Anyway, there’s your update.
Caio

Now, lets laugh a little, even if it’s old news. The point is still relevant and the general (I’m looking at you Gawker/TechCrunch) theme and tone and ‘fuck your feed’ is never too late. So here’s my make-up post. No links or pics, sorry for that but, y’know, other shit is going on and I’m gonna lose my job over it if I don’t get FMLA protection for me & my primary caretaker during these episodes. Enjoy!

Google has bought Motorola.
That is awesome.
It is like a dream come true. If it works, there may be a device to rival the iPhone (for more than a week). Imagine if you will, Apple having to become more aggressive in the handheld race? Let alone the massive fallout drama this will probably create, which should just be fantastic reading for the tech-soap people. So, a few predictions I am glad to finally see realized:
10. More Droids. Lots of them. A variation for each kind of customer, maybe a do-it-yourself model for the hardcore users (which I would buy, maybe even use). The hardcore Droid should be marketed with the Episode I bit about C-3P0 being a hand made copy (built by Darth Vader) of a mass-produced droid, seen multiple times throughout the original trilogy. They’ll call it… Droid-it-yourself. But, it can only be updated with the v4.0.1.g.2.1 build vf782,9 version of Android, which is being phased up to g2.v7,001.2.x Build 2. Maybe. Hopefully. Depending in your hardware and carrier.
9. Employee conflict. Lots of it. A non-stop roller coaster of blame and rage quitting, as the DIY outsells every polished device they produce. The anonymous, open, emails begin to spin a tapestry of angst and conflict that eclipse Steve Jobs’ own open letter declaring war on Nintendo, with Sony’s help – renting bunkers in Japan to an elite squad of Geniuses, who are tasked with assassinating the emperor… after dealing with his attack ape and Godzilla.
8. In an attempt to regain control of the situation, Google’s executives initiate order 67. All Google-based accounts become transparent and anonymity on the web is forever annihilated, revealing the authors of the blighted emails. The courts are swift in delivering justice to the condemned, in the face of the President’s deleted tweet of his dick becoming immortalized on Google’s once stark homepage (now carrying only an ad for the top five Droid models).
7. The-hacker-formerly-known-as-Anonymous launches a poor attempt to Google-bomb “Google.com” to the first hit when “stoopid” is searched, with only the processing power of Yahoo! and Bing users. The attempt never really goes anywhere, but they tried. The world is brought to the realization the exclamation points and sound effects are not good for business as Google crushes their servers using their tablet Droid, Optimus-fuck-your-shit-up-oid.
6. Motorola employees form an underground movement to overthrow their smarter, faster, overlords and seize power for themselves. Dubbed “Moogle” the movement successfully captures the once proud CEO, Eric Schmidt and holds him ransom, for their stolen dignity. No one pays the ransom and Schmidt is forgotten to the ages, until emerging decades later to run Facebook. The once lowly social network site, turned car manufacturer. There he waits.
5. Apple buys Google and attempts to fuse it with Sony. Samsung sues them for copying their idea to fuse the remains of Sega with Atari – the patent dates back to 1998, but Apple’s contacts within the patent office adjust the dates on their patent to 1985. Only thirty years after Marty vouchsafed his parents’ marriage. Frustrated, Samsung nukes Japan and ruins Apple’s plans at the root.
4. The unwieldy beast that is Gooplrola begins to democratize its culture. No longer is the strong hand of the broken CEO or senior staff able to hold the reins. Indeed, not until now has Apple’s proud Steve Jobs felt fear, but in his fear, hammered as-it-were, and battle-weary he turns to an intern he does not quite understand named Johnny Weyland. Placing the company into Weyland’s young hands, Steve Jobs retires and later dies peacefully in his home, kept alive only by an IV of the blood of unborn babies. His last words are, “Fuck you, Bill.” Nobody knows who or what this “Bill” is, but damn that’s hateful.
3. Weyland becomes increasingly eccentric and dubs Apple’s first humanoid computers, ‘iMe’ using his own body as the chassis design.
2. The wasteland that was once Japan begins to show a reemergence of life signs. Samsung’s attempt to extract Sony survivors goes horribly awry and a nuclear-powered virus makes its way to Korea.
1. In the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, Apple launches the iPhone 5, now called the ‘Queen’ and a new version of the iMe, dubbed the ‘Bishop’ along with some retail employees, to Mars. Because, location, location, location…

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Okay, here’s a glimpse at what else I do. Even when I’m inactive on my own blog, I hang on Twitter and I read a lot of RSS. Just recently, I saw a shared link to a blog who proposed something interesting to my most ingrained concentration. A proof of God, based on cherry-picked physics and theology. It isn’t profound or good by any means, but it meant I had something to play with. This is what I do: play with idiots. Not “idiots” in the colloquial sense, but in the ideologue sense of the word: it’s fun and always ends the same way, it is the journey to that end which is fun. When someone rage quits, I smile a little. Call it the lulz, or whatever, I like it. So, here are the screen caps of the latest adventure into mindlessness:
I’m not linking to the latest idiot, directly, but here’s what the pedo-party-named moron (love the girls) used as a proof of God:

I’ve never come across anywhere. 

