These days, try as I do to focus on my real work, as a citizen scientist, I am too dismayed by the implications of some of what I see, especially given the knowledge of the devastating effects on my own human life and my mom’s of clunky rollouts of stuff where anything potentially cool is mired with parasitic, dishonest junkware.
I do not favor throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, but I do need to know sooner rather than much later which is which. And for any further growth or construction in or contiguous to any of the three properties I am a joint owner of (0000F5D7 is the ID as Tata knows).
As the Yimbies and other pro deregulation and pilfering with sad kayfabe types explode I cannot continue to be stripped of a say in the use of my own assets, not to mention continued violations of my civil rights.
The web of life is an amazing thing. A year ago I read about Tejas Thackeray and took a liking to the guy, because of his implicit understanding of that. He talked about how everything in nature is interconnected
Nature can be brutal, but for the most part it is remarkably efficient. Killing is relatively swift and occurs only as needed.
By contrast, in an Idiocracy especially, human built systems are slow, wasteful, mind boggling cruel and favor the appearance of efficiency over the real thing. Alison Taylor wrote a piece on corrupt firms which captures the dynamic.
And with societies as broken as ours are on even the most obvious environment friendly stances it is alarming.
Factory farms or equally vile wet markets are not just horrifically cruel, they are a breeding ground for disease. One of the better articles in The New Republic pointed out that maybe wanting cheap eggs is itself the problem. It is not truly utopian to keep sowing seeds for worsening polycrises.
Further, by 2026 extreme cruelty to animals is not a “cultural” issue to embrace. In both Western and Eastern traditions there are far better things to point to with pride than wet markets and factory farms.
If we had a press that was less of an embarrassment to everything instead of fawning sycophantically on some guys whose main talent is scamming “suckers”, they would grasp far more
It brings me to my second point from the previous post, If you were actually that bright you would unambiguously be able to move fast without breaking shit. If you need to basically buy up the govt and destroy regulations so you can pollute space, breed prolifically while huffing ketamine and boasting about rocket explosions, odds are you are a sign of a profoundly and more scarily irreparably broken society rather than the genius.
I recently read a book by Adam Becker, who is really cool and an actually really intelligent and characteristically humble typical scientist.
But even he disappointly cannot come and outright admit that these guys are stupid. There is such a thing as too much humility and it afflicts many of the better adults (who are also less susceptible to the juggernauts these idiots visit on people like me)
Everything described in his book documents a spiralling out of control Idiocracy.
And yet even he does not dispute the notion that this lunatic thugocracy (Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, a truly nightmarish person called Ray Kurzweil) is full of geniuses rather than a scarier variation on 1984’s scurrying beetle like men. And that is the type that thrives in what has long been an Idiocracy
I really cannot condemn our press enough. This is why I find reading the average mainstream piece of media akin to light torture. They describe as geniuses some guys who can write some code and then dropout and learn how to game “suckers”.
If you look at publicly funded science the barrier by contrast is often really high. And that is right. You don’t want science to ever be a field where the barriers to entry are low and easy to game.
I was always very aware that if you break something, you inconvenience a large number of people and destroy expensive precision instrumentation and generally turn into the type of person who is rightly reviled.
But at my last workplace (the first marketplace friendly workplace I ever worked in) for the first time ever I noticed something alarming. The side by side coexistence of genuinely brilliant (and strained, stressed and unhappy seeming) scientists and a collection of this fatuous idiot type who really doesn’t seem to give a shit.
I would end up seeing that again over and over and over in some form or another.
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