PCs vs. Macs

This is my take on the issue. I'm not particularly biased since I don't like Microsoft, I just don't view Apple as superiour. I watched all the Mac ads- they're pretty funny, but just a little bit slanted, so I decided a comparison would make an interesting post.

Stability: Mac OS X is more stable than Windows. That's quite obvious. But Windows has gotten a lot better in terms of stability, and while Apple would love to claim that their OS doesn't ever fail spectacularly, the programs still crash and data is still lost forever. And I haven't even had "Oshit where'd my work go!?" happen to me on Windows, but I've probably been lucky.

Security: Viruses and spyware don't afflict Macs. Make it more popular, and they will. To a far lesser extent, of course, since Windows appears to have security holes large enough to sail a battleship through, but while Windows security is improving, Mac's security can only go downhill as their popularity increases. And since I'm a fairly competent PC-user, viruses and spyware don't bother me all that much.

Those awesome nifty programs: OOO SHINY. If I had a Mac, I'd have software to edit the movies I don't film, make slideshows of the pictures I don't show off, the music I don't play, and the schedule I'll ignore. And I can use Office now, which I don't have anyways! And I can play all those games- wait, no, Dawn of War doesn't have a Mac version. But I can just boot my Macbook in PC mode! Or maybe I'll burn my money and snort the ashes, because I'm wasting the money either way. I'm sarcastic because the ads push the idea that you can run all these amazing programs, except their built-in programs aren't amazing, and to run Windows programs you need to buy Windows.

Familiarity: I'm already fairly familiar with Windows. Yes, I could learn how to use Macs, but my (admittedly limited) experience with the OS is that you can't do as much as on a PC because they don't let you mess around as much. I haven't owned a Mac, so I haven't tried doing unorthodox things, but for instance I couldn't take my music off my Ipod, which was irritating as all my music was in Berlin. (There are probably programs that do it for you, but I'd like to do it myself so I know how it works.)

Summary: Macs have advantages over PCs, but they're not worth switching to. Besides having to get used to doing things the Mac way, there are things I can't do and games I can't play. And they're more expensive (a slightly worse Macbook costs about $300 CAD more than my laptop did.) Besides, if I were really irritated with Windows, I'd switch to Linux, not Mac.

What we really need is an OS that takes all the good things from Windows, Mac, and Linux, and combines it into the OS to end all others. But that's not going to happen as neither Microsoft nor Apple would benefit, no other company could break in to the market like that, and Linux is already a product of the people but it obviously has flaws. So Windows it is, for now.

Motivation (or a lack thereof)

Update: Hahaha, the day after I wrote this I woke up when math started. I have math AFTER I have bio. I need to fix my sleep schedule (I keep sleeping through my alarms.) Btw, read the post for this to make sense.

So recently I've been missing a few bio lectures. I think I've missed 4 in the past three weeks. The problem is that they're far too fucking early, ie 8 AM, and I'm all too willing to stay up until 3 AM reading websites (like www.waiterrant.net! It's stories from the manager of a restaurant. They are good.) Or some other useless activity. Since I have to get up at 7 but usually end up awake at 8:30, I'm in a bad situation.

So what to do? Before you slap me and yell "Get more sleep, fool!" allow me to point out that I'm well aware I need more sleep, I just don't care at the time. How do I start caring? Simple, I decide what I'm going to do with my life. In case you hadn't noticed, my passions (fiery as they are) are political and environmental. Namely because we're fucking ourselves over, but that's the topic of a post to come. Since I've chosen the wrong faculty if I wanted to solve political problems, I've decided I'm going to focus my studies on environmental sciences. So I'm contemplating majoring in Chemistry with a minor in Environmental Sciences (and probably comp sci.)

Essentially, I've decided there are a few things I'm going to change in my life. First of all, I'm going to take my studies seriously, even if it's fucking bio 111, (aka the stuff I did in high school, only in less depth!) Secondly, I'm going to become more active about the issues I think are important. Finally, I'm hopefully going to go into a profession where I can make a difference to the world.

Let's see what I think in four years.

(Oh, and I'm giving vegetarianism a shot, even if it means I eat salad only sometimes. Stupid cafeteria.)

On Updating

I'll update if you guys comment. Assuming anyone reads this.

Because otherwise I'll assume no one does.

The Corporation

The Corporation, by Joel Bakan, is probably my favourite political book. As the name implies, it has to do with corporations. And the reason I like it so much is because I think its message is hugely important. So I'm going to explain the book, and maybe you'll agree. Maybe you'll even read it.

Corporations are publicly-traded companies that have no owner, they have shareholders and a CEO that runs the company. Their legal responsibility is to produce profit for the shareholders- if the CEO does anything to reduce profit, he may be fired or sued. Bakan's argument is that corporations are psychopaths, acting only in their own interest. In the movie, The Corporation, they keep an actual checklist of actions that corporations take that correspond to the FBI's list of psychopathic actions.

