8 ms·

So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian? I find that a bit offensive and I'm a Californian and an Agnostic. The article itself is an

by SamAtt 17y ago

So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian? I find that a bit offensive and I'm a Californian and an Agnostic. The article itself is an undeserved defense of California. I love California and I do believe we have some of the most inventive people in the world but when you add the projected shortfall over the next couple years to our current debt you get a number that's getting close to Google's total market cap. I don't know how you invent yourself out of a mess like that

skushch 17y ago
California is certainly at the end of the road here. There's no way around a reform at this point. I think in the next few years it will be interesting to see if we chose well when asking for deep cuts in spending.
- Retric 17y ago
  It's completely an issue of bad governance. Per capita income 2008: (http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/290.html#income_bystatepc_fy08-20090205 http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/290.html#income_b...) California: 47,706 USA: 44,254 Texas: 42,796 PS: A 26billion deficit = ~700$ per person.
- dkarl 17y ago
  Texas is not any better, for the simple reason that Austin is the only place any sane person wants to live, and most of the money is in Houston or Dallas. Austin is full of brainy people distracted by culture and working service jobs just to stay; Houston and Dallas are full of people with an appetite for money and nothing holding them back, not sophistication and not vision either (except visions of themselves driving expensive cars and screwing hot blondes.) Austin will continue to produce a modest amount of innovation, and Houston and Dallas will continue to produce an immodest number of millionaires. It's like having a beautiful pig and an elephant with a great personality and hoping they'll have perfect offspring -- the cities are hundreds of miles apart, the people don't like each other, and the DNA definitely doesn't splice.
  - quellhorst 17y ago
    Distracted by culture or drugs and alcohol? Anyway, a place is what you make it. If you are not happy where you are now, its likely moving won't change that.
    - dkarl 17y ago
      Distracted by whatever they consider as culture. Live music, community agriculture, hipster bars, lifestyle emissions reduction, New Age hippiedom, Christianity, drugs, you name it. There's quite a spectrum, but Austin is a place where people are concerned with living well, helping others live well, and generally working to figure out what "living well" means. That kind of exploration is where most of Austin's restless spirit takes it. Startups are pretty diametrically in opposition to "living well" unless you consider it a spiritual exercise like a monk living in the desert and whipping himself ;-) (Mostly kidding.) Sometimes I think all these intelligent questers are going to raise a generation of really smart hippie-raised kids who roll their eyes at their idealistic parents and decide to take over the world. Is that what happened in California? Is Austin just one generation behind?
      - quellhorst 17y ago
        Maybe they are just consumers of culture. Wearing art as tattoos, t-shirts that say 'Keep Austin Weird', painting their houses unconventional colors. None of that seems very creative to me. Its too easy to buy stuff to be act creative than make it. The problem that has to be solved is instead of everyone in Austin priding themselves at how laid back they are they need to realize they are actually just being lazy. People in California seem more driven.
        thismat 17y ago
        huge college town though, might have a lot to do with the attitudes and the hippie shops who make money selling to them...now that I think about hippies owning stores, it reminds me of Thundercloud Subs...man I miss that place.
  - 17y ago
gort 17y ago
"So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian?" Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy. As for sexy, well, I dunno. [ETA: Hmm, started a horribly off-topic side-thread. Sorry.]
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  "Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy." Playing devil's advocate here (or perhaps the better term is God's advocate), if I understand you correctly you are saying that all beings of higher intelligence and wisdom should conform to your definition of goodness. Does that seem very brainy? Would you like your dog creating a sense of what is right or wrong and then holding you to account for it? How about an ant? When I take my 3-year old for shots, he definitely views the entire process as decidedly immoral. But he's not seeing it from my viewpoint now, is he? I believe the notion is that goodness as God understands it is beyond my ability to understand it. The greater good when dealing with a universe is so far beyond a petty 100-year lifespan (or a 10K year civilization) that comparisons are kind of silly. We wouldn't even understand the moral questions, much less the answers I'm not saying I buy into it, I'm simply pointing out that you're taking a cheap shot at religion. I believe the best response to this is: all I've got is this brain and I have to use it to make judgments. That's cool, but all it really means is the point is undecidable.
  - gort 17y ago
    So, if only I had vastly more insight and wisdom, I might approve of torturing ordinary people forever? I find this extremely unlikely. If you're so agnostic about morality that you won't condemn the torture of ordinary people for eternity, I don't see how you can condemn or condone anything, ever. I don't consider this a cheap shot. This is the profoundly rotten core at the heart of traditional Christianity (and, indeed, Islam).
    - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
      Look -- I'm not a religious person. But I'm willing to play along, because I understand the arguments. So let's continue for purposes of instruction. Religion is based around the limitations of human knowledge. The idea is that the Great Spirit, Great Father, or whatever is older and wiser than us (but yet strangely human!) so he understands things we do not. Just as when we were a child we did not understand things, now the Big Dude With The Beard knows things far beyond our kin. Like a child, you can stamp your feet and complain about his/her/it lack of suitable morality for you all you want, but it really just plays into the entire metaphor, doesn't it? I can tell you that more liberal Christans view sin as being apart from God, and hell as being simply apart from God forever. Taken this way, it simply means that if you're doing okay with the plan (whatever the plan is) you get to hang out with the big guy. If not, you don't. And that's awful! You really want to hang out with the big guy. It's the fundamentalists who get into this "lake of fire" bit and such. I imagine "not hanging with the Big Kahuna" doesn't bring in the converts as much as "tearing your eyes out with pain" but I was never much into marketing and sales. As for me, and you seem to be interested in my morals, I'm perfectly happy not being able to make moral decisions for God. As long as he returns the favor. (grin) I don't think that torturing folks for eternity is moral for me to do, but I try to confine my judgments of morality to myself. I also think that you're arguing with what some bunch of folks "think" some other (probably imaginary) being will do, and that seems really, really silly to me. Better to determine what you think about the idea of God in general -- any kind of God -- before you go lumping the whole kit and kaboodle together and passing your own judgment on it.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jdfreefly 17y ago
(take this with a grain of salt...I'm one of the "earners") You can't invent yourself out of a system of entitlements that has long since divorced itself from reality. You have a (comparatively) small group of people making a large portion of the income with a much larger group of people making little to no income and demanding more and more help from the earners to support their philanthropic causes. What makes it hard to swallow is that we see loads of money being thrown at things like education and helping the homeless but we see no improvement. I'm all for helping educate people, and lending a hand to the less fortunate, but I expect a return on my investment. When you take this much from me and my return is children who can't read turning into violent criminals and the wonderful view of a homeless man crapping in a doorway on the way to work...I want a refund.
- lutorm 17y ago
  "loads of money being thrown at things like education"? State funding for the University of California has decreased from 7% of the state of California's general fund in 1970 to 3.2% in 2008. Between 1990 and 2008, inflation-adjusted state support per UC student fell by 40%. As a result, the total inflation-adjusted education expenditure per UC student (including student fees and contributions from UC General Funds) decreased by 19%, while student costs rose by 138%. That doesn't sound like money's being thrown at education, at least not higher ed. (text lifted from this letter: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/08/MN6218KIRQ.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/08/...)
- dflock 17y ago
  I'm from the UK and have traveled fairly widely - and I have to say that San Francisco has the highest number of homeless people I've seen anywhere in the developed world. Maybe it's the weather. Anyway, whatever's being done about it, it's either not working, or not enough.

