https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SToHV-n0ZYw

long dark winters come sold to one with words untrue "we will protect you"

Cantaloupe Island https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B1oIXGX0Io This is a jazz song I've had in my head for years and I didn't know the title! I remember it being used in movies and the like forever. Now you guys remember too (for the few of you old enough to have it tickle a memory)

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-results-23-baltimore-schools-have-zero-students-proficient-in-math-jovani-patterson-maryland-comprehensive-assessment-program-maryland-governor-wes-moore

Just finished watching M3GAN after seeing a recommendation from podcast of the lotus eaters. It was a good film. One of the core requirements of a good thriller is it's a morality tale: The main character needs to do something to deserve what's coming next. Often, that's a man cheating on his wife or something of the sort. In this case, it's a woman's hubris and neglect of her niece so she could improve her career. It spends a lot of time talking about society, and the effect of screens on children, and our fetishization of tech, and the tech cycle. It also hints at some of the threats of AI. A year ago, I would have scoffed at it, but seeing the power of ChatGPT, it's become real fodder for horror. Ultimately, the main character realizes they did wrong and repent, and that sets the stage for the climax. Overall, it was really satisfying. Really neat thing about the whole movie is it's a successful movie that isn't based on a previous thing. It's an original idea, and it's a well executed movie. It would be nice if the overwhelming success of this movie (it's made 10x the initial investment already) helps promote good filmmaking and original ideas.

https://www.livescience.com/47311-antarctic-insect-smallest-genome.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfOd-kDs5g4 I don't really vtuber, but this is a great video haha

So I was thinking: we should finally follow the science to it's obvious conclusion: make it mandatory under the law to eat, drink, sleep, and breathe. Anti eaters, anti drinkers, anti sleepers, and anti breathers will push back against these new rules, but we need to do it to save lives.

Throughout most of human history, societies were not primarily organized around the principles of capitalism, which include a market economy based on the exchange of goods and services for profit, private ownership of the means of production, and the pursuit of individual wealth and accumulation. Instead, many societies were organized around different economic systems, such as command economy, feudalism, communitarianism, tribal communism, or some hybrid of several economic systems. Capitalism as a dominant economic system only began to emerge in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it was not until the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries that it became the dominant economic system in the Western world. Most societies historically were centered around different forms of strong central state control. The creation of a strong central state is often associated with the development of agriculture, as agriculture requires a complex system of organization and regulation to support large-scale food production. A strong central state is able to provide the infrastructure and resources needed to support agriculture, such as irrigation systems, transportation networks, and markets. Agriculture is typically more productive than hunting and gathering, and it allows societies to support larger populations and create a more stable and reliable food supply. As a result, agriculture often crowds out hunting and gathering as the dominant mode of food production, as it allows societies to support larger populations and to produce a more diverse range of foods. However, the adoption of agriculture also has a number of consequences for societies, including changes in social and economic organization, the development of social hierarchies, and the loss of traditional ways of life. In many cases, the adoption of agriculture has led to the displacement of hunter-gatherer societies, as they are unable to compete with the productivity of agriculture and are often forced to adapt to new ways of life. Overall, the creation of a strong central state is often associated with the development of agriculture, as it provides the resources and infrastructure needed to support large-scale food production. However, the adoption of agriculture also has significant social and economic consequences, and it can lead to the displacement of hunter-gatherer societies. There are a number of examples of economies that are explicitly non-capitalist where environmental and human rights abuses took place. The forests England were heavily exploited during the medieval period, as the demand for wood and other forest products increased with the growing population and the development of the economy. This led to widespread deforestation, as large areas of forest were cleared to meet the demand for timber, fuel, and other products. The deforestation of England had significant environmental consequences, including soil erosion, loss of habitat, and the decline of many species. Easter Island in South Asia was an island where the people were apparently wiped out as the people focused all their resources on building giant stone heads. The economy of Easter Island was based on a system of subsistence agriculture and fishing, and the island's resources were collectively owned and managed by the community as a whole. The Rapa Nui people did not engage in trade or commerce with other societies, and there was no system of money or currency on the island. The Mayan civilization was formed from people who diverged from eurasian civilizations 20,000 years ago and despite that had its own set of environmental and human rights issues. Some of the environmental problems faced by the Maya civilization included deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution, which were the result of the civilization's reliance on agriculture and urban development. The Maya civilization also had a hierarchical social structure, and it is believed that there were significant inequalities in terms of wealth, power, and access to resources. The ruling class of the Maya civilization, which included the nobles, priests, and rulers, enjoyed a higher standard of living than the common people, who were often subject to harsh working conditions and had few rights or protections. Now all that being said, I don't mean to insinuate that capitalism is an economic system without sin either. England under industrialist capitalism also suffered deforestation and the london fog was a result of mass air pollution from burning coal, and the industrial revolution may have led to massive increases in quality of living, but it also led to massive wealth inequality and injustice. Today, we live with many legacies of pure greed, including the bulk of the United States being a fundamentally different ecosystem then it would have been prior to colonization, and I would argue the United States is one of the most capitalist civilizations in history so it can't be discounted. Clearly there's a lot of issues with wealth inequality there too, and it's indisputable that compared to the post baby boomer economic boom the average worker and the average CEO have much different lives comparatively speaking. That said, I don't need to prove capitalism is a system without faults to prove that it is not the root cause of all problems in the world. The pursuit of money and the pursuit of political power are two different goals that have driven human behavior throughout history. Both the pursuit of money and the pursuit of political power can be motivated by a desire for advantage and a desire to gain power and control over others. No matter what economic system people live under, individuals will always crave advantage compared to others and will use the systems available to them to achieve that end. In capitalist societies, the pursuit of money is often seen as a primary goal, and people may use their wealth and resources to gain influence and power. In non-capitalist societies, the pursuit of political power may be more important, and people may use their connections and influence to gain control over resources and decision-making. Ultimately, the pursuit of money and the pursuit of political power are both driven by a desire for advantage and a desire to gain power and control over others. While the specific systems that people use to achieve these goals may vary, the underlying motivations are often the same.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-23/china-estimates-covid-surge-is-infecting-37-million-people-a-day?leadSource=uverify%20wall Clearly everyone in china has now died. China is just a giant ghost city now. Nobody is alive on account of them all being dead.

