Bear with me here some personal stuff is relevant: My first and only so far standardized psychological diagnostic (WAIS III) concluded I was narcissistic essentially for recognizing my own intelligence and some other things. (It then proceeded to tell me how above average my intelligence is. /smh) I feel like this is wrong but I have no way to disprove it. If anything I have excessive empathy. I can’t play multiplayer competitive games for example because I feel guilty when I win. I don’t like “entrepreneurship” because I feel like I’m exploiting information asymmetry. I worked myself out of a job repairing computers so well my clients no longer needed me. I’m vegan 99% of the time because I find the idea of enjoying the product of torture unconscionable. My girlfriend finds me to be quite loving and compassionate and I do genuinely care about the happiness of those around me. I’m against all forms of punishment because in my view crime is either desperation or illness. I strongly agree with the phrase: All who do evil are suffering. I feel like I could think up other examples. Is organizing two disaster relief charity drives the kind of thing narcissists typically do? /snark
That said, I also recognize the primacy of power, having basically none in my life thanks to being unable to drive or make phone calls. Which finally brings me to my point here. Disability turns me down repeatedly because I can’t properly complete the process or hire a lawyer. For me it’s impossible to get or fetch records being in a small town that pretends email doesn’t exist still.
Socially, until I get some other diagnosis or official label. I am simply lazy. And holy crap if that’s not one of the top five awful social labels to endure. It’s like a secular version of original sin. Economically and socially being male and jobless means I am lazy until proven otherwise by income or exception. I specify male because until recently being an aspiring homemaker was a perfectly valid social option for women, and still is in many areas of the nation. But men have been expected to win bread since its invention as far as I know. If that’s wrong, so be it, my point is that right now, my society thinks all males who fail to work are lazy by default. And that all laziness should be punished. (Preferably by austerity, homelessness, and death apparently.)
Further, I think psychology as an institution refuses to challenge this out of fear. For example, how come no disorder has excessive laziness as a symptom when literally every other aspect of human psychodynamics if carried to a harmful extreme is part of some disorder or other? Seriously, pick a sensation or behavior and mentally carry it to the extreme, you’ll find that as a symptom somewhere.
All except laziness. Interestingly, disturbingly, even horrifying physical wasting diseases that merely somewhat look like laziness get the same treatment. I.E. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. (That disease is nightmarish, and our loathsome society scolds people who have it.)
So why this omission? I’ll tell you. Because if our medical establishment recognized laziness as a legitimate medical phenomenon then the shame and blame that justifies homelessness (the pillory of our era) would be undermined and the whole capitalist ideology would have to go to war with the psychological sciences because they would find them literally attacking capitalism.
Incidentally this tells us something about the social pecking order as well. Clearly medical science comes second to corporate interests. You already knew that if you ever had your doctor told no by an insurance company, or you ever noticed one of those “this office does not perscribe narcotics” signs in the waiting room of same.
Science always serves power. That’s why politicians always commend PHDs instead of having them.
This essay is aimed at people who want solutions more than this guy…
Nature is perpetually in flux. It’s cute but true to say change is the only real constant. Preserving nature is a contradiction in terms. I am not a green. Nature is only green because that’s the color of efficiency with respect to its goal: Leveraging sunlight and water to create sugar from the dirt. We can do it better.
Everything we think of when we think of nature was a previous era’s destroyer. Oxygen, trees, flowering plants, life above water, insects… All of it was destructive and transformative. Humanity is natural. What we do and make is equally natural. Nothing about us violates the laws of stars and stone. We can not escape nature. It will exist, even when time and space do not.
The current arrangement of life forms is transient with or without us. Ultimately even we are transient. And so without a shred of irony or guilt I quite seriously advocate replacing Earth’s ecology (passively or actively) with an anthropocentric one. One not built on perpetual fear, pain, chaos, starvation, and mass murder.
