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The Free Talk Live BBS
Profile of Level 20 Anklebiter
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1
Serious Business / I need help on planning for my transition (TG stuff)
« on: October 23, 2011, 11:43:42 AM »
I know this is probably not the best forum for this since mine problem is very specific, but I guess the real questions I have here with regard to planning for my transition is mostly monetary in nature. In this case, I really need help figuring out my expenses, how to manage them, and what I can do to build up some savings for the transition (therapy, hormones, etc). So, any information, advice, websites, and the like would be appreciated.
2
General / Federal Reserve audit reveals 16 trillion dollars worth of undisclosed loans
« on: July 21, 2011, 10:24:31 PM »3
General / Why I am not a Voluntaryist.
« on: July 21, 2010, 12:54:02 PM »
I thought I finally out my true thoughts on the matter of human order rather than sitting on the sidelines anymore. As many here remember me as ladyattis, that early on I was a minarchist up until 2006ish where I began to study the work of Rothbard (and later on Mises, Bohm-Bawerk, Hayek, and etc). But as I started to explore other ideas, especially those from Asian thinkers (Confucius in particular) or Asian influenced thinkers (Schopenhauer) I've made a made a decidedly unusual conclusion: that voluntary social order itself is a contradiction.
I won't go in-depth in this post about why I made this conclusion, but I'll summarize. The base component of human societies is the family as the human species procreates sexually instead of asexually, thus males and females take on different biological roles that are essential to the continuation of the species. This biological version of the division of labor even extends to the couple's division of responsibilities. Men care for the physically challenging work, women focus on other tasks like child rearing. Sometimes the division of labor varies as I've seen in anthropological studies of certain ethnic minorities throughout the world, but the division regardless of how it is setup is always there. This is key because often such division plays to the biological strengths of each sex while shielding their given weaknesses. The more one examines this trait of playing to strengths and covering weaknesses in the human family, it becomes clear that none of this is ever chosen freely as much as a person is not free to fly to the moon on a whim. It takes some thought (although, some of this is quite spontaneous in its genesis) to organize even the smallest of families, thus it's common that decisions in a family are done by its elders (the parents themselves, or their parents). This is not done out of malice or wish to dominate, but that it is done out of the fact that those who have lived the longest have the best knowledge of what to do in most situations. If the family elders don't know, they oftener will seek out answers, and puzzle out the right questions to ask to clear up their own ignorance of a matter.
Anyways, all of this means that societies being built on top of the family unit then follow a similar division of labor where each institution stands out of either history (as accident) or necessity (as heuristic or principle). This includes the State. Now, this doesn't mean the State is in the latter category of necessity, but it does mean that those organs within the State may be necessary and wanted. And it may be to the best interests of all human beings to see those organs of necessity liberated from the State as to better their function, rather than demanding their demise at the whims of zealots (like Ian). It is this particular point of view that I take which I see as both qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from Voluntaryism as the very idea of a purely voluntary society stands in conflict with my view that some social institutions and orders are not only a matter of fact, but of a matter of fulfilling the very definition of a society. And more importantly, that these institutions and orders do not necessarily derive their power from authority, but rather from function, as it is authority (or what I like to call the dominance complex) is the seed of tyranny and not functionality.
This distinction between my view on society and that of Voluntaryism means more or less that I am not a Voluntaryist in any degree. And moreover, that I have views which are more aligned with that of left-libertarians and other anti-authoritarian philosophies. I'm not sure that Voluntaryists are a problem, but I do see their philosophy as fundamentally weak as it cannot integrate both the essential nature of the human family as the genesis of social order nor explain why something being purely voluntary is in itself sufficiently good.
TLDR-Version: Society has some properties of being not voluntary, therefore Voluntaryism is contradictory in the assumption of achieving a purely voluntary society.
