This is a Virtual Reality (VR), Viewer
A complicated thing that straps on your head, and puts a miniature TV in front of your eyes.
It comes with a miniature instruction book full of warnings about its dangers.
The main danger I can see, is that it does not work. You need a personal instructor for you and only you and your thing.
In large parts of the world. fighting is going on with few people knowing what they are fighting over.
Someone should step in and make a map of what they are fighting over. And keep making maps as long as they show what is going on, who is fighting who.
This could be supplemented by furnishing the combatants with phones so they can talk to each other easily (and we could listen to these conversations easily). This would not be cheap, but would be less expensive than war.
A helper is someone who helps you when you need them. We could not get along without them.
They will put you in an ambulance and take you to a hospital. Where professional helpers will know what to do with you.
A friend is someone who likes you, regardless of your other qualities - like your dog.
Ray is my helper, and takes me in his car once a week to Cartago, where I can get my packages that are flown in from Miami, that was shipped from Amazon.
He can speak Spanish, which is a big help. And provides two Internet connections to our house.
Since the closing days of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers, pundits, international relations scholars, and policy analysts have argued that great-power war is a relic of a bygone age. In 1986, the historian John Lewis Gaddis termed the post–World War II era a “Long Peace” because the Soviet Union and the United States had not come to blows. A few years later, the political scientist John Mueller suggested that changing norms had made great-power conflict obsolete. By 2011, the psychologist Steven Pinker was arguing that the Long Peace had morphed into a “New Peace,” marked by a generalized decrease of violence in human affairs.
I have been trying to interest my family in Microsoft Teams. Bur religious people that they are, they are not interested. Teamwork does not apply to Religion. Why?
Because Religion is hierarchical, with its important people and unimportant people. Group decisions cannot be made there. They know they should be able to do make decisions demographically. but they also know they cannot and should not.
In fact, this applies to most social situations. Equality does not apply there, instead inequality. usually vast inequality. And this is what people feel comfortable with.
This is what is behind Business, and in our time, Startups.
The simplest way of doing this was slavery, the system that ran the ancient world. And much later, the plantation world. This is now considered morally reprehensible because it does not allow the Individual to develop fully.
Doing this now is difficult. because people have to be convinced that joining you would be to their advantage. They are not going to give away their power easily.
In some cases, people arrive in power accidentally, and manage to perpetuate their power, as dictators. This may or may not last.
This is a huge understatement, but one we ignore with all our strength.
We look around us and see nothing but people, how can we be a failure?
Indeed, if there were fewer of us, we would be more successful. We pour gasoline into our cars, which pump out all kinds of nasties. But we say "This is not a problem!"
Are both artificial sweeteners. They are now packaged together, in little packets
I add them to my espresso coffee. And sometimes, to make it extra tasty, I add a little Irish Cream.
They will love it, and ask for more. Not always, but usually.
A good example of this was Mormonism. Its leader, Joseph Smith, exploited his followers endlessly. When he was killed by a furious mab, he was replaced by Brigham Young, who worked his people even harder, and was more successful.
In our time, people are abused in their Office, and they can see nothing wrong with that.
Our values have become reversed, and we have not noticed this.
This probably was caused by the Industrial Revolution, a big deal that was followed by another big deal: the Computer.
Doctor John, as he was universally referred to, was John G. Neihardt a man of many talents, including erotic ones (he had a beautiful, talented wife), and taught at the U of Missouri.
I attended that institution in the Sixties and fell under his spell. And I recently downloaded some of his writings, including Audible books.
He would teach during the winter, but move to an Indian reservation in the summer, where his girls would ride horses with the Indian boys. Girls have strong thighs, and they can grip a bareback horse tightly.
l was here he met Black Elk, an Indian Medicine man, who did not speak English or cut his hair. He would tell Nheeihardt the story of his life, speaking thru an interpreter, and then Neihadt, back in his cabin, would type up what he remembered.
It became his best-seller and is still being sold today.
They just chew their food a couple of times and swallow it without tasting it.
Very efficient. But not good for their body.
They only use their mouth for talking, for telling other people what to do, right now.
The move from a phone to a smartphone was natural, we just added the Internet, and most folks never noticed the difference. Calling next door or across the world, what's the difference?
But using your watch to check your pulse rate? Not so exciting. Whatever it is, it's got to be exciting and it's got to be simple, no matter what happens in the background.
That''s the whole point of progress, to make everything seem simple, whether it is or not.
If it's complicated (as most things are) todays people will not notice it. Most of what's going on will not be noticed.
Take a look at this course listing for Coursera: Coursera Link.
