Reality Check
Happy Saturday! Reality check! for the day!
Sometimes in times of chaos like a pandemic and civil unrest we can feel untethered and undefined, like a piece of our identity was stolen. Not me of course. I'm defined by how much pudding I eat and my Tapioca count hasn't changed any.
Here's the answer, it takes time. Our confusion and disorientation comes from a sense of time that is linked to a 24 hour news cycle and constant consumerism. We expect instant gratification. We want it and we want it now. But here's the problem. Culture changes take time. Racism in this country is gradually reducing if for no other reason than we are interbreeding and not just with black and white. Black and Latino, Black and Asian, and Latino and Asian. In a hundred years all this interbreeding is going to make racism moot. Whites will be a minority. But, that's not all. We are shifting attitudes of the majority, but slowly.
This observation leads us to the question: should we demand large changes here and now? Yes! But the goal is not to just end racism. The goal is to improve human morals overall.
Why don't Conservatives see this? Because Conservatives are religious and the religious believe in objective morality and not subjective morality. Objective morality means that all morals are fixed as defined by some god and further no more new morals can be forth coming. This makes the religious a very special kind of evil and all the religious will rot in a very special hell reserved for child molesters and people who talk at the theater. Realize when we are fighting for improved morals about racism we are not just fighting the evils of racists, but the evils of objective morality that believe all morals are fixed by god and no new ones are forthcoming. We can see this in the "All lives matter" mentality. The Bible doesn't have anything to say about forms of bigotry other than religious bigotry. This is why the religious will fight for Christians who are persecuted in Muslim countries, but are blind to racism. Being a racist is not a thing in the Bible. In fact, quite the opposite. God marked Cain and the Mormons took that mark to be a reason to sponsor outright racism. The Bible doesn't say anything about climate change either and being good stewards of the entire planet. Heck, when the Bible was written they didn't know they were on a planet.
When we are fighting for gay marriage, racial equality, or climate change management then we are fighting religion because we need new morals, new morals that objective morality cannot abide. What this means is that we should expect this fight to end racism will take generations and is no less a fight than the fight to end all religion by education. Religion is for people who can't adopt new morals. Religion has been around for thousands of years. Reducing religion to zero is going to take hundreds of years because it has to be done by each person voluntary abandoning religion when they believe it is the right thing to do. We have a ton of new morals that need to be observed and the religious are in the way.
Wait, there's more. I am a computer scientist by training. As part of our training we are educated on how to map one problem onto a known problem with a solution. For example, when I was young I was always losing my car keys. Then I hit on the idea to never take my car keys out of my pocket. Once I did that I never lost them again. I had the same problem with my wallet. So I thought, well if never taking my keys out of my pocket worked for my car keys then that should work for my wallet. I still maintain this behavior today of never taking my keys or wallet out of my pocket so I don't lose them.
Racism falls into a class of problems that we have no solution for, I'm sorry to say. Racism is bigotry, bigotry that is inherent to any sub-culture and all humans. Every dominant culture has sub-cultures. Every sub-culture has sub-cultures. If you are part of the Black community in America you know what those black sub-cultures are. The same is true if you are homosexual regarding the gay community.
Every culture is bigoted against every other culture. That's just a fact of human life. As far as anthropology studies have shown there are no cultures without sub-cultures and further more there are no cultures that are not bigoted against the other.
Classifying problems to a more general problem can also lead to a known set of problems with no solution. We call these sets of problems intractable. Bigotry is intractable. All humans are bigots. We have never found a culture where bigotry didn't exist. So what can we expect then? How much racism can we expect to end?
Well, in computer science even if we don't have a known solution then sometimes we use a partial solution. In computer science if we have a complete solution we call that an algorithm. If we have a partial solution we call that a heuristic. Even if there is no algorithm for eliminating racism then perhaps we can find a heuristic?