I won't go in-depth in this post about why I made this conclusion, but I'll summarize. The base component of human societies is the family as the human species procreates sexually instead of asexually, thus males and females take on different biological roles that are essential to the continuation of the species. This biological version of the division of labor even extends to the couple's division of responsibilities. Men care for the physically challenging work, women focus on other tasks like child rearing. Sometimes the division of labor varies as I've seen in anthropological studies of certain ethnic minorities throughout the world, but the division regardless of how it is setup is always there. This is key because often such division plays to the biological strengths of each sex while shielding their given weaknesses. The more one examines this trait of playing to strengths and covering weaknesses in the human family, it becomes clear that none of this is ever chosen freely as much as a person is not free to fly to the moon on a whim. It takes some thought (although, some of this is quite spontaneous in its genesis) to organize even the smallest of families, thus it's common that decisions in a family are done by its elders (the parents themselves, or their parents). This is not done out of malice or wish to dominate, but that it is done out of the fact that those who have lived the longest have the best knowledge of what to do in most situations. If the family elders don't know, they oftener will seek out answers, and puzzle out the right questions to ask to clear up their own ignorance of a matter.
Anyways, all of this means that societies being built on top of the family unit then follow a similar division of labor where each institution stands out of either history (as accident) or necessity (as heuristic or principle). This includes the State. Now, this doesn't mean the State is in the latter category of necessity, but it does mean that those organs within the State may be necessary and wanted. And it may be to the best interests of all human beings to see those organs of necessity liberated from the State as to better their function, rather than demanding their demise at the whims of zealots (like Ian). It is this particular point of view that I take which I see as both qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from Voluntaryism as the very idea of a purely voluntary society stands in conflict with my view that some social institutions and orders are not only a matter of fact, but of a matter of fulfilling the very definition of a society. And more importantly, that these institutions and orders do not necessarily derive their power from authority, but rather from function, as it is authority (or what I like to call the dominance complex) is the seed of tyranny and not functionality.
This distinction between my view on society and that of Voluntaryism means more or less that I am not a Voluntaryist in any degree. And moreover, that I have views which are more aligned with that of left-libertarians and other anti-authoritarian philosophies. I'm not sure that Voluntaryists are a problem, but I do see their philosophy as fundamentally weak as it cannot integrate both the essential nature of the human family as the genesis of social order nor explain why something being purely voluntary is in itself sufficiently good.
TLDR-Version: Society has some properties of being not voluntary, therefore Voluntaryism is contradictory in the assumption of achieving a purely voluntary society.
4
General / The Babe Theory of Political Movements - Interesting
« on: March 12, 2010, 09:57:26 PM »
[youtube=425,350]<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wm9sqUY2SkI&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wm9sqUY2SkI&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>[/youtube]
I thought this video was quite interesting and it does raise an interesting point. What's your opinion on it?
I thought this video was quite interesting and it does raise an interesting point. What's your opinion on it?
5
General / [Soon-to-be graduate project] SquareOne: the SecondLife simulator done right.
« on: March 08, 2010, 10:28:18 PM »
Okay, I'm just posting it here until I feel up to putting together a wordpress blog to document the project properly.
First, what is SquareOne and what is SecondLife?
SecondLife is a product/service by Linden Lab which is more or less a 3d virtual world where content creation is relatively simple (note: relatively in terms of existing persistent environments or the lack thereof). It started out as a product that was suppose to be coupled with a 3d immersion rig until Philip Rosedale (founder of LL and former CTO of RealNetworks) realized that the rig wasn't practical or economical (to say the least). So they kept the core of what was then known as Linden World which became SecondLife. In SecondLife content comes in a few strict categories/types; animations, sounds, images (skins, clothes, and etc), primitives (aka prims), and scripts. Three of the five content types have to be uploaded (there's a special case for prims where sculpt maps are applied to them, thus the maps are images which must be uploaded too) and the other two can be created at no cost in game (prims and scripts). These are all uploaded to a server called an asset server. The actual world space is handled by a server called a simulator which contains a space at 256^3 in full (quite large until you realize most of the action happens below 180 meters on the Z axis, thus most space is wasted). Each simulator also handles the scripts which are attached to prims, thus these scripts are not compiled into machine code rather they're handled in bytecode form. Tying together the whole thing (aside from the login server frontend) is the grid, which is more or less a construct that allows simulators to talk to each other when a user moves from one to the other either those simulators adjacent or in a teleport across the entire grid space itself to a non-adjacent simulator. There is also a physics engine which is handling the activity of physical objects and actions on its side of the server/client relationship. And there's one other piece to this puzzle which handles microtransactions via their virtual currency called a Linden (L$), but its functionality bears no importance to the actual instant action of content and users in the simulator which is in the grid space.