Which may simply be because it’s nonsense, but I don’t see any flaws in it. Do you?

As with all else, I prefer simplicity and immediate observation, and this proof is simple and immediate.

It’s grounded in two principles we observe to invariably occur when we have immediate knowledge of any given event.

1) All of God’s creation seeks stability. For instance water runs downhill seeking stability from motion and once stable doesn’t seek motion.. So that given sufficient time any particular quantity of matter will eventually find stability.

Given an eternal universe that has always existed there would prior to now have occurred sufficient time for any particular quantity of matter to have found stability because any required amount of sufficient time would be less than the virtually infinite quantity of time that has occurred prior to now.

So that no matter how vast the universe, and no matter how extreme the quantity of time required for sufficiency, it would be less in quantity than that which came prior to the present now.

2) The effect is always within and never greater than the cause.

This eliminates those entities that are stable returning to non stability because non motion cannot cause motion. This also eliminates recent big bang occurrences without an outside mover because non motion cannot come from motion, and any outside mover would have also previously found stability prior to causing a big bang.

And since we do observe motion and matter seeking stability it follows that there could not have occurred previously sufficient time which further proves that the universe is not eternal, and if not eternal, it must have a cause which is a creator.

Alright, you have the premise, now here’s the fun. As usual, his pee-pee shrunk back into his guts and he deleted our conversation, rather than deal with it. So, The rest are screen-caps,  from after the fact, via Reeder for Mac. After he let me post, uncensored, I thought he might be the first opponent with the balls to let it just hang out there and didn’t think capping his sight was necessary, but I was wrong. Fuckberries. So, here goes, hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Here’s where he finally deletes me because I wasn’t arguing about his inane and unusable “proof” rather than fight back with what he thinks to be grounds to raise children on. The foundation of his milieu and paranoia. Entertaining, I hope. I’ll be back here again this week (I expect) to post more pithy stuff, but I thought this little diversion might be fun.AL
edit >>  Looks like I’ve been double deleted. The latest version completely cuts me out and indulges the author’s severe ideology. Which means, for those keeping count, I won the argument. An important thing to understand about arguing on the internet: be bold and never delete your weaknesses. Follow this rule and you won’t end up looking like a spineless fucktard, or a obsessive prick (the kind not looking for vaginas, but preferring moldable clay). I can’t wait for his children to grow up and find out what a bitch “love the girls” (again, a very pedo name) makes themselves out to be for all the world to see. Here’s the final version/comment on his post, before going Mel Gibson on my ass (booyah!):

The best part is that he deleted the Pope, in order to make a final grasping attempt at keeping his idiocy the center of the universe. I hope you all can understand how satisfying it is to see these “fags” (as the internet calls them) implode into censorship and scared denial of their delusions. Yeah, you’re Universal. Bitch. Hah!Tweet

Spartans were the most macho and badass people to have ever lived. They were capable of great military feats and they were brutal believers in eugenics. The culture was built to create the best warriors in the world, at their time and ever. They created a kind of brotherhood unseen before or since. Among the most macho things this culture could imagine were men holding hands and covering each other in battle, or in daily life and interaction. High-fiving their wives as sign of deepest love and men kissing each other deeply upon the mouth, as a sign of deepest regard and respect. Wait, what?

