It started as a joke, but I'm beginning to wonder if we're going to see some noticeable shift in the ratio of extroverts to introverts. I remember hearing once that there's a spike in violent crime about a week into a heat wave, and we're about to finish week 2 of significant social distancing in the U.S.

I'll be very curious to see what changes in mental health we see over the next few weeks. I'm finding myself free of this weird pressure that I was previously unaware of. Our culture was driving me to question whether I was secretly interested in a more active social life, and whether I was secretly miserable because I didn't have one. My wife and I have been talking a lot about how little this has really affected our day-to-day, other than our daughter being home full-time now. But we're both doing the same jobs, I'm working from home every day instead of three days per week, but that's about it. I guess we're doing a tad more planning about when to go to the grocery store?

We won't know a lot of effects for years to come. The economy may be different, also our government's role in our lives. All we can do is wait and see.

This sounds a lot like what happened after Sandy Hook -- lots of sound and fury, but little actual action. That said, the fears of a second Charlottesville are not unreasonable. Still, this is the first I'm hearing of any potential mass protests or whatever, despite living in Richmond.

In contrast to the "no Appalachian identity" idea, I submit Albion's Seed, which argues that it was actually four separate "countries" that colonized the U.S. In the case of Appalachia, it was the Scots-Irish (who were actually neither of those things), i.e. those who lived around the border between Scotland and Ireland. This part of the British Isles was pretty terrible, with England and/or Scotland invading the border areas constantly, plus lots of crime. As this review summarizes it:

In response to these pressures, the border people militarized and stayed feudal long past the point where the rest of the island had started modernizing. Life consisted of farming the lands of whichever brutal warlord had the top hand today, followed by being called to fight for him on short notice, followed by a grisly death. The border people dealt with it as best they could, and developed a culture marked by extreme levels of clannishness, xenophobia, drunkenness, stubbornness, and violence.

Some choice bits about Borderer (as the book calls them) society in America:

Colonial opinion on the Borderers differed within a very narrow range: one Pennsylvanian writer called them “the scum of two nations”, another Anglican clergyman called them “the scum of the universe”.

One of the first Borderer leaders was John Houston. On the ship over to America, the crew tried to steal some of his possessions; Houston retaliated by leading a mutiny of the passengers, stealing the ship, and sailing it to America himself. He settled in West Virginia; one of his descendants was famous Texan Sam Houston.

Traditional Borderer prayer: “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn.”

“The backcountry folk bragged that one interior county of North Carolina had so little ‘larnin’ that the only literate inhabitant was elected ‘county reader.'”

Rates of public schooling in the backcountry settled by the Borderers were “the lowest in British North America” and sometimes involved rituals like “barring out”, where the children would physically keep the teacher out of the school until he gave in and granted the students the day off.

“In the year 1767, [Anglican priest] Charles Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day.”

The Borderers really liked America – unsurprising given where they came from – and started identifying as American earlier and more fiercely than any of the other settlers who had come before. Unsurprisingly, they strongly supported the Revolution – Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death!”) was a Borderer. They also also played a disproportionate role in westward expansion. After the Revolution, America made an almost literal 180 degree turn and the “backcountry” became the “frontier”. It was the Borderers who were happiest going off into the wilderness and fighting Indians, and most of the famous frontiersmen like Davy Crockett were of their number. This was a big part of the reason the Wild West was so wild compared to, say, Minnesota (also a frontier inhabited by lots of Indians, but settled by Northerners and Germans) and why it inherited seemingly Gaelic traditions like cattle rustling.

What's especially interesting is how many of these attributes square with the stereotypical hillbilly. Also with later genetic research.

What's happeniiiiiiiiiing...........

Someone, somewhere has done the calculus and decided that we may be approaching some kind of tipping point.

I remember that when Trump was elected, Paul Krugman posted to Facebook that an outgoing Republican member of Congress told him that the Republicans were going to use Trump to get everything they wanted (deregulation, tax cuts, etc.) and then throw him to the wolves in favor of Pence.

First, I think you're overestimating the reach of the economic recovery. In aggregate things got better, but this was not universal. If you were a 40-year-old man in the midwest with no education past high school, your job prospects did not bounce back the way a 25-year-old with a master's degree's did.

