We will have to agree to disagree about whether that represents a moving target or not and the real proof will ultimately result from the ability of the Rent/Trade Board to continue to remain a viable avenue for
DVC rentals. My mickeybar bets it will.
For what it's worth, I don't think the underlying principles are a moving target. And, I think the R/T board
will remain viable---and probably more than just viable. But, I suspect in the end that any mechanisms won't quite capture the sense of "community" that they are meant to impose. They might come close, and that might be good enough. We'll see with time, and I hope that they do.
Thought I would save everyone some time.
Off topic, but that course was my favorite class in college (and no, I wasn't a philosophy major). For those who haven't taken it, the general thrust is to explore whether or not we can "know" (or, equivalently, "prove") anything at all regarding things in the natural world. For example, how do you "know" that the next time you step on the floor, it will hold you up? How do you "know" that the lamp you see in the corner is really there, and not some illusion? How do you "know" that the other people you speak with are really people with souls, and not just clever automatons meant to look like people?
The course starts by showing that you really can't know any of this stuff---you have past experience, or personal frames of reference, but not absolute knowledge of the future or the external world; likewise you might know things you personally verified earlier, but they could have changed since you checked them, or your senses befuddled, etc. You then progress through a variety of attempts to refute this position. For example, you try to come up with alternate definitions of the word "know". In the end, though, none of this works.
So far, this was just very frustrating, but in an interesting sort of way. Until, that is, the last lecture. The professor (at Berkeley) who taught the class was
Barry Stroud. At the time, he was the guy who "wrote the book" on epistemology---if you were taking the philosophy of knowledge at a reasonably serious university, chances are good that Stroud's book was in your reading list---probably at the top.
So, it was extremely cool when he concluded his course with the following observation. I am paraphrasing here, because it was 20 years ago, but I still remember where I was sitting in the lecture hall when he said it:
So, if you've been following along, you've come to the inescapable conclusion that we don't really "know" anything. We've tried to redefine knowledge, and we've tried a variety of proof techniques, but none of those have actually worked. So, where does that leave us?
In my opinion, that leaves us to conclude that philosophy, as a discipline, must be utterly worthless. Because of course we know things! How else could we get through life? Can you imagine what life would be like if every time you tried to open a door you first had to convince yourself that the doorknob was really there? Ridiculous! So, clearly, philosophy is just dead wrong on this question.
And, this is my line of research; my life's work. To understand why philosophy is so broken as to not be able to make statements about these most elementary of truths.
You could literally hear the brains exploding in the room.
The Man in epistemology just openly said what we all had been thinking all along---it was all a bunch of crap. It was very,
very cool.
I don't care if this post counts or not
