Posts by BenWilson
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Nice one David. Do you live your life in an anarchic way? Can I come and just help myself to your stuff right now?
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Ha ha, if everything belonged to everybody, there'd be nothing to steal
That is certainly true. It does carry the cost that you live in a world where there is nothing worth stealing.
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Finn, totally agree from personal experience. The bigger the system, the worse the mess.
This is not to say totally ratshit POS software shouldn't be rewritten, but that's not 'functioning but faulty', it's the software equivalent of living in Iraq. And it's usually the result, as in Iraq, of a previous rewrite that was rushed through by incompetent or corrupt (or both) management.
These ideas always come from management. Any engineer looks at the previous bunch of engineers, counts the person-centuries they spent building the system, divides by a number proportional to their ego, and works out they couldn't do it in a lifetime. Management looks at their ego-ridden estimate, and works out the timeframe it's needed in, divides the first by the second, and hires that number of monkeys. Then they blame the engineer when the timeframe is reached and they haven't got out of the analysis phase. The engineer blames the monkeys. The monkeys get fired, and fresh untrained monkeys are hired, which adds a lot of extra training time. Eventually the engineer and the manager are fired (or promoted sideways for their amazing work).
So at the end the only real outcome is that a lot of monkeys got training. Which is good for society and bad for the company. Kind of funny how capitalism works sometimes.
It's not so funny in politics, though, where in this analogy society is the company, and bureaucrats are the monkeys. The engineer is the philosopher, and the manager is the politician.
And since in realpolitik, all engineers are actually bureaucrats, all managers are philosophers and all politicians are monkeys, neither society nor companies prosper under such an approach.
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Anarchism is more a challenge to the self-serving authority of elite groups than it is any kind of dogmatic belief.
So is just saying what thing these elites are doing that you don't like, and why. Much more targeted and likely to have a useful outcome, if enough people agree with you. If not, feel free to live out in the bush, no one is stopping you.
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Andrew, sounds like paradise on Earth. Who could wish for more? Pity about a few bad eggs (the menfolk, by the sound of it).
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Actually, pre-Maori Polynesian settlers would have been very strictly bound up in familial hierarchies, taboos etc
For about as long as it took anyone at the bottom of the heap to piss off to greener pastures. Which in NZ-just-discovered would have probably been about 1 day, by the sounds of it. The remainder set up 'government' over what tiny jurisdiction a few dozen people could actual enforce, and they probably are the groups that became powerful and dominated. But I suggest a lot of people would have just bailed off into the wilderness with a few mates/chicks, and lived quite happily a totally anarchist life slaughtering Moas and picking fish up off the beach etc. Until contention over access to the women led to cold-blooded murder with absolutely no consequences, perhaps. Who knows? I mean one canoe of people controlling the entire South Island? Yeah right.
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Anarchy has been tried and is still being tried all over the world. It's not theoretical, it's a perfectly valid emigration option. Anyone who truly loves lawless society doesn't have to go very far at all to find one. For humanity it has been the norm for most of our existence, governments are a very modern invention.
The Maori have even lived that way in comparatively recent times, when NZ was first settled by them, the early period would have been beautifully anarchic. So long as resources were superabundant, populations low, and no existing power structures got in the way, people would have lived in comparative peace and bounty.
Why did it end? Why was Maori society not anarchic when Europeans arrived? OK, it wouldn't exactly have been a safe and lawful place, definitely was not by all early European accounts, but there were power structures in place.
Riddle me that, anarchist.
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I'm all for an autonomous Tuhoe nation
I'm not and I don't mind saying so. I think it's a really stupid idea. I can't think of anything good about it either for Tuhoe or NZ.
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Paul, nice honesty. My mum (who is a teacher) told me that it never bothered her when students were streets ahead of her on something. It gave her hope for the future.
But I can well imagine the frustrations involved in teaching such a rapidly changing subject as graphics, from just keeping up yourself, to the institutions keeping up, or stubbornly failing to do so.
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Robyn
Oi, the world record for typing is about 170wpm! Did you maybe mean 50wpm or 500 characters per minute?
Speed doesn't mean much without accuracy :)
Read more carefully! It was only apparent speed. I was preloading a little buffer with the entire paragraph, then pushing 'print' and miming that I was typing. This was an old fashioned impact printer, since it was actually also a typewriter, so the sound was genuine enough. The poor old dear had no idea this was even possible. The first time she ripped the page out of the typewriter, convinced that I was just randomly hitting keys (which I was), but couldn't find one single error in the 50 word paragraph I'd knocked out in about 20 seconds (yes 500 wpm was hyperbole). So she made me do it again. Buffer still loaded, off we go.
She must have realized there was some trick but she sure couldn't work out what it was. She decided not to pursue the matter and expose her shocking ignorance of the equipment she was teaching us to use.
It was a cheap shot on my part, but hey, fair enough too. This technology wasn't even cutting edge then. She was always very impressed that I never made any mistakes in my typing, one of the benefits of on-screen editing. I was always unimpressed that anyone could make a mistake in their typing in that day and age.
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