JASKN

I imagine so. Welcome to the forum.

The interesting thing about job opportunities is that they are perpetually in flux -- even after you've been granted the opportunity, or stumbled upon it, or are pursuing it independently, you'd better be figuring out your next step, or the opportunity dies. The world's most successful businesses today won't exist in a shorter time than you'd think, if they remain the same. Constant change, planning, looking down the road is what's necessary -- and not coincidentally, it reflects the human need to never stop figuring out how to survive and make things better. Keep moving or die, as they say. The point is, even if you'd pursued the absolute best opportunities in absolutely the best ways (and there is so much legitimate variation here -- there are no perfect opportunities), you'd still be in the same boat as Facebook, Apple, Caterpillar, the new trendy restaurant downtown, the guy who wrote a killer best-selling Amazon novel last year, or the girl who just got the junior executive position at Yum Brands: You've gotta figure some new shit out, because that other stuff is done now, and the world has already changed and is working with a new set of variables and values. While your life isn't "as good" (or, not good in the same way) as it might have been, it's not hopeless, nor even necessarily bad. You now have a 6-year depression informing your decisions, which will give you a different perspective (and in many cases an edge) over competitors, or even just for your own decisions on which opportunities to explore. It's kind of cliche by now, but whenever the idea of "it's too late to be successful" comes up, I always think of Harland Sanders, founder of KFC. He'd had many setbacks and held many jobs until in his 60's, he "recognized the potential of the restaurant franchising concept, and the first KFC franchise opened in Utah in 1952." Now, KFC "is the world's second largest restaurant chain (as measured by sales) after McDonald's, with 18,875 outlets [!] in 118 countries." What I like about this story is it didn't take a degree in rocket science to achieve (but even if it had, there's no reason why you can't become a rocket scientist at 60!) -- it's relatable, a lot of people could make themselves successful in this kind of way. The feelings are hard when you're good and depressed. But, as long as you're not brain dead, it's far from over.

Hi Cameron, I went ahead and created a username for you - an email with a temporary password should have been sent already. Once you log in, please let me know whether you're able to make edits to pages.

Invision (the forum software developers) fixed this error for us, applying an early patch ahead of their next update (hooray!).

Ah, sorry... That mirrors the "New Content" page, sorting topics by most recent posts, top down.

In "New Content," it looks like the only option is to view by topics, and those topics are arranged by most recently posted only. "Activity Stream" is located within the dropdown menu next to "New Content," and can switch to a view showing posts or topics, and can also sort topics based on start date. Finally, if you're in a specific forum, you can sort threads by start date via a dropdown menu on the upper right.

I don't believe the "New Content" button is visible for users who are not logged in. However, we have a block on the side of the Forums page that shows recent topics.

That is weird... It's happening for me in both visual themes, and in every profile. Was it your own profile you were trying to view, or someone else's? If someone else's, were you able to edit that profile, or was there a message saying you didn't have permissions to edit? As a temporary workaround, you can view at least your own content by using the dropdown menu next to your name at the top of each page. We may need to contact the forum software developers about this.

Well, it looks like the update finally went through... with one snag: About 30 posts didn't make it. The good news is that we know which posts (thanks softwareNerd). So, we've kept the prior forum version up and running at old.objectivismonline.com. If anyone would like to copy/past their lost post(s) into the now-updated forum, the content can be found in the following links: http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=27859&p=338180 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=27859&p=338183 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28340&p=338173 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28340&p=338174 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28340&p=338181 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28581&p=338160 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28581&p=338165 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28865&p=338161 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28865&p=338162 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28865&p=338163 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28865&p=338164 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28869&p=338157 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28869&p=338167 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28869&p=338176 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338166 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338168 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338169 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338170 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338175 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338177 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338178 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338179 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338182 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338185 http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28877&p=338188 I may or may not have time to go through the some of the links/posts later. So if you repost, go ahead and let me know in this thread, and I'll skip that if I get a chance to go through them. Little tweaks will still be implemented here and there. If you see something wonky or otherwise have any thoughts on the update, let us know below!

For what purpose do you want to achieve this end? Writing eloquently isn't necessary if you just want to understand something for yourself, but it is necessary if you want to communicate effectively to a certain subset of people. As Jack mentioned, focusing on arguing, convincing, or communicating is hitting the gas before the starter, if you don't first have some end you're looking to achieve. That said, I, too, wanted to communicate better some years ago, half because I just wanted to win arguments. Eventually, I realized that winning arguments isn't possible unless you're interested and honest enough to consider many facts and viewpoints. That caused me to stop caring as much about winning the arguments, and to start caring more about knowing the truth for myself. Soon, I also began caring more about which truths I focused on, since I was now learning for myself rather than others. The single most helpful thing I did (biggest bang for the buck) was making myself stop and think (even when I was embarrassed and didn't want to), "Do I really believe this? Why?" It may amaze you how little you actually know about something, if you stop to think about it. But that thinking will become habit, and soon produces compounding positive results for any given thing on which you choose to focus.

There are some detailed stories of her final years in "100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand": http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0451231309?vs=1

Here's my 2¢: Quit school and stop racking up debt, and start working. In between working, do stuff: learn stuff, go places, read things, DO things. Interests aren't made by introspecting, they're made by trying things out. If you're wondering what you're interested in, no amount of thinking is ever going to tell you. Try things over varying amounts of time, and you will know automatically if you like it or not. Repeat. But like Nicky said, spend your own 2¢, not mine.

