smenor/tangents

Inflections

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Episode Transcript

there I'm Scott and this is Tangents

But today is Friday the 19th of September

2025 and it is 1712 as I'm recording this

I always I don't know why I want to

tell you that but obviously as zero relevance or impact when you're listening

But but I am less than 24 hours before my flight out of Tokyo tomorrow which is

it's why I I've been out of the country out of the US rather I don't even know exactly
probably almost two months I think it's that quite two months but almost two months
I first left when was it I don't even remember I think it was the trying to figure it out 19th of July
so 19th of August 19th yeah about two months damn near two months wild I don't even know what to say
I decided well I mean I mean I go I don't have like a specific outline this time
this is going to be more just extinct perics than peraneous and probably will be my last one
for this trip well I'm in Japan and it might be my last one for a little while because
a little more complicated to record one of these when I don't have my own space and I'm going from
having my own hotel room to the living with my mom and sister probably want my own space for a little
while I will be I guess in Arizona next week so I'll probably record one of these then but it's
going to be spotty for a little bit frustrating thing I mean I am so I'm very fortunate that I
have people to stay with right I'm very very fortunate that I'm not going to be like on the street
despite not having a job or any source of income at the moment I'm kind of working
on that although I have to say like first off I've been applying to a bunch of shit and I'm
continuing to apply to a bunch of shit and the frequency with which I get any kind of response at all
is just fucking nil it's I mean it's that is zero exactly but it's like one application out of
dozens I'll get somebody to return thanks but thanks for sorry you're not a great fit
and often you know it's like oh well you're not we looked at your application turns out
you're not qualified and then the actual application and the qualifications are things that I'm
worked way more than qualified for and it was in my application so I'm not sure
what the fuck is going on there but I got those for a few community colleges that I was going to
try to teach that and it was like yeah I I more than meet all of the qualifications
word for these things and the funny thing is I don't want to be a professor at a community
college I I know what's involved there I know how much work it is I know what the compensation is
and it's just so much more work than I care to put in for what they're going to pay me and
there's not really any job security it's like it's just like not a lot of upside and it's just
you know I mean honestly it's a thing that if I was not in a kind of desperate position I wouldn't
even consider and I only really applied because a friend from my union is kind of recruiting people
she wants to unionize the community colleges in Arizona and so she's recruiting people to
to be profs there and I'm just like I don't know I like teaching don't get me wrong I if I could
like if I could really define what I'm doing I'd just pick and choose stuff I wouldn't mind
teaching a class like one class every year or so maybe every three semesters would probably be
more ideal or maybe even every other year yeah be like an ongoing thing that I would do
and it does it is one of those things that you know the more you teach especially the same class
the more efficient it becomes the every every every season every semester ends up being a
little bit unique and you get different set of students some people have different stuff that they're
good at and some things work and some things don't and I always try to dial it in and adjust
for for the class but still if you're teaching the same class like the first time you teach it
even if you get a syllabus and you've got materials for it the first time you teach it is
so much fucking work so much well I guess you could be extraordinarily lazy and not do any work
then it's gonna suck but if you try to do it at all well if you try to put in like even just like
a little bit of time and effort to try to make it an okay class where you're actually teaching
stuff and it's not excruciatingly boring and you're actually like you know you thought it through
let's just say that if you do that it takes so much prep time and then if you're grading shit
like even if you have TA's grading with you or air quotes graders I guess you could again it's one
of those things you could be super lazy and just do like multiple choice or something that's
really painfully easy that you could just automate even but if you're actually like to me that
that is just busy work for the most part if you put something into a test or a quiz that can be
answered in multiple choice usually not always but usually you're just wasting people's time
more often than not like the purpose at least as far as I'm concerned of especially test
sequences but also homework partly as to practice partly as to get some experience and partly
it's just as a sort of guide you know like really to see where you are what you know what you need to learn
and to kind of figure that stuff out I'm not interested like if I'm if I'm teaching I'm not
interested in testing to sort of sort of sort of sort of people I don't really think that that's
I don't I don't believe in that just fundamentally I think you know I I'm more of like a
past fail kind of guy I do think you know there's like strong like exceptional past and then there's
like okay you pat you did the work you got the stuff and then there's kind of like yeah you didn't you
didn't get it and hopefully not too many people are in the latter category I I fucking hate
and I think this is a thing that I don't know exactly where it comes from but it's fucking painful
like the last time well I guess I thought of courses since then but the last time I took a
erototic course the was Gil and I and it was this course that we made up and it was basically like
high performance computing for people who are not computer science majors so like how to use a
super computer for people who are in a discipline that is not computer science and we did that and then
you get people in there and they're they're always like generally speaking the most annoying
students that do this shit are the ones that already have fucking AIDS so that they've got they're
doing well they got an A and they come in and they're trying to get like extra extra credit
and for which is odd also because I always offer a couple things for extra credit and
some people take me up on it but not many and it's not that hard it's like teach it fast you can
teach one of the uh a lesson basically and I think that's worth a decent amount of extra credit
and I I'm not sure if it's like the most fair thing because some people have a lot of social anxiety
looks looking into a mirror right now but some people are very uncomfortable getting up in front of
a class and teaching and I would for that reason I gave all their options as well but I think that the
teaching thing is you know it's like a presentation is fine but to actually teach something like you
put stuff together you make a lesson plan you teach it I think it's a I think it's a good way to learn
there's there's a thing in medical school which is watch one do one teach one and I think when you do
that you really learn things in a way that you don't otherwise and you also you know I mean it
shines a light on what you don't know which is what I think is the real purpose of a test or
a quiz because it's so easy when you sit there in the lecture to listen and you're like oh yeah I
got this I understand that I don't need to I you know it's clear it's I've just got it
I then you actually start really digging in like you you work a problem whether it's
and and I I fucking hate homework is a general rule especially because like as a professor it's a
lot to grade takes a lot of effort and time again you can do it as multiple choice but if you're
