people

Democracy Is About People, Stupid.

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what the hell?

There’s little that hasn’t been written or said about the U.S. Presidential Election. When asked about it, I have been saying that there were two bad candidates and one of them had to win.

This pisses off people who are emotionally attached to one of the two. I’m ok with that. One represented individual oligarchy, one represented corporate oligarchy, and if you can’t tell which is which then maybe you’re part of the problem.

The people whose candidate won have been pretty happy. The people whose candidate lost have been trying to figure out why. It’s gotten so bad that LinkedIn has become a toxic waste dump of curated perspectives on… well, that, the Democratic party, and all the other stuff that probably shouldn’t be posted by people who want to hire someone or be hired by someone. It’s become further polarized because of it.

And that’s what helped get the result. People are viewing ‘those people’, whoever they are, as all sorts of negative things without understanding things.

Jon Stewart and Sarah Smarsh had a conversation about it… and the content probably should have been spoken about decades ago. It’s almost an hour long, but some people really need to watch this.

Identity, class… things that I hear progressive democrats talk about a lot and yet they somehow miss the boat consistently on that.

America is a big and diverse place, and it’s bigger and more diverse than most perspectives I’ve seen expressed. I have friends across the spectrum. I don’t have to agree with them, but I do have to understand their perspectives.

When looking at politics, people look at the narratives provided and if it fits their personal experience and identity better than the other narrative, they choose that one. Rationality might be discussion before voting, but voting is emotional for a lot of people.

It’s about people. Stereotyping them in a negative way ain’t gonna make things better. Understand the people who a democracy is supposed to represent, don’t depend on data analytics.

Go outside and listen. Respect people enough not to treat them like spreadsheet.

Of Bears And Men

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I’m not sure where it came from, but this thing about a woman choosing between a bear and a man has been going across social media. At first, I laughed, because I completely understand why some women might choose a bear.

Given an opportunity to choose between a bear and a man, I might go with a bear myself. Given a choice between a bear and a woman, I might go with the bear too. It’s not a gender thing, it’s a people thing. People come with baggage.

I know what to expect from a bear. People are wonky. I thought the whole thing was a pretty good joke from a female perspective, but I’ve seen it take a turn for the serious – and sadly some men have made the point women make with the (hopefully) initial joke. If it wasn’t initially a joke, it was… unkind to the good men out there, and yeah, they do have a right to say something, just as a woman would have a right to say something if the underwear on the joke were of a different gender.

Yet as it plays out across the internet, various examples pop up in response to women that do a good job of demonstrating why a woman would make the choice of a bear – some demeaning and sexist stuff. That’s the stuff you see. The stuff you don’t see are the men who either know it’s a trap – because it is a trap – or know that even defending the good guys out there (there are some of us, I count myself among them) will cause other men to show up from the shadows to beat on them. Why? Well, because they want to be seen as good men, clearly. Good men, though, might be offended by the whole thing.

Maybe good men should be offended. If men made generalizations about women, all manner of fury would rain down on them, as some female influencers have pointed out.

Let’s change this up a bit. If a woman is walking down a dark alley and sees a black man and a white man, which does she choose? Suddenly we have profiling. This is why I say it’s a trap. A well baited trap, sure to cause some anger amongst both good and bad men.

As someone who has walked across streets in dark places so as not to alarm women – all 5’3″ of me, looking hispanic in the U.S. – I see both sides because I’m used to being hated for the wrong reasons.

Maybe there is a woman out there who answers – and I think properly – it depends on the man and the bear. Toxic masculinity is a thing. I understand that, and I think most men do just as well as women in very different contexts. Some men are jerks, just as some women are… less than perfect, let’s say.

Toxic femininity is a thing too, though I’m not well read on the topic and I don’t presently want to be. You can find it on search engines, and no, it’s not a bunch of guys talking about bad women. On cursory inspection, it looked much more deep than that and something maybe women should talk about too.

