Tag: Lies

Categories
Travel

Day 1162 and AirTag

Heathrow remains a bit of a shitshow and impossible to navigate. I got lost in a liminal space where all I could hear was announcements about their staffing shortages but I could see no other human in sight.

A long concrete hallway in Terminal 5 at Heathrow without any people

I got in a nice peaceful 20 minute walk without another soul. And then I was thrown into the maw of baggage claim and lost luggage.

I typically use a 3 bag cascade system anytime I’m on the road for an extended period. A checked bag, a small roller and a backpack.

I was doing a short positioning flight to get my Heathrow transcontinental. At the originating flight on British Airways I was told you can’t check in for the transcontinental so for the 3 hour “hop” flight I should check both (full flight and no overhead storage is a constant issue these days) so I should collect them at Heathrow and re-check in the morning.

Always travel with AirTags.

Somehow despite me not flying BA for the transcontinental, and the most salient fact of me not even being checked in for my longer transcontinental flight, the damn bags got “checked through” and are lost somewhere in Heathrow. They were at another terminal as the tags show waiting for my flight overnight. This was a mistake on almost everyone’s part at the various airlines.

I’m wiped as I spent spent two hours of my evening trying to locate last night but thankfully in my backpack I always carry an overnight PJ set, my medications, electronics & the “wet” toiletries that Heathrow polices like the Stasi in a quart baggie. I overnighted in a hotel just find.

I’m trying to find the luggage and AirTags insist it’s at Terminal 3. The airline says it’s in “The Bin” and should be sorted into my flight. I’ve got no other way of assessing if that’s true so I may I’ll end up in El Segundo with nothing but black Gap sweats.

My usual system is designed for this chaos and I rarely let the small grey roller out of my sight and never let my backpack be taken from my person except at security. I won’t deviate from it ever again.

The story has a happy ending even if I don’t know if my bags will make it yet. I was able to enjoy a dim sum breakfast at the Cathay Pacific lounge and get a copy of the Financial Times.

Dan Dan Noodles and fresh bao
Categories
Aesthetics Emotional Work Uncategorized

1156 and On and Off

I don’t have anything to say right now. I had an offline day in which I stayed in the moment and reflected.

Sometimes it’s simply a choice to be in the problems of a given moment. You could just not fixate. The frictions of any given day are a choice. If you choose to experience a problem more then once it’s not done teaching you.

I’m always hopeful that I’ll learn my lesson. That each time I’m “on” and experiencing the same problem again is because I’ve chosen to keep at the lesson.

Maybe it’s fine to get comfortable. The older I get the more I envy my stupid younger self who has the energy to be a total moron. Now if I’m a total moron my life stands still. I have to actively choose to learn from the problems in front of me.

And so as I chose to jump back into another round of action I can only hope I’ve learned my lesson. Truly sometimes I wish I was a faster learner. But then I see I learn at all and that’s not at all a guarantee. Plenty of people work hard at just staying in the same place.

Entropy tugging at our bodies erodes the coastlines of our personal boundaries. Hopefully whatever is reshaped by the pressure emerges stronger. Mostly it’s just cliff’s falling into the sea. In other news, I drove up a long coastal road and contemplated thermodynamics. It was lovely.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1153 and Open Roads

I went on a “long” drive today. It took three hours go about 160 kilometers, which is for Americans about 35 miles per hour. The speed limit was technically 60 mph (or 90km an hour) but traffic was everywhere and open road a mere dream.

Americans are so spoiled for our interstate system. I’d encourage anyone who can to rent a car and drive the roads of greater Europe and remind yourself how good we have it with Eisenhower’s legacy. Highways are not always open roads.

The various forms of traffic ranged from other vehicles to actual sheep. Spring is around the corner in the Mediterranean and little lambs tend to wander. Police, and pedestrians wandered even far from the city and nowhere was there more than a few kilometers to open the throttle. The black Mercedes I rode in roared through needless roundabouts.

