Never been one to let the carrier drop

Hate is thinking that a deity has created a place of eternal suffering in order to punish you if you don’t guess right amongst the plethora of religions that all appear man-made in a world where there’s a survival incentive to make up religions (if you’re a priest, it puts food on the table) and humans obviously make things up all the time.

Love is thinking that a deity has created a place of eternal suffering so that the masochists will have a utopia too.

1) I think it’s a good thing to take money – the power to mint it and control it – out of the hands of government. Crypto also offers the possibility of evolving money in two important directions – #1: we can start tracking metadata for each transaction including real world resources and man-hours – ETH already has the vehicle for this, although it would take getting everyone to understand why it was a good idea to get it implemented #2: We can start using separate types of money for renewable and nonrenewable resources. Cryptocurrency helps open people’s eyes to the idea of ‘multiple types of money’ and could also be a vehicle to help facilitate this. Squishing all types of value into one type of money is resulting in us repeatedly doing stupid things.
2) The large use of energy is something that could easily be rectified. If instead of having all participants constantly hashing and scaling the difficulty needed by the total hashrate, we required participants to *occasionally* hash to prove they *could have* (replace the proof of work with a proof of capability of work) and to hash on demand (allowing the network both to get the hashes it needs to make the blockchain go and also allowing the network to challenge suspected cheaters to prove they really can turn over them hashes) we could reduce power exponentially. The huge power usage is because no matter how many participate, the payout per block is the same – and stupid numbers of people have started participating. We can design the network to still do what it does while using a lot less power than it does.
3) Blockchain technology offers us a lot of awesome possibilities, including the possibility of checking vote aggregation ourselves. So far it’s the wild west on the idea of using it for money/value, but the idea is a good one – governments would likely be much better behaved if we took the power of the purse away from them. This is not saying I don’t believe in funding government operations – but right now, my government is murdering massive numbers of people using my tax dollars, and I feel represented by basically Bernie, AOC, and no one else. Cryptocurrencies offer us the possibility of taking some power away from governments and I think that is a good thing
4) Some cryptocurrencies also use very little power while empowering a new way of building a communications network – I gesture you to Helium.
5) All that said – the future of cryptocurrencies as a vehicle for value is extremely unclear. No one should invest any money in them they can not afford to lose. It is also not at all clear what future cryptocurrencies based on a proof of work that uses hashing have post the advent of large quantum computers.
6) Most of the time I agree with you, but on this one I think you’re probably under informed and acting as a shill for people in power that are frightened – though whether that’s because they *don’t* understand blockchain or whether it’s because they do, I don’t know.

Apparently republicans are complaining about the “liberal bias on campus”. I believe this – because conservatives are generally interested in implementing things that are false-to-fact. Actual education on the data does not support the conservative agenda nor the conservative ideals. But this isn’t a flaw in America’s colleges – rather, it’s a flaw in what has become conservativism in America. Now, mind you, I was never a fan of conservative thought. I’ve never thought the past was better than the future except perhaps in some very specific instances like windows 7 and the motorola photon 4Q – I definitely recognize that things like Obamacare are a huge leap forward and that a concentrated effort on awareness of the least of us is in fact leading us down a path that’s likely to end with a lot more equality and justice for all, even if it might be a little uncomfortable on the way.

So, I was never a fan of “let’s stay where we are” or “let’s go backwards” or “let’s have a small government that doesn’t protect us from the privitations of big moneyed individuals” even before American conservatism became “let’s do everything we can to enslave the little guy so Betsy Devoss can get her third yacht” and “let’s cheer on the KKK and tell the cops good job shooting those innocents, please shoot some more”

But now that American conservatism is “Go ahead, punch him, I’ll pay your legal bills” – not to mention failing to pay bills (a common Trump thing) – not to mention ignoring science (I don’t know which I find more pathetic, the antivaxers and antimaskers or the people who want to pretend global warming isn’t real) not to mention ignoring common sense (Let’s destroy the most valuable liquid on the planet – water – in order to get a little bit of energy in a system where the *sky is raining soup*) not to mention ignoring hard data (we could talk about the laffer curve, or we could talk about abstinence only education)

Basically, the phrase that comes to mind when describing conservative goals at this point is ‘just plain dumb’. They of course support this with a cavalcade of lies, and most of the purpose of the conservative party is to make sure that at all costs, the pigs stay more equal.