First off, I find the word and idea of “bro-mance” deeply offensive and treat utterances of “man-crush” like most people would react to “fuck” and extremely-religious people react to “goddamn”. The underlying ideology is so offensive to my mind that it immediately angers me and I become unspeakably enraged when the defense is given as “its a thing.” I’m an unapologetic geek and because of, or that is because, I do not understand the lust men hide for other men. I embrace both the glory (little which there is) for knowing about things ranging from mundane bacteria to the spectacular Mars terraforming mission, and also embrace the stigma of really caring about this stuff. As either a result, or as a origin story to my villainous drive toward world domination, I also loathe the ‘bro-culture’ of fanatically witnessing sporting events and making lazily-veiled attempts at homoerotic overtures. I’m also strait and think Bailey-Jay is fucking awesome. The interpolation of those two points should jar anyone who considers themselves a “bra” and make the rest of this post unnecessary to anyone who doesn’t.
The Spartan culture embraced real manliness and aristocracy through a kind of eugenics program. But, they were unabashed in regard to that cultural heritage. They didn’t compete on one scale and veil anything. They expected Olympians as the rule and not in one thing or another – either you were balanced, or you were a failure. Bench-pressing 400 lbs. meant shit to them, if you couldn’t also run a mile, in lock-step with everyone else. We have moved so far away from that understanding that it strains my mind to think about it. Specialization is the only thing that matters to us. Sexuality is a fluid and apocryphal thing in our Western culture, but we insist on idealizing things which are sexualized: of fitness and dominance. The manly ideal, they understood, is based on cooperation and the team. Our manly ideal is based on “better than everyone else.” More manly, more strait, more fit, more everything. As a result, we are less manly, less capable of accepting that there is a place for caring and for a relationship between men which is asexual in fact, but expressed through the means of what we identify as sexual in practice.
The result of this displacement, is the repression and frustration, splitting marriages apart and causing rampant cheating on spouses. It is the oversimplification of manliness. Manliness, as shown by the Spartans, is embracing who we are and how we feel, as much as it is winning the battle today. It is about being unapologetic about who you are and what you care about. It is about being comfortable with what you care about and what you hold dear and doing everything you can to protect that from any threat – internal or external. Its about not hurting your friend and not cheating or lying to your spouse. “Being a man” means loving other men and idealizing other men, for their candor and grace and understanding. It means respect and dignity on a scale the world has sadly seldom seen since the fall of Pelops.

The reason words like “bro-mance” exist is a cultural one. It belies the idea that sexuality is stagnant, solid and safe. It mentions the insecurity and abject fear people have when they encounter someone who loves another enough to put themselves into a secure, long-standing, relationship. It undermines the possibility that people might actually be sexual being and that our best ways of expressing that level of trust and love can be communicated through the mediums we have. Sexual acts between the same gender, between those who have no reproductive reason to act, can be as meaningful as non-sexual acts between those who have a reproductive reason to interact. They are specifically human things to do and communicate the most raw of human emotive capacity: that sex isn’t what really matters – friendship is. The kinship we are drawn to is what makes us human, what makes our relationships with each other and the world unique. It should not disturb us, or drive a new word into existence, when we care – or, even love – each other, it should enrich our existing experience of being people. It should not be a matter of sexuality, but of relationships. We are, verifiably, who we run with – the pack we are in tune to – if it be men, women, or other should matter less to us than the people they are individually. Only a social construct of fear and, at times, hate, get in the way of a renewed Spartan project in personhood and respect and love.

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Okay. Back to the debate and how much I think it is a matter of bullshit. Since I was in grade school, I have thought of this debate as ridiculous. Why? because the very process of Evolutionary biological science is the process of Intelligent Design theory. What is actually in question is not, for me (a very important distinction here, as I am trying to push the Red Sea back together), about the process, it is about the nature of what we mean by the word and idea of God. The focus upon the “literal” interpretation some idiots form as a cosmology and account of creation is not of any substance or importance to me. The apparent randomness of selection is equally not important to me. Here is something I see: natural selection operates on a scale which is so wide in scope, yet singular in narrative, that it meets the basic premise of the idea of God and that as it unfolds, as ideas become the genes and nucleic acids of culture and culture has risen to determine the selective process (see dairy cows), what we end up with is neither purely biological, nor purely intellectual – but, certainly natural.

It is that flow of the biological into the intellectual – from hardwiring to software – and the exact same (not just similar) process taking place, which all Intelligent Design theories of any substantive note derive the notion that God is guiding the world. Let me say here one thing: anyone, ANYONE, who takes the Bible, or any other religious text, absolutely literally is a fucking moron. Not in the good, “foolish” sense invoked by St. Sir Thomas More, but in the God-damned-fucking-intellectual-tiolet-paper-way of meaning the term. The Early Church Fathers (yeah, I’m Catholic) put it well, ‘any interpretation of the Holy Scripture which invokes distain or hate is not a Christian interpretation.’ Among the Rabbis, this was said of the Torah: ‘Whatever brings you pain, do not act such that you bring that pain upon another – all else is commentary.’ Islam speaks the same, so does Taoism, Animism, etc… EVERY religion (outside of the obscure and arcane) and, perhaps strangely to some, so too does Evolution speak of human action and intervention in the genetic cycle. This is the crux of my point: Evolution and all other forms of design agree, selflessness and compassion – empathy and understanding – are paramount. I think we differ more in the commentary than in the core of the argument. Which makes the argument an object of ridicule.

