Saturday, December 12, 2009

NoFun™ Money

I recently had a conversation in which someone was basically saying that people who handed out small change to beggers on the street were doing society a diservice:
"Take as a simple example the act of giving a panhandler spare change. While this charitable act may seem noble oir compassionate, from a broader perspective it probably hurts society. By giving a panhandler change, s/he is incentivized to remain unproductive. Furthermore, others are disincentivized: the hourly wage of panhandling approaches the hourly wage of menial work, which is often more unpleasant. Since panhandling produces no value, the reward for the production of value falls off at the low end."
They said.

A couple of points with this.

1) "Since panhandling produces no value"

Panhandling does produce value. Your average begger lives right on the line of survival. He or she is not panhandling for kicks and giggles but simply to get through another day. Beggers, upon hearing that charity has been made illegal aren't just gonna curl up and say "Gee, okay, I'll jus' go chuck myself under a bus." Take away petty charity and what's left..? Petty crime. And petty crime is a pain in the arse. Policemen cost money, so do courts. So does social disruption to local business and residents in areas where once beggers/now malingerers frequent.

Basically, everyday charity is a distrbuted and voluntary tax which prevents a certain demographic of any city from turning into petty criminals.

They also serve as negative examples - bogeymen for the modern times. "Hey lil' Johnny, you do your homework now, or you might end up sitting on the kerb with no front teeth and shit in your pants." A useful social function.

2) "Furthermore, others are disincentivized: the hourly wage of panhandling approaches the hourly wage of menial work, which is often more unpleasant."

I dunno, standing around all day in bad shoes, with everyone wishing you would just fuck off and die, in the rain maybe, or in the cold, with screw all to look forward to, zero prospects and probably no girlfriend, a grumbling belly and bad teeth sounds pretty unpleasent to me. Work, however grindingly tedious and meaninglessly repetitive, does carry an ounce or two of honour and social acceptence along with it. Also the comfort of predictable routines, something to plan around. Externalities. It's not all about money.

Maybe you mean that fabled begger who actually has money bursting out of the seams of his or her matress, a nice house in the burbs and two peachy-faced kids going to college..? There's one in every city or so I've heard. The one near us has a mercedes he keeps in a garage for special days, and pearly porcelain teeth he keeps carefully stained during the week, just for appearances.

I don't think it's the money that people get hung up on but the alleged fact that a begger, by sitting on his butt, can earn enough to have a lifestyle pretty much indistinguishable from that of a menial worker in a more reputable profession.

Which I agree, is not a good thing.

So. A fun idea I had. Rather than abolish or otherwise obstruct everyday charity, perhaps we should change the lifestyle a begger can buy with the income he or she derives from begging.

Ta-da:No-Fun Money™

...Continued...

Monday, March 09, 2009

The Ducks of Meaning.

Hmm. Hokay, I want to try to describe how 'meaning' can be ascribed to a physical point located on a neural network. There is nothing special about the particular neurons there, they are all indistinguishable to the eye. They don't have "Hi I'm your concept of fashion" tattooed on their membranes. So why does one neurone-body mean "affable" and another mean "snot"..?

I want you to imagine a pool of still, unrippled water. The edge of the pool is populated by specially trained ducks. Each has a pebble to push in with its beak. They all have electrodes wired to their butts. All these wires coil away into the back of our volunteer for the evening - Bill's - head. Each wire is connected to parts of Bill's sensory sytems - His visual centre, his tactile centre etc. A very cute nurse is handing things to Bill for him to percieve, and every once in a while wiggling her hips for no reason in particular. Let's call her Miranda. And make her a blonde-bombshell.
...Continued...

Sunday, March 08, 2009

The Carrier and the Content.

AMOEBA, another marvel of engineering, but this time one not aspiring toward being alive. Now we can write our names upon the water, and not be overly Keatsian about it. Anyway. What is this doing here..? Well, it illustrates my ideas about the carrier and the content very well.

In the last post I talked about a TV:
"None of the components of a TV are individually alive. But, together, in orchestra, they support a picture, a story, the content of which has very little to do with the mechanics of the device supporting it."
But this device - comprising about 50 small wave generators acting on a common medium to form a standing wave of meaningful content - acts as a much better analogy to our own situation.
...Continued...

Friday, February 27, 2009

Definitions of life.

Anyone being overly-flexible with the concept of 'life' and 'what is living' really pisses me off.

It's like the word: 'beautiful'. Everyone is beautiful these days. They all have inner beauty or outer beauty or spiritual beauty, or some kind of hidden beauty that no-one can understand etc. etc. etc. It's bull. Some people, in fact a very great many, many people, are just true-blue, butt-awful ugly.
...Continued...

Monday, February 16, 2009

Visualising Superposition and Entangled Pairs.

Dunno about you but quantum theory makes my head spin.

Sometimes it helps to get the old imagination working, and try to visualize things.

On Superposition:

Superposition seems like magic, but it's not really. Anyway, the first bugbear is the 'seems like nonsense' problem of something being everywhere at the same time, effectively at least.

Don't know about you, but when I was a kid we didn't have all the toys we have these days, but we did have bits of string. One thing you could do with a bit of otherwise mundane string, was to whirl it so fast it became a blur. [You can try this at home kids] In fact, it became a magic shield.

Whooo.

...Continued...

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Monday, January 26, 2009

The Playdoh of Life.

I think I've been trying for a long time to see where everything is going with Life™, where it must go, where it has always had to go.

Imagine we are watching a game being played by unseen hands. We reckon we understand the basic rules of play, sometimes we can even predict moves before they're made, but because we've never actually seen a game completed, we cannot be sure we know each rule that governs it. Nor can we be absolutely sure of the purpose of the whole business, nor if indeed there is an end or a purpose involved.

So. The game of life.
...Continued...

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things

Notes on:
"Women, Fire and dangerous things" By Lakoff.

...Continued...