h. Play

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.

There’s a lot of pretending in blackness. It is the result of our circumstances.

Everywhere we exist, we pretend that it’s fine. Sometimes it actually is, when we’re entrenched in our black communities in the Black metaverse.

But when we’re next to each other, next to non-black people, we know we’re not equal. And so the pretending begins.

I’m making as much money as you, I’m going to pretend, while knowing that the statistics say that white wealth is ten to hundred times, on average, bigger.

I’m as free as you are, I’m going to pretend, while knowing that the statistics say the reality is that I have five more times chances to get arrested for any reason.

Pretending allows us to live, while it poisons our souls. It poisons our existences.

So people pretend to be disrespected. On a Sunday night around a dice game in a nice neighborhood, someone pulled the trigger, probably faking outrage under the blanket of alcohol intoxication. And so a 28 year old black man died for the most absurd reason: none.

It was unnecessary, it was probably an accident. He is gone and we’re back pretending that it is just how things are.

There’s a name for this: “hybridity”. The living in-between. It’s a central concept to postcolonial studies, one developed by scholars like Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Hybridity creates something entirely new—neither colonizer nor colonized, but eternally suspended, living in the liminal.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud in Son of Elsewhere, A Memoir in Pieces.

I really enjoyed your book, Stan.

It made me long for what I’ve never had in depth, community, but it also made me wildly aware of the luck of not having to feel the weight of it, of them all, on my shoulders, ever.

That’s actually really heavy. Highways to build all by myself.

No religion. A very secular culture. Fragmented families. Zero blood-related family, no one looking like me. An English first name in the French countryside! Finding myself on the West coast of America. Life always has been hybrid as fuck to me.

And so of course, I needed extremely solid foundations. Science, knowledge and music stabilized me and allowed me to move in this world the way I wanted, respectfully.

And just like you Elamin, and migrants all over the world, I’m a little obsessed with routes and spaces. I think this is why I am in love with horizontality; the endless possibilities, for everyone.

I know!! Completely unreal. This week, I burned two CDs for my car. The pack of 10 CD-R was $2.99.

So weird to touch those again. Weird memories of Plextor and 4X and Yamaha emerging.

I’m also going to buy more music CDs to rip so I needed a CD/DVD player, which was like $25. It’s so cheap, works well, and no one can’t take that music from me, ever.

And yes, I will copy those files on a $15, 128GB flash drive as well.

There are some good things about tech, these days.