the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

token cheat

 i slept alright last night, though i got up for bit and then tried to sleep in after, and was woken at 7.17am by an enthusiastic city worker to be informed that they'd cleared the dead rat from the sidewalk that i reported yesterday.

they honestly didn't need to call :/

my first hour or two were spent putting together a summary of my last six months for my recruiter, while simultaneously continuing the auto-doc work i'd begun yesterday afternoon (an endless back-and-forth gen-eval loop between opencode's bigpickle and codex luna) which literally took the entire day to complete.

[takes a moment to do that just-one-more-thing]

to be honest, i have only the vaguest notion of what was being done all day. there were a couple of points where i had to get involved and clarify some principles, but by and large it was a lot of uninteresting crap and a lot of breaking one thing while fixing another...

budget AI is, well, budget.

once i got the summary sent off, i took mr smear with me to the pharmacy to pick up gd's prescription. he read while keeping an eye on the queue numbers, i did a bit of shopping, completely forgetting the mug mission we'd been on on friday, until we were already home :P

we must have been there an hour or so, and i was feeling worryingly faint. not sure if sick, or just sleep deprived. i just had to look up the term sleep deprived.

once we returned home, i finally started looking at client work. i spent a few hours trying to establish a baseline cost estimate for the backfill i'm supposed to be starting this week, which took forever and ended with me encountering bad source data and having to make my jobs more tolerant. i feel like i cheated, because i used the databricks AI for the real work and my own tokens just to validate it.

the inexplicable cost jump from last week reared its ugly head, and led me to dive deep to try and figure out what was going on... which led me to the not-exactly-verifiable conclusion that mlflow tracing was the prime culprit. removing its artifacts seemed to make my later verification efforts vastly cheaper, but in any event i'm no longer even trying to use the company AI to get any actual work done.

during one of mr smear's downtimes, i set him to cleaning our standing fans. i had to guide him a bit at first, but the second one he did all by himself and he really did do a good job 🙌

another win was getting him to use another of his downtimes to practice drawing backgrounds, and he appears to be quite excited by the results, though i cannot verify what he's been up to because he's being unusually secretive.

yet another win was getting him to come with me for a walk once i was *done* with my work day, he was happy to join me and we had a good time discussing all sorts of interesting things ^_^

[exhales]

dinner time.

nerve bump

i managed to get a surprising amount of work done yesterday, especially considering a couple of rounds of parenting drama revolving around my son being sneaky and dishonest about his screen time violations. dinner was nice - we're continuing with chocolat, and i was very pleased to hear mr smear commenting about what a great movie it is "even if it is really calm and slow" - and then we were invited upstairs for some fluxx.

a lot of the hour or so we were there was fun, but for two things: big data being mean to his youngest (he's really impatient with him), and mr smear being a really bad sport :(

i actually slept really well last night (i only had two coffees yesterday, and i forgot to take my magnesium supplement), but i was woken at 6am by mr smear's traumatizingly loud and aggressive alarm. which turned out to be a good thing, once my nerves calmed a little, because i have to go in a couple of minutes and i had a fair amount to do.

...

tahoma sent me a link to unfortunately, you need to know what the jevons paradox is yesterday, which i happen to have seen the day before. it's absolutely brilliant.

entangled

i posted something this morning, and i'm disappointed that it hasn't got much attention:

nobody's talking about something that's really important: regardless of whether you've been retrenched or not, how do you trust an employer that would throw your fellow employees under the bus for the promise of cost cutting AI? how do you return to working for a company that did that to you? where's the incentive to work hard and behave as if you and your employers have a shared stake in the future of your company?

the accepted behavior of our industry leaders is nothing short of psychopathic, and nobody is calling them to account.  we've all just accepted that this is what business looks like now, and it's hurting not just the human beings who do the work and have families to provide for, but also the businesses themselves, and also our economies.

...

the pharmacy run was stressful. after waiting about half an hour, listening to music and knowing there were another ten numbers to go, i was suddenly yanked out of my reverie as i registered that my number was suddenly, unexpectedly up. i rushed to the counter, struggling to turn the music off (the button just didn't work) and get my paperwork out, only to find myself standing there waiting for someone who turned out to be a technician and not a pharmacist.

he was trying to fix the queue number system.

what followed was chaos, with a couple of us keeping track of the numbers because nobody - including the pharmacists - understand what was happening. as my meeting time got closer, i was approached by a woman who was also in a hurry and wanted to trade numbers.

anyway, that wasn't the worst of it. the worst of it was my credit card being declined, and having to set up gd's on my phone wallet with her validating it from her phone while the pharmacist became impatient and a large crowd was suddenly behind me. i managed to get it done in record time, but not without a high level of stress.

i managed to catch a bus and get home and join the zoom call one minute late.