And we must ask why does it matter? The answer to that, I think, lies with the Jesuit order. We seek scientific understanding in order to become better stewards of the creation we have been given. Does that differ in a meaningful way from anything Dan Dennett has to say? Does it fly in the face of Intelligent Design? I think it does. It does not mention God, nor does it mention how. We should engage what we find, no limits, no expectations, no answers – as it were. It simply says we should seek the Truth. No assumptions, beyond that we have a real and grave task not to fuck the world up, like it is going to end at some point and God, Evolution, or anything or anyone else is going to forgive us for being bad stewards. Intelligent Design will say God won’t forgive our asinine behavior, Evolution will reassure us that natural selection will weed out our destructive species. Either way, we come to the same end: the Jesuits’ goad for scientific knowledge, as a greater knowledge of our charge, ourselves, and the needs of a greater ecosystem than we can completely fathom or control – which has been built for a greater good than we can encompass with our minds, shall stand witness to our knowing and unknowing actions is a unilateral message from both camps – neither having to use the word God.

I challenge anyone to illustrate a more devout people than those queer, insane, heretical, Jesuits – as pertains to the finding of God in the numbers, the science, and the design which evidence supports (versus justifying their faith). They are somewhere outside of the debate between the biological scientist and Intelligent Design theorists – why? Because they see God’s grandeur in the natural selection process. To them, evolution is the intelligence in the design. Taking a step back, and disagreeing with a premise of Richard Dawkins (who is a genuine, earnest, but, respectfully, dim-witted and overly-vexed militant atheist unable to see the trees for the forest), I am forced to conclude that there is a kind of self-lessness required in natural selection. The gene cannot exist in a vacuum and must make concessions. Biological science and certainly more advanced forms like psychology and the predominantly anonymously created memes, require that letting go, in order to survive. In order to be passed on, to spread, it must withstand time and outlast ownership – and thereby, selfishness. Compassion and even love (not romantic love) is necessary for natural selection to operate. That is the love of God to the Intelligent Design camp and it is the hurdle to understanding between them and the Evolutionists. Evolutionists have focused too much on the selfishness of the gene, of the entity, of the idea, and must start to look at the process more like Aristotle looked at argument. The speaker is not responsible for the ideas they put forth, you (the listener) are. This isn’t a complete rebuttal of ‘The Selfish Gene’, but it is a significant point, which makes it a work in serious question. So serious, I would place it on a religious scale: if you already have an answer, why ask the question?

*I should note, while I have known people who have become Jesuits, I am not myself a Jesuit, nor have I been instructed by anyone who identified themselves as such, with one exception. That exception was a Jesuit of some 30+ years and I was pulled away from his metaphorical jugular (his expertise) in Aquinas-lust-driven hate of Kant and Nietzsche, by a kind Mathematician who had a degree of religious and philosophical import. To give you a picture of that Mathematician’s importance, I backed down and silenced myself immediately at the mere gesture of his hand. Imagine having a mastiff ready for a fight and starved for human flesh, in the arena, with a combatant and waving a hand to suddenly return it to its cell. That man remains a kind of master to me, which I have to defeat intellectually, before I can face his hand again. To this day – some few seven years later – I expect I would obey that command to back down and retreat. If you’ve been reading, you know how much I love a good fight and how little ground I’ll give up. This Mathematician is as strongly regarded by me, as a theologian and thinker, for his brilliance, as Immanuel Kant is as a philosopher and thinker. And then, there’s Copleston, SJ. He’s a fucking badass and I agree, the Jesuits sinned against philosophy by requiring him to write a history of philosophy, rather than his own philosophy.

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Talking to people in the USA’s Southern Belt, I find (very often) I yearn for the “fruitful” mind-feilds of the North. However, there is as little understanding of economics in my home in the North as there is in the South of the US. This is a problem inspired by demagogs and reinforced over generations of conceptual inbreeding. I’ll try to break this down simply, without pandering to the kind of people who would play banjoes along the river line.

