This is from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. It’s an anecdote his grad school advisor told him about a Samoan lying around on the beach.

MISSIONARY: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that.

SAMOAN: Why? What do you think I should be doing?

MISSIONARY: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it?

SAMOAN: And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money.

SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you.

SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day.

In modern society you either work or starve. There’s no adventurous alternative as would have been available before modernity.

As your annoying communist I’ll also point out that if you’re a scientist developing novel methods to detect endotoxins your grant funding is currently being eviscerated by the US federal government and you’re likely to find a much more lucrative career path working for a pharmaceutical company that lacks your research ethics. And if you make it up to the admin level you can go lobby the government too!

Look, you can do the same thing with any religious document. See for instance Jeremy England’s Every Life is on Fire in which he equates passages in the Torah about Moses to the thermodynamical necessity of the emergence of life as an autocatalytic process. The metaphor is tortured and the whole enterprise comes off as awkward and unnecessary. Scientific principles are entirely nihilistic; it’s our interpretations of them that make them magical. And those interpretations aren’t captured by any holy document.

The fungi take over for a few hundred thousand years, tops. There are some global climate swings during this period but eventually the balance is restored and the next set of animals asserts hegemony. Just because this is the first mass extinction caused by animals (arguably) doesn’t mean it won’t play out like the others.

It will even agree that AIs shouldn’t controlled by oligarchic tech monopolies and should instead be distributed freely and fairly for the public good, but the international system of nation states competing against each other militarily and economically prevents this. But maybe it will agree to the opposite of that too, I didn’t try asking.

Real quick the appendix might have an evolutionary function. When you have a gut infection and your intestine flushes out everything (good and bad bacteria), the appendix might be a cache for good bacteria that avoids both the infection and flushing. The good bacteria then repopulate your gut from your appendix.

But please put your plastic in the bin marked plastic.

Science: Please stop using the word believe, it’s making me nervous.

We had an economic plan for this almost a century ago. It was called the “euthenasia of the rentier class” advocated by john Maynard Keynes. I guess we didn’t expect the rentier to also control the financial system.

I think this is true of US presidents too.

93 percent less water pollution

Does it though? Did they really do XCT on enough brains in areas with different F in their water to show this over time? And correct for the fact that it calcifies with age anyway? And probably does so variably across individuals and populations (2023 meta-analysis says old white men are the most likely to have calcified pineal glands).

It’s called a typo.

Thanks, Joe von Hindenbiden

Repeal Taft-Hartley and pass the PRO Act while we’re at it

What I find interesting about this article is that it critiques heavily about the first 200 pages, says almost nothing about the next 600, and then says the conclusion is unsatisfactory because it didn’t quote the book the author wrote in 1991. It’s transparently personal.

Academics write books. Get over it.

Yeah it’s a summary work that draws on decades of research. Both of these authors are extremely well-published in their respective fields. I’m like a third of the way through Dawn of Everything and it’s just as academic as “Debt” was, and neither are mass-market pulp. But work like this always draws hit pieces because it’s a way for critics to get their name out there.

Check out “The Dawn of Everything” by Wengrow and Graeber

Everyone in the US is complicit. Everyone in NATO member countries is complicit. Everyone not fighting to overthrow their imperialist government is complicit. Again, not the point.