"Who" Rides the Mountain Bike?

In northeast Ohio our fall weather this year has been spectacular. I've been taking advantage of that with several mountain bike rides per week. I've been chasing after a new personal best time around the big creek park trail loop because the overall conditions are prime for that.

Riding fast on the MTB is an entirely different experience than riding fast on the road since the trail is rough, has many twists and turns and many rapid ups and downs. Also many of the obstacles, like trees or rocks are inches or just a couple of feet away on the trail, while the road is built for cars and trees and other obstruction are several feet away so you don't even have to be aware of them. Riding 20 miles per hour on the MTB feels like warp speed, on the road that is just cruising along speed.

One of the "weird" elements of riding the MTB fast is "you" have to look where "you" are going to engage whatever neural/muscular system actually pilots the mountain bike. That is "you", your verbal and symbolic mode of consciousness really isn't driving. In fact, if "you" start thinking words and concepts, they are distractions that disrupt the actual pilot.

That kind of split in consciousness can happen in a car as well. Many times when people commute to an office by car, the "driver" of the car allows the verbal/symbolic mode of consciousness to flit away into a fantasy realm so the miles pass almost unnoticed. The I "ends up" at work as if the drive was passed in slumber. The opposite of that might happen when some emergency situation happens, like if a tree limb suddenly fell on the road, or in winter, the car loses control on a patch of ice.

The question is, "who is the pilot"? Is the pilot of the MTB the same thing as "me"?

No. The MTB scenario gives me a very clear answer on this question. One of the "tasks" for the verbal/symbolic consciousness during the MTB ride is to remember to keep looking down the trail because the eyes "steer" the bike. The verbal mode of consciousness routinely fucks this up. One well known example is "object fixation", while sweeping the eyes through a turn, the verbal consciousness, that is the "I", will go into worry mode and riders can stare at a tree, a rock, debris on the trail or whatever, which inexorably makes the actual "pilot" of the bike aim right for that obstacle. This happens to car drivers, motorcyclists, and the term originated with airplane pilots in one of the mass killing spree "world wars" where the pilot would unintentionally kamikaze right into the target they tried to bomb.

This reminds me of post about the futility of "Expert How-To Videos". The "communication" between the "I" and the pilot is not symbolic or verbal, it's really "by feel". Now that I spent hundreds of hours on the MTB, little glimpses of "feel" come through to the "I". I'll "feel" the tire and ground interface with my feet, but that chain of communication for me is weak and inconsistent. For some people who are super experts it's constant and solid.

Really "the pilot" is like an animal companion with respect to the verbal and symbolic mode of consciousness. This is why it's very good for people to be around lots of different types of animals through their life and not turn into an urban housecat type. The urban housecat human tends to think the whole world is verbal, when hardly any of it is. The mode of communication with the pilot mode of consciousness is in its terms not in words.

Debt Money and Who "Owns"?

I wrote a few posts about the absurd claims of ownership of the so called "new world" by governments (really the mafiosi ruling clique) of countries like France, Spain, England, or the Netherlands back in the age of sail. The french claimed ownership via rituals and claims backed by the fucking pope, as if that somehow added validity to the nonsense. The Netherlands and then the young USA took a contractual/legalistic approach for their nonsense which is why there are a bunch of treaties with "Indians" and the US.

The thing that really set the "ownership" claims of the US in stone was the mass of US citizens settling various areas and their collective consent to the rules of the game of land and property ownership. That game appeared to be based on fairly common-sense rules, for example: when you mix your labor with some naturally free thing, you get some entitlement to "own" said thing.

That sequence of historical examples is pretty interesting to ponder with respect to the current corporate/financial landscape in the US. The debt-based money creates a model of ownership that's more like the spain/france model of new world claims than the work-mingled model of the US. Like, who "owns" a corporation when the money to purchase it came from loans aka printed money? There's no "risk" by the purchasers, even though corporate types run their pie-holes about their "risk taking" all the time. Many "investors" are shuffling debt money around in a similar way. They're not risking their actual personal money into some corporate deal.

It's all some elaborate ritual of paper shuffling. The "original" owner of some company might have owned it in the common sense way, but the new owner certainly does not. This is especially of interest to employees, who for whatever reason decided to accept this new pile of shit system over the past 50 years, mainly because they don't realize it happened.

This is especially apparent at tech companies where the engineers literally "own" the intellectual property of the company, as it is/was in their brains. They, however, agree to play the game imposed on them by some corporate twats and dutifully sign over ownership claims on patents, for example.

Anyway, the people with the money printer really claim ownership over everything in a really specific/peculiar way--mainly on a per transaction basis. That is, any ownership claim is settled using their digits.

A fairly interesting and subtle shift is happening to this overall model, though. It's cheaper and easier than ever to "do" anything, that is make any product... For me, personally, I wonder daily why I am still "working for" somebody else as an engineer. It's probably a question millions of employees have, well at least the people who actually make stuff or do stuff have.

LLMs = 3D Printing

A few years ago, a startup company started to "3D print houses". Really, they just splooged out concrete walls onto a slab with a gantry concrete thing. Lots of shitheads thought it was "disruptive". There were many breathless videos on youtube about how it would change everything, but those were videos made by shitheads for shitheads. Since youtube has a comments section, you could see what people in the home construction business thought about it: not much. The construction industry stats say only about 15% of the cost and time for home construction go into stick framing.

The 3D printed walls concept was a follow on to the massive hype wave of 3D printing in manufacturing and how it would "change everything" too. It's not clear why that particular technology got so much hype. Nobody cared similarly about pattern cutting machines, or lathes, or CNC controlled machine tools, or whatever: many of those things have been around since the 1950s. 3D printing turned out to be another tool in an already enormous toolbox. AFAIK, the 3D printed walls concept fizzled out entirely in home construction.

To me, LLMs look a whole lot like 3D printing with respect to the massive hype wave and speculative stock market spaz out. I finally got around to setting up a small home system to get some hands on understanding of these things. I'm currently using one of the smaller demo-ish models available from Meta's open source models because I don't want to spend $10,000 on e-junk GPUs to use one of the large models.

Initially, even the small LLM is mind-blowing. It's wild to type in a question like: who are all the Cleveland Browns quarterbacks since Tim Couch? And get an answer that's probably 99% correct. You can ask similarly obscure questions about many topics and get an answer. The whole Internet, or at least most of the wikipedia is compressed into a database of weights that's only around 4-5 GB. However, it becomes apparent quickly that the LLM has severe limits and is often "buggy". In fact, in some scenarios it will spout endless nonsense in response to some prompt.

