IMO, the real value of av's is offsetting the risk costs of car rental, which would be most beneficial to poor people, ie not tesla consumers (although I understand they need to go to the upmarket to get funding to develop the tech)

---

Upon further reflection, this is a highly optimistic read of AVs. They are a natural monopoly, with (necessary) regulations on entry and total quantity (think if every e-scooter was tesla sized), the known flaws of the current rideshare market, and (according to Zack) tesla's dominant technological position.

$5 bet: If Tesla AV's prove viable, they will roll out in Calif first, be quite expensive to not alienate their current user base, and provoke a (probably deserved) significant regulatory backlash that will end up just cementing it as the dominant player. The distribution of the ride services will spread following the typical enshittification process, either using Tesla's insane valuation to roll out a company fleet or more likely distributing risk and capital liability with some sort of "market based allocation" of Tesla owner's available rides to conduct PD against both sides of the market. The immediate solution is the DOJ getting a remedy requiring all AV companies to make their vehicle available through 3rd party market platforms, plus rigorous enforcement (making) of anti-anti-steering laws, but the chance of that is about 0

If all goes to plan, this is the first in a series of C-tier things called "Robbie Adequately Analyzes Media". This is premised off of the fact that many video essays that I see are simply a moderately attractive individual providing an accurate assesment of the themes of a text, with not much extra information, 10th grade english shit. I passed 11th grade english and look OK in climbing videos, thus I have long said that I could do better. However, I clearly can't because I haven't, so I recently decided to be derivative in earnest.

To wit: today's google doodle is an oddly radical reflection on colonialism. It is part of a special series for the 2024 olympic games, celebrating the relatively new dicipline of surfing. It features a little bird- google's standin for the olympic athletes- surfing in a bird fountain. The overall location is tropical, reflecting the fact that the event is being held in Tahiti, instead of mainland France. Indeed, the clueless bird seems a little out of place compared to the urban settings of the previous doodles and the ornate turtle statues making the waves they surf. by analogy, this shows that the Olympic athletes and more broadly white colonizers see Tahiti as a mere set of waves, a mere fountain in paradise for them to splash around in, sticking flowers in thier hair in a desperate bid to integrate with the sorroundings. This is driven home when a Turtle, implied by the carvings to be the ones who built this place, appears under the surfer's board, looking tired, and throwing in our face that these games are played on the backs of the opressed and colonized.
Or something like that.

Telling someone to read a book is an awfull thing to do because it is too easy. If you say, "We are protesting, come picket with us" or "live without this, it is possible and good" then they have all sorts of reasons and excuses to not join you. However, anyone can read a book, and saying that all they need to be political is to read one puts them in a horrible double bind: either they make the implausible and humiliating admission of illiteracy or they make the even worse admission that truly, deep down, they would much rather wallow in thier learned helplesness then face even the barest glimpse of freedom that a book can offer.

Maybe Neocons are just what you get when you drag the mean zero-sum two-player cold war logic into our networked technofeudal present. The Trotskyist -> Neocon pipeline isn't real, because the Trots (and related Straussians) didnt change. Everybody else did.

Thoughts on Trump V. United States 7/1/24

Fear and Loathing in the Bunker - No Questions Asked - the Cheap Dream

Read Thompson's article before mine, itll make more sense

In a bit over a month, we will hit the 50 year anniversary of Nixon's maudlin spectacle, and this article has been on my mind a lot. On one hand, it seems terribly relevant to our crumbling government, authoritarian leanings, and terrified but apathetic electorate, and on the other hand experience shows that things broadly cooled off in the immediate aftermath of this. The 70's was a time of ruinous disaster for most working class people, but it was an ultimately passive slide into industrial blight, social isolation and hollow consumerism.

Part of me expects to see this again, since apathy and isolation are in no short supply these days, and after the psychotic burnout of these last few elections I cannot think of someone who wouldn't be eager to wash their hands of this whole politics thing. Might as well just let Bezos take it all and resign ourselves to a quiet corporate demise instead of dealing with this politician shit. A high-powered shark with a fistful of answers Trump is not.

