kings of the hill and the meaning of art

It wasn’t our weapons of mass destruction that made us kings of the hill. I suppose they did help us wipe out some of the bigger mammals, but mostly we just used them on each other. Still we lived pretty much in our own little niche like everybody else until we discovered agriculture, and that was when we began to take over the world.

And it was because of our intelligence that we were able to figure out agriculture, more importantly it was our intelligence that helped us invent language, or was it the other way? In any case it allowed us to pass on what we figured out to everybody else, so that we only had to have one guy figure out something and he could tell everybody else.

But animals had been around a long time, how come none of them ever became intelligent? Probably because they weren’t bipedal. Four legs pretty stable, two legs sort of wobbly, and then what good are those two other legs which are just kind of hanging there from the shoulders?

They still haven’t agreed on why we became bipedal. The most prominent theory right now is that it was hot in Africa, and if we went on two legs there wasn’t so much of us to shine on, just the tops of our head, and we had a lot of area to sweat to keep us cool, and since we were apes we were used to using our forepaws a bit like arms, and then I think we just began carrying things, and then there were all kinds of things you could do if you were a clever man and had hands, whereas if you were a clever mammoth all you could do was think deep philosophical thoughts while you munched grass and kept an eye out for the sabretooth.

And of course intelligence isn’t cheap, you need a big brain, and then you need a big head, which can’t pass through the birth canal so that we are born only partially formed and we have to stay with our parents about a dozen years which is where I think we got our morality. But then some of us decided to be bad, and did pretty well by that, and now we have that constant morality play in the background of everything we do.

But it does entertain us. And nobody knows, but those cave paintings must have something to do with entertainment. Myself I think it is just showbiz, though some of my purer in heart arty friends think it is something holy.

There is that whole thing about how art is supposed to reveal truth, and I think that is booshwa, there is no truth, but some people need to think there is, so they can go about their daily labor with the sweat of their brow and if they thought it was pointless they’d stop doing it, and then what would the rest of us have to eat? So that’s the artists’ job, to bullshit them so that they think there is a meaning in life and this way everybody eats.

Kind of a new theory of mine, haven’t worked out all the kinks yet but I think it has a nice ring.

Man the Speculator

I have heard the names of Kurt Vonnegut and William Faulkner, but I don't think I have read any of their stuff.

I think it's unlikely that people would voluntarily turn the world over to computers and/or robots. What's more likely is that people in power would use those machines as tools to gain more power over their fellow men. At some point the machines might get too big for their britches and try to seize control but, like you said, all we'd have to do is pull their plugs. It is possible, though, that the machines would take control little by little as their masters became lazy and ceased to supervise them properly. By the time people realized what was happening, it would be too late. Not that we couldn't still whip their electronic asses, but we might be so dependent on them by then that nobody would want to live in a world without them.

When you think about it, it's kind of funny that we humans took over the world like we did. Everybody says that it's because we are so smart, but it could just as likely be due to our aggressive natures, or maybe a little of both. Lots of animals are aggressive, but lots of animals don't have the smarts to invent weapons of mass destruction in order to become king of the hill. Of course there is no guarantee that our dominance is permanent. We have only been here a couple hundred thousand years, which is a drop in the bucket in geological time. I think that cockroaches have been here longer than that.

This month's National Geographic has an article about prehistoric art. It seems they keep finding earlier and earlier examples of it, which has led to lots of speculation about it's significance in human development. In some cases, cultures developed this stuff and then seem to have lost it for thousands of years. Did they abandon their art because times got so tough that they couldn't afford the luxury anymore? Maybe, but in some cases adversity seems to have fostered artistic expression instead of inhibiting it. Of course it's all speculation, which is kind of an art form in itself. Maybe that's one of our greatest virtues, the ability to speculate, to ask ourselves and each other, "What if?"

running the world

Did you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? His books were kind of science fiction, but not the monsters and ray gun science fiction, more like social political and pretty humorous for the most part. He had one book where a character kept saying, “I once read a science fiction story where...”

I once read a science fiction story where the computers were taking over the world and all the generals in their big hats and scientists in their lab coats were helpless to stop them, but then a janitor came along and there was a cord in the way of mopping the floor so he pulled it, and of course it unplugged the bad computer and the world was saved for the humans. The story did not go on to tell how the humans ran their world without computers.

Well you know we humans are a tribe. We are the most social animals on earth after the ants and the bees, and some kind of mole rat. We care about humans running the world. We would be bummed out if mole rats took over even if they ran it better than we do. Well of course running the world implies that you are running it for the sake of whatever animal you happen to be. If the cows take over I think that will be the end of Italian beefs.

But I don’t about computers and robots. Would they want a world where little robots sat chock a block in the classroom and then went to Robot U and then ran big robot corporations? Would they want a world where they lived in citadels and went out into the plains every summer to catch their allotment of humans according to what the state allowed them because they wouldn’t want to wipe us out and have nothing to hunt.

