The Great Simplification - Full Movie

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Weinstein etc. give off a certain vibe that rubs me the wrong way. First, get rich in finance, then get celebrated for thinking about how to fix what the financialisation of everything has broken, what "we" have broken, as if they'd sacrifice their careers to attone for my sins.
So, yeah, in the century of profile-building, these guys come off as very adept at that.
They're also very late to realize all this stuff.

I don't expect any new revelations from them - the environmentalists and sociologists etc. have been thinking about this stuff for decades. What I do expect however, and here I give them credit, is that they will carry these ideas to new audiences, without the stigma of having a history in environmentalism.
Basically, I think rich Americans probably need to hear this from other rich Americans, because if they hear it from someone less wealthy, it's a leftist ideology born out of resentment or something.

The thing with Eric Weinstein - from everything he says he's not rich at all. He's living an upper-middle class life but nothing like one might expect for a guy whose managing funds for Peter Thiel. One of his complaints is that boomers in their 70's are still holding on to positions in a way that talent younger than themselves can't come of age and develop. This is one of the points that I think Elon Musk got right in a recent interview when someone mentioned that out of all the things he seems interested in life extension didn't seem to be one of them, and his response was that people generally don't change their minds with new information and that if you had people living significantly longer the only result would be that the world would ossify even more - not only would they work until they died but they'd live to defend all of the ideas they had in their young adulthood which might be proven wrong by then but it won't matter.

Something else I'm thinking about a bit, maybe at random, but I was watching some things that had my mind back on economics again. I realize I can sit there and listen to Yanis Varoufakis and Slasoj Zizek discussing techno-feudalism, it makes perfect sense to me, I can then change the station and listen to Chamath Palihapitiya and company with Going All In (a venture capitalist roundtable) interviewing Elon Musk and discussing economics, inflation as it represents available money against available goods, the need for recessions and bear markets to wash out excess and irresponsibly utilized money so that the best businesses survive, all of that makes sense to me too.

Admittedly my college economics was limited to intro to micro and macro, an early intermediate macroeconomic course, a lot of the times with Mark Blyth it gets arcane but I can tell he knows what he's talking about, it seems like we live in a world where all of the people are likeable from within their own bubbles and you can agree with their narratives if you're sitting with them but you realize that the two groups I just mentioned, ie. VC roundtable and Musk vs. Varoufakis and Zizek, there might be fundamentals they'd agree on but particular areas where they'd really philosophically be shooting it out. I think that's what I'd what to be able to find out more on. For example, it makes perfect sense for Elon to say in an interview that if 'stuff' isn't getting made there's no economy and that printing money just creates inflation (his comment that you could be on a desert island with a billion dollars and its worthless if no one knows you're there), at the same time I see where, unless all of the climate science about extinction, biodiversity, and global warming is pure left-wing fantasy extorted out of 97% of scientists (not impossible but, even as a lay spectator who believes in the power of group-think, careerism, economic extortion means, it's really hard to believe that they could get this far on whole cloth BS and to the best I can see it can be both true and horribly politically abused on the left at the same time), it just seems like we're in a very difficult position.

Speaking to that position - my understanding is that the upper class and upper-middle class want to keep things going exactly as they are for as long as they can. The trouble is they have been, over the last forty years, taking that out on working class wages. It seems like the big connection on why that's happening, ie. why you can listen to business leaders where - when you get to hear more about them they're likable people who'd make well-intentioned decisions, they're in part driving the wheels of the situation, you get the sense that it's been about the outflow of labor to the developing world (ie. the neoliberal order), that a lot of the sacrifices being paid on our soil at least seem to be getting reciprocated in the uplift of prior developing countries, but this is where we run into the question of materials and the kind of thing that Simon Michaux was talking about.

This is where, as a lay person who tries to stay informed on these topics, I wish I did have the time to do something like a deep fact-check of Dr. Michaux's work (Nate Hagens as well) when they're talking about the degree of materials shortages we have being an even more pressingly immediate problem than climate change (ie. something that would hit us full force by the end of the decade). When I think of now three groups (high quality leftists in the way of Varoufakis, Zizek, possibly Blyth, informed businessmen and entrepreneurs sort of spanning the usual center-left to center-right, and then sort of the GameB / Concilience Project consensus), the narratives are violently different. The degree to which Varoufakis and Zizek don't talk about materials limitations immediately might not be alarming but it's alarming then that the VC's aren't seeing a steady escalation of price in their purchase orders already.

