Japanese Cars and the Tech Industry

I've been working in "tech" for years doing so called embedded software. It's the type of software that runs in an electronic gizmo you might own, like a Roku, or a cable modem, or a stereo, bike computer or whatever. There are countless such items out there in the world, and there's some team of software people making them work.

In the past 10-15 years, I'd say that particular niche of tech, like the rest of tech, "jumped the shark". At some point in the early 2000s, maybe around 2008-10, the task of writing that type of software subtly shifted from creating something new to "integrating" existing components that other people wrote. That same thing happened all through the tech industry.

"Integrating" systems seems much easier than creating things from scratch, but it often doesn't work out like people hope and generally products based on that approach end up being pretty janky and fragile. Tech gizmos "created from scratch" can also be janky, but in my experience, the products built more or less from scratch did not have the "janky" characteristic.

Anyway, I think the "integrated tech junk" problem will get significantly worse over the next few years because of AI generated slop code, which will take the "engineer" job down another notch from being an integrator to being a slopmaster.

I think this is actually a great opportunity in tech similar to the opportunity Japanese car manufacturers had in the 70s and 80s. They focused on reliability and value when the big three in the US were focused on style and marketing. I guess the analogous scenario in tech would be to make software and devices that actually work instead of focusing on AI generated slop, or "natural language" AI interfaces.

NYC Spent $81K Per Homeless Person

Governments are good at wasting money and killing people.

The government of NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person. The obvious reaction to that is, why not just give the homeless people that money so they can live in a home, or smoke it all up as crack, or whatever

There's not really any way to "fix" problems like homelessness because there's no way to fix people. I'm not sure what fraction of the population can actually be helped, but it's pretty small. Dysfunctional people generally can't be "fixed". The people who are otherwise functional, but end up in some acute trouble they can recover from only with help is a very small group indeed.

Those people who are capable of recovering should, obviously, be helped. The people who receive government assistance but can't really recover or ever be productive are actually the basis for an industry that's really lucrative for the people running it.

Anyway, I guess nobody should be shocked at a number like $80K. The really interesting thing to know would be how much do executives and management in the homeless industrial complex make relative to that. I'm sure some of those people are getting into the seven figures in salaries, i.e. a  10x or more multiple of what the average crackhead costs a place like NYC.

Narratives and Mountain Bike Trails

I regularly ride on a couple of mountain bike trails. One is in my woods on my property. The other is in a park that's about a mile from my house. The trail in my back yard is about 0.8 miles. The park trail is about 6 miles. I've ridden dozens of laps on the backyard trail and maybe 10 laps of the park trail.

One of the interesting things that happens with these trails is my brain "automatically" subdivides the trail into a collection of linked segments. I didn't sit down with a piece of paper and draw a map or really even think about it at all, but it's obvious after the fact that there are distinctly different sections all linked together.

There's obvious advantages to thinking about the trails like that. Generally each segment contains a specifically difficult challenge, like a steep hill, or a gnarly set of turns, a narrow bridge, or an obstacle of some kind. It's often helpful to be mentally prepared a second or two ahead of time to get positioned on the bike, or speed up, or slow down in advance.

Also there's an overall distinct "feel" of the section, which is how the sections come to be delineated in the first place, like going up a steep hill is just all out hard, or cruising down a gentle slope is fast and easy, but in that case it's necessary to be attentive to corners to not brake too much and maintain some speed.

Anyway, it's pretty common for the mountain bike sessions to feel like an adventure story. Typically it's about executing each section cleanly and as fast as possible. It's really easy to blow it and have to brake hard or go off a trail or even crash. It's self-rewarding to get through a turn at speed or to go blasting over a narrow wood path that's 30 feet long.

I don't do a similar mental segmentation of a road bike route at all. It often has distinct sections, but they're much longer in terms of both time and distance and generally the focus of the mind is on maintaining some level of effort, rather than trying to stay on the road.

It's fairly easy to see where "meaning" in a story comes from when looking at the MTB trail case. The narrative is associated with physicality on the MTB. The physical effort is similar to emotion in the instance of a story. A piece of music is similar, that is words or the overall flow of the music is linked with physicality through rhythm and the up and down of the pitch and maybe emotional content of the chords and words.

More "Invade Iran" Blather from Trump

The USA is the ultimate "Zionist Occupied Government" 4channers and others raved about for years. It is utterly stupid for the US to try to invade Iran after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fizzled out with nothing positive to show. I don't think it's even remotely plausible to drop US infantry into Iran in any significant numbers. I'm sure there are plenty of special ops dudes running around in Iran, but that's a lot different than setting up bases, etc... Anyway, draft dodging Trump continues to pretend that invading Iran is an option. It's appalling the US has such trash installed in DC and has for many presidencies.

