Diary: Who Brung You

 

One of the issues that I think that we have come to internalize and allow to become pathological is the simplistic idea that anyone in the past that did anything that is now considered “evil” is totally bad and all of the positive accomplishments along with the bad shit is painted with the ugly brush.

I find it most entertaining and somewhat disheartening to watch this in action.  It is like being in the Catholic Church during the days of my youth.  You can go to school, get good grades, be on the football team, help out in the food pantry, visit your grandmother and generally be a model citizen.  But eat a snickers bar in the grocery store and “forget” to pay for it and you are certainly going to hell.

I am coming to the conclusion that the expectations of the past are out of line with the reality that the past had to come to grips with.  Choices are offered to different cohorts and the decisions made in the long ago that benefited the majority at that particular time have consequences that come to fruition in the present.

I think that we have gone far enough along the spectrum of blaming the past.  We have been sold the idea that people can be perfect and the world can hold hands into the bright shiny future.  I sense that the people doing the most complaining are the folks that were birthed by those who most benefited from the decisions of the past.

Essay: Long Form Struggles

 

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing.

From Wikipedia

One of my continuing struggles in life (one I will probably die struggling with) is the desire to structure everything in a rationalist and materialist manner.  I have a sneaking hunch that the world doesn’t work that way and I know definitely that people are for the most part not so much rational as self-absorbed (which, to be honest, is pretty rational).

So let’s begin with the simple fact that individuals of any type or flavor will attempt to impose their personal point of view/ideology on the world around them.  I tend to think that this is “human nature”.  Most folks just want to be seen as the “smartest guy in the room” and the only way to do that in a social setting is to brag to a socially acceptable degree. 

I suppose that my struggles with the long form is that in order to do so truthfully, I have to address the flaws in my thinking.  I tend to think that the process will be to write, then put it away for a while, then re-read and correct flaws, then repeat the process until I get sick of it and then publish.

The nature of my subject matter will change.  I suppose that I will need to change the structure of the blogs.  I am thinking that my writing needs to be in two different forms:  “Diary” entries will be marked as such in the title and be short, maybe a quick bitch about stupid shit or an anecdote relating to something that I find amusing.  The big pieces (the ones that are so difficult to regularly pen will be labelled “Essay”.

But these rubrics are fraught with the importance I put on them.  Diary entries are almost by definition a form of an essay.  There doesn’t seem to be a clear definition of essay, and I think that my proposed labelling will merely signal how much time I put into the piece.  I have a hunch that, taken as a whole, the quick diary pieces will be as revealing as the essays when judged by their content.

So today is a true essay, I am attempting to come up with an answer to a question that I have been skirting around for nearly two decades.  I seem to have an unreasonable need to write almost every day, and to place said writing out there in the hopes that others will occasionally read it.  I don’t really track the number of people who see it, as I am somewhat unwilling to go to the effort of modifying my site to maintain statistics.  Most of the time the simple act of posting scratches the weird writing itch.

I suppose that I don’t write to convince anyone but myself.  I was listening to a podcast the other day and the subject of “Quietism” came up and I was drawn to it.  

(https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/history-of-ideas/montaigne)

I think that I will do some more reading on the subject.  Today I hit up Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quietism_(philosophy)

And later today I will try and digest this piece:

https://petemandik.substack.com/p/the-qualia-quietism-manifesto

Mostly, I am coming to believe that this discussion is somewhat akin to angels dancing on the head of a pin.  I am beginning to wonder if the subject can be answered in a universal sense and I am more and more drawn to the protestant reformation as an example where both sides of the discussion are merely folks trying to make their description of a personal and internal phenomenon an across the board mandate for “how people perceive the world”.

I am attempting to figure out how my mind works, not to impose that particular straight jacket on a description of how all human’s minds work, but just as an understanding of how I get from the real world “experience” to the decisions that stem from those data points.  

What I find difficult to bear is the tendency of folks who look into this kind of thing to attempt to create “laws” for the multitudes when at best they can only attempt a documentation of a model that exists solely inside their bodies (I’ll discuss the effects of non-cranial inputs to “thought” in another essay).  

Philosophers argue all the time and during all ages.  It is kind of normal.  The key to it is to not take their points of view all that seriously and try to see what you can distill from their thoughts that allow you to structure your mental model (good artists borrow, great artists steal).  But as soon as you start pushing off your personal views as universal truth, you are becoming religious.  