I find it convenient as an individual to lump people in general into toxic and non-toxic categories, but that too isn’t fair – it’s really about toxic relationships, and not always the romantic kind.

If you’d choose a bear over me, I’m good with that. I’d like some distance from the bear anyway. While bears might be more predictable, the stakes are higher, and I don’t feel like winning a Darwin award.

In the end, it’s easier to avoid women and bears, which is probably why I’m single and uneaten. I’m good with that. So much less drama.

Donut Man.

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“I think something’s wrong with him”, she whispers to a friend, watching the man who was sitting by himself, his hand gesticulating. His hair is wild, his beard unkempt, his glasses slightly askew on his face.

“Maybe he’s mad”, her friend says conspiratorially.

I sit back, drinking my coffee, watching the elderly man with his Bluetooth earplug in as he seemingly talks to himself. They can’t see it. I can.

They’re dressed fancily. Maybe fashionably, I don’t know much about such things, but neither one of them seems really attractive.

Maybe it’s their appearance, maybe it’s their behavior. I can’t tell the difference these days as to why someone is unattractive or attractive. I don’t know that it matters anymore, and I don’t know that it ever did.

He’s shaking his hand in the air now, his voice becoming slightly louder yet indiscernible over the noise in the mall. His other hand puts down his donut, a few stray colorful sprinkles left in his beard. He twists and looks at them.

“Oh my god!”, one of them exclaims quietly.

“I’m on the damned phone!”, he says loudly while staring at them.

I break into laughter, coming dangerously close to having my mocha rise into my nasal cavity.

They fall silent, properly corrected by Donut Man who, incidentally, managed to shake those sprinkles free of his beard when he made his exclamation.

Orbits

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During its flight, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft returned images of the Earth and Moon. Separate images of the Earth and Moon were combined to generate this view. Link to original here.

Planets in our solar system, or even the moon, are generally things we think about when we use the word orbit. It’s one of those words where something other than ourselves can be the center.

When we see orbits, we generally think that everything is in the same plane – that if we drew the orbits on a piece of paper they would all be circular and on that same flat plane as the paper. This isn’t right. We simplify because of the medium of paper.

People have orbits. We orbit each other in various ways, and we may even change who or whatever we orbit over time. Our gravity is our sphere of influence, our ability to pull other bodies toward ourselves, and they in turn do the same.

It’s worth thinking about the next time you find yourself stuck somewhere around a group of people you don’t know – a common interest’s gravity put people around each other.

The more you consider it, the more it makes sense – at least for me, so far. Even when we write, our readers are orbiting not us, but what we write, the flotsam we put out to the network sometimes having enough gravity, if only for an instant, to pull someone into orbit. They may stay. They may not.

Don’t waste the time you spend on others near you. Make the most of it. You may never see them again.

The Contrasts.

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The sunset yesterday evening was intense, like the next 2 days of weather will be here in Trinidad and Tobago. The rains beat out their own rhythm, sometimes with the glancing blows of high wind, sometimes not, and in the Northwest of Trinidad it has been… unpredictable.

Before I left for an appointment today, it was raining one way, then another, bamboo nearby was sheared by the wind. I found it exhilarating. I always have enjoyed a good storm, but today it was only a few hours where I live, with a sunset as above. In South Trinidad, though, I imagine it was much worse, with people still having been flooded from past days.

It’s disappointing, really. The same problems keep coming back while the politicians point at each others for local elections. The flooding has been happening more frequently recently, but the Water and Sewage Company of Trinidad and Tobago somehow never seems to have enough water in the reservoir. There’s too many levels of bureaucracy, not enough accountability, and no effective change – but the government of course wants to bring back a property tax based on what someone guesstimates you can rent a property for.

Nature has no time for that.

There is brave talk about electric cars, and hybrids, but the state owned Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission has problems with the grid off and on, at least where I am. It’s hard to imagine the grid charging so many cars every night. I’ve heard the batteries for the cars cost sometimes more than the cars themselves to replace sometimes. All in the name of ‘saving the planet’ which will well be here long after we are not.