Billionaires and Cults

I recently watched some videos of Peter Thiel talking about transhumanism and the anti-christ and other "fringe" topics. It makes a ton of sense that rich people are into transhumanism, because death mocks the whole concept of wealth and privilege. It also makes sense that wealthy people are really into "the occult" and secret societies like skull and bones and other similar nonsense all of which is related to the "transhuman" projects because they're all about an "escape" from death.

Think about billionaires of yesteryear, like pharaohs of Egypt. They built elaborate tombs and were surrounded by a bunch of cults and priests that developed funerary rites and guide books of the afterlife basically "to live forever". Nobody today can really imagine some deadass mummy is "alive" or that there is a very particular egpytian spirit world filled with the phantasmagoria their priests came up with while smoking ancient egyptian crack and somehow a pyramid and a room full of their bling setup an apartment in hell. However, some billionaire will listen to a dude like Ray Kurzweil about transhumanism, whose just another version of the same shit and invest in elaborate scammy projects to help move crazy projects forward.

It makes me think the rapid construction of data centers and splooging gazillions into "AI" is more about their cultish beliefs than anything else. It seems entirely plausible that "the wealthy" or ruling class people support an ongoing R&D effort, maybe lasting centuries, that's 20% serious/80% scam. Then there are reactions to that R&D project in entities like the catholic church. They still have "exorcists" and demonologists (you can find videos of priests talking about these subjects at length on youtube).

The concept of "demons", demonic possession and various occult practices seem to all revolve around "the ego's" realization it's alien to the 3D physical reality world, the same way a computer program is alien or in another dimension from the physical computer hardware, really all information is in some separate dimension apart from physical reality though thoroughly attached to it.

Over the years people have come up with various faux operations on "the ego". One concept is a human being can "shed their ego", that is, drop their personal history and become "reborn". I think the overall phenomenon at work in that concept is the personal history is accidental and imposed by others, like parents, the culture, random life experience, etc... and the egomaniacal weirdo wants to be fully self made and "perfect". I think this is also related to the nature of death; the grim reaper is present in the accidental/random nature of experience and circumstances of birth. The egomaniac wants to be free of that.

There's another variation on that theme where the "ego is discarded" and then replaced with a so called "demon". Various secret societies seem to practice this concept. For example some occult jewish groups basically believe in some version of resurrection in this manner, that is, the demon of some dead jew takes up residence in some current day live jew. A prominent example of this is Sabbathi Zevi who beamed down into Leo Frank. Note that this concept is essentially the same idea as being "an officer" of some corporation, which is a faux being.

Unfortunately, the whole population of the west is suckered into these schemes, just like in ancient egypt many generations of average joes spent their life building tombs for dead retard psychos. It's gross. Fuck these people.

Sorry rich bros, you're going to die just like me, a bird, or a bum on the streets. In fact the natural and sometimes rapid death of animals, even when sometimes horrible, seems better in many ways than kicking the bucket in a nursing home or under hospice care or whatever.

Trump Sending in Marines?

There's a rumor that 5,000 US marines might "go into Iran"? I'm not exactly sure what that means. Maybe they are going to try to control the straight of Hormuz or something? It seems entirely implausible the US can perform some type of amphibious landing in Iran, so it's not clear what this rumor even means. Perhaps it is meant to pump oil prices. It is Friday the 13th, so maybe some cult/numerologist retard in the federal government took the auguries and decided it is time indeed to "invade".

Anyway, I guess we won't know until the Baal worshippers in DC and Israel decide to do it. I'm not sure how many marines it would take to wipe out the current Epstein government and reboot the US from the corporate oligarchy run by devil worshipers to something resembling Jeffersonian democracy. 

Failing Volkswagen Screws Workers, Execs Cash In

 This is a very typical story: Volkswagen plans 50,000 job cuts due to plunging profits while board members secure €1.75 million each in bonuses

Even though VW is swirling down the toilet, the executives structured their bonus schemes so they would almost certainly be paid while at the same time they shafted the workforce. This is a pattern that's very common, although once in a great while some CEO bucks the trend and sacrifices for their workers.

Even though blatant cheating and malfeasance is so common these days, it will eventually stir up a hornet's nest especially if times really get tough for the average joe or jane. They will realize the nominal "ruling class" is actually very easy to reach out and touch so to speak.

This is yet another reason why absurdism is the only philosophy that makes any sense. "The system" always runs amok. Eventually the average person realizes everything they were conditioned and trained to believe is a lie that keeps them docile and working for trash.