[Taxacom] GLOBAL-TREEFINDER

[Gangolf Jobb]

A new unpaid TREEFINDER version is online at:

   www.treefinder.de

TREEFINDER is a software to compute phylogenetic trees from molecular 
sequences.

New features include:

 - global search from multiple start trees
 - user-definable start trees
 - start tree generator
 - export of tip distances
 - more tolerant data import
 - more compatible PostScript code
 - bootstrap analysis under topological constraints
 - confidence limits for all numerical results, including
 - confidence limits for divergence times
 - simplified tree calibration
 - minor bug fixes

We need more freedom in science, more independence, more democracy. We 
need decent pay at home.

Are you, too, fed up watching others live in nice houses that a 
scientist can never afford? Watching them have space and the security to 
raise a family while you have not, have time for other things than work? 
No matter how much I work - as an academic scientist I will never be 
able to buy me a nice house with a garden near Munich, not within 
reasonable time. But inheritors and speculators can, football players, 
farmers, lawyers, the top managers of big companies. Those who own, the 
lobbyists, and those who decide about their own salaries. Is it really 
necessary that the rich must earn from everything we do? Why does a 
doctor's ex-wife get more than a working scientist? Why does her lawyer 
get more? Why the owner of her house? What makes their "work" more 
important than science? Give someone 10,000,000 Euros per year for 
dismissing thousands of people, that's useful! When honest work does not 
pay we have crime and rebellion and it is time for a change.

I still have no position in Munich. They are now employing people from 
foreign countries and are expecting me to go abroad. They are expecting 
me to give up TREEFINDER and work on somebody else's problem. After nine 
years of hard work I can still not earn my life because some professors 
are against it. Science makes poor and homeless. Good work does not pay. 
Little effort will be honoured the same as huge, too much effort will be 
punished. Just the number of publications counts, just the number of 
softwares that have been begun and never finished, just the number of 
institutes where one has stayed for a while. Talk much about few, teach 
what is easy to explain. Invent the problems that are easy to solve and 
accomplishable during your short-time stays. And why not exploiting 
others if you've been exploited, too? Keep out the competent, award each 
other positions and prizes but don't change the world. - THIS is what 
the professors are teaching us! Moreover, they are teaching us 
dependence and how to be good employees, good bureaucrats, and how not 
to question the established order. But the opposite is what people 
should learn in universities and schools.

Funding regulations encourage the migration of scientists to keep the 
salaries low, to prevent people from doing their own thing. Exploiting 
foreigners is easy as they have no local support and no local 
commitment, they feel like guests and not responsible to change 
anything. What remains is living for the job. Scientists stay where you 
come from! Most science jobs are not worth moving one centimeter away 
from home. Insist on doing what you personally find useful at your home 
places, strike for adequate jobs and decent pay! If you cannot 
participate, you must work against the system. If you cannot have 
security, you must work against the system. Jobs must come to the people 
and not vice versa. The outflows of "human capital" from most places of 
the world leave deserts of opportunity behind.

The mere existence of rich people makes most people poor. The rich buy 
everything and others must pay them rent, loose their jobs, must be 
profitable. Many must dig for what others just put in a safe. Many are 
needed to provide all the luxuries that only a rich minority can afford, 
work that is useless for most of us. The rich consume the most 
resources, make everything expensive, make it unavailable for others and 
for better purposes. Land, people, ideas are wasted to entertain the 
rich, and to let them feel superior. How many people could do science 
instead? Or help preventing the destruction of nature? How many could do 
useful work. Nice work. Work they like. See how much effort is put into 
making everyone's life expensive and complicated, into the creation of 
needs that never existed before, into everything that gets the rich even 
more. See how many people must do idiotic things because they are poor, 
because others own everything.

Too many people depend on what the rich may want to spend money for. The 
rich decide what is market and where money is invested, decide who may 
have a job and who not, decide whose work is useful and whose not. The 
rich take influence on politics and consumer behavior, make laws that 
suite their own needs. The free market is undemocratic, it always 
decides in favor of the rich. A democracy must not tolerate the 
accumulation of too much capital in a few hands, must avoid too much 
difference in wealth. The use of capital must be controlled by the 
public, and for the benefit of the public. We need laws to limit high 
incomes and private property to no more than, say, ten times of what an 
average citizen can get for useful WORK. We must limit the possibilities 
of earning from other sources than useful work - and define 
democratically what is useful. We must limit earning from owning. Limit 
advertising. Limit the amount of land that a person or company may 
occupy and disfigure with superfluous buildings. Competition is no fun 
if some people inherit everything and get all the support while others 
don't.

