Blackmoor Vituperative

Find a career that a computer can’t do. This means finding a career that doesn’t involve computers at all.

Lobby for a no-loopholes wealth tax and a basic income. The odds are against you, but it’s really the only path forward at this point.

Leave the USA for a country that values humans over corporations. Do it as soon as possible, because those doors are closing, too.

I wish you luck.

About a third of the population is actively hostile toward learning how the universe works and enjoys inflicting harm for its own sake.

Whether they use a god or a religion or a political stance is all just an excuse. They don’t actually believe what they say, and they don’t actually care if their victims do, either.

In the USA, for the past 30 or so years, those people have been waving the Republican flag around. They call themselves other things in other times and places. The mistake the rest of us make is thinking they have a goal aside from lies, hatred, and death.

They dont. And they literally do. Not. Care. If anything they say or do is true, much less consistent. Not one bit.

Go back as far in human history as you like. Our tools have improved, but we’re still the same.

And yes, I think it’s a solid third. At the end of the second world war, German support for the Nazis was still around 30%. Around 27% of the population of Hong Kong support rule by a strong leader without checks (which, in that context, means Beijing). And you can see how our elections go.

There is something fundamentally broken in humanity. I don’t think it can be fixed, and I think the sooner we’re extinct the better. Maybe the corvids or raccoons will be better people.

But that’s just my opinion.

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

E. E. Cummings

We are about 15-20 years too late to change anything, but if you are curious how this started, it was during the Clinton administration.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9709/27/clinton.radio/ (CNN, 1997)

Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, helped make judicial sabotage a priority for Republicans when President Obama was elected.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/when-basic-governance-deemed-controversial-flna6c10205110 (NBC News, 2013)

And it worked, because Democrats failed to realize that they were no longer dealing with Reagan Republicans, but were instead dealing with an increasingly deranged death cult. So they continued to rely on appeals to reason, to compromise, and to putting the good of the country ahead of (most of) their political differences.

I learned an important lesson from a boy named Brian in the sixth grade: bullies see an appeal to reason as an explicit invitation to continue the bullying. They do not care about reason, or compromise, or making the world better. They just want to be the ones doing the punching, and most people are content to stand by and watch and do nothing.

And so they have.

I wish Americans were a little less fixated on 18th century concepts of political science, civic engagement, and natural philosophy.

I had a sombre thought today. The world I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore. In some important ways, that’s a good thing. But it’s a bad thing, in a few ways. I feel sad for people who’ll never be able to live in it. Ah, well.

For no particular reason, the song “Fame”, by Irene Cara, came into my mind today. Google tells me it was released in 1980: 42 years ago. I haven’t heard it in very nearly that long, but I recall it clearly, and I even recall the name of the singer.

That is just how hugely popular that song was… briefly. And then nothing. When’s the last time you thought of it? How strange that is. The fleeting popularity of fame, so to speak.

It’s not really my style of pop song, and I still haven’t seen the eponymous movie, but even I loved the song and sang along to it, at the time. Of course, I was in my early teens then, and a boy, so I could never actually tell anyone I loved that song. It would have been indistinguishable to wearing a “call me a ‘homo’ and push me down” sign. (I’m not gay, and was even less so then, thanks to adolescent hormones, but bullies don’t place a high value on accuracy. Hopefully, my own miserable teen years helped distract the bullies from actual gay kids.)

Anyway, that’s not what compelled me to write this post. I’m writing this post because I asked Google to “play ‘Fame’ by Irene Cara on YouTube, on ‘downstairs group'” (my downstairs speakers). And, obligingly, it did (Google can be… contrary, sometimes).

And then it played “YMCA”, by the Village People.

And THAT made me laugh out loud.

Imagine a world where Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple had the combined wealth and power of Mailboxes, Etc. …

Proposal: some services must never be operated for profit. As in, if you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. What kind of services?

• Hospitals
• Military
• Police
• Post Offices
• Prisons
• Roads
• Schools
• Trains

Story hook: a team of people from 2080 go back to the 1960s to attempt to prevent the end of Human civilization. How? By lobbying legislators to put civilian use of ARPANET under exclusive control of the US Post Office before Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf develop TCP/IP.

Update: In case this was unclear: if you put “Contracting Company” after any of these services, it should make NO DIFFERENCE. NONE. If you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. We are at least a generation past the point where the “contractor” loophole should have been legislatively closed. Human beings are not “resources” to be squeezed dry and discarded.

I find this interesting. Go has been on my short list of “next things to play with” for a little while, but I am adding Rust above it.

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS “is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions.”

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS’s Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust “combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java.”

But there’s another reason they’re promoting Rust:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/02/20/0143226/is-it-more-energy-efficient-to-program-in-rust

Avengers: Endgame…

Society dealing with a 50% loss in population is nothing — NOTHING — compared to the mass starvation and tragedy that would result from a sudden 100% increase in population after society has adapted to the previous 50% population loss.

Today you have two children. You have a job, and you can feed them.

Tomorrow you have another unemployed adult in your household, and two more children to feed.

How does that feel?

And that’s if you are lucky. If you aren’t, you (SUDDENLY — to you it seems five years have gone by in a moment) are a single adult with a child, and you have no job and nowhere to live. And there are THREE BILLION people who, like you, weren’t here yesterday. Good luck finding a job or a place to live.

Avengers: Endgame is the beginning of a tragedy the likes of which the world has never seen.