doing it well it's not going to be multiple choice it's going to be like something is written up
and you got some work that you've done and you know it's it's it's not something that's just going
to be like you got a C I mean like you had four options and then C was the correct one I
not that you got a C as the grade but those are the things that are easy to grade and when you do
the more complicated stuff and again like this is if you have a grader it seems appealing it seems
like a great thing but if it's not somebody who's a domain expert and whatever you're teaching
and especially if you're teaching something that's a little nuanced and your assignments are a
little bit abstract and open went ended it's really difficult for somebody to like figure out a
rubric and and grade I mean this is one thing actually that and maybe I'm just ridiculous here but
one of the ways that it really optimizes when you teach again is the first time you grade something
at least this is how I generally do it and I'm not I'm not saying this is an efficient door
optimal way to do it but the thing that I like to do is at least kind of scan through everything
and sort of see pretty much what everybody's done it's really and the reason that I landed on this
is I used to like you just start grading and then as you're grading you notice patterns and you notice
some people are just not getting certain things and like it's a lot of people are not getting certain
things or something that you thought was not going to be obvious like almost everybody got
and learning that kind of stuff helps you calibrate it and then it helps you grade it and I think
that kind of stuff really like at least for my taste means that you have to kind of grade first
without scoring anything I go through all the stuff and then you make your rubric or you might
have like an outline of the rubric but the real rubric for grading for me comes during and after
I've gone through everything just just because of that calibration and also I mean just I'm kind
of saying or it was going to kind of say that you know like that is a nice thing that you can do
and then you do it once and then the next year it's easier but as I'm as I'm talking about this
it's it's a little more difficult than that because it is certainly it's not even possible it
every year unless you literally just record yourself and you repeat that you're going to teach
things a little differently and to me I mean the the way a class works it's much more of a conversation
than just I mean you're still lecturing but the way that I would want to teach given my drillers
is that you know you kind of see where the class is and you have really a conversation with people
you're sitting there and you're sort of learning what people are interested in learning
where they're coming from and every every time I've taught a class even if it's the same class
you get like a different flavor it's you know I mean I guess if you had a large enough class
maybe you start getting like a blend and it sort of averages out but if you have 20 30 people in
the class you're going to have just just by random fluctuation and chance you're going to have
some that are really strong in some things some you know one year everybody's got calculus and
they just got it down and then one year like people barely barely have scratched it and that means
that the way that you're going to teach stuff if you're actually doing it well is going to change
and the way that you're going to grade stuff and the rubric that you make is going to change and so
it ends up being a lot of work to do it well which is one of these things like actually it gets to
another kind of annoying thing about the giant air quotes audible air quotes AI if you actually
had like the the best way to teach if you could actually do it would be to have essentially like a
personal tutor like the idea of an actual artificial intelligence that could know everything about
you know what you know know how you learn and know how to explain and how to give you like the
next layer of information on any subject that'd be fucking awesome that would be like you wouldn't
need to grade or test or do any of that kind of stuff because you could just have that thing
constantly assess you and the assessment wouldn't really be to score you but it's to the sort of see
well where do we go next what do you have what are we what are we going to work on and that would be
that would be great that would be amazing and I do think like you could do something like that in time
eventually but the shit that people have now that passes for giant again air quotes AI it's
not artificial intelligence it's not intelligent at all it's just like stochastic parrot nonsense
literally just pulp from the corpus the stuff that it was trained on and it's it's set up to
extract statistical patterns from that and then regenerate them or regenerate things that look like
the training data and so you end up with stuff that I mean it basically just is this
slop that is to some extent plagiarized from the training data and you know it's not really
it's not it's I don't know it's it's hard to describe all the ways that it's not actually
anything that would pass for intelligence and it's one of these things also like I understand
I mean don't get me wrong I I have also had the same first experience where you start playing with it and you're like
oh wow this is amazing but I also have had that same experience with infinite screen on
now blue sky and before Twitter this is just an app like a bot basically that is constantly
I mean the name kind of says it it's just sort of screaming it's like ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
changing the number of ages each time and then if you mention it then it replies also with that
and it does this in a way that you know obviously there's no intelligence there it's just like
statistics and like the length of the ages and the delay between when it responds and when you've
mentioned it change and those things make it feel very much like there's a entity there like
there's an intelligence but obviously it's just random shit and I think that really gets to the
magic trick that is this LLN shit because it definitely I agree feels kind of like a person
feels like you're interacting with something that has a presence in intelligence but what's really
happening is you're just getting against statistical nonsense and it's generated from stuff that
was written by people who have intelligence and a perspective and all that kind of stuff so because
it's coming from that it's able to simulate it it's able to give you something that feels kind of like
it but then you know that's that's like the first brush you're like wow this is amazing
I then you start like asking it some questions where you know the answer they're leaving some
stuff out of your prompt and it really falls apart really fast like it's it's so bad it's all
so bad it's frustrating to me because a lot of people just don't have like the the understanding of
stuff to be able to assess it well and a lot of people who are in a position to allocate funds and
like give give people like sample and fuck tons of money are just taken in by this magic trick
I don't judge people who are just like random everyday people especially when people are telling
you like oh this is this is the way to do this I don't I don't judge people for not getting it
but like VCs the people of the venture capitalists who are giving him money investors these kinds of
just and it's not just them but I mean like up and down the executive stack of all these massive
companies and you just have all these people falling for this shit and it's just like I never really
had a opinion of a lot of you people I never had a high opinion of general CEOs or VPs but you see
how quickly and easily these people are taken in by again just a cheap magic trick
and it's just like I don't know it's frustrating it's just fucking frustrating I say this is
somebody who tried to raise money for something real and failed miserably it's just fucking annoying
to me that people are selling this shit that you know really is not it's not intelligent at all