Update: I also advocate body cams and live streaming for all non-classified official, public official, activity. And deception with awareness of or intent to harm, being made a felony akin to fraud, and manslaughter if a single death among believers due to belief can be established.
This will never happen of course.
Fission, open AI, open robotics, basic income, and a wealth cap.
Power, actuation, distribution.
Fission
Because it’s the most efficient today existing way of extracting calories from dirt. Nothing else comes even close at the terrestrial scale. Only a Dyson Swarm is in the same league. And that only counts because it’s simply a vast upscale of known technologies. Fusion would compete if it existed, but it doesn’t yet. But even if it did fission would still be on the list because fission provides more than just electricity and heat. Fission also produces a whole spectrum of special materials ranging from super batteries to cancer cures.
Robots/AI
For all the compulsory labor any society we choose to build needs.
Progressive tax and a basic income I
To insure the production from the new ecology is distributed with human comfort in mind.
For the first time in history, we can make labor voluntary. We can transition humanity into a chemotrophic phase of evolution, as opposed to phototrophic.
We’re already doing this in a sense. We use our technology which consumes electricity to produce more food than we ever could by hand. We eat oil. Literally, qualitatively, and figuratively. So I propose instead we switch the portions of that mechanical metabolism that can handle it over to the vastly more efficient and more abundant food source. Fissile material.
And no we won’t ever run out. Tectonic and volcanic activity is always lifting and stirring material up into the oceans for use to harness. Even uranium specifically is endlessly renewable. The sun will run out of hydrogen before humanity runs out of uranium. And that’s just one easy source of fuel allowing for fission. Thorium is everywhere also.
Other than the qualitatively eternal energy foundation upon which to build a human future, why fission? It seems the chemical limit for energy density without losing excessive energy during manufacture and refinement is similar between food oils and fossil fuels. Gasoline and olive oil have very similar energy density. Nature and the refineries have apparently hit a similar wall.
For some perspective of how much power is in there, just consider that fuel air explosives, which are just air mixed with gasoline, are at least 4 times as powerful as dynamite. Gasoline, and therefore olive oil, are more energy dense than dynamite. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’ll correct this if I am. But regardless, it’s certainly all dwarfed by fission.
Fission, as I’m sure you know from popular culture and atomic weapon fame, is almost magically energy dense. One kilogram of uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal. That is an almost Sci-Fi level of power. “Almost,” only because it’s not science fiction, it’s just science.
All energy can be measured in the same unit we use for food. Calories. (Kcal.) Any task requires calories of energy. This is the great equalizer. Humanity and its technology are one metabolism. Entropy’s arrow. When we eat a plant or animal we are eating a combination of sunlight and fossil fuels. These fuel sources are incredibly weak compared to what’s literally in the dirt.
Robots and human sacrifice.
Applying this entire-picture, wholistic, way of thinking to the human process of completing tasks, you realize that “the robots,” specifically total involuntary-job automation, are morally urgent. Why? Because currently we run our society on a human sacrifice lottery. Literally. (I use this word a lot to clarify that I’m being entirely serious as opposed to hyperbolic or euphemistic.)
Game it out in your head: By us having humans drive the trucks, knowing with absolute certainty that some will fatally crash, and accepting it, we all behaviorally agree that moving stuff around is worth X randomly selected lives. Sidenote: This is another reason why fission. Because life per watt, fission is the safest form of power. Only hydroelectric comes close, and that at the cost of staggering scale surface disruption. (Think the Three Gorges Dam.)
Breaking it down further into hours lost the exchange is immediate. An hour of labor is an hour of life. We buy and sell lives. Our cars might as well run on blood.
The only reason we accept this lethal madness is because we see no alternatives, or we don’t see it at all. Robots are the alternative. See the robots.