https://video.fbxl.net/w/p/wncXRsWk4ucwPiGzmm2YvP The Graysonian Ethic deepfake audio book is fully released now, and this weekend I uploaded the whole thing to peertube. Here's a playlist with everything laid out in order. Totally playable without an account on fbxl social. It's also on youtube if you want to see it there.

On the other side of the fediverse, @realcaseyrollins@social.teci.world brought up an interesting point, that the concept of doxxing being something with values around it is relatively new. Thought it could make an interesting conversation here. On one hand, this isn't really a thing that was discussed much for most of history. Publishing the personal information of a person who did a thing didn't really have any moral connotations to it. Under the ideal of freedom of speech, it should be considered acceptable to publish any information about a person. On the other hand, even from a libertarian mindset and from a constitutional perspective, there are limitations to freedom of speech. For example, you're not allowed to commit fraud. You're not allowed to perjure, you're not allowed to lie about someone else in a way that causes them damage, do you not allowed to claim that you are a police officer when you're not, you're not allowed to represent that you have professional licensure you don't have, there's a lot of things that you're not allowed to do. Then from another perspective, it's important to understand the difference between what is law and what is something else, any taboos against doxing aren't enshrined in law anywhere, it's just a dick move. On the other hand there, when you have a rule on a site like Twitter that is so big and so ubiquitous, even though it isn't a law per se, it can effectively stifle speech to a similar extent because of the Monopoly Powers involved. So getting past that, why exactly would someone who values Free speech consider doxing to be something worth considering to be a taboo or against the local instance rules? To me, I think that that really boils down to a change in the nature of communication. Prior to the internet, there was a non-trivial amount of effort involved with communication. In order to talk to someone on the phone, you needed to get their phone number, you needed to pick up a phone, you needed to dial the phone, and that phone call if it wasn't local could cost a lot of money. Likewise, if you wanted to send a specific message to a million people, you would have to print off a million copies of that thing, then you would need to buy a million stamps, and a million envelopes, or alternatively you'd have to walk up to a million houses and drop them in a million mailboxes. Today, if you are among the anointed few in big tech, you can get a message out to millions of people for free. The hackers who released the trucker convoy data (and keep in mind that hacking as a relatively low risk crime of breaking into computer systems didn't exist 40 years ago -- prior to that, if you wanted to steal data from a charity you would have to break into the offices of that charity) didn't need to print out a thousand copies of that data, they just had to post it online once. At that point their exploits were carried all around the world. From there, people who supported this cause had their names and email addresses and postal codes out there, and there's an entire planet full of people who might decide that they are offended, and then from there it is an incredibly low cost operation to start spamming people's employers with emails. The human brain evolved in a world of a 50 person society. In that world, you and everyone you knew made up about 50 people. Occasionally you might run into another tribe, in which case there would likely be a war. Outsiders were dangerous. In a 50 person society, social proof is incredibly important. If 10 other people in your 50 person society back a person, that person probably has some serious power. If 49 other people back that person, then that person is basically the king. I contract, if you can find 50 people on the planet Earth who disagree with you about something, congratulations that's not very impressive. But our brains tell us that it is. The key to all of this tangent is realizing that there is a particular danger to the difference between the way that our brains are wired, and the way that the internet age actually is. The famous example for first amendment case of yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't actually against the law. However, the reason that such dicta was mentioned is the self-evident danger of crowds in a physical space. If you say a thing that causes a riot in a physical space, it is clear that something bad has happened especially if it's based on things that are either not true or partially true or presented in a highly emotional way meant to manipulate. If one whips a digital crowd into a frenzy and a similar way, seems to me that innocent people could definitely be trampled in the same way. If such a thing isn't explicitly illegal, I can understand why theater owners would ban you for doing it. I said before that the left doesn't come up with bad ideas, they just are stupid about them and shut off their brains and turn them into universals when they are not. The idea of stochastic terrorism isn't based on a stupid idea. If you behave in certain ways that you are reasonably convinced will result in harm against another person, particularly when you're aiming a large group at that person, that certainly seems to be a thing. Intent seems to play into it as well. Accidentally revealing details about a certain person is patently different than intentionally revealing details about a certain person alongside a bunch of reasons why people should go off and lynch that person. I guess arguably it's the call for lynching that is the problem not the release of personal information. At the end of the day, I think the best solution to the problem of doxing would be to change in the neopuritanical culture. We really need to stop worrying about what every single person is doing and thinking and saying, and demanding that they all agree with us in every way. That cultural change may not be possible. In a large enough group you always have bad actors, and the internet provides the largest group available. So that being the case, allowing people their anonymity and at the very least making breaking that without consent a taboo, and maybe enforcing it at the service level may be the right thing to do. Anyway, this is mostly just a brain dump, what are your thoughts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPDK7cO-JPs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc I've been saying a lot lately that these people I'm up against would have been guarding the railcars to Auschwitz. This theory is chillingly accurate to today, but was written about the actual people who would end up a few years after it was written guard the railcars to Auschwitz.

