Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, one thing you can safely say about DOGE, the cryptocurrency. It is headed for zero. It has a *unlimited supply*, with a fairly high mint rate. It was originally intended as a joke.

One thing you can say about DOGE, the government agency, is it is also a terrible idea. Musk is the poster child for Dunning-Kruger – we’re talking about the guy who thought you could have a 600 mile long evacuated above ground tunnel, among other things. He also doesn’t understand that the more people you make homeless and hungry, the less wealth we as a species have. DOGE is also likely to destroy many useful functions that the government performs.. protecting our bank accounts, protecting us against bad loans, protecting us from e coli, protecting us from predatory corporations who otherwise would destroy all the land and poison all the water to make a few bucks.

Musk himself has says there will be some hardship. I vote all Musk’s money be taken away and he be forced to live with the hardships he is causing.

#1: Property values – from my point of view, the sane person wants their property values to stay the same, or to go down. If you want your property values to go up, A: you hate your neighborhood and are planning on leaving B: you don’t want other people to be able to afford to live there C: possibly you’re doing two things which are a bad idea – 1) gauging your value as a person on your net worth and 2) including the value of your home in your assessment of your net worth – not only might you lose it at any time to the capricious whims of earth, but this encourages all kinds of unhealthy thinking surrounding the family unit – healthy families have more than a few people and the home may be owned amongst everyone or titled in one person’s name for convenience sake.

In any case, lowering property values is a good thing. Which is good, because I want to live in a neighborhood that looks lived in, with science projects and houses of all different colors and sports equipment and dogs and kids and general mayhem.

#2: The cheapest option is often *not* *the best. For example in southern california the argument against desal plants is often the cost of water. However, what SoCal is doing now will sooner or later lead to a catastrophe – indeed one could argue it already has (more on this in another post). SoCal should be self sufficient, water wise, and that is better than having the cheapest water.

#3: Ideally we would be getting rid of money in favor of a better system. Money, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, encourages bad decisions, some so bad that they may lead to the destruction of our species.

#4: We have undoubtedly made Earth too difficult. In general we should be thinking in every system how can we make this easier – how can we make less things illegal, how can we accept more people for who they are, how can we deprioritize GDP and prioritize health, happiness, and sanity.

I have to say, contempt of court should not be a crime, because most courts in the USA deserve contempt. (Of course, anyone who thinks they are worthy to judge others is starting out in a extremely questionable place, and when we look at the US where murder is encouraged if done by a cop or soldier, where ethics are for sale to the highest bidder).. In any case “Your Dishonor” seems like a honest way to refer to a judge.

Please make a whole series of movies about the space dog from Over The Moon.. thank you 😉

One thing that I do worry about, post the previous post, is what absolutely wrong beliefs *my* mind is defending. No real way to know, either.

I didn’t really feel like this accurately captured me.. I feel like the benevolence should be higher. I maybe should have thought a little more about the data I was feeding it.

One of the problems I’ve been having lately is that increasingly I find the tendencies of the way my job is arranged to burn through many hours of my life for no reason frustrating.

Part of this is that I’m increasingly wanting to be spending time in the studio working on my musical skills – I’ve been really making a lot of progress in addressing some of my weaknesses as a musician lately. One thing I will acknowledge is that thus far I can only do about 4 hours straight of playing right now – but that’s up from about 2 hours a few months ago, and I’m guessing the number will continue to go up as I continue to put effort into it.

Of course, one of the downsides of this is that it means my paws are sore a lot of the time, although I’m under the impression that if I keep up this level of working out, musically, they will be less sore. They hurt less than they did a few months ago.

In order to have time to continue doing my day job while working on my musical skills I’ve completely given up facebook. I can’t say that I miss it.

Anyway, so, my hope is if I can keep up this pace for another six months or so I will be able to reproduce the music I can imagine and that I will also be able to find work writing and recording music – we will see.

Some of the exercises I’ve been working on recently include working on being able to comfortably improvise around the 12 bar blues in every key (i’ve still got two keys left to go, Db and Eb, and I’m still working on my comfort level on Gb and Ab). I’m also trying to reach a place where I’m as good at soloing in E as C, because I forsee a lot of E in my future.

So, I’m pondering making a more advanced sustain pedal controller for my two keyboards.

In particular, I’d like to implement the following features:

1) Latching and momentary control for the novation
2) sustain of both keyboards with one pedal

What I’m thinking of doing is looking for a three pedal input device, and modifying it so that

A: pressing the center pedal applies sustain to both keybaords
B: pressing the center pedal along with the left or right pedals applies or clears a latching state

I am thinking of using a microcontroller and two relays – obviously this could be done with straight logic but using a microcontroller allows debouncing and also possibly adding additional features later.

I really wonder how this period of time will look to me in the future when I look back over my journal. I hope that the complete political and social dysfunction we are currently experiencing will resolve itself, and that the economic stupidity will actually be transcended – it’s possible that things could go extremely worse wrong – of course, in a lot of the worst case scenarios, my web server is not going to be there to look at.

But, even though things look grim at the moment, I have a lot of hope. For one thing, I think COVID is going to teach even the most conservative among us that it’s a good idea to listen to the smart people, and a bad idea to listen to the lying liars. I also think in the case of COVID, a bunch of the folks who believe the dumbest things are going to, well, die. Evolution in action. And my hope is that we will all collectively learn a thing or three from this and life will get better from here.

I also still have hopes that my personal life will get better, as I do sometimes manage to grow. At least a little bit. I think that my conflict-averse nature is going to have to get sorted out at least somewhat, and I also think I’m going to have to give even more time to what I really want to be doing and trust that the rest of this mess will work itself out because people who really want to be working on the social and political and economic aspects of the world will improve those aspects.

And, I do have to recognize there are reasons to be grateful even now. The vast array of food products available to us even in a pandemic is pretty astonishing, for example – in a good way. And I’m grateful to have broadband – if I’m going to have to avoid most of humanity, it’s good to still have the ability to appriciate the best of our art, and to publish my own art.