Progressive Tax and Basic Income II
That is my beef with both capitalists and most socialists. They both are pro slavery. Socialism worships this lottery in the form of deification of the worker. (An almost ancient Aztec situation when you think about it.) While capitalism on the other hand is like fire. A wonderful tool, if contained. A horrifying disaster if not. Right now 26 people own half the world’s wealth. That is like when a fire reduced the solids volume of a home by orders of magnitude by converting it into ash involuntarily. Currently the best metaphor for the global economy is a planet sized capitalist dumpster fire.
We don’t need to put it out, but we need to contain it. And this is as morally urgent as the human sacrifice situation. Indeed it’s arguably part of the same elephant.
A wealth capping progressive tax is as badly needed as a basic income. A wealth cap isn’t needed to pay for a basic income. Frankly we can just print the money needed for a basic income and the knock on benefits will vastly out weigh any inflation caused, which could be countered by other means if even needed. (Poverty costs trillions per year anyway, that cost instantly vanishes the moment you deploy a UBI. It’s fiscally obvious. Moral urgency satisfaction is only the first benefit.)
A wealth cap is needed to prevent gross concentration, stagnation, and oppression. One person having that much wealth is in this context analogous to one person starting a forest fire. Steps must be taken to prevent this sort of wealth inequality type arson. Our forest sized garden needs firebreaks and sprinklers. It’s that simple.
There is a separate and similarly urgent need for a high basic income. To prevent gross deficiency that gives rise to all the horrors and costs of poverty ranging from petty crime to institutional psychosis. Poverty, is cheaper to deal with up front. Like how it’s cheaper to change the oil than replace a seized engine.
You’re likely familiar with the concept of medicare for all, well I propose additionally Unemployment Insurance for all. Just extend qualification to everyone and expand the system as needed. Though I’m sure specific systems debate could provide a better way than my off the cuff suggestion.
Regardless, in the end, if the flow of money is like the flow of water, we need rain and evaporation, or drought and flooding will destroy everything we ever make.
And that’s it. That’s the core set of changes I think would essentially fix our social problems. The rest are secondary issues. These are the primary colors of human prosperity.
Fission, open AI, open robotics, basic income, and a wealth cap.
TLDR: Vote for whoever you actually want to win. Especially if you don’t usually vote anyway. It’s more fun that way. And better for the deeper future.
Get yourself on record. Democracy functioning or not is compromise so you’re gonna be unhappy to some degree regardless. So might as well lean towards your ideals.
Granted there is no good reason to panic about Trump. But that’s a far cry from there being any cogent argument to vote for him from any negative utilitarian perspective.
Especially if you assume he’s going to win anyway.
I was #BernieorBust before there was a term, I called the election nice and early. Not that it matters.
But no I’m not gonna vote for Trump for the same reason I won’t tactically vote period anymore. The whole reason Bernie was a thing is because finally we could vote for someone, not against them. From the left logic in voting for Trump is flawed. It’s the UniteBlue logic. It’s the could be worse argument. Only you’re saying a neolib would be worse. But worse isn’t the point.
In that situation you’re completely free to vote your conscience. Which I did. I voted green knowing I’d lose. And I don’t agree with them either.
I’m a gun carrying pro nuclear anti (third wave?) SJW leftist. (I do consider myself a fighter for social justice by definition, which just makes the term SJW confusing and stupid.) There’s plenty wrong with the DNC and the left. But none of it is addressed by voting for Trump. Also Trump is not going to win 2020. If nothing else the DNC will rig in a more convincing fake.
The most important issue isn’t military, it’s election integrity. Because it doesn’t matter what you think on any other issue if your only policy influence, elections, are a sham. It’s social triage.
Without addressing election integrity your political position turn into nothing more than petitioner to the king. But then, maybe somehow that’s enough. I have no one to really to game this out with. Even in 2016 no one would really listen and speak with me.
That’s why I’ve pretty much stopped writing. It’s just that this started as a comment and got big enough to retask as a post.
