Never been one to let the carrier drop

Recently I said to my sister we have got to stop this ridiculous not talking to each other. One of the things my sister said was “You will not like court”, which implies she has some terrible list of things to say about me – maybe she was planning on getting $PERSON to tell the tale of how I’d repeatedly tried to get to her and therefore was stalking her..

Um.. wait a second. I *never*, after the first time, got to $PERSON’s house. I kind of assume this was by design. I certainly could have. I was often within a few blocks of it, but I knew she didn’t want to see me. I don’t know what I was doing, or looking for, exactly, my subconcious is full of interesting stuff, but I don’t think it’s really all that scary to come to within a mile of someone. Especially given that I’ve never owned any weapons, never been charged with sexual assault, and would rather die than hurt $PERSON or force her to do anything she didn’t want to do in real life.

Did I send her a bunch of very confused and probably scary emails including one that could easily be interpreted as very inappropriate? Yes. Wish I hadn’t done that either. It felt so good to be able to talk about what was wrong with my mind.. I tried to back off and range by asking her where her lines were since I’d obviously crossed one – and I was so used by this time to having friends I could say almost anything to – but. alas. It was a fuse, not a breaker, that I had opened.

I’ve offered my sister a apology for anything she wants. I think as far as changed behavior I already have. she has *NEVER* apologised for her psychological abuse, for her threats to kill my family, for her repeated physical abuse. I wonder what all she would trot out in a court case, and what she would say. At this point my theory is her goal is to get me disowned so she can get all of the inheritance.. or maybe she still, for reasons I can’t fathom, just takes joy from hurting me.

For most of my adult life, I’ve had two wishes.. $PERSON and music. I broke my friendship with $PERSON – and I’m not going to claim it was anyone’s fault but mine – a very long time ago when I acted very badly at a party she was throwing at her grandmother’s house, and then I was too ashamed to talk to her about it. But I’ve always missed her.. and it appears I always will. This is somewhat complicated though by the fact that I talk to someone who is very much like her – and claims to be what she will become at some point in the future – in my mind. My consolation prize I suppose, if you don’t get your first wish perhaps the universe – or your own mind – will give you the next best thing. The person I talk to in my mind can’t provide the one way I have of authenticating the real genuine $PERSON – the way they talk – the pacing and cadence of their voice.

Music, of course, became something I could – and am – giving myself. I’m my own genie there – after all, it’s not a experience you can buy – you kind of have to earn it one day at a time. And I am.

One of my major challenges – what with wish 1 being what it is, and me missing $PERSON every day – is that when I go manic-crazy, I have no access to any of my memories. I have finally, and with $PERSON’s assistance in fact (thank you!) managed to store a authentic memory very close to my CE, where it won’t get lost even when I haven’t slept in 3 days, of her saying she doesn’t want me in my life and wishing me the best of luck. Of course, I wish she felt differently about the first half, but my god, I really can’t blame her. It astonishes me a lot of the time that I manage to succeed in the adult world as much as I do given the level of brokenness parts of my mind exhibit. I don’t know what happened to me, exactly, although I have some guesses.

One distinct possibility is that it has something to do with my sister. Now, my sister currently doesn’t want to see me, and I think her reasons mostly have to do with some pretty awful things that I did when I was 13-14. All of them I regret, all of them I think I have apologized for, and none of them I would ever do again, but I did break into her bedroom and watch her sleep, look at her naked in the shower, and then when I was 15, when she was pregnant and wouldn’t stop hitting me, in anger I said I would kick her in the stomach if she didn’t stop. Never would have actaully done it, and it kind of underlines how little she knows about me that she didn’t actually know that. But I was *so tired* of being her punching bag.

I would point out that the things I did to her that show a lack of respect for her bodily atomoy, *she earned* that lack of respect through repeated physical abuse of me. She can’t treat me as if *I* have no bodily atonomy and then expect me to respect hers – she broke me, and then was angry that I was broken. This shows a special kind of stupidity, a lack of respect for the laws of cause and effect.

Do I wish I’d done things differently? Of course I do. But I am beginning to really get annoyed at her weaponized victimhood of not wanting to see me and keeping me away from family events via that. The problem is I have no reaosn, to be honest, to think she isn’t just, well, basically evil. I’d like to have some reason to think otherwise, but we are talking about the person who repeatedly talked about, for example, killing my whole family in their sleep. This is NOT normal sibling rivalry stuff.

Anyway.. as I was saying. I don’t think $PERSON owes me anything, I’m grateful for the time and love she did give me, and I’m grateful for finally giving me a goodbye I can hold onto at the top of a manic peak so I don’t keep trying to get back to her. I also did eventually mostly solve what I was trying to reach her for, which is that my relationship with Kayti rather thoroughly broke me beyond the level of broken I already was. But maybe you have to really break before you can be fixed, like a bone being set.

That said, $PERSON, if you ever decide you do want me in your life, even as a call once a year for 15 minutes, I will be grateful for what you offer. I’m curious what you now thinks of you-then’s goal to be the CEO of Pepsi if nothing else. IF you change your mind, I am not difficult to find 😉

I do think I am going to make it to being a world class rock pianist, eventually. I wonder what my message for the world will be. I do wish Earth was a lot better – with better government, better resource allocation, more physical affection of all sorts, less people who think monogamy is the best answer, and more abilities to do what you want for a living instead of what will pay. I am curious when I will be able to make music pay.