And it's true. The only time they care about the environment, or their employees, or any of the problems they cause, is when it could damage their sales. If you take a company like The Body Shop, whose whole business practice is based on not using animal-testing and being ethical, and it becomes incorporated, then that company will start to cut corners and maybe test on animals a little. Which it was found guilty of doing. And quite often they don't break their code of ethics, they break the law, for the simple reason is that by doing so, the profit they earn will be greater than the fine.

This is obviously a huge problem as corporations are immensely powerful (more than half of the world's 100 largest economies are corporations) and have a huge, often damaging effect on our lives. Bakan offers a few solutions to this problem. There are two sources of change: consumers, and voters. Yes, it's true that consumers can elect not to buy from companies unless they behave ethically, but not only are corporations still likely to break the law and act damagingly when they can get away with it, but this style of voting with your dollar is flawed. This is because it means that richer people have a greater voice than the poor, and also excludes the companies that we don't buy from (mining, anyone?) or can't stop buying from. The other way is to convince politicians to enact harsher fees on breaking the law and to rephrase the roles of corporations so that profit is not their only goal. This has the problem that lobbyists are an effective and legal way to raise profits, so anti-corporation legislation is hard to pass.

In any case, I feel that if corporations had to bear responsibility for the environmental and social damage they cause, the world would have many less problems than it currently does. So long as corporations destroy the environment, coerce weaker governments into allowing corporations to have their way, and deal with dictatorships (legitimizing those corrupt governments), creating any kind of positive change will be a challenge indeed.

(Oh, and I didn't go to that STAND meeting. Oh well, I'll do my own research.)

Punk and I

Two things. First, I'm planning to write in this a whole lot more often (which means they're not appearing in Facebook anymore, as I don't feel like spamming your news feed with my notes and because it appears here so having it be there as well is just silly.) This is the newest one because for the other two I had trouble figuring out what I wanted to say, so they were sitting around as drafts for quite a while.

Secondly, my elucidating title says this post is about punk. Specifically about my personal connection to it. For starters, I'm not punk. I don't know all that much good punk, and I'm not part of the culture. I can respect punk culture and its principles, and like some punk music, but that doesn't make me punk. The reason for this post is that I've been listening to a fair bit of punk recently.

Oh, and before I get into this, the people who dress punk, listen to Yellowcard or Switchfoot, or shop at Hot Topic, are not punk. If you dress like you dress and listen to what you do because you want to be different or because it's cool, you're not punk. I believe that punks dress like punks because they don't want society to dictate to them what to wear. If you hate the government because they're corporate lackeys, hate the corporation because they don't care about the people, and hate the police because they do the government's dirty work, you're probably punk. You might just be anti-government. Because the most important part of punk music's not that it's angry, fast, and often offensive, it's that it's like that because it's political, and that's what you're supposed to take away. Which is pretty rare among music genres- emo, techno, rock, and indie don't usually have political messages.

Or so I think. Because I'm not punk, I'm not in the scene and I don't know a lot of music, so I might be misguided. I do listen to the music and can agree with its anticorporate message, for a reason that I should probably have made the focus of every post I've ever written, and that I'll probably write about tomorrow. I don't want to get a piercing, wear a denim jacket with patches from my favourite bands, and I don't hate the police. I'm also not very angry (and I think James is pretty rare as being mellow, from what I can remember of him.) So if it weren't for the fact that I could agree with a lot of what punk music says, and that I don't pretend to be the least bit punk, I'd feel like a huge poser for liking it.

Woo, university!

Guess what? I am a full-time student at the educational facility situated on the University Endowment lands in Vancouver, namely the University of British Columbia, commonly called UBC. In fact, apparently "I am UBC." Because that makes so very much sense- I don't go there, I PERSONIFY IT. Anyways, except for that clever line, UBC is pretty awesome. And this is why.

A) It's university. Which means I'm taking the classes I like, get to choose when to have them, the classes are generally pretty good, I'm not forced to attend them, and I'm generally given more responsibility. Which isn't something that's going to faze me. And suprisingly I don't have much work. I'd actually be willing to have more if bio and physics were more interesting, as so far it's been review in both, but I figure the work will come eventually.

B) I live in residence. Which means I don't have to cook for myself (a mixed blessing, as often I'd like to,) there's a whole bunch of really nice people around, and classes are like 5-10 minutes away. And I get to sleep during my breaks, which I love.

C) It's beautiful. The campus itself is very nice- there's lots of tall trees, there's a Japanese garden, a botanical garden, a rose garden, and a forest pretty near by. But even better is the fact that I can see the ocean from my house, and it's a short (but steep) walk down to the beach. Granted, it's a nudist beach, but I could really care less. I don't have to declothe myself. There are also mountains like an hour away. Ocean + mountains + forest = amazing.

So yeah. I'm pretty happy. I still miss the friends I had in Vienna, but things are pretty cool here too.

