Garbage disposal went out a few weeks back. Just started leakin'. It's okay, it's a Sears; my father-in-law put it in back in like 2004 which I recognize is exactly the sort of thing old people say.

The total time to diagnose, research, purchase, remove and replace the garbage disposal was approximately 2 1/2 hours spread across two days. That included a run to Home Depot to get an assortment of plumbing to replace the father-in-law's "rocket garbage out the other sink" drain geometry.

This made me realize that the machine, from an "effort and cognition" standpoint, has been the equivalent of two, two and a half "garbage disposals" a day, six to seven days a week, for two years.

My cousin and his friends are having a boy weekend, a "for those who tried to rock" adventure at an AirBNB to recapture the mood of trying to be rawk stars back when they were in their teens and early 20s. They're all extremely excited about it even though it's weeks away. I declined my invite because frankly, I was nowhere near them as a teenager (and when they were teenagers I was... seven) but pointed out to my cousin that they clearly need to do this more often; with "deaths from despair" leading all other causes for white dudes over 50, simply bringing guitars, poker chips and tequila to a beach cabin twice a year could extend their lives an easy 20 years. My cousin agreed (several of them clearly neeed this) and pointed out I should come next time as dorking around with a bunch of aging butt-rockers might just clear up my musical constipation.

I said that every ten-fifteen years I'm apparently required to do something stupid and laborious that shuts everything else down. In high school it was a 4x4 Triumph TR-7 with a Chevy 400. In my 30s it was a birth center. In my 40s it's apparently a $150k CNC machine. Besides which...

I had the world's cheapest Atmos studio. I've been limping along on these ancient Tascam surround controllers, one of which I've owned since it was new in 2003. They were born at the height of the capacitor plague, and yes I've recapped all three of them multiple times. I taught myself surface-mount soldering just so I could rebuild the analog section of one. And about five months ago a yahoo in a stolen car drove through the substation that shares a yard with the police department. I heard the bang from here, a quarter mile away. Power flickered in a crazy way, then went out, and despite having four separate UPS in this house, it took out a 40TB server and two surround controllers. The server? Came back once it was allowed to express its outrage. But the controllers started dying in ways I've never seen, that the Internet has never catalogued, that cannot be solved without replacing and reprogramming ePROMs and ICs that have not been available since Obama was president.

Said-same cousin pointed out that Washington's current laws make it so that I will have to pay capital gains on the amount of crypto I'll need to sell in order to expand the birth center. The thought process went like this:

- For that amount of money I could move to another state for a few months while I pull the money.

- But it's going directly to schools.

- Which absolutely need it, this is why your kid is a private school brat.

- Besides which, the only people who would be sympathetic to your plight are the sort of people you hate.

- You aren't even vaguely poor anymore. Why do you feel so poor.

- Because you haven't spent any gains on anything since before COVID.

So I sold some crypto and bought myself a $5000 audio interface. B-stock, of course; I'm not a monster. It showed up yesterday. I put Kai through the monitors one last time and tore it all out.

I dunno. It should feel like a victory. So far it feels like a defeat. I've spent two years trying to find a cheaper solution. I failed. This will solve my problems perfectly - I goddamn saved myself some time by subconsciously buying the wrong bits of eBay which will serendipitously allow me to remove an entire digital-analog conversion chain consisting if eight cables and three powered devices - and yet, my inability to figure out some clever way to solve the problem is absolutely galling. Never mind the fact that this is such corner-case weirdness that the cheapest solution is to use actual movie theater parts - since they aren't made anymore, and since my chosen gadget interfaces at a systems level with the rest of my gadgets, it would be stupid to, you know, not do what every other Atmos studio does. Not that there's a lot of those.

I think there's a fundamental alienation that takes place when your problems are so far removed from the normal experience of everyday life that they take paragraphs to describe. It's probably why, despite being wildly successful by any metric whatsoever, things are a constant goddamn struggle.

LOOK AT THIS LITTLE FUCKER

Goddamn R2 unit right there. It's 650-odd parts in SolidWorks. I did not design about 150 of them. I had to model them in Solidworks, though, and they all need to line up in three dimensions. 650 parts, no tolerance stacking errors. It all fucking bolts together.

I used to get sick at the end of every season. It's my body responding to stress, basically, by collapsing once I'm over the hump. I haven't had a season since 2019 but I've made a speedrun from stomach flu to thanksgiving to my kid's birthday to COVID to Christmas. My wife has caught none of it. I said something like "I'm embarrassed for my genes" and she said "that's not your genes, that's your ACE score" and she's probably right. That, and those 650-odd parts are... kind of it. There are a few bits and bobs that need to be modified or tweaked, and a couple minor components that need to be created and tested but fundamentally, the next part is "wire it, plumb it and program it."

Two garbage disposals a day for two years. No excuse me, nearly three. Fucker showed up April 2021. While it was crossing the ocean, the Ever Given was clogging the Suez.

(rolls eyes)

(sighs)

(pours cup of coffee)

So look. Once upon a time, American conservatives believed in welfare. Conservatives believed that if you wanted to see what capitalism could do, your best move was to unchain your captains of industry from the social morass. It's not that conservatives liked poor people, it's that they figured the whole point of government was to get the waste people out of the way of the ubermensch. That all changed with William F. Buckley and The National Review, and it all changed with Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.

Buckley was the son of an oil magnate who did well in the Mexican coup of 1914. Rand was the daughter of a pharmacist in St. Petersberg who did poorly in the October Revolution. Buckley was of the opinion that the rich owed poor people in general nothing, and poor brown people less than nothing. Rand was of the opinion that poor people will come with guns and take away everything so get yours and defend it with your life.

But you can't say that without circumlocuting around it so they invented a whole new language for "fuck poor people." They smothered it in intellectualism, terminology, metaphor. What, according to Rand's biographers, is Objectivism? "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". Buckley, for his part, burst onto the scene by claiming that Yale was full of godless communists who refused to let good Christians practice their god-given selfishness.

Sometimes they let the mask slip. Rand called John F. Kennedy a fascist for coming up with the Peace Corps. During the '80s, the most outwardly flagrant decade of "objectivism" or "compassionate conservatism" or whatever, Ivan Boesky said "Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”

The thing is? It's nothing but intellectualized selfishness. It is the core principle that you are the center of the universe, you should own it, and you should expect everyone else to do the same. Rand called it "the Virtue of Selfishness" and "objectivists" spent the next sixty years arguing about whether she really meant "selfishness" because it's really hard to see "selfishness" (or "greed" for that matter) as anything but a pejorative. Rand didn't give a fuck, she was on the losing side of The Terrors.

Objectivism is this thing teenagers fuck around with because teenagers are isolated, pampered and circumscribed by more rules than adults. In general, objectivism goes by the wayside as soon as your place in society becomes rewarding but some people get stuck.

If the only place you have friends is online discussion forums, you are more likely to get stuck.

Yudikowsky is younger than I am. He caught that tail end when things were switching from UseNet to MySpace. Usenet had no formatting and the only thing you could distinguish yourself with was your ability to argue; MySpace had pictures so it was all over as far as nerd culture was concerned. IN MY OPINION this drove the can't-get-laid types deeper underground where the only place they could find any friends was among themselves. And, since "themselves" were generally over-clever, socially-awkward people who didn't get invited to parties, I-Me-Mine became the obvious guide star. You can't talk about Reagan, though, that's what your parents are doing. And you can reference Rand but you're doing something new and exciting. And nobody will listen to you but your online friends so you basically go Philosophical Incel.

Incels can't get laid not because they suck at life but because there's something wrong with women. Objectivists can't get ahead not because they lack the empathy that most people use to form bonds but because society is broken. And, much like Incels sprayed all over society with GamerGate and Elliott Roger and Enrique Tarrio and all that bullshit, the Objectivists gave us LessWrong and SlateStarCodex and Nick Land and latter-day accelerationism and this whole constellation of entitled white bullshit. If you want to see what that looks like among the dipshits who aren't posturing intellectuals, this is the book. If you want to see what it looks like among the dipshits who are?

Look. The protective coloration used these days is "effective altruism.". Here's how that works:

Effective altruism emphasizes impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. This has broad applications to the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.

Sounds great, right? It's altruism, but it's effective, because you're being impartial! You're saving the most lives! You're reducing the most suffering! And you're doing it this way because you know better!

The definition of "effective" and "altruism" is just as tortured as "selfishness" was under the Objectivists. Hitler was an "effective" "altruist" because humanity would benefit from a world without Jews, since Jews were inferior. The living standards in the United States and Australia are substantially better now than they were when the place was full of aboriginals, and so much more population is supported - objectively speaking, genocide is good! Can't say that out loud, though. Far better to spreadsheet that shit so you can talk about which genocides you can slow down with the least amount of intervention.

Here's the problem. They all want to be Hugo Drax. That's the whole schtick. Elon Musk moving to Mars. Peter Thiel on his tropical island. They know better than you - they are "less wrong" - and obviously only the most credible rubes believe in a second coming while true geniuses know that it's the AI we have to worry about.

And I wouldn't give a shit? Here's the punchline about Roko's Basilisk.

...see, that's Harlan Ellison's most famous story. "Roko" was fucking trolling. "There's nothing to attract a troll quite like a posturing pseudointellectual who thinks he knows better than everyone else," he said, tongue-in-cheek. But you either learn from that?

Or you give Sam Bankman Fried billions of dollars.

For as much good as I see in that movement, it’s also become apparent that it is deeply immature and myopic, in a way that enabled Bankman-Fried and Ellison, and that it desperately needs to grow up. That means emulating the kinds of practices that more mature philanthropic institutions and movements have used for centuries, and becoming much more risk-averse. EA needs much stronger guardrails to prevent another figure like Bankman-Fried from emerging — and to prevent its tenets from becoming little more than justifications for malfeasance.