Overall, philosophy and religion are two sides of the same coin.  What is happening with both is the universal need to think that you are “right”.   This is the path that I am trying hard to steer clear of (albeit unsuccessfully).  Always in the back of my thoughts is the annoyed, self-important, and unwelcome thought that people who don’t understand what I am trying to say are stupid.  I work hard at squelching this, but it is an ongoing battle.

So my essays will continue to be “attempts”.  I will continue to put in digressions not quite appropriate to the core thesis, but that is how my mind works.  I will continue to use crude language interspersed with technicalia because that is how my mind works as well.  

Please don’t expect epiphanies, because I sure don’t.  When I write something down here, it is because I know that I don’t really understand it and ossifying my thinking in words lets me return later to try and continue in the ongoing, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt for understanding.

(final weird digression:  Since I recently finished Harry Potter, I really wish that I could invent or buy a “pensieve”.  It would be great to accurately document your past thoughts without the years wearing down the edges to make you forget the places you were wrong.  I know that folk around here sneer at ‘Arry Potter, but it is at it’s core a well-written escapist fantasy and those are pretty thin on the ground.)

I'll do it Myself Dad

 

(Homemade naan, beer, and tzatziki, I did buy the cucumber and tomato)

This post is a riff on a question I asked during the Archdruid’s weekly Q&A 

I’ll do it myself dad.

I briefly enjoyed the time period when raising my sons when these words became commonplace.  

But I am thinking more and more that during this time in my last adolescence (retirement) that I am thinking the same thing.  So my question as follows is:

How do I keep any non-corporeal entity (beneficial, hostile, or neutral) out of my business?

I can’t say as I have ever had a significant experience of this type, and more and more, listening and reading about such experiences, I can’t think that it would be all that pleasant. Judging from the experiences described in this forum, I am pretty sure I can be quite happy continuing that lack.

So lately I have been practicing the “sphere of protection” with an addendum in my brain that adds “this means you”.  Is there anything else that you can recommend to let me continue keeping this kind of thing at arms length so that I can continue my dotage without?

(for other forum participants, please continue your path and report on results when it moves you, I find it fascinating and I do believe your narratives, but I am opting out)

I suppose that this is an odd thing to ask in such a forum, but I think that I am coming to the point in my life when I am skeptical just about everything and just want to be at peace with the grab-bag of good and bad that the world that I can sense offers me.  I suppose that the period that I am living in is truly my second adolescence, I don’t really have anywhere to go or anything to do and overall I am really beginning to appreciate this.  

I think a lot of the time, when people get all “spiritual”, they are doing it in an odd “mirror world” of the academic community, especially in my age cohort.  It seems to me that they are cramming for a test at the end of the quarter.

I suppose I do tend toward thinking that there is a soul that powers the individual.  I am ambivalent about whether it is immortal (obviously I am hoping that it lasts beyond this “mortal coil” but I also realize that there is no proof, either negative or positive for this supposition).  

Pascal’s Wager posits:

Pascal's Wager, in simple terms, is an argument suggesting that it's a better bet to believe in God than not to, even if you can't be certain God exists. The logic is that the potential reward of believing (eternal happiness) far outweighs the potential loss (a changed lifestyle) if God doesn't exist. Conversely, the potential loss of not believing (eternal damnation) is infinite, while the potential gain (if God doesn't exist) is finite

In decisions under risk, the agent assigns subjective probabilities to the various states of the world. Assume that the states of the world are independent of what the agent does. A figure of merit called the expected utility, or the expectation of a given action can be calculated by a simple formula: for each state, multiply the utility that the action produces in that state by the state’s probability; then, add these numbers. According to decision theory, rationality requires you to perform the action of maximum expected utility (if there is one).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/#:~:text=In%20decisions%20under%20risk%2C%20the,(if%20there%20is%20one).

Pascal’s wager is kind of a red herring.  He conflates soul, heaven/hell, and the christian god and then slants the bet so that losing is infinite.  This is bullshit.  No one knows.  

But I am working on restating the “bet”.  It is harder than it seems at first blush.  I am trying to remove the ideas of “heaven and hell” and get over the idea that “good” and “evil” and “justice” have any real meaning outside of personal preference.  I am spending time working through Leibnitz’s “Best of all possible worlds” and I am thinking there is some merit there.   I am also giving Spinoza another go.  I didn’t really understand last time, maybe I can figure it out this time.

All of this rotates openly around me, being the imperfect and dwindling being of an uncertain mix of the corporeal and incorporeal is trying to isolate “me” and my place (if any) in the grand scheme.  

