Have finally discovered a way to shake off subscribers: post 6,000,000 words from a Moldbug essay and then claim my followers ought to be slaves. I will repeat until I'm back down to 906 subscribers.
If your work and studies are entirely for earthly and servile purposes, then you've lost the thread. Most of your work and studies ought to be done for a more general form of good—for your personal betterment, for appreciation of what God has created, for goodness itself—as these are fundamentally more important. You ought to engage in the servile so that you can engage in higher things; that ought to be your primary motivation in seeking money when you must.
1. Owning a pet
No. People living just above the poverty line can pretty easily afford pets. It's not difficult for those making $100k a year.
Article complains about things like grooming costs.... Just do it yourself? It's not an extremely difficult or time consuming task.
2. Family vacations
Go somewhere cheaper. Plan things in a way to minimize costs. If I could afford a two week vacation in 2022, there's no reason people with actual income can't do so now.
3. Eating out at restaurants.
Let's say you have a family of eight. You each eat a good deal, slightly on the higher end. That'll be $25 each, for a total of $200, plus a generous 100%, $200 tip. You're telling me you can't save $400 a month from your >$5k per month (middle class) income to eat out? Or is once a month not enough for you? Maybe you have fancier tastes?
4. Concert tickets
Support local bands. If all you are into is what's super popular and you don't settle for anything less than Taylor Swift, just don't go, as you don't deserve music anyways.
5. Groceries
I'm so sorry to learn that the middle class cannot afford groceries and is starving to death. I will donate some food to the middle class food pantry over in Marquette this weekend.
6. Second-hand clothing and thrift stores
Prices at big name thrift stores have gone up, but plenty of smaller chains and individual stores exist. There's one in each of the towns I know best. And even if this weren't true, you're still complaining about something that is cheaper than what you would normally pay.
7. Health maintenance like teeth cleaning
Clean them yourself.
8. Owning a home or paying rent
I'm so sorry to learn that the middle class cannot afford homes and is living on the street. I will do some hours at the middle class homeless shelter over in Marquette this weekend.
9. Fast food meals
That this entry exists makes me think 10 would have probably been the right number of entries....
10. Appliances like air fryers and microwaves
Middle class people can't afford to purchase a $50 appliance that last years; it is simply too great a burden for them.
11. Farmer's markets
I hope this one is true. These people who make $100k a year yet can't easily budget for a microwave don't deserve organic food.
Don't lie to homeless people.
Recent figures indicate that up to 1 in 5 pregnant women in the U.S. now use cannabis.
That's enough Internet for today
Dull Academic Incessant Liturgical Yapping: Philosophical Orations on Order & Reaction
If your work and studies are entirely for earthly and servile purposes, then you've lost the thread. Most of your work and studies ought to be done for a more general form of good—for your personal betterment, for appreciation of what God has created, for…
It's not wrong to engage with the practical, and in fact it's necessary. Build homes, for instance. Such is good. But never do so entirely for practical ends. You are a human being, and as such, were designed for higher purposes; to be concerned merely with the practical is to reduce yourself to a lower animal, to reject your God-given higher nature. Yes, build homes, but appreciate the rational elements that allow you to do so, appreciate the mathematical beauty of what you've built, and use what you earn doing so for higher purposes such as the pursuit of truth, the creation and appreciation of beauty, the cultivation of wisdom, and the contemplation of the divine — endeavors that speak to our uniquely human capacity for rational thought and spiritual understanding.
This approach transforms what could be mere labor into a form of contemplation, where each practical act becomes an opportunity to participate in and appreciate the deeper order of things, as well as putting them into their proper, subordinate place of allowing you to engage in deeper, leisurely practices that relate more directly to fulfilling our nature as human beings.
This approach transforms what could be mere labor into a form of contemplation, where each practical act becomes an opportunity to participate in and appreciate the deeper order of things, as well as putting them into their proper, subordinate place of allowing you to engage in deeper, leisurely practices that relate more directly to fulfilling our nature as human beings.
Let’s have another thought-experiment.
Picture the Earth—our beautiful, blue, spinning globe. Take all the habitable land area and color it white—as a neutral background for our thought experiment.
Now, select the subset of this beautiful planet on which a sober, sensible, civilized person, such as Sam Altman, would consider it prudent and safe to wander, “on foot and alone,” carrying his iPad, at night. Leave that part white. Color the other part brown. Then, from the brown subset, select the further subset in which Sam Altman,
carrying his iPad, would not consider it prudent and safe to wander in the daytime. Color that part black. (Why can’t Google Maps do this?)