Fundamentally? It is now, has always been and shall always be "It's okay that I'm a selfish fuck because I'm smarter than you." In any reasonable society that gets you pilloried. In shareholder capitalism that gets you a board seat.

And that's why it will never be okay.

Whelp, I think Consequence 1 is that the State Department and CIA will never let Russia be a world power again. The fact that the neocons allowed Russia to regain enough power to place a useful idiot in the oval office will forever inoculate the Gray Men from allowing politicians to set policy. The CIA gets their teddy bear back - "destruction of the Former Soviet Union" has been on their wishlist since they checked off "Destruction of the Soviet Union". I don't know that they'll succeed but between the Magnitsky Act, the Bucket'O'Sanctions and the half-tithe we're spending to decimate the Russian military five times over, I know it's rough for Russia.

I think it will take several electoral cycles for Teh Crazeh to burn itself out in the Republican Party, but burn itself out it will. People forget: the number one requirement for Republicans has been LOYALTY since Newt Gingrich and we've seen the logical outcome of that. The era of Mitch McConnell is over; Democrats gained more seats than gerrymandering could protect, and Biden has nominated more judges than Trump as anyone with any character basically went "four more years" during the Trump Era. You can see this playing out in the Boebert Vs. Green debacle as the former nearly lost to a progressive Democrat while the latter handily beat her centrist challenger - Boebert now has to worry about actual voters while Green has to worry about even crazier morons to her right primarying her.

I think the cost of opportunism has been demonstrated for all far and wide. You can be Jason Miller? But all that's left for you is stand-ups on a hated network for old people whose only advertiser is a coke-addled pillow salesman. When all the world is leaning into ESG and everyone around you had a choice between ethics or opportunism, your scarlet letter is never going away. You know how Snowden shocked the world with all his revelations about the NSA? Ten years previously all that shit was called Total Information Awareness. Know what drove TIA underground? The whole country going "oh fuck not John Poindexter again." And that was effectively before social media, an era before teenaged citizen journalists could supercut your transgressions while bored. You can no more get history off the internet than you can get piss out of a swimming pool, and the whole of the Trump Posse Baby Ruthed the fuck out of that watering hole.

I think Jared Kushner is now Our Man in Riyadh. I think MBS went "I am the despot now" and the CIA went "fine, we see how well flattery works, we've got our own Donald Trump now." People forget - Donald Trump went "Jared is going to fix the Middle East" and by damn if Jared Kushner didn't somehow normalize relations to the point where you can fly direct from Riyadh to Tel Aviv now. Do I think Jared Kushner had anything to do with this? No I do not. The man's COVID solution was Facebook. But I think MBS doesn't give a shit about Palestine and the CIA went "we'll fund that emotion" and here we are. Will he still turn up drowned off the Canary Islands like Robert Maxwell? I sincerely hope so. But not while he's still a useful idiot. At its most cynical level, the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi sent a message to the CIA as to how MBS intended to run the country, and from a CIA standpoint, it wasn't particularly expensive or damaging - compare and contrast with Iran.

As far as consequences for Donald Trump? Whelp, he's likely got federal charges lined up against him, his extremely shady taxes are public, and at least two states are lined up for criminal and civil charges related to a smorgasbord of shady shit. And there is no disinfectant like sunlight.

I think he's got five, six years of ignominy left. I don't know if he'll ever serve time. I know we'll be talking about it until he fucking dies, which is extremely tedious, but objectively speaking, the man is a historical figure. He matters more than George Wallace, Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon. He's up there with John Wilkes Booth as far as I'm concerned.

We have been worried about a man like Donald Trump since before he was born. It has always been up to question what would happen if a legitimate challenge to democracy were to arise - how fragile is the republic, really?

I believe we have our answer.

One thing about our Mennonite form of government: it doesn't move quickly. There are many faster, more agile implementations of democracy in the world and while they're clearly better at coming up with things like universal healthcare, they also give you things like Brexit and Hugo Chavez.

Which is not to say it won't happen again. But a whole lot of Donald Trump's maneuverability was due to the element of surprise. You can attack Pearl Harbor twice but it won't do nearly as much. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme? And Donald Trump was what happens when George Wallace or Huey Long don't get shot, frankly. I don't know what that means for the future? But I know it'll be generations before anyone allows another Donald Trump to happen.

I'm sure there are people who can make open relationships work. I'll just say that in the 30 years I have been peripheral to the polyamorous community I have never once met one. More than that, nobody griefs quite like polys. Every anecdote I have about a bad breakup - every single one, except with the guy who is a diagnosed sociopath - involves a joint decision to fuck other people. The bitterest humans I know are the ones who tried to make open relationships work.

Quoth lil:

If monogamy is not based on the desire and joy in being together, then it’s control.

"Monogamy" can be substituted out of that sentence with no difficulty whatsoever. Polyamory, chess, bass fishing.

"I want to explore my sexuality" is a very, VERY different statement than "I want to explore my sexuality with you." Recognize that she is saying "I am offering you no commitments" and that is literally all she is saying. Recognize that she is laying the groundwork for "I owe you fuckall behaviorally speaking" and gird your loins for it. You will suck at this. I say this because I know you.

Your best move is to say "come find me when you've figured it out, because you matter to me more than I matter to you right now and I'm not going to put up with that."

Li'l story. I've known my wife since 1994. She literally gave me my dorm key. And within a week she was dating this other guy. Dated him for five years. Married him. Stayed married to him for two years. Then got sick of his shit and kicked him out. He was literally the only person she ever dated.

And we started dating, and she said a few things about having never really dated, and wanting to maybe figure out what that looked like, and I was kinda cool with it, and she had a party with a group of friends, one of whom, like me, wanted to date her earlier but couldn't, and I thought "I owe her this" and then I immediately thought "no, no I don't" and came right back to the house having left and kicked his ass out.

We'd been "dating" for two weeks at the time. That was more than twenty years ago.

A serial monogamist who was married for six years doesn't need to figure out her shit at your expense. You can be cool with it? But you won't be happy about it. And she won't respect you.

CANCEL AWAY FUCKERS

Holy shit this is amazing. It's like he's doing an impression of Doug Balloon but without realizing he's the target of the parody.

To his great credit, Trump reinvented the G.O.P.

...as archetypal Italian fascism...?

He destroyed the corporate husk of Reaganism and set the party on the path to being a multiracial working-class party.

Which races, exactly? Anglos, Saxons and Protestants? Scots-Irish and Muscovite Slavs?

To his great discredit, he enshrouded this transition in bigotry, buffoonery and corruption.

aaaaaand fascism. Let's not disregard the fascism, shall we?

He ushered in an age of performance politics — an age in which leaders put more emphasis on attention-grabbing postures than on practical change.

Ohhhh I dunno, some of us will never forget Terry Schiavo or the original October Surprise.

The left had its own smaller version of performative populism. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became a major political figure thanks to her important contributions to Instagram.

The Green New Deal was not a legislative package but a cotton candy media concoction.

...much like the New Deal, except without passing.

Slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the police” were not practical policies, just cool catchphrases to put on posters.

I have boots older than ICE, that shit could be abolished tomorrow and the world would breathe a sigh of relief. "Defund the Police" should have been "Demilitarize the Police" and you know it and things would have been fine.

That year, after progressives appeared to cost the Democrats several House seats with randy talk of socialism, moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger roasted the left and was one of those who helped pull the party back toward the center on crime and other issues.

...who? The former spook who won suburban Virginia by 5 points? That I legit had to look up?

Biden rejected the performative style of the populist moment while harnessing some progressive ideas.

LOL you mean the guy who used executive actions to pardon marijuana offenses and relieve student debt by edict?

Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago.

...which is why they've all been completely silent over the past week.

Peak wokeness has passed.

...maybe you made it up

There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation.

SHOT

I was a skeptic of the Jan. 6 committee at first, but I now recognize it’s played an important cultural role.

CHASER

That committee forced America to look into the abyss, to see the nihilistic violence that lay at the heart of Trumpian populism.

But remember, it's multicultural "Trumpian populism."

The election of 2022 marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us.

Yep it certainly wasn't about abortion.

Though the results are partial, and Trump acolytes could still help Republicans control Congress, this election we saw the emergence of an anti-Trump majority.

Because while 4/5ths of the country didn't vote for Trump in 2016, they are also 7-year locusts and it's taken them a while to claw their way out of the sand.

According to a national exit poll, nearly 60 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump.

...'cuz it wouldn't be the New York Times if they weren't linking to polls that have been useless for a decade or more.

Almost half of the voters who said they “somewhat disapprove” of Biden as president still voted for Democrats, presumably because they were not going to vote for Trumpianism.

Shit SURE has changed

The single most important result of this election was the triumph of the normies. Establishmentarian, practical leaders who are not always screaming angrily at you did phenomenally well, on right and left: Mike DeWine in Ohio, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. Workmanlike incumbents from John Thune in South Dakota to Ron Wyden in Oregon had successful nights. Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin had the quotation that summarized the election: “Boring wins.”

"Here are a list of elected officials nobody is talking about that I can cherry-pick to prove my point."

Americans are still deeply unhappy with the state of the country, but their theory of change seems to have begun to shift. Less histrionic media soap opera. Less existential politics of menace. Let’s find people who can get stuff done.

©2020 David Brooks

The telling election results were at the secretary of state level. The America First Secretary of State Coalition features candidates who rejected the 2020 election results and who would have been a threat to election integrity if they had won Tuesday. Most either lost or seem on their way to losing. Meanwhile, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who stood up to Trump’s bullying, won by a wide margin.

Thereby surprising exactly no one except the establishment pundit class and those who still humor them for some reason.

Because Democrats restrained their more extreme tendencies while Republicans didn’t,

I love how "extreme tendencies" on the left is things like healthcare.

