Obama

I was listening to Obama talking about creating jobs. Obama's pretty cool. But I want to take issue with the whole idea of "creating jobs" as an end goal. We want to create *happiness*. Sometimes jobs make people unhappy.

Economist talk about "growth" as the goal. This is also flawed. Economic growth means bigger GDP, the market values of goods and services we produce. If one works really hard to produce stuff, one might make the GDP bigger, but again one might not be happy.

Happiness is achieved when the standard of living is high. It's achieved when people are efficient. People need more than just jobs, they need jobs that do important stuff efficiently... jobs that are well matched to the people doing them so they enjoy it.

How to achieve happiness in jobs... Does anybody enjoy cleaning toilets?... Cleaning toilets should be worth about $200 an hour really... because it's so fucked up. Just like people get extra pay for danger, they should get extra pay for gross-out factor.

Separate from happiness there's an innate force within the living (organisms) to take control of matter and reorganize it into a device that behaves in a similar way. It's religious preaching, manifest destiny, reproduction in general. These forces often go against the happiness of one group in favor of the happiness of another.

The classic example to me is in the Bible (old testament). Israelites are displacing other people from fertile land, taking over resources, and using the land to reproduce. But they describe it in terms of removing people who don't love God. Really their actions only make sense* from a biological perspective, and from a distance they are similar to certain bacteria, engaging in war for control of resources.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/access/id/39584/title/WARRING_BACTERIA

When I say sense, I don't mean they are doing any kind of good. I just mean they are doing what many biological organisms do - sort of blindly try to expand their species.

It's so odd for me to live in a brain that tries to guide me (with signals of pleasure and pain) toward its multiple often conflicting goals: to understand stuff, to reproduce, to survive, to care about others, to gain power, to create art, to eat, to sleep, etc.