Now, this all seems to work in general, but there are critical flaws in the design of SecondLife which even Linden Lab (corporation that owns this product/service). The first one is latency. Latency is often caused by many problems which tend to crop up together: too many users per simulator, too many scripts per simulator, and too many requests to an asset server from the same (or other) users. Pretty much this makes the architecture very brittle in its activity under heavy loads. At most, a single simulator can hold 40 users concurrently, but this is done with high latency and many failures of asset server requests. Even if there's not many users near that limit other things can trigger failures of simulators: physics. Physics is very hard on many computers, especially when there's many objects being acted upon at once like an explosion or an avalanche. And the asset server itself can simply fail to send requested content in a timely fashion too either due to too many user requests or due to its implementation in UDP (rather than TCP) for the transport layer activity. All this means is that the server side of SecondLife is quite a confusing mess of trouble due to latency alone. Other issues can arise such as lost/corrupt assets or scripts running amok due to a scripting language change by the developers, but these are oddly the rarest of the failures of the serverside part of SecondLife. I won't discuss the clientside issues of SecondLife as my project focuses specifically on the serverside issues and reimplementations.
Second, what is SquareOne? It's the name of the project in which I propose to reimplement the SecondLife server architecture in a manner that is more sane and practical for the existing technology as well as it will be future technology tolerant as opposed to how it is implemented today in its haphazard form. The term SquareOne came to mind when discussing this project with a friend and whether or not I should use the OpenSimulator code as my base which we both agreed that OpenSimulator was a buggier mess than SecondLife's own implementation. So you can see I am literally reimplementing SecondLife from 'square one.'
What are going to be the differences between SecondLife simulators and SquareOne simulators?
SquareOne servers will be space and content agnostic. That means you can design your public space in whatever dimensions you wish; however large or small. It also means whatever you create as content both as objects in the space or as behavior for those objects (as scripts) will not be handled directly by the server, but rather by the clients. This will be possible by the use of templates (implemented in XML) to tell clients what they are receiving and how they are suppose to behave or be displayed. Also in SquareOne no space will exist without a user. All spaces in SquareOne will be handled by users directly as private (client side only) or shared (cross client via client interactions) spaces or indirectly as a public space (persistent user space offloaded to a server in lieu of the user). This means that all content will have a user responsible to it (or even many users). All of this means that the server simply handles three basic tasks: authentication of users (and their content access), routing users templates for their clients to load (as to define how the space is to be presented), and to assign users to each other per the space they share (public space).
Another key difference between SecondLife simulators and SquareOne simulators will be the matter of distributed network computing via its implementation in Stackless Python. Which will mean that many physical servers can be assigned to any public space as needed rather than the current situation where classes of simulators are assigned either a single core of a rack or N number of simulators per core as Linden Lab does today. In this context, this means load can be balanced more fairly in a SquareOne implementation versus a SecondLife implementation (where even a class 7 simulator can have a core all by itself even if it doesn't utilize a significant portion of its purchased CPU time). What this meas for SquareOne is that it is designed in such a way that can utilize resources more properly and in a manner that can exploit maturing models of content distribution (web caching, cloud storage, and etc).
To be continued...
First, what is SquareOne and what is SecondLife?
SecondLife is a product/service by Linden Lab which is more or less a 3d virtual world where content creation is relatively simple (note: relatively in terms of existing persistent environments or the lack thereof). It started out as a product that was suppose to be coupled with a 3d immersion rig until Philip Rosedale (founder of LL and former CTO of RealNetworks) realized that the rig wasn't practical or economical (to say the least). So they kept the core of what was then known as Linden World which became SecondLife. In SecondLife content comes in a few strict categories/types; animations, sounds, images (skins, clothes, and etc), primitives (aka prims), and scripts. Three of the five content types have to be uploaded (there's a special case for prims where sculpt maps are applied to them, thus the maps are images which must be uploaded too) and the other two can be created at no cost in game (prims and scripts). These are all uploaded to a server called an asset server. The actual world space is handled by a server called a simulator which contains a space at 256^3 in full (quite large until you realize most of the action happens below 180 meters on the Z axis, thus most space is wasted). Each simulator also handles the scripts which are attached to prims, thus these scripts are not compiled into machine code rather they're handled in bytecode form. Tying together the whole thing (aside from the login server frontend) is the grid, which is more or less a construct that allows simulators to talk to each other when a user moves from one to the other either those simulators adjacent or in a teleport across the entire grid space itself to a non-adjacent simulator. There is also a physics engine which is handling the activity of physical objects and actions on its side of the server/client relationship. And there's one other piece to this puzzle which handles microtransactions via their virtual currency called a Linden (L$), but its functionality bears no importance to the actual instant action of content and users in the simulator which is in the grid space.
