The Price of Time

It's a common strategy for companies to offer gifts in kind, probably the most common form of a corporate thankyou (or maybe well known) is the frequent flyer program. Airlines often have excess capacity on flights, the variable cost of having a customer sitting in that seat is let's say $40. Even though a flight to Hawaii might cost you $1100 if you would only take that seat on that flight because you can pay for it with frequent flyer points you get an otherwise empty seat so you get a flight you value at $1100 and it only costs the company $40. This works so long as the system is set up so a paying customer never gets bumped for a ff awardee.
I've been reading on win-win strategies under game theory and I was thinking about the old pay rise negotiations.
Firstly negotiation under game theory (and in practice) is daunting enough, but the thing about pay rises is that they are more or less the opposite of the above situation.
You see thanks to Income tax (and HECS) is that an employer values a pay rise much more than you do. An extra $4000 might represent depanding on your tax bracket as little as $2200 a year or $42 a week to you but it means $76 a week your employer has to pay. That's of course a worse case scenario and generally the more you earn the more you claim back on tax. But to someone like me who has no deductable expenses (apart from donations to recognised charities) combined with short term cashflow problems having half a pay rise locked away for a year (or 50 if using tax effective super contributions) just isn't something I get all fussed about.
So it costs a company up to twice as many dollars to get the same impact out of me, the taxation system not only taxes better performance but it reduces the incentive for a company to say thankyou in cold hard cash.
Now when I was a casual employee you don't talk salaries but in hours, like $9.80 an hour to be seniour management at HJ's and $21 to talk shit on a phone. And it made it clear cut what time was worth, infact pay was related directly to time. Performance measures generally held steady and you had that 1:1 relationship between time spent and revenue raised. ie. for every 1 hour worked you sold 23 burgers. but most jobs and indeed work don't follow this cycle. take retail, for two months of the year (november & december) the value of an hour goes up alot during the christmas retail period, I think it's something like 80% of the years business happens in December. Hence you see the casual staff numbers balloon up at this time and then be cut back massively come February.
And most full time jobs are the same but it gets obscured by the fact that time isn't the only factor that can increase or decrease your value, it can just be sheer capacity, your strategic fit, customer demand, timing, seasonality, business cycles, government investment, overseas interest rates, deregulation, regulation and so on and so fourth, but the fact is that not every hour you put in is worth as much as every other hour you put in.
Your energy and concentration are not as good at the end of a day as at the beginning of the day, or the shipping deadline is 2pm and customers tend to only use your services up until this time.
Furthermore, if people were really honest with themselves they would admit that they only put in at maximum around 3 hours of productive effort a day, yet most of us are at work for 8. Some people do pile on the effort and work a phenomenal amount of hours productively and these people are why Unemployment is high, they should actually be highering graduates to do their book keeping and other things for them that they are currently micromanaging like Donald Rumsfield. Yes they may have to sacrifice their pay but this again comes back to the same question?
What is the value of time?
8 hours work, 8 hours rest and 8 hours recreation is the basis of the 8 hour day. Outside melbourne trades hall we fitted a monument to this notion, it is what many, but not I would consider a 'balanced' day. But If I have to work as many hours a day as I'm sleeping I'm not doing one or the other efficiently.
If say you shift the balance to 10 hours work (pretty common) and cut back to 7 hours recreation and 7 hours rest already we see that the situation is unbalanced. Now you would also notice that this breakdown adds up to 24 hours, lot's of assumptions have been made here, or ommitted for want of simplicity. For example what is commute time? is it working day or recreation day, in the mornings it's more likely to come out of rest time. Say you are the average Melburnite and your commute is 1 hour each way through rush hour traffic - 10 hours became 12. Or even in the balanced perspective 8 hours becomes 10. You may even enjoy driving and good old breakfast radio or like me enjoy a 15 k ride to work whilst listening to music. It doesn't really matter if you enjoy it or not it's part and parcel of your decision to work. And I don't really begrude work for not being sub 1 minute travel time for my place of residence. I'm a realist but really the decision to sell your time to an employer really leaves two things to negotiate at a table and most often we only negotiate one side of the deal and worse give away the other.
How often does work give you money because it may as well or to make a favorable impression? once a year if that, and believe me a company would rather give money to customers to say thank you than employees.
Yet we give away time that is our recuperation time, valuable time to a company and in reality the company probably doesn't value it anywhere near what you or I do.
Infact if anything by the time you sign your first contract you've probably overprovisioned your time for what the company demands in value.
You could probably get out 75% of the output in 50% of the time you work now, and I feel that estimate is conservative. as such 50% of your hours should be negotiable.
So there is time that you value more than your employer does, and then there is pay which an employer values more than you do.
So I would have thought if anything hours would reduce as you moved up in a company but the reverse tends to happen.
That's what I call a lose-lose anyway I'll see how I go at the negotiating table.