The reality is that if these islands, among all the other islands, went and did everything right, from renewable energy to carbon footprints, it wouldn’t have much of an effect on the global climate because these nations, while polluting, aren’t the core of it. For their trouble, they import everything they are told to at high costs, but the global situation’s problems are really in the larger nations that export these things to the smaller nations. “This is good for the climate!”

The woman with a hungry child on the corner has more immediate concerns.

Since Trinidad and Tobago refuses to believe it can produce it’s own technology solutions, hampered by the failed attempts by government to innovate. Big businesses thrive, small businesses die, and everyone wants to start a small business. Big businesses largely import things and sell them to people. Small businesses try to make local things. The bias, as it is, is evident.

The batteries for the cars will end up in the local dumps, likely. Poisoning ground water, like old cell phones and computers do. Politicians will vie to be elected while not actually doing anything, and the shell game of government corporations absolves all from blame.

It is, in it’s own right, a beautiful dystopia at certain hours, populated with a majority of good people who do not go out at night as much – partly economics, partly crime. The crime of the young has become more personal, more painful to the victims, symptoms of a deep economic divide that the government regularly excavates. It’s not an economic divide, really. It’s a moat.

It can be depressing to see on a daily basis. At busy intersections, we see women with children holding up signs with lists of what they need. There are too many for most to help. This was once a rich country. What happened?

I look toward the west, toward Venezuela, another nation which was rich – and could still be rich. I deal with Venezuelans fairly frequently, and while some call them a plague, I see the hard working immigrants that build countries given the right tools. This fresh blood could be an asset. There are intelligent people here, talented people, who in a land where titles mean more than merit, find no place here. They dream.

It’s not too much to ask for a better tomorrow, particularly if you’re willing to put in the sweat equity. I see it almost every day, contrasted against BMWs and Range Rovers while police escort Ministers through the traffic they are responsible for.

These contrasts are much like the sunset. At certain times, beautiful. The rains will come again tomorrow, properties will be flooded, government will posture yet again, and we’ll see what the sunset looks like tomorrow.

It is in it’s own way Groundhog day in a nation with no groundhogs.

Traffic.

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Streaming twice a day on the nearby highway, I see the cars pile up into patterns, each one encapsulating it’s occupants in their own common individuality.

The SUV, the taxis, the sports cars, the lowered cars, the raised pickups, the work trucks… each one we associate with a person in our minds. A stereotype, a bias. Despite stereotypes, we know they’re all individuals that have common traits.

The sports car guy, the lowered car guy and the raised pickup guy probably spend a good bit of time in automotive parts places. We can picture them there, dressed up as mockups of our stereotypes. That’s how Netflix picks your movies and other algorithms make recommendations for products, content, and more – by associating you with a computerized stereotype that is based on actual real time data.

They’re all heading in the same direction twice a day, at about the same time. Very individual. And each suffers individually in the congested roadways, knowing that tomorrow they will do it again. Part of it is stupidity of some employers, part of it is the stupidity of people, part of it is the stupidity of… well, there’s a lot of stupidity causing congestion. It’s like a virus that we can get over, but are permanently scarred by.

Each one of these individuals is doing it for some mix of reasons, from taking over the world to making sure that their children have food. Each of them has hopes and dreams. Each of them has aspirations, each of them has their lifetime’s worth of experience.

Each of them is a physical record of their ancestors, dating back to their, marked by life events – living memory. In minds alone, each human brain is 100 terabytes, with a range of 1 Terabyte to 2.5 Petabytes according to present estimates. Factor in all the physical memory of our history and how we lived, we’re well past that. That traffic is really a huge bit of network congestion – increasingly so with computer controlled traffic lights.

That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of data.

All stuck in the same spot because… the individuals are on leashes that pull them at the same time.