But beyond that, it's a mistake to couch this in solely economic terms. There's a lot more going on than that, and I think there are often situations where our broader political language does not have the capability of describing it. I recently re-read this essay on James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. One of the key points is regarding legibility, and what happens when groups within a society simply cannot understand one another. After pointing out some researching showing the remarkably positive effects that a high density of "co-religionists" has on a community, the essay continues:

I know this is hard, but imagine actually being a conservative Christian in a dying town. Everything I just described is going away, nothing seems able to replace it, and things are just getting worse. The most noticeable difference by far is going to be “cultural” – what language would you use? “Loss of faith and family” is actually pretty apt. Let’s say that their arguments are identical to mine, just shrouded in local language. Fine – all that means is that In the final analysis, the conservative christian recognizes that they’re being deprived even of the power to complain, which is to say, even of the power to explain their powerlessness.

So when you talk about people thinking in "very bizarre and nonsensical ways," I think this is what you're really talking about. It really was people not being heard, but it wasn't that no one was listening, it's that the broader population didn't know how.

Because remember, populism doesn't have to look like Trump. Populist parties starting winning elections like crazy all over the western world after the Great Recession. But again, it wasn't just conservatives. For every Trump or Le Pen you also have a Syriza or Podemos.

That this is how the question is being framed is why we're fucked.

Very few, sadly. But I do appreciate that I've developed a reputation among my office as someone who knows what he's talking about, and I would say that I'm taken seriously (in a good way).

I like the idea behind my job (I work for the federal disability system), but unfortunately have too much exposure to how the sausage is made to appreciate it much beyond that. Still, I recognize that, flawed though it is, it's still a net societal good.

Still a couple hours to go here in my time zone, so greetings from the past. We took our daughter and a couple friends to the light show at the local botanical garden...it was cold, but the (spiked) hot chocolate we smuggled in definitely helped.

My wife was in Charleston, SC for a couple days, only coming back in town about 3-4 hours ago. She's off putting the kid to bed. Meanwhile, I'm here, sitting on IRC, playing Dwarf Fortress, watching Best of the Worst, and futzing around with GitLab. Also debating putting LineageOS on my phone.

Last New Year's we also did the garden, and then my wife and mother-in-law drank too much (my wife had probably the worst hangover I've ever seen her have the next day). I had something like half a bottle of whiskey and played Killing Floor. The year before, we were drunk at a concert venue in Charleston. I'm superstitious enough to hope that maybe a low-key New Year's will lead to a low-key year. But honestly this is where I'm at right now anyway. I feel like I could use a year-long vacation.

Have patience and trust the institutions.

Not the people in them, necessarily. But this year has actually made me appreciate the genius of what the Founders put together.

The thing to remember is that our country has always been pretty much nuts. I'm still going through Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, and the degree to which Hamilton and Jefferson were at each others' throats is unprecedented. Jefferson literally hired a guy at the State Department, officially as its translator, whose real job was to write editorials under a pseudonym lambasting Hamilton as dictatorial and aristocratic. Newspapers, meanwhile, had no ethical code(s) whatsoever. As Jefferson later wrote in a letter to John Norvell in 1807:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

They recognized when setting up our current government that people were terrible, and were careful to make everyone's scrabbling for power counterbalance everyone else's. And remember too that we've survived some terrible presidencies. Bush II, Buchanan (who botched the slavery issue), Harding (who died in office before the country realized how corrupt his administration had been), Andrew Johnson (who fucked up Reconstruction and was impeached for his firing of Secretary of Defense Stanton), etc. And that's without getting into how insanely corrupt local politics was through most of the 19th and into the 20th centuries.

So be angry, but don't lose hope. And channel that anger someplace. Write to your newspaper, tell your friends why Net Neutrality matters, whatever. It's not about changing things all by yourself, but being part of a much bigger whole that can.

As Isherwood said, the whole tone and way of communicating in your post is saying that your reader is dumber than you, doesn't understand it as well as you do, and needs enlightenment. You're assuming that you're smarter than literally every person who reads your post, and that you know more about AI risk than them as well.

Meanwhile, you give an incredibly shallow description of the issue, but give no insight into what the current thinking on the problem actually is, or what any actual solutions might be. A good discussion wouldn't excuse the attitude of your post, but its absence certainly makes it worse.

I've long had a hard time taking Polygon seriously, and this isn't doing a whole lot to change that.

The author seems hellbent on ignoring context. A lot of us did resist Steam when it first came out. I didn't install it until 2006, and that was only to play CS Source. To this day, I always check to see if a game is available from GoG, then from Humble, and only then from Steam. Meanwhile things have improved -- offline mode is now actually a thing, and they're doing refunds. Sure it took longer than it should have, but I'm not sure it deserves the article's level of criticism. Plus, there's a lot to like about Steam: I like not having to keep track of 800 CDs that I will invariably lose. I like cloud saves so that I don't lose progress switching computers or if I uninstall the game for a time. GoG, Humble, Origin, all of those platforms only came along once Valve showed that they could be viable.