Now, this all seems to work in general, but there are critical flaws in the design of SecondLife which even Linden Lab (corporation that owns this product/service). The first one is latency. Latency is often caused by many problems which tend to crop up together: too many users per simulator, too many scripts per simulator, and too many requests to an asset server from the same (or other) users. Pretty much this makes the architecture very brittle in its activity under heavy loads. At most, a single simulator can hold 40 users concurrently, but this is done with high latency and many failures of asset server requests. Even if there's not many users near that limit other things can trigger failures of simulators: physics. Physics is very hard on many computers, especially when there's many objects being acted upon at once like an explosion or an avalanche. And the asset server itself can simply fail to send requested content in a timely fashion too either due to too many user requests or due to its implementation in UDP (rather than TCP) for the transport layer activity. All this means is that the server side of SecondLife is quite a confusing mess of trouble due to latency alone. Other issues can arise such as lost/corrupt assets or scripts running amok due to a scripting language change by the developers, but these are oddly the rarest of the failures of the serverside part of SecondLife. I won't discuss the clientside issues of SecondLife as my project focuses specifically on the serverside issues and reimplementations.
Second, what is SquareOne? It's the name of the project in which I propose to reimplement the SecondLife server architecture in a manner that is more sane and practical for the existing technology as well as it will be future technology tolerant as opposed to how it is implemented today in its haphazard form. The term SquareOne came to mind when discussing this project with a friend and whether or not I should use the OpenSimulator code as my base which we both agreed that OpenSimulator was a buggier mess than SecondLife's own implementation. So you can see I am literally reimplementing SecondLife from 'square one.'
What are going to be the differences between SecondLife simulators and SquareOne simulators?
SquareOne servers will be space and content agnostic. That means you can design your public space in whatever dimensions you wish; however large or small. It also means whatever you create as content both as objects in the space or as behavior for those objects (as scripts) will not be handled directly by the server, but rather by the clients. This will be possible by the use of templates (implemented in XML) to tell clients what they are receiving and how they are suppose to behave or be displayed. Also in SquareOne no space will exist without a user. All spaces in SquareOne will be handled by users directly as private (client side only) or shared (cross client via client interactions) spaces or indirectly as a public space (persistent user space offloaded to a server in lieu of the user). This means that all content will have a user responsible to it (or even many users). All of this means that the server simply handles three basic tasks: authentication of users (and their content access), routing users templates for their clients to load (as to define how the space is to be presented), and to assign users to each other per the space they share (public space).
Another key difference between SecondLife simulators and SquareOne simulators will be the matter of distributed network computing via its implementation in Stackless Python. Which will mean that many physical servers can be assigned to any public space as needed rather than the current situation where classes of simulators are assigned either a single core of a rack or N number of simulators per core as Linden Lab does today. In this context, this means load can be balanced more fairly in a SquareOne implementation versus a SecondLife implementation (where even a class 7 simulator can have a core all by itself even if it doesn't utilize a significant portion of its purchased CPU time). What this meas for SquareOne is that it is designed in such a way that can utilize resources more properly and in a manner that can exploit maturing models of content distribution (web caching, cloud storage, and etc).
To be continued...
6
General / Attis' Brainstorm Sessions (aka Bullshit Sessions) for Liberty(tm)!
« on: February 25, 2010, 11:55:58 AM »
Anyways, sorry for the crass title of the thread, but I wanted to make it clear that most of what I will post in here is either incomplete or rubbish, but it's focused on tossing around ideas on the matter of promoting personal liberty (and responsibility).
