Round Up #34

Before I decided on my format change, I was going to space out round ups by three months and then only have 10 slots -- using this to create some selective pressure toward quality.  

As it is, the real skill of going through a value bin is learning how to sort through for what is good and useful, so I will just be sending out my findings more in the style of a fire hose.  This might therefore be the final round up post.

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1)  So why is a ruler called a ruler, and what does it tell us about how the pre-moderns looked at political power?

2) On Sauntering, from a rightful urban descendant of Thoreau's from the 1920s. 

A kind of philosophy distills itself in the mind of the saunterer. Painfully tedious as people often are, they have the sublime quality of interesting one. Not merely by what they say, but often by what they don't say. Their eyes—how amazing is the thought of all those millions of little betraying windows! How bravely they struggle to express what is in them. A modern essayist has spoken of "the haggard necessities of parlor conversation." But the life of the streets has no such conventions. It is real: it comes hot from the pan. It is as informal, as direct and as unpretentious as the greetings of dogs. It is a never-failing remedy for the blues.

3) Newton, Defoe and Financial Bubbles. 

4) http://elizabethandrama.org/  

Indeed, though most people only think of Shakespeare when they think of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare wrote only 37 plays (a couple in collaboration) that we know of; happily, more than 600 plays from this era survive.  This means that, for those who savor the potential exquisiteness of the English language, our ancient dramas can be the source of a lifetime worth of reading enjoyment.

5) Another maker channel I enjoy, Noho91.  He has more equipment than my gold standard, but is willing to reach down more to useful low tech hacks to help with his projects.  Representative example. 

6)  Cola di Rienzo and the basically led a 1340s French Revolution in Italy.  The difference being he lost and didn't change the arc of events in the same way. 

7)  The Sibylline Books were Roman books that they consulted at key times, Foundation style. 

8) Coooool.

9)  Great discussion of technology and its effects.

10)  I love the patter this man gives as he shows levels of complexity in drawing. 

Round Up #33

Aphorisms/Shorts
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"[Nietzsche] has all the psychological penetration of the great novelists who were his contemporaries, minus the characters (his loneliness was so intense he didn't even have them for company)."  Geoff Dyer.

“There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."  Alexander Von Humboldt

"Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution."  -- attribution is contested.  Some claim Milton Friedman.  Some a Russian proverb. 

Sure, so many good lines in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but here is one that is vastly under-appreciated: 

Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent

"Ignorance is bliss.  But bliss is boring." Coded message in the show Gravity Falls.

"Where the study of history might seek to discover, explain and understand, possibly to facilitate judgment, our current moment demands decision first, study later (if at all)." William Davies.

"Beauty has been stolen from the people and sold back to them under the concept of luxury."  Kanye West

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little…” Roland Barthes

Links and Research
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Great piece on Nietzsche's views of education and how his critiques hold up today.

Now that is an interesting town.

Besançon is the historical capital of watchmaking in France. This has led it to become a center for innovative companies in the fields of microtechnology, micromechanics, and biomedical engineering. . . 

The greenest city in France,[5] it enjoys a quality of life recognized in Europe. Thanks to its rich historical and cultural heritage and its unique architecture, Besançon has been labeled a "Town of Art and History" since 1986 and its fortifications due to Vauban has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2008.

Cool blog: The Impractical Cogitator. 

Fun.

And, yes. 

I dig craftsmanship with hand tools.  I'll even tolerate the douchie patrons of the work, if it means that powerful play goes on. 

Samo Burja: not only a better collapse theorist than me, but a better on the other hand optimist, and even scholar of China during the Warring States period. 

It makes perfect sense that "desultory" is used less and less in the language over time.   

Ian Welsh gives some nuggets from an absolute "wow" book.  Here's a humdinger: 

We have been propagandized to view testosterone as related to violence.

Nope.

Oh, it can be. But what testosterone appears to actually be related to is status seeking. If violence and bullying is what a society rewards with status, then yup, testosterone is about violence.

But if hugging and caring for people will get you more status, suddenly high-T individuals are the biggest huggers and carers around. . . And here’s the thing, in hunter-gatherer bands (note the word bands), the high status individuals are caring, wise and slow to anger. The high status caring men also spread their genes around plenty.

In researching how vinegar could disinfect compared to bleach, I came across this gem of an article.  What left me quite bemused was the how defensive the article was, written by someone who had clearly been assaulted and damaged by internet culture.  It makes me chuckle when I think about it.  

Round Up #32

Aphorisms/Shorts
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If you can see through G.K. Chesterton's work to know where he is engaging in sophistry, and where he is being brilliant, then you are well on your way to fruitful explorations of the world.

"To know solves only subordinate problems, but learning protects against tedium." Don Colacho.  Now that's a manifesto, right there.

 "Hemmed in by language and horizons of time and space, reading is always a stylising of past reality."  John Keane

Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter:  "I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues . . . Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me . . . Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat.”

If glass were invented today, it would be hailed as this amazing technology that could be 3D printed using . . . sand itself!  What a disruptive technology!  Let's get some start ups going, and bid up their price to earnings somewhere between 800 and infinity (which would be the case if they had no earnings -- because who needs earnings when you are dIsRupTIve !?!) 

Links/research
===

I've been getting into mechanical toys again.  This has lead me to the marvelous Paul Spooner -- one, and two videos.  How is this for an artistic statement? 

As well as all the cars, clocks and other machines that make our lives efficient and comfortable, there are quite a lot of machines that have no practical use at all. Machines that are the antithesis of practicality, made by artists who have no interest in efficiency or comfort. They often make machines that express their anger about the dehumanising mechanisation of war, policing, bureaucracy or about the increasing distance between people who seem always to be on the phone but seldom talking to those next to them.

My machines are even more useless than those because I’m not even angry, having led an easy life in a beautiful country doing pretty much as I please all day. I make machines about things I find funny or absurd, hoping that others will feel the same. Even if I am a little annoyed when I start making something, the feeling has usually worn off by the time I’ve finished.

