OneWordSoln

No, happiness is the result of making others happy. Unhappiness is the same thing but for when you treat people badly. A person riding waves of happiness and unhappiness is doing so because they do not understand this fundamental reality of human existence and have not learned how to treat others accordingly.

We alone have free will and the Law of Karma (reaping what we sow in others) is the universe's feedback mechanism to nudge us away from animalistic competition at the expense of others and towards humanitarian cooperation for the benefit of one and all, no matter what their superficial differences.

To become consumed with universal compassion for all others and therefore be committed to helping create happiness in all those around us is to have become the owner of a deep abiding peace and happiness that cannot be shaken irrespective of external circumstances.

Becoming consumed by active, selfless love for all others is the zenith of human self-evolution and is the ultimate meaning of life. That so few understand this absolute truth is precisely why so many suffer and those who gain riches are left so very empty.

When one strives for the happiness of others one has fulfilled the greatest purpose in life and the reward is a deep abiding peace and happiness, regardless of circumstance.

All it costs is your entire life and the scorn of your fellow man who are mostly embroiled in the seeking of pleasures and therefore know not happiness.

What a bargain!

The price of a product is not the same as the wages a corporation pays its employees. Walmart's billions of profits could have been shared more fairly with its employees but that's not how the "Cult of the MBA" treats their fellow human beings.

And it is not the government's responsibility to make us treat our fellow human beings with generosity and compassion, though I would welcome any attempts for them to do so. Unfortunately, the governments of the world are nearly wholly controlled by the callous wealthy.

The platinum rule: do unto others as they would like to be treated. And, yes, that is (within limits, for we don't want to give the alcoholic more alcohol) the essence of religion.

I don't know Tolstoy but we are only responsible for loving others; if they don't return it that determines their outcome, not ours. Love is the opposite of selfishness so to require something in return is not love at all but some kind of manipulative transaction. That doesn't mean it doesn't emotionally hurt when someone treats you cruelly.

And 'Nature Boy' by Nat King Cole is a great, great song. It's amazing when a song can embody wisdom. My favorite is Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" with his spoken word intro:

"Seems to me, it aint the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be a gasser."

Your second paragraph is mostly correct. Furthermore, the vast majority of people who acquire great wealth have done so by taking advantage of many, many others, from the workers that they pay as little as possible (e.g. Uber) to their customers whom they charge as much as possible (e.g. the Pharma corps).

>> Capitalism is built to make sure that psychopaths are never satisfied;

Although it happens all the time, it's not the nature of capitalism that makes it so, just the greedy potential of human beings. We each develop an inertia of life and capitalism (especially 2019's unfettered capitalism) definitely allows the rich to get richer, but that is not built into the system, just the majority of human beings. No, capitalism is also very good at letting those who earn a great deal of money share that money with those who have been less lucky in the roll of life's monetary dice. More simply put: systems designed/implemented by human beings are only as good as the human beings who manifest them. If they are callous, then the system will be callous, and that is precisely what we have today.

>> The fact that wealth and happiness are often mentioned together in articles and books is a very strong indicator that they are related.

No, that just indicates that most people don't understand the difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is related to physical well-being -- i.e. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the like -- and wealth is the easiest way to get any kind and amount of pleasure one desires. Happiness and/or its opposite is the accumulated results of our treatment of others; it results in a feeling that wells up inside of us. It is absolutely unrelated to any physical pleasure.

At the most raw, basic level of our universe are the physics-level automatic systems but at the most sublime level (and only for human beings) there is the Law of Karma. Because we are endowed with free will and are required to live in groups to survive and prosper, the universe is designed with an automatic feedback mechanism to nudge us toward selfless cooperation and away from the selfish competition of our animal physicality. As such, we quite literally reap the feelings we sow in others. That is why wealth has no direct bearing on our happiness, although it is very negatively correlated with the tyrannical corporate execs who have reduced their workers to 'human resources' to be brutally bargained with to maximize the owners' profit.