Subjective AI Results.

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Banality. I don’t often use the word, I don’t often encounter the word, and it’s largely because ‘unoriginal’ seems to work better for me. That said, one of the things I’ve encountered while I play with the new toy for me, Tumblr, used it effectively and topically:

Project Parakeet: On the Banality of A.I. writing nailed it, covering the same basic idea I have expressed repeatedly in things I’ve written, such as, “It’s All Statistics” and “AI: Standing on the Shoulders of Technology, Seeking Humanity“.

It’s heartening to know others are independently observing the same things, though I do admit I found the prose a bit more flowery than my own style:

“…What Chatbots do is scrape the Web, the library of texts already written, and learn from it how to add to the collection, which causes them to start scraping their own work in ever enlarging quantities, along with the texts produced by future humans. Both sets of documents will then degenerate. For as the adoption of AI relieves people of their verbal and mental powers and pushes them toward an echoing conformity, much as the mass adoption of map apps have abolished their senses of direction, the human writings from which the AI draws will decline in originality and quality along, ad infinitum, with their derivatives. Enmeshed, dependent, mutually enslaved, machine and man will unite their special weaknesses – lack of feeling and lack of sense – and spawn a thing of perfect lunacy, like the child of a psychopath and an idiot…”

Walter Kirn, ‘Project Parakeet: On the Banality of A.I. Writing’, Unbound, March 18th, 2023.

Yes. Walter Kirn’s writing had me re-assessing my own opinion not because I believe he’s wrong, but because I believe we are right. This morning I found it lead to at least one other important question.

Who Does Banality Appeal To?

You see, the problem here is that banality is subjective because what is original for one person is not original for the other. I have seen people look shocked when I discovered something they already knew and expressed glee. It wasn’t original for them, it was original for me. In the same token, I have written and said things that I believe are mundane to have others think it is profound.

Banality – lack of originality – is subjective.

So why would people be so enthralled with the output of these large language models(LLMs), failing a societal mirror test? Maybe because the writing that comes out of them is better than their own. It’s like Grammarly on steroids, and Grammarly doesn’t make you a better writer, it just makes you look like you are a better writer. It’s like being dishonest on your dating profile.

When I prompted different LLMs about whether the quality of education was declining, the responses were non-committal, evasive and some more flowery than others in doing so. I’d love to see a LLM say, “Well shit. I don’t know anything about that”, but instead we get what they expect we want to see. It’s like asking someone a technical question during an interview that they don’t have the answer to and they just shoot a shotgun of verbage at you, a violent emetic eruption of knowledge that doesn’t answer the question.

“I don’t know”, in my mind, is a perfectly legitimate response and tells me a lot more than having to weed through someone’s verbal or written vomit to see if they even have a clue. I’m the person who says, “I don’t know”, and if it’s interesting enough to me for whatever reason, the unspoken is, “I’ll find out”.

The LLM’s can’t find out. They’re waiting to be fed by their keepers, and their keepers have some pretty big blind spots because we, as human beings, have a lot more questions than answers. We can hide behind what we do know, but it’s what we don’t know that gives us the questions.

I’ve probably read about 10,000 books in my lifetime, give or take, at the age of 51. This is largely because I am of Generation X, and we didn’t have the flat screens children have had in previous generations. Therefore, my measure of banality, if there could be such a measure, would be higher than people who have read less – and that’s just books. There’s websites, all manner of writing on social media, the blogs I check out, etc, and those have become more refined because I have a low tolerance for banality and mediocrity.

Meanwhile, many aspire to see things as banal and mediocre. This is not elitism. This is seen when a child learns something new and expresses joy an adult looks at them in wonder, wishing that they could enjoy that originality again. We never get to go back, but we get to visit with children.

Going to bookstores used to be a true pleasure for me, but now when I look at the shelves I see less and less new, the rest a bunch of banality with nice covers. Yet books continue to sell because people don’t see that banality. My threshold for originality is higher, and in a way it’s a curse.

