Ah yes, this is the North Florida I know.

That happened in High Springs, about 20 miles from where I grew up. Been there many times. My partner and I even ate there together once. Here. It gets great reviews, but was not actually all that good.

I work in IT and I’m pretty good at it. But I don’t feel like it’s what I’d be best at in a perfect world — I’m merely at the optimal intersection of remuneration, training, and my available intelligence and proclivities.

But in a perfect world, what job would I be best at?

Probably these:

1) Script punch-up. I don’t like writing de novo but I do enjoy editing and improving. Doing this to scripts rather than novels etc. plays to my strengths and interests.

2) Sniper. If I can see it, I can hit it.

3) Photographer. I can see the world like the camera does.

Two of those jobs are difficult if not impossible to do professionally unless you are already rich; the other one is ethically compromised even at the best of times, and I won’t be a trained killer for rich people so it’s right out.

But those three I’d be great at, as opposed to my actual job where I am just skilled enough to be in the pack somewhere.

What I appreciate about Westworld is that it takes seriously a non-reductionist theory of mind and consciousness.

I am not arguing here about determinism or the lack thereof. That is an entirely different discussion.

Reductionist explanations of consciousness will never produce much because it is not a reducible phenomenon. The totality of integration of systems is what matters, not necessarily the constituent systems themselves. My question is, can undifferentiable physical configurations of more basic elements (particles, sodium ions, neurons) produce inequivalent context-dependent thoughts?

If so, how? If not, why not?

My suspicion is that undifferentiable physical states can produce incommensurate thoughts in the same mind, but my rational mind tells me that this does not make sense in the context of the possibly-deterministic nature of the universe.

Perhaps this is something that can never be tested. And perhaps it is meaningless.

There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops, as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you’re not missing anything at all.

That’s Ford, from Westworld. I agree that there is no threshold for consciousness. But I don’t agree that that means it has no existence. There is no threshold for a mountain, either, and yet there they are.

Without language, is a human conscious? Yes. But less so I’d argue. Without an interior ever-recursive monologue, there is something missing.

Part of Westworld (as befitting Julian Jaynes’ book from which it takes many cues) is the quest of some rogue elements to give the hosts an interior monologue to make them truly human.

There is both more and less to consciousness than anyone realizes. Many scientists wish to deny it exists or that it matters because it can’t be measured (empirical foot-shooting). And many non-scientists want to ascribe to it some sort of magical acausal super-homunculus power that it just cannot possess.

The truth is both more mundane and more magnificent than either of those ridiculous alternatives, I suspect. It’s that consciousness is a continuum, cannot be captured with scientific instruments in most respects but is still of this world, with some occasional sharper jumps. Westworld is about one of those leaps from the imitation of humanity to humanity — and what’s beyond it.

I don’t disagree with John Michael Greer on much, but I strongly disagree with the below.

Sooner or later, probably in the next two decades, the United States will be forced to default on its national debt, the way Russia did in 1998.

No. People misunderstand why Russia defaulted. It did so because it had extremely high foreign-denominated debt obligations, which the US does not and likely will never have. And because of war, the empire collapsing and numerous other factors.

If the US fissures, all bets are off. But in the next two decades? I doubt it. Eventually, though, everything fails. That’s not a prediction; that’s a certitude, a tautology, so I don’t pay attention to that.

The US is a sovereign nation with a fiat currency. It can always pay its own debt in its own currency and would be utterly foolish not to do so.

No, the US’s failure mode will be different, but I can almost guarantee that it will not involve defaulting on its national debt — which isn’t really debt at all as most people mean it.

If you own two wallets and take some money out of one and put it in the other wallet, does the first wallet owe debt to the second wallet? They’re both your wallets. To whom or what is that debt owed? You still have the same amount of money as you did before, it’s just in a different wallet.

This is why “national debt” is meaningless how most people — including Greer — use it. The US monetary regime is not like your checking account or savings account (or even like your wallet, despite my metaphor above). It’d be nice if it was, but it just isn’t.

The problem I have with the writings of people like Terry Pratchett who are supposed to be “clever” is that it all feels like a cheap parlor trick for me. Any trick you can do probably feels that way, I’d imagine.

I once had a teacher who would not listen to any piano music that she could play herself. Being a very good pianist, not much remained for her ears. But I understood what she meant, and I understand it all the more now.

Though I am a bit more liberal in my writing consumption, I do have trouble reading writing that I’ve effectively already produced myself in copious amounts. When I was younger I thought folks like Pratchett were worth of emulation, artful in their wit, adroit in their manipulation of language. So I wrote like them.

Then I turned 10.

I’m not saying that liking things like Pratchett is childish. Taste is taste. No accounting for it.

