vernor vinge, tech jobs and ai, texas gerrymandering turn back, gettysburg address, social media withdrawal strategy
yesterday i was grateful for the sci-fi reading group...
today i am looking forward to getting paid...
i am sitting in bigmouth coffee shop... my alternative to kitchen and coffee, and really more my place than kitchen and coffee except for the relationships i have there... and their inability to open consistently at the time they say they will...
i am mulling over how i might further withdraw from social media... and i come to the idea that i need to do more and more that puts me in direct contact with people... face to face... last night was sci-fi book club... i joined this club with my wife... i have been enjoying it, but i am getting a little tired of a literature that struggles to imagine a good future for humanity... we read neuromancer by william gibson... i didn't like the book very much... character development was thin and in the end i didn't really like any of the characters... it was hard to stay engaged... the descriptive prose was not so much unreadable as it failed to evoke images in my mind... scene descriptions deployed language and words that nothing in my personal experience related to...
i have decided to give the "lit" (short for literature? literrary?) book club a try... they are meeting the week after thanksgiving... i have purchased the book... we'll see if my wife wants to join too...
heather cox richardson about the gettysburgh address...
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
this post comes on the heels of a trump administration total defeat on the release of the epstein files... approved with only one no vote in the house... approved by unanimous consent in the senate... this is not what i expected... i had been given the impression that the senate might hold the line for the administration... very far from it... i am waiting for further analysis of what just happened... i am not so naive as to believe we will actually get all the scoop of trump's involvement with epstein... still... is this the beginning of the end of the hegemonic control trump has had over the republican party?...
and... a federal court has blocked the texas gerrymandering attempt on grounds of racial descriminatation...
In blow to Trump, federal judges block new Texas congressional map - POLITICO
A panel of federal judges has blocked Texas’ newly redrawn congressional map — which made five districts in the state more favorable to Republicans — saying the plan appeared to be an illegal race-based gerrymander.
will the supreme court uphold?... will the challenge to california's similar effort knock that back too?... i would prefer that all gerrymandering efforts fail...
a big theme in a lot of sci-fi is ai... this caught my eye...
Tech layoffs continue despite AI advancements
"According to a project from economist Ezra Karger aiming to predict the progress of AI, more than 18 percent of American work hours will be AI-assisted by 2030," writes Niall Ferguson for The Free Press. "Ten years later, AI will be as important to this century as electricity or the car were to the previous one"
personally, i am in the mode of withdrawing from tech and returning, as much as i can, to analog ways of doing things...
last night in the after book club gathering at draught for beers, i had a conversation with one of the members about how awful capitalism is, though he was maintaining it was the best system we've come up with so far... a kind of backhanded support of capitalism if you ask me... i don't particularly agree that a system that is destroying the environment and has huge potential to take humanity down with it can be viewed as any kind of best system...
apropos of that conversation i ran across this article on vernor vinge...
Declassified FBI file reveals surveillance of author Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge—the Hugo Award–winning science fiction author who passed away in March 2024—imagined a world where individuals, not governments, held the power. His 1981 novella True Names featured hackers known as "warlocks" fighting a corrupt, incompetent government, while his 1985 novel The Peace War made the case for anarcho-capitalism.
i have recommended it to the sci-fi book club moderator...
parting photograph...
a little over two years ago when i started presenting femininely and wearing lipstick in public, it gave me a huge charge to leave a lipstick stain on a mug, as i had seen women do my entire life... it was a deep invocation of femininity to me... i still get a charge from leaving my feminine mark on mugs, but not as intense as initially... just now i wonder, what does someone see when they see a mug i have left with a lipstick stain on it?... without me around... i imagine they would assume a woman had been the user of the cup...