On abortion and many other issues, the median voter rule still applies.

Let's elide the fact that 80% of the population agrees with democratic policies so we can ignore who the extremists are, shall we?

To be clear, I am not saying the fever has broken within the minds of those in the MAGA movement.

Oh hell no. Nor will he talk about their numbers or their sources of funding.

I am not saying MAGA Republicans won’t unleash a lot of looniness in the next Congress.

Because then who the hell will you ask diners in Cleveland about?

I am saying voters have built a wall around that movement to make sure it no longer wins the power it once enjoyed.

Bothsides it again, David.

I am saying voters have given Republicans clear marching orders — to do what Democrats did and beat back the populist excesses on their own side.

chef's kiss

There are two large truths I’ll leave you with.

Only two? c'mon David you've got some words left!

The first is that both parties are fundamentally weak.

This is why over half the country wants a third party to vote for yet the Democratic Socialists elected one state office and Libertarians won zero.

The Democrats are weak because they have become the party of the educated elite.

The Democrats are weak because they require a stance against corruption in order to retain their voter base.

The Republicans are weak because of Trump.

The Republicans are weak because they've practiced demagoguery and fascism for long enough that eventually, a fascist demagogue captured the party.

The Republican weakness is easier to expunge.

My favorite quote of this election: "You can turn away from Trump and lose the primary or you can turn towards Trump and lose the general."

If Republicans get rid of Trump, they could become the dominant party in America.

something something active shooter drills something something abortion something something debt something something

Second, the battle to preserve the liberal world order is fully underway.

While populist authoritarianism remains a powerful force worldwide, people, from Kyiv to Kalamazoo, have risen up to push us toward a world in which rules matter, practicality matters, stability and character matter.

No thanks to the New York Times, which is far too busy rewarding pithy phrases like "from Kyiv to Kalamazoo."

As Irving Kristol once wrote, the people in our democracy “are not uncommonly wise, but their experience tends to make them uncommonly sensible.”

Great thing about David Brooks? You always know he's quoting out of context. For one thing, he wasn't writing, he was speaking. For another, he was speaking before the American Enterprise Institute, a group that can be referred to safely as, shall we say, "fans of conservative politics." Finally, he was addressing them on the occasion of the end of mutherfucking communism. This is an arch-conservative thought leader, doing a victory lap in front of his biggest fans, and what did he have to say?

The common people in such a democracy are not uncommonly wise, but their experience tends to make them uncommonly ­sensible. They learn their economics by taking out a mortgage, they learn their politics by watching the local school board in action, and they learn the impossibility of "social engineering" by trying to raise their children to be decent human beings. These people are the bedrock of bourgeois capitalism, and it is on this rock that our modern democracies have been built.

But a society needs more than sensible men and women if it is to prosper: It needs the energies of the creative imagination as expressed in religion and the arts. It is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than experiencing one's life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.

The whole piece is worth worth reading. It's an old-school conservative saying "let's be careful of our victory laps." This lolbrooks drivel? This is an old-school conservative saying "we're still relevant." The former is thought-provoking. The latter is a lie.

So sample from this list. Broad generalization, not always true, but civil wars are generally fought across three divides:

- Ethnic. My people hate your people and have always hated your people. This covers Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, most of the "places you barely know about and would never visit" wars.

- Ideological. Your way of running the world and my way of running the world are utterly incompatible. This covers Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, places the US sent troops in the name of domino theory.

- Economical. Your use of capitalism and my use of capitalism are mutually exclusive. These wars are exceedingly rare. I can only think of one.

In my lifetime, the "proper" way to discuss the Civil War has shifted from "it was obviously about freeing the slaves" to "it was obviously about the economic repression forced upon the Southern States by mercantilist Northern industrialists" to "it was obviously about freeing the slaves who also weren't truly freed and anyone who says otherwise is a racist" in no small part because the only logical conclusion of the actual facts on the ground is "unfettered capitalism does grievous harm to humanity." Kinda like how we talk about the vast open unsettled spaces of the American frontier rather than the multiple civilizations we wiped out through targeted genocide in order to make them appear wide open.

I bring this up because you learned about the Missouri Compromise without learning why because history teachers aren't allowed to teach "our current system was bad, is bad and is likely to continue to be bad" their best bet is to lay the facts at your feet and hope you twig to enough of the clues that eventually you'll look shit up for yourself who am I kidding 99% of them don't know either. Look:

- The economic system of the northern (manufacturing) United States was "rich people own factories, poor people work until they're dead or useless at which point we cast them aside and they can either beg on the street or hope they've had enough children that they'll be tended to in their nasty, brutish and short old age."

- The economic system of the southern (agricultural) United States was "rich people own plantations, they also own the people who work on those plantations and if they're kind plantation owners the lives of the people they own will be marginally better than the lives of the people the northern industrialists hire."

- The social system of the northern (manufacturing) United States was "rich people own everything, if you're lucky you'll get a job so you'll have a roof over your head."

- The social system of the southern (agricultural) United States was "rich people own everything including, maybe, you, and if they don't, hardscrabble subsistence farming is pretty much what you got but you're too uneducated and primitive to know the difference, hey look it could be worse you could be black and in chains."

So the Missouri Compromise? Was fundamentally "do we let the economic and social system of the north expand or do we let the economic and social system of the south expand." The North can't make money if employees are free, the South can't make money if employees are skilled. The economic and social systems were far more divided than people have been led to believe; there had been a system whereby southern agricultural staples were turned into northern manufactured goods but globalism meant that non-Southern cotton etc. was cheaper. Expanding free ranching and farming to the West would further undercut the South so in order to protect the Southern economy, Western production needed to be both cheaper and shittier than that produced by literal slave labor. The Northern companies and economists firmly believed the only way for the United States to exist as a country was to increase skilled labor in the south; one of the principle reasons for fighting the Civil War is the British were more than happy to subsidize crappy slave-based agriculture in the South, starve out the North and basically reintegrate the disUnited States back into the Commonwealth.

So everybody learns "it was/was not about freeing the slaves" because "it was about whether your slaves feel 'free' or not" gets your textbook banned in Texas.

I BRING THIS ALL UP because the actual strains necessary to produce a "civil war" in the United States are gargantuan compared to "does a thin/thick margin of popular opinion support/condemn this or that contrived social issue." The amount of "interstate commerce" trappings in the Constitution, leaned on heavily by the Originalists on the Supreme Court, basically prevent Kansas from going to war with Missouri. Not only that, but troops are deliberately scattered about for exactly this reason, the Army hates the Navy for exactly this reason, federal taxes are spread about for exactly this reason.

Yes, we fought a civil war before, yes it was ostensibly about cultural issues, but it was a different country then under very different pressures with very different interdependencies in a very different economic milieu. If anything, the tensions in the United States are entirely about rural vs. metropolitan for the simple reason that the Electoral College is tilted towards rural areas.

I will also point out that the Trump Administration, and their supporters, literally attempted to overthrow the government of the United States through every means available to them... and failed... because the government is largely made up of bureaucrats who want to keep their job. That's it. That's their motivation. Rome persisted for centuries not because of any natural cultural superiority, but because bureaucrats will always preserve their bureaucracy and when you decentralize things enough, your org chart simply can't be decapitated.

The government of Ukraine has fallen twice in the past 20 years under pressures less than January 6, for example, once in 2004 and again in 2014. Yeah, the current situation sucks... but like, a plurality of Republicans want to legalize weed. 42% of Republicans don't want Roe overturned. So do I think shit gonna be ugly? Yes. Yesindoodledydo. Do I think Arizona's gonna start shooting across the border at California?

It's too expensive to even posture like that.

Gonna be inline snark 'cuz that's all this is worth

How about that for a click-bait-y title?

That's all he does. use that magnifying glass at the upper right and search for "rushkoff" and tell me otherwise. Rushkoff is the edgelord's Michio Kaku.

Watching the bitcoin phenomenon is a bit like watching the three-decade decline of the internet from a playspace for the counterculture to one for venture capitalists.

It was absolutely instantaneous. NCSA Mosaic was developed with public money and released in April 1993. Marc Andreesen took the code and released Netscape for profit in October 1994. He sold it to AOL for $4.3b four years later and immediately got into for-profit hosting. There's this idea that the Web was somehow going to be an altruistic cypherpunk utopia without anyone paying attention to the fact that there have been exactly zero altruistic cypherpunks.

We thought the net would break the monopoly of top-down, corporate media.

No one ever thought this. They just paid lip service to it so they could ignore patents and trademarks.

But as business interests took over it has become primarily a delivery system for streaming television to consumers, and consumer data to advertisers.

LOL and they sold it as net neutrality

Likewise, bitcoin was intended to break the monopoly of the banking system over central currency and credit.

Bitcoin was intended to circumvent tariffs and taxes. Nobody intends to "circumvent the banking system" by taking the books and making them universally public.

In return for dedicating all that hardware and wattage authenticating transactions and recording them in a ledger known as the blockchain, they are rewarded with bitcoin. It is their verification activity that mines new bitcoin into existence. And the more bitcoin they have, the more committed they will be to maintaining the integrity of the blockchain recording their assets.

I mean, you can sell bitcoin. Used ASIC miners? Not nearly as liquid. What keeps miners committed to the integrity of the blockchain is their investment in the ecosystem. If anything the past couple years have taught us that miners give no fux about politics or geography, they go where the power is cheapest, even if it's Texas.

In essence, bitcoin is money built and maintained by nerds, based on the premise that good nerds will outnumber the bad nerds.

I doubt you'll find many nerds ascribing to "good" vs. "bad" considering how many of them are libertarians. The argument isn't "we do this for good" it's "you can't tell me what to do."

Sure, bad actors can dedicate all of their processing power to fake transactions, but they will be outnumbered by those who want the token to work properly.