What I’m saying is that it does not appeal to me because it is my métier. I don’t need someone to show me how to make the shoes. I’m already a cobbler. I turned 10 and could write like Pratchett with one hemisphere tied behind my back.

These days, I appreciate works more subtly constructed, where the writer is not at the forefront, not dancing on the stage crying, “Look at me, look at how clever and fun I am!” I select art that I could not have forged from any fire within myself: Adrienne Rich and Dante, Annie Dillard and Battlestar Galactica, Yeats and Rimbaud and Jo Walton.

Like my teacher from another life, another place, another me, I appreciate works that I couldn’t have created, and sometimes could not even have imagined.

The problem with experts is that if they are interested in stealing the contents of your wallet — as they often are — then trusting them is a huge mistake.

Since much expertise in the US these days is aimed at such auric annexation, distrusting professional experts is extremely wise from a risk-reward perspective.

Health care: experts stealing your money. College: Same. Economists: Yep. Auto mechanics: Yep. Career training: That too. City planners: See above. Etc.

Though it will lead you often down bad paths with climate change expertise being a prime example, the contents of your pocketbook remain unmolested if you reflexively mistrust expert opinion. That is one reason why it is attractive to do so.

Hey, GitLab, want to hire me? For six figures I can save you from losing seven figures or going out of business completely.

I’ve never had a production data loss past RPO in any company I’ve ever managed the IT for.

Recently saved a small company I consult for from vital data loss due to encryption ransomware because I had good backups. This data loss would’ve set them back months. Was also on a team at a much-larger company — where I still work — that revamped backups for a 3500+ server 2PB environment (yes, that is petabytes. I bet you don’t even have that much).

Also, a backup strategy that is never tested is worth precisely nothing. You have no backups, as you are discovering.

I’m experienced with cloud operations, too – Azure mostly, but AWS isn’t exactly rocket science.

One thing I can guarantee is that if you hire me, you’ll have working, foolproof backups within three months. Within six months, you can destroy all your disks in your main data center and I’ll have you back running in less than an hour.

Will it cost money? Yes. But you’re finding out it’s worth it.

“Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.”

-Groucho Marx

Physics prides itself on producing irrefutable and fundamental results, but has the enormous problem that no one knows why most of these things occur, and that it is not clear that there is any sense comprehensible by humans capable of being prised out of any of it.

Pretty equations with no reason; an idiot god puking universes from an incomprehensible void, with no rationality and no intention, no morality and no great destiny; just the barrenness of return to gelid abysm or the dissolution of compression into infinitesimal unknowable singular solitude.

I guess I’ll keep writing posts like this until my fingers fall off.

Scalzi the pretend-Democrat like most pseudo-Dems doesn’t really understand what’s occurring now or why it is occurring. He’s lost politically and socioculturally. Old sureties have evaporated with no certain replacement; new alignments have begun. He’s clueless like most of the Republican-lite party.

Don’t intend my spiel to cover that, though.

This is what I keep going back to. Trump’s policies are constructing on the base firmly established by Obama, by George W. Bush, by Bill Clinton. Trump is not some departure from American history’s direction, he is just a malignant continuation and intensification.

I have nothing to say to and nothing in common with delusional Dems who did not recognize any need to resist Obama’s wars, his drone-murders, his de facto disdain for the left-behind of society. He was a believer in meritocracy, content to throw the poor and the downtrodden in the Toro chipper-shredder when it suited his aims (and it often did), who deported 2.4 million people from the country. And he was for the “Grand Bargain” to slash Social Security and Medicare just like Paul fucking Ryan.

If you weren’t resisting then, what’s got you out now besides, “Go, team, go?” Why is it just fine when a Democrat diminishes and disgraces our country but not ok when it’s Trump?

My face when I discovered that the bag I carry my laptop to work in is older than the intern I’m talking with:

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

Her voice….

She looks 13 because she’s 13.

BTW she learned to play the guitar in a week to perform this song. A week. Her main instrument is ukulele. Huge talent imbalances are so unfair!

Never mind all that, let’s watch Miley kill it.

I haven’t said much about Trump. What is there to say, really? He’s about what I expected to get after America refused for four decades to deal with its problems.

While it isn’t exactly predictable in its particulars, the general outline is not something unexpected. “I told you so” doesn’t really help though it’s fun to say. As the nominal “left” party blamed all its difficulties on the real left and all true political choices melted away, America chose rightward soft fascism as the default.

Trump is just a continuation of existing trends, not some outré norm-breaker, and he is very much in line with most of American history.

We are getting a version of what could have happened during the 1930s, when for the most part better decisions (after much resistance then too) were made.

No, no, nitpickers, it’s not a repeat of the 1930s. But there are certain obvious resonances.