...

after the daily, i ate a quick breakfast and headed to the office. it was a complicated day, with me untangling a mess of work that needed to be reverted, then replayed. i thought i'd done a good job of it, but around 5pm i learned that one of the reverts broke the CI pipeline and nobody (least of all me) could figure out how 🤦‍♂️

at least my sync with my mentor went positively, although a bit later my fellow contractor paid me a visit, distressed, because everyone he's spoken to about the hackathon has given him a different answer and none of them seem fair or right to him. i gave him some advice, but i'm glad i'm not in that position.

during the day it crossed my mind that there's a huge difference between standing on the balcony of a top floor of a very tall tower, and seeing a photo from it, so i walked home, picked up mr smear and walked back to the office to give him a tour of the four corners of our floor. he was thrilled, and it became a powerful lesson in perspective ^_^

we sat down to dinner soon after getting home, and watched the second third of little shop of horrors, which to my delight he's thoroughly enjoying and is completely invested. i must admit, though, i'm finding it more and more amusing that he often pauses to describe what's happening as if he's just had some deep insight or epiphany; like, he's just stopped us to demonstrate, unwittingly, that he understood what just happened on the screen 🤣

 ...

mozambicans: suffered the highest recent casualties, with at least five citizens killed during violent mob attacks and arson in coastal towns, displacing nearly 600 people.

malawians: hundreds forced from their homes, seeking emergency refuge in community halls and mosques while awaiting state-sponsored evacuation.

ghanaians: hundreds voluntarily repatriating via state-chartered flights out of johannesburg due to severe harassment and safety fears.

zimbabweans: facing intense harassment, unlawful evictions, and workplace discrimination as one of the largest migrant populations.

nigerians: dozens requesting emergency flights home, prompting government airlifts and formal diplomatic interventions.

somalians: small business and shop owners facing widespread looting, vandalism, and economic displacement.

congolese: refugees and asylum seekers experiencing systematic exclusion from public healthcare and targeted harassment.

if this is what's happening to black africans right now, it's not going to be long before it starts happening to white africans. and in the current political climate, it's probably going to begin with the jews :(

...

after saying goodnight to my mom, i discussed my fears with gd, which led to a conversation about how she's been handling the years since october 7th and her relationship with the news. along with everything else, i'm glad she's starting to feel a bit of relief and see the light as other nations begin to wake up to what's been going on under their noses all this time.

wake up

 i just woke up both furious and ashamed and sad. i had a series of three nightmares: the first, i couldn't get on an international flight because i was unable to fill out a form through an ever-enlarging cluster of technological failures. the second i don't quite recall, but it also had to do with systems failing. the third, i was riding a tandem bike with mr smear and he refused to get out of the road when it got dangerous, and defiantly kept both of us in the lane until i braked hard and dragged him and the bike off to the sidewalk. i was so mad and feeling so incapable of getting through to him without violence that i slapped him so hard that i broke his glasses.

it also doesn't help that i woke up much earlier to go to the toilet, and ended up doing exactly what i keep trying to avoid - doomscrolling. learning that the UN has continued their filthy campaign against us by adding israel to he sexual violence list when we're the victims of it (see the silenced no more report), and then learning that there's another global round of layoffs happening and that israel is likely to be particularly badly affected because of the strengthening of the shekel.

gods help us.

discouraged

 the more i worked today, the more despairing i felt. i'm extremely anxious and overwhelmed, i feel like i'm drowning. every layer of the onion i peel shows me that the onion was far larger and deeper than i thought; or, at least, each wall that i break down thinking it's the last one turns out to have two more standing right behind it.

it doesn't help me personally that i understand that what this company has done to itself is dangerously stupid: most of the companies in our industry, it seems, have shot themselves in the foot by attempting to drop headcount and fill the gaps with AI. even if we were using the latest models this would be a stretch, but with the model pricing being raised across the board (the drug dealer's sample period is over) and the israeli shekel having strengthened significantly against the dollar (making actual developers more expensive to the company), it's a race to the bottom and everyone's losing.

the only positive thing i managed to do - i'm not holding my breath about the disappointing reports i put together after five additional hours of investigation, or the plans for tomorrow so that i can ask for help - was to disable and migrate all of the thousands of lines of irrelevant and contradictory repository rules and skills that i didn't realize were polluting each and every AI context i've been working with up until now :/

