EditWednesday, February 19, 2003
Rock Steady
Well, you all know I was worried about my date with Elizabeth, but it turned out great! She was really happy to see me, and really liked the gift I got her, a little stuffed kitten-sorta-thing. We had a long, non-boring chat at the coffee house, and best of all? Well, she originally said she would only have until 7:30?
She had 'till 8:10. O:-)
Oh, and remember how she was going to see her parents this weekend, precluding me from seeing her? Apparently, that's off too, so I'll get to have the infamous picnic date this Saturday. Rock steady. Rock steady.
Oh, and I don't care what you say: your theory of homesteading immensely effects your political philosphy- I'll post my notes on it after the speech.
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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Where have I been?
Well, I've been in Reno at a competition Wednesday through Sunday. Oh, wait, that's my (soon to be girlfriend? who knows...) Elizabeth. So I didn't get to see her through Valentine's Day. AWWWW :-( But I talked to her on the phone yesterday (kinda slow conversation, but okay) and online today. We have a third date planned: coffee at Sweet Release's, er, I mean Sweet Eugene's. As many of you know, the third date is the critical nexus of dates. It's either grow or die- no stagnation here. So, I'll be consulting the usual suspects for advice- post any if you have any. The worst that can happen is the "just friends" spiel- so I hope I don't suffer that. But it looks like things are going well, so... who knows?
Markets and Rings
If there's one thing I've learned in all my life, it's this: markets respond very quickly, more so than you can imagine. If there's a demand for something, however obscure, there are many, many people out there, waiting to fill that niche- for a price.
Thursday I got a request from a romantic advisor: a friend of hers had her Aggie Ring messed up and needs it replaced: but A&M's knighted "official ring provider" lost her information- as governmental bureaucracies often do. So, they need me to find someone who can make her ring, and thanks to my fundamental insight above, I know it can be done. I should have done it earlier, but by tomorrow I'll be calling numbers from the phonebook to find some jeweler willing to do a "special job" at price below A&M's monopolistic one. And I know someone's willing.
The above is for educational purposes only.
More on Geoists Did I use that already?
Thursday I'll be giving a speech on homesteading for the AggieTM Libertarians. The flier will look something like this:
Homesteading... *yawn*... boring topic, right?
WRONG, dead wrong!
How you believe natural resources can be first owned, and forever owned, has an immense impact on your political philosphy. Thursday night, longtime member Silas Barta will give a riveting speech explaining the libertarian theory of homesteading in the context of geoism/Georgism, socialism, and constitutionalism, explaining the various methods each employ to justify them, and what the implications are of each. You'll never think of the phrase "This is *my* land!" the same way again!
Till next time, doodz!
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Tuesday, February 11, 2003
It was a dirty day... dirty day
You're looking for explanations, I don't even understand/ If you need someone to blame, throw a rock in the air you'll hit someone guilty.
Sorry, just had to throw in some U2 lyrics there. But I do have some bad news to share. I finally built up the courage to ask Tina for her ##, but she said no. Shame, shame. Ah well. Elizabeth, if you're reading, yes, I do like you. A lot. But you simply have to understand, women are very capricious, and until we're really bf/gf, I have to live with the risk that you'll go bonkers and leave me at the worst time for the least obvious reason, as happened the last four, five times. But who's counting, eh? If you need someone to blame...
Aironut Client Utility
I haven't updated as often as I'd like to over the past weekend because my 100% reliable wireless internet connection from my apartment complex quit on us, and they STILL haven't gotten it fixed. Yeah, way to wait until a business day... and still not fix it. I haven't seen it so far today, so I'm typing this from a school computer, just like in asking for Tina's ##, to hedge my bets.
If I had been on, I'd have already told you about my lunch date with Elizabeth, which also went well. Except she said she had some extra time after lunch, but I couldn't think of anything to do. I'm kicking myself over how I could have taken her to the park. Regardless, she is going to a competition in Reno for which she'll have to leave tomorrow morning, so I won't be able to see her until Sunday. Yes, that means no Valentines for me an Elizabeth. Dirtier day. But at least I'll get to talk to her while she's there (probably).
The geoism-IP connection!
Sorry, I still haven't put my thoughts together on that, and don't know where, if other than here, such thoughts would be published. But I'll let you know. For now, I can offer this nugget: the connection lies in "If not for ____ , ____ would not exist."
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Saturday, February 08, 2003
A non-psycho girl!
I'm happy to report that last night my date with Elizabeth went great. There was never a dull moment. I'm under the impression this will really develop into something. She already agreed to see me again on Monday for lunch. We met at Square One, then went to the movies, then for coffee. I called her already today. I'm glad I was able to meet a non-psycho girl, i.e., one who does not seem to like me, then flees at the first possible moment. (No, you don't have to like me to be a non-psycho girl, you simply have to act in a consistent- not even logical, just consistently illogical, perhaps- manner.) So things are looking up.
