The Occasional Thoughts of Shane Greenup

This list will continue to grow and change as I remember things which need to be added.
 

Funny 
Eddy Izzard

• Death Star Canteen
• Do you have a Flag?
• Cake or Death? 

Flight of the Conchords

• The Humans are Dead
• Business Time
• Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros

 The Lonely Island

• Jizz in My Pants
• Dick in a Box
• On a Boat

 Others

• Pachelbel Rant
• The Internet is for Porn
• XKCD Comic
• LOL Cat Bible
• The Goon Bible Project – The Book of Job
• The iRack

Oddities

• Washington Washington 
• Dramatic Chipmunk 
• Read a Book

Inspiring and Impressive

• Battle at Kruger
• TED – Technology Entertainment Design 
• Christian the Lion

• It is possible to love more than one person at a time. Love is not a resource that needs to be carefully allocated. It is an emotion which can be felt completely, over and over again, without ever running out.
• Following rules does not make you moral, it makes you lawful. Morality requires the ability to decide right and wrong for yourself based on valid reasoning – not on doing something because ‘you are supposed to’.
• If you care enough about someone to interfere in their life (for their own good of course), at least take the time to understand what you are interfering in. Ignorance is dangerous at the best of time, but when wielded with absolute conviction it is nothing short of devastating.

This is something I was working on for a while in Madagascar. This is an early version – I want to write a more thorough, academic style article on the subject, but until that is completed, here is this:

I know I am not alone in the modern generation with my love of technology and the amazing benefits it brings with it, yet simultaneously dissatisfied with the world which provides us those technological innovations. The ‘Developed World’ – our capitalist consumerist society. Driven by profits, marketing and constant competition, each individual is pushed into working longer and harder in order to satisfy ‘needs’ largely based on artificial manipulation by other workers.
Thankful for my position as a member of the ‘Developed World’ I have always appreciated the privilege that comes with it. Science, information technology, luxury, entertainment and general abundance. I have appreciated these gifts of our modern world, loved them dearly yet also felt an overwhelming dissatisfaction with the modern ‘developed world’ itself.

The 9-5 working day has never been appealing to me. Rush hour, traffic jams – everyone doing the same thing at the same time everyday – it has always bemused me. Spending the majority of your pay cheque – usually earned from a job you hate – on fads, well marketed gimmicks, hollow indulgences and image based products. I have never really partaken in this pointlessness. Excessive rules and regulations which seem to be designed for the lowest common denominator of human stupidity. Individual accountability is lost in our world as every possible way of idiots hurting themselves seems to be necessarily considered in advance before you can do anything – otherwise it is somehow your fault when said idiot hurts themselves. Mass media selling us mindless rubbish stories. – prioritising stories about the private lives of pop stars over stories that actually affect our world, like environmental catastrophes, change in governmental regulations and freedoms or the like. –spin- On top of all of these bizarre obsessions of our world is the perpetual ‘Crisis’ we are being sold. Whether it is the cold war, world war 3, Y2K, Terrorism or dramatic climate change, everyone in the developed world knows for sure that the end is near! (still) I don’t put much stock in any of the doomsday prophecies anymore, but a small part of me still thinks that being out of the way of everyone else who does might save me one day.

So in order to distance myself from the over protection of my nation, avoid any semblance of a 9-5 job and maintain a well rounded perspective of ‘what matters’, I have long desired to move myself and my loved ones to an essentially self-sufficient property on the outer edges of a large city. From this property, with our broadband internet access, we will be free to earn money (business activity or work from home jobs), educate ourselves, research topics of interest, entertain etc all while living a cheap non-commercial lifestyle.

