Cav's Place

Some time ago, a newspaper from here published a list of questions that, they said, everyone should ask themselves. They probably just needed to fill an empty spot on the page with something, picked this list up from somewhere and published it, but I thought the questions were interesting enough, though nothing new, so I split them, since the article often used a single phrase to ask more than one question, translated them and saved them. And now I’ll get to actually answer them here…

Am I a nice person?
Not really. I believe I’m a very just and honest person, who also cares a lot about certain issues. That means that the vast majority of people tend to put me in positions that leave little room for niceness, especially since my proposed solutions, or even the issues themselves, are often very unpopular.

What do I have to be grateful for?
Being in reasonably good health and having access to medical services if needed. A mind that works well enough, though certainly not as well as I’d like. Being provided with a roof over my head and something to eat and drink, even if it’s perhaps not what I’d want. Having a decent computer and Internet connection. Enjoying a reasonable degree of safety, both at home and when I decide to go out. Not being required to get in contact with people I wouldn’t feel comfortable around, excepting my parents, but I can usually avoid bumping into them around the house too, though I don’t like what I need to do in order for that to happen. Not being required to directly fight someone in a position of authority in order to be allowed to live in my own world, such as it is. And, obviously, that I was in that relationship with Andra, even if simply because it proves that something like that is not impossible for me.
Basically, I have to be grateful for having the first two levels of Maslow’s pyramid reasonably covered. It’s hardly enough by any standards, but you realize things could be much worse when you think of how many people don’t have any of this…

What’s missing in my life?
Pretty much everything placed on the other three levels of that pyramid, as well as an even better coverage of the first two? That’d probably be the general idea…
But if you want to be specific, what I’m sorely missing right now is a relationship. Not just any relationship, of course; I think anyone reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about. Being with her again, living together and everything working out so we’d both be reasonably happy and even closer than we were back then. Otherwise, a best friend that I’d be insanely close to and could also actually spend time with often enough. I could also say I’m missing a chance to create that major positive change in the world that I keep hoping for, but if I had her and a true best friend in my life and things would be working out extremely well with them, I think I’d manage something, somehow, someday…

What should I change in myself?
As long as I don’t hurt others who don’t deserve it, it seems wrong to say that I should change anything. I am who I am and that’s who I’ll keep on being. Society should find a way to allow me to make use of my skills just as I am.
I could say that I’d like to be able to express myself much better and perhaps to be more driven, so I’ll need less time to actually start doing what I plan to do, but again, if these traits just don’t come naturally to me and their absence doesn’t exactly hurt anyone but myself, I’m just the way I should be. It could also be nice to stop being so afraid of people, so I could actually do certain things that require contact with others in the rare moments when I want to do such things, but the truth is that this fear also provides me with a good excuse not to do things that the vast majority consider “normal” but that I wouldn’t want to do anyway, so it’s a price I’m willing to pay for at least as long as society will continue to have such expectations of me.

What should I change in my life?
See what I said is missing in my life, but I don’t see how I could make those things happen. I tried all I could think of and I’m still here, after all.
Something that could change even without Andra or a true best friend would be my living arrangements, because I certainly don’t want to live with my parents. But I obviously could never even last a month by myself, so that’d require moving in with someone who’s at least a friend and I certainly don’t have any that I could live with.

Am I honest?
Absolutely. Usually too honest for my own good, but I’m glad of it.

Do I know how to listen to others?
Unfortunately, not really. There are so few people I’m talking to that I’m often just waiting to say something during a conversation, especially since none of them understand what truly matters to me, which makes me feel the need to let even more things out as I try to lighten the burden.
That changes if I can truly relate to what they’re saying, but that’s not too likely since, if they can’t really understand me, chances are that their problems are very different from mine and therefore I can’t exactly relate to them either. On the other hand, people often say things that I’m very much against, in which case I’ll react accordingly. If neither applies, then I’ll listen to the problem and try to come up with a solution, but that doesn’t usually work well because people rarely like my proposed solutions, not to mention that sometimes they’re simply not looking for solutions at all.

Do I know how to help those in need?
See what I said above. If I’m not against their desired outcome, I do my best to offer a solution, but often they either don’t like it or say it’s impossible.