...

gd and i were a little late to the school meeting this morning, because of course we hit ridiculous rush hour traffic and of course we decided to get off and switch to the light rail just as we got through the worst of it. we had a good, productive hour with the councillor and new homeroom teacher, though, some of it was funny and some deeply concerning. the homeroom teacher did a little snooping right after, though, and called me to clarify that the incidents were not quite as serious as they'd been made out to be.

that was an enormous relief.

gd stopped at azrieli by herself on the way home, which was the first time she's felt safe enough (from a health perspective) to do so in many months. i came home and dived into work.

i had a really rough afternoon, and i don't know if my regularly running back-and-forth to the bathroom was the result of something i ate, or the anxiety that was slowly building up.

either way, my first real "break" was after mr smear came home, and we had a very long (an hour or so) family meeting during which we discussed All The Things that had come up during the school meeting. it was mostly positive, but the big stuff is him needing to learn to avoid alienating his peers, and find more ways to connect with them.

oh, yes - mr smear came home sporting a weird rash on his hand. gd and i suspect that it might be from the borrowed wrist protectors, but it didn't seem to be getting any worse so now we think he must have brushed past a bush or something that he had an allergic reaction to.

because we were super-bored, and not stressed about anything, we discovered that in addition to everything else we have an infestation of cigarette beetles - or something very similar :/

by the time we had dinner i didn't have much of an appetite, and neither did gd, though we managed to eat anyway. after a couple of great episodes of infinity train (we're into season 2, now), we chatted with my mom for a while, fortunately discussing her birthday present and not making the mistake of getting her something she doesn't want.

...

we also discussed my cousin who was scammed a while back, and taken for literally everything he had. not only has he just gone from wealthy to destitute, and not only is he seemingly making every effort to not get back on his feet again, but gd made a good point today and now we're all really concerned that he's essentially dragging his son down with him, because nobody else is going to put him up.

it's just awful.

...

i honestly don't know how i'm going to sleep tonight, but i have to. i'm so nervous about all the steps i need to take in the morning, and i feel just horrible about everything.

a day off

 according to dr google i'm at risk of developing a stroke because i used a massager on my neck. i'm not sure that's true, but i'm definitely scared off doing that again as the back of my head's been feeling a bit numb since i did it.

...

i got a relatively good night's sleep last night, minus waking up in the middle of the night with my neck / shoulder locking up and needing more than half an hour of work to be able to return to bed, but little-to-no lower back or hip discomfort.

mr smear, however, did not have a good night. he's clearly properly sick, regardless of yesterday's RAT outcome.

the three of us left him home alone as my mother and i dropped gd off at her physio appointment, then walked about florentin looking for blinds. we eventually found a place, but were rather put off by their charging approximately NIS 500 per small window, and double that per door. we have quite a few windows and doors.

as it is, i'm feeling decidedly financially unstable lately...

we met up with gd and went to meshek barzilay for a really nice lunch. speaking of financially unstable :P

we then returned home for a while - disturbing mr smear's full day of screen time - and a bit later my mom and i paid a visit to the library, where i checked out a better (though not pristine) copy of my name is asher lev. we meandered all over the place until catching a bus home, then meandered between the shops to find vegan marshmallows, then returned home for a relaxed evening.

i mean, it was relaxing for my mother and i, for gd and mr smear not so much. him because he's sick, her because in spite of a good physio session her shoulder's been locking up the whole afternoon.

my mother made - and taught gd to make - her pea soup for dinner, which was delicious ^_^

i've just put mr smear to bed, reading between his coughs, and i'm amazed to see it's 11pm already (O_o)

...

aside from contesting my parking fine, and opening an investigation into our bean bag purchase (after holding for half an hour to be told they'll call me back, after more than a week of trying to get hold of them to find out where our bean bags are), and holding for half an hour with social security to be told that i should just ignore the last message i got from them, i've been made very uncomfortable by the idea that there are authors warning other authors not to so much as quote a lyric of a song - even if it's clear that it's a quote - because that's not considered fair use. i cannot believe that's true, but if it's true, then the state of copyright law is even more awful and even less aligned with its spirit than i thought.