and they got people just buying into it and sending like billions and billions of dollars on this
crap and you got people the one thing that I do get some hope from is like I'm on Facebook
I shouldn't be but I got back on for a variety of reasons and I've stayed on for a little while
for a few reasons but I'm there and I keep seeing always fucking like all these fucking ads
for this garbage and the comments are like there are some people who like I think they're people
they might be bots they feel very chilly they're just like you know I don't I don't think they're
just random people I think they're like people who are involved in some way or they're being paid
or whatever to say good things usually crap and then you get a fuckload of bots saying
good things and often they're poorly written like they're all saying the same stuff with the same
misspelling verbatim and it's just ridiculous which is like if you have an LLM the one thing
LLMs are good at is generating random crap that kind of sounds and looks superficially right
you could you could just generate a bunch of comments and the who the fuck is going to look at the
comments and really delve into them and if the comments are short enough it could be plausible
but they don't even seem to bother with that they just like throw crap there and it's just so sad
and then the part that gives me hope though the part that I take some some happiness in
is that every single one of these has a bunch of people first off a bunch of people
angry reacting and laughing and second a bunch of people just like crapping on it and often
like the ones that haven't bothered with the bots or the shills it's just people laughing at it
or crapping on it in the in the remarks and you know you look at that and it's like how are you
people not fucking embarrassed to be paying money to show people these fucking ads and it's so lazy
it's so like you can you can see like somebody is asleep at the wheel they're paying for these things
they're not cleaning up their responses and then there there are these things where it's like
weeks old or months old and it's just people crapping on the thing and if you look at that and
anybody monitoring this shit are you just you just set it up one day and you got to going
and you're like that paying attention you don't care I don't know if I was if I was selling this crap
I would at least pretend I would at least like go in and look through that and say oh yeah we
should delete these comments because these comments are really making us look bad and they don't
they don't fucking like it's so phoned in and lazy it really offends me it deeply deeply
offends me and again they're getting paid up scene amounts of money for this shit and it's
frustrating as fuck anyway if if you could really have like a genuine artificial intelligence
that would be a great teacher like or it could be but we don't have that you have artificial
I hate using the words stupidity because it's it's a very ableist language but I'm trying to think
like what would be an alternative that's not that I'm not sure whatever it is you have just this
artificial garbage just flock that is just a regurgitated pulp of stuff that is plagiarized mostly
and it's massively resource intensive and it doesn't actually you know it depends on the
the one that you're looking at but to some extent or another and often to a very large extent
it has like no ability to to reason or do anything that's yeah and you look at it it's just like
such dog shit and it's frustrating again like how do people not see it but anyway if you
had that it would be it would be the way to teach or it would be a way to teach another thing that
you could do that we actually could do without having to make that kind of crap is literally what
I just said learn one or watch one learn what watch one do one teach one so you know you you have a
physics problem you're learning chemistry and you know you're like well what is the stoichiometry
of this reaction we have hydrogen gas we have oxygen gas and we're going to mix them together
in some proportion and given ignition source and the product is going to be water and so you know
in terms of volume or mass figure out like what is the stoichiometric relationship
that is to say like what is the proportion of hydrogen that we mix with oxygen
that when we ignite it forms a certain amount of water and you know maybe not even obviously
we all know H2O I think and so it's two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen and in reality oxygen is usually
atomic oxygen but it's O2 gas and the hydrogen is H2 gas so it's still two molecules of H2
for every molecule of O2 and you know I'm just trying to try to go fit but you know you do this
and then you figure out like well what is the atomic mass of hydrogen and what is the atomic mass of
oxygen and then you can figure out like well it's like if you mix I'm just pulling numbers out of
my ass so apologies if these are wrong and disclaimer that they probably are but you know you have
like a kilogram of hydrogen and we have like 16 kilograms of oxygen and we mix those together
and then how much water do you get and how much hydrogen and oxygen are going to be left over
and yeah you you can figure that out it's a pretty basic problem I give you that and then you
solve it and then now you know like what the stoichiometric relationship is and how
molecules work a little bit and you know you just kind of like go from there and so you know like
the first I do it myself and you watch and then you do one and you know if you have trouble
then we don't advance to the next step but yeah or if you have questions when you watch
me do it we don't advance to the next step and then once you've done it and you can do it
now you teach somebody to do it and if you do that if we all did that with everything
there are enough people out there and enough people who want to learn and who need to learn
that we could all just you know do that and teach that way and when you think about it it's like
why why the fuck do you even need AI for that you can just do it with people like you don't
need that's that's the kind of thing you could easily easily do I understand to some extent
why it's not how we do stuff because it's difficult in in the structure of like industrialized
education sort of way schools work as we at least as we've set them up but it's not that hard
to do in reality and if you set things up like that and especially if you did it from the
point where kids were like little and it's like okay well you have watched somebody read this book
and now you start reading the book to somebody else and now you start teaching somebody else how to read
and it's it's just stuff that you could you know like teach somebody how to do the
alphabet and you teach somebody with the sounds are what the shapes are how to write stuff
and then they they learn it they teach it and you just keep passing stuff on that way
um you know it's I don't know it's just it's such an obvious simple thing and I will say
I am not an expert in education despite having taught many times so maybe there are good
reasons why you can't just do that and obviously also like there are nuances and there are details
and things are everything is more complicated than it seems on the surface so yeah it's not like
you can just immediately do that but I feel like there's a way that you could make that kind of work
and there's no need for the fake AI even if you had the really AI but especially with the
fake ship anyway I don't want to keep rambling on about this but it's just it's frustrating just I
I wish that um actually as long as I'm talking about this that teaching part would be a thing
that I would do I would you know and and if I was doing it the way that I would want to do it
it would be more combination of a lecture and also a mediation so it's like uh you do a little
bit of a lecture and then you're also kind of like giving people the ability to do the
watch one um do one teach one sort of thing and you're just sort of there in case there are
any any little hiccups any stumbles so anyway that would be one thing I would like to do