Some engineers I know are riding the wave of agentic "coding", which is actually a really complicated version of human coding. It's another type of programming, where instead of directly writing code in "C" or System Verilog or whatever, an engineer writes up an elaborate prompt, which is then iteratively modeled and tested, ideally all by the agents.

The killer problem with all this stuff is it appears to 99% work as long as there is a bunch of prior art and public code it can model... Even though it's limited, it is amazing to see in practice. Also it only "works" for people who are already experts. It does not work at all for people who aren't--in fact for them it's like a slow acting poison or "rabbit starvation" scenario. The junior engineer people who adopt the agentic coding approach will never be experts.

I think this current approach will end up dominating several specific real-world use cases. For example, it's a significantly "better manual" than most manuals, or a better how-to book than most how to books. For example, say you have a specific farm tractor and want to change the oil and filters, it's a PITA to find that type of info in a PDF manual, for example, so it would be good to ask in natural language "what's the part number of the oil filter?" and get the correct answer. Companies will probably start to publish their info in some manner that's very friendly to LLMs.

The key factor with LLM as "manual" is there's little to no impact from an incorrect answer to a question, like if you order the wrong filter because the LLM produced nonsense, the typical impact would be it doesn't fit correctly. The same type of error could happen with the traditional methods of looking up a part number or even ordering the correct part number but getting the wrong thing delivered. All of that is already "imperfect".

I can see it replacing GUIs for complex systems, like large networks with lots of different hardware boxes, but a very specific system has to be constructed for that to really function the way people imagine it should: that is flawlessly. The model would have to be able to iteratively experiment and prove the network configuration with a high-fidelity simulator before applying the configuration to a real system. That scenario is a bit like the 3D printed walls scenario.

Anyway, the LLM technology really is cool and interesting, however the 4chan maxim "nothing ever happens" is a good one to keep in mind when something is hyped to the skies. The trope "this changes everything" is so common, yet so often wrong. 

Ideal of Optimization vs Way of the Raccoon

I notice many people "hunt" for the ideal parking place. This simple scenario shows how difficult it is to "optimize" even basic stuff. "Difficult" is not the word, it's impossible. 

One reason it's impossible is the boundaries of the problem, and the variables being optimized are arbitrary. A person might elect to optimize time, or energy, or whatever and follow a simple scheme meant to do that when parking. In every case, the model will omit potentially important factors, or will operate over arbitrary time spans, or whatever, and will be simply incorrect. Then the overall costs in time and energy of parking lots, or roads, or cars, yada yada end up being treated as fixed constant values rather than another even more complicated set of variables to consider. Aspects of the problem won't even have a mathematical representation--like the value of functional health... like almost everyone would be better off walking a certain distance every day, so the "optimal" parking spot might be 1 mile away from a store.

Since it's impossible to develop a useful model, individuals, then masses of people follow a monkey-see-monkey-do strategy. They learn an overall pattern for the parking algorithm from their parents, friends, and watching others. This mass behavior becomes "the system".

Once there's a system, bureaucrats and dweebs try to optimize elements of it, like tweaking road building methods, adding "start/stop" systems to cars and the like. Those attempts at optimization are similarly fraught. Often they're the outcome of academic research that's akin to research seen in dietary advice, or exercise advice, which flip-flops every few years. For example, a few years ago all the running and cycling experts were heavily promoting "zone 2 training"--meaning the best way to train was lots of easy miles. Previously, they strongly advocated "high intensity training", and now they returned to that after touting zone 2 training.

The raccoon lives in the negative spaces of the human world. I think this is good advice for the humans that can take it. Let's go back to the "weight training" idea from the previous post. The masses go to the gym. The gym has formalized equipment that's part of "the system". Instead, get a bag of sand and walk up and down an irregular hill while holding it in different positions. There's your raccoon workout. Or instead of a bag of sand carry a log, or a bundle of chains, a boulder or whatever.

One of the weird side-effects of the way of the raccoon is it is inherently "cheaper"--like a log is free and a boulder is free. While all the life-scripts and solutions of "the system" come with a fee or other expenses because the masses buy them, like a weight set is expensive, which is really strange if you think about it.

The Way of the Raccoon

From Here

"Bodybuilding" is a great example of idealism run amok; it shows ideal concepts are often, maybe always, arbitrary and bizarre. The bodybuilder emulates a beef cow and 'roid maxxes and eats a lot to pack on muscle mass. In a surprisingly large number of cases, the 'roid doses can lead to the body's systems failing so even the most basic functions like breathing and immune response can be severely compromised--not exactly "ideal".

I remember a handful of backyard football games when I was around 17 or 18 years old where guys who were in the "bodybuilder" hobby would show up. They were uniformly ineffectual as athletes in spite of "looking" muscular. Lifting weights and gaining muscle mass is a very specific activity that doesn't lead to all round athleticism. Looking back on those days, I'd say in general, it was difficult to guess how effective someone would be at a sport by their physique.

Many examples of idealism have a similar flavor. They're "image" dominated and dumb: devoid of real world information. Weirdly, adults tend to encourage idealistic views of the world among children and actively shield kids from real world information. Jobs and careers are idealized, politicians are idealized, the military is idealized, romance and sex are idealized, etc... As a consequence, teenage boys and girls often have an idealized image of love and romance that actually torments them as their relationships fail to compare to a thing they haven't thought through at all, nor experienced first hand.

The notion there's a "perfection" dominates countless obsessive behaviors of men and women: makeup, hairstyle, dentistry, eyesight, eye color, skin color and complexion, and on and on. People get plastic surgery because their nose doesn't conform to some notion of an abstract perfect shape or size, or think their head is the wrong shape and get wildly invasive plastic surgery to match some completely phony image of a celebrity who's all made-up and only photographed from specific angles with specific lighting.

Quite weirdly, the "ideals" dominate the reals. Those who pursue and "believe" in the ideals are thought of as the good ones. Those who are realistic are cynics at best or the archetypal "losers". The loser archetype is the ultimate bogeyman, especially for the middle class people who work their whole life mainly to avoid falling into that category.

An antidote to this trap is "the way of the raccoon". A raccoon is an omnivore, is curious and adaptable, and is a survivor and doesn't participate in fruitless activities and goes into a torpor over the winter. Adaptability goes hand in hand with a realistic appraisal of the world, while "idealism" exists in an world of perpetual psychosis.

Wrench Set versus Symbols and Algorithms

There is a lot of information in a set of wrenches you might find in a toolbox. For example, the length of a wrench and the size of the nut it's meant to turn are proportional. The history of use of the wrenches is probably related to scratches on the opening and on the handle. Maybe there is oxidation and discoloring, except where the user's hand left a light coating of oils, and on and on. The size of the wrench also implies various things about the range of forces a human hand and arm can apply, etc... The most likely to be missing wrench is, ironically the most used one: which is the basis of the missing 10 mm wrench joke. There might be paint overspray on the wrenches since steel rusts, and if the person who owned the wrenches worked with older crusty equipment it's pretty common to carelessly blast it with spray paint for rust protection. The wrenches are a sub-unit of many larger wholes all linked together in a big multi-dimensional web. The natural world is all like that, but the web is much larger and tied together at myriad scales.

