Reflections on Amandla Stenberg “Calling Out” Kylie Jenner for Cultural Appropriation.

My reaction to calling out other folks for cultural appropriation is mainly to laugh, and then to sigh.

Do they not understand, I wonder, how contingent and how young so very many “ancient” cultural traditions are? How quickly they spread? How human cultures always have and always will borrow, pilfer and adopt bits of other cultures?

Always have, and always, always will.

This whole cultural “appropriation” obsession and calling out people for it is at best a distraction to anything useful and at worst actively harmful — especially when you use it to bully and shame young people.

This is a good piece for the most part, but I don’t agree that things like an AI are not a threat. I think this view is pretty daft and ahistorical, actually. And I disagree with the idea that technological progress has halted. Plateaued for a bit, yes, but not halted.

About the AI question, the reason it is worth pondering is that even threats with a very small chance of coming true if they have a very large — potentially life-ending — impact still deserve thought and mitigation even if the odds of any particular danger materializing are quite small. A lesson we are about to learn the extremely hard way due to climate change, by the way.

But think of it this way. From the time humans started making war until 1945, we had at most a bomb that could destroy a city block.

By late 1945, we had a bomb that could singly destroy an entire city. One plane. One bomb. An entire metropolis, wiped out. Not science fiction. Hard reality.

By 1952, we had a bomb that could destroy an entire region. One bomb. Urban New England, just gone.

Not all progressions are linear. Some of the most destructive ones are in fact extremely non-linear, and since an AI is not likely something we’d create but rather something that would start to evolve on its own, it’s fundamentally unpredictable and worth mitigating against a hostile AI or even worse an AI so powerful it didn’t care about us at all. The idea that we’d “create” an AI is pretty stupid, actually. It’d most likely create itself without our noticing. And even if we did kick it off, it’d most likely be a much-accelerated process of evolution so that just like our own brains we did not understand the result. And perhaps could not control even a little bit.

I’m not a Singulatarian or a technological utopian but I do believe — and history demonstrates this — that humans can create very destructive very powerful things without really understanding what they are doing. Evidence shows this. Thinking about it and working to prevent it is worth something. Worth quite a lot, actually.

Given that there is at least a small bit of risk for instance that in the future some rogue AI will decide to disassemble the sun to travel to another galaxy, spending a few million now to understand the possibilities seems worth it, yes?

About technological progress, like a lot of folks this person is fairly lacking in historical knowledge. Though I agree that we’ve picked most low-hanging fruit, there are possibility spaces we’ve hardly even begun to explore. And some we still probably have not even discovered.

Another thing. I saw a chart a few months ago that I can’t find right now, but when I do find it I will post it because it was great (and I will find it). If I remember right, for the first 190,000 of the 200,000 years of anatomically modern human history, economic growth per capita/yr was something like 0.00000167%. Or, basically, nothing.

Then this happened:

Like with regular bombs vs. hydrogen bombs, some progressions are hugely, staggeringly non-linear.

Technological history moves in spikes and plateaus. Anatomically modern humans used stone tools for 150,000+ years. Then they didn’t. They used bronze for maybe 8,000 years. Etc. Right now I’m perfectly content to admit we are at a plateau. But as history demonstrates time and time again just when everyone is convinced that nothing else can possibility be invented, a wave of invention comes along.

There is a limit to this, of course. But have we hit it? Really doubtful. Really, really doubtful. We are young and the universe is vast. We are clumsy puppies stumbling over the living room entryway, not even having made it to the front door and thinking we’ve seen it all, the entire house, not even realizing that there is an outside.

Running Windows 10 in a VM at 4K.

I’ve confirmed that it does not in fact properly support 4K.

What in the hell. This is a brand new OS. 4K has been out for three years now.

Microsoft is smoking all the crack.

Ok, 4K is pretty cool. Both my partner and I have 4K monitors now. Mine is my secondary monitor, hers is her primary.

But my main monitor and machine is a 5K iMac. Here’s what 4K looks like inside the 5K iMac (both scaled correctly).

Oh, little 4K, don’t cry in the face of the awesome power of my fully-operational 5K battle station.

By the way, a 27″ 5K monitor has nearly twice the pixels of a 4K monitor — 14.7 million vs. 8.3 million.

The world is going to change over the next 100 years more than any time in the last couple of thousand.

It might not be an apocalypse by some definitions but to the people living through it, it certainly will feel like one.

Even people on the left have no idea. They really just do not, probably because it is too painful to think about, to realize that their children are quite likely to have far worse (and shorter) lives than they themselves enjoyed.

So check this out. Say Hansen is only a quarter right (which is by the way below the consensus estimates of sea level rise).

That still means tens to hundreds of millions of people displaced, huge amounts of climate change. Drought. Famine. War.

Sad that nukes haven’t been used since WWII? Well, you won’t have to be sad for much longer! I can nearly guarantee that they’ll be used in the next ~50 years in nearly-inevitable resource wars as a result of GCC.

People just have no idea. They really don’t. Even the ones who believe don’t really understand.

