Zane Selvans

Zane Selvans

34p

41 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

14 years ago @ Amateur Earthling - Colorado Dreaming and ... · 0 replies · +1 points

People seem to have good things to say about Boulder as a place to have a startup. Yet another reason to move. As if I needed more.

14 years ago @ IntenseDebate Blog - IntenseDebate Comments... · 2 replies · +1 points

Will be interested to see just how difficult (or easy) FB chooses to make that implementation process. Good luck!

14 years ago @ IntenseDebate Blog - IntenseDebate Comments... · 2 replies · +1 points

Hmm, this does seem to be an issue. Is it possible for you to integrate FB Connect via ID directly, associating a FB identity with an ID account in the same way that one can currently use an OpenID? And how about doing the same thing with Twitter? Really in the long run, all these identities have to get unified somehow and persist for any kind of real reputation system to work.

14 years ago @ Michelle's Resear... - links for May 14th fro... · 0 replies · +1 points

All it takes is a monkey wrench...

14 years ago @ Amateur Earthling - Another way of breeding · 0 replies · +1 points

I guess part of what I'm thinking is that the kind of presumed genetic attachment -- feeling so differently about your own biological offspring, and having shared biology with a partner -- while potentially a real concern, is something that I believe it would be good for us to work against as a species and a society. At least part of this expectation is social (not genetic) and that part we can overcome, and I think there could be real benefits to doing so, for population, and for our ability to identify with "foreign" peoples. I think there's also a very strong argument for cementing a relationship (with the child, with the partner) through conscientious volition. By
openly and purposefully *choosing* to do something, especially something which is socially unusual, you create a different kind of bond. A kind of bond, incidentally, which on Earth humans are perhaps uniquely capable of forming. What would it be like, as a child and later, to know that you were not random, that your parents chose you, specifically, as an individual. How would it affect your image of yourself? How would it affect the parents to have to say to themselves, in great detail, that they *did* this thing, that it did not "happen".

Also, ultimately it doesn't matter what the population growth rate is in the US (or Russia, or Italy, or Japan, or Spain, or Portugal, or Poland, etc.) In exponential growth, it is only growing subpopulations that matter numerically in the long run), and really it's the product of population and material consumption that's the problem, by which measure having one child in the US is similar to having ~20 average Earth children. But this is not an argument against adopting someone from a poor country. We should not suggest that the solution to excessive population and consumption is to keep everyone else poor. Humanity needs to learn how to live well in a sustainable way, and that's something that can be learned and practiced anywhere.

14 years ago @ Amateur Earthling - Reading Afghanistan · 0 replies · +1 points

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll add it to the ever lengthening book-queue...

14 years ago @ Amateur Earthling - The Time Value of Info... · 0 replies · +1 points

They do try. My point is that because you ultimately pay for materials with money, and future money is almost always treated as less valuable as present money, our markets will always tend to treat materials in the future as less valuable than materials in the present, and I think that's probably incorrect.

14 years ago @ Amateur Earthling - A Letter to Richard Rh... · 0 replies · +1 points

Good lord, I just broke down into tears reading this out loud to Michelle.

14 years ago @ Amateur Earthling - Shared Links for Apr 6th · 0 replies · +1 points

I talked to my sister (who is a La Leche League organizer) about this article, and she had her own litany of reasons why this article is broken. She pointed out that co-sleeping made night-time parenting a non-issue for their family, and that the LLL breastfeeding source book is probably a much more exhaustive literature review than what the Atlantic author did (albeit obviously a review with a bias... just like it sounds like the Atlantic author had). She also pointed out that in a lot of places (like Fresno anyway) new mothers are given basically no support or incentive to even attempt breastfeeding by the medical establishment. They can't even possibly have the problem this upper middle class New Yorker is having. She admitted that the equitable division of parental/spousal labor, and American housewife isolation are serious problems, but again, I think this is much much more indicative of our having structured society in a broken way, than of something being wrong (or even sub-optimal) with breastfeeding.

Wow. Six years? He's going to remember that, which might be interesting socially. Our mom stopped around 4 I think - or at least, there were 4 years between us, and there wasn't any overlap. I don't really have any memories of it (but I do remember when my sister was born). And her dad (a doctor) disowned her temporarily for it. Ah, society.

I wish I could take the credit for the Apollonian vs. Dionysian, but it's really Michael Pollan's trope. Imitation, flattery, etc.

14 years ago @ IntenseDebate Blog - WordPress Plugin v2.1 · 0 replies · +2 points

This is at http://amateurearthling.org

It appears to have worked. The "import" took place almost instantly, which suggests that it didn't actually do any importing (when I originally imported my comments way back when, it queued and took an hour or something to clear). No duplicate comments are apparent.