Going to Ken-tuck-ee

There's a scene in Last of the Mohicans which epitomizes the appeal of the ranger character archetype. (skip to about 1:25)

The british officer Duncan is incredulous that Hawkeye is not going to participate in the british empire's little war against the french empire and asks how he can just "head west". Hawkeye mocking response is, "We face north then turn left".

The complete man is necessarily free and sovereign. The corporate man lives in a world that's arbitrary and at best is all negotiated and fraught with policies and rules that are all about enforcing a pyramid structure, mainly to keep the people on the top at the top. The big lie of the current day, for example, is the system is pragmatic and utilitarian though it's loaded up with nonsense and ideological claptrap.

This character and theme is common in books, movies, and TV of course. I believe it mainly appeals to men. The ranger is a special case because he's also in a frontier setting where the reach of an entity like the british empire is limited to non-existent. No civilization also requires maximum badassery and self-sufficiency.

Another variation on this theme is offered up by the numerous fictional characters derived from "The Saint", who maybe had some antecedents I'm not aware of. There's a bad movie The Saint with Val Kilmer as the main character. He's a thief/super spy like James Bond or Jack Bauer in the 24 TV show. The Saint character was first depicted in books in the 1920s so maybe it's the "root" of that tree of archetypes. The movie from 1997 is mainly interesting as a cultural artifact of this "high tech" era because he repeatedly busts out gadgets to use in his exploits, which inevitably include archaic tech junk like floppy disks. Now those items are nostalgia bait for gen Xers.

The Saint tree of characters are also "outside the system" but since they live in world-cities rather than the frontier, so they're outside or above the law only because of their extreme skills. They nominally have "a job" and work for various people or organizations, but live by their own code and make their own rules.

A real person who figuratively went to Ken-tuck-ee like Hawkeye planned to in Last of the Mohicans is Richard Proenneke. He moved to Alaska and built his own cabin and more or less lived off the land for decades. He lived the ranger archetype life. He was another hyper-competent man.

This archetype exists because it's a fantasy of many people, including me. Why does it remain an unrealized fantasy? That's a very interesting question because it's such a common scenario. When I think back on my corporate jobs, for example, there was always some team of super-competent people at the core of this or that company who ended up as the Duncan character when they felt like they should be Hawkeye or The Saint.

At my first job, for example, I was too young and incompetent to fall into that role myself, but I worked with others that were yoked into that role. They end up being quite frustrated and annoyed all the time. My boss at the time was in that scenario. Another guy named Glenn who was maybe in his mid to late thirties at the time was also in that scenario. They repeatedly wondered why they were helping the corporation out, because without them, it would just collapse. The executives pocketed huge salaries and bonuses while they worked long hours and ended up chewing up their precious life energy and time on chores like flying all over the world and doing things they really weren't interested in.

Now that I'm in their same position, I wonder, on a daily basis why I keep at it? The "it"/work ends up being a kind of tiring negotiation with corporate entities who insist on ever dumber and more restrictive policies, that the competent category of people can ignore or circumvent: but why? The yoke is entirely imaginary. The money itself that people work for is fake.

The fictional characters and story elements offer up answers to this question. The Saint character, for example, at least in the movie is portrayed as a victim of the catholic church as he was reared as an abandoned orphan child. It's arbitrary rules, abuses, and manslaughter of his childhood sweetheart led him out of the system. The illusion of legitimacy didn't exist for him. So his whole life was outside the system. The hawkeye character has a similar unique origin story: orphan raised by Mohicans in the frontier so he was always outside. Everyone else is sort of roped into this thing as a "way of life" and training from K-12 in the school system. It's pretty hard to break that mold and run off to the wilderness especially when there are family ties and the like involved.

Another variation on this theme is the "lost city". In that scenario, the men can escape to some place that's not a corrupted corporate shit world. Ayn Rand has a peculiar version of that story where all the competent dudes go during the early industrial age. Another variation on that theme is Hyperborea, the lost home of the white man. I wrote before about how the entire western world lives in the shared hallucination/myth of Atlantis now, which is quite wild to realize.

Anyway, I'd really like to go to Ken-tuck-ee instead of sit through another Microsoft Teams meeting.

Worship Money = Worship Death

About 10 years ago, I planted what I then imagined were 300 future christmas trees. Even as I planted them, though, the concept of "monetizing" the trees went by the wayside because I started to empathize with them and began to appreciate the difficulty and struggle of trees. They transformed from future money to a fellow being. Now several of those trees are 10-20 feet tall. I adopted a similar point of view about my whole property and followed a path of "life begets life", so in the case of the trees, they lead to more squirrels, etc...

That view point was also informed by reading about the "pioneer history" of this area. When the european farmers moved here, it was all woods and packed with life, including animals like Elk and wolves. The farmers killed all those animals through hunting and habitat destruction. Few people today share the pioneer's perspective on nature and try to interpret it as "utilitarian", that is, necessary. It really wasn't though. For example, there's a story about a guy from New York who came to northeast Ohio to hunt wolves, but could find none out in the woods. Somebody, somehow, according to the story, tied a wolf to a tree for him to shoot. That's far from utilitarian. To me, that's an act of abhorrent, depraved people. Also, by the 1900s, farmers here were systematically trying to exterminate squirrels because everything else was already dead. In that case they were literally monetizing squirrel pelts because there was a bounty on them. That was just a follow on to monetizing everything else.

