economicsresearch - Tumblr blog

economicsresearch · 15 hours

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page 562 panel - But on a happy note at least I'm buried and crushed by my own photos and memories. I had a role to play in their creation. At least it's not a pile of text and images churned senselessly from the gaping maw of an AI machine. At least that. We aren't designed to sort the clutter we can produce and store for ourselves and we certainly aren't ready for a fire hose of nonsense imaginary. Even if its benign, and a lot of it won't be, at the very least we will be distracted by it, weakened, grumpy and confused. And that's a best outcome.

Also, this vacation was great.

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economicsresearch · 2 days

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page 562 panel a - And of course it's a lie. Always with the lies. You haven't lost a perfect part of your past, a precious treasure, because the perfect memory has been decaying all along. It floats from server to server, sloughing bytes with every transfer, corrupting code. Your perfect memory is the same as your less perfect, human memory; changed every time you recall it. Memories are rewritten in remembering no matter their form. Memories as ghosts of the memories that came before, and so the haunting grows.

Before you ask, it is not the same as a photo album. Yes it can be lost in a fire and yes those pictures were precious but they didn't weigh on us or demand our attention in the same way. An album's photos didn't define us to ourselves and to others the way a digital album on your phone might today. Aside from a few choice pieces, our photos were not a ubiquitous part of society that we carried around with us to refer to if needed at any moment. Our attention to them was different, more engrossing but only in their presence. A memory could be jogged by a picture, but the picture was remembered as well, it was real and in a book that existed in one place. If you weren't with the photo you couldn't see it, so what choice was there but to remember both the photo and the time it contains. The thingness of the photo in an album means you can set it aside, leave it at home on a shelf under the stairs. You aren't dragging the ever-lengthening tail of your whole life with you all the time, leaving you exhausted and too tired to create the new memories that could be happening now. All weight and no joy.

And another nice thing about a photo album is that once it is made it has a habit of maintaining its form without further inputs. Keep it out of the rain and the sun and it does well. There is no need to drag rare earth minerals out of a muddy pit in Africa to support your granny opening her album. When you pull out a photo to see what is written on the back there are no server farms with hugely destructive electrical and cooling costs involved. Your photos are killing you and killing all of us. So many fucking ghosts.

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economicsresearch · 3 days

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page 562 panel a - Of course you are welcome to tell yourself that the machine connects you to more of your life, in the same way having access to wikipedia makes you smarter. It doesn't. You are an empty vessel that sometimes feels filled but moments later you are drained and vacant. You don't remember anything. You just look and move on. You have farmed out the hard work of memory to a tool and you are now slave to it, your abilities of recall atrophied. Plenty obliterates all nuance and subtlety. Unless your goal is to be a shit cyborg whose experience of the world is a shallow one, you are not better for your tools.

The cost of it all only adds to the humiliation. Not just the cost of having emotional profundity erased and overridden by visual overabundance, but there is actual treasure we hand over to be treated in this way. A worse product at a higher price. Remembering for ourselves is free but now there's rent. Maybe only cents on the day but still we tithe a corporation to keep a dead parent alive or remember an ex who we hated at the end. Why are they still here? Monetary cost, emotional cost, such small amounts you barely notice, but real all the same. The ghosts of memory we can't quite see, the ghosts of wealth drained that we never knew we had, they all grow fat and laugh at us.

Memories gained, memories lost. It feels natural, like the moon and the tides, ceaseless and without worry. As the night draws on this moonrise is lost but there will be another tomorrow, it goes. But once we decided to hoard and fortify, make memories permanent now that they're safely stored outside our fallible biology, it all becomes brittle and a loss is catastrophic; there is trauma in preservation now. Our technological aide-memoire (usurper-memoire?) make us think it can all be retained, we just need to use the tools, pay the toll, be conscientious, have some goddamned personal responsibility. But a harddrive melts, a password is lost or a company goes bankrupt and once again there is the same old loss. Only this time it's your fault. If only there had been a third back-up or a fourth, then I wouldn't have so foolishly deleted this piece of my soul. And we are left ill and worried by a buzz inside us as we try to keep it all safe, but we can't. We can't control the corporation that dances and sways in capitalism's breeze or even the micro solder that has some imperfect weakness at an atomic level, We can only pray.

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economicsresearch · 3 days

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page 562 - Do you ever feel overwhelmed scrolling through all the pictures you took, that you transferred from one phone to the next, backed up on a laptop or locked up in the cloud? Memories that could have been left to fallow, instead rise up zombie-like into your emotional present on a random Tuesday night when you scroll back too far?

There is so much and you don't need most of it. Most memory is meant to disappear after all; maybe only rising up when the light and the smell of an evening combine just so, or a photo falls out of an old notebook. Save the very few -- privileged or damned -- we all have corners and rooms that stay dark. You are meant to forget. It is not natural to scroll and be reminded of every 20 minutes from the last 15 years.