As surely as a person can be drunk on power or alcohol or drugs, one can be drunk on accruing wealth at the expense of others; in all instances, the hangover is unpleasant. If the intoxication leads to maltreatment of others, then that hangover will be a deep-seated unhappiness that can only be cured by creating fresh happiness in others; each day is a new day, i.e. "there's still time to change the road you're on". The problem is that the inertia of our lives combined with the general denial of the Law of Karma's existence usually leads the person to only dig the hole deeper.

The entire purpose of human life is to rise above our mammalian competitive instincts and self-evolve ourselves and our societies into cooperative groups of humanitarians where we are obsessed with compassion for everyone. That such compassionate regard for the poor is almost non-existent in today's world societies is the source of much misery and unhappiness -- misery for the poor and unhappiness for the selfish, unfulfilled wealthy who callously disregard their ability to uplift their fellow man.

There was a great story that popped up here (IIRC) about a successful health-care company whose owner was in the process of converting it to a non-profit. Because he had realized that his wealth was the direct result of his workers' efforts he out-of-the-blue gave large bonuses to ALL his employees (based upon seniority). That man gets it and his happiness should be held up as how capitalism is capable of enriching society.

It's just my guess, but I think that most people are so uncomfortable with their own thoughts and feelings that they have to continually drown them out with idle chatter. The problem is that they select those others very carefully so as to avoid any ideas that may impinge upon their established worldview.

Perhaps it comes down to that there are just very few genuinely curious and intellectually honest people in the world, the result being that the majority (i.e. the others) self-select their environments and then either ignore others or, worse yet, attack them.

If he means, from a mathematical point of view, Mathematica's ability to both symbolically and numerically solve advanced mathematical systems of equations, he's not technically wrong, even if his oversized ego oozes out of every word he utters.

If, however, he's talking about general computational systems vis a vis creating programs to run on today's microprocessors, he has obviously drunk too much of his own kool-aid.

I mean, Mathematica is a truly great, great piece of software, but his "New Kind of Science" was both utterly worthless and a fantastic treatise on how a person's grandiose religion of self leads to utter delusion.

And the same reason I returned it to Barnes & Noble within two days.

If you go to emptywheel.net and search for 'Haberman', you will see the many examples cited by the excellent Ms. Wheeler. There are 18 results. Perhaps they are not all critical of Ms. Haberman, but the one I chose to read (the 3rd, "NYT's Trump Interview: Money for Nothing and Clicks for Free") most certainly was.

Marcy Wheeler deserves a Pulitzer Prize for her work.

I named the "obfuscators" just as I was asked to.

I mean obfuscation as in downplaying the seriousness of the crimes of Trump et al. She has been a part of normalizing their deviance and that is the single most effective technique the disingenuous can use to thwart the change we need so badly. It's not Soviet-era propaganda, it's just a nudge away from the truth of how corrupt and amoral our current government is. It pushes us from the righteous anger at their machinations towards "they've done some not-good things"; therein lies a world of difference.

Read Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel.net. Her "potty mouth" is wholly appropriate and her reporting is top-notch.

Yeah, but the Guardian is, by my estimation, a truly bad-ass journalistic institution devoted to speaking truth to power.

The NYT employs enough disingenuous obfuscators that I will never pay them a penny, nor will I let them collect my information.

Beyond that, what they don't realize is that other news sites will simply report on what is reported in the NYT, and those sites will forever be free. From time to time I will copypaste a NYT url to a single-use non-private FF instance to read (and then immediately clear history) whereby I invariably find that the article only has a few bits that expanded my knowledge. Most of the articles are those few bits of new info followed by summaries of days or months old information that I am already fully aware of. And the same goes for the WaPo.

I understand that we need to support good journalism and I will when I find some really good journalism, without auto-play vids and ridiculous amounts of ad content and making sure the readership on "both sides" is fairly represented. The WaPo has potential but Bezos' quest for all the dollars is ruining it.

What they don't get is that they can't control the information and that information has no intrinsic price, for our primary advantage as human beings is our ability to spread ideas and information from person to person. Their information is going to get aggregated and there's not a damn thing they can do about it, and I'm willing to wait 12 hours for it to get to me secondhand.

The MBAs are digging their own graves every single day and they don't have anyone to blame but themselves. That they have gone all in on the advertisers is only hastening their demise.

