happybadger [he/him]

Thanks! You just unlocked something terrible. It was so inconvenient to find the file each time.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I’m not them. I’m just a Marxist calling it out as self-defeating Orthodox Marxism.

Marx was also writing based on observing specific conditions in specific places 150 years ago. The point of Marxism is that it’s a way to coherently frame the things you’re currently observing as intersectionally as possible and test them against prior studies while checking your own personal biases. Most of my organising as a Marxist is in anarchist or democratic socialist orgs because they’re easier to start in the surveillance state that developed after Marx said this. They just don’t scale up as easily as an ML org like PSL, which maintains the same message with discipline in cities across the US. That higher level of organisation is equally important to anarchism’s ease with local organisation, more secure and more able to centralise and use resources.

two paths to the same outcome, two distinct levels of organisation that complement each other where the other falls short

All of the local signs were immediately taken down when Trump was reelected, but I searched for like 4 years for a single one that had an economic argument. Just one line on one sign that mentioned socioeconomics. Not once. It was pure Catholic indulgence for freaks in $500k+ homes. One of them said “in this house we believe water is a human right” and their mansion was on a private lake.

The only thing I learned from multiple physics classes was that I’m not a physicist. People would die if I had to do physics. It’s nonsense made up by nerds to feel smart when real geniuses just eat the apple that falls on their head. Free apple.

I think homeschooling is great. My resume isn’t particularly impressive and I have a mediocre GPA from a mediocre school. When I apply for jobs in today’s economy, there’s so much competition. It would be awesome if they could look at the next resume and see “education: school of life, professor mom, A+ and ten stickers for chores”. I would get that job easily.

It’d be neat if this eventually resulted in something like self-healing space habitat hulls that generate a useful byproduct.

The Purpose of a System is What It Does

It’s pathetic that they didn’t even bother to look at the measuring tape. This flagged as AI slop within a few seconds for me. Not even good AI slop.

Even living so close to the ranches and dryland wheat farms that they poison my water, I can’t afford beef and bread has increased in price by like 40% over the past few years. Cow demons going bankrupt will increase my food security because I can buy their land to homestead on and use their water rights for humans.

Hey gamers, I know where to find free top-tier RAM and GPUs. And you get to pretend you’re in a spy game.

It’d be neat if this could double as fall protection like those backpacks for kids. My great-grandmother died at 101 because a fall broke her hip and she didn’t have the wound healing ability to keep it from becoming infected. If that belt had an airbag it would really add a lot of quality of life to that population.

Yes but you get Kitsap Bangor and galleys with a panini bar. Non-dolphins get slop on a ship.

I see it like submariners getting the best food and pay in a navy. The moment you pay attention to your environment or consider the hope of rescue, you’re the most vulnerable human alive. You’re in a bathtub at the top of a burning skyscraper and all the forces of nature want to kill you instantly if a single component fails. If I couldn’t distract myself with jokes, it’d be like emergency medicine or leftist politics where the reality is horrifying beyond comprehension. I’d last like a week in space before I’m kissing soil for being safe.

wake up, look at the sports score, my team lost 0:2

sigh, go back to my coffee, hope the rest of the season goes well

I’m really curious to see what happens with the Slate truck. The price keeps ballooning to the point that I don’t think consumers will be able to afford it over an econobox, but an electrified 1990s Ford Ranger is exactly what would give me the most utility from a vehicle. It goes further and hauls more than my cargo bike without any extra shit that will break, while having more safety features than a kei truck that can’t drive well on the roads I would need it to.

Outside of a BYD at half the price, it’s the only vehicle I could see myself buying. Either I get a really nice car at a nice ebike price or a purely practical car at an econobox price. Otherwise it makes infinitely more sense to wait for solid-state batteries to proliferate outside of Chinese models so I don’t have to deal with any of the drawbacks to EVs.

It’s what drove me out of emergency medicine. My inner Puzzle Demon was completely satisfied by an environment where the puzzle is doing creative, emotional, technical, moral, manual labour for a noble mission. Keeping track of a dozen metrics and half a dozen textbooks, a constant stream of new puzzles, I got to indulge my need to compulsively read and analyse. But I also felt like a vampire because the US medical system means I save a life only to saddle a profoundly disabled person with an unpayable debt. The only non-Puzzle Demon route I could find was being an MSF doctor right as the west decided that bombing MSF hospitals was okay.

It’s also what drove me into public sector horticulture. I get to spend all day in the sun solving puzzles. Every kind of labour involved except for emotional, but all of that Puzzle Demon energy goes into making meaningful public gardens. With those budgets shrinking and my pay freezing below subsistence level, the better-paying alternative is to be a private landscaper and poison my neighbours while stealing the water from their mouths. The richest assholes in the city get another trophy that I can’t even visit after work and it raises the surrounding property values. All roads lead to Puzzle Demonology without the disarmed public sector providing a sustainable alternative.

Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor.

Funding streams are my big concern here. Government research is mostly toward non-profitable things. I like that NASA takes a decade to develop a robot and cancels the launch repeatedly to make it as safe as possible. Plenty of derived consumer tech will come out of that project and it has the least chance of exploding over my head. Corporate research is mostly toward profitable things. It further enshrines corporate power, limits more technology behind patents, and creates exploitative technologies to generate the most profit for their time. Our intuition goes so haywire with things like tech industry hope-ium, in the opposite direction of NASA considering lots of problems in its slower public research. The best version of an organisation like that is a slow trickle of good data for every field and products for consumer use without restrictions.