Category: Me Myself&I

Now that both the comic and the show are gone, I wish I’d seen:

• Dogs and cats being central to survival
• Bicycles being key in a powerless world
• People seeking batteries for memory/nostalgia purposes to the point of offering everything they have for them
• The cure being real but still under development and failing like 75% of the time
• Beige computers, 90s tech and solar panels
• Less feudalism and more going through every warehouse around with funny stock management stories
• Matriarchies
• Less emphasis on abuse as the entire world is being abused by zombies already

Instead we got the same scenario over and over and over. A bit sad, innit.

Nothing. It feels like nothing. It’s boring.

You see dispensaries here and there. You recognize them because of the usually large hemp visuals and pretty large security dudes posted up on a high chair or under an umbrella.

People coming out of those otherwise-looking-just-like-other-shops shops, carrying little Duro 6 bags. It could be weed, edibles, oil. Whatever.

If you visit you will experience the standard, particular and classic skunk smell at any hour, at any location in LA. 6am at a traffic light, the smell and then if you scan around, maybe a little smoke coming from some car, in the sea of metal.

It could be at 2pm in a luscious backyard on a Tuesday, outside work between buildings at midnight, it doesn’t matter. It always happens. The Smell.

Never really in public public though. People don’t show off about smoking, nor talk about it. It’s around without being around, you know what I mean?

What about cannabis-intoxicated people in public? Well I guess it slows everything down a little bit. Decisions. Maneuvers. Everything takes a bit longer than without it. People craving junk food, maybe that’s the worst aspect of it? I’m not sure, it’s not really an issue.

Like I said, it’s boring. It’s awesome.

There are two, hot tools used by capitalism right now: exclusivity and subscription.

Exclusivity works for a while, until it doesn’t. If you’re successful or wildly successful with exclusive content, people will either copy, steal or offer more for said exclusivity. It doesn’t scale at all. We see this a lot in video games these days; games are far too expensive to make to be exclusive to one platform. It goes back to simple economics: it is good to sell something to a lot of people, rather than less.

Subscription sounds like the ultimate capitalist tool: you will pay for the rest of your life with contract renewals (adding more and more bullet points, mmhmm). But subscription hits two very hard obstacles. First, on the consumer side: we can’t subscribe to everything, that’s unsustainable as hell! I saw the other day Mercedes talking about $1200 annual subscription to get software improvements on electric vehicles, what kind of landlord BS is that? Unsustainable.

But the part that most people forget about subscription that really sucks, is on the producer side: you need to produce quality, constantly. You can’t never rest. You have to get that content out there (otherwise you lose income instantly), and that’s massive anxiety. The relationship between producer and customer becomes quite abusive. I know Patreon creators feel me on that one. It doesn’t work well with intellectual and creative work, which is often born from accidents and progress through iteration. So you start adding water to your lemonade and now people are resentful and either give you nasty feedback, leave, or both.

Conclusion: UBI, baby! Because nothing else works.

A few key points from the article:

• The rate of those deaths has been increasing every year for 20 years by +7% or less; it was +26% in 2020, with the highest rate in 40 years.
• It is estimated that more than half the alcohol sold in the US is used for binge drinking.
• +42% of alcohol-related death for women ages 35 to 44.
• Those deaths are directly related to alcohol consumption and don’t include drunk driving or alcohol-fueled violence.

If we include those, we’re talking about 140,000 deaths per year. We’re losing about 10K folks to COVID every month (120,000 a year). So alcohol in the US right now is more deadly than this stupid virus.

This is not good?

Put another way, it’s better to look at the housing crisis as a policy issue, not a technological one.

It is both simultaneously, dear journalist. Imagine that. It’s a policy issue, for not wanting to house people in empty buildings right now. It’s a technological one for the way we completely suck at building good, sustainable, healthy housing.

This makes me so happy. Not just because they 3D-printed a house, which is how we should be building homes from now on (most efficient way to build, period), but because the shape is very reminiscent of my house prototype: one-story, monocoque, yessir!

Billionaires are not doing anything valuable, y’all. Dear Mr. Bezos, give up your wealth right now and install a giant 3D-printer in every city of America. People would sing your praise for the rest of humanity’s existence.

They sell those giant 86” TVs for under a grand now.

Kids 3 years old and younger growing up with those in front of their eyeballs, will probably be adults who will want VR and not think twice about it. So twenty years from now, in 2043.

Mark Zuckerberg might have been off by twenty years, just like Bill Gates; in 2000, he wanted young people to use touchscreens and digital pens. Well, in 2023 it is a common reality.

It’s hard to predict markets!

But also bringing natural, human elements to computing was and is a noble goal. Doing the opposite, folding humans into the digital, emotionless online world is a different thing.

I don’t do those often. I went to my favorite Fatburger joint in Inglewood, and ordered a King meal. It took 30mn for the very understaffed staff to bring my burger through the deserted sitting area but MAYNE, was it good. Crispy skinny fries and a juicy, tasty burger with everything on it, Marvin and Bar-Kays on the radio and my back in the sun.

Bliss.

My immune system microdosing on Omicron/B.Q.1.2.3.4 injected in my body through a bivalent vaccine shot I got yesterday like,

(Pfizer I)
(Pfizer II)
(Pfizer III)

I bought a head lettuce for $6 this morning. It’s supposed to be 79cts.

I have no idea what’s going on with those crypto crashes. I mean, I understand that it was all smoke and mirror, and that’s all there was, as many people knew.

I  also understand, watching this, that we could easily solve our problems if money was the missing ingredient. But money is abundant, we create it out of thin air whenever we want. And then it disappears in ultra complex techno-finance schemes led by one dude who’s like, “oops”.

What a strange system.