Worry Mode of Consciousness

I've been riding the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail on a regular basis since fall of 2025. Even though I'm in pretty decent shape for my age and am actually fairly fast on a road bike, I suck on the mountain bike. For example, I'm in the top 10, or sometimes the "king of the mountain" out of hundreds or even multiple thousand people on certain Strava segments on the road bike, but I'm in the bottom half or worse on the Big Creek Park segments, which probably means I'm the slowest of the "fast people" who are the ones that bother having a Strava account in the first place. I find this annoying, so I work to improve my speed.

Going fast on the MTB is at least as dependent on technique as aerobic conditioning. The technique seems to be about training the mind and body with a much more complicated center-of-mass/bike position model than is required for road biking. Of course that model is all based on "feel" and experience rather than a conscious physics model. The conscious mind model is too slow to pilot the bike effectively and efficiently.

On the mountain bike, efficiency is key, and efficiency means not braking too much for a corner or difficult section. Braking for every corner is one of the things that really drains all the speed/kinetic energy from the mountain bike/rider system, and then of course requires the rider to replace that energy from their legs, so it's also quite tiring. The inefficiency drags the average speed way down.

However, it's quite "scary" to try to maintain speed through corners, especially on steep downhill sections. The fear is really a manifestation of the lack of a good mind/body model for the mountain bike. The temptation to grab the brakes is almost impossible to overcome, for very good reason. The conscious mind "knows" there's a big gap in training and there's no mind/body mountain bike model to rely on.

Unfortunately, building up that model involves crashes. I just crashed yesterday while trying to "flow" through a "fast", but relatively flat section of the trail, but it has turn after turn after turn, plus little bumps and dips. I resisted the temptation to get on the brakes and tried maneuvering through each turn. Eventually the front wheel washed out on some soil that was loose and slippery compared to the rest of the corners and down I went.

A few minutes later, I realized my mistake "consciously", that I was off balance on the bike in that corner. My weight was too far back and probably shifted to the wrong side of the bike, that is, on the inside of the turn. Anyway, the whole of the mind/body model for the MTB seems to be about keeping the center-of-mass of the bike body system optimal over the wheels all the time, then developing a feel for the limits of the wheels for given soil conditions. When the center-of-mass is well positioned, it's possible to safely bail out of a bad situation, or to slide through a turn even when the wheels lose group.

The inability of the conscious mind, that is the "self" or the "ego" to wrangle with 3D reality is very common. One variant of this problem manifests as "worry" which is fairly similar to the "scary" feeling on a mountain bike. Worry is low level nagging stress that some situation is "out of control", that is, "unknown".

On the MTB, the "scare" feeling is the conscious realization that training is inadequate to handle a given speed through a turn. The "scare" feeling is transient--it lasts the duration of a turn which might be 2 seconds. Since the only way to get better is to train the turns there's no point mentally obsessing on it.

Worry is the consciousness trying to play out many different scenarios in an obsessive manner. It's generally worthless compared to the mountain bike training and learning process. People worry about work. They worry about love, family, finances, etc... Some people are worried their entire life. The "worry" scenario is all imagined, but it leads to adverse physical consequences, like higher cortisol levels which are the "bad" and "heavy" feeling.

A corresponding mode of consciousness to worrying is "enduring". The person who decides to "endure" their worry and heavy feeling has a model that they'll "get to the other side" eventually. That is, by struggling, they will eventually "make it" or succeed and their burden (the cortisol dose) will eventually go away. There are various sayings and folk-wisdom phrases associated with this mode of consciousness, e.g. "it's darkest before the dawn".

The enduring mode of consciousness is foolish to indulge because the "worry" is all imaginary. Old Obi-Wan's advice to "let go" is really good. The "go with the flow" model is really all that can be done anyway. The recognition of the reality of given circumstances is the best antidote.

Psychosis is Normal

A person having a "psychotic break" can't distinguish between their inner world imaginings and the 3D external reality world. If you witness a friend or relative struggle with psychosis, it's frightening, especially when that person might have been competent and balanced previously. That reveals the mind-model of reality is as contingent as physical health. "You" have potentially as little control over your mind model as you do on getting a cold or breaking your leg.

The concept of a "normal" mode of consciousness and a "psychotic" mode of consciousness implies that this state is "rare", especially if you ever witnessed someone lose it that way. However, once you start considering all the nonsense and bullshit that compels peoples' lives all over the world, the "psychotic" condition seems to be the norm.

"Lawn care" is a good example of a completely imaginary, groomed compulsion. Through the summer millions of people in the US are ruled by an image of uniform green squares. When their grass departs from that image, they must mow. People will spend $10,000 on a lawn mower machine. People who can't DIY anything will spend $1000 for a mechanic to change their oil and do other minor service on their mower. Some people pay thousands of dollars per year to landscapers to maintain that image, and never even go out of their house and walk on the grass, or even look at their flower beds. It's all very strange.

Political parties are another great example. Dolts imagine they are on a "team" with a scumbag like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and the only thing preventing a utopia is the bad guys on the other team. That stultifying mental model dominates some people's entire lives. All the contrary evidence and day-to-day experience of actual reality doesn't change their mental model one iota. They'll argue with the other team until they're blue in the face about random issues they have zero first hand knowledge of.

There's endless examples. As I wrote in the previous post, much of this psychosis is cultivated by "the ruling class", many of whom earnestly believe it. In that scenario, they more or less project their own reality model onto their cult members and the shared delusion forms a herd. People scoff at a group like Heaven's Gate, but actually live that Heaven's Gate life. Their own personal Marshal Applewhite could be a boss, or a political figure, or some talking head who's preaching about COVID, global warming or any number of other topics.

One of the interesting reactions to this cult grooming is people who reject all facts or any model of reality that doesn't seem authentic to them. For example, the flat earther people glom onto a "theory" they consider the opposite of the authoritative teaching of "globe earth". The flat earthers are scorned, but they're actually more enlightened than a lot of people who simply regurgitate an authority's statements without any actual knoweledge.

The realization that one is going to die and that nobody knows anything is a good antidote to these forms of psychosis. Another useful realization is quite a lot of the human world is composed of inanimate objects that actually feed on human energy and attention, aka the world of the dead. The lawn care industry is a great example of that. People feed a giant grass beast and kill all kinds of other creatures to maintain their green square image. In some jurisdictions, it's even written into the laws that the plants in a yard can only be so long.

Rule by Common Sense

When I was in middle school and high school from the mid to late 1980s the predominant insult label you would throw at someone was "poseur". "Fag" was another one, which basically meant the same thing, that is the person was weak, incompetent, and a fraud.

The poseur term came from Punk Rock, which was a big thing at the time. In that world, "poseur" was a band who pretended to be a "punk" but was really just a commercial scammer. For example, the band "Blondie" reportedly disliked their big hit song "Heart of Glass" which was a disco tune, because they were a punk band, and didn't want to be revealed as greedy corporate money whores instead of authentic punk rockers.

There was a corresponding attempt to be "good at things" among my friends and peers at school. I don't think that 100% came from the concept of fear of being labeled a poseur. In fact, it was probably the opposite. That is, people who put an emphasis on competency would gravitate to use an insult like "poseur".

