Potentially with experienced staff members they might try to call its bluff but then it seems like they’ve also been uprooting experienced personnel, making everyone unstable, replacing them with Trumper patsies etc. which probably minimises this kind of pushback.

I think there’s another issue in that the agencies who receive the executive order are essentially obliged to act as if they are legally binding until they’re shot down in court. This means there’s a sort of time gap where an executive order can enact an essentially permanent change (e.g. delete a bunch of info, bomb something, etc.) and the court has no way to get it reversed by the time they rule on it.

I hear this kind of thing a lot and I’ve been tempted to think it myself. But ultimately I have come to the conclusion that twice is too often to be a coincidence and this kind of thinking has been too complacent.

There’s this whole alignment of the billionaire class taking long term, unveiled and direct ownership of the government sphere, in the most powerful, militarised country in the world, in a way that was even unprecedented under neoliberalism. And it really depends on how little backstabbing goes on between them which determines how long this show will go on for. It might be 5 years, it might be 500.

Think of it this way: the first term was reconnaissance. He and his team were probing all the weak points and creating the conditions for the second term, doing things like getting the right supreme court judges in place that now he’s personally almost untouchable from a legal standpoint.

This second term is the main event so to speak, and I don’t think the US should expect the pace of change to slow down any time soon.

How many articles do we need about Tesla cars being destroyed or vandalized?

Well we need something to break up all the bad news

Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer

I guess fundamentally I see the mind as arising out of physicality and emergent constructs within that physical system rather than being fundamental. The reason the Gaia hypothesis appeals to me then is because it is just an extension of that emergence idea but across the whole world

Maybe like a limited Gaia hypothesis. The whole planet is a conscious thing, we are its braincells and its hands.

Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.

We’re just smelly sacks of biology like a rat or a lizard who happen to have developed higher reasoning capacity for whatever reason.

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?

I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.

It’s still March… 2020

Too real. Not just holidays, weeks and months go by and it’s like “shit when did it get to 2025??”

I no longer feel a sense of unrealised potential for myself I guess. That’s it, I’ve got what I’ve got.

Died eating sea urchins… Yeah that kind of tracks actually.

Not a hamster but when I had gerbils, one had eaten half of the other. Not long afterwards the cannibal developed a severe middle ear infection which killed her even during treatment.

I’m very much so on this team. Single digit hours are too early, frankly.

Hanlon’s razor. It’s pretty clear some people can be stupid and malicious simultaneously, or will even feign stupidity to hide malice.

A good way is to find a meetup group with some shared interest. It doesn’t really matter what so long as the crowd is good and you know enough to hold a conversation in the subject.