(A shiny new laptop helps :D)

Darfur, Fasting, and Confusion

On October 5th, 2006, I ate nothing. Drank some water, took a vitamin, and felt kinda miserable near the end, and went for 24 hours without food. As sane people who believe I'm fairly sane as well, you're probably wondering why that is. So I'll explain. STAND, which is an acronym for Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, organized a day called Darfur Fast, to show solidarity with the people of Darfur. It's currently Ramadan, but while usually the people of Darfur would be fasting during the day and eating at home after sunset, they have been displaced, murdered, and starved. The reason I took part is not that I feel the people of Darfur appreciate the gesture (as much as they'd appreciate basic necessities) but that I have never gone a day without eating and that this is an issue that I feel strongly about, and I wanted to make a statement.

I'm not entirely sure what effect I had as I didn't shout my action from the rooftops, but I did mention it to some people (and even told one guy about what's going on, as he had never heard of it. For shame, media, do what you're supposed to do. By which I don't mean sensationalise the issue for a week, but investigate and educate the people about all issues, not just the Issue of the Week.) As part of my statement, I wanted to tell you guys all about it, but as you'll see later I had more trouble writing about the issue than I thought.

So what is the issue? Well, Sudan is primarily Muslim, but they are divided into the primarily Arabic Central and Eastern Sudan, and the predominately black people of Darfur. The Sudanese government wants Sudan to be an Arabic state, and thus marginalized the people of Darfur, who rebelled in protest. This started around 2003, when the government was already engaged in a civil war in the south, and so rather than diverting its military to combat the problem, it created and supplied militias, known as the janjaweed, who then started to terrorize and murder the population. The Sudanese government has also refused to allow humanitarian aid into Darfur, and the janjaweed have poisoned crops and wells. This is a systematic effort to drive out or murder the non-Arab people of Darfur, it is genocide, and it is overwhelmingly horrible. I literally can't imagine it, and it is one of the few issues that I am genuinely passionate about.

So what can you do? Well, I'm not sure. That's why I didn't write this earlier. I cannot think of any conflict of the previous century that was actually resolved through humanitarian intervention. Rwanda is stable because a rebel force took over the government and stopped the killing (well, and France intervened, but on the side of the government that was perpetrating the genocide.) The UN is still in Kosovo and I don't see how they're going to get out, while the UN didn't intervene at all during the ethnic cleansing in the other Balkan states. I don't know much about Somalia other than that the intervention there was pretty catastrophic, and don't get me started on Iraq. On the whole, genocide seems to generally run its course, and I don't know whether interventions actually help. On Monday STAND is having a meeting to discuss concrete solutions, which I'm quite tempted to attend, so maybe they'll correct my views on the subject.

The world makes me depressed. Only that fact that I want to change it keeps me from staying depressed. I will be writing a post about the issues I feel threaten us the most soon, and I honestly hope to influence you guys to do something, because fasting and thinking has led me to the conclusion that I can no longer sit around and occasionally be disgusted by the world.

Blasphemous heresy

Over the past two years, I've occasionally found time to seriously contemplate faith. In case you hadn't heard me sharing my religious views, which I did probably more often than anyone except the people who wore religious shirts at school, I view God as a possible but impersonal and undetectable being that may be behind the creation of the universe and may subtly influence the mechanics behind the facade of reality. That being said, I do not believe God has a specific message for us, that God's male or that he listens to us, or that any historical figure has been anything but human.

I recently read a book that demands we reject faith outright. It is called the End of Faith, and it outlines the damage religion has caused before, the dangers we face now on account of religion, the lunacy (according to him) of believing anything about the world strictly by faith, without evidence, and the advantage of approaching spirituality seriously and scientifically with reason and evidence. I don't agree with everything he says- I don't think believing in the Bible is lunacy, just misguided, just as you may or may not believe that I'm misguided, but I do believe that religion can cause great harm, and probably will in future. (Think about fundamentalism, especially Islamism.)

But as Yann Martel put it, "To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." I'm pretty sure he meant this as an attack on agnosticism, believing it to be wishy-washy, but I disagree. Because, doubt is not my philosophy of life, and God certainly isn't either. My philosophy is that we should minimise the harm that we cause others, and here's why.

The majority of humanity consists of sentient beings with their own emotions, beliefs, mind, and loves and is loved in return. They may be dumb schmucks, they may be assholes, and they may be criminals, but they are still humans nonetheless and therefore are worthy of our compassion. (Psychopaths are an exception to the rule, and we should attempt to understand murderers, but we should not forgive them.)

So how can we have compassion for others, how can we love our neighbours as Jesus wished us to, and still pursue policies that cause others to suffer? How can we not have compassion for others as humans? So how can we excuse the exploitation of the third world, the invasion of countries on false grounds, or the growing inequality between the rich and the poor? How can anyone believe that the majority of the world is destined to go to hell? What sort of God is that?

But we cannot eliminate suffering from the world. People will always be selfish because every selfless act has some ulterior motive, even if that motive is simply being proud of your selflessness. Therefore I feel that we should at least try to minimize the harm we cause others, and that is the philosophy I intend to live by.