h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nothing like working with experts.
Was that you or someone else?

It must have been someone else. My last posting to you was moderated. Did you get to see it before that happened?

It was a classic Philip Larkin poem and I sent you a link to it:

They (naughty word) you up your mum and dad
They do not mean to, but they do.
They give you all the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.

Know the one?

I can remember being shocked by the 'f' word, but the poem rings so true, particularly when it goes on that they were (past tense of naughty word) up in their turn, etc.

Seemed relevant to the previous posting.

No. I didn't catch it before the grannies got to it.
I've been having a little trouble getting on to the site at times.

Phillip Larkin.

Actually, I've been having a bit more trouble with the memory this week. According to the wife and the computer, this is Friday.
But I went to bed last night thinking yesterday was Wednesday...
Since I lost a day somewhere, you might have posted that on that day.

I read some MP or other the other day babbling about the key to increased productivity and reduced hooliganism being responsible parenting.
Ach! Just what every factory and office begs for, more potential employees with their brains and morals intact. Might even have a bit of ethics tucked aways in their lunch kits...
If the parents went to school and learned nothing about parenting and responsibility, and they, in their irresponsible parenting, send their chilluns to the very same schools they were a product of...

Off to the corporate creches with them! Management knows how to raise the proper employee! Don't leave it in the hands of those who are lucky to find employment themselves. They don't have what it takes!
Industry will be inculcated most effectively by INDUSTRY. Trust us.
We've never led you wrong, have we?

What! You mean it's all a plot to give the bosses docile employees who are used to routine??? Surely not!!

Modern schooling appears to be more about trying to make yourself heard above the noise and to keep the peace.

Children as young as four are being excluded from school for being out of control and violent.

You lost a day? Ask your wife if you were awake.

I'm end-of-the-week dog tired (and therefore probably a bit more cynical than usual).

I sincerely thought yesterday was
Wednesday. All day long. So much so that I actually doubted the computer and my wife, until I found several other sources that said that today was Friday.

Now, the really sick thing will be when I have a deja vu of my lost day...

I just picked the kid up from the school and we are going to the library once shes walked the dog and taken a bit of trash out.

I get so tired of having to remind her every day of what few basic chores she has to perform.
My mother and stepfather required so much more of me... and didn't really care what our grades were.

The school library is shutting down for end of the semester.
Soon, school will be out, and my daughter will be looking for excuses to veg out.
I've got to find a way to keep her active.
Mentally and physically.

The lawyers are running the schools now.
Wonder where they went to school?

What are her interests? That might be a good start. Are there any community projects looking for volunteers? That might keep her out of mischief and look good on her CV later. These things can be quite fun and she might feel a sense of contribution to the neighbourhood.

In these parts, you can find projects like canal clearing, woodland maintenance. I used to know people who visited old people in hospital or nursing homes who didn't get visitors.

Did I mention earlier that some of the schools here are gettin police attached? That's really worrying if our schoolchildren are getting so difficult to control.

Yes, well, there is a disturbing trend with regard to schools everywhere, including Europe.
I think they actually make a mistake publicizing all the problems and shootings and expellings in the media. I think the kids are in a place where if it gets ink, or their parents or teachers into court, well, they get their fifteen minutes.

There was an eight year old the other day who was convicted of a felony for flinging a folded bit of chewing gum foil into another kid's eye and damaging it...
Um.
Childhood is not supposed to be a cozy little haven. There is supposed to be a few experiences to put a little bark on them.
I knew kids when I was growing up who had one eye or missing fingers and a false leg or two. Burn scars on their face.

But this close scrutiny of schools by law enforcement and yingyangs trying to get reelected is garbage. Laws are written and passed in reaction, not in thought. You have to be on the ground floor of a situation to learn how to handle it, not perched in a tower, looking down on people.

I heard a startling statistic the other day on the TV. It said that 46% of American women between 21 and 40 have no children.
Now that is a blow to education right there.
People who don't have children don't care about funding day cares and medical care and better schooling, 'cause now that they're grown, what do they care what happens to children?
This statistic popped up in a talk show segment dealing with young women who have their tubes tied. And their partners or husbands, who encouraged them.

Yes, well, there is a disturbing trend with regard to schools everywhere, including Europe.
I think they actually make a mistake publicizing all the problems and shootings and expellings in the media. I think the kids are in a place where if it gets ink, or their parents or teachers into court, well, they get their fifteen minutes.

There was an eight year old the other day who was convicted of a felony for flinging a folded bit of chewing gum foil into another kid's eye and damaging it...
Um.
Childhood is not supposed to be a cozy little haven. There is supposed to be a few experiences to put a little bark on them.
I knew kids when I was growing up who had one eye or missing fingers and a false leg or two. Burn scars on their face.

But this close scrutiny of schools by law enforcement and yingyangs trying to get reelected is garbage. Laws are written and passed in reaction, not in thought. You have to be on the ground floor of a situation to learn how to handle it, not perched in a tower, looking down on people.