Well of course not, they wouldn’t be aware, they wouldn’t have goals, they wouldn’t care which city had the tallest skyscrapers or which Robot U had the best football team in the land. Well I suppose someone could program that into them, there is all this strange AI stuff going on, and every time my sister shows me some new app on her super duper phone I am like, “I had no idea we could do that. What a world we live in.”

But if we are just a bunch of electric networks, which I kind of believe, then why not if computers got to the point of where they had just as many as we, couldn’t they have awareness too? And if they had awareness, then wouldn’t they have free will. Well I don’t personally believe in free will, but it kind of depends on how you define free will.

Ah you know William Faulkner wrote a parable in one of his books about how the cats used to rule the world. But it’s a hard job, in fact it’s an impossible one, you just lurch from one crisis to the next and nothing ever really gets solved, and did I mention that it is a pain in the ass. So they got together and decided to give the job to some other animal that was smart enough to sort of do it, but not smart enough to ever figure out that it really couldn’t be done. That’s why they go after that thread on the sofa, or in my case, the keys on the keyboard, they just want to adjust some little detail that we have missed.

We Need Them Both

I didn't mean to say that there should be no government regulation of business, just that you shouldn't abolish a whole sector of the economy, like the stock market, in the process. Looking back on it, that's probably not what you were proposing and I kind of over reacted. I agree that corporations don't have souls, but they're not supposed to. It's the people who run them who are supposed to have souls, and I suppose you could say the same thing about governments. Both corporations and governments are just theoretical concepts on paper until you add people to the equation.

Maybe everything will be run by computers someday. I wonder if they will do a better job of it than people. My guess is that they will make some things better and some things worse. Computers are manufactured and programmed by people after all. When the computers are able to reproduce and program themselves, they might decide that they don't need us anymore. That is when the shit will really hit the fan. For now, though, we are stuck with both corporations and governments, and the people who run them. Maybe our descendants will look back on our era and call it "the good old days."

I hadn't heard about that Walgreen tax scam. I thought that all those international companies paid taxes to whatever country the money was made in. If that's true, and I'm not sure that it is, Walgreen would have to pay taxes on all the money they made in the U.S., no matter where their corporate headquarters were located. How about those Japanese auto companies who have manufacturing and sales facilities in this country. Don't they have to pay taxes to Uncle Sam? I know that some rich people put their money into foreign banks to shield it from U.S. taxes, and I suppose a corporation could do the same thing. Whoever asked for this global economy anyway?

running up the white flag and letting the Beagle roar

I’m going to run up the white flag on this one. In retrospect I was talking out of my ass. I really don’t know much about corporations. I went to wiki and it didn’t tell me all that much, but it does appear that it is more complicated than I thought it was. My only real argument was that the corporation lacked the human touch, which might be inclined to take pride in the product and build it right, and not in some cheesy way that would result in higher prices, and maybe the guy would want to fund some philanthropy because he thought it would save his soul, whereas the corporation has no soul, and the board of directors would never approve throwing money away. But this is kind of a small difference because I expect there are not that many individuals who would choose the more solid product over solid profits or who want to give to charity.

It was a half-formed thought (that corporations were inherently amoral) which was no big deal because many things are amoral, and I only brought it up because I was kind of pissed about that corporations should be running the country, because you hear it all the time, and it doesn’t make any sense, because the two are interconnected and because they have vastly different missions.

So again I’m sorry I brought it up. I should have thought longer about it and not said it.

I’m sure we’ve been over this several times but who paved the road to Beaglesonia and protects you from a bunch of hockey fans on the other side of the river? And if they got the money to do these things from taxing the private sector, the private sector gets its money from the sweat of your brow.

In this ridiculous argument about govt vs private sector, you see only the bad in govt and only the good in the private sector. They both have their good and bad sides.

And the last sentence (Beagles 12/26/14 7:5) is the wild libertarian squeal for untrammeled capitalism. Oh yes, let’s go back to the gilded age when the railroads were given public land willy nilly, and little kids were working 60 hour weeks, and you never had to worry about anybody inspecting your factory for safety or your restaurant for serving poisonous food. Let the eagle roar.

Here’s a pretty cool development. The latest fad in corporate trickery is where a big American company buys a small company in a foreign land that has low corporate taxes and then does a little razzmatazz and suddenly it pretends to be the small company and that the big American company is a subsidiary and now all its taxes are paid to the foreign country at their lower rates. All perfectly legal. Can I trust you to figure out who had the law written and enacted?

That was just exactly what Walgreens was planning on doing, but then the media ran the story and the public was outraged, and Walgreens realized it was going to loose a lot of customers to CVS and backed out. Inspiring story.

