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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:16AM (11 children)
To a point, yes. The more scarce it becomes, the higher the price. You can see examples every day when people leave their families and go to work.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:22AM (10 children)
Scarcity in what reference?
If "your time as a resource" then you can see scarcity.
When is "your or any equivalent time", then suddenly the scarcity is debatable - and the market price is lower than you would accept.
And your family time suddenly change from "saleable resource" in "quality time with the family".
Do you qualify an (unique) object of art as a "resource"? Is a bottle of rare wine (which you would never think to sell but keep it to enjoy yourself) a resource?
I'm equally seeing people taking long breaks from paid work to do whatever they like better than paid work.
A matter of affordability, right.
My point: you can qualify (and quantify) some of the "life time" as a resource, but it doesn't follow that all the "life time" is a resource.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 31 2017, @11:08AM (9 children)
Yes, yes it does. Something either is a resource or it isn't. When the value of your time to you becomes higher than anyone is willing to pay, you stay home. When it lowers, you go to work.
Lemme splain very carefully. You as an individual get twenty-four hours per day. That is most definitely a finite number. How you distribute it is up to you but you cannot stretch it or compact it in any way*. It is a resource because you have to choose how to spend it and it is scarce because no matter what you do you will never get more than twenty four hours in a day.
* You can apparently stretch it by using tools or paying for someone to do something for you but that's an illusion; you still only have twenty four hours of your own to distribute per day.
Absolutely. I've been on one for two years and change, though I've started hustling up some moneys again very recently. A wiser person than me would have saved all that money I burned through for retirement but it is what it is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:29PM (8 children)
Now look, we may discuss on the basis of two different interpretation of the "resource".
For me, "resource" is strictly related with economy and I refuse to let my entire life be governed by economy - I need craziness and moments of "the fuck with responsibility and planning and evaluating consequences. Que sera, sera - here-and-now's the only certainty". As such, I won't consider my personal time as a "resource".
Yeah, the choice of seeing everything as a budget (at least) may be rationally valid, but not everything need to be rational - e.g. my personal time is economically invaluable, there aren't enough money in this world to pay for something I'm not selling; sounds too crazy for you?
The always-rational kind of attitude leads to hypoalcoholemia: physiologically, it's a condition in which there's too much blood in alcohol; the external manifestation is taking life too serious for too long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:03PM
Never said it did. Infinity isn't rational but it's a perfectly acceptable value to set on specific hours of your time.
Yeah, we're arguing semantics. Let's us stop doing that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:33PM (6 children)
And yet even the craziness and "the fuck with responsibility and planning and evaluating consequences" are economic choices in which you're choosing how to allocate limited resources. Nobody said economics had to be *rational* - in fact the advertising industry is almost entirely dedicated to promoting irrational economic activity.
Economics is the science of resource allocation - and *everything* is a resource. Most especially time.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 31 2017, @10:33PM (5 children)
Semantics. You want to call them so, feel free to do it but be aware that, in doings so, you risk diminishing your reality.
There's a distinction between "doing it the natural way" and "doing it within the bounds of a science".
Just because the burger-flipper doesn't jump from heights due to the inexorable effects of gravity will have on his body, it doesn't mean the poor creature is doing physics.
A science propose models and define specific terms. Those models will always be an incomplete representation of the reality and the terminology will reduce the object it defines, letting aside the traits of that object which are not relevant to that particular science. E.g. physicists will ignore the "resource" trait of time, is inconsequential for their studies.
To understand the "you risk diminishing your reality", try the following experiment: during sex, try to apply "time management" techniques to your very actions during the act and run "what-if scenarios to optimize the efficiency in terms of intensity of orgasm vs the time required to obtain it, within the constraints of energy available for both partners after a whole day at the office, the quality of your dinner and the time between the dinner and sex".
See where applying economy under these circumstances will lead you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday September 01 2017, @03:29AM (4 children)
Ah, I think I see where we're disagreeing. When I say "it's a science", I think you're hearing "we should approach this scientifically" Which I am categorically *not* saying. There is a difference between understanding the mechanics of something, and choosing to let that (inevitably imperfect) understanding be the governing factor in your actions. As an example - understanding fluid dynamics can in fact be quite useful in crossing a murky flooding river - it will give you valuable insight into what exactly the water may be doing that will be invisible to your senses until much later (maybe too late). But that understanding alone won't be of much value - you also have to know how to keep (and recover) your footing and equilibrium. And how to interpret the look and feel of the water so that you can figure out what you're not seeing. And recognize that even if you had 100% perfect information and understanding, that there's still just too much information for you to reason through fast enough to do any good - it's when you use your understanding to inform your intuition that it becomes truly valuable
And so when I say "time is a resource and allocating it is always an economic activity", I am not saying it's something that should be approached with charts and rulebooks, but rather that this is an activity that obeys certain well-defined (and moderately well understood) rules. And as with any game, you're going to play a lot better if you understand those rules and keep them in mind while you play. But your moment-to-moment decisions, as well as exactly what it means to "win", need to come from your heart and intuition.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 01 2017, @03:41AM (3 children)
Semantics, as I said, highly context dependent [xkcd.com]
In this case, the context asserted [soylentnews.org]:
and then the discussion flowed towards establishing the (limited) context in which the assertion is valid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday September 01 2017, @01:00PM (2 children)
What can you do with time other than spend it?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 01 2017, @10:53PM (1 child)
Having it (as a good/bad one)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 03 2017, @03:36PM
Having a good time is one of my favorite ways to spend time - but those are two rather different definitions of "time". The former refers to an internal state of mind and/or a conceptual grouping of events, the latter a finite quasi-physical resource which I'm always using it at a constant rate of 1 second per second. The former is what really matters on an individual level, and the latter is the substrate/resource from which they are made.
Honestly, if I'm missing something fundamental I'd love to see it.