My point is, colleges have a liberal bias not because they have a political agenda, but because they are teaching the facts, and the facts do not support American conservatives.

One thing the US medical system badly needs is a set of rules similar to the ones mechanics operate under.

1) They should be required to provide a quote beforehand. Recently a doctor ordered some unnecessary imaging for me and the imaging lab could not even tell me how much it would cost.
2) They should not get paid if a reasonable person would conclude they did not solve the problem. This would require a little bit of special-case handling because of course you have hypochondriacs who would never believe they had been cured, but I am sure we could come up with a way (maybe a independent panel of reviewers) to implement it. For long term treatments money could go into a escrow account until the patient concludes the work was successful.

As it currently stands, they have NO reason to behave themselves. They can charge anything they want, they never have to get any results, and because of protectionism for health insurance companies you can’t even change providers if you don’t like the results you’re getting unless you want to wait for the next enrollment period. Being a doctor is a license to steal – and also my ongoing experience with them suggests they all think they know my body better than I do and they often do not bother to even listen to me.

From my POV, health care in the USA is the worst in the industrialized world – and the people who run the system have no shame and are making no real attempt to improve it.

So, I’ve become sufficiently cynical to suspect that the actual running of the pipeline recently shut down by ransomware was done by industrial controllers, and the operators shut it down because they’re very conservative and they hoped they could make the Biden administration et al look bad. IT’s difficult to know, although I do hope this will push massive EV adoption. It would be nice if in their attempt to hold a gun to our head Big Oil committed suicide instead.

What I do know is that the hack occured becuase Microsoft abandons old windows versions. Now, this should be illegal – similar to how car manufacturers are required to provide repair parts for any mass produced automobile, Microsoft should be forced to release the source code for any operating system they abandon so volunteers can continue to maintain it. Linux proves that open-source software is more stable and secure than closed-source anyway.

Now, many people would say “No, you should be forced to regularly “upgrade” (in the case of win 10, downgrade) so Microsoft can continue making a profit. I don’t understand why these people want to live in a dystopia. Being forced to adapt to a change when you’re busy doing something else is clearly dystopian, and there’s also almost no chance that all the makers of (perfectly functional, useful, sometimes very complex and expensive) computer-interfaced hardware are going to manage to get drivers out for each new version Microsoft chooses to create.

Someone was trying to convince me we should nationalize Facebook because they’re upset Trump got kicked off it. No, that’s a horrible idea – my final argument that I would describe as a crushing blow was to ask if we should nationalize all communication infrastructure – should Fox News be nationalized? How is this different from Ganz Deutschland hört den Furher im Volksempfanger? No, I don’t think so. But we probably do need to have greater government oversight of Microsoft given the position operating systems play in our world – and as I said, they should be *forced* – if they want to stay in business in the USA – to release the source code of anything they abandon so it can continue to be maintained.

Let’s *try* to aim for *less* of a dystopia rather than more?

Side note – being forced to ride the upgrade train may be another example of how capitalism encourages us to make really bad decisions. It raises GDP, and our government seems to think a perpetually climbing GDP is a good thing, but it reduces effectiveness and wastes man-hours – it wastes real world resources to make paper ones. Sounds like another great example of the tool using us instead of us using the tool!

So, as I see it, conservative – right leaning – people are generally anxious to throw people under the bus. Illegal immigrant? You’re not a person, you deserve to suffer. Black? The cops should just shoot you now. Poor? You should be enslaved so the rich can get richer. And so on.

