Random Thoughts XI: Listen to the Whispers

[choxorn]

You don't have to search for Stalin, he will find you either way.

In Soviet Russia, Stalin search for YOU.

 

[amadeus]

Cryptocurrencies

I’mma have to read you later! But thanks for what I’m sure to be an informative answer.

 

[amadeus]

Sometimes I feel like I’m a parody of a grownup. I don’t know if I can understand people on more than a superficial level, and I have a hard time figuring out for myself if other people are just playing characters in their outward lives like I feel I am.

I kinda feel like I’m an observer, not a participant, in the cogwheels that turn the machine of civilization. It’s a feeling of distance, not an isolating distance, but like how a lone baseball fan feels watching a game from the cheap seats.

That’s not the worst place to be. Sit down with a beer and a hotdog and let the players run the diamond.

Yep.

SHOUT
OUT
I’d like to give a shoutout to the circle.
Actually, all your basic shapes are pretty useful.
I should really study some basic math again.
You know they say you’d never use it?
That’s not always true. I make stuff,
and sometimes I need to know angles
and other things.
Oh yeah.​

 

[Birdjaguar]

BACK IN BUSINESS | JASON ZWEIG

Kids Always Win in the End

From ‘penny dreadfuls’ to music to videogames, often the best way to make a child-friendly business boom has been to try limiting it.

In late August, the Chinese government cracked down on videogames, banning anyone under the age of 18 from playing online between Monday and Thursday. On the other three days of the week and on public holidays, children will be allowed to play online only between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. This rule, including an “anti-addiction” system for tracking players, is the latest in the centuries of efforts by parents and governments to control the lucrative market for children’s minds.

It also is a reminder about such reforms throughout history: Often, the best way to make a business boom is to try limiting it. Ever since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, telling people they can’t have something has made them want it all the more.

In every generation, children have craved whatever entertainment their parents decried and restricted the most. Then they’ve grown up, become parents themselves— and promptly curtailed their own children’s favorite diversions, often enlisting governments to enact new restrictions. Such criticisms and crackdowns have tended to fizzle, fail or backfire.

Consider the printed weekly serials of Victorian Britain called “penny dreadfuls.” Sold for a penny an issue to entice the biggest possible audience of children, they sensationalized crime, adventure, and the supernatural. Contemporary moralists called them “foul and filthy trash” and “penny packets of poison” that would turn lower-class children into violent criminals, threatening Britain’s social order. As critics fulminated and London’s Society for the Suppression of Vice sent the police to raid publishers, sales of penny dreadfuls went from a few thousand a week to hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, crime rates fell as these cheap publications turned out to be a gateway drug that helped children on reading. Among the Britons who went on to acclaim after loving penny dreadfuls in their youth were novelist H.G. Wells and J.M. Barrie, creator of “Peter Pan.”

In the 1950s in the U.S., comic books came under the same kind of fire. In 1954, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on whether comic books were contributing to juvenile delinquency. Its report, bolstered by so-called expert testimony that has long since been debunked, concluded that many comics offered “short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality and horror.” In response, the industry adopted the Comics Code Authority, mandating that “in every instance good shall triumph over evil” and that “all lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.”

Kids didn’t want that. So William Gaines, formerly a kingpin of horror and crime comic books, fomotion, cused his energy on Mad magazine. At its peak from the 1950s through the 1970s, Mad’s parodies and mockery taught millions of children to distrust powerful institutions like those that had attacked comic books—and made millions of dollars for Gaines and his investors.

In the mid-1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center—led by women married to leading politicians, including Tipper Gore, then-wife of future Vice President Al Gore—argued that popular music was behind a surge in rape and other violence. The group pushed several proposals, including putting warning labels on records with offensive lyrics, and prompted hearings by the Senate Commerce Committee. In his Senate testimony, musician Frank Zappa called the proposals “the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation.” Nevertheless, the music industry complied, hastily devising a “parental advisory” label. While some stores refused to carry albums that had been stick-hook ered, sales boomed overall. Rap and hip-hop, one of the genres targeted by the PMRC, went on to become America’s best-selling music. Perhaps that wasn’t in spite of the parental advisories, but because of them. In 1989, on his track “Freedom of Speech,” the rapper Ice-T ridiculed the warning labels: “The sticker on the record is what makes ’em sell gold....The more you try to suppress us, the larger we get.”

