The Meaning And Measurement Of Destination Image: Fill & Download for Free

There are two related words involved here, that are often misused to great confusion.Resizing means changing how large an image appears on some output medium, whether print or screen. This is not an inherent property of digital images, which are just grids of numbers.Part of the confusion comes when you resize an image for output on a screen, because sizes on screens are also often measured in pixels rather than physical units like millimetres or inches. Because there’s no standardised way to get the pixel density of any given screen, it’s genrally impossible to specify an exact physical size, so we fall back to using pixels, and hope for the best.None of this is a problem when outputting to a physical medium like print on paper, because the units are always based on physical measurements, not, say, how many ink dots wide the image is.To output a digital image of a particular width, in pixels, to a screen at a different width, in pixels, we need to do…Resampling, where we mathematically interpolate what each pixel in the destination image is made up from in the source image. For example if you have a source image 4 pixels wide but you want to show it in a space only 2 pixels wide, each destination pixel will be an average of 2 source pixels: [▓░] → [▒]When you resample the other way, into a larger destination image, you basically invent new pixels to put into the gaps that’d be left: [▓░] → [▓▒░]

Image SourceAfrica has never been a prime destination for foreign investment. Further, not all investments are equal. In my books, inflows should be graded based on the amount and quality of jobs they create, as well as their outlying positive effects in the recipient economy. Places like the Caymans or Ireland are inflated due to the inflows from companies that adhere legalistically to their country's tax codes. Those, like the resource extraction investments made in Africa, lead to a minority of well-enumerated jobs. That is where the comparison ends.Tax havens have strong laws protecting property. This is the incentive that encourages further investment. African countries rank poorly in all the standard measurements of legal enforcement. Further, mining jobs although lucrative tend to be economic siloes in Africa. The support services needed for tax havens: electricity, IT support, legal services are usually close at hand. In contrast, the major processing centres for African resources are usually not on the continent; places like Belgium, Israel, the UAE, Switzerland and Singapore are where the diamonds are polished, the gold and crude oil refined. An ideal historical example would be how the lack of a production base in Spain meant that the bullion flow from the Americas, although the property of Spain, ended up creating jobs in England and the low countries. African countries tend to have more people seeking employment, whereas those jobs can make a positive dent in the job-market of low population countries, their positive effects may be more muted in a country like Nigeria or Egypt. For perspective, globally, the entire mineral production value chain employs some 50 million people. Agriculture employs close to a billion, many of them in Africa.Financial transactions in tax havens occur in equivalent or near equivalent currencies: Pounds or Euro. The lucrative salaries for the minority also increase the demand for foreign exchange. The cars, jaunts abroad or Rolexes they require as status signals are not made in Africa. While the Euro or Pound crossing a ration of 2:1, in exchange for the dollar, is likely to bring on fainting spells, the Nigerian Naira trades at a ratio of 360:1 and the South African Rand at a ration of 15:1. As the demand from these countries for more foreign exchange increases, unless it is balanced out by a demand for their currency from foreigners; that will only drive the exchange rate higher. This is to the detriment of farmers, who need things like fertilizers, and local manufacturers; who being unable to compete on quality have to do so on price. This is the famed Dutch disease.Of course, foreign investment is merely the means to an end of increased productivity. South Africa is one of the largest mineral producers in the world. Nigeria exports some 2 million barrels of crude oil daily. African countries are some of the largest producers of commodities in the world. All those bring in tens of billions in revenue. That is where onerous taxation and corruption may then come in. But just as the countries' resource revenues need to be put into context, so too do the levels of foreign investment.The narrative is that African countries are especially corrupt; they are, but not especially so; indeed some of them are less corrupt than richer countries. The correct view, in my opinion, is that corruption in African countries is more destructive because it cannibalises already scarce resources. One of my favourite talking points is how South Korea makes more from a single export category than Nigeria and South Africa make from all their combined export revenues. That would mean that Nigeria or South Africa merely being just as corrupt as South Korea would be more damaging to them. They need to be less because they have less. That they are not, is, as the kids say, highly problematic.

