I checked Wikipedia and it says you're still alive. This is for you.
I will be surprised if you read this. Well, my last post has 289 views, and maybe some of them are you, or maybe RSS readers don't add views and you use that.
I am writing this for what I could consider purely selfish reasons: there is nothing promising that I can think of doing, and so I can either write this post, or waste time doing stuff. I got my weight down to 54.3 kg at the start of this year by not eating or drinking anything for a day, but then I convinced myself that what was important was not whether I ate, but whether I went online, and so within 24 hours my weight was up by 2 kg and it hasn't been close to that low since.
One thing I have been doing recently is posting polls on Reddit. Today I was considering posting a poll asking, "if someone thought of an idea that would change the world, would you expect them to try to share it by making a popular Reddit post", but that's similar to another poll I asked about using money to share an important solution. (Incidentally, I somehow did not realize for years that the name I used for my mage in World of Warcraft in 2006, Taemojitsu, rhymes with the name, Kagomitsu, that was on the email address that Mei shared with her sister, and now I wonder if that's weird and I should stop using the name.)
I have also had no less than three conversations with people about the main suggestion promoted by this weblog (all within the last few months). One caused me to focus on the angle of "parents helping their children". Although the data that resulted did not cause the second person I conversed with to take action, that second conversation did help me realize that talking about "rich people" working less is not helpful, because people view that as a small and unproductive demographic, which is separate from the main culture and possibly acting selfishly.
The third conversation was with my oldest brother, who is now in prison. As a result of the dialogue, I challenged myself to write an explanation for "why society needs an excuse like war for people to be nice to strangers". In a followup email to my brother, I explained that I avoided making a value judgement about the importance of stopping war in order to, basically, avoid the conclusion that love makes people evil. This explanation is one that I did not post to Reddit and so is not publicly available online at the moment.
Anyway: my brother criticizes my writing for being too long and rambling, saying I should read the Elements of Style again. If you were to share what I will lazily start calling "the idea", people would truly be surprised, me included. Therefore, it's fair to say that I have not discouraged anyone from sharing the idea by implying that you would share it. I will take the incident where you let your site's domain name expire, and I posted about it here after a day, as evidence that you might read this site.
I also wanted to say that when you started making dance music again in 2013, I was not sure why. If it had any relation to me posting videos from clubs in Singapore, it would seem to have been from a misunderstanding: I thought it would have been clear that I had no extra money to spend at the time, and I have never been to a dance club myself. The only time I ever went to any event that included dancing was, I believe, a graduation party for my middle school class, at which I didn't dance, but probably just brought a book and sat in a chair reading it. My church almost certainly held events with dancing, and like most high schools my school had dance events like the "prom", but I did not attend any of them.
(I did attend an uncle's wedding when I was probably less than 10 years old, but I would not have been expected to dance at that age; and I did take tap dance lessons for a year or two and then perform on stage, but that was not social dancing; and I have been to at least two talent shows in my life that included dance performances.)
The second person I mentioned in 2012, as 'Person B', hereby named as Kate Kiatsiri (Kanyakorn Kiatsiri, Keidsiri), did upload photos to Facebook in 2011 or 2012 of herself at a club, though.
I'm not sure what else I should say. I think the model I wrote for my oldest brother was useful. I recently tried sending it to an economics journal that has no fee for submissions; the editor was kind enough to reply with an explanation that the journal was not for new research, and encouraged me to submit it elsewhere. The idea here is that an economist might be reluctant to make the claim that "high earners" working less helps the poor, if no economics journal has ever published an explanation of why that might be so. But even if an economics journal were to accept it, I would still have to find someone who would be willing to use that explanation as a basis for action. So anyway, I'll just paste it here, to avoid making this post too long: When rich people work less, does it help the poor? A simple model
My brother criticized the model for not including unemployment, using an example that used the names Hans, Christian, and Anderson (the three names of the author of a popular book on fairy tales that includes stories like the original Little Mermaid where she dies at the end).
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Update 24 Mar 2025, 04:39
The reason not to update this post is that when I act randomly, it can cause people to think that I am not competent and discourage them from supporting this idea. I therefore ask that anyone who is not Yoko Ono not read beyond this.
My brother would surely criticize the way I am writing this. I have no plan except "mention some Japanese language songs". If things went as I planned, I would be asleep, because I had believed that an annual check of fire suppression systems would be today and so was trying to get some rest before that time block. But in fact that is tomorrow, and realizing this meant one less reason for me to try to sleep instead of writing this. So I had a healthy breakfast of 13 peanut butter cookies that I made yesterday (146g) and 175g milk and now am writing randomly.
When I realized 16 years ago the complexity of interactions that result from "exposing needs to get closer to other people", aka the L-word, one of my thoughts was that people communicate through culture like songs. It's a problem that people can't directly describe; the importance of the problem and the efficacy of any remedial solutions cannot be agreed upon; and so songs are an appropriate medium as they do not need to describe things that people will agree are true.
Anyway, I had some music playing as part of ceaseless experiments with how to sleep and how to wake up. After some other songs like Mozart - Requiem in D minor (ss0_t583), at 3:09:58, Crow Song was randomly selected by my computer out of 56 songs and started playing.
I can't pretend that other people will care about the songs that I find meaningful. I learned of this song because of Mei, aka 'Person A' and the first person I mentioned in the post about the first petition, whose last name is almost certainly not Hiratou. I don't even know if she finds the song meaningful or interesting. TANGENT. At some point (don't feel like checking chat logs) I mentioned the TV show Densha Otoko to her. There was a video game character in an MMO that I assessed with high confidence to belong to Mei; maybe she even linked it to me, or maybe it appeared on a Photobucket account that she linked to me or something. Google's AI says in response to "what is the anime character in densha otoko" that the fictional anime show in the TV series is "Getsumento Heiki Mina" (月面兎兵器ミーナ), and so I guess that was the name of the character, unsure of the spelling. I have two of her WoW characters bookmarked from 15 years ago, and I only remember knowing of two, so I think the Mina character must have been in Aion. I think it was the templar character (the class I had said was the worst in the game at PvP) with which she enjoyed fighting clerics (the class that I played; note interaction where after servers merged, someone announced in chat that they were deleting character and I surmised that this was Mei, etc. etc.; I think that was shortly before the last time I logged in to Aion).
Anyway, the point is that her having a character with that name made me believe that she had watched the show Densha Otoko after I had mentioned it. It would fit a pattern of naming game characters after characters from works of fiction, such as drow (dark elf) characters from Forgotten Realms novels. To be specific, as I saw it, the analogy was supposed to be just as the viewpoint character in Densha Otoko was initially enamoured with Mina but then found someone to care about in real life, one could imagine that I would 'give up' Mei (someone who could have been fictional as I had never seen her image or heard her voice) if I cared about Kanyakorn Kiatsiri. Note: I have never been big on names or conversation, and so I am unsure if I ever addressed Kanyakorn Kiatsiri by name (any name) in real life, or for that matter online.