Do I judge those around me?
Absolutely, but I really do my best to judge fairly. We all judge, so the criteria we base our judgments on make all the difference.

What will I do in my life?
That’s a really good question. The only thing I know is that at some point I will die. Besides that, I seem to be quite stuck in my current situation and see no way out unless what I said is missing in my life will no longer be missing. So, as things stand, it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much besides suffering.

I think I’ll stop here, for now. These questions probably deserve better answers than I’ll be able to provide if I just force myself to answer all of them in a single sitting, so I’d better continue at some other time.

Yet again, certain people in positions of authority fail to understand that game worlds are not actually real. They also fail to understand that gamers are generally not like them in that aspect. Or they could just be pretending in order to appear like they actually have something to do and therefore justify their paycheck, of course. That in itself could be somewhat less of a problem if they’d be the only ones having, or pretending to have, such beliefs, but what makes it worse is that certain other people, especially those who are over a certain age and have minor children or grandchildren, end up believing them as well.
Yes, it’s true that a very small number of people may actually make this confusion between a game and reality, but we’re talking about thousands, if not just hundreds, out of the hundreds of millions who play games. In such situations, the person is the problem, not the game. Such people could also be driven to act in certain ways by movies, books, stories they hear or even their own imagination, so they should be kept away from the rest of the population for safety reasons. The rest, however, know the difference quite well, and if some of them try to justify their actions by saying that they were trying out something they saw in a game, that’s just an attempt at avoiding responsibility for their own actions, sort of a modern variant of “the Devil made me do it”.
A special case is that of very young children, who may make this confusion in large numbers. But we’re mainly talking about children under two, or at most under four, who would be quite unable to play games anyway. Only a serious lack of education could make this confusion persist past this age, which means that just these parents, grandparents and other authority figures would be to blame for the situation, because they didn’t adapt the educational activities to present day realities. But even without such education, a human brain that’s not severely malfunctioning will quickly learn to clearly make this difference on its own, so this exception can only be stretched to cover at most all children under four and those children under six or seven who have completely unfit parents or guardians. Past those ages, you simply can’t claim that more than a tiny fraction of one percent of people can confuse games with reality.

People’s actions inside game worlds can be an indicator of their morals, but that’s not a rule, and these virtual actions don’t have to reflect what they’d actually do in real life situations even when they do reveal their morals. A reasonably (or even just marginally) sane individual can use games to release negative emotions, performing violent or otherwise harmful actions in a virtual environment in order to lower the risk of outbursts in real life situations. A curious individual can use games to try out certain actions without needing to use real situations, and real people, to do so. And even a person who has a certain desire to cause harm can find a safe release inside a game world and decide against actually acting on that desire in real life, where being caught could have serious consequences. So, just because game worlds are not real worlds and gamers are fully aware of this, allowing harmful actions in games can actually have beneficial effects in most cases.
On the other hand, a lot of games do penalize unnecessary harmful actions and lead players towards fighting for the greater good. That’s not a general rule, but it’s what usually happens. Perhaps some could argue that there should be a stronger bias in this direction and that the penalties for harmful actions should be greater, but the truth is that games must first be enjoyable. Actually, it must first be possible for a game to be successfully completed, and solving many situations that arise in games would be impossible if the laws and regulations of real life would apply in full. Plus that, while a certain kind of realism is very much desired, a game tends to become less enjoyable if it’s too similar to real life. After all, many people play games (or watch movies, or read books) just for the feeling of escapism that these activities provide.
As such, if games would start implementing these laws and regulations in full and perhaps even stop allowing certain harmful actions altogether, they’d become much less interesting for people. That’d mean that far fewer people would play them, or at least that far fewer people would feel involved in the action while playing them. In this situation, all those beneficial effects I mentioned above would be greatly diminished, but the people who are deranged enough to be unable to tell the difference between a virtual world and the real one would still have plenty of opportunities to act on their insanity. In other words, it’d be a lot of pain for little or no gain.

