A collection of sh*t quite honestly

Hello to all. The snow has started. No adventures this week. The world is slowing coming into the wintry darkness. There is some form of Seasonal Affective Disorder, the thoughts of darkness and cold make ones spine shrivel. How unfortunate that our biology does not allow for hibernation. There are several unfinished and bizarre drafts of ideas from the last few months that will be pasted below. They make no sense, are fairly disjointed and are not relevant or useful in any way. They have been sitting there for a while though so just need to clear them out. There is nothing else to report this week unfortunately. One has reached some level of diminishing returns on other projects, stuck in traffic jams etc. Now for the madness. Fight me on all of them, good luck finishing them, they are inherently rubbish: 1. The Agar (ridiculous scale: 4) There was a popular game in around the 2010-2016 time period, where internet was becoming more inextricable and widespread, by the name of agar.io. might be an idea to play a few games before reading on. it is a fun game and would recommend to anyone with patience and a decent mouse. essentially you start off as a small blob and you collect tiny little dots worth 1 point, grow your mass by 1 and you gobble up enough of these and you can eventually absorb other blobs and gain their points. the sole objective of the game was to be the biggest blob. as you got bigger you got slower. there were little spiky structures that could split you up into smaller blobs and you would move them all in tandem. you could choose to split your blob into two faster, smaller blobs after a certain size, re-meld them etc. these were strategic options at a certain point in the game and so on. it meant nothing at the time but looking back it was representative of a great many things; governments, ideologies, companies, biological organisms even. i suppose the main theme is that the incentive of the game was just to get bigger (or avoid being absorbed) and that is what every player was out to do. it seems to be a theme of life though. everything wants to get bigger, increase it's mass, expand, gobble up everything.

The agar represents any group of living things in a way. a company wants to get bigger numbers, an idea wants more people, a government wants more influence, a biological organism wants more replication. we are in some way living in agario. you could view companies or nations or ideas as living things trying to outcompete one another, grow larger etc. It is actually a reasonable way to view history/people/organizations, you can understand that the underlying incentive is growth in whatever way keeps them alive. They can naturally become cancerous, highly efficient or stall, stagnate, run into obstacles, be absorbed by other agars, absorb other agars etc. You could understand wars, competition, conflict as nothing more than two organisms competing to grow in a confined space, to be top of the leaderboard. 2. Standardization, Optimization, Bastardization, Minimization (ridiculous scale: 8)

You have some genius in a company saying 'we can shorten the length of the snicker 5mm! we have run the tests and consumers know no difference! we will save XXmillion!'. This genius brand manager gets themselves a promotion and in steps some new genius. the cycle repeats. until the snickers is about 3cm shorter or narrower or the milk ingredient has been replaced and so on. It never makes a difference to the consumer in that direct iteration but over time you look back and think 'damn a dairy milk used to taste a lot nicer than this and was a lot thicker i am pretty sure 0.o'. Combine this with manufacturer price increases and bam you're paying double for half as much. does it matter? not really. does anyone care? clearly not, we keep buying dairy milks.

Next up, why does a dairy milk contain pieces of oreo and daim and other bastardised brands just crammed in there to no end. Because you have big boi mondelez owning all of those brands and just mashing everything together to shove shit down your throat endlessly. why buy a dairy milk, valued consumer when you can purchase some sort of hybrid chocolate sugar monstrosity bastard creature from the sugar lab. everything needs to be standard across all market for efficiency, so you just have the same shit in a different packet in whatever markets they have swallowed. uk/ire,dairy milk = scandinavia,marabou. These guys just swallow up everything in their path and then cram all the same shit in different colour packets. standardised, bastardised and boring. those old gold wrappers had character, the little lumpy caramello squares had the impression of luxury and being something different, special. now they have the feeling of being optimised blocks of sugar. they always were to some extent but its just a different feeling unwrapping a reasealable plastic packet versus that gold or silver foil and unlatching the papery outer layer. more fun. no fun anymore, just optimised units designed for optimised numbers on a screen. we are creating machines, not companies. machines optimised for producing and pumping, no human element, just units and digits. produce, pump, harvest the digits, repeat. mechanized consumption in a way. these chocolate bars are no longer treats, theyre units, units of consumption. we dont call people customers anymore, we call them consumers. no human element, they are just machines to pump units into. am i wrong? almost entirely.