That emphasis on competency makes sense in the context of the US economy of the time. In the 1970s and 80s, the US still made stuff, so a widespread culture of competency sort of makes sense. However, at the same time, the US started to turn into the financialized, scam based shit show it is today. This was heralded by things like the "Savings and Loan" crime wave of the 80s.

The departure from "common sense" and the beliefs I grew up with goes hand in hand with the "elite overproduction" concept from Peter Turchin. There's an inverse statistical relationship between the "elites" and the "people", which is an age old story. We're in a period of peak parasite, and maximum social stress now. It's probably the maximum deviation from "common sense" as well.

The deviation from common sense is easy to understand. Government and corporations make novel claims to create new organizations and opportunities for wealth extraction. Trannies and pronouns are great current day examples. The "ruling class" can find fault with "common sense" and ordinary people and undertake social engineering quests. In the late 1800s it was the temperance movement. Today it's basically the opposite of things that happened then. Like in the 1800s around that time there was a "eugenics" movement. Today there's basically an opposite concept of racism and opposition to "white people" as a category. Both concepts are arbitrary inventions of the "ruling class" of the times.

The madness basically comes about through the financial system which extracts wealth from the population en masse and diverts it to the various causes of the ruling class people. It seems pretty likely the break between the ruling class and the common sense people will form around the financial system and associated institutions like the insurance industry or banks or the legal system, which is also a participant in the madness.

Power Law and Financial Fraudsters

Supposedly the debt money scheme came about when bankers realized people rarely asked for their deposits, so the bankers could loan out the vast majority of deposits, or in some cases, even more than the total deposits when the precious metals were just represented as digits. Their business model is fraud.

That's another example of a power law at work, i.e. only about 10% of deposit accounts might be closed over a given time period. The average person assumes a "flat" distribution, that is 100% of deposits must be available all the time.

The bankers know the situation with deposit accounts, but the average person has no clue. The average person's model of banking is it's like a more "secure" example of a cash jar you might keep in a cupboard and banks are just a money custodian service. This is another example of the genetic disparity in the definition of "common sense".

The average person's assumption of a flat distribution in deposit availability is based on a belief in fairness, and antagonism for cheaters such as the bankers who are financial fraudsters.

The banker and financial parasite class, which extends into entities like insurance companies and many corporations, assume the pretense of being "managers" or stewards of collective wealth even though all their systems fail repeatedly throughout history.

Time Orientation

We took our dogs to the vet last week. The bill for two annual checkups plus a couple of shots and a couple of packs of ivermectin based heartworm medication was about $1000. In the early 2000s, it cost about $80-90 for one dog annual checkup and medications. Annualized inflation of $90 to $500 from 2008 to 2026 is about 10%. The supposed official inflation rate over that time is like 3%. The inflation calculator predicts the current day vet bill should only be $140 if it was $90 in 2008. 

One theory about the wild vet bills is corporate and financial scumbags bought up all the vet practices in the US, so there's basically a cartel running the business, just like a cartel runs the medical business. I can imagine that's the case, but it's not the root cause. The root cause is debt dollars and people's overall time orientation.

Currently people believe the future is entirely owned by some financial trash people. For anything to happen in the present day, a business needs a loan. The loans are just digits the bank puts in an account. People then "work" to pay back the debt. A loan is a promise to work in the future.

When you own property, you have the opposite time orientation. You did all the work in the past. Now you have a valuable thing like a piece of property or a piece of gold, or a car or whatever. You don't have to do anything that doesn't add value or improve your situation. In that scenario you own your future and financial scumbags are seen as the obvious parasites they are.

The debt money economy has slowly morphed into a managerial economy, which is actually how the cartel vet business came about and why the vet business will turn into something like the medical industry in the US, which is another cartel business that's completely controlled into a giant rent seeking machine. People pay an enormous monthly fee to insurance companies to participate in the system. The insurance companies became big management cartels of the awful medical business in the US. They are apparently trying to do the same with vets.

The managerial component of this shitty system gets more invasive with each passing year. These vermin want to micromanage and track every aspect of people's lives. This is only possible because people believe in the debt money system. 

The Value of Voting (zero)

I know a handful of people who are political partisans, that is, they're really "into" political parties like the republicans or democrats. Thankfully, these groups represent small minorities now. Only about 27% of the population "identifies" as a democrat, and about 27% identify as a republican. That ~20% number is a consistent value across many disparate scenarios. I would guess about 20% of the population gets COVID shots now, for example. Indeed:

As of early 2026, about 17.5% of adults reported having received the 2025-26 COVID-19 vaccine, which includes booster doses.

The 20% number is evidence of some phenomenon that follows a power law. These are all examples of what I would call an "erosion of belief" scenario. COVID offers a great recent example. Initially there's a lie: "COVID will kill you if you don't get an untested, ineffective concoction from pharmaceutical companies." The lie is sold via the herd behavior of the populace. However, over time one-by-one people exit the herd as their personal experience contradicts the narrative pushed by self-interested salespeople like Fauci. For some reason though about 20% of the people continue to insist the herd opinion was correct.

The herd formation mechanism is easy to understand. Humans seem to have some "voting" mechanism in their brain just like ducks or chickens or cows. When confronted with an unknown situation, humans will decide what to do based on observation of other people in an ongoing informal "vote". Our flock of ducks does the same thing all day, everyday. They decide what to do as a group, especially what's "dangerous" or safe.

Imagine a scenario with 20 people caught in a rain storm who could take shelter in a cave or a spooky dilapidated cabin. The process by which the group "decides" the spooky scenario is safe is essentially a vote. The way the situation really unfolds is the "braves" or "independents" or "risk takers" actually decide what to do by going into the cave, then the others follow along once it's proven safe via a sort of "vote" that's quite similar to the duck's voting mechanism. The followers memory performs an "experience laundering" and they convert their following into a "decision"; this would correspond to the one-by-one reassessment of the COVID lie... okay, so what about the remnant 20%?

The remnant 20% seems to be stuck in what's essentially an imaginary voting loop. That is, they formed their opinion as a member of the herd. The herd moved on, they didn't notice. This seems to be the case for political partisans. During an election cycle, the herd gets convinced to vote for dirtbag "A" or "B". The election ends, ditbag "A" doesn't do anything promised or discussed in the election cycle. One by one, the herd understands that, except the remnant.

Anyway, an obvious conclusion is the value of the vote is zero. The only thing that matters is real information and an ability to evaluate it. The voting mechanism comes about because the common scenario is lack of info, and inability to evaluate it in adequate time. This scenario is rare/never happens for humans in the modern world, however, our ancestors lived in that world all the time for millions/billions of years so people "feel" like that's the ongoing situation.

The Rich Kids Table

We recently watched the TV show "Landman" which is about an executive at an independent oil company in Texas. It follows the same template as the TV series "Yellowstone". Ostensibly the writers of the show are "conservatives", at least that's the sales pitch associated with the string of shows from the same producers.

Even though the show is supposed to be "right wing" or conservative, and promotes the oil industry, it also includes ideas as you'd see in the other slop on Netflix or any of the other streaming services or networks which is labeled as "DEI", for example, there is always a tranny or gay character in these shows. Apparently that's obligatory, or the show gets paid to include that content.