This is, in fact, quite similar to how I attempted to create a Warcraft 3 account named Mitsuko, after the character in the book Battle Royale who dies to gunfire, but had to settle for Misaki.
But the point is that this is a single piece of evidence that suggests Mei might have watched or read something that I had mentioned. As a counterpoint, when Mei moved to Japan in 2007 (returning to the US after a year), I mentioned and wanted to send her the book The Diamond Age, and I don't believe she ever read that book. The reasoning is that prior to the Mina character, I had expressed a minor point of criticism: Mei had said "I didn't know you watched stuff like [dramas]", and I had replied that I mentioned it before: this was one of the spammy emails I had sent to her while she was in Japan. So it would have been reasonable for her to watch a drama I had mentioned then, even if she hadn't read a book I had mentioned.
Anyway. Mei once sent me a screenshot of a long list of anime series that she had watched. I never attempted to watch them myself. Actually I just remembered that one of her Aion characters was named Taiga, after the character in 'Toradora!'. (And those were the only two Aion characters of hers that I knew of.) So in 2009, I watched at least two anime series that Mei watched; but there is no reason to think that these two held any special significance for her.
One of them was 'Angel Beats!', and this is where Crow Song comes from. As I said, there is no reason to think that other people will see any of the music that I listen to as significant or interesting.
I illegally downloaded the following songs from Girls Dead Monster, the band made up of fictional characters from the show 'Angel Beats!':
'Crow Song':
'01 - Crow Song.mp3' '02 - Alchemy.mp3' '03 - My Song.mp3'
'Little Braver':
'01 - Little Braver.mp3' '02 - Shine Days.mp3' '03 - Answer Song.mp3'
'Thousand Enemies':
'01 - Thousand Enemies.mp3' '02 - Rain Song.mp3' '03 - Highest Life.mp3'
Apparently they had more songs? I'm not sure if I deleted ones that I didn't like. Alchemy has the line, "fureru mono wo kagayakashite yuku" which I occasionally think of (just a day or two ago I thought of it in the context of not being able to make polls that make people look stupid); but only Crow Song is linked in my sleep folder. Rain Song is too sad. Thousand Enemies is not useful when I am trying to do nothing. Crow Song has the line, "kibou terasu hikari no uta wo" or something, maybe I mangled it.
When I was living outside in 2012 and I would go to a certain plaza for Wi-Fi after the public library closed, several times someone played very loud music from a guitar with large speakers. I considered whether it was possible that Mei was paying this person to play music there. See relevant lines of lyrics from Crow Song.
Anyway, that was one song! Its lyrics are in Japanese and you are Japanese.
The second song I was thinking of was Rusty Nail. I linked to this to Mei and asked if she thought one of the band members was cute (the one that later committed suicide), and she focused on the fact of his unusual hair color. I . . . DO, in fact, have a cover of this song downloaded: Rusty Nail (Cover)[GERMAN SUPLEX], but I have not illegally downloaded the original song itself because, unlike Crow Song, it isn't a song of hope. So that means the place where I have a copy of it is just in Orangemarmalade's first PvP video in World of Warcraft, made in 2005 or 2006: a Korean person using a Japanese song, which is why for the longest time I was uncertain whether some other songs in Korean PvP videos were Korean, Chinese, or some other language.
Then, like, some songs by Hatsune Miku? I'm not sure if I could say I view them as significant. I previously obliquely referenced the song Stratosphere (as the title of an archive-containing jpg, using a photo of the sky taken by Kanyakorn Kiatsiri), which Mei played at some point and which was communicated to me by the instant messaging client changing her status or something; but I'm not sure if I even have it downloaded. There is a particular cover of "エアーマンが倒せない feat.初音ミク" which, again, Mei linked to me; but I have not bothered to link to this in the music folder that I use, so I rarely listen to it. And it definitely is not about memory, which is a common point between Crow Song and Rusty Nail.
It isn't Japanese, but I can at least mention Kamelot - Karma. It is featured in Gegon's 'The Last Ovski' PvP video (2006). So I checked: other Japanese songs in the 56 illegally downloaded songs in my sleep folder (I have literally never paid money for music):
01_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Instrumental)
03_Cool Whispers
18_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Pr1)
19_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Pr2)
20_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Vocal Version)
from the OST of the drama Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (2006);
FinalFantasyVIIINightwishGhostLoveScore.avi is not a Japanese song but was made into a video using a Japanese game and posted on Google Video in 2007 or earlier;
Kanako's Theme - Suwa Foughten Field, is definitely not a song one would expect to sleep to, but in the past when I was trying to stay awake for some reason, I found that even music like this could not keep me awake;
Kouya Ruten (karaoke - vietsub)
LEVEL5-judgelight- 歌詞付きフル
【東方原曲】風神録「ネイティブフェイス」(Native Faith) 【高音質】
🔴【歌枠】洋楽限定🎙English Song Singing Stream!!【ココツキ】[CocoTsuki - My Immortal - Evanescence] [cDl0zdi2IMs] (unlisted video, not a Japanese song but a Japanese singer)
荒野流転 歌詞付 (the song I linked at the end of https://pastebin.com/Wy8B0hK9)
This concludes sad Japanese songs that are not too sad.
Oh, one other song that I remember, the Hatsune Miku song "04.vanished the life -notreborn" from the album CLOSED SYSTEM, which (again) Mei listened to which caused me to download it. But the album has four other songs which I have zero interest in, and according to my filesystem the last time I accessed this song was 12 Sep 2021. Maybe it's too sad! In the same category is 火葬曲, by Hatsune Miku: only a few days ago I illegally downloaded the cover of this song by Nana Mitani, as well as her cover of "Megu Megu ☆ Fire Endless Night". 火葬曲 is the song that Mei listened to a day or two after her cat was killed by a dog (Jan 2011); which I surmised was the cat that she got in 2004 and named Misaki, after me, but it might not have been.
That would have been a good place to stop but I remembered the end credits song from 'Angel Beats!' and found another song as well. Those end credits have lyrics that, without listening to the song or doing a web search, are something like "at some point people become alone, living only in memories". 「孤独さえ (word I don't understand, aishi) 笑ってられる様に私は戦うんだ、涙なんて見せないんだ」. The other song I found was 01-PLANETARIUM, featured in the drama Hana Yori Dango, which I am currently ignoring because Japanese companies like to copyright strike everything; last accessed 12 Sep 2021 as well (an hour after 'vanished the life -notreborn', so not an automatic search). I had thought of the Angel Beats end credits song before I started writing this, or I wouldn't have mentioned it; there are two other Japanese language songs that I didn't remember until I saw them in a list of files that I won't mention (or three if you count A Cruel Angel's Thesis, last accessed 15 Mar 2024, or four with "Morning Musume" which is the name of a group and I don't even know what song it is; and Elfen Lied- Lillium_0001 which is not a Japanese language song, but a song about a Japanese anime, would make five more songs; or six with "mikuウマウマ_製作者様に感謝" which features a Japanese character, not sad; or seven with ParaParaParadiseBoomBoomFire which features Japanese dancers, not sad).