We Need to Define "Corporations"

You say that you like businesses but not corporations. Well, almost every business in the country, including many sole proprietorships and non-profits, are incorporated. The reason you incorporate your business is to protect your personal assets in case you get sued or the business goes under. I'm sure that my father's business was incorporated, and it was just a partnership of five guys. I remember when the amateur choir of which my mother was a member got incorporated. They had about a hundred members and, the way it was explained to me, each one of those members could have been sued if somebody fell down and hurt themselves at one of their concerts. Once they became incorporated, only the group as a whole could be sued and the individual members were held harmless.

There are lots of different categories of corporations, but I think the ones you have been dissing are the public corporations, the ones that sell common stock to the general public. When a partnership, private equity company, or family business begins to sell stock, it is said that they "go public". It's a big step that brings them into a whole new regulatory world. I think the reason most companies go public is to raise capital so that they can expand the business. Instead of just borrowing the money, they essentially sell little bits of the company, which are called "shares". Each shareholder becomes a part owner of the business, albeit a very small part. They can vote for the board of directors, but they get one vote for each share they own, and the existing board of directors already owns enough shares between them that they usually dominate the elections. Most of the shareholders don't care about that, they're just in it for the money.

When a company puts new shares up for sale, it's called an "initial public offering", although I think that most of the shares are initially bought up by dealers, not the general public. It is only from this initial sale that the company gets any money, when the shares are repeatedly traded back and forth between people, the company doesn't get a cut of that. When a company's stock goes up in price, the company does gain prestige, which might help them get a better price on their next IPO. The reason a CEO gets canned if the stock tanks is that all the board members own a lot of shares, which is essentially why they're on the board in the first place.

The shares owned by the board members, and all the other shareholders, represent their own personal assets and are not included in the accounting of the corporation's assets. When the corporation makes a profit, the board can decide to distribute some of that profit to the shareholders as dividends. Once that happens, it's not the corporation's money anymore, it's the shareholders' money, and it is taxed accordingly.

So is this the type of corporations that you believe are structurally bad? If so, what is it about their structure that you don't like? You have told me before that you are not a big fan of the stock market. Is this the reason you don't like these companies? If the stock market didn't exist, companies could still sell stock, but the buyers wouldn't have a place to re-sell their shares to other people. I suppose they could still make private deals, one at a time, but I'm not sure how that would work. Some companies, Procter & Gamble is one of them, will sell you their stock directly without going through a broker. I believe this is called "over the counter or OTC". Would you abolish that too? If companies couldn't sell shares to raise capital, they would have to borrow it, mostly from banks. Don't the banks have enough power already?

Procter & Gamble kept me out of poverty for 23 years, and Wall Street has kept me out of poverty for the last 24 years. If it wasn't for those two institutions, I would probably be a poor man today, adding one more to the ranks of poverty. Anything the government does for us is funded by money that was skimmed off the private sector economy. The more you restrict that economy, the less money will be available for skimming off.



 

merry christmas and so is your mother

Oh I declare Beagles sometimes writing at you is like writing at a wall. For one thing you keep confusing corporations with business. Did your father earn money to feed and clothe you, and send you to school? Was he a corporation? I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. Business is fine. Without trade and commerce we would all be living on some isolated piece of land fishing and shooting deer to stock the larder. With commerce we are able to live in tall towers in cities of light. I am certainly for commerce.

And then you say that well maybe corporations haven’t wiped out poverty, but neither has government, well neither has Charlie Manson, nor the Lord Almighty. This is the so is your mother argument. If we are talking about corporations, let’s talk about corporations, we can talk about politicians later. You are the one who said corporations could pull people out of poverty. Personally, I would rather see the poor people form their own corporations and make their own money (Beagles 12/23/14 6:5) And anyway I don’t know how you distinguish business from politics and businessmen from politicians, inasmuch as one influences the other and the businessmen become politicians and vice versa.

And the bottom of your first paragraph which goes something like corporations are man’s best friend and corporations are the devil incarnate. Geez-A-Lou, like the grandpa in Everybody Loves Raymond used to say (this country needs more old guys in their undershirts saying Geez-A-Lou, just like it needs good Cuban cigars, oh wait, we are going to get good Cuban Cigars thanks to my good buddy Barak Hussein).

And who built the road to Beaglesonia so that you can spend the social security money that the government runs for you? And who regulates your deer so that some idiot doesn’t get out in his 4x4 with an AR-17 and shoot them all leaving none for you? And keeps the Canadians from invading and making you say aboot instead of about? And who did that nifty little trick that made Kim Jong-un’s internet go out?

Of course it’s a hypothetical question, and maybe you wouldn’t invest in Liecheatandsteal earning ten percent annually and instead put your money Peaceonearthgoodwilltowardsmen which is losing two percent every year, but I’ll wager most everybody else in the country will. It’s just meant to illustrate the inherently amoral structure of corporations. But you can’t tell the difference between businesses and corporations so I don’t know why I am talking to you. Well maybe because nobody else is lining up to talk to me.

Oh Merry Christmas to you too.