A person who rejects ideas only on hearsay doesn't really care about ideas -- that's clear on the face of it. Do you know anyone who takes thinking seriously, who doesn't find his own facts in order to clarify his own ideas? A thinker (or a "classically normal" person) doesn't need hand-led through slanderous claims. He simply learns and decides for himself. I agree with the prior posts: it's not the slander or the slandered that's the problem, it's the people who believe it without a second thought.

Hi everyone, I apologize for the delay in updating info on the forum donations. But, it wasn't for lack of good news. After I posted the request for $215 to cover OO's costs for a year, donations came in promptly and continued for the next week or so. In total, we collected $495 toward the recent request! Additionally, $300 was donated earlier this year. In total, $895 was donated toward keeping the site up and running smoothly. (I'd also like to thank softwareNerd for his contributions implementing that smooth site performance.) Thank you all! We had a few "small dollar" donations, but it was good to see them, too. A dollar is a dollar, and $5 says, "The forum is important to me." Here's to another year of rational discussion.

I noticed the same thing, pretty much from day one after switching to Invision's chat service. A guest has never replied to me, so I wondered if they might be bots. But, an Invision forum search didn't yield any info about chat guests possibly being bots. Guest permission for chat can be withdrawn. Has anyone ever gotten a guest to respond in the chat? If not, I'll change the permission so that only users can use the chat.

People get pretty set in their ways and are slow to change, no matter the present living context. Say the world's organizational structures had some huge catastrophic happening like multi-country nuclear war. What would the remaining people do? And I mean, present-day people, the ones living right this very moment. Would they begin setting fires to their remaining abodes, forget everything about their prior money-and-trading social system, and go live in the caves? That would be fantastic, ridiculous. They would pick up where they left off and adjust to the new norm, with their personal dispositions more or less intact for day-to-day living. My point is that "collapse" isn't a possibility. Change for the worse happens at a moderate rate at most, because people are slow to change for better or worse when most of their daily context stays the same. And, usually they've changed for the better when most of their daily context is uprooted and thrown in a worse direction than the prior normal.

That's interesting, especially with the evangelizing lip service. Care to take a stab as to why? Maybe "be kind to others" makes them back down sooner when confronted? "God will provide"? Heaven will bring justice by default?

"Best" is measured in lots of ways when you're talking about human bodies. Best looking? Best likelihood of aging well (and by well, does that mean longevity, looking attractive, feeling good, without major illness such as skin cancer...?), best as compared to his closest ethnic group, best in a bodybuilding competition, best for lowest threshold for personal health upkeep per life duration? Etc. But, that was my point. People are so different physically as compared to present knowledge on human health. What works for one often doesn't work for another. My observations were about what effect different types of exercise seems to have within the context of diverse genetics. But presently, "seems" is about as good as it gets. That said, I've personally had the best results using the exercise regime in your other post. It seems counterintuitive, but if I try to do more than a couple workouts a week, my joints get torn up and I can't recover soon enough for more exercise later in the week.

I can't tell if you mean that gay marriage/relationships are still un-normal, and if so in what sense. I only meant that automatically ostracizing gays will soon be a thing of the past. Then, gay-specific behaviors will become familiar. At that point, gays will seem "normal," both to the population at large and to his own self. A gay won't feel the need to rebel against the ostracizing, and so he'll do what he would have liked to do to begin with. He won't need rainbow flags, he'll probably just do a white wedding like all the other "normal" people do. Gay culture will become less independent, or regular culture will become more gay, or both.

In net, this decision is a positive. Given how messed up the system is, how many contradictions, how many confused parties making and influencing decisions, how long it takes to reverse rulings, it doesn't get much better than a broad judgement, heavily symbolic, which will cut many future bogus battles in court which should have never taken place.

It definitely doesn't have the nostalgia (although, modern marriages don't reflect ancient tradition in the ways the religious seem to believe). Now that gay marriage will become completely normal, hopefully we won't have fringe rebels coming up with tacky symbols like the rainbow flag and coining awkward terms like "life partner" anymore. Maybe the new normal gays will coin some new poetic phrase, like, "Now through the vastness of time shall these two souls traverse."

Inevitable given the last few years, but not necessarily this soon. I can't believe just ten years ago we still weren't supposed to talk about gays out loud.

I spend my life picking up new skillsets, not just through jobs -- although (full time) jobs can be a good source for this. So naturally, I say "go for it." But, is a part-time job really the best way for you to learn these two particular skills? If you throw yourself into a very social job environment, you will probably learn how to navigate through the noise OK, but no more than you would joining a group of hobbyists. And then, if you find a very good salesman (difficult) who is willing to let you follow him around (unlikely for a part-timer, why would he invest the time?), you would probably not learn anywhere near as much as you would watching YouTube videos after work at night, for a fraction of the time invested. I'm pro-learning new stuff, but not necessarily at low-learning-value part time jobs, where their main concern is for you to fulfill a narrowly-defined purpose. It's not ideal for learning new things, and you'll probably get pushback if you try to deviate even slightly.

Well, Rand was a genius. My point was that childhood is directly related to the philosophy one develops, up to the point where one becomes aware of the philosophic underpinnings one has unconsciously accepted. From there, it's a long road of inner examination and incremental change (if there is even any desire to change and examine) -- all still informed by past experiences, especially childhood experiences.

Leftover Christian sexual stigmatizing, coupled with a generally higher male sex drive?