Into Morrisons. I'll wait in the cafe and have a coffee. Some kids are playing. Maybe they're a bit excited after having had about six weeks of full-on Xmas capitalism drilled into them. I'm just sitting minding my own business. Then some old guy at the next table tells them to stop because they're bothering me. I happen to like children and dislike adults who have totally forgotten childhood.

WTF RIGHT DO YOU HAVE TO SPEAK ON MY BEHALF?

I don't say that, of course.

Is it me?

It is definitely you. The old man is clearly more qualified to determine your preferences and internal mental/emotional states.

Is the old guy the great unknown?

The people seemed broken. Caught in a suburban, shopping mall, consumer web of fake coffee, fake discounts and deals, fake autonomy, fake television, leading nowhere except further crystallization of the wealthy and the exploited. Fake happiness, although they're probably happier than me, and who am I to determine their preferences and internal mental/emotional states?

For Everyone; but Lastcard especially:

Tis always a season...

https://youtu.be/8ujLyu59DDY

The fact that I have no remedy for the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake. -H. L. Mencken



Merry Christmas from your SMP Mod. Now get shopping - there are only 16 shopping days left before Christmas.

Cheer up!

You too!

And there is remedy which is not fake at all. It's called clarity through education, care for knowledge and the pursue of the unknown, it's called exploration. We shall never seize exploring and at the end of our exploration will be to arrive at the same place again and see it for the first time. This is the goal of science, an endless improvement of awareness and wisdom. A thousand generations looking at the moon and seeing it incrementally different, an ever emerging recognition of its true condition.

Clarity brings confidence and happiness and motivation to obtain further clarity and solve problems. Clarity builds better ethics, recognizes and improves the human condition, enables imagination to produce original synthesis that opens doors to intelligence.

In the end there are four kinds of people. Those that see the glass half empty. Those that see the glass half full. A third kind born out of the second that sees the glass filled 50% and yet with enough deuterium atoms in it to desalinate through fusion reactions sea water resulting in dozens of glasses of crystal clear water. Finally there is a 4th kind who is inspired by the visionary dreamers of the third kind but is taken down to earth by the futility eternally devastating the first kind during their depressing battle for clarity, yet somehow born out of love and persistence find the guts to fly again and deliver the dream with struggle, at last in place triumph of clarity for all 4.

This is our condition. The world is a beautiful and difficult at times place. But it is a place always worth fighting for.

I was trying to write a joke about how comedy and comedians are being undermined by humorless, prudish, and rigidly ideological influences but that’s not funny.

It’s all out of order, prejudice and hubris is supposed to be the punchlines, not the cover story.
Why not mock a prudish lack of discipline in some reactions to the sight of female nipples?

So physics is over with, with all the talks of unification any day now, going back to Maxwell with electricity and magnetism, with a QM spanner in the works was akin to a great movie with the audience left wanting more, all the while the neuroscientists are turning inwards as opposed to looking outwards because that is where the real exploration lies. We got the Higgs. We got gravitational waves. The greatest minds on Earth went down a pointless rabbithole with string theory. Well no. It may seem for nothing now but it will be admired somehow. It must do.

El Fin.

Been thinking of some of the implications of self driving cars and came up w/ 'no more parking tickets!' bec you can simply tell the car to drive in circles and pick you up when you text it. That made me look up how much NYC takes in from parking tickets: $545 million/year! Good grief! NYC's budget is a disaster already, and here comes more pain.

OTOH, all of the absurdly priced parking garages in Manhattan will go busto which is a reason to celebrate all by itself.

Yeah because city roads can sustain an unlimited amount of traffic.

Overpriced car parks are to be replaced by overpriced hotels? Awesome, I'm so happy.

https://lookup.london/welbeck-street-car-park/

I wonder how better the traffic would be if all cars were driven by computers rather than humans and all lane merging was optimized constantly, all cars cooperating to minimize the time you literally have to stop and restart and you leave room between cars so that others can merge fast and not have to wait and you to stop and let them in etc. Also merge way in advance of the time you have to exit not at the last moment and generally optimize distance between cars as function of speed to avoid shock waves forming so easily.

Also shock waves would be predicted in advance and all cars would slow down before the shock wave formed, all accidents or road work would be communicated to all cars so that they would merge to other lanes much earlier and all traffic would be constantly directed to different routes to maximize all capacity and all traffic lights would be adjusted to not be red when nobody is on the other lanes waiting or driving. All stupid pedestrians that press light buttons and then leave would be ignored once they left, the duration for red vs green would adjust all day including interactions with multiple streets etc.

Yes scientific society 101. If you want to drive your car you can do it too but you lose points from your income if you are not near optimal and the money from all that are seriously suboptimal is used to build more infrastructure etc. If you are very good you win points. You also have parts of the city or simulation parks you can drive recklessly with consequences just to relive the chaos every now and then for fun!

Of course it will optimize, but won't alter that car travel is for the wealthy, and everyone else uses public transport. The price of car travel will have to be artificially high, otherwise there will be too much traffic.

All citizens have decent cars to begin with if they work for the state and they have great variety of same cost to choose from but they can buy their own too if they can afford it or with services offered and better performance in job etc.

But public transportation is amazing. First it is fast when needed and services endless locations and it is combined with local rent cars or bikes or motor bikes for the rest of your commute to where you want to go to avoid using a big car. You go fast to any location you want because you use public for the big distances and the minor corrections last part of the trip with rented equipment that then others pick up from where you arrive or self drive them back to their higher demand location or something or people working for this pick them up in carriers and takes them there.

It is totally stupid to not be able to go fast anywhere with less environmental impact and cost. Its absurd and a sign of decay of a superpower to have endless traffic and being unable to directly design itself to solve it.


In fact if the US doesnt get it together soon another place in the world that will start with newer better designed for traffic cities will take over silicon valley etc.

Also stop the madness with idiotic population growth under misery already, at least until we are out of this system to other parts of the galaxy.

Too much traffic? Like in London? Most hominids are born with legs and learn how to walk. And how to ride a bicycle. Excellent exercise also. Stop being lazy. Ride a bike and carry a gun, supplemented with wads of cash and the world is your oyster. You can dodge the rabble much easier.


Also; stop with the whinning. It's Christmas time: the maddest, merriest time of the year.

Now that's the spirit!!!!

Sweetness even fake or cheesy one wins. Use Queen for countermeasure elsewhere.

I dont care how many times this has been used in stupid department stores and whatever and the made up often fake image of artists back then. I dont care how cheesy or whatever they want to call it, screw it.

It wins again always and forever.



And dont forget its priceless sibling that at any decade is a reason enough to learn how to play the keyboard or saxophone, especially if you do not have math and physics to dominate your youth and obscure your direction in life away from what else, an easier goal, teenage girls...

For a Jew, Christmas cost me a fortune in whiskey. Some ppl on here will appreciate that.