This page is like a waste basket for trains of thought.  It's the only page here that I hope will grow more disorganized with time.

MONEY

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."
       - George Orwell

Money is a term used to describe a quasi-thing that is somewhere between a substance and an idea.  It exists mainly because a lot of people think it does.  Money comes in various forms, mainly the physical form, and the electronic form.  Examples of the physical form include paper currency, and coins.  These are paper (which comes from trees) and metal (which people and machines dig out of the ground) which have been printed or shaped so that people will think that they are money.  Examples of the electronic form include the money in your bank account, the money that banks and credit card companies lend to you so that you can buy things you can't afford, and the money you may have saved in a retirement account.

A lot of people spend a lot of time and thought trying to figure out how to get money.  This is because, due to the way society is arranged, money is usually the one and only thing that entitles you to get things you need, such as food, clothing, and shelter.  Sometimes it helps with secondary needs, too, like friends and sex.  Money is also an effective way of convincing people that they want to do things for you, like build you a house, make you a sandwich, or fix your car.  Normally, most people will refuse to do these kinds of things for you, unless you give them money.

So, it isn't surprising that people spend so much of their lives trying to get money.  There are far more people who don't have anywhere near enough of it, than people who have a lot of it.  This helps society stay arranged like an upside-down tree.  A lot of things in the world are arranged like a tree.

For those who feel that they don't have enough money, and would like to get more, I've decided to list some of the ways I've found to get money.

1. Going To Work

This is by far the most reliable way to get money.  The way it works is: you look for somebody who has more money than you, who is in need of some service or skill that you know how to provide.  Actually, the most important thing is for you to be able to convince that person that you can provide what they need.  It does help, sometimes, if you can really provide it.  As long as this person (or group of people) believe that you are doing something useful for them, and also that you are obeying whatever rules they may have decided they want you to follow, they will give you some of their money on a regular basis.

If you don't think you have any abilities that other people would be willing to give you money for, or if people haven't been expressing much interest in the abilities that you do have, take comfort in the fact that it is normally possible for most people to learn new abilities, which they can then trade for money.  Popular ways of doing this include reading books, going to school, and practicing.  If you're about to venture in that direction, you might even want to consider trying to figure out which abilities people are willing to pay the most money for.

2. Selling Goods and Services

If you know how to make things that people want, or do things that people want done, you can try to offer these things to the general public in exchange for money.  This is often called "running a business" or "being your own boss."  In this case, the people you get money from don't necessarily have to have a lot of it (although it might help).  They simply have to be willing to part with some of what they do have, or borrow it from somebody.

Since the world is very large, and both the natural and cultural ecosystems are varied, there is an almost infinite number of goods and services that you could sell.  Popular goods include food, clothing, music, jewelry, sex toys, and other gadgets.  Popular services include cooking the food (which most of your customers will expect), doing people's taxes, fixing their cars and computers, parenting their children for them, matchmaking, and making their lawns look nice.  Lesser known goods include pretend equipment that can only be used within video games, and 3D computer models of real or imaginary objects.

3. The Stock Market

The stock market is a lot like money, in that it is partially real, but mostly electronic and somewhat imaginary.  For practical purposes, you can think of it as sort of a "place", kind of like a real market, where people buy and sell imaginary pieces of corporations.  It is often associated with Wall Street, which is a real (and pretty old) street in New York City, New York, USA.

A corporation is a single-minded group of people, who have cooperatively developed schemes for getting a lot of money.  Even corporations that don't get any money, for the most part, have developed schemes that make it seem like they will be able to get a lot of money in the future.  For these reasons (and usually more for the second reason, than the first) people consider corporations to be very valuable.  And as with most valuable things, a lot of people want to own them. 

Now, due to the fact that corporations are generally made of more than one person,  it isn't possible for everybody to own them.  So, people imagine in their minds, and then write down on paper (which makes it seem less imaginary) that corporations are divided into imaginary pieces, called shares.  They divide them into enough shares so that anybody can own lots of the shares, if they can afford them.  The shares can be traded for money, and at any given time, the amount of money that somebody is willing to give you for a share, or want from you in exchange for their shares, depends a little bit on how much money the corporation is getting, and a little bit more on how much money people think it might get in the future, but mostly on the general mood and opinions of the people in the stock market at the moment.  So, needless to say, the prices fluctuate quite a bit as the crowd in the market reacts to news from the outside world.

The main idea, if you want to make money in the stock market, is to buy shares of a corporation at a time when people are willing to sell them cheap, and to sell the shares at a later time when people are willing to pay a lot for them.  In this way, people have an excuse for giving and taking a lot of money from each other.  That excuse is called "stock", and it works a lot like a conversation piece.  In much the same way that conversation pieces give people something to talk about, when what they really want to do is just talk, stocks give people something to throw money around about, when what they really want to do is just throw money around, in hopes that they will catch more than they throw.