Racism is not the only intractable problem we face today, health care is too. Health care in the United States is a disaster for about half the country if not more. I include myself in the disaster half. In 1992 Ross Perot ran for President and his health-care solution to our crumbling health care system was to look around the world and adopt something better than what we have now. Ross Perot settled on the Canadian system. Heuristics have the advantage of having some level of proven success. The Canadian health-care system in 1992 had much better metrics than the US system did. So why not use it? We can apply this same thinking to racism. We can look at Europe and other places around the world to see if they have better race relations. And guess what, they most assuredly do. Blacks in Europe are treated better. So we can look to Europe and other countries and set our racism expectations to at least that which already exists in other places in the world. Does this mean we should not expect better than Europe? No, but it does suggest we have path forward of at least realizing what other countries have before we venture even farther.
But that's not all. Conservatives are right about some things and Conservative criticism of attempting to achieve cultural solutions found in other countries is spot on. Their number one criticism is that the US is not Europe. We are two very different cultures. What works there will not work here. This is especially poignant when it comes to guns. America already has 300-400 million guns in the hands of private owners. Taking away that many guns is a logistical nightmare. It is not always practical or possible to implement a cultural specific solution in another culture.
But why not?
This brings me to my last point of our reality check: life is a feedback loop. If you build a society around policing then it stands to reason you cannot overnight do away with the police. These kinds of feedback loops take time to phase out. US citizens today are conditioned to call the police and not take care of things themselves. We can change that of course but it will take time. Although I don't think it will take as long as one might imagine. Why? Because there are many lawless places in the United States where the police don't go.
Take the South side of Chicago. If you walk down the street there it is not uncommon for businesses to have rolling metal gates that cover the entire front of the store after hours. When you close the store then you pull the metal rolling door down and lock it. No smashing of windows happen. I saw a photo on Facebook of San Mateo, CA where the store shops had windows boarded up with plywood. One of the users asked the question, "Is this what we can expect now?" I thought this question was kinda of arrogant. It is arrogant to assume that not having a rolling metal door is your privilege.
Police to a large degree are just corporate welfare. They provide protection so businesses do not have to pay for it themselves. The ironic thing is that if you replaced the police with metal doors, hire private security and other security measures then it would probably be cheaper than what you pay in taxes for the police. And the police only respond to crimes after the fact where a metal door will protect your windows all the time. The police protection is to only provide reports for when your window is broken so you can claim insurance and get money to pay for damages.
Life is a feedback loop means that we can't just end policing cold turkey. Our minds in America today are trained to call the police, or 911. We need to change that mindset to providing our own security thus establishing a new feedback loop. In other words we need to adopt new feedback loops while old feedback loops are phased out.
So as you can see our reality check is quite complicated. Our expectations for ending racism are facing strong forces resisting the change:
1. Instant gratification in our American undermines the need for a long term fight. Further, racism will fall away or change to something less in a hundred years due to interbreeding of the races.
2. Adding new morals runs counter to religion and religious moral objectivity having fixed, static morals.
3. Racism is a form of bigotry and at no time has any culture been bigotry free. A game of whack-a-mole will result where racism is already being replaced with the next generation of bigotry of anti-liberalism where conservatives have been openly hating liberals without penalty of bigotry going on five decades.
4. Life is a feedback loop. Think of this as systemic racism. The police are an institution designed to harass minorities and the poor. In order to replace it we need an alternative and further we need to phase out what currently exists while phasing in another.
Now comes the hard part of our reality check. What I just laid out was the easy part of laying out for you how hard this will be. Now lets talk solutions.
Shame is only a start. Shame like what happens with protesting only opens a door and raises awareness. Shame alone cannot change identities or create new morals. Further the shame the protesters bring regarding a new moral is immediately countered by a counter shame on the religious side that rejects the new moral. Shame wars ensue. This is what we experience with "All Lives Matter".
There is one particular solution known to work to end bigotry beyond shaming that has been repeated in multiple studies and has been shown to change a bigots' mind. That solution is dinner. Yes, bring the two parties together to have dinner and get to know each other on a personal level. Let's do that! Dinner all around?
