Probably not. People like convenience. If you don’t offer it, someone else will. Netflix does some of this, and honestly Netflix is one of the most likely ways to minimize pirating. iTunes single-handedly stopped a huge part of music sharing. People wanted high quality sound and they wanted it digitally. iTunes provided that, people had no problem spending for that service. Until producers/companies/artists realize that:

• people want TV shows right when they air
• they want to watch them when they want
• they want to be able to pause
• they dont want to pay for a TV subscription because you don’t have time to watch enough shows to make it worth it
• they don’t want to buy DVDs, have them scratch and break, or have an “extended edition” released a few months later
• TV shows should also come with subtitles, in 4 languages minimum
• TV shows should be shown in 1080p quality

… then piracy will continue. The average user likes pirating more because it’s convenient rather than because it’s free. When you can’t offer a decent competing service, you lose. Good day, sir.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.

Oscar Wilde said that. Oscar Wilde is an interesting dead man. His short, witty, to-the-point sayings have experienced an extreme revival with the advent of the internet. He’s quoted often by people who don’t even know who he was, or only know the Wikipedia summary of his life. He’s quoted because he fits into the construct of the internet: the quotes are relatively concise, interesting, and have an element of romantic elegance (“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”) that is easy to relate to. They are not very threatening to the neo-hippie-but-tech-saturated-generation that rules the internet today. They just fit, and they’ve become a staple overnight.

The internet’s ability to do this terrifies some people, notable Nicholas Carr, a self-preservationist Enyclopedia Britannica editor who wrote a piece in The Atlantic titled, “Is Google making us stupid?” In the article, he insinuates that short-span reading, like skimming articles or browsing facebook, is changing the neuroplasticity of the brain.

But I disagree.

Carr himself explains a chunk of my argument:

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

These analogies are fitting for the internet. I do think the internet is changing things. For one, it’s making us way, way smarter. I learned programming only via free online resources. I learned a skill, which I sell as skilled labor professionally. I learned it for free. I sell it for money. Thank you, collective internet contributors. Just as the unforeseen benefits of the printing press outweighed the negatives, the internet will create super intelligent humans. We have essentially built a hive-mind of information.

Everyone agrees the internet is awesome in this sense, but what about the changing neuroplasticity of the brain? As Carr uses mostly anecdotal evidence for this, mostly of his own experiences with reading, I will use anecdotal evidence as well. I read articles online all the time, I program, I facebook. I love short snippets of information. But when Dance with Dragons was released, I spent 2 days devouring 1,040 pages of gritty, descriptive fantasy. I do read less than I did as a kid, mostly because I spend less time reading books I don’t enjoy. This means the quality of my reading has risen. And unlike Carr, I have no “mental fog” when trying to read a long complicated novel. (There are few things in life more complicated than the story lines in Song of Ice and Fire) On top of that, this series is fairly popular, meaning other people have no problem reading thousands of pages as well as posting online on the crazy ASOIAF forums and participating in the huge online community for this book. These are techy people, and they read. A LOT. Since Carr’s article also kind of attacks the younger generation, I’d say look at the readership of Harry Potter. Think about the sheer mass amount of tumblrs dedicated to Harry Potter. These kids (and adults) love short sweet info, but they also love reading Harry Potter, a considerably long series, renowned for it’s depth and quality of writing.

10 years ago you were limited to the information that fit your social class. Now, the limits are removed. But Carr should be worried. His position as an encyclopedia editor is under attack. Now we have hive-mind expertise contributing to Wikipedia for free. Like the scribes that were not needed after the printing press, Carr is no longer needed. I guess it makes sense to write a book about how you lost your job. We all gotta put food on the table.

There’s a psychological experiment that examines how influenced one is by his or her peers. They are placed in a room with a projector that shows an image of several lines of varying length - and a last one that needs to be matched to one of the others, like in the image below.