The Fat Acceptance/Fat Celebration movement is chock full of morons at all times, but they really deeply disturb me when they start harming children. I’ve seen other examples of this including many people postulating that it is abuse to regulate your child’s diet, but this is just one I found today.

Despite what the article claims — wrongly — the evidence is pretty clear that being an overweight or (especially) an obese child makes later adulthood obesity more likely and leads directly to other health problems.

More evidence here (check the citations, too.)

This is just unconscionable. These people are fine when they harm themselves but when they start hurting defenseless people is when they should be made to shut the fuck up. And perhaps be arrested for child abuse.

Well, looks like geoengineering or space engineering it’ll be.

Humans only do the right thing after all other ways are attempted, so soon that’ll be the only choice.

So that’s what we will do.

The next 100 years of human history are gonna be frickin’ crazy like you can’t even imagine. Like Justin Bieber riding on a manatee shooting AK-47s into the sky kinda crazy.

Yeah.

Health care costs set to rise 25 to 50%.

PPACA is not bending the health care cost curve downward as promised.  It is sending premiums into the orbit.   NYT reported:

Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected.

But the useful idiots of the left like Kevin Drum and Amanda Marcotte assured me this was absolutely impossible and all merely evil right-wing lies and propaganda!

When in fact it was utterly predictable and predicted by me and many, many others possessed of even a tiny lick of sense.

Interesting facts about me:

1) I have terrible balance. I can’t roller skate, use a skateboard, roller blade or anything like that. Also I fall or nearly fall up and down stairs a lot. No medical condition indicated. Have been this way all my life.

2) I (and many other people) set a world record in 1997 for the longest-distance non-stop parachute operation in the world. Two mid-air refuelings, 19 hours flying. Then the jump. This record likely still stands though I haven’t looked into it.

3) Dogs freak me out in some metaphysical way. So needy. Cannot deal.

4) I tried lucid dreaming in the 5th grade. Got hooked on it. Thanks, Omni magazine.

5) By the time I was 10 or 11, I’d subscribed (thanks to my grandparents) to Scientific American, Omni, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Popular Science and some other magazines. Also read National Geographic cover to cover starting when I was six. Nerdiest kid alive? Hell yeah.

6) I once asked for a strange girl’s number in a Waffle House in the middle of the night. This is something I almost never do, but I got it, and it was I think real. I never called her as my life was just too busy at that time.

7) If I had a superpower, I’d want it to be the ability to speak, read, write and fully understand any language fluently without training.

8) I used to be able to hold my breath for more than two minutes while swimming underwater. What living on a clean river in Florida will do for you. Used to freak people right the hell out.

9) I used to read 9-12 books concurrently.

10) I don’t naturally have much empathy. Think I was just born this way. I try to rein it in and not become a complete sociopath but it’s a lifelong battle.

What a voice.

I’d like to write an sf novel written in Egyptian (late period) hieroglyphics.

I spent much of my early life creating my own languages, and during that time as I was studying enough to attempt something like that, I examined very deeply many other languages and writing systems*.

I attempted to learn to read and to write late Egyptian hieroglyphics as well. I did that for about two years, and it is much harder than any currently extant human writing (or reading) system. Those are relatively easy for me. Hieroglyphics not so much.

Even at the height of my learning I could only accurately decipher — after much effort — 20% of even the simplest writing.

But if I had infinite time on earth, I really would learn it and then write an entire sf novel that way just for my own amusement.

Now that would be cool.

*Which let me tell you is so so much harder in a hick town pre-internet with basically no real library and no transportation, as compared to now. When I look back at what I was able to achieve with basically no resources and so many people even in my own family actively, violently hostile to me, I’m frickin’ amazed. Go early me!

It’s way, way too far out to do this but I’m doing it anyway.

With all the soothsaying savvy at my command, I predict that Scott Walker will be the Republican nominee and if the economy is in a downward trend during the presidential election, he will be the next president of the United States.

If the economy is in an upward or flat trend, it will be Hillary Clinton, narrowly, and Bernie Sanders will be her running mate.

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?

Not intending to get into deep sociological analysis here. Like most things I write on this blog, this is reactionary and typed up in five minutes or less.

But I miss the old web. Before social networks and the vast invasion of the stupid people and the corporate conquest and subjugation. It really was a bit of a weeder when it was more difficult to do anything useful.

People are content to give away their life and their freedom for 10% off at Outback. I will never, ever understand this. Fuck those people and everything they stand for, everything they are. We have no common ground at all.

At least I got to live through the wild west of BBSes and the early web, and to feel that promise even if at the time I recognized it as probably false.

Humans are like any other animal: their own doom and their own nemesis. Why would we be immune from any natural laws that govern other creatures? We are not. We’re just acting out an old, old play on a larger stage.

History, prove me wrong. But is so very rarely does.

The term “cloud” makes me laugh as it’s all just crap on a server somewhere, just like always.

Just now the server is farther away, performance is worse and your data is also really insecure.