Hollywood is well aware of the dinner solution and has long practiced using this indirect dinner approach for one community: the gay community. Since the late 1990s Hollywood has been including gay characters at much larger rates into our entertainment. Entertainment then becomes an indirect way of having dinner together and getting to know someone so as to eliminate bigotry. Hollywood's role in normalizing homosexuals as acceptable play a large role in gay marriage being adopted. Sadly, Hollywood has made no such attempt with the black community and in fact quite the opposite. Hollywood's portrayal of blacks is stereotypical of what the bigots believe. One of my favorite TV shows is, "Chuck". This is a comedy about a nerd who becomes a spy inadvertently by having a computer program implanted in his head. The token black on "Chuck" is an overweight store manager of the "Buy More" store. Not only is "Big Mike" overweight, he's also stupid and lazy. Big Mike has a cousin and his cousin is a mirror image overweight, donut-eating cop.
If we are serious about ending racism or at least dramatically reducing it then we need to move from protests to dinner, from shaming to getting to know each other. This means that people in the black community are going to need to cross-over into the white community and vice-versa. This is going to be an extraordinary challenge because centuries of oppression have built up walls between the communities. This happens to every oppressed sub-culture where the sub-culture becomes hardened its isolation. But if we want racism to change this is the proven path forward. Food is always a good meeting ground. The black community has long had food and music traditions that make attractive venues for everyone. That's the place to start.
Hollywood could help as well. Hollywood has a choice. The can show the black culture at it is with all of its current drug and gang related dysfunction due to centuries of being oppressed or they could promote positive images of blacks.
There are two parts to the philosophy:
1. Idle hands mean an idle mind. Irreni keeps everyone focused and busy on doing positive things in life so as to leave no time for the negativity.
2. Culture blur of rotating people of all cultures throughout everyone's life.
Bigotry is just one of many negative character traits of today's idle chatter and idle minds. People have time to plot destruction of someone they hate because they don't have a full schedule of helping people they love. Irreni addresses this problem head on with self-governing. Self-governing is where we all learn the laws and implement them ourselves rather than politicians, police officers, judges, and central government. You will be required to learn city codes, environmental laws, and all other manner of law rather than sit in front of your television and be entertained. Today too many people are entertaining themselves with bigotry entertainment, most notably 100% of all right-wing media is hate entertainment targeting bottomless hate towards liberals and minorities. Irreni World Scale will eliminate this not by going after conservative media itself, but rather by eliminating entertainment as a pass-time. We should all be doing meaningful things with our short time on Earth. Today we waste too much of our time with entertainment of no meaning.
Irreni World Scale eliminates central government and replaces it with MGOs, or micro-modular governing organizations. MGOs are of fixed size thirty people and they are sovereign the same way the United States is a sovereign nation today. With only thirty people then that means everyone in the MGO will have governing responsibilities from managing the criminals in your MGO to the "national" budget. Everyone will be so busy running the day-to-day necessities of the MGO then they will have no time to be programmed by hate media such like conservative media is today.
Irreni World Scale is an simply an experimental government. Each MGO is a test tube in our political lab. Just as you can imagine in a chemistry lab where the contents of the test tube are central to the experiment then so is the make up of people who form the MGO. For example, one experiment control within the Irreni design is to automatically require a 10% or 3 person rotation of personnel every five years for no reason other than to blur cultures. This rotation solves many problems and not the least of which is bigotry is reduced by rotating in new people of different cultures. There will be deliberate changes where bigotry against some culture has been detected within the MGO and the bigoted culture will be represented by a new member. This automatic rotation is not the only time personnel within the MGO can change. People will more commonly be rotated as parameters for some political experiment just like a chemists replaces test tube chemicals. Finally, MGO personnel can be entirely dispersed if the MGO government embarks on violence.
Irreni is a political laboratory. As such there will be many competing experiments running simultaneously around the world. This can be easily accomplished where billions of people on planet Earth today translates into hundreds of millions of MGOs as test tubes in our Irreni lab. What this means is the Irreni has built in the mechanism for weighing bigotry cultural changes within a culture against all the other changes going on at the same time. Is racism our biggest problem facing humanity today? Should racism changes take a back seat to climate change management? We don't think that way today because we just are reactionary based upon whatever sensational disaster or calamity pops up. That is no way to run a country or a culture. Irreni World Scale is by definition a political laboratory and all experiments are continuously weighted as part of the larger whole.
Sometimes in times of chaos like a pandemic and civil unrest we can feel untethered and undefined, like a piece of our identity was stolen. Not me of course. I'm defined by how much pudding I eat and my Tapioca count hasn't changed any.