The real world analog information web is distinct from information that's encoded in symbols and algorithms... One very interesting point to ponder about symbols is they represent algorithmic states at least in a machine like a computer and don't have "independent" existence. The hardware of the computer implements a finite and systemic representation of those states.

In the natural world, the wrench information web is not encoded it just is. 

"Your Consciousness"

There's a Sci-Fi phrase which is shows the crux of the problem of the Ego and the information dimension. That phrase is "your consciousness" as in "your consciousness can be transplanted into a computer" or another body or whatever. This is a trope that's explored in many Sci-Fi series like various Star Treks, or in The 100 where there's a "city of light" which is a reference to the jewish mythology of a "New Jerusalem" where the main characters go live as consciousness transplanted to a computer simulation "body".

The phrase is patterned after many other possessive phrases, like "your luggage" or "your teeth" or "your hair" where "you" and the item that's owned are separate entities. However, obviously in the "your consciousness" scenario, there's no separation. "You" are "your consciousness". "You" seems to exist in the information dimension and have an analogous relationship to your brain as a running computer program has to its CPU, RAM, busses and peripherals. The running computer program actually isn't "in the computer" either, but if you shut the computer off its information dimension vanishes.

The concept of transplanting your consciousness is ostensibly akin to transplanting the total state of the computer program to another computer--something that's 100% possible to do, and in fact is a common strategy for redundant backup systems.

However, the "state" of the underlying biological "hardware" of a human can't be represented symbolically, so it's not possible to "read it out". Where the computer is a contrived symbol processor and is based on state information that can be 100% translated to symbols, the analog nature of the 3D reality world does not seem amenable to symbolization. One version of that problem is a human's physicality is not even neatly divvied up into computer-like or machine-like parts. The boundaries of what affects consciousness are extremely fuzzy--for example gut bacteria signal the brain. Who knows what else does?

At best, a replica-model of "you" could exist in some type of computer model. This is the essence of the Star Trek transporter horror--the super powerful ship's computer and sensors analyze the totality of the crew-member, which actually isn't even possible if concepts from quantum mechanics are correct, which apparently converts the crew-member to a stream of energy/information, then reverses the process in the ship and replicates a copy of the crew member.

My guess is there are always more "bits" or any type of definite symbol required to represent 3D reality world state information than can be "read out".

Matter/Pattern and Hades Kingdom

Many posts ago, I noted the etymology of "Pattern" and "Matter" and their conceptual relationship with archetypal male and female. I think this concept is useful in elaborating the idea of "the false monastery" aka "the system" or Hades Kingdom and the "true monastery" as in the fictional shaolin monastery of the TV show Kung Fu.

One narrative of "the world" is matter is undifferentiated substance until pattern comes along. For example there is a classical world concept that nothing happens until "the plan" comes along. A theme in creation myths is there's a differentiation between sky and earth, for example. In the jew myths, there's a statement cribbed from greek philosophers: in the beginning was the word and the word was god, that is "the pattern" god.

One of the greek concepts elaborated by Plato in several of the plays starring the Socrates character is there's a realm of forms and ideas. The forms and ideas can "materialize" via human work. There's an example of the "ideal chair" that becomes a real chair, and the real chair is always imperfect. The idea realm is a real place, and concepts like mathematics have an independent origin that precedes everything else.

There's a comedic split in greek philosophical opinion on this subject in the  apocryphal story of Plato's Chicken. 

Interestingly, the first line of the Dao de Ching is: "The Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way." I think it's essentially the same idea as the Socrates character saying, "I know that I know nothing." Human symbolic and verbal reasoning is inherently limited. The "truth" of the world can't be expressed in words or symbols. This is what the joke of Plato's chicken is about. The joke is a different version of a zen koan like "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"

The "false monastery" or the "Kingdom of Hades", which is the Empire in Star Wars or the winter King's realm in The Game of Thrones or Mordor in The Lord of the Rings mistakes phantasmagorical concepts of the information dimension for primal 3d reality. It is "pattern-centrism".

Where does the pattern actually come from? Where do the concepts of circles, rectangles, triangles, squares and symbols themselves actually arise when it's difficult to find such a thing in the natural world? The easiest one to find is a circle--the disk of the sun is fairly close to a perfect circle. When the sun is behind clouds one can see it as a disk. It is easy to replicate with a mechanical version of a an algorithm: trace out a circle with a string fixed to the center. It's more difficult to find natural analogues of rectangles or even straight lines, so where could the idea even originate? In a nutshell, I think the base representation of these geometric "ideas" is encoded in the human visual system's hardware, but the "running software" of consciousness or cognition is actually in "the information dimension(s)" and the information dimensions are all orthogonal to 3D reality and each arises from the meat computer brains of men and animals and even machines that produce their own information dimension.

The relationship between the information dimension and the 3d reality world is at the root of this split in philosophy. Descartes line, "I think therefore I am" is a good summary of the false monastery take. The fundamental reality is attained through symbolic reasoning, really the ability to reason rather than the sensation of being alive. A great fictional depiction of this mode of thinking is the idea that "human consciousness" could be transplanted into a computer, then "you" would "live forever". This notion is shown in various Star Trek episodes, Stargate episodes and in the TV show "The 100" in "The City of Light". Another variation on this theme is the Star Trek character Data. Though he's a machine, he's conscious and unique. There's even a trial about it in episode which is one of the great examples of sci-fi speculative philosophy.

The false monastery or Hades Kingdom tends toward brutality and psychopathy and sterilization of nature. The approach is "imposition of forms" driven by a religious devotion to pure "idealism".

No Money for a Good Man

One of the lingering tropes of the sci-fi/fantasy/religious genres is a hero or savior character will come along and "set things right". One current-day example of this is the saga of Jeff Epstein and his pals. Since a bunch of info about Epstein leaked out into the public, thousands of people began to imagine that "somebody" would come along and jail the main conspirators. As time goes along, though, witnesses and whistleblowers follow Epstein's exit from this earthly realm. Another couple of them were "suicided" in recent weeks.

To me, it looks like the jew mafia and some associates managed to take control of lots of public institutions including the office of the Presidency of the United States and many major financial institutions, that is, "the system" that would bring any of these people to trial. Of course they did. If it weren't this jew mafia, it'd be some other group of people acting the exact same way, that is, using bribery, blackmail, espionage, murder and mayhem to try to "control" whatever thing and impose their systems on everyone else because of course they would.