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Update 24 Mar 2025, 19:30
The title of my main weblog is partly a reference to the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, as well as to the shaman class in World of Warcraft using ankhs as a reagent for self-resurrection. So it isn't a surprise that I am once again referencing a work of the late Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum, p54:
Choices. It was always choices…
There’d been that man down in Spackle, the one that’d killed those little kids. The people’d sent for her and she’d looked at him and seen the guilt writhing in his head like a red worm, and then she’d taken them to his farm and showed them where to dig, and he’d thrown himself down and asked her for mercy, because he said he’d been drunk and it’d all been done in alcohol.
Her words came back to her. She’d said, in sobriety: end it in hemp.
So I have no excuses like "can't fall asleep" for updating this post again.
A comment on a video which apparently is favourable to you:
I did not realize Yoko Ono was still alive today, and 91 YEARS OLD.
(8 months ago, 2.8K upvotes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMOABV_zgrk&lc=UgymJne_2Xet7ztPMJ54AaABAg
I haven't watched even a single second of the video because I would have to stop the music and sound of waves which has been continuing since I first tried to sleep, 17 hours ago. I am commenting only about the surprise felt by the people who upvoted this.
The truth is, the accurate way to describe the situation is "there was never much of a reason to expect success". On the other hand, the way that I would attempt to make people think of the situation, if we do succeed, is what TV Tropes has decided to call the Xanatos Gambit: "a plan for which all foreseeable outcomes benefit the creator — including ones that superficially appear to be failure." Pick a random number from 1 to 100: it's not that the number was predicted, it's that there was a plan for each number to show how it was the perfect number.
No one wants to waste 10+ years of their life. However, this is a common outcome, and there is no sense in complaining about it. Some people do not even get 10 years of life.
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Update 24 Mar 2025, 22:24
Acting as if it was all according to plan is just maintaining consistency with people's expectations. It's like in a story where the audience learns something, and then the main characters almost immediately learn it as well or demonstrate their knowledge of it, even if learning it then is completely unrealistic or the explanation for previous actions seems inconsistent with knowing this information, because the audience will judge characters if they do not know something that everyone else (the entire audience) knows.
Currently trying to skim through the comments of various clickbait videos so I can spend my time doing something more interesting. Many of these videos are about why the viewer will never be rich, or will never retire, or will never stop working, or other variations of this wording: when I skimmed through the transcript of one video, which I am trying to find but modern website memory requirements are working against me as it is already 22:52 and at least half this time has been waiting for my browser to unfreeze, the answer to the title "why" of the 10+ minute video was "lifestyle inflation". Many other videos are about why the viewer does not choose to stop working, or otherwise alter their behavior to effect positive outcomes. Taken together, the real reason many people can't stop working, is because other people won't stop working (leading to high prices for housing etc.). Still waiting for a browser tab to load, with my poor 16-year-old hard drive continuously reading and slowly reducing swap space usage, after many laborious minutes spent writing that information.
So the title of that particular video was, You Will Never Have Your Finances In Order, Here's Why (again, "because of lifestyle inflation"). I took the effort of skimming the transcript (not watching the video) because the video description says,
You will never be rich!
It's not something that people hear enough. Based on the demographics of people who watch my videos most of you are from advanced countries so you will be doing well by global standards but you still won't be rich.
With one comment with 2.3K upvotes saying,
I was a financial adviser for many years and I can't tell you how true this video is. I used to have to do suitability by federal law which means I had to ask what people made and almost every millionaire I dealt with income was over 250000. Even more notable was most millionaires didn't understand basic investing. Trust me they got more help than the average Joe.
Implication, >$250k income and a millionaire is not "rich" or "having your finances in order".
Anyway, I thought I'd try to think of some examples from a drama like The Legend of Anle (the title of which, 安乐传, uses the same character as Water Margin 水滸傳, one of the six best-known classic Chinese novels: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/傳#Definitions_2), of audience knowledge influencing the story. Well, okay, I guess the biggest thing: the identify of the main female lead, Anle. The intro to each episode has a montage of images that includes the main male lead blindfolded, but near the end of the series we see that this is nothing more than a literal scene from the story, not a metaphor. In fact, the male lead knew the identify of the female lead all along, just as the audience could be certain of her identity within one or two episodes. So we conclude that the male lead is not so stupid that he didn't know something that the audience knew.
Or as a second example: the identify of a prominently featured character. Very soon after the audience learns this information, other characters discuss it and so it becomes known by characters for whom this information would be important. Or more generally and as is common in stories, information relevant to the plot is only revealed to the audience at a point when the main characters have already performed actions that they would have changed had they known this information, like the existence of a letter sent by Princess Anning.
Or to sum it up, acting like you don't or didn't know what you're doing just causes people to be anxious: it doesn't accomplish anything else useful, even if the truth is that you didn't know what you were doing. Allowing people to tell themselves a story that (mostly) absolves them of responsibility, while making you more responsible for outcomes, is not morally wrong.
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Update 25 Mar 2025, 00:06
That could make for an interesting poll: "If a politician that you elected doesn't have any idea how to fix a problem, would you prefer they act confidently or express their uncertainty?" with answers that examine both what people want, and how they would morally judge a confident attitude. But I'm not going to make such a poll.
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Update 27 Mar 2025, 21:58
This post is still hovering at 2 views, at least one of which is probably me, so I'm like.
80 minutes ago my brother used an Amazon Echo device to pass along a message from my sister, since I don't have phone service, about a mini pizza; so I went to her home and ate some food, and also listened to her reading a few pages from The Lives of Christopher Chant to her daughters. So I learned what a besom is.
I do find it regrettable that I have no confidence that people (like economists) that I shared the idea with understood that it helps low earners when high earners work less. To me, this is such a dumb reason for someone not to share it. But if they wanted it to be known that they were not dumb, they could have talked to me and indicated which points were understood by them, and which were not.
This is how stories work. Sometimes the outcome is undesired by some people. But a story is more acceptable if a person could easily have avoided the undesired outcome by changing their actions. For example: in the drama Love Game in Eastern Fantasy (永夜星河), the princess could have exited her carriage after being saved by a wandering demon catcher. She did not, and so lost him forever. The secondary female character, Miaomiao, could have been more assertive in rejecting an unwanted suitor and prevented a bracelet from being put on her wrist, which led to misunderstandings. Although the situation was resolved, she had allowed the situation to slip out of her control.
In the drama Can Lan Jue (苍兰诀), the current God of War is interested in Orchid but does not end up with her. Since she was also interested in him, the reason they did not end up together is no more and no less than because he erased her memory of an encounter they had together, in which he almost killed her by accident but she saved his life. All he had to do was not erase her memory. Similarly, all people had to do was reply to me.
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Update 27 Mar 2025, 22:51
This has nothing at all to do with you, but I am deliberately not saying anything else to anyone online. Someone who streams games could set up a 45° mirror with a screen parallel to a desk, and put a camera behind the mirror, so that they appear to be looking at the viewer when they look at the screen. One person says their engagement skyrocketed from putting a tiny camera in front of their screen. On the one hand, there are people who play games and regularly get tens of thousands of viewers without always looking at the camera. On the other hand, would they get more viewers if they did this?