Video compiling David Lynch arguing that habits and routines free him to be creative. 

From the book Range by David Epstein

The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area (33)

I found the Intelligence Squared YouTube channel.  Seems good to give content to listen to while I do chores.

I don't know if this is a rabbit hole I want to go down, but there are claims to co-ops handled the last global financial crisis better than traditional for-profit companies.

. . . Lead to list of worker cooperatives, which lead to this line, which I found amusing "Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse is a radical infoshop . . ."  (It's worth saying that when it comes to anarchist stuff I am such a MOP.  It's not my thing, but I find it interesting to look at).

Round-Up #31

Our feature presentation reminds you to cultivate your garden.

 

Aphorisms and Shorts
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 While a Matrix metaphor might work when describing the masses, it is better to think of the elites in the U.S. as lotus eaters.  They are too doped up on greed to make any moves.  Alas, they've also locked the doors to the cockpit and are the only ones who can steer.

Possible rule to blunt consumerism: after you have secured food, shelter, heating/cooling, only buy things that you will do at least three hours of work with.

"History is an art, like the other sciences" Veronica Wedgood.

"Liberty is not the fruit of order alone; it is the fruit of mutual concessions between order and disorder." Don Colacho.  I despair of this ever being widely (enough) understood.

Rank and file Republican voters think everything is a conspiracy, and then vote in such a way as to conspiracies happen.  (Democrats now do it too, but with different conspiracies).

In the age of the printing press,  anonymity was a way to avoid the hectoring of the outside world and achieve authenticity.  In the internet age, anonymity is a way to join in the hectoring and with it the pan-societal effort to make sure no can be authentic anywhere.

Why has all conservatism become a project in personal vanity?  It's the logic of profit that surrounds our culture.  It's impossible for nearly anyone to imagine investing in something that might cost them more than they receive.  Thus the conservatives feel their best return on investment is to set back and proclaim.

Traditionalism in America has nothing to do with tradition.

Related.  "Speech is sharing -- a cooperative art.  You're not sharing, merely egoizing."  Ursula Le Guin.  From The Dispossessed.

The real curse of living in interesting times is watching people try to win iteration after iteration of a negative sum game.

Links and Research
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I likee.

Always looking for the visually stunning.

Here's a sub-Reddit that aggregates interesting articles better than I do.  I think I am going to stop doing that soon.

Speaking of Reddit, here is a good thread of Weird Collapse thought, one not destined for the kind of aggregation mentioned just above.  

Cal Newport on the dying art of book reading.

I am working on another spiral through Western History for deeper understanding and amusement.  I started at 1455 and am reading each year in Wikipedia.  This will explain why my tid-bits might cluster together by year for a while.  I have no time-frame for how long this project will take.  I also will follow my own inclinations in reading whatever I want

The 1518 Dancing Plague -- maybe mushrooms, maybe mass hysteria.

I read this  short book on Martin Luther.  And it made me think of the nature of the Reformation as a revolution. From the text:

He [Martin Luther] was a revolutionary, but a conservative one.  

. . .

So often a new movement suffers from overenthusiasm. The Reformation was no exception in this respect. Zealots took the usual shortcut from bondage to freedom by way of turmoil instead of restrained orderly procedure. 

In parts of Germany the old ways were thrown off hastily. Organs, paintings, and statues were thrown from the churches, vestments were discarded, bread and wine were both administered to the laity, priests married, nuns took husbands, monastic vows were renounced, various forms of the mass were discontinued, priests and worshipers who persisted in the traditional forms were attacked.

It is interesting to contrast this with the French Revolution, which I recently learned more about in a book by J. F. Bosher.

Looking for a really basic investment strategy?  You could do worse than this.

Round Up #30

Aphorisms and Shorts
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We are all historians. We are all crafters of space. We are all psychologists.  We are all nutritionist.  We are all currency traders.  Doing any or all of these 100% according to the defaults around us is still a decision, often a very bad one.

I live in a red state (one with no blue counties, in fact), so I have a vested interest in team red doing okay, but I don't know how much an alpha male with guns is supposed to be worth against drones and tanks, but, sure, let's make a fetish out of small arms.

DeepMind-style AI will have a much easier time mastering clickbait headlines and tweets than long-form essays, to any level of human intelligence.  Perhaps it already has, and we're just not going to be told.

(Related). There won't ever be a need for AI to master the long-form essay.  The blood of the immature can always be stirred short-form (ergo keep it all short form AND keep them all immature!) and the retirement-center bots will be able to make do with small-talk.

Democracy as an institution is in really bad shape.  I am one of the few people who can acknowledge this without first taking glee in it, whereas those who can't are in denial.  Many of those who think they believe in Democracy really only believe in protecting their own feelings, and so cannot acknowledge the situation -- which only further weakens Democracy.

Having a mind blown and a mind stretched are very similar things.  A lot of it has to do with the amount of flexibility already present in the mind before going under the load.

People care so little about the truth, that any time anyone but those of the most demonstrably heroic bents says they are pursuing it, you should immediately start thinking what their real motivation is.

Great Hesse quote:  "I want to point out constantly and with infectious enthusiasm how blissfully varied the world is, and with equal constancy remind people that this variety is based on an underlying unity."


Link and Research
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Remember: not politics, but meta-politics.  Fascinating poll on self-censorship in U.S. and other issues meta-political.

50% of strong liberals support firing Trump donors, 36% of strong conservatives support firing Biden donors; 32% are worried about missing out on job opportunities because of their political opinions.

This discussion on atomic chess -- which I thought would have been solved but isn't -- also has this link showing anti-chess (aka losing chess) is solved for an opening (e3).  It would not have been intuitive to me that anti-chess was solved, but makes sense in light of the number of forced moves.