It's odd there's some group of people with apparently endless money or influence who insist on pushing a handful of random concepts onto the public and there's endless minions who just go along with it and dutifully follow orders to promote those random concepts. Of the random concepts pushed, the tranny thing is the hardest to explain or understand. It's an issue that affects a micro-fraction of the population, so it barely has a real-world presence, but there's apparently at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year available to propagandize it. I spent at least 4 hours of my precious life watching corporate HR slop with similar propaganda.

Lots of observers, including me, struggle to understand how such a system "works". That is, how is it possible rando companies have to pay money to make employees watch videos about pronouns? It makes no sense at all.

The alt-media has been discussing this apparent system of control for decades now, but generally veers into realms of the fantastical and supernatural to fill in the "no sense" gaps. Works of fiction like the movie "They Live" show some version of this alt-media explanation. In that movie, a group of extra-dimensional aliens bamboozle humanity with a mind control ray fed through TV and ads.

I think a better model is offered up by high school cliques. The rich kids table in the cafeteria "runs the school". Their random opinions end up on blast over the PA. Lots of the other "kids" in the world high-school end up falling in line with the rich kids to get a share of the largess on offer from the rich kids.

It's interesting their random beliefs and opinions end up defining them as a clique. It's kind of the opposite scenario "real-politik" observers think is going on. That group believes the beliefs and opinions of the ruling class are calculated and are promoted for cynical reasons that keep the ruling class in power.

The real-politik explanation is the ruling-class are clever schemers with no real beliefs or opinions other than a lust for power and wealth, and all they do on the public stage is an act, or any beliefs they promote are meant to divide and conquer or whatever, that is, it's all calculated and fraudulent.

I think the real-politik explanation is incorrect. Basically the rich kids table world-view is a selection of random concepts from the inner world of a handful of people. It's packaged up as a religious creed for the rest of the school, but the ideas are just an incoherent list, like global warming is somehow associated with gays and trannies and pronouns.

Gadget Bicycles and Dilettantism

Last Sunday, I did one of my favorite bike rides through an Amish neighborhood near Middlefield, then back home via the Maple Highlands Trail bike path. The weather was ideal, so lots of people were out. I was on the bike path for about 10 miles, or about 30 minutes of my hour and forty-five minutes of riding. I realized most of the recreational rider people I passed were on a "gadget bike" of some kind. That is, it really deviated from the classic safety bicycle double diamond design that's been around for so long.

The two big gadget categories are recumbent trikes and ebikes. The people riding a classic road bike are few and far between. Road bikes are still the largest single category of bicycle by sales volume per year, but constitute less than half of aggregate bicycle sales according to the stats I see.

Sports like cycling are fad driven consumer activities in the US. This is a pattern I noticed over my life. Road cycling went through two booms, for example, since I've been riding. The first was the Greg LeMond boom in the late 1980s. The second was the Lance Armstrong boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During the booms, it was possible to go racing regularly. In between the booms, the number of active participants gets really low so in lower population areas, there's not even any races. Sports like rollerblading came and went in a  handful of years. Various "e" vehicles are the current fad/sport consumer stuff apparently.

Fad sports are part of a larger pattern of behavior in the US that's driven by the financial system and apparent debt driven "wealth" of the US which I'd label "dilettantism".  It's common for a person to try a bunch of different activities and hobbies in the US. It's rare for someone to pursue mastery of a sport or hobby. People can imagine they'd "like" pursuing a given sport, buy the gear, then don't really have time or the inclination to do it. It's like playing at playing.

Ironically, the reason people don't have the time to do what they imagine they'd like to do is they are spread thin through dilettantism. They don't gave time to be a good cyclist because they also imagine they want to golf, go fishing, work on classic cars, ride ATVs, mow their lawns, etc... A significant portion of the US population with at least a middle class income is like that. This leads to the phenomenon of "inch deep, mile wide" where people have no depth of knowledge, but some experience on many topics. This scenario is very common.

I think this tendency seeps into professional life as well and is exacerbated by LLMs, which allow amateurs and hacks to imagine they "know what they're doing" because they have a chatbot barf up an apparent answer to a question they type in. In reality, hardly anyone knows what he's doing.

Why is $5/gallon Gas a Pain Point?

I drove past several gas stations with gas at $4.999/gallon today, aka $5. That is a magical pain point for many people in the US. For some reason, only at $5 a gallon, masses of people begin to realize it's pretty expensive to own a car. Even a trivial trip, or god forbid, a long daily commute is observable cost. "Oh that was $10 in just gas" people will think.

At some point, though, gas prices kill the economy overall and oil prices will plunge again. That happened in the early 2000s with more empire wars in the middle east. I can't recall the peak oil price, but around 2007, crude hit something like $150/barrel. Gas got somewhere around $5/gallon back then too. I don't recall the details though.... that all led to the exposure of the big financial crime wave of the day, aka "a crisis".

Average mom and pop people can ignore certain expenses, but probably not gas and food. Eventually high cost of basic necessities squeezes the rest of the BS out of the economy... Can't afford gas--cancel Netflix and Hulu etc.... Can't buy groceries? No more crap from Amazon then.

I think they'll keep this dumb-fuck war going for quite a while. Americans have very little control over their own government.

Messy Life

For many years my "active" time has been divided up between work and one or two main hobbies. Although, I find as the years go by, I'm really only able to really support one hobby. I feel like I'm spread pretty thin. I work the typical 9-5ish kind of hours, then maybe do 5-10 hours of my hobby. Miscellaneous chores and errands take up the rest of my time.

One way I compensate for being spread thin is by letting my organization go to shit. For example I have a pretty good workshop. I have metal and woodworking equipment and tools for car and equipment repairs, etc... Sometimes it is very organized and tidy, but generally tends toward chaos. It's currently in a very bad state because my focus is on other things, but I do have to randomly tackle repair jobs on a car the house or whatever.

I noticed many active people end up in a similar situation. Being messy seems like a cheat code, but it really is detrimental overall. For example, a lost tool might add an extra half hour to some repair job, and that extra churn compounds the problems. Plus in theory it's even "dangerous" as in there is more stuff to trip over in a messy shop.

I know professional fabricators who are very good at being neat and clean in their workshop. That said, they can spend an hour or two of the day cleaning and putting stuff away and still be productive for 6 hours or whatever, while my general goal when I'm trying to fix something in the house is to be as fast as possible so I can go do other things.

I believe if I had a better system for organizing things, my workshop wouldn't be such a mess. I find, for example, the classic big toolbox for storing tools doesn't work for me. My problem is my collection of tools changes pretty rapidly as I need to tackle new jobs, but the storage for it doesn't... so it ends up shoved into toolbox drawers.

Anyway, periodically I spend some time refactoring my stuff and do a big cleanup. Now that spring is finally here in northeast Ohio, I'm starting on that project. I'm going to use boxes and shelves and bags instead of a toolbox.

Common Sense and Genes

I concluded a "multi-cultural" society leads to general dysfunction, mainly because there's no agreed upon common sense, because I think that common sense is essentially genetic. This conclusion is drawn from my personal experiences in the tech industry over the years working with people from different ethnic backgrounds. There are endless, more general/basic-world examples out there on YouTube as well.

My family watches random youtube videos in the evenings. We regularly watch a handful of clip channels. Now that people have cell phones and cameras are everywhere, things that probably seem entirely random an accidental to the individuals experiencing them are, once deposited on the internet, revealed to really be in some sub-category of human experience.

For example, there's a whole category of "third world janky bridges". It's apparently very common for people to try to cross a perilous, failing piece of crap bridges while carrying way too much weight. Most of the videos we watch focus more on the comic outcomes of such situations, so the bridges collapse in slapstick fashion, and everyone is OK. A quite common reaction by people in "the west" is: Why don't they just spend a little more effort and make a better bridge? In many cases, even the local materials like trees could be used to build a more robust structure. An Eagle Scout in the US would be able to make a significantly better structure to get a merit badge. To an American, the scenario defies "common sense".

By the way, I don't mean to cast aspersions on people in "the third world" and imply the "west" is vastly superior. I'd cite another very common category of video: police bodycam footage, as contrary evidence to such claims of superiority. Those videos feature the underbelly of the US. Many international viewers post comments on the videos wondering why there are so many crazy people in America; And why do so many of those also have guns? Or why do completely dysfunctional, even actually medically "retarded" people have a driver's license in the US? Those examples also defy "common sense".

The western countries are quite "rich", and that generally implies "organized". High quality of life and lots of infrastructure comes from a population that managed to cooperate for some period of time, mainly after WW2 up through the 1980s. The areas of the world with ad hoc infrastructure seem to struggle to organize to do something relatively simple and cheap like building a decent footbridge over a ravine.

The police bodycam videos in the US depict what I'd call the "mouse utopia" scenario run amok. Many problems in the US appear "solved", like infrastructure, in the sense that there's some system to handle it and generally the system works, although bridges still collapse and overall the country's infrastructure is in decline as the ruling class and monetary system sucks the wealth out of the nation. However, problems which have no solution, like mass mental illness, and toxic materialism have no solution, and the ruling class's "answer" to all that is more police and surveillance systems and the like.

One theory about the poverty of the "third world" versus the wealth of "the west" is warm weather is corrosive to societal organization, and cold weather produces the opposite effect. The cold forces people to organize and cooperate and maybe importantly, inoculates the population against cheaters. The opposite scenario plays out in warm climates. This is possibly because the "common sense" understanding of the two groups is different and born of people's ancestors living in different biomes for thousands of years.

from: here

In the cold climate case, people might have learned over time that it makes sense to cooperate on shared infrastructure because failing to do so meant death for individual's families in the winter. The apparent "sucker" behavior of contributing to a common good leads to a better chance of even individual's survival. OTOH, in the warm weather case, perhaps there's a significant penalty for being the sucker that devotes one's time to public projects, and a benefit in being a scammer/cheater because there's an abundance of food calories readily available. Also possibly, there's less of an emphasis on mastery of technical material or achievement for similar reasons.

Chinese Excavators and the Next Big Thing

There are several projects I would like to do this summer that more or less require a mini excavator. I want to fix some janky old infrastructure on my property, fix some drainage issues, build a pond, and maybe cut in some roads to join up the sides of my property that are bisected by a ravine. If I rented an excavator to do all that, the total cost would probably get into the $5,000 range. For a couple of years I looked for a used excavator for this purpose, but they're in the $25-30,000 price range and they do not sell very quickly. The used listings on Craigslist, for example, or heavy equipment specialty websites are around for months.

Used heavy equipment is sort of like a used car. A machine might cost $25,000 but require $5,000 in repairs the first year of ownership and ongoing maintenance and repairs. A new machine is more likely to be trouble free and might be fixed for free if there's a faulty part. Anyway, I've been reluctant to pull the trigger on that purchase.

Another, relatively "new" option for heavy equipment is Chinese made stuff. For example, there's a company called Rippa that has dealers in the US that sells machines that are the equivalent of a used Kubota for maybe $10,000 less, like their R18 is in the $17,500 price range currently. The machine uses a Kubota engine and Eaton hydraulic pump, so the core pieces are proven. A major downside is the used market for them seems non-existent, so it's hard to say how long it would take to unload it when I was done with all my projects. That said, $17,500 is very cheap for all the capability an excavator has and it's almost a no-brainer for me to buy one.

I think these Chinese excavators are a good example of what's coming next. The US economy and system is in full retard mode. The entire economy is focused on very high cost, resource intensive negative ROI nonsense, like LLM models in the workplace, data centers, spying on people, and mass murder overseas for Israel. Additionally, the economy is loaded with parasitism and rent seeking.

At the very same time, good old Mr. Chang from China is trying to give you a really good deal on an excavator or some other value-adding tool that can solve your real world problems. I recall the same scenario with Japanese cars when I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s. Initially there was skepticism and incumbent car makers paid PR people to undermine the reputation of the Japanese vehicles, but inevitably real-world experience wins out, actually the formula is like this:

1. Initially 80% of people believe the con, and 20% of people form their own opinion;
2. Over 1-2 years, the 80% who always believe authorities update their opinion based on real-world experience.
3. Finally the positions reverse, so 20% of people are in the cult, 80% match up with the original 20%.

Good examples of this were provided by "W" Bush Iraq war and the COVID hysteria. The AI hysterical psychosis is just beginning that transition.

Anyway the guiding star for people with respect to Japanese vehicles in the 70s early 2000s was value and reliability, or an overall practical and pragmatic outlook on life. Today, Japanese manufacturers are like their Western counterparts, although the car manufacturers' management is not quite as stupid as GM's or Ford's or Chrysler/Stellantis whatever. Toyota, for example skipped the EV debacle, which maybe will bankrupt Ford eventually. That said, the Japanese companies seem to be following the rent-seeking, low value approach of western companies.

The "green field" is now that pragmatic, back to basics, reliability/value scenario.

Communities Can't Afford Their Own Infrastructure

We had a couple of days of very heavy rains in late March, which is quite common here in northeast Ohio. However, it caused a "flash flood" of sorts through the East Branch of the Chagrin River and pushed dozens of trees up against Wisner Road Bridge in Chardon Township and washed out a section of the road. Wisner Road is a tertiary road at best, but I ride my bike through there regularly because it leads to the base of one of the longest hill climbs in our area.

Anyway, the township does not have money to repair the road and it certainly won't have money to repair the bridge if it's damaged, which would cost millions of dollars to replace. It really doesn't have money to maintain the road, either. It's been in rough shape for several years, so the township is turning to the County and the State of Ohio, neither of which really have the money either.

This is a problem all over the country and around the world. All the infrastructure out there, especially the public infrastructure, is really just an ongoing debt and expense--basically because of the model of "payment" that comes from and makes the financial system function and extract wealth from the entirety of the economy.

For all practical purposes, the local jurisdictions, like the county and the township "own" the infrastructure and more or less collect tolls to operate it in the form of property taxes. However, they don't maintain a surplus or any form of savings apparently and every entity needs to borrow money to operate. This is actually very weird. Typically, taxpayers are funding debts in the form of bonds in their jurisdiction. The bonds is the source of money in the accounts of an entity like a township. The taxes don't just accumulate in the form of savings accounts, or gold or whatever, and are then spent as needed.

