DSPS

(Based on a facebook status I posted a few nights ago)

Alright, ladies and gents, let's have us a little chat about invisible disabilities.

When you have no legs and have to get around using a wheelchair or whatever, then everyone looks at you and says, oh look at that poor guy, trudging (metaphorically) through life with such bravery and dedication, let's build him special bathrooms and access ramps and lynch anyone who looks at him the wrong way.

And then sometimes you have different conditions, which do not make themselves readily visible by halving your height or by equipping you with an adorable doggy that's legally allowed to accompany you everywhere, and then everyone looks at you and says, oh look at that guy, what the fuck is wrong with him and why can't that bastard just act normal, let's shun him from society and mock his difficulties with vigor and alacrity.

So you know what, I'm not going to cry right now about having trouble seeing the distinction between different shades of red, or about my hilariously deformed spine, or my self-destructive eating habits or the social anxiety or the insane mood swings, but I'm tired, literally, of letting this sleeping thing slide.

Sleep! Wonderful thing, or so I hear. Humans apparently spend roughly 1/3 of their lifetime doing it. It must truly be the bee's knees. Oh what a shame it would probably be if you couldn't do it.
Well, hey, you know that one time you came back from your trip to America and the jet lag was so damn nasty you got yourself a Circadin prescription rather than wait for it to pass naturally after a few days? Yeah, I've been enjoying that particular condition for the last 17 years or so. Probably more, but all these years without sleep do make the memories rather fuzzy around the edges.

I can't sleep. Sure, I occasionally go to bed and briefly lose consciousness, but that bears the same resemblance to real sleep as getting around on a wheelchair does to parkour.
Yesterday I got home from work after finally giving up hope of getting anything productive done this week, so utterly drained and exhausted from several unusually-horrible nights following 2 weeks of head-splitting stress and anxiety (I sincerely apologize to anyone I snapped at lately) and decided that, fuck it, that horrible pill that used to make me completely sedated for up to 20 hours, I'm gonna take two of them, fire up the ol' A/C, barricade the windows, and party like it's zZzZzZzsnore. Well, seeing as 5 hours later I'm here, ranting at length, I think you could take a wild guess at how well that plan worked.

I can't sleep. I've tried everything. Tea, alcohol, milk, water, physical activity, lighter physical activity, heavier physical activity, sex, masturbation, video lectures on algebra, complete physical exhaustion, complete emotional exhaustion, counting sheep, counting camels, more blankets, less blankets, air conditioning, white noise, gentle music, power metal, eating carbs, eating proteins, eating nothing, Stilnox, Ambien, Nocturno, Miro, melatonin, earplugs, blindfolds, natural light, unnatural light, no light, fresh air, freshly washed sheets, nicely scented room, going to sleep earlier, waking up later, gradually making a full round to move my sleep time earlier, lemons, plums and mangoes in syrup. It doesn't work, it simply does not. Other than specific chemical substances, I can assure you with full confidence that any sleep tips you can offer I have heard and I have tried and they have failed. My bastard of a brain is living in the wrong timezone and there is not a bloody thing I can do about it.

Going to sleep at any point earlier than 06:00 means I will sleep badly. Going to sleep at any point earlier than 01:00 qualifies as a light nap and you're welcome to replace your night's sleep with one and let me know how good that feels. Going to sleep earlier than 22:00 usually means I'm going to wake up in 3 hours max, dizzy and pissed off, and be unable to even think about sleep (or anything else) until I literally collapse 20-24 hours later.

This is Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. It's a natural jet lag that never ends. If you've ever felt a bit off after switching daylight savings time, well, then you're 10% of the way to understanding what I feel like every single day of my life. It's such an utterly fucked up condition that the only way to get it diagnosed is to complain about bad sleep until the doctors run out of other options. I'm not even kidding, this is literally how this is diagnosed, by reaching the point of "we know you can't sleep and all we can say is that it's none of the reasons on this list". Nobody has any idea why it happens, and there's no cure other than working the graveyard shift.

Why the hell am I writing all this? Mostly because of the situation described in this little comic. It's the arrogant ignorance I can't handle. You think you know what tiredness is, and you're wrong. The last time I had proper sleep for more than one night in a row was November 2011. I'm tired, and I'm tired of being tired, and it affects my life in the exact same way that you'd expect chronic sleep deprivation to.

What can you do to help? Well, gee, what do you do to help guys in wheelchairs? I don't want your pity and I don't want your tax money and I don't want people marching in the streets brandishing badly worded signs for the rights of DSPS patients in the name of justice and equality.
I just want some basic understanding. This is a terrible crippling debilitating disorder, and I'm fighting it and trying to lead a normal life as much as I can, and then something happens in my life that makes hell break loose and a few sleepless nights later I get people telling me "what the fuck, man, just go to bed earlier" and I just want to punch them right in their smug faces.

I'm <name redacted>, I have several very real problems that are not visible to you, and I just want you to acknowledge them and not feel so bloody smart because you came up with "just go to bed earlier" all on your own. Maybe also cut me a little bit of slack when in a state of complete exhaustion I say the wrong thing. I wrote this shit while you were sleeping safely in your beds, filling up your mana bars, because I can't.

There's no punchline. It's not funny. Good night and sleep tight.

Micromanaging The Government

It's generally agreed that micromanagement is bad; after all, not only is it extremely time-inefficient, but also managers tend to be too busy managing to have as much technical expertise as their underlings.

Why, then, do we try to micromanage our government?

The idea of democracy is that the power belongs to the people, but this doesn't mean that the people need to micromanage. When a company's CEO decides that the company needs to launch a product, he does not bother himself with the cogs and gears, or go around inspecting every line of code. So why should we care how our government chooses to attain our goals, so long as it does so effectively?

