1 a: food wasteb: discarded or useless material2 a:trash 1bb: inaccurate or useless data
Interesting idea, that material is useless. Discarded, certainly. It looks like offal and by extension food waste are the primary sources for the word, as originally people didn’t have much else to discard. Eventually once they took up agriculture, a lot of the food waste could end up being used eventually as fertilizer. The modern concept of garbage is relatively recent, coming about especially in the past hundred years as “planned obsolescence’ became a cornerstone of the modern economy. Either you are compelled to get the latest and greatest whatever, or the old shit you bought a year ago just up and broke.
Unfortunately, this is not sustainable, and yet no one has put much thought into the future yet, it seems. I can’t help but think that in the near future, landfills are going to be mined as the gold mines they actually are. Unless someone develops a straightforward and relatively inexpensive way to directly convert matter into energy (and back again, preferably), the raw materials we use to operate or civilization are slowly being depleted. Rather, the easy to get sources are being depleted. Hell, did you know we’re running out of helium? It is true, god doesn’t come behind and restock the shelves after we’re gone through and plundered them. Sure, Cod may rebound off the coast of New England if we stop raping the shit out of their collected assholes every fucking year, but raw resources are in simply finite. In the short term, we’re going to start hitting walls.
I bring this up because I was remind as I hauled the garbage to the curb that I meant to describe how we’re handling garbage as a household these days. I used to burn everything that was not recyclable or simply nonburnable (batteries, glass, and so on). Now, we’re separating everything out further yet. Paper, recyclable plastic, metal and glass get recycled. Organics get composted. Paper and similar products which are not easily recyclable are put into a burn pile, and all of the plastic (wrappers, polypropylene, bags, and so on) that are not easily recyclable are put into the “actual garbage” stream. I do not feel that bad throwing //just this//, as I figure in thirty years someone will have finally gotten a good handle on thermal depolymerization and they’ll start building recycling plants on top of landfills, reversing their flow. At least, if we make it that long, landfills will go from a liability to a resource rich deposit. You see, it isn’t really garbage at all, we just haven’t realized that sustainability is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NECESSARY AND THE ONLY PART OF THE EQUATION WORTH DISCUSSING.
2:46 PM me: isn’t it like 2 in the morning over there?
2:51 PM jessica: no
almost 10
what’s up
want a hamster?
probably good food for your cats
probably won’t survive the mail though
I spend a lot of time flying through the deeper recesses of my own brain (sans psychotropics these days (for the most part!)). These forays often take me on any number of tangents. I was daydreaming about a situation, a miniature short story if you will, and the behavior of the actors struck me…they were afraid of reality. Having the puppets external to myself, as beings separate from myself, allowed me to see that this was a fundamental aspect of their (and by extension, our) situation.
Combining this with the little I’ve gleaned of Buddhism, I realized that the task that Buddhism sets us upon, the task of seeing things not as we wish to see them, but as they actually are, is an attempt to deal with this fundamental issue that every human animal has. Mindfulness, meditation, the desire for truth…all attempts at cutting through this elaborate layer of what is effectively bullshit that the human animal heaps up upon reality in an attempt to see it the way they wish to see it, instead of how it truly exists. Seeing truth creates anxiety and fear for a number of reasons, but it seems the primary cause is the responsibility it imposes: you are not allowed an easy out, you are not allowed to lie, you are not allowed to weasel and twist things about until they fit your agenda. You are completely responsible for yourself and your actions. This ties in with Buddhism and the continual attempt to not cloud your mind with what amounts to mental pollution: the opposite of clarity. You feel afraid of reality, so you craft lies until you are comfortable again. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, doesn’t matter what the situation is. The truth is a precious commodity, as the historical Buddha recognized.
This will continue to be a fundamental problem for our species until it is instilled at a young age that only children are allowed to behave poorly, that adults are expected to be held to a higher standard. Until mindfulness and some modern, secular version of Buddhism is taught as a fundamental life skill necessary for every human animal, we are going to be led about like blind fools by reckless puppets like George Bush and Dick Cheney. Hell, after this change is enacted, it will still likely take decades if not centuries for all of the ripples caused by thousands of years of bullshit-run-amok to die down, for the fragile, shattered collective human psyche to heal to the point where it can calmly and with open eyes see and accept reality for what it is.