In essence, economics is very simple. To illustrate this simplicity, we need only look at a clear example. Here is why we should: very few people understand global economics, because the subject is global, not because they can’t, but because they are jumping on too late in the discussion and nobody is willing to stop arguing to say, ‘Hello, welcome to the world.’ Further, intercontinental and interstate economics are also complex in execution, only due to their historical aspects and that’s where everyone has been since at least the 4th century BC in the West and 5th century BC in the East. But, in spite of executional issues and intricacies of foreign policy and certain instances of bad blood between polities, the concept remains absolutely simple. And I’d like to illustrate it now, through an example. I’ll draw upon myself and my experience, but I think you should be able to follow along fairly well.
As a child, I had a friend who was superior at wood work. I was superior at metal work. I won’t go into the specifics of why, because it is not relevant at this juncture, but I will eventually address this difference. We eventually began trading services for each others’ goods. He was fast at what he did and I was slow and methodical. He rendered broad, basic, goods, whereas mine were more intricate and complexly designed. He offered me a 1-1 ratio. I knew it took him a third of the time to make and half the expertise, so I asked for a 1/5 ratio (as a barter). He accepted and by our friendship, he learned to work as well as me with metal and I learned to work better than him with wood and clay. So, our standing policy changed and I accepted 1 of his metal work units to 2 of my wood-and-claywork units. And we continued this way. We learned from each other back and forth, until a final equilibrium was reached and we needed someone else to take on the lower-expertise “chores”, we had exchanged at such enormous proportions, before specialization and communication had made them tedious and simple. But, to that party, these were entirely new skills and knowledge, thus they were growing in our direction and they were a vital role in building ourselves. We had a project in mind, but this is how economics actually operates at any scale.
A society cut off from anyone else goes nowhere – in fact, if they were in contact and get cut off they will regress (see Tasmania). But, where more communication and trade occur, everyone grows. Eventually incorporating others, until everyone is doing their best as a society (no matter what or how many times specialties swap) and everyone benefits from the growth and pruning and new growth.
As long as I can remember, my parents have been sided with the “conservative” people in matters of foreign policy and economics (to specify only the two fronts concerned here). And here’s the difference between “liberal” and “conservative” economics: nothing. Both end up without a proper direction. The “liberal” schema is one of purely trusting things to come out better in the end without seeking reciprocity for specialization and equal trade for labor and knowledge investments (in a positive sense). This ends in homogeneity in result, rather than furthering advance. The “conservative” schema is one of modular trust and concern which pushes resources in a limited scope toward domination and, again, does not concern itself with the investment of knowledge (in a negative sense). This ends in futile over-exergance and over-consolidation of priorities, strangling advance. The key is globalization.

Why globalization? Because it means the person only able to mine coal can do so better than the man designing the computers which allow communication about better ways to run companies can speak back  to his boss. Keeping the lights on and keeping the mill working to build the silicon chipsets needed for those computers. Keeping that battery loaded with stored power, so an email or post can be made. So, the person making two wood-cut units can trade them for one metal-formed unit, which turns up production and quality of life to a 1-1 ratio and pushes the metal worker up to a new 2-1 ratio and the wood worker responds with a new 1-1, or even 2-1, ratio of trade and value. Basically, the “good” jobs go to those who can do them best, due to higher standards of living; while the “bad” jobs go to those with lower standards of living (monetarily and actually).

Each society moves up and jobs build in specialty, then a flush occurs, eliminating those jobs no one is willing to do in a specific country anymore. Those jobs move on and COMPLETELY NEW jobs begin to come into existence as old jobs move to where they are “high-tech”. That is how the global economy operates, and has operated since tribalism predominated trade. That is the core lesson, you need to talk about economics intelligently: things moving from the simple toward the simple, through complex relationships of relative advancement and resources. The current economic crisis is a result of the ego-centric (country/culturally) model withholding of jobs: not the loss of the lowest positions no one in those countries are willing to perform in order to facilitate the upper-tier peoples’ having what they need to do what they do affordably and necessarily. It is a lack of understanding of these basic economic realities: without the “simple” knowledge and efforts of the natives in cultivating the land, the “advanced” European settlers would have perished, or had to learn those skills all over again, from scratch in a new environment.

The US, in it’s settlement stages didn’t understand that fact of inter-tribal/cultural economics and forced years of re-aclimation and adaption upon themselves by rejecting the natives as an enemy to their way of life and feelings. Economics is about reason and understanding, much more than feelings or xenophobia. It is about the tiers of advancement, formed by centuries of working out ways to work together. Some people are using hand-held computers to speak to millions and over-turn governments – which have been around for decades, if not (in principle) millennia – while others are starving-to-death and have seldom ever seen a motor vehicle. It is a large world, but globalization depends on us to want to advance and uplift those who (for one reason or another) have not uplifted themselves. We need to save the dying children of Africa and India and China, in order to have our iPads and eat it too. That is the reality of global economics: what affects the least of us, effects the greatest of us. This, from my perspective, is a good thing for human kind to understand and why I support globalization whole-heartedly. It isn’t about the country, but it is about companies, and law is there to support us if we want it. So, go out and tell people what global economics is really about: it is about helping others help you, by helping themselves.