Unfortunately, that changes nothing. If the inability of the DNC to put someone with an intact frontal lobe in a position to challenge their alleged greatest enemy teaches us one thing, it is to not underestimate the power of institutional momentum. Over the past 50 years we have seen a definite slide towards increasing executive power, with Bush II legalizing Watergate and C. Thomas making it not matter now. It has also slid inexorably toward Nixon's cruel vision of the American Dream, with presidents no longer even pretending to be grand magicians opening eyes and conjuring miracles (Bernie was almost the exception). This means that our country is so primed with apathy, misery and a desire to just need to say "yes" that some fucking buffon like Trump can stumble into being the next Hitler. This is neither the era of Kissenger's exacting strategy or Mussolini's undeniable spice, but of Charles II' horrible incompetence mixed with unimaginable power.

This could also all be bullshit, of course. Annoying leftists like me are always crying apocalypse, and capitalists are more then happy to give us a signal boost because nothing breeds inelasticity like fear. But a straight comparison to the Nixon years, which we did ultimately survive, is delusional. Back then we had a functional welfare state, historically low income inequality, strong community organizations, and (as it later turned out) no serious competitor on the world stage. Now, leveraged miles out over the abyss on the false promises of hack politicians and the financial system they taped back together after '08 and a capital distribution built so that when ownership rights break down there will be the "green zone" suburbs with food & guns vs. everyone else,we are capital F Fucked.

It seems that in the face of such total apocalypse, the only question is weather we can make it epic.

I am on a hill that I will die on. I will die in this ozone and arsenic choked valley fighting for every inch in this race of miles because I can see no other option that gets me through the 10 years I have left. I hold no grudge against anyone who hits the bricks before it gets ugly, and even feel a bit bad about not cutting and running myself, but this is the life of the idealist.

So, after the big boom when they send some yall in to sift through the slag, I only hope that my life reads like a story that rings with the tone passed down from first rebel to king Ludd to give me Liberty or give me Death to Better to die on my feet then Live on my Knees to freak power to make total destroy to now.

Pass the torch.

ok edgy rant over glad thats out of my system lol

Paris is Burning would be good to play with the ideas of the similarity in social constructeness between money and gender becuz the ppl are notonly genderqueer but also explicitly wealthqueer (?)

Thoughts on hedgehogs and foxes

There is a tale as old as anyone can know about a hedgehog and a fox. This is another tale that misses the important aspect of scale-- is it not a million tiny spines, each hardened and intricately designed and uniquely placed tha tmake up the hedgehog's defenses, and isn't it the tight unity of body and mind that allows a fox to dodge so?>/p>

Straining the metaphor? obbiously. True? I think so. We are all hedgehogs in God+'s plan, and all foxes to the plants we eat for dinner.

There are two Important similar videos that I watched Recently and I want to share:

• I ate only McDonald's Burgers for two months
• MA Fine Art Presentation

If you are anything like me, you are in no way prepared for these videos. Both almost killed me in thier way, and they certainly elecited a new feeling. I have much to say about the content of both, but it would be disorganized and unconnected and so forth, so in the spiret of Silejoism (see immediately previously article) I will focus on the feeling.

Both videos feature someone doing something I care about at a level I can never hope to attain while simultaneoulsy doing or focusing on something absolutely ridiculous. Both videos are presented very academically, with only the occasional reminder of the absurdidty of the premise. I am suspicious of the underlying point made by the creator, but can't help but love these videos because they both very obviously "have the sauce".

They make me feel hopefull about what preforming at a high level really means. If these dipshits can do it in their fields, surely I can. It also makes me wonder how much weird shit high-preformers git up to and just don't tell us about. There is also an aspect of the grotesque; both people are doing something at a certain nexus of depraved pysicality and intellectual comment that is simultaneously repellant and deeply appealing. Complex.

Not just Irony, but the very practice of media analysys is DEAD

The video essay has democratized critical media analysys to the point where anyone can do learn it with ease, and the massive availability of accessible metanarratives online means that it can be applied to any political point of view.

This means that the project of thinking about what we watch to learn more about ourselves is over, because we can now define ourselves totally in relation to media analysys. I am defined to a large extent by my ability to tear any entertainment product a new asshole in a matter of seconds, but since I can totally represent myself in this act means I don't learn about myself in the process.

The only (non-recursive) option here is to engage with all media at an entirely surface level. What bodily feelings does it give me, what viceral emotions, what does it motivate me to do immediately after? Search for positive vibes and ride them, avoiding the impulse to analyze the content of the media, only looking at the content of the pysical reaction.