Let's face it, people's goals in life are really simple. We generally want to live without fear of war, famine, pestilence and death. We want to avoid traffic jams, and have the time and means to watch other people embarrass themselves in front of video cameras. In extreme cases we might want self fulfillment too.

There is not a single person in the entire world whose end goal is to pay less taxes. Nobody actively wants any specific laws. In fact, almost nobody even wants to either prevent or allow gay marriage. All of these things are means to an end, whether that end is financial prosperity, equality and justice, personal safety, or pleasing the Lord Almighty as He lies dreaming in R'lyeh.

That's why we should treat our elected officials the same way any good employer treats any valuable employee: tell them what we want done, and leave them to figure out how they can get it done on budget. It's their job, and they should be able to do it better than us. After all, if they can't do their job without our constant nitpicky supervision, why should we hire them in the first place?

Of course, at the same time it's important to remember that an employer usually has the ability to fire an employee if the employee breaks the law, knowingly acts against the employer's interests, or just proves to be completely incompetent. Not all employees would be motivated to do the best job they can when they know that it'll be years until anyone can possibly fire, demote, or otherwise punish them; and some people might be very motivated indeed to get a job that they know they are under-qualified for.

So if we want to keep up this democracy thing, we should act like it. If the people are the ones in charge, then the people should make sure to employ public servants who are capable of hearing what the people want and delivering it to them, while firing the ones who have proven that they aren't fit for the job.

And most importantly, we mustn't fall for politicians who promise to deal with whatever crisis is in the headlines this month; they are just like job candidates who can't do anything except spout buzzwords. By next year none of it will matter, and we'll be stuck paying the bloated salary of an employee who never gets any work done.

The STEM crisis

This post is my opinion on this article: The STEM Crisis Is a Myth.

Despite professional, scientific phrasing such as "Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle", I suspect that this article may not be completely trustworthy. In the name of skeptics everywhere, let us dive straight into this conspiracy theory, and see whether it makes any sense.

The first time that the article tries to explain why the STEM crisis is a myth, it uses self contradicting logic. It picks someone's estimates for the number of new STEM bachelors and the number of new STEM jobs, and shows that not all of these bachelors will be able to get a job. This would make a lot of sense if the article hadn't mentioned just a few paragraphs earlier what a stunningly high percentage of STEM bachelors don't work in STEM jobs - 20% abandoned the field less than 2 years after graduating (and another 38% in the following 8 years). So why bother comparing these total numbers which are already known to be irrelevant?

According to the next paragraph, a third of recent CS graduates aren't working in their profession, and a third of those say that the reason is a lack of jobs. So basically, out of a group of young inexperienced workers fresh out of an unknown educational institute, only 11% say there is a lack of jobs. These numbers do an even better job of showing how irrelevant the previous claim is - most of the people who don't work in that field don't even do that as a result of a lack of jobs!

Point for thought: has anyone checked the numbers of bachelors of various arts who work in their fields? Animators, movie directors, musicians? How about historians? English majors? The article says that "Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job". The use of the word "surprise" here is entirely unsubstantiated, and I suspect that it was picked mostly for effect.

One paragraph I found worth focusing on is the one that says: "That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen". By what criteria exactly does anyone make that comparison? In CS alone, as a sub-field of STEM, the differences in salaries across time and space are absolutely staggering. The job offer I am probably going to accept tomorrow pays a whopping 40% less than the job offer I am almost certain to get later this week. And keep in mind that I myself am neither a complete newbie nor a rock-star developer; top software developers easily get a monthly salary 4-5 times higher than the lowest rank of code monkeys. So what conclusion is anyone expected to draw out of some average numbers? If the price of labor has not risen, is it because the ratio of supply and demand has stayed exactly the same, or maybe there are simply many places that now require the aforementioned code monkeys? Perhaps due to financial considerations it has become impractical for many places to pay rock-star developers quite as much as they used to, in a way that some may even refer to as the "bursting" of a certain "bubble"? Such averages tell us nothing of value here.

Moving on to the explanations about the conspiracy itself, we see sentences like "... an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense". Yes, this is absolutely correct, in the same way that petrol is widely viewed as an important engine for transportation: accurately. With all due respect to philosophy majors and certified homeopaths alike, their professional contribution to the overall well-being of a country is somewhat less than that of your average engineer. Sure, if 100% of the population are scientists, this may cause some friction, but we're hardly at a point where we have to worry about that sort of freaky phenomenon.

This approach is, in fact, seen more than once in the article. "Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options", apparently. It continues to quote the CEO of Lockheed Martin, who tells us that while his engineer employees are all excellent engineers, "the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly". Forgive me for getting all scientific here, but that's not particularly controlled or randomized, is it? The ones who advance in that organization are clearly still engineers. And what's the connection between non-STEM studies and broad thinking/ clear writing, anyway? Are you trying to say that a STEM degree actively inhibits one's abilities in the fields of broad thinking and clear writing?

This, sadly is where the article ends, without having provided any real basis for its fantastic conspiratorial claims, leaving me quite unconvinced.

This is a good place to note that this article makes the same mistake as literally every other article I've ever seen on this subject: the implicit assumption that graduating with a STEM degree qualifies a person to be a valuable STEM worker. This assumption is what we in the biz refer to as "bullshit".

I obviously lack the tools and data to exactly quantify the amount of STEM graduates who are incapable of actually working in the position they studied for, but from what I've read in data compiled by bigger men than I, the percentages are in the high double digits. If we focus on my particular field, software engineering, I can count at least 3 sources that claimed that over 80% of the people they interview for software development positions fail in the most basic of code-writing tasks. This pretty much invalidates any numeric comparison that anyone can ever make between the number of STEM graduates and the number of STEM workers; if, as was mentioned above, 11% of STEM bachelors say that there is a lack of jobs, isn't is likely that these are the lowest 11%, the ones wholly unqualified to work in their field? The ones who just barely passed their exams without understanding any of the material? The ones who graduated from the highly professional college that Uncle Joe runs in his basement? Possibly the ones who cheated their way to the degree? Not all of these industries are lousy automated production lines; a company that needs 1 skilled engineer cannot possibly fill that position with 1000 unskilled ones.

