RandomNotes

Title: Random Notes
Created: 2023-03-25

* opportunistic political rhetoric
* some risks are the responsibility of the government to manage
* covid - normalizing mass death now, 
* every U.S. government bureaucracy is slow, wasteful and frequently incompetent 
* What will determine the degree of success in your life is your ability to work in a team.
* Humans think about life as a drama full of decision-making, what will be the meaning of human life if most decisions are taking by algorithms?
* Digital information consumption as a psychological control vector
* Language is the operating system of human culture. From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations — even computer code. A.I.’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By gaining mastery of language, A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to holy sepulchers.
* the level of surveillance the Palestinians are experiencing may be what we all will experience.
* mammals solve most problems by feeling things.
* first, our lives are increasingly dematerialized, consisting of consuming and generating information online,
* On the Internet, the truth is paywalled and the bullshit is free
* increased shamelessness in politics
* everyone is desperately seeking their own audience and fracturing reality in the process.
* it's easier to destroy than create
* Just like relationships between people, relationships between countries can all too easily be built on a foundation of unintentional misunderstandings, faulty assumptions and predigested truths
* The rich innovate in cyberspace, which is largely a regulation free zone. The poor innovate on the ground, in real things, and local government rules micromanage the physical.
* what can guide in the era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming and cyber-warfare?
* should you ask AI where you should work, whom you should marry, 
* human power depends on mass cooperation and mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities.
* There’s been an average of more than one school shooting per week in the United States so far in 2023, so it’s great to see lawmakers from both parties finally reaching consensus on how to protect America’s children: Ban TikTok.
* In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail; in 2018 we are down to zero.
* People aren’t paid so poorly because they have to be for their job to exist—they’re paid so poorly because some folks benefit from it.
* “We were promised inequality in exchange for economic dynamism. We got inequality, now dynamism is declining.”
* programming isn't coding
* April 2022 reporters at Swiss television station RTS created a fake website of a restaurant in Lausanne and, in just 20 days, were able to get the restaurant listed as one of the city’s ten best on TripAdvisor
* animals have ethics
* All progress is bad for somebody
* The old growth model is based on fossil fuels and pollution. The new growth
strategy is about cutting emissions, creating jobs and boosting innovation.
* secular and thinking arecommited truethcompassion and freedom 
* China - We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.
*  “God did not make being an auto worker a good job!” 
* “High-tech technologies tend to get cheaper because of ever-increasing knowledge accumulation. Comparatively lower-tech technologies can’t get much cheaper because we’ve accumulated all the knowledge we can already,”
* They (American founders) believed that it was possible to recognize and secure rights for all even while putting power in the hands only of some (white male property holders).
* “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” writes Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
* wants to believe you can create something amazing and innovative with Known, Controlled, Riskless Process.
* moral tastes -  care, equity, proportionality (whereby rewards are based on merit or contribution), loyalty, purity and authority
* Humans gain new capacities through their interactions with language, symbols, and media. (how about AI)
* there’s very little evidence of actual competency that are required in this paperwork. It’s all evidence of compliance... what they have is a competency in contracting. But if we want to make law and policy that are implementable, then we have to have implementers at the table when that law and policy is being written.
* ”Military glory is the attractive rainbow that arises in showers of blood.” A.L.
* The epitaph on more than one Roman tombstone read: “A gang of doctors killed me.”
* What are we promoting? >There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making. Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
* Life doesn't have a narrative arc.
* Toxic masculinity refers to the notion that some people’s idea of “manliness” perpetuates domination, homophobia, and aggression
* engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.
* The empty part of the drawer is what makes it a useful tool.
* Lithium is abundant but not always easy to extract.
* Being alive is bad for your health
* Why computers - You can predict rapid progress in places where computers can see what’s happening.
* Healthy cities must build new things and rehabilitate old ones
* The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare. -- Bobby Knight
* When goods don’t cross borders, armies will
* What was once given by family, neighborhood and workplace now must be achieved and actively cultivated on an individual basis. (happiness)
* ... that depends on whether the price of endless war exceeds or falls short of the price of permanent surrender
* History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership
* A competitive global system is not built to solve coordination problems (neoliberalism)
* [Clinton]"Democrats dumped the working class and became the party of Wall Street and welfare bums."
* perceptions without conceptions are blind.
* free-market ideology -- in this vision, individual choice and individual advancement take center stage. Requirements are recast as paternalistic; freedom is understood as doing as one pleases. Civic education is a public good. Left to the market, it will always be undersupplied.
* the absence of power also corrupts
* Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money -- it’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.
* Compared to Walmart who earns $235,450 of sales per employe, Costco earns more than twice the amount at $744,893.
* "labor immigration" she wants to restrict.
*  People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead. – Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
* The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines - Vonnegut
* It may be impossible to live without a culture.” – Kurt Vonnegut
* “women hold up half the sky,”
* given the choice of order or justice, he would prefer order.
* America's social contract
* Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world’ ; never interrupt it unnecessarily.” 
* The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn.
* when the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. Now, we have the Bible and they have the land.
* the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies the fact that both peoples are historically indigenous and neither has anywhere else to go, even as delusional dreams persist on both sides of the disappearance of the other.
* the ruthlessness of machines
* AI instruments of discovery rather than engines of production
* As Feynman once said about the universe, "It's not complicated, it's just a lot of it".
* education is civilization building
* techno-capital machine
* motors of man
* their smiles now exist only in photographs.
*  to prevent cemeteries from replacing cities 
* “If we don’t invest money in families, there is no future for any of us,” 
* Creating the conditions for success ...
* It's harder to do your job when you are not aligned...
* government-managed markets...
* American justice
* American South - Organized labor was, is and remains an existential threat to the political and economic elites of a region whose foremost commitment is to the maintenance of an employer-dominated economy of low-wage labor and its attendant social order.
* reminder that the United States' role in global security isn't the best issue to use as leverage for parochial electoral advantage. It can get real very quickly. 
* Before Kant, it’s said, philosophers were divided between Rationalists and Empiricists
* he called colonialism “evil” and congratulated the Chinese and Japanese for denying entry to European invaders
* confusing motion for work
* Infrastructure is destiny

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