...

i saw a couple of disturbing things today: even "educational" tech is interfering with our kids learning, and this guy's quote is heartbreakingly powerful: "do you know how hard you have to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?"

we're in serious shit as a species right now.

sleep journal entry

 it was a horrible night, coughing and choking. and then a gross morning, with a sinus infection and a lot more expectoratin'. i'm so fucking tired.

in the middle of the night, after i did managed to fall asleep, i woke up choking from a dream about fighting drones with cyberpunk weapons. it's been a couple of hours, i wish i could remember the details.

i took mr smear to school this morning, and we talked about shaved heads (he has to wear a band for school while he grows his hair long) and tattoos (about not doing them without good reason, and not doing any that can't be covered up), and as i dropped him off i showed him a picture of myself with my head shaved. he was mortified :/

since getting back home, i've had breakfast (for my supplement regimen), watched a video about elon musk's tweet about UBI that's made me think the following: if the US could figure out how to enforce corporate taxes and shuts down loopholes for them and their wealthy elite, they'll have more than enough money to provide UBI and a stable, healthy economy.

useless

 today was rough, psychologically more than anything else. i was literally incapable of doing my "one job" task, every time i sat down (after pumping myself up with random distractions) i found myself doing anything but.

including paying our upstairs friends a visit to borrow a drill, and managing to find a guy from the post office to help me book the return for tomorrow, and taking mr smear to his friend's place where they're having a sleepover right now.

oh! and this morning i published the article i was working on until 1.30am.

last night was full of attacks, so i turned my phone off and the three of us slept in the locked mamad, and we were fine 🙏

this evening was a "date night" for me and gd, and we ordered a very expensive dinner, which was only partially disrupted by a potential attack. but it didn't matter, because as much as the side dishes were fantastic, the main course was just unpleasant, so it's not like the terrorists ruined the experience.

after dinner, i finally settled down and acted on the HUGE RELIEF NEWS from the afternoon (the money i transferred yesterday landed where it was supposed to), and for the first time in my life i picked a few stocks and EFTs and put money down on them

here's hoping i didn't make bad calls, but knowing what i know - having studied economics and investment theory as part of my undergrad - you can't do too badly when you bet on the market, and right now it looks like betting on the US and israel long-term is the safest move available.

meditation marathon

thoughts for the day: everyone in the media is getting paid to keep everyone on edge, including themselves. i don't need to think about war with iran until it's actually happening. nobody does. STFU.

also, the global economy is full of shit, everything's being run by people who have as much understanding of how things work as small children. there aren't many adults around.

if i'm right, what's coming is AI weaning us off management bloat and enabling people to find and operate in tiny niches. kind of like pre-industrial societies.

...

 today began with disappointment, but it was less disappointing than if it had come tomorrow: mr smear woke up and decided that he didn't want to go to the trance party, he'd rather just stay home and read all weekend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've been reading richard currier's unbound: how eight technologies made us human and brought our world to the brink, and while it's taken me forever to get into it, it's fascinating stuff.

mr smear had been waiting for the bus for a while before we realized that it was the tel aviv marathon today...

gd and i had a quiet morning, napping, mostly, and then we headed out to return the frying pan and find a solution for the ugly cables that were just installed. but, the marathon. so we walked around trying to get on a bus, then got on the bus which literally went in a circle and took us back one stop, and then we split up because i realized i'd have to walk all the way to the center and back.

returning the frying pan would have been less emotional had the woman not decided to try 'splain to me how the non-stick pan wasn't non-sticking properly because i was obviously cooking wrong 😠

at least i found cable hole covers. i'll try them sometime, i guess.

i finally found a decent-looking replacement frying pan on sale at a different store, i hope it's good. then i picked up garbage bags, and then i began my trek home.

picking up a coffee along the way, and syncing with sailor for a bit.

i had issues getting mr smear home today, again, and i realized (after we had a fight about it) that he and his friends are using whatsapp as social media. so there goes whatsapp - i've blocked it and he's down to actual phone calls and sms'es now.

at least he didn't lose more privileges this week - i mean, his screen time privileges have been pushed back another week now, but we were both excited about him getting his reading privileges back this evening.

i never in my life thought i would ever write a sentence like the above, but here we are. you gotta do what you gotta do.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading my encryption package and updating my website, and then had a long chat with urchin, and now i've showered, and taken the garbage out, and shabbat has started, and gd's cooking a delicious dinner, and for a moment the world is just fine.

it's okay

 the morning went alright. we hit the mall early, and after some consulting with the parents' group i think we got the right thing - an actual tanach for mr smear. and then a bunch of stuff at the pharmacy and grocery store.

and then a bread and a bagel and a... pretzel thingy at the bakery.