It's enough to keep anyone busy for a while. But most people will not even try.
Even a sniff of so much learning makes them nervous. seseser
Both of these companies want you in bed with them.
Which is totally confusing to most Computer users, who have no idea where they are.
One of these users is me, who has Google laptops (Chromebooks) and Microsoft laptops (Windows 10).
They both use the same ID (my email address) but different passwords.
This is not right, they want me to be smarter than I am.
Sorry guys, this problem is yours, not mine.
It has made us more like it. It has no objection to learning more. when we often reach a limit.
Altho this has been strongly resisted, since we feel the computer is a foreign power.
I will make this personal - how has the computer affected me?
This is an easier question to answer - it changed my source of income. The economy I live in.
I graduated as an Electronic Engineer from the U of Illinois in 1959. Which meant I knew a lot about Vacuum Tubes.
I am sitting now in front of my laptop, which does not have a single tube in it. But is connected, via the Internet, to billions of other computers, mainly smartphones.
Has my life changed? So much so, I can hardly recognize myself. I keep asking "What am I?" But getting no clear answer.
Because much of me, has become mixed up with the Computer.
I now have to ask myself "How did this happen?" and "What happened?"
Ar least they can me. Maybe I take them too seriously and expect them to work right.
Which they often do not.
My solution? I add them to the trash.
I come from a religious family, so I know what I am talking about.
I just went thru an email discussion with a cousin of mine, and I was shocked to find she had distorted it to fit her religious needs.
Our family belonged to the RLDS church, the second-largest Mormon church. It has since become the Community of Christ church, which involved a number of changes.
It decided it needed a Temple, and built a strange-looking one. And then found they had no use for it.
In the past, this problem would have been resolved by the Church's Prophet - who would have asked God for an answer. Which would have been written down, and added to the Church's sacred literature.
But this time, it decided to ask the Church members for an answer. They had none.
Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Teams primarily competes with the similar service Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration.[7] Teams is replacing other Microsoft-operated business messaging and collaboration platforms, including Skype for Business and Microsoft Classroom.
Scan thru this article and see what you can get here.
I have spent most of the morning doing this. Working with Amazon, Gmail, and Aeropost.
Amazon is the worst, it has passwords all over the place, and doesn't seem to mind making life hard for you.
This is part of the decline of the RLDS church. Which had a huge effect on church members, altho they were usually not aware of it.
I had a cousin, Florence, who was an example of this. As the RLDS church became the Community of Christ church, they erected a Temple that was a round, spiral structure. It did not look like Temple to most people. Then they realized something even more shocking: they had no use for this building.
So they set up a committee, to find a Mission for the Temple. I attended a branch of the Church in Washinton, DC, when this we being done. We stood in a circle, holding hands, while we waited for an answer. It felt good, but no answer came.
I just now realized this, and I am 83 years old.
I was born in 1936, during the depths of the Depression. People kept having babies, whether they could afford them or not.
I was born in Ft. Madison, Iowa, a Railroad town, that had plenty of cheap housing for its workers. My father's mother owned one of these houses that she allowed my parents to live in for free.
The last time I was in Ft. Madison (for a family reunion) a cousin of mine took us on a tour of the West End, where we had lived. The little house I was born in was gone, torn down for its timber.
This causes a problem because China wants the same thing. And it has plenty of American Money to do this.
The US could be reasonable, and decide there were some parts of the world (such as Afghanistan) it did not want. But reasonableness is not part of the Globalization game. It wants everything or nothing.
And it will kill to get it.
People have become stupid, in politics, and Computers might be one reason for this.
One reason is the Internet, which has made a global economy possible. This is a good thing for business, but not so good for people, as individuals. Who have been turned into Consumers, with little power of thought. They have become Stupid.
To put this another way: People, with their limited brainpower, are forced to compete with Computers, with their powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI).
This has become worse with the advent of the Computer Cloud, which has made Computer services cheaper than ever.
This would not be a problem if people understood this. But usually, they do not, and do not want to. The Global Economy has given them a lot, and they don't want that taken away.
This reasoning is unconscious but powerful.
The craziest things are happening in Georgia, and this is the latest one.
I found this entertaining, which means you will not be interested in it.
The Times calls it "The 31-day campaign against QAnon." The reporting is excellent.
But first I must explain the Rise of this church, which happened because of the death of its founder Joseph Smith in 1844, who wrote the Book of Mormon.
When he died, there were so many bullets in his corpse, they could hardly pick him up to put him in his coffin, to carry him back to Nauvoo, Illinois.
His wife, Emma, did not explain to her little boys what had been the cause of his death. And the oldest one, Joseph Smith III, assumed all his life that his father was innocent of all wrongs, which was hardly true.
