Here is an example of a code block inserted into my text body:
function codeBlock(param) {
if (param) {
console.log(param);
} else {
return "nope";
}
const here = "this";
codeBlock(here);
There you have it!
Here is an example of a code block inserted into my text body:
function codeBlock(param) {
if (param) {
console.log(param);
} else {
return "