The world is an incredibly complex place; it takes a tremendous amount of work to keep all the necessary and complex systems running. A lot of that wo...
Some of us have not only thought about some of the profound things we might do -- we did it. I spent 2 years in VISTA (now Americorps) working with ch...
One possible reason is that they just don't think of it as "a hell which is full of suffering" It's one thing to acknowledge that there is suffering i...
Whatever turns you off! Whatever makes one wish for the death of the last human... Ecological collapse, progress on a stick, extruded ennui, minutia m...
More boring is not just... more boring, it became unsustainable at least 4.5 billion people ago. Capitalism is predicated on expansion: expanding extr...
Of course, we don't do things (like who we fall in love with) on the basis of the diminishing law of utility. Sometimes we can apply such reasoning wh...
How about this: People would rather be the highest paid person in a group at $50,000 a year. then making $50,000 more ($100,000 a year) and be the low...
Yes, neuroscience. Slip of the fingers. Believing in Fate wouldn't help, as far as I can tell. I was aiming at the idea that there are forces (like th...
Maybe study neurology? Westerners don't believe in Fate anymore but a lot of stuff goes on between our ears that we have no knowledge of nor control o...
Oh, yeah... one other thing: A lot of decision making we do is not made consciously, so it is quite often difficult or impossible to know WHY we decid...
Whether you pursue education within an institution or pursue it outside of the same, it is mostly a practical matter. Do you need a recognized degree?...
Why the hell not? Look, there is something that can be done about boredom. Assemblng parts doesn't have to be a factory version of Day of the Living D...
The two really horrible jobs here are the circuit board inspectors and the call center workers. The crew laying pipe and the guy doing something with ...
Have you ever heard of 'hash numbers'? I once had a temp job adding up hash numbers for Cargill Incorporated, a giant ag. product company. The hash nu...
Sounds like a colossal bore. Most work is inevitably tedious, dull, dirty, difficult, and a damned drag. That is why they pay people. Nobody would do ...
Yes there are costs to refusing to self-educate. Look, all education is self-education. You are the one that has to pay attention in lectures, read th...
Quite a few colleges offer students the option of designing their majors. One could, for instance, combine creative writing, physics, chemistry, and a...
Radical thinkers have proposed an inverse wage scale with the highest pay for necessary and very unattractive jobs like unclogging big sewer pipes (no...
TheHedoMinimalist is entertaining the recurrent dream of the self-made man. Maybe 1/2 of 1% of the population (too generous an estimate?) are really a...
Yes, one would hope. Vaguely interested students had best start at a low cost community college to find out if they can, and want to do college work. ...
Do you think you won't run into a hoard of pretentious intellectual wannabe's on line? Guess again! Yes, It is possible to educate one's self (autodid...
I took some classics and literature courses through Extension when I was about 35. It was a good experience, but it was not for a degree. It would hav...
Over the last x number of years, I have known several high school graduates who were exceptionally well educated. They read, they discussed, they inqu...
I suspect that many philosophers probably are humorless gits. This is probably associated with their low appreciation of being embodied beings--creatu...
Oh, come on. It isn't just at Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech that one will find intelligent people. Sour grapes? Well, gee whiz, if he is making close to ...
College was extremely valuable to me as a means to personal growth (intellectual, interpersonal, social, all that). College helped me get jobs, some o...
Well, first of all, being homosexual doesn't rule out fathering children. For men who are 'exclusively homosexual' -- never have heterosexual partners...
Well... has this experiment been done? I would be very surprised if, in one form or another, it had not been done. There is a ton of research publishe...
Does CK want to separate (somebody, himself, whoever) from the American Revolution? Maybe he feels it was an inadequate revolution? Too bourgeois? Jus...
The Guardian reader responses are not tightly moderated, and the result is more amusing moments, as well as more pointless (but not rude, crude) respo...
Pornography is produced to meet a very wide variety of tastes. Practically, no matter what you are into, somebody is making porn that you will like. B...
The elderly among us will remember the "Satanic Panic" of the 1970s-1990s. Satan was to those lunatics what being racist or fascist is to the current ...
Making money any way they can is as French as pate foie gras, as Irish as boiled potatoes, as Ugandan as matoke, and as at home in Thailand as pad Tha...
Sigh. I wasn't claiming that Nike was making a racist gesture. The article states that some people think that the Ross flag is racist, because some pe...
oops - meant to include the link. Here it is. "the 13-star model, a design associated with the Revolutionary War, the Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ro...
"The 'N' word" has never represented 'negro' or 'nègre', to the best of my knowledge. And 'nigger' was definitely a term of disparagement and scorn un...
Correct. Nike and patriotism have no connection. If Nike wanted to prove their patriotic fides, they could start manufacturing their shoes here instea...
Going by the headline in the New York Times which is, after all, the newspaper of record (so they say), the Betsy Ross flag was a design associated wi...
Actually, I doubt very much if Nike IN FACT was worried about anything other than the bottom line and how social media might affect their image and sa...
I don't expect to see a swastika on a Nike shoe or a VW car anytime in the near future. 250 years from now? It's quite possible that the swastika will...
I would first dismiss from discussion those who are psychotic and experiencing very negative hallucinations and those who have CD, MI, and other 'como...
A national health care program should not increase the individual outlay for health care, because most Americans are already paying premiums for healt...
Pleasure vs. pain is too reductionistic. It is probably the case that single celled organisms operate on so simple a basis, moving toward food and awa...
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