Open Stride

A goodweekend is not as easy as intuitively it promises to be.
I find usually I just spend too much time recovering and not enough time doing productive stuff.
but I managed to catch up with a fair few people and stuff. Furthermore I stimulated my brain finding myself drawn into a whole bunch of design stuff.
I was going to say, at some point, something and that something was that if ever you get an invitation into someone else's world, take it.
I mean to say if people want you to take an interest in something do so.
Why I say this is that I was watching Crude Impact on SBS, where they were saying that if China consumed resources the way US citizens did we would need 6 more planet earths.
Daunting enough but I am confident that market forces will painfully reinforce that this simply cannot happen, no matter what WA premiers promise they can dig out of the ground.
Anyhoo, that is to say I thought, each and every person lives in a world of their own. Because perceptions are unique to one person, and if perceptions have an impact on the qualities of any object, person or thing in the universe.
For example, houses and cars are of relatively little value to me, but they are god given rights in the same way lungs are for others (again not a god given right)
Speaking of lungs mine are back to their screaming best.
I was drifting off to sleep last night in my running gear when I said: No! go fucken run tohm you always let yourself down on a weekend.
So then I got up and ran from my house round the zoo and then around princes park and then back home, which is about 9.5k but the real revelation was that it actually got easier, as I ran my legs felt looser and I just sped up and sped up. I was overtaking people for the first time in a long time around the park.
I then headed home and heading along the bike path that hugs the railway line the bells started ringing and the boom gates fell.
I realised if I sped up I could avoid having to jog on the spot waiting for traffic to pass.
So I did and I hit something that I hadn't for maybe 3-4 years. My open stride.
For ages (2 months) even though my heart has been strong, my lungs good I still haven't felt like I was going fast. Last night I hit my stride and it felt fast and it felt good.
Running is good.

A waste of breath...

If you didn't catch southpark last monday (in Australia) possibly last January in the US they played Part 1 of Go God Go! Southpark like John Safran are good at handling issues I find because they never let any one audiance get too comfortable. Plus Mrs Garrison is hilarious in almost every appearance on that show.

Anyway that's how I would prefer the endless debates aboot religion should be conducted, commically and with feces being thrown.
Instead extremists tend to set out to maximise human suffering and moderates simply to consume most of the resources of intellectual capacity humanity has to offer.
I was reading a blog entry that was looking at the 'controversy' of the da vinci code as to whether Jesus could have fathered a child or not and whether in the early days of Christianity they were even organised enough to actually follow and protect this bloodline.
Now immediately my mind clicks into gear to come out with rational arguements for or against this case and my DAV experiences deeply ingrained make me want to pursue it with fervor.
But I read on and then found that the author proposed that this was meerly an extension of a 'deeper' question, a debate that had raged on for years:
Was Jesus Devine?
Interesting? Yes. Was the authors arguements good? Yes. They seemed well thought out, the dialogue was engaging and it was drawing on volumes of research.
I read about two paragraphs and was up to the bit where St Paul was trying to claim he had visions from Jesus and this gave him title to being the 12th apostle, maybe something about the definition of 'Messiah' I don't know. If it had been a conversation I would have been compelled to speak out with my opinion. But instead having really only broken the surface on the arguement presented a question popped into my head:

Do I care?






Well........................no.

No I don't care if Jesus was devine or not. It's of relatively little importance to me. I don't have much personally invested either way. I don't care whether Gabriel or Buddha were devine or not. I just don't care.
The obvious retort is the old 'Why do you talk about it so much then?' which plays on a favorite past time of mine which is to ask someone who's clearly fine 'Why are you upset?' or 'What's wrong Tim?' and refuse to take 'Nothing' for an answer.
I remember reading in a Comic following Lex Luthor's run at presidency the first chapter was called 'The Reason' where without any dialogue or text you followed Lex through his day constantly being confronted by the image of Superman until he cracks and decides to run for president.
This is essentially what being an athiest is like, you live in a world with people who begin with the assumption their personal god exists, or moderates who begin with the assumption that a personal god exists. And work from there.
It's like being put on a committee to solve the 'Reduction of Water in our Bucket Project' beginning with the assumption that the bucket is perfect and there can't be a leak.
I must admit ignorance to a lot of non-Judaic religions but here is a selection of controversial debates that thanks to the beggining assumptions result in a total waste of time (these have actually been debated by professionals):

When does a soul enter an embrio/fertilised egg
Where do children go who die of natural causes before being baptised (resulting in the Catholic Limbo clause)
Anything regarding the Holy Trinity
If two teachings from the Prophet contradict eachother should we default to the earlier or the latter teaching?

And so on and so on...
I mean imagine if your most intelligent friends called meetings with experts around the world to spend their time debating issues such as:

Did Tyrone from TV's good times prefer Sandlewood or Oceanspray?
Can a power ranger coin be used for evil?
Which componant Lion in Voltron is the most intrinsically good?

Imagine if people killed eachother over these issues on a day to day basis, Imagine if some of the worlds most capable (but not brilliant) minds where pouring study day after day into these issues.
Imagine if on Insight and other panel discussion programs moral questions deferred to the president of the Transformers fan club.
Imagine if merchandisers were exempt from tax if they sold anything related to telly tubbies.
Imagine if the highest point in every town had a huge building dedicated to David Hasselhoff.

That's what it's like being an athiest.
Example my former housemate Damo spent a year of his life writing a long thesis on Agency, now he's dedicating some years to writing about modal metaphysics, in doing so he has some pretty interesting theories on what is moral behaviour and he has to read up to find out what progress has actually been made into moral studies and what have been proposed by other academics for the past however many thousands of years.
Infact psychologists and scientists and what not have gotten together and done studies on what does and doesn't constitute moral behaviour.
Now he's probably dealing with an end of the spectrum that is beyond any sort of moral call I'll ever have to make.
I would imagine these sorts of experts are who you should refer to in understanding complex situations in terms of weighing up say the rights of an individual against a majority, the tyranny of majority or where one decision effects multiple parties such as borrowing resources off of future generations.
Complex, the sort of stuff Jimmy Carter used to agonize over.
Compare to say the case of The Bean Farmer's Union vs Pythagoras. What's that I say?
Pythagoras wasn't he the guy that came up with all them rules about the nature of right angled triangles?
Yes, but did you know he was also a bit of a religious leader? It's true. Seldom does anyone question: Was Pythagoras Devine? which is a compelling question I don't care about. I would say probably since he clearly had some sort of devine insight into triangles, timeless and universal. However he forbade his followers eat beans.
Now beans are a low fat source of protein and in terms of the food chain take much less energy to produce. They are vital to mexicans and vegetarians.
Imagine if we paid as much legislative respect to Pythagoras' church as we do to the Judaic one's, we would have 'bean free' on our menu, in certain states you wouldn't be allowed to grow beans.
In africa you can be stoned to death for eating beans.
The list goes on. Furthermore an expert in things Pythagoras did or didn't like would be respected and subsidized in taxation, they would get a seat on discussion panals where poor Damo may never set foot. No cocktails and cupcakes and glamorous models for him, no choirs to lift his spirits in the great hall that he presides over.
No for damian it is just his rustic clothing and study for as long as he lives.