I would definitely give in my dear others I mean I I know that I would like
well I don't know I think a lot about this because it's like what what would I do
if I could do anything you could just snap your fingers and then like the works in a certain way
the thing I mean fundamentally if I could not have to make money and just like
work on my own stuff that would be preferable to do anything I can then go um you know and
it which is not to say that I wouldn't do work but it's like I just wish that I didn't have the
do work and somehow you know convert that to dollars I hate the I hate the dollar conversion part
um and yeah I just think about like how if you think about like for most of human history
obviously there are certain things that you kind of have to do like you you'd have to prepare food
you have to either hunt or garden or food and you know build shelter maintain it all this
kind of stuff but you could imagine like there was a time where especially
once people got food forests kind of set up the amount of labor people had to put into that
versus like modern agriculture where it's extremely labor intensive and chemically and energy intensive
when people felt food forests they needed to work like legitimately like 10 20 hours a week of
light work and light work that you're doing with friends and family and once he did that you know
the food would just kind of like be there and similarly you know at once upon a time you could build
your own place to live just like go out into the woods and build a place and now you got your place
and you could just stay there you could just that could be your place and you think about that
versus now I mean but just the amount of time and money and effort it would take to
to get a place that is yours and then once you've got it it's not like it's actually actually yours
because you have property taxes and you have all this other shit and eventually you could
lose it despite having paid for the whole thing despite having done everything you know the things
could change and then you follow the rules and then one day like it's not yours anymore
that's like it's it's still fucked up and the only things that we have now that kind of
give people the ability to do not have to work and not have the gun to their head to the work
is essentially stealing other people's labor like having extra properties that are
technically kind of yours and then you're a landlord and then they pay you for them
and they they're working to pay you and you're just sitting there doing a very
minimal amount of effort to maintain them or paying somebody else for it and the rest of it is just
going into a giant pot and for you and then at the same time also you're paying interest probably
that interest is going into an even bigger pot for for some rich fucks above you and probably
another layer on top of that and it's just like it is the way things are so fucked up and
frustrating versus the way they could be like we could all there's enough there's enough housing
build that we could all just have a fucking house like or when I say have a house I mean you
could be an apartment or something but you could live comfortably we could all live comfortably
and have a space and the only reason that we can't do that is because some people are hoarding
a fuck ton of space for no reason other than they want to exploit other people like get them
to work for them and then you think also like and if I had like space and I could just live
and I could get food then I would teach for free you know I wouldn't I don't need the
compensation for it I'm not interested I say this a lot but I don't understand the concept of money
and I really mean that I mean like I understand I have a PhD in physics I understand
what people think the concept of money is and the currency of exchange and all is kind of stuff
but it is so far detached like the modern fiat currency so far detached from anything of any real
value that it's just like it literally just imaginary bullshit it's literally just scores in a computer
and a database someplace and if you changed those numbers if suddenly you went into the bank
and completely reshuffled all the the account balances it would change very little especially
if you like suddenly just yeah let's just give everybody a couple hundred grand it would change
extremely little it's not like there's some finite pool of of stuff that you can get and and
and also I mean like there's this whole lie about like supply and demand and the cost of things and
you know like well if the the lie is basically if you gave everybody a hundred grand the prices
of everything would just go up and that would read but in reality I don't think that's true I really
don't think that's true which is another reason that I it's just I don't understand the concept
of money I think it's just completely made up bullshit and you know like at one point in time maybe
you had some kind of connection to just something of some kind of value although also there's another
thing I I know I've talked about this before but but I think that I made an episode about it
or I mentioned it in that episode but people at one point in time but the story that
economics professors like the tell and the the capitalist you know fairy tale is basically well
at one point in time people would do bartering and then they needed that more efficient to
means of exchange because you know you don't want to have to barter for everything and also if you
have X and you need Z but you can't actually trade X for Z you can trade X with somebody else for Y
and the person that trades the Y you can use that Y to trade with the Z and then you and so
instead of going through that intermediate stuff now you can just convert your X to dollars or whatever
your currency is and then you can just go directly to Z and the dollars are that's the story that's
the the the story people tell when you actually look at it historically it's not how things worked
like for the most part indigenous populations have more like gift economies they don't
actually like like bartering is this is the thing that happens for certain scarce goods or if you're
interacting with people like outside of of your community but within the community and especially
like the community would generally speaking be family and then extended family you're not really
accounting shit you just kind of oh I've got some extra of this and you need it so here have some
and you've got some extra of that and then I need it and so you're like here have some or I need some
shit done and I need a couple extra hands for it and you're around so you help me and you need something
else done and I'm around and I have to know how to do it and so I help you that's the kind like
without any kind of accounting going on it's not a transactional sort of thing and when you start
looking at that you start seeing like oh all of this get that we do and all of the not that
just purely shit on capitalism but all this idea that we have that like oh it's just natural
that people barter and all of this stuff and so it's since they're bartering currency makes more
sense and boy it's all bullshit it's all just made up fucking bullshit and it's it's kind of
ridiculous and kind of awful and especially also when you start realizing oh people used to go
or when people went to indigenous communities like colonizers would be these people they go
someplace in Africa or the Americas or in Asia or South Pacific or wherever they go someplace
and they find people and the people that they find they're they're they're they're sitting there
and they're having a lot of leisure time like a ridiculous amount of leisure time they're not
not really doing like lots of work and you have these European colonists that are sitting there
and like you lazy assholes right and the truth is like for the most part they figured out ways
to you know whether it was food forests or some kind of hunting or gathering or whatever that
did not require a shit ton of effort and so people had and they also like said up shelter
and the shelter you know it would take bursts of effort to build at some point or if it was