The Unexpected Twist

In the end, if people actually read what these things spit out, the threshold for originality should increase since after the honeymoon period is over with their LLM of choice, they’ll realize banality.

In a way, maybe it’s like watching children figure things out on their own. Some things cannot be taught, they have to be learned. Maybe the world needs this so that it can appreciate more of the true originality out there.

I’m uncertain. It’s a ray of hope in a world where marketers would have us believe in a utopian future that they have never fulfilled while dystopia creeps in quietly through the back door.

We can hope, or we can wring our hands, but one thing is certain:

We’re not putting it back in the box.

A Peopley Earth.

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This planet sucks. It’s full of people, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing but we seem to like it that way.

The people do silly things, play with anything with a flat screen that has some sort of light coming out of it, chasing red dots while sticking food in their mouths.

They drive around either in gasoline or diesel powered vehicles and pollute or buy electric cars that someone else already polluted to create.  The drive past each other, looking smug at each other about how they’re ‘saving a planet’. Carlin was right. The planet doesn’t need saving, we do.

We have billionaires who say really weird things and do weirder things, but that’s ok because they’re rich and eccentric. If they were poor they’d be locked away in an asylum somewhere. Billionaires just live in bigger asylums and nobody knows whether the inside or the outside is the actual asylum.

We have politicians that are dishonest who get elected to office on promises. People do it every election cycle and are surprised things don’t change. There has got to be a party somewhere where the other mammals get together and just laugh at us. I would. I’d go, but they’d probably want me to wear a hat and ride a tricycle.

I’m sure I wouldn’t like the hat.

Of Shadows And Ghosts

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ghost of mahinThis is not a sad article. This is about connections and weights, about people as we see them and people as they were.

It’s been almost 13 years since my father passed away. It’s been about 5 months since my mother passed away. There are many others that are significant – the number never goes down. Every time, every single person is significant to us for reasons that are sometimes easily explained despite how complicated the relationship is. To say that I have ever had a simple relationship is an understatement. Everything is complex, nuanced, and open for discussion.

Yet when a person hits that full stop of life, some things simplify as we get to know them beyond the frames we put them in. Other perspectives weigh in. The people typically grow in death as we learn more about them from other people, good and bad, right and wrong. An example: My father, who was proud of me joining the Navy, was once forbidden to join the Navy by his father. My mother left a trail of artists who were affected by her passing, and that was truly her audience for her writings – complex, passionate, and a trail of breadcrumbs through a life of difficult exploration in being human.

But we only know people in certain ways, as we know them and are allowed to know them – as they permit us, as we permit ourselves. Framing them, judging only by what is available, we form sometimes strong opinions about things much more nuanced, only shadows of who they were.

And the ghosts, in the end, tell us more.

This extends into our digital worlds as well.

Emotional Bandwidth

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Full Moon MeditationIt’s been a rough week, between my mother’s death and keeping myself busy as a way of dealing with it, pushing a vision of a future on a canvas of land. I know she wanted all of her children to sculpt parts of the world leaving bits of their poetry of achievements as pillows in our lives to cushion us from the pains of living.

I am familiar with how I grieve all too well, and I know that I would need the emotional bandwidth to deal with it. There have been plenty of relationships I’ve been in that have not had reciprocation, that were one-sided, and that needed to be addressed – as we all have at some point, perhaps giving us a false sense of comfort until we figure out how toxic they are. Until we realize how much they distract us from things that are of worth, of value. They rob us of time, of energy, of emotional bandwidth… they rob us of life, for what else is life but time, energy and emotion? And so I ended some toxic relationships.

In such times, with the death of someone, you find out who is really of worth in your life. You treasure them and keep them.

And you find those that you were there for but couldn’t be bothered. You let those go.

Bridges cannot be burned if they do not exist, and if a bridge doesn’t work for you it does not exist.