Emma did not follow Brigham Young to Utah, but remained in Nauvoo, with her sons.
Meanwhile, another church had been forming in Northern Illiinois of LDS members, who called themselves RLDS. They needed a Religious leader and Joseph Smith III joined them, in this capacity, but remained in Nauvoo, with his family, for a while.
But the Church insisted that he move to join them, in Plano, Illinois.
The RLDS then bought land in Southern Iowa, and built a town on it, they called Lamoni.
JS III then concentred (successfully) on making Lamoni his town. And on making the RLDS church his church. What happened to the original RLDS members I do not know.
He moved the Church to Independence, Missouri, started a building program, and died there.
Later in the 20th Century, many changes happened, and the Church became the Community of Christ church.
These changes were complicated and I cannot say much about them, except the RLDS church was no more.
Where it is sold should make no difference, but I am here to tell you - it sure does.
I bought it at a Walmart in Costa Rica, but its software is broken beyond repair, right out of the box.
Anything made Up North always asks you if everything is working all right, during an install.
This thing does not. It could be easily fixed, but this would mean recognition of a class of people, that as far as Microsoft is concerned, does not exist.
Gee, I hate to sound optimistic, but I can urge you to read this.
I live in tiny Costa Rica, but it is part of Latin America, and shares many of its problems - and those of the US as well.
Many Americans move here, in search of a better life. But after a few years they go back. America's problems are their problems, and they cannot live without them.
I got this from the book What Longfellow Heard.
He need not tell us, he is a young man in love, traveling on the Contenant with his young wife, who has jusr found she is pregnant. This was before electricity and their room was dark.
A miscarraige on a first prenancy is not uncommon, but they do not know that. She thought she was dying, and made quite a racket. Enough to waken rhe whole hotel, which sent a doctor to their room.
This is only part of the story, which I urge you to read for yourself.
And this situation is getting worse as our population increases.
If asked about this, people will say "Maybe so, but I don't want to think about it." They are being irrresponsible, and pretending they are not important to the way the earth is developing.
How is it developing? Not so good, but with one exception, the Computer, which seems to be doing fine.
This bothers people, how can it be doing fine, when people are not? I want to examine this question.
This is part of a larger problem: how can our technologies (or Tech) improve, when we are not?
You may say "Because we are animals, and they are not. We have to take time off to reproduce and develop, Once they are built (by us) rhey just run, as we tell them to do." They do not have to think, which causes us lots of problems.
But for Human Life to happen, we have to think - I think. If we stop thinking, we end up making some huge mistakes. As we have done many times in the past.
"But we have recovered many times," you will say. But it is not obvious now, how we can, when much of the world is under water.
Living in Costa Rica, as I do, but shopping at Amazon and Walmart, I get hit by this every day.
I have a workaround in the form of Aerupost, a company that owns a building in Miami that is a warehouse, where American companies can ship their goods. It then flies them all over the world, pays import duties, and delivers them to their customers.
The Rich and Powerful in every country get together periodically and decide how much to tax everyone else. If they tax rhen too much, ihis is bad for their retail businesses that they also own.
To bring Women's clothing from the US into Costa Rica, for example, you double the price. This is good for anyone with a sewing machine in Costa Rica, who can copy the latest fashions.
Marielos (who I used to live with) could do this, and employed two women full-time, copying clothing from her pattern book. Her company lived on the edge of the law: as long as it was small, the Big Guys did not bother her.
I have had a variety of mental problems, and this has been one of the worst. I knew something was wrong, and badly wrong, bur I didn't know what it was. It didn't just feel mental, but also physical.
Our modern lifestyle has something to do with it. We are demanding too much of our bodies and minds, and they get badly out of kilter.
Like many other people, I have been attracted to the Computer and its Software. And I have written about this a lot. This began in the Eighties and Nineties, and with the arrival of the Internet, it went crazy, and produced a boom, and then a bust.
It is now beginning to settle down, and become more humane, but this has taken awhile (about forty years, in fact). And meanwhile, most people have become completely confused and irresponsible.
We should be screaming "All this is too much!" But we have gone crazy instead, and are incapable of realizing this craziness. How could we understand something that has never happened to us before?
We can criticize Trump easily enough, but not the people who elected him (most of the nation). This would be a big job, one that we do not want to tackle.
These have always been strange bedfellows. And with the hospitalization of Trump, they have become even stranger.
With every press release, you wonder who is talking.
This was written 5 days ago, and and is just now seeing the light of day. I recommend you read it.
Both companies leverage vast amounts of data for unprecedented surveillance.