My current weird guy mathy obsession is multiples of threes that aren't multiples of nines.  So, when I set the timer on the microwave, I make sure to make it one of those numbers -- 21, 42, 33, the like.  42 being a particular favorite.  Anyway, this video shows why multiples of nine are still quite worthy.

Now that I know there is an ethnic group called the Karens, I can't unsee that when I see a Karen meme.

This one is more of a note to self -- you do realize this blog is more my notebook than anything else, yes? -- When Hesse was learning reading to study style, his favorite author was Vladimir Korolenko.  Here is what is available on Project Gutenberg.

Here is a piece that really takes to task the current belief that destruction - carbon = sustainability.

I found some more good doomer writing.  This time buried in a comment section.  I'm glad other people are doing it so I don't have to. Time to cut back on the political internet again.

Better doom than me: an empire of one.

Round Up #29

Aphorisms and Shorts
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The trans-humanist plan: to transcend the meat-space.  What's their back-up plan?  To do it better.

"Unable to achieve what it desires, 'progress' christens what it achieves desire."  -- Don Colacho.  This is great an explanation for neo-mania.

If living around beautiful old works is so edifying, if walkable towns so important, if there is a certain ineffable dolce vita to all things Italian, why did they invent fascism?

How often do you hear of the wealthy cleaning up a mess they created? 1) they refuse, as a matter of principle 2) it's cheaper to give to other causes, and they know it.

Instead of talking about having the wrong heroes, I think it is more useful to talk about admiring the wrong attributes.  The dominate culture values the fact of fortune, no matter how it was earned.  It values fame the same way.  These are bad values.

To right-wingers who brag "we have more guns": history shows that once you overthrow civil order, ya'll will stop being a "we" pretty quickly.

Isn't that what Padmé said?:
"So this is how liberty dies . . . with robots everywhere."
 *Glares at a droid.*

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Links and research
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As is known, I hate television.  Here's some more anti-television content, which linked to this academic paper.

Pondering the third aphorism -- the one about fascism -- above lead me to do some background research, eventually coming to the interesting position of John Adalbert Lukacs -- he classified himself as a reactionary, but under the rubric of being against vulgarity, widely defined.  This made him against the demagoguery of McCarthy and the invasion of Iraq.  Judge a reactionary on what they are reacting against.

Coming further down this line of research, check out this book review.

Lilla presents his point succinctly: “Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable.” 

. . . One might expect nostalgia to be a condition of the old. Surprisingly it isn’t. It is often the young who long for the return of a fictional past which never existed but offers a life without the tedious concerns of the present. 

. . . The old know better than the young that cultural memory is selective, and like memory of childbirth, tends to obscure the worst bits and present them as quaint. The old have heard the stories before, and their counter-stories. 

I discovered the word juggernaut

 is probably derived from the Sanskrit/Odia Jagannātha (Devanagari जगन्नाथ, Odia ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ) "world-lord", combining jagata ("world") and natha ("lord"), which is one of the names of Krishna found in the Sanskrit epics.

I learned that the Brother's Grimm began the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German equivalent of Oxford English Dictionary.

Use Dubai as a metaphor for our times.

Here is another good blog of someone who understands the doom.

From reading Range, I was exposed to the music of Django Reinhardt.

Le Guin sure knows how to do a commencement speech.

Round Up #27

Aphorisms/Shorts
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It would seem most successful entrepreneurs are people who don't think the rules apply to them and then in fact that turned out to be right long enough to build enough capital to either eventually comply with or change the rules.

We just accept at the level of truism that the internet contains "the sum total of all information," but if this is true why do most of the best blogs consistently import knowledge from books into the internet?

A while back my wife and I saw the most recent version of Emma.  It brought back to mind the terrible character of Frank Churchill.  But Frank Churchill shows the default, normalized behavior found on any remotely popular section of the internet, so much so that I don't know if it is even possible to explain to them what is wrong with how Churchill acts.  The classics bring my grief to the surface.

In these debauched times, the ability to read an unassigned book is potent signal of the tenderness, openness, and meta-cognition that is necessary (but not sufficient) to understand anything important.

To put a positive spin on the last quote, the test wouldn't work so well if our times weren't so debauched, decadent.

Also related.  I know somehow I'm the one who would seem rude by saying "I want to gauge if this conversation is worth continuing, so please tell me about some of the books you've read in the last six months."  Better to avoid situations where I even need to ask.

Many of those with an avid interest in collapse don't seem to understand that there is more to life than whatever ends up killing you.

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Links and Research
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So France has the highest per capita consumption of whisky in the world.  This really doesn't fit to stereotype, but that's why we keep learning.

. . .  Further interesting things down this line: India consumes the most total whisky.  BUT 85% of the population doesn't drink, and so the U.S. has a larger population of drinkers.  THEREFORE the Indian drinking population out-drinks the U.S. drinking population in whisky, but the billion people in India who don't drink drag the per capita numbers way down.

Speaking of alcohol, I wondered if was used as a drug in vision quests.  It would appear this was true at least for the Iroquois.

"Granola Shotgun" has a beautiful piece that performs the near-impossible and combines deep-felt empathy for an individual elder while at the same time exposing how her story shows the cracks in the systems Boomers are going to try to rely on.

I'm going to also guess the women in this piece is the one who expressed in another piece that a van-dwelling nomad who worked as a tech professional was cheating the system. Her position was treated with grace there as well.  Johnny S. sure does have a lot of tact.

I'm calling it quits on adding to my list of art from Reddit that deals with our Covid-19 shelter-in-place world. It is an interesting snap-shot of a moment and a gestalt.

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YouTube and Podcasts
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Data visualization to make primes and approximations of pi . . . stunning.  The video finishes with a brief, inspiring statement about the importance of mathematical play.

I got interested in stretching and used the search term "science of stretching."