something elaborate maybe it would take like an ongoing effort over a long period of time but once
you put that effort in it's done and then it just exists or you know like a burst of effort and
then it's done and then it just like oh we're gonna raise the barn and then then you get the barn
and now you've got now you've just you don't have a fucking mortgage on the barn you don't have a
you know like leaned the to the bank that you don't actually own your own barn you built it
with the community and I'm kind of mixing things like the if it's still I'm in essentially
that's kind of how it worked and you look at that and you look at these these fucking settlers
came in and like fuck you guys you have to change this and they teach this horrible mode of agriculture
which is this industrial like row monoculture kind of crop stuff which is how most of our
agriculture is down every now and it's very inefficient it's extremely resource intensive
and it's basically set up so that like normally in food forests you have an ecosystem
so you like you might have some pests but you'll have stuff there to eat the pests and you'll have
stuff for the pests seed and then you'll have like things that kind of keep the deer out of the crop
that you want or you've got enough extra that they're eating some of it but you're still getting
what you need and all this kind of stuff and you know like I mean even so far is like stuff
when it's growing together because it forms an ecosystem this kind of stuff well the simple
obvious one would be like fixing nitrogen so you don't need fertilizer if you have stuff that's
fixing nitrogen growing with stuff that needs nitrogen and can't fix it itself now was suddenly
your need for fertilizer is much much less and you know there's there's stuff that makes the
water that falls on the rain sort of stick in the soil this soil more and there's stuff that you know
just like you can you keep going through the list and you start looking at this and it's like when
you have an ecosystem you don't really need pesticides at least to the same extent and really
probably at all and you don't need to do a lot of the maintenance stuff you don't need you need
to like clean things up and make sure that certain things are not growing in certain places
and make sure that the stuff that you want to grow is okay but other than that and then you
get the proportions kind of right other than that and like fine tuning you can just get stuff to grow
almost on its own and like the amount of ongoing effort that it takes is so minimal compared to
the sort of Western agriculture system that we use and you look at that and you just like I don't
know it's it's very offensive how just how much more resource intensive it is and it's also
designed if you do monoculture like that it's basically designed to sap the soil of certain nutrients
so now because you're growing only one kind of thing that might not fix nitrogen it's extracting
all of the all the fixed nitrogen from the soil and now you have soil that is after a few cycles
not able to support anything and you either have to rotate crops or they just everything dies and also
by the way you're not taking you know it's not just that you're taking the fruits out but you're
taking all of the stuff out and you're like disposing of it someplace else so all the other minerals
that are there are just getting pushed off someplace else or you know they're extracted from the soil
as well and you're just making barren shitty soil versus you could be doing this in a way that
makes much more sense and works much better it is just I don't know I and also I do want to
obviously like things were not perfect and I do like having the ability to get surgery if you need
surgery I like I needed out of the truck to me to get my retina fixed and I like the fact that I could
do that I like living in a society with that I like having a manufactured computer that I can use
but I can record this on and share it with you and do work on and all that kind of stuff I like
that kind of stuff it's kind of nice but you don't need to do it the way that we're doing it like
we could make things so much better and all of this shit is just shit the people made up
and a lot of it could be better and you know I'm not saying like we should go back to the way
things were but why don't we look at the way things were and look at the way things are and improve on
things and this is also my thing you know I've talked about this before but when you're traveling
go around and see how other people do shit and recognize the things that you're not doing
and then steal the good ideas you know like I just had a friend traveling with me around your
pan for a week last week I think it's now it's a week ago but this was her first time being on a
train and her remark is just like trains are fucking awesome like having a metro and having
even without shit concept just having trains to get around the city is fucking awesome and then when
you have like shinconsen or the Chinese high-speed rail or tijie ve whatever it is it's
fucking amazing it's like you know and this is just one example of public transit and public goods
but you can look at other stuff and go around the world and see like oh there are places where
if you need surgery you don't have to pay for it it's just covered and it's not like that's
automatically like this giant queue that everybody has to get into and it's you know this big
train there are places where it's actually kind of works well not none of them are perfect
and some things are better in some places and some things are better in other places but yeah
what you could do there's nothing that says that you have to replicate one particular thing you
can kind of look around see what works and see what doesn't work and then take the best parts
and figure out the stuff that doesn't work and figure out why it doesn't work
and replace it or do something better or try something new you can go around and say like well
everybody having nothing gets stuck on this car thing but everybody having their own private car
and having to have a car like to get around in the US if you don't have a car you're kind of
a little bit fucked in a lot of places and the in fact it's a luxury to live places where you
don't need a car in the US unlike most of the world where if if you live in Tokyo or in Bangkok
or most of the places that I've visited on this trip or most of the places that I haven't
visited that are around you know you do not you could just be a random person living some place
and not having a car is actually not a big deal like you can for the most part get where you want to
go you can do the things you want to do and it's not like you're going to be like taking
over to give us amount of time to do it either in fact it's it's easier here not having a car
for most things to just take the metro and then you get there then it would be to you know you
pay for parking and then you drive someplace you deal with traffic and then you have to find a parking
spot and you have to pay for parking there and then it actually is worse it's a worse experience
to have a car in a lot of places and wait you know and you think about like that the expensive
having a car the expensive having to have insurance and every car has an individual driver that's not
that will train because we can't afford to train everybody well and so now the odds of getting in
a wreck are much higher every car is taking up so much space like you know if you look at like
how big a car is there's a there's a there's a I I should find it but there's a really nice cartoon
that I like that sort of shows a road and it shows like this is how many cars or how much space
this moving this many people and cars with a single driver takes and then this is what it looks
like if they're all in trains or buses or bicycles and you look at that and it's just so much
more efficient and you think about like all the time that you're spending in traffic all the the risk
of damage all the waste of energy and materials and the disposal of all that stuff
the ecological impact of all that stuff and again you're just like solving a problem that