Thought of this because of a video I watched years ago, where an expert archer appears to shoot the camera, but it's a mirror which cracks. Too dangerous to use glass and risk damaging the camera.
Also, completely unrelated, I have no idea how the Chinese version of Three-Body did those 'Buddhist' shots with a mirrored image that gradually fades out towards the center of the screen. It seemed it must have been through a clever arrangement with glass (not metal) as the reflective surface. A good understanding of reflections and how to set up the shot physically seemed more likely than easy, boring use of digital effects; or maybe I observed an actual, slight difference in perspective in a mirrored shot.
Regarding the economic idea, I worry that someone who shared it might be asked, "well if it's so easy to fix most problems in the world, why didn't we do this before?" and not know how to answer. To me, the bit with improving signal accuracy (and how it relates to conflict-promoting attitudes that lead to war) is the answer, which is the part that I haven't pasted online, only emailed to a few people. I think most people wouldn't even ask this question, or would be satisfied with an explanation like "production efficiency has greatly increased" or "the Cold War ended".
If people can agree that it does help low earners when high earners work less, then maybe there could be discussion about why some ways of getting high earners to work less are better than other ways (because they encourage higher signal accuracy in other areas, by destroying income as a reliable signal of ability). But the conversation must start somewhere. Despite writing this post on 18 Mar, I have no idea if the world is in such a state that it's possible for that conversation to start now. Specifically, as the only thing I control, I wonder if I need to write more.
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Update 29 Mar 2025, 02:43
I am writing this because there was something that made me happy, which makes me want to share it, but if I shared it with anyone else it would be like I was giving up on you sharing the economic idea.
The second conversation I described in this post was with free software advocate Richard Stallman. A year or so ago I came across a utility program with a manual page that mentioned he had written some of it: the 'uniq' utility, which I have since found occasional use for. He was too busy to continue discussing the topic of the economic idea, both when I emailed him this February and three years ago. So if I was writing to him, what I say here would not even be read. I don't know if you might feel the same way.
Extra details so I don't have to worry about whether to feel guilty for selecting what information to include, because I have no confirmation that the reason you or other people are not sharing the idea is not that you think I am a bad, or dishonest, person (this uncertainty could be cleared up by people talking to me): I was watching a video by Smiley, and she started to sing the lyrics to a popular song with the word "boom". I tried to think of other songs with this word, similar to the conversation about songs with "baby" in Baby Driver. BBoom BBoom(뿜뿜) by Momoland is one such song. While I listened to that song, I checked the comments: one of them mentioned "great!"
This seemed somehow familiar, but when I listened to the song again I couldn't find it, nor did it appear in a lyrics video. I thought it might be a Lisa Rhee dance cover video: either she didn't cover it, or it got deleted, but while searching I found a video from Indonesia where they say 'great' near the start of the song.
Incidentally, I think this video from the Philippines is better. But I'm watching these in 144p because I'm just searching for information (and because my computer has 3% free memory and 61% swap space used, and I can only play 720p60 without it overheating); I don't care about either of these videos of males dancing. And I found the video I watched before: dance cover by Vivian Shen, where she puts "Great!" on the screen to match the audio at 0:09 and 1:33. Based on the comment on the official video with 2.7k upvotes, saying "Great!" at this point in the song must appear in a lot of other videos or performances.
But that's just background information. During my search I saw some other videos which have remarkably high view counts compared to subscribers, suggesting high quality: a dance cover with 700k views by Karen Zeng who has 36k subs, and a dance cover with 1.7M views by Mari G who has 38k subs (with the description, "[ Edit ]: HOLY COWS TYSM FOR 1M!! views omkfjhajsdhfakjsdh ^^ this is surreal, you guys are AMAZING💗💗💗"). Also the short video of the dance by chanieme, comparing original vs TikTok (Douyin) versions of the dance, has 22M views.
At this point, I'm going to compare myself to the fans of Chinese dramas (Cdramas) as described in a post I replied to on Reddit. Their heated advocacy of their favorite actors or dramas can be off-putting to outside observers. I thought that these dance covers were inferior to the performances of the Chinese (Taiwanese) temple dance group Pop Candy 跳跳糖, but I couldn't remember why I thought this.
Of course this is how people often think: we have a certain opinion but can't remember why, or re-evaluating that opinion would take too much effort (like solving 100 math problems). But I looked through some videos and found one reason I think Pop Candy's performance is better, and then I found that I had already noticed and noted this detail:
06 Aug 2024
BBoom BBoom 뿜뿜: BJ햄찡: CfxaD3fKX_U at 38, 80, 142 (audio edit at 114, skip ~46 sec) same as shorts; BJ Ssonim: upwfcz8n5NM; Lady's: _EZHQTjOFG4 at 87, 2RZED1V6l80 at 86; 依庭 紅茶: pPa6GQZ-Uyk at 314; 包家潮州六姊妹: -DE10joCE08 kick at 34; T4g8jvvdYJc run forward at 73
They don't (didn't, because Covid-19 combined with smart phones and TikTok might have mostly ended temple dance culture, I don't know) do that quick run to switch positions in all performances, even when the circumstances would allow it: for example, they don't in a video recorded on 25 Mar 2019 by 熾焰狂峰, or the same performance recorded by Angel 志. They just run in place for a second.
I made a note of this in case I'm ever able to animate it in a program like MikuMikuDance (which Mei introduced me to, sending me a basic video she made on 06 Oct 2010, after she had figured out how to get UI text to show up properly). So far I haven't animated anything; either because I'm lazy, or because I'm concerned that expending effort in that way is not the best way to get people to use the economic idea.
Most of the videos that I think would make good motions feature female dancers, but, for example, I still need to take a minute or two to evaluate Dschinghis Khan - Moskau (Starparade 14.06.1979) to decide whether it could succeed as a dance motion.
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Update 30 Mar 2025, 03:15
A zero-value update, which I am writing because I experience no negative consequences for it. In general I am not checking the news, but I checked my Yahoo email accounts to prevent them from being deleted from inactivity and after signing out I saw some headlines that I clicked on.
This story made me think about how so many people don't expect, or hope for, any drastic change in how the world operates:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/finance/news/meta-platforms-meta-mega-cap-223956154.html
A lot of the time, criticism happens because people perceive an environment in which a certain action is contrary to the interests or desires of an overwhelming majority of the population. People think that they are criticizing someone who is too dumb to see what other people want. This kind of criticism can only be neutralized by showing that the factual basis for the criticism is wrong: that the majority does want a certain outcome. Providing this evidence can be difficult, and so someone who suggests changes that affect diverse population segments, each with their own conceptions of what people want (which inevitably means that some of these views will be wrong, to varying degrees), must be prepared for this kind of criticism with no easy way to immediately answer it.
