The Debate Drinking Game!

With the divorce debate still irritating us, I present to you all the Debate Drinking Game.

Basically it goes like this - get a friend and a whole lot of water (or any other liquid), and watch some debate on the television. You and your friend takes opposite sites. Whenever any of these 'bad arguments' occur, the person siding with the party which made them, takes a dose of the liquid. See who dies of water poisoning first.

Works well with other debates to!

[ ] Think of the Children
[ ] Religious Attack ("Fight the Good Fight! Our victory is assured!")
[ ] Personal Attack
[ ] Reference to something which happened in the opponent's past
[ ] Attempting to show Opponent is a Hypocrite
[ ] Godwin's Law (Reference to Nazism or other extremists)
[ ] Reading From the Bible
[ ] Misreading/Misinterpreting something from the Bible
[ ] Bringing up Statistics which don't make sense
[ ] Bringing up Statistics which are misinterpreted
[ ] Making up Statistics as you go along
[ ] Extended Metaphor which makes no sense
[ ] "I can't counter your argument but choose not to agree with you"
[ ] "You have your own opinion and I deserve mine"
[ ] X is a human right
[ ] X is a FUNDEMENTAL human right
[ ] Celebrity agrees
[ ] Some Important Person Agrees (Dr/Lawyer/whatever)
[ ] Political Party Agrees
[ ] Slippery Slope Argument ("If we give them X today, they'll want Y tomorrow")
[ ] Reference to the year ("Its 2011")
[ ] Reminder of the country the debate is taking place in
[ ] All Catholic Priests are pdfs
[ ] Circular Argument
[ ] Us or Them argument "People who believe in X are all [bad thing]"
[ ] Liberalist Creed statement "We should have the right to decide for ourselves"
[ ] Conservatist Creed statement "Its worked in the past"
[ ] No True Scotsman ("If you were a true [member of group], you would agree with me") - S.C.



I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. But you should have enough to unbalance the Sodium in your brain.


Llama

Petition to Save the World

Petition to save the world

So, there appears to be a 'new' phenomenon in social networking sites these days, which appears to be a logical continuation of the 'email petitions' that used to be common a while back.

Generally they take the following form:

"[Request that people put this up for an hour]
[Messsage Goes Here - generally its either about raising awareness or putting it up in some groups' honour]
[NumberOfPerson% won't repost this statement, emotional blackmail to repost goes here]"

Example:

"Put this as your status if you know someone who has Mad Llama Disease. I wish that people would cure this horrible disease. People who have Mad Llama Disease look for LOVE & ATTENTION. 92.135% won't copy and paste this. Will you make it your status for at least one hour?"

Now I've seen a ton of these, for reasons including cancer, homosexuality and some law in Uganda about killing gay people, asperger's syndrome...

Now, for the most cases these things are useless. For certain cases, they are actually worse than doing nothing at all.

So lets start with 'useless' ones. The world doesn't function through democracy or through wishful thinking. If 1000 people sign a petition for there to be democracy in Libya, there won't be democracy in libya.

Petitions and stuff like that work when:

a. Someone is actually giving the results to the right person
b. The right person actually listens to the results (for example is a politician in a DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY)
c. The change is easy to do and the only reason it wasn't done was because there was a perceived lack of interest in it

Most importantly, pharmacutical companies don't work through democracy either. They work through the movement of profits. So a petition to cure mad llama syndrome - if its not going to be profitable, is going to be useless.

Now lets talk about "Raising Awareness". This is a common excuse. "Yes I put this message up in order to raise awareness about mad llama syndrome".
Awareness is such a funny word isn't it? Lets see what it means: "The state or quality of being aware of something". So I would assume "Raising awareness" means "Making people who weren't aware, now aware".

So, what a nice idea. So you'd expect that 'awareness' will teach information that most people don't know. Now I don't think within a 250/100 character limit you can teach too many people, but I digress. So, did you know being homosexual is neither a choice nor an illness? I sure didn't know this very obvious fact until I saw it in one of these posts.