A great little hobby you can partake in is to look into a brand, find its parent company, go to their website and check if they have a 'modern slavery statement'. if they do, it is almost certain they have been implicated in slavery, child labour or forced labour. it is morbidly hilarious. another mad one, theres something like 3 million children that die from malnutrition or poor water. that is a mental one. one of those every year is surely a genius who can solve an issue. just a complete waste of human capital. this is just complaining/pontificating, quite hypocritical because i do enjoy a snickers.

Mechanized improvement. In a way our entire culture reflects the last 200 years of human memory. we pump out consumables, we increase production, we improve to sell more. music has gone this way, a standard recipe for successful songs, pump them out by the dozen, harvest the cash and optimise for the next round. industry the same, we standardise something that works, pump it out harvest the cash and optimise for the next round. repeat purchases, constant increase of the numbers, production, sales, volumes, optimise the costs and continue. how much of this has been informed by our own memory banks? we went through two world wars, where the only metric was increase production, pump the materials out, get ready for the next round. increase the number of bullets, guns and shells, increase the numbers and win. increase the numbers of bars, sales and distribution, increase the numbers and win. we are involved in constant wars without the overt blood and without us even knowing it. optimise, standardise, pump, repeat. improve the numbers, win. acquire units of consumption, strongholds of spending, strategic display points, regions, categories, sub-categories, segments, demographics, consumers. there are no people anymore, just units to be optimised for whatever your end goal is. governments have fallen into this mode of thinking, bureaucratic machines that optimise for their own self perpetuation, target groups, demographics, regions, capture them optimise their voting behaviour and win. increase gdp, improve debt ratios, win. there are no people of a country, just units to be allocated into sectors and kept alive to perpetuate productivity. improve labour force, increase spending, increase economic output.

3. Strange Settlements (ridiculous scale: god knows, it makes no sense even)

   I was considering to do a voice note for this one but it will make no sense unless written down in some way. Please, attack the ideas like rabid dogs.

   
   

   Spurred a little bit by the cities i have seen, which i found a bit insane honestly. They are inherently unhealthy, that many people definitely should not be contained in that way for a whole myriad of reasons: disease, social degeneration, food quality, air quality, strain of waste disposal the list goes on and on. Having said that though there are incredible oppurtunities for collaboration, productivity and idea generation in cities.

   
   

   On the other side of the scale you have rural/agrarian. This has a whole host issues as well - lack of services, lack of diversity, more potential for close-mindedness/misperceptions, lack of oppurtunities for young people etc. But there is some social trust, shared identity and more of a feeling of being on the same team , shared goals etc.

   
   

   Is there a way to strike a balance, at scale, without significant bureaucracy between the two. I think we have the capacity and the tools. The thought would be some sort of cycling mechanism which you can opt in or out of. it could work like you are born and you have a rural upbringing to build a community driven mindset and then slowly you commute a little further in towards a city as education progresses. Can also expand education to practical things outside of the rote learning test based curriculum. Hands on money management, hands on gardening, hands on trade training. Doing all this from a young age makes a more well rounded individual and could make career/life choices easier, help people find what they are good at quicker.

   
   

   Then you can go specialise in a city setting, meet lots of people etc, work hard party hard, contribute to an industry/creative endeavour/ profession/career of your choice, find a family etc and then you can be cycled back out towards the country to raise your own kids etc, integrate with a community, contribute to community projects etc, your work responsibilities are decreased if you choose and can contribute more to the area projects, education of the youth in whatever your field is, then when you get old you can focus more on the passing on of knowledge. kind of gearing at a more localised and sustainable mode of living, more shared resources, community atmosphere but no obligations towards 'contributing to the common good' or any of that. make it a choice and people will probably remember their childhood fondly and want to share it, ensuring decent amount of people return to their roots of community and contribute.

   
   

   What is it lacking? recognition of private property sure, maybe some sort transfer system, recognition of roots, maybe opt in/out for certain areas to go etc. Facilitation of ambition? common floor, no limit on ceiling for potential? Move to different country? opt in/out again? Bad people, free riders, nefarious folks? possible to build this into the system somehow? Rivalry between areas, communities? Differences in socio economic success, formation of class based communities again ?

   
   

   Have to have a flexible adapting system which can facilitate. You increase public transport and education systems. you want to standardise things but not to the point where you reduce the drive to strive for better. so what of you just raised the floor to a point where you cant fail? no risk then.