Boys use words to express
Girls use words to exclaim
Men use words to explain
Women use words to evoke

Who am I?

Who am I?
In usernames and passwords
Do we not answer ourselves every day?
Why do we pretend that philosophy is a discipline only for quiet personal contemplation?
Aren't we in an age where it is everywhere?
Don't give in to those in power.
Being human is just a protocol
To serve you to the beast
And crunch your bones in your sleep.

I believe in total free speech - that you're free to express any opinion. But I also believe in the value of the social etiquette that's been repeated since forever in geekdom : Don't feed the trolls.

Life is like a treadmill when the only way to get somewhere, is to make that same journey that gets you nowhere over and over again.

Life is the process of fighting death.
The young and the old, the newborn and the dying, we all live the last day of our lives over and over again, whether we realize it or not - just that all the time we manage to postpone death. Every single day is a bonus, every single day a second chance. Nothing is ever too late, and never too early. Why are we always so tempted to think that death is so far away and focus on the dying breath when it is constantly just one night away?

tradition. religion. ideology. nationality. language. science.
what is it that we gained in exchange for such a host of divisive paradigms that try to arrive at the same conclusion through conflicting nomenclatures that give people in power so many ways to play their political games?

Maybe the reason we think extremists are beyond reason, is that we are afraid their reasons may be compelling, and are not ready to allocate them our patience and resources to hear them out?

We quarrel not because we're so different, but because we're so alike.

The problem with the word tradition is that it is a word. By making it a word, we strip it of its fluidity. There are no dying traditions. Once you call it tradition, it's already dead.

Random thoughts on selling prices

The problem with capitalism is that it attempts to abstract all experiences and human conditions in terms of resource ownership. The problem with meritocracy is that it lends credibility to the idea that your deserve the resources that you own.

What if prices were all suggestions and you pay any price you think goods are worth, but you'll be taxed for whatever you underpay, measured according to your earning power?

That means a cup of coffee can be marked $1 no matter where it is sold, but you're free to pay $3 if you really enjoy it, and your taxes suggest that you pay $6 if you earn 6 times the average salary, or you can overpay someone else instead. Your quality of life cannot be improved by increasing consumption, but rather by the choices you make.

Would it work out?

The nominal value of money would lose its current meaning, but isn't it how it should be?

Anxiety is the state of being perpetually distracted by the future.

The value of history isn't in learning from mistakes but informing us no society is an absolute truth, that we're free to make new mistakes.

Replace censorship with Equal Voice Opportunity, where you can make your case against any motion. Censorship is simply coward denial.

perseverance is mostly consistent self deception. the hard part is outdoing yourself in being increasingly crafty and naive at the same time

Perseverance is choosing to presume that something is impossible, and then believing otherwise.

The root of all evil

I think one way I am able to accommodate the idea of race and culture is the idea of indoctrination. Indoctrination into a specific paradigm constructed by the characteristics of the language the culture feeds you.

Some people swallow it whole, others improvise. But I think it's not possible to truly be unaffected by the languages you speak, no matter how little you may know your second or third languages. I think races and cultures change as they merge. Nobody can really so called preserve one's culture, The very thought of wanting to preserve ones culture I think is a sign that one has had some kind of global influence.

Race and culture are therefore approximations, not prescriptions. But when the approximation is too far off, why do people still want to try to fit in?

I think the answer lies in power. I think the acceleration of the development of language is driven by the greed for power. Through language , you can make people think in a certain way, use them to your advantage, and make them desire to be thus used.

Culture is the root of all evil!

India

That soft orange glow
Quite readily made me forget
That heat and madness
That was Delhi, my first taste of India.
For long days
Was a very short time; not enough
To get accustomed to how meals are served, much less
To understand how food tasted to the locals.
I still have no idea how this great country works, it is as if
Chaos were its expression of order.
However things seem to fail randomly,
Thehy seem to get their act together -
More or less.

I remember the driver's nonchalant replies,
Softly insisting on his own recommendations;
The way how a small door along a dusty avenue
Can open up to a chic cafe;
The way homeless children came by to sell you goods
While your car is stuck in the jam.

I recall how nobody seems to stop to notice
When the lights go out abruptly halfway through dinner;
And I remember the taste of that desert served to me:
Almost sweet, almost warm -
That in-between, unsettling to  me,
Seemed to be a soft-spot I couldn't detect.

Looking out from my window seat,
I see an India expanding under me -
Its network of household lights
Glowing in a soft orange
Like Earth's own magma.

Culture

Culture, to me, is simply a way of life, testified by those for whom it worked, to be effective ways of surviving through specific situations in their times. These situations may be external, such as earthquakes or the ice age, or internal, or "cultural", arising out of simply subscribing to the very paradigm the culture presents.

This way of life is typically accumulated through trial and error, similar in spirit to scientific methods - except that those who failed either died from their failure, or were rendered unable to testify by mechanisms built into the system to protect itself.

As such, it is difficult to gauge the value of subscribing to a culture. Situations in which prescribed solutions are effective may or may not happen again, or in cases may not happen often enough to justify the inconveniences of situations internal to the culture. Mechanisms built into cultures to preserve the culture may work positively or negatively when encountering situations not addressed by the culture. Maybe in done cases, the culture may "cause" more problems than it addresses. More often than not, internal issues form most of the experience of subscribing to the culture, thus you need to be "inside" to really "understand".

Whichever the case, while science gives verifiable explanations for its ways and religion gives explicit internal explanations, cultures don't offer any. Probably strategic I think - in that it's targeted to become your basic assumptions with which you explain everything else. In that way, it'd take you a long time before you figure out that you can question culture, just like you can question any philosophy, science or religion.

A different kind of money

Is it possible to trade privacy for freedom from corruption? I don't know much about economics, but let's just imagine this - a world where moral high ground is the dirtiest taboo, and everything is transparent.

Imagine a world where all currency is digital, secured via quantum cryptography, and processed on a global cloud that makes all transactions searchable. A world where it is not banks are the ones issuing legal tender notes based on complex mathematical models - currencies are personal credits, issued by individuals, each credit being a promise to fulfill a unit time of work. Credits rise and fall in buying power, based on the value put on the individual's work. You can't issue more credits than the hours you have in your predicted lifespan. When you're down and out, agriculture is your fallback plan - at the bottom line, one credit is an hour on a farmer's hand, harvesting the crop from the earth.

Since there is no universal currency, companies cannot simply pay you, but have to secure the credits of individual service providers. Goods have no inherent value, tangible goods are just a means of securing somebody's services.

What would such a world be like?

Is heaven an idea to which we try to match reality, or a reality to which we try to match the idea? Do we assume we understand it perfectly, or is five sigma good enough?