I wasn’t exactly in civilization during most of the drive. I was going from a fairly major city to a beach town. In between was not so picturesque villages and ample signs of degrowth.

If Americans are saddened by rest stop towns and hollowed out empty America, do not make the mistake that it’s unique to us. Inflation, corruption, poverty and overbearing government are everywhere that we tolerate it. If we must have an expensive bureaucracy the least they can give us is the open road.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1151 and Waiting Line

Do you believe
In what you see
Motionless wheel
Nothing is real
Wasting my time
In the waiting line
Do you believe
In what you see

Waiting Line Zero 7 Sophie Barker

I like to do errands with noise canceling headphones on these days. The ambient noise of public life has become more grating as I get older. Cue up lo-fi chill hop beats you can study/relax to Bojack Horseman joke.

Or in my case, a down tempo bit on waiting in lines from some softer era when Garden State was all the rage. I have to admit I’ve never seen the movie.

It seems apt that the more alienated we become from the human component of public life that the more the waiting in line feels like an unreal unreal activity.

We run our little programs in our little lives. We accept being NPCs for a little convenience. You don’t want to slow up everyone’s business with any of your troubles.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1149 and Human Nature

I am experiencing a waning in my desire to be online. Not because I don’t wish to be in the thick of things, but because I simply don’t have as much I want to contribute when I am myself under stress. And it’s all stress now unless you simply stop caring. And I still care.

It’s human nature to be stressed at the available problems. I’ve got access to all kinds of problems now on my phone. So I am stressed.

I don’t have any reason to be participating in any stress but my own at the moment except that I see a lot of available problems because I am always watching.

I’d rather pay less attention. But paying attention is what pays the bills. Ted Goia says we’ve gone from art to commerce to attention to dopamine

An uncharitable view of people who sell art, commerce and informations or blame Athens, Jerusalem, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley if you must. In that order.

I suppose this view of information technology as unmitigated casinos of sin is true in a world of addicts. I don’t think we are all addicts. Nor do I think anyone who sells something addictive is a drug dealer.

I’m neither an addict nor a dealer but here I am selling and consuming information nevertheless. I’m not a Kardashian but I’m not a Buddha either. Maybe at best I’m Kim Kierkegaard. The sickness into death compels me to poast.

If we are all addicted to the constant influx of other people’s bullshit then I suppose the attention economy has moved to the addiction economy. We are addicted to the dramas of humanity and some of our dramas are more or less real than other.

A screen grab from a friend of the scariest thing in the world. An attention whore.

Except I don’t particularly want to be addicted to anyone’s bullshit right now. I’m not even all that interested in my own. I’m sick of my bullshit. Why should I pay attention to yours? At best I’ll pay attention to the bullshit on Netflix’s Love is Blind. I don’t mind if it’s packaged for sale. I actually prefer it. At least it wraps in an hour.

I’ve got a few basic principles that orient my life. I believe humans can make decisions for themselves. I believe most of us aren’t at all good at it because we are reactive impulsive animals with just the barest capacity for reasons.

But that capacity exists and it has separated us from the animals. We shall remained chained to the consequences of knowledge. I understand the impulse to blame that bitch Eve. But we’ve got the apple of the tree of knowledge so it’s time to accept paradise is lost.

Anyways, good luck surviving the churn and try not to fuck people over. Good faith is all we’ve got. Try to deliver value and not suck more resources than you deliver. Bow to the thermodynamic Gods and climb the Kardashev scale. Or keep up with the Cardassians. Are you sure you know how many lights there are? Better Google it to make sure.

Captain Picard getting Cardassian in the loop reinforcement learning. I mean torture. There are four lights.
Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1144 and Parsifal

I’m just going to ramble this one as the synthesis on it isn’t worth the energy to me tonight. I’ll work on that another day if I get around to it.

My mother’s interpretation of the legend of Parsifal is that we cannot succeed at our quest if we do not ask the right questions. I suspect it has something to do with the innocence of a pure heart asking the right questions but frankly this is a bit beyond my own experience of the Waldorf Steiner system.

