Chuck You

This reminds me of when we lived in Bellingham, Wa. There’s a place nearby called Chuckanut Ridge. That area is mostly populated by hoity-toity rich (for the area) folks. During that time, there was some more housing proposed to be built on the Ridge. This caused the NIMBYs who lived there to put up yard signs and to festoon their Volvos with bumper stickers that said “SAVE CHUCKANUT RIDGE.” They desperately wanted the Ridge preserved in its “natural” state, you see.

However, as I wanted to point out to these people but never did, the “natural” state is their not being there. They never would’ve understood, though. To all of them, they were the last valid resident that moved in so any changes they made (built their house, cleared their land, whatever) were the last justified alterations and anyone after that was some interloper there solely to harm them and their way of life.

It would’ve been pointless to bring this set of ideas to their attention as they would’ve been completely unable to comprehend them. But it made me laugh at the time. And still does.

Nice to Meth You

Just a man having a productive day.

Meth is a hell of a drug; it makes you feel extremely productive but also causes you to be absurdly incompetent1.

  1. I’ve heard. I personally would never touch the stuff, after seeing what it did to acquaintances in North Florida.

Future Past

Behind the scenes a thousand less obtrusive electronics media are humming and stirring and bleeping through the hours. Important office blocks in Hong Kong nowadays are built, as it were, around their electronics. The territory has borrowed an idiom from the Americans as it borrows so many, and calls them not merely ‘high-tech,’ but actually ‘intelligent’ buildings, able to think. They can think through the circuits that are laid between their storeys, through the aerials and dishes on their roofs, through laser beams and TV systems. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank thinks constantly about the state of the Hang Seng financial index, displaying its conclusions on VDU screens all over the place. The Exchange Building will think also, if you pay it a fat enough subscription, about the day’s races at Shatin and Happy Valley, and present the runners’ names, the odds and the form through display units on your executive desk. It also talks: its elevators announce their progress in a sepulchral, very English male voice, like a butler’s. At night, however late, there are always lights burning in such office blocks of Central, and when I see them it gives me a not unpleasant tremor of the uncanny, as though they are lights from another world. I do not imagine people at their desks in there, only banks of computers, walls of flickering screens, tapes electronically whirring, cursors moving up and down, all bathed in the pale green light of the computer age. Nowhere is more inextricably enmeshed in electronics than is Hong Kong, and if we could see its myriad lines of inner communication, as one sees laser beams, the skies would be criss-crossed, the streets would be festooned, and we would be tripping over percentages wherever we went.

Jan Morris on Hong Kong in the 1980s

Bland

Ha, what? This creation has the same insipid characteristics that every other AI song I’ve heard possesses. Dynamically, it’s extremely static and generic. The rhyme scheme is predictable and is basically just a simplified ballad one.

The music is a standard ol’ four bar in 4/4 time. It all sounds so extremely AI-gen to me.

Securidad

Someone should really do a deeper dive into why when someone says a change or restriction is for “security,” so many people accept it readily, nod sagely in agreement, then become snivelingly obeisant.

That’s always puzzled me. Yes, I know there is a lot of literature slantwise to that subject, but I mean something really specific. I’m referring to as close as we can tell to finding out what happens neurologically there that just seems to shortcut all thought and consideration.

It’s like a scifi cognitive hack and I think that’s equal parts horrifying and fascinating.

Pealegal

True, but there’s more to it than that. And the “more” paints progressives in an even worse light, unfortunately. I remember the tail end of the pay toilet battles during the early and mid-1980s. The progressives got them banned because “no one should have to pay to do a basic bodily function” and because their position was that there should be free and plentiful public restrooms1. But then they never bothered to build any political power to achieve this goal.

Like much of progressivism, the pay toilet battle highlighted a tendency which has metastasized to be even worse now — they take something away, even if imperfect, and replace it with nothing at all.

And that’s never a winning strategy, weirdo degrowther fantasies aside.

  1. Which I agree with.

You can love or hate AI, but itโ€™s killed crappy 8GB versions of pricey PCs and Macs.

Putin says he saved Russia, but a year of challenges suggests Moscowโ€™s position is precarious.

Home Tech Companies Are Peddling ‘Affectionate Intelligence.’ Should We Fall for It? Big hell no on that one, ghost rider.

A Record-Shattering $1 Trillion Poured Into ETFs This Year.

Welcome to the femosphere, the latest dark, toxic corner of the internetโ€ฆ for women.

People like me flocked to Berlin because it was โ€˜poor but sexyโ€™. Those times are over. Europe turning back into a backwater.

Except for a few elites in the national security establishment, the nation seems to have collectively shrugged at the fact that an unfriendly foreign government has access to the personal conversations of the American people. Pretty nuts.

Millions of children have lost their health insurance.