I don’t want to type stuff into a command line. Like ever. If this is possible then I’m in.

This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?

The objections are about its personality? Who cares, as long as it’s good at coding? That’s the only thing it’s actually useful for.

You could say the same thing about capitalism in general yet here we are.

Environmental concerns have never stopped any developed economy from doing what they want. Just look at this area on a map. These objections are not serious. The passenger rail service is trash in the US because of the automobile and hydrocarbon industries.

That might mean they figure out their societal problems before they try to industrialize

So I’ll be honest. I use GPT to write Python scripts for my research. I’m not a coder and I don’t want to be one, but I do need to model data sometimes and I find it incredibly useful that I can tell it something in English and it can write modeling scripts in Python. It’s also a great way to learn some coding basics. So please tell me why this is bad and what I should do instead.

We’re at the point in wealth concentration where you can just look at someone and tell when they think poor people should be slaves. He looks like the Monopoly Man.

America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.

Wild how international finance is now tied to a feud between a rodeo clown and an adult gundam nerd. I thought the subprime mortgage crisis was stupid but this has to break some record. I’ve accepted that the world will get progressively dumber in my lifetime but at this point I can’t imagine how.

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I’m supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I’m here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we’d have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don’t waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

Could you please finish your manifesto? I want to know what happens at the end. Do we mass shoot all the boomers?

Yeah every new technological solution has its associated ecological cost. Some are better than others. Guess which ones are the most profitable.

There’s something called the Kuznets environmental curve that explains this pretty intuitively. It’s an optimistic forecast that I only buy when I’m in a good mood.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve

This is from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. It’s an anecdote his grad school advisor told him about a Samoan lying around on the beach.

MISSIONARY: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that.

SAMOAN: Why? What do you think I should be doing?

MISSIONARY: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it?

SAMOAN: And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money.

SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you.

SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day.

In modern society you either work or starve. There’s no adventurous alternative as would have been available before modernity.

Having visited Berlin and Auschwitz, I agree with you. I just implore you not to take the perils of the military industrial complex required to defeat such evil lightly. Especially important is the alienation that it creates in its adherents, which prefigures additional evil. To paraphrase Einstein, our civilization will not survive the next world war.

Since you’re into Douglass, here’s a snippet from across the ocean. One of our greatest poets was Petőfi, who rallied the Hungarians to revolution against the Habsburgs. He died in the war but his compatriot, Kossuth, escaped and toured America, and much was written about him in Douglass’ paper.

The parallels to today are uncanny, with a war in Crimea, a divided Europe, and an overstretched Anglo empire.

I believe that in all human life there is an infinity of possibility. I don’t believe it can be realized in a single human life. So I idealize humans as sacred with the understanding that they are not. This grades into other organisms as well, but less complex beings have more definite boundaries. So mosquito life can be instrumentalized if it results in malaria, and this is why we spray them en masse with insecticides.

The logic of inflicting cruelty to save lives works in the animal kingdom, but I don’t extend it to us (or mammals generally but this is another discussion), so this is I think where we disagree. To me, extending this to human lives who suffer visibly results in the kind of thinking that ends in holocaust.

But I understand the counterargument. I understand why John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry and why he refused to surrender. I also think he should have retreated into the mountains when he had the opportunity, but this is again another discussion. I just don’t think another war will give us what we want, and this is I think what Frederick Douglas was getting at when he tried to dissuade Brown from carrying out the raid. Thanks for listening.

You have to talk to them and admit they’re human beings worth talking to. You have to believe they act the way they do because of a deep pain, and you have to imagine what it’s like to feel such pain. And you have to accept that doing so is dangerous because you can’t trust them. Without a faith to guide you this sounds impossible. And it leaves us trying to engineer solutions that make things worse. I don’t have any answers either, I just wanted you to try to realize how painful it is to hear good people suggesting evil things.

I’m sorry but this just doesn’t work. A society that abandons hope for the redemption of the worst transgressors of its social norms is a society like the US, with the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world (after El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan). You can’t just kill the traitors just like you can’t just imprison all the murderers and political dissidents.

Redemption does work. It is documented within the most extreme circumstances. It’s not easy and it requires time and resources. But it can only happen with patience and kindness. And I admit that this brings with it a lot of contradictions but I won’t be a part of an extermination campaign no matter how grotesque the vermin might appear.

Did anybody find the transcript for this second leak? The first one was so cringe and I’d love to read this one as well.