Miners are resistant to 51% attacks because they lose money. "Working properly" has nothing to do with it. It's kinda weird that Rushkoff is building an argument that Bitcoin was intended to be something out of the Whole Earth Catalog and is now something out of the Sears Catalog rather than observing that a bunch of arrogant nerds thought they could out-computer the government but whatever.

At its most ambitious, bitcoin is meant to provide an anonymous, decentralized, frictionless, and incorruptible form of transaction–an alternative to the extractive, central, bank-issued currencies now enjoying a virtual monopoly in our economies.

"Extractive" was never the argument - "manipulated" was the beef. of course, BTC manipulation is trivial compared to markets (see, for example, the massive sell-off this morning to cover last night's futures) and that argument could certainly be made, and has been made. Yet Rushkoff seems to be going for a "betrayal of principles" thing here, an odd position to take considering the general chaotic neutral disposition of the average bitcoiner.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t just about increasing efficiency, but taking down an economic elite that has been using its control over currency to maintain its wealth and power.

Do let's not confuse "elites" with "governments." Which, oddly enough, is an even more laughable assertion but nonetheless one of the core Bitcoin beliefs.

Central currency is not the only kind of money that ever existed. For many centuries, gold and other precious metals served as money.

There is very little evidence of this. The monetary value of a shekel is fully 1500 years older than shekel coins. The Romans used base metals that were always substantially less valuable than the units of currency they represented. The Chinese used paper money. Only certain backward barbarian kingdoms of the European Middle Ages had coins worth their raw materials. It is accepted as gospel truth that we've always traded with gold and silver, but the fact of the matter is, we've always made jewelry out of gold and silver and used bookkeeping for trade.

The problem with gold was that it was so scarce and valuable in its own right, that no one wanted to spend it on daily necessities such as bread or chicken. Gold was hoarded, and really only useful for long-distance trading between the wealthy.

I love how these sorts of diatribes always include some form of "we used to use nothing but barter, but barter also sucked" or "we used to use nothing but gold and silver, but gold and silver sucked." It's Van Danicken Syndrome through and through - "us moderns can clearly distinguish how stupid this idea was, but people born before the invention of Twinkies had entirely smooth forelobes and could barely brush their teeth." The fucking Incas were absolutely baffled why the Spaniards cared so much about gold. So were the Aztecs. Gold and silver were an obsession for that period of time between "Gibbon" and "Era Gibbon wrote about" and since nobody wrote about anything in between, we just assumed we'd always used gold and silver for everything even though it absolutely sucks for trade.

During the Crusades, however, many European communities adopted the more flexible market money systems they had seen used in Moorish territories.

Even primitive Europeans immediately realized how stupid gold was the minute they were shown anything else

Market money was virtually worthless: like a poker chip or IOU that was redeemed for a loaf of bread or dozen eggs at the end of the day. Unlike gold, which was no good for transactions because it was too scarce, market moneys existed only to enable trade, and often expired at the end of the day. They couldn’t be stashed.

It was actually Marco Polo who introduced Europe to paper money. He even wrote a book about it. inter-village trade was always based on favor economies because it has always been based on favor economies and if you tried to say Jane didn't owe you a dozen eggs because Jane didn't redeem her egg coupon before sunset everyone around you would kick you out of the village and then ask you why they'd bother with a system of account that required a priest since everyone was illiterate.

But this sort of money was fabulous for trade, which was the whole point of money, anyway. Everybody who had a way of creating value–whether making shoes or growing grain–now had a way of exchanging that value with others. The use of market moneys led to a century or two of wealth creation unlike any we’ve ever seen since.

Or... you know... the Italian city-states created fractional reserve banking.

The former peasants of feudalism became the merchant middle class, working just three or four days a week, and exhibiting a level of skeletal growth (a sign of health) larger than at any time in the history of humanity, until the 1980s.

Or... you know... the Jews became the merchant middle class because they weren't allowed to work or own land

The problem was that the aristocracy, who hadn’t created value themselves for hundreds of years, was losing its stranglehold over the masses. As the poor grew wealthy, the wealthy grew relatively poorer. So they outlawed local moneys, and replaced them with central currency.

...seems like that would warrant a link. Or a footnote. Or an example. Or the part of Rushkoff's colon that it was removed from.

"Central" is it relates to Feudal Europe is particularly hilarious considering that it was a mess of Medicis, Borgias, Hapsburgs, Forzas and other families that didn't give a fuck about the peasants so long as they paid their taxes. You are now aware that Italians have been speaking Italian since shortly after the American Civil War and that the rulers of Russia mostly spoke French. England's royal family changed their name from "Saxe-Coburg Gotha" to "Windsor" at the outbreak of The Great War.

All money was borrowed from the central treasury, at a rate of interest set by the king. People had to pay back more than they borrowed. It was a terrible drain

The drain was taxation. Always has been. This is weirdly wrong. I mean, even people with a real itch against central banks will tell you they're a modern phenomenon.

The rising merchant middle class of the late Middle Ages became incapable of transacting on their own; the money was just too expensive.

This is directly wrong and incredibly nuts. The issue of the middle ages was paying for conflict, which is one of the reasons the Medicis came to power. Inflation is actually a modern phenomenon, as catalogued exhaustively by Piketty.

The merchant class became peasants and laborers again, the cities became the only place to work, and the plague soon followed.

It had nothing at all to do with Trade. Bocaccio's Decameron certainly wasn't about a bunch of bored travelers sitting out a quarantine, and when Engels wrote "The Condition of The Working Class of England in 1844" everyone knew he meant 1244. Shit's gettin' WIERD man

And that’s the system we’re stuck with today, with central banks issuing money, and banking conglomerates lending it to the public and verifying our transactions for a fee.

LOL

Bitcoin was meant to cut out those unnecessary intermediaries, and replace them with computer cycles. The high processing cost of mining bitcoin–as well as an arbitrary limit on the total number of coin that can ever be mined–keeps the money supply scarce.

Right - 'cuz as we all know, the bitcoin is indivisible which means it cannot be used to trade for anything worth less than one bitcoin.

But this means that instead of re-creating those high-velocity market monies of the Middle Ages, the abundant ones that worked like poker chips, bitcoin re-creates the market mechanisms of gold, a currency that invites hoarding and speculation while discouraging transactions. Oops.

Ladies and gentlemen, cargo cult economics. I've never seen the like.

This explains why bitcoin has become less a means of exchange than a speculative pyramid, as well as why the coin’s developers and early investors have ended up billionaires.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

The wealth disparity in bitcoin is worse than that of central currency, with 4 percent of users owning 96 percent of bitcoin. So much for breaking the banking monopoly; this is just hackers seizing the banking industry for themselves.

Well... but by definition, the guys who bought early are... not banks. Just because the Bolsheviks replaced one bad system with another does not mean the Romanovs survived.

The money itself is worthless. Less than worthless, in fact. We are spending massive amounts of machine cycles and electricity, burning fossils fuels for no reason other than to prove our commitment to the coin.

I mean yeah people do stupid shit for money. I'm not entirely sure Bitcoin is that much more offensive than influencers selling jars full of farts but in a capitalist economy you do what gets you paid.

What if the “proof of work” for coin were based on something good for the world, rather than aiming so directly for ecological self-destruction?

Ahhh yes. "Proof of plant and other stories by people who don't get it"

The non-financial uses of the blockchain are certainly inspiring: Smart contracts let people devise and administrate complicated agreements without hiring lawyers. Whole companies and co-ops can be orchestrated and secured through simple sets of instructions that are confirmed and recorded on a blockchain such as Ethereum.

(waves hands) "you know, crypto-whatever stuff."

It requires a whole lot of code and electricity, however,

Or so I read in USA Today and investigated no further

Still, even if such currency and contract solutions can work, the part of the story that nobody’s talking about is the ending.

My name is Douglas Rushkoff, and I talked to exactly zero experts about this column

What happens when all the bitcoin is mined?

Douglas Rushkoff has never learned of asymptotes apparently. "Whelp, gentlemen, that was the last bitcoin. It was fun but now we have to get jobs." (flips switch)

Bitcoin transactions are authenticated by the thousands of people who dedicate their computers and electricity to building the blockchain.

Of course the argument up to this point would be the utter lack of people but go off I guess

What is the incentive for people to spend millions of dollars on computers and power once there’s no more kickback of coin?

Oh my god he didn't even google it

I have asked this question of the world’s leading blockchain investors, miners, and scholars, and none of them have offered a satisfactory answer.

I would pay real money to be a fly on the wall for those convos.

The best they can come up with is “we’ll figure out when the time comes.” (How is that good enough justification for a combined quarter of a trillion dollar bet on cryptocurrencies?)

wait how old is this

I spoke to the CEOs of four companies that have either just issued or are about to issue tokens, and none of them had even considered how the blockchain is administrated once the coin is all mined, or what that means to the future of their operations.

Was one of them DOGE? 'cuz I feel like one of them was DOGE. Quarter trillion dollar marketcap would be November 2017. So maybe not DOGE.

So what will really happen when all the bitcoin is mined? The people and companies currently authenticating transactions for coin will instead insist on service fees.

I... I have nothing but side-eye.

Already, financial institutions like banks and brokerage houses are rising to the occasion, promoting their own blockchain– as well as authentication services for those who want to keep using existing cryptocurrencies.

This is turning into some weird fever-dream out of the mind of John McAfee.

So instead of disrupting and replacing the banking industry and its fees, bitcoin and other blockchains simply feed into the banking monopolies.

I mean of course they will. They deal with money and they don't care what kind it is. The world has been running on SWIFT, not dollars, for decades now. Thinking anything else is mockably naive. But the random shit Rushkoff is pulling out of his ass is legitimately unsettling.

Like the internet, it was meant to engender trust by connecting people directly to one another.

Good old Internet, the world's first trust protocol. It certainly wasn't meant to exchange data.

