What I Did
FRONT-END:
I’ve gotten nothing officially pushed out. My editor/cohabitant/lover/friend/coparent and I have now moved our household, so that’s been a minor distraction to everything else. It’s amazing how much life’s events ripple everywhere.
Our decrease in doing anything productive was further magnified by the maintenance requirements of two small, inexperienced people who rely heavily on us until they’ve acquired enough experience and height to culturally assimilate on their own.
BACK-END:
Quite a lot has happened, with much more explanation in the next section.
Apparently, Christmas is in a few days. That’s definitely a holiday people celebrate, and I must remember to get Chinese food if Iowa’s weather lets up. We’ve just gotten hit by a blizzard, which is like snow but sideways and everywhere.
Seriousness aside, my wife and I will continue our holiday tradition of ramen. It’s our Gentile Hanukkah, where God provided when we were absolutely destitute and living in our car.
What I Learned
I have had a spate of amusing anecdotes the past few weeks, which kicked up about 4.2 hours after we finally settled into our new apartment. Normally, life happens at the speed of 1 event/week, but not lately.
So, instead of abstracting everything out like I normally do, I’ll just dump the sequence of events here:
- Getting internet access is an awful experience, and you can blame Title II for that from 1934. It’s a government-forced monopoly by classifying certain telecommunications providers as “common carriers”. I have been the victim of it through CenturyLink taking 2 weeks to plug in my internet, but we’re now officially online and I have the technological means to my First Amendment rights again.
- I got to hang out in the back of a cop car for a few hours and almost went to jail from a clerical error. The short version is that if you have a no contact order amended by the courts to “recommendation by the Department” and don’t clarify which department or for how long, and if the police are required to mandatory-arrest a no contact order violation, you’ve got a party going. I now have the luxury of contacting the Department [of Human Services] to get evidence of my closed case, then must request a judge amend its language, then have to inform the police to be sure I don’t end up in a cop car again. It’s a further shame why American culture sincerely believes felony=criminal.
- One important piece of wisdom: save all your passwords into a password manager (e.g., KeePass), then store them in cloud sync. This includes Wi-Fi passwords and system logins. I did not do that second sentence, and am now locked out of my BIOS config on my gaming computer. To make a circuitous story short, I now don’t have a gaming-grade computer. I’m convinced this is a bit of divine intervention, because I’ve been more productive in the past two weeks than the month before that.
- Now that I’m selling auto insurance to the worst drivers in Iowa, I make proper family-supporting money. One of the lifestyle shocks that’s come with this is the fact that we’ll have to pay our own health insurance. Since I have an eeny-weeny employer, they can only afford to pay 80% of my healthcare. I sincerely resent the fact that I’d have to pay healthcare post-tax if I shopped around, so to get revenge I’m probably going to make my own company to funnel some group health insurance (even it’s a group of 1), but I really need to finish my non-tech-related writing before I can start riding that tech wave downward.
- Speaking of non-tech-related writing, I’ve encountered a soft and slow realization that a two-person project has twice the moving parts of a one-person project, especially when the other person’s editing has to splice into the mix of a lifestyle maintaining small people and self-discovery. This means the pacing will run slower and more steadily compared to the neurotic fixations that come with writing projects.
- Since December has an important holiday in in somewhere, my wife asked for a new hippy treatment for her hair. It involves rhassoul clay, jojoba oil, shea butter, and some other girly thing I can’t remember. We found a way to buy hippy things at scale.
- I’ve been reading an I-really-want-to-read-that-someday-but-not-right-now-and-it’s-two-years-later book: Watchman Nee’s “The Spiritual Man”. I don’t entirely agree with Nee’s classification between “flesh” and “soul”, but I have now seen from his point of view that we can just as easily screw over our lives by being “soulish” as by being “fleshly”. The answer is to be “spiritual”, though the closest I can see of its existence is that the “spirit” operates as a form of abstraction. Need more data, must keep reading.