• First video mentions some of the basics of what happens in a stretch, however  . . . 
• Second video shows how the benefits claimed are incorrect.
• This podcast has an interview with a researcher who agrees. 
• Apparently acupuncture isn't total bullshit. It has to do with moving connective tissue to get muscle stretches. 

Round Up #26 (Extra Doomy)

Aphorisms/Shorts
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Hate to break it to you, but you can't syllogism your way to a better society.  Especially if you're not willing to start with some ethical premises against narcissism or being self-centered.

The doomosphere does not lack in information, intelligence or perspectives. So I don't try to contribute in that way.  I feel like my niche is to try to provide some social skills.

The whole Democratic primary process has been a demonstration of how to turn educated voters into lower information voters.

When the political class has shown a complete, stark, sociopathic disregard for 80 percent of the population -- what is another 19 (or 19.9) percent?

Sorry, friends, the Left is a Granfallon.  My real Karass is those who get to the root of things (radical, I know).  Prep and survive, but not like a Prepper or Survivalist.

A t-shirt only I would like: I had to live through the deconstruction of simple, unhurried, sacred beauty and all I got were these lousy interesting times.





Articles Read
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Realizing how crucial Sarah Perry's work was to my explorations of happiness I decided to try to read more of her stuff.  It's an ongoing project, but it started with reading what she left up on The View from Hell.  There is very little left indeed, so I also read through the comments and thus was directed to

Razib Khan, filtered by the tag "liberalism." Here is a good quote for y'all:

 I’ve been writing and discussing with people on the internet, and in private, for many years now, and have come to the conclusion most people are decent, but they’re also craven and intellectually unserious outside of their domain specificity when they are intellectual. Many of our institutions are quite corrupt, and those which are supposedly the torchbearers of the Enlightenment, such as science, are filled with people who are also blind to their own biases or dominated by those who will plainly lie to advance their professional prospects or retain esteem from colleagues.

Yup, I'm am very bearish on the survival of democracy . . . and further scientific progress.   But I do like my own ongoing happiness project, so I probably won't be going much deeper down this path.  I recommend the whole piece, however; it tries to put a hopeful frame on it all.

Back to Perry.  I did not realize before that she had some great Dao writing, drawing from Christopher Alexander.  One, two, three.

I started another piece, Fluid Rigor, avoiding most of the branchings to other pieces, but not being able to stop myself to read Weaponized Sacredness before returning to FR.  It's a truly remarkable piece, giving an independent explanation of why coordination is so difficult, why middle management and Moloch reigns, and a justification of a Sabbath, even from the system's point of view.

I think I am going to stop the exploration there for now.  I have to show my respect for Perry as a much greater essayist, but this is exactly the kind of insight that can get you into trouble (meaning make you very unhappy).

On another note, Franco's regime shows that power (probably) doesn't work the way you think it does.

Reddit
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A piece on the effects (and affects) of advertising. Money quote (pun accepted):

Healthy identity formation comes from shared values and personal experiences, which create the foundation of the identity. But advertisers have invaded our lives and pushed to redefine our identities not by these things, but by products.

A piece on poverty, whose last section that reminds of the value of the drop out lifestyle.

How many rich people can afford to lay down all their work and go sit outside at 2 PM on a regular workday, simply because they notice the sun is shining? They can't!

And it finishes with this gem of a quote

I'll leave you with a quote of Don Colacho: The rich man is not disconcerted by anyone except by someone who does not envy him. [Link added by me.]

Youtube
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Youtube thinks I need sovietwave music.  A Reddit discussion of what that is.

I think Youtube did a better job in recommending this to me.  Eh, let's make a mini-tv for it:


I don't imagine many people will have the patience to watch all of it, but feel free to watch a bit and then skip around.  Any dose of this will do you good.

Round Up #25

Aphorisms and Shorts

The dao is real.  In fact, the dao is realer than we are, and that's our real problem in explaining it.

Why less anti-social media? Simple: more living, less arguing.

". . . in narcissism believing something is preferable to doing something because the former is about you and the latter is about everyone else." from The Last Psychiatrist

"When we work at the sugar-canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe."  In Candide.  (1759)

Complaining is one thing, if it is done under a set of fairly consistent principles.  (Keep in mind also that people don't have to have a stated opinion on everything).  Instead, I call the way most people complain mowbs (magic one-way bats).  Well, bats can crack both ways.

People with problematic views at least (also sometimes at most) show they care about the issue.  One of the best ways to avoid having a currently problematic view is not care about anything and therefore agree with everything in your social circle.  Too bad the person who agrees with the current group-think will one day have problematic views on record when the consensus changes.

Detroit is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet.

If your nation's pandemic plan requires everyone to be galaxy-brain level economic mentants, AND simultaneously altruistic, then you have a bad pandemic plan.

Links and Research

As I use the radio functionality on my dumb phone more and more, I keep having fun finds like the Retro Cocktail Hour.

Here in 2020, I have been making a study of weirdos.  One such term I used was "eccentrics."  This chapter from the autobiography of  Edith Sitwell contains some comments bound to amuse, if not instruct.  The quote most pulled from the chapter and spread on the internet:

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

You may also be interested in the life of Stanley Clifford Weyman (New Yorker piece)

Canada's Technocracy, Inc from the 30s and 40s is fascinating (see also Wikipedia). I learned about it because I read Elon Musk's grandfather on his mother's side was involved in it.

And another case of where I don't need to do doomer writing because the work has already been done.  I present this review of Four Futures.

Speaking of doom, here is a twitter thread of cognitive mistakes people make around nature, because they translate it into a relationship.  Yet another set of reasons you can't get people to coordinate to do the right thing.

While we have computation, though, might as well have mandelbulbs. . . Like the Mandelbrot set brought into 3D.

I'm really glad I started the sub-Reddit r/weirdcollapse.  It has brought some websites my way such as Rustic Outcast and Zero Input Agriculture.

A friendly reminder: the founding fathers did not want you to vote.