Another moral panic over children’s entertainment came in late 1993 and early 1994, when the U.S. Senate investigated violence in videogames. The hearings cited such hits as “Mortal Kombat,” in which fighters tore off their enemies’ heads and ripped out their spines in one and “Night Trap,” whose hulking vampires used drills to drain the blood from their victims. Sen. Joseph Lieberman introduced a bill that would create a government commission to monitor the content of videogames. To avert that, the industry came up with its own rating board, which labels games and apps on their suitability for children and other users. The result? Videogames became more violent—and popular—than ever. Today, estimates the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group, 76% of U.S. children and 67% of adults play video-games. Many say they couldn’t have survived Covid quarantine without them.

The Chinese government has long had its own concerns about protecting young minds from what it regards as immoral influences. Chinese authorities often refer to videogames as “opium for the spirit” or “opium for the mind,” invoking not only gaming’s addictive properties but the nation’s humiliating defeat by Britain and other colonial powers in the Opium Wars of the 19th century. Many Chinese parents worry about how much time their children spend gaming, which gives the
authorities the perfect pretext for the latest crackdown on children’s online activity. “It’s a convenient way for the Chinese government to gain consensus and support for the idea of controlling the internet in general,” says Marcella Szablewicz, a media professor at Pace University who studies gaming in China.

The Chinese government has been restricting videogame usage for at least 20 years, says Lisa Cosmas Hanson, president of Niko Partners, a firm in Campbell, Calif., that researches the Asian gaming industry. Yet the number of gamers in China rose from 120 million in 2010 to 727 million last year, according to Niko.

Less than 5% of Chinese video-game revenue, on average, comes from children. Players of all ages have sidestepped China’s previous restrictions on videogames by using such dodges as private computer networks, logging on with fake identification or getting another person to sign in for them.

On Sept. 4, the first Saturday under China’s new restrictions, servers for “Honor of Kings,” one of the country’s most popular mobile games, appear to have crashed during the single hour of government- permitted play, apparently because they couldn’t handle the surge in traffic. Gamers aren’t going to put up with that. In the struggle between an authoritarian government and a few hundred million children, sooner or later the kids are going to win. Back in Business is an occasional column that puts the present day in perspective by looking at business history and those who shaped it.

In every generation, children have craved the entertainment their parents restricted most.

China has issued new measures aimed at curbing what authorities describe as youth videogame addiction.

 

[warpus]

I’mma have to read you later! But thanks for what I’m sure to be an informative answer.

tl;dr: All my post really said was that the technology that cryptocurrencies use is still fairly new, but has been evolving. The tech doesn't have to be bad for the environment - and many projects are already carbon neutral. The mathematical work required on some blockchains that you complained about - that is being fixed on the biggest smart contract blockchain (Ethereum), but will take a couple years to move over to the new system. For instance, we ran an NFT event last night, and we use the WAX blockchain to achieve our goals. This blockchain is designed to be environmentally friendly and is carbon neutral already

 

[Birdjaguar]

@thetrooper Are you at 7777 yet?

 

[amadeus]

From ‘penny dreadfuls’ to music to videogames, often the best way to make a child-friendly business boom has been to try limiting it.

This article could be improved with one point: as it says the literacy of Britons improved with the penny novels, gaming and leisure has made some degree of technological literacy almost innate in the Western youth.

When I was in school, you only owned a computer if you were a geek or if your parents’ had to have one for work, and even then it was fewer than one-tenth of American households—and we had more computers than anybody!

If our friends over there want to hobble a generation of youth, let them. Let them run their system into the ground. What did Boris Yeltsin say? You can make a throne out of bayonets but you can’t sit on it for very long.