I heard a startling statistic the other day on the TV. It said that 46% of American women between 21 and 40 have no children.
Now that is a blow to education right there.
People who don't have children don't care about funding day cares and medical care and better schooling, 'cause now that they're grown, what do they care what happens to children?
This statistic popped up in a talk show segment dealing with young women who have their tubes tied. And their partners or husbands, who encouraged them.

I got caught up in a hoax virus alert a couple of days ago, deleted a file and have had trouble with my computer until today, when I found out how to reinsert it.

Second time I've been caught out that way.

I agree with you that people who haven't got children have no conception of what life is like with them, and consequently, no sympathy. I became a lot better at my work once I understood from experience.

I've had a burp with the computer today.
I had to restart twice and I ran the scan disk.
I deleted about two hundred items from my disk over since I last did a defrag and my pages were freezing a little bit.
I found out I have 188 hidden files.
I'd like to find out what they are. They are taking up quite a bit of space.
I've been reading Liane Willey's "Pretending to be Normal"
So many things that she talks about are so close to what I went through.
But I am also wondering how it is that I am able to work a computer at all... I keep forgetting things that I don't do on a regular basis and the the things I do on a regular basis...I'm not sure why I started doing some of them in the first place.

Which makes it very interesting to try and teach the daughter anything.
She weed in her pants on the walk home this afternoon. I told her it was no big deal. I've had a couple of incidents like that, even as an "adult".
My mother and stepfather would have been all over me. In fact, were, a couple of times, when I was a kid.
Ah...
Well, some things never change. I thought they were idiots when I was a kid. I think they're not too terribly bright now.
I must remember to ask the daughter what she thinks of me.
Write...a...note...on...my...hand...
ask daughter...
what?
Maybe she knows.

I've got hidden files on mine as well. No idea what they are (although they might be stuff I deleted and backed up so that I can reinstate them within a certain time period, just to make sure that I haven't deleted something vital).

I've not read 'Pretending to be normal'. What's the theme?

Weeing in pants? Sounds like stress or illness. She's not being bullied or anything like that is she?

My offspring is still heavily into Harry Potter. I bought the video for him. He's now shouting out chess moves (but he's still Harry Potter).

Nah. She just doesn't like using the loo at school. Too many people.
They shout and play and act like kids. She's not a big kid person.

Liane Willey's book is about a woman who had a difficult time with life until she found out that one of her twins had Aspergers.
She began to research the subject and found that the aspects of the condition very much matched her own.
Now she is an internationally known expert on the subject.
She admits that she has never been clinically diagnosed, but she says that she has been unable to find a doctor who knows enough or cares enough to assess her.

"Neuro-typicals" as Aspies call, um, "normal" people, have this idea that "you're just obsessing, get over it, move on, and join us".

She says that if you are not missing a limb or having chemo-therapy, that neuro-typicals believe that there is nothing wrong with you that you don't want to be wrong with you. So, all you have to do is learn to behave and everything will be all right.

The daughter got some birthday money in the mail yesterday and immediately demanded to go to the mall, where we hit two bookstores and a jewelry kiosk. She bought a miniature silver pyramid.
She is still rereading her Harry Potter books on a regular basis.
She bought a fantasy book written by a sixteen year old girl who had written her first at thirteen.

Deepak Chopra (I think you expressed an opinion about him earlier) says that western doctors pronounce you well if they can't find traces of illness and eastern (he talks mainly of Ayurvedic) doctors say that illness is an absence of health. I'd say that's about right.

Is your daughter a budding author as well, then?

I've just read an article about an american corporation which has taken out a patent on 'Basmati' rice - something that has taken Asian farmers generations to perfect. That is truly worrying - and immoral.

The articles I found on the BBC and the web are from August of last year.
Do you have more recent info?

Texas is the largest rice producing state in the U.S., I believe.
The strains that RiceTec has come up with must have some definable difference or they wouldn't be patentable.
I will see what else I can find.

The fact that Indian MPs got involved to the point of disrupting parliamentary activities strongly suggests a less than charitable interest on their part. When politics and food get involved, somebody's making a buck somewhere.

So, I reserve judgement until I know more.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1809000/1809581.stm

Now, corporate greed and multinational monopolies are disgusting.
Prosecuting a farmer because a plant does what it does, is obscene.

But it happens in:

Clothing
Do you know who owns the process that produces the fibres you wear?
Who owns the genetic patent on the cotton strain or the type of sheep?

Automobiles
They sell you something that is designed to fall apart and some of the parts can only be bought from offshoots of the manufacturer.
There are guiding patents for automobile principles that hold sway in much of the world.

Plastics
which are derived from petroleum or cellulose or plant oils and each particular process or product is patented somewhere.

Somewhere, someone invented the wheel.
People have been taking out patents on it's "improvement" for hundreds of years.

I've got a copy of a Paul Gross movie, called in this edition "Northern Extremes". It had another name in it's initial release, but I can't remember it. The plot involves a little fishing village on an island off the coast of Canada. The government decides that it needs to reduce offshore fishing by 2% in order to complete a treaty with Belgian fishing interests in exchange for something else. Since the little island's fishermen only bring in 2% of the total fish for the entire country, the government decides to tell them that, for the good of the country, they can't fish for the next four years.
The plot proceeds from there.