Good enough to be an art movement! (an ironic statementabout the content, I have already violated my own rules. I guess this sort of thing takes practice.) Call it Sijeloism, after the Toki Pona word for a body or substantive existance.

Technofeudalist Realism and Switching Costs: two Thoughts about Technofeudalism

Just got my copy of Yanis Veroufakis' Technofeudalism (off amazon, ofcourse, Big reccomend), and I have what are right now two seeds of thought about it that might grow into somehting larger. The first is a broader look on the lack of catasrophic revolution through an analysys of the precice economic motions of technofeudalism. The second is accepting as true the basic premisis of techofeudalism, what are the myths and media in which it represents itself? a difficult question because as with classical feudalism, the king only needs to justify himself and mythologize to non-serfs, who are in limited supply under technofeudalism.

The basic premise of the first question came when trying to economically think about how cloud rents are set. By definition, cloud capital is a very diverse and frankly annoyingly vauge entity that extracts rent from all aspects of society, but it seems to exist both culturally through the technostructure's affects on our desires when interacting with the economic sphere (and potentially social sphere, but I feel thinking about that is a bit beyond me) and as a multi-sided platform in controll of our markets. Traditionally, two-sided platforms were argued as nessacarily providing some service otherwise they would be outcompeted by direct contact between parties. What prevents a not-amazon from entry and disruption online (where there is little of the pysical concerns(ie startup cost and dificulty of obtaining loans for by definition sub-profitable ventures) is their unique access to both buyers and sellers, each forching the other onto Amazon to access more of the other, giving Amazon Nigh-unprecedented monopoly power.

Update c. a couple days later: realized all this is bullshit after the Amex thing. My apologies.

Furries as metaphor: cross-frame application to further understanding of (empathy with) homophobes

Been reading Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler, and she proposes that the main way that homophobes remain genderphobic by constantly refusing to understand "gender". Since it is not particularly dificult to understand and the repeated invocation of it in their rhetoric brings them into contact with it, they must constantly work to affirm how little they could possibly relate to it, and therefore prevent contamination with the idea.

If this sounds like gibberish, yeah. Butler is a total nerd, and constantly speaks philosopher jargon, which valid, but also not great for most. Something that helped me and might help some yall is connecting it to how I felt about furries; I believe the psychological dynamics are pretty much the same. For a while I hovered at a vauge distaste intellectually and overt disgust emotionally, feeling and somewhat thinking that there was some sort of deep mystery to the whole thing but refusing to do any investigation or talking with a real furry, out of fear of being found out with any sort of intrest in the subject beyond denial, and I think Butler thinks that similar dynamics charecterize homophobes, and if true, feeling out these feelings might be a way for me and some yall to empathise with them in a know thy enemy sort of way.

Was just at the library and some kid started talking to me trying to get me to buy him a laptop. Asked him what his favorite part of school was and he said "videogames". Was going to say something about how if we made roblox woke we would have anarchy in the century, but it occors to me that roblox might already be pretty not horrible maybe. A lot is said about like 4chan and the toxicity of the early internet, but those of us who spent our formative years on it are a proper gaggle of fags. Is this sampling bias on my part, selection bias on who decides to get off the internet when, or evidence of a genuinely positive force in society?
Doubless a question already asked a million ways a million times before.

Representative democracy trains us to think of politics as a weak link problem

Thoughts on the events of 4/29 in president's circle SLC

This account is solely my subjective oppinion a day after the events, and I have not had time to compost this into an adaquetly appealing, or even coherent, narative. This text is not to be taken as a factual re-telling of the events, or my own final oppinions about them. Proceed with caution.

I was initially not planning on going to the protest, but a brief convorsation with a classmate convinced me that I wohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEou104m_P0uld sufficently regret not going, so after a change of footwear I was ready. I went directly there after my exam, and arrived before the speaches started. Mecha have gotten good at talking less, although it is somewhat telling that the best speech by far was Julio's reading of something a former Black Panther had written. The establishment of the encampment was a suprise to me, but between my love of camping and the overall energy I was begining to get into the mood, and decided to join the campers. At this point I thought the police would be largely unwilling to clear the encampment, so I brought a whole bunch of shit including my Blahaj.

After a brief intercession where I had a nice chat with some people, I was directed to sit in the middle with the other campers, and told that we were likely to get arrested in defence of the camp. After some consideration I decided that I was willing to go through with that, because I didn't have any exams untill 3:00 the next day. We remained seated in the circle for some time, waiting for news from the negotiators. a couple of experienced organizers more or less filled the air with encouragement for those of us less sure, genuinely impressed with the psychological power of the collective demonstrations.