I wish people would stop worrying so much about what may happen in a virtual world and focus more on what is actually going on in the real one. And when they do think about games, I wish they’d try to make them better, more diverse, more involving, more interesting, more entertaining and easier to obtain for all people instead of adding even more limitations.
That’d be a good use of time and resources, while this is a waste of both at best, and likely has the potential to cause even more harm if more people will learn that they can just blame games for their actions and therefore avoid taking full responsibility. Not to mention that it also provides parents and guardians with an excuse when things go wrong with their children, offering them something to blame for their own failings. After all, we all know that you can safely blame a game for anything and everything you want. It won’t fight back because, you see, it’s not real.

I seem to be gathering reasons to be really angry over these past few days. Or, better yet, people seem to keep providing me with them. There are three major ones just now, caused by three different people. The first two are friends, or at least people I like to think of as friends, and the third one is related to my previous post. I think I won’t use names when talking about my friends. There are few people I’m talking to with any noticeable frequency and they’ll know who each is about anyway, in case they’ll be reading this.

Before I’ll get to the actual issues, I think I should list the things that anger me the most. I’m talking about the top two, which aren’t related to what happened now, but should put things in perspective. Past the first two, the ranking may depend on my current mood and what has happened to me or what I heard of recently…
As I said numerous times before, the worst thing anyone can do under the current circumstances is have a child. Also applies to getting pregnant and not intending to have an abortion, obviously, but if there’ll be a miscarriage or the baby will be stillborn then I guess no real harm is done. Also applies to adopting children, because this may encourage those who get pregnant accidentally to carry the pregnancies to term. In the end, I don’t care too much why you decide not to have or care for a child, the fact itself is what matters, because having children is the worst single crime possible when the world is as overpopulated as it is. I may agree that certain extraordinary individuals really should breed, but they should first use those extraordinary abilities to come up with and impose a system like the one I keep suggesting (though preferably better). This is the one thing I will not forgive of anyone under the current circumstances.
The second is breaking up with a person who is obviously still very much in love with you and truly desires to continue the relationship. Exceptions to this are if said person is obviously guilty of one of the very few things that I see as potential justification for ending a relationship, such as repeated abuse, or if there was a very clear and specific agreement at the start of the relationship, understood and accepted by all those involved, specifying other conditions for the termination of the relationship. The agreement won’t make me fully accept the situation though, but at least I’ll no longer see it as unforgivable. Because otherwise it truly is unforgivable for just about anyone. The exception to this is, quite obviously, that I can’t really hold the fact that she left me against Andra and, as much as I’d like to think otherwise, I sometimes doubt I’ll be able to really hold the fact that she left someone else since then against her for any significant amount of time either, were I to learn that she did something like this.
Past this point, it gets much harder to rank… If asked, I tend to say that the third problem is getting a job while still in school, because it puts you in the rat race more than anything, it makes you devote pretty much all of your time and attention to things that have nothing to do with your relationships or ideals (or at least with no ideals that I’d care for) and it means you accept the emphasis that our current society puts on money, which harms everyone who may be fighting for something different, including myself. After all, all you need to do in order to fight for the status quo is to not actively fight against it, and there are few, if any, things that say that you’ve surrendered to this society more than this. I guess I could suffer through something like this if Andra was in this situation, though I’d certainly hate it, but not when it comes to anyone else. Still, it’s not something with permanent effects, so I’ll likely get over what happened shortly after the person either graduated, dropped out, quit or was fired.
But neutering a pet is a huge problem as well, and I sometimes have difficulty explaining even to myself why I see it as slightly less evil than getting a job while still in school. Perhaps because it does at least prevent an overpopulation problem, though the problem itself is far less important than the one involving us humans and this method is completely wrong when it comes to dealing with it. Perhaps also because it has less of an impact on society… Either way, I won’t get into it again, did it plenty of times already. I’ll just say once again that I’m waiting for the day when the birth control methods for pets will be similar to the long-term or even permanent ones used for humans, without altering behavior and certainly without taking away any bodily function other than procreation, and that I’ll maintain my firm opposition to the current method and anyone who makes use of it. Once again, I could get over it if Andra’d be in this situation (and I’m quite sure she actually is), though I’d obviously hate it, but it’s a huge problem when it comes to anyone else. Can be forgiven in time, if the person will no longer support the practice, but never forgotten, because the effects can never be reversed.