I realized I would much rather live in that flourishing nature woodland than old depleted farmland, so I do what I can to help out, but mostly get out of the way of that positive feedback loop of life. It appears to be "working" in that myriad birds and animals frequent our property.

In classical world mythology money is ruled by the king of the dead and the underworld, Hades. The term "plutocrat" comes from Pluto, which is another name for Hades. Money and death really seem to go together always. Money is really the god of the modern world and its associated worldview and philosophy is really death-centric. I think that's summed up fairly well by the behavioral biologists who struggle to understand animal behavior from a purely utilitarian and psychopathic perspective. It's also part and parcel of the perspective of scammers and "leadership" who manipulate the mass of people into war, scam contracts, and the like. There's also a literal death cult associated with the LLM mania who want to obliterate biological life and replace it with machines.

This is all depicted in the "Game of Thrones" king of the dead character and the zombie army. I guess the army represents the middle class extension of the will of the psychopathic oligarchy who train the population to power their systems.

Human Housecats and Outsourcing

I had a 50 cc Honda mini-bike when I was in maybe 6th grade. I do not remember why or how I got it. I know it was bought used. I also don't know what eventually happened to it. I will have to ask my dad if he remembers if it was a birthday present or whatever.

It was kind of unreliable. It was a 2 stroke, of course, and back then I'm sure most people just slopped way too much 2 stroke oil into their gas mix, which, quite paradoxically will burn out pistons and rings because the fuel-air mix is too lean. Consequently, the thing probably needed a full rebuild, but my dad taught me how to get it running even in its janky condition.

That experience was typical among my male and some female peers. That is, if you had a broke thing, somebody taught you to fix it and explained how it actually worked. Depending on your household situation, you might be exposed to a wide range of DIY fix-it or build-it projects and learn to pour concrete, frame a house, fix a car, an electric outlet or whatever. One of my school friends had a hyper-competent family in the performance automobile business. He learned how to operate tools like metal lathes and mills when he was a kid, and I was able to experience some of that too.

I experienced a shift in demographics in the tech/engineering world toward the end of my career where the white american guys were gradually replaced with people from Asia who often had no similar background. The white american guys often had that project-doing background like me and my peers, by contrast the "new" workforce is urban housecat types who never did a single project. The urban housecat types among the white people are the effete coastal city types.

two economies

When I started working in the early 1990s, I gradually realized much of middle class life was a trap and a scam, basically to keep living the dopey middle class life style. For example, I signed up for a new car loan and realized I was working to pay for a car so I could drive to work. In the mid 1990s, I signed up for a home loan. For most middle class people, their house is just where they go to sleep so they can go back to work, then it's also where you can struggle to do a hobby or get some exercise.

The trap part of that life is the loans. You really don't "need" a loan to get a house or a car, in fact the loan is a severe life impairment. The other part of that life that's a trap is "status" associated with being a participant in the system. For example, if you're one of "the good ones" you can get a loan for a new Toyota Landcruiser or Sequoia to go buy groceries rather than drive a cash car to do the same chores. The French fur traders used the same system on native americans back in the 17th and 18th century. They offered credit to the indians in their company stores who then paid it back with work--trapping beavers. One aspect of the trade goods was "status symbols", like fancy blankets.

A side effect of all the middle class people working in "the system" all around the world is the emergence of a parallel universe "outside" that credit and lifestyle trap.

The "tech industry" offers a great current example. Many tech products are super cheap commodity items--in many cases they're cheaper than ever. For example, single board computers for process control and automation are dirt cheap. CNC machines, plasma cutters, on and on are all dirt cheap. Lots of software is free. If you as an individual want to do something productive with "tech" the barrier to entry is less than a speed bump. By contrast, everything associated with or competing with "AI"/Datacenters is stupidly expensive, like GPUs and computer memories are off the charts expensive. Similarly, salaries associated with all that are very high, while if you're actually using tech for a real purpose, the money really isn't there.

The "economy" appears to be a bunch of middle class people enmeshed in mass psychosis at any given moment, so it appears foolish or uneconomical to do the thing the mass of people aren't hallucinating about. For example, if you have skills to do useful tech stuff, does it make sense to labor for peanuts and do something productive when you could sit in meetings with people in a mass hallucination and get paid to LARP as an "engineer"?

The working and lower class people in the US are basically outside the psychosis/hallucination bubble. They lack the training and indoctrination to get into the corporate debt Matrix basically. Groups like the Amish reject the hallucination for the most part.

Last of the Mohicans

We watched the Daniel Day Lewis movie Last of the Mohicans (1992) last night. It's a great movie adapted from such a great book. Like The Lord of The Rings Aragorn character, the main character(s) in Last of the Mohicans are Rangers.