(Note: the content of this post has largely been superceded by 3 Dialogs with less text.. If you’re arriving here via a link, I recommend one more click! :) )——-The point of living isn’t to “make life perfect” or “accept our lives as perfect” or “have everything we want.” The point of life is to express true self.That little phrase… “express true self” — packs an enormous amount of meaning, if one understands it well. But not that many people understand it well, so to make sense of this discussion we have to go on a kind of journey.Like all journeys, this one starts from wherever you are now. For most people, the “where I am now” should really be described as “somewhat trapped in my identity.” That is, we have beliefs about who and what we are, and those beliefs — when seen from an appropriately high altitude — turn out to be a kind of prison which limits our understanding of who we are and our vision of what’s possible in life.Deprived of freedom by our prison, we thrash around trying to solve the consequences arising from a small cell. A prisoner has a lot of reasons to be frustrated; at night you can hear them humming “I Shall Be Released” wistfully, dreaming of life beyond the walls, and those dreams show up as desires that seem unachievable or “Someday-ish”: “someday, when I get a new job” or “someday, when I get rid of the spouse I have and marry the one I want”, or “someday when I’m rich” or “someday when I’m older and don’t have to put up with my parents”…. someday, I shall be released from my prison. But today, I’m frustrated and looking for comfort, distraction, pleasure, progress, self-esteem, relief from suffering, etc.Our desires for a better life are not the disease, they’re the symptom: if you’re in prison, you have a lot of frustrated desires and you spend a lot of energy trying to scratch those itches. But if you manage to smuggle some whiskey into your cell, you might feel better that night but it doesn’t change the basic impenetrability of the walls. In the morning, there you are again, yes?The disease is the prison. And what is the prison? The walls of the prison are made out of beliefs. And what are beliefs? The way I like to say it is that “beliefs are disowned meaning.” That phrase “disowned meaning” is a bit tricky to grasp, so part of the journey of this answer is to clarify it and give it some context. Ultimately what we want is to escape from the prison, yes? Or even better: not just escape from the prison, but understand how prisons get built so that we can avoid building yet another prison if we manage to escape from the current one!Because… even if you escape the current prison, if the prison-building instincts continue to operate, a new prison will result. You’ll turn your freedom back into a trap again. You have to master the principles of freedom maintenance, one could say, if you’re going to really solve the root of this human condition.I like to frame our problem by dividing it up into three distinct perspectives. This is about three different ways to look at the same phenomenon, you could say — each perspective gives a different focus, but it’s really all the same thing. It’s just that if you walk around the difficult topic and study it from these 3 different angles, it becomes possible to see the underlying unity by noticing the connections between the things that you see from each view. The 3 views merge together into a greater whole with persistence.To keep it simple, I usually just number the 3 views, and call them “dialog 1, 2, and 3”. (There’s various ways to give them titles instead of numbers, but the titles are only meaningful if you’ve had some exposure to each conversation, so numbers are good enough to get started.)Here’s a short treatment of the 3 perspectives:Dialog #1We’ve already started dialog #1 above — by talking about how humans are trapped in their identities a bit. The first dialog explores the nature of the traps that we’re in and where those traps come from.The basic principle here is that humans get trapped because the kind of “self” which they believe in is a defined object. The mind makes up an identity which it believes represents “me”, and that identity becomes the focal point of survival instincts — the instincts which we all have, which are baked-in to our ancient emotional, psychological, and biological wiring. We all want to survive, and it’s a very powerful force, and when the mind cooks up a concept of self, our survival instincts get tuned in to that concept and survival becomes more than “don’t get hit by a bus” — it becomes “make your self-concept valid and worthy and safe and persistent.”The structure of values which emerges from that Prime Directive (a.k.a “make the ego survive at all costs!”) tends to produce a lot of limitations on our experience of self and our self-expression. For example, the human tendency towards self-righteousness is a manifestation of this ego-survival instinct: “having defined myself by allegiance to some abstract ideal, my ego is at stake when that idea is challenged by others”, and so one must “fight for their ideas” — often that turns into overwrought conflict and long, nasty arguments about politics or religion or who’s-better-than-whom or who-did-what-to-whom and so on.Self-righteousness is a symptom of being in prison: if I depend on my beliefs to tell me who I am, then I am enslaved by the need to defend those beliefs. But self-righteousness is not the only symptom of imprisonment: literally anything which we use to define ourselves has some means of manifesting prison-like symptoms. (Consider the endless and tedious questions on Quora like “can an INTP love an ENFJ?”, as if there were 16 cell blocks in the Jail of Love and the rules may not allow the inmates to mix freely…)In Dialog #1, the goal is to “turn on the lights so the prison is visible”, and then begin to take ownership of the prison. To own the prison is to shift