Caveat: At the store, on a typical Thursday

Banalities & Journaling / Caretaking and Dementia

Small anecdote from my life, today.

Arthur tried (stubbornly) to try to pay the previous customer’s groceries, at the checkout at the grocery store today. He simply wasn’t receiving the communication from me, from the previous customer, and from the cashier that it wasn’t his “turn” to pay – we were next in line, the previous customer was still finishing checking out of the store, but Arthur was ready to pay, now. He was left bewildered and confused when we told him to stop trying to pay. I had to take his credit card out of his hand.

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Caveat: Links #17

Uncategorized

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

An internet meme.

picture

A quote.

“God forbid you should do something as crazy as trying to walk from your apartment to the strip mall, like I tried to do. Walking in Irving, Texas is the act of a mad man.” – Chris Arnade

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Caveat: Unlimited economic growth is possible

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Here is a half-formed thought.

I was thinking yesterday about the difference between material economy and cultural economy. This distinction might not be novel, but I feel like I’ve stumbled on it on my own, for the most part. At one level, my thought is a kind of extension of Georgism, out past the bounds of “land” to a broader scope: not just land but “all material things.” And that domain is what we typically think of when we think of “economy”: farms, produce, factories, mines, etc. But more and more, there’s another domain for economy: immaterial things. Cultural objects, such as: financial instruments, software, novels, meme-stocks, spam. Some are good and useful, some are not, but what they all share is that their “value” (their abstract tokenization under the index “money,” within the broader economy) is not linked to any physicality, and is uncorrelated to it. You could have high-bandwidth, low-value cultural objects (spam, AI), or you could have low-bandwidth, high-value cultural objects (well-written books, Ethereum digital coins [but not Bitcoins, which have a much higher computational overhead and therefore material impact]). Here, by “bandwidth,” I mean the material substrate where these objects exist. They rely on the substrate, but aren’t strictly speaking correlated to it, in terms of valuation. Because the value is uncorrelated with the material substrate, their value can grow in unlimited fashion despite a finite material basis. That’s “star trek style” post-scarcity economy, if you want.

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Caveat: Links #16

Links

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

An internet meme.

picture

A quote.

“We’re all stochastic parrots attached to monkeys on typewriters all the way down. That’s only insulting if you don’t like parrots and monkeys and imagine you possess some ineffably higher-order consciousness their kinds of minds cannot embody.” – Venkatesh Rao

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Caveat: Looking no worse for wear

Not My Poetry 
Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.

It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and 
bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.

– Caitlin Seida (American poet, b. 1989 (?))

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Caveat: The Ends And The Means

Less Banal Than Usual / Life is a Dream / Passive-Aggressive Lunatic Ravings / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Suicide is a selfish act. This is because it leaves behind those who care about us. This is not to say that I’m morally opposed to suicide – sometimes we need to be selfish. Sometimes what’s best for us is to leave behind those who care about us.

That said, one thing that is MORE selfish than suicide is to request or require PERMISSION to commit suicide, from those around us who care about us. That is unfair to them. This happened to me: my wife Michelle essentially demanded my PERMISSION to commit suicide. In the moment, I granted it – because I saw she was suffering and couldn’t deny her her exit. But now these past 24 years, I’ve LIVED with that. Was that fair of her, to make me do that? I feel that it was deeply selfish of her. Am I wrong?

I mean: do what you want. Nothing and no one can stop you, except your own lack of willpower and commitment. But don’t make any demand of me regarding my expressed attitude toward your act.

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Caveat: Links #13

Links

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

An internet meme (en español).

picture

A quote.

“Why don’t you understand? The human race IS an endless number of monkeys and every day we produce an endless number of words and one of us already wrote hamlet.” – Erik Uden

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Caveat: Links #12

Links / Quotable

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

An internet comic.

picture

A quote.

“Due process is key to making any kind of libertarian political system work. All reprisals and punishments have to be ‘above board’ – otherwise corruption will rot the freedoms supposedly being preserved, thus favoring the powerful and privileged and providing an uneven playing field. To the extent that due process fails us, we become an unjust society. One of the most evil cultural trends of recent decades is that vigilantism has become acceptable to vast swathes of the population, both on the right and left. The left calls out, ‘Kill the rich!’ while the right exhorts us to ‘kill the woke!’ Both of these are pure vigilantism devoid of any concept of due process.” – JL Jones

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