somatic

“Slavery” doesn’t have just one configuration.

It’s just a word that we sometimes use to describe certain kinds of superior-inferior relationships: master-servant, lord-peasant, employer-employee, landlord-tenant, etc.

Or how about debtpeon-bank?

Taxman-taxpayer...

Government-citizen...

State-subject...

You say “slavery” and you think of “black slavery”, but do you think of the ruthlessly exploited sharecropper?

How about the fresh-faced grad indentured to his debt for life?

The newlywed with the mortgage on the house that cost him 10x what it cost his father?

Slavery is closer than you think.

What you’re pointing out is just one expression of the larger phenomenon of America’s third-world-ification.

We absolutely should have new airports. And trains. And not only should we have new airports and trains, we should have underground and undersea trains. Transatlantic undersea trains. Transpacific undersea trains.

And we should have gleaming cityscapes of marble and gold, and great wide shaded streets free of cars and trucks and vehicles larger than mopeds or maybe sportbikes.

And parks and water sculptures and street-corner quartets, flying cars and space elevators and O’Neill colonies, underground hydroponics farms and enormous vaulted subterranean spaces with artificial skies indistinguishable from a summer’s day.

And you know why we don’t?

Not for lack of industry or energy or technology or imagination.

But because the money men aren’t interested.

For an open-source phone to work, the devs will need to be paid.

Open source as charity has run out of steam; to survive, open source must be profitable.

The way to do it is to have a license under which all uses personal, educational, hobbyist, etc. are completely free and open source, but as soon as someone wants to sell something with your code in it, you get a cut.

Not entirely unlike a transaction processor like Visa or MasterCard.

It should be viral, so that all commercial software made with software under the license must also be licensed under the license, and the corporation’s commercial code must be available for inspection upon (legal?) inquiry, though the corporation may restrict the ability for others to use their code in other corporations’ commercial applications.

Lock-in is achieved when it’s cheaper and easier for these freeloading corporate entities to pay up (the devs) than it is to try to rewrite everything.

You know, that phrase, “we value your privacy”, is actually pretty accurate when viewed in the right light.

Truly we have transcended parody.

This strikes me as profound and I would like to hear more.

Do you have other writings?

Are there any books about this?

Do you think about this often?

Maximum efficiency will occur when no humans are employed and all energy is produced and transmogrified for, and consumed by, retrofeudal neoaristocrats living lives of infinite leisure in their garden cloud paradise fortresses.

Free markets are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Many things that we would consider to be intrinsic and inextricable parts of the human experience are things which cannot survive the relentless assault of unrestricted Darwinian competition.

A free market is a defect-defect equilibrium, and a defect-defect equilibrium is like fire. It's very powerful, and absolutely necessary; we wouldn't have what we have without fire, and we wouldn't even be human as we are without it, but we must be very careful that it doesn't escape the fireplace and burn the house down.

You ask what would "increase overall quality of life the most?" There are non-economic markets, as well. Mating, for instance. Until very recently it was highly monogamous and strictly regulated. And now it isn't. Winner-take-all.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say that our world is the direct product of decisions, our collective decisions... and the people who make them:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

— Edward Bernays, Propaganda.

Not only does Apple offer no option to buy a 15 inch with a full keyboard, they’ve also failed to upgrade the 13 inch model with this refresh.

WTF, honestly.

Your username is uncapitalized.

This situation is perhaps the finest example of the self-licking ice cream cone.

Consider:

* “The community” (houseowners) own the present stock of houses;

* The price of a house is driven not by materials or labor, but by supply;

* The supply of houses is controlled by the houseowners.

But it gets better. If houses cost more, not less,

* The local government gets more money from property taxes;

* The banks get their cut out of interest on the loans;

* The employers (corporations) keep their employees on the treadmill;

* The state and federal governments get their cuts from the income taxes.

We have the technology. You could probably buy a mansion for $100k if it was in literally anyone’s interest besides the line-level worker.

We humans are remarkably solipsistic creatures. Why not build more elsewhere? Probably because leadership isn’t feeling the squeeze.

No one complained when they named everything iEverything.

Or if they did, the complainers weren’t important enough to matter.

Just be thankful that they didn’t name iMac MacMan.

Amazon is just one facet of a larger phenomenon of social and economic centralization and the ever-intensifying tournament by which the resources are distributed as a natural and necessary consequence.

Wal-Mart and Amazon are not really in the same industry.

Wal-Mart is an old retailer with a lot of physical stores and a well-established business model.

Amazon is a young software company with the world’s biggest Internet store, the world’s biggest computer apparatus, and a bunch of other things I probably don’t even know about.

But it’s the software thing that’s the important bit. Software is intelligence, intelligence is efficiency, and Amazon is software first. In any “old” industry it wants to enter, it becomes, by default, the smartest competitor therein. It will start out with better logistics than the incumbent industry experts with decades of experience.

It’s like Amazon has a 20-point IQ advantage in anything it wants to do. Or more.

A scary competitor. Scarier than anything from the Robber Baron era.

I interpreted your comment to mean something like “Emacs is configurable with third-party LISP code”, in much the same way as Vim is configurable with third-party Vimscript.

But Vim is written in C, Vimscript being just a bolt on, whereas Emacs LISP is its own language entirely, a distinct variant of LISP, and much of Emacs implemented in it.

Emacs is written in Emacs LISP, which is its own language. The really performance-critical stuff is written in C, as is the interpreter, but that’s it.

If I may ask, where did you find a front-end job you liked?