I picked two up (well they're not kids, they're in their late 20s) and they've been working with me ever since. Can't wait until they move out, but at least they learned some electronics!
The Street Kids of San Francisco
121–130 of 210 posts
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine the wobbly will quite happily let the farmer go and get a representative of the US government for him to fight. Likely he will have naturally moved on before such a representative responds to 'someone is enjoying my shade against my will!'
I agree that people can commit crimes without getting caught much of the time? I'm not sure if you have a point.
It's a sad world we live in when "sitting in the shade" is called a crime - and imply that it's bad people aren't getting 'caught' for such trivial things.
I mean, if we're talking about absurdity of points, you are saying that a single travelling poor man sitting in the shade is something that is worthy of invoking the power of the federal government to combat.
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most American LSD is distributed through the "Rainbow Family" distribution network. Basically the same people you see on the streets of San Francisco. It's a stretch calling these people a gang. It has zero connection to drugs like heroin, cocaine, and meth.
and that is because there is no profit in LSD (I suppose related to it not being addictive?) In SF, $50 will get you an eighth of pot, whereas LSD is like $5/hit (so a twenty is enough to meet God)
A vile costs less than $1 per hit and a fraction of that price for someone "in the family". You can only move so much though since it's not a habit.
Several factors favor a small source of distributors. Ergot is dangerous to work with, it's a difficult synthesis, and the overhead costs of making 1,000 hits and 1,000,000,000 is essentially the same.
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a justification for private property. How will there ever be an orchard otherwise ? Orchards don't just burst spontaneously into existence. Imagine that no one 'fought the natives for it'. Instead the land was a vacant waste with no one living there and nothing growing there. Over the years through hard work, dedication and sacrifice the land was amended and the trees grew creating the orchard. The only thing…
> Imagine that no one 'fought the natives for it'. Instead the land was a vacant waste with no one living there and nothing growing there. Dear Randian, These statements imply that you consider the native people "no one" and native vegetation rather than industrial crops "a vacant waste". I think those are rude presumptions.
It's more than rude: you should see what Ayn Rand had to say about the native Americans.
> Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right
> to take over this continent.
>
> http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an old wobbly story: A wobbly was riding a freight train across the midwest one summer, in between jobs. The train sided out in the middle of nowhere, and it was scorching hot, so the wobbly got off the train and started walking down a dirt road. After a couple of miles, the road passed by an apple orchard. The wobbly hopped over the fence, and sat down to rest under the shade of a big apple tree. The wobbly…
I don't see why you need a broad intellectual foundation here. Property is granted by governments. Why? Because it's a useful abstraction. Where did the government get the property? It claimed it and enforced its claim by force. So I guess my answer to the story would be: fine, you can fight the owner for it, but the real owner isn't me, it's the United States government. If you are so inclined to fight the governmen…
> Property is granted by governments. Why? Because it's a useful abstraction.
This is where that 'broad intellectual foundation' comes in. You may think that it is, sure, but why? Not everyone does, and there's a whole lot of philosophical discussion on this very topic. Our conception of 'private property' has only been around ~200 years, and humanity's been around just a bit more than that.
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#126I'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and…
> On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Could you expand on the flaws in their disdain of capitalism? Or, if that's too broad a question, perhaps direct us to some reading material on the subject? I don't mean this in a snarky or side-taking manner... in fact I'm struggling with my own views on capitalism and would love to expand my knowledge on the issue.
Here's the basics, from an anarchist/communist perspective: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-03-31-anti-capitalis...
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Could you expand on the flaws in their disdain of capitalism? Or, if that's too broad a question, perhaps direct us to some reading material on the subject? I don't mean this in a snarky or side-taking manner... in fact I'm struggling with my own views on capitalism and would love to expand my knowledge on the issue.
So part of the problem is their alternatives to capitalism. Which are mostly primitivist (as in, destroy infrastructure) communist (in the central planning, grey way depicted in i.e. The Dispossessed) or just kinda goofy. As a lifestyle choice, living off the refuse of a bloated and exorbitant society is actually quite sustainable until you need serious healthcare. As something for everybody to do, a new way of gover…
I will not argue with you about my disdain for hippies and their views, but to mention a few things from a slightly different perspective...
> But ultimately, seven billion people are never going to form some totally sweet Zapatista-style worldwide commune.
Most serious communists would agree, at least for the near-term: you'd need a few generations of socialism before that'd even be remotely possible.
> At that scale, the markets are going to be at work. Capitalism is inevitable.
Note that 'capitalism' != 'markets,' or even 'free markets.' Mutualism, for example, is market socialism.
> But the farms and kibbutzim themselves are still participants in a larger capitalist system.
Totally, 100% agree.
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Radical punk rock literally saved my life. As someone who's been a part of both of these worlds off and on for 16 years, I couldn't disagree with you more. I see the aesthetics of the hacker and punk scenes as being extremely similar, where as the underlying motives are currently lightyears apart. For instance, "hacker houses" and "collective houses" have a similar aesthetic. Both are about people living together, an…
I haven't had exposure to the hacker houses on the West Coast, so I can't really speak to that. The motives of hackers I've known usually have to do with impacting the world and making it better for more people. I've been in punk houses with hackers, but we mostly had parties with art people, and collaborated with anarchists. I'm not talking about the Silicon Valley startup scene, which I know nothing about. I'm movi…
Perhaps my perspective is tainted by living in the bay area through two (three?) tech bubbles, however I still don't see it. I agree that HN-type hackers and anarchists both use aesthetically similar language, like "changing the world," but I think that means something substantially different in each context.
My sense is that when tech people talk about changing the world, they generally mean keeping the form of the world basically the same, but making it more efficient.
Here's an example from HN and YC, 42floors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500176
They use the language you're talking about -- they want to "change the world" ...with a commercial real-estate search engine! I'm sure that these folks are doing fine work, but really, the world is going to be fundamentally the same, it just might be a little easier to find commercial real-estate in it.
On the other hand, the anarchist basis is that fundamental aspects of society (police, prisons, judges, rulers, laws, taxes) were all the inventions of kings, which were later appropriated rather than destroyed. That it was a mistake to think it was possible to "change the world" simply by putting these same structures in the hands of different people, and that what's actually required is to eliminate them completely.
These, I think, are pretty different ways of conceptualizing that phrase.
I will agree that there are sometimes unusual intersections (the history of twitter, for instance).
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Best parties I've been to were a healthy blend of web folks, hippies, anarchists, engineers, and discordians. I did observe that despite having fairly good classical training and historical knowledge--more than I had, certainly!--there did not seem to be a lot of self-educated people who knew physics and hard-sciences beyond a somewhat populist level. I suggest that this may be due theoretical physics and whatnot req…
How did you connect with that crowd? I've noticed a very high overlap between techies and hippies, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to stumble into a group of discordians short of randomly wandering the streets shouting "hail eris!".
"I've noticed a very high overlap between techies and hippies..."
Have you seen The Net? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doQAwLb-DEE
Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine that no one 'fought the natives for it'. Instead the land was a vacant waste with no one living there and nothing growing there. Dear Randian, These statements imply that you consider the native people "no one" and native vegetation rather than industrial crops "a vacant waste". I think those are rude presumptions.
It's more than rude: you should see what Ayn Rand had to say about the native Americans. > Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right > to take over this continent. > > http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand It is pretty disgusting.
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