Now most dissapointing of all I logged onto the comments left on this post I was reading and I saw all these specific questions technical aspects of the bible story posted under parky's comment 'this was too long - :)' asking can you trace the lineage of the 12 disciples? more blah blah blah...
Again who cares, these I would have thought may be some important questions:

What is moral behaviour?

That's a good starting point for everyone, the second thing is to resist the temptation to rush to the nearest holy book and find out. Because a much better answer is:

moral behaviour is anything that reduces suffering, immoral behaviour is anything that increases suffering.

Now that's a starting point isn't it, and the real kick in the pants is that religion can deviate from such a simple test, in our society people are wasting their time and energy having all sorts of debates over whether Pythagoras meant beans literally or in a metaphysical sense. One could ask: how did this ever become a moral question?

ANZAC Day greatest day of the year

Ah the traditions of Anzac day are long and proud. What a special day of the year.
I had just done my laundry on Monday night where I confronted the reality that I couldn't make it through the week, even with a public holiday without doing a load.
Anyway whenever I have done my washing it's usually so long overdue that I get a certain luxurious feeling like I've just bought a whole heap of new clothes.
As such I had my pick on Anzac day of bball singlets to choose from to go playing in. I'd texted all my players the night before and in the best Anzac tradition I got up early in the morning around 8.30 (tim brown on SYN by the way is a truly representing youth voice of rare wit and intelligence matched with equal ambivolence and superfluity) and played some NBA Live 07 where as the Houston Rockets I shat all over the Dallas Mavericks with T-Mac sinking 69 points 5 rebounds 2 steals and 2 blocks with 8/8 3 point shots made just to get me in the mood.
Then I went in early to town and even though Vincent & Tosh had cancelled and Daud couldn't make it Rio was still down for it and I had my traditional al fresco breakfast. I sure miss Misaki on days like these because I use to go out for breakfast with her in real classy places and get things called 'The Big Breakfast' or Eggs Florentine or Benedict and occasionally pancakes. Infact we probably went out for breakfast more than dinner. I think Breakfast feels like more of an achievement.
Anyway, suffice to say I just can't bring myself to the skivvy wearing loner state of mind where you hand over decent money for a great breakfast to eat by yourself. Instead I went to a swanston walk cafe and handed over too much money to enjoy an indecent breakfast by myself.
Speaking of indecent the complete absence of all other forms of CBD entertainment outside of the parade sure brings the bogans into this neck of the woods adorned in essendon and collingwood colours drinking a lot of beer (at 11am) and swearing loudly, I know carlton is no exception when it comes to its fair share of unruly fans and these guys are more likely to shell out for membership than people with highly disposable incomes having values of 'loyalty' over values of 'value'.
Anyway I ate my breakfast and Rio texted me to say he was running late and so I had an hour to warm up before our game.
I have been working on my jump shot, well technically its just the regular overarm shot, and I'd be hitting around 45%, I wanna get over 50% but my problem is in a game I'm expected to be down on the low post picking up garbage goals not hitting jumpers.
But After 20 minutes warm up (approximately half of regular game time) I decided to switch to hook shots and found I'm hitting about 30% even with my back to the basket, If I could get that up it would be super helpful on the low postin converting an offensive rebound into a score.
After my shoulder was getting tired I switched to my old bad shooting style which could be called the pass shot, It's my awkward long range underarm shot that I used whin I was a teenager playing and got increadibly accurate. It would be useless except for its deceptive nature.
A) it looks like a pass so instead of blocking the shot defenders rush into the key to intercept the pass or stop the man inside.
B) it gives me extra range so people don't expect me to shoot for 3 because I can't hit it with a jumper.
Anyway I still shoot about 80% with this but it's so easy to block it's useless in the paint.
But that more or less concluded my hour long warmup.
I bought a Gatorade and rode up to melbourne uni where I played with Rio against some chinese guys 4 on 4 half court. The first game me, rio and this other dude made up one team and represented all rebounding options so we won 10-4 then we switched the other rebounding king and I went from grabbing 3 boards to 14 thanks to my superior boxing out, admittedly a lot of rebounds where off my own low post shots but I scored about 3 of the 10 to tuck away our second win.
Then we switched to 3 on 3 when Omar came to play some big guys with some illmatic ball handling skills. We did pretty well and I did surprisingly well rebounding considering a 10 kilo disadvantage I had but we lost.
Second game we lost by a more convincing margin but Rio finally got his low post shooting down. Omar claimed to have too much power from all this wisdom teeth surgery.
Anyway then I ate some lunch and hit boarders for a while. By the time I got home it was 5.30, by the time I got back from the supermarket it was 6. By the time gnocchi kicked in It was 8.30 and I managed half an hour reading before I passed out.
What a fine way to uphold the traditions of Anzac day.