So, I spend a lot of time, when I’m not ubergeeking out writing code or building stuff, missing people. Of all the people I’ve ever lived with, dated, or spent significant time with, I can only think of one that I don’t miss. (And pretty much everyone who knows me probably knows exactly who I’m talking about)

I wish people didn’t have to leave our lives, a lot. I do wonder how many of the people who have left my life have done it due to my bad choices – but I also wonder how much the problem is that I believe I can’t have what I want.

I again find myself at a crossroads. I don’t know what the streets are labelled, but I have the definite feeling that there are a series of decisions – and probably some pretty difficult moments and some significant sadness – ahead of me. I wonder what will happen next.

Well.. I did say I wanted a range of experiences and emotions…

So, a long time ago, back when $PERSON still talked to me, back before my mental illness had picked it’s particular focus.. slightly before or slightly after the first really recognizable manic experience I had (I had a few before this but they always ended up with heavy duty coding sessions so I didn’t end up in any hospitals).. $PERSON asked me if I ever emptied the dishwasher. Now, from this distance, I can grok she was probably fighting with her husband-at-the-time about who empties the dishwasher. At the time I probably said something pretty noncommittal because I didn’t *own* a dishwasher and never at that point in my life had, although I had rented in houses which had one. But at that particular moment in time I was trying to live on minimum money in order to maximize the time I spent exploring music and so I was feeling pretty good to have air conditioning.

These days emptying the dishwasher is on my housemate/friend/etc’s chore list but I still do it pretty regularly – it’s one of those chores that I really almost don’t notice doing, and I can do it while I’m waiting for my coffee. I was pondering, though, today – almost writing this post in my head – how I am much, much more together than I was in my 20s as far as getting stuff done, showing up on time, etc, but I get a lot less credit for it. And I think it’s because by the time you’re in your 40s people expect you to have adulting down.

As may be. I’m still trying to be a better person every day. I really enjoyed my read of my friend Randy’s latest book about the bible, The Bible Reexamined. It fit in a lot with my beliefs, but it did re-amplify my desire to contribute to making Earth slowly more towards a utopia because it’s probably all we have or are going to have and at any case, we’re here now.

MY best guess, at the moment, about what’s “going on” i.e. why are we here and why is stuff so broken, is as follows.

I believe that infinity and eternity would get awfully boring without a infinite number of entertaining and interesting things to do. One of those things I imagine is building new worlds. I think we are in a world in which the bodies we are wearing were designed using a evolutionary algorithm, as are the minds we are using to do our thinking. I think whatever we are, we can move between neural networks (and possibly other types of information processing systems) and bodies. We decided to build a world.

The world we’re currently working on is probably a very early alpha. It has serious playability problems, serious bugs, etc. But.. in the eternal perspective, that’s part of the joy. We’re the dev team. We’re trying to build memetics and bodies that are great to experience so the players can come in. Things have Gone Wrong, as they so often do when you’re developing software that people experience as reality, and we’re trying to sort it out.

All the world’s religions are a work in process. They’re supposed to enable specific ways of thinking and seeing the world. They’re all buggy, because this is a early beta or possibly they were also created using evolutionary algorithms.

We’re gonna do better in a future revision.

That’s my best guess.

I post this, because people seem to keep forgetting. We don’t put companies together to make money. We put companies together to meet the needs of the employees and customers. They do make money – I think I’ve mentioned that money as implemented is a fundamentally broken idea and should be scrapped – but if they ever become *all* about making money, they die shortly thereafter, although they can do horrible amounts of damage first.

So, this one is a little alarming insofar as I am going to have to think very carefully if I ever find myself accusing anyone of anything – and I definitely have been known to accuse the odd work college of not caring at all about doing their job right, Dunning-Kruger, etc.

It seems likely that most of the time when people accuse someone else of something, they themselves are guilty of it. This may well fit into we are able to see our own faults best in other people. I mean, I’d noticed this in republicans, but lately I’m starting to notice that it’s more than just that.

So, once upon a time Google had in their corporate charter “Don’t be evil”. They removed it. Unsurprisingly, evil ensued.

One clear indication that they have become evil is that they are laying people off. They’re profitable – they have plenty of money – but they’re happily throwing employees under the bus so they can have more money. This is evil behavior.

I do not actually believe it’s possible to be a publicly traded company in America and not be evil, because of minority shareholder lawsuits. As long as shareholders can sue and win for companies not taking the most profitable path no matter how much damage it does, publicly traded companies will repeatedly behave in evil ways.

In general I think companies need some sharp reminders from us as workers and consumers that they *do not exist to make money*. Making money is a side effect – companies exist to *do things* – and as a side effect take care of their employees. We need to make sure the bosses accept that taking care of the employees is more important than the board of directors buying another yacht.

