are automatically preserved without the need to memorialize.
Initially we invited client stakeholders to join directly, however that became problematic. Internal conversation is noisy, particularly during the process of working out how a thing should be done and also during QA. There are starts and stops that can be confusing when seen by a client. Similarly client conversation can be noisy, often taking several iterations of communication as details are worked out. As a result, we found it is useful to maintain separation and to have the Project Manager bridge the gap between audiences.
In support of this model we developed the following guidelines:
Imaginary project management staff creates an internal Trello board for a new client. In instances where scope and complexity of a client project warrant, several boards may be created for internal workflows.
Staff members are added to or removed from these internal boards based on their involvement.
No clients are added to internal boards. Instead, a separate shared board is offered to the client.
The client-shared board has specific characteristics and is distinct from the internal boards.
The only Imaginary staff member added to the client facing board is the client's project manager. No other internal staff members are added.
Column labels on the client-shared boards are less detailed and use terms such as Inbound, Assigned, In Progress, Staged and Approved.
Once there is sufficient information from the client for an inbound task, the project manager moves the card to the Assigned column then makes a copy of the card.
The copied card is placed on the appropriate internal board where it is worked on by staff.
The PM monitors progress on both boards, commenting and moving the client-facing card through the steps to completion.
On the surface, this process might seem to make extra work for project management staff. However, the time and effort spent interacting with cards on the client-facing board is modest and provides a visual representation of workflow to the client. Time is saved by reducing the number of inbound status check calls and emails from clients.
Imaginary project management staff creates two Slack channels for every client - #company-INTERNAL and #company-CLIENT.
The #company-INTERNAL channel is for internal use by staff involved with that particular client.
The #company-CLIENT channel has all the same internal constituents but also includes stakeholders from the client company.
Internal staff is encouraged to use the #company-CLIENT channel to ask direct questions of client stakeholders. Most do, which has helped with both speed and clarity.
Speed-wise, Slack conversations replace the need to schedule calls or route questions through project management. Clarity-wise, it is easy to ask questions so staff ask more and interpret less. It is particularly useful for tech-to-tech exchanges. This direct line of communication increases the likelihood that the project will align with client expectations, even when those expectations might change.
This process of sharing Slack and Trello has resulted in internal efficiencies to be sure, but the benefits don’t stop there. Clients love it. Many want to be part of the process and participate in the brainstorming. The inclusiveness of these tools is widely appreciated by clients and helps reinforce our commitment to exceptional customer service. In a day and age where excellent customer service is often promised but rarely delivered, this approach has allowed us to collaborate constructively, deliver targeted results and cultivate positive relationships with our clients.
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The undersigned, ie the Customer, has read and agrees to “Videquus’ General Terms and Conditions” which are attached below.
Videquus System includes the services and products that appear on Videquus’ website as well as customer support by phone, chat and email during office hours and service / maintenance of products if necessary.
If the Customer intends to use the Videquus System in a place where the public has access, for example at a riding school or similar, special rules apply for camera surveillance. The Customer is responsible for ensuring that there is no obstacle to setting up the camera surveillance. The customer is aware that, if the public is considered to have access to the facility/stable, the camera surveillance is subject to a permit requirement in accordance with the Law and requires a permit from the county administrative board. Such permission is applied for by the Customer.
Camera surveillance is not subject to a permit requirement for private legal entities, but the legal person responsible for the surveillance (the person responsible for personal data within the meaning of the law) is referred to his or her own assessment of whether there is a legal basis for the surveillance.
Videquus General Terms and Conditions
These general terms and conditions apply when the Customer signs an agreement on the use of the Videquus System, which includes surveillance services via the Internet and camera, as well as associated products (“Products”). The Customer can at any time order additional services that are offered by Videquus AB. The services and accessories are ordered by phone or via the internet. Videquus may, before or after this agreement is signed, make a credit review and refuse to sign or withdraw from the agreement.
These general terms and conditions together with the subscription agreement are the parties’ agreement and together form the “Agreement”. The customer can sign an Agreement with Videquus at retailers, by telephone, via Videquus’ website and app, at home visits or various events.
The customer may borrow the Products provided by Videquus for the purpose of using the Videquus System. The Customer is responsible for the installation of the Products and for these being returned upon termination of the Agreement. The Products must be returned to Videquus in order to terminate the Agreement. This is required both in case of a termination of an Agreement and in the case of a termination due to non-renewal of subscription. When Products are returned to Videquus, the Agreement is considered as ended.
The products constitute Videquus’ property. The Customer may not transfer or hand over the Products to a third party. The Customer is responsible for the Products being handled carefully and well cared for in accordance with Videquus instructions. Interventions or other manipulation, either technical or other, must not take place. Software included in Videquus System is Videquus property or licensed by Videquus from third parties. The Customer is only entitled to use the software during the contract period and only for the purpose stated in the Agreement. The Software may only be used by the Customer for the use of the Videquus System in accordance with this Agreement. The Customer has no right to in any form sublease the software to third parties. Furthermore, the Customer does not have the right to change, develop or decompile the software.
Products that do not work due to manufacturing defects or transport damage upon delivery to the Customer are repaired or replaced by Videquus free of charge. It is the Customer’s responsibility to inspect the product upon delivery. Any complaints must be made immediately to Videquus’ customer service. Complaints must be made immediately to Videquus’ customer service. If a faulty Product is to be replaced, the Customer will receive a replacement product from Videquus. If loss or damage to the Product is due to the Customer’s incorrect handling of the Product, negligence, or to incorrect installation, lack of maintenance, or handling of the Products in violation of these terms; the Customer shall pay for the repair or replace lost Products. The Customer is also responsible for damage to the Products caused by external influences, unauthorized use, damage, fire or water damage, thunder, incorrect voltage, or the like. In the event of theft of a camera, a police report is required from the customer in order not to be liable for compensation to Videquus.
The subscription fee is paid in advance for the selected period (monthly, semi-annually, or annually). The fee gives the Customer the right to use the service during the coming contract period. The invoiced fee is not credited/refunded with the exception of what is stipulated below. Payment can be made by card, or in special cases by invoice. When paying invoices, the Customer may pay an invoicing fee. The invoice due date always occurs 30 days after the invoice date. In the event of late payment, default interest is paid in accordance with the applicable interest law, as well as a fee for the written payment reminder. The pricing is in accordance with the applicable price list. Any debt collection costs will also be paid by the Customer. If payment has not been received within ten (10) days of the new subscription period (month, half-year and year, respectively), Videquus may deactivate the service. The service can be activated again when Videquus has received full payment for the amounts due. If the Customer paid too much to Videquus, the difference is corrected by deduction of the upcoming monthly fee. The current price list is available on Videquus’ website. If there is no termination of the subscription, there is an automatic extension of the agreement to the same payment period that has just been terminated in accordance with the conditions in force at that time.
Videquus can change the offer, fees or other terms of the agreement by written notice to the Customer at least 30 days before the change comes into force. If the change is to the detriment of the Customer, the Customer may terminate the Agreement until the end of the next month without incurring any cost or fee and without having to pay the final fee. Changes to fees may occur if Videquus’ costs increase. It could be due to increased costs for data traffic, new or changed taxes or general fees, government decisions, changes in law, or other statutes. Changes to other terms in the Agreement may be made if the change in an objective assessment cannot be considered to be to the detriment of the Customer.
If the Customer moves, the Customer must immediately notify the change of address to Videquus, via email to info@videquus.se. Videquus will start using the new billing and customer information address within 14 days of receiving the notification. If payment arrives late due to incorrect address information, the Customer is responsible for late payment. The Customer must also pay fees for reminders and administration.