That circumstantial evidence makes it at least seem like Michaux, Hagens, etc. are spouting BS but I feel like I'd need to be able to do the kind of trace on it that Mikah point out that some skeptics did on the fake space station building we were discussing in another thread over in the science area. It's a bit like either all of these narratives are correct but radically incomplete in their own ways (ie. Michaux might be underestimating Ambri's ability to use calcium and antimony rather than rare earth for energy storage, and then there's all the nascent perovskite thin-film cells). I get that it can be easy to be ruthlessly competitive around here and people to varying degrees like to scalp each other on facts, but this really seems like it's a puzzle that, let say, at least some of the more prominent thinkers on this forum should be able to sort out if we put our heads together. It's an interesting problem in my mind because I don't feel like any of these narratives by themselves really tell us where we're at and I think they're all being as honest with us as they can but they're living within their own myopic spheres where they really need lots of good information at very specific levels to do their work but at the same time I think they get highway hypnosis from the streams they're looking at, and that really happens to all of us. That's a big part of why I like Daniel Schachtenberger as much as I do - ie. the whole issue of very real but competing interests causing most of human attention and energy to radiate off as waste heat from infighting is one of the topics he's paying a lot of attention to.

The scariest outcome is that Hagens and Michaux are right where what happens in the next twenty years would make Varfaukas and Zizek's concerns about techno-feudalism almost look like the preferable of the two dystopias, and they can cover for that not being a common story simply because you can't scare the general population and have good things come of that - especially if everyone is praying for a technological Hail Mary that will get us around the bend, that it's too soon to call, and at it's most cynical maybe some of the political insiders are thinking in the Darwinian sense 'my genes first'. At the same time that's the sort of thing that any really juicy conspiracy theory is made of (the Alex Joneses and David Icke's of the world either lack plausibility or even if there were lizard people or Nordic reptilian shape-shifters the noise on the topic is so profound that any attempt to pan through it is like trying to sift gold nuggets out of diarrhea at which point you just shrug, call the patterns Jungian manifestations, and move on). The trouble is, in the real world, really juicy conspiracy theories almost don't occur outside of very specific agencies or workplaces where things work very autocratically (or in Russia I'm not even sure how they'd use the term 'conspiracy theory' right now, they're almost joining the DPRK in their state propaganda).

That last part makes me think that just about anything that's really a conspiracy theory that has no meat to it, or a scam, should fold pretty fast the moment it actually hits skeptics radars. We don't have the kind of state propaganda which would make these sorts of things unknowable. It really does make me wonder though if we are maybe within a generation of seeing divergent narratives collapse, just because it's impossible IMHO for experts in different areas to have completely diverging views of the world unless the world is just informationally so large that's a case of the elephant parable playing out in which case what... they need to maybe all tap down on the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt)? To that last point I think the least amount of that is coming from the business class, the most of it is coming from climate and materials alarmists, and the more thoughtful and analytic on the left are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum in that they're more worried about techno feudalism or The Great Reset than they are with a total materials collapse the way Hagens and Michaux are suggesting. It's a case where if all of this is just a puff of wind in 2040 and things are just moving along business as usual - it'll be really bizarre to reflect back on how that happened or how these guys got this as wrong as they did.

To the above, thinking about Daniel Shmachtenberger, Samo Burja, Zack Stein, the whole Concilience Project crew, I think I really enjoy their output for the same reason that I enjoy John Gray. to the best that I can tell it's very high quality and high impact generalist and synthetist material. If I were to pan out and get personal, I can see where it's not impossible that they could fall from grace but I sort of have to put them in the same place in their own plane that I put early Metalheadz crew for drum n' bass - ie. a collective of legendary competence.

Metalheadz it's easier to prove and more stable because the discography is there and you can repeatedly listen to the outputs of Photek, Hidden Agenda, Wax Doctor, Source Direct, Digital, J Majik, etc., GameB and Concilience Project could improve or decay over time depending on whether or not they continue to make contact with reality. I can still think of how much it pissed me off when Bret Weinstein almost lead the IDW off a cliff with vaccines (Claire Lehman and Yuri Deigin helped reign that in), to that end I'm thinking the Hagen axis is either the most urgent / pressing or it could be the next Ivermectin waiting to happen. The world would be a much better place if it were just the later but it's true that human wishes don't oscillate the amount of raw materials in the ground, it's not new age manifestation we're talking about - it's mining and there has to be a lot of hard data on it.

