BillyOblivion

Head is an achin' and knees are abraded
Plates in my neck and stitches updated
Toes are a cracking and Tendons inflamed
These are a few of my favorite pains

But yes, the author of those books is mostly correct, there's some kinds of pain that serve as a useful warning function. Those are good and we should be grateful.

Others are artifacts of historical stupidity. I've learned those lessons and reminding me of them is useless.

Interestingly enough there is some evidence--or at least assertions by people who've studied this sort of thing--that doing this sort of problem solving ahead of time tends to reduce the paralysis.

When you get on a plane, go into a restaurant, when you're wandering down the street or when you go someplace new think about a few common emergencies and just think about how you might respond to them.

Pain is good, it tells you you're still alive.

All in all though, I'd rather have the alive w/out the pain. At least as far as I know.

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3t0l49/

Sorry, saw it earlier today and couldn't resist.

Dunno mate, I could name a few US Presidents and non-US leaders.

There are a whole class of ideas that one can pretty much reject out of hand because of their association with "nearby" ideas, such that "examine" means "reduce to previously solved equation".

Give an idea "Steven" that, once examined proves to be hooey, someone can come along and say "This is Fred. It is just like Steven, except that we skip the reformulation step".

If "Steven" is based on pure hooey then "Fred" has a significant likelihood of being complete hooey as well.

As a rough example, we are very, very sure that ptolemaic system is pretty much hooey. Very, very clever hooey, but still hooey. However in today's world' if some comes to us with the idea of a heliocentric system, well, it's better* than the ptolemaic system but still hooey.

The wise man values his time and triages new ideas such that he has the time and energy to work on those that do not have the quality of "pure hooey".

It is entirely possible that I might be confused.

I read "Life" to be a reference to a game played while immersed in, and as an escape from Real Life(tm), and this confusion comes from the term "microtransation", which is rather hard-linked in my skull to "micropayments", aka "the millicent ghetto"

In the version of Real Life I am playing microtransations don't get you out of much of anything worth getting into in the first place.

It just makes the game more realistic. After all, IRL you can almost always pay your way out of a situation if you have the coin and the connections.

What good does getting mad do? What does it accomplish?

Asks the guy who routinely gets mad at a video game that was made for WIndows 95.

No.

It's an honest assessment of the state of the world.

I'm not agreeing with that position, I'm just saying that there are folks who would prefer an efficient program that yielded the wrong results if it benefited them, and would engage in all manner of philosophicalish circumlocutions to justify it to themselves.