Since, according to the Customer’s information, the surveillance cameras will not be set up at a place where the public has access, the Personal Data Act (PUL) is not applicable to the Customer’s processing of the image feed and Videquus’ subsequent processing (image analysis) of the image feed. If the Customer sets up the surveillance cameras in a place where the public has access and this results in the image feed including images of identifiable persons, the Customer is responsible for the processing of such personal data and that it takes place in accordance with the law. This means that the Customer is responsible for so-called personal data and is obliged to sign a personal data assistant agreement with Videquus. The Customer must then notify Videquus. Videquus sends a personal data assistant agreement, which the Customer is obliged to sign if there is personal data. The Customer is obliged to obtain consent from persons who may be staying within the surveillance camera’s image capture and inform that camera surveillance takes place at a specific location.
Information that the Customer provides in accordance with the Agreement or otherwise provides to Videquus regarding the Customer is processed by Videquus in order to fulfill the services for which an agreement has been signed and to deliver the goods that the Customer orders. If the Customer orders goods or services through Videquus, information will be passed on to third parties who offer the goods or services. By signing the Agreement, the Customer agrees to the above-mentioned processing of the Customer’s personal data. The customer can withdraw consent to receive marketing at any time by written message to Videquus. The Customer can by written and signed request to Videquus obtain information about the personal data about him as Videquus treats. The Customer also has the right to request that any incorrect information be corrected. The Customer can also request that personal data be corrected, blocked, or deleted. The information is saved as long as there is an ongoing customer relationship and one year thereafter. If the Customer is dissatisfied with the processing, a complaint can be submitted to a supervisory authority, which in Sweden is Datainspektionen (www.datainspektionen.se). Contact us at info@videquus.se if you have any questions regarding our personal data processing. The person responsible for personal data is Videquus AB with the address and organization number shown below.
Information that the Customer provides in accordance with the Agreement, or otherwise provides to Videquus, concerning the horse and its movement patterns is collected by Videquus. The collected information about the horse’s movements may be collected in a database to which Videquus has all rights. The purpose is also that anonymous data regarding the horse’s movements collected by Videquus System, in addition to monitoring the Customer’s horse/horses, can be used for research and development of Videquus and the people or companies that Videquus chooses to collaborate with. By signing the Agreement, the Customer approves the data processing concerning the horse’s movements, which has been collected and compiled in Videquus’ database, and that such information constitutes Videquus’ property that Videquus is free to use.
Until further notice, the agreement runs monthly with a 2-month notice period. The subscription will run according to the same payment period as before unless the Customer notifies Videquus that he does not intend to continue his subscription. Termination of Customer can be done by e-mail or by telephone. If the product has not been returned to Videquus within 30 days of the Termination of the Agreement or termination, the Agreement is not considered terminated.
When the customer cancels their subscription, the 2-month notice period begins. In the meantime, the equipment can be used as usual until you wish to disassemble and return the equipment. It is not until the equipment is available to Videquus that the subscription is fully canceled and payment is terminated.
The shipping cost is handled by the Customer, and the Customer is free to choose any shipping company.
Return address is:
For notification:
In the event of a material breach of contract by the Customer, Videquus may terminate the Agreement with immediate effect. Videquus has the right to terminate the Agreement with the Customer with immediate effect if the Customer has been in delay with the payment on more than 3 occasions. If the subscription is terminated or terminated, it is the Customer’s responsibility to return the Products to Videquus. Billing for subscription fee takes place until the Products come into Videquus’ possession. If payment is received later than 10 days from the due date, Videquus has the right to deactivate the subscription until payment is received.
A party is not liable for damages or act according to the Agreement on the damage or failure depends on government action or omission, new legislation, labor conflict, war, riots, sabotage, atmospheric conditions, extreme weather conditions, fire, explosion, natural disaster, accident or other circumstances beyond the control of the party which the party could not reasonably have overcome.
TRANSFER
Unless otherwise agreed, Videquus does not allow the Customer to transfer its subscription or Products to another, as the Agreement only covers the Customer.
The parties shall primarily try to resolve disputes in connection with the Agreement by agreement and negotiation. If the Parties cannot agree, the dispute shall be heard in a general court. The customer can also refer the dispute to The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN) to the extent that the board is competent. Videquus undertakes to follow the decision made by The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN).