At approx. 9:15, when negotiation with the university had fallen apart, the police began to announce that they were going to clear the area, and I began to seriously elive that I was going to spend the night in jail. At this point I wrote a close friend's phone # on my arm.

The cops understood they needed to keep us active so when the clas came we were more tired then them, so they sent out one joker with a megaphone every 20 minutes to rile us up. This kept us standing and chanting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEou104m_P0for 2 hours. 1.5 hours in, I took a catnap-- sometimes the whole cant-really-feel-strong-emotion thing works well. Mildly nervous, sentiment shared by everyone. I decided to treat this whole thing academically, as more of an observer then a participant to generally get in as little trouble as possible, while still sticking it out.

Eventualy, SLCPD showed up, and (it appears) distributed riot gear between themselves and the UPD. People with locked arms began rapidly circling the camp, but there were not enough, so the perimiter was broken and the police wited for people to get tired and for the thing to fall apart. Then, they started to hit in waves, pulling down tents and grabbing 2-3 people per hit. They could have picked us off like that, but the rear appears to have fallen apart at this point and we fell deeper into the camp. The perimieter falling at this point seems to have been a largely good thing, because it allowed the hardcore mfs who knew how to handle themselves to form an effective front infront of us campers, and I elected to hang back and essentially keep my hands visible. I am not afraid to say that at this point I was noticably nervous and feeling less and less like getting arrested.

At this point, the presumably soon-to-be-infamous hatchet was confiscated. It was a foot long at most, wilded by a no more then 5'5" individual who did not appear particularly pysically powerfull. They were a bit high-strung through the prior protest, bringing their own megaphone and generally being a bit more wild then the rest, but in a much less organized way then the real ones who were organizing. They sat down in the encampment behind the main body of campers, and as the police pushed into the encampment we were herded away from them by an organizer. seperated, an officer went around behind them and simply picked them up, causing them to drop the hatchet without swinging it (or assuming a position where they could swing it with any efficacy). Certainly not the brightest bulb in the box, a silid condmnation of individual action, and (based on the SLCPD officer walking around holding it like a foul daiper afterword) an example of cops blowing things out of proportion. A news article reported the hatchet confiscation and "injuries" from thrown bits of cardboard and disposable plastic water bottles (at the pigs), implying a connection.

At this point, I think that MECHA people began to liquidate the camp on the opposite side of us. I assumed that the pigs had fully encircled us and were the ones pulling down the tents. The line of real ones held 2 charges, in a roughly triangle shape with us campers in the middle, preventing a total rout. Hands on shilds with hands on backs, 2-3 layers. Wooden planks and a stool interceeding.

Eventually, once approx 2/3 of the tents had been pulled to the far end of the field, the organizers called for a "tactical dispersion". Obviously sortof a chickenshit thing to do, but I will admit to being glad for an excuse and not hesitating to take my leave of the scene, obviously sortof a chickenshit thing to do. I was initially suspicious of the person who made the argument, but with the breakup of the crowd I was more then happy to take the conformation of some rando as confirming the truth. It appears I should not have been so doubtfull. Tactically, it makes sense: sufficent matierel had been recovered to keep the thing going, and they needed to keep bail money and non-arrested personel supplies up to keep things moving into the future. After I left, I assume some people tried to stick it out or the cops charged the stragglers, to make up to the reported 17 arrests.

I procedded to take a long route to my dorm, and on the way I was briefly accosted by a truck full of homophobes who appeared unable to pronounce "faggot". I offered a hand gesture without comment and kept walking.

What did we learn?

• Lesson #1: Memorize a couple close friend's phone numbers now. Never know when you might need them.
• Lesson #2: Do not underestimate the cops' brutality or the organizer's willingness to act calculatingly. Do not fear, but understand.
• Lesson #3: Pack light, bring only cheap things
• Lesson #4: Never underestimate your psychological tendancy to get swept up in these sort of thing. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

3:13 pm 4/30: follow-up rally announced for 6:00. Not going to attend due to major negative vibes (read: because I am a total poser), specifically with the timing and rumors I feel like this is more just an excuse to fight the cops then really spread the word. Noble, but not what I feel like doing. Not publishing notes till tomorrow morning for obvious infosec reasons.