What can we realistically expect regarding changing culture to end racism, or changing culture to change the police?
Here's the answer, it takes time. Our confusion and disorientation comes from a sense of time that is linked to a 24 hour news cycle and constant consumerism. We expect instant gratification. We want it and we want it now. But here's the problem. Culture changes take time. Racism in this country is gradually reducing if for no other reason than we are interbreeding and not just with black and white. Black and Latino, Black and Asian, and Latino and Asian. In a hundred years all this interbreeding is going to make racism moot. Whites will be a minority. But, that's not all. We are shifting attitudes of the majority, but slowly.
This observation leads us to the question: should we demand large changes here and now? Yes! But the goal is not to just end racism. The goal is to improve human morals overall.
Let's put this in a different context. Managing climate change has far more moral improvement than just preventing disasters that will kill millions and billions. Reducing energy consumption reduces climate emissions. Energy management and making things efficient will also improve life for the poor. Less energy required means less money spent. Cheap energy means it is widely available because scarcity drives prices. As we use less energy than the existing energy pool supply excess makes the exiting pool cheaper. Managing climate change then improves our energy morals for the poor. But wait, there is more. Every generation needs to ensure a planet safe and liveable for the next generation. Managing climate change allows us to hand off to the next generation a clean, robust Planet as well as teaches every subsequent generation the importance of maintaining a perpetually clean, robust Earth. Managing climate change is far and away the right moral thing today even if disaster were not looming.
When we are fighting for gay marriage, racial equality, or climate change management then we are fighting religion because we need new morals, new morals that objective morality cannot abide. What this means is that we should expect this fight to end racism will take generations and is no less a fight than the fight to end all religion by education. Religion is for people who can't adopt new morals. Religion has been around for thousands of years. Reducing religion to zero is going to take hundreds of years because it has to be done by each person voluntary abandoning religion when they believe it is the right thing to do. We have a ton of new morals that need to be observed and the religious are in the way.
Wait, there's more. I am a computer scientist by training. As part of our training we are educated on how to map one problem onto a known problem with a solution. For example, when I was young I was always losing my car keys. Then I hit on the idea to never take my car keys out of my pocket. Once I did that I never lost them again. I had the same problem with my wallet. So I thought, well if never taking my keys out of my pocket worked for my car keys then that should work for my wallet. I still maintain this behavior today of never taking my keys or wallet out of my pocket so I don't lose them.
Racism falls into a class of problems that we have no solution for, I'm sorry to say. Racism is bigotry, bigotry that is inherent to any sub-culture and all humans. Every dominant culture has sub-cultures. Every sub-culture has sub-cultures. If you are part of the Black community in America you know what those black sub-cultures are. The same is true if you are homosexual regarding the gay community.
Every culture is bigoted against every other culture. That's just a fact of human life. As far as anthropology studies have shown there are no cultures without sub-cultures and further more there are no cultures that are not bigoted against the other.
Classifying problems to a more general problem can also lead to a known set of problems with no solution. We call these sets of problems intractable. Bigotry is intractable. All humans are bigots. We have never found a culture where bigotry didn't exist. So what can we expect then? How much racism can we expect to end?
Well, in computer science even if we don't have a known solution then sometimes we use a partial solution. In computer science if we have a complete solution we call that an algorithm. If we have a partial solution we call that a heuristic. Even if there is no algorithm for eliminating racism then perhaps we can find a heuristic?
Racism is not the only intractable problem we face today, health care is too. Health care in the United States is a disaster for about half the country if not more. I include myself in the disaster half. In 1992 Ross Perot ran for President and his health-care solution to our crumbling health care system was to look around the world and adopt something better than what we have now. Ross Perot settled on the Canadian system. Heuristics have the advantage of having some level of proven success. The Canadian health-care system in 1992 had much better metrics than the US system did. So why not use it? We can apply this same thinking to racism. We can look at Europe and other places around the world to see if they have better race relations. And guess what, they most assuredly do. Blacks in Europe are treated better. So we can look to Europe and other countries and set our racism expectations to at least that which already exists in other places in the world. Does this mean we should not expect better than Europe? No, but it does suggest we have path forward of at least realizing what other countries have before we venture even farther.