by SamAtt 17y ago

skushch 17y ago

California is certainly at the end of the road here. There's no way around a reform at this point. I think in the next few years it will be interesting to see if we chose well when asking for deep cuts in spending.

Retric 17y ago
It's completely an issue of bad governance. Per capita income 2008: (http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/290.html#income_bystatepc_fy08-20090205 http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/290.html#income_b...) California: 47,706 USA: 44,254 Texas: 42,796 PS: A 26billion deficit = ~700$ per person.
dkarl 17y ago
Texas is not any better, for the simple reason that Austin is the only place any sane person wants to live, and most of the money is in Houston or Dallas. Austin is full of brainy people distracted by culture and working service jobs just to stay; Houston and Dallas are full of people with an appetite for money and nothing holding them back, not sophistication and not vision either (except visions of themselves driving expensive cars and screwing hot blondes.) Austin will continue to produce a modest amount of innovation, and Houston and Dallas will continue to produce an immodest number of millionaires. It's like having a beautiful pig and an elephant with a great personality and hoping they'll have perfect offspring -- the cities are hundreds of miles apart, the people don't like each other, and the DNA definitely doesn't splice.
- quellhorst 17y ago
  Distracted by culture or drugs and alcohol? Anyway, a place is what you make it. If you are not happy where you are now, its likely moving won't change that.
  - dkarl 17y ago
    Distracted by whatever they consider as culture. Live music, community agriculture, hipster bars, lifestyle emissions reduction, New Age hippiedom, Christianity, drugs, you name it. There's quite a spectrum, but Austin is a place where people are concerned with living well, helping others live well, and generally working to figure out what "living well" means. That kind of exploration is where most of Austin's restless spirit takes it. Startups are pretty diametrically in opposition to "living well" unless you consider it a spiritual exercise like a monk living in the desert and whipping himself ;-) (Mostly kidding.) Sometimes I think all these intelligent questers are going to raise a generation of really smart hippie-raised kids who roll their eyes at their idealistic parents and decide to take over the world. Is that what happened in California? Is Austin just one generation behind?
    - quellhorst 17y ago
      Maybe they are just consumers of culture. Wearing art as tattoos, t-shirts that say 'Keep Austin Weird', painting their houses unconventional colors. None of that seems very creative to me. Its too easy to buy stuff to be act creative than make it. The problem that has to be solved is instead of everyone in Austin priding themselves at how laid back they are they need to realize they are actually just being lazy. People in California seem more driven.
      - thismat 17y ago
        huge college town though, might have a lot to do with the attitudes and the hippie shops who make money selling to them...now that I think about hippies owning stores, it reminds me of Thundercloud Subs...man I miss that place.
- 17y ago

gort 17y ago

"So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian?" Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy. As for sexy, well, I dunno. [ETA: Hmm, started a horribly off-topic side-thread. Sorry.]

