When Life Hands you Lemons

More complicated than you and I will ever fathom.

It’s one thing to think about how weird it is to be anything at all, but it’s an entirely other thing to think about just how we got here.

How many thousands of generations of homo sapiens have died so we can sit inside our insulated homes, with a roof over our heads, on top of a bed, wearing pajamas and under a comforter?

Many. Many thousands.

Progress is parabolic.

Each of the generations before us have made technological progress in order to stay alive. It’s only recently that we’ve been able to live in comfort and focus on improving our lives and the lives of others.

So what’s next? We’re currently in the information age. What comes after the information age? I encourage you to think about this for yourself, but you should be aware of a few things:

1. All of Elon Musk’s ventures are ridiculous. Tesla is among the tamest, as are The Boring Company and Paypal. SpaceX, Neuralink, and OpenAI are among the craziest. Read up on them if you haven’t.
2. We are basically cyborgs. Our phones are basically part of us. Imagine what you can and can’t do without your phone, and how naked you feel when you don’t have it with you.
3. We’re on the cusp of mass automation. Self-driving cars are here, assembly lines have nearly been fully-automated. Full automation of food service is already on the near horizon.

Pause the video now to do some thinking.

jeopardy music

Personally, I’m predicting another industrial revolution, followed by another Renaissance. We’ll be spending the next however long spending time automating all our services for however many years, then there will be a period of arts and expression afterward. A problem I see with it is that everybody needs to have something to work toward, and many non-creative types may have a problem with finding something to do. Suicide rates will increase drastically, medicine costs will rise, and the world will become restless.

I’m expecting a 30-60 years for the next industrial revolution, then maybe 100-150 for a Renaissance.

What do you think?

In last month’s post, I wrote about how it’s impossible to determine if the news you’re getting is true, and part of the reason is that news profits from getting views. Let’s explore that further.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. News websites get paid a fraction of a penny when someone sees an ad on it. (I had originally planned to explain all the technical details but it turned out to be wordy and dry, sorta like my sense of humor.) So sometimes a news website, even an honorable one, might run an article (or title) of questionable validity in order to make ends meet for the month. It’s clickbait.

What news website do you know that provides mostly fact and little fiction, or vice versa? News organizations out on either end are usually less popular. It’s not as exciting to read facts without any excitement every so often, and it’s not very fun to read lies all the time either. Being deep on either end of the spectrum isn’t as sustainable a business model.

Now that we’ve established that news articles will create fake news for money, we begin to wonder: is there some sort of barrier or counter to this?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: nooooooooooooooo.

For one, where exactly would you put this barrier? Would you put it on platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit? Well, no, because these websites are platforms, not publishers; they aren’t in the business of dictating which news articles are true and which aren’t.

Mike Rowe wrote a post about this point recently. It’s rather long but it’s a very easy read.

If you choose one thing not to skip, choose the preceding post from Mike Rowe. He’s much more articulate than I.

What if you had a unified body of people that vetted all news articles before they were posted online and discarded the ones that weren’t true?

Well, that would be:

1. Biased
2. Impossible to manage, based on sheer amount of content published per second
3. Easily manipulated
4. Pretty much the definition of censorship

Bringing a machine-learning algorithm in as a solution would only address the second issue, and would likely make the first and third worse. Pff. Can you imagine if someone taught the all-encompassing censorship algorithm that nobody is allowed to post anything bad about Joe Biden or Donald Trump?

What it comes down to

is this: we have to do our own research on the news we receive. We have to carefully scrutinize each bit of information to determine for ourselves whether it’s true or false, and we can’t rely on a machine or another person to do this for us.

I full realize that I’m shouting into the wind, here. People are already failing at this. People are more happy to yell within their echochambers than think critically and objectively about the things they read and hear around them.

The future is bleak, and we’re living in it.

There will be a part 3 to this post, because there has to be.

Sometimes when I get fired up about politics, I think about writing a piece on why I disagree with aspects of both sides. It hasn’t come to that yet, but I do consider moving to another country all the time.

This month has been full of studying for job interviews and working on various music projects. Here’s something my a cappella group put together earlier this month. It took a long time.

This quarantine I learned:

• How to trade stock options (though I’m still learning)
• Basic audio engineering
• Video editing
• Dynamic programming
• Front-end web development
• Basic quant trading
• How to make really good cheesecake
• The science behind the ketogenic diet
• Basic Italian
• I am much less tolerant with annoying people than I thought
• My pride gets in the way of many things
• many other things

I just want a job. Or at least, I want to be able to make money doing the things I’m doing now. Hopefully this will all pay off soon.

August. We got 1/3 of the year left. I wonder what it has in store for us.

We’re all addicted. It’s just a matter of noticing. But what are we addicted to?

Here, I’ll break it down for you.

Sugar

First and perhaps most obvious, sugar and carbs aren’t required as any part of a diet. It is, however, in almost every food we eat, if not as sugar, then as high fructose corn syrup.

In the year 1965, there was a research project done on coronary heart disease, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of coronary heart disease. But get this: the research project was sponsored by the Sugar Research Foundation, and the role of sugar in coronary heart disease was heavily downplayed. Here’s my source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2548255

There are many other articles out there, and studies have been done to prove this point. But it was too late. The food industry has been pushing low-fat foods since then.

Low-fat foods taste bad, though. Fatty foods are delicious, and are what make food taste good. In order to counteract the quality of food dropping, manufacturers began to add sugar in place of the fats.

Coincidentally, the enzyme used to create high-fructose corn syrup was discovered in the same year, 1965, and started being marketed in the 1970s. It was known as being cheaper to produce and much easier to work with than cane sugar, and now you’ll find it in everything.

YOU DON’T NEED IT.

Pleasure

Why do you keep your phone with you at all times?

Why do you keep going back to those same shows, movies, or songs?

You’re addicted to that feeling of being rewarded. Rewarded for making the right decisions or having the right connections, even if they don’t manifest in that way.

Checking your phone is like playing slots. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. And if you win, you get a notification in red. The color red is good for grabbing your attention, for reasons that are frankly beyond the scope of this post.

We live in an age of overwhelming pleasure, and we’re addicted to it. Try putting your phone away for twelve hours and see how much you struggle without it. If you want to challenge yourself further, go for a full dopamine detox.

A dopamine detox means no social media, no video games, no TV, no unproductive Youtube (which is basically TV, let’s be honest here) etc. for a week. It’ll break you out of harmful addictions and re-incentivize you to focus on the better things in life.

Control and Power

This one is much more difficult to see and understand in a practical sense.

Most people will pass this off, saying, “I’m the bottom rung in my company. I don’t have any power.”

It’s not true.

You have control when you decide what to eat for lunch. You have control when you drive your car. You have control when you browse Youtube, or move your character around in a game, or when you have conversations.

The general overarching goal in life is to gain more control over your life. You work to make money to buy things that give you power, in hopes to one day retire when you don’t have to do anything you don’t have to.

You have power over your children, and to some degree, your significant other. You have control over your pets. I don’t think I need to make my point any more clear.

Even the people who willingly give up control are somewhat doing it of their own accord. They’re told that relinquishing their control will free them. I don’t know whether they’ve found what they were searching for, so I won’t make any judgments.

Whether or not the words “control” and “power” are interchangeable can be debated. I say they can, and control is more yearned and more destructive.

That separator looks pretty cool. I should use it more often.