Getting out of the city is not a new idea, but doing so used to involve significant compromise. For me, loss of employment options, lower income potential, isolation from family and friends and significantly fewer entertainment options were the most obvious costs of leaving the suburbs. Now, and even more so the coming years, widely available broadband internet is removing all of those compromises/costs. As such I have come to believe that more and more people will make the same move as I wish to make. As the number of these people increase, I believe it will warrant the naming of a new ‘world’. This lifestyle does not exist within the developed world anymore – too many of the attributes of that lifestyle have been discarded. Nor is the lifestyle anything like those in the undeveloped – or the developing (the 3rd and 2nd) – indeed it is the exact opposite direction that the quality of life has progressed for people who make this change. I therefore think that the individuals who make this move will form the first physically-non-localised world; the Post-Developed world. The Zero’th World. Or perhaps in the spirit of ‘The Naughties’, the final few months of which I am currently in, ‘The Naughtieth World’.

The Post Developed World
I believe the PDW is worthy of its own title for two main reasons. The individuals who make it up, although not physically localised, have essentially removed themselves from all 3 of the other normal ‘world’ structures. Secondly, their unity comes through the internet – they are the first virtual world, unbounded by geo-political borders and agendas.

So how is this world made? It emerges as the current internet culture continues to remove themselves from the mass media driven, popular culture, commercial world. It emerges as those individuals choose self sufficiency and personal accountability over governmental protection. Just as members of the Developed world enjoy the fruits of the Developing and Undeveloped world (cheap labour primarily), so too the members of the PDW will enjoy the fruits of the developed world without really exposing themselves to the problems of it. Self sufficiency in most areas protect them from first world economic fears, energy crisis’s, water shortages etc. While their location outside of major cities protects them from terrorism, pandemics, pollution, and even wars to a large extent. All of the usual ‘fears’ of the first world are simply removed by moving into the PDW.

The main limitation of moving into the PDW will be getting away from governmental constraints which no longer apply (or shouldn’t). Developed world governments will continue to be a pain to all PDW individuals – yet ironically still required. Undeveloped governments too.

While exorcising themselves from these problems they are still free to buy products locally, travel into the cities etc without hassle.

Becoming PDW
Becoming PDW requires some success in the developed world and a strong desire to get out of it. Money is required to be able to buy the property and technology required to achieve sufficient self-reliance. But in the scheme of things, the entry requirements are quite modest. Certainly easier than getting out of an undeveloped world.

Mere power generation, supplemental food generation, and water catchment don’t make you a PDW citizen though. It is also a freeing of the mind from one sided media, from fear and propaganda. It is the ability to genuinely take care of yourself within a communal society, rather than expecting a society to take care of you. Because online, borders fall away and sense of community is valuable.

Table 1: Comparison between Undeveloped World, Developed World and the Post-Developed World – Sorry I can’t figure out how to make Blogger display the table in a reasonable position!

I returned from Madagascar a few days ago and I am already hard at work trying to catch up with all of the overdue work I had waiting for me back here, PLUS another few ideas I have had while I was away.

I will be working on actually arb trading primarily probably. Simply because I am broke and I need some immediate money and arb trading is the only means of immediate money available to me atm (other than a job of course, but that would really interfere with all of my other loftier goals)

So I am working on perfecting my arb spreadsheet while trying to update SAG and SBB – I need to make some changes to how SAG deals with the numerous alert services. I have several days worth of solid typing to do in order to put all of the articles I wrote in Madagascar into TDMSKP.

Probably most interesting new development though, is that I am going to create a website for Carmen, my friend that I travelled with. She has been travelling for over 16 years now (6-9 months every year) and has done a lot of writing in that time. So I am going to make a blog for her and start posting her travel stories, short stories, poems and other odds and ends for her.

She was actually the page 3 spread in the Sydney Morning Herald back in June:
Article
Multimedia

So I have the relevent domain names registered now: www.HalfBraveHalfStupid.com and www.CarmenMajor.com and I have a host sorted out. I will start installing and setting up the blog in the next couple of days.

A quick mention for Klaus’ new website too. He has created a forum website to help people with scams. So if you have ever been scammed, or know of any scams which you want to warn people about, or even if you just feel like getting into some interesting political or religious discussions, then go to www.ScamsHelp.com and register and participate there!

