Small amounts of time add up. How much value you attach to your
own time is your own affair, but you assume inaccurately if you
assume that everyone values eir own time at the same rate.
More than once on this list I have been informed that I didn't know
what I was talking about, usually politely. There are so very many
interesting things in the world to study and discuss, it seems
rather stupid to insist on discussing a particular subject in a
particular forum that some members of the forum have objected to.
Ninety percent of the topics that are brought up here elicit no
objections. If I were to bring up a topic of discussion and meet
objections to it from more than one of the list old-timers (ooh,
I'm biased, because I guess I've gotten to be one of those myself
by now), I would take that topic to a forum where it was more
welcome. And I usually follow this rule on any forum, including
those forums in which I am *not* an old-timer, not just the
extropians list.
This very discussion is particularly unwelcome to many (not all)
because it is metadiscussion. At the very least, you could
follow the convention of flagging it as such (illustrated on the
subject line above) so that it may be more easily filtered by
those who have no time to follow metadiscussion.
To the best of our knowledge, if things go on as they have been
going on for ages, we are all trapped on this planet and we are
all doomed to die. Think about that next time you are impatient
with a person who feels that e has no time for nonsense. Some
folks are actually working hard for your and my benefit, and
some of them use this list to obtain useful information.
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception