And so it begins…

So it’s kinda frustrating to hear people calling for others to go first.

That’s not necessarily what I’m calling for. I want us all to go together. But we can’t all go for a solution until we all agree on the problem.

The really frustrating thing is nobody seems to want to do anything about it.

Like so many things in America, education is very unequal. We have world class schools, and we have very poor and inadequate schools. The people who live in the areas with the very good schools think the people who live in the areas with the very poor schools should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fix their own damn schools, and if they don’t, well, that’s a them problem not a me problem. Unfortunately, it actually is a you problem, because, turns out, all of us are likely to be negatively affected if large numbers of Americans are fucking morons.

I like Gnome. I like KDE, too. I actually think they’re both great, in their own ways, but I personally prefer Gnome.

The RVs are a symptom. Going after the symptom doesn’t necessarily do anything to address the underlying issue. But the underlying issue is systemic, which makes it very difficult to fix.

Real estate is the primary source of wealth for most people in the US. To bring down housing costs would necessarily mean bringing down home values, leading to many people potentially losing a considerable amount of their personal net worth. And I’m not talking about billionaires, or even necessarily millionaires. I’m talking mostly about people whose net worth is in the hundreds of thousands, with the vast majority of that coming from any equity they might have in their home.

There’s no viable solution for fixing this that doesn’t result in those people losing at least some net worth, at least initially. Not that I can see, anyway. We need to do it anyway, but I understand why those people aren’t enthusiastic about it.

I think “renewable” has become a buzz word that people don’t think critically about, so a lot of folks don’t understand how important it is for an energy source to be renewable.

Once you’ve pumped an oil well dry, it stays dry. It doesn’t refill with oil, at least not on human timescales. But the sunlight that solar panels used to generate electricity today will be replaced with new sunlight tomorrow. And that daily renewal of sunlight will continue for many, many millions of years.

It seems so obvious to me.

The state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission fired biologist Brittney Brown in September after she reposted a meme on her personal Instagram account that claimed Kirk wouldn’t care about children being shot in their classrooms.

I mean, I’m sure he didn’t care.

Public interest!? What are we, communists? It’s all about private profit. That’s how you know you live in a free country. True Freedom™ means prioritizing the maximization of profits for a relatively small number of owners and executives, over public interest, the environment, and even basic human decency and well being in general.

It is. And so is American football. You don’t believe that because you’re ignorant, but just because you don’t like or understand a sport doesn’t mean it isn’t a real sport.

Thank you for the clarification.

What we call AI today isn’t really artificial intelligence. When you have a conversation with an AI chat bot you’re not talking to another thinking entity, you’re interacting with software that has been designed to give the illusion of conversing with another intelligent being. The technology has advanced enough that the illusion can be very convincing, but it is still only an illusion. That’s why I don’t fear LLMs being self aware and taking over the world, because they’re not real intelligences. They don’t have the ability to think for themselves because they don’t have the ability to think.

Edit: please read ricecake’s reply for an important correction to my comment.

So should rugby be called handegg, too?

We’re gonna have to fight these bozos at some point, aren’t we…

I mean, I don’t really care if someone works honestly and gets more. Want to do OT and buy a jet ski? Fine, whatever. Not my preferred avenue but you do you.

Yeah, but that’s the thing: when the priority is get rich so you can buy lots of shit, morality becomes a secondary consideration, if it’s a consideration at all. Morality, empathy and ethics should be the standard, with exceptional wealth and consumption being the exception, rather than exorbitant wealth and consumption being the goal and morality and empathy being fringe concepts.

It’s not just that some people work a few extra hours to earn a jet ski, it’s that our culture conditions us to believe that the money and the things are what people should be primarily striving for, and that everything else is unimportant.

That is unfortunate. I guess there’s no place for people like me.

I’ve thought about it. And it’s not just Trump. I see Trump more as a symptom of the problem, not the problem himself.

The thing is, my values just don’t align with many, if not most other Americans. A lot of Americans are fairly money obsessed. Many Americans are greedy and selfish. There seems to be a culture of getting rich anyway you can, even if it is through unethical means.

I also think many Americans are hyper consumers. The idea seems to be to work and hustle and grind intensely, to make as much money as possible so that you can spend that money conspicuously. Work hard, spend hard, party hard. Indulge, indulge, indulge. Money and indulgence and consumption supersedes relationships and any kind of social connection.

And somehow, for some this money obsessed consumerism runs concurrently with a bizarre form of Christianity, even though those two things seem to be at odds with one another. Don’t get me wrong, the greed and the consumerism are by no means restricted only to Christian Americans. There are plenty of secular or atheist Americans who are plenty greedy, too. It just seems to be in the DNA of the nation. Everything’s money and money is everything.

Americans will say, “there’s nothing wrong with working hard to support your family,” but it’s not just supporting your family, it’s about making enough money to buy a massive house and fill it with stuff, and fill your extra large garage with big, expensive cars and trucks, and all sorts of “toys,” like boats and jet skis and four wheelers, and campers/RVs. And no matter how much stuff you have, it’s never enough. You always need more, or better stuff. That goes way, way beyond just “supporting your family.”

Frankly, I’m exhausted by it. I tried living that way for a lot of years but I don’t have the energy anymore.

If this disaster has taught us anything it’s that we can’t continue to be so utterly dependent on oil. This particular oil crisis was unnecessary, a result of profoundly incompetent leadership, but it really just accelerated the inevitable.

Oil is a finite natural resource. There’s only so much of it in the ground, and it can’t be renewed on human time scales. What we pump up and burn is essentially gone forever. We’ve already used a lot of what took nature millions of years to create. We’ve already pumped up and burned the easiest and cheapest to get at oil. There’s no more Jed Clampett oil. You know, oil that’s so near the surface and easy to extract that you can find it by accident. No, that’s all gone. We have to really look hard to find more oil, today. New oil discovery is much more expensive.

There are still about 1.77 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves. But, we use 37 billion barrels of oil every year. At that rate of consumption, proven oil reserves will be depleted in a little under 50 years. And that’s at current annual consumption levels. If our annual consumption increases, the time remaining to total depletion of proven oil reserves decreases.

We will all but certainly discover more oil than what is already proven. However, that oil will almost certainly be more expensive to extract. Again, we’ve pumped up and burned all the Jed Clampett, sweet bubbling crude. Today, we have to drill deeper to get to less easy to extract oil, like oil that’s locked up in porous rock that has to be fractured apart.

So it takes more money to produce a barrel of oil than used to, and the demand for oil just keeps going up every year. Higher oil prices are an inevitability. It’s simple supply and demand. We simply can’t afford to continue to be so dependent on oil. We have to diversify.

Electrified transportation is a great option, especially if the electricity is generated from renewable sources. Once we’ve burned a gallon of gas, it’s just gone. It’s been used and it’s never coming back. Conversely, the sunlight that was used today to generate electricity will be replaced with new sunlight tomorrow. The sun keeps making more, and it will keep making more for billions of years.

This isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s a financial issue, it’s a common sense issue.

Not exactly John Wick, is he.

Trump safe

That’s unfortunate.

I’m gonna buy a bottle of nice champagne for the day when Trump finally kicks it.