The "C" Computer Language versus The US Government

In recent weeks I noticed some articles about federal government officials recommending no new programs be written using the "C" computer language because of "memory safety" issues that these officials claim other languages don't have. This is the first time in my career that a government bureaucrat offered an opinion about something I work with every day.

My initial thought is it is a safe bet that "C" will outlast the current US federal government by many decades--I don't mean the Biden administration, nor the Trump administration, I mean the US constitutional order and all its associated institutions. My second thought is who is paying the officials to have those opinions? I could get into the details of why "C" will be around forever, but it's pretty dull stuff.

Corporate Global Warming Training?

I recently sat through the annual sexual harassment training at work. I've probably wasted about 40 hours of my life sitting through various elementary school "courses" like it at various jobs. I would bet $50 that over the next 10 years corporations will mandate global warming courses, or whatever random white liberal religious topics they feel the desire to preach about.

To me, the global warming topic is the most ridiculous of the virtue signaling/luxury beliefs preached about by people like Bill Gates, with his 66,000 square foot house, Al Gore, or Taylor Swift with her private jets flights to get ice cream. The mini-me liberal believers are similarly fraudulent in their preaching. Of my family and friends, I'm the "greenest" and have been slashing my lifestyle for years mainly to get out the matrix as quickly as possible, but I also am the most skeptical about computer models' ability to predict the weather 100 years from now.

Anyway, I think now that Trump was elected a second time, which is really just a big request by the nation for the establishment to fuck off, there will be a push through institutions like corporations to drill their favored opinions into the heads of employees.

I think things are about as centralized and mechanical and controlled as they will get in my lifetime right now, and the trend will thankfully be to move rapidly in the other direction.

Fake Music, Fake Sports: Why?

Every once in a while I watch a video on the YouTube channel "Wings of Pegasus". The guy makes videos that reveal which musical performances, whether live or recorded use auto-tune or other manipulation. He just did a series of videos on Taylor Swift, who of course is super produced. Her concert audio is all pre-recorded, etc... She's a spokeswoman for global warming but she takes a private jet everywhere, etc.. Sports is similarly fake. The NFL seems about as real as WWE. The pro and Olympic athletes are all dopers.

Those industries insist it's all real and "clean". That is, sports are real contests with athletes who train hard so they're superhuman. Taylor Swift and myriad other music industry products are actually super talented musicians who all sing perfectly in tune all the time and never miss a note. Why do they lie about it all?

I think there's a simple message embedded in sports and music "stardom". It really helps cement the average person's "belief" in the system's legitimacy. If there are super star musicians, and super star athletes, then it follows there are super star CEOs or super star politicians, and that whoever the system says is a super star really is as talented as a phony like Taylor Swift or some doper athlete.

Politicians often hang out with such people to imply they're all part of the big important people club and that there's a natural difference between them and the masses. That is, a politician is talented at doing politician shit the same way Taylor Swift is somehow mysteriously better than myriad rando people with way more talent on YouTube, or a given 'roid monster is a naturally better person because they can run fast or bench press 315 pounds 20 times.

The story that's sold to kids and childish adults about athletes is they train hard and have genetic gifts, and that it's plausible anyone with similar characteristics could achieve success in sports. People who participate in sports often look up to the pro athletes as a model, which is useful for companies that sell shoes, or bikes, or sports drinks.

The musician narrative is different. It's usually that the musician is a magic person or a fairy princess or whatever and they were "discovered" and their natural supremacy was put on stage for all the world to see.

Failing Life Scripts

My wife and I are watching "Gilmore Girls" which was first broadcast back in 2000. It's pretty interesting to watch as a cultural artifact, but is not something I'd typically want playing in the background in the evening chill out time.

One of the main characters Rory Gilmore is a high school, then college student who wants to be a news reporter even as that industry was already disintigrating. The show pretends like the newspaper industry was viable and thriving when even in the early 2000s it was already falling apart. I'm in my 50s now, and I started real adult life in the early 90s, and I can't remember the last time I had a newspaper subscription. All the friends and family members I have who worked in the news media eventually moved on, because it was a dead/dying industry in the early 2000s. Even today cable news channels like CNN are on their last legs.

Anyway, a whole shitload of life scripts like "news reporter" turned non-viable just during my adult life. In fact, the general idea that a person could go to college, major in any random thing, and graduate and make a upper middle class salary are long gone. In fact, now a college degree can be much more of a burden than a path to success if a kid takes out a student loan; even if they have wealthy parents or grandparents who can finance their education, it's still potentially a big waste of resources that could be better applied elsewhere.

I think the average person experiences systemic economic failure through failure of the life scripts. When the plans they received through their education and upbringing don't work, it's very stressful and difficult to adjust.

One way to interpret the 2024 and 2016 election is the MAGA republicans want to restore the viability of the life scripts that worked in 1955. They think it's possible to use the regulatory system and tariffs to resuscitate manufacturing in the US to bring back high wage manufacturing jobs. Maybe it's possible, but essentially the whole neoliberal program needs to be rolled back and there's no signs of that from Trump who in his first term undid some post 2008 banking regulations. The neoliberal system is essentially a giant parasite that sucked wealth out of the population via the financial system, and banks are a key component of that theft.

What was the neoliberals' vision of the future? What are the life scripts on offer from the democrats? It is the "own nothing and be happy future" where most people are proles who survive on Bill Gates brand bug paste, don't own a house, and get a monthly welfare payment in the form of crypto currency. Some apparatchik class manages the system and preaches about butt sex and pronouns and tells you what the temperature of the earth should be. It's very bizarre to me to see my left wing friends and family continue to recite the bullshit associated with their bizarro world neopuritan religion.