This post originally appeared on Fast Company and was published March 1, 2018.

Ahhh, there it is. Topical as ever, Fast Company. And Pocket, giving you psychedelic little fever dreams from The Before Times in an attempt to keep you engaged.

Well, I sank an hour into it just for the snark, so thanks I guess. But holy shit.

Oh, you had a question:

I'm curious about all y'alls thoughts on this.

My thought is "google 'bitcoin difficulty chart.'" Or if you prefer:

You are standing 21 steps from the wall. Every ten seconds, you walk halfway to the wall. How many seconds until you reach it?

'cuz the reward for mining bitcoin goes down 50% every certain number of blocks. It's called a "halving." You can look that up, too - it happened at block 210,000, block 420,000, block 630,000, block 840,000, block 1,030,000 etc. And yes, because there's a discreet number of bitcoin, eventually (theoretically) the last one will be mined... but right now, that's predicted to happen in the year 2140.

At which point an ANTminer will be the technological equivalent of this guy.

So maybe there are other things to worry about.

Kirksite and bronze.

Sterle did a pretty nice set for Chaumet. Totally the inspiration for doing this. The FLW stuff looks cooler, the Chaumet stuff is better executed. But then, that's House Chaumet.

Great is the enemy of good enough. I've gone from being pretty damn proud of them individually to being pretty damn annoyed by the inconsistencies caused by shitty investment, challenging forms, awful mold chemistry, failed equipment and a partridge in a pair tree but I'm also cognizant that as heirlooms go, ain't nobody on either side of my kid's family touched that.

it also beats tar out of the official resin garbage.

I remember the day. It was weird. I went to junior high school back then, I think I was in 7th or 8th grade... At home, my father had the TV on aljazeera and he kept repeating "bin Laden finally got you, you maniacs", while his face mirrored the horror he was watching on TV, and knowing fully what that meant for everyone. The next day at school everyone was talking about it in class, and everyone was EXTATIC. Celebrating. I remember that some discussions broke out about it where some students were arguing that the attack killed civilians, but many were quick to counter that many many more civilians were killed by the USA all over the middle East and that this was the only way to do anything against the military power that is the US. In case you didn't realize, virtually everyone in the middle East hates the USA, and usually has a valid reason why to.

I didn't know what to think. I understood both arguments. And even though it is obvious what was right and wrong and that terrorist attacks should never be supported, I still struggled in taking a stance.

Once I made up my mind though, I kept my opinion to myself. Because loudly speaking out against the attacks was an act of treason.

While reading the article, it struck me how the same 12% in the states that were against the war in Afghanistan (and were called traitors), are probably the parallel group to the ones in the middle East who did not support the attacks and were also seen as traitors.

That day, hatred won. Everyone knew what was coming. The wrath of the almighty would thunder down onto the whole middle east for decades. The results of which we see today.

What did it bring? More hatred. More trauma. More generations of hatred.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we would rather have the "traitors" on both sides in positions of power instead of the "warriors" and "heros".

The reply to this keeps 502'ing on me so I will drop it here for kleinbl00

Okay grumpy old man you earned yourself some devil's advocacy.

Your response pissed me the fuck off. Then I sat on top of my hill, and thought about this while watching the smoke from California and Oregon destroying the sky. Since I am camping out in the parking lot of a hospital after my injections, and have wifi access, I'll answer you. I am not nearly as good of a writer as you and I think we talked past each other, so let's see if I can expand our ideas here.

That means the median visual astronomer was 30 years old when the HST went up, and 37 when WFPC2 went online.

You discount the visual astronomers that have died off in the last 30 years. I bring up people don't like space and you reply with the ultimate example of "pretty space picture nobody knows shit about." Why was this picture taken? What question was being asked? Yea Yea Yea first image with the Hubble Palette, whatever. Even here on Hubski, you and I are the only two people that know what "Hubble Palette" means, and I'll get to that in a moment. I've been in a room with Jeff Hestor http://www.jeff-hester.com/about-dr-hester/ and got to talk to him one on one a long time ago when I still gave a shit. He's a fantastic person, he's fighting the good fight for what it is worth. But the person and the idea behind the image means not-a-fucking-thing. Pretty picture on a college dorm, all that matters. PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE SPACE THEY LIKE PRETTY PICTURES

That sounds about right - I was lugging a Coulter 10" Dobsonian around in the back of a Buick Skylark in those years where you could still pretend the ground was relevant. That shining period between billion dollar astigmatism and the Pillars of Creation shot. ... 'cuz I'm sorry - all the SBIG in the world will never fucking compete with that. Not ever. I tried a little game before I started writing this: I googled "most famous Hubble photographs" and "most famous Palomar photographs" and you know what? The Palomar shots are of Palomar.

There are five Messier awards in the Astronomical League Observing programs. https://www.astroleague.org/al/obsclubs/AlphabeticObservingClubs.html I have all of them. I have the Hershell 400 and Hershell 400 (2) awards. I have enough awards to start making a run at the Master Observer certificate if I feel like making that effort. I have used remote telescopes to assist with the confirmation of exoplanets to the point my name is on five scientific papers, and used my own gear back home to track two more that are still being worked on and may finally publish this year. I have a NASA placard on my wall thanking me for engaging in outreach to over 50,000 people. I also have a NASA award for organizing a science campaign during the 2017 eclipse where we rounded up 600 boy scouts to do real data collection backing up the pros in aircraft and satellites that is going to be published this year if not already out. Now that we are done comparing prom gowns and all the other girls think we are pretty, let's cut the bullshit and get to the point.

Oh, and Hubble is in the news at least quarterly, and again PRETTY PICTURES; how many people outside of us even know what the hell Palomar is? People do not like space, they like PRETTY PICTURES.

Ever been to the Griffith Observatory? It's pretty funny reading their plaques trying to justify the place as if it ever did any real science. They pretty much boil down to "we stare at sunspots sometimes." 1.6 million visitors a year, beyotch.

Never been to Griffin, but I've paid for a few nights with the 60" at Mt. Wilson twice. $1500/night for the group. The second evening myself and a few other people used the night to drag some impressive glass up there. I think between the ten of us, we had a combined $25,000 of eyepieces on us. And honestly, I think I had a better view through a 32" Obsession at the star party that got cancelled mentioned above. Of your 1.6 million visitors I wonder how many are there because the Griffin people used to whore themselves out to every movie and TV production they could wedge themselves into. 161 productions according to IMDB. LA is a city of 20 million people, that visitation number is impressive but let's not kid ourselves that the people of Los Angeles give a shit about Griffin, Mt. Wilson or any of these places. What percent of these visitors are out of state tourists?

I remember star parties out in the desert. We had good sky. The Pleiades are a loose cluster from the Sangre de Cristos, they aren't seven sisters. The Milky Way is a naked eye object from under a streetlamp. Rich fuckers, too, with like 12" Meades'n'shit. And what were things pointed at? ... and maybe some rogue crankiwumpus like you insistent on making people look away from the center of the eyepiece so he could claim he showed them M81.

I have data on the state of astronomy clubs across the nation. Clubs with a combined 2700 members in areas representing 36+ million people in the USA. But some few rich people bought a $5000 coat rack they take out a few times a year means Astronomy is healthy? Are you going to seriously make the argument "rich people most effected" to me? Because if that is your argument fuck you and your fucking high horse. YOU.. FUCKING YOU of all people are better than that and I expect better from you. Note the numbers on those clubs. People in astronomy clubs are not even a rounding error on a statistical blip on the long tail. The older guys who did all the work either got Covid and died or noped out because they don't want to deal with the 40% of America that turns out to get its reality from foreign Facebook bullshit memes and flat earth groups. And fuck you, we don't show people galaxies at outreach we show open clusters and globular clusters like M3, M5, M92, M15, M11, M52 etc because those are easy to train someone to see quickly. You pull a "rich people impacted" argument on me of all people then toss around "elitism hur hur?" eat shit.

Now - I didn't drag 50lbs of sonotube above the frost line to stare at planets. I did my dark sky shit, and I enjoyed it. Doodled in notebooks by red light and everything. But I did that shit alone and I didn't expect anyone to come with me. The serious hunting? That shit is solitary. And you yourself, homie, spent half your time photographing and the other half processing. I've seen your shots. The social aspect pretty much demands a trophy. Sure maybe you can get some accolades for your dedication if you describe your adventures but the picture's worth a thousand words. And with the amount of post-processing that's been de rigeur in astronomy since Clyde Fucking Tombaugh, that means an equatorial mount or a steppermotored Dobsonian hack. And that means $$$$$.

Done the visual from dark skies, documented it, have the certificates and notebooks to prove it. Even started on the Urban observing programs because work was killing me and I was unable to travel anywhere. You know why visual observers go into astrophotography? I know 'cause I was one, and talked to dozens if not hundreds who did the same. LIGHT POLLUTION. You know how many people in the USA care about light pollution? NONE. Even the AMA cannot get traction on the idea of overlighting residential neighborhoods is increasing breast cancer rates and has a possible link to the rise in autism. Photography lets me at least pretend that I am doing astronomy even if photos are shit for experiencing the world around us. What would you rather have? Someone looking at nothing put pictures of the Grand Canyon, or actually GOING there and experiencing it. Would you rather have people looking a the moon with their own eyes, or relegate everything to flat images on a screen. I made my choice and walked away from the shit show becasue I see where the world is going; I don't want any part of a society that wants pictures but not the experience.

Try and tell me Stellarvue was selling more than 200 scopes a year ever. I remember when the ex-Soviet Maksutov Cassagrains came out and holy shit you could do planetary astronomy for less than $4k. My family paid $400 a night to go to an astronomy B&B and they couldn't afford a 16" Dobsonian. $22k for a 10" MCT? Hot diggedy damn! You got anything aspirational for little shits like me who saved up half his summer's wages for a cardboard and particle board clunker with a telrad and a $150 Orion focuser?