Damn hard thing to do and it gets people pissed off when you talk about it.

Trimming

 

Spent some time this morning trimming down the bookmarks for my daily “news”.  I must admit that I was getting a little out of control in my search for evidence of the decline of the west.  I really don’t need to do that.  

Look, like it or not, the condition set that allowed us to take more off the table than we put on the table is ending.  It was a great deal here in the land o’ the free while it lasted, but the world is making the adaptations needed to even things out.  

I spend a lot of time thinking about how I process the data coming in from the world around me.  But on days like today, I start wondering if that is just self-indulgence and a form of intellectual masturbation.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am going to continue pondering this in hopes that by doing so, it helps in making sense of the information coming in through my sensorium.  

All of this comes about because of the simple fact that I paid too much attention in my humanities courses back when such things were deemed to be necessary.  Then I forgot about those ideas when I had to go into society to make nickels to support my materialist side.  Now that I am retired, I have time to reconsider things that I never got to the bottom of back in the day.

I suppose that my problem is that I am neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat.  I am definitely neither a christian or an atheist.  I believe in things that have no proof, but the things that I believe have no disproofs either.  I have years as a scientist, but I also have years as an altar boy.  I am not at all certain how to deal with this kind of thing.  But it puts me smack in the middle of the nastiest, longest running, and violent argument of the past four millenia.  

So, I will post here on this out of the way cul de sac of the internet and try to work through what passes as a philosophy in my brain.  I am leaning strongly towards the idea that there is such a thing as a soul and that it does have an impact on my life.  I have no opinion as to whether it is immortal.  I think that there are things out there that we cannot perceive using the five senses but that still have an effect on my life, I have no idea of how they work. 

I just know that thinking I can get to the bottom of all this and “know” how the world works in toto is not possible and I will die wondering.

Today, this doesn’t bother me.  The sky is bright blue and the temperature is damn close to perfect.  I think that I will pay attention to that.

Anti Hoard

 

My neighbor is in the process of moving out.  He apparently got all butt-hurt because the landlord raised the rent, so he decided to move into a more expensive apartment.  The reasoning eludes me, but apparently there is more storage space and he can consolidate all his worldly goods and the garage that comes with the apartment lets him get out of his storage rental.

When he was moving, I watched the three “young bucks and a truck” spend three to four hours carrying furniture and boxes to almost fill the floor space of a 25-foot box truck with stuff from his apartment.  I know the dimensions of the space and that came out of a 700 sq ft apartment.

For some reason, watching that process made me go through and do another evaluation concerning the excess of my possessions.  Now, for those of you who occasionally read this blog, you have been patient in hearing me nattering on about this, sorry about having to watch me beat the horse carcass again.

So today I am grimly looking at my electronic fetish.  It has always been a problem.  At least today it is at a point where the total of the devices takes up less than a cubic foot.  But it is still ridiculous.  Television (wall mounted 32” so no floor space taken).  I think this stays.  I don’t plug it in until October (9th week of the NFL season) and I unplug it after the Super Bowl.  It stays.

Three e-ink Kindles (4th generation that I bought back in 2012, a 10th gen oasis that I bought in ‘19, and the big mistake, a Kindle Scribe that I bought three years ago.  So at least one of these e-inks models have to go, maybe two as I am getting progressively more uncomfortable with Amazon’s domineering control of the e-books I “own” (they have now openly stated that I only have a license to read them).  I am considering giving away the scribe, to big and clunky for comfort.

I have an iPhone that stays.  It is my only phone and I have no desire for a land line.  I have finally come to grips with the way that particular cookie has crumbled.  I am not fond of it, but there are a lot of things that I am not fond of.

Finally the ones that embarrass me the most.  I have a beat up old Kindle Fire 10” that I bought back in 2018.  I use it to watch/listen to interviews and such.  But it is slowing down and the sleazy bastards at amazon are not supporting the software anymore and it is getting clunkier and clunkier.  I just bought a new model.  I don’t especially like the idea, but I have to make a space, and for now, these are the cheapest tablets around of decent quality, but you do have to spend time and effort getting around the “walled garden” that the muddy river wants you to live in. 

Finally there is the two laptops both of them ancient and both sort of “hobbyish”.  There is an ancient MacBook Air (2012) that I bought for $80.00 and used it to learn how to install Linux on Apple hardware.  Then there is a Lenovo thinkpad that I got for free (I did have to dig out an old SSD to get it running), one of these has to go.