I'm not so sure the narratives are as mutually exclusive as they appear to you. I think techno-feudalism and techno-environmental utopia can go together very well, as can techno feudalism and resource deficiency/collapse.
I imagine they could all well fuse together in a blade runner like heterotopia, where there's amazing technology for some, and living in garbage dumps for others.
I have seen plastic recycling in slums in india, where the garbage is sorted by hand. This mechanisim of recycling is amazingly effective, all the while the people who make up that mechanism are living in abject poverty.
Maybe in the future, most of mankind will be busy mining garbage dumps to maintain a techno-utopia for the few who can afford a handful of life-extending machines.

You know, if prdinary humans have beain computer interfaces that allow some level of control, in one way or another, maybe cars and all that are obsolete, abd people will live in poverty like two hundred years ago - and all those metals in cars can go to fancy machinery.

I watched Jaron Lanier the other day, speaking about the metaverse. He's expecting it to end civilisation. He says a society can't function if everyone is perceiving their own reality. To some extent, that's already the case, of course.
But when Zuckerberg talks about it, he speaks about the amazing opportunities of creating new worlds at the touch of a button.
Both visions contain each other, Lanier is not contradicting Zuckerberg and vice versa.

And: I'm not sure to what extent businesspeople are expecting new repositories of rare earth metals in the arctic circle. Then resources wouldn't run out as quickly as predicted. (but climate change would have progressed to a catastrophic level).... Historically, stuff has always been going good and bad. Neoliberal globalisation, as you mentioned, has lifted China out of poverty, to the detriment of the western working class. (Btw.,that detriment was predicted and intended. Hayek wrote that the nation states would have to give up their protection for domestic workers, so the domestic workers would be able to feel the cold wind of the global markets [he actually used that phrase] so they would accept their wagess dropping "to that of the Hindu" [sic].)


Oh, and regarding Weinstein's upper middle class lifestyle: maybe upper middle class like Merkel's successor, Friedrich Merz. He's a Blackrock Hedge fund manager who owns two private jets, which he defines as upper middle class. ... If you are hanging around Peter Thiel, you're perception might be skewed. Weinstein is probably not Thiel-rich, and he might not keep himself some young men for blood transfusions....

A link to what you're talking about:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/19 ... y-concerns

That should probably have it's own paragraph in the DSM, unless it already falls under some personality disorder or neurosis already characterized by crass negotiations with death already existing (such as sympathetic magic and human sacrifice).

Two possibilities when you die:

One is that you blink out of existence permanently and the last few things that might flash across your mind is how much you may have embarrassed yourself and damaged others while thrashing about trying to prevent the inevitable.

The other - one hell of a life review.

Another one of these I just watched, Nate having a conversation with Aza Raskin. Aza cofounded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, previously was head of Mozilla labs and is currently involved in the deep learning and AI field. Some of the more interesting/scary things he was discussing was both the likelihood of computer-generated music indistinguishable from human-made music, even adjustable by verbal user input, movies restructured by verbal user input, the degree of deep fakes we'll be dealing with in the next couple years (to the extent that it will collapse public trust in images and videos found online), and furthermore a project he's involved with that's not only AI geometrically mapped quite a few human languages but is attempting to model and build similar AI mappings of whale, dolphin, etc. language:

^^
That's a great interview, thanks for sharing.

I've been prepared for AI music for a while, ever since Google made a doodle which would generate compositions in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach.

What frustrates me about this is: humans like making music, and art.
They don't like filling out tax forms.

It looks like umemployed artists will be filling out tax forms, while computers make art, without the ability to enjoy it. So, as far as I'm concerned, the AI industry is already on the path to making this world unlivable.

I think the narcissism and borderline epidemic is also likely to exponentiate as childhood development gets wrecked by kids being able to manipulate movies and music, outright rather than just select, via their preferences among so many other things where any pushback or hard boundaries in reality disappears and they find themselves instead living in a sort of cloud-based Skinner box for advertisers.