I think neither MAGA nor Bill Gates' dystopia will happen in the US. In fact I think the "belief" based society is a thing of the past and being molded and shaped by life scripts and a failing system is just a recipe for personal unhappiness if not an early demise. The follow on to the neoliberal system is the no-system IMO, well at least for people like me. I think giant bureaucratic entities like countries and mega corporations will falter as well because all that shit is built on training, and really an agreement between the people and the people who run the institutions that the life scripts will work... but now there's no script.

I think the COVID scenario was a sneak preview of the downside of "belief" and following the rando opinions of authority figures and their scripts. It showed that you basically have to assay information yourself and make up your own mind and that the system is predatory and is built on lies. "Should I take the covid juice?" For me it was a clear "no". For most people it wasn't a decision they made, they just went along with what was just a sales pitch from pharma companies. The dopes that run corporations tried to strong arm their employees to take the juice too.

Anyway, it's early days for these changes. The future life scripts will be based on what rando individuals come up with as the system neoliberal corporatocracy system flails and dies off.

Life Scripts and "The System"

A common complaint in the USA, especially by younger people, is the "life scripts" don't work anymore. Basically there's no easy recipe to achieve the middle class American lifestyle.

When I was in primary school, the educational system, which is just one component of "The System" was setup to track kids into three groups, essentially. There was an "elite" track, which really didn't exist in my local school system. Then a professional track, which meant you'd go to college, and then everybody else.

The "elite" track was for kids in wealthy families basically. They might go to a private school, then go to a fancy college like Harvard or Yale. A couple of my friends did end up in elite schools. One ended up in a cushy job making a 6 figure salary back in 1995 even though she didn't have any special skills or knowledge. The other, sadly, died in college.

The professional track meant you'd go to some random college and end up with a professional job like doctor, lawyer, dentist, engineer, or just some office job. That's the track I was in and most of my friends were in. Most ended up with professional jobs of some kind. Some went and did more interesting things, but were ultimately still reasonably successful. Although a handful of people I know ended up with college debt, no job, and kind of wrecked.

A lot of the kids in the everybody else track went to the military, then college. Some went into the trades and some just got other random jobs until they found their niche.

The generic life scripts associated with the corporate/consumer "system" we live in worked pretty well back in the early 1990s when I started out in post college adult life. A person who even half-assedly applied him or herself in the professional track could at least get a job and earn an income, eventually get a house and even start a family, own a car, go on vacations, etc...

The life scripts were kind of failing already back in the 1990s, though, and included a lot of poison ideas, like going into debt to buy depreciating assets like cars, or to believe a house is an "investment" that will only appreciate in value.

Anyway, by now, the almost every life script is wrecked and does not work. You can be a professional person in certain places in the USA, like Los Angles, and basically be a working class drone unable to buy a house--which would actually be a totally foolish idea if you could slave away and make a $200,000 down payment on a $1M dumpy house with a dirt lawn with a homeless camp on the sidewalk.

The "elite" are trying to push a new set of life scripts, like "own nothing and be happy" on the people, but it looks like a no sale. Anyway, people insisting the old life scripts continue also can't work.

Voted Trump? Got Neocons Again!

Supposedly Trump appointed Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State. He's just another POS neocon. This is a polite way of omitting that Trump and Rubio are zionist jew puppets. Zionist jews have snarfed TRILLIONS of dollars out of the US for utterly failed wars for their LARP project in Israel. It's pure insanity that people keep going along with this shit.

I didn't expect anything different. I was just wondering how terribly jewed out Trump 2.0 would be. If Harris had been elected we'd just get some other psycho mass murdering jews in charge of US foreign policy.

How to Invest Locally

Geauga County has a good bike path, really a multi-purpose trail, called the "Maple Highlands Trail" which follows former railroad grades. I ride on there several days a week as part different loops I use for my rides. I generally ride out some country roads and maybe do some hill climbs or put in some miles then make my way back home on the trail.

I looked up the total cost of the system. It's very low compared to similar lengths of road. Large bridges on the bike path are a tiny fraction of the cost of bridges along the road, like $200,000 versus $1.5M. The bike path infrastructure doesn't have to carry semi trucks or heavy equipment, of course. Also it makes use of the old railbed and is a fraction of the width of a two lane road so it's inherently less expensive than a road.

The system cost maybe $750k - $1M altogether over the span of several years and is about 21 miles long. One section of the system is a dual purpose road for Amish buggies to bypass a steep hill along State Route 608. I believe all the pavement of the system is original even though it's about 20 years old now. It's in pretty good condition overall. Even 20 years on, its potential benefit to residents and businesses is barely realized.

$1M per 35,321 households in Geauga County is only $28! Over 20 years that's $1.41 per household per year. The number of people with a Strava account that have ridden the trail is about 2,100. Some estimate about only about 5% of cyclists use Strava so at least 40,000 people total have ridden the trail in just the last 10 years or so. Similar numbers of runners and walkers use the trail as well. The vast majority use it for recreation or exercise. A tiny handful of people use it for transportation and commuting. A large fraction of the total population of the county, then, used the trail system, plus visitors use the system as well.

Anyway, it's one of the rare no-brainer, manifestly beneficial infrastructure projects I've seen in my lifetime. If it were hooked up with neighboring county rails-to-trails system it would be even more beneficial and if it were combined with other infrastructure projects that would not impact its primary purpose it would be even more valuable. For example, maybe there's some need for telecom conduit and fiber optic infrastructure via those paths. I have no idea if that's the case, but it's just an obvious potential scenario that could add more value to such projects. Even lower cost infrastructure would be useful for horseback riding, gravel bikes, mountain bikes and even road bikes.