My neighbor's obnoxious sodium vapor street light

Singapore teen charged with stealing wireless internet access

Let me state for the record that stealing is wrong.

Now, lets examine the real nature of the circumstance...

My neighbor put up one of those obnoxious sodium vapor street lights on a pole that is close to my property. I will readily acknowledge that he is completely within his right to do so. Even if the light is an obnoxious eyesore. But here is the point of my rant...

Can my neighbor stop me from using the light emitted from his obnoxious street light? Hardly. He cannot control where the light goes. So I can sit out in my yard in the middle of the night and read the paper using his light if I want to...and he cannot stop me. Can my neighbor stop me from using the deterrent effect of a street light, his street ligtht, to reduce the possibility of crime in my neighborhood?

If my neighbor didn't want me to use his street light then he better direct it specifically on to his property. Or he should set the light to shine at a frequency that only he can see. Or he should turn the light off when he is not using it. Or...

My wifi network? Protected with a shared WEP key? Well, yeah... so what is your point?

OMvirtualG!!!

I was surprised by Gold Farming in China... Oh yeah, surprised is not the word I will continue to use...

Second Life: Real Money in a Virtual World [Link]

I won't suggest this is ethically wrong. I won't suggest this is morally wrong.

I will only state for the record that in its entirety this is completely WRONG!

OMGoldFarmers!!!

I posted the previous (Cyber Agricultural Engineers, Oh my!) rather as an off-hand remark. More like an exclamation. Then I began to internalize exactly what 'Gold Farming' represented in my world view. Then the warning klaxon began to sound in earnest.

Perhaps as much as two years ago I slack-jaw marveled at an NPR story about a fellow who had paid ~$12,500 USD for a virtual island in one of the on-line games. The reporter went on to suggest that this enterprising individual would do what any self respecting property developer would do... sub-divide, build, sell and make a fortune. A real fortune, selling digital dreams to other would be digital Barons.

So if this adheres so closely to the brick and mortal model of value enhancement then why am I so excited about it? Real world value is being assigned to virtual world entities. With this assignment we are leaving the reality of our terra firma for the vast uncharted space of our fantasies. The gap between values and Values is widening with no regard to the cost in human terms. Literally, while people on one side of our planet are starving to death, people on the 'other side' of reality are spending real time, real money and real energy achieving status in a pretend world. In the ether of the net.

It will always be easier/cheaper to offer a person the picture of a bowl of rice than it will to offer the bowl of rice. Pictures will not feed the outer person. Pictures will not sustain the inner person.

Neo, take the blue pill.

What is right about Liberals?

Michael Bérubé responding to criticism leveled by "Maximilian Pakaluk’s recent review of my book in the National Review Online." offered the following position....

As I explain in What’s Liberal?, there’s another reason I don’t share Harris’s faith (or that of any other “ethical realist") in mind-independent concepts: I think that believing in them can have nasty consequences. That is, people who believe that they’ve discovered objective moral principles out there in the ether (as distinct from people who think they’re working out sublunary moral principles with their fellow human beings) are especially likely to think of people who believe otherwise—or who simply believe in other principles—as not merely mistaken about this or that but objectively wrong as measured by some nonhuman, observer-independent criterion. Or, as I write elsewhere in the chapter, “you might conclude that people who disagree with you are not simply working from different moral premises but, rather, are alien—or opposed—to morality itself. It then becomes all the easier to exclude them from the conversation, from all forms of human community.” And one of the purposes of the liberal arts—golly, but I thought this argument was as clear as a mountain stream—is to teach people how to think about fundamental disagreements in human affairs, and how to conceptualize fundamental disagreements without coming to the conclusion that the people who disagree with you must be expelled or exterminated.

Not to sound fawning or patronizing but this is the clearest explanation of a "Liberal" position that I have ever encountered. In the space of one paragraph, albeit a complex one, Bérubé is able to point to the crux of the matter, mind-independent concepts. I see his discussion not just as a personal one but as a world-view as well - clarifying many, if not all, of the world struggles.

How clearly I can hear the Christian Fundamentalists saying, "you are not simply working from different moral premises but, rather, are alien—or opposed—to morality itself." Echoed are the voices of the Extremists of almost every camp. Armed with such righteous indignation it is easy to see how violence is the next available method of cleansing the alien immoral influences.

Life becomes very cheap when we disconnect ethics and values from our day to day existence. Mind-independent concepts are just such a disconnect.