This results in the kind of crappy, nonsensical outcomes we see in a state like Ohio, like the "indefinite" closure of Wisner Road and bridge. A common model appears to be much of the infrastructure is left to rot until it falls apart completely. Then treated as "an emergency" even though it's 100% guaranteed to happen in a given time span. Households behave in a similar fashion. Rather than save up a bunch of money to regularly repair and improve a house, people will go into debt with "home equity" loans and the like.

Anyway people have been trained to follow this model, even though it's entirely contrary to their interest. The debt based money is created ex nihilo, then the public works to pay it off through productive activity. The debt is essentially magically monetized labor and resources, the banks essentially do a leveraged buyout of all the people in the country.

It's actually quite weird people keep going along with this trashy scam system. This system makes the real cost of infrastructure higher than it otherwise should be, just like cars cost more, houses cost more, college costs more because of "finance". It's all so dumb.

AI is like Death By Rabbit

There's a famous nutritional paradox: if you're starving you'll die more quickly if you eat rabbit meat than eat nothing. Rabbit meat is so lean that a starving person gets protein poisoning from it. I think this is an OK analogy for "AI". It looks like it performs some essential function, like filling a hungry belly, but it's actually a slow acting poison.

I see this unfolding pretty rapidly in my tech job. Rather than write code by hand, now, many people use AI. I can now tell when someone is doing that because it doesn't really work, nor does the AI code generator stuff have a good template, apparently, for packing things up like a person would. There's weird emphasis on nonsensical details, and big things are missing.

Similarly people do "research" by collecting a bunch of AI slop into documents, so now the whitepapers and other things that corporations do to generate and work with ideas are now just computer generated stuff that's often filled with incorrect information. For some strange reason, people assume the AI generated stuff is complete and authoritative in spite of numerous contrary anecdotes out there on YouTube, or contrary personal experience.

In my personal experience the LLM generated slop has maybe a 50/50 chance of being "correct" in a useful way about specific queries. Some code it generates contains syntax errors, for example, which is pretty bizarre to me; I thought it would somehow run things through a compiler to cross check its generated code, but apparently not. Estoreic subjects with very little online content are generally just outright incorrect.

The AI looks "productive", but it's actually akin to rabbit meat for a starving man, or ocean water to a thirsty man. The "value" for a person or institution like a corporation in people working on ideas is to build up a sort of shared concept model of whatever it is people are doing. This enables people to work together and make things. The reports, white papers, plans, and other similar dross that corporations produce is actually worthless and often people never look at it again.

The AI sloppification of work will result in piles of the same dross, but no associated creation of a shared concept model because people will be engaged with basically a hallucination of their ego projected into a chatbot, rather than constructively building concepts with their own brain. There are some reports out there of people descending into psychosis after chatting with their chatbot hallucinations for hundreds of hours. They end up acting like the Hollywood depictions of insanity. Back in the 70s and 80s one of the movie tropes about insane people was they thought they were Napolean or Jesus. People are chatting themselves into a similar scenario.

It will not take long for this scenario to reach its logical conclusion. The stuff companies make, especially tech companies, or similarly IP heavy companies like law firms, or tech dependent companies like manufacturers who rely on programmed machine tools will slowly and steadily become moribund and dysfunctional. Most corporations are already some version of that. The zero nutrition AI stuff will exacerbate that tendency. 

"Investors" and Suckers

One thing that's become obvious to me over the years is the only real "investors" are insider traders. Everybody else is a sucker. They provide so called "liquidity" the insiders ride in and out of positions on. The current war is a great example. Trump or his handlers spew nonsensical diatribes on social media. The market reacts, and they ring the register. The insiders make guaranteed fortunes based on knowing the timing of the media releases. Every other chump out there earnestly buying stocks with their 401(k) or "trading" with their money in a E-Trade account or whatever are absolute suckers. If you don't have that insider info, it's gambling at best.

Trump: Death Throes of Boomerworld.

Lots of people who were absolutely tired of the Bush era neocon wars voted for Trump as an alternative to endless wars for jews and the petrobux funnymoney monopoly that NYC and DC have exploited for years. Trump though is just another puppet. It's hard to tell exactly who controls the agenda or what's going on but it's pretty clear the US is going to devalue the dollar like crazy to pay for a bunch of destruction in Iran, most likely for naught, as with the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc... just a crop of destruction by psycho trash ruling class twats.

I think Trump's administration and the floundering of the current neoliberal/boomerworld system mesh up pretty well. Individuals are beginning to realize one by one that this system is a rigged pile of shit and non-participation is an option. We don't have to slave away in the salt mines for oligarch trash.

Anyway, the unintended consequences of yet another waste-fest war might lead to the demise of this current dumb system. Good riddance.

"AI" in Tech

I think it's fairly easy to guess how "AI" is going to affect the tech industry even after just a few months of people actually using it to try to do things.

There are basically two categories of tech work: stuff that's already been done and stuff that hasn't been done (much) if at all. The stuff that's already been done is obviously "easy to do", because there's a template for it that exists already. In my experience the tech industry became saturated with available "off the shelf" tools by around 2010, so by now 85% or more of tech work is just "systems integration".

The stuff that hasn't been done before, either by anyone, or by a company, or an individual developer is generally more difficult, but the work tends to be more focused and outcome oriented and I think necessarily better, meaning less buggy and janky.

"AI" does the stuff that's already been done. It can spit out endless reams of things that have already been done, like web GUIs.

"AI" fails horribly at niche, novel, or weird things; it will barf up code that's simply incorrect. An inexperienced person will take the code at face value and will have a hard time even trying to determine why it doesn't work.

The template-like code that's generated by AI will be even more janky than the "developer as integrator" code that tech has been churning out for more than a decade. The "novel" code it spits out just won't work at all.

Both these things are worse outcomes than just slogging along with the status quo methods of software development. To me it seems obvious the world will be better off with less tech/electro-mechanical stuff in general. It seems like the equivalent of tail fins on cars in the 1950s; it's kind of a weird fad and status symbol posturing. However, the tech industry is run by people who chase trends and who believe each other's bullshit.

Some managers in tech will grasp the limitations of "AI". Others will go pedal to the metal because they're lemmings. Their companies will go flying off a cliff and crash and burn hard.

I think all this is part of a bigger picture reshuffling of the economy as well. The totally financialized western economies are reaching their logical conclusion with the lifespan of the boomers who created these fucked up things.

Practicality, pragmatism, reliability and value are going to replace the era of bullshit and scams little by little. That's the next "big wave".

Animism versus Cults

The animist view of the world is everything has a "spirit", whether it's a bird, tree, rock or human. In that worldview places can have a spirit, and things like a cave or a mountain can have a spirit. I think that perspective is the organic/natural spiritual view of the 3D reality world for people. It's an extrapolation of an individual's experience of reality. "If I'm conscious everything else might be as well."

That said, the ability of any human to directly interact with others' consciousness, even another human's consciousness is severely limited/non-existent.

It is challenging to attempt to tune into the world's mind or to even imagine the perspective of something like a tree; it's an act of imagination and subtle intuition. What do the trees want?  Who the fuck knows? The attempt to plug into the world's minds will eventually bring some ideas bubbling up into the well of consciousness and imagination.

It's an interesting thought experiment to ponder how people try to resolve the ambiguity of this animist scenario... if nobody knows what the spirits want or try to say, then how can it ever be decoded? Well, it can't... but a bunch of political mechanisms inevitably fill in those gaps.