Spam

Because I almost never use my hotmail account, I almost never expect to recieve any email. I've never ever had problems with spam either. In a time when people where leaping from hotmail to yahoo and gmail like there was no tomorrow even using their crappy ISP provided accounts I stuck by because I had no reason, I'd almost never recieved a single bit of spam.
So today I log in and to my bitter dissapointment people I know have instead sent me promo's and advertising material.
Maybe what they say is true, the internet is the end of human contact if the only reason people can think to contact me is to send me mail flyers.
I mean obscure pornographique at least.
Anyway April's been a let down in blogging, but man not because I haven't wanted to post, if you had seen the ideas stewing in my head you'd be all like, man I want some stew.
Anyway I will endeavor to post.
The great dissappearing pancake.

John's Wager

If you look at John's second most recent blog post of his personal life you'll see a well reasoned and lightly entertaining post.
But I remember a wager I made with John, one whose end I fulfilled and he sold out, claiming he had 'already had that conversation' infact I don't even think it was that it was more like 'I already know what she'll say'.
That wasn't the deal john.

that wasn't the deal.

And unlike John I'd like to apologize for not keeping my blog up to date.
I've been busy, but not with better stuff to do.

Hygene Theory

Is there anything I dislike more than some uppity pussy turning their nose up at some food or balking at using some utensil or camping aparatus for fear of microscopic germs.
I heard at a recent dinner party some dude had a sister who brought out her boyfriend from another country and the dad threw a BBQ party for him and offered him a sausage and he said 'Can't eat that its burnt, carcenogenic' and the Dad, rightly in my opinion decided to dislike him forever.
I've also seen a dude on Nerds FC when taken on a camping trip ask if the nozzle on his sleeping matress has been sterilised, to which he was lied to when the response was 'yes' he then couldn't believe that it had.
We are talking grown people here, people beyond the whole 'boy germs, girl germs' age of 6.
People who wont eat stuff off the ground, are horrified of having to touch a toilet seat to put it down, couldn't imagine anything worse than a kid playing in mud.
All this bubble wrapping is producing highly strung, socially awkward people of no use to society in general.
The only germs or microbes I've ever heard doing serious damage to anybody are the ones in Hospitals what eat your flesh off your bones. Because Hospitals are so sterilised.

*and occasionally from Bay Marie's in dodgy businesses, but what's a couple of days watching day time tv between friends.

Lately I feel like Kobe

I'm glad Kobe has surpassed Lebron, apart from the whole alleged forcing himself on hotel staff incident, I never really understood why Kobe get's backseat to Lebron. A guy who is potentially great seems to take precedence over someone who has maximum game.
So anyway to qualify the subject heading I don't feel like Kobe in that I don't feel an urge to have extra marital relations with people who don't necessarily want my loving. No I'm referring to Kobe's wonder week racking up 4 games in a row with plus 50 points breaking that run on the 5th game with 43 points. Now when an MVP can score average ppg of 25 (or in Steve "Nasty" Nash's case 19) that's a phenomanal run.
So when I say lately I feel like Kobe, I mean I don't know how Kobe feels, I mean it could be anything from the bored elite 'business as usual' to the pig ignorant lotto winner 'god is moving me from a dimension beyond my understanding'.
What I feel like is that I am racking up performance milestones, like I'm stronger than ever and resistance is just dropping away.
I don't know if anyone else has ever fallen into this good times zone but If I had to guestimate the coordinates of it's origins I would say self respect.
I think for me it always comes from treating myself as my numero uno competitor. Just as I try to bury the tohm of yesterday, i try to make it hard for tohmorrow to surpass me now.
If only I was good at something that pays as well as bball. (if you make it)

A Sad Day

Some point 8 months ago I was going to sleep, which I have done many times since however, on this particular occasion I stumbled accross a pile of garbage intermixed with clothes and leapt over my doona which had been left awkwardly the last time I got up. I then read a bit and put my book down on top of an old cereal bowl that now contained my mobile phone.
In doing so I knocked a pile of change onto the floor and like a crystal bullett in the forehead I realised

I cannot look after myself.

I'm incapable, or rather inept.
I also realised at that time if I was going to be dating again I had to do muchos mostest to actually transform my room into a place I would be willing for a girl to see.
It was a lot of work, infact the ratio of time spent cleaning up a room to time spent making a tidy room messy must be something like 80:1 yet a messy room stays messy and takes a long time to get messier so why ever clean anything up?
For at least 3 months now I have been relatively tidy.
But the point is I have met people that find this task, real real easy.
The overwhelming majority of these people are girls, girls who can look at two shirts of seemingly the same substance and say: that one is clean, that one is dirty.
Men who are neat I should qualify as not finding it easy, they usually are hardcore disciplinarians with repressed matricidal tendencies.
Anyhoo mayhaps the import is the reaction to the words neat and dirty.

Maybe some people actually read the sentance this way:

Anyhoo mayhaps the import is the reaction to the words neat and dirty.

But I would read it more like this:

Anyhoo mayhaps the import is the reaction to the words loser and fun.

Is it any wonder I throw tantrums cleaning my room.

I don't want to be a loser.

Top Ten: Misakigo

1. Sewiously
2. Fresh Begetables
3. I habe a question
4. Its become my favorite
5. That-a why?
6. Carbohydro
7. Seep (Sheep)
8. Puppies underwear (actually talking about Paul Pierce)
9. oh my gosh!
10. Gorgeous

I mean she can think I'm picking on her english, but I'd be so dissapointed if she lifted her standard to professional, she'd probably become a boring individual if she spoke, well not like me but someone else.
missing you petal.

A Real Job Pt.1: Win-win

I thought I'd dedicate some time sharing my thoughts on why it may be good to go work for a souless corporate entity.
I think many people work on behalf of mortgages, and work towards ambiguous and thoughtless financial goals, not because they are stupid or imoral but simply because determining a purpose in life is clearly quite difficult.