I wrote a phrase on reddit.com once, mostly in jest, but I think it was a premonition of this blog post. Or, both the comment and this blog post are a premonition of something larger that is building in our collected minds:
…And abolish the need for nationalistic and primitive governments (which exist primarily to continue their own survival), thereby ushering in a new world order where man realizes that all are one, everyone and thing your neighbor, and the kingdom of “god” as it was once imagined slowly settles upon us comfortably, dispelling the nightmares of our childhood.
Man can, by simple reason alone, make his existence more equitable, perfect and just.
There is more floating around in here. I don’t know how much of it is my own thought and how much is distilled essence of things I’ve read, heard and experienced…but there is more to this than I can get out at the current time. Until then, let our minds rest upon the concept of equanimity.
…I decided to do it. One of the things I liked most about our early year diet revision was knowing exactly how much I was eating, and how much I ought to be eating. I liked the control that knowledge brought. Which is why I decided to commit to Weight Watchers for three months.
Tonight, I have 0.5 points left. I had a slice of toast with peanut butter, tea with 2 tablespoons of liquid creamer, and a package of yogurt for breakfast, which was 9 points. Lunch was a fiber bar and a banana at 4 points, and dinner was salad and soup with a glass of fruit juice at 16 points (salad dressing and croutons are pretty point heavy items!). For ’snacks’ I had a second cup of tea with creamer when I got home and two beers while shooting bitches in the evening. 35.5 points total out of 36, and I actually feel quite full. This is going very well!
The website isn’t bad, but sometimes is a bit slow, they gotta take some of my fucking fee and upgrade their servers…
I wear a double-layered tinfoil hat, but in some ways I am incredibly risky and throw caution to the wind, taunting the people tasked with illegally monitoring me with my disregard of the knowledge that they can (and probably do) monitor and observe every packet in and out of our LAN. These tools can help if you decide (unlike me) to be a little more cautious and careful in your jaunts through cyberspace.
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Let me answer this question: computer gaming is the only reason anyone sane would choose Microsoft over Linux.
So after her success I was back to the question that perpetually plagues me: Why would anyone choose Windows over Linux?
There’s far less risk for viruses and malware.
It’s free.
Applications are free.
It’s far more flexible.
It has multiple routes for support.
It is improving at a far faster rate than Windows.
The jury sent a note to the trial judge with the following query: Since the Constitution needed to be amended in 1919 to authorize federal criminal prosecutions for manufacturing and smuggling alcohol, a juror wanted to know from the judge where “is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?”
That’s a fair question.
Did you know you have the power to question law as a juror? I bet you didn’t, because the government does not want you to realize that a jury is one of the last bastions of our power against tyranny. A judge will likely try to have you removed if you are the lone dissenter, but if you can convince your fellow jurors into at least a deadlock, you’re golden. Which is the entire idea of a trial by jury:
Like so many of America’s early leaders, John Adams was a strong proponent of jury nullification. Here’s Adams: “It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”
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UPDATE: 5 online ‘health’ calculators, I actually used the BMI one (which says I’m overweight) and the body fat one (which lied to me and said I’m only 12.5% body fat, but apparently it’s easy to get wrong).
…what an interesting concept. I like the original Greek meaning a bit better, it resonates with the sound of the word better, I believe. I found it after reading the entry ‘book curse‘, which I found on reddit. My how easily I am distracted…
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I didn’t realize that an iPhone with contract costs (at a minimum) $1,320 for the first year…that is madness! Makes me really glad I’ve grandfathered my Immix contract for as long as I have, the ‘feature set’ for the price is really sweet…
Hopefully I won’t drop or break this expensive little thing, and can sell it for what I bought it for on eBay if the Android phones reach their potential.