And so you feel feel sick from remembering. And you feel sick because you can't remember, because the remembering you just subjected yourself to isn't really remembering. It's forced and unnatural; a decisive moment abstracted from the life that surrounded it. There was smell and touch and emotion present when the photo was taken. Gone, killed by the visual. Another memory tried to surface, spurred by the photo in front of you. Gone, recall smashed apart by distraction. Only the remorseless engine remains, the piston of the scroll as a new picture is stamped over the old and again and again and anything gnawing at the edge of consciousness never has a chance. You're left with the feeling that you've lost something before it was even in your grasp. That you had finally remembered the combination to the safe where your most precious treasures are stored but the door was slammed, the dial spun and the numbers changed again.

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economicsresearch · 4 months

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page 562 - guess what grunt-laugher;

I had a whole bunch to say about growth without end is capitalism's animating principle and also its inevitable downfall given our existence on a finite world. I was going to say something like consuming the last of our resources leaves nothing to consume but ourselves and we inevitably transform into a sickening monstrosity, an ouroboros human centipede. I think there was something about how inserting AI into that mess might seem to help, so we're only responsible for the shit eating, but the solution ignores that shit is still being made, concentrating its toxicity in every cycle and drowning the chance for something new that could get us out of this mess.

But I can't remember the specifics or even if it made any sense.

Got distracted when I found this is Economian instruction manual for sex. Very abstracted. VERY seXXXXy.

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 -There is a time and a place for isolation. Thought and reflection can yield enormous benefit.

You can even lose yourself entirely. So long as it is by choice.

But it takes community to understand that some people grunt-laugh and fart at the same time after being chained in a dungeon for X time, while others just prattle on about machine learning while drawing mysterious stone churches that vanish into the landscape even as they emerge from it.

Just another Saturday night!

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 - other guy is telling me I'm boring.

I'm telling them to be more awake.

They're telling me to be quiet so they can sleep.

I'm asking them how can I be boring if they're just trying to sleep.

They're grunting at me? No it's a laugh, they just laugh weird.

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 - but I would probably also be okay with something like this. A bit of the ol' above below.

#economics #economy #economist #equilibrium price shortages and surpluses #unstable equilibrium #equilibrium #unstable #surplus #shortage #time #ethiopia #church #orthodox christianity #stone church #architecture #carving #stone work

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 panel a - while we're in imagination mode, look at this high rising high-rise.

Can we all agree that the word YUMMY is pretty nice adjective to use here.

Yummy.

Above ground is really something.

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 panel b - I'm not actually going to stare at the ceaseless power of the ocean's waves, obviously. I feel I haven't mentioned in a while but still in a dungeon.

Here, however, is my impression of staring at the throbbing ocean from atop an impressively tall cliff.

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 - friction can be good.

A bumpy walk in the forest and a tearful time with friends. Nothing is solved, efficiency doesn't matter, but everything can be better.

Enjoy your repetitive operations *tips hat* I'm off to stare at the ceaseless power of the ocean's waves.

#economics #economy #economist #equilibrium price shortages and surpluses #unstable equilibrium #equilibrium #unstable #surplus #shortage #time #geology #erosion #cliff #buildings #tall #condo #towers #real estate

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 - what's the rush?

AI promises efficiency because it does what we do but without lunch breaks. But who needs faster?

Why are we running at death so hard? Why let AI do the work faster when we can just spend a nice afternoon drawing a picture?

#economics #economy #economist #equilibrium price shortages and surpluses #unstable equilibrium #equilibrium #unstable #surplus #shortage #time #geoglogy #real estate #cliff #cliff top #view #vista

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 - great, efficiency, ya.

When the world holds efficiency as the marker of success, almost an end in itself, the past is a series of not quite right failures. It's a source of data to be mined for improvements and refuses magic and joy because they don't get you where you're going as fast and as cheaply as possible.

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 - ugh, efficiency.

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economicsresearch · 5 months

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page 562 - Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Where did that come from? Not me. Someone who knows please let me know and give credit where it's due.

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economicsresearch · 6 months

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page 562 panel a - a tartan scarf is one type of scarf.

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economicsresearch · 1 year

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page 562 panel a - variation on a theme.

And now I give you the same square but the slash is on a slight angle. Is your life better for the choice?

Maybe you like one over the other. That's cool and nice.

Choose choose choose choose choose, or you will not be defined and you will not exist.

Buy everything you want but remember any meaning, any feeling you get from it that is beyond pure utility is based in community. An adult emerges from an egg and finds a scarf, they use it to stay warm, oblivious to its colours and patterns and the cultural discussion between Serge Ibaka and OG Anunoby about who put who onto scarves.

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