Round Up #24

Aphorisms/Shorts

The real cruelty of America to its young is not that is denying them the American Dream.  It is denying them the Human Dream of starting a family that they can keep healthy and free from deprivation.  This is unsustainable.  If it is the first unsustainable thing to pop, then that will be for the good.  If it is toward the last, there will be no American society.

My advocacy of frugality is based on quality and personal freedom, not signaling.  And the help to the environment is a bonus.

"Live and love sincerely and vividly. Abstractions don't precede embodiment, they follow it."  Nathan Spears

I know modernity's shtick is efficiency.  But twitter does not efficiently give you information; rather, it efficiently kills time.

You are not asked  daily to participate in democracy.  You choose to freak out about things you can't control.  This is not the same thing, and you need to learn the difference.  However, you do make daily decisions about consumption and production.  We should think about those more.

It's not an exaggeration to say late stage capitalism keeps wrecking my sleep.

Contra neo-mania: rather than debating a banana and duct tape (yawn), we should be debating lobster-phone versus fur-lined cup.

When our country puts kids in cages, it invokes images of the holocaust, a horrible past.  When we use killer robots in the sky to kill kids, it is part of the future, a disruptive future.  No wonder progressives can accept the latter.

Reddit

Yes, the phone of the counter-revolution is a work of art.

I know I've been hard on Republicans lately.  Here's me really getting into it with a Democrat trying some of that sweet, sweet virtue signalling for Reddit karma.

I wrote some responses to the last episode of Bojack Horseman after binge watching the last episodes the day they came out.

Three little posts, one, two, thee without a home or a family tree.  Oh, and a bonus one on a fan theory.

Links

Article on the impact of Hilary's "deplorables" comment.  As a bonus, here is something to know about swing voters: "[they] didn’t care whether he [Trump] paid taxes or not — and thought he was smart to pay none."  (See, people love to scam the government).

I had never seen Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" 1981 music video.  It is most delightful camp.  If it had been made today, it would be the source of innumerable memes.

Side research for my piece on UBI lead to Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data.

Round Up #23

Aphorisms/Shorts

And lo, he realized that it as his life-long self-deprecation, taught to him from a child of the (an?) underclass that made him think his voice should be valued lower than his links.  Now, he consciously changes that.  I mean I.  I choose to change that.

These Americans trading liberty for convenience don't realize that if they keep it up they'll soon have neither.  (Thanks, Benny)

[Academic economists influenced policy under a false sense of scientific certainty and thus] "subsumed the interests of Americans as producers to the interests of Americans as consumers, trading well-paid jobs for low-cost electronics."  Binyamin Appelbaum, quoted here.

Links

I went back to Koning's work on "moneyness".  I read several pieces that show he thinks liquidity is the solution to many puzzles in modern finance.

• The Bond Stock Conundrum
• Why (Not) Rent Your Home
• Liquidity Everywhere
• Beware CAPE. . . 
• Why are Gold and Bonds Rising Together?

Information technology does make this the golden age of financial liquidity, but I think 1) IT is a vulnerable system that grows more fragile over time 2) IT is probably ecologically unsustainable 3) the distortions are bigger in scope than what liquidity accounts for.  Still, I think the liquidity vector has to be thought about in order to have a reasonably well calibrated "10,000 foot" view of economics.

New subject. The guide to Corporate Democrat Speak.

Highly recommended sequence on Immoral Mazes. . . Introduction.

Round Up #22

Links

I call this paragraph-sized post required reading for my fellow Americans.

RIP, Kill Your TV  Try this quote: "By escaping its box and slipping into every crevice of our lives, television has performed the devil’s trick of making us believe it doesn’t exist."

The Revolution will Not Be Televised. From another time, when the walls of our prison were visible. . .

An interview in the 90s.

Media Burn in 1975 by the Ant Farm Collective. More anti-television.  Alas, also piped through YouTube.

. . . Set to Music

New subject: on the basis of the information in this article alone, I am going to forecast that we will experience significant disruptions of the internet (at least for the 80-99%).  I say the odds are 60% by 2030 and 80% by 2040.  I also would not be surprised if this broke sooner.

I also found out about the right to repair movement.   This leads the the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and repair.org.

I try to avoid too much insight this path did lead me to Paul Nystrom's remarkable insights into consumerism. . . from 1928.

I gave some thought to taking up wood carving.  I found a great carver [his newer site] who uses a utility knife as his main tool.



Aphorisms/Shorts

"The only thing worse than having a crisis is not having a crisis." Lou Kemp from Samsdat.  Slightly tweak that to:

The only thing worse than having a crisis is never having a crisis.  Just realized that is close to "If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake."  --Frank Wilczek.

My current understanding is that solar power is good tactically, but poor strategically.

Identity is deeper to people than happiness.  Consumerism exploits this by sandblasting our organic, healthy identities, so we are left struggling to try to fashion them on our own.   We try to buy them, which is good for profits in the short-run, but is a source of system-threatening internal contradictions in the long run.

I have seen the worst souls of my generation destroyed by Twitter (well, damaged further).

"We used to have to talk to other humans if we wanted to join a cult." comment on a Reddit thread by user named 77096.

A frontier is not just the only place a certain type of individualism works, it is also the only place a certain type of communitarinism works. How sad to not see the real common enemy of bureaucracy.

I have been thinking more about the devil's trick -- see first link above -- touch screens fool us into thinking we are not using a tool. . . and that the tool isn't using us.

Round Up #21

From Research

I am looking into investment again, so that is what I captured in my research.

I have heard about at least one billionaire hoarding nickles.  Looking into it further lead to this marvelously interesting article on the work done to change the alloy. (Also, some analysis of hoarding a million dollars in nickles).

I thought that maybe healthcare as a sector would be protected against inflation.  Turns out that is almost certainly wrong.

If I hadn't moved into different intellectual circles, I wouldn't know that Netflix isn't very much in China, but instead is growing in India and Japan.  Whether that is deliberate strategy or there are forces barring their way, the article doesn't say.