8:09 pm 4/30: Protest moved to metro jail, good call. Also good call to not attend, the vibes are definately negative. A possible interpritation for all this is that the internet has created a uniquly radical and small bubble in the SLC leftist community (myself included, insofar as I am really a leftist and/or part of a community)-- the classic we go hard bc we need to combined with the social media bubble thing.

8:55 pm 4/30: After further reflection, bhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEou104m_P0ad call. most attendees at protest were college students w nothing better to do like myself. Off campus, main source of warm bodies (me) is absent. Also, I think (based on vauge phrasology, potentially incorrect) that they are protesting for the release of hachet person. An impressive show of solidarity, but taking their eyes off the ball a bit in my oppinion: bad optics, small potatoes goal, high risk for little reward. Not my play. On a personal note, I dissapoint myself with my brain's attempts to assume hachet person's gender in the feminine. Even if their dumb af, they have a right to pronounce.

5:19 am 5/1: I was wrong about last night's rally. I suppose they grabbed Julio (black panther speech guy) Monday morning, and he was infact totally innocent and I 100% should have been at the protest. Lesson: trust the people, they know whats up. Publishing blog.

It is best to think of degrowth not in terms of the litteral reduction of GDP per capita, while that is necacary it is also anciliary. It is more the premise that it is easier to decouple GDP growth from human happieness then it is to decouple it from polluting.

Since capitalisim tries to convert all transactions to money, it is easy to trace all phenomena through money, but a "materialism" that stops whenever it hits money will inevitably miss whatever remains after capitalism's failed comoditization

Academia and Feudalism

CONTEXT

I have recently been thinking about this sort of thing, and I think it makes more sense if you see academia as trying to graft an essentially mideaval mode of production and life history onto our modern capitalist world.

The career path for an academic shares many similarities with ye olde craftsman's- work on the family farm untill young adulthood, building basic skills, then go apprintace under some master craftsman who will provide a sort of mean standard of living, then work your way up eventually completing a masterwork (PHD thesis) and being accepted as a master, where the guild cooperation keeps you in buisness and you can eventually start training apprintaces of your own.

Academia worked like this for a while, by simultaneously convincing aristocrats to give them money and also acting as a two-sided platform to give legitimacy to wealthy children while subsidizing research to build that legitimacy. Most scientific progress was done either as a side-hustle of the otherwise provisioned or as part of this mideaval institution.

Then, the industrial revolution at about 1750 began ravaging the original trade guilds by comodifying and mass-producing their goods. Academia doged this bullet (kindof) because research by definition cannot be commodified-- good research is on some level fundamentally different from all other research, so the mideavil trade guild structure needed to be maintained.

I am not advocating for this mideavil system in terms of fairness or goodness for reaserchers, it was full of rent extraction (think of having the students author sections of his textbook that he still makes money off of) and the construction of fiefdoms of hangers-on even when it isn't healthy (having Sabine get this independant funding but still expecting her to be "loyal" to him), just pointing out that it has a major part of the goods and bads.

Anyway, as our society has become totally capitalist and donors/governments stopped recognizing the feudal character, they started desperately trying to comodify research to fit it into the capitalist framework (just the right amount of edgy) and create the samey degree mills that we know & love by inventing macines (string theory's framework) that can produce new papers that hit a basic standard of "new" to seem like real reserch but not too new to escape the comodity definition (a new partical is new enough, but doesn't smash the framework)

So academia is really just a confused jumble of some of the worst parts of mideaval craftsmanship and comodity production, full of some of the most earnest and intellegent people out there and also just a whole bunch of assholes.

As far as solutions go, Sabine's jump to youtube is interesting, but I don't know if it is sustainable (because of how much revenue per view she gets, there needs to be like a fuckload of casual pysics fans for every researcher supported, and IDK if there are enough of those to sustain a productive field's worth of researchers. And also, the attention economy has it's own set of yikes things that we have just begun to see the edge of.

A silly and radical suggestion: Grant by lottery. Standardized testing for proficiency in basic skills (mathematical and statistical competence, maybe writing ability), and then randomly assign 5 year grants to anyone who scores above a certain amount. Maybe we can even keep the masterwork structure, but that would be a big compromise. Teaching positions w cross-subsidization when not haves a grant (they can teach math and writing, they just passed a big ol test in it!)