This is the real reason for the perpetual shortage of STEM workers. In industries where skill matters, anyone who lacks these skills simply doesn't exist. As long as jobs remain empty, no amount of unemployed STEM graduates would be evidence that there is no shortage of workers.

Discrimination

Racism, prejudice and discrimination have been a part of human society for a very long time. I mostly believe in equality (where applicable), but sometimes the politically incorrect truth must be said out loud.

There are people in our society who, sadly, adhere very strictly to rather offensive stereotypes. An entire slice of the population, which really appears to deserve different treatment.

They are extremely uneducated; you'd be hard pressed to find one of them that knows how to read or write, or has even the most rudimentary mathematical skills. None of them has ever made any significant contribution to any scientific field, and none of them has achieved anything in any of the liberal arts.

They tend to, as a general rule, altogether neglect their civic duties. They seldom hold a job, they do not pay taxes, and only in very rare cases do they serve in the military.

They appear to be exempt from most laws. They do not get prosecuted or punished for vandalism, in which they engage often. They noisily disturb the peace at night and the police will not come for them. They accost random passersby in the street, and even sexually harass and face no punishment. No jail time, no fines, no sex offenders registry.

Worst of all, they still get taken care of. They live on my dime and yours. We, the productive members of society, are responsible for their well-being, for their health and prosperity. They give nothing, and take everything.

I feel that the inclusion of these people in our modern human society brings us great peril, and something must be done before it's too late.

---

I seem to run across too many militant vegans these days. For some reason, they appear to be convinced that animals are people, and deserve the same rights as humans.

Needless to say, I find the idea completely ludicrous. Allow me to elaborate:

Cows don't pay taxes.
Chickens don't serve in the army.
Cats aren't prosecuted for vandalism.
Dogs don't get registered as sex offenders.
No pig has ever made a significant scientific discovery.
No goose has ever written a symphony or painted a landscape.

While I won't be as insensitive as to suggest that they lack the capacity, evidence clearly shows that they lack the will. They are completely parasitic, they contribute nothing to the advancement of either our species or theirs, but we give them food and a place to sleep, we give them love and provide healthcare. Oftentimes, a human who finds a poor homeless cat, or dog, or really any animal at all, will give it shelter and food. When have you ever seen an animal extend the same favor to an orphaned human?

So, no, I do not believe that animals are people. I will not support their right to elect or get elected. I will not support their right to get a driving license. I do not believe that the state needs to spend money on their education. And, most importantly, since they aren't people, I will choose whether or not to eat them in chili sauce in my own discretion.

I am not a murderous bastard. I do not kick puppies and I do not burn kittens. I do not step on ants, and I peacefully coexist with the praying mantis that has, apparently, taken residence in my apartment since last night. I will, however, place the interests of my species above those of other species. I will not sacrifice my health, nor my happiness, to protect a bunch of cows, and I do not think that any other human should, either.

Animals are food. All of them. If they don't get eaten by humans, they will get eaten by something else. Feral animals do not lead a long peaceful life of self fulfillment and die in their beds at a ripe old age; they get chased through various terrains knowing full well that one misstep will lead to their untimely demise. They get sick, they get hungry; nature is not the perfect utopia imagined by certain people, not even close. Feral cows are eaten quite savagely by various predators, and never have I seen a lion protesting with a "Meat is murder!" placard.

Above all, I must pity these militant vegans. Comparing carnivores to Nazis, and eating meat to the holocaust... assuming no serious brain dysfunction, this implies a sincere belief that over 90% of all humans are monstrous homicidal maniacs, devoid of any morals or emotions, fueled by insatiable lust for blood. I cannot imagine what it must be like, living with that belief, fearful of every person you see on the street. In all fairness, if you believe humans are like that, then maybe I can see the sense in "animals are people".

Or maybe they don't really believe that and just enjoy the intense provocation. Maybe they have made some personal decision and are having so much trouble with it that they absolutely have to deliberately alienate nearly all of mankind.

But one thing is certain: whatever they may believe, or claim to believe, there do not appear to be any vegans currently campaigning in favor of making animals work, pay taxes, and obey the law in exchange for equal rights.

Let Hitler Die

Every year, about a week before Israel celebrates its Independence Day, it takes a day off to remember Adolf Hitler. I, for one, find it pretty sick.

Every year, in honor of the so-called "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day", the sirens blare solemnly for two minutes of still and silent contemplation. This is apparently meant to remind us of the horrors of the Holocaust, for some reason. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this reason is to perpetuate the memory of insane, hateful individuals who took it upon themselves to kill millions of innocent people with horrifying efficiency.

Every year, between the depressing movies on the TV and the not-really-depressing songs on the radio, the various official ceremonies try to appear serious and respectful as they light 6 candles, and let 6 people say that, yes, they too might possibly have distant relatives that perished in the camps. The recycled texts and songs disgracefully remind us that nobody, in fact, cares enough to refresh the thoroughly chewed contents of these ceremonies. Now, I'll be the first to admit that this sort of remembrance by meaningless repetition is a staple of Jewish tradition, but from a sane and secular viewpoint, it's still disrespectful to the slain and the survivors alike.

