5 entries for August 2026

"Inevitable" often means "would love to do that without your consent".

We still have a choice!

[Aspiring tech overlords seek to remove people's ability to consent.]

[Destabilizing the developing world through stealing resources and destructive wars is a cause for mass displacement and migration. The spoils are used to build western tech infrastructure and mass surveillance is proposed as a solution to people's fears of scary migrants walking around.]

[The ruling class wants you to believe you shouldn't have a say in how your society's resources are used to shape the future of your society; it's necessary to convince you because it's actually not inevitable.]

[Computers may be one of the first tools to preceed their tasks: first build it, then figure out what to do with it.]

"There is no shallow end," a philosophy professor told me. Because any objection whatsoever, from any angle, can fell a theory, you can't carve out ace of philosophical territory, master it in isola-, and move on to the next.

My first day of class in the philosophy major, the professor opens the semester by saying that anyone who says that "philosophy is useless" is already philosophizing, building up an intellectual argument to make a point that is important to them, and therefore defeating their own statement in the very breath of uttering it.

You question the assumptions of physics and you end up in metaphysics—a branch of philosophy. You question the assumptions of history and you end up in epistemology—a branch of philosophy. You try to take any other discipline out at the foundations and you end up in philosophy; you try to take philosophy out at the foundations and you only end up in meta-philosophy: even deeper in than when you started.

Who pays the price?

Universal basic income is not a reward for idleness; it is recognition that productivity gains belong to society, not just to capital.

A society that automates its way to prosperity while abandoning its workers has not progressed at all.

Technology advocacy without social advocacy is just greed with better tooling.

There is Always Another Lunch

most daily choices are reversible, and because life presents an endless stream of future opportunities, spending excessive time and energy on minor decisions is inefficient and puts you at the end of the lunchtime rush of orders put into the kitchen.