Moving on to specifics, the first message I received was letting me know that the person in question just got a job. Since she’s still in school and, if her plans will work out, will still be studying for many years to come, I’m sure you can see why that was completely unacceptable. I knew that she was planning to do this, but I certainly didn’t think it was going to happen so soon and hoped she’d change her mind eventually, before actually getting a chance to do it…
A day later, Thursday, I saw the other person posting a message in which she was basically bragging that her kitten was just being neutered. What’s more, after someone replied to point out some of the potential problems with this procedure and ask her to reconsider, she very happily announced that her other cat is also neutered and is perfectly fine. Perhaps I shouldn’t have reacted quite as I did because I had figured out a long time ago that she supported this, but I pretended I didn’t know just to avoid this sort of argument. Lying to yourself always comes back and bites you in the ass, doesn’t it?
As for the third reason to be angry, that came today in the form of Remus Cernea making his “personal opinion” regarding the second round of elections public. He started well, by saying that he urges all his voters to vote as their conscience tells them to, but then moved on to support Mircea Geoana by speaking at length against Traian Basescu. Well, when the candidate that I voted for supports the one that I’m certain is by far the greater evil, I believe I’m quite entitled to feel betrayed. What’s more, there were certain rumors during the campaign saying that he’ll support Geoana and he repeatedly denied them. It would appear that green lies are exactly the same as yellow, red or orange ones. (Romanians should understand that better, sorry for anyone else who happens to be reading this.)

Note (May, 2012): I fear I must distance myself from the affirmation made in this post’s title. It is possible that it would have been true if him and the Green Party would have somehow bridged their differences, but since they failed to do so and went their separate ways, they have both added to the long list of disappointments, Remus and his new party now being even higher on it than the Green Party, unfortunately.

Sunday was the first round of our presidential elections. The fact that Traian Basescu and Mircea Geoana were going to make it to the second round was extremely obvious, but ten others decided to try their luck as well. Some of them truly desired to become president, others perhaps merely dreamed of it, but I’m quite sure that one of them didn’t want the position at all. I’m talking about Remus Cernea, who enlisted in the Green Party shortly before the start of the campaign in order to become their candidate.
So why did he run if he didn’t want to become president? To create visibility for both himself and the Green Party, of course. For himself because he keeps fighting against the “system” and such visibility will improve both the credibility of his future campaigns and his chances of obtaining funding when he requires it; for the Green Party because they’re new on the Romanian political scene and could only obtain fractions of a percent so far.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this pairing was that the Green Party can perhaps be noted for a moderate environmental doctrine and little else, while Remus Cernea is a strong advocate of nondiscrimination, of the rights and freedoms of all individuals, of the separation of church and state and several other related concepts. Proof of this is that, when asked why did he choose to join the Green Party, he said that he can work well with their doctrine, that there are no conflicts between their doctrine and his ideals. And that’s true, the Green Party’s doctrine and Remus Cernea’s ideals can work together very well, but they’re different things, so the situation could be better described as the independent candidate Remus Cernea being supported by the Green Party. This was painfully obvious whenever he was invited to a show during the campaign, since he promoted his own ideas whenever he was given the chance and didn’t appear too thrilled when he was asked to talk about environmental issues, simply because that used up time he would have preferred to use to talk about something else.
Because of that, some of the people who noticed that something wasn’t quite right were likely inclined to dismiss the whole thing as yet another one of the many tricks that politicians try to play. And that should have really been avoided, because a recent survey showed that, for example, 92% of Romanians discriminate against homosexuals, so a person who supports nondiscrimination would already have a dreadful time gaining approval even without a potentially suspicious behavior. True, any publicity is good publicity, so the fact that his stance is very much against that of the majority means that some people have at least heard of him already and others are likely to hear of him when his position will generate some controversy. It’s also true that, considering the Green Party’s target of obtaining the required 5% to make it into the parliament at the next elections, they could potentially focus just on the minorities. But when the message itself becomes confusing, when it’s obvious that the party and the candidate are talking about different things, it’s hard to gain any significant support.
What’s more, perhaps his main theme was the unfair and restrictive electoral law, which is a discussion that I’m sure the vast majority of potential voters just tuned out because it truly is irrelevant at the current time. It was obviously too late to change it for the current elections and it’s too early to start talking about it for the next ones, which are scheduled for 2012. Talking about the environment would have attracted a certain segment of the population and also bridged the gap between the party and their candidate, while boldly tackling the most sensitive matters when it comes to discrimination would have obviously gone well with the minorities in question, but this approach likely drove away more people than it attracted…