Let's cut to the chase: every year, while the sirens scream, while the candles are lit, while the TV shows the same sad movies, who is it that we remember? Why, the exact same party we remember in any similar occasion, of course: The Bad Guys. Just like everybody remembers the name of Jack the Ripper but nobody remembers the names of his victims, commemorating this crime yields nothing but eternal life for the criminals. When you're standing still, some of the names that are likely to be etched inside your respectfully bowed head are:

1. Adolf Hitler
2. Adolf Eichmann
3. Dr. Josef Mengele
4. Joseph Goebbels
5. Hermann Goering 
6. Heinrich Himmler

There are probably a few others that come to mind. You can take a peek at this list of 15 Nazis and, I am certain, find that most of them are familiar to you. Everybody knows Eva Braun, too, and she didn't even get personally involved with the Jew-killing (as far as I'm aware). 

And who's on the other side? How many of The Good Guys (AKA The Victims) do we actually remember on this remembrance day?

1. Anne Frank

Some might remember Mordechai Anielewicz, if they'd been extremely attentive, but I had to google his last name as well. The victims, the very people we pretend to commemorate, mostly remain anonymous. 

You might say that this is an opportunity to remember family members who were murdered in the Holocaust, but then, why the special day and why the special treatment? You have hundreds of dead relatives, certainly some that died more recently and that were closer to you. Do you spend an entire sad day every year in their memory? The only difference is the circumstances, because these particular people were killed by Hitler.

Even supposing that you do want to dedicate a day to grieving those family members, and that this, of all days, makes sense for it, doesn't it become cheap by being shared with everyone in the country? This is not a day that you have chosen to dedicate to your family, but a day that has been chosen by someone else, arbitrarily, to collectively grieve some anonymous dead people that almost no living person today ever knew personally. Suppose you've lost a dear family member in recent years and every year you remember them on the date of their demise; would you trade that day for a national Remembering-The-Dead Day? Again, the only difference is the circumstances, because these people were among Hitler's victims.

Every year, a day is dedicated to the memory of something which, in itself, isn't amazingly memorable; people have been killing one another since the dawn of time. Even today, I have no doubt, somebody somewhere is killing a person in ways that would make Hitler cringe. Pretending to commemorate these particular victims, which, as victims, were so un-special that we cannot even remember their names, does nothing except commemorate their murderers. I, for one, do not feel that these murderers deserve to be commemorated.

But these reasons, on the whole, mostly appeal to those who frankly and actively want to remember the dead, which is a rather personal thing. Why must the rest of us face all this excess sadness? War, famine, pestilence and death ravage the world every hour of every day, and depression is generally considered an international epidemic; do we really need to dedicate a whole day every year to sheer sadness? Why should a person who enjoys their life stop on this day and be miserable? Worse, why should a person who is already miserable suffer more on this day?

This is as if somebody said: Hitler made it his goal to exterminate all Jews and failed, so for one day every year we're going to feel bad for him. For an entire day we will show respect for his handiwork. For 2 minutes we will even go as far as to stop our lives completely, and pretend to be dead for his sake. I cannot even imagine how this made it into Jewish tradition, which includes, for example, the following holy days:

Day	What happened	What we do on this day
Chanukah	The Romans tried to kill us, conquered our land and destroyed our holy temple.	Light colorful candles, play with a dreidel, give money to kids, and eat delicious extra-oily foodstuffs.
Purim	The Persians tried to kill us, apparently unsuccessfully.	Give candy to people, wear costumes, donate to charity, and generally be happy. The Hebrew Wikipedia page on this subject claims the bible literally forbids being sad on this day.
Passover	We escaped Egypt after being enslaved for centuries, and Pharaoh commanding to kill all our male babies.	While most actual traditions of this holiday revolve around obsessive-compulsive behaviour, it is by all means a happy day and a happy month, and some go as far as saying the whole month is forbidden to grieve in.
Holocaust Remembrance Day	The Germans tried to kill us, but failed to finish the job.	Mourn, grieve, and pretend to be dead for 2 minutes.

If the Holocaust deserves to have a day dedicated to it at all, it should be for celebrating our national escape from certain doom. If the destruction of our holy temple by a conquering empire can be given a positive spin (i.e. "God Almighty gave us enough oil to light our lamps!"), I'm sure that we can spare some happiness for the memory of how a murderous maniac, who initiated the biggest war in the history of mankind and killed tens of millions of people, ultimately failed in his carefully orchestrated scheme to kill all Jews.

---

While this covers the emotional and historical aspects, there is another reason for this holiday which people inevitably mention: What if another Hitler arises?

Well? What if another Hitler arises? How is remembering the original Hitler going to stop him? There is only one kind of person who would avoid doing something because "someone has done it in the past", and, frankly, I don't think hipsters are known for committing war crimes.

But seriously, what kind of reason is that? The reason not to commit genocide is not "it's been done before", but "it's a bad thing to do". If you're a parent trying to teach your kid that stealing is wrong you may choose the moral approach ("It hurts other people"), the pragmatic approach ("You'll get thrown in prison"), the philosophical approach ("How would you feel if someone stole from you?") or just the direct approach ("It's bad!"). Can you even imagine a parent telling their kid not to steal because "This guy 70 years ago stole a lot of things"? Sounds like a surefire way of raising a little criminal, if anything.

While some people imagine that the memory of the original event gives us a frame of reference for next time, perhaps a few pointers and indicators for warning signs to watch out for, the truth is the absolute opposite. This merely gives us a cheap weapon to use in arguments when we have nothing good to say, or an even cheaper weapon when we want to incite emotion in the masses. How cheap is this weapon? Approximately this much. How can you stop someone from being a Nazi if, as every resident of the internet knows, merely making a comparison to the Nazis makes you automatically lose the debate?

It's not just the internet, either. I can't remember any Israeli prime minister or defense minister in my lifetime who wasn't accused of being a Nazi, and so were countless other army commanders of varying ranks. Twice in the last few years our very own orthodox Jews have used Holocaust imagery in their protests against democracy. This probably isn't as widespread in the rest of the world, but plenty of foreign politicians are also called Nazis whenever the opportunity arises.

