Geoff's Miscellany

In the past 100 years, the world has experienced three major technological revolutions with respect to human industriousness and communication:

1. Mass availability of automobiles for personal travel.
2. Mass telecommunications for mass one-way messages via television/radio and telephone calls.
3. Mass availability of personal computers.

Instead, we’re in this bizarre circumstance wherein traveling to a central location (because it came first) is the primary work mindset and telecommunications and computers are used to make employees more aware of their work bureaucracy from home.

No man is an island, even conceptually.

We see ourselves enmeshed in multple layers reality:

1. Family
2. City
3. Nation
4. Sport teams
5. Religious groups
6. The physical world
7. Etc

There are certainly more elements to this and many of our social selves instantiate precisely to fit into these groups. So we behave differently at work than at home, in a forrest than at church, at a restaurant than at a friend's house, etc.

I found this paper, or rather, saw it linked on Twitter. It purports to criticize the behaviors of online dating platforms for their sexual racism, suggest that sexual selection is the result of more than individual choice, but rather of cultural factors as well, "In this view, individuals’ intimate affiliations are not the product of "pure" individual choice, but are instead shaped by accretions of state and social power." The paper then suggests that one can resist such assortative mating, "resistance simply requires recognizing that desire is malleable," particularly it can be shaped by online dating platform algorithms. But whose desires should be shaped, I wonder. I'll simply drop this paragraph here indicating whose desires should not

I mean, of course it is. Farming animals requires ecosystem maintenance, whereas vegetation farming on mega farms is simply a process of ecosystem alteration through a process of chemical fertilizing, mass pesticide promulgation, and government subsidizing of non-ideal plants in regions hostile to their growth. Dr. Eades, over at protein power has a great post about this:

Human herding mimics the ‘herding’ done by large predators in the wild. That replicating natural herding creates the richest soil makes sense given that grasslands, large herbivores, and carnivores all co-evolved. Just as with diet, the closer we come to what the forces of natural selection designed us to eat, the better things work.

I came across an archived usenet post linked on social media:

How come the heros of our movies are no longer Micky Rooney or Spencer Tracy playing Thomas Edison, or Paul Muni playing Erlich or Pasteur, instead Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison and Woody Harrelson playing Larry Flint? And movies whose heros are lawyers.

 

Paperwork and lawyering. Fixing and improving and advancing society by talk-talk, not building. A lawyer president and his lawyer wife. Crises of power that don’t involve spy planes and sputniks, but incredibly complicated and desceptive word defintions and complicated tax frauds. You think we’re not preparing to go to Mars because SF is too optimistic? Sure. But it was optimistic about whether or not the can-do engineering of the 40’s and 50’s, done by the kids who’d grown up playing with radios and mechanics in the 20’s, was going to continue. Needless to say, it didn’t. I’ve seen a late 1950’s book of science fair projects for teenagers that include things like building your own X-ray machine and cyclotron (no, I’m not kidding– it can be done). There are rockets in there, and cloud chambers, and all kinds of wonderful electronics stuff. But we didn’t go that way. Instead, we turned our children into little Clintons, and our society into a bunch of people sitting at PCs, entering data about social  engineering, not mechanical engineering. So instead of going to Mars, we went instead to beaurocratic Hell. Enjoy, everybody. It really could have been different. Nature didn’t stop us– WE stopped us.

I find people wielding the wage gap as proof of oppression in the United States tiresome and stupid. But this article which acknowledges that it is close is ridiculous on a new level. In it the author observes:

Women want an equal partner, but there are increasingly fewer candidates to choose from. The census reports that “the average adult woman in the US is more likely to be a college graduate than the average adult man.” Moreover, today’s young, childless female city-dwellers [editorial chuckle] with college degrees are out-earning their male counterparts by 8 cents on the dollar. Their higher incomes may be why they are less likely (29 percent) to be living with their parents than single men (35 percent).

The federal income tax decreases liberty and gives government officials incentive to increase the scope and power of the federal government. Because we are a federal system in the United States, we need some form of funding for government operations. In my mind, funding that with tariffs is wiser and more constitutional. Essentially, I’m a protectionist because the debate comes down to: income tax vs tariffs or large vs small government.