everybody has but instead of solving it once for everybody or even even solving it a couple times
in different ways for everybody you're solving it all individually over and over and over again
and of course it's going to be ridiculously inefficient and of course it's going to take
much more space and create a lot more traffic like the amount of people
is true like if you go on the Tokyo Metro during rush hour it'll be crowded but also there's a
massive train with 12 cars and a new one comes every like two minutes and each one of those is
crowded but the amount of people you're moving versus if every one of those people was in a fucking car
it's it's ridiculous it's completely ridiculous and it's just like seal that fucking idea
and also like the reason I want people looking at that kind of stuff is because you should be
fucking pissed you should you should actually be pissed if you live in the US how fucked up things are
and how needlessly fucked up things are and when you start looking at it too and it's like
this is things of this way not because people decided to make them that way but mostly because
like some rich assholes wanted to sell cars and so they ripped up the trolleys and some rich assholes
had this other interest and so they or yeah in the US like the answer to a lot of stuff
is also racism so it's like well if you put in public transit system black people get to use it
too and we can't possibly have that so you know I mean it doesn't take very very much scratching
when you like I looked in Gilbert for a while and people there are weirdly opposed to the light rail
coming down there and the light rail so badly just once the turn right like it comes down
main street in Mesa it just wants to turn right and then go down through downtown Gilbert
when I say it wants to I mean like I think one day it will I think it's almost inevitable
but people in Gilbert don't want that and they don't want it because the same reason that they don't
want something in Scottsdale because they're like oh no if we do that and poor people might come here
or if we do this then brown people or black people might come here and like I mean they
they won't necessarily say that openly but that's it's it's clearly what they're thinking
and the poor one they will say openly so you know you talk to people and it's like oh you're just
fucking classes than racist and you know it's it's annoying and again I do think
and I think space at worst I think inevitably one day it will happen just because it's you can slow
down the future you can delay things you can put up a roadblocks but eventually there are
things that just make more sense and eventually things get better they don't necessarily have
to but I do think people on average like making things better and there are reasons like
eventually you run out of gas like it worst case scenario eventually it's just not going to be
feasible to have everybody running their own car the energy will not work the amount of resources
that it takes to do that isn't going to work and so eventually you start getting more densities
and eventually you start building more public transit because that's what you have to do and it would
be nice if you just said like well we can see this is going to happen you can see 50 years from now
there's going to be public transit in Phoenix assuming Phoenix is habitable why not just fucking do it
now eventually you guys are going to have some kind of universal healthcare why not just fucking do
why do you have to like delay this stuff and the most annoying thing also is like you get so many
people who would benefit so much from this who have been convinced that it's bad and that they should
be against it and they're fighting it and in reality the people who really benefit from not having
it are an extremely small subset of people and even they even like I mean the episode on
well I was words have meaning but a lot of it was on like racism and the thing about racism
and all the stuff that I was talking about even the racists even the people who are
air quotes winning in that system and I mean this about capitalism too even the air quotes winners
are suffering because of the system like the system is worse for everybody the system I
talk about this a lot but I am a pilot and if I want to fly someplace first off the amount
that it costs to rent a plane even a cheap plane but especially like a kind of nice plane
the amount that it costs the gas that it uses it's so ridiculous and then you know it takes so much
more time I have to be trained if the do all this kind of stuff and I'm not moving that many people
so it gets if you look at like an a380 years and then like that it's actually pretty efficient
in terms of how far people are going for each kilometer or mild traveled per person but if you
look at like an individual little like a series or a says not it's you're talking like SUV kind of
economy for fuel and do you know which is that terrible terrible but it's not great
and so you look at that and you're like then on top of that and you imagine everybody could do
that somehow you have you have little microfusion reactors so now everybody can have their own
private plane well now you still have to get from the airport to someplace and then you have to
and you think about like all the extra steps versus if we had Shinkansen you know I could travel
around Arizona and I think about does a lot because I'm gonna be in Arizona and a week and I need
to get from Phoenix to Flagstaff and then back to Phoenix and if I if I could just take a fucking
Shinkansen from LA to Phoenix and then take another one to Flagstaff it'd be so much better it'd be
infinitely better versus also like imagine I have like money's no object I can rent a car or I
can pay a driver or whatever and I could even have a private jet fly me from LA to the Flagstaff
and I still like I get to the airport and Flagstaff and now what do I do I have a you have
a last mile problem versus if you had fucking public transit going to the airport or going from
the train station you're just fine you're just you it's it's so much better and easier for
everybody again including the dairy air quotes rich people and of course also also if you fix
some things like you because there's no reason the things that are terrible about travel
mostly don't need to be that way you're there are certain things that just kind of need to be
shitty but there are a lot of things that we make shitty for the sake of making them shitty like they
don't need to be as bad as they are you don't need security to be as terrible as it is
you could make you could solve the problem which we actually do have of needing some degree of security
and do it in a way that is not fucking horrible and you can kind of see this because there's like
TSA precheck in global entry and all this kind of stuff you could just do it for everybody there's no
there's no real reason not to do it for everybody and instead we make everybody you know you've
got grandma taking off her shoes because that's a problem you got people dumping their water because
somehow magically my two liters of water is going to become a bomb like it which is just fucking ridiculous
it's just like it's not that it's not possible but if somebody is going to do that and that
determined they'll find another way really and probably probably not going to make like a
peroxide compound or whatever it is um that is a liquid and then have a binary chemical or whatever
to you know it's it's like you can do it but it's it's more like a theoretical thing it's not like a
real thing and then the shoe thing is just like some one asshole tried to let us shoes on fire one time
and now everybody from then on has to take off their shoes but but if you get through the TSA precheck
thing you no longer have to take off your shoes because reasons yeah it's just that the whole thing
is between security theater and just bullshit the look I'm slurring there anyway I'd probably need
to eat and I definitely it's 18 now oh eight right now and it is my last night and uh in Tokyo so
I feel like I should probably go out and do something although I don't know I'm kind of content