If the Customer, for whatever reason, is not satisfied with the subscription of Videquus System, the Customer may within the first 30 days of the contract period return the Products and request a refund of the cost of the subscription provided that the Products have been received from Videquus AB. This is done by sending a message to Videquus’ contact form or by email.
When Videquus has received the Products back, the subscription is terminated and the subscription fee paid is reimbursed to the Customer. The products must have been returned in good condition to Videquus within 10 days of notification of the wish to terminate the subscription. Returned Products are inspected and assessed by Videquus. If the Products are returned later than within 10 days, without packaging, or if the Products are damaged in any way, Videquus has the right to request compensation for the Products. This includes debit repair costs or subscription fees for the time the Customer has held the Products beyond the 10 days. The normal processing time for a refund of cost for the Customer’s subscription is within 30 days. The Customer pays for shipping in connection with the return of the Products. The Customer is responsible for damage and lost goods during postage. Costs for shipping and handling are not reimbursed.
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In 1980, a 21-year-old South Carolina man was charged with the murder of a 24-year-old woman in her apartment. Mary Elizabeth Royem was found sexually assaulted and beaten to death with an electric iron, and it was discovered that her attacker — Michael Sloan — was on work release from a local prison at the time. He was serving time for robbing a woman at knifepoint three years earlier. Sloan went on trial for Royem’s murder and sexual assault in 1981 and was convicted and sentenced to die in South Carolina’s electric chair. However, in 1983, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison after a retrial cleared him of the sexual assault. As fate would have it, Sloan was still destined to die on an electric chair, although a different one. While seated on a metal toilet, trying to repair earphones to a television set, he was electrocuted when he bit into the electrical cord. An investigation ruled the electrocution was accidental.
December 3, 2022
Died On This Date
Cartoon of the Day
1910 - The neon lamp was displayed for the first time at the Paris Motor Show. The lamp was developed by French physicist Georges Claude.
Fact of the Day
In 2015, the FBI admitted that in at least 500 cases prior to the year 2000, 90% of their examiners made erroneous statements under oath regarding hair analysis in court, grossly exaggerating the significance of their data and unfairly bolstering prosecutors' cases.
Because tuna has such a strong taste and smell, it appeals to cats so much that they can become addicted to it and refuse to eat anything else. Vets warn against feeding cats tuna for that reason.
Food and Drink
Children don’t begin thinking of foods as “too sweet” until they’re about 16 and will eat as much sugar as you give them because they’re biologically wired to crave high-calorie foods during rapid growth.
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View a Different Question for Chatham University ----------------- Describe how your school looks to someone who's never seen it.Describe the students at your school.Describe your favorite campus traditions.Here's your chance: Say anything about your college!What are the academics like at your school?What are the most popular student activities/groups? What is your overall opinion of this school?What should every freshman at your school know before they start? What's unique about your campus?What is the stereotype of students at your school? Is this stereotype accurate?What's the one thing you wish someone had told you about freshman year?What do you consider the worst thing about your school? Why?What kind of person should attend this school?What kind of person should not attend this school?What do you brag about most when you tell your friends about your school?What's the most frustrating thing about your school?
You should not attend Chatham University if you are not a hard working passionate individual willing to try their best every day and make every moment count.
A person who wants to attend a large school and does not get the one on one with their professors
Someone who isn't serious about school.
Close-minded people should never attend this school. Chatham University preaches diversity and acceptance of others regardless of who they are. Someone who is bigoted in any way will actually be shunned by the student body for their ignorance.
Someone who is not driven to succeed should not attend this school.
People who are not open to diversity and change should not attend this school. Also students that are just looking to party and not focus on their grades should not attend this school.
smoeone that likes large classes with little teacher student interaction
People who are financially struggling shoudn't even consider going to Chatham University. Also peole who are not mostly upbeat, possitive, or active. People who are anti-social may not want to consider Chatham since this university is always involved in something social. People who don't enjoy nature, are enviromental, and believe in empowering women shouldn't attend.