This story makes me want to make a poll about free speech:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/phd-student-snatched-masked-officers-050035809.html
Without actually mentioning the key phrase, "free speech", but instead phrasing it something like, "Should people be allowed to voice opinions that are critical of the attitudes taken by a majority of the population, and which have the potential to cause real-world harm, without being punished?"
This story makes me want to make a poll about how badly people want the fighting in Ukraine to end:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/senator-mark-kelly-snaps-back-042815440.html
"Everyone wants this war to end, but [...]"
So the poll would be, how much would you personally pay to stop all fighting in Ukraine? With options starting at nothing (or paying to make it continue). A lot of people could probably be said to only want a war to end if it means their side "wins". If the offered outcome is one in which their side "loses", even if no more people die, then they would say that they would prefer for the war to continue, even though it means more people die. And if people say this, then I see no reason not to believe that this is what they want. (Although keeping in mind that a reckless attitude can sometimes be beneficial in confrontations, which teaches people to hide what they really want.)
It might be better to make the options for a poll like this in terms of a percentage of income, though. Like, at the moment, I apparently have about $30 in money, which is mostly or all Christmas gifts from my mum over the years; there might also be a $50 or $100 bill from an envelope about 12 years ago, which I found behind my door and didn't remember who it was from; so I might pay up to $130 to stop tens of thousands of people from dying in war, because that's all I have.
A lot of the polls I created, I didn't vote in, though. There was the poll about a button to end all war ("but not police brutality"): I didn't vote in this poll, but I wouldn't push that button, even though I would pay at least $30 to stop the fighting in Ukraine. (And if there was a button to stop only the fighting in Ukraine, I would push it.) Also, I don't have an opinion on the Turkey-Kurd conflict, in which Kurdish attacks are often attacks on Turkish military forces that are very similar to the attacks the US military experienced while in Iraq, which most a lot of people in the US called terrorist attacks. Noting that the US military often prefers to describe things precisely, and so incident reports more typically referred to "enemies" or "military-aged males", and not to "insurgents" or "terrorists".
I also have no opinion on what the rules should be for ownership of natural resources: whether all profit from using up a limited natural resource should accrue to people who live within 10 km of the resource, or 100 km, or 1000 km, or 10 000 km. This being one of the reasons that a group of people sometimes want to form their own country, to avoid sharing profits with people who live further[*] away. (*I am avoiding changing it to farther because of the word farthing.)
One can imagine a world where people are not penalized for having opinions on topics like this, but this is not the world we live in. People see society, and public discourse, as being full of problems, to the point that minor issues cannot be discussed without harming progress towards solutions for much bigger problems. People who have a strong view about minor issues will see an opinion as a reason to reject someone who expresses an opposing view, while people who agree with the expressed view will often not view this as significant enough to support someone who expresses it: these opinions act as a blacklist only. (One can imagine using 10 different issues, with two possible opinions on each, to reduce a pool of potential candidates from 2^10 = 1024, down to 1, and yes I had to use a calculator as I thought it would be 1 million.) Even people who don't care about the minor issues will take the act of publicly expressing an opinion as evidence that someone is not suitable for leadership, because they are alienating potential supporters for no good reason (since the minor issue will not get solved anyway).
If we fix major issues in society, then it would be more acceptable to express opinions about other issues.
To be honest I just had the thought, how many people, even people like the people on this list, know that it's almost certain that people who were hostile to the government of Ukraine fired on crowds of people protesting against the government in 2014 in order to get the government blamed for the resulting deaths? Anyway, if the "no wars or internal conflicts" button were pressed, then violent protests against governments would not be possible, and so Ukraine's 2014 revolution would not have happened. (Ukraine's president at the time explained that he did not want to give the order for police forces to fire on civilians, and so the only option left was to give up power.)
Incremental update in chronological order: the fact of expressing opinions on minor issues being a political disadvantage is itself a minor issue, and so while I think it would be possible to teach people about it (like a classroom experiment, with progressively solving issues to see how it influences voting), there isn't going to be a discussion about whether to teach people about this unless major issues get solved.
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Update 30 Mar 2025, 18:27
I was idly thinking about Ukraine and war and other things from the previous update to this post, and I thought of a poll and then realized it would be a bad poll, that no one should create. "If the fighting in Ukraine stopped now, would you say that Ukraine won the war or lost the war?" Or asking whether Ukraine or Russia won the war.
Compare that famous quote, "a strange game: the only way to win is not to play." Asking a question in which it implies it was possible for either side to win the war would cause people to get emotionally upset. Maybe Ukraine and Russia are both winners, similarly to how maybe Korea somehow benefits from being split in two: but "winning" in this manner is not how people would typically think of the outcome of war, and language is better without miscommunication. A lot of Chinese costume dramas and donghua (anime) touch on war, but I thought of a scene from Love Game in Eastern Fantasy, where after being killed dozens of times for harming the main female lead with changed medicine, Miaomiao makes a wish that "all affectionate and righteous people are at peace", and explains that "peace is the greatest wish of ordinary people".
The fighting in Ukraine is like the lyrics to the popular song, Through The Fire And Flames (via Grim - Total Annihilation, 2006, but he only used the first few minutes which didn't include these lyrics): "Now here we stand with their blood our hands / We fought so hard now can we understand / I'll break the seal of this curse if I possibly can / For freedom of every man."
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Update 31 Mar 2025, 04:55
My next task should have been listening to '『火葬曲』- 実谷なな 『Cremation Song ⧸ Kasou Kyoku』- Nana Mitani [OB1_zB5DaGg].mkv', but I didn't want to be sad so I looked for a way to procrastinate by seeing if I was ready to sleep. The album art shows her family name first, so I guess I should rename files to match. Family name second must just be a convention suggested by the publisher.
I requested in the first update to this post that no one else read these updates, but I didn't expect anyone who read up to that point (maybe no one) to follow that request. Like, I mentioned the drama The Legend of Anle in case someone who owns a $5000 white wig reads this. But now I am really writing as though no one else except you will read this.
I must say that I have a severe lack of confidence, not in my own abilities, but in my ability to influence what other people do. It's so easy for me to imagine other people doing nothing, no matter what I do.
In my crazy world, the US government (synecdoche, a word I learned from Elyse Sugimoto: only a tiny part of the US government, from an agency I can't predict) is looking at what I do online, possibly reporting some information to people, and occasionally interfering. I blame the US government for my browser apparently failing to properly retrieve YouTube DASH video or audio chunks due to what seems to be file length of 0. I can get around this when I expect it to be a problem by using youtube.com/embed/, but I use the main website and UI partly as a way of possibly getting some kind of input about what I should be doing.
The basic message that I have been getting is that I shouldn't be watching AoE2 videos, but the consistency of browser problems etc. varies. I was able to watch about the first 26 minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK1wAIothdc earlier, then problems started around the time that the first game in the set was pretty obviously over, meaning it was a waste of time to continue watching that game except for entertainment.