just staying in but I feel like I should do something because it's like you know lose that
opportunity um definitely at least gets something to eat um and with that I will talk to you later
I'm really sleepy I'm so not looking forward to I'm not looking forward to uh deflying back it's
it's such a it's kind of funny because it's like on one hand I do understand either the funny thing
is I was going to call this inflections I never even got the fucking inflections uh the inflections part
well actually it'll finish this and I'll get through the inflections cap that often and get
the I can't I can't believe him an hour in and I didn't even think about this actually I
felt good I mean I'm going to get to the inflections so the inflections thing the re and I'm just
going to blast through this but the the idea there was just that uh there are certain times
whether it's societally or in your own life you know you could you could change things dramatically
almost any time there there are wherever you are whatever you're doing you could make a move that
changes the the course of your life especially if it's a destructive move like if it's something
damaging to yourself or others you could do that you could choose to but you could make like a big
change and like you could decide to move someplace and figure out how to do it or I could decide
I'm going to go on a trip and be away for two months and these like you could do that any time
but there are times when you're kind of an inflection point and at these inflection points
it doesn't take like that much effort doesn't take that much energy they're just kind of like a
point where you can kind of push things a little bit one way or another and it rolls downhill
from there it's kind of like a saddle point so you're in a you can imagine like you're at the top of
mountain and once you're down in the valley if you want to you could be in the valley which is
kind of like where you are most of the time you can climb up a mountain I don't have the edges of the
valley and then really change things but it takes a lot of doing it takes a lot of discipline and
care and concern and all of that or you know if you happen to be at a place where you're like
at the top of the hill or at a hill where you can go left or right it might take exactly the
same like you're at the the fork in the road and both paths are going downhill both paths take
about the same amount of energy and right now or they you know you never know maybe down the road
one will take a lot more and one will take a lot less but right now both are going to be about
the same amount of effort and you could just choose and that is that is what I was kind of
talk about with inflections and my whole my whole thing there was just going to be like you
you know like I could just not get on the plane tomorrow I could do that and then things would be
very different I'm going to obviously but there are things like that that you could do so you can
inflect things anytime but you can also like I found myself ending with my kind of miserable
job ending and in a place where I could have fit for the amount of money that I've spent traveling
I could have lived in Arizona in my same situation with my car and all that kind of stuff
I could have gotten about to October maybe maybe maybe November and then I'd run out of money
or I could have done what I did and I did that and I'm actually I feel really glad that I did
it I feel I don't it does help that I don't understand the concept of money but I don't feel
any regrets about like what I've spent money on or what I've done to in the last couple of months
the only thing that I kind of wish is just a I really want to figure out a way to I'm not saying
I want to live as I have been the last couple of months because it's it's more of a vacation
but to be able to travel a little bit or just to be someplace else and have some flexibility
and that not be somebody else's bitch so to be in a sort of speak that have the boss with the
gun to your head that you know like if you don't do the asshole of shit that I'm forcing
you to do then you're gonna be out on the street and you're gonna go or in my case not on the street
but have to live this is I'm actually wrapping up with the stuff that I started on I have places
to stay but you know I will be in a place where I don't have my own space for a little while
I'm not I'm not looking forward to that I'm really not and then I have an opportunity to go
someplace else where I would have my own space but it would be like in the middle of the
fucking nowhere and it's like okay then how the fuck do I get out of there how do I how do I travel
anywhere from there um like it's it's very different than like if I if I had a place here even if
it was a modern or modest place or or in Paris or whatever you can get around you have the city
to do stuff and and you can you can wander you could hang out with people you got people to hang
out with versus like you're in the middle of the desert and there's not really many people around
and what are you gonna do and that just doesn't sound just not sound appealing to me
being stuck being stuck in Gilbert and you know like hey what am I doing there I'm not sure
be when I'm there like I need a car or you know dealing with the transit there is a fucking nightmare
especially if you're getting anywhere that is not on a transit line which is most places
and like I just am thinking about like what why do I want to be what do I want to do
and I'm at kind of an inflection point I really I need to figure out what to what to do next that's
kind of what I was what I was saying anyway I don't want to ramble on about this for too much
longer because I am getting I'm I'm ready to eat something now kind of wild it's my last I could
I could eat someplace for lunch tomorrow I guess but this will probably be my last sort of
niceish meal in Tokyo um I don't know I'm probably not gonna spend like ridiculous amount of money
it's been a tiny bit that is actually one thing about like Tokyo and in so many places outside
of the US like the rent here is not cheap but it's cheaper than LA to be that guess it depends on
where you stay but I could live here more cheaply than I could live in LA for sure and I would be
more comfortable I would have the the Metro and the Shinkansen and then when you look at like the
cost of food even if you go someplace is like I mean that don't come here wrong you can go to a
sushi restaurant and spend like 80,000 yen for person you could you could do that but you can also
just go and you can on the other extreme get like ramen for a few hundred yen but for 500 to
a thousand yen you can get a pretty decent meal or 1500 yen if you're um you can get a pretty decent
meal and if you had the kitchen and all that kind of stuff it wouldn't be that hard to to make
a pretty good food here and it wouldn't be that expensive and yeah I'm not just trying to talk
myself in the the staying here necessarily I'm not that I'm staying here but I'm obviously going
back but the getting stuff set up so there would be here but I'm looking at different places
and I'm considering where it would be and I definitely know wherever I go the thing that I want
I mean I want to be able to spend time with my mom and sister that's a big one but I really
I really want to just be someplace where I don't need to make a ridiculous amount of money to be
comfortable and I can just I can have my own space and reasonably well and have stuff that I can
do and I have to have a car I really really don't want to have a car again and it's like maybe
one day I will but if I could avoid it I would be glad to not have one I didn't have a car before
I got married in my wife her ex-wife wanted to not be the only one that drove so I learned how to
drive but I was in my 20s and I think I would have been fine never learning how to drive truly
I could have just like not done it and it would have been a big deal and if I lived in a different
society or in a place where there was public transit then I didn't have to then I why would you have
a car why would you want to it's it's one of these things like in the US you think about like what
