here’s life

So, I’m dredging through Treehugger, a trendy website about Green news, and I see this TED video and it mentions Polyface Farms in the caption. The presenter in the video spends a while talking about Salatin’s biosystem, and how he uses a group of species to work together to make a huge amount of food off of 100 acres. The presentation is about how plants do things to make us grow them, to make bees pollinate them, etc. We all do things to promote one species over another in an effort to promote our own species, and so the selection pressures favor certain behaviors. Rather than thinking that it’s people-versus-nature, we should notice–and build on–the fact that people and plants work together. That is how Joel works with the grass, cattle and other critters on Polyface Farm.

It makes me want to go back to raising animals. Maybe I’m forgetting all those mornings where I went out and walked in the chilly, wet, grass, dragging feed around. Maybe what I really want is have a “hobby farm”, and fund it with my real job. Or maybe I should follow in my family’s footsteps and get a small amount of land, raise as much as I can on it, then quit the industry and go farming full time. But, then I think of the bigger picture—am I getting stuck on a tiny aspect: growing things, and really I should be thinking about how I can help others, serve God, and make life better in general? Growing food would cause a symbiotic relationship with my customers who would get better value food than elsewhere (business sense says they would). And if I could figure out how to help others do the same thing, that would be a benefit to others. And if, while so helping others—-whether here, or somewhere that it rains more, or in Africa where there is just packed dirt—if I also help them discover God’s love for them, then my purpose in life would be complete.

But, before going and doing something drastic, like quitting my job and buying a farm and some cows..,,in India,,,maybe I should do what I can in my current situation—because just moving to Timbuktu won’t magically turn me into a great dirt-farming missionary. So, what is the next step? Do I get my own house in town so I have at least a little area to capture solar energy? Do I start doing more active evangelism? (more than just hoping they ask why I don’t strangle annoying people). Do I go haggle with the City to let me build a cheap house so that I can help everyone who needs one have an affordable place to live? Or do I just keep doing what I have to do, wash my dishes and laundry, clean up my house, and wait for Monday to go back to work? I could change the foodscape in my town, help dozens of people afford their own house, help a town in Senegal have clean water, and help transmit the Gospel by radio into closed countries.
But, I don’t really have time. Right now. What with work and all. And, I’ve got some webcomics to check back on before I go watch a movie.

So, I thought I’d go ahead and be politically active, and so I contacted my senator and asked that he support “Net Neutrality”. And, today I found a letter in my mailbox from Senator Brownback. Evidentally, senators don’t need stamps, they just have to sign in the corner where a stamp would be, and their content gets whisked to me. Cool.
So, the letter thanks me for my input, of course, and explains why government regulation of the free market would stifle creativity and innovation among the broadband access providers. The arguments I had heard for why these providers shouldn’t be allowed to charge content providers for quality service evidently do not appeal to all people. So, what do I believe? Are the proponents so-called “Net Neutrality” just anti-bussiness activists? Is S. Brownback being paid off? How do you find the truth when everything you hear is at least kinda true, and people you assume to be reasonable and intelligent are on both sides of the issue?

And Net Neutrality doesn’t really matter. Sure, if the pro-regulation people are right, before long the telecoms will decide what you see on the internet, by charging the people who have websites extra if they want their reader to be able to see their website in a timely manner. So it will be like having a couple dozen channels on TV, rather than millions of sites. And if the other side—that says just let the market, not the government, decide—if they are right, and don’t get their way, the internet will become stagnate, with telecoms not able to afford new fiber, and you will soon have slow service across the board. Those are the worse-case senarios.
But, there is an issue with not being able to tell which side of an issue is the correct one. And it is more important than freedom on the internet. This is matters of faith: what do you believe.

I am constanly exposed to different views on God, the universe and everything—the stuff that really matters. From people at work, to things I read, to people I talk to. And maybe this is a problem, but I try not to be the kind of person that is stereotyped as sticking with what they believe, even if it appears illogical, because that is how we’ve always believed, and we aren’t going to change now! Instead, I figure that if it is correct, it will be evident upon careful analysis. The problem is, rather than having a filter that just rejects everything that doesn’t line up exactly with my historic views, I have to logically evaluate everything I hear, to figure out if it is correct or not. And since I hear alot, this is hard.

And usually I am lazy. Too lazy to go check all the facts, so I absorb a view as “one way of looking at things that has some validity”. That’s a lot easier than picking it apart, and trying to decide if everything they claim as premises are actually true, to the extent that they are claiming, and if the interpretation they propose is actually logical. Instead, I grant the idea some credibility, which starts to cast reasonable doubt on my own beliefs. I have been led to believe that the burden of proof for my own beliefs lies with me—-that in order to be intelectually honest, I have to have logical, provable, testable evidence for what I believe before I can call for the same from someone who disagrees. But, with some of the most important things in life—”is there a God?”, “did life form by accident?”, “who says morality isn’t just a helpful ideal?”, “is this true, or do you just want it to be?”—on many issues, it is hard to get out your test tubes and multimeters and prove which view is correct.
Or maybe that’s another almost-truth that I’ve kinda given credance to.

So, maybe I just draw a line in the sand, and say, “This is what I believe, if I’m going to change, you’d better have some incontrovertible proof that this new view is correct!” But, wouldn’t that make me stick with things even if they aren’t true? I’ve been wrong before.