Six years ago, I got invited to be a part of a focus group, as someone doing outreach and talking to the public. I got to have two days of talks with the folks making beginner telescopes. I think that I am still technically under that NDA, but the telescopes we thought up are now on sale. https://www.celestron.com/products/starsense-explorer-lt-80az They are on mounts that do not suck, the optics are "fine" and just enough tech to make it easy to use. This is what you should be recomending for kids with birthday money, or paper route money etc to get. And no I do not get paid to promote them, never did. Now that Orion owns Meade, I am hoping that the software guys on the Meade side make the Orion stuff better and easier to use. We also promoted the Starblast 4.5" table top reflectors and got some 20 put into the local library system. You almost certainly know that you can get a not-bad beginner telescope for roughly $250 which is a lot of money for someone on minimum income, but doable. You acuse me of eliteism, remember? I'm trying to get people to not buy shitty hobby killing telescopes at Walmart and target, you see to think all there is out there is $10,000 glass.

Know what kills hobbies? Elitism. That's why vinyl still exists, and why skaters are still listening to Dinosaur Jr. 30 years later. That Icona Pop LP you bought at Whole Foods to play on the Salvation Army Technics you paid too much for because you didn't know any better? That's a gateway. So are those shitty Instagram-class Celestrons.

Hobbies die when the people that have been around for a while stop helping the newcomers. Youtube vids are cool and all, but without someone to look at face to face and say "can you help me" you lose the new blood to the learning curve. Write all the checks you want, build all the shit you think you can get. Hell build public accessible observatories like I have done. No volunteers? You are fucked. Chase away the volunteers? Yer fucked. Have a lot of money but nobdy to do the work needed to keep the hobby/club/organization going? You die. Elitism is a minor problem compared to the lack of suckers and fools like I used to be doing all the work cause Duty, Honor, "the Cause," outreach, whatever. When the old greybeards stop attending gatherings, when the old timers like me walk away, when the apathy kicks in, the hoby dies. Make the rewards for doing an incredible amount of shit work not worth the squeeze, and your hobby dies just as dead as "elitism." Insult and berate the people on the ground doing the work, most of whom do it for the love and not much else, and your organization will die.

I'll betcha if you threw another one on the University grounds they'd shut up. Yeah you're right - nobody serious could see anything serious seriously. But nobody following Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter is ready to venture an hour into the hinterlands to pretend they can see Neptune anyway. Couple times *hanging out with their normie buddies? Sipping cocoa and schnapps while staring at things they could legit see through binoculars? That's another matter.

The Devil's advocate question is this: Why the fuck would I do that? The college already showed that they would not back us up, after working with them for TWO FUCKING DECADES where their physics students got extra credit for hanging out with people owning better gear than the bloody university did! All that time of working with them to the point where the star party was a 400ish paying customer event twice a year. What in the HELL makes you think they would step in and help and/or support us in a new adventure? When someone shows me their true colours, and shows me exactly what value they place on my efforts, I remember that. My friends got thrown under a bus for a bunch of idiots chasing social media clout, people that would have forgotten the event even took place as soon as the new thing got more likes and upvotes. The people we worked for free to add value to their students, and asked for nothing in return other than the use of their name to help with the Park Service and the Dept. of the Interior were tossed aside without even an afterthought. Fuck ever associating with people like that ever again. The couple that ran the show since the mid 90's are rumored to put together a very private event with no advertising, no door prizes, no sponsors once the Covid shit is mostly over. The University and its students won't be welcome.

The disconnect here, and this idea hit me in the middle of one of my drives into town to deal with society crap, is that you are not Human. Don't get mad, this is compliment, but I need to dig deep and make sure I am saying what I mean to say with that statement. You and I, and the people on this website are not human. Sure we are all homo sapiens with four limbs, 20 digits, forward facing binocular vision etc, but that "sapiens" part of the name? We are outliers looking in on the human experience. My county has a population of roughly 12K people. The county seat has a population of some 2500 people. There is a library in town, and since librarians are bigger gossips than any bartender I try to befriend them. In June of 2021 the total number of checked out books was under 200. Not 200K, TWO HUNDRED. This includes digital rentals as I specifically asked if there was an uptick during the pandemic. TWO HUNDRED BOOKS A MONTH. Between you and I, I bet we hit that in a typical year. Two people read more in a year than an ENTIRE COUNTY OF PEOPLE do in a month. Now, there are no bookstores in the county, I checked, not even a used book store! It is possible that everyone here, a county where 80% of households are below the poverty line, are buying books online or pirating PDF's, but I've met the neighbors and let's say I have doubts. YOU read more than just about anyone else I've even known, online or off. More importantly, you retain the info you ingest, can process it and explain it to others in context. That skill alone puts you in the top 5% of the smart people in this country. If you last name was gates, or bezos, or Boringoldmoneywhitedude the fourth, you'd have gone to an ivy league, made your business connections and almost certainly be running a Fortune 1000 class company by now. You exist on a level that at times I don't think you understand, maybe you do and just feel guilty or whatever and keep that offline. You and I got the shit rolls on the family dice and had to make due with what we were given. Yet somehow we if not thrived as least did not suck on a shotgun or die of a drug overdose or any other multitude of pitfalls that you and I have shared stories about. We are both retired, and let's be brutally honest here, most people in our generation are NOT going to retire until the last two years of their lives when the body and brain break down from over work and their employer can no longer accommodate their needs, so ship them off to die at home on government health care to keep the health insurance costs low for the rest of the drones in the factory. You and I are talking on a website with maybe 30 active users, four of whom have PhDs in the sciences, and this place is run by two guys using STEM cells to help prolong healthy living, a technology that I bet at most 1 out of 500 people even know exists. How many people know this place exists? 2000? Maybe? When you look at where we are, and where everyone else is, you and I are not even a statistical blip on the very end of the very long tail of human existence. How many people here are into what can be roped into pop culture? None of us, I mean I don't know what a Dinosaur Jr was and had to look it up, some meh band from 30 years ago. Talk to most people and all they spit out is tv shows and movies, and not much else. I could sit here for a few hours and list line item after line item that makes not just you and I but most of the people on this website outside the base human experience. We are "human" by the proxy of our biology, but if we walked into a city council meeting or a PTA meeting, how many people there would we be able to connect with?

The problem you and I both have is that we are in a bubble. Might be different bubbles, but each of the bubbles we exist in protect us from the normal shit normal people go through every day. We can read a book, we can listen to a politicial speach and understand the language about the people they are rallying, but we see this all from the outside. We have the Time, money and privilege to be able to do something that in not directly paying the bills. You can watch your neighbors make poor choices about thier house, but talk about it as an academic exercise to explain the housing market to the rest of us outliers. You get to talk to the rich and wealthy, you mentioned you have had relationships working and otherwise with the famous etc. I've talked to people who have space hardware on the surface of other planets. I can pick up my phone right now and call someone working in mission control for the ISS. Kids I met at outreach events 15 years ago are now building Artemis hardware. This puts me in a VASTLY different head space when it comes to space and astronomy that just about anyone but the guy here that launched satellites earlier this year. Your reply to me really pissed me off until I realized you are coming at this as someone looking in from a 50,000 foot level. Do either one of us really remember what it is like to live on minimum wage? I bet neither of us has 50K in student loan debt. We both own where we live. Neither of us is living paycheck to paycheck. I was homeless living in Truck Center Parking lots off the interstates, and now can barely offer advice from that time nearly four decades ago. We both have expensive esoteric hobbies that the average person cannot comprehend the cost to get into. You can drop a few grand on some widgit thing for your watchmaking and not feel the dread of not eating for a month. Everything about you is outside of a normal human living experience in the current world except your family and upbringing. How many humans do you know that can build a $100K plus milling machine just because they want to fuck around a little bit? Hell, I can't do that, then again I have no income either.

Once I calmed down and actually though about what you wrote, I realize you are not being a cunt just to be a pissant, you are just tone deaf and out of the loop of what is going on at the ground level. Congrats, you won the game.

I'm curious as to why we need to augment your self-loathing on this one, Ben. The article is a nuanced, long-form investigation of "velvet eugenics" and the impact of prenatal testing on parents, children and society. By your own admission you've undergone professional and voluntary education and training on medical ethics, so this is likely something you've grappled with your entire adult life. You're an intelligent man, capable of distinction and compartmentalization but lately you've eschewed all that to get people to yell at you. It seems to be a form of "the religious shouldn't breed" and no amount of discussion around "this isn't a religious discussion" or "this isn't a people shouldn't breed discussion" dissuades you from your monolithic pursuit of castigation.

It's a shame because clearly you could add to this discussion but you're instead choosing to obfuscate it with inflammatory language so the discussion can be all about you. What are you worried about us discussing? What are you trying to distract us from? As someone whose life has been shaped by congenital defects I would value your input if you chose to share it. Speaking for myself, we went out of our way to get our kid genetically tested. We absolutely would have aborted if we'd popped Trisomy 21 because yeah - that's an 80% mortality rate with profound lifestyle impacts. Some of the other stuff? We didn't plan. Fortunately it didn't matter. So I have a perspective on this, and appreciate the perspectives of others. And I'm curious what you're so afraid of.

I'm guessing there's an outward "I wish I was never born" performative dance that supports you socially, combined with an inner "but I love my fiancee and am actively planning a future" hopefulness that can't be reconciled, so you go through this "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Kabuki because if you have to admit that you actually hope you wake up every morning you'll be forced to address that you have something to lose now and you're just too spiritually weak to accept that the world would regret your passing. After all, if you value the world and the world values you, you might just have to press pause on your wholesale outward rejection of your entire inherited value system. You might have to examine your core beliefs and attempt to mature as a man. And it's so much easier being the angry product of arrested development.