Oh dear. Yes. And all that, without even talking about VR and what it will do to people, when they're no longer communicating via text and video - with Facebook manipulating the message in transport - but in a "public" "reality" entirely owned by Facebook and geared towards manipulating your sense data.

... For a while now, I've been doing jobs designing for VR, commissioned by public institutions, and I'm doing my best to make them not awful, because it's taxpayer money and also I don't enjoy doing a mediocre job,in general. I have little personal interest in the stuff, but have the hardware floating around the office now. There's surprisingly little content for it, still - other than 'social VR', and from research it seems some people really get hooked on it, and spend a major part of their social lives technologically mediated like that.

With advances in AI, all this stuff will at some point become aesthetically less jarring, then good, then indistinguishable from reality. That's all going to become really, really weird, and really, really troubling.

Unless we run out of coltan on the way, which I consider likely.

Good luck with that project.

Side question - are you familiar at all with Audrey Tang, ie. Taiwan's digital minister? A lot of people, like Tristan Harris, Forrest Landry, etc. have been interviewing him for ideas because he seems to have done a remarkably good job (at least by all outward appearances) of tilting the structure of the social media ecosystem toward both collaborative communication and making it - structurally - difficult to troll or spam. In a way it's structured well enough that he told some interviewers that they were often able to trace most spam and fake news back to its source within a day and get it sorted out. Similarly the had digital online chat forums for public halls, a bit like how Youtube has chat side-bars for live events, but there was a structure trick there as well which helped prevent flooding (it could have been a content relevance filter or something like that - not 100% sure). I'm not sure how much of that would translate to what you're doing but I really like that at least someone out there is building better models than we've propagated from the US and showcasing a notable degree of success with them.

For VR it seems like the trick is combining fun, growth, and engagement with some real element of the unforgiving. I think in my own case I'll eventually buy a VR headset. I'm not wild about Facebook, Google, having a perfect map of my room but I think the main goal would be to at least know what's going on in that world first-hand, be able to survey it, and see what sorts of things or places actually have stuff that's wholesome, useful, even good investing opportunities, rather than just an easy-mode lampoon of real world activities.

thanks - right now, the interesting things in VR are plays with graphics, in my opinion. Half-life Alyx looks great but is also somewhat boring, but really wild things are these kind of ps1-style horror things, where the horror is amplified through the sheer low texture quality, so you're constantly on your toes because you really can't easily determine what things actually are.
Beyond that, it's a bit like as if reddit were a real space, where redditors hang out as real people in avatars... I spent some time "incognito" as a furry. ... actually, that was boring. Turns out, all furries ever talk about when they're among other furries is how they're being bullied by non-furries. and once, a bunch of middle-aged men in anime-girl avatars gave me a lecture about German ww1 hand-guns.

I currently work exclusively with pico devices - the facebook/meta/oculues quest 2 isn't even available in germany, because facebook refuses to bow to German privacy laws. Pico is owned by tik tok/bytedance, but I'm less worried about the Chinese spying on me because currently, the Chinese government has very little impact on my life, compared to western corporations.... and Pico is developer firendly, it's just the device with android on it, unlike the oculus devices which are a closed ecosystem that doesn't just allow installing non-verified software by non-verified developers. Customer service is a bit awful though, but the programmer I'm working with is good enough to work with a crappily documented API.

about Audrey Tang - I saw her (she's trans, as far as I know) in some interviews here and there during the pandemic, because she really seems to have managed information flow well, like, letting people check via app where they could get masks and where they had run out, saving people the time to travel to stores that were out of stock.

Interesting. Admittedly I'd have a hard time sticking around or socializing in those environments, the banalities of the sort you mentioned give me a headache (probably you as well I'm guessing).


That part threw me because I'm used to seeing geeky Asian men with long hair, Audrey doesn't wear makeup (at least in the interviews I've seen), and I've seen a few feminine poses in pictures but without further context I maybe just took that as Audrey having a somewhat androgynous self-representation.

Someone I have been listening to for a while whose on the other side of it (can't tell whether she's atypical or trans - either way incredibly sharp analytically) is the Bitcoin and commodities broker/investor Lynn Alden. She's actually been echoing some of what Zoltan Pozsar has been saying about the likelihood that we're headed toward a more commodities-based economy in the near future (haven't heard her say Bretton Woods III yet though) and I'm still trying to pick through some of the implications of that aside from brutal scarcity.