No deep philosophical analysis in this post, but I want to let you all know what the next one will be, since I haven't finished developing my thoughts into a coherent argument yet. I will attempt to show the parallels between belief in intellectual property rights (IP) and geoism/Georgism. For those who don't know, geoism is, in general, the belief that ownership of land is immoral unless you pay to the surrounding community the net cost to them of your ownership.
Silas gets in his school paper!!!
That's right, on Thursday I participated in a debate about the coming war on Iraq. See the online article here. Note that the argument attributed to me probably isn't my "strongest" since most people accept the legitimacy of taxation, even after my grandiose demostration during the debate, where I threatened a hot girl with death if she wouldn't give me her Aggiebuckstm. Probably my stronger, unquoted point, is that it's absolutely impossible, even in the strongest totalitarian state, to prevent a devoted soul from sneaking in a nuke, so the best we can hope for is to take away the desire to do so, as freer countries like Switzerland and Lichtenstein already do.
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Tuesday, February 04, 2003
We get letters tm
It's very rare on this site that I directly and publicly answer the feedback I get, but this time I'll make an exception, since there was such a huge response to my last (as usual, hard-hitting) post.
First, thanks for noting the hard-hitting nature of the site, Mr. xcxx.
Second, I received a number of complaints slamming my possible connection with space program endeavors. A characteristic one came from my long-time vizierette Laurel:
Shouldn't NASA close in the first place? I mean, what's with the government-funded shuttles anyway? If this is your research topic, check my site for a TIME mag article on why shuttles are antiquated systems.
I thank Laurel for the link, and am reminded of an onion article, which, after a search of their archives, including through Googles cache feature, I still can't find. But I must emphasize that my research area is not NASA shuttles. The problem of closed loop system identification has a very large number of applications, including commercial flight (in which spotting a failure ahead of time would be nice unless you're the government and want to cover up disasters like TWA Flight 800) and process and robotic control.
And what about women?
I was just getting to that. There seems to be demand to know about my love life. Well, some of you only have yourselves to blame for not being online. But for the rest of you, I was able to track down a lovely lady named Elizabeth I met last November at a Bach concert. (See the hilarious satire article about it.) I didn't ask for her number unfortunately because I didn't expect to be in town this long. We corresponded by email for a short while, and I called her yesterday for a loooooong chat on the phone. Possible date this weekend, but she says she won't be here the weekend of Valentine's. Bummer.
I hope Elizabeth isn't reading this because I have to mention another very hot, very stacked girl that I like, Tina. Unfortunately I haven't been able to muster up the courage to say hi, but it looks like I'll have to if I want to have a date for Valentine's...
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Sunday, February 02, 2003
Understanding Rights
Sorry I haven't posted much recently. But I'm sure you continue to check this site regularly for my powerful, thoughtful analysis of the topics of the day from a pure, ancap point of view.
I'm not the best right theorist, but some people make uneducated attacks on rights that really deserve to be corrected. They say rights are a mere "social/human construct." One friend asked me this weekend how it could be that rights "make society more efficient."
And my answer: that rights "increase efficiency" is not only true, it's trivially true. Imagine a typical society for a moment. There will always be conflicting desires, assuming they don't exist in the so-called Garden of Eden. Somebody will always want X, while someone else wants "not X." Viewing social interactions in this context, a right can simply be viewed as the statement "whenever [situation] the desire for X takes priority over not-X." Imagine, then, that I want to live, and you want me not to live (you want me to die, and want to do things to that end). Saying that I have the "right to life" is the equivalent of saying "In conflicts over on person's life, that person's desire to live ought to take priority over the desire of others for that person to die." Naturally, for a complete moral theory, you would need to add qualifiers.
True, it's not necessary for rights to exist. But since they are an easy way of sorting out desires, they avoid the tedium of having "start from scratch" deciding whose desires take priority in a situation. Thus, it's trivially true that rights enhance efficiency, since systematizing any conflict resolution (i.e., placing a hierarchy on what desires take priority over others) decreases the "entropy" of the area in which the conflicts take place, and thus increase efficiency. You could go without rights, then, if every conflict were resolved without reference to rights, but in a manner corresponding to the "usual" rights.
In fact, I don't think anyone really disagrees with the concept of rights, but rather, over their assignment. Even the most avid socialist, who would deny you the right to own a factory, still believe in rights: he believes that the desires of the factory workers to the outputs take priority over the factory owner's desire thereto. That is a statement of a right, regardless of whether said socialist deems it a "human construct" or not.
Thoughts on the Space Shuttle Crash
Just for the record, the crash was bad, like 9/11.
I recently realized that my research area is exactly what is intended to prevent such disasters. My advisor is having me reasearch "closed loop system identification," and the space shuttle is a closed loop system that needs to be constantly identified to forsee failure, to put it in the most succint way possible.
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