Of course we can. You're perhaps thinking of ownership as being something more than a social construction, but that's all it is.
"Own" just means that we agree with other people that we have certain rights over some property - land, or whatever. That ownership is enforced to varying degrees by society. That's it.
Yep. The same fallacy would get you “we can’t own a candy bar because its component atoms originated in distant stars billions of years ago and will outlive our solar system”. Sorry, no, that’s my Kit Kat.
Sure we can. We made fences, guns, and governments to do exactly that. But it turns out these coordination and defensive devices sort of blow up in our hands. And come a huge hurricane, storm, flood, or fire, nature just laughs are our land surveys and continues unabated.
Well, for one, he can't film himself installing, e.g., fake artworks in the greatest museums in the world, as he did.
And, for those who don't know, he is from Bristol, England, the home of the band Massive Attack. I've been digging their music lately, especially their songs with the late Sinead O'Connor.
The Great(est) Command(ment) is to love God with all our being, and then to love our neighbors as ourself, not more, not less.
Being kind, generous, forgiving, helpful, and compassionate are some of the ways we can love people, and should, in order to be a good person who reaps happiness in their life. God does not force us to do this, and freely allows us to choose each virtue's corresponding vice, if we wish, instead.
God would, however, prefer us to treat each other well and form loving societies, but our ignorance of what good even is, as well as or selfishnesses that rebel against lovingly curious attitudes and behaviors, are preventing our moving towards such positive self-evolution.
We all have the choice to embark on becoming filled with love towards each other; a person does not need God's help to choose to be good by embracing a more virtuous life that cares for others, but the Creator just might be essential for our becoming actually transformed into a really, really good person. In fact, connecting with the Ultimate Loner just might be an integral part of what is possible in the human experience.
And I'm using "just might" as a big ol' hint that that is actually the truth of our reality, which is exactly what it is, my friends.
The choice to seek, learn, and believe the truth is everyone's human right. We each exercise that right every moment of every day, for good or ill, in loving care or selfish callousness.
I'm curious if anyone has considered how to use modern electronic components to replace the old "copper coil"-based mechanisms and such that that fine gentleman uses to replace the old parts? I understand he is basically doing museum-grade restorations, and I fully respect that.
But I'm guessing that finding modern components with the same functionality would be cheaeper and longer-lasting, but that's just a WAG. I've watched a couple of YouTube pinball machine restoration vids and those old machines sure are filled with rat's nests of stuff.
It seems like finding modern alternatives would be a good way to keep the machines alive for longer while also making them more serviceable going forward. Plus, that would be a very practical and interesting project for group of mechanical/electrical engineers, that would likely have eventual robotics applications.
In that vein, I wonder if there are any companies that have created tech frameworks to facilitate creating old-world-style pinball machines with modern infrastructure.
Like others have said, solenoid coils don't have a replacement. They're the state of the art for a two position actuator.
You could conceivably replace most of an ElectroMechanical machine's steppers and relays and score reels and things with a microcontroller and digital displays, and there are transitional machines that were factory produced as EM and Solid State, but I think you loose the character of the games that way. The buzzing and thunks and the lamps turning off while it computes and all that is part of the experience.
If there's no way to make the games work as they did originally, sure, make them work again by any means, but while we can make them work like they did, we should.
There's p-roc and p3-roc that offer the basics of a computer to pinball interface board (you'll need at least a solenoid driver board, too). That would probably be the basis of control for a modern enthusiast built pinball machine. Most enthusiasts are trying to build something that fits more in the Solid State era than the EM era though.
The copper coils are usually things like solenoids, never going to replace that, we still use that tech.
In practice doing this would take restoring a pinball machine from a "build/repair it with your hands" project and turn it into a programming project where you are starting at a computer screen the whole time. You would just replace the "brain" with an arduino or raspberry pi, connect it to the existing lights and solenoids, but then you need to program it and then it becomes a different thing.
There are still companies making new pinball machines today. The mechanical parts are pretty similar to what they've always been. Energize a copper coil, make a piece of metal move. However, the "brains" have come a long way and are basically just modern computers. Also, everything is far more modular. Old pinball machines were a rats nest of wires. Modern pinball machines just use standard computer cables / connectors.
For reference: Stern is nearly the whole market, but there is Jersey Jack and Spooky Pinball, and a handful of smaller players in the market. There is an incredible private community over on pinside.com if you want a community of real people to chat about these machines.
The great leap forward happened in communist china. Probably communism and centrally planned economies have starved at least as many people as capitalism. Neither system seems particularly concerned with feeding poor people.
It’s not a feature of any specific political system. It’s a function of power.
The British stood by and allowed the Irish to starve, whilst Ireland was exporting record amounts of food that wasn’t potatoes, as they were concerned about charity being a corrupting influence on the Irish wretches.
You are correct. The reason is that neither has any compassion, to this very day.
OTOH, either system could be structured to be based upon compassion, if the people in charge made the choice to do so. Any human system could be altered to incorporate compassion into its motivations and mechanisms.
I'm a fan of fettered capitalism with socially-conscious citizens, but that requires the wealthy, middle class, and poor to be compassionate. What is important is to internalize the currently external costs corporations impose upon the environment and populace to make their profit.
For now, it's 'by the wealthy for the wealthy', no matter which system is dominant, no matter which religion is in power, no matter which ethnicity to ruling class represents. That is because compassion is sorely lacking in this world's peoples, especially its rulers.
The way to defeat 'famine mode' is to exercise anyway. That's how I lost weight to wrestle at my minimum. It's tortuous, for sure, but vigorous exercise can raise your metabolism for IIRC 24hrs.
Thank God, they don't let kids do that dumb sh_t anymore, but this was over 30ya.
I loved that album in my youth. Now that I have kids in their teens, Clapton isn't much our style, preferring Pink Floyd and Massive Attack, lately. It's great not having really ever listened to "Dark Side of the Moon" until recently.
Cheers, mate. I had the exact same thing ring in my head when I saw the article title.
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