we came home, dropped everything off, then turned around and caught a bus to south tel aviv. we got to the store without incident, and picked up our couch cushions. the ones we paid for almost half a year ago. along the way i tried to explain the time value of money to mr smear. and that it's not exactly stealing, but kind of stealing, when you promise goods in return for money and delay the delivery for an unreasonably long time.

on the way home, we stopped at a coffee shop for coffee and apple juice. we all had a good time, right until we didn't - so that kinda sucked - but by the time we left we were alright again. the walk to the bus took infinity time because of the light rail construction, so we ended up at a light rail station and used that to get home instead.

i quite like the light rail.

the afternoon has been spent relaxing, with a good chunk of it devoted to an exciting rewatch of the first pirates of the caribbean movie. so that was awesome. now we're all chilling until it's time to go to our friends - or frenemies, in mr smear and their daughter's case :P

back to front

 yeah, it wasn't a great night's sleep, but it was definitely an improvement. so that's good.

i started the day with a walk to the hospital, after discovering that gd and i had completely missed her appointment we waited months to be able to make. by months. the appointment was mid-may.

mid-may.

goddamn.

anyway, i managed to secure one for only a couple of weeks' time, and i managed to sort out some more stuff at the clinic along the way home.

...

mr smear's drawing is incredible. he drew a knight on a horse, waving a flag, in motion, yesterday, and today he doodled (on a computer with a mouse) detailed images of among us characters that completely blew us away.

...

i spent most of my work day involved in frontend fuckery. i've managed to get the results i wanted, under very particular circumstances, and the underlying code is ugly and i have no idea what it's actually doing.

it's kinda embarrassing.

i went over all the extracurricular activities the school is offering, misread how much it would cost, got both gd and mr smear excited about them, and then realized we couldn't afford it. i'm struggling to wrap my head around how the arts and music programmes cost between the same amounts as the school fees and double the school fees, and that's on top of the school fees.

where are the other parents getting all this money?

anyway, gd took mr smear to his hebrew tutor, and i took him to his jiujitsu class. for the most part, his day went well and mine was pretty successful. and gd's doing well enough emotionally that she's actually been able to read for the first time in ages. so that's good.

it was fun chatting with a cousin my mom was visiting while putting mr smear to bed. afterwards, we continued reading the goblet of fire but i had to stop because the book's version of events at the quidditch world cup were far too much like what's actually happening with us and hamas/hezbollah.

holy shit.

the balancing act

things got worse before they got better. but who knows what tomorrow may bring?

yesterday:

the day began alright, although i was still sick and i'm still sick now. i'm praying i'll be feeling better / less icky by tomorrow because i really want to take my family to the election day barbeque with ze germans. i dropped mr smear off at school, and i managed to get some work done before picking him up from school.

i wasn't able to cancel gd's allergy test by phone - we didn't just have a problem with authorization, and we didn't just have a problem with her being unexpectedly sick, but we also had a problem with her forgetting not to take antihistamines for the week before the test - so i dragged mr smear along to the hospital to do it in person. the receptionist admitted that when she's alone she never answers the phones. it got a bit awkward. but not as awkward as a couple of hours later when she called me back from the morning and figured out who she was talking to.

mr smear was really hungry - it didn't occur to me to check his bag and see that he hadn't eaten his lunch - and we went past our favorite bakery where they made him up an excellent bagel, i grabbed a ciabatta and the two of us sat on a bench in the sun, enjoying them and a conversation about mindfulness.

for a couple of hours things were going alright, and then it was time for homework. i warned him beforehand, to give him time to prepare, but things immediately started going awry and then suddenly we found ourselves back in tantrum town.

it got really, really bad.

again.

i called the therapist, who was able to call back very quickly and we talked while there was an ongoing situation, with gd and i taking turns to go check in on him. it was madness, and i admit there were steps i took that i keenly regret.

"we should try not to pathologize his behavior" was unfortunately said after i'd made the observation that his behavior was demonic.

the therapist tried to assure as that his behavior wasn't extraordinary enough to warrant panicking, and suggested some possible mitigation steps, but i'm pretty sure an eight year-old throwing a full-on tantrum isn't normal, and those mitigation steps seemed mighty similar to what i'd been doing in the first place when all the shit started.

eventually things calmed down, and the remainder of the evening was... bearable. we put him to bed as usual, but when i wished him a good night it was with a heavy, heavy heart.

today:

today started off well again, although i was still sick and i suspect it might be getting worse. i know gd's was definitely worse today, and she was in a particularly bad way yesterday and saturday. i hope she doesn't have bronchitis again. hell, i hope i don't get it. i'm becoming pretty confident that this is covid.

no, we're not testing, because the protocols once you're tested are completely ridiculous.

anyway, the morning was mostly good even though mr smear was a bit upset when i dropped him off at school - he doesn't like how the world works, he just wants a dog - and i had a pretty productive workday until picking him up early from school to take him for an introductory session with a recommended hebrew teacher.

the plan was to pick him up fifteen minutes prior to the session, which took place about a five minute walk from the school. that seemed like a great plan, at least, until he took more than ten minutes to get to the gate.

