Are billionaires completely useless?

Billionaires emit a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person. Currently there are 2,668 billionaires on this planet. That's 2 and a half billion extra people as liabilities just in greenhouse gases, and the cost to the public in extractive and other practices may put them as 4 billion useless eaters (minus 2,668 actual mouths).

Are billionaires pulling their weight? 2,668 of them hauling 4 billion and more? Are they useful? If you believe the job creator myth, then sure. The job creator myth is false. The monkey hive creates jobs, strange slime mold of a global brain finds the exploits. Billionaires just seem to be in the way. Oh, you can argue the philanthropical good, but then you must question whether one tiny brain is smarter than the global slime mold and I say no. 

Besides, when you look at global generation of movement and monies, billionaires are tiny. Global World Product they are collectively around 1%.  Take Mark Cuban and his medication sales setup. Laudible, but way too small. Big Pharma is generating 4 trillion a year and Cuban is bringing his dime to the thousand-to-open poker table? or hows about Yvon Coinard donating 3 billion to fight climate crisis? Why that's asking an ant to move a skyscraper. 

"They can fund lobbying groups and politicians, rant about colonizing Mars, and buy midlife crisis toys like Twitter or weekend getaways on a space station, but their scope for effecting real change is actually tiny on a global scale. Even Putin and Xi, who are at the state-level actor end of the scale (individually they're multi-billionaires: but they also control nuclear weapons, armies, and populations in 8-9 digits) have little global leverage. Putin's catastrophic adventure in Ukraine has revealed how threadbare the emperor's suit is: all the current gassing in the Russian media about using nuclear weapons if he doesn't get his way actually does is to demonstrate the uselessness of those nuclear weapons for achieving political/diplomatic objectives.

So I conclude that they probably feel about as helpless in the face of revolutions, climate change, and economic upheaval as you and I." - Charlie Stross

Studies have shown that the rich max out in comfort level around $100 million. I understand the advantage of having billions to leverage on tasks, but it works out much better if a billionaire simply gave at random to one thousand people. One thousand allies and their friends. American Communism is the Best Communism.

Q4 2022

Getting kicked off Twitter was the best thing that happened to me on Twitter

I went back and read the post after I was kicked off Twitter, and it is the lament of an addict.

I'm glad I'm off Twitter. I had fun times. I had shitty times. You get that dopamine kick when you get a lot of likes, or a like from a celebrity, or even a conversation with a celebrity. That's why people tweet. I get it. The same as I get my alcoholism. Twitter and alcohol were co-accelerants in my intellectual descent and the bitter black quality of my tweets. I just kept getting meaner and meaner. Thank goodness I didn't have Twitter during the lockdown.

I had some highlights, like when I spoke with Harry Turtledove about crafting alternate worlds. I would send him scenarios like if Carthage won against Rome, or the South winning the Civil War. He would write back, "It's great that you figured out how to logically alter our timeline, but you don't tell me what happens after. That's the fun part". 

Which explains why I am not an author of alternate histories.

I got my PET scan results one year after they found the ocular melanoma, that grisly goblin in my eye. The thing is still in there, slowly dying. More important my scan is NEGATIVE for metastasis. Hurray for me. Only the one kidney, half blind, next crisis.

Manger Baby Zombie Jesus

65 and a half years old, I suddenly noticed the inside of my elbows looking like the back of a fat ladies knee and I am grossed out by age. 

Thankfully not towards women my age. Younger women fun to play with but the older you get the more it feels like baby fucking. Fucking someone's daughter just is unsavory. Ah, but the crepe skin, folds and cottage cheese ass of women my age I don't mind. I find it kind o sexy, so I can only hope women my age feel the same about saggy, baggy old me.

Hurray for evolution.

I'm getting the thin skin bruises in my 60s, which suggests the 7th decade gets me. Every decade has tried to kill me which I don't like. There were certain indications that I might have another thirty years. That simultaneously excites and appalls me. The horror is I keep on turning into a lizard. The excitement is I can't stop watching the TV show anyway, and if I can get in front of the camera so much the better. And then you die. Apres mois, le deluge.

