tcpip | Employment Changes, Land Tax, Labor for Refugees, Beowulf, Gaming, Numbers

Employment Changes, Land Tax, Labor for Refugees, Beowulf, Gaming, Numbers

Well, I was a pleasant part-time working situation. However in the past couple of weeks I've picked up two major contracts. So now I'm working about 55 hours/week and my probable annual income looking, ahhh, quite high. Certainly an extraordinary turn-around from six months ago. Nevertheless, the time constrains means that something obviously has to go, and sadly I suspect it's going to be the community research organisation, Borderlands.

Just had another letter published in The Age today over land tax, under the title A dumb deal must not kill a good tax, following an article from the previous day.

Had dinner last night with a member of the NSW Right, who is a co-convenor of Labor for Refugees over there. At last, some national face-to-face meeting! We reached the agreement to push the national co-ordination issue and raise the idea of a national plebiscite on refugee issues (that should scare the pants of the party hierarchy). We also have Laurie Ferguson in our sights after publically promoting policy that is worse that the Labor Party's official refugee policy. Honestly, Petro Georgiou is better than Labor's shadow minister on immigration. As an aside to all this, I'm speaking at an anti-war rally on March 18th at the State Library in my capacity as convenor of Labor for Refugees.

Regrettably missed

bar_bar_ella's birthday drinks last Saturday, but did make it to

horngirl's with

severina_242. Lots of enjoyable discussion. Also managed (finally!) to get to visit

missmalice and hand on a swag of computer books to her partner, who seems to know what he's doing. Met their adorable rodents.

Was going to attend Beowulf on Tuesday eve but the theatre company has sold our pre-purchased tickets (we were late, but still). Ran into Johan Scheffer, a local MP, after this incident who considered a little illegal, so I rang consumer affairs the following day - two tickets are being held for Saturday.

On a very related thread to Beowulf, gaming is going well.

caseopaya,

strangedave,

jazzyjay all making excellent contributions, as is Andrew L (non-livejournal, amazing). The illusion seems more or less complete - behind the narrative it may actually amaze some people but I actually have a system (of sorts) running. I should have a fifth scene up this weekend, and although I haven't done anything for it yet, I've started the livejournal community

runequest. Let's hack that third edition into something brilliant.

In other news, I conducted the service at the Unitarian's last Sunday. I used the example of the Canadian Unitarian Church offering sanctuary to asylum seekers in the opening words, a reading on the establishment of the Unitarian Service Committe, who provided safe passage for refugees from Nazi Germany from inside Czechoslavakia, and a combined Thomas Jefferson quote in the closing words; "A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither... Dissent is the highest form of patriotism"

Recent brain-breaker award goes to

jahbulon. Pythagoras once claimed "all is numbers", and as a Little black box predicts the occurrence of major world events such as 9/11 and tsunami, he might be right.

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I'm speaking at an anti-war rally on March 18th at the State Library in my capacity as convenor of Labor for Refugees.

Congratulations

Little black box predicts the occurrence of major world events such as 9/11 and tsunami

I'm still waiting for a scientific explanation before I'll start to believe any of it.
http://www.skepticreport.com/psychics/radin2002.htm

Touché

Damn, and I was hoping to have some fun with this!

I wonder if the Skeptic Report has ever answered the questions raised in the 80s by Rupert Sheldrake...

From the black box article: "Dr John Hartwell, working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, was the first to uncover evidence that people could sense the future. In the mid-1970s he hooked people up to hospital scanning machines so that he could study their brainwave patterns. He began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings. When the pictures were shown, the machines registered the subject's brainwaves as they reacted strongly to the images before them. This was to be expected. Far less easy to explain was the fact that in many cases, these dramatic patterns began to register a few seconds before each of the pictures were even flashed up. It was as though Dr Hartwell's case studies were somehow seeing into the future, and detecting when the next shocking image would be shown next."

The first thing to cross my mind at this was that it reminded me of the way you can see something happening at a distance a bit before you hear it due to the time lag of the sound medium. The next thought was that if a similar thing were happening with this, then that would mean that the physical event wasn't the source of the information being perceived, but was just another medium like light or sound, with an associated time lag, that was just a reflection of something else that occurred at a level 'behind' the physical. Just what that level might be was an interesting thought, until my brain threw in The Matrix and spoiled it.

Pleasant musings on planes of reality etc aside, to my way of thinking it should be quite possible to predict future events, provided you don't accept that there's any such thing as a random occurrence - ie, that everything happens because of something that happened immediately before, which happened because of something before that etc etc. If that's the case, then all the information of everything that's ever going to happen in the future is already contained in what's happening now. All you need is enough information on the present and sufficient data-crunching power, and you could predict anything that's going to happen. Of course, that would require something close to omniscience to be really accurate, but given a smaller range of data and unknown reserves of untapped brainpower, it's quite possible that small, subconscious analyses of Stuff What's Going On Just Now might be able to predict apparently 'random' future events, giving rise to things like intuition and prophetic glimpses of the future.

(Note - I only did physics up to first year uni level and never studied all the Einsteinian and quantum stuff, so i'm still stuck in Newtonland where ideas like time running backwards break my brain. Hence my puny cause-and-effect ponderings may be rather outdated in current thinking. But it's fun.)

Indeed. It's only for the "fun" reasons that I posted this is in the first instance.

The original article of course, didn't link it to poor ol' Pythagoras. After making his notorious comment, the ancient Hellenes started to point out "well, if everything is numbers and you're the greatest mathematician that ever lived, then surely you can predict the future, right?".

After that he became known as Pythagoras The Mad.

I'm very sceptical about this predictive little black box - it appears it doesn't make specific predictions but just suggests something important is about to happen. This could theoretically be linked to any event you decide to classify as important.

The fact that the machine started behaving funny 4 hours before 9-11, rather than suggesting that there was a direct link, seems to me as if they're fudging their data to make the facts fit the theory - "OK, so it didn't happen at the same time, but it was really close" - it reminds me of the attempts to link the lengths of pyramid corridors to world events.

Interesting, but I don't really think they've proved anything yet. It certainly doesn't sound as if we can obtain any real value from its purported predictions.

*nods* You're quite right, of course. It merely made suggestions of "something big" - and that's being kind to the theory. Still the fact that there is some variation is interesting.

Just a sideways - for those with 'cheque' capacity accounts, debits tax is due to be abolished from 1st July 2005 :) Now this is the first time I have heard of a tax actually being taken away without be replaced with something. But do you think banks will pass on this saving???? Nah, course not, they'll probably make up their own so you won't notice your not paying it!!!
*shrug*

Oh, there's plenty of cases of taxes being abolished in recent years... Most of it has been tax cuts for the medium to well-off with a relatively disproportionate cut in service for the poorer members of society :/

At the end of the day however there are two things you can tax. The results of people's labour or the resources that they control. One of these reduces human productivity and the other encourages it. Guess which is which?

i heard about this all just before the shuttle columbia incident.
it was during a time i was still researching my calling (a shamanism calling) and my uncanny relativity to computers/the internet. check out a book by Jose Arguelles called "Time and the Technosphere: The Law of Time in Human Affairs" if you haven't before. it is an an excellent resource that explains mayan mathematics in the modern world.

Heh. I kinda thought that you'd respond to this thread.

I've had an amusing side interest in Mayan mathematics and the end of the age of jaguars (Dec 23, 2012) for quite some time now. At least one other person agrees with me...

I've always quite liked the idea of following natural time rather than artificial time. Mind you, I argued that for nearly all things that concern chronology...

Of course, with all this interest in the Mayan calender, the poor ol' Incan calender (with a different "end time") is forgotton.

well the reason i've studied mayan and not incan is largely because of the musings that were pointed in my direction, and the roots in toltec knowledge, however, being such a busy traveller i have not had any meritable study in ancient history. some of the women elders in my family have visited some of the ancient sites in peru and panamerica, and so i'm curious. how is incan mathematics different and/or its calendar? as far as i can tell, mayan mathematics is perfect in every way, forward and backward, because it's the only viable explanation for the visions and lost time phenomena i've experienced since i was small. mayan ideology and some aztecan as well, have been the only fair illustration to me of what encounters i've had in both the dream world and the "living" reality in which i am inevitably stuck until the winter solstice of 2012..

I'm not sure how different the mathematics is, but the calendars have different cycles.

I reckon you'll like this;

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~rjsalvad/scmfaq/calendar.html

To that I say, "I do." Let's go on our honeymoon, post-haste.
Or we could always just pretend we did.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/tornspacetime/59072.html
Moo hua hah huh hah

Heheh...

I reckon we start at Tenochtitlan then down to Cusco and to conclude back up to Xunuantunich, in awe of their buildings and their sheer stupidity which caused the civilization to fall into ruin...

After that is mescal with the Pueblo and gamble away the world....

Too bad

anevilyak is reading my copy of The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness by Carl Johan Calleman, Ph.D. with foreword by Argoolez (Arguelles with lacking a fancy ass keyboard or memory for alt codes).

But I'm starting to have to more seriously propel that we're married, babe. You're a fucking gem in my heart.

Hey. Do you know of any good online concise (20 pages or less) documents regarding immigrants/refugees from East Timor to Australia? Being in the US I'm not really thinking about those issues a lot but it occured to me to ask. I don't know if your interests are seperate or coincide here. Also, being in Australia what can you say are the most important issues there for ET solidarity? This could be really short.

Thanks!

Elizabeth

Hmmmm... There's enormous amounts of material on Australia-East Timor refugee issues. A search on "Australia-East Timor Association" will come up with a result... As for current solidarity issues? Oil! Oil! Oil!

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Employment Changes, Land Tax, Labor for Refugees, Beowulf, Gaming, Numbers

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future events such as these will affect us in the future..

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tax

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the little black box stuff

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Re: the little black box stuff

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I have now owned you, thank you, come again.

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When do we get pregnant again?

docs about refugees

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