Meno, Minnesota, If you’re still there we’re neighbors. I’d drive a few miles to talk with you in person, heck I’d take time off to do it.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news butbi left the twin cities in my rearview mirror a long time ago.
My big adventure was going back in one of my new cars, there were 2 in my lifetime, and wanted to make timenamd it was a full moon at Provo, and slammed on the brakes to get off the old I think it was 66, and I totaled it.
I did get back about ten years ago, which was the Minnesota that is unrecognizable.
Hope to disappoint, would be great, are you from nearby states to there?
Just ‘curious’- as Your other forum’s title goes.
Guess not.
In a word: BUSINESS.
Business rules the world. Science is in the pocket of business. Politics is in the pocket of business etc, etc. I was watching the film “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” just the other day. Unintentionally (I imagine) it beautifully illustrates the lunatic, self-destructive way people behave in the pursuit of money. Business has so much power that it has people eating out of its hand. Take the internet. People say that the internet is “free”. Tosh. We pay for the internet, for example, through advertising. How else do we have the likes of YouTube? A financially successful site such as YouTube makes its money from advertising. It attracts advertisers by getting people through its doors. We, the ordinary people, pay for all this advertising indirectly through inflated prices. The cost of living would be less than half of what it is now were it not for business. Business is not benign. Business is an out-of-control monster.
Where we are heading: Destruction? Armageddon?
You correctly say that our minds are being kidnapped, it is all making people very, very sick indeed. However, I do think sometimes that people connive with business, albeit unwittingly. They have allowed business to get away with doing a whitewash job on itself such as to, in effect, disable people’s critical faculties. The disabling of these critical faculties enables people to wrongly claim that e.g. the internet is free.
well now wait a minute. is business bad de facto, or only certain kinds of business?
what is business? we know what money is; the solution to the double coincidence of wants dilemma. perfectly necessary. it must be the particular kind of exchanges that are, for you, suspect here. and rightly so.
lemme try something. tell me how this fact strikes you immediately. don’t think about it. i mean don’t start trying to ‘rationalize’ it. just go with the immediate feeling.
wage/salary earners are paid less than the value of what they produce when it is sold.
sounds fishy, duddint it? you’re like ‘okay wait… why is that?’ forget about ‘why’ it is… just worry about that it is, and more importantly ask, does it have to be that way. is there another way? you bet your ass there is, but it would involve the excision of an entire class of people in our western society.
for two points, name that class.
Business is bad. Full stop.
What is business? Business is slavery. That the less powerful in this country do not know that they are slaves, and even pride themselves on being citizens of a free nation, is down to the cunning of the slave owners.
Money is merely another means used by business to control the slaves. In the times when slaves were still called slaves, they were “paid” in bed, board, food, clothing etc., However, with the advent of money, the slaves were given their “freedom”, and instead of working for bed and board etc, worked for money. This money was, of course, merelyreturned to the slave owners in payment for bought goods i.e. bed, board, food clothing. The modern word for slave is “employee”. That we do not equate the words “slave” and “employee” is down to the cunning of the slave owners i.e. business.
Business is also a drug pusher. Hear any business/consumer programme on tv or radio and you will likely hear business people or their representatives discussing how to make their products more addictive. They use this word addictive and no one challenges it, no one challenges what is really and truly meant by selling addictive products. In the 60s, in the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, it is even remarked that the business of business is to “lie and cheat and steal from folks every day”. In the 60s, people apparently knew the character of business. But it has done such an effective whitewash job on itself these last decades, that people appear to have lost sight of the unpleasant truth about business.
slow down a minute and think about what business essentially is. an agreement between two or more people involving an exchange of some kind of product or service. you have a chicken and i want one. i have some leather and you want some. i give you some leather and you give me a chicken. we just conducted a business transaction. now what’s wrong with that? nuthin.
what you mean - and this is something you can sense is sketchy without really knowing how and why - is that our particular kind of business in our particular kind of society has got some issues. but i’d not call it ‘slavery’, although the phrase ‘wage slavery’ is quite popular among centrists and leftists. the reason why it’s not technically slavery is because a wage earner can choose to deny a job. however, there are consequences for denying the job that if critically examined, reveal a whole nuther set of problems. check out the somewhat short-lived popular idea/movement among anarchists/leftists long ago called ‘refusal of work’.
so here’s some problems that would result from that… problems that cut through issues that are made trivial by comparison. they’re really meaty existential problems that say something about the very essence of society and bring the very foundation of ‘rights’ into question.
think about this. first, you didn’t ask to be born. next, you’re expected to follow the rules of your society and become either a wage worker or a capitalist. if you do neither, you go broke. your options then are to rely solely on social welfare assistance or become self sufficient in some way that doesn’t involve you participating in a legitimate job of some kind. your options are now narrowed down to two; hike out into the woods somewhere and become a grizzly adams or begin some kind of criminal activity to make money.