I figure at a minimum, I need to get rid of one, perhaps two e-ink kindles, an old kindle fire, and one of the laptops.  

Next will be the painful part, addressing my kitchen equipment fetish.

Project

 

Bought this non-shiny piece of hardware today.  It will be part of an experiment to become more “prepperish” in a rational manner.  My son G. and I are currently going through an “I love Indian food” phase and one of the things that I especially enjoy is when the restaurant brings me a basket of hot naan.  It truly makes my day.  

So the culinary learning effort for the next little while will be the production, consumption, and improvement of flatbreads.  

Tortillas (both corn and flour) will always hold a special place in my heart.  Having grown up with Wonder Bread, when I discovered that bread could actually have flavor, I was blown away.  But with the exception of pairing white American bread with good smoked barbeque, it really will never have a place in my kitchen.

What the American yuppie boomer scum have done with European-style bread makes me want to wean myself off of any American raised bread that is for sale.  Local bakeries here in the land of riots and self-righteousness (Portland, OR) a loaf of bread can run you between $9.00 and $13.00 bucks.  Oh, I can grab the bus over to Dave’s Killer Bread (Owned by a big corp claiming social consciousness) and buy a loaf of frozen day-old bread for around $4.00.  Daves is a better deal, but I can only afford to live off their scraps (in stores, the price pushes $7.00).

So, I am thinking that bread is, and always will be the “staff of life”, whatever that means.  So learning to make the breads that taste good and sustain the poor will be essential in the years ahead.  My projects will be naan for a wheat bread and corn tortillas 

A non-guilty pleasure

 

I am not ashamed.

I never finished reading the Harry Potter series back in the day when my sons were Potterheads.  I plowed through the early books and quite enjoyed them.  But as my sons became the standard-issue hormonal teenagers and I had to deal with the real life teenagers, I stopped reading them or watching the movies (#’s 4 through 7) because the books pretty accurately portrayed the angsty/self absorption that is bog standard for that age grouping.  I had enough of that shit in my real life.

So, I did buy an “all in one” e-book copy of the series a couple years ago but I was still working and the electrons remained frozen on silicon until last week.  

So I decided to see what happened in the books.

First, I really think that Ms. Rowling knows how to spin a yarn.  I think that this is a solid piece of writing.  I can understand why the kids liked it, but what I find interesting is how much I enjoyed it.  I am definitely not the demographic it was written for.

So I decided this morning that I need to do a slow read and pull out the now passé methodology of literature outlines and criticism taught by Lavon Lake at Clearfield High School a long time ago.

What I am finding interesting is peering in on the still passionate foofooraw of the factions within the fan base.  People study these books closely and spend as much (probably more) time as folks currently studying the Iliad.  

I am going to do a slow-re-read, and maybe watch the movies.  Not because it is great literature, but because I want to figure out just why it is so enjoyable.  I will probably fail.

I have to consider the simple idea that it is like chocolate ice cream.  It is pleasing in a manner that defies description, it doesn’t hurt anything, and sometimes, when the mood suits you, a person can obsess on it for a brief period of time.

Correlations

Correlation is not causality:

Look, everyone is low-key a-twitter about trumpy’s latest bit of performative art over in the middle east.  I remember him doing something similar back around this time in his first term.  He blew a bunch of holes in the Syrian desert and that did nothing particularly useful other than letting the male/female news-whores (Mika and Joe and their ilk) dismount the “I hate Trump” train for a day or two.

I can’t say that this time is different other than the fact that I have successfully weaned myself off mainstream media and at this time I take my news-whores in written form and have a much higher threshold of disbelief.

Look, when I was still in my serious tin-foil hat days, I found it interesting that one could take a plain-vanilla, reasonably accurate set of data like sunspots and map “shit-hitting-the-fan” events on the poor, innocent graph and believe that it meant something.  Now I am not so certain.

My latest worldview is that especially here in the land-o-the-free and to a unknown extent elsewhere, we have the attention span of a swarm of gnats.  We act like everything that happened two weeks ago is ancient history.  I cling to data like sunspots not because they are correlative/causitive, but because they remind me that history is there and echoes throughout the actions of the world.

History is there, from Darius to Sikes-Picot to the six-day-war.  People in that region remember it all and act on that history.  We are a bit player in that context.  Maybe we ought to step aside and let them continue.