I do want to start this by saying that none of this is meant as an attack on individual baby boomers, or the struggles they went through. I know that despite the narrative I'm about to craft it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I reference the stagflation of the 1970s or the recession of the 1990s, but those were real things that real people had to struggle through. Not knowing if a Tsar Bomba was going to hit your town and vaporize everything you cared about, that was a real thing. Regardless, the model I'll paint is reasonably accurate enough broad model in my view to help us choose a new path forward. The baby boomers, those born after 1945 until sometime around the late 60s, have been a dominant cultural force for easily 50 years, but the world they grew up in is not the world we live in, so we need to stop looking at the world through their lens. The boomers grew up in Eden, a golden age of unprecedented prosperity for the most part. Even when there were problems (and eventually problems started to show up), the systems were so powerful they could hit the accelerator pedal in the moment to get out of them, such as when Ronald Reagan got America out of stagflation by doubling the federal debt while Paul Volker cranked up interest rates and that was practical because there wasn't much debt out there. They as a cohort were able to purchase houses cheaper than anyone since because the world was used to high interest rates and prices were proportionately affected by that, but held those assets as interest rates dropped causing proportional rises in the prices of the assets they held. They were able to go to college relatively cheaply but even if they didn't there was a strong industrial base in western countries that allowed people to leave school and get a job they could raise a family on. They experienced the largest technological boom in the history of the world, and with the economic prosperity and freedom they experienced they were free to liberalize in ways it's hard to explain today. As they aged, they became the dominant owners of stocks and economic policies were laid out in such a way that their assets would explode in value. Anyone who has had an argument with their boomer parents or grandparents about how "it's easy to get a job" or "it's easy to get a house" or any one of a lot of different arguments knows what I'm talking about. Their reality is fundamentally different than those who came after them. This directly results in the deintellectualising of society because boomers don't have any existential need to build accurate mental models of the world to protect themselves and thrive by predicting future trends in an unpredictable world -- their world is like a garden of Eden that magically provides during the good times and protects during the bad times. We've seen this with the lowest common denominator politics, and people can totally get by just following a few simplistic ideologies that never have to change with the world, because don't worry -- everything will be fine no matter what. My father is a boomer. He grew up for quite some time without running water or electricity. He's gone from that world to a world today where he's got fiber optic internet piped directly into his home and he can order virtually anything directly to his front doorstep in 2 days. One reason so many technologies were able to be adopted so quickly is that the boomers adopted them. We say "boomer" as a pejorative for someone who can't get technology, but they've adapted later in life to virtually every technology on earth, and they're the ones who built a lot of the stuff we rely on. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are boomers. Richard Stallman is a boomer. This has led to the concept that new technologies or ideas are generally automatically good and people who oppose them are just incapable of handling the new thing. I had this directed ideology directed at me when I questioned the new interface in Windows 8. "You're just an old man who doesn't understand new things! Step aside, it's time for a new generation to take over!" The boomers were raised by those who experienced World War 2, and created this mythologicalized version of World War 2 that's essentially star wars. There's good vs. evil, and the evil is faceless and irredeemable. Despite living in Eden, the Boomers already realized there was a problem with their life philosophy. The 1983 hit film "The Big Chill" far predated films like The Matrix or Fight Club in identifying that the world people were creating was hollow and empty, and that people were losing connections with each other. Who cares? We'll just make our numbers go higher have some sex and that'll help the pain go away! One thing it's important to understand is that they aren't bad people, they were just a product of their time (as we are, and I'm pretty certain the Millennials will be judged far more harshly by their children and grandchildren than by their parents, so we'll get our turn). It's easy to be beneficent when you're living in Eden. The attitudes I'll be talking about are natural given what happened around them. Among the different core beliefs is there's always plenty to go around so we can afford to be generous and to