people think is freedom and what are the things that you're aspiring to and a lot of them are just
silly a lot of them are kind of ridiculous a lot of them you know like oh you're gonna
just to I don't know why this one came up but you're gonna have a big wedding and people look
like thinking about how much you're gonna spend on the wedding and how the wedding's gonna go
and all this kind of stuff I did you spend like a ridiculous amount of money more money than
sometimes people make in a year or several years on a wedding or on a fucking ring or something
like that and then like what what was the point of that is it something that was really you know
I mean there are things that I keep coming back to travel but the like travel I don't feel like
is waste of money I I feel like it was it's money will spend spending time with people
to the extent that it costs money to to do that or having meals with people and kind of stuff
there there are things like that that feel like they're good and useful and worth
whatever you're putting in having my computer having a nice computer that works and that you
can use and all this kind of stuff actually and I I don't regret spending money on my computer
I wish that I I wish well I wish that it was like an open source thing that was more compatible
and didn't have like enriching Apple and have this weird conflict between Apple and Google and
all the layers of bullshit there but I still I still feel pretty decent about it I don't feel
like bad about it and I don't know they're just like having well I I don't want to go into
to those because especially it's it's an hour ten minutes in but I was going to talk about like
gone I was it was just like having a little mental flight back to Kyoto and when my friend
and I were there walking around we passed a place and there was ridiculous and there was a couple
of different compounds but a couple like ridiculous ridiculous places you know like people have
the house and they have like a giant yard and they have maybe a guest house and some other stuff
and you just look at that and don't give it wrong I I wouldn't mind if money was no object
and resources were I I wouldn't mind that but also like what do you really need do you really
need that I don't know I think you can be comfortable with with a lot less and you know what is
really worth putting putting resources and time and effort into and I think also like the amount
this is this is probably going to be the last thing that I talked about here today but like
the amount of money that I've made and various points in my life like my my last job was not
paid that well but was still better than a lot of people that were probably harder than I did
but you know I've had jobs where I mean pretty significant amount of money for a little while
and yet the the stuff that I had to show for it and the stuff that I was doing with that money
was kind of silly it was not and I don't even mean like extravagant purchases or ridiculous stuff
although the car that I had was such a fucking waste of money so too I just like I regret that
one deeply I enjoyed it a little bit and it was nice driving people around it was nice having a
thing to get around Phoenix but if I didn't have to have that car like the amount of extra money
that I would have or the money that would have gone to paying student loans or like credit card
debt or whatever it is just like why would you sink those resources into that and you just convert
again I don't understand the concept of money but I do understand that is equivalent to the
this much of your life that you're putting into to work or whatever and you just think about
like is it really worth I would rather not have to put in that and just have you know like a certain
amount that covers my needs and then have the rest of the time be like leisure time and my leisure time
might end up being putting stuff together like this or writing programs or you know like all
there you could be whatever random stuff but it doesn't necessarily have to be like converted to
you have to do this in order to make money in order to not be on the street or in order to get your
eye fixed or whatever and it's just like I don't know it it's it's interesting to me but I am
I'm so fucking tired I hope it doesn't come across that I'm tired because I'm like you know
A I don't have notes for this so it's probably a little rambly and then B like I don't think it's
obvious obvious but I am like struggling here I'm just like sleepy and with that I think
I'm gonna go get something to eat and I'm gonna fly back tomorrow and at this time
and 24 hours from now I will be like halfway back to LA which is fucking wild
at least unlike my friend I don't have a six hour layover when I get there and then a flight
to Phoenix I just have the the main flight so I feel bad for her that she had to do that although
still like it's one of those things like it everything is interminable and it goes on forever
and then it's over and it's it's a very weird it's right up there with my thing that's like
you know everything is either impossible or trivial if you want once you understand how to do
calculus it's actually pretty fucking easy and before you learn how to do it if you wanted to
if you wanted to take limits or figure out the volume of certain things it could be fucking impossible
and I mean you think about Lengzino's paradoxes and people spent hundreds of years thinking
about these things and they never came up with limits and then all of a sudden Newtonian
11 minutes came up with calculus and now it just becomes like oh well yeah you're taking
Zeno's paradoxes I guess I should say if you're listening and you don't know this is just the idea
a few of them but basically the idea is you can never get from A to B because first you have to get
halfway there and then you have to get halfway from where you are to the next place and then you have
to get halfway from there to the next place and so on and so on and they're infinitely many
halfway theirs the thing that that loses is of course each one you're if you're going at a constant
speed first you travel half the distance and it takes half the time and then next one you're
traveling a quarter of the distance which is half the remaining distance and it takes a quarter
of the time which is after remaining time and each time you're taking half of the the time
remaining to go half of the distance and it basically works out to be a limit and it ends up being
just a finite amount of time and it's actually is pretty simple but people struggled with this
and couldn't figure it out for I want to say centuries but I think like over a thousand years
people didn't get it and all of a sudden it's like oh it's just a limit and you just look at
stuff like that and it's like that there are just so many things like that and I think life is
very much like that as well like I'm sure whatever I'm doing a year or two from now will
seem probably in some sense trivial compared to thinking about what to do
certainly well I guess the the only options are either I figure something out or I'm completely
and probably in a figure something out I hope I hope although I don't know we'll see we'll see
with that thanks is ever for listening and the next time I talk to you I will probably be back in the
US I can't I can't believe that I I was so glad to the spend a week with my friend here though
that was that was nice I really enjoyed that I I always think people should travel just in general
and I'm somebody like I love my I love my own company I love spending time with myself and I don't
really need that much interaction with people and a lot of people annoy me like in any significant
amount of time I kind of get tired of a lot of people her I did not get tired of and I really enjoyed
I enjoyed her company in spending time walking around with her and doing stuff so anyway that was
it was nice I I know I've said that before but it is just yeah just thinking about it again
but with that thanks again and talk to you soon it's at you

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smenor/tangentsBy Scott Menor, PhD