Venn Diagrams

 

I tend to love the damn things (Venn Diagrams that is).  I find them interesting in the sense that they do provide a visual to kick off thinking about a subject.  I usually manage over time to start modifying them in my head.   They aren’t really all that good a way to accurately depict nuance and conflict within the particular system, but they ça donne à réfléchir.

Consider the simple diagram above.  This is (to me at least) a reasonable view of how to discuss politics in America.  I think that the colors accurately reflect how most of my friends view the situation. 

But I think that it is really not all that easy.  The sizes of the pinkish and the bluish right/wrong circles are not exactly equal as shown, even worse, the labels can be swapped by merely changing who is looking at it.  It is kind of a “Schroedinger’s label” kind of event, where you can imagine the labels in a digital closet somewhere and they only settle down, almost randomly on one of the two circles on you see above when someone allows them on the computer screen.

I suppose that what I worry about the most is that the little football shape that is the intersection of right and wrong where realistic compromises can be made is shrinking.  The two circles are moving away from each other and the space where compromises can be made is shrinking.

I think that I read somewhere that a significant minority of the US feels that an upcoming civil war is in the cards.  I have a hunch that there is no valid and falsifiable methodology that the yellow journalist who wrote the piece can produce to support his/her claim (label warning: I do not consider polls valid as their statistical universe is always constructed to support a pre-existing opinion).  But in this case, if I were to pull an opinion out of my ass (like the original writer, what sauce for the goose after all) I would not disagree with the 40% estimate, but rather hedge my claim by stating +/- 15%.

Politics is an odd beast that sleeps in the purplish intersection above.  Politics is also the human means of everything not turning into an oversized barroom brawl.  The solutions that politics gives you never really make anyone happy, it just makes the solution offered not worth fighting about.

The way that the country seems to be moving is that the sideways movement of the two circles is proceeding apace and the little football shape is growing smaller.  All I can hope for is that their speed doesn’t increase.

A Complete Shitshow

 I can't even read the headlines anymore.  Everyone is frenetically clutching their pearls, taking sides, and shouting incoherently.  Everyone is certain that they know "the plan" and are popping up like everywhere.  Everyone seems to have chosen sides.

Trump.  Pity the fool.  Everyone seems to want to pin the blame on this particular jackass, but the truth of the matter is that he is a front-man, a salesman that (like all salesmen) uses glad-handing, a haircut, a good suit, and a good golf game to sell shit.  He is an excellent salesman, but he is nothing more than that.

So now we get to spend the next month or so trying to ignore the legion of salesmen in the differing media types attempting to sell me their narrative of how things are working out.  In a real sense, they are minions of a system that is moving the way it wants to move and they are only providing a smokescreen of semi-believable (and sometimes not-believable) storylines to provide a particularly sinister forum for rooting for who is going to kill who.

I think that we are looking at a time where the old divisions are at each other again.  The remnants of provinces the Holy Roman Empire and the Austro-Hungarians are fighting against whoever they feel is oppressing them this time (Poland is definitely gonna gets its turn in time).  The descendants of Moses are still trying to smite the descendants of Amalek son of Eliphaz.  Zhōngguó ( 中國) will continue to work on bringing 中華民國 back into line (this will happen about the same time that the new chip fabs being built here in the US are up and running).

Look, lots of stuff going on.  Everything that we are fretting about goes a lot further back than 1945 and the long-suppressed animosities that came from the last set of lame compromises that were shoved down throats on the other side of the planet.

I am thinking that we are looking at another of the periods where more shit is happening than anyone has the ability to damp down.  It doesn't mean then end of the world, it does mean that things are going to be changing in a way that lots and lots of folks won't like.

Past examples of unpleasantness:

1776-1812 (American Revolution through Waterloo)

1840-1870 (Europe's spasm, say goodbye to Metternich, say Hello to Bismark)

1915-1945 (The second thirty years war, because Two was a consequence of One)

So I kinda look at 2016 as the start of the current thirty-year mess.  And this time we know what is happening elsewhere (I am looking at you China and India).  We are just beginning to get some traction on this particular path of unpleasantness.  

Now, you are probably thinking about how I seem blasé about this.  I suppose that, in a sense, I am quite weary of it.  But I will most likely live long enough to see things get worse before they start getting better again.  My personal goal is to adapt to the world around me and make the best of what is going to probably be a somewhat less pleasant and lazy life.

Rabbit Holes

 Trying to write.  Big stuff is hard work and I am not used to that anymore.  I think that I need to get back to the basics and realize that outlines and drafts work better than my lazy, stream of consciousness.  I think a lot of the time, things here on the web are the product of a certain amount of laziness and I am probably more guilty than most.