For the rest, it's basically the author saying "I wish a corporation were beneficent," while ignoring the fact that corporations exist for profit and nothing else. Is this really news for anyone?

Just remember: chaos means Trump is not actively making decisions. This is a good thing, as those decisions he has made have been pretty much universally terrible.

I talked about most of what's going on in my post from Friday. The weekend was of course better, although there have been people at our house every day since Friday night. That is exhausting, and I'm hoping that it stops soon. I may skip class tonight just so I can not talk to anyone (especially since I have to go into the office tomorrow, and people work there).

That's about it. I'm largely avoiding the National Dumpster Fire, and trying to get caught up on my reading. Have a bunch of sci-fi thanks to a trip to the bookstore and the Humble Book Bundle awhile back, and am re-reading the original Dune Chronicles. The main one I'm really into right now is also by Frank Herbert: Destination: Void. It's about the creation of AI by early-spacefaring humanity, and is amazing.

If you haven't seen it, my post on flow may touch on some of this. Let me preface this by saying you should be proud that you're even thinking about this -- I know I was easily 10 years older than you before I started figuring this out. Also, thanks for thinking of me!

The first thing is to not expect yourself to feel any different about the tasks that you have to do. In other words, there's no way to magically make yourself want to do certain things more, nor are you likely to feel better about them. At least not at first. It's about building habits, and fuck motivation. Motivation is the hot girl from the club who makes you think she's interested before she gets bored and moves on. Discipline and habit-forming is the girl who comes over to take care of you when you're sick. There are times when I'm literally saying in my head over and over some mantra of "I hate this and don't want to do it," while doing it. That for me is helpful - it means I can put more energy into doing it than into trying to make myself happy about it. I think we get off track (or at least I know I do) by thinking we can change how we feel about something in order to make it easier to do. I don't think that's true; the feelings come second. First you just have to decide you're going to do it even though you don't want to, and even though you may not be happy while doing it. This Zenpencils comic (using a quote by one of your countrymen) is also good.

Some people find scheduling helpful, and it definitely can be in terms of building those habits. I think at the end of the day it's about accountability - what's keeping you from slacking off? Having other people can help; it both makes the task less unpleasant and can be a strong motivator in and of itself. When I first started lifting weights in law school, I never would've worked half as hard as I did if I hadn't had someone to go with me. We weren't even super close friends or anything: I'm a hippy, anti-establishment, vaguely-pacifist guy, he is a Mormon who had recently become an officer in the Marine Corps. But we kept each other on schedule, and the result was that over the course of 1.5 years I gained close to 50 lbs. of muscle (I was that underweight when we started). Nowadays, knowing my kung fu school is there training gives me a big boost in forcing myself to come in, and it makes training much more enjoyable than it would be if I were just sitting on my own.

The other thing I'll mention is that you need to have a balance between short- and long-term goals. Long-term goals are why you start, but then you need to put those out of your mind. Or at least I do much of the time. I think that's been one of my problems with drawing - I can see what a good picture looks like, so all I see in the meantime is the difference. This gets into what I wrote about in the post I linked above: the need to find short-term goals and work on them, but have them be in service to the larger one. It also makes things less overwhelming. If you're training to run a marathon, you shouldn't spend all your time thinking about the marathon; it just gets too abstract. Instead, think about building up to running 2 miles. Then 3, then 4, etc. Eventually you're there.

“People are social by nature and will be drawn to gathering places to share ideas and be entertained. It’s not just about making money. It’s about building trust. Retailers who tap into this trend will be rewarded.”

I think that's the key. It also means they're going to have to stop under-training their employees. As someone tech savvy, I avoid places like Best Buy like the plague, even though their prices are often competitive with Amazon. But since their people don't know what they're talking about, why bother? At the same time, I went to Home Depot yesterday, hoping to actually find something that could confirm what I think I need to fix, but there were like 4 employees in the whole store. I went there specifically to get some advice, but again they failed to deliver. I hope they learn.

I've reached the point where I can start taking my own kung fu students. We're working on the logistics now, so hopefully that'll start soon. I'm pretty excited, but also nervous as hell. It's a lot of responsibility, and a lot will be expected of me.

Bring on the contractors who cost twice as much!

That explains quite a bit. Anytime I hear whining about regulations, my first thought is to wonder which people the author wants to throw into the furnace of industry.

Life shouldn't imitate Dwarf Fortress.