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So, the U.S. is big on controlling the citizen experience. We see a lot of complaints (especially from the anti-big business/capitalism/profitability/sustainability/etc crowd) about the user-experience-driven company Apple. But, they rarely seem to turn that criticism on government, law, or society. Why? Because it isn’t a company, it isn’t an outside force: it implicates them. It is an array of forces, set in motion on their behalf, which they would rather have in place than have to worry about the natural consequences of their actions and decisions. Wouldn’t it be nice (by which I mean “nice” in the more arcane, euphemistic sense) if a successful company like Apple were forced by the Big Gov. to be more “open”? To allow jailbreaking to be a normal part of the life-cycle of their products? To have to service jailbroken devices like they weren’t voided-warranty-but-not-yet-paid-off-by-the-customer-and-therefore-actually-owned-by-someone-else (i.e. actually under warranty and also under the user- versus owner’s – discretion)? That’s the same as demanding McDonald’s to specify their coffee as hot. Specify, it requires them to declare all over their packaging, of a liquid good known for being hot, is in fact, hot. Sometimes (according to some recipes) very hot. Third-degree burns hot. Or, more. Less hot (less than boiling, to the Thai, for example) if you live in certain world/urban/integrated areas.

In Italy, they serve your espresso in a plain glassware cup, with no warnings, and they expect you to know that the perfect cup of coffee is steam, forced to condensate in a packed unit of ground coffee beans. If you’re dumb enough to just shoot it back, well, you deserve to be that much further from the gene pool… dumbass. Here’s another great moment in child-proofing society, which links back to my title: alcohol. Like many other, later, things we try to protect people from by protecting them from exposure, alcohol was targeted and chosen as a kind of early plastic playground. We flatly banned it. After studying the bad it could do (which it can do horrible things) we banned it from our shores.

We all know what a terrible, stupid thing it was to ban alcohol. But, we haven’t really learned from it. How do I know? We put a safe-for-children-above-x label on it. 18, then 21. The kids we’re forcing to go kill people, to those we expect have somehow learned to (through osmosis, one must presume) have self-control outside a controlled environment. Why do we make this (and so many developmental) assumption? The worst thing I can imagine for a child is living in a home which refuses to let them learn their limits. No sharp objects, with which to cut themselves, thus learning the permeability and fragility of their flesh. No hot burners, or God forbid, open flames with which to learn heat (energy in it’s rawest form) and how to utilize, rather than simply consume it. No wine at dinner, to learn limitation of capacity and eventually control over consumption.

My question in the title is a tip to my particular form of pseudo-sadism. But, it is a tease toward the authority of age. There are some people who really can learn from others’ mistakes. They are exceptional people. But, most of us learn from our own. Nothing was more monumental in my adult life, than drinking for 10-12 hours and having good (or, at least engaging) conversation with an old friend. We were drinking at a 1-1 scale. But, I have a much higher (much, much, much, higher tolerance) for the toxin than my old friend. I woke up and was pleasant enough, sober enough, and euphoric enough – that my friend’s soon-to-be fiancé asked, “You both drank the same… why are you okay, but he is like this?” (She was South Korean and allergic to a protein compound in alcohol, he was utterly obliterated and spent hours driveling and throwing up in the bed, bathroom, and shower). I slept like the dead for six hours and rose to the same fresh coffee as him and felt fine and was under complete control of my faculties. I told her it was a difference of genetics and conditioning.

Conditioning is important here. I come from an immigrant family and to deny the wine at dinner, was the same as denying your meat, but not as offensive as denying the vegetables. It was expensive, and important. It was also a building block. Physically, it began the cycle of difference between me and my friend. Psychologically, it was a foundation for the idea of my own, personal, limits and what I could gain by age and experience. It was a gateway to the kind of knowledge inscribed above the Oracle of Apollo. It was, given my sensibility and relative intelligence, a vehicle for getting more severe beatings, through more intellectual and severe and open criticism. In closing, (yeah, I’m taking that back – for the moment) it was how I learned my place in the world. I’m not settled on a purpose, but I have a place, because my grandparents forced us to drink alcohol. Our parents, or Godparents, even got us drunk. As children. And it put things, including us and authority, and age, and virtue, in a better perspective. At least I think so. But, I’m wondering: Can I drink with your kid?

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So, I was sitting in a bar. (I won’t bare down on you with the important things going on in the predominantly Arab world of North Africa, or the crisis in Japan: I have a Twitter feed for that.) And I was asked about video compression. To me, this has never really been a question, “what is video compression?” just didn’t ever enter my sphere of thoughts. Video (digitally speaking) is two threads: visual (pictures in a series) and audio (noises in a series), married up into an experience of ‘video’. This is apparently a clandestine art and a weird way of thinking about things in the mainstream.