Citations:
https://underlore.com/batman-feels-the-bern/
Where I said the following July 1, 2015: “If he doesn’t win the primary that’ll just prove the left is as rigged and working for the 1% as the right is well beyond any need to be hyperbolic or cynical.”
https://underlore.com/how-i-got-banned-from-dailykos-com-in-less-than-8-hours/
Wherein I said the following no later than August 8, 2015: “If the dems hand Hillary the dem primary, Americans deserve a Republican president. And that’s what we’ll get, regardless of who wins the general.”
All the writing I did on my blog about Sanders: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Funderlore.com+Bernie+Sanders&atb=v139-6&ia=web
I’m fascinated by the forces that manufacture concepts like this.
It’s amazing that it’s actually possible for some to not realize that the very existence of multicellular life, and the unmitigated primacy of cooperation and language itself as a survival trait, entirely refutes the pro-slavery world view implied by reverence for drudgery and the exploitative trade imbalance called “profit.”
It’s almost like blindsight, minus the logical consistency.
I wish Orwell had presented the concept of doublethink differently such that it was more socially obvious in cases like this.
People genuinely don’t realize it’s inherently conflicted. (And there are so many t makes one wonder how democracy itself can be valid when such a small a handful of opinion makers can be so effective.)
That entire notion of labor’s purpose exists to enable the very thing it in the next breath so bitterly attacks as “laziness.” Or should I say Sloth? In another era it’d be the same arguments on behalf of the clergy or the crown.
It’s the same as it has been. A PR firm selling a world view to the masses that keeps them working, expressly so that the owners of the firm and its (royal) clients won’t have to.
But that’s all old news. More recently I am genuinely curious how the narrative is going to evolve when it finds itself in a context where it can no longer (cogently at least) blame unemployment on some imaginary and arbitrarily defined character flaw.
Picture an island with 10 people but only two jobs thanks to innovation. Would they still try to spin the resulting 80% unemployment rate as due to “laziness?”
I mean if demand for leisure/freedom (“laziness/sloth”) is a character flaw (unless you’re rich?) then it follows that work itself is an axiomatic virtue doesn’t it? So without needed tasks, would they invent superfluous time consuming painful ones for the other 80% of the island? (Would simply flogging them be acceptable instead for the sin of having free time?)
Would they be asked to invent such tasks or do the flogging themselves “voluntarily” on pain of avoiding worse social punishment for being “too lazy to find a job?”
Only asking conceptually. Asking my back brain really. After all, few are rational agents in this. Most answers given would just be repetition of some PR firm like always. I’m better off waiting for a press release than asking any one member of the party.
You ever notice how they dare not make any degree of laziness a mental disability? Like how it HAS to stay forever in the realm of shameful character traits. Have you ever wondered why it is that seemingly all other affective traits carried to some socially damning pathological extreme can be parsed as mental illness except the desire to evade labor?
TLDR: Take Bile Pills with meals. This post is a modified version of my entirely positive review of a specific brand of bile acid caplets.
Several years ago, I’m not even sure how many, I developed chronic cholecystitis. The negative impact on my life had been hard to articulate. I had no insurance. I had no recourse but to completely wrap my eating choices around what would not cause me excruciating pain. (Rice became a dear and lifelong friend.) The ER simply gives you pain meds and sends you home, everything else gets treated like recreational surgery. Thus I was stuck with truly unfair levels of fear and pain.
I came to literally fear and obsess over food. Then came Obamacare and finally surgery was possible for a serf like me. But that too terrified me due to potential complications and the one way nature of the solution. My aunt for example got the surgery and it did not cure her symptoms and wished she could undo the procedure.
I searched for alternate treatments and read every wiki relevant to the organ and its products. This is where I discovered that bile is 97% water, and the rest bile salts. I searched and hoped humanity would sell me these salts because I figured if I preload my system with the salts my need to make my own bile would be diminished and as a result I would not get attacks.
This. Proved. True.