Still, it can be somehow understandable. He has never been involved in politics before and the party is new and inexperienced. I can only hope that they’ll know better next time and take proper advantage of anything they might have gained in this campaign, because they truly are better than just the lesser evil.
The Green Party in Romania is far from what it should be, even as far as their doctrine goes, but it is a little step in the right direction, while all major parties represent either steps or true leaps in various wrong directions. And activists like Remus Cernea are more than needed in important positions in this day and age. Yes, I always admitted that he’s completely unsuited for the role of president, but there are plenty of other positions where him or others like him could do a world of good.
You should note that all the criticism posted above was strictly about this campaign, so it should come as no surprise when I say that I truly wish to see the Green Party making it into the parliament at the next elections and perhaps also see Remus Cernea appointed in a position that’ll offer him the chance to truly influence the country’s direction in the areas that interest him. That’ll be very hard, considering the mere 0.62% of voters that he managed to persuade this time around, but it’s not impossible if the lessons will be properly learned…

As for the second round of the elections, I must add that Traian Basescu is still, in my opinion, by far the lesser evil at the current moment. Right now we need a strong and determined president, who also enjoys sufficient support to have a chance of subduing certain interest groups, many of which are in some way connected with his opponent’s party, and he’s the only actor on the current political scene to meet those requirements. Sure, he has his own “clients” as well and the direction he’ll attempt to steer the country towards is far from the best one, but I honestly feel that his “clients” and ideas are significantly less dangerous than the alternative.
Perhaps a truly good candidate will somehow appear in 2014, maybe even from the Green Party, but until then I have to stick to my usual rule: Vote for the party or candidate whose values are closest to yours in the first round and against the one who’ll either directly cause or indirectly allow the most harm to come to you and your city, country or world in the second round. This rule made me vote for Remus Cernea in the first round, and this rule will make me vote for Traian Basescu in the second round.

When I first saw the proposal for the new Dutch road tax, I thought something was finally moving in the right direction. The basic concept is correct: You don’t pollute or damage roads simply by owning a car; you do that by driving it. Plus that purchase taxes discourage people from replacing their old cars with newer ones, which likely use less fuel and emit less carbon dioxide, so eliminating them can have a positive environmental effect under certain circumstances. However, installing a GPS on every car in order to report its location to the authorities for the purposes of calculating the distance covered and whether it’s being driven in high-traffic areas during rush hour is a frightening prospect, not to mention ineffective in calculating how much the car actually pollutes.

I don’t think I need to explain why having a GPS installed in order to track where you are and where you’ve been at all times and report that information to the authorities is a bad thing. Whatever the officials say about how that information will be used and even if this could help recover stolen vehicles, the price is much too high!
One has to wonder why has this method been selected when it’s not even necessary, since sealing the distance covered indicator to prevent it from being tampered with would be enough to know how much the car has been driven and installing some sort of device in the exhaust system to record the emissions would indicate the exact amount each car produces, which is a very important piece of information that the GPS could never gather. And since rush hour traffic implies frequent starts and stops and engines running without the vehicles actually moving, the resulting emissions are also higher, which would result in the desired higher tax for the people who insist on driving through high-traffic areas during rush hour.
I can’t stress this enough: Tracking people like that is unacceptable! Knowing how much they drive and the emissions they’re responsible for is completely reasonable, even necessary, but the authorities shouldn’t be able to know where a person is or has been at all times unless they have reasonable reason to believe that said person is carrying out criminal activities!

At least, as I said before, getting rid of the purchase taxes could help, but only if it’s done right. Eliminating them entirely actually encourages people to buy their first car or additional ones if they already have at least one that they intend to keep, which is certainly not desirable. But if these taxes would be waived for people who turn in their old car when purchasing the new one, and even then only if the new car has a lower fuel consumption and lower emissions than the old one, the advantages of both systems would present themselves: People would still be discouraged from buying their first car or additional cars, but they’d be encouraged to replace old cars with newer ones that are better for the environment.