So when does Awareness work? When you have simple information, which most people don't know, and which could be important - "Did you know that after the age of 102, you should test yourself for Mad Llama Disease by performing this method? It could save your life"

Allright, so now we see how most of those are useless. Now in certain cases (as explained earlier), they do more harm than good. Lets explain why:

People like feeling happy. Sometimes certain things cause feelings of guilt - such as the emotional blackmail which comes with each and every message. Now, signing/spreading this sort of thing, gives a cheerful feeling that you're actually doing something helpful. In reality (as above) you're doing nothing. Now, this feeling of having done something could very well stop you from doing something which could actually help.

Case study - Yesterday I helped Mad Llama Disease Sufferers by 'raising awareness'. I don't feel compelled to help in another way such as by sending money to research facilities, which could actually help someone. When the emotional blackmail appears to push you to spread the message around, you will obey that. You won't be doing anything useful.

So use your head instead of your emotional centers of your brain.

Llama.

For Posterity...

(Or - How we're ruining the past for the future)

Unlike what you may think, this post isn't about divorce or anything else. Its about something else.

So, last time I was watching television (yeah really) and as I shot through the different channels, I spotted one showing "Tom and Jerry". Now I used to love that show when I was younger, so I decided to watch it. However instead of the happy memories of my childhood, I got to saw a CGI piece of rubbish which was totally different from what I was expecting.

This was a disappointment to me. And the problem is that it happens all too much. What this problem is, is simply that people are 'recreating', or 'remaking' popular tv shows or movies in the past, and trying to sell them again to us. The problem is of course, that generally this attempt is half-baked and its horrible.


Lets give another example. I love Star Trek. There are quite a few things I like about it, how 'scientific' it is, how deep and riveting the story is... et cetera. So when they pulled out a new "Star Trek" film a couple of years ago, they obviously kept the same theme. Wrooooong. It happened to be a generic "Action Movie" in space which was 'branded' with the star trek name. It conserved unimportant things like characters, but changed the style and the theme completely. While original star trek had logical and 'scientific' plots, this rubbish was about using red matter to create black holes to suck up supernovas which destroy galaxies.


So what happens in 10.. 20 years. You mention Star Trek to someone, and he'll automatically think about this film. The awesome series of the past has been 'wiped away' by the latest thing.


So why do they insist on ruining our childhood? Simple. Money. Brand Recognition. If you can start off with a popular franchise, you can get more interest, even if its rubbish. Yep, lets go for the quick buck. And its done constantly. Very few series' are safe from the quick buck.


I will end this post with one single, powerful proof. "Star Wars Prequels".


End of discussion.


Llama

The Free Market to the Rescue!

The title is a sarcastic quip which I use frequently whenever topics on corporate misbehavior comes up. This blog attempts to explain to you people why the "free market" concept does not work in this modern world, and why keeping 'gubberment intervention' out and waiting for the people to 'vote with their wallet' in order to regulate the market is a stupid idea.

So, lets explain what the Free Market is all about. To explain simply - the government doesn't interfere in anything. It makes sure of certain things - such as that crime doesn't interfere - but otherwise companies are allowed to do what they like, and the market will fix any problems.

So here's an ideal case where the free market actually works:
You have a small village of say 100 people. You have 3 shops which sell bread. They are the only source of this bread, and the village is the only place they can sell the bread. Someone discovers that shop A is adding chalk to its flour and making poor bread. He tells everyone else, and these 100 people avoid going to shop A. Shop A goes out of business, or must otherwise change its habits, in order to avoid this. If Shop B raises its prices, then people will go to Shop C, and B will be forced to lower it again.


So here's why this system doesn't work in real life:


1. Patents - Companies love them. But in effect this breaks the free market, since its a government interference in the system. So when a company which has a collection of patents argues against government intervention, it's being very naughty indeed. Recently a company got a patent on a frequently used drug. Where it was once sold at 50 dollars or so, now its sold at 3000. Its totally legal in the free market.