- Another IRWTRTSBNRNAI2YL book: “God’s Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and His Times”. The reality of Western society is that Rockefeller/Carnegie/Musk/Gates/Soros/Bezos/Trump have the same pathology to get them there: they’re simply opportunists in the middle of the evil/good spectrum. They treat the ruthless acquisition of companies as a calculated move, similar to merging onto a highway or cleaning out an oven. It’s simply habits, or “business”. As horrifying as you may find that, it’s a far better arrangement than the last batch of guys running the planet: ruthless military leaders.
I guess I have some abstractions to make in all this:
- The standards we impose on ourselves are either too severe (and we’re killing ourselves over nothing) or too lax (and we get in big trouble). The latter will leave you in a world of hurt, but the first in a world of misery.
- American society has deteriorated, but this isn’t really a “new” thing. It was only magnified from the 2020 pandemonium. Technology permits us to live as cloistered a life as we want, with even the poorest in society only really needing to visit the grocery store to get all their needs met. This doesn’t create a meaningful life for non-geeks like me, but people will only change by experiencing hardship to interact with others or choosing to get out more.
- We find meaning proportional to how much the things we do challenge us and influence others. Since we don’t know the future, there’s no reason to kill ourselves about whether we actually influence anyone, since that’s a complete crapshoot. Instead, aim for grandiose goals and give the rest to God.
I have a new prediction about the USA, but it needs me to recap reserve currency, and I haven’t fully fleshed out my economics page yet:
- Government issues currency (100,000 %^& to 1,000 people, who trade it around for stuff).
- People keep making stuff and getting born, so government keeps issuing more %^& to match it.
- To yank %^& back out of the market, Federal government creates a Reserve central bank that issues loans called “bonds” (which take 5-30 years until an investor gets interest on it), then they simply park the money the investors give them.
- Any time the %^& gets too high (“inflation”), they’ll raise the interest rate. Since they’re super safe (because they have the market cornered on killing people and it’s hard to attempt market dominance against them more than once) even 1% less than company bonds is enough to vacuum up all the %^&.
- Right now, the US debt is quite a lot of money. They’re still able to pay their debts, but they haven’t even paid their debt payments on time for a few years now. But, they’re also the cool kids in the class because Russia’s trying to Ukraine themselves and China’s…well…diligent with acquiring information about absolutely every person on the planet and has a government that may need a tuneup on civil liberties. Most of the world anchors their currency to the US dollar.
So, now to the prediction:
- As of November, we’ve seen more campaign funding going toward buying votes and lawsuits than actual advertising. I anticipate the Democrats will win in a close nail-biter come 2024, 51% to 50%.
- Most economies that crash take about 4 years to recover. If our government simply let go and let God, we’d be making it rain again by 2026. As it stands, the government will keep re-engineering “solutions” until they’re either out of money or the public has suffered enough that >70% of them can actually agree strongly on how awful they’re doing.
- Right now, the bond rate has hiked to ~5.5%. The last time this happened was before the debt was about 3 new cars for every American citizen, and before we could get eyeballs on information while pooping.
- As of March 2027, the bonds for March 2022 (when the bond hike happened) reach maturity. If we get a Biden re-election, which will totally happen if last month was any sort of pattern, not much will change to confront the issue.
- I anticipate migration to another currency. Either we’ll see some sort of central government arise from the ashes and introduce a new reserve currency, or maybe everyone will scatter to the four winds with various cryptocurrencies. I’m inclined to believe the latter because blocks of computer code are technically more “presently real” than a government’s promise to pay back what they took, and if you can’t trust the US with its relatively hands-off approach, which government can you trust?
What I’m Doing
Working in an insurance office right now while I work through my vast body of essays. I’ve been distilling and thematically unifying all my creative works:
- Marching ~14 essays about large-scale aspects of existence through GainedInSite.
- Then, a venture into TheoLogos:
- Universal Christian facts
- Christian disciplines
- Christ’s influence
- Christ and society (with a new essay on cults)
- Christ and the future
- Alternative Christian perspectives
- My potential heresy
- Spiritual data
- Then, to my latest distillation on NotaGenius on how modern society works:
- Human messiness
- Engineering
- Law
- Business – General
- Business – Money
- Business – Entrepreneurship
- Business – Management
- Nature
- Math
- Possessions
- Finally, after all this, I will feel sufficiently ready to plow heavily into TechSplained.