That the vast majority of humanity choose to ignore their moral impulses only testifies to our free will being absolute and the callous disregard (or worse) of others in the choices they make. Simply put, most people simply choose to remain moored to our physical body's animal heritage, where the mammalian dictates are competition between groups for power and within the group for sex and status.

I find it strange that the author didn't mention the incessant tracking and difficulty in making system changes. Note that in their quest to create a uniform installation, Microsoft has deliberately moved away from customization to the point of trying to ensure their look-and-feel (i.e. 'branding') doesn't get customized away.

Anyway, I paid $100 for the Win10 Pro update on my Dell Inspiron 17 box (my first Windows box since Win7 at work and XP64 at home) and am totally delighted to have finally jettisoned them for good. The laptop was Ubuntu-ready from the get-go and is user-servicable as well. Wiping the SSD was a true joy, as was installing and upgrading Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has been -- UI quirks aside -- an absolute dream to work with. Sure, I don't have Visual Studio but I'm an old vi guy anyway and while open source F# is just not the same as the Microsoft version, OCAML, C/C++, and Python give me all the programming tools I could ever need.

Goodbye, Microsoft, you can shove your MBAs whereever you'd like on your way to obsolescence.

Such haziness is only inevitable for those who don't know but wish to act like they know more than others. The first step to wisdom is in honestly admitting what one does not know. Most people are ego- and pleasure-driven and therefore would rather make up something pretty or convenient or whatever, instead of admitting that they don't have the answers.

"What is the meaning of our existence?" is not at all hazy but is far more simple (yet subtly complex) than people are willing to admit; of course, people are generally not willing to admit that another person can have knowledge they do not, especially if they are deeply wedded to their particular culture (e.g. academic philosophy) and/or faith. And, yes, I do know the answer to this question, and, yes, the answer is both very simple and deeply complex (very much in the realm of "Not 2, not 1").

The simple meaning of our existence is to enjoy life, to be happy. The complexity arises in a couple of dimensions. First, we need to live in societies to survive and prosper. As such, we have an innate morality that pushes us away from selfish, animalistic competition and toward selfless, humane cooperation, across all artificial divisions [e.g. ethnicity, form of religion (including none at all), sexual preference and identity]. This morality is a part of our being and is tied to the inner feelings we get when we interact with our fellow human beings and even the Earth itself (for when we harm the Earth we harm others). Our morality affects how we think and, therefore, how we approach life with our attitudes and behaviors; each society imparts its own moral teachings upon its acolytes, from Dr. King's univesal love and service to the purely capitalistic callous disregard for the suffering of others to the purely evil ethnic hatred and violently oppressive practices by various groups.

The inner feelings of happiness or unhappiness we experience are what we reap from what we have sown in others, combined with our level of self-evolution, for we are the only creatures with a free will and a mind that can evolve itself within its life to achieve moral perfection. As such, we are the only creatures that live under the most subtle of laws: the Law of Karma. This can be evidenced in the general misery of the wealthy and the rather surprising level of joy of the people of the projects that I currently live in; yes, there are exceptions to this because there are, of course, people in these projects that look at others as Buber's "It" and there are wealthy that seek to uplift those less fortunate than themselves (though they are few and far between). It is obvious to anyone living honestly that material wealth does not determine happiness, though it sure does buy plenty of pleasure, most people confusing the two for the simple fact that most people are only concerned with the material aspect of this world, not the bigger questions such as those understood by Buber and the other Sufi sages sprinkled throughout history.

So, then, the meaning of life is to become happy by evolving oneself to create happiness in others by first personally embodying the highest ideals of compassion and service and then by working to establish societies where those ideals are manifest in the institutions of government, business and religion themselves. Here it is obvious that we have allowed the most ruthless, hypcritical and selfish liars and oppressors to seize and hold power. From a game theoretic standpoint, they have access to more tools than the moral human being and the fruits of their labors stand testament to their single-minded power-seeking, our tattered Earth going to ruin and the misery of the poverty-stricken masses demonstrating their efforts.

