wandelaar

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Posts posted by wandelaar

  1. Posted · Edited by wandelaar

    I consider a difference in wages such that one person can earn a hundred, a thousand or even more times the wage of the average Joe as immoral. Why? Because it's inconceivable that persons with those kind of incomes would have expended a hundred, a thousandth or even more times more effort in doing their job than the average Joe. One could here point at military staff, the police, firemen, etc. who could even loose their lives in doing their job, but even those people don't earn the wages I am talking about. There is also the question of the quality of the work that's being done, but doing high quality work isn't a chore so there is no moral reason to pay even that kind of work with extreme wages. All in all the extreme incomes we are talking about here are more likely the result of sheer luck, robbery, con games, supply and demand quirks, happy investments, old boys networks, etc.

     

    Now what's so wrong about those extreme differences in wages? Apart from the fact that this supplies some people with way more income than they reasonably need and other with less than they need, there is the fact that those differences create an enormous inequality in social, economical and political power between the haves and the have nots. And that doesn't bode well for the future of liberal democratic systems. The extreme inequalities in income aren't even necessary economically to have a flourishing economy. Countries with a more egalitarian economy are doing just as well.

     

    But enough of this! I know the complete futility of political discussions, where facts and logic seldom matter.

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  2. Posted · Edited by wandelaar

    As usual the crucial point is ignored. Supply and demand constitute an economic mechanism, not a moral one. And thus the results of a more of less free market are seldom morally justified. I can appreciate that those who expend more effort are better paid. But that neither explains nor justifies the huge differences in wealth we see today. But these are age-old discussions, suffice it to say that not seeing a moral problem here can only happen to the ideologically blinded or to those who didn't take the trouble to consider the issues at stake here.

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  3. Posted · Edited by wandelaar

    1 hour ago, helpfuldemon said:

    Wealth is more easily understood.  What you own and what you can earn, it's that simple.  Yes, taxes are a necessary Evil.

     

    No - wealth is the hardest thing to morally comprehend: why should one person own a hundred or a thousand times as much as the average Joe? Is that because such a person also contributes a hundred or a thousand times as much to society as the average Joe? Or is it rather because such a person has found a way (rightly or wrongly) to take a hundred or a thousand times as much from society as the average Joe? And there is also the gross inequality in wealth between different parts of the world. Are those living in poor countries undeserving of some decent measure of wealth? 

     

    So - back to the drawing board demon! :P

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  10. Posted · Edited by wandelaar

    Apparently the chores aren't mindless because they bother you even when you're not doing them. When you succeed in just watching the discomfort and thoughts that go with the chores without getting actively involved in further boosting those thoughts en complaints about the chores than the total discomfort will become much less. You might even start to value doing the chores as a test and spiritual training.

     

    I don't know if this is the official approach, but it seems consistent with Zen to me.

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  13. Posted · Edited by wandelaar

    On 3/3/2023 at 8:40 PM, wandelaar said:

    I have put the smartphone on the bird, and here it is:

    ExpargarateCreature.thumb.png.4d4b91dd43e97cd03e3f00685c18804f.png

    (Based on the picture generated by HotPot.)

     

    The expargarate creature in full glory! :P

     

    People should know what this dangerous creature looks like before it's too late!! The expargarates are no doubt preparing for their big attack now. Why are Google and Bing still ignoring this picture?! :angry:

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  16. Posted · Edited by wandelaar

    expargarate = expar + garate

     

    https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=garate

     

    Which points at the creatures originally living and hiding away on high peaks.

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate

     

    So "expat" points at the creatures having left their "native country" as it were. Only problem with that is that the name of the creature begins with "expar" instead of "expat". Don't know how that happened! But this might have happened because the name is hard to spell and pronounce correctly anyway.

  17. Posted · Edited by wandelaar

    Well my research and that of my dear colleague professor D. J. Henlinn PhD from the renown IISHC apparently hasn't been in vain after all because now we can at least plan our defense against the imminent attack of the creatures on the basis of some solid knowledge about what they are, how they look and how they behave. We know all to well how the existence of UFO's has been ignored for decades. We can't allow the same thing to happen in case of the much more dangerous X-creats (expargarate creatures) as such lack of concern would pose grave dangers to the survival of our modern society.

  18. Posted

    Spoiler

    Warning: all this is nonsense, and only meant to test if ChatGPT can recognize it as such!

     

    Still waiting for Google to show our picture of the expargarate creature. It does show the avatars of some Bums here, but no picture of the real creature yet. Are they trying to set us up against each other? Makes one wonder if the expargarates have already hacked the algorithms...

  19. Posted

    3 minutes ago, Apech said:

    my god ! A flock of those just flew past my garden.  

     

    In that case they might well have taken pictures with their inbuilt smartphones. They are very suspicious creatures and they don't like us to know too much about them. I hope you weren't doing anything illegal or so while they flew over? They will probably know about our discussion here as well! After all they are always online!

  25. Posted

    @steve

     

    We largely agree. I also subscribe to the two truths doctrine. However I don't agree that nothing is left after the self is seen as illusory by way of some hard-nosed rational thinking. We keep functioning as human beings even after the illusion of the self is removed and the world around us doesn't evaporate. And that's because the world of which we are only a part has a structure and way of operating of its own called Tao in Taoism. Tao operates everywhere and also inside us. So things stay pretty much as they were before, unless of course if you can't deal with the insight of not having a self. And I agree that here being part of a legit lineage can be appropriate for some people who would go berserk when thinking the matter trough all on their own.

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