But that's not all. Conservatives are right about some things and Conservative criticism of attempting to achieve cultural solutions found in other countries is spot on. Their number one criticism is that the US is not Europe. We are two very different cultures. What works there will not work here. This is especially poignant when it comes to guns. America already has 300-400 million guns in the hands of private owners. Taking away that many guns is a logistical nightmare. It is not always practical or possible to implement a cultural specific solution in another culture.
But why not?
This brings me to my last point of our reality check: life is a feedback loop. If you build a society around policing then it stands to reason you cannot overnight do away with the police. These kinds of feedback loops take time to phase out. US citizens today are conditioned to call the police and not take care of things themselves. We can change that of course but it will take time. Although I don't think it will take as long as one might imagine. Why? Because there are many lawless places in the United States where the police don't go.
Take the South side of Chicago. If you walk down the street there it is not uncommon for businesses to have rolling metal gates that cover the entire front of the store after hours. When you close the store then you pull the metal rolling door down and lock it. No smashing of windows happen. I saw a photo on Facebook of San Mateo, CA where the store shops had windows boarded up with plywood. One of the users asked the question, "Is this what we can expect now?" I thought this question was kinda of arrogant. It is arrogant to assume that not having a rolling metal door is your privilege.
Police to a large degree are just corporate welfare. They provide protection so businesses do not have to pay for it themselves. The ironic thing is that if you replaced the police with metal doors, hire private security and other security measures then it would probably be cheaper than what you pay in taxes for the police. And the police only respond to crimes after the fact where a metal door will protect your windows all the time. The police protection is to only provide reports for when your window is broken so you can claim insurance and get money to pay for damages.
Life is a feedback loop means that we can't just end policing cold turkey. Our minds in America today are trained to call the police, or 911. We need to change that mindset to providing our own security thus establishing a new feedback loop. In other words we need to adopt new feedback loops while old feedback loops are phased out.
So as you can see our reality check is quite complicated. Our expectations for ending racism are facing strong forces resisting the change:
1. Instant gratification in our American undermines the need for a long term fight. Further, racism will fall away or change to something less in a hundred years due to interbreeding of the races.
2. Adding new morals runs counter to religion and religious moral objectivity having fixed, static morals.
3. Racism is a form of bigotry and at no time has any culture been bigotry free. A game of whack-a-mole will result where racism is already being replaced with the next generation of bigotry of anti-liberalism where conservatives have been openly hating liberals without penalty of bigotry going on five decades.
4. Life is a feedback loop. Think of this as systemic racism. The police are an institution designed to harass minorities and the poor. In order to replace it we need an alternative and further we need to phase out what currently exists while phasing in another.
Now comes the hard part of our reality check. What I just laid out was the easy part of laying out for you how hard this will be. Now lets talk solutions.
Shame is only a start. Shame like what happens with protesting only opens a door and raises awareness. Shame alone cannot change identities or create new morals. Further the shame the protesters bring regarding a new moral is immediately countered by a counter shame on the religious side that rejects the new moral. Shame wars ensue. This is what we experience with "All Lives Matter".
There is one particular solution known to work to end bigotry beyond shaming that has been repeated in multiple studies and has been shown to change a bigots' mind. That solution is dinner. Yes, bring the two parties together to have dinner and get to know each other on a personal level. Let's do that! Dinner all around?
There is a dinner problem with bigotry though because one of the effects of bigotry is for both sides to build walls so as to deliberately remain apart. Dinner then is going to require a lot of effort. Because of this then one bigotry researcher back in the 1980s pointed out that feminism will be successful in reducing female discrimination long before anti-racism is reduces black discrimination. After all we all live with women at some point in our lives.
Hollywood is well aware of the dinner solution and has long practiced using this indirect dinner approach for one community: the gay community. Since the late 1990s Hollywood has been including gay characters at much larger rates into our entertainment. Entertainment then becomes an indirect way of having dinner together and getting to know someone so as to eliminate bigotry. Hollywood's role in normalizing homosexuals as acceptable play a large role in gay marriage being adopted. Sadly, Hollywood has made no such attempt with the black community and in fact quite the opposite. Hollywood's portrayal of blacks is stereotypical of what the bigots believe. One of my favorite TV shows is, "Chuck". This is a comedy about a nerd who becomes a spy inadvertently by having a computer program implanted in his head. The token black on "Chuck" is an overweight store manager of the "Buy More" store. Not only is "Big Mike" overweight, he's also stupid and lazy. Big Mike has a cousin and his cousin is a mirror image overweight, donut-eating cop.