Good angle of seeing the problem. Oil weight for weight along with coal has 4 times as much energy than TNT. A full 60 litre tank of a small car has about as much energy as a 250kg bomb.

Tech has progressed so rapidly that modern society is built on a continuation of this energy still being at our disposal. The science community actually rates how advance intelligent life is by the amount of energy they can harness.

That said, electric motors are highly efficient compared to ICE engines.....this is where the advantages to for going green ends though. I doubt there will be any revolution in battery tech for the foreseeable future. Concrete and steel production relies heavily on fossil fuels too.

Most who advocate for going green just don't see the monumental challenges to overcome and they never propose any viable solutions.

Two "solutions" I can think of is to make breaking down cellulose to sugar more widespread as an alternative to gasoline that can only be used on small motorbikes that are very fuel efficient.

Another is somehow to extract uranium from sea water.

In green the most exciting things seem to be Ambri's calcium/antimony grid batteries, Perovskite solar cells (if they can extend their longevity). and possibly the 'doped glass' solid state batteries if they can find ways to either use less-rare elements or less of them. Seems like the highest priorities are 1) less rare substances and 2) circular economy.


Yeah, it's a really big raw materials issue. While it's not academic I thought this guy had some interesting thoughts on it from an investor's perspective:



The big joke of the last week of course was Debbie Stabenow (Michigan senator) being on public record saying something to the effect of 'Wow - these gas prices really must suck. Glad I have an EV'. That went over about as well as one would expect, particularly with EV's still being as expensive as they are. It makes you wonder if our standard for elites now is completed a degree from a mail-order school.


They're doing things with algae biofuel as well. The critical question obviously is what does the yield look like as that tech matures and will it ever be realistic or will it need to be something where we primarily need to grow algae for other purposes and have biofuels as a byproduct for it to ever scale up in a reasonable fashion.

There's another one out there as well - ie. biosolids, where they'll take municipal waste and heat it above the boiling point (based on a 1913 technology that with two world wars just never got implemented until recently). The idea there as well seems that they can create coal and possibly other fuels by denaturing sewage.

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Naked, Enough, Whole, Complete;
Moving, Connecting, Co-Creating;
Ocean Whole Water Wave Verily Field
Particle

Wave

And All That Jazz too...

-me...

THiS Ain't 'Rocket Science;'
Yet It is; And that's A Problem;

Master the Tools,

Survive And Thrive;

Be Mastered By the Tools,
And Wither Away As Just Another
Grape Vine Who Never Truly Lived At All...

In Other Words, i Don't Need to Change Water into Wine

As i HuManufacture My Own Grapes; They Stay Sweet Eternally Now

as

-me2...

Now As i Shift Back to the Old Ways of iRobot;

With The Attention Span of Less Than A Gold Fish;
Yes, Less Than Three Seconds Waiting for the Next

Dopamine
Hit of Social
Media And The 'Such';

THere is Gonna Be A Whole
Lot of Misery And Suffering Before

(Wailing, Gnashing of Teeth,
And All That 'Blues Jazz' too)

Folks Strip oFF ALL the Layers of CuLTuRaL

Clothes And Actually 'Unplug' And Set Themselves Free...

Yep, Naked, Enough, Whole, Complete; Moving Connecting
Co-Creating on 'The Cheap' Generating Energy oF LiGHT From Within

Giving, Sharing, Caring, Healing For All With Least Harm; Inhaling Peace
Exhaling LoVE iN JoY oF LiGHT iN Effortless Ease of Autotelic Flow
Increasing Human Potentials Always Dancing A Tight Rope Higher;

Yawn, of
Course it
Helps to Start
Off Financially Independent
to Do this When Money Is the

'God' And It is Worthless As What's
Left of Dead Dinosaurs and The 'Such' (US).

-me3

Post Script: i Realize The "Matrix MeMe" Has Become
Old And Overused; Never The Less, if one Can And Will
Leave 'The Old Words (Worlds) Behind,' The Music in the Trailer is Most

Definitely
A Renewable
Source For
Human

Energy
Within in
Terms of
Moving, Connecting,
And Co-Creating More;
For Those Still or Firstly Capable
Of Being In Moving Connecting Ways To Co-Create Anew.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ix7TUGVYIo

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