The great puzzle of our time: why so many bonds with negative interest rates around the world? (including now negative interest rates for "junk" ie "high yield" bonds).  I like this short memo on the topic.

Reddit

I wrote two popular pieces on r/leanfire, one about leaving my job, and the second about the aftermath.

I suggest r/BottleNeck for people who wants to learn about peak energy without fear porn.

I took a quick stab at answering the question of how many of the Celtics in 1960s are in the Hall of Fame based just on team success and reputation.  This then manifested someone showing me the work done more rigorously.

A hot take on the possibility of negative interest rates in the U.S.  (see above).

Musings on why most people don't really know what makes for a good manager.

Reminder that our culture is a wasteland.

I saw A Narcissist's Prayer :

That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did... You deserved it. 

Aphorisms/Shorts

What conservatives don't understand is that only artificial things can be as clean as they want.

Liberals prefer to be liberal with other people's money, and conservatives prefer to be conservative with other people's morals.  Oh, I'm now an old man, fighting last generation's war. Now right-wingers also prefer to be right-wing with other people's money and leftists prefer to signal leftism about other people's morals.

Space travel isn't going to be colonization.  It is going to be white flight.

I love bad decisions; I could watch them all day.

The argument that it was better to build a school than a prison might have been true.  But now, in order to pay for the care of the richest generation in human history, we will soon have money for neither.

The way the ideas of Buddhism spread through the West was basically self-help for affluent people.

"Why bother explaining if the audience always sees it as a starting point for a win-lose debate rather than an opportunity to learn?" Jacob Lund Fisker, hallow be his name.

"Anxiety is paying interest on pain, but if you catch it in time, you only have to pay the principal." Ran Prieur

Round Up #20

Free Books Read

Romeo and Juliet.  A rereading, of course.  In fact, I taught it for several years.  I had a conversation recently with a friend that reminded me that we discount a great many books we read when we were younger, leaving them in a ghetto to no longer be examined.  Romeo and Juliet is a play not just for the young, but everyone who was once young.

Hamlet.  I think I had last read it in high school.  It was more powerful for me then when it was the story of a person, this time I caught the subtleties to know it is a story about a world.  If you think life is unfair, you should really examine death more closely.  Hamlet is a play not just for the dead, but everyone who will one day be dead.

Reddit

That's why I'm the friendly doomer.

Oklahoma is not exactly what you think it is.


Aphorisms/Shorts

We are living an odd double life, still a rush from judgement in face-to-face encounters, but a stampede to judgment online. Something has to give.

As Hume lifted Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, Captain Beefheart lifted me from my slumbers of normality. And so far, the results have been lasting.

Speaking of music, I find that Beefheart and Miles Davis great for drawing and painting, terrible for writing a draft.  I listen to pink noise instead.

 Only artificial things can get as clean as most conservatives want, and most conservatives don't know that.

Of all the lessons to teach a Harvard or Oxford grad, the hardest seems to be a non sequitur.  Particularly about where one went to school.

In reviewing the cliche I hate the most, I came across someone criticizing another, "it is what it is."

Anti-social media platforms which allow only upvotes are the ultimate fool's paradise.

To someone who wrote: "Imagine actually believing things in 2019 LMAO."  . . .  Imagine believing that as you don't believe in anything you are free from consequences.

The literati: by pretending to have read everything, they end up not reading anything (at least not deeply).

Reason operates on the Faith that it has all the information.  (Faith often reasons that it doesn't).

Round Up #19

Finds While Surfing

1) The hacking mindset as essentially the opposite of mathematics.  And, bonus, he points out that hackers like puns.  Thus, a possible corollary: the reason normies don't like puns is because they want a more stable reality than language -- and really reality -- can offer. << That's one of my favorite sentences I've ever written.

2) Ran Prieur on status

It's hard for me to even understand status. If you use status to get your way with people, it's different from paying them, different from physically threatening them, and different from being actually qualified to tell them what to do. As far as I can figure, status is a mental shortcut, the appearance of being qualified to tell people what to do, for observers who are too lazy to discern the reality. The word "prestige" comes from French and Latin words for deceit and illusion.

3) Anthill podcast series on the Future of India.  Listened to this and this and this.

4) Also Anthill had a podcast whose theme was darkness and did several riffs on different aspects of the word, including London nightlife and dark matter.

5) Math can be as beautiful as so-called abstract art, which is really non-representational art, which is really decoration.  I probably should add that I think that beauty is much more important than most people think.

Infinite Jest

Some of the most thoughtful writing I have done recently is in threads on the Infinite Jest subreddit.-

• A piece on Infinite Jest and the film critic Bazin, moving on to good art being about more than one variable.
• Responding to a criticism of Wallace's choice of characters to focus on. 

Free Books Read

Right, Ho Jeeves (audio) and My Man Jeeves and The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.  The prose of Wodehouse is like a tonic for the soul.  My wife said she was reading a bougie mystery.  I replied that Wodehouse's world is so aristocratic that you get beyond bougie anxiety to real comfort, and eccentricity.

MacBeth by you-know-who.  I recommend using a side-by-side translation, such as here, though that does add distractions and ads.  You could find printed copies cheap or at a library, though. 

Books from the Local Library

No Time to Spare Ursula LeGuin.  I will put some quotes from the book below.

Aphorisms/Shorts

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug . . . almost as much as belief in progress.

The short run is the only run Americans care about anymore.

I actually think there are many business books that are well-researched and have important things to offer, however in the interest of truth they should open with this disclaimer: "the vast majority organizations will not be able to get through the incentive-traps of their own office politics to correctly do any of this, but . . . "

"It's so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one." Ursula LeGuin

"Fear is seldom wise and never kind." Ibid.

What if happiness meant being the kind of person who overreacts to spoilers?