There are two things that must be true in order for you to get a lot of money in the stock market.  It could be argued that you could probably get a little bit of money with just one or the other, but it seems to me that you really need both in order to get a lot of money.  The two requirements are:

• You have to understand what's going on, and know what you're doing.  You have to be able to read price charts and balance sheets, understand earnings reports, have a broad view of the economy and which parts of it are thriving (or not), know what makes companies succeed or fail, and most importantly: be able to follow and predict the mood swings of the crowd.  That last one is a little bit tricky, but fortunately people are more or less predictable.
• You have to get lucky.

4. Gambling

Gambling is both a good way to get money, and a better way to lose money.  With gambling, a company called a casino (or your local church, or state government) offers to take some of your money, in return for the chance that they might give you back even more money.  They give you games to play, which are really another type of conversation piece, designed to be tangible substitutes for the laws of probability that pervade our universe.

The games are set up so that the casino always has a slighly higher probability of keeping your money, than you have of getting theirs.  So, if you're lucky in the short run, you will get some of their money.  If you are unlucky, you will lose some of yours.  In the long run, however, because of the laws of probability, you will almost certainly lose money.  This is summed up in the saying, "Quit while you're ahead!" 

Casinos make money in the long run.  For this reason, it is probably a better idea to start a casino, than it is to play at one.  SEE #2.

5. I intend to add to this list as I discover new ways to get money.  Right now though, I have to go to work.  SEE #1.

ICE-9

I discovered something interesting last night.  Remember "The Recruit"?  Remember the name of the computer virus they were trying to smuggle?  Ice-9.

"Ice-9", it turns out, is a phrase originally coined by Kurt Vonnegut, in Cat's Cradle. Since he coined the term, everybody and their brother seems to have used it for something. 

It's the name of at least one band, probably more.  It's the name of a real computer virus in real life.  It's the name of dozens of miscellaneous small projects of various sorts.  Its the inspiration for countless screennames, e-mail addresses, etc.  It's a Joe Satriani song.... 

And all of this is presumably because (as Kurt Vonnegut would say) "they liked the SOUND of it."

(A)theism

Assume for just a moment that there is a god. Could he prove his existence, if he were so inclined? Well, couldn't he just announce his presence to everybody in a way that couldn't be easily ignored? What if, one morning, this enormous disembodied face appeared in the sky, and started speaking in a booming voice for everybody to hear. If you went to your doorstep, and this huge apparition in the sky was explaining to everybody on the daylight side of the earth that he was god, nice to meet you - would you believe? What if he didn't go away?

I imagine that many would probably believe, and many would go searching for some other explanation - like a U.S. military project named "Operation Enhanced Shock and Awe" gone wrong (or right). Or something.

But here's my point. It seems to me that all the kneejerk arguments about how god can't be proven to exist, rely on god keeping himself quiet. In other words, when people say this, what I hear is "you can't prove god exists because there's no evidence of him." But what if there were? Surely, if lowly old me can leave evidence of myself in the places I've been, if Bill Clinton can leave evidence of himself on Monica's dress, then the grand almighty creator of the universe could leave some evidence of himself somewhere.

Because we don't know of any direct, convincing evidence of the existence of god - because so far his existence is all hearsay - the most rational conclusion, SO FAR, would seem to be that there's no santa claus, no easter bunny, and no god. But that seems beside the point, to me. My point is, if there were a god, and if he wanted to come out of the closet, he could. Because he hasn't, I find the likelihood of his existence very small - but hey, whatever gets you through the day, right?

If there is a god, I say "Shame on god!" If he was really so awesome, so loving, so all that, the least he could do is say hi - make some sort of contact. Not a very neighborly god, if you ask me. By remaining hidden, he leaves the whole matter to whether you believe in the existence of something for which there is no evidence. But anybody can believe anything they want, without making the belief any more or less likely. I can say "I believe that when I die, I'm going to Illinois. Respect my belief! Or I'll call ya intolerant!" or "My belief is that everybody lives 7 times. I read it in a book written by a guy that talked to god! Respect it!" But so what?

If some guy came around and started performing large-scale miracles that neither I nor Penn & Teller could explain, yeah I'd probably be more inclined to listen to what he had to say. But Christ!!! I don't even get to meet Jesus! So again all we have to go on is hearsay about some guy who lived 2,000 years ago, and what some people wrote that they saw him do, and what they claim he said. ("I swear man, I was THERE!" - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

Maybe god's just a snob. Or shy. Or a fairytale. Either way, if he existed, and if he were so inclined, I bet he could make a believer out of you!

