Hard Things

[ysabetwordsmith]

Life is full of things which are hard or tedious or otherwise unpleasant that need doing anyhow. They help make the world go 'round, they improve skills, and they boost your sense of self-respect. But doing them still kinda sucks. It's all the more difficult to do those things when nobody appreciates it. Happily, blogging allows us to share our accomplishments and pat each other on the back.

What are some of the hard things you've done recently?

Comments

Re: Thoughts

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

"....and the food supply in America is increasingly untrustworthy because they keep taking away inspectors and other safeguards."
Very true. Notice how much squealing and protesting took place whenever the move to ID where ALL fresh produce came from--down to the field? France does this and has for years.
:^\

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Let's not forget that they recently removed providence marking from the meat. And that about a third of seafood is incorrectly labeled as to species. Or that America imports food from China which has shitty safety standards.

It's not about safety. It's about control and they get very angry when consumers try to control their own food.

Re: Thoughts

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

There's no way I want to eat ANYTHING from China.
We've got perfectly good agricultural land right here--why not use it?
:^}

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Because growing our own food would be more secure, but less profitable for the megacorps who decide what people are permitted to eat.

Re: Thoughts

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Nod. I remember there was a contamination in peanut butter - a rare thing because roasting peanuts usually kills all microorganisms - and the food regulations just signed months ago (written by the food/ag lobby, naturally) were acknowledged as insufficient to swiftly find the culprit.

Alas, this did not lead to genera pressure to improve those regulations.

Re: Thoughts

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

John, you have to remember that most people have no idea what's actually going on in the US now that our "news" has become little more than which team won a certain game or who's getting married in Hollywood or putting out a new movie.
Chances are quite good that the factory where that peanut butter was made is to blame and not the farmers who raised them.
:^}

Re: Thoughts

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it wasn't the peanut farm that was at fault - that's nearly impossible because it was bacterial, and, again, roasting the peanuts should have killed anything the farm left behind. (Now, if it'd been a toxin... but it wasn't, and that was the big question causing confusion.)

This was a time when the Republicans were in control, and they'd proudly pointed to the regulations as friendly to business and sufficient. Well, clearly it was one of those things, but the competing proposal was more like the French system referenced elsewhere - where they could have tracked those peanuts to the farm, the roasting plant, and the processing (peanut-buttering?) plant, and that would have identified precisely what went wrong, and which jars of peanut butter were potentially affected.

Oh, lord, and now I'm flashing on the creationist who was fond of pointing out that a jar of peanut butter won't develop life - so why do you believe the earth would do so spontaneously?

"hey... YEAH! You're right! It shouldn't have happened! Why, in order for that to be possible you'd need something to upend entropy! And it'd have to be huge, really freakin' huge, like... shit, I dunno, a GIANT FUSION REACTOR. Except, with that much power, it'd have to be... mumble... on the order of a hundred million miles away. Welp, you got me, life on earth required a creator because who could imagine a giant fusion reaction occurring nearly a hundred million miles away for millions of years?"

Re: Thoughts

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

Hello Big Bang Theory....or as the Bible puts it: "let there be light!"
:^)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I like to say that God wrote the Universe in about three lines of code. It's so obviously not handmade, but generated from base rules, and the same rules are used to control wildly different applications. It's just so elegant.

I am further amused that someone has now made a computer game with god-type code. The settings aren't premade, they're generated; and the tone is positive and exploratory rather than violent like most modern games. I don't know why people say that petty saints are obscure. They're really obvious to me. Sure, I don't know which of the programmers it is, but somebody in there has enough admin-level access to the Universe to be copying bits of base code for educational purposes. It's adorable.

Spirituality and science aren't as far apart as some people like to think.

Re: Thoughts

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

"Spirituality and science aren't as far apart as some people like to think."
Amen to that!
VERY elegantly put, all of it.
Petty saints as programers for special bits of Life Code.
I love the way you put concepts and words together.
:^)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>> "Spirituality and science aren't as far apart as some people like to think."
Amen to that!
VERY elegantly put, all of it.<<

Thank you!

>>Petty saints as programers for special bits of Life Code.<<

Yeah, from what I've seen, saints are just people who:
* have a really big sense of compassion
* share some common interest(s) with their patron deity
* are good enough at flexibility and nonattachment to make a sizable aperture to pour divine energy through without trying to hold onto it
* being mortal, exist on a smaller scale than the Divine and can therefore serve as fine-pointed tools.

It's like God says, "Can you hold this while I finish the knot?" and they're always, "Sure," instead of, "I'm busy." And most of them are like that for everyone. They're always looking at the world and trying to figure out how to patch it up.

>> I love the way you put concepts and words together. <<

Thank you.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

That's because citizens have a statistically insignificant impact on what happens in America. If something doesn't benefit big business or rich people, it has a miniscule chance of happening. Proper food safety costs more money and time, so big business is against it, so it's routinely undermined.