Parsifal (or Sir Percival) was a Knight of King Arthur. His story is told by the troubadours of France and Germany, notably Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. The Parsifal story stands between the past age that looked for secrets of the spirit and the coming age that was going to search for the secrets of matter.

In this engaging retelling of the legend of Parsifal, Charles Kovacs’s critical commentary offers Steiner-Waldorf educators an unrivalled insight into teaching the story of Parsifal and will aid in lesson planning

Parsifal and the Search for The Grail

This feels relevant to me in the context of artificial intelligence making computer programming more accessible. Prompt engineering is simply asking the right question. Enabling more people to specify exactly what they want is terrifying because it might enable more people to ask the right questions and get an answer.

If you depend on people not being able to ask the right questions without your guidance you’d probably oppose it too. I believe that there is a religious aspect to our entire approach to artificial intelligence and we must grapple with it as surely as the Reformation shook the Catholic Church.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1142 and Come See The Violence Inherent in the System

While parked in gridlock caused by the American state department delegation snarling traffic in Tirana, I shared a classic British comedic sketch from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail with a friend who resides part time in the Balkans.

King Arthur is riding through his lands and is asked to contemplate anarcho-syndicalism and the constitutional arrangement most equitable to an offended peasant named Dennis.

Help! Help! I’m being repressed

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Feeling moderately repressed ourselves by the various bureaucrats, politicians, and general institutional disarrays that was in our way, the joke hit home. No matter your station in life, we are all a repressed in someone else’s system.

We can make jokes about staying above the API layer all we like, but the nudging organizational state is finding ways to reduce us to variables. Many of us have become spreadsheet brained. Will it be a gradient descent into the madness of a jackbooted local minima?

Perhaps it better to become the disassociating trader acted by Paul Bettany in Margin Call who simply can’t stomach that level of hypocrisy. He knows we want to play innocent about the violence hidden underneath the abstractions.

“Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you’re necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin’ houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair really fuckin’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so fuck em. Fuck normal peopl

Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) Margin Call

We are all experiencing some level of abstraction from the base layers of reality. Some of us are more academic about it. Some of us are simply more or less unwilling to accept the hypocrisy of it. None of us can opt out completely. Plenty of professions let you get closer to the visceral base reality and then you too can see the violent inherent in the system.

And so we argued over resources and raw power. How abstract can we get? The paleoconomists say “go back to the gold standard” but we can’t. Can we go forward though?

Most of us see that entirely detaching the exchange value of goods from material items and their underlying value is a huge struggle for most people. We wouldn’t have endless discussions about the cost of groceries if it was clear to folks how the market priced physical goods.

Financial markets are fictions where we negotiate material needs like food, shelter, clean water, bodily integrity, and property ownership claims. All need to be priced in. It isn’t fun when the exchange value mechanism completely detaches from that reality. It makes us uneasy. Shrinkflation makes humans feel gaslit.

Humans are physical beings who abstracted our physical needs into an elaborate market system of exchange values. And like that Monty Python sketch, sure it’s a fun joke, a meme if you prefer, but that meme is a reminder to see the violence inherent in the system.

Anyways, I hope Antony Blinken enjoyed his time in Albania and that everyone has a productive weekend in Munich for the neutral ground security conference. Our diplomats have never needed a neutral ground weekend more amirite? The financial engineers will concede that reality. Maybe.

Categories
Culture

Day 1136 and Shopping in Heels

I had some practical acquisitions that needed to be purchased. They were most easily purchased via an in person retail environment for reasons I won’t get into. I much prefer ecommerce but not everywhere has Amazon if you can believe it.

I wanted to get this done quickly. While it’s true I like to putter around many types of stores. I’m quite fond of browsing in grocery stores for instances. But I prefer to be ruthlessly pragmatic when it comes to necessities. Browsing can be your enemy when you know exactly what you want.

Much of shopping can be a hostile and adversarial environment. Merchandising, pricing, sales associates all work on your focus and attention.