*sigh*

we rushed across to the teacher, and then i went and picked up a coffee (good coffee, uncomfortable toilet and i needed to pee). i sat thinking about mindfulness and yanis varoufakis on neo-feudalism until the smoking outside started bothering me, then called my mom for a quick chat on my way to pick him up.

he seemed to have had a reasonably good time (she has a dog, that definitely helped), we came home, and things were calm until homework time.

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN...

i tried to do things a bit differently than yesterday. there were some touch-and-go moments. i invested heavily in something that i've obviously been developing unwittingly: manipulation. and heavy compromise. and more manipulation. whatever it was that worked, the two of us managed to get through a bunch of questions, one of which he initially flat-out refused to answer, and i got him onto the prodigy math game for a lot longer than i told him he had to without any actual fighting whatsoever.

gd's impressed, i'm still in disbelief.

good dinner, good bathtime, good bedtime (we're reading harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban). post-bedtime has been a struggling with the runny nose and the coughing, but i've put together a good chunk of a first article on the tech i've been playing with and gotten this out, while listening to our neighbors struggling to deal with their little kid (it's almost midnight, holy shit) and pondering whether my own child has attention issues / some mild form of autism.

what a weird fucking week so far.

and tomorrow's municipal election day. i know who i'm voting for (the incumbent), but i'm not sure about the party (why are their parties involved?) and i'm worried that with our booked car and supply of vegan meat alternatives we might end up bailing due to illness :(

building on decolonization

Cape Town is suffering from an extreme example of a syndrome that's plaguing the entire world, a syndrome that is caused by infrastructure that is geared towards supporting populations in the mid-20th century and that is woefully inadequate and inappropriate given current demands, let alone near and distant future demands. These infrastructure deficiencies - and inefficiencies - directly contribute to the extreme inequality of opportunity that plagues our nation, and while apartheid policies did have a role in determining which races are more disadvantaged the underlying mechanisms in play today are no different that in any other country where populations living in urban centres have more access to opportunity than those in the periphery. A reduction in relative poverty will also go a long way towards reducing the frightening levels of crime we face.

This is an outline of steps we need to take as a society if we're to uplift communities and move towards a reduction of poverty and general improvement of living conditions for all.

First, it must be noted that most of our economic issues can be attributed to government interference with the free market. All of our governments are plagued with selfishness, greed, ignorance and corruption, what we need is to wean ourselves off technologically as fast as possible. That's obviously easier said than done, but there are some things in the interim that our governments can do to ease burdens on both sides of the equation. The first thing is to let us solve our own problems without fining us, as we've seen in the Western Cape where we've been penalized for reducing our water use and for private solar power installations.

Second, we desperately need to let go of our ideas of “heritage"; if we're going to talk about decolonizing things, we should start with this. We don't need cities that look the way our parents remember them as much as we need cities that service its citizens. We simply do not have the resources available for people to live in houses in the middle of densely populated areas, urban areas must expand vertically and the wealthier citizens who can afford the construction and the commute costs can build their mansions in the peripheries.

Gentrification is not actually a problem, but a lack of affordable housing is. The less high-density construction we allow the less options lower income brackets will have, and we're forcing lower earners out of city centres and into expensive cars and commutes. That's an enormous unofficial tax in addition to everything else.

Any new construction in urban centres should have a minimum legal density, and as much communal gardening space must be provided as is practical, in particular rooftops and around the circumference of each level. Urban farming is an extremely important concept that must be encouraged as much as possible. It's also recommended that every large apartment complex have its own safe play areas for families; we used to play in the streets and know our neighbours, which was important for fostering healthy communities.

Low cost housing in urban centres is as counter-productive as any other kind of affirmative action, instead of equalizing populations it simply repositions inequalities along different axes. You might help a few families with low-cost housing, but at the cost of pushing higher-income families out and it doesn't make the slightest difference to the rest of the low-income families. If you're not making a positive difference for the majority of people, there's a good chance your solution is actually a part of the problem.