your relationship to it — instead of denying its existence (i.e. “who me? I’m not trapped!”) or lamenting its existence (“poor me, I wish I could be free”) or blaming The System (“we’re all victims! It’s the Trilateral Commission or Original Sin or The Human Condition”), what’s needed is truth-telling and responsibility-taking: the prison is real, I can see it and understand how it works, and I can recognize my own hand in its construction and maintenance.That’s Dialog #1: when you can take ownership of the prison, seeing how it works and recognizing your own participation in its existence, that’s a huge step towards recovering freedom.Dialog #2Dialog #2 can be introduced by contrasting “the Reporter” and “the King”. A reporter is the personification of “representational meaning”. What does that mean? To “represent” something is to “talk about it as an external thing.” When a reporter shows up at the scene of an auto accident, they take notes and pictures so that the news can be accurately presented to the public, yes?The measure of success for a reporter is “did he accurately describe the facts of the situation?”, and there’s bonus points for “did he deliver a compelling story that’s readable and holds the reader’s interest?”But what’s not immediately visible when we discuss the reporter’s view is that the reporter is bound by a set of rules of meaning: the reporter is constrained in their relationship to the news they report — the reporter “stands outside” of the events, a mere observer. In theory, the reporter doesn’t make the news, he just tells it, right? His relationship is limited, he has no responsibility for what happened, he only has responsibility to re-present it accurately and engagingly to the public.The reporter is “boxed in by the commitment to representation”. He’s not allowed to interfere or help, and he’s not to blame for the accident. His status as an observer renders him powerless to change reality, his role is just to talk about it as an outsider.Contrast that with the king now: the king is different from the reporter, because the king has the authority to “make meaning.” If the king waves his scepter from the throne and says “let there be a tax on tea!”, then a tax on tea comes into being. The king causes certain kinds of truth to come into existence, because he has a different relationship to the kingdom than the reporter — he is not limited to merely telling us about the existing taxes, he can make new taxes with his authority.The king’s relationship “transcends observation”: it goes beyond the boundaries of the reporter’s rule-bound limitations. The king doesn’t just observe the accident and write about it, he gets in there and waves his scepter to make things happen and (hopefully) foster the cleanup, healing, and installation of new traffic lights, etc. The king can be active in ways that the reporter cannot, as a result of his holding authority which transcends the limits of the representation-only mindset.This is a simplification of Dialog #2 — really, it’s about the difference between “discriminative meaning” and “transcendent meaning”, with the reporter and the king being personifications of those abstract ideas. Discriminative meaning is what we do when we’re “bound by the rules of meaning” — when we relate to things as if they’re external to us and their truth is based on facts which we aren’t responsible for. Discriminative meaning trusts the divisions between self-and-other, good and bad, inside and outside, important and unimportant, cause and effect, and all of the other elements of meaning which we typically hold as “just the way it is” — the rules of the game of meaning which were here before we arrived and will be here after we’re gone.Believing ourselves to be mere spectators in the game of meaning, confined to the grandstands to watch the drama play out on the field, we grant too much trust to the reality of the line between fan and athlete — we think that the rules of meaning severely restrict what we can be and what we can think, and in our deeply-entrenched habit of Reporter-ness, it simply doesn’t occur to us very often to pick up a scepter and start making new truth.Dialog #2 is largely about the idea that we are each “the meaning-maker” in our own lives, but we have lost touch with that or never understood it in the first place. If the king falls asleep and his sceptre drops to the floor, and then he dreams a dream of himself as a reporter, he could be forgiven for thinking that he’s powerless at the scene of the accident, yes? He wouldn’t make any tea taxes while dreaming, he’d be scribbling notes and writing about the way things are in the kingdom, unaware of his true role in the unfolding of national events.To achieve competence with Dialog #2 is about the ability to “make transcendent meaning” freely, which starts with seeing how one abdicates or disowns the meaning they make, believing themselves to be constrained by “the rules of logic” or “the need for evidence” or “conventional thinking” or “what everybody knows” — our belief that what we interpret as real is a mere representation of objective reality, discounting the power of the meaning we have made from the flow of events that we have experienced, and rejecting the principle that we’re the source of all meaning in our worlds.To see clearly from this perspective is to recognize that authenticity requires one to take responsibility for the meaning that they make and start operating as a causal force rather than a mere faithful representer: to stop “playing reporter” all the time and pick up the sceptre, with some appreciation of its power and respect for the consequences of neglecting it.Dialog #3Dialog #3 approaches the question “who am I?” from a perspective which appreciates both of the other dialogs. On the one hand, we’re trying to take responsibility for the trap that we’re in (“owning the ego”), and on the other hand we’re