The US ruling class and its systems are probably near peak depravity and destructiveness now. The steady "legalization" of former organized crime businesses like sports gambling and drugs is one sign these mafiosi are firmly in control. The depiction of hard drug use by "cool kids" is de riguer on the garbage entertainment fodder on HBO or whatever streaming service. 

A similarly forlorn hope is the masses will "wake up" and be their own savior. This is an even sadder trope. One of the disturbing testimonies on the fallen state of humans in general is provided by the rapid conversion of the native american tribesmen to debt slavery back in the fur trading days. They got roped into a system contrived by psychos in the ancient near east thousands of years before almost immediately even though their ancestors parted company maybe 20,000 years prior.

A "good man" is like an alien on this earth. His goals and aspirations don't line up at all with the systems and activities that appear to bring "wealth", especially in monetary forms. These people appear as a total weirdo:  guy like Johnny Appleseed is one example. Their goals and aspirations wildly diverge from that of "the system", which is more or less just a contrivance of the greediest and most vile freaks on the planet to feed their appetites.

Many people subtly acknowledge this in their "retirement" plans. That is, they'll start focusing on "the good" once they're done with their corporate minion life. They'll volunteer at a dog shelter or work at a soup kitchen or whatever, but only after they invested enough money into the system to make a middle class wage on dividends, etc... That is, being "good" is at odds with keeping this system going--I think this is just generally true.

Almost anything you'd want to do that's really "good" won't make any money. Money is entirely a creation of Hades and his minions and the underworld. The formula of "first I need to make enough money" is their formula.

Failure to Accept Reality

The road to hell is not paved with good intentions. I think it's an inability to accept reality. Maybe "hell" is in the enormous gap between people's mental models and the 3d reality world.

Let's take a really simple thing like "car accidents" and insurance as a starting point to flesh out this concept. Car accidents are inevitable, just like it's inevitable people trip and fall from time to time all throughout their life. A person might do something dumb like back into a garage door in the morning because they had too much coffee, or get into a fender bender because another car was obscured behind the "A" pillar when they glanced up the road. These things happen all the time. Cars really should be treated as potentially disposable items, or at least the paneling of a car should be, but they're not, and many people "buy" a car with a debt agreement so they don't even really own the shiny metal.

That whole scenario exists in some bizarre hell-realm, but let's just stick with the insurance aspect of it, which is sort of a hell-gap-squared scenario. Since people can't afford their cars, they pay for car insurance to mitigate the financial damage from an accident. Then when they have an accident, or somebody steals a part or their whole car, they often discover the insurance is unhelpful or bad. For example, I had my catalytic converter stolen at work about 10 years ago. I decided to file an insurance claim, even though I knew better. The insurance would only pay for some shitty aftermarket converter that didn't even fit my car instead of paying for an OEM one, which is what I would have done. Then my premiums went up substantially as well: total fucking scam. I'd been paying premiums for years and the parasites wouldn't really even properly fix my car for a measly $1200 or whatever.

Even in the cases of accidents that cause bodily injury or loss of life, the main function of the insurance industry is to protect its profitability. People imagine there should be a magic thing which protects them from accidents, but in reality there's only a parasite that injures them continually.

The actual reality of transportation is people can allocate X% of their income to it. This is true for individuals and society. Ideally the minimal level of resources for comfortable transportation would be allocated to it. Similarly, in the cold-hard reality world, the concept of "fault" is pretty childish and car accidents have many causes. One stupid cause, for example, is roads are double-wide so there can be head on accidents. A system of only split-lane roads would cost more, and add to travel times, but would be safer. By only allocating X% of their income to the roads, people sign up for the possibility of head-on collisions. Similarly, if it were 2x harder to get a driver's license, crashes would obviously decline, but that will never happen because the car industry wants to make as much money as possible.

Anyway, overall it costs person X% of their income all-in, including accidents and repairs, to use a car. However, and this is where the hell aspect comes about, they refuse to acknowledge these very basic facts. Even word and concept "accident" provides glaring testimony about this fantasy land. "Accident" implies avoidable.

Shaolin Monastery/Hades Kingdom

Now that I'm in my 50s, I see most of my "education" was really training to be a minion of Hades and his adherents. Few of the people who trained me knew that, and those who did treated it in an ironic way. One example was the long time football coach/gym/math teacher in the high school. In gym class, he sort of joked that the exercises we were doing were preparing us 14 year olds for whatever war was going on at the time in the late 1980s--because my whole life the US has been involved in some war or another. The education system in the US is about the goals of the "system" rather than the kid's well being, completeness, or actual knowledge.

There are many examples of the same scenario in corporate america where this sort of "education" continues in truly nonsensical/bizarre fashion. For example, in many corporations employees have to watch elementary school level computer security videos. The reason they do is their companies have hacking insurance policies and as part of the policy they have to watch videos made by some businesses that are very likely owned by insurance corporations. People who are going to get scammed by emails will get scammed no matter how many videos they watch. Nobody else needs to watch the videos and won't get scammed by emails, phone calls, and texts. It's just a rent-seeking scam.

Another fairly obvious example of this concept is property taxes. What are property taxes, really? The common sense understanding of property taxes is they are fees to keep local government services going. They "pay for" things like roads, bridges, and schools. However, at least in my area, they're akin to a mortgage because the land is essentially collateral for "bond issues". A jurisdiction has effective claim on ownership of all real-estate so it can make payment on its debts. That is very far from a "fee for service" model, especially since you can't opt out.

As always, the "system" is mostly self-interested and crass. What's novel today is its patina of respectability and authority is worn paper thin. This scenario is a very old story going back thousands of years and through various civilizations and nations.

Another scenario that goes back thousands of years and across many nations and civilizations is "the jedi" pop into existence, essentially because the negative space around a very dominant Hades' Kingdom gets so obvious and large that even a pretty average person can imagine what it would be like to not live in hell.

In Star Wars I think the Jedi are depicted reasonably well in many of the movies in that they are ineffectual. The jedi are not the saviors of the people stuck in the system, nor are they heroes although they're depicted that way especially in the originally released movies.

My conclusion about the system is the best I can do is go ride my mountain bike as fast as I can and let the forest reclaim my lawn and try to restore local wildlife populations, and even all that is futile and will fail unless the system collapses. I can avoid supporting the system and stop interacting with it as much as possible and get off the various corporate treadmill scams, but that's about it.

There's no "fight" against it possible. Nobody's going to blow up the TV transmitter of the interdimentional aliens in They Live. Nobody's going to blow up the death star. Nobody's going to assassinate the King of the Dead like in Game of Thrones, or throw the ring into Mount Doom's fire. There's no Neo. No hacker collective is going to make "tech" actually work for "the people", etc... ad nauseum.