I have a few tricks I use on my own psychology if I would prefer my limited cognitive energy be used on more important decisions than what I’m about to purchase. Deciding between a bunch options for a non important decision weighs on your capacity. I don’t know if science has replicated decision fatigue but it sure feels like it’s real to me.

I wore a pair of high heels to go shopping in this case. It’s just enough discomfort to provide a bit of focus. I wouldn’t want to stay on my feet overly long in heels so I’ll encourage myself to make decisions quickly and not linger over it.

I was able to easily and without agonizing make quick decisions on a number of purchases. Once something fell within 80% of the parameters I’d set out for the item I know I wished to buy I said yes and moved on. It really can be that easy. I’d rather use my focus on important things.

Categories
Media

Day 1122 and Zombie Media

The lifespan of a media brand is an odd thing. Commanding attention and influencing the opinion of large audiences is hard work. Distribution of information has changed a lot in my lifetime which has shaken the business of media.

Some generational powers like Vogue have managed to hang on even as the internet democratized access to changing fashions. Newspapers, which have consolidated fiercely, are no longer local city standard bearers. The most financial success went in national directions like The New York Times.

Everything is fighting a losing war against the Internet. Weeklies that were concerned with recapping the goings on in the world have all but disappeared. The Economist almost made the transition to the the digital era but lost its way.

For me it was when John Micklethwait left The Economist for Bloomberg. I loved the publication as a teen & twenty something. I miss it still, but once its paywall was up and the editors I trusted were gone, it ceased to exist as an influence in my world. Influence can wane quickly. I read Bloomberg now.

Other media outlets have gone to battle in the Hobbesian war of all against all and seem to be competing with rage headlines and audience capture niches. These are the ones that concern me the most.

Wired Magazine was beloved by the first wave of Internet and technology enthusiasts. Its essays defined the era. Now it seems to have turned on the promise of technology entirely with panicked headlines about the dangers inherent in a new form of corporate structure.

A Dangerous Home for Online Extremism: DAOs

For me, seeing Wired doing this sort of thing is akin to the moment in a zombie movie when a friend or family member is bitten. As they are reanimated from the dead, you are in grief and shock, but also must quickly accept your friend is gone and what is in its place is able to harm you.

For what it’s worth, I have been arguing for the innovative potential in decentralized autonomous organizations for years. I appreciate the spotlight being put on them. But I’m also sad to see a media brand lose trust. It’s not so easily regained.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1118 and Distrustful Shopper

I am a good shopper. I know retail cadences and when to buy a product. If you want to know sales happen or new merchandise timing I usually know. I know manufacturing chains, sourcing standards and material costs across multiple categories. I loved working inside corporate retail and consider my time in cosmetics and fashion to be foundational to my approach to businesses.

This is useful context for what I am currently feeling. I’ve become a very distrustful shopper. Now I feel as if I’m starting from scratch every single time I need to replace an item even if it’s in a category I know intimately.

I’ve worn the same pair of simple black Gap 100% cotton sweatpants for as long as I can remember. They were roughly $30 and I’d get years of good wear. I’d reorder a couple pairs every Black Friday just to be sure I’d always have them.

It wasn’t easy but I could find them. I’d need to check what size (medium) and its name from the last order (always changing) but I’d almost always be able to find it. It drove me bonkers it didn’t maintain a consistent SKU (stock keeping unit) when it was clearly the identical product.

It got harder and harder to find. And then this year they appear to have stopped manufacturing them entirely. I’ve been checking in on the Gap website every couple of months this year and it’s just not re-appearing.

I’ve written about institutional distrust before. But there is something that bothers me about how even someone with experience like me just cannot purchase basic goods reliably anymore.

Shoppers have to relearn an entire series of sizing, merchandising, naming, and pricing cues over and over with no reliability on offer from even the most established brands.

If you like an item and it serves you well, buy another one immediately. Heck buy two. There guarantee that you will able to find it again in a few years.