The crux of the issue resides in the answer to "Why, with most people not being evil bastards, is the world moving away from happiness?" Besides the efforts of the relatively few amoral people, most people are too confused to either confront or overcome their own personal demons and are therefore blind to either their own foibles or those that rule over them; such people are not merely individuals, they form powerful groups of super-ego-driven packs of self-centered power mongers. Here the evidence can be seen in how many poor people support corrupt, self-serving politicians that make the life of common people worse, as well as how many obviously hypocritical religious institutions maintain their adherents.

Here then can be found the ultimate crux of the meaning of life: our Creator is literally Unfathomable and absolutely peerless -- after all, It is the Creator of time, space and all the subtle, mathematical laws that interrelate them -- but It has tied our self-evolution into reaching out within ourselves and establishing a relationship with It. Only in that reaching out can we learn how to self-evolve ourselves beyond our petty animalistic, pack-centric destructiveness and into a global cooperation of compassionate humanitarians that understand that every human being deserves happiness, respect, dignity and the opportunities to live a life of achievement and self-worth, according to their own predilections.

The caveat to such universal compassion is that we must be ever on guard for persons and groups that teach hatred and oppression of others. They must be stripped of their ability to harm others for the work of the righteous is ALWAYS to protect the innocent, no matter who they are, for we are one human race, with all non-destructuve members deserving of FDR's Four Freedoms.

Ultimately, we can talk about what we believe but our choices each and every day are the evidence of the life we live, and that evidence shows in our facial expressions, our tone of voice and the joy (or its lack) we feel within.

"The Way goes in." --Rumi

The Chinese govt's oppression of Christians, Falun Gong and Muslims is ABSOLUTELY fascist.

When one tells the truth there is no guarantee that the listener lives closely enough with the truth to recognize it as such, the filters of their life often obscurring the simpler reality that some few others choose to inhabit.

All that is important is living and telling one's truth because, in the end, most people don't even know who Dunning & Kruger are, let alone that McArthur Wheeler bears a great resemblance to the vast majority of humanity in the early 21st Century.

Something special happens when one reads a piece of such ineffable beauty. Beyond thought or specific emotion, we are affected, taken to some other undefined place. It happens very rarely for me, perhaps due to my lifetime of tech-oriented pursuits, but it certainly happened to me today and I am thankful for Ms. Gannon's soul-bearing work of beauty.

On another note and only because I am a paying, very satisfied customer, I have to recommend MasterClass. I was originally simply interested in watching Gary Kasparov's chess class with my 10yo son, but when I saw the list of experts in writing, music and media production, we decided that $90 for one class was inferior to $180 for a year of all the classes (and we live in public housing so this was no easy investment). It has been an outstanding decision. I literally did this within the past week and watching Judy Blume and Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood with my 12yo daughter has been nothing less than revelatory. I also have enjoyed Will Wright and Herbie Hancock and Malcolm Gladwell and Frank Gehry and Hans Zimmer; excellence and passion inspire us. The production on the classes is its own master class in educational video creation in the internet age, but their choice of educators is its own special kind of genius.

My favorite, however (and surprisingly, to me), has been the poet Billy Collins. We need more poets' hearts in this digital world of MBAs ruthlessly squeezing the populace and our beloved Mother Earth for everything the laws they crafted will allow. I applaud Victoria Gannon for her wonderful piece of poetic prose. Her poet's heart has inspired me this morning and I need all of that I can get in this world of callous competition.

To some extent, I agree. However, 15-year-olds are the direct result of their parents' attitudes and teachings so their foundations have largely been established by that point. Put another way: if children are raised by bullshitters who never cared if their children are also full of crap, then that 15-year-old will likely continue on that path forever, unless they have a serious epiphany.

As an American, I am so disgusted by lies that I refused to bullshit my kids about Santa Claus. I informed them that it was utter bullshit but that they were not to ever tell other kids the truth because that was between them and their parents. It really gave my kids an entirely different perspective on American culture and the mass insanity (however benign it is considered) that entire cultures can adopt as the status quo.

Personally I felt that weaving an absurd yarn about something so important for the overall culture in general and for the kids in particular was only going to damage my credibility with my kids later when they finally learned the truth, that truth being that I had foisted a ridiculous lie upon them since before they could remember.