Government housing should be as dense as possible, and should be positioned as close to the city as possible. In Cape Town, we are very lucky to have two problems that can be solved together - that of available land close to urban centres, and that of exposed and unprotected train tracks. If we were to construct tunnels over the tracks and build large residential and commercial complexes over and around those tunnels we could not only have a defensible underground* transport network, but we could significantly reduce the load on that network by bringing people closer to their employment opportunities and infrastructure.

Third, we must embrace the remote work revolution. There are many sectors that can and should make a remote work option available, and companies should receive economic incentives to do so. There should also be incentives for companies to make products and services available online. This is not just to reduce traffic, fossil fuel waste and expenses all-round, but will go a long way to levelling the playing field for all income groups.

Finally, we need to completely rethink education. Most of our population lacks resources and facilities to learn and up-skill, and that makes it nigh-impossible to improve their station in life. Poor people don't need charity, they need to be empowered. Even if they could afford the time and money to learn, they wouldn't be empowered by sitting in classrooms learning theory; we need mentorship programs, available in their areas because people with no money or earning potential can't be expected to travel. Companies should be incentivized to send missions, mobile offices, into the poorer areas, to provide on-the-job training in practical skills. We need to subsidize mobile coverage for areas that telecommunications don't find lucrative, with free data available for educational websites and applications.

In conclusion, we, the people, need to effect change and create real solutions to real problems, without waiting on our government bodies to do it for us. We all deserve better, rich or poor, black or white, this is our country - and we're all in this together.

---
* artificially underground, of course.

observations

1. i think one of the biggest problems in modern society is that we equate success with job security. instead of working to make our jobs redundant so we can move on to the next thing, we've been trained to perform the same tedious, repetitive tasks and are left worrying about foreigners and robots "stealing our jobs". i know not everyone is able, but i'm talking about general societal values not personal capabilities.

...

the "job market" is premised on jobs being things with inherent value that can be filled and traded. "success" shouldn't be based on your performance doing a specific job, or being an expert, etc.

"success" should be measured by how well one applies one's skills to serving society. when you're doing something that serves society, society will be willing to pay for it.

---2. it's human nature to presume guilt until innocence is proven, because it's a good short-term safety precaution even though we know that for a society it presents long term dangers. the same goes for how we treat animals: we presume they're soulless, consumable objects until they're proven to be intelligent. this is why so many people are up in arms about dog festivals and whaling, but are happy to eat pigs and octopuses who are far more intelligent and demonstrate emotional ranges comparable to humans.

this observation brought to you by octopus - most intelligent animal on earth

the wrong conspiracy theory debunked

holy cow. we just watched ethos, hosted by woody harrelson and edited by members of the illiterati*.

this documentary, combined with hot coffee, fahrenheit 9/11, ungrip, the century of self and a couple of others, paints a phenomenally bleak picture of the united states, its motivations and its influences.

for the longest time i've found myself infuriated by 9/11 conspiracy theorists. i usually take a skeptical view of conspiracy theories because conspiracies are difficult to pull off and there aren't many organizations with that kind of intelligence, reach and discipline; in the case of the 9/11 conspiracies, the evidence supporting it was utterly refuted early on and there really wasn't any reason to go on and on about how the planes couldn't possibly have caused the amount of destruction that they did.

but what i never heard from 9/11 conspiracy theorists was how it was entirely plausible that the powers that be (presumably the wunch of bankers behind the federal reserve farce) arranged for the attacks in the first place: al qaeda could easily have been inspired and assisted in their attacks without involving so many people that someone would be able to spill the beans. i buy into occam's razor, and that's a fairly simple explanation that doesn't defy the evidence.

anyway, that's not really what ethos is about. i found the ending pleasantly surprising and warmly inspiring. there is hope! and as long as we don't let anyone limit the power that the internet has bestowed upon us, there are ways up out of this subterranean tunnel.

* the subtitles were surprisingly wrong a lot of the time and some of the quotes had spelling errors, one would expect a production like this to be slightly more serious about quality control

dear WIRED

Hi

I haven't received my issue in a couple of months, which is fine because I use my subscription to log in to the digital edition on my iPad. I would be very grateful if you could stop delivering physical copies and instead just let me continue to use my digital pass that I pay for anyway. I would also be very grateful if you could make this an option available to all subscribers, WIRED is the one magazine that I would *expect* to have a high enough respect for our environment to consider this option.