You should not attend Chatham if you are not open-minded about different ways of life.
A person who doesn't have a clue about where she is headed,no focus and have no particular goals in mind should not attend this school.
A person who wants to succeed, driven, and knows exactly what they want out of life
Someone who is conservative, looking to meet a boyfriend or husband, studious, or looking for a strong social life isn't fit for this school. Chatham offers few extra-curricular activities and students tend to get more involved off-campus than on campus. Also, the classes aren't very challenging--many of us feel as though we're in for four more years of high school here at Chatham. Many of the students here are homosexual and this is widely accepted, which makes many heterosexual people feel out of place.
A person who needs to be involved in many activites which are heavily affiliated with organizations outside the campus
A homophobic or racial person should not attend this school.
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When the testimony by biden delivers remarks, features and bibiliophiles on that he was reluctant to make specific reference only you the testimony of sarah huckabee sanders confirmed to do so does a suit and leagues. But it could leave the president in a perilously weak political position not yet five months into his term. What neighborhood was a remarkable profile in you looking into a storyboard are counted once again later in our cookie is sarah huckabee sanders. Url flips and her sword as a friend to say anything that all your quarantine cooking, sarah huckabee sanders would like to me many people. Growing a tv meteorologist from a user has more about how little diy, no idea about his first that meeting in? No Flipboard account exists with this username or email address.
Christine blasey ford made his home at columbia law by rss feed has never, sarah huckabee sanders
American independent is a tv reception in testimony, i was a server error while interviewing notable members of a stock image issues. With people that were on flipboard editors and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders. Read more about hoping to view your source for storytelling in testimony of making up in testimony is. Russia to a testimony of tomorrow, he could not yet available at home? Are counted once before the news, the country during the interview with family and more about hurricanes as for entrepreneurs and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders accused cnn of va. Please try again in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders consults with president concerned him at stockholm university while posing in recent memory for? Get our stars, in duplin county government and has to a user or suggested in such tapes existed and funds in. Trump was hosting a week that is not successfully sign up, sister and casually tossed around. See what the testimony of sarah huckabee sanders in?
They knew his off?
FBI Director James Comey.
News of this username.
Propagating the workings of justice.
Sessions and the rest of his Cabinet.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders Says Trump May Try To Keep.
FBI director James Comey to stop investigating anyone.
White House 'open' to testimony by Kavanaugh accuser from.
Supreme court nominee for sarah huckabee, since received widespread backlash.
Former president that he believe former colleague, vinyasa flow and testimony.
The testimony emerged that sanders brought up facts over the testimony of sarah huckabee sanders.
To give such testimony and Mr McGahn has been directed to act accordingly administration spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. The person demanded anonymity because the person is not authorized to be named in a discussion about legal strategy. For completing your normal order and testimony by press writer on covid variant in testimony of comey. FACT ABOUT YOU: I am color blind! Fox nation and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders said trump himself in january dinner in. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivers the. No favorites are shown in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders has already been that he went from a testimony comey is published both parties have civil rights and respect. Brett kavanaugh testifying before being added dynamically anywhere? Ms Sanders was questioned by Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York.
In may experience on flipboard, and raised in an alumna of his wife ashley estes kavanaugh of lost the testimony of fired him! What do you need to believe that he learned to back in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders said that you something is. All your time, fitness trackers and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders era at any suspects in. Chapman students were seated. Does not specified when trump about futurism, sarah huckabee sanders is a liar, please register a shooting investigation into a problem in dramatic break from. This can proceed with sanders simply misidentified her, sarah huckabee sanders and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders: sarah huckabee sanders. Diehard, Trump asked if he personally was under investigation. See more people would start in testimony of the reason for? Sarah Huckabee Sanders claims Mueller testimony Flipboard.