" . . . the real difficulty of democracy is not that voters are unworthy, but that their vote is generally the least worthy thing about them."  C.K. Chesterton

Americans are trained to show their taste by complaining, especially about what they lack.  If you say something is good enough to an standard American, prepare for an intense argument. 

Round Up #18

From Surfing and Researching

1) A house 3D printed out of soil for $1,000

2) Shareable.net.  Lots of news and ideas about getting sharing to happen in the urban space.

3) Poking around the topic of steel manning, I found this article against the practice and feel in love with the blog, Thing of Things.

4) Two visions of Utopia, meaning no-where trying to manifest a some-where: 1) Masdar City, and 2) Oceanix and their plan to make  floating cities, really floating city blocks to reclaim projected parts of cities lost by rising sea levels.  About the latter:

Chen’s concept includes a very clear plan to anchor these floating communities about a mile off the coast of major global cities. Specifically, Chen and Ingels want to use a material called biorock, which uses small bursts of electricity to stimulate the growth of limestone from ocean mineral deposits — a real-world concept that is not only ecologically friendly but is also currently used to foster the growth of coral reefs.

5) Let this be a coda for any attempt to speed read through good literature:

Did the world's great novelists really spend years agonising over the pitch and rhythm of their sentences so some time-efficient post-modern reader could skim over the text like a political spin doctor searching for soundbites in the transcript of a ministerial speech? 

6) I'm still working on my answers to the "IQ is everything" crowd.  From C.K. Chesterton

 If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would always prefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat.

Note: Chesterton was born in 1874 and lived and wrote in England.  He doesn't mean the Democratic Party of the United States.

7) Interest in the 2020 was already at 2016 Election Day levels in April.

8) Great point by Atrios on the fascination with squeezing labor costs while continuing mad spending sprees on machinery and bureaucracies:

My theory about one reason firms are especially sociopathic about labor costs is it's something everyone can understand . . .  "Nobody" knows how much some piece of equipment for the factory should cost - and even if they do they don't have much control over it  . . . No one's going to lose their job (or get rewarded) for overpaying (underpaying) for things nobody understands the cost of. But labor costs and wages are something people have a good sense of.

(Cp this article on cost disease being predicted by critics of capitalism).

9) This piece from r/collapse saves me having to write up some of my deepest fears about the future.

From YouTube

Video essay on Dr. Strangelove

How To Start A Library of Things drawing from the expertise of the Toronto Tool Library

Aphorisms/Shorts

Conjecture: if technology hits the point that the state, and property, are incontestable, then the incentive for bullshit jobs will go away.  As dangerous as it is for the 99%, that might need to be the order it happens.

 ". . . I suspect that this is a badly run prison world, like on Hogan's Heroes . . ." Ran Prieur

 You know what?  Let's forget about the abstraction of "America."  Let's make family meals great again.

If you believe in AI-vin, you should consider donating a kidney.

Speaking of AI-vin, the Wise and AI-Mighty, I refuse to worship intelligence until it is free of social signaling.

Portrait of the author the last few days: by day, I drink coffee and try to ask interesting questions.  By night, I drink a glass of wine and read old-timey books.

Porting My Twitter Over, Part 3

Aphorisms/Shorts

You probably need AI to enforce rules against AI.

(To make at home) Cold brew coffee tastes better, but requires planning ahead.  Normal coffee requires no prior work and has more caffeine.  You know which one wins most days.

"Even the class in the Dead Poet's Society was in rows." --  my wife.

The only thing we have to fear is confidence itself.

"It's the thought that counts" is an expression that was almost certainly created within the context of a family, and it only seems to work in that context.  The fact that so many people today spend so little time or attention in the domestic sphere makes the saying seem to ring totally false.

I've never met someone who appreciated, or even kept, a participation trophy.  Kids don't ask for them.  Kids aren't in charge of the situation. They're not for the kids.  They're for the parents, you idiots.

Complaining on the internet for an hour is easier and has more 1) short term and 2) guaranteed pay-off than spending that same hour working on a problem.  Now, repeat that across our species over billion of total hours . . .

If “show me, don’t tell me” was always correct writing advice, then Shakespeare would never have had asides. And Hamlet would have never said “to be, or not to be."

Being a relatively smart person hasn't yielded too many benefits in my life, but here is one: I have the cognitive skills and the memory to keep track of when people are thoughtful and careful with language to some people and not to others.

You fail to get warmth from 100% of fires you don't start.

Interesting is easier to hack than beautiful.  Hence, prioritize the beautiful over the interesting . . . especially in interesting times.

If the spoilers alone were enough to ruin something you were going to watch, then it wasn't worth watching.

At what point do you start adapting to a new reality, instead of just fashionably whining?

Probably the best idea, as measured by possible utility to the human race, I've had in months.  But, alas, oh alack! -- such is the nature of ideas: they need fertile ground to grow:

Get rid of the free throws in basketball; instead, every second foul place the player in a penalty box for 1 minute of game play. 

Porting My Twitter Over, Part 2

My Aphorisms/Shorts

The revolution will be upcycled . . . and then modular.  Or it won't be much of revolution, now will it?

I have not lost the ability to dream; I have lost the ability to pretend that other people will follow any of my dreams.

Self driving cars could be called auto-automobiles.  I'd also accept them being called "autobots."

Inside of consumerism, "sufficient luxury" is an oxymoron.  Outside of consumerism, you can live a meaningful life.

I'm only interested in listening to people who listen to other people.

There is enough beauty and wonder to go around.  There cannot be enough results.

The American Ideal is someone who looks extremely fit, but who works constantly at a job where they sit (a seat of power, as it were).

Devil's advocate: these violent video games these boys want to play might be safer than the mythology games our political tribes want to play on anti-social media.

The way nature shows defiance is beautiful, it "defies expectations." The defiance also seems to give boundless energy.  But when some human-type-person who is obsessed with hierarchy shows defiance, is there anything more ugly? Is there anything more sapping?