People from all over the world love those characters. There are monuments in Germany dedicated to Hawkeye, (the Daniel Day Lewis character). The Soviet Union had a stamp series based on James Fenimore Cooper's novels from the 1820s. For contemporary testimony, browse the comments section on the youtube theme song.

5G Systems and Tech ROI Issues

I worked on wireless telecom systems from about 2001 to 2020. Over those years, system capabilities kept expanding as a side effect of increasing capability of CPUs and other computational hardware. All the stuff I worked on was broadcast based so the cost of the system was linearly amortized over each user, so the more users the better in terms of cost per user.

I was surprised to learn, recently, that the computational requirements of 5G networks substantially increase with each user so lots of expensive equipment is required to handle just a handful of users. For example, the ORAN reference open-source software requires around $100K of servers and GPUs to handle just 15 users! A few years ago, those servers and software would probably only cost $30-50K but the AI/datacenter bubble has distorted the price of tech junk dramatically. Even if costs return to normal eventually, tens of thousands of dollars for 10-15 people is stupidly expensive too.

The reference software is probably not optimized, and generic GPUs are inefficient. Presumably a more engineered system could be significantly more efficient maybe by a factor of 10, but the core problem of increased cost per user doesn't go away, it's just not "as bad".

Note that this pattern follows the "LLM" pattern. For example, now when I search for something on google, their LLM spits out a result. The cost per LLM search result is probably significantly higher than the cost per search in their good-old system which probably has that "broadcast" amortized price structure, since the scanning of the Internet, indexing web sites, etc... was done once per many thousand searches. The cost to encode information in the LLM is high, and that's amortized over all the uses of it, that is, each "search" using google's LLM, however, the cost to run the LLM is also high per search. Presumably, google plans to reduce that cost, then charge people monthly subscriptions for their service, which is probably why their search engine has been getting worse. So the "Internet" will effectively turn into a privatized rent seeking scheme. Good luck with that.

Another interesting side-effect of declining tech ROI is actual productive and useful stuff is extremely cheap. Effectively a garage shop scale operation can build almost anything. There's endless examples of this phenomenon on YouTube where a small team of dudes build airplanes, boats, cars, motorcycles, and on and on. It's not hard to imagine an "engineer centric" world emerges from that, where the corporate and finance overhead and parasitism go away.

It's possible the "hit them where they ain't" strategy could work out really well for localities that foster that approach.

Vote Harder!

The people in my county habitually vote for republicans in every election. When there was a "tea party" branch of the republican party they voted for politicians who preached about a small government. Since then, a little after 2008, though, the county government grew larger and more intrusive which is exactly what would happen if people voted for democrats. The state government is republican dominated, but they're also pushing democrat-esque policies. One of the very annoying issues is the county will implement some type of septic system monitoring program, which is happening at the behest of the state government, I believe.

The pretext for the program is poorly maintained septic systems are contributing nitrogen runoff into lake erie. This monitoring system was initially proposed maybe ten years ago. I was skeptical about that claim then. Maybe in some worst case scenario a house with a totally failed waste treatment system could generate runoff directly into a ditch and thereby into a waterway, but that might only be a 1/1000 case.

In almost every other case, even an inefficient, poorly maintained system would still drain through a leech field and might be several feet away from any type of waterway. Human waste isn't any different in nitrogen content than animal waste, so evidence that septic systems are contributing to nitrogen in rivers might be hard to come by in a low population density county like mine. I think there are as many deer in Geauga County as people, for example and I don't see deer using public restrooms. I looked for any research papers on the topic.

For example, there should be elevated nitrogen levels in the various rivers originating in Geauga county, or a lake like Bass Lake which is surrounded by homes with such waste disposal systems should have elevated nitrogen levels or high bacteria counts, but at the time I didn't find any information suggesting that was happening. It doesn't even look like the state or local agencies monitor that, or if they do the results aren't published in a way that's easy to find online.

The main culprits in lake erie nitrogen pollution are cities with sub-standard waste water treatment and farms in western Ohio. This is fairly obvious and well known. I think the idea that septic systems contribute to this issue is mainly a guess. They probably do, but if their contribution goes to zero it might not result in some measurable change in lake erie water quality.

So why are the small-government state and county officials pushing this scheme instead of fighting it tooth and nail?

Well, people will get paid to implement this testing program, septic installers will have a few years making lots of extra money, and land developers need centralized sewer and water systems to build higher density housing, and testing the septic systems is a first step in that scam. Smacking homeowners with $20,000 septic repair bills will get them clamoring for centralized solutions because they're retards.

This is really a great example of how the government actually "works". The blah blah of ideological talking points from politicians is all nonsense for dumb ass voters. The only thing that pushes government to act is groups with sufficient money to be organized year after year and also to bribe or blackmail the government employees and politicians.

Individual citizens have a hard time lobbying the government in a similar way because they don't have a lot of time or money to waste on it, so even moderately organized groups or entities like a business with a "budget" to spend strategically are much more influential.