So, I want to talk about terminology. These terms and ideas we take for granted once we get to a certain depth in technology. Does the mainstream know what in the hell we’re talking about when we compare the NN (net neutrality) position of ISPs (internet service providers)? Or, the simple concept of a codec (COmpression-DECompression formula/algorithm)? I’m persistently surprised by the number of “no” answers given and implied in conversations I have. One of the most vital and actively fought over regulatory steps, since civil equality laws (y’know, making black people get acknowledged as people), is net neutrality and the only people who know about it are geeks.

I don’t think this needs to be so. In fact, I think people who aren’t geeks can and will care, if we help them understand the words we are using. Why is Microsoft bad? Well, in the finer points they aren’t: they have led a charge against malware, which is second to none. Granted, it is precipitated by churning out some of the most malware prone OS’s in history, with greater compatibility with malware than with legit software, but that doesn’t negate the fight they have fought. FOSS is a greater leach, in many ways, which copies (often, initially, poorly) the ideas of companies which lose money because of FOSS ripping off their multimillion investments in innovation. The complexities of technology are many and quickly become overwhelming to the mainstream user. What I want is this: a jumping-off point. A start. A place where we can begin to bring the mainstream up-to-date with what should really matter to them, as they determine what floats.

I don’t see this as a matter of company loyalties (which many nerds have, while geeks have a brutal lack of loyalty), but rather something we should address in our terminology. Finding a way to breach the gap between the mainstream and the geek. Instead of just throwing out the word codec, maybe we should make the time to note it is a formula, a recipe by which you can get varied results by mixing different components in different quantities. Just like a recipe, a codec allows us to make the same basic result, but it can be by different means. Essentially, all video codecs lead to a video, but whether you use the dry mac&cheese pack, the cheese sauce pack, or ramen, you will end up with noodles. Which do you want is then the question. This is a way of opening up our world, giving a point-of-entry, to those who have for decades been the silent backbone, the pillars of the market we needed. They might even be able to have a real conversation with us.

I think making the time to think about and breakdown the terminology barrier will pay off for everyone. Give it try. Maybe there is a future geek sitting in front of you who just needs a door to be opened, before they can get in. Maybe you’re talking to someone who doesn’t understand the lingo, but makes decisions. Who cares? Maybe you’re just growing a circle of people who have a clue and will continue to expand their understanding because you gave them a foot in the door. Any which way it goes, let’s take some amount of care with the terminology we use and start letting the mainstream in on the jokes. He who laughs best laughs last, but not if they are alone.

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Okay, so I’m working more. This means I’m updating the blog posts less. Oddly, this is a good thing. I’m using Twitter to greater effect and gaining followers. But, it means I’m losing here. Sure there are spikes related to purchasing my iOS themes, but, really, I think I’m losing traffic as a voice on the web. How many of you actually come here for my conversation, versus my products? I’m not being disillusioned  by Capitalism, but I am reevaluating what my constituency wants/will support: I don’t think anyone wants another blog about crap no one cares about. I try to make this something interesting and I look to my viewers for points of entry. I prefer to just go off on shit my cohorts find/subscribe to  I differ with, but that’s not my style. I look at your searches and my interests and try to meet you half way. Here’s a chance to point me in a direction, as much as it is a chance to be pro-active in defining the content you consume. Feedback is a massive part of new media. Give it to us and we’ll keep pumping out new stuff for you to enjoy.

The balance of personal IRL and OL is out of whack. AL and me are at an impasse. AL has become more identified with me over the last year or so, but I am still reluctant to make them one and the same. I prefer to retain some characterization and self-parody which AL makes possible, but I have had lots of self-importent news to share and a lot of self-important changes going on, for longer than I can remember. I’d like to share those things, but I lack the where-with-all to be Tycho about it and feel shriveled and inadequate to articulate it in a persistent strip like Gabe. So, I just remove myself and AL suffers for it.
I’d like to know this: how many of you tune in for AL and how many of you tune in for me? I know I can be boring and so can AngryLemming, we have our differences and points of likeness. But, where are you? The few people who give a damn where this thing goes should pipe-up (cohorts included). Please let me know what you think  in the comments. Personally, I’m inclined to continue to use AL as a shield and as a voice to expunge my inner self of frustrations and to focus myself on a certain slant of light. This has upsides and downsides. I would like to know more about my readership in this respect.
I’m not the kind of person to pull my punches, but I usually go all out E.Honda style as AL… Also, I tend toward mutual understanding more than the take-it-or-leave style I have fashioned AL for. What do you like and why do you subscribe? Is it approach or subject matter? Is it the tone, or the venting-attitude? The articles or the links?