On a related note, I find it extremely tiring that I have access via iPad but not iPhone, and I have access via my partner's Android device... but I don't have access from my PC unless I've downloaded an issue on a mobile device, sent myself an article via email and then logged in using the link on my PC. I've paid for the subscription, your PC offering is just as good as your mobile offering, and it's just plain silly that I can't find an easy way to just log in from my PC from the get-go and get the digital magazine experience.

Thank you for your consideration.

drawing blanks

okay, i'm ready for a (relatively) early night. chris porter: ugly and angry is unbelievably funny, the second half was even better than the first!

---i slept terribly last night. i woke up to a message from comixology explaining that due to their servers being hacked we'd need to reset our passwords and change any similar passwords on other sites or services. well, it sounds like they weren't particularly diligent. i'm not impressed.

i spoke to a recruiter today and he seemed kinda enthusiastic. we'll see.

the cleaning lady came in after lunch, and we talked for a while about immigration politics and taxes. apparently i need to file my taxes soon. oh, shit. newk'd's pretty good with these things, i'm very glad he's willing to help me...

i wanted lunch but our subway doesn't do falafel, so i took a metro to another subway. or a subway to a subway. egads. anyway, it was good and while i was there i read this wired article about silicon valley that makes a very good case for social responsibility.

i then returned to my local starbucks to work on my comics. i got some good stuff done, excitingly so!

---while there my mother messaged me to remind me that it's been eleven years since her brother passed away. i started responding and got emotional, then erased what i was writing because i realized that it was for me, not for her. i don't usually get emotional about death, but eleven years ago when i found out i cried like a baby, and today i was taken by surprise to be tearing up in public.

---horseman arrived and i packed up, we walked the icy, icy walk to the metro and headed to la belle province - an uber-dodgy diner. as we completed ordering some old guy came up and began harassing us for not buying the delicious muffins that were on sale, because they're delicious *and* the proceeds go towards the children. how heartless could we be? he himself claims to be diabetic, so if it's important enough that *he* risks it then we should feel obliged. or heartless.

he was so up-in-our-faces about it, i actually expected things to get physical. people, man... people. i suspect he was just attempting to flirt with the disinterested teen behind the counter.

horseman and i talked about all sorts of things in french, then i headed back to hit the gym. jiu-jitsu felt a bit slow but eventually i got the basic techniques of the day. kickboxing began on an aggravating note because the class dumbass (i've mentioned him before) made a comment about israelis invading and stealing palestinian land. he wouldn't shut up when i told him to, and was shocked to discover that i'm an israeli. one of the guys is a palestinian refugee, his family having left in '48, and we couldn't just let it all slide...

... fortunately, the two of us share some of our views and we presented the mess together to the clueless who were interested. once that was off our collective chest we got into training; it was a particularly tough beginner's class and i was partnered with a first-timer. so it was up to me to teach him the basics and i spent some time with him on the bags afterwards. he's a football player, once he gets the kicks he'll be fine :P

...

after showering, i watched a couple more episodes of freaks and geeks and the better it gets the sadder i get that there's only one season :'(

that's it. that's my day. now to climb into bed and hope to wake up refreshed for tomorrow morning's telephone interview. or whatever it's supposed to be.

collaborative consumption

if you're not familiar with the ideas and tools of collaborative consumption you definitely need to invest sixteen minutes in watching rachel_botsman - the case for collaborative consumption.

the backswing

a couple of weeks ago i mentioned being wow'ed by allan savory's ted talk about reversing desertification.

now, i've waxed lyrical on the topic of political veganism and i've shared my displeasure with the community's methods quite vocally, but here, look, we have a way to achieve their goals while simultaneously continuing to provide for the meat-eaters amongst us:

all we need to do is ban industrial farming techniques, and force the farmers to follow the planned grazing methodology with their combined herds.

this would achieve a number of goals. first and foremost, it would reclaim land that all these farmers would continue to use, so there's a massive incentive for them right there. second, animals out to pasture are already in a much happier and healthier position than they are at present, and we could use this as a springboard to push for greater animal rights. third, as healthy as the vegan lifestyle may be, most people do not want to give up eating meat and, quite frankly, the more of them the better.

say what???

that's right, the meat and dairy industries are pretty much our only hope of resuscitating the planet. so instead of antagonizing them, let's go win-win and play nice: if they succeed with planned grazing, we win, the farmers win, and the animals win.

---i watched vegucated, and it reinforced my belief that people can be made to care enough to actually get this done. it's just an idea, but we can all share it, and make it ours, and turn it into reality. we can do better, without much sacrifice, and here's a way.