"Win-Win: One of four outcomes our company provides, the others being Win-Lose, Lose-Win and Lose-Lose."

You can only go into business if you be making someone's life easier. That is ethically, obviously there are people who go into business, that parasitically leach resources out of the community (Win-Lose) who sacrifice themselves unsustainably (Lose-Win) or run a company into the ground through sheer incompetence (Lose-Lose).
The last kind being normally reserved for politics.
But Win-win is the fundamental belief required, tat you can benifit other people and mutually benefit yourself - it really is this belief that makes profit and value possible.
Value occurs when you apply your expertise to a problem for someone else who pays for this solution which covers the cost of your efforts and then some.
A person will only pay that bit extra if the solution is of value to them.
And that's where win win occurs.
Of course a sentient person can also wring intensive value out of a joint venture that may have occured in error.
At any rate as Musashi would say meditate on this in depth.

Darkplace returns

Darkplace, a show close to the greatest show ever is coming back soon.
Thursday just got it's flavour back.
SBS if you can.

Michael Jordan Goes To Hell

"Let me introduce you to my main man Brett,
He is smoking what is not a cigarrette..."
- Salt 'N Pepa - Heavin and Hell

Indeed it seems to be seeming that S&P defined hell as the ghettos in which there community is expected to survive and thrive. Infact they combine both paradise and damnation into one tight package.
There are no generally agreed specifications and dimensions for hell. Which really you know all it needs to be is the unpleasant alternative to Heaven, you know like a production line, or an eternity of having to sit next to a talkative old person on a tram, or just a room full of mosquitoes. Anything annoying when multiplied by eternity would infact become unbearable torture. One would think.
Maybe just people in a queue talking ignorantly about a band you like. Or talking passionately about a band you think is overrated.
Or just teenage girls talking.
Anyway the point is you wouldn't have to do much when talking about eternity to make hell extremely unpleasent.
Yet most church groups rely on vague terms like "the worst place you can imagine" if you grew up in the country that's probably the dentist.
If you watch lots of anime from Japan it's probably a lot worse than the Catholic church can imagine. (although presumably not much worse than what the inquisitors used to do to fellow human beings on their god's behalf).
But you know this definition is really the weakest, its quite hard to imagine some place without then realising with certain self admonishment that it doesn't work that well.
Straightforward: Lake of Fire. Burn in hell for eternity in a lake of fire. I mean it's impossible to really concieve this as punishment from a mortal perspective, simply because there's only so much pain a physical body can take then it shuts down. If your mind shut down because it was being roasted in inconcievable agony the experience would probably be akin to the athiest concept of the afterlife.
But supposing if the "afterlife" is different and one's threshold of pain is increased so one doesn't pass out. I imagine you feel pain, you feel pain, you feel pain, pain becomes boring and your mind starts to focus on other things.
Like moving from one climate to another, humidity makes it hard to breathe. Heat makes you sweat doing the simplest tasks and cold puts you to slip or makes your nipples go hard.
Anyway the point is if you are conscious to experience pain, and the feedback is useless (ie cannot alleviate the pain) then most likely your conscious is going to get over it and work on other things.
So we find ourselves in a game, to make pain and suffering of any use (as pain and suffering) there has to be ways to improve or reduce your situation on the pain and suffering front.
Furthermore this ridiculous dimension of pain is supposed to operate for eternity. Therefore Economics don't really apply because it would seem you have an infinite resource (time) and economics is based on the belief that relative to our needs(/wants) resources are limited. But if you had all the time ever (so much time, the concept of time became irrelivant) your potential would become infinite.
So say you take all the concepts of hell that various nasty individuals have imagined over the years and rolled them all up into one mega hell and then multiplied it by the largest number you can think of and...
Michael Jordan would still trounce it.
Think about it. Put someone with michael jordans work ethic into a hell even worse than has previously been concieved and give him an eternity to triumph over it and give it 10,000 or 100,000 years and he will triumph. Through sheer unshakeable resolve.
He'd push apart those mountains. Chew through the shackles holding him down and wring the buzzard that pecks out his livers neck. He'd dunk the giant bolder down on the apex of the hill so hard it wouldn't roll down the other side.
He'd recruit a reliable center and a swingman of similar ability to Scottie Pippen, maybe even put together a dream team and be simply unbeatable.
It may not happen overnight, in fact if hell does exist I'd be surprised given the time the tennents have had (6,000 years mayhaps for the one's that first made graven images) that I'd be surprised if it wasn't hospitable by now.
It just doesn't work, unless it works in ways so mysterious as to be inconcievable and thus not worth wasting your time worrying about.
So stop praying already, if you indeed have an afterlife, you've got plenty of time anyway.

Outed

At the bottom of this post I have attached a newsletter I recieve every month from a faith group having just finished reading "Letter to a Christian Nation" I think I can't go back.
I was priveledged to have a chance in life to discover how wondrous the world around me is, I only had this chance because my father when he was 6-8 years old realised that religion was in essence all bullshit. When I was taught "Religious Education" in Primary school, of which any one of a religion other than Christianity was excused (at a Public School no less) I could never really get into prayer. When I prayed there was a distinct absence of anybody responding.
I was fortunately aware as too few are too late, that there was infact a choice, to accept or reject god. My parents said "do you believe in God?" you could choose or not choose. There was some confusion because my parents also wanted me to experience the magic of Santa and the tooth fairy but overall I would have spent almost in entirety 10 weeks believing in God.
But something else happens when you look at Intelligent Design, possibly the most significant advance in science for centuries, possibly bigger (shamefully so) than Einstein's theory of relativity. Because religion by imposing on the territory of scientific process invited science in like never before to have a look.
I'm not going to explain the far reaching implications of intelligent design suffice to say, on cursory observation points out how ridiculous and more to the point useless a belief in God - (amplified for belief in a specific god) is.
Therefore I wish you to know that I will afford no special respect for anyone's religious beliefs and practices, it's a waste of my time and energy and I find it personally offensive because of the impact it has on the world I wish to live in and reproduce and alleviate human sufferring.
If on the other hand you want to waste a lot of time and energy protecting a lot of suffering and misery that goes on in the world check out any of below (except earth hour it's an environmental cause and has nothing to do with multi-faith subsequently sounds pretty good):