Anyway, I mention this because it's possible that Sherine has some knowledge or involvement about this interference. Survey, A particular end, and a particular means: six responses and, actually, an amazingly diverse population of respondents. Only two are from the US. All six answered Yes to "Would you be upset if there were great improvements to the world that only came about because people were killed?" (Edit: I remembered I was one of those six.)
Sherine only knows about the idea because a bomb at the Boston marathon. I cannot say whether killing people was the goal, but it was a likely outcome and the actual outcome. It seems reasonable to say that if no one had been killed, it's less likely she would have acted in a way that caused me to contact her and less likely she would have cared about the explanation I offered for the actions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother. So, this is a story that results from some people being killed.
Your story also involves someone being killed. People commented on the video I linked (that I did not watch) that they did not know that you were next to John when he was shot. The typical thought that people seem to have about that is that "it must be so traumatic to be next to someone you care about when they are violently killed". My thought, as you might expect, is that the person who killed John Lennon, whose name I do not remember, had no desire to kill you. My thought about this in the past 11 hours, some point after the previous update, was that "one can think of this in terms of the expectation that males will fight and die, while females are not expected to take such risks."
If fighting in wars is really such a big concern for males, one might ask why males did not band together and support a solution to war which would keep them from dying. Of course, males don't think like this: no civilians in the US expect to die from war unless they specifically volunteer to go to a war zone as a private military contractor (or in a more vulnerable role like a health care worker or journalist who goes to a war zone). But I can be just as disappointed in, say, poor people: even using a metric like "disability-adjusted life years" to measure the burden of being poor, the decrease in lifespan from being poor is probably much higher than the average decrease from violent deaths.
Basically, we can observe that in this world, people die. A lot of people can say they have been affected in a substantial way by someone dying. Kate Kiatsiri reacted significantly to someone she knew dying, in 2012: maybe this male was a romantic interest of hers, and maybe if he hadn't died, they would have married or something and I wouldn't have a reason to mention her now. Sherine had her cousin or whatever who died, although I somewhat harshly stated in response to her lack of action that she didn't care about that cousin. The friend of Sherine's middle school crush died, coincidentally shortly after Sherine sort-of shared the idea on Twitter, and the last time I checked he still had that friend in his Twitter bio ~10 years later, although I either forgot his name or he deleted his Twitter account.
So people prefer a story that does not involve anyone dying, but we do not have to respect this wish. I am basically expressing my uncertainty whether it would be better for people to learn of the idea because the actions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother influenced Sherine, or because your husband was killed which probably resulted in you acting in a different way and being more interested in reading things like comments on your website. Do you think it would be better if Sherine's story causes people to learn of the idea?
P.S. comments to this post are open
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Update 01 Apr 2025, 17:17
I shouldn't be updating this post. I had decided I shouldn't do anything online (like watching YouTube videos) for three days, other than doing Google searches for my current weight and daily diet (edit 22:47: and checking Yara's Twitter account), which I have been doing since around the time the recent fighting in Gaza started. (I also watched several episodes of the Chinese drama "Everyone Loves Me" (2024) last night, on a smart TV.)
Today I thought of the possibility of contacting Grigori Perelman, who famously rejected a $1M prize after some controversy regarding whether his proof of a difficult problem was complete. I made a note of it, so that maybe I could try it at some point (possibly years) in the future; and then I went online and checked.
After doing my own searches, I asked an AI (text model thing), which nicely summarized the information I had already found and gave me confidence that I wasn't missing anything. However, linking to answers seems broken, and some bookmarked older answers redirect to the main page. Anyway, I asked perplexity.ai (the engine that most frequently gave correct answers in a comparison), "what is grigori perelman's most recent email address", then clicked on the suggested followup questions, "How does Perelman's email policy compare to other mathematicians", "What kind of emails does Perelman typically respond to", "Are there any exceptions to Perelman's strict email policy".
Also, I republished the post from 2017 that had a comment from the mysterious "B". Ohh, and I just found the Comments tab. Hi, Ellie Kesselman! I am honestly amazed that you commented on this site! I have published your second comment that was withheld as spam by Blogspot, even though I have comment moderation set to Never.
It turns out that no one else could have logged in, and so the inactivity on this blog is not an indication that no one cared about this idea. Google now uses IP checks for suspicious logins, if a browser's cookies do not indicate previous use of an account. I almost got locked out of all my accounts myself after moving to a new location.
You don't know how many times I spammed that link to pastebin on different sites to get to 4000 views, haha.
Yoko Ono: I had mentioned Grigori Perelman to my friend Hanna, back in 2011 or something (at least I think I did). This was regarding the uncertainty over whether he had successfully proved a theorem. The reason I thought of contacting him now was simple: 1) He has a reputation, and if he said something to the news media they would listen. 2) His actions indicate he cares about problems, and is willing to make sacrifices. Sharing this idea would involve the risk of a sacrifice due to failing. 3) It seemed that maybe not enough people knew of him that there could be a chance of actually contacting him.
Regarding the third point, there might actually be a better chance of contacting the much better-known mathematician Terence Tao (whose list of topics he doesn't respond to I had already found before asking Perplexity AI).
The argument for why I should not try to contact these people (such attempts would most likely fail, but I cannot rule out success), and why you should act as though I did not update this post today: the first argument that I posted on pastebin, which Ellie Kesselman mentioned in her recent comments (I literally do not remember anyone ever replying when I posted the link to that argument on so many weblog posts in 2011), opens by talking about knowledge specialization.
The fact is, mathematicians have no special knowledge of economics. They also have no special knowledge of whether it is important to fund militaries in preparation for war, or why people who earn $1M per year work hard so that they can earn more than $1M the next year, or why young people spend all their time on TikTok instead of researching solutions to problems that will affect their future.
I have done my best to verify that the basic idea of this site (a decrease in wage rate with an inflection point earlier than the minimum that most people would choose to work) would both work, and would also have a net positive effect on society. Or, to put it another way, that smart people are not secretly better off under the current system and are disguising their intelligence in all of the studies that show that smart people have lower fertility. Or, to put it another way, that there is not a "morality gene" which has been increasing in frequency. (Let's agree that an alien invasion, in the style of Larry Niven's Protector or more subtly as in Vernor Vinge's True Names, is unrealistic, and that I am really a human and not an alien AI masquerading as a human on the Internet.)
Although mathematicians like Grigori Perelman or Terence Tao understand much more about maths than you or I ever will, they have average competence in other knowledge areas. If I had contacted one such back in 2011 and they had shared it, they would have been sharing something that they had made only a minimal contribution to verifying. The same would be true even if they shared it now: I would be asserting, with more confidence than I could have had in 2011, that it would be right for them to share it, and they would simply be relying on me: a person who would share no consequences of failure from them sharing it, as I have no reputation to lose.
This lack of contribution from their area of expertise would be one more reason for them to ignore any attempt from me to contact them, but it's also a reason it's no better for them to share it than for anyone else to do so. Maybe, even without expertise, they would better understand it than you do. I don't know. How well do you understand it? Does my oldest brother, who is in prison, really find it difficult to understand my point that high earners working less helps low earners? I felt like your reaction in 2011, and then later in that Twitter status that you deleted in like Oct 2012 which I can't even really remember (and maybe I even misremembered that such a status ever existed), suggested you thought all of this was important.