 

[Birdjaguar]

This article could be improved with one point: as it says the literacy of Britons improved with the penny novels, gaming and leisure has made some degree of technological literacy almost innate in the Western youth.

When I was in school, you only owned a computer if you were a geek or if your parents’ had to have one for work, and even then it was fewer than one-tenth of American households—and we had more computers than anybody!

If our friends over there want to hobble a generation of youth, let them. Let them run their system into the ground. What did Boris Yeltsin say? You can make a throne out of bayonets but you can’t sit on it for very long.

Yes gaming is a gateway drug for computer literacy, but if one only plays on a phone, I'm not so sure.

 

[amadeus]

Yes gaming is a gateway drug for computer literacy, but if one only plays on a phone, I'm not so sure.

Phone literacy is tech literacy!

If you need assistance, dial me at Morganville 5-8612. I'm getting a new heel for my shoe.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Phone literacy is tech literacy!

I may be forced to get literate if vaccine passports get approved here. Right now I have a card given to me by the pharmacy, but apparently everyone will be expected to download an app on a phone.

I don't have a smartphone. I don't even have a cell phone. I have no idea how to use those. My phone is a landline that doesn't take messages or even ID callers.

I'm old enough to remember when a phone really was this heavy, clunky thing that could be used as a murder weapon like in '60s detective shows, and we were on a party line with the neighboring acreage and farm.

 

[Farm Boy]

Sometimes I feel like I’m a parody of a grownup. I don’t know if I can understand people on more than a superficial level, and I have a hard time figuring out for myself if other people are just playing characters in their outward lives like I feel I am.

I kinda feel like I’m an observer, not a participant, in the cogwheels that turn the machine of civilization. It’s a feeling of distance, not an isolating distance, but like how a lone baseball fan feels watching a game from the cheap seats.

That’s not the worst place to be. Sit down with a beer and a hotdog and let the players run the diamond.

Yep.

You've seemed on-game, and insightful, recently. I worry, being me, that this is a product of pain.

Even if you have a healthy life, one that wants, really for nothing - it can go back to a feeling of disconnect. Nothing is permanent. It's why all those religious fuddy-duddies that most people only find when they're old and increasingly alone(hence, in unrelenting pain and isolation) harp on "GOD" being your only permanent friend in this world. The pastors have busted out the pain sermons* in honor of 9-11, and they're worth a listen. Distance is pain(numbness is too, but worse), even if it's not severe enough to have triggered the alarms yet.

*The gospel of suffering, if you care to delve into Catholicism(as an outsider, as once I was, and still somewhat am), is one of its more redeeming features.

 

[Farm Boy]

Legit random thought:

I read, frequently, that people are never mightier than when they share their pain an vulnerability. I find this hard to believe: but - if you want it, this both has been getting me up in the morning to move, and it hurts so bad.

Spoiler You're living it now. Now. :

Happiness will always hurt worse in the end. Grab it anyways.

 

[amadeus]

I worry, being me, that this is a product of pain.

It’s a product of neurons and electrodes and chemicals and whatever else goes on in the brain. I don’t understand it. I just clock in at ten, check out at 10:30, and clock out at seven.

 

[Farm Boy]

Oh for sure. I'm going to show up in a few hours, hungover and smelling and unshaved in front of a bunch of clean living rural protestant work ethic folks. But getting past shame seems useful. I'm not actually dogshit most of the time, even if I feel it.

 

[thetrooper]

@thetrooper Are you at 7777 yet?

Soon!

Spoiler :

@Takhisis had a better idea though

 

[Takhisis]

Happiness will always hurt worse in the end. Grab it anyways.

Why should happiness hurt?

 

[Farm Boy]

Should? Because God is an *******, I guess?

 

[Ajidica]

Why should happiness hurt?

Speaking as someone who was raised Catholic, if you don't feel guilt doing something, you're doing it wrong.

 

[Farm Boy]

Just... live longer?

Or find something you truly love? More than yourself?

Like a lot more than yourself.

It'll start to make sense then. But no. Evil hurts less. It's just evil. You can always be set free.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Since we are waxing philosophical:

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always. accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician; and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.