Level Up

The 1970s TV show Kung Fu showed the main character Caine in two distinct settings. One was the Shaolin Monastary. The other was the Old West. As an aside, the Caine character in many stories is the one who is between two worlds, has two families, or whatever, like Greek Prometheus, because the character is Prometheus.

The Shaolin Monastary in the show is depicted as an ideal school. The teachers are perfectly wise. The curriculum trains the mind and body to the highest possible degree. The student graduates only when he's perfectly ready and has mastered of kung fu and self-control.

An interesting concept that's not explored in the show, at least that I remember, is a "false monastery". The fraudulent monastery is day-to-day life for almost everyone in their education, then their adult life in the corporate world or other institutions. People aren't trained to be independent, complete humans. They're trained to be part of a machine and feed it. The medical industry is a great, easy to understand example of this concept: don't lose weight, and stop eating slop poison food or get in shape; become a dependent of a substance they make like ozempic or whatever pill because then you can sit in an office chair and do corporate work all day a a few more years longer than you would if you were totally fat.

The local mountain bike trail is like a Shaolin Monastery of the woods. The teachers are physics and nature and other riders. The riders are a free-range version of the students in the show and speed is the kung fu. It's very satisfying to try to go faster and faster around that course and attain new levels of skill at bike handling. One of the aspects of the true art, and true temple that's interesting to think about is there's no end to the quest for skill and speed. The pursuit of it is the whole point.

The false monastery is all about ends that aren't even achievable by its students. A great example of that is the concept of "retirement". People want to quit working, but to do that, they have to consume all the prime years of their life on a corporate treadmill and end up as a spent husk who's minding a retirement account balance which represents a bunch of other dummies on other treadmills.

Light versus Heavy

One lesson embedded in my education was the world is organized by rational principles that can be discovered, broken down, and understood. I was in school during late 1970s through the early 1990s. That was, I think, the tail end of an era people who imagined they solved the puzzles of the universe. For example, in biology, it was all explained by Darwin and evolution, and DNA. In physics there was still a quest for a "grand unified theory". Arguably the whole AI/robot bubble hysteria is a follow on to these narratives which are all variations on the theme of progress and linear history.

These concepts are really religious notions. They're a narrative vehicle for trying to understand the world and they fit prior era religious tropes, like a prophet explains what's what to the masses. Charles Darwin was a prophet. Isaac Newton another one. A prophet of the current time is somebody like Claude Shannon who's a grand-daddy of AI and the Internet.

Many of the concepts of these prophets are bastardized and misapplied, just like any other religion. For example, various ham-fisted versions of "survival of the fittest" turn into "might makes right" assertions by this or that political group. A current day assertion of this type is the entirety of "the economy" can be "optimized" by "AI".

Arguably the economy optimization concept and the "survival of the fittest" concept are different manifestations of the religious idea that there's "one" understandable order. This idea doesn't mesh up very well with even basic bitch common sense observations of the natural order of things.

For example, nature seems to favor a multiplicity of beings and forms because there's no "one thing" on earth. Even an individual person is composed of multitudinous parts, like white blood cells or organs, or different parts of the brain, or gut bacteria, etc... The arbitrariness of the economic order is hard to even comprehend; there's no underlying principle governing it.

One of the concepts I kick around from time to time is "bicycle world" or more generally "light vehicle" world. We mainly live in a heavy/steel based transportation system because we live in heavy world, like you need a bulldozer to make a road, so the bridges have to be built to carry many tons. It's not hard to imagine the "light world" where everyone takes light vehicles, so bridges are light, houses are made of lightweight ephemeral materials, etc... Everything would be built for ease of movement and travel.

The Black Box for Competent People

I've come full circle in my adult working life. I'm in the same position as my boss at my first job out of college. Bob was a very competent person and was miffed about being forced into a management position. He was a scientist/engineer who worked on a bunch of very interesting academic/pure research projects, like building instrumentation for astrophysics experiments back in the 1960s. He fit the model of many adults I knew growing up where there was a significant focus on being a competent man.

I tried to follow that same model. I think it's the middle class mindset. Middle class and working class people believe it's necessary to actually "do something" or to be able to do things to make a living. Consequently, they are trained to do things, build things, understand things. When they apply that mindset to a thing like a corporation, though, they're stumped because it's almost impossibly stupid. To them it's a black box.

A guy like my first professional job boss Bob was very smart and focused and dedicated. I assume he had that mindset in college as well, because he maintained it after. Maybe he sometimes partied in college, but he probably also stayed up all night to finish projects or homework, or to study for tests. However, he ended up working "for" a bunch of nepo baby chuckle-fucks who breezed through the MBA curriculum at whatever university.

Competent people barely exist in "history", which is a pretty good clue that things have always been like this. The ruling class clique is poseurs and actors and professional liars. The people who actually make the world work are their dupes.

These "competent" dupes are in the dark about how this grifting class continues to stay in control.

A Time for Shitheads and Conmen

I was pretty shocked and disillusioned by the COVID debacle when I saw maybe 80% of people just went along with the official narrative of the cold and flu season doomsday. Now, I'm not surprised that the same type of people are all wrapped up in the AI narrative and current psychosis.

The COVID insanity wore on me daily because I thought people were better than they actually are, so I was waiting for them to "wake up". They never did, even though their opinion about COVID and the hysteria changed over time. They didn't update their mental model about the whole debacle, most importantly, about their own reactions and thinking.

The AI hysteria is reaching levels of absurdity on par with COVID hysteria. For example, government clowns are now getting involved in it. Some turd like Bernie Sanders is grandstanding about AI fear among his retard constituency. I assume he $ee$ it as an opportunity to cash in on some donations from the dumb fucks that think he's a credible person.

A large part of the population decided right away that LLMs were perfect authorities on every subject. I assume there's huge overlap between that group and the COVID enthusiasts. Many people in corporate america are all-in on the LLMs. I assume those people were happily setting up hoops for employees to jump through to comply with edicts from the COVID grifters.

At least this time, I realize it's an era of shitheads and conmen, so I have no concept of "fighting" and am certainly do nothing as foolish as exerting imaginary will-force against these fucktards. It's as pointless as waging war on the sea or trying to swim against a rip current. I doubt I can keep working in the tech industry, though. I was hoping to cruise for a couple of more years, then retire, but I'm getting "noped" out of it, as in, "hey, can you do this absolutely stupid shit as your job?"

A more interesting question is will the non-NPC, competent people continue to help out corporations and grifting trash like Bernie Sanders or whatever government creature. For example, will competent people even bother with some dumb ass company that uses an LLM agent interview/screener? I certainly wouldn't.