It is my conclusion that the vast majority of what people consider their precious traditions are nothing more than excuses to continue to act badly in the face of a lack of critical thinking.

Thanks. And yeah, WP is really only a broad, top-tier foundation that can (and has) grow(n) organically in a rather appropriately demand-driven way. [Of course, such human systems will always have problems on touchy subjects as digital information is always most useful for factual subjects where opinions are less relevant.]

Really, I am of the perspective that a machine-grokked indexing system will always be less useful in a significant set of edge-cases than a human-curated index due to such factors as language ambiguity and gaming of such algorithms. As well, the sheer size of the internet requires ranking the pages to ensure the most useful links are properly denoted as such.

WP, being likely the most important and useful crowd-sourced and -built human information system, it is up to us to both keep it funded and add the information we deem important.

Ultimately, Wikipedia provides an effective keyword lookup that maps to curated links.

Regardless, the notion of a general web index is well nigh moot at this point due to its not having been built into the system from the get-go. Any such attempt at this point will be, by definition, ad hoc and built by some group of individuals, with the vastness of the content, the cost of the project and the intrinsic conflicts that will no doubt arise making independence from finance and legal issues non-trivial, to say the least.

Really, Wikipedia is the most sensible foundation I can imagine, given that Google has become a self-serving for-profit corporate advertising machine.

Man, The New Yorker just churns my processor, making the fans crank up. What is it doing, mining Bitcoin? (I'm in FF 60.4, browsing with tracking protection.)

They are beautiful and it almost looks like silver. I loved seeing them when I was in Finland.

Just because you don't understand its reasons doesn't make it a random occurance. I'm guessing you were near a nest or a fledgling, but that's just my non-educated guess.

Another possibility is that you looked like a former 'enemy' of crows. Crows can remember people who mess with them for up to two years and seem to be able to communicate that information among their peers. There is an excellent documentary about that behavior and it may have even been about scientists in the BC area.

They wore masks to test whether the information could be passed down from generation to generation. They found one crow offspring that still recognized the mask its parents had been trained on.

I believe it was called "The Intelligent World of Crows". It was excellent.

Sorry, I think we (my kids and myself) got it as we were literally wondering just last week how to tell crows and ravens apart. (We are always scanning for wildlife of all kinds.)

Yup, last week my kids and I, who are always on the lookout for wildlife of all kinds, were wondering how to tell crows from ravens. So, yeah, very, very nice timing for us, too.

Does anyone know if there is a statistically significant difference between the electronic and paper machines in the swing states? I seem to remember hearing that Wisconsin had a very skewed correlation based upon county machine type, but would love to see the actual breakdown.

>> Why the down votes?

Let me offer a theory:

It seems that we need a 'Law of Anonymous Social Systems Entropy' (not to be confused with the idea of 'Social Entropy') that states that every social system (including social media platforms) tends, over time, to demonstrate that groups of negative human beings will eventually -- by virtue of their being less constrained by civility and less tolerant of foreign ideas or groups -- infiltrate and negatively affect all human social systems that allow anonymity. This is likely due to the fact that anonymous social capital (e.g. this site's user reputation) is not real enough to activate normal human self-censorship. As well, the disingenuous will be able to game the system to gain the social capital necessary to negatively affect the system. Note that the negative group need not be in the majority to do damage.

It has taken longer for HN to reflect this truth but it appears that a significant percentage of this site's commentariat has finally become more and more insular to ideas -- and even questions -- more borderline than the ideas of those who hold its social capital (i.e. those with the ability to downvote a post).

In theory, anonymity is great for allowing free-thinking people to express their controversial views without worry for reprisal from other groups, but in reality that gives cover to the people with purely destructive, anti-social, anti-progressive and intolerant tendencies. And those attitudes and their accompanying behaviors have a much greater negative system effect than those of well-intentioned users.

The fact that our entire world is now connected by effectively anonymous social media means that the above concept has crept into every aspect of our lives, and has actually cost lives in places such as Myanmar.

(Note that I don't have the karma to up or down vote.)