look the other way on thing. It's a moral good to dismantle old systems and old moral frameworks. If there is a belief that is literally true but has bad connotations then it's immoral to have that belief. We should try to get everything now with nothing saved for the future since they experienced the largest quality of life boom ever and lived with the spectre of nuclear war at all times. Judging others morally is the worst thing you can do. These are all luxury beliefs one can hold when there's no immediate existential threat, there's so much food everyone is getting fat, there's so many homes people are buying multiple, and America has most of the stuff. One line a historian I like talks about how "A strong and honorable person looks for flaws they hate in others and then look for those in themselves, in that evil cuts across all things, including our own hearts, allowing greater empathy when others fail. However, the degenerate refuses to judge themselves against objective moral standards and then create purely evil bogeymen as 'others' to justify their superiority against." This is in the context of painting the Nazis as the total evil to compare ourselves against. Personally, I've seen this worldview in other ways. As America's government engaged in evil during the war on Terror, I'd see people justify mass violations of basic human rights as "Well look at Syria! Look at Iran!" as if those people being evil justified our evil because we weren't being as evil as the most evil people we could find. Boomer politics don't want to judge anyone for anything... unless they're a group that has been decided upon as evil such as nazis, racists, sexists, misogynists, etc. We see this taken advantage of by politicians today and if we were using our brains we'd realize how absurd and offensively reductive it is. "Everyone who disagrees with me is in a group we've all agreed is irredeemably evil and so we can do anything we want to them as a result including mass violations of basic human rights because they aren't humans, they're nazis!" The permissiveness and the focus on hedonistic pleasure rather than eudimonia comes directly from the boomers. The idea that high school is the best time of your life really started with them. The idea that partying and sex and drugs are a moral good in themselves is at its core a boomer idea. Like him or hate him, Donald Trump is the most boomer president ever. He's loud, views the world in binary terms, has a personally degenerate lifestyle including excess and debauchery including sexual debauchery, has an unintellectual view of the world and is extremely narcissistic. He makes short slogans using simple language and promises things will be fixed right away. He doesn't focus on any traditional values such as honor, gravitas, or duty. He isn't actually religious, but especially on the campaign trail doesn't negatively judge those who are. Ironically though, his most influential detractors are the exact same. They don't make arguments. They just keep yelling "You're a nazi!" over and over again because the world must be separated into good and evil. The press (even the independent press) plays red rover taking two sides of the former president either being the worst evil of this generation or the greatest hero since the last one. There are no shades of grey, there is no disassembling different parts of the man or his presidency. Even stuff intended to appear intellectual is a simulacra of intellectualism, simple ideas wrapped up in a nice suit. The thing is, we're no longer in the garden of Eden. There were recessions in the late 70s, early 80s, early 90s, in 2001, 2003, and 2008 and each time the political world (including the millennials who are arguably more boomer than the boomers in some of their broken views of the world) cheered as a simple but dangerous solution of hitting the accelerator pedal with debt and later money printing powered through times that were supposed to hurt. Those simplistic policies may have worked in the short-term, but every time they were used the entire fabric holding Eden together was damaged a little more, and at this point it's inevitable we've entered a period of pain we can't escape from with easy solutions. Witness the United Kingdom which just tried the "just cut taxes" solution and ultimately was required to increase taxes to the highest level since world war 2. the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and its response is an excellent example of boomer politics, and the dangers we're facing. The simple solution of "just shut everything down! Everyone will starve if we do that? Just send everyone free money! There's an experimental vaccine? Stop being such a Luddite and take it, everything will work out, we live in Eden! You don't agree? You're not one of the bad guys, are you?" was implemented, and even simple discussion of the ramifications of different policies was effectively banned by big tech (and I see you out there small tech platforms that did the same) I'm pretty sure that was the last bite at the forbidden fruit. The consequences of simplistic policies are now impossible to escape. We can spend more money to get people out of things, but debt is getting more expensive for everyone. We can