The test subject is told that everyone in the room is a test subject, but they are not; they are actors placed there to try to create a fake community for the one true test subject. The first few fake test subjects are asked, and they answer with the wrong answer, “B”. The examiner goes down to each subject and they all continue to say, “B”. The last test subject is the true one, and his or her answer depends on what they see on the screen, as well as what they think their peers believe. Solomon Asch conducted this study on college students and this was his result:

To Asch’s surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed themselves to the ‘obviously erroneous’ answers given by the other group members at least once.

According to Asch, people conform to a wrong answer for two reasons: they want to be liked, or they trust the group’s opinion. In all of the pictures I’ve seen of this study, all of the test subjects are men. I’ve always been fascinated with what would happen with a mixed group and different variations. All female actors and male test taker, all make actors and female test taker, and so on. Moreover, if the groups were truly mixed, would women or men align themselves with the majority more often, or would there be no statistical difference?

Leni taking photographs in Africa.

In my experience, women have trouble withstanding the pressures of community more than men. (Anecdotal, no less.)

So one person that totally fascinates me is Leni Riefenstahl, because of her absolute resolution when it comes to her art. She made (possibly) propagandist films commissioned by the Nazi party, which she calls art films. Her arguments are that at the time, most Germans supported Hitler and her films are more about art than about fascism, and she never publicly endorsed the Nazi Party and was not a member of it. After the fall of the Nazis, she was blacklisted and never made another movie until she was 90-something, when she made a scuba diving movie. I find it incredible that she never once caved in to any admission of guilt or being a propagandist. She said “no” to all the critics. She declared herself an artist through-and-through until the day she died.

As most film critics describe her as the most accomplished, creative and innovating female filmmaker of the 20th century now, she spent most of her life not making movies. I admire her resolution but at the same time she sacrificed her career for it. (Although maybe even if she admitted she was wrong, she could still be blacklisted.) Ultimately she didn’t care about being accepted and she didn’t care if people thought her films were propagandist. She cared about being right. She trusted her own instinct and never balked. Whether she’s right or not, is above my pay-grade. Ultimately, I thought that was pretty inspirational.

Oh, and her work is incredibly striking, too.

You can read more on Leni and watch her Nazi-commissioned films (warning: some people are offended by the Nazi imagery) and you can read more on conformity studies to get more in depth statistics.

While browsing Facebook I noticed the different viewpoints my friends had on the Occupy movement. While I ignore most people’s political ramblings, I’ve had certain conversations that made me think, “hmmm”, which is significant, considering the last thing that made me think that was LOST.

I have no authority to speak on the Occupy Wall Street movement; I haven’t attended any protests. I “liked” them on Facebook and “liked” a few statuses, which in this day and age means a bit less than nothing. I have no real authority on economics. I got an B in my introductory course to Macro-Economics. I’m a college student – nay, a community college student – so I think my authority on morality and justice is also lacking. I have no starring role in any political movement. I change my political party back and forth every year, because if I ever run for office, it would make a really funny news story.

The Occupy movement is about frustration, and there’s no real frustration leader, is there? I get frustrated pretty easily, so I’ll go ahead and nominate myself for the role! Sorry guys, power vacuum. Couldn’t help it.

First order of business when you are frustrated is: What’s wrong?

Well alot of things are wrong for people in my shoes. One, it’s hard to find a job, much less one that respects your skill set. Education is incredibly expensive, and although doing a stint in the ole community college helps out – there are still two more years I have to pay for by selling my soul to bank loans the devil. So the issue is money. Money, money, money.

Must be funny, in a rich man’s world.

So there are people who are richer than me, and that sucks! How come I don’t get that money?! Oh yeah, cause I didn’t work for it.

But the catch is – they didn’t work for all of it either. And therein lies the injustice.

We have a social contract: us peons agree to pay a part of our income to the government so they can go fight wars, pave roads, educate kids, pay senators and twiddle their thumbs and whatever it is they do. Along with the peons, businesses, who legally sometimes like to be considered “persons”, also have to pay taxes.