Some people can "agree" aka vote on what the spirits want. In another scenario people cede this interpretation to an authority figure like a priest or augur or shaman who will claim to know what the spirits say or want. Another tactic, which is the one at work in the world today is for a central power to essentially never shut up and jam up all channels with pronouncements and claims. Today it's scientism that's on 24/7 full blast with various claims about the nature of reality. Various religions make somewhat outdated claims for a full explanation of the world like people who believe the bible is literally true.

All such noise doesn't really solve the original ambiguity though. It could mainly be categorized as distractions from that central problem.

The claims about "the spirits" or consciousness of the world is really an extension of the ambiguity of one's own mind and consciousness: "Where is the mind? What is it? Where do ideas come from?" etc... 

Cult Leader Concept Formation

The Heaven's Gate cult is the subject of lots of scholarly papers and journalistic investigation because it's very well documented and was a shocking public spectacle case. The cult reached its deadly end in the early days of the world wide web and made videos about their beliefs. Investigators conducted interviews in the wake of their mass suicide and the material is out there in various formats.

It exemplifies the "cult leader"/henchman system. Without the henchman, in this case, there's probably no "Heaven's Gate" cult.

The leader was a guy named Marshall Applewhite. His top henchman was a nurse named Bonnie Nettles. They actually met in a mental hospital where she was working as a nurse and he was a patient, although this part of the story seems to be disputed.

In the version where they met in the loony bin, Applewhite suffered a psychological breakdown in the wake of being fired from his music professor job for having an affair with a male student. She was a "seeker" interested in astrology and the occult. For some reason, the two hit it off, and that gave rise to what became Heaven's Gate.

In fact, it looks more like Nettles was the real creator of Heaven's Gate, but she needed a "leader" to glom onto. It's interesting there's not more information about her life out there on the internet and that most people think Applewhite was the brains of the operation and creator of their mythology.

Their beliefs are an interesting mishmash of biblicisms and sci fi, in other words, classic sci fi and modern sci fi. A few of the cults I've read about created a similar blend of ideas where Jesus is an alien, or will return in a space ship, or whatever.

The "UFO"/aliens/area 51 concept seems to be promoted by the government from day one, maybe as a joke, and continues even to this day. The concept there is "the government" has contact with "aliens", but can't reveal it to the public for some bizarre reason. It follows the pattern of priests who are in contact with god, who lives in a cave, or can only be contacted on a mountain top, or whatever. Select "priests" get to talk to the god. Similarly, Trump gets to talk with Aliens, I guess. Lol.

Anyway, I think it's useful to discuss the "concept formation" of people like Applewhite/Nettles from the point-of-view of human consciousness being "alien to 3D reality world". That is, our consciousness exists in an "information dimension" which arises from, but is distinct from the 3D reality world of physics and matter.

The ego/self/mind, whatever you want to label the consciousness in it's information dimension struggles with the limitations, insults, and trauma of the 3D reality world. I think this is the result of a very specific method of raising children.

It's pretty common for parents to shield their children from the brutality and/or skeezy animalistic aspects of the human and natural world. Children often don't differentiate between their fantasy/inner world and the external 3D reality. When a child is shielded from the ugly parts of life, or never has to reconcile their model of reality with real life, they can enter adulthood and adolescence with that cartoonish model intact.

When that model collides with reality, there's a couple of basic paths for dealing with the trauma of life: adjust the inner world model to match the brutal realities of life, or adjust the model to wish that trauma away. In the case of Applewhite, he was a gay dude, but was outed in humiliating circumstances. There's not enough info on the biography of Nettles, who seems pretty "normal" in her early life, but for some reason she formed a quasi-marriage with Applewhite, who eagerly played into her astrology/new age fantasies.

The ego/self/mind of man often can't accept the "you don't matter and you will die" aspect of 3D reality. In the case of Appliewhite/Nettles they created a mythology where, in version one, they'd be physically raptured to a space ship. (The Church of the Subgenius lampoons this belief in their materials: you get raptured to a UFO and have sex with sexy aliens.) There's a version of this story floating around on youtube about space Nazis. Anyway, this idea didn't work out for Nettles, who died of cancer before being beamed up.

In typical cult leader fashion, after Nettle's death, Applewhite had to adjust the mythology rather than accept the grim fact of Nettle's pre-rapture expiration, to more of the traditional view of "the soul" being from another dimension, so Nettles shed her meat chariot but still existed and participated in the cult. In some of the cult videos on YouTube, Applewhite sits in a lawn chair and talks. There's an empty lawn chair next to him, presumably for the ghost of Nettles.

Anyway to summarize the above: the self/mind can't deal with it's temporality and the traumas of life. Rather than adjust the idealized inner world model to reality, the cult leader adjusts the model to flee reality, essentially--this is the seeming basis for at least Christianity and Judaism. The cult leader looks to create various narratives that negate the aspects of life that contradict the idealized version of reality in their mind model of reality.

Cults and religions tend to "go big" in their narratives to elevate the self/ego  to "cosmic import", so the narratives tend toward comprehensive schemes and stories with a beginning, middle, and end of the world where only the cool people survive and are rewarded and everyone else is killed in a flood, meteor storm, alien invasion or whatever. Those narratives tend to gratify the ego of the believer who of course assumes they will get the golden ticket and end up in the land of the blessed.

The millenarian/doomsday cults tend toward biblical/alien themes while ignoring the realm of middle of the road mythology, which I think is actually pretty interesting and telling. By middle of the road mythology, I mean a whole cast of creatures and characters of earthly proportion are omitted from their themes and narratives, AFAIK. For example, I don't think I ever heard of a cult which focused heavily on vampires, dragons, or monsters like Bigfoot. The Norse and Germanic mythology actually includes stories of that type of creature, plus the "gods" of the Germanic mythology are more human-scale entities than the more abstract characters of the bible stories. (Here is an article about a vampire "cult", but it was more like a gang than a cult)

In fact, the people who "believe" in bigfoot or ghosts seem to be more into LARPing and having fun with their mythological subject matter than to be serious. Having fun and playing is antithetical to the cultish mindset.

The Cult Leader/Henchman System

One of the prevailing hopes/dreams of humanity is the world could be good and just if the current day leadership were removed/killed.

The author Robert Sopolsky (sp?) published a paper on a tribe of baboons (I think) in Africa where the alpha male leadership died off after gorging on tainted food from a trashbin or some similar scenario. The alpha males prevented the lower status apes from eating the goodies, so it only affected them.

He described the resulting dead alpha male ape society as a golden age. The survivors had lower stress levels and lived a more equal, mutually beneficial life at least for a while. That seems to support the notion that wiping out the "leadership" of any given corporate entity, like a country, would result in a similar golden age... I think there's some merit to that concept.

The problem with that theory is it seems like "the problem" isn't solely the alpha leadership, especially for humans, it's all the followers that really make the pyramid system function, so even if the top of the pyramid is lopped off, the lower levels will quickly build another one.

Videos of frat hazing cult behavior sometimes are released to the public. Even though hazing has been banned a number of times over the years, and to non-cult members the behavior seems insane, lots of people still "willingly" engage in it. 