print money to keep debt cheaper, but that increases inflation. The boomer existence where there was plenty of everything and you never wanted for anything besides a couple scary times at the gas station in the 70s isn't real anymore, we're no longer living in Eden. Everything that's happening right now was predictable. I know because I predicted it, and acted upon those predictions to successfully make my life better, and I'm not alone. I'm not a hyper-academic, but what I've got is my eyes open and a desire to build a realistic model of the world so I can predict what happens next. While the talking heads on TV who are ostensibly paid to help us understand what's happening act as if nobody could possibly have predicted anything that occurred. Of course they're failing to predict this, their models are based on living forever in Eden. We have been kicked out of the Eden of our parents and grandparents. We can't close our eyes and pretend our actions don't have consequences anymore. The past 50 years has been marked by decadence, a decline in governance, philosophy, morality, social life, and practicality that was enabled by an unprecedented golden age of plenty caused by demographic factors and several technological booms the likes of which the world has never seen before. That's not to say there haven't been positives of this era, but it isn't sustainable. In history, we've been in moments like this before. During the Muslim invasions of India around 1100, rather than improve their armies, the Hindu Rajas built more temples to their Gods so they would be granted victory resulting in massive losses despite a 100 to 1 numbers advantage and virtually all of India being conquered. At the same time, the Song dynasty was being attacked from the North by the Liao, and instead of actually doing anything to protect their country they just wrote poems about how much they wanted to win instead of doing anything that would help. Much later, the arrogant Qing dynasty would look at shipments of modern firearms from England and say "There's nothing we need here" which ultimately led to the end of imperial China altogether. Rome famously was decadent during its decline and there were massive parties and orgies while the country was slowly picked apart until the republic fell to dictatorship. These all happened because the good times led to unrealistic mental models of what the world was like, and when the good times ended acting upon those models led to disaster. The boomers were a product of their time, but so too we must be. The answer is not a binary choice between liberals and conservatives. Both those ideologies as manifested by the boomers fail to reach effective solutions to the problems we face and while we can take some good ideas from both, they must be largely rejected as decadent in our current times. Other people have a list of other ideologies we can slot into, but the fact is that we don't need 200 year old theories about a world we don't live in. That's no less decadent. Millennials have largely inherited the attitudes from their parents without realizing it. While attacking Boomers, it's usually for not being boomer enough. Gen Z is the first generation in 100 years to be more conservative than their parents, and I expect that trend to continue as kids rediscover the wisdom of their ancestors in the much more brutal era ahead. We need a new intellectualism intended to reconnect with the reality of the world. Reality outside our perception is the ultimate arbiter of truth as the Chinese, Indians, and Romans discovered, and we need to reconnect with truth by investigating reality. We need to build true and honest mental models to understand the world, and we need to reconcile our ethical framework with the reality of the true and honest world, and we need to come up with ideas both new and old put together in ways that actually deal with the world that exists around us. Those models need to be multi-order. Boomer politics stops at first order thinking. "poor people? give them money. Homeless? Put them in houses." That's fine in Eden, but in the real world everything is a trade-off. First order thinking leads to big solutions that end up genocidal. We need to grow up and accept that we need to make decisions that will have bad outcomes for people we don't want to hurt because that's what being an adult means -- When you leave Eden, decisions stop being easy and you have to choose between hurting one person or hurting another. It's going to mean a lot of sacred cows need to be slaughtered, and that does mean your sacred cow too.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-woke-esg "Ya, hehe. I had to be, it's what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get f***ed by it. By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us."

https://youtu.be/wKBMRkFIdm0 This video is extraordinary in my eyes, it describes the current state of our western world.

"FT8 - Tipping Point for Ham Radio?" https://www.flexradio.com/insider/articles/ft8-tipping-point-for-ham-radio/

I've been commenting on everyone's posts for like a week and it doesn't look like any of them made it through. Testing to see what's broken...

https://nitter.net/martsharter/status/1589756693155840000#m