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The netbook market is really expanding, this one looks like a lot of quality equipment for $400. The Acer Aspire One looks pretty interesting as well. I don’t know what it is about small electronic devices, but I’m hopelessly hooked…
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This is an excellent idea for subsidising the cost of a solar electric system for your house. If electric companies were smart, they’d be doing this themselves: allowing customers (at no up front cost of their own) to choose to have renewable installed. The system would be owned by the power company (say PPL or Southern Company) but the energy would be (mostly) used by the customer’s household. The bill of course stays the same, just the source of the energy would change. The customer gets the satisfaction of knowing that their TV and lights aren’t radically changing the environment, and the electric company gets to keep their customer and increases their generation capacity without building additional, massive plants. As with all things that I think “if it is that simple and necessary, it should simply be DONE”: when I’m dictator, things are going to be different…
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Taxes. We pay them, and what do we get back? Bombs, guns and spilled blood. The average individual pays at about a 40% rate, pretty similar to what you see in European countries, and yet we have none of the benifits that your average European country has…because we’re blowing so much money on ‘defense spending’. How the hell can we justify this war machine that is draining our treasuries like a damn cancer. But even suggest trimming the military budget and suddenly your a fucking terrorist, soft on defense, aren’t a patriot, or some other mindless drivel. Oh, and let’s cut taxes on the wealthy while we’re at it. Fucking baby jesus, what is wrong with this country? Moronic imbiciles, so easily controlled. Just turn the TV on and read the corporate message…
…when I’m dictator, things are going to be different…
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Energy. We need it. We’re doing it wrong. Denmark is doing it right.
“Denmark is the model that the United States should be following,” said Steve Pullins, executive director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Modern Grid Initiative.
How’d they do it? Distributed energy.
Unlike traditional “centralized” systems, distributed energy relies on small power-generating technologies like solar panels or ultra-efficient natural-gas turbines built near the point of energy consumption to supplement or displace grid-distributed electricity.
Consumers can not only draw power from the grid, but can feed power into it as well. For instance, homes equipped with solar-power panels could feed unused electricity back into the grid, adding to the total available supply.
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Peru has an energy problem too, as in a lot of rural villages don’t have it! They also went with the obvious answer, decentralized local generation. This story made me smile, the entire article restored a little faith in humanity. The project is just getting started, but it…well, it is just freaking awesome!
To say that this experimental project has been a success so far would be an understatement. Last year 21 homes in Alumbre were equipped with 100-watt wind turbines that power their homes, and the village’s school was powered with a 500-watt turbine. The wind turbines store energy into what are known as “deep cycle” batteries, and the batteries when fully charged can potentially provide energy to homes for up to three days. The batteries need to be replaced every 3-4 years, and for this reason each family with a turbine must contribute to a battery replacement fund on a monthly basis. They pay about 10 nuevo soles each (~ $3 American), a sum that’s less than what most families were previously spending each month on candles and kerosene for lamps.
As I watched her poke around on the screen, managing inventory, calculating points, staying within her range, it hit me:
Weight Watchers is an RPG.
Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!
Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells — whoops, I mean foods — you can still use with your remaining points.
The alternative pretty much sucks:
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Found that article on Provigil that I had misplaced. I may have found and posted it before, but I can’t remember. Have I ever mentioned I have a terrible memory? There was this smart drug I had bookmarked a really cool article about, but I can’t find it now. Or maybe I had posted it before. What was it called, pro-something?
A contrasting viewpoint. I already have the creativity of a ’special needs’ toddler, so I don’t really see this as a downside…
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Hulu: TV without the TV. Between this and Comedy Central having TDS and the Colbert Report online, I wouldn’t be sad one bit to get rid of my fucking $70 a month pile-of-crap cable TV bill…
No, seriously, you should watch Arrested Development. This is the pilot, it is hilarious but doesn’t have the production values of the rest of the series. Hopefully it gets you hooked:
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And while I’m sharing things I find awesome, check out Liam Finn:
This is a bit shorter than the version they played in the live show, but it gives you a small taste. These guys were just fucking awesome…