2. Exclusivity - This may be caused by patents - however the main problem is that people are egoists. They won't sacrifice anything if they don't gain anything for it. So, lets say that a particular company is selling an exclusive gaming platform which has a bunch of nice games. This company then does some immoral things, such as putting rootkits on cds, or using the law to get large masses of information on people who visited a hacker's website [if you're not following the rules lately, this is pretty much what is happening to Sony]. The free market would tell you to boycott them if you dislike them, and they'll change. It'll be pretty easy to avoid buying certain things, tons of companies make televisions or other electronic media. But if you want to buy an item which only they can sell (such as their gaming console) - you'll have to go without. For an abstract idea. Nobody is going to do that.


3. Mega-Corporations float too much - Huge corporations make millions and billions of profits every year. You think that getting 5000 people to boycott them will make a difference? It'll cause a rounding error drop in their profits. It won't work. And even then, other companies could still trade with them. Sony makes the iPhone 5 cameras too. Do you boycott that as well?


4. Companies communicate and fuse. Small companies become large companies. Companies agree with each other and keep prices high on purpose. Companies will form their own monopolies through agreement. Companies will buy each other and larger 'harder to sink' companies come out.


5. Start-up is expensive. In our ideal free market, companies pop up all the time to replace the ones which died, and to add mixture to the market. However in many of our most important sectors, this is very difficult indeed. I can't just wake up tomorrow and start a car-making factory, or a telecommunications company, or a public transport company. So we'll get naturally monopolies in certain areas.


6. Information is hard to get - if a company does something very bad, it can usually cover it up. It can advertise the opposite or put a spin on it. People will eventually forget how your company started a civil war, how you supported a fascist dictatorship or how you shoved illegal software into your products.


I'm sure there are other reasons, I just can't remember them right now. But the idea that the market will sort itself out... is stupid. We need a powerful force to watch over things and ensure that everyone plays ball.


Llama

Mass Produced Music

(Special Thanks to LMF for having triggered this one off)

Once upon a time, music was a creative 'art'. An expression of what the person was feeling in a way. If you were happy, you sang something cheerful or whatever. Bards would sing tales and add their own special touch to them. Artists would compose music in the form of musical scores, which other people could play and add their own feel to things.

But then music turned into a business, and it all went downhill from there. When i say "Business" I mean it turned into an enterprise for which extracting money is the only goal. While beforehand it was primarily a creative and entertaining process, now it is literally mass produced. Scores of people work on a single 'song', which is crafted in such a way as to earn the most money.

Previously, when you had an artist, the artist would have been the song's creator. Nowadays, when you say that you like a song by [artist/band], the person in front of the camera probably has very little to do with the actual song. In order to prove this point, I attempted to see the credits for particular famous songs. Unfortunatly this proved difficult - so i picked up the last Mainstream cd I own, and looked at the credits. By the way its a 1997 "Aqua" album. So lets look at who wrote the very famous "Barbie Girl" song.

So, according to this it is "Produced Arranged and Mixed" by 4 people.None of them are the band members by the way. Turning to the back page credits we have the 4 member band. That's 8 so far. "All tracks mastered by..." is another person. There are 7 backing vocals and 3 "Guitar" (not the band members either). If we also add the "Styling", "Hair and Makeup" to the group - that gives us the grant total of... 20 people. There is also a page of "Thanks and Special Thanks". I didn't count Management either. Lets compare this to the very famous "Beethoven Symphony No 6." which is a 4 hour symphony written by 1 person. See what I mean?

What an artist adds to the whole thing is simply the "Image". Its the friendly face in front of the mechanical process. There aren't too many things this person must have, since autotune and editing has removed most prerequisites. They simply need to look attractive or attempt to put a sensual touch into things. An alternative (especially for males) is to be eccentric or otherwise infamous - such as taking microphones off people who have won an award. Note that this is mostly relevant for 'pop' music.


Lets look at the top 10 songs at this present moment. The Source is this site here, and its for the week ending 26th March.

So lets gauge the appearance of this people in the charts shall we?