Maybe I need to do more in-depth analysis myself. I did a little research on Net Neutrality, and found out that it is more complex than it looks, and laws might not protect the consumer. We can’t make a law telling telecoms to “be nice”. This page seems to be a good view. But I’ve got no proof that what he says is true

net business opportunity: an add-on for myspace, facebook, blogger, del.icio.us, youtube, etc that pulls them all together into a common interface that is better and allows you to add content to any of them, and it self populates over them all. That way, you don’t stick with something that is mediocre because of a lock-in and all your friends are there—all your friends are everywhere. And it’s all connected. It’s Web 2.0^2. Who wants to help me?

Here’s the thing. Capitalism works, and it works well. But, companies have realized that they don’t have to be the best, or even very good, all they go to do is use advertizing to hook customers, and then set things up so they are stuck. Or, be big enough that customers really have no other choice. (how many cable providers can you access?) What lets this work is the sad truth: People put up with it! People don’t demand, or even ask for the option to easily move on to something different if something better comes along. They put their lives into myspace, knowing that if virb.com comes along, they can’t move—their information, their cool profile setup, their global network, it’s all stuck in myspace. And they don’t tell Tom “I’d like to have export options. And if you could make friend requests, bullitin board posts, and messages all RSS so I can just plug them into my new blog, that would be great. I’m not going to sign up for your 24/7 ad machine until I know I can leave when I want to.” If the companies had that kind of customers, the customers would be better served, because the companies would have to actually compete on quality of service. Not just compete on the ability to get that initial sign up.

So, your mission, is to become a customer that cares about quality, that cares about choice. Also, if you want to, let’s build a system that short circuits the corporate lock-in strategy. At least for online social networking. We’ll work on telcom’s later.

So, I’m at this friend’s house with some people from church, and we’ve bbq’ed some stuff, eaten, played a game, and some people are downstairs playing a bongo drum video game, others are upstairs, talking, and watching videos on the internet using the TV. Sure, it’s not the best way to spend an evening, but it has a lot more interaction, and therefore is better, than zoning out for an hour and a half watching a movie. It’s also better than dropping acid (even a face-shield and lab apron won’t fully protect you from the broken pyrex and splash damage!)
So, anyway, if you are watching Mario Bros. Matrix remixes, the advertizements that are targeting your demographic range from beer-ad graphic styles to outright softcore. This is a little awkward when it is a mixed-company church group. Granted, maybe it is a little more suprising to me since I never see ads. So, I repeatedly make comments about Firefox until I was probably getting annoying. I’m not trying to be a nuisence, I just think we can do better than this. He was using IE 7, which has tabs–and admirable leap for the browser monster. But the ads are so annoying, taking up screen space, causing information dilution, and just not necessary. So, get Firefox, install Adblock, and reclaim your web experience, making it safe(er) to watch a guy playing a guitar, using a spoon in his mouth for a slide.

I am thankful, in light of the date, that I do not have an ex-, and that I am free to come, and go, and live and work, following only the will of God, and not having to have every plan altered by the calculation of it’s effect on my significant other. I do realize thet that extra planning would be a joy, but I rejoice in the uncomplexity of my current life. When the rich, young ruler came to Jesus, He didn’t say “One thing you lack, go sell your possessions and buy an engagement ring and some chocolate…”

When people use the word “Luck” they mean lots of different things. One use is an arbitrary, chance-based idea of randomness. “You just got lucky!” they say, as you sink a three-pointer blindfolded. This is one way of saying, “Brownian movement and undefinable chaotic processes caused your results to fall several standard deviations from the center of the maxwell curve!” Another way that the word is used is to mean a points system that gets used up by preferred things happening–or is just measured by happy things happening. “Today is my lucky day! I think I’ll go buy some lottery tickets!” Maybe it’s based on what you do–like karma. “See a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.” People also refer to luck as the reasoning behind some complex set of cause-and-effect circumstances. “It’s bad luck to break a mirror, spill salt, juggle chainsaws, etc.”
Most of the time that Luck is invoked, it is in a way that totally ignores God’s role in our everyday lives. Now, granted, there is a lot that happens that doesn’t seem to have God’s direct, obvious input. It seems that God has set up the world to operate in certain non-deterministic ways. Your Statistics teacher would get annoyed if his sample of random coin tosses wasn’t a normal distribution of heads and tails, but God could intervene in the world that way if He wanted to. And He does intervene sometimes, and we call that a miracle—sometimes what we see is as simple as something other than the most likely thing happening.
Sometimes we think of a system of points, where you rack up luck, and then good things happen to you, or you don’t have luck, and then bad things happen to you. This is an abdication of personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions (we blame it on some undefinable “bad luck”) but it also forgets that God can rework how what we do effects what happens to us. Often God does this by changing something bad in a short-term, temporal sense, into a blessing in a more long-lasting sense. When you seem to be “down on your luck”, take a moment to ask God to make something pleasing to Him come of it—and then stop digging, look around and see how you got yourself into this hole. Stop blaming others for things that are your fault—and don’t go for the fatalistic cop-out of “I just have such bad luck!”
When it is some sort of cause-and-effect thing—where there is a valid reason that one thing would bring another—don’t call it luck. Walking under a ladder isn’t bad luck, but it may be a safety hazard, since a slight bump could send the ladder tumbling, and the bundle of shingles could land on you. Most of this category is all nonsense–superstitions and old wives tales. Often it would have to be enforced by some supernatural, but non-God and arbitrary entity. What natural properties of a black cat would bring unhappy circumstances to anyone walking perpendicular to it?

So, luck has no place, but it is often more handy to wish someone luck, than to affirm your feelings that because you care about them, you would be happier if the random, stochastic, un-calculable, complex processes would effect the outcomes of the events in question in a way that was beneficial to them.

On that note, I’m going to bed. I pray that God would give you true, lasting joy.