The very term "Nazi", in fact, has become such a tired cliche that it pops up everywhere, and in our very own country that should be holding the concept sacred, every right wing supporter has been dubbed a rightnazi, every left wing supporter is a leftnazi, every feminist is a feminazi and every vegetarian is a vegginazi.  To see just how overused the Nazi cliche is, simply answer this question for me: what do you call a person, especially online, who often corrects grammatical mistakes made by others?

If another mustached madman ever truly arises in attempt to finish off the Jews, he will laugh and shrug off all Nazi accusations, just like countless thousands before him have. This constant use of the term in ridiculous settings has done nothing but desensitize the entire world to the actual horrors of the Holocaust; if pointing out the difference between "your" and "you're" puts me in the same camp as a genocidal dictator, then apparently being a genocidal dictator isn't all that bad.

If you want to prevent a second Holocaust, the best thing you can do is forget everything you ever knew about the Holocaust and argue this case from a moral or pragmatic, rather than historical, point of view. The best thing you can hope the memory of Hitler will achieve is absolutely nothing; the worst is inspiration for other people who already have a similar mindset and will not be deterred by an argument of this sort.

---

The name of Hitler, and other individuals of similar circumstances, is often mentioned in Hebrew suffixed by the expression יימח שמו, which Babylon helpfully translates as "May his name be erased". It might be time to do what we've been absentmindedly saying for two thirds of a century, and, instead of granting eternal life on the pages of history, to erase Hitler's name from those pages and let him rot in the anonymity that he so well deserves.

Protecting Our Children

This filth has been filling our movies, shows, magazines, and even the internet, for far too long. You used to have to watch it privately and quietly in the middle of the night on some TV channel that had nothing better to show, or go out and purchase some printed materials where everyone could see you and judge your tastes. But now it has become so ubiquitous that not only is it accessible for free in huge amounts on the internet, or on TV at any time of the day, but commercials run rampant with it and mainstream books are sickeningly full of it, making the whole thing practically inescapable!

Sure, some people would argue that there is nothing wrong with it, that it is merely a basic biological function of humans, the mere documentation of a natural phenomenon, nothing to be ashamed of. And, of course, in its own way it teaches us important things that all adults need to know, but which schools seem unwilling to properly teach us. But I say no, these flimsy excuses only try to hide the disgusting truth, that this horrible thing is destroying our society!

The fact that it deliberately engenders terrible and sinful lust in its viewers is, I hope, undeniable; after all, it is carefully built to incite these exact emotions. The subjects prepared to exacting specifications; the lighting, just so, to optimally show their exciting shapes and shades. Or, just as bad, graphic descriptions in textual media paint such a vivid picture that we might as well be sitting in the same room. One can hardly refrain from drooling at the mere idea, and often cannot think of anything else until their urges are, temporarily, sated.

But an even greater problem is how all of these enticing views and descriptions create and perpetuate an unrealistic standard, which cannot possibly be met by any of your real life interactions. These fictitious accounts, performed by talented professionals with skill beyond any of us average Joes, meticulously captured on film and often edited further to make them even more alluring, are unlikely to be matched by you or anyone you know due to lack of skill, practice, equipment. All of this results in an endless void of unrealistic expectations, never to be filled, always leaving us wanting.

How many people have asked their spouses to do something they've seen in one of these shows, only to be met with a scornful look and, should they be willing to try, crushing disappointment at the amateur results? How many inexperienced teenagers have had their expectations built by such things they have seen online, and grew up thinking that this is how the real world is and should be?

And that, of course, leads to the most dangerous part: people, especially underage, seeing these shows and trying to mimic them at home. A young and impressionable viewer might well try to perform something they've seen on TV, without properly understanding the significance of their actions or the inherent dangers. Such experiments may well result in people harming themselves, or the people they love, and possibly leaving them scarred for the rest of their lives.

I say we have to stop it here. Get rid of this abominable phenomenon while we can, before it's too late. So I urge you to say no to cooking shows, to books full of sensational descriptions of feasts, to pictures of heavenly foodstuffs in commercials or on random websites. At the very least, if you insist on displaying such content, hide it behind a NSFH warning (Not Safe For the Hungry) and make it accessible only for responsible adults over the age of 18.

So for the sake of our children, please, say no to culinography!

My Immortal Soul

I find it very hard to believe in the supernatural.

It's worth it, however, to define what I mean when I say "supernatural", which seems to be different from what most people mean.

What is it that, in most people's opinions, qualifies ghosts or telekinesis as supernatural? Nothing about such phenomena is above nature. Surely ghosts obey some natural rules; most people would agree that they look a certain way, behave a certain way, and are incapable of performing certain things, for example interacting with physical objects. If a ghost tried to pick up a pencil, you could predict the outcome: its hand would pass through the pencil.

As far as I'm concerned, it is the existence of these rules that defines "nature". Nature is the whole universe and everything in it, and it is all subject to various natural laws, be it Newton's third law or "ghosts cannot pick up pencils". This, in turn, means that nature is, theoretically, completely predictable; we can perfectly predict the result of a collision of two particles, or the presence of a particle in a magnetic field, and so on. And since these laws encompass everything in existence, obviously nothing we see is supernatural.

Now, in light of this, let us examine the following chain of events: I, while walking in the street, see an acquaintance, and wave at him. We can break it down like so:

1. Photons from the sun hit my friend and are reflected in my direction.
2. The photons go into my eyes, and the visual information is transmitted to my brain.
3. My brain performs some miraculous image processing, facial recognition, and data retrieval, reaching the conclusion that this is an acquaintance of mine.
4. ???
5. My brain sends some signals down to my muscles.
6. Certain muscles contract, moving various parts of my hand in some directions.
7. I wave.