Recently there were bodycam videos from police going into a frat house in Iowa where a bunch of shirtless dudes were standing in a dark room in the basement. The dudes in the basement were so brainwashed into an alternate reality of frat membership "omerta" that they could barely respond to questions from the police.

The pyramid structure seems to be something like:

• Cult Leader Figurehead
• Top Psychopath Henchmen
• Second tier henchmen who tell NPCs what to do
• NPCs

In the cases of Aum Shinrikyo and the Bagwan Sri Rajneesh cults the cult leader and the top psychopath henchmen lived in a sort of co-dependent relationship where the attributes the cult leader lacked were made up for by the psychopathic henchmen, and vice versa. The top level henchmen maybe lack the charisma or desire to interact with the public, or lack the confidence or insanity to try to foist their crazy expansive crazy vision on others. Similarly, the cult leader probably lacks the desire to deal with myriad details to carry out their insane schemes.

I think if the leaders and complete top level henchman layer of society were removed entirely, it would take a long time for a pyramid structure to reconstitute. That pyramidal structure, though, and the cult leader/henchman system is duplicated over and over throughout the entirety of a country like the US.

 

Man Made Mud

This time of year, the late winter/early spring in northeast Ohio is the maple syrup season and the mud season.

One of the more interesting, surprising observations of my 50+ year life is mud is mostly man made; there are exceptions, of course, but mud is generally a product of disturbed nature, that is, where the natural courses of drainage and plant growth are destroyed or disturbed.

My property illustrates this very well. In the spring, some areas of our yard, that is the grassy areas of the property where all the trees were chopped down many years ago can turn into a swamp in February/March. Then if people, or animals like deer, walk through the swamp the soil percolates up through the grass and it turns to soupy mud in spots.

In the wooded areas of the property, where the soil is composed of the same glacial till at the same slopes, there's no mud. There are leaves on the ground this time of year from the fall, plus the forest root system seems to form a ubiquitous drainage network. The tree root systems in a long lived forest like that are everywhere, even coming up just under the leaf mat. There are areas which are natural pools formed by long dead trees that fell over and uprooted... even those drain in a day or two after a heavy rain.

People try to dry out the grassy lawn areas with french drains and similar strategies, but the lifetime of shallow drainage systems is pretty short. If they're not buried below the frost line, eventually they'll break up from frost heave, or get clogged up or collapse, or get ripped up by trees or animals. The previous owner of our house went all-in on such drainage systems and they started failing about 10 years ago. They probably lasted 15-20 years, plus they don't really drain the swampy lawn areas, so they're kind of pointless.

I let some of the muddy areas of the lawn grow wild. After a couple of years they turned back into a meadow. Meadows generally do a good job covering up the mud as well. The taller, thicker weeds like goldenrod or berry bushes will collapse under the heavy snows and form a thick mat after a couple of years. Eventually trees will take over there too and in the distant future that will turn to a nicely drained forest area as well.

In perpetually damp areas that were wrecked by annual mowing and rolling, it's difficult for even a meadow to establish itself, and moss takes over, so even in that case, the mud gets covered. So generally a property manager doesn't really have to "do something" to cover up mud, eventually it takes care of itself. However, eventually might be a really long time.

Matter/Pattern

Sometimes the origin of words yields a surprisingly fresh insight into the nature of things. I was curious about the origin of the word "matter" as in "I matter", meaning, "I am important". The more common meaning of "matter", and maybe the "original" meaning is: undifferentiated stuff. Eventually, I guess that concept morphed into various versions of "stuff", for example "the matter at hand", which is maybe how it turned into the concept of "mattering", as in "I matter" as in "I am stuff as well".

The origin of matter is the Latin word mater, which is mother, as in mother earth. I think "mater" and various version of that word go waaaay back into the mysts of time and the theoretical "proto indoeuropean language". 

The origin of "matter" being "mother" leads to the obvious question what's the "pater" derived word that takes on the same role, and that's "pattern".

The concept that the undifferentiated material world is "feminine" and the plan is "masculine" is an old one apparently. One of the symbols of that is the obelisk, like the Washington monument, which is, of course, a dick. One of the associated ancient concepts in agriculture is "the sun" goes into "the earth" and produces the plants in a crop.

Nothing Lasts and "You" Don't Matter

The mind exists in "an information dimension". Other people with a similar model of the mind think there's "one information dimension" and conceptualize it as a place and think the distinction between individual's minds is an illusion. Who knows? Anyway, there's a sort of strange relationship between this dimension and the 3D reality world. They are attached, but distinct. In fact, the concept of a "space" or "dimension" seems entirely off, but there's no other suitable analogy because ironically enough the mind's representations of such a concept revolve around the body's relationship to other objects in 3D reality.

This scenario gives birth to all sorts of human dramas and delusions. The entirety of these delusions is encompassed in the probably apocryphal, too good to be true story of Alexander "the great" meeting the cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, which is in present day Turkey. The two men offer completely different conclusions about how one should live when the temporality of a mind is the most fundamental human fact.

Not only is "I" temporal but the entirety of human endeavor is also. Diogenes decided to live the simplest possible, most "natural" life. Alexander went and killed a bunch of people and "conquered" territory to establish "hellenic civilization", that is to impose the mental model of his bros on as many people as possible to the extent that's ever possible which is "great". The civilization model is basically a shared delusion.

For some odd reason for many people it's a bitter pill to swallow the notion that nothing at all lasts and you don't "matter" even though this is as obvious as the blue sky, stars, or sunrise. In a world of all change, nothing lasts. Even stones eventually turn to dust. Men and women age. Once firm, supple skin turns wrinkly and dry. The entire world of man will be over in the blink of an eye in geological terms. That is all obvious.

The story of Diogenes and Alexander revolves around the "I matter" concept. Ultimately, mattering can be boiled down to "leaving a mark". I think that terminology betrays the origin of the "I matter" concept. The verbal and symbolic reasoning aspect of the mind is an entity of symbol processing and memory. As long as there's "memory" there's an "I". Another aspect of "mattering" is being able to impose one's own internal model of reality on others. A person can insist "I matter the most". This particular idea is expressed by the tombs of pharaohs of Egypt, or those Chinese emperors buried with terracotta armies, or Viking funerals where the bros of the dead dude sacrificed women, pets, horses and the like.

Modern variations on this theme are greatly attenuated and more playful. For example, the grave of Benjamin Orr, a member of the rock band  "The Cars" has a grave site in Thompson, Ohio. Fans put little trinkets to pay homage to his memory. Similarly, Chef Boyardee's grave in All Soul's cemetery in Chardon is honored with cans of spaghetti and meatballs and the like.

 

Another twist on this scenario is people form narratives with a "god" and order of the world related to the god or gods, where the "I" existed before birth, then continues after death but is blessed or punished according to some cosmic rule book and presumably a life score. This is the mind model of probably billions of people. The concept there is one "matters" as part of a gamified, systemic reality. The particular rules of these games are bizarre and utterly arbitrary.

I think the rules various groups invent betrays some genetic underpinning for belief. Like various sects of jews have hyper-legalistic beliefs about their demon lord's systemic game. Other ethnic groups understand the game is not legalistic at all, because of course it's absurd god has a giant set of rulebooks and have more animistic and ironically more comprehensive views of the information dimension/spirit realm.

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.