Not an easy read.
I was visiting with a friend yesterday when she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was learning the Python programming language. "What is that good for?" she asked.
I should have explained that any programming language could be used to do many things, but I know from experience, that most people cannot understand how this works. How information has to be digitized before it can be processed by a computer, but this happens very fast.
Their minds work much like any animal's, and it cannot understand any other way. They know if they could understand this other way, and think like a Programmer, they could make a lot more money. But they cannot cross this gap.
I was surprised to find Baileys stocked in my local liquor store.
My taste for coffee changes frequently, depending on the brand of coffee. But this morning Britt's Espresso coffee, with Splenda and Baileys, tastes just right.
It's a weird combination of drugs, but perfectly legal.
The US got its culture from the UK, but now the Culture flow has reversed. All the world now wants American popular culture - altho Chinese goodies are close behind.
The British PM just another child by a woman not married to him.
I should be overjoyed at this development.= but I am not. I feel I am being used, and that does not feel right.
To cope with this I have to become another person, someone asexual. not heterosexual or homosexual. More like my father. Who could father children (much to the satisfaction of my mother) but once that was done he slept in another bedroom.
This is how the Mormons felt about themselves, in the 19th Century. And many of their neighbors felt the same way, Every town had its own militia (with cannons) and was often at war with other towns.
This sounds like Latin America (or the Middle East) does't It?
Obvious, huh? But not so obvious to many people, who insist on doing things the wrong way. The way they think they should work. This is especially true in Religion.
The world consists of many black boxes, where the working inside them is hidden from view. Science (including Computer Science) consists on discovering how they work.
The latest techniques for this are called Machine Learning (or Data Science). Where people program computers to look inside these boxes. People have to be trained also to work with their Computers in doing this.
There are many online courses to help them, and they are cheap.
Stupid in the Center, where it really counts.
This combination can be hard to deal with, but is very common, because it is so useful, in a negative way. It makes it difficult for those you are talking to, to think.
Once they begin to understand what is going on, you vanish.
This is easy if your conversation is online. I used to have a friend I emailed frequently with. Then he stopped answering my emails, so I started calling him on weekends. Then he stopped answering my calls. When someone decides to disappear, believe me, they disappear.
I have another title for this posting: Disappear! It's easy.
This was proven by the last debate, that Trump easily dominated.
I once knew a man involved in the Congression Reseach Service publications, which publish every word uttered on the floor of Congress.
He said they had a good laugh, reading some of the things that were said.
The debates in the Congressional Congress (1774-1778) were kept secret, until they were written down, and sent to the States for ratification.
The biggest advantage is obvious: you will be like everyone else.
We are very social critters, and we do most of our learning by imitating others.
This works: any three-year-old child can learn any language effortlessly. And some languages, are so complicated, adults cannot learn them. This even applies to Computer languages, where language systems are updated frequently.
We are not only stupid, we have to prove we are stupid, and make other people stupid also. This happens in any office, including the offices of most Computer companies.
I have been in these Computer companies, in Southern California and Silicon Valley. And have been watching how most people use their products.
I see one thing, over and over: Mass Stupidity.
The first woman in your life is always your mother. And how you handle that relationship determines how you handle the rest of your life.
For a woman, the next most important relationship is a man: her husband. For a man, his wife. These are difficult relationships and often fail. Homosexual relationships are something I cannot help you with, but it seems to me, some consistency is important here.
Your third relationship is with yourself, which is difficult because you are so damn difficult. One of your problems is straying focussed on yourself. Meditation helps, but can only help.
So far from God, and ao close to America!
Drugs flow North across the border, and guns flow South, in about equal quantities.
Meanwhile, people like my sister, who lives close to the border, are dodging the bullets.
It did not use to be this way. My family used to drive from Illinois to Acapulco every year-end vacation to enjoy the beaches and the cheap motels.
As I read through the messages on my laptop this morning, I could not escape the feeling that something was terribly wrong with our world.
This is the first thing we have to face: something is terribly wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but terribly wrong. What is it?
It is probably a complex of many forces, and it is our job to tackle the worst of them. Agreed?
Probably not. Most people think we should not tackle our big problems, but content ourselves with the small ones. The big ones are too dangerous.
I think one of the big ones is a reversal of values. This can happen easily and has a huge impact. We end up liking bad things and hating good things. Thinking we are doing just the opposite.
The first thing we have to do is admit this is possible. We have been taught that all of the people cannot be wrong all of the time. Maybe so, but if a certain percentage is wrong, a tipping point is reached, where most become wrong. We have to admit this a possibility.
And has already happened.