1. Lady Gaga
2. Cee Lo Green - Exception?
3. Katy Perry , Kayne West
4. Rihanna
5. Jennifer Lopez
6. P!nk
7. Bruno Mars
8. Enrique Iglesias
9. Britney Spears
10. Ke-dollar-ha


Theres an image of each in the link, which can help to clarify and prove my hypothesis.


In conclusion - music isn't a creative process, or an art anymore. It is simply an Assembly Line kind of thing, where the product itself is a mixture of the talents of many people who you probably never heard of, and the packaging is the artist itself.


Money is the goal, it is both the sinews, the means and the end.


The Llama

I Predict....

A few days ago I was checking the maltese Times website for updates to the war in Libya. As always, the most entertaining part is the comments, which triggered off this blogpost.

For those who aren't familiar with the quality of the comments on that website, imagine this - You put 1000 monkeys with typewriters in a room, however 33% of the monkeys are political zealots, 33% of them are religious xor anti-religious zealots, and 33% are uninformed or just plain stupid. The rest are normal. Note that these sets are not disjoint.

Anyhoo, on an article about the War in Libya, two different people posted two different Nostradamus prophecies which appeared to predict what would happen. Now this gave me some thought, why are there still people around that believe him?

This raises a number of problems with believing predictions or prophesies -

1. You are assuming that the predictor has enough cosmic knowledge to simulate/model the cosmos enough to make the prediction
1b. You are asserting a fatalist universe and denying the existance of free will
2. You don't know anything about probabilities
3. Prophesies can be interpreted in different ways generally - this adds onto 2.

So, I'm not going to go into 1 and 1b too much, I will leave that for a future blogpost.

2 is quite the kicker really. I did some wikipedia research on Nostradamus. Apparently he died in 1556, and predicted what I understand to be around 950 units. So you would assume the probability that he was right in at least 1 of them over the past 450 years should surprise no-one. Even if there was only one way of interpreting each prophecy, the probability of a particular event happening is very large, especially over 450 years.

Now 3 I decided to show using a slightly humorous method. I thought of some text I could bring up which is written in a 'prophetic' style and which has no predictions or nothing to do with current events. After some thought I decided upon the Book of Mozilla. For those who don't know what that is, its a humorous long-term joke which the firefox developers put quotes from in their software (about:mozilla), it details events about Firefox in an elaborate manner.

Anyhow, I chose this interesting quote:

"Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children"

I will now proceed to interpret this piece as having to do with the current Libyan civil war.

Mammon is personification for Greed. Being a dictator for 40 years in an oil rich country is greedy. Since the libyan people were using the old flag which gaddafi had removed, its 'the beast reborn'. Its spreading over the Earth through the UN resolution, and the numbers are large enough. They cunningly took over half of Libya. The rest of the prediction is the future, where the 'sacred words' are the promises of freedom.

See? And you throught that that piece was about Netscape, IE6 and Microsoft. Foolish Mortals.

Llama

Bloaty Software

So, was updating my Yahoo messenger just today (yes I still use it). So I downloaded the installation file and ran it. Now, just to be clear - the installation file is just for the messenger, and not like the Windows Live Essentials one which has a bunch of stuff you can install. So anyway. Here's the first page.

Yes, I just want to install the IM client. So, lets see what happens if I choose "Next". I get an add-on to my browser, my homepage changes, my default search engine changes and.. oh look, there's actually some Search Protection which will stop me from changing the search back to what it was before.


Woah. Oh look, hidden behind there is another link - "Custom". Lets see what happens when I click it.

Oh look, Yahoo Toolbar was going to be installed as well. I didn't want that either. Good thing I spotted the custom link at the top, because even if I was careful enough to uncheck all the junk, I'd still the Toolbar.


So, what do we learn from this, aside from Yahoo trying to sneak a ton of rubbish on my PC? If you're installing something, DON'T press NEXT, NEXT NEXT. Lots of idiots people do this, and this is the reason why a company tries to sneak in as much rubbish as possible when you want something else.


Now certain companies do this because they get sponsored - but Yahoo doesn't need a sponsor, I wonder why its doing it. Maybe it likes splashing itself over your PC.

Llama