Or maybe the take a pill. You look at pictures of ripped Jeff Bezos and think Hollywood trainers and  East Coast doctors. Or maybe he started living the way we used to, because he cold afford it. Pictures and portraits of elderly hunter gatherers are ripppped. Rodeo physiques.

Kids at home, watching me on TV, grimace and think he gonna die. And yet I don't.

Fuck immortality give me immorbidity. The immorbidity pill. The Blue Pill.

Come On, Killdozer!

The movie Killdozer I always assume starred Claude Akins as the Sheriff with the epic line of challenge: "Come on Killdozer!". Proving memory is recreative (and probably non-local), Claude Akins was not in the movie. That line was never uttered. The movie starred Clint Walker and Robert Ulrich. Maybe there was a sequel? No, no Killdozer II.

The story and sceenplay for the movie were by Theodore Sturgeon, he of  the "90% is all crap" quotation. I stand with Ted. 90% of my stuff is crap. It does not mean the 10% left is sublime. 

I've had moderate success inside the computer to try to get out of the Uncanny Valley, but it is an Uncanny Ocean. "AI"s exist for nudging things into deep fake reality, but I do ejoy the painterliness of the clay analog virtual medium. Next stop, extruded clay 3D prints. 

In the meantime, I'm getting my money's worth from this free software, no sarcasm intended.

The Mystery of the Wonton Killer

We are funny little ape shaped bugs, floating along with a tiny dust mote like Whos in Whoville. We would like to think there are other Whos or who-shaped beings out in the cosmos, but it could be we are it, or it for around in this here light cone. In which case, what? Nihilism? 

Of course we Whos could invent someone to keep us company? 

End of the Anthropocene.

Beginning of the Mechanozoic.

Where The Wild Things Aren't

100 years seems like a long time, but it isn't. In my own brain I have stories told me from that time. One hundred years ago is 1922. The beginning of the Modern age. Electrification.

If I had a time machine, I could snatch someone from 1922 and bring them here. They would be able to figure stuff out. Oh, a TV! Computer, a little more explaining. But then, they exclaim, oh shows and games! Why, you must never get bored!

We can safely bring someone from 1922, but 1822, two hundred years back? They are gonna be spooked by stuff, and some might get used to it. And so on into the past.

The one thing my time heist kidnap victim wll not forgive me for, the thing that will make them weep, is how barren and badly mangled we have made the Earth. In terms of sheer killing things off, 1922 was trying its darnedest, but the planet was a lush paradise compared to our poverty of today. Whole ecosystems gone, other teetering on the brink. 

We live in squalid hovels thinking them noble palaces. It is because we are now (and have been since 4/23/1978) * a force of Nature.

Humans have tamed a lot of things, but we, despite having a seat at the table, still do not have dominion.

Take the unsettling but charming videos of people with tame big cats. Lions, tigers, leopards. Yes, it is nice that big cats are cats, but I really think big cats should be eating people. 

I understand animals can be friends. I understand humans have shaped the world since the taming of fire. But this sterile land that these animals are now stuck in with us, in this human snowglobe.

Outside that dome, in the red zone, mass slaughter, done by us. We have to stop killing shit. That is step one. Will we? Or will we continue to be as dumb as bacteria in a peach tree dish?

Art Making

I am still beta testing OpenAI's DALL E 2, the text-to-image generator. This result from the phrase "sugar skull spider, digital art".

Sometimes I'll do my own virtual reality render of the results, like this one in Adobe Medium:

I'm also back on the bronze casting. This one is entitled "Mister Potato Chip and Friends". None of the pieces would stand so I welded them together. The thicknesses of metal vary, so the welds are not great but solid. Weld quality also suffered from poor eyesight.

I have about fifty figures like this in the 1/10th scale, and these will be added to the ongoing piece, Grandpa's Funeral.