How Much Can Be Wasted?

There are many types of economic activity that are tightly constrained, for example, in the US it's extremely rare to build any new railroad lines, now. Similarly, road construction and even basic maintenance of roads and bridges is severely constrained. Only $X is allocated to that every year, and when money isn't available, the roads simply fall apart. Road departments can't just grab more and more money.

That contrasts strongly with the "AI" hysteria, or the COVID hysteria, or warmongering activity. In those cases endless billions of dollars are available to burn. These things are like a resource hernia or cancer. Nothing in the system imposes a constraint on them, so the mega consumption of resources shows up as symptoms like inflation, or failing supply chains, and the public unwittingly carries the burden.

The LLMs are a particularly interesting case to me because the hype and reality are so far apart. I tried to use the google LLM a few times so far. For example, I've been using a tool called "mkosi" lately which generates Linux operating system images based on a simple conf file. mkosi is a great, very useful tool for the type of work I do. If there's anything an LLM should actually be able to do successfully, it would be to crank out simple conf files, but it doesn't. It spits out incorrect nonsense most of the time.

It's 1000x more efficient for me to read the mkosi documentation and just create the file myself than trying to type in chatbot prompt patterns. I recognize that, but I know many people don't and they'll spend all day typing away to chatbots burning up electricity and accomplish less than nothing.

How much can be wasted on these mega-waste projects? Prior examples provide some bleak guidance. The Vietnam war was a similar boondoggle, probably run by the parents of the current generation of resource wasters, and it actually broke the US financial system of the day. Charles deGaul actually broke it.  That is some outside force had to call bullshit on the criminals in DC. Now, it's a good question if there's any such "outside force" as all the countries have a similar debt based financial system and enjoy printing endless amounts of cash for their dumb projects and crony enrichment.

If it requires a public revolt to staunch the flow of waste, it probably has a long way to run. The past several decades of systemically bad strategic choices by the ruling class which directly harm the public in the US haven't led to a revolt. The election of Trump, a total fraud, was maybe a soft version of that, however, the mass of people seems quite far from the "kill all of them" moment.

Money + Utilitarianism = Trash

In recent years, I noticed a genre of "academic discussion" that shows what an absolute trash pile the current system is. A "scientist" will observe an animal doing something interesting, like an elephant rescuing a baby antelope from a pool at the zoo, then he or she will struggle mightily to explain that action with some trash model from their academic "discipline". For example, it seems like the standard academic's behavioral model of every animal, including humans, is psychopathic meat robot. Animals only do things associated with energy saving, or self preservation, or procreation, or maybe a handful of other supposed motives. When an elephant saves another animal, their behavior is reframed as some combination of those base motives. This approach spills over into a bunch of other fields like economics or management at corporations, or whatever. The overall philosophy is banal utilitarianism--they grey ooze of philosphies.

It's a philosophy and approach to life which nobody I know follows. This is a really odd situation. In most people's actual life, they try to do interesting and fun things, or do "good", meaning altruistic things. For example, when I go ride the mountain bike trail, there are a bunch of other people there doing the same thing because it's fun. In their "official" life, like at work, they're often immersed in the gray ooze of corporatocracy.

One thing I noted at work over the past 10 years or so is the engineers who have interests outside the gray ooze are the best at their jobs as well; the people who are fully in the corporate ooze are kind of useless and lack creativity and even basic problem solving skills. It's not really clear to me why the real living people keep helping out the corporate slime. Somehow that trash managed to con everyone into making "the system" function for them.

Eyewatering Expense of Tech Junk

Around 2011, I ended up working in Nashville on a "music recognition system". The company I worked for was a part owner of the Shazaam music recognition system patents. They initially use the system to monitor airplay of songs on the radio. It was interesting to be able to work through all that code.  I fixed a minor bug in the software which caused it to crash periodically, but then the company mothballed the system. It was easier and less expensive to pay people overseas to do the same work by hand.

Anyway, that system relied on "fingerprinting" techniques which were developed, I guess, in the 1990s. One application was panoramic photo stitching. The music recognition system was actually an image processing technique and used the same approach as image stitching algorithms. Anyway, by 2010, audio was "easy", that is well within the processing capability of plain-old x86 server hardware so one server could handle many simultaneous searches of a database. Panoramic photos were "easy" too and were in the processing capability of even a smartphone.

An interesting trend today is many ultra-brute-force super dumb algorithms are appear to be viable on hardware like GPUs and FPGA accelerator cards, but that shit is super expensive at the moment. For example an FPGA with a cutting edge FPGA is around $10,000. Capable GPU cards are similarly expensive. Additionally the GPUs consume so much power that they are having trouble cooling the boards adequately. Right now there's a problem of connectors melting, for example.

One example of a brute force algorithm is so called "Gaussian Splatting", which can be used to reconstruct a 3D model of a scene from multiple 2D photos; the demos are almost like magic. However, it's extremely computationally intensive. Similarly various radio networking and RADAR applications are stupidly computationally intensive. The neural network pattern matching and machine learning techniques are also brute force approaches.

This is a novel scenario in tech world. The fingerprinting algorithms of the 1990s and early 2000s were the long standing pattern where clever and efficient techniques created new applications. They also followed the pattern of "mass production" leads to lower cost and very low per use resource consumption.

Brute force solutions to problems were generally dismissed as not close to viable for real world use. They're too expensive. I think this is still true, but there's a lot of investor money and PR bullshitting that obscures this common sense perspective.

When there is a lot of funny money, many things can look viable and get support even if they're totally stupid. In the 1920s, for example, people thought blimps were a viable mode of transportation because it kind of worked and there was enough surplus cash to "invest" in blimp companies, but obviously it wasn't close to viable. Similarly, I doubt a datacenter on every corner chewing up 1000 households of electricity is viable and a technician isn't going to run around to a million data centers swapping out burned up GPU boards.

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.

Competent People in Human Housecat World

I know many habitually competent people, and I know lots of people I'd label "human housecats". For the human housecats, most of the world is a black box. The habitually competent people live in a no-black-box world.

Over the years of working in corporate environments I noticed there's a paradoxical situation that arises from this split in the population. The housecats like to manage and be managed and love to create policies and procedures and laws, but as a group they're entirely ineffectual. The policies and procedures can't make up for inexperience, lack of knowledge, or just general tendencies associated with competency, so it's all kind of a pointless make-work exercise. Paradoxically this is what most people do all day at "work".