If we are serious about ending racism or at least dramatically reducing it then we need to move from protests to dinner, from shaming to getting to know each other. This means that people in the black community are going to need to cross-over into the white community and vice-versa. This is going to be an extraordinary challenge because centuries of oppression have built up walls between the communities. This happens to every oppressed sub-culture where the sub-culture becomes hardened its isolation. But if we want racism to change this is the proven path forward. Food is always a good meeting ground. The black community has long had food and music traditions that make attractive venues for everyone. That's the place to start.
Hollywood could help as well. Hollywood has a choice. The can show the black culture at it is with all of its current drug and gang related dysfunction due to centuries of being oppressed or they could promote positive images of blacks.
Let's move on.
Next up is some master class s**t. Irreni World Scale is the final word on minimizing all bigotry and not just racism. The Irreni approach is simple in its philosophy and complex in its implementation.
There are two parts to the philosophy:
1. Idle hands mean an idle mind. Irreni keeps everyone focused and busy on doing positive things in life so as to leave no time for the negativity.
2. Culture blur of rotating people of all cultures throughout everyone's life.
Bigotry is just one of many negative character traits of today's idle chatter and idle minds. People have time to plot destruction of someone they hate because they don't have a full schedule of helping people they love. Irreni addresses this problem head on with self-governing. Self-governing is where we all learn the laws and implement them ourselves rather than politicians, police officers, judges, and central government. You will be required to learn city codes, environmental laws, and all other manner of law rather than sit in front of your television and be entertained. Today too many people are entertaining themselves with bigotry entertainment, most notably 100% of all right-wing media is hate entertainment targeting bottomless hate towards liberals and minorities. Irreni World Scale will eliminate this not by going after conservative media itself, but rather by eliminating entertainment as a pass-time. We should all be doing meaningful things with our short time on Earth. Today we waste too much of our time with entertainment of no meaning.
Irreni World Scale eliminates central government and replaces it with MGOs, or micro-modular governing organizations. MGOs are of fixed size thirty people and they are sovereign the same way the United States is a sovereign nation today. With only thirty people then that means everyone in the MGO will have governing responsibilities from managing the criminals in your MGO to the "national" budget. Everyone will be so busy running the day-to-day necessities of the MGO then they will have no time to be programmed by hate media such like conservative media is today.
Irreni World Scale is an simply an experimental government. Each MGO is a test tube in our political lab. Just as you can imagine in a chemistry lab where the contents of the test tube are central to the experiment then so is the make up of people who form the MGO. For example, one experiment control within the Irreni design is to automatically require a 10% or 3 person rotation of personnel every five years for no reason other than to blur cultures. This rotation solves many problems and not the least of which is bigotry is reduced by rotating in new people of different cultures. There will be deliberate changes where bigotry against some culture has been detected within the MGO and the bigoted culture will be represented by a new member. This automatic rotation is not the only time personnel within the MGO can change. People will more commonly be rotated as parameters for some political experiment just like a chemists replaces test tube chemicals. Finally, MGO personnel can be entirely dispersed if the MGO government embarks on violence.
Irreni is a political laboratory. As such there will be many competing experiments running simultaneously around the world. This can be easily accomplished where billions of people on planet Earth today translates into hundreds of millions of MGOs as test tubes in our Irreni lab. What this means is the Irreni has built in the mechanism for weighing bigotry cultural changes within a culture against all the other changes going on at the same time. Is racism our biggest problem facing humanity today? Should racism changes take a back seat to climate change management? We don't think that way today because we just are reactionary based upon whatever sensational disaster or calamity pops up. That is no way to run a country or a culture. Irreni World Scale is by definition a political laboratory and all experiments are continuously weighted as part of the larger whole.
Join an MGO today!
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You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
https://irreni.blogspot.com/p/join.html
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
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Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
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Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
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