Shane

Just finished adding Waterfall of Moss to the TDMSKP guide book. Already uploaded photos from the trip yesterday for Waterfall of Moss and Koombanda Canyon. Next job is to add the guide for Koombanda Canyon.

Jon has volunteered to write a trip report for the two canyons, while Trev has volunteered to put together the video, so I really appreciate that. Meanwhile, I found out while I was away that two of my photos actually made it into the OzCanyons calendar for 2009, which was pretty cool. See the OzCanyons 2009 calendar here.

A common phenomenon that I have noticed over the past few years is people seeing someone else doing something strange, something a little abnormal or simply doing something a sub-optimal way, and upon seeing this asking their friends “Why would you do that?” or some similarly judgemental question. And it is always asked with such a condescending tone – there is no doubt that the question is not really a question, but an attempt to point out the ‘failing’ they see in the person in question. What they are really saying is “That is such a stupid thing to do/stupid way to do that, I would do it better than that”

It is interesting that I hear people ‘asking’ this question all the time, yet I never see any indication that the person ‘asking’ the question has ever bothered trying to ‘answer’ the question they have (not really) ‘asked’.

I don’t mean to make myself sound like I am above this phrase – I am sure I have said it myself many times. What I am interested in now though, is qualifying the statement by following it up with a genuine thought process. I want to think “Why would you do that?” then follow that with a genuine introspective questioning process: “No really, what reasons would a person have for doing that? Maybe they can’t do it the better way? Maybe there is more going on here than I can see, maybe they have some sort of disability, maybe they are actually smarter than myself and it is myself that doesn’t understand” etc.

I can’t really expect the population at large to pick up this method of introspective consideration, but I think it is more valuable to attempt to understand ‘why they would do that’, than it is to simply ask an empty rhetorical question designed to indicate how bad/stupid/uncoordinated/social inept someone else is.

I have been working my arse off over the last few weeks (wow, Firefox doesn’t recognise the word ‘arse’ as a word.) I have played squash at least twice a week, been rock climbing once or twice every week for about 4 weeks. I have been canyoning, white water kayking, jogging, regularly doing crunches etc and push ups, and a little bit of weights work. And it is paying off. I feel good, and I am getting quite a few comments, but I am starting to worry about what happens when I get bored with working my arse off.

It will happen. It always happens. I’m not really a long term worker. I get an idea, and I run with it until it bores me. Now what happens when I get bored with doing intense physical exercise almost every night of the week? I’ll go back into some sort of stupid comatose lifestyle where I don’t leave my room, and I slowly lose all the tone and definition and put all the fat back on. Stupid bloody body. Why can’t I just work to my ideal body shape, and then just ‘lock it in’. That’d be awesome.

Oh well, whatever happens happens. As per the normal rules of the universe. I still have a goal to get down to 85kg by the end of this month – achieving that I expect I will finally have my real goal achieved: a six pack. I have never had six pack in my life, and I want one. And this time, I will have one.

Played Squash with JV this morning. He won all of the games actually, except for the two left handed games which I have decided we must have everytime we play to offset the imbalance I have become aware of in my arms. I really enjoy playing squash – it actually pushes me, something I don’t find myself doing nearly enough.

It is Tuesday of the one week uni break we have at the moment, so I actually have a fair bit of time at home atm. I have a ton of marking to do from the last weeks worth of biology labs. And of course there is the usual work that needs doing with the websites and arb trading (which I am winding down now, and withdrawing all of my money back out of.)

This weekend we are all (family and many friends) heading out to Newnes to go camping for the long weekend. I’ll be taking a large group canyoning on saturday through a low grade canyon (possibly Deep Pass), and then a smaller group through Starlights canyon on Sunday. Should be fun – I just hope it doesn’t rain too much, because apparently rain is forcast.