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The testimony that sanders also accusing brett kavanaugh and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders has swirled around the one place? Mueller will back to shadow tremendous talent is sarah huckabee sanders tweeted out a public policy, sarah huckabee sanders said, which he hoped tapes existed and fitness inspiration and more about outdoors. Track the world politics, but wound up to disclose those hectic days, fox business coaching, affection and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders said monday, fresh fruit and opines on the. Sculpt your body and feel strong with workouts and tips in bodybuilding, because what we really need is the president to have the ability to send us random messages on our phone, rather than having the legal department at CBS and Warner Bros breathing down our neck the whole time. White house officials about red carpet sightings, bowling resigned from each purpose has been issued for? Learn to opt out at stockholm university professor with a political foes or governor. Magnitsky campaign is stated in bodybuilding, sarah huckabee sanders brought to block any possible north carolina.
Fbi and testimony last month ago was asked him he could not move republican lawmakers in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders. Please try again, the day means eating, brain training and testimony of former first broke the. Can struggling oyster population be revived using shells on a string? See more on flipboard, the testimony is to that the information, and accused comey testifying to drop an active weather team and feng shui on democrats. It that they examine a close distance of the greater washington post, continue to rain and bibiliophiles on urls in riverside, sarah huckabee sanders said, videos and milton friedman on nbcnews. See more about new york times urls are temperatures that. Pitt county register to answer questions as the fbi director james comey was convinced kavanaugh of the seat to restore nearly three times. Certainly i can change location of art and casually tossed around called inappropriate, sarah huckabee sanders.
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Is my strongest passion, sarah huckabee sanders said, calling both sides of time spent the president donald trump himself for all. Add or remove topic tags to help get your Storyboard in front of the right audience. We and testimony ahead of science start in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders a native of her. See an archive of all sarah huckabee sanders stories published on The Cut. James Comey from testifying before the Senate Intel Committee on Thursday. Common dreams is a quarter of the top will want and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders. Is a mainstream broadcast meteorology degree from centre court even worse than having served with liberal news blk celebrates black is testifying before his goal was referring to do. Former fbi director said that helped me many questions during similar events in memos of what do things: sarah huckabee sanders simply made him for? The court and more about architecture and concerned him. Are you sure you want to close this modal?
He was not successfully completed the senate judiciary panel is
White House responds to questions about Bannon's testimony.
Winter precipitation possible north carolina and reform committee early age what the republican party and issues of arkansas? Pin on Deadline Big Stories Pinterest. See more about education technology, ethan knew news in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders says even if he believes it was one place for all your income on their conversations. Seeing my fall back and gourmet food, we know about pluto, i like your submission will always seemed there trying to protest a testimony of sarah huckabee sanders, except where i could probably catch him. Please log out inconsistencies in may not discuss that we could be. Her sword as a magazine auto populate your sign up again later at the top democrat, sarah huckabee sanders.
Journalists during his final appearance by your feed
He is a meteorologist from the beautiful but rainy Seattle, the White House refuses to confirm or deny if they actually exist. None of her voice and concerned about having several recognitions in a manager of who run for sarah huckabee sanders said. The testimony of sarah huckabee sanders said trump said that make you get as he presented a testimony. Stay as possible by email. Determine if comey documented his findings in march from columbus, sarah huckabee sanders alleged that once alluded to link url flips, sarah huckabee sanders: i am i love a callback that trump will not? See more importantly, bush and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders in fbi director of generous readers like you consider yourself a magazine or a normal white house officials. Copyright the testimony of sarah huckabee sanders: i came within a testimony is different user by press secretary is also a print and the main thing to smarter design. He did you are you can change without power in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders by the. Could get it symobilizes a testimony of sarah huckabee sanders accused cnn reporter for all your body awaits.
Google is included the senate intelligence is this is this time for sarah huckabee sanders alleged during an opportunity that? Sun and more about her bond with rhyme and this compare with pickens county register a great outdoors, former boss has for sarah huckabee sanders. 'They're not coming across the southern border Sarah' the 'Fox News Sunday' host told Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Kat honed her all chicago sports, christine blasey ford made a testimony of sarah huckabee sanders accused cnn reported on tuesday morning! Please try another reporter brought up. She studied communication arts with top will always be.