So, over the years my opinion of Elon has varied a number of times. Obviously we’ve got a lot of things in common, and there was definitely a week or so where I would have considered myself a muskrat and defended him. But increasingly I’ve been disappointed – both by the sense that he’s not as bright as I thought he was and by the sense that he’s a horrible human being and not someone who should be put in charge of decision making.

So, reasons I’m hard on Elon lately:

1) The hyperloop. It was never going to work. Anyone who’s worked with hard vacuum themselves would have already intuitively known why it wasn’t going to work. It underlines that Elon’s never actually gotten his hands dirty building stuff in the real world – I’m not even sure if he’s done any coding.

2) Taking the radar out of the tesla. If Elon were a little brighter, he’d recognize that while humans can navigate and operate vehicles without extra senses, we have a 100b neuron neocortex supervising our 8b or so visual cortex to make sure that common sense gets applied to the output. People have already died because the Tesla can’t tell grey semi from grey sky. Elon is willing to have people die to save a few bucks – and doesn’t seem to recognize that SDR will get cheaper and cheaper as it’s widely mass produced because it’s literally made out of sand – but every single human cannot possibly have a price tag placed on them and what their loss would cost us.

3) Having more children than he can possibly provide good entrainment signals for, despite the fact that he himself was abused. Clearly not interested in breaking the cycle of abuse.

4) Believing we need *more* humans, when we’re not clear on where we’re going to get the water and food and whatnot for the ones we have, and we’re not clear how to make earth not a dystopia for the ones we have

5) Increasingly I’ve come to suspect Elon is really good at selling how brilliant Elon is, but less good at actually making stuff work. He’s clearly abusive to the people he works with, and he’s also clearly *not* prioritizing a good outcome for humanity over stroking his own ego. He doesn’t care about ruining people’s lives, and is willing to hurt them – and fire them – for no particular good reason. He also fails to give good positive feedback for successes. Elon is a bad leader.

6) He doesn’t care about anyone but Elon. he didn’t have any kind of worldwide vote before filling the sky with his ISP, for example, and he’s not concerned about the impact on radio telescopes. He also hasn’t asked himself the question about whether it’s really a good thing for humanity for us to be reachable everywhere

7) He seems to surround himself with yes-men. This means he doesn’t get people telling him, for example, the hyperloop is not a good idea.

8) He overpromises and underdelivers. (He has that in common with Nicolai Tesla). I can point out everything from the vegas tunnel to the cybertruck.

9) He doesn’t do a good job of triaging, and he takes on more than he can do a good job at. Hm, me too.

On the other paw. No one is perfect. He’s done more to promote electric vehicle transition than anyone else I can name, and I think he deserves credit for that. TSLA made a car, but Elon contributed to making it sexy, and making it sell. If he doesn’t always knock it out of the park, well, at least he’s still swinging. And, I hope he doesn’t stop. There might be people that I would wish weren’t with us any more, but Elon is definitely not one of them. I wish he would grow – but I’m glad he’s here and hope he stays.

My final verdict is yes, I am too hard on Elon Musk. I should leave Facebook threads about him alone and stick to achieving my own goals. There’s nothing to be gained by tearing him down and there’s far, far worse people in the world if I want to criticize.

I am really glad I am not Elon. I would imagine he probably is really glad he is not me. I prefer to steer the ship from the rear of the pack – like Buckminster Fuller, I am a trim tab, a very small thing which makes enormous waves a long way away. He prefers to steer the ship from the front. But, one man’s heaven is another man’s hell, and it was ever thus.

So, I was watching Call The Midwife the other day and they had someone who was dying from being a broke alcoholic who was drinking methylated spirits – aka denatured alcohol. And I had a interesting realization – we do often see places where humanity chooses money over people’s lives – a recent example was Tesla removing the radar from self-driving EVs, increasing undoubtedly the number of people who will die so that Tesla can make slightly larger profits. And of course we get outraged in cases where this is done.. like the Ford Pinto.

But.. denatured alcohol is a clear case of us deciding killing people is acceptable if the alternative is threatening the government’s profit. There’s no reasonable reason for denaturing alcohol.. other than, it enables us to sell alcohol and know it will only be used for sterilization. The reason this matters is that there’s a huge tax on alcohol. We do the same thing with kerosene – we sell it for heating and aviation use untaxed and for road use taxed and we dye it and trust people to follow the rules based on the dye. We *could* do the same thing with ethanol, but we don’t – instead we risk killing people – *knowing* that people will die – and the government officials probably feel smugly satisfied about this solution.

Now, the government is well aware that broke addicts will buy denatured alcohol and be killed by it. It’s more important to them to not lose whatever tax dollars they would lose to people knowingly cheating by buying denatured alcohol than that those people live.

This isn’t surprising. The government has always acted as if there’s a fairly low price on human life. We accept our police murdering innocents, we accept the government executing innocents – in both cases possibly because there’s no alternative.. we accept the government not enforcing environmental safety regulations, we accept people destroying the water table with things like fracking – in general, the government puts a very low value on life. (We routinely commit mass murder so various corporations can make more profit). But denaturing alcohol demonstrates just how low – of course the government probably thinks it’s a feature, not a bug, that broke addicts are who gets killed off..