Subject: Re: source access vs dynamism From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/09/03 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3145340726081755@naggum.no> * Raffael Cavallaro | The "something" which they "want ... so badly" is not to starve. again, no, that is not the explanation. if it makes you happy, I'll sure concede that under conditions where the only other condition is death, I expect people to accept most everything, but even then, there are limits. however, I wasn't talking about people who actually face starvation as their only option. however, if you care to argue such things, it's much more forceful to use conditions that aren't dictated by politics, since the whole point is to question why people freely accept conditions that they a very short time later object so strongly to that they go on strike and do other labor-union things to hurt their employer. obviously you can force people into an "accept or die" situation if you _want_ to, as many politicians seem to get a kick out of doing, but then the issue is how these people get to and stay in power. it has always amazed me how you can actually manage to keep millions of people in check just by making them believe that you face each one of them at a time, because as soon as they understand that everybody else are just as unhappy, things start to happen. this kind of grand-scale trickery and deceit is as useful in selling crap software as in running third-world countries. | Its quite easy to fault them for accepting such employment when you live | in a society with a complete social safety net, where no one ever | starves, no matter how long he's been unemployed. Unfortunately, this is | not the reality that many, if not most people live in. I actually love this line of argument. because I haven't personally experienced the entire world history dating back to the first humanoid, I shouldn't say anything that you can take to be about conditions that you consider the single most important in human history. how very cute. it is also customary to hold up the third world as an example of how bad things can be, but that is really very silly: all the reasons for their problems are different from our past problems, which were a lot worse, considering that there were no aliens who sent us big fat checks with lots of strings attached and with a world bank (no, make that a universe bank) to tell us how to run things. you see, neither Europe nor the U.S. have _always_ been affluent, and some would say we still aren't all that affluent. e.g., Norway was correctly described as a really backward country near the beginning of the previous century, complete with atrocious hygiene, extremely low worker morale, and rampant abuse of alcohol and prostitutes as soon as people were paid. we're still mainly exporting raw materials for other countries to process and profit from, and people _still_ drink themselves unconscious on pay day. people here, too, were starving at times, and did basically anything to stay alive. a whole bunch moved to the U.S. and, lo and behold, managed to multiply much faster there than they ever did back here. however, the point I'm trying to get across is that people who did _not_ live in fear of starving, moved to the big cities where there was work and the _prospect_ of more wealth some fuzzy time in the future, but actually, right then, people were starving and dying in the cities and _not_ in the countryside where they came from. the _cause_ of the bad working conditions was that people were willing to accept just about anything after having been promised the sky. my case is against people who promise the sky, who capitalize on people's hopes for the future, yet who never give them a decent _present_ because they work better when both their hopes and their need are high. my case is against people who don't see that they have been tricked by such people and turn away from them, but instead embrace them the more they don't get their promised future, for fear of losing _all_ hope. my case is against people who don't actually accept what they say they accept and then form labor unions and whatnot to fight for the rights they _agreed_ to have violated in order to maintain a _hope_ for a better future. this is way off topic as such, but the software equivalent is what we get from Redmond, WA: oppressively bad shit today but ever better promises of a better future, and people buy this line, for some unfathomable reason. in conclusion, I'd have to say that I don't think people actually want a better future -- they want a _promise_ of a better future. when they get a better future, they won't be satisfied with it. in fact, they turn out to be _dissatisfied_ with it, as in "this is _it_?". that's what happens when you promise too much. those who survived the AI Winter can tell stories about that promise-making gone wrong, too. the core problem is that today's whole marketing culture is all about glitz and glory and solving _all_ the problems of the past with this teensy new gizmo or software or whatever. why don't people wake up and smell the espresso? they've been had! the biggest problem with this crap isn't that people waste so much money on idiotic things and so much time on stuff that won't ever give them what they want, it's that that which really _would_ improve their future has very little chance of ever getting out there, except surreptitiously, like Lisp does. and that's what I worry about. #:Erik -- save the children: just say NO to sex with pro-lifers