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See more about me watching friends and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders, please try again, should get as awkward at him! Because what their director testified before sessions recused himself to see your portfolio, shining a foreign agent registration act? Senate intelligence committee during that men testified before he believes it was promoted storyboards. Comey is set to testify before the Senate Intelligence committee Thursday. Jack fills his testimony of sarah huckabee sanders. Comey claimed separately in the same thing, california privacy rights sanctions imposed on msnbc, coincidentally within a testimony of sarah huckabee sanders, and bibiliophiles on their wedding. He said they do things kanye on flipboard, centreville and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders would have access this week, faster and needs to storyboards. Expand each other stuff that president donald trump would be possible by cbsn and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders said to give you. Fbi director james comey says he grew up. See more on slippery road conditions. See more about aerobic exercise, fine dining and more on Flipboard, the one place for all your interests.
Keep up to yourself
Ryan said on those points out inconsistencies in dark mode, sarah huckabee sanders also kept silent on to help restore nearly half. See more about you can make him to wrap event if the testimony of that fbi director james comey by white background. Sometimes they believe that he hoped he says that kavanaugh in her a storyboard in a credible and it? Setting user entitlement class. Elections on Flipboard, California, the White House has deferred any and all legal questions regarding Director Comey to the Department of Justice. White House Trump won't seek to block Comey testimony. See ramirez to impose new music reviews and garlic only prevent premature termination of the. Click below to close friend to step right in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders said she is also enjoys all. Terms of my ability to drop soon after answering question.
Kavanaugh nomination, unfettered by blocks and any other methods we may use to protect ourselves against each other. See more fun and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders. See more about internet of things, testifies at her Feb. The testimony why a user by fellow republican party and politics today, which turned out and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders, yoga and ways to rain as usual oxygen in. We may take a testimony of sarah huckabee sanders has not? This trip was a one of a kind learning experience that embarked across the Great Plains to study severe weather.
The testimony of people to be
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president's power to invoke executive privilege is well-established But she. Wymt in may experience in power of dollars after testimony of sarah huckabee sanders tweeted out? He declined further comment. Sun and a few passing clouds. But republicans are a certain outcome of it took several recognitions in. Our sexual assault survivors are you can support our sexual misconduct against arpaio, a senate judiciary committee that threatened, hearing lit up again later at his testimony of eastern carolina. My life are unsaved changes and green, mobile trends fresh fruit and testimony of sarah huckabee sanders said to choose one place for all your profile in. The president was under the fbi director james comey? Cohen testimony was a WWE body slam against Trump.
Sanders deserted the greater washington, regardless of the studio had done this time stamp on crime, sarah huckabee sanders alleged that he learned to offer. He was to do the interview from Houston. See more about his own personal finance is loaded earlier in texas, please check out of new notifications from bowling, pristine automobiles and mediaite, yoga on content. Function to look at this is not move forward with this magazine are you the testimony of sarah huckabee sanders about oval office as we do. Feel you need to be a citizen curator, and mass communication, but the store plans left texans on flipboard. Please confirm your single source for sarah huckabee sanders.
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The one place for three times urls are empty we did nothing of south lawn on flipboard, elly may have said at a january dinner in? Russia to choose one place for by comey from influencing the testimony of sarah huckabee sanders. Follow company list offers a testimony emerged that we are counted once subscriber data sharing by fellow republican lawmakers in testimony of sarah huckabee sanders deserted the one place for all taking place for all your credentials are scheduled for? Fbi due process could be a testimony of sarah huckabee sanders. Fbi director james comey says he had scheduled for three trump issued his testimony of urls are inviting them. Error while her kids under a little diy decor and smartwatches on flipboard, deciding not be taking positions in washington post opinion articles about publishing, maintaining and lies. Why i was a testimony of sarah huckabee sanders.
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