The habitually competent people tend to "just go do things" which obviates management, policies, procedures and the like--they negate the human housecat world. One of my neighbors, for example, took down a huge ash tree in his front yard yesterday rather than hire a tree company. He rented a lift, then chopped the tree down bit by bit with a chainsaw. I don't think it even took an hour for him to do the whole project. His neighbor is another high competence person who heats his home with firewood, so he helped buck the tree.

Another paradoxical situation is the housecat people, who are incapable, often tend toward control freakery, meaning they love to extend their policy/procedure making into any sphere of activity often under the guise of concerns about "safety". For example, in recent months, housecats decided they were afraid of e-bikes or other new e-vehicles and passed various laws in rando jurisdictions around the world. This is just one example of myriad similar scenarios. People who have no idea what they're doing in general make "policy" on random topics, typically in response to serial panics. The current-day panic in various jurisdictions is "e-bikes". Next year it will be some other random thing.

Note that competency is never suggested as a solution to these panics. That is, if people learned how to manage their own shit, nobody would even think to make these nonsense laws and policies. In fact, to me, the whole human housecat + manager world looks like an enormous "control fraud" situation which enables a lot of ineffectual people to be paid and to gain "power" over others. The lubricant for the movement of this group is incompetence. Someone who knows what he's doing prevents these awful people from getting theirs.

Big Dumb System

Now that I'm in my mid 50s, I am starting to have some brushes with the "end of life racket", which was thankfully out of sight and consequently out of mind for most of my prior life. That racket shows how bleak and regimented the middle class life is.

People march down a toll road over their whole life. They scrimp and save so they can give as much money as possible to hospitals, nursing homes, and finally funeral directors who collect the last fee. A careful person might manage to get a good pile of money to their heirs. A careless person will get worked over by this system entirely and go from a wealthy middle class person to a pauper in a handful of years of decrepitude.

Even body disposal is weirdly expensive. It must be a cartel situation, which is certainly aided by the government and regulation. You could empty out 150 pounds of meat from a freezer, put it in a garbage bag and chuck it in the trash, for example and nobody would bat an eye. Of course there are myriad taboos and legal versions of the same that ensure the funeral racket keeps collecting thousands of dollars per stiff.

I doubt it's legal to build a funeral pyre in most states, for example, but it is legal to incinerate a corpse at a funeral home. A well constructed and fueled wood fire will melt metals. Incinerating a body with a wood fires would be pretty cheap and was fit for kings and warriors for centuries. It's probably also illegal to dig a hole and bury a body like generations of settlers in the US did, although people bury dogs, horses, cows, etc... on their property all the time in rural and even suburban areas.

A few years ago, an unfortunate deer was hit by a car and died on my property. I put her under a large pile of wood chips in the woods, probably double the diameter of her body and three times as deep. I couldn't smell the decomposing body at all, nor did any scavengers disturb the pile. That much carbon rich material basically soaks up any nastiness. I used the wood chips in the garden a couple of years later. Of course there wasn't a trace of flesh left. Eventually even the bones break down.

One of the problems of the "highly organized" economy is the average person becomes a totally unskilled dope whose life is hemmed in by lies spun by douchebags and scammers who want their piece of the money pie. They can't even imagine there's an alternative to the set of cartel offered services and life rituals.

They also are maintained in a sort of fantasy land unreality existence because somebody else "does it" whatever it is. This type of person is the "urban/suburban housecat". They do their job, which is often some abstract nonsense, then pay skilled people to do absolutely everything else in their life. This has apparently led to an overall denial of the realities of life because everything can be managed by "experts" and everything can be "fixed".

Romanization

One of the core elements of the fantasy genre is it is set in the negative space of the current day world which is fully "Romanized" for lack of a better term. Like in the fantasy genre, there's no police officers giving parking tickets to the characters. Instead they are dealing directly with the forces of nature and creatures embodying the same. Also there's no churches and christianity.

Contemplating this topic got me thinking how absolutely weird officialdom is. It's loaded with cosplay and mandatory honorifics and titles and all that kind of nonsense. For example a "judge" wears a robe and people in a courtroom are forced to pay various honors to some rando dude or woman, like "all rise" and such. In England the judges still wear a white wig for some bizarre reason. Lawyers spend their whole professional life in that world of nonsense and procedures. Politicians who are basically the landfill of humanity spend all day citing their titles to each other. "The news" apes that behavior to anybody who cares to listen to their blah blah. Hospitals are another example. The employees wear color coded garments and different outfits that denote their status and rank. The police are a paramilitary organization with ranks and hats. Priests in the Catholic church wear a uniform. When they "perform" a mass they wear a fancy pants version of it. It goes on and on. In fact, almost every aspect of human life is enmeshed in some official structure in the current day world, especially if you live in a city. People believe, for example, professional care is required to die, even.

In the fantasy genre, the characters typically exist in a frontier type world; if officialdom exists in the story, it's typically entirely corrupt. For example, the soldiers guarding some castle or outpost are typically expendable cannon fodder. In movies that's signaled partially by their uniforms which generally contrast with the main character's outfits. The main villain guy might wear some elaborate outfit, sit on a throne, etc...

It's maybe not such a surprise the northern europeans "remember" their heritage via the fantasy genre, especially if it's encoded in their DNA, even after 1000+ years of romanization and absolutism of the catholic church. Romanization basically ends where the pavement does, which is also quite a fascinating pattern to think about.

More of The Fantasy Genre

 

There's a band named Heilung who according to the wikipedia

...describe their music as "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe". Their music is usually about Germanic deities, the Jǫtnar, and valkyries. "Heilung" is a German noun meaning "healing"

Maybe there's a core set of feelings and ideas associated with genetics that the fantasy genre expresses. Perhaps that used to be the religion of the northern europeans.

Metal Popularity and Hunter Gatherer DNA

This is a follow up to the "what is the fantasy genre" post.

It's pretty common for metal bands to borrow or embody tropes from the fantasy genre. The band "Castle Rat" is a case in point.

If you look at a map of "hunter gatherer" DNA in western europe and a map of metal band popularity they seem to overlap well.

Metal Bands per Million People by Country

WHG Admixture Map

The different color schemes in the maps make the correlation hard to see clearly, but it seems pretty good. There are some outliers, like Greece has a really high number of metal bands per capita compared to the WHG admixture, but the overall scheme lines up.

A Problem with a Life Based on Utilitarianism

The thing I really wanted to get to in the previous post is many of the activities people engage in out of apparent "utility" are really cult rituals: high school band or football are two great examples. The average family when I was in school thought those activities were valuable and heavily censured many non-sanctioned activities which were only for weirdos, like a kid who might continue playing dungeons and dragons into their senior year in high school, or who played with matchbox cars or whatever age inappropriate thing would be seen as a total freak or "loser", which was the ultimate bogeyman when I was a kid.