Well, the March events have been pouring in – there are almost as many here as on the calendar! I hope you can attend something:

Yoga classes (Weeks beginning 7 Mar) Hindu
Short Course on the Song of Songs (13 Mar) Jewish
Women and Human Rights in South Asia (14 Mar) Peace
Jewish Holocaust Museum Public Lecture (14 and 21 Mar) Jewish
Workshop for Birthing Mother (15 Mar) Jewish
Black Harmony Gathering (17 Mar) Koori community
Workshop on Spirituality and Social Justice (17 Mar) Christian
Jews, Shoah and Genocide (18 Mar) Jewish
Pastoral Care Meeting (18 Mar) Muslim
World Meditation Hour (18 Mar) Brahma Kumaris
Continuing Education in Ministry (19 Mar) Christian
New Moon Gatherings for Women (19 Mar) Jewish
Birth of the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) (30 Mar) Interfaith
Nomination for the Young Muslim of the Year (30 Mar) Muslim
Earth Hour (31 Mar) Environmental Peace

Together At Last

A+ For Effort. My brother found this one at his job.
Decent post shortly.

Ascension and Inertia

I went to see father Bob some time and in a possible good fortune avoided the trap of "confirmation bias" ie thinking all Catholic priests (indeed Catholocism) is as good as father Bob (or for that matter Father Ted).
Instead on the first attempt I had to sit through a lecture delivered by some other priest who was inarticulate, old and conservative. His inspirational sermon was about how we should all concentrate on heaven every day and know how good it will be, and in knowing this strive to earn our place there.
Now that is not really a synopsis, that was more or less all he said. Inspiring? no. Infact it made me realise what a useful term 'Heaven' is to bandy about. It's impossible as a notion to reject because it is by definition, undefined, similar to concepts of 'perfect' or 'Eutopia' or 'Art' the exact level to which one satisfies our criteria is left for each imaginer to imagine for themselves.
Example - my idea of heaven would probably involve being a member of a crime fighting basketball troop that went around solving complicated strategic problems and realising it through some kind of divine basketball tournament in a futuristic fun park.
My mother's idea of heaven probably involves heaps of 'nice shit' like blue and white china, speghetti marinara, tuscan countryside and Marie Claire magazines.
if through some hilarious mishap we were to go to eachothers eternal paradises we would probably be in for a royal shit time.
Other terms that work like this are 'terrorist' and 'unaustralian/unamerican' actually unaustralian makes me laugh when I hear it.
Suffice to say some times romantic escapism has its place I used to wonder as a little child what if Gravity gave out one day and we just fell into the sky, holding onto the grass desperately.
As I got older the musing possibly became dumber or more sophisticated, like a massive object such as the moon falling to earth and destroying the atmosphere or some shite.
Anyway I saw this video clip and the way they shot the divers made me understand the whole 'taken up' thing, what a wonderful way to avoid the pain of death to experience that trampoline sensation as gravity takes hold of you and your upwards momentum diminishes to zilch and you start accelerating towards the mat. But to just have that situation reversed.
Nowonder martyrdom is such an attractive option, good going religion.

Manufacturing and the circle of life

I wish I had the time, intelligence and concentration to put together a succinct and thourough demolition of the common arguement about keeping Aussie jobs in Australia and not shipping them overseas.
So from the outset I know one thing you have to establish is a world view. ie. stop thinking about just Australia is if the wider world does not exist.
Okay Major arguement #1 in favor of preventing jobs from going overseas - unemployment:

The gist of it is that if you ship jobs overseas in manufacturing people lose there jobs and this is devestating to communities and families as people don't want to be on welfare.
Okay the immediate solution to losing your job is get another job - aha but you are not educated enough to easily transfer your work efforts. Hence hencely arguement number one has the following issues - if you remove low skill jobs you exacerbate structural unemployment (unemployment caused by people having the wrong skills to fill the available roles as in a factory floor worker can't go from that to filling the in demand job vacancy of actuary).
Structural unemployment is really the biggest issue any government faces in their labor pool that is willing participants that lack the skills and abilities to actually sate the demand for labor.
So subsidising manufacturing (production subsidy) is really a form of welfare anyway because we are taking resources from productive sectors of the economy (via tax) and then redistributing it to sectors of the economy that normally couldn't compete price wise in the world market (through the subsidy) its welfare, we are injecting a handout to industries so they don't starve to death. Or you can get fiercely protectionist.
The arguement however falls down because the transition of jobs isn't an issue of employed people losing their jobs to the cosmos but infact employed people losing their jobs to unemployed people.
To simplify the arguement imagine two surgeons - you and some other person. You are a fairly good doctor in every thousand patients you operate on only 2 die the rest come through safely. The other surgeon is better though, in every thousand operations he conducts .418 patients die.
I don't even know if this is a KPI but in a market where there is only so much demand and either of you can easily fill that demand one could assume as good as you are people will prefer the other surgeon. You may have to get another job or move to another location, or specialise in another field.
You couldn't really argue whether that was fair or not because if all else being equal one is better than the other one will assume all the business goes in their direction.
So suppose instead there is one job, screwing screw 24b into hole 24b, and you can do this 27 times an hour at the cost of $18 an hour. Now the time it took to accumulate the expertise of being a surgeon is roughly 10 years at a cost $128,000. The time it takes to become an expert in screwing screw 24b into hole 24b was 12 seconds at a cost of $0.58 (your wages plus your foremans for given time plus opportunity costs of lost productivity on the line and then figure was exagerated to add impact)
So now say that it doesn't really matter who screws screw 24b into hole 24b, almost anyone can pick up the skill for fifty eight cents. Now taking a microscoping viewpoint and saying that every other step of the production line was complicated and not as easy to replace, one could easily if their weren't laws against it lose said job to someone willing to work for $16 an hour, who in turn could easily lose their job to someone willing to work for $14 an hour and so on and so on.
Unions were in fact formed in the days where there were so many people that Employers could bid down wages to 50c and fire you for exhaling through your nose.
I agree, but what isn't usually considered in this arguement is that you have a community that aren't fat cats sitting in ivory towers but people who have spent the best part of 300 years walking behind an ox, standing in mud, losing 75% of their infants and subsisting off less than $1 a day.
These are the people that have banded together negotiated a pay rise
to $1 an hour and are just as capable of placing screw 24b in hole 24b.
This is where the jobs are going, to people who will benefit much much more than you are. Furthermore $18 an hour isn't just money from heaven, money is a portable store of wealth, there are economicc definitions of money, but basically my point revolves around highlighting that money isn't just money, currency has a value determined by what it can buy, Wages like all other expenses/investments represent actual things of value, ie resources. So if you pay someone $18 to do the same thing as someone who will do it for $2 you are in fact wasting a lot of resources.
This arguement is an arguement to preserve for someone the priveledge of wasting resources.
In this crash course of Economics, economics as I understand it from year 11 is based around the premis of 'Relative to our wants, resources are limited' most economic studies are concerned with efficiency, ie employing those resources to best fulfill the wants of people.
Put simply if manufacturing jobs is whats in question who wants it more? someone with nothing who is willing to accept lower wages for the priveledge of work.
Jobs that are low skilled and if you permit me the license - "undesirable" are the ones likely to be shipped overseas to places where people find such jobs "desirable" for one and one reason only - they are much worse off than "we" are here.
If you take the world view we know that our planet is roughly the shape of a basketball and that every bit that sticks up above the blue bits has people crawling all over it, so we know that resources are most definitely finite.
So needlessly throwing away $16 or possibly $17 is irresponsible knowing that resources will eventually run out. The net effect of the "unemployment" arguement means that A) more people worldwide will most likely be employed. B) if these shitty jobs are all these people have you must acknowledge that they are only under threat because somebody else out there has less. C) the world at large is getting short shifted by wasting resources here there and everywhere.

Major arguement #2 - If the jobs go overseas we'll end up dependant on them and they will rule the world.

Assuming "they" = China which is the one having explosive growth. This statement is incorrect on a number of grounds, coming back to again that market mechanism, the jobs are not being transferred because of evil its because they are cheaper. So one could assume before through trade we become slaves to Chinese overlords or whoever else, we could assume that we would sooner accept lower wages than unfair treatment.
So the worst case is entirely avoidable under the same pretext that the jobs are under threat in the first place.
Secondly I find this arguement wrong because it is counterintuitive to trade anyway. The idea of buying and selling goods is to better our lifestyle options, why do we need to earn $18 an hour if all the consumer goods we needed were produced at a fraction of the cost? If this was in any way a significantly damaging shift in the job market it would be offset by the fact that living expenses go down.
My old economics lecturer (fat guy) used to introduce things so he could dismiss them and here's one I would introduce now - wages are not the issue, wages generally reflect living expenses, thus if wages had to decrease you would assume retailers rather than price themselves out of business would lower their prices unless the supply dwindled out of proportion with demand. In other words the economy might shrink a little but living standards may not have to.
The real point is that making the arguement that we will become slaves through market forces is ridiculous because it is the same as suggesting there is something inherantly different between people from Ballarat and people from Bendigo* if gold mining operations where to move between the town.
Infact the reason this didn't all happen a long time ago is because of Mao's economic mismanagement.
Anyone is perfectly entitled to want to work and negotiate wages that will compensate them for their time. To argue any differently is racist and furthermore, if what we are really afraid of is despotic abuse of economic power then we should stop employing such tactics ourselves.

Arguement #3 - it's all some people have.

Easily dismissed, the only reason all they have is under threat is because somebody else has less.
The real issue is when you land a job that is easy, menial and boring. Tragically nobody tried to invest any development training in you and you never learnt any transferrable skills, all you know is how to screw screws - the word for an indistinguishable good is called a commodity, and that is precicely what you have become. Working within strict specifications all your life you stifled your own belief in your ability to be anything more.
Your employer let you down, they never invested any of the proceeds generated by your activity into making you any better or more useful, but you too just sat there too lazy to move.
Thus we enter the two way responsibility of the employer employee relationship. If your employer does not offer you training or even opportunity for development you are obliged to quit and seek new employment.
Similarly employers need to bring people up with their company, and invest in their work force to not leave a bunch of redundant commodities as someone elses problem, or everyone elses problem, accepting subsidies from the government without at the same time moving out of the business is immoral and escalates our commitment to wasteful practices.
A good company will endeavor to make menial jobs redundant and at the same time allow their employees autonomy and creativity to move up the chain and achieve their best.
The few that cannot cope will not be permitted the delusion that their fate will be waiting with a warm seat for their children, and understand the importance of educating their children or allow them to sink in the ever changing market.
Discouraging your child from pursuing their highest potential is nothing less than child abuse.