Consider this little gem that popped up over at wikipedia:

So, it appears that 16,000 words is somewhere in the range of a novellete or a a low-end novella.  

Then consider the subject.  Baby boomers.  Pretty easy stuff: people in the US born between 1946 and 1964.  So 16,000 words on a subject with a simple definition.  Must be a lot of freight in that train.  All I wanted was the definition.

Complex issues, freighted with a lot of nuance, secondary meanings, and societal taboo are not amenable to short blog posts or tiktok videos.  Maybe actually trying to understand any “whole issue: and the repercussions of any decision is difficult for me and others here in the simulacrum of discourse that is our digital stomping ground.  I’m going to keep trying, but nearly everything worth talking about ends up in yet another rabbit hole.

Rabbit hole is just another word for hard work.

The Trolley Problem

 

So, I got an interesting response from a reader concerning my recent rant on AI and robots and old science fiction.  The part that raised some questions was:

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a set of guidelines for the behavior of robots, designed to ensure their interaction with humans is safe and ethical. They are: 1) A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

The response from this reader was:

Law 1 is hugely problematic. Just think of all the 'hate laws' being pushed at the moment. What is 'harm'? And what if stopping a human being coming to harm requires harming them?

Yep.  He has got it right.  But then again, you have to think a little past that. About those laws, what they are trying to do, who is doing them, and the culture that promulgated them.

Consider for a moment the “trolley problem” presented above.  “Holy Kobiashi Maru Batman!”  This tired conundrum is trotted out and undergraduates preen and strut with their tired ass rationales.

But I think that this kind of thing is exactly what worries my gentle reader who pointed out the dilemma.  Our society really can’t stand the idea of “you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t”.  

The simple and unsophisticated presentation of the trolley problem is one where the mental/physical states of the person operating the switch and the victims on the tracks are unknown.  This is both simplistic and stupid.

Imagine you own petty bigotries and problematic actions (and please don’t think they aren’t there) and then imagine that you knew the identities and mental states of the “victims” on the track.  Now you have a real problem don’t you?  

What if the “one” is your daughter?  I would venture to guess that there would be five dead people at the end of the experiment.  What if you knew that four  of the five had terminal disease and would die in a week, would the change in death timing mean anything to you?

Let’s use an imaginary “Harry Potter” scenario but with no “magic” to help you out.  What if the “one” was Sweet Hermione and the “five” were mean-old Slytherins and you were a Hufflepuff?  Maybe a different answer depending on your house.  I am certain members of Ravenclaw and Slytherin would not take much time to make their respective choices.

The Robots and intelligences that we are trying to make will be a different hodgepodge of conflicting goals, prejudices, compromises and methodologies that make up our laws.  But at the end, the rules coded into them will be our rules because we did the coding.  The chance that they can come up with a solution that will make everyone happy is exactly zero.

My solution to the trolley problem is that I would walk away.  If there is no way to win, don’t play.  Maybe that is what we need to teach.  

Protein

 

“The American Way of Life is non-negotiable”.

George H.W. Bush

No pretty pictures today.  I am sitting at my multi use table (I suppose that it is technically a “kitchen table” but it looks out the widow at the courtyard and the blue sky, so it gets used for just about everything) and pondering the way that thing are going and treasuring the idea that I might be able to avoid most of the mess that seems to be heading our way.

Look, maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a Jain.  I am too much of an opportunistic omnivore to ignore meat.  Kill a plant to eat, kill an animal to eat, sorry folks, but it is where you draw the line.  My line is just the other side of primates.  Bushmeat in Africa is barbaric.  Those folks are our cousins.  Everything else is just prey.

So today is a quick discussion of my favored protein sources.  My radically diminished consumption of lamb and beef are not for some ridiculous moral posturing.  They are kept at arm's length  because they are ridiculously “overpriced” in the amount of CO2 that they produce.  They are also ridiculously overpriced in dollar terms as well.  

So I now tend toward pork, tempeh, and TVP.  During the next couple of years, I have a hunch that I will be drifting more and more toward the tempeh and TVP.  Again, this isn’t because of some high-falutin’ moral crusade, it is just the way the cookie crumbles.  

The graphs above are generated by Elon’s pet project.  My only caveat is that the price of tempeh is probably reflected as the overpriced nonsense sold in stores.  I can assure you that if you spend a little time and make it yourself, the cost goes way down

The times are ‘a changin.