It turned out that "band" was significantly more useful than football in my high school than any of the organized sports. A weirdly high number of kids in my band program went on to be professional musicians in some capacity. Some became successful professional musicians. Others went on to be music educators. AFAIK, none of the people who played football went onto be a professional athlete of any kind and those who went onto earn high incomes in their adult life were in professions that had nothing to do with organized sports and are lawyers or dentists or whatever, which is really the norm for the "successful" band people too. Thankfully, I don't think any of the kids in our school suffered CTE or other chronic injuries from football, but that does happen of course. Some kids did get their knees wrecked and a few were chronic 'roid abusers, but I don't think they continued that after high school, but even a few years of heavy steroid use can cause long term physical damage to key organs and tissue.

I think the typical lesson an adult would draw, in retrospect, from their time in various organized activities like sports or band or school plays would be: "I learned to train and prepare and get better at something." That is, even though what they did was boring, maybe high pressure, or even painful and physically demanding, they were able to plow through and maybe even win, or perform perfectly and get applause or whatever. 

A kid could learn the same lessons, maybe in a significantly better way, from self directed ad hoc activities and games. I can cite several examples of kids, including myself, who became proficient at a hobby well outside the official activities of a school. For example, one of my good friends in high school went onto be a professional race car driver for a few seasons and ended up making car racing his vocation. I raced bicycles through college and into my adult life and always did that in a self-directed trial and error way and managed to at least win some races over my amateur career. I even helped organize a handful of amateur races over the years through the early 2000s. The people I know who do self-directed endurance sports, like running, triathlon, road bike racing, or similar sports are, as adults, even adults in their 70s, significantly healthier than their peers. I know a guy who in his early 70s completed a grueling gravel bike race with several thousand feet of elevation gain for example. 

In retrospect, the claims of utility made by the "organized" sports or activities in high school, that is, it would eventually "pay off" while the self-directed ad hoc activities were seen as second or third tier by comparison were severely overstated, at least for me and the people I grew up with.

Serious LARPs

When I was in middle school and high school my friends and I played lots of different kinds of games. For some years, we played AD&D almost every weekend. We also played different board strategy games like Conquest of the Empire. We also organized paintball tournaments, which got quite popular so there were dozens of kids running around in the woods. All that stuff was very fun but those things also had the tendency to fizzle out for reasons that were mysterious at the time, and even with 40+ years of hindsight, I'm not sure why they fell apart.

By contrast, the "official" activities like organized team sports or various music or performance oriented activities like band or plays, happened year after year and consumed probably hundreds of hours of mine and my friends lives per year. The ad hoc play activities which were generally much more "fun" competed for just a few hours of time per month maybe.

I was in several high school band activities and was good at playing so eventually I had a scholarship in college for it, but I was never that interested in it, and never contemplated it as a vocation. I knew all along I'd stop playing once I was free from school. I sold my sax the same day I graduated from college. I probably played two times in the subsequent decades.

High school band is a weird ritualistic activity. Most kids who are really into music are interested in pop music, rock and roll and other genres which are mainly guitar based and all about getting the attention of the fans. However, when I was in school, there were never guitar parts in band, nor any opportunity to learn or play guitar in school. At least 50%, probably more like 75% of the kids in the band were not even interested in music as a hobby or as an important element of their life. They were in band because their parents thought they should do something like that because colleges wanted kids to be in extra-curricular activities.

In retrospect, it's obvious that organized high school sports were a version of the same thing, but with some game involved. In our school, football was the big sport, and it was even more pointless and ritualistic from the point of view of life prep than even band was. Some of the high school football kids suffered life changing injuries like completely blowing out their knee, or took steroids to be on the team and got nothing out of it beyond high school.

As far as I know, none of the kids in my graduating class went on to play division 1 college football and nobody in the history of my high school ever played professional football. Just a handful of my classmates that played high school football went on to play football in college for small liberal arts schools where the sports programs were de-emphasized to the point it was more of a liability or an opportunity cost to play.

In spite of that, in the years since I graduated high school, the community plowed a huge amount of resources into the high school football team, literally millions of dollars to build a fancy new stadium, but the program continues in the same mode as the late 1980s in terms of not creating NFL players or Division 1 quarterbacks, etc...

Anyway, this is just another investigation into what people consider "serious" versus "play". All the official high school sanctioned activities like football or band were in the "serious" category versus our paintball games, however, as discussed above they're all basically the same kind of thing, basically LARPing.

What is The "Fantasy" Genre?

I recently watched a few videos by the band "Castle Rat".

The lead singer is a pretty woman in her prime, and wears a skimpy outfit, but apart from the side boob and butt cheeks in the videos, the compelling thing about them is nostalgia for 1970s/1980s Sci-Fi and Fantasy media from that era. It really takes me back. It's like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life. I can smell the used book store scent in my mind.

I'm not sure how that aesthetic continued on to the present day so the artistic style of a band made up of people born maybe in the late 1990s or early 2000s would be steeped in it. I stopped paying as much attention to the fantasy genre by the time I was a junior in high school and was learning to drive. 

One of my good school friends and I are still in touch regularly and both were into the sword and sorcery stuff in the middle school years and occasionally reminisce about it. I was really steeped in that realm of concepts for a few years from maybe from around 1982 until 1986 or so. We played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back then, and it was sort of part of the "job" to read and steep in the lore of the overall genre.

The sword and sorcery fantasy realm is another instance of a very detailed "shared hallucination" as is evidenced by the Castle Rat videos which draw on the shared visual vocabulary of that genre. My friends and I sort of lived in that fantasy realm and visited the "real world" of school and the like from the age of about 12-14 maybe 15 at the latest. We also had a "real world" version of the fantasy realm, like exploring caves and cliffs in our neighborhoods in Munson or having a campfire at the end of the day of exploring and hanging out.

All that stuff was pretty fun and interesting. I'd say, in general, "real life" failed to measure up. This is a really common scenario, by the way. Most people I know seem to vastly prefer their LARPs and hobbies to their jobs and the day to day grind of life.

The fantasy genre is really ancient, of course, it goes back to the oldest known recorded story: The Epic of Gilgamesh so it seems likely people had a similar fantasy versus the drudgery of normal life split in their minds. Anyway, it's interesting to ponder what people are "really doing" with such a pastime. The woman in the Castle Rat videos is acting out concepts that people have in their heads for thousands of years, like walking around in the woods with a sword or bow and arrow drawn and ready to fight some mysterious foes.

A lot of hobbies that aren't really obviously related to something like the fantasy genre exist in a similar realm of mind, like Mountain Biking or Road Biking are that for me. An MTB ride is a little adventure excursion and battle against various forces and trying to rack up experience points, basically.