THE MEANING OF LIFE

I don't think "meaning" is the right word. I think the question, "what is the meaning of life?" is a bit too vague, and probably not quite the right question. Same thing goes for "Why are we here?" We're here because of an awful lot of things, but mostly the laws of physics and the principles of cause and effect, one thing leading to another for billions of years - that sort of thing. But when people ask that question, it sounds to me like they mean "What are we here to do?" or "What is our purpose?" Maybe they mean "What am I supposed to do?"

I think a better question is, not so much "What are we supposed to do?", but rather What have we been doing? What are we doing? What does it looks like we are going to do?

So I say, just look around. What do bees do? The cynical answer: "They eat, reproduce, and die" leaves out some pretty important things. Bees also organize impressively, scout, communicate, build hives, and make honey. Ants also have complex societies: they organize, build infrastructures, gather food, communicate - they even have garbagemen that take the colony's trash to a "dump" outside the hill. Beavers build dams. Birds build nests. Bacteria create all kinds of elaborate structures and societies - mainly out of themselves and their waste products.

So.... what do humans do? Again, "eat, reproduce, die" leaves out an awful lot of notable things. What else do humans do?

1. We build roads. We've been doing that for a long time. The more and better roads we build, the easier it is to move ourselves and the resources that we carry around the planet. We do similar things with boats and airplanes.
2. We move resources around, and we turn things into other things. For example, we turn rock into roads; wood and other things into houses and buildings and McDonalds' and such; we dig tunnels, build bridges and dams (like beavers!), and move earth from hills into the ocean to make new ground. We even turn certain kinds of materials into amazing gadgets like cars, watches, synthesizers, and Gamecubes!
3. We learn, record information, and communicate what we know, as well as what we make up in our heads. Useful knowledge tends to spread, since we like to talk to each other. (Useless info spreads too.)
4. Just as we build networks of road so that ourselves and our resources can move around more easily, we also build communications networks so that the information and knowledge can move around too. (Roads were kind of the first communications networks, back when we had to carry information in our heads, or on pieces of paper.) We build telephone lines, fibre optic networks, computer networks, TV and radio antennas, and cel phone towers. We built the almighty internet, which is how you were able to get this long winded paragraph into your brain.

Why do we do all this? Where is it all leading? Well, for one thing, we're not exactly planning it. Sure, some select people and groups occasionally invent something deliberately, but mostly these things just develop as a result of people doing their thing. We probably won't really know where it's leading until we get there.

In the meantime though, when I look around, human society looks an awful lot like a developing organism. Instead of cells, it has people. Instead of veins, it has interstate highways. Instead of organs, it has corporations and other organisations. Instead of brains, it has governments (oh well). Instead of blood, it has resources and money, or "wealth." Cells with access to the blood flourish; cells that can't get blood, die. Instead of metabolism, we have economies. Generations of cells die off, and new ones are born all the time, but the shape of the organism remains continuous - i.e. we still have our banks, insurance companies, governments, infrastructure, universities, etc.

So that's what I think is going on. We're cells in a developing organism. Running around, carrying materials around, building the planet's infrastructure, turning things into things, passing information around on a nervous system we created, learning collectively, metabolising the planet, organising ourselves and the materials at our disposal into networks, which expidite even more development.

I'm not sure what this organism is going to turn out to be, but I think it is going to be very, very smart.  Actually, it already is. 

I'm pretty sure that we do all this because we are programmed to, just as bees and ants are programmed to operate as they do. I'm not exactly decided on why we're programmed this way, but I'm working on it. I think it has something to do with projecting the details of our own individual development onto our environments. Something like, if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (if the individual's development echos its species' evolution) then the ontogeny of the planet recapitulates all of the above. Or another way to look at it is: whatever it is that caused life to evolve highly enough to produce humans, is also causing it to evolve higher into this planetary organism.

(Note: I don't know a thing about Gaia-anything other than whatever they said in FF: The Spirits Within. Any similarities are coincidental. I do believe that the Earth is alive, in a way. But not that it has a spirit, or anything like that. But then, I don't believe that we have spirits, either.)

So..... what should you (we) be doing? Heh. You're just a cell! Do whatever comes naturally. Do whatever you want, just don't blow the planet up. You'll probably be happiest if you're complying with your programming though. That generally boils down to finding your place in the organism (society), being useful (get a job, do some research, etc.), and obeying the other obvious parts of your programming (eating, sleeping, having sex, avoiding dismemberment.) Beware of inactivity - cells in the body that aren't very useful have a way of killing themselves. Try to get money - it's like nourishment. Don't stress though! It's not a cells business to do too much thinking or worrying. The surrounding society has a life of its own, and will tend to move you here and there. Go with the flow, do whatever makes you happy, because what makes you happy is usually what you're supposed to be doing, anyway (again, we're programmed that way).