Some of these steps are fairly understandable. We know how muscles work, we understand the function of the human eye, and we are certainly on our way towards understanding how the brain does some of what it does. But what about step 4? Why, in a nutshell, do I wave?

The automatic answer is that I choose to wave. I could also choose not to wave. Something within the black box that is step 4 has decided that I, whatever "I" means, want to wave. It has taken all the information from the eyes, it has scanned my memory for familiar faces, it has consulted a vast database of experience to find the socially acceptable thing to do when recognizing an acquaintance in the street, it has considered my mood, and has reached the conclusion that I want to wave.

You could, of course, narrow down each of those steps, break it down to the smallest parts, end up with a list of hundreds of steps describing all of the most basic physical, biological or chemical interactions that make up this simple event. You could break step 4 into many smaller steps as well, but somewhere you would still end up with one step, let us name it Step X, that deals with whether or not I actually want to wave. Which brings us to the big question:

Is the mechanism behind Step X natural?

If Step X is natural, then it obeys natural laws, and is a direct result of the chain of events that precedes it. Given the exact circumstances, we could calculate the outcome. Or, in other words, free will is impossible because it is all predetermined, and determinism must be true.

If Step X is not natural, then its mechanism is above and outside nature; it exists somewhere outside the physical universe and can reach into it and affect it without being subject to its laws. I am no great theologian, but it seems to me that such a mechanism, the entity that performs this step, can be safely referred to as a soul.

That's it, more or less, that's my conclusion. Either the universe is deterministic and we are all meaty machines, or we have an actual supernatural soul. 

Not such a bad choice, actually.

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* One argument I have heard against this conclusion is that a third option exists, and that is randomness, i.e. not all natural laws are predictable. I do not accept it, because I don't believe in a random nature and have never heard of any laws that even claim to be random, and never mind the fact that proving randomness is literally impossible. But be that as it may, it may still be viewed as a sort of determinism, in that our reactions are governed by the quirks of quantum mechanics rather than any sort of free will, so I guess the final conclusion should be phrased as: if free will exists, then souls exist.

Kurzweil's Cyber Friend

After the exciting news that Ray Kurzweil has joined Google, we have finally been treated to this tidbit about their plans together: the Cyber-Friend search engine which truly knows you, and knows how to give you exactly the information you want.
Now, I love Kurzweil and Google as much as the next guy, I want the singularity to happen and I definitely see the direction Kurzweil is trying to go here (and, to an extent, the direction Google is trying to go here), but it seems to me like this particular step in that direction is a bad one.

You see, there is this phenomenon called the echo-chamber effect. If you aren't familiar with it, the basic premise is this: suppose you're a communist. You read communist blogs, follow communist news websites, and network with other communists on facebook. Needless to say, you are therefore bombarded with confirmations of your communist ideas and opinions; should a dirty capitalist pig dare to defile your facebook wall with a capitalist article, picture or joke, they will surely be deleted. Moreover, should another capitalist show up on one of the communist blogs that you frequent, they will be immediately shot down by all the communists, reminding you immediately of the superiority of your views.

That capitalist pig, naturally, in his capitalist blogs, with his capitalist facebook friends, is as sure of his opinion as you are of yours, and cannot imagine how you can be so blind to the obvious capitalist truth.

That is unfortunate but understandable. People always seek similar people, for a variety of reasons, some of which are even sensible. Facebook got some flak for enhancing this approach, but it's really no different from any club, movement, or other gathering of people offline. Facebook is, at the end of the day, a social network. It has no overarching social responsibility. Every time you blame facebook for being full of people who fall prey to stupid "Repost this if you want Bill Gates to give you free ice cream" statuses, you must keep in mind that the only function facebook provides is to let those people, who would have believed the same nonsense even without facebook, be heard.

Google is not facebook.
You just need to look at the news items related to Google to see the difference. Getting sued for allowing companies to buy ads related to trademarked terms? Outrage over blocking certain content for certain countries? Google has, for a large chunk of the population, become the Portal to the Internet, if not the internet itself. Unless you're an academic, or journalist, or lawyer, who routinely searches for specific types of information in specific repositories, when you want to know something you simply Google it.

This brings us back to Kurzweil's vision of the search engine which learns what you like and what you're usually looking for.

Never mind the communist example from earlier. This time, let's pretend you're a person from an extremely religious background, and maybe the year is circa 2020. You have somehow heard of this "evolution" thing for the first time around the age of 25 and are absolutely shocked at this sacrilegious idea. It gnaws at your mind, that people would openly speak of such blasphemy. It can't possibly be true, can it? You must find out more...

So you go to Google, and you type "evolution", and you press the button. But the year is 2020. Google has been observing your searches for years, and it knows that you're always searching for religious stuff, and reading religious stuff. It knows you, to use Kurzweil's words, better than you know yourself.
Tell me, what sort of results do you think that you'd get from Googling "evolution" with that sort of background?

The thing about the echo chamber effect is that it really is what we want. Everybody wants to be surrounded by people who confirm your beliefs repeatedly and tell you that you're absolutely right, and that anyone thinking differently is insane, or immoral, or just stupid. And a Google that knows it and gives you what you want will make sure that whenever you're online (which, as the years progress, becomes increasingly synonymous with "all the time"), you will get nothing but an eternal echo chamber, where any diversity of thought is ignored with all the power that modern technology can provide.

According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil himself enjoyed quite a diverse environment in his youth; personally, I always assumed that that was a big part of how he grew into such an exceptional person. I sincerely hope that his quest to bring the Singularity will take a different path from this flawed idea of giving the users of the internet exactly what they think they want.

A Parental Paradox

Lo and behold, all the idiots marching up and down the streets holding signs and chanting slogans have Made A Difference! The Israeli government has heard the plight of the Israeli parents and has opened eleventy-billion new kindergartens, free of charge (taxes aren't real money, as we all know), so parents can actually go to work without having to spend half their monthly salary on a real kindergarten.