Then do the same for Sam Altman’s grandfather, in 1950, with his portable Smith-Corona. Then, repeat the exercise for 1900. (Part of the reason this is such a useful mental exercise, and unfortunately such a difficult one, is that it requires you to actually know what the world was like in 1950 or 1900. If your way of getting this information starts with statistical tables, ur doin it rong. There are these things called “books” which will help you out.)
If you perform this exercise accurately, or at least if you get the same results as me, you’ll see a 20C quite indistinguishable from Stage III melanoma. And this progress continues, to rousing applause and general self-congratulation, right up into our own dear official NYT approved 2013.
Realizing that something in the 20th-century model of governance, as taught by the best and brightest of Harvard, Stanford, the NYT and other fine institutions of papally infallible veracity, isn’t working out quite right, is indeed a step in the right direction. Everybody’s going to have their own particular beef. Mine, as we’ve seen, is that 75 years of this rigorously scientific system of government has reduced what was once America’s fourth-largest city to a demon-haunted slum—and while extreme, this outcome is anything but an exception.
YouTube
World's Biggest GHETTO !!!!!
Let's go for a ride starting in Highland Park (first few buildings), and then into Detroit . Witness the destruction of once Great industrial American cities turning them into ghost towns. Even in downtown Detroit, there are empty skyscrapers.... This video…
How much more fun of a computer is an iPad than an Apple II? Is it 37.6 times more fun? Or 198.2 times more fun? Or even 547.9? It would seem clear, to anyone not a blithering idiot, that any process which claims to be able to derive any such number is retarded at best and may well constitute felony math abuse.
Not at all! The Bureau of Labor Statistics is, in fact, in possession of exactly this figure. Here’s how they do it. Since Apple was selling computers continuously from Apple II to iPad, we can look at the period when both the Apple II and Apple III were on sale, divide the list price of the Apple III by the Apple II; later, the Mac 512K by the Apple III, and so on until we reach the iPad. This process is called hedonic regression. It is thoroughly official—approved of by both Harvard and the US Government. So who’s the blithering idiot now?
If we are analyzing real governments in the real world, our financial analysis has to be rooted in political reality. The political reality is that “citizens” are not owners of their government, but rather assets—in other words, slaves. Our only hope is for a regime that’s more Thomas Jefferson and less Simon Legree. Fortunately, as we’ll see, this analysis aligns the financial interests of the State with our own interests as human beings.
What are the financial interests of the absolute State? To maximize the value of its productive assets. The State’s assets are (a) land and buildings, (b) equipment, and (c) human chattel. We understand how to value and manage (a) and (b) just fine. But most of its equity consists of (c)—an asset not really taught in most business schools.
There is another way to ask whether, excluding advances in technology (which do fall under (c), since technology is a human ability—but hard to monopolize), America is a more valuable nation in 2013 than it was in 1950. We can ask: is the average American a better human being than his or her ancestors of 1950? I.e.: has the USG cultivated its human capital, or wasted it?
...
The American of 2013 is much more likely to be a meth-head, a thug or ho, a worthless trustafarian slacker, etc., etc., etc. Especially when we look at non-elite ethnic subpopulations —“cracker” Scots-Irish, African Americans, etc.—I don’t think any serious person could really claim that the average American is superior as a human being to his grandparents.
What’s notable about this interpretation is that, again, your interests and your government’s are just about perfectly aligned. You don’t want to be a heroin addict. Washington doesn’t want its slaves to be heroin addicts. You want to be a better person—more informed, more reliable, more capable. As a better person, you are a better and more valuable capital asset. You augment your government’s market cap. Back to Sam Altman:
"Most of us want our lives to get better every year—the hedonic treadmill is a pain that way."
As “hedonic” implies, “better” means “more fun.”
...
Most of us want to become better people every year. We’re pretty confident, perhaps falsely, that this will lead to more hedonic rewards in the long run or at least has the best chance of doing so. But this isn’t the goal. The goal, believe it or not, is to become better people. And ideally our children will be even better than us. So again—the market cap goes up.
Everything I’m saying here (including the economics) was said by Carlyle more than 150 years ago, notably in Chartism. The apotheosis of the hedonic principle is the immortal Pig-Philosophy. Briefly, Carlyle tells us, the difference between man and beast is that maximization of hedonic utility is always and everywhere the method of a beast. Not coincidentally, it is also the method of a toddler.