*The 3 second rule in Ballarat is the 12 second rule in Bendigo, possible explaining the smell.

Rock Candy Mountain

I want to wake up, eat Nachos with Guacamole with Misaki, head down to the park, play some ball then sit down with a 7-eleven slurpy to watch a movie and pass out.
Should be simple for a man of my achievements right?
Man it seems impossible right now, being pushed to my tolerance limits by this Summer that started in August (when Spring normally starts) and I'd even do a swap with Morley to wear homeboy gear and eat delicious delicious snow. Do 7-eleven just sell the flavor syrup in Canada and you supply your own snow for snow cones?
I guess I'll never know.
I wouldn't last long in the middle east thats for sure and not just because I could never bring myself to pay "proper" respect to them religions they have over there.
Anyway I heard Equinox has been and passed, and maybe it's just that I'm pushing myself like 'two day old shit' as Fife would say which is to say too hard.

Ticks

The world is one relentless pursuit of growth, of building more because more is more. Just increase things and everything is solved.
I don't agree with this attitude at all but man, if this is the prevailing human drive why do so many people drag their feet and stick within mindless repetitive circles. I'm not talking about you of course. I'm talking about people who don't think just do.
Who furthermore need to be told what to do. In the mornings now I have to leave early to aim for the train before the train I actually need to catch because it is now reliably not running. Simple messages like 'The 8.19 will not run today' or if they want to get tricky 'the 8.19 has been delayed and is now expected in 20 minutes' does that mean two trains will arrive piled on top of eachother? the delayed 8.19 and the scheduled 8.39?
Noooooooooooooooo. No. And what ticks me off more is that somewhere, someone is paid to manage the trains you know what the compensation payable to people who can "provide evidence they were effected by delays" weekly and monthly ticket holders can recieve 1 x Daily ticket.
If there were ever any serious incentive to run services when scheduled eg. refund tickets you could bet there would be no late trains if the businesses success depended on it.
that's really the start of my list today.
I'm genuinelly angry, which is...rare. I feel...angry.

but I still love technology

Matt Shirvington hosts 'Beyond Tomorrow' with some other lady, a show modelled on the old 'Beyond 2000' which was highly successful back when I was 6 or 7. A more apt name perhaps for the new version as I suspect some of the new technologies we got a sneak peak at in the late 80's early 90's I suspect were obsolete by the time 2000 came.
Now recall if you were watching the Patriotic coverage of the 2000 olympics in Sydney by channel 7 were when Shirvo dropped out of the 100m sprint heats he talked at length about what a disgrace and dissapointment he was. So strong was his conviction it was quite confronting as he seemed to hold his own expectations so far beyond what was possibly the general publics.
That is to say whilst people may have said 'you never know Matt Shirvington if he can luck out and get through to the finals he may just get lucky and win a medal' whereas Matt seemed to say 'Everyone expects me to win gold'.
Everyone pretty much expects the US to win gold, through Maurice Green or Ato Baldin (Canada I think).
Anyway that was in 2000. Compare Shirvington's spirit to Jordan who threw a ball I'm told at some match from one end of the court to the his basket and it missed. Apparantly some journo asked him 'did you really expect that one to go in?' and MJ responded 'I expect all of them to go in.' I expect some of my shots to go in.
But lately I've been practicing my shooting because for most of the past year I've been using my relative size advantage and position as power forward to collect 'garbage goals' that is other people's genuine attempts on the basket which I've collected on the rebound and put through from a safe distance. Otherwise I used my 'bad habit' which was an underarm two handed shot 'from the hip' which I think is how they refer to it in trick shooting.
I have also been able to pull off the odd skyhook which is a good habit I developed through my inability (or lack of confidence) to cross the court and create scoring opportunities I tend to clumsily back into my defender and then in fair immitation of the skyhook lob it one handed perpendicular to my defender at the basket and unlike Kareem abdul jabar only occasionally get it in.
So currently I've been practicing the conventional 'jump shot' or perhaps just 'shot' would be better as I haven't started jumping yet.
Anyway of all places I learnt the proper method from a manga called 'slam dunk' and the process of shooting is incredibly awkward to me but I figure if I can add conventional shooting to my reputior of awkwardness I may actually become a useful player on the team.
Needless to say what looks good and graceful (the classic jump shot) actually feels incredibly awkward and uncomfortable. The whole process of learning is infact about getting the awkward feel trained into my muscles in what is known as 'muscle memory'.
Had someone explained this to me when I was young I would have stuck at a lot more things I found really uncomfortable and not have ended up with such things as my bizarre pengrip.
But Slam magazine has all sorts of adds in it one of which is an add selling a brace that stops your shooting arm at the perfect angle for release in a diagram labelled -'too little,too much,money!' to demonstrate the product and importance of arm position.
Now I don't own this thing but at any rate I believe questionable 'technological advancements' like this first came in with devices for golf and then later bowling and shit like that.
Matt Shirvington in a press conference post dropping out talked about the hardcore training he was going to undertake including computer mapping of every muscle fiber or something, it tries my memory too much to recall the exact nature but I'm more or less certain it would have involved using computers to design a super precise and targeted training routine to perfect his form.
That is time off the starting blocks, maximise the energy spent in forward momentum and train out the up and down stuff.
Theoretically possible I suppose. But why on earth would we ever go to such effort to train someone's muscles into a running machine instead of just building a running machine?
And everyone knows from rocky 4 that technology driven training doesn't compare to simply running around in a forest.
I mean if you want perfect start using the perfect materials, maybe wheels instead of legs.
I guess Matt had the right idea, it could work (if you then had the time to spend) but time may not have been on his side, possibly hence his emotionally confronting locker wall punching reaction to dropping out of the heats.