This seems to have worked well for almost a few minutes.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: in these free kindergartens you get approximately two adults for about 35 toddlers. I'm devoutly childfree, granted, but I can see how this might be considered sub-optimal by some. Having hung out with plenty of young elitist parents in my last job, I'm under the impression that what the relatively rich consider to be a good kindergarten would have a ratio of 1:4 (or even 1:3), whereas 1:17 is considered to be somewhere between "emotionally scarring" and "criminally negligent".

I was going to show some serious calculations with serious demographic data, but bugger that; the above ratios are quite enough to demonstrate this point:
The belief that there must be one kindergarten teacher for every 4 children means that you must quadruple the number of people working in this profession. And when you have to quadruple the amount of workers in a difficult and unrewarding (not to mention unproductive) profession, I'd say you have a national problem.

Worse yet, you then add insult to injury by demanding that the people working in this profession don't get paid properly; after all, at 1 kindergarten teachers per 4 children and 2 parents per child, this means if you want the kindergarten teacher to have an average salary, the average parent would have to pay 1/8 of his or her salary every month. More, in fact, because a kindergarten needs to pay out of that same money for everything they have, from the building to the food. And even more, because those who make a lot of money already pay large sums to keep their children at the 1:4 ratio and safely away from this sort of discussion. I'll be nice and call it 1/7 then.

And of course, few parents settle for one kid these days. Have your firstborn accidentally followed by a pair of twins and that's more than 40% of your monthly salary automatically spent faster than you can say "social welfare". Does it even matter whether this 40% is in the form of taxes or just money you have to spend?

This will never work. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Less adult supervision for kids or higher costs for kindergartens, you have no choice but to pick one and make the best out of it.

Basic Rights

So there you are, sitting at the train station, when you happen to overhear this guy talking on his cellphone. It seems like he's about to buy insurance against... I don't know, stubbing his toe on alien spacecraft or something equally stupid. Whatever it is, it's perfectly obvious to you at that moment that this person is about to waste his money, and... oh no, he's about to give the insurance salesperson his credit card details!

Naturally, without wasting a moment, you punch him in the face, grab his cellphone and throw it under an incoming train. Disaster averted, you grin proudly at the man you just saved, expecting some form of eternal gratitude. He seems a bit reluctant about it, but you're convinced that as soon as he realizes what a favor you just did him he'll lovingly embrace you and thank you for saving his money.

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Today someone found a 56 years old man who hanged himself in his apartment and for some reason two separate teams of paramedics rushed to the scene. When the second team got there, the first team told them something along the lines of "Don't bother trying to resuscitate him, he's already in rigor mortis". The second team decided to ignore it, and after 7 stressful minutes without breathing or pulse, got the man back to life. They are, apparently, considered heroes for it.

---

Look, I realize that some people might be insane and decide to hurt themselves for some reason which us sane people might consider ridiculous. That's not even the point.
You wouldn't assume control over someone's money to forcibly prevent him from making a financial mistake that might ruin the rest of his life, would you? Forget the silly insurance example up there, suppose you caught someone in the middle of sending his bank account details to that good old Nigerian prince, would you tackle the guy and actually physically force him not to do it?
I sincerely hope that every single person reading these lines replied with "Dude, no, it's HIS money and he can do with it what he will".

So why is it that when it comes to someone's life instead of money, suddenly their most basic rights are forfeit?

A person's life is their own. For good or bad, the decision must be theirs. It doesn't matter if you think you're so much smarter than them that you know, absolutely know, that things will be fine in another few years and this person will be glad to be alive. Hell, it doesn't matter even if you know for a fact that whatever this person is going through is purely temporary. It's still their choice.

What if it were the other way? You find this guy who's so absolutely depressed, suffering from various illnesses, lost his job, his wife ran away with the kids and the dog, maybe he even gave his bank account to a Nigerian prince and all his life savings are now gone. This person, you can clearly see, is miserable and doomed. Does that give you the right to kill him just because you think that would be doing him a favor?

With all due respect to people who want to "help" other people, this sometimes involves too much arrogance. You don't necessarily know what's better for other people. And even if you do know, you can't just take control over another person. You just can't. It's the most basic of human rights.

If you could arbitrarily deprive others of their basic rights for their alleged good, where would you draw the line? If you're allowed to "save" someone's life when they made it perfectly clear that they don't want it, what else are you allowed to save?
Should people be allowed to spend their money in a sub-optimal way? Suppose I want this nice chair I found in a catalogue, but you, being smarter than me, know I might be just as happy with another chair that costs 10% less. Are you , a random person, allowed to forcibly take my money and spend it on the second chair?

Maybe the government should also tell people which job to work at, which house to live in, what food to eat, what to do in their spare time, whom to marry, so long as it's for their own good. It's scientifically proven that you can't trust people to choose their own spouses (e.g. domestic violence), perhaps it's time for the lawmakers to intervene.

---

The absolutely worst part here is that the analogy between life and money just doesn't cut it in this particular case. This guy up there had no pulse for at least 7 minutes while he was being resuscitated, and who knows how long before that. That's 7 minutes without circulation, without oxygen reaching his brain. This isn't "saving" someone and giving him a second chance for a bright future; this is taking a person who was already miserable enough to choose death over life, denying him this choice, and probably adding severe brain damage to his list of troubles.

You know, while some people who survive their suicide attempts eventually try again, I have never heard of a single person who successfully committed suicide and then regretted it. I think I'd give them the benefit of doubt before choosing to violate their most basic human rights by forcing life upon those who don't want it.