I’m in a strange place to be asking this, but there it is. I prefer to be read and I want to know why you read my stuff. Honestly, I could go either way at this point. AngryLemming, has served a purpose and I find it draining to put myself into his character. He is complex, yet very different than me in some ways – while being the same as me in others. Im currently at an impasse, about who you need me to be. The terms and conditions you arrived here leave me perplexed as to who you were looking to find. Me bare, boringly obsessive about time and design, or AL (obsessive about design and perpetuity). I think I can go either way. I may not agree, but I am glad to get input. Hit me up for comments.

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The 30% cut may end up being adjusted and lowered if feedback indicates its necessity. Blaming the rate is pretty ridiculous at this point, but there are other things which are being quietly swept under this heading. Apple doesn’t condone the collection and sale of customer info – as seen in a previous hype-over-iOS evil regarding analytics and tracking – which is a big part of subscription business. Almost half the profits publishers make on subscriptions comes from selling customer info to spammers. If customers opt to use iTunes IDs to purchase their subscription, they don’t have to set up new accounts and publishers have no info to sell. Well, they could still gather that info, if they published interactive content with compelling enough ads to get customers to click on them, but most of them don’t think they’re good enough at what they do to accomplish that. So, 30% is really more like 80%, because they will not be able to gather and sell personal info and analytics on those sales made through the Apple ecosystem’s universal IDs. Publishers also seem pretty sure that will be enough of a majority, because Apple engineered it to be universal, simple, and a proven preference of iOS customers, such that it will be the option taken and that info will be lost to them. From a consumer standpoint the iTunes system seems a double win, get the same content for the same price, but not have the junk mail and spam of the past – basically, putting yourself into a default Do Not Call list, by not putting yourself on the publishers’ analytics.
Before we look at all the evil Apple does with their cut, let’s look at a deeper problem of the publishers’ existing model. The “untenable” prospect of Apple enforcing the iTunes option be included, coupled with the facts we just covered, is that publishers may have to reveal the true cost to customers. The way the business has been conducted (collecting and selling customer info) has subsidized content production and pricing. Just like buying a CD meant you were paying pittance to the artist, while digital pushed down the excuses the music industry had (printing, stocking, logistics, etc) and ended up chopping the top heavy studios to pieces, while artists made more. Publishers don’t want to change their business model to include less top-heavy positions and don’t want to be cornered into creating better content, which will actually sell at the unsubsidized price – because that means they’ll have to get rid of the kind of shills and absurdists who create empty content – like this hype I’m now dealing with here. Remember when there was no end to the manufactured boy-bands? Yeah, well, publishers don’t want to give up their version of those – because they are pricy as hell, but nobody is going to buy them if they can get better stuff at the same price (or cheaper) elsewhere. This debacle just means publishers will have to take a critical look at their lineups, both in management and in content creators, as well as make content worth buying (finally).
Now let’s look at the evil Apple uses this cut for. In spite of the nefarious claims made widely across the web, Apple uses much of its time and energy in software to further the end of open standards and resources. Looking at iOS’s competition, I fail to see how they would be in any way competitive, if Apple didn’t maintain WebKit as an open browser and maintain its development entirely on their own dollar – without this software, we’d still be waiting for FireFox’s mobile version, or dealing with IEmobile (or Opera’s poorly executed mobile version). Which is to say, we’d have no Android boom at all (because without WebKit, there is no Crome either). Just one example, there are many more. Next, we have the problems of being innovative. Apple likes to stay a year-or two ahead of competition, which means they have to innovate and produce products which are ahead of their time. This means they have to internally subsidize the cost of, say, a retina display, so they can offer it to consumers at the same price point as the previous generation technology. Part of how they do it is through existing margins, part of it is through production alpha (the more they produce the less each unit costs), part of it is through the iOS ecosystem and the cut they take on software. So, software/content feeds the hardware it exists on. Next, the money also goes to the existing infrastructure, which becomes more costly the larger it grows to be. More users means more consumed content, which means more developers, more software, more connections, more cost to maintain a quality standard meeting expectations of both. The more customers, the more developers, the better the ecosystem, but the bigger the cost to maintain that infrastructure the ecosystem exists on. To put it in perspective: the Cydia cut is also 30%, lightly curated, and they aren’t creating the hardware or maintaining the purchasing system (they use PayPal and Amazon’s), although they do have a few open source projects they maintain. So, all those ‘evil’ things taken into account, Apple seems to be within reason demanding 30% if customers use their system over whatever other options publishers include in their apps… at least to my mind, but I write this stuff for free.

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