I will make it clear, since I don't think I ever did so: a lot of time, the benefit from "art" is in providing a new goal to the audience. Often, that goal is no more and no less than "spend some time contemplating this art work". My uncultured self thinks of the museum scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (same scene played slightly slower and lower pitched, which one is right??), which prominently features people standing still looking at art.
In this way, by diversifying people's goals, art has the effect of increasing awareness of "the varying reliability of primary signals". But, according to the quote that opens that argument, the most precious asset is time. It would be better if people could diversify their goals without having to spend time looking at, or experiencing, artwork. I wrote the second part of that document because it seemed to me that people were avoiding solutions that involved conflicting goals. This idea that provides, or rather encourages, a conflict between wage rate and total income (noting that this conflict does not exist with overtime: one maximizes wage rate by maximizing income and time worked); and also the solution to tanking specialization that I suggested for World of Warcraft, back when it was a completely different game than it is today, 14 years later.
In that solution, tanks are supposed to balance the twin demands of damage (or threat, which comes from damage), and mitigation. The game around the time that I made this suggestion was one in which tanks were only concerned with mitigation. Whenever threat became a problem (from power inflation), the developers just buffed the threat multiplier that tanks got, so that it ceased to be a problem.
So the idea here is that people tend to think in terms of solutions that preserve the existing ways in which people measure things: things like "whether a tank is competent in their role". Around the time I made that post, tanks were judged as incompetent if they ever lost threat. (I have no idea how it is in current WoW, but in Classic WoW which replicates WoW as it was in 2006, one can see many examples of tanks losing threat in videos that are posted of dramatic and interesting content.) So I was suggesting a solution that would cause tanks to be judged negatively by the existing standards. Criticism would only be reduced if people changed the standard, i.e. signals, by which they evaluated other players.
Similarly with this economic idea. Instead of "rich = smart", or "rich = bad" as the case may be, people would have to use other methods to evaluate people. And people seem to be reluctant to suggest changes which would force people to think differently. The second part of that argument explains why forcing people to think differently has benefits to society.
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Update 03 Apr 2025, 09:41
I want to live on infinitely, if I can live on infinitely, everything will[be fulfilled] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B6%E3%81%86
Alchemy - Girls Dead Monster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk&lc=UgxMn4ntWm8BIPZhCPJ4AaABAg
my browser just had a bug that makes me restart
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Update 03 Apr, 10:07
After having another store-bought cookie (US$0.34 before tax, 280 kcal), I have decided to finish this update. I linked that video for one reason: the loss of the Sewol ferry in 2014.
As usual, I didn't bother to watch the video; I just read comments to see whether it was worth watching, without contributing watchtime to something that might just be clickbait. (YouTube uses watchtime to decide which videos to suggest to other users: that video is currently #10 on trending.) Comments say that the video was already posted months ago on Kurzgesagt's Korean channel, and everyone in Korea already knows the information in the video. One Korean comment says that the video focuses on birthrates (for the "SOUTH KOREA IS OVER" clickbait title), but Korea also has big economic and political problems too.
I want to draw attention to one theme in the comments (there is also a well-written English comment by a Korean 7th-grader, using their mother's account): the difficulty of finding jobs. The statistics don't look bad: the Republic of Korea only has a 5.4% youth unemployment rate in 2023, down from 10% eight years ago. In contrast, India is at 15.6%, down from 26% in 2018; the United States is at 8%, down from 15% in 2021 due to Covid-19 and 18% in 2010; Spain is at 29%, down from 55% in 2013.
But people think it's bad. One person said that something that was mistranslated as job-to-job ratio was 0.28, which they said was 0.28 people out of 100 getting a job. (Maybe this is 0.28 hires per 100 job applications.) Another person talks about their difficult economic situation and how surprised other people are to learn that this person went to a top university with a scholarship. Other people talk about 60+ hour work weeks. In general: young people feel poor, think that housing prices are too high, and think that old people control all of the wealth and political influence. They feel that old people are making young people work hard, to the detriment of the country's future; but the point is that young people feel they are being forced to work hard and that it isn't their generation's choice. (The 7th-grader wrote about students having to study 12 hours a day, their career aspirations, and their lack of hope for the future.)
I assert that even though the young unemployment rate seems low, too much supply of labor is still the correct explanation for these problems. The explanation that most people have is the "people are greedy" explanation. I am too lazy to search through my Reddit posts for when I submitted this explanation (those posts might have comments on what people thought of it), so I am just pasting it again here:
A Brief Explanation of Economic Inequality in the 21st Century
(I logged in to see if it would get it to show up on the list of recent public pastes: nope.)
To quote from that (tip, use shift-ctrl-V to paste instead of ctrl-V, to paste without formatting which sometimes messes up rich text entry fields like this one):
Most people have a very basic understanding of the causes of inequality. They say that it's because rich people are greedy or cheating. Imagine people distributing some resources, like children taking candy from a piñata. One person is greedy, taking 10 times his share, and another person hesitates for too long and ends up with just one piece of candy. In this explanation, the solution is for people not to be greedy.
So, Korea's problems are not because old people are greedy. But young people have no reason to see the truth of the situation if they don't see a realistic solution. Blaming another group of people gives them (i.e., their dumber friends, for whom they care dearly) moral license to act without responsibility, as with the partying that led to 159 people suffocating in a crowd in 2022.
Well, I was also going to mention the "nut rage incident": the Wikipedia article is incomplete and does not clarify that Cho Yang-ho ordered cabin crew chief Park Chang-jin off the plane not because the nuts were not served on a plate, but because he was not able to confidently refer to the rules to contradict her claim that the rules stated that the nuts should be served on a plate. It is an example of people in Korea being reluctant to challenge authority, even when an authority figure is in the wrong.
In contrast, the Korean drama "My Dearest Nemesis" (2025) has a scene in Ep 01 where the main female character sprays a company director with a fire extinguisher because he was smoking in a room where he shouldn't.
To be clear: my best guess is that maybe when I shared this economic idea on the English forums for the Korean game Aion, an English-speaking employee might have found it significant enough to share with the main Korean branch, and it could have found its way from there to the Korean government. Or maybe this is completely wrong, which would not concern or upset me.
Another video I'm not bothering to watch: How The Finance Industry Destroys Economies (linked comment: "Automated rent extraction" is a phrase I didn't think would immediately make total sense.) For anyone who thinks society can't do better than the current system of encouraging everyone to work as much as possible (powered by fossil fuels).
Yoko Ono, I don't think talking about Korea's problems makes you more likely to share this idea. I think about the Sewol disaster's victims every time I take a cold shower, which during the winter is not often. I hope you will excuse me writing about a topic that does not directly concern you.