My first idea is to try to get the idea of liberty (from a naturalistic/metaphysical position) on the minds of scientists and scholars. Why do I think it's important to focus on the literati/intellectuals is the fact that these folks make up the bulk of textbook authors, thus have a direct line to every student from elementary to college (under/graduate) in the country (and possibly the world to a lesser extent).
One particular area I think that should be focused upon is the life sciences because it's here where the ideas of Malthus got applied to biological evolution (aka natural selection). It's here where often many discoveries on living things and the systems they make up (environment, themselves, and other species) seem to justify a previously assumed wrong position in economics (such as laissez faire positions).
To a lesser extent, I think physicists should be considered as valid targets for persuasion too because many of their own theories suggest or justify emergent order sans Prime Mover, thus their ideas may have a wider range of impact than the life sciences (even though their work has rarely had any interdisciplinary interactions).
Anyways, that's my first proposal, see what you make of it, see what you can topple or justify.
Peace.
My first idea is to try to get the idea of liberty (from a naturalistic/metaphysical position) on the minds of scientists and scholars. Why do I think it's important to focus on the literati/intellectuals is the fact that these folks make up the bulk of textbook authors, thus have a direct line to every student from elementary to college (under/graduate) in the country (and possibly the world to a lesser extent).
One particular area I think that should be focused upon is the life sciences because it's here where the ideas of Malthus got applied to biological evolution (aka natural selection). It's here where often many discoveries on living things and the systems they make up (environment, themselves, and other species) seem to justify a previously assumed wrong position in economics (such as laissez faire positions).
To a lesser extent, I think physicists should be considered as valid targets for persuasion too because many of their own theories suggest or justify emergent order sans Prime Mover, thus their ideas may have a wider range of impact than the life sciences (even though their work has rarely had any interdisciplinary interactions).
Anyways, that's my first proposal, see what you make of it, see what you can topple or justify.
Peace.
7
General / Obama Joker Poster.. Not astroturf?
« on: August 04, 2009, 02:22:31 PM »
Apparently it may not be fake, here's the original poster.
http://www.theresistancemanifesto.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=79&Itemid=88
http://www.theresistancemanifesto.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=79&Itemid=88
8
General / How do you fight a bad idea with a good idea?
« on: November 25, 2008, 12:39:58 AM »
Just a question, because I think most of us here think that liberty in general is a good idea, so tyranny conversely is a bad idea. Now, how do you fight the bad idea? Any hints, clues, and/or tips?
9
The Polling Pit / Abortion is Murder?
« on: October 27, 2008, 01:14:49 PM »
Semi-serious poll. Mostly I want to see what people think in their posts. Vote what you feel is the most funny or congruegent (or both) with your values.
10
The Polling Pit / Civil Disobedience effectivness?
« on: October 07, 2008, 08:52:22 PM »
I only ask this question because I believe that fundamentally the majority of Americans don't give a flying flip whether 10,000 Lauren Canarios live or die in their action of civil disobedience so long as it doesn't cost them their way of life. What can a CivDis'er do when no one feels for them nor thinks of them?
11
The Polling Pit / What should we do to shield our wealth from the coming currency collapse?
« on: October 06, 2008, 03:40:41 PM »
If there's more options you think should be add to the poll, feel free to post before voting.
12
The Polling Pit / Ian is fracking nuts!
« on: September 27, 2008, 01:48:17 PM »
In light of last night's show when Ian yet again went off the deep end calling a small-time judge a control freak I have to wonder if his move to NH has only deepened his insanity, but I want to ask you all how nutty his the lawn dart these days?
13
The Polling Pit / Moral obligations and debts.
« on: September 19, 2008, 01:04:44 PM »
Choose, but choose wisely. 
14
The Polling Pit / Lets play 'Karnak.'
« on: August 05, 2008, 08:26:36 PM »
I thought this would be a nice game to play with respect to what we know and especially what we don't about the future. If you can come up with more options please offer them.
If you can come up with more options please offer them.
15
The Polling Pit / What is best in life?
« on: August 05, 2008, 07:57:31 AM »
It's just a random thought stuck in my head this morning.
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