One solution thrown around is the $20 minimum wage, which is strange to me. This is where the community college econ class comes in! From what I understand, a higher minimum wage can eliminate poverty for some, but raises unemployment and the victims end up being those that are handicapped or socially disadvantaged. This, to me, is immoral. On the other hand, proponents of a higher minimum wage say that it raises the quality of life and increases business efficiency. Ultimately it is a give and take, with morality being intertwined with both sides. But .. the question arises:

Is a high quality of life part of our current social contract? Do we deserve it just because we pay our taxes? We clearly deserve to live above the poverty line, and eliminating poverty is a, shall we say, government intention. I don’t think the government has completely abandoned the really poor. While the programs are struggling and mostly failing, I don’t think this is where the Occupy Wall St. movement stems from. We want the poor to be taken care of, but it’s not just the poor, it’s the 99%. The middle class and the lower class feel cheated. Even the upper middle class does. And it’s not because the government isn’t guaranteeing a high quality of life or directly neglecting the poor.

Deep down, as Americans, we know we have to work hard to pursue happiness.

So we do, we work hard, we use public roads, public education, we pay for it, we work harder. We play it fair. But it suddenly occurs to us that it’s not fair. Because for the social contract to work, everybody’s gotta play it fair.

The law is just. Sort of. I am not about to read the tax code and call things out as just or unjust. But I think it is fairly okay. Ideally certain things are subsidized and I understand the economic and sometimes political powers that influence that. Ultimately if all businesses paid their taxes legally the economic landscape would be crucially different. I fondly remember a CNN segment (back when I had cable) of them going over which companies used offshore tax havens, they displayed a huge list which included their parent company – Time Warner. Wolf Blitzer explained that out of respect for full disclosure they included that, and also pointed out that FOX News’s parent company, News Corp, had about twice as many. That really makes it okay, CNN.

What kind of enforcement exists in a country where a company’s cable news network can nonchalantly mention in a news story how they break the law? The morality of the topic has become so lenient that someone even considering paying their taxes fair and square is almost a joke.

I hope I’ve convinced you by now that the problem is injustice in tax code enforcement. If we lived in a tax-just country, we wouldn’t be frustrated, because we would earn what we deserved. We would work harder or smarter, and earn more. And when someone at the head of a large corporation would screw up, they would crash and burn. I think being an executive is an incredibly demanding job, and I do think they deserve to get paid based on their job performance. The job demands excellence, and doesn’t warrant forgiveness. If you screw up, you crash and burn. This isn’t Sunday school. You don’t get to try again. If you can’t aspire to excellence, get a job that doesn’t require that.

So, what’s the solution?

1. Bank run party! Take all your money out of your bank, and hide it in your backyard, or a local credit union or something. If a true bank run occurred, banks would have a harder time lending money and would be happy to forgive chunks of your debt. This happened when Citi was failing. Imagine if they were all failing! This isn’t a direct protest against unfair tax enforcement, but it’s a legal and effective way to show frustration. And if you’re in a bit of debt, and enough people do it, it could help you out. I think I’ve earned $5 in my entire lifetime from bank interest. The loss for me moving my money to a credit union would be insignificant.

2. Stock vote party! I’m not exactly sure how stocks work and how buying a stock enables you to vote on who runs the company. I sort of vaguely remember that once you own a stock there are certain things you can vote on. Could the 99% mobilize to buy a stock of a certain company and then vote everyone out of power? My dog could probably run a bank. Don’t quote me on this one, I don’t think it’s this easy to fire an exec.

3. Someone with authority actually enforcing the law. Someone that is like, the chief enforcer of the law, enforcing the law. Why don’t we have one of those? Oh, wait..

Aside: I think the lack of focus of the Occupy movement makes it so easy for Obama and other politicians to brush it aside. I think his official statement is that he “understands” and that it reflects “broad-based frustration.” End of line.

4. ???

5. Profit

In Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he condemns hate, and even shows that segregation is morally detestable. But he knows that fighting hate is not the battle, you can’t fight people into loving you. Just as fighting greed can’t be your battle. We can’t fight corporate America into wanting to give everything away and go to India to “find themselves.” The only thing you can fight for is justice. And as MLK said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The civil rights movement fought for justice under the law, but this protest against Wall St. is a fight for justice to be enforced.