with the former, you’ll inevitably end up breaking the law; you can’t just plop down on a piece of land wherever you want because somebody owns it. with the latter, you’re willingly breaking the law.
now think about how absurd this situation really is. you don’t owe anybody anything, and yet if you don’t participate in a society you fundamentally disagree with (its business, i mean), you become a homeless bum or a criminal. so now where is your ‘right’ to refuse to participate here? oh you still have it, but to exercise it you have to forfeit all your dignity or become a renegade.
see what i mean by existential? one of those little nooks in human reality that everybody overlooks because they’re… well, they’re either a capitalist parasite or a working class dipshit.
so as you can see this refusal of work gig is a pretty radical and dangerous commitment, and yet it is essentially no violation of a civil contract. there is no contract, see, unless you sign it. otherwise, it’s coercive, and if it’s coercive, it’s instigating a state of war between you and the state. the state becomes your enemy, and you become a criminal anarchist, or a homeless bum, or a coward with a job, or a parasite with a company.
how many people have ever looked this far down into the real nooks and crannies of the civil contract? what was it rousseau said… born free, but everywhere in chains?
And who would one be engaged in business with? Certainly not the same sort they find in the same circumstance. Time is their only resource and they have no leverage on its value. Sounds to me like you agree with PLD.
PLD did. And you’re like hold on now.
PLD did, may have even gone a little deeper.
call it like it is.
her polemical rant on ‘business’ was too short tempered and not well thought out. business is an indispensable part of our social and material existence. what she’s done is acted on the premonition that something ain’t right about business models in the western world… and she’s correct about that intuition. but she’s thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
but i’m not trying to quell her rage. in fact, i encourage it. you gotta hold on to that fury.
I can accept that fairly easily.
From both sides.
And man I do enjoy your sense of humor.
Sorry sir, leaving well enough alone. Hope your mood improves.
No you’re good man. I just needed a way to post that video. Angry lapdogs have always intrigued me.
That dog is owned by a 250 Asian woman who looks like a sumo wrestler and thinks she’s a queen. The wife of one of the dudes I work for. In part I’m responsible for her weight problem, though. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t be eating so good.
But what the hell is that on the back end of that dog? A diaper or what?
I never did understand dressing up a pet in people wear. And the video was a hoot.
the practical reason is to keep a short haired breed of dog like that warm during the winter months. that’s understandable and appropriate. but this context is a little different and becomes gloriously comical once it’s understood. this isn’t just a dog in a sweater. it’s a symbol representing everything pretentious about bourgeois culture. the uselessness of the breed itself… compared to working dog breeds… as an expression of the luxury of royalty and the elite class that doesn’t have to labor. the emperors surrounded by a pack of shih-tzus, for instance, captures this image perfectly. next comes the gross anthropomorphization of the animal; the bourgeois expresses its latent desire to be ‘god’ in humanizing the creature… making it a little person-pet it can order around and laugh at in adoration whenever company is around. ‘oh isn’t that adorable! look at his little sweater!’
and the impotence of the toy dog’s harmless barking. the little useless dog that won’t shut up… that think’s its in charge. the little boss, much like the bourgeois owner, who’s bark is always worse than his bite.
all these metaphors and analogies come together to form a perfect rendition of the joke of the bourgeois spirit. you ought to see the way the sumo wrestler queen interacts with this insect of a dog. it’s almost nauseating. i get my hopes up that the german shepherd will eat the dog and then attack her, but it never happens.
You can provide an animal warm with out dressing it up in a people suit.
I ain’t even going to comment on anything else you said.
I found some maple. Not the right dimensions but a table saw, a good rip blade and a dado blade works wonders. Sucks to have to change back and forth between the rip blade and dado set. That takes more time then I imagined. Got about half the floor relaid. Back breaking labor, but a break every couple hours, makes it less the chore, and I can drink beer, which I like, lots. Lots slower going then I thought.
so you’ve got some maple that isn’t already tongue-and-grooved? what the hell is it… it can’t be flooring because if it was it would already have it.
so you’re literally doing this floor from scratch, man. that’s hardcore af. here’s what you do to avoid having to switch between blades; run all of it through the dado blade first, or, rip all of it first. then you only have to cut the pieces to length and you’ll be done with the table saw.
how are you gonna fasten it to the floor? you got a flooring nailer?
and if it’s not too late to make this suggestion, use plastic biscuits instead of wooden ones (are you using biscuits?). as a general rule, wood will always shrink, expand and flex in different temperatures and over long periods of time. when those biscuits get’ta moving around, the seams start opening up and shit.
if you have any significant dips in the sub-floor, a man oughta run a few beads of construction adhesive underneath those pieces to prevent squeaking. run you a string line across the floor from wall to wall to find those dips.
man’s milling his own flooring outta raw maple. hard.core.as.fuck.
It’s fastened to the floor just like it was the day it was built. It’s reclaimed maple flooring, It’s just not the right width, so I’m only milling one side.