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
"Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy." Playing devil's advocate here (or perhaps the better term is God's advocate), if I understand you correctly you are saying that all beings of higher intelligence and wisdom should conform to your definition of goodness. Does that seem very brainy? Would you like your dog creating a sense of what is right or wrong and then holding you to account for it? How about an ant? When I take my 3-year old for shots, he definitely views the entire process as decidedly immoral. But he's not seeing it from my viewpoint now, is he? I believe the notion is that goodness as God understands it is beyond my ability to understand it. The greater good when dealing with a universe is so far beyond a petty 100-year lifespan (or a 10K year civilization) that comparisons are kind of silly. We wouldn't even understand the moral questions, much less the answers I'm not saying I buy into it, I'm simply pointing out that you're taking a cheap shot at religion. I believe the best response to this is: all I've got is this brain and I have to use it to make judgments. That's cool, but all it really means is the point is undecidable.
- gort 17y ago
  So, if only I had vastly more insight and wisdom, I might approve of torturing ordinary people forever? I find this extremely unlikely. If you're so agnostic about morality that you won't condemn the torture of ordinary people for eternity, I don't see how you can condemn or condone anything, ever. I don't consider this a cheap shot. This is the profoundly rotten core at the heart of traditional Christianity (and, indeed, Islam).
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    Look -- I'm not a religious person. But I'm willing to play along, because I understand the arguments. So let's continue for purposes of instruction. Religion is based around the limitations of human knowledge. The idea is that the Great Spirit, Great Father, or whatever is older and wiser than us (but yet strangely human!) so he understands things we do not. Just as when we were a child we did not understand things, now the Big Dude With The Beard knows things far beyond our kin. Like a child, you can stamp your feet and complain about his/her/it lack of suitable morality for you all you want, but it really just plays into the entire metaphor, doesn't it? I can tell you that more liberal Christans view sin as being apart from God, and hell as being simply apart from God forever. Taken this way, it simply means that if you're doing okay with the plan (whatever the plan is) you get to hang out with the big guy. If not, you don't. And that's awful! You really want to hang out with the big guy. It's the fundamentalists who get into this "lake of fire" bit and such. I imagine "not hanging with the Big Kahuna" doesn't bring in the converts as much as "tearing your eyes out with pain" but I was never much into marketing and sales. As for me, and you seem to be interested in my morals, I'm perfectly happy not being able to make moral decisions for God. As long as he returns the favor. (grin) I don't think that torturing folks for eternity is moral for me to do, but I try to confine my judgments of morality to myself. I also think that you're arguing with what some bunch of folks "think" some other (probably imaginary) being will do, and that seems really, really silly to me. Better to determine what you think about the idea of God in general -- any kind of God -- before you go lumping the whole kit and kaboodle together and passing your own judgment on it.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jdfreefly 17y ago

(take this with a grain of salt...I'm one of the "earners") You can't invent yourself out of a system of entitlements that has long since divorced itself from reality. You have a (comparatively) small group of people making a large portion of the income with a much larger group of people making little to no income and demanding more and more help from the earners to support their philanthropic causes. What makes it hard to swallow is that we see loads of money being thrown at things like education and helping the homeless but we see no improvement. I'm all for helping educate people, and lending a hand to the less fortunate, but I expect a return on my investment. When you take this much from me and my return is children who can't read turning into violent criminals and the wonderful view of a homeless man crapping in a doorway on the way to work...I want a refund.

lutorm 17y ago
"loads of money being thrown at things like education"? State funding for the University of California has decreased from 7% of the state of California's general fund in 1970 to 3.2% in 2008. Between 1990 and 2008, inflation-adjusted state support per UC student fell by 40%. As a result, the total inflation-adjusted education expenditure per UC student (including student fees and contributions from UC General Funds) decreased by 19%, while student costs rose by 138%. That doesn't sound like money's being thrown at education, at least not higher ed. (text lifted from this letter: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/08/MN6218KIRQ.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/08/...)
dflock 17y ago
I'm from the UK and have traveled fairly widely - and I have to say that San Francisco has the highest number of homeless people I've seen anywhere in the developed world. Maybe it's the weather. Anyway, whatever's being done about it, it's either not working, or not enough.