You're getting lazy with it though. It's transparent. It also demonstrates how uncomfortable you are with yourself and your self image, which is usually a sign of readiness for growth.

I, for one, am here to help. Happy Holidays!

You know... I originally posted a picture of a friend of mine with Downs and jokingly said “my other friend Ben said you can eat a bag of dicks”.

But I had to delete it. This Ben would never say that. Frankly, he’d never say anything mean like that. Ben reminds me of all that is good in the world. He is a man filled with love. He lights up a room. He is happy.

So I deleted the picture of Ben because he would be sad if he knew that I weaponized him because I was frustrated with your disregard for his life. He would hug you and tell you he “loves you too much”.

So you don’t get a picture of Ben with a snippy response from me. Instead you get this response. Which is me being sad for you. Sad that you’re so angry at the world that you would rob the humanity from people who are often times the best of us. I’m embarrassed that I sunk to your level.

The bad Emily

ANDIWANNAQUITSOFREAKINGBADITHURTS!!!

He gazed up at the enormous circledot. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the golden badge. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved mk.

(jokes obv mk, we love u man)

I'm old enough that as a kid, my great uncle Fran used to tell me first hand stories of the Great Depression. My grandfather would walk the railroad tracks as a kid, picking up bits of metal to sell for scrap to get bread. This central banking money system is fucked. Yields have progressively spiked and dropped within lower bounds for the last four decades. Now the bound is near zero.

Central banks are pushing on string. That said, the economy is magic. It heals and transforms. People trade, build, and create. IMO in a very real way, what will die off in this next decade needs to die off. It was on life support anyway.

My biggest worry is that skyrocketing unemployment will lead to populism, nationalism, and conflict. There's going to be fertile ground for that bullshit. But, as far as the economy goes, I think the world has a real opportunity to rebuild with one that is less top-heavy. I see crypto as a fundamental building block of that. Institutions of trust have been the focus of economic exploits. That's Bernie's whole bang. My prediction is that in the next decade, Central Bank hi-jinks will continue to prove ineffectual at best, and an organic token-based economy will grow parallel to it.

You know, the last thing I ever wanted to be known for on Hubski was my military service. But for fucks sake, I guess I'm stepping in for the sheer idiocy of these posts. Have you ever actually interacted with someone who has recently served Nil? Have you asked them about their experiences? I can almost guarantee you haven't, because you know fuck all.

First off, looking at work today, the US military is a decently paying job. It's east to look at the $20k salary and scream "WE AREN'T PAYING THEM ANYTHING". However what costs does an E2 in the military have? Healthcare is paid for, lodging is paid for, food is paid for, any classes they take are paid for. That $20k is solely expendable income. How many people you know, Nil, have $20k of expendable income a year? And that's as a 18 year old with zero life experience.

Second, look at who is going to combat nowadays. Who died this year? Green berets were the majority of casualties. What troops were sent to Iraq in response to this Iran nonsense? The 82nd airborne. What do these forces have in common my friend? I'll go ahead and answer because I know you don't know. They all volunteer MULTIPLE TIMES. Anyone going to dangerous situations is actively trying to get there. If you want to talk surge times, sure, but that's a long fucking time ago. Stating that the military is life ruining is sheer ignorance. It speaks to a basic understanding of the lives of 99% of service members.

Quite honestly, your entire posts reads like a vietnam-era diatribe against the man. I would suggest not speaking to something you know nothing about .

Photography

Going to a DSLR from a pocket point and shoot a few years ago was a wonderful change. My lizard/frogs/bugs photos jumped up in quality significantly. Fall is coming up, and the bugs are starting to get more sparse, so I've been focusing more and more on birds. They're more difficult to work with though, as they're often any combination of pretty far away, very shy, move around a lot, or sticking to the shadows and thick leaves and branches. My 70mm lens isn't cutting it, so I'm gonna save money so in the spring, I can buy maybe a 400mm lens or something. I already have a bird/bug hunting strategy for if and when I do. From sunup to about ten, I'll have the bigger lens out for birds. Then from ten to early afternoon, when the birds become less active, I'll switch to the 70mm lens and turn my attention on the crawly guys.

iNaturalist has done me a lot of good this year, motivating me to get out more. I've learned a lot from it too and look forward to getting out and learning more the rest of this year and into next year.

.

.

.

Life

I wanted to talk about other things tonight, but my heart isn't in it at the moment. I don't want to be all Facebook Melodramatic Cryptic Post or anything, but I don't want to go into detail about some hardships I'm working through. My burdens are my own to worry about and I'm trying my best as possible to be a level, positive voice on Hubski and in life in general. I'm having a tough year though, I'm ashamed to admit, and today was such a good day it really made me realize how much I've been struggling, for quite a while actually. I know I'll survive in the long run, cause I'm a never give up kind of guy and I'm blessed with some genuinely good people in my life, so don't worry too much. All that said, maybe if some of you are the praying type, as vulgar and selfish as it is for me to ask, throw one or two my way?

Well I don't know who to believe now.

https://imgur.com/a/PbyGotd

Found this photo from a few years ago - my first foray into beers that weren't easy to quaff lagers.

I got it cause it had a funny name, Jack the Sipper, turns out I really like dark beers and thus I was converted. It's certainly not as heavy as the beers I moved onto, but I have a strong nostgalic feel for my first "different" beer.

Is it bad that I was in a real bar drinking before I opened Pubski?

My daughter and I went to Maine last weekend. We stayed in a rustic cabin. It was amazing.

Also, she recently wrote this poem.

She is 7. What the hell?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2019/08/23/deconstructing-googles-excuses-on-tracking-protection/ says it better than I ever could.

I'm sure some people at google care about privacy and user freedom, but google itself clearly does not.

This weekend was what we Eurovision-nerds refer to as Super Saturday, where 5 national entries were selected (with two more following on Sunday).

Finland is sending none other than Darude, whom you may remember from his 1999 smash hit (which is now possibly stuck in your head just from reading his name). Alas this song is no Sandstorm, being more muted and much less catchy.

Georgia is one of my favourite Eurovision nations, which rarely fails to entertain. This year they are less fun than usual, but I still quite like it.

Iceland's pick is not very typical for Eurovision. It will certainly stand out. It's brutal. I almost like it.

Moldova had my favourite song last year. This year they're just ok in my opinion.

My native Norway is sending a catchy dance tune with a solid dose of joik. I'm biased, of course, but I like it.

Portugal this year seems quirky just for the sake of being quirky.

And finally Serbia went with this ballad.

This is probably the best crop so far this year. And in general I'm happy with how many countries are choosing to sing in other languages than English this year. :-)

I decided to take a few days to get together my response for this because in my opinion, well, you're all wrong or looking at this from the wrong angle.

The reason they do this isn't to get more women on boards now for any immediate reason even if that's how they sell it to you. The reason they do this is to start shifting societal norms. Corporations do this. I'm on a committee at work and they asked us about changing a bonus system, some people disagreed since it wouldn't benefit them while some people agreed since it would benefit them. I found out just how much of a natural born corporate shill I am that day by chiming in that it didn't matter what anybody thought, it mattered that in a year or two when all the staff were different anyways this would be the new normal and how would it benefit us then ? What kind of staff would we be attracting and would this effect our ability to retain the best staff in the long term ?

So, current opinions aside, what does this do in a year or in five years ? When everybody's moved on to talking about something else ? Keep in mind that Trudeau's gender neutral cabinet is old news, I actually straight up forgot about it. What did it do though ? It changed who we saw in power and that's important because it gets us more comfortable with the idea. Let's look at nurses, generally elderly patient don't like male nurses because it's weird for them. They aren't used to it. So we provide incentive to going into the profession or hiring male staff. It achieves basically nothing in the short term beyond some numbers. In the long term though people growing up now see male nurses more commonly and aren't as weird about it. We now have a larger pool of people who are likely to pick the profession and considering our aging population and nursing shortage that's not such a bad thing. Representation is generally what people are trying to change with these things, encouraging a wider variety of people to aim high has benefits across the country. You want to lower teen pregnancy and thereby the number of people relying on the welfare system ? Want to lower the number of people who fall through the cracks ? You've got to give them something to aim for. They don't even have to become a CEO, all they have to do is not get knocked up or get hooked on drugs before they're able to take care of themselves. In this case representation matters.

I strongly recommend any book by Bruce Hood, one of my favourites is called The Self Illusion which argues the self as we know it is likely entirely built of our experiences in the world. One study cited looked at how gender plays a part in how we interact with babies. The same baby was dressed in either blue or pink and introduced as either Nathan or Sarah. When introduced to the same baby as a girl the adults talked about how beautiful she was and when introduced to the baby as a boy they commented on what career they might have. This study was done in 1986, the women who young girls now look up to were raised in this type of environment. So the question isn't do women simply prefer different professions, it's not even have we socially influenced women to prefer different professions ( we know we have ), it is can we use this to our benefit. Corporations don't care about you, and neither does the government. Corporations care about the health of said corporation and the government cares about the health of the place they are governing. Some succeed and some fail, this is how one is attempting to succeed in the long run.

I'll totally pretend to give you answers.

What is killing me this time - compared to all the other challenges I faced in life - is that this one; first, is not in my hand and I am simply sitting there and suffering, and second, it affects more than just myself.

know the difference between FEELING helpless and BEING helpless.

So okay. You went on a trip and met a girl and felt titillated and infatuated for the first time in a while. Happens to literally every person in a long-term relationship. I flirt recklessly. My wife knows I do. She also knows I come home to her because a lot of it is situational. Infatuation is exploring the possibilities. Love is cherishing the realities. You may not be in love with Sarah but she's also not surprising you much anymore. Novelty is a hell of a drug.

And okay. Sarah accepted that she cares more about you than you care about her, and you, for some dumb goddamn reason, decided to keep her around as a fuckbuddy until AUGUST or some shit.