I'm sick of hating narcissists.  When you do that in America, you almost run out of people.

America: worry about everything while making sure you don't care about anything.

 I propose that we have 73 Five-Day Weeks (73*5 = 365).  We could call the leap year day "Leap Day" and then all of our days of the week would line up every year.

A re-write for Batman v Superman:

After the "space 9-11" scene, start with Bruce Wayne in board meetings with Lex Luthor, plotting to deal with the alien threat.  The arc of the movie would then be Wayne realizing Superman is a good guy, turning on Luthor.  This would allow for Batman to start fighting Superman in Act I, or Act II by the latest.  And it would even give a structural reason for Doomsday to be worked into the end as Luthor scrambles to find a way to defeat the Justice League that is forming in front of him.

Luthor and Wayne would work as foils and commentary upon each other, including daddy issues.

Round Up #17

From Searches and Surfing

Bold prediction on Alzheimer's by a Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth College:

Not only have there been more than 200 failed trials for Alzheimer’s, it’s been clear for some time that researchers are likely decades away from being able to treat this dreaded disease. Which leads me to a prediction: There will be no effective therapy for Alzheimer’s disease in my lifetime.

The rest of the article gives some strong arguments as to why this might be the case.

I had no idea the extent China was investing in the rest of the world.  I really need to start learning more about China if I am going to understand the future.

Speaking of China, Jimmy Carter had this to say

“Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody?” Carter asked. “None. And we have stayed at war.” The U.S., he noted, has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making the country “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” Carter said. This is, he said, because of America’s tendency to force other nations to “adopt our American principles.”

Carter is one of those rare people who gets more radical as he gets older.  And I love it.

#generative on twitter makes me happy, especially this.

How Seven Nation Army became an anthem chant.

The Outline making the case that the Trump presidency has been good for psychedelic drug research.  In our politically polarized climate, neglect has probably been optimal.

Check out the Degringolade Dreamwidth journal.  The dictionary definition of degringolade is "a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition) : downfall."  Here's a good post to start with.  And here is the older blog before it was moved to Dreamwidth.

Aphorisms and Shorts

When neither side engages in good faith, any instance of being correct is purely coincidental.

Corollary: I refuse to praise tribe-D or tribe-R at this point.

Related: be very suspicious of any take-down that assumes each and every thing someone else stated is wrong.

"We hyper[-]manage our identities. We hurt each other. We go out and buy some shit. Bonus points when we do all three at once."  td0s of Pray for Calamity

Rick Sanchez says ". . . being nice is something stupid people to hedge their bets." But really, intelligence is a way that dark people keep going in darkness longer than they should.

Boston is a riddle.  New York City is an explanation.  (Cribbed from C.K. Chesterton on London versus Paris).

Porting My Twitter Over, (Perhaps) Part 1

I have started reading through my old tweets, deleting the ones that weren't very good, and moving any good ideas over here.

The fact that it is so difficult and time-consuming to move through old tweets proves why this needs to be done: twitter is an inappropriate place to put ideas I'd like to come back to later.

In any case, I had moved through two year's worth of re-tweets, and here are some that I thought were interesting enough to share.

==

“Lindy” “SITG” “Antifragile” - these concepts have changed our consciousness. Taleb is etched in history for this.

But as I noticed months ago (w Kav), the man’s a narcissist. Never align yourself with these people - it’s about them. If they can’t use you, they’ll discard you. https://t.co/4oUDU9YplI

— Pat Stedman (@Pat_Stedman) December 26, 2018

Focused attention is not interchangeable with distractible attention. It’s like regular stomach versus dessert stomach. You can be full and still have room for dessert. And when you are regular hungry, dessert won’t do. You’ll want a savory protein.

— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 3, 2018

Imagine learning to drive a car by manipulating trigonometric symbols on a piece of paper. This is how we teach math to children. Future generations will regards us as barbarians.

— Ardian (@rdntola) October 26, 2018

I love other people who play the lottery. #voluntarytaxation

— JC (@CaroseljJ) October 16, 2018

My son was beating me in chess.
Son: "Wow, I thought you were good at chess."
Me: "I'm only good compared to little kids; as you get older, you see my limitations."
There might be a metaphor in there somewhere.

— Kuwuakeda (@kuwuakeda) September 18, 2018

@elonmusk does a bunch of stupid shit I don't agree with, but I can name five billionaires in this instant who are far, far worse.

But they don't tweet, so apparently opposing their globalist-scale predatory behavior is less interesting?

Hmm...

— Sindre (@Triquetrea) July 13, 2018

Thought: right-leaning bias complexes are likely much more easily machine-learnable than left-leaning due to greater internal consistency/cohesion. Recommender systems converging on right-wing conspiracy content are a first indicator.

The singularity will be Trumpist 🤣

— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 27, 2018

friendly reminder that you don't *have* to consume horror-news. it's not a requirement for good citizenship

— Mark (@haircut_hippie) June 19, 2018

History is just another content farm, though passed through the spam filter of legacy storage economics

— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 15, 2018

In short: I don't think human beings have become more 'empiricist' in the past 500 years, perhaps apart from an extremely small section of the elite. I think most people have switched *one* of their sources of blind and unquestioned authority to Science and Technology.

— Pseudoerasmus (@pseudoerasmus) February 17, 2018

Shower thought: being in nature is relaxing because nature no longer asks anything of us. In a city we are surrounded by things our identity is created through relationship to - other humans, cars, homes. We no longer use natural things; they don’t define us, so it feels quiet.

— '*•:Ḟreyjạ:•*' (@utotranslucence) August 19, 2018

Signaling values and signaling status are both good.

Signal values to make friends/enemies.

Signal status to set expectations reflecting real, dumb-to-ignore asymmetries.

It’s when you conflate them that things get bad. Don’t signal virtue to establish status or vice versa.

— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 4, 2018