Now, this is a *LOSING STRATEGY* – which is why for the past hundred years, every time the conservatives get in power the economy in general does worse, individuals do worse, and happiness levels drop. However, humans are programmable creatures, and the conservative news does a good idea of selling, over and over, the idea that it is a winning strategy. They also carefully sell the idea that we’re barely making it, that we’re all going to starve if 10% of us don’t work, which is utter bullshit – humanity is *spectacularly wealthy*. But – as we all know, having power *causes brain damage* – and part of how that manifests is when they get in power, conservatives actually think they are improving the world by throwing people under the bus, as often and as quickly as possible.

Liberals are in love with the radical idea that if we work together we can all get further. Obviously, so am I. Generally to the extent you can build a trustworthy government it is also the best vehicle for making sure people *don’t* get thrown under the bus. Part of the problem is we perpetually have people trying to throw other people under the bus so they can profit – you end up with for-profit prisons, prisons with for-profit telecoms, for-profit immigration detention centers combined with artificially low immigration quotas, and all sorts of similar things. Naturally the for-profit prisons use their money to advocate for making more and more things illegal.

I guess when I look at the government, I see the social services arm as mostly trustworthy but under-funded, the education arm as somewhat trustworthy but someone needs to take away all those stupid tests, and the criminal justice system as downright evil and needing completely retooled. The laws are somewhere in the middle. I go back and forth on whether earth is a dystopia, or just a long way from a utopic center – I definitely am aware that my position is well, well above average on Earth (I am ‘privileged’)

So, I was having a conversation with a friend who pointed out that the US was dangerously close to a birthrate at which bad things would happen. I inquired further as to what they meant, because as far as I knew we were nowhere near a low enough birthrate to risk food production, power, technology, etc. It turned out what they were referring to was “the economy”.

This really underlines to me, not that I needed it underlined, how dumb our current patchwork quilt of rules surrounding resources is. Greta Thunberg had pointed out the folly of a system that exists to perpetually try and get higher and higher GDP – there *obviously must be a point* at which this will fail if GDP is tied to physical resources because physical resources available are a bounded resource.

Now, of course, our economy is doomed to failure for other reasons as well – it is tied to the idea that everyone must have a job and that simply isn’t realistic in the world of increasing mass automation, and it fails to recognize the value that many people who don’t have a official “job” bring to the overall picture.

However, if we were to chase the idea that we perpetually must have more children in order to continue to have GDP rise off a cliff, it would inevitably lead to the extinction of the human race. We have to come to understand that we must live in balance with the system we’re living off of, and we must find ways to live on nature’s interest rather than the principal.

This doesn’t necessarily have to mean losing quality of life. I still like best the idea of shaping a neurological operating system that enables us to experience vast riches by copying access to experiences from mind to mind – think of it as video games, only without the computer hardware. We might need some computer or technological help to pull this off – and we certainly will have to learn to build really trustworthy computer systems before we can do this, which will mean completely taking money out of the development of operating systems because money corrupts, in general, everything it touches, at least from a making-it-trustworthy point of view. It drives via competition it until it reaches a peak, and then it drives it into corruption and off a cliff. At least, that’s my current perspective – I gesture you to Windows 10, not to mention the state of the US health care system, as examples.

Anyway, my point remains. We *MUST* design a better resource allocation system or we must accept that humanity will be extinct within a century. Our current system will chase ever increasing GDP off a cliff.

We almost certainly are *above* the carrying capacity of the planet – we can see this in ever dwindling supplies of all sorts of key resources. We need to be reducing our population, and our current RAS will not encourage that. When people talk about how Americans are having less children because they “cannot afford them”, that sounds like *good* news to me

For those of you who have been missing my orchestral-movie-soundtrack stuff, here is a little bit I did today just to make sure I haven’t forgotten how: Maypole

So, recently someone tried to sell me on that old chestnut, the idea that the universe requires a creator but God doesn’t.