This is the only thing I'm going to give you a ration of shit for. You're in a shitty place. It sucks. I'm sorry. I'ma give you some pathways I promise but for a minute, sit there and feel bad for this. Because it's a shitty thing to do to another human being. "I don't feel that we have a future together but... let's keep rubbing our genitals together for another four months because we have nothing better to do." It's one thing if you're both at "eh" in the relationship but if you're already acknowledging that she's way more into you than you are into her, keeping her on the leash is fuckin' cruel, dude. And it's going to cause things to cascade one of three ways:

(1) She's going to muster up her self-esteem and drop you like a hot rock because who the fuck are you to string her along like that after you've both acknowledged that she's got feelings you can't reciprocate.

(2) She's going to take what she can get for as long as she can get it and try to win you over to her way of thinking HONESTLY. You've given her a deadline, you've given her an ultimatum, you've given her a way forward: how to win a guy in 120 days. And, as a bonus, she gets to bump uglies.

(3) She's going to take what she can get for as long as she can get it and try to win you over to her way of thinking BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. You've given her a deadline, you've given her an ultimatum, you've given her a way forward: how to land your man in one easy step. And, as a bonus, you already had a pregnancy scare 5 weeks ago.

If I understand correctly, you have not been present at any doctor's appointments. You have her word that she's pregnant. If you believe her, that's plenty evidence enough. If you don't believe her, she wouldn't be the first person to fake a pregnancy in order to push a guy into marriage. It's happened to three of my friends, in fact. But don't focus on that. In the end it doesn't matter. Those three pathways are independent of pregnancy, real or feigned; the pregnancy is a complication but it does not affect the fundamental core of your relationship with Sarah.

Your relationship with your father is coloring your current situation way too much. Makes sense. Entirely natural. By all means analyze it, reflect on it, react to it, but then set it aside because the relationship that matters now is between you, your potential child, and the mother of that potential child. That's where a lot of the helplessness is coming from: you had no power over your father yet he still holds power over you. You have no power over this child yet this child holds power over you. Hold it up to the light, nod at it, then put it back in the drawer.

Your current reaction to Sarah has a lot to do with the fact that you thought you killed all responsibility to the relationship yet still managed to reap the benefits. Yet here she is, drowning you in responsibility and threatening to cut you off entirely from any benefits. She's making it clear that you are unnecessary to her future plans, much like you made it clear that she was unnecessary to yours. What was the word? "Paralyzed." All right. You're frozen. You can't move, you can't breathe, and you're freaking out. Hold it up to the light, nod at it, then put it back in the drawer.

NOW

You're all about abortion which leads me to believe that divorce doesn't offend your religious sensibilities. You're freaking out about your family's reaction to a kid out of wedlock. And you're fixated on this child's future alienation because you're going to have no input into their life. Yet the obvious solution - marry the girl - has been ruled out, out of hand, with no discussion whatsoever. Why is that?

Marry the girl. Now you've got a say in the kid's upbringing. Commit to not being a stranger. Get to know her family and friends. Commit to three more years in Germany, three more years of trying to see what kind of life you can build with Sarah. It's the first two years of a child's life that govern so much of their future and having two parents that love them under one roof where they feel safe and loved makes all the difference in the world.

If you're not into it within three years, part amicably. Support your child. Be a part of their life. Be anchored in her family. Be a relative that doesn't vanish. Be a father. You can be travel dad no problem. After you've front-loaded the commitment it'll be nearly impossible to shrug you off, particularly if you comport yourself like a gentleman. And fuckin' hell, you may discover that having something in common with Sarah, who is about to give over her body and time for the next two years to the life and well-being of your firstborn, makes her someone you can love more.

You might be surprised what happens when you extend the girl some trust and empathy. You might find she warms up into more of a person you want her to be. And, you might discover that she miscarries and you didn't have to blow up your life. Maybe you go through with the wedding, maybe you drop her like a hot rock and learn to never again string along a girl who likes you more than you like her.

Either way, your best move is to commit to a wedding and let it play out for better or worse. All the bullshit above aside, saying I'm going to do this means you're DOING something which breaks you free from paralysis. You're making a move, you're making a decision, you're acting towards your own future, and you're forcing the probability cascade to break down in your favor.

- You propose to the girl. She turns you down. You say you want to help. She turns you down. You try to be in the kid's life. She turns you down. You've done all you can, your father can't resent you completely, and the door is open to be a part later.

- You propose to the girl. She says yes. You get married, have a kid, stick it out as long as you can, and end up being Foreign Dad. By then you're more settled financially, you have a better idea what your future holds and you've influenced your child's future in an immeasurably positive way.

- You propose to the girl. She says yes. The pregnancy disappears. You walk away unscathed.

- You propose to the girl. She says yes. The pregnancy disappears. You find your feelings towards Sarah have changed. To be continued, for better or worse.

- You propose to the girl. She says yes. You have a family and live happily ever after.

Either way, when you've decided you no longer care for someone as much as they care for you, stop fucking them for both your sakes.

Writing is fun. Being a writer is bullshit. This dichotomy is one of the things writers don't talk about, don't write books about, don't tell students about.

Somewhere on here there's an article about the dirty little secret that every writer you've ever read had/has a spouse or a parent that allows them to eat so they can spend fuckin' forever grinding away at that magnum opus that nobody gives a shit about. If you're a "writer", odds are good you're also wasting your time from an economics standpoint. Stephen King will tell you that Tabby basically underwrote his career through Carrie. Anne LaMott will mention in passing that her dad's agent read eight of her books and oh by the way she's divorced from the guy who put food on the table while she did it. It's the dirty little secret: the people who don't have a benefactor are competing with the people who do but nobody mentions the benefactors. The two successful screenwriters I came up with were both in a position where they could live in $3k/mo apartments for two fucking years without having to earn a penny so they could sit there and write. Must be nice.

The other dichotomy is nobody gets into writing because they want to perform in front of an audience. Nobody sits down to write a book so they can carry it around under their figurative or literal arm to dozens of trained professionals all intent on saying no. Nobody sets out to prove themselves over and over and over again only to be sent a "not for us - sent from my iPad" email on Thanksgiving evening (true story). But once you get accepted by an agent you're a god. But once you get rejected by a publisher you're scum. But once you get published you're a god. But once the book gets panned you're scum.

And it's all so goddamned capricious.

If you ever want to see into the soul of any performer, ask them what work they're most proud of. It won't be one you've heard of. It'll be that thing they believed in, that they put their heart and soul into, that the marketplace crushed. And maybe they'll have rationalized why it got crushed, and maybe they won't, but it's still the central fable of their lives, be it written or a work-in-progress. It's the thing that allows them to make peace with the capriciousness.

Some people don't make peace with the capriciousness.

Hemingway was absolutely at the top of his game. Pithy mutherfucker. "There's nothing to writing. You just sit at the typewriter and bleed." Said the guy who tried on 47 endings and 18 titles for Farewell to Arms. David Foster Wallace? The closer he got to death, the more personal his writing became, the less interested his audience was in what he had to say.

The stories I write for me? Nobody wants to read them. The stories I shit out because someone throws a buck at me? ZOMGBUSINESS. That'll fuck with a mind: You're auditioning for genius but for some reason what they love the most is derivative crap. You'll notice nobody ever calls Danielle Steel or Dan Brown tortured geniuses. You may not think Amy Winehouse would have been different 20 years sober, but you don't care if David Lee Roth is different 20 years sober. Amy Winehouse was "serious." Diamond Dave is not.

So if you're a serious artiste you're left grappling with the cognitive dissonance that if you get paid you're a sell-out but if you don't get paid you starve (unless you're one of the lucky dilettantes we don't talk about but we all know and us serious artistes all know they aren't serious anyway, just lucky). And if you're a serious artiste you know that validation is nothing but validation is everything but validation is illogical but if it matters it MUST be logical and somehow

if you let yourself go

and turn off for a while

and give it to the bottle, give it to the powder, give it to the needle, give it to whatever

it doesn't

matter

so much.

Writers, as a species, are sensitive. Writers, as a species, are introverts. Writers, as a profession, must have nerves of steel and an endless appetite for rejection and writers, as a profession, are chronically, criminally underpaid and undervalued. And if that writer has a tendency towards dependency, that dependency is what allows them to power through that cognitive dissonance. It's the thing that allows them to write for an audience.

Would Amy Winehouse's material be different if she were sober? Who knows. King's certainly is.

Inebriation allows writers to plow through the bullshit of being writers. Lots of writers can do it without substance abuse. Some can't. For those who can't, the proximate cause of their substance abuse is the bullshit of being a writer, and the bullshit of being a writer definitely colors their writing (lookin' at you, Charlie Kaufman).

who wants to be a great writer if you are only a great writer when you're fucked up? what an awful fucking curse you know?

Said every writing drunk in the history of writing, ever.

And then they poured another shot.

Keep in mind: for all intents and purposes, once you hit 25 you've chosen every brand you'll ever choose. This is one reason why advertising focuses heavily on teenagers and young adults; it's easier to hack a presidential election than it is to get your mom to switch dish detergent. Macrobrews are kinda fucked in this regard because those goddamn whippersnappers tend to buy a sixer of something expensive and semi-local, but only every now and then: my roommate will buy six Blue Moons about three times a year while my dad will buy a half-rack of Coors Light once or twice a week. So they're marketing to a rarified stratum: people under 25 who are deciding on "their regular beer" that they can get most places. The Most Interesting Man came out in 2006 so everybody they could (legally) influence back then is between the ages of 35 and 40. Time to do something new because they know that even if they kill off The Most Interesting Man, you aren't going to switch to Corona at this late date. You started drinking Dos Equis to set yourself apart from those choads.

The owners of the macro brews give no fucks, of course. 70% of beer sales in the US are controlled by one fucking company.