Mock Cults/Religions

While I was thinking about the question "do cult leaders believe their own bullshit?" the case of mock cults and mock religions came to mind. A couple of good examples of those are Dudeism, which is a faux religion/philosophy based on the movie The Big Lebowski which is maybe related to concepts from Robert Anton Wilson's "Discordianism".

Another related phony religion is "The Church of the Subgenius" which was a big thing when I was in high school and college--the mascot image of that religion was a 1950s looking man with a pipe named "J.R. Bob Dobbs". I'm not even sure how I knew that. It's possible some friends of mine had materials from the parody "religion" in high school. One of the guys who developed the "Church of the Subgenius" is Ivan Stang who was headquartered in Cleveland Heights, Ohio for some time, which is maybe why it was a big thing here. Stickers of J.R. Bob Dobbs were all over the place. I haven't seen one for ages though.

The mock religions are an interesting case because they are created, intentionally, as a parody of mainstream religions and cults. I think they mock the general concept of "belief" in what's often, ultimately a comic book. Or maybe more generally, they are a reiteration of the concept that the symbolic reasoning mind is really an alien to this earth and can actually "know nothing" of substance. This concept is emphasized most strongly, I think, by science, the ultimate rational mind project which basically demolished all "revealed" religions and then led to the bizarre concepts of the 19th century philosophers who gave birth to Nazi and Zionist ideologies which are really just another species of mock religions.

The "judaism" of a guy like Benjamin Netanyahoo or Ben Shapiro is as "serious" as Dudeism or the Church of Scientology. The core of their "belief" is from a Nazi philosopher who preached that "believing really really hard" was the ultimate/best human activity, which is obviously nonsensical.

Another related example of these fake churches is faux music groups like "the KLF" who had a number of huge hit songs in the early 1990s like "3AM Eternal" and that song that's played all the time at basketball games "Dr Who and the Tardis".

This whole subcategory of philosophy or overall approaches to life is really related to what I'd call "the way", and it pops up at the end of empires. A philosopher like Diogenes is a great example of one. I think the overall category could be labeled "absurdism". I'd even lump stoicism in with that category, and count myself as an absurdist. I think the gnostics are another related category; their claim to knowledge is radically subjective.

The absurdists realize that claims on knowledge are mostly false. Not much can be known. Virtually ever single person parading around on the public stage is an absolute fraud and scumbag. Nations and religions are corporations fleecing people and often mass murdering people for profit.

Will the Psycho Jew Mafia Launch a False Flag Attack on the US?

Unfortunately, it seems like a near certainty that the psycho jew mafia will launch a false flag attack on the US and blame it on Iran and the corrupt doofus government and many dumb fuck Americans will go along with it. However, at the same time lots of people in the US are skeptical of such claims by now. Even if it's 25% of the population that's a whole lot. The media is not as capable of bamboozling the masses as they once were. It's probably wishful thinking to imagine the public would say "no" to escalating the retarded war on Iran to a full scale ground invasion, but it could happen. 

Do Cult Leaders Believe Their Own Bullshit?

Back in the 1980s, a famous west-coast cult led by an Indian guy named "Bagwan Sri Rajneesh" broke up under pressure from governments for its nefarious activities. The cult was large and had lots of money and real estate all over the world. The cult leader had a collection of Rolls Royce cars. That aspect of the cult was featured on a 60 Minutes piece about it back in the early 80s. I remember watching it when I was a kid.

One of the persistent questions about cults is do the leaders of a cult believe their own bullshit? In the 60 Minutes piece, Rajneesh came across as a very cynical scammer. Whatever words he said were betrayed by his mannerisms and owning a collection of expensive cars, at least that's what I thought when I was maybe 12 years old or so.

 

The Rajneesh cult was just starting to go down the full crazy trail just like Heaven's Gate, or Jonestown cult or Aum Shinrikyo did by the time the Rajneeshies came under legal pressure. For example, they poisoned the local townspeople near their Oregon cult HQ with salmonella in 1984.

The prevalence of cultish behavior and beliefs is lost on many people. For example, in the image above of Rajneesh in a Rolls includes a bunch of people in "asian" style garb and many people associate cult behavior with things "asiatic" or from "the east". However, there are plenty of jews in cults, or european descended people in western style cults. You can find scenes of mobs of jews worshipping various messiah type figures wearing their particular garb which is just some version of the robes warn by the Rajneeshies.

Here's a picture of Trump visiting the grave of Schneerson, the guy pictured above, who led a large cult that apparently is running the US government now.

One model of the cult leader is they are a cynical scammer who knows the ideas they sell to their believers are all imaginary. That is, if they were to have a discussion with an outsider about their cult's beliefs, they'd acknowledge the cult beliefs are just a bunch of nonsense and stories. Another model of the cult leader type is they are also "committed" to their stories. Often they invent a third party, aka "god" who gave them a "revelation".

I think the second type of cult leader is actually the most common and it's the current model in charge of Israel, or the model of the neocons in the United States, which actually seems based on Germanic romantic philosophy and the overall "anti-rationalist" theme of it.

Is the Trump Admin Dumb Enough to Send Troops into Iran?

Lots of pundits are pointing out an "Iran Invasion" is essentially a suicide mission, or is totally implausible to begin with due to the terrain in Iran: It's extremely rugged, even worse than Afghanistan. Also the Iranians had decades to prepare for such a war, so any attempt to invade would likely turn into a bloody failure regardless of air superiority and technological wonder tools like satellites, etc...

In spite of that, the Trump admin seems to be intimating an invasion is in the offing. This makes me wonder if the purpose of the whole Iran boondoggle is really to "destroy" the US to rush in the next level of jewing the population with crypto-currency and AI tracking of behavior.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. The war doesn't seem to be following the script the US and Israel had hoped for and it keeps getting more dangerous every day.

Kelly Osbourne: Bad Models of Reality

I think I watched at least a few episodes of whatever TV show the Osbourne family was on in the early 2000s, so I was aware of who Kelly Osbourne is when her current day picture started circulating the Internet as a cautionary plastic surgery tale. She currently looks like a ghoul.

I think that's a great example of the vast gulf between the ideas people can have about 3D reality world, including their own body, and the natural order of things. It seems like there's no "good" cosmetic surgery, except for things like repairing injuries. Reshaping a human's face or body to fit some particular notion of beauty seems to almost always produce a trainwreck outcome.

Humans seem to have some built in methods of assessing very slight deviations from the natural distribution of muscle, bone, and skin maybe to help us avoid people with diseases. When a plastic surgeon slices and dices somebody's bones and muscles, it leaves some weird fingerprint of distortion that registers as "diseased" or something similar.

A few months ago I was on a flight to LA and sat behind a woman who had filler injected into her face--mainly her lips. She frequently talked to her husband throughout the flight, and he was across the aisle from her so her face was frequently visible. The filler is supposed to make a person look younger, but it just looks  like swelling, maybe from an insect sting. It must not be possible to replace lost collagen and other elements of the natural youthful skin in a way that accurately mimics it. It looks "off". This naturally draws attention if for no other reason than to figure out the problem the person is having.

Kelly Osbourne's visage is just a great example of the gulf between the natural order of things and the mental model of reality, which in her case is just some opinions she, maybe her family and a plastic surgeon had about what her face should look like.