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Update 03 Apr 2025, 16:25
I was going to write that the situation was that you had refused to share this idea, and that I was doing nothing, and compare this to the scene from Everything Loves Me around Ep 08 where Gu Xun is at the arcade trying to get Yue Qianling to agree to take a job (and contrast with Hana Yori Dango where the male character waits in the rain), but this is too serious for that. I am not acting like you have refused to share it.
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Update 04 Apr 2025, 11:12
I'm saying this because I feel like you might have had some confusion about my identity. I might have said this on my currently-banned Twitter account, which you may or may not have read. When I was in Iraq, in 2008~2009, I wrote みさき or ミサキ, sometimes vertically I think, on the styrofoam clamshell containers that I used to store a meal in (I would wake up around 3~5 pm shortly before my shift, go to dinner and store that extra meal which was ostensibly for a second person, and then eat that meal in the middle of my shift around midnight); and around 12 years ago, my third-oldest sister sent me a light blue cloth facial tissue holder with MISAKI embroidered on it for Christmas, but no one has ever addressed me by that name in real life, I believe. I have never introduced myself as Misaki.
Also, I made a poll: Is "Rich people are greedy" a good explanation for economic inequality?
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Update 04 Apr 2025, 13:51
I'm not surprised that the currency exchange rate poll that I posted for a teenager audience
my browser just had the bug that makes me have to close it
https://www.reddit.com/r/polls/comments/1jcw9xg/would_you_want_the_value_of_the_currency_used_in/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teenager_Polls/comments/1jcwj5m/would_you_want_the_value_of_the_currency_used_in/
Interpolate the rest of what I would have said here, it's fairly predictable
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teenager_Polls/comments/1jcw10j/do_you_truly_consider_yourself_to_be_a_good_person/
https://www.quora.com/How-do-Jean-Calvins-and-Thomas-Hobbes-philosophies-relate-to-each-other/answer/Isidore-Fitzroy
https://www.quora.com/How-closely-do-Calvin-and-Hobbes-reflect-the-philosophies-of-John-Calvin-and-Thomas-Hobbes/answer/Elliott-Yoon
https://www.quora.com/In-‘Calvin-and-Hobbes’-does-Calvin-ever-give-any-indication-that-he-knows-Hobbes-is-not-alive/answer/Zack-Brown-320
(The comic about fate)
Oh, well it seems that I didn't quit my browser, so I don't have to log back in but I also can't see what I type until I switch tabs, alt-tab to another pgoram and back, and then al-ttab I mean ctrl-tab back to the original tab. Screen does not update, I meanredenred screen content does not update unless I do that, although scroll location with the same content can change if I simply alt-tab without switching tabs. So, I wanted to add this link about trust: well< it's too hard to find it since I can't get the screen to update I mean by typing trust * in the URL bar. Bu it's a survey about trust in different countries; the chart I found of interest was India and China having high trust, according to this survey (there are many surveys about trust which sometimes show different results, possibly due to different wording).
The point about this that I wanted to make is that some religions may reduce trust in people, making people act worse, because the rules of the religion substitute for evaluating morailty through other ways. It's like a lactic acid bacteria reducing the pH of milk which kills off other types of bacterias; only in this case, it's a morality I mean a religion that creates a toxic environment for other means of evaluating morality, by making people act badly if they don't convert to the religion and follow it. I have typed all that without seeing the screen dupate and ow I am pressing Update.
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Update 05 Apr 2025, 16:53
As you know, the current president of the United States was almost killed by an assassin's bullet last year, during the campaigning period. The motivations of the assassin remain unknown. As a result of this event, I didn't publish a survey that I wrote about the importance of preventing a future decline in human intelligence.
I prefer to have the view that no one is bad. Partly, one might say that through this attitude, I seek to convince other people that I am also not bad: this is one reason people are resistant to this worldview, because they perceive it to be to the advantage of people who are actually bad.
I have always felt that if we fix most problems in the world, then we should release everyone who is in prison. If this were to happen, it would now include my oldest brother (if he is still alive then). Some people who are in prison have done things that are quite bad (and some people who are not in prison have also done bad things, but that's another topic). A lot of people who are in prison for doing bad things are convinced that it's right for them to be in prison. My goal is that I could potentially meet anyone who is released from prison, with them knowing I have some responsibility for them and a lot of other people who have done bad things being released from prison, and they would not harm me.
I thought I would mention two examples of people doing bad things: one from real life and one fictional. Real life: the person nicknamed the Night Stalker.
At age 12, Ramirez was taken under the wing of his older cousin, Miguel Angel "Mike" Valles (June 14, 1949 – April 8, 1995), a soldier in the U.S. Army who himself had already become a serial killer and rapist during his service in the Vietnam War. Mike often boasted of committing gruesome war crimes in Vietnam, and shared Polaroid photos with Ramirez showing Vietnamese women whom he had raped, murdered, and dismembered or decapitated. It is alleged that many of these photos depicted women being tied to trees or wooden posts both before and after they were sexually assaulted and killed by Valles.
His capture:
Her husband, Manuel De La Torre, witnessed the attempt and struck Ramirez over the head with a fence post in the pursuit. A group of over ten residents (including Jose Burgoin's sons) formed and chased Ramirez down Hubbard Street in Boyle Heights. They soon restrained Ramirez and relentlessly beat him.
His attitude after arrest:
At his first court appearance, he raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, "Hail Satan!" [...]
He stated to reporters after the death sentences, "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland."
The fictional case is the Japanese film Grotesque (2009). I have not watched it. The IMDb description is "A doctor kidnaps a young couple and forces them into a game of torment that slowly extinguishes their hopes for survival." The key points, as I see it, are that the kidnapper does not seem to have a motivation for the crime that most people would guess at; the kidnapped people die, but manage to injure the kidnapper; and the ending shows the kidnapper preparing to abduct more people, while showing evidence of the injury.
The details of the movie involve the people being restrained in a way in which they can obtain some freedom by injuring themselves. In a way, it might be seen as a counterpoint to the story of the novel 1984: in which two people who believe they love each other end up betraying each other rather than face their fears, which in the case of the male character is a fear of rats (such as with the reputed torture that involves heating a metal bowl on someone's chest to force rats in the bowl to burrow through the person's chest to escape). So in this Japanese film, there is no betrayal.
As a counterpoint to that film, I would like to mention that the director or something of the Chinese drama Can Lan Jue (苍兰诀), aka Love Between Fairy and Devil (兰 means orchid and this English title sort of forces the overall story, but is probably good for attracting interest), said that the overall message he wanted to make with the drama was that "love makes people better."
We can see how this is a message that a Chinese creator is more likely to incorporate into a work than a Japanese creator. Meanwhile, many works from US culture have the superficial message that love causes people to act in a good way, but rarely focus on the possibility of people other than the main characters expressing love. The expression of "acting in a good way" also often involves killing many people who are seen as being bad (and without love).
Anyway, if the antagonist of that Japanese film were real, then my hope would be that his thinking would change such that he would not try to kill me if he had the opportunity. Of course, if he were real, then I also think he should go to prison, unless people used this idea and people agree to let people who have done similarly bad things out of prison.