Capitalism is legalized blackmail. From everything that is produced a 
significant portion goes to the rich and is lost for the public. Too 
many people are excluded from the useful trades and must serve the rich, 
must invent or sell something idiotic, cause damage, get on everyone 
else's nerves. Capitalism produces a world of idiots in which we all 
must live in. Economic growth is most of all a method how the rich avoid 
sharing with us. We get something only if they get more. Capitalism 
works fine at the cost of others, at the cost of nature. But capitalism 
does not work fine as soon as resources must be shared. We must close 
the cycle of wealth. We must avoid that the fruits of our labors 
accumulate and get burned at the tip of a social pyramid and are used 
against us. Why let the rich decide what we do? Why let them earn 
without work? Why let them have fun at our expense? Just because they 
have the money? Why don't we simply expropriate the rich? Not to make 
people equal, but to ensure that good work pays. To ensure that 
everybody is given the chance to do good work. To ensure that 
unnecessary economic activities are avoided and natural resources are saved.

Avoid all the advertizing that nobody wants to see! Avoid over-feeding 
markets with over-production and unnecessary products and services! 
Avoid replacing good things by expensive things! Avoid the trading of 
mountains of junk goods! Avoid wasting people's time in traffic jams and 
warehouses, in unnecessary meetings and seminars! Avoid the daily 
transportation of millions of people to their unnecessary jobs and back 
and save a lot of energy! Work less! Work at home! Get up late! Do 
something useful! Don't buy the rich a sailing boat! And if you don't 
have the choice, if the rich is blackmailing you, then go and burn* it 
down in the night! Be as unloyal to your employers as they are to you! 
Work for yourself, work for the public - but don't make the rich more rich!

(*) BTW: This is all meant symbolically. Of course, we must change the 
world by peaceful and democratic means, and in accordance with the 
constitution of the respective country.

We need more alternatives to the employers' mercy, more possibilities to 
work as free-lancers. We need public funding for all kinds of useful 
work that no market exists for, or not yet exists for, funding that must 
be available to everybody. Not only for scientific work, but also for 
political work, environmental work, social work. For Inventors. For all 
who hate excessive commercialism. The banks are our worst enemies 
because they demand the privatization of everything. We need again more 
public enterprises that guarantee jobs and reliable incomes to everybody 
and earn money for PUBLIC use. We must nationalize banks and insurance 
companies, airlines and energy providers, telecommunication and 
supermarket chains, all large corporations. Let this all be ours! Not 
theirs. We must protect public enterprises against privatization. We 
must protect local economies against competition and exploitation from 
outside. And people need more time to think. It is inacceptable that 
employers decide where we live and what we do and that they reduce us to 
disposable manpower, that they populate our home places with cheap 
competitors and transfer our jobs and our technology to elsewhere. We 
cannot accept that employers blackmail us with unemployment and global 
competition, make us superfluous, make us die out. We are not tools that 
one may use for a while and then throw away.

There is enough for all: Take it away from the rich. Take it for having 
provided them the productive environment that has made them rich. Take 
it as a compensation for excluding us from the pleasant side of life. 
Raise more taxes on luxuries, on land, on flying, on stays in expensive 
hotels, on driving expensive cars. Take it away from all who sell 
questionable products and services, from all who serve the rich. Let 
taxes on being rich follow dynamically the number of unemployed people, 
the number of crimes. Let taxes depend on the usefulness of one's work. 
Penalize junk goods and cheap imports from China. Penalize buying more 
than one needs. Maximize life-quality for all instead of shareholders' 
profits. Stop averaging away the world's diversity of cultures and 
languages. Stop sacrificing people's commitment to particular places or 
works or local communities for the benefit of few, and at the expense of 
most of us. The way world is changing is not the only one possible. It 
is what WE permit and encourage, what WE buy and vote for, what WE do - 
and what we not do. And too often it is what the rich make us believe we 
should do.

We - the poor - are the majority. We can take away whatever we want. 
Most of us just don't know because the rich don't want us to know.

We - the academics - can have a strong influence on public opinion. 
Information management is our profession. We can become very dangerous 
to the rich and the powerful IF AND ONLY IF we become advocates of the 
poor and the exploited. Spread your opinions to motivate others with 
similar opinions! Spread your doubts! Say what spoils your oppressors' 
business! We must expropriate the rich, they are a threat to the world. 
They threaten science, peace, our future, and everything that does not 
promise fast profits.

Discontent is the fuel that drives revolutions. Let's set it on fire!


Gangolf Jobb