God's Will

Let's suppose, for just one moment, that all them people who believe in some sort of organized religion have a point. Since there are several big religions, and each of them has approximately three billion different sects, let's give this benefit of doubt just to a few common points that Judaism, Christianity and Islam can probably generally agree about:

1. God exists.
2. God wants us to do certain things, and not do certain other things.
3. God has supernatural control over natural events.

Now, the disagreements between different religions/ sects are mostly about the fine details of point #2, but they all agree that the point itself is valid: some things are commandments, others are sins, etc. Having accepted these basic assumptions, I believe I have a solution to these disagreements.

Let's take a random question that may have religious significance, for example, am I allowed to eat pork? Jews and Muslims would tell me that God wants me not to, whereas Christians would tell me that God doesn't mind it. In order to settle this disagreement, I suggest that we go directly to the highest authority.

I simply decide to submit myself wholly to God's will, instead of the various people who claim to be his representatives, and let Him answer this question - whatever He tells me personally, I shall do.
So I toss a coin.
If God can create the entire universe and perform all the fascinating miracles that the bible is full of... and if God is so loving and merciful and we are all His children...and if He watches us every hour of every day... surely He can make the effort of making the coin fall on the right side for the sake of giving us this invaluable knowledge, no?

Wrong Way To Die

Every now and then you hear about someone (often young, male and Asian) found dead after spending too many days in a row playing some computer game (often by Blizzard Entertainment). Shortly afterwards, humans, being humans, start with a healthy mix of "video games kill" and "why didn't anyone save him" and the general "oh how terrible".

Common causes of death around the globe feature mostly cancer, heart disease, car accidents, and other terrible illnesses. Now, I can't speak for everyone here, but if I had to choose one of the following options...

1. A horrible slow death of some disease, full of agonizing pain and ever deteriorating systems.
2. A quicker albeit painful and frightening death from a car accident or a faster disease.
3. A quick, calm, peaceful death, while doing something that I love doing.

... well, whoever asks me that question would have to wait a long time until I could stop laughing in his face.

Besides, based on my ample experience in the fields of not-eating and not-sleeping, I find it impossible to believe that anyone could go that long without food, drink or sleep, and without feeling that something bad is happening. Ergo, it should be viewed not as some sort of accident, like some people say, but as a suicide, and even next to other forms of suicides it's still the best way to go, both for the happy "victim" and for the people who don't have to clean his guts/ brain/ blood from the floor. 

I'd go on about why suicide is no more terrible than a person's decision to harm himself in another way (e.g. smoking, drinking, gambling, enrolling in a university, etc.) but I'll probably have an entire post about that. So let's just leave it with the headline "Today an Asian man chose to end his life in a much more pleasant way than nature originally intended".

Welfare

Congratulations, you've just won the elections and have been named prime minister of the democratic nation of Smallland (somewhere on the west coast of Noplace). After accepting your hat of office in a modest ceremony, your seasoned president recommends that you start working on next year's budget.

Luckily for you, Smallland is indeed small, and you have an annual budget of $22,000. Likely candidates for a slice of the money pie are Richard the teacher, upon whom depends the future generation, and Brad the mad, who suffers from crippling mental disabilities and therefore can't work and needs the country to buy his food, medicine, TV, and other such necessities. What are you, the freshly sworn prime minister, going to do?

This is an obvious oversimplification of a very real issue. You always have the old, the sick, and the terminally lazy, who cannot earn their own money, and in modern times, for some reason, they are fully entitled to receive some amount of money from their country. But money, even though most of it is virtual nowadays, is still a finite resource; every penny you choose to give Brad up there will be taken away from Richard who not only works for it, but is using this money to do an important job and create a better tomorrow.

The money is short enough as it is; not only does Richard complain often that this tiny budget is not enough to buy textbooks for all his students, but he frequently has to argue with other factions who need their own funding such as Roger the soldier who defends the national border (all 27 meters of it). Additionally, the budget is always trying to shrink, because Eric the cleric considers himself too holy to pay taxes.

Yes, these taxes are very much a part of the budget discussion. After all, a country is a completely ethereal entity; it's not a person who shows up in the corn fields every morning and at the end of the month receives a sparkly paycheck. A country has no income of its own, and every penny that it spends is a penny that was earned by one of its citizens via actual work.

Which means that the question of social welfare boils down to: how much money are you willing to take away from people who worked hard for it, and give to a third party which is guaranteed to use it to produce absolutely nothing?

Let's consider merely the old people, because the numbers are easy to come by: over 12% of the USA's population is 65+ years old, in France it's over 16%, and in Germany it's over 20%. Suppose you give each of these poor souls a mere minimum wage from the country's coffers; even that would immediately drain a ridiculous number of billions of whatever your local currency is.

These billions could pay teachers and doctors, they could build roads and bridges and houses, they could research a cure for cancer, they could do a great many things, and none of things is as useless as simply giving the money away to an ever-growing group of people defined by being unable to produce anything in return.

Because the problem won't end with this year's budget. The elderly slice of the population is growing at a steady pace, and a smaller and smaller part of the population actually pays those taxes that are supposed to do all of the above work. Agreeing to give a certain amount of money this year will make each old person expect a similar amount next year, but the number of people who expect this money is growing much faster than the actual budget, which means that either the salary-for-nothing they've grown to depend on will shrink and dwindle, or the amount of money that goes towards productive ends will.

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Clarification #1: I have no problem with charity. A person has the right to give some of his money to people he cares about, should they become unable to provide for themselves. But this is not something that should be made compulsory by using a country's budget and drawing out of the people's taxes.

Clarification #2: Plenty of people could work if only welfare money wasn't discouraging them from it. There are many jobs that require only a working brain, and can be performed by any cripple, especially in the age of the internet. There are many jobs that don't require the spryness of a 20 years old youth and can allow the elderly to earn their keep. Maybe countries interested in social welfare would do well to match jobs to potential employees instead of sending people on a lifelong paid vacation.