And I was thinking about it, and I realized this idea is beyond absurd. If God is a neural network they are a neural network orders of magnitude more complex than *we* are, and we certainly appear to require a framework within which we can exist. I suppose it’s possible that we would be able to exist without the hardware that is our brain, but the vastly different behaviors that people with brain damage exhibit suggest that this is not in fact the case.

(Of course, a lot of Christians get nervous when I talk about God being a neural network – then again, they want for God to have no free will at all, because that’s the only way the whole “Jesus had to die for your sins” thing even makes a tiny shred of sense. Still doesn’t make a *lot* of sense then.)

Anyway, to return to the previous problem. The universe appears to have a relatively small handful of rigid rules – it’s a framework. I have no trouble at all believing this universe was always here and will always be here. I have a much larger problem believing this hypothetical God was always here and will always be here given that we haven’t even come up with a way yet that a thinking being could exist without somewhere to exist in.

So, my original point remains – if the universe requires a creator, so does God, and you’re stuck. If God doesn’t require a creator, neither does the universe. And, given the rigid and simple nature of the universe, if one came about before the other, I’d vote universe first, God second.

Now, of course, we have to consider other possibilities, as I pointed out to this person. One is that creator and creation may be entangled – God may have been created h*self in the process of creating the universe. Certainly creating a universe would be a evolutionary thing. We also have to consider that time’s arrow may only flow in the direction that it does for creatures of our type. Time may be multidimensional, or not exist at all, for creatures of other types. So the discussion about who created who may be meaningless because maybe it was *all* already here and we’re just experiencing it as this linear thing because of the type of creatures we are.

We also should consider the possibility that God in fact created the universe and h*self and we’re currently in the bootstrapping process before God actually exists. I don’t think this is likely but it does go into the hat.

I still also like the possibility that we’re living as a accidental side effect of some other process and no one knows we’re here. It explains a lot.

I could go on for a few more paragraphs but I’m trying to avoid wear and tear on the paws so I’ll save it for some other time.

I do like from time to time the idea that “God” may in fact be a team – I think I’ve spoken elsewhere about the possibility that *we are the operators* – and then we put on our player hats and we’re the players. There’s a certain beauty to this and clearly we have demonstrated that we are capable of building universes.

While I’m tossing additional thoughts in here – it has always scared me that Christianity disables people’s brains such that they can’t see the obvious flaw in claiming the universe required a creator but God didn’t. At some point I should make a list of all the ways Christianity obviously fails common sense as expressed by someone who is capable of thinking in boolean algebra, and why it scares me that the people who believe in it *cannot* see this no matter what you do or say. (It does reinforce my thought that Christianity is a informational virus that in certain ways blinds it’s host so that it can continue to live and reproduce)

I do wonder if, as a programmer who has done a especially deep dive into programming, I’m more able to see religions as programs for humans – written by people with dubious and possibly even nefarious aims – than the average person.

So, this is a great article that I think sums up why I think windows 10 – and MacOs 11 – are both heading straight into dystopian land. Big corporations believe that it’s their computer, not yours, and thanks to Citizens United, those big corporations own the government as well.

(one of my friends immediately equates me saying this with me being a Trumpian Antimasker who believes the Hollywood Elites and Liberal Academia are responsible for all the ills of the world – and I really don’t think it’s the same thing at all. Trumpanzees and antivaxers believe in things which are *not true* – I believe in something which is *demonstrably* true, which is that Microsoft has placed themselves in a position to install software on your computer without your knowledge or consent and is steadily abusing this position more and more. You *cannot* remove Edge from Windows 10. Nor a whole long list of other applications. Microsoft sincerely believes it is their computer, not yours. Even scarier, in S mode you cannot install Chrome)

At this point I am *hoping* Microsoft screws up in some way which results in bricking millions of windows PCs, because at least that will get the government to notice how scarily dictatorship-like their position is over the desktop market. In the meantime, I will keep running windows 7,