alert to the difference between discriminative and transcendent meaning, such that we don’t consider ourselves limited to just “telling it the way that we see it.”If you have some competence in both of those dialogs, and then ask “who am I?” with a fresh set of eyes that competence provides, then a new possibility can emerge which was previously obscure or impossible to conceive: to have an active hand in putting meaning into “I”.There are two ways that “the self” can be a meaningful phrase. The first way is what we already understand: the mind runs unconscious and reactive psychological processes, those processes operate under the pretense of being a reporter who “discovers the self” and “tries to represent it as ideas and images” in the mind. This first kind of self is reasonably entitled “ego”, not because it necessarily thinks too highly of itself, but because it is a construct of discriminative thinking — thinking which trusts certain distinctions too much and relies on them when formulating the concept of self, without taking any ownership of the process which produces that self-concept.The second way that the self can be meaningful is if the meaning-maker starts to wield its scepter in a special way. Once a human being understands that they are the source of all meaning in their world — once they stop believing themselves to be a mere reporter on “the way I am and the way things are”, then new possibilities come into existence which were previously obscured. In particular, the new possibililty that matters in this Dialog #3 is the possibility of becoming “self-grounding.”To understand self-grounding, you have to wrestle with a paradox. There’s various ways to approach the paradox, and various metaphors that I use to talk about it. The basic idea is that “true self is its own ground of being.” It’s like a candle that makes it’s own wax, so that there’s never a shortage of light — or a train that lays its own track, so it always has somewhere to go, etc.In less metaphoric terms, true self “is the source of the truth of its own existence and validity.” This is both a very precise kind of thing, and at the same time very “mind-bending”, because it seems to break all of the rules that we take for granted about truth and existence. It’s easy to miss or dismiss this possibility, because in order to consider it seriously you really need the courage of a true king: someone who understands the scepter in their hand and notices what happens when they hold it up and face the mirror at the same time.I have the power to “make meaning”, rather than merely reporting on it. This principle extends not only to the meaning that I make about life, it extends to the meaning that I give to “myself”, as well. What does “I” mean? What does that symbol refer to?If I am the maker-of-all-meaning, then “I” is included in the set of all meanings, and I am now also the maker of myself… with potentially unlimited responsibility for that meaning. Associated with that unlimited responsibility is unlimited freedom — something which we can naturally realize if we simply trace the trajectory of the common-sense insight that “freedom and responsibility are correlated.”Indeed they are: my level of freedom is correlated with my willingness to take responsibility, and when the topic is “what does ‘I’ mean?”, the possibilities which are available very much depend on the quality of my grip on that scepter that makes meaning.So to resolve this paradox, where “I” is the source of all meaning, including the meaning of itself, there must be more than “a realization or insight”. There must be more than a mere observation or reporting-on-what-I-discovers. There must be a kind of action — an “existential act”, in which “I” exercises its authority to give meaning to things, while facing the mirror… granting validity to itself.To be self-grounding is to be the ongoing and sustainable source of the truth of ones’ own existence and validity. Doing that necessarily implies that one becomes independent of other kinds of validation: I no longer need evidence that proves I’m OK. I no longer need “self-esteem” in the ordinary sense of the word, where my psychological reactions are cooperative with my emotional need to feel validated and important relative to others, etc. The kind of “I” which owns its own foundation does not need to prove anything to itself or others, because it is not relying on a chain of evidence or argument which validates and sustains its own meaning and significance.It makes its own meaning and significance, in real time, in an entirely sustainable flow from source to destination and back to source again: this truth is a light that does not need external sources of candle wax, and thus is not enslaved by the wax salesmen.These three dialogs are one way of slicing up the existential problem of the nature of the self: of course there are other approaches, but I’ve been working this problem for many years and this is what works for me. Having said all of that, to return to your question — and my claim that the point of life is “to express true self” — it may be possible now to at least hint at the depth of meaning in that phrase: true self has an unconditional foundation because it is self-provided. That foundation isn’t some static rock on a mountain, it’s a living and breathing and ever-growing whole which radiates values and creativity and truth and joy and love and a deep beauty which appreciates the richness of reality without self-deception or “positive thinking” slathered on like cheap glitter. That kind of self mainly wants to express itself by awakening its world and inviting everyone out of the stands and onto the field.Is the game perfect? What does “perfect” mean? That’s up to you to define. I suggest that you define it in a way that honors your role as the author of the game. If you make the rules, fixing the imperfections is actually straightforward.