Over the past several days (at the time of the original review) I have thoroughly tested my body with foods I know for a fact to be fool proof triggers for gal attacks. Not only do I feel no pain in the organ, I feel no tension, or anything else. It is as if the organ has been completely repaired.
I am metabolizing my food better. It takes less to fill me and I have more energy. And ZERO pain!
One tablet before any intake that I know comes with fat and I am so far 100% certain to not have gal tension, much less an ache or a full blown attack.
I’m confident with proper diet this substance will allow my gal bladder to recover. But even if it doesn’t, my situation is wildly improved.
Update: Three months in, still no attacks. I’ve found it’s good to try and take it in the middle of the meal. It still works either way but if you take it early you can get cramping etc similar to gastric dumping, and if you take it at the end you’ll taste it and might still get tension.
I wish I could have twice as many caplets at half the volume for the same price. Still, I’d give ten stars if I could. I can eat again.
Update 2015-06-28 0105 AM: Six months in and things are even better than before. By taking the load off my gal bladder it would appear I’m allowing it to heal and shrinking my own stones. I now have to buy the salts even less frequently as my normal tolerance for foods return. Still very much a 10 star product in my view, and a clear reason for me to never fully trust or rely the FDA and medical establishment again. Why? Because finding/deducing this cure myself and on amazon and not because of a doctor’s advice speaks volumes about how badly the system is broken.
I take this personally because this is a life changing substance for me and I can’t possibly be alone. It literally saved an organ, and I suspect if it were more widely known lives would be saved because sometimes people die during gal bladder removal surgery, and that surgery might have been avoided by simply taking one of these 22cent caplets with every extremely fatty meal.
My required intake has dropped significantly because the load taken off my organs has it would seem allowed them to recover to a noticeable degree. I only really need one every other day on average now. It is hard to articulate the degree of positive impact this has had on my life.
The risks of gal bladder surgery are real and serious. And there’s no going back once it’s done. Doctors should be recommending this before surgery, and only considering surgery if this doesn’t work or something.
Update 2016-01-16 0929 AM: I suspect this will be my last update because things are unchanged and that is magnificent. I don’t get gal aches anymore unless I truly over indulge. And if I do get them I can just take one of these and basically give it a little time. This stuff changed my life. I just can’t say enough good things.
A noise draws my attention. I sweep my gaze across the crumbling ruins. I probably shouldn’t be in here if the upper floor and its supports are as decayed as what little I can see in this gloom… But, as ever, emotions administrate logic, not the other way around. And the feeling keeping me here is hard to describe. Reasons are meaningless anyway. They’re always known second, if ever. Like all mammals, I chase stimuli that brings me pleasure, avoid that which brings me pain. The rest is ignored.
At the very least greed for more information is present. Willingness to endure risk. Yes, this place could collapse on me, but it’s also beautiful. There is an arcanity here. A hint of forgotten and hidden power. Opportunity. Vindication. Proof.
Authenticity is always in question. The need to express alone can be overwhelming, or at least an easy source of that pleasure and evasion. Maybe there’s nothing here but art and fiction. Myth at best. A lie I can be forgiven for believing in. But the gamble is worth it and so I hope, and I look.
I take in my surroundings. Surprisingly fresh smelling. The miracles of plant life and fungi. A few square meters terraformed by evolution and time. A human space, abandoned, and reclaimed, by its original owners. With no compassion, but also no judgment. The beetles and worms under the stones don’t love us. Nor do they hate. They simply accept. Mindless organic machines. I hope?
Do they chase their own wormy pleasures? I hope not. I wonder for a moment about when pleasure evolved and why. A familiar abyss opens before that thought process, and I turn away. Focus can sometimes be a choice. To whatever degree choice can even be that is. Another abyss dodged, of a completely different sort.
The joys of being this far in are exhausted. The risk of being crushed and suffocated insufficient to push me away. More proof against deterrence as a concept. Being human is ignoring threats. I thus move deeper into the ruins.