I had the information from the June edition of the New Internationalist magazine and yes - it was RiceTec Inc. If, as it appears the international bio-tech companies are racing to patnet the major food crops, this could result in the world's seed supply being monopolised by a few large corporations. Farmers rights to save and sell their seeds are being compromised and livelihoods threatened.

I think that it *is* obscene. Food patenting, gene patenting. No doubt if they could do it, corporations would patent the air we breathe and the water we drink.

You can patent sheep?? I had heard of patents on cotton strains and I think that's not on either.

This looks to me like storing up trouble. If the world (or America, or the west generally) is seen to be unfair and oppressive, that's how wars start. I think we need to get our house in order on this one before it's too late.

My wife and mother and mother-in-law are fans of a phrase they use on my all the time,"Don't worry about what you can't change."

The human potential to survive without interference from units larger than the village council has been ignored for thousands of years.
Governments, merchants, churches, and just plain megalomania have ravaged this planet since time began.

There are parts of the world where if you want to move ten cows to the market, you loose four on the way to customs, road tax, police, and the priest. Then you loose one to the market master just to have the right to sell.
Everybody gets their little piece.
In order to build a house, you have to have approval and you have to pay a fee to get the application filed. You have to pay a fee to get a permit after the approval. You have to pay the supplier, the contractor, the union, the site inspector, the plumbing inspector and the building inspector. Then you have to have the damned thing insured and you have to pay property and improvements taxes on it.
If you see it, that get's taxed. If you don't use the money from the sale within a certain period, that gets taxed again.

In Italy, when you buy a car, you pay a form of VAT, you pay for a license based on the brake horsepower, and if it breaks down, you get fined as they tow it away for not having a functioning vehicle or having a valid license. You can't renew the license if it is not running and you can't own it if it is not running. At least that's how I remember it.

In the U.S., you can't have a farm crop or a pig herd insured unless it is registered as a known variety with certain parameters of survival and known yield. Most farmers use hybrid seed that can only be grown once, because it is sterile. Next year they have to buy some more.

Beyond livelihood, the reason that the big food and seed weasels have so much power is because a larger and larger portion of the world's people cannot clothe or feed themselves. They buy their clothes and their food. They have jobs that have no direct relationship to their survival.
The markets that the rice from India are sold on did not always exist. They are a product of the above phenomenon.
If everybody took out just two hours of their day, every day, to feed and clothe themselves, then the whole world would change.
But warriors and thieves have always known that it is easier to steal than it is to produce.
So, in order to protect your food supply and your fiber source, you have to use some of your resources to pay guards.
Since they are mercenaries, they are just as willing to be paid by one group as another, so enters corruption into the equation.

Edison and a group of fellows once controlled the patents to movie-making equipment and film-processing for most of the U.S. They sent out lawyers and enforcers to make it stick.
One man, a Mr. Seldon, kept the courts busy with litigation for years with an unusable patent that described a sort of automobile. He collected a lot of money in royalties from the big makers before his patent ran out or he was successfully challenged by Henry Ford.

Universities have patents on mice, dogs, monkeys, flatworms, soap bubble-forming apparatus, strains of e coli, and certain forms of ice.
There are patents on types of clays for brickmaking, types of sand for glassmaking and cement.
The "Suzuki Method" is patented.
If you go down to the art supply store, practically everything in there is patented or has a patent applied to the way in which it is processed or manufactured.

The "Happy Birthday" song is still copyrighted.

I don't have any answers.
The more things you sic the lawyers on, the more things you give them control of.

The more you try to appeal to people's sense of decency, the stranger they look at you.

Should be: "a phrase they use on me all the time."

and, with regard to the house: " if you sell it, that gets taxed."


Sorry. Stream of conch shellness...

I've a guest coming to stay with me from Hawaii (did I say?). She's not someone I know well. I gave her a lift to a Peace through the Arts camp a couple of years ago. She needs a place to stay for a couple of nights.

Normally, I would rush around getting the place 'fit', however, there's so much going on, I don't have the energy at the moment.

Did you live in Italy at one time that you know this stuff about cars? Fascinating.

I can see that there are two sides to every story, but it seems to me that this patent stuff is getting out of hand.

I did read (or hear, I can't remember which) that each of us in western society has the equivalent of 200 servants in the household equipment that we have - washing machines, hoovers, running water, electric light, etc.

Up to a point, I think the whole concept of patenting "living" things is nursing on air...but, on the other hand, no political theory or economic theory can predictably deal with innovations by innovators or inventors or researchers who truly do need a little protection in order to keep from being inundated by copies.
Unfortunately, because of the legal fiction of "intellectual property", the person who does the actually thinking or doing often gets left far behind, often without a cent or a bit of credit, like that lady who discovered the DNA sequence, but had the bad luck to die at the wrong time, allowing Crook and that other crook to take her credit...

I sometimes think lawsuits should be settled with champion duels.
Let the worst man win and televise the whole thing.
I have no idea what lawyers do for a living or why.

The daughter has developed a habit of scribbling weird heiroglyphics in notebooks and journals and claiming they are stories.
Odd bits of ideas, maybe, but not stories. Yet.

We're going to try to work on that this summer.