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

- Elizabeth Warren, bringing it.

It says, “Freedom begins with Courage”

I tried looking for news reports on this, because to me it seems slightly offensive – but nothing. Nobody seems to care. Obviously people know who Che is, or using his image would be pointless in an ad campaign. I think the truth is people might love revolution here more than they hated communism. There really isn’t much hate directed towards Romania’s socialist policies. For a country so stuck in it’s past, you’d expect it to be super sensitive to this stuff, but Romania’s sensitivities are highly personal. They hate the Securitate, they hate Ceausescu, and they hate the poverty of the past. Did I mention they hate the Securitate? They really hate those guys. For good reason.

But nobody seems to hate the free services they got under communism. And nobody hated the fervor of the Revolution. And that is why it’s perfectly okay to advertise a juice here using Che Guevara. Because Che represents courage and revolution and the common worker. He doesn’t represent the systematic abuse and violations of privacy the Securitate inflicted on them for so many years.

Romanians seem to like Che. The fact that he was a Marxist, somewhere, somehow, stopped mattering.

Images Sarah Palin took off her website after the shooting this morning of a congresswoman and federal judge:

Liberal targets are literally in cross-hairs. A bit creepy, no? At least she took it down. I’m sure she meant that these candidates needed to be VOTED out, but the imagery and rhetoric .. who knows, maybe it incited someone? Ick ick ick.

Update: Lol wtf

When Californians are asked by a human pollster their opinion on prop 19, more than half say they are against it. When asked by a robot, Prop 19 passes with a 13% margin.

Isn’t that staggering?

What I find interesting also is all the fake websites popping up calling themselves “Stoners against Prop 19″ Yeah. Pretty creative. There’s been some digging up and the people behind these websites are the same ones that oppose it – the law enforcement unions.

Hey, they need job security, right?

It’s interesting that they would take this route. But it’s smart. It’s a lot more effective than “Marijuana Kills” ads on TV. People are starting to believe it and being opposed to it – so the result is alot more uncertain now.

This reminds me, I need to re-register to vote. I’m still registered Republican for some reason.

‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it! - Sarah Palin on Twitter

She’s got a point. Language is only incorrect if it’s misunderstood – imo! Everyone seemed to know she meant “refute”.

HuffPuffTheMagicDragon Post and whoever else on the internet that still cares about politics when there isn’t a presidential election is jumping on it, but to me its a bigger issue. I’m fighting a one-woman battle against this sort of linguistic Nazism. You CAN invent words. It is correct. As much as you guys hate it, language is alive, txt speak is correct in it’s own way and there is very little wrong and right about language.

That’s why language is awesome! Thanks to Shakespeare and .. *gulp* Sarah Palin.

I wish I could write more but I’m tired, so here goes. I love living in America, especially California. Thanks to the government and social structure, I think I live in the country with the most upward social mobility on this planet. Community college is also a godsend, cause it’s so affordable to start developing your career. You give up some parts of the college experience, but that’s okay. I love living in Dana Point; I love the beach and the ocean.

I feel that we shouldn’t be celebrating the declaration of independence but more the current time we are in. The Declaration had 1 explicit mention of racism:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

The implicit example of racism of “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Pursuit of happiness doesn’t mean much in the D of I context, since liberty sort of covers that.

Liberty is the concept of ideological and political philosophy that identifies the condition to which an individual has the right to behave according to one’s own personal responsibility and free will.

So what is pursuit of happiness? It’s a filler for property. The original Locke phrase is “Life liberty and property” Why was property removed? Because slaves are property, and the framers wanted to tax slaves.

Classy.

So why do I say this? Because one thing that always pops up around this time of year is how great our framers like Franklin and Jefferson were, how they pooped rainbows and spread love all over our great country.

Why not face history in an objective way? Our history is dirty, sad, and chock-full of racism. Actually, before the Americas, there were little to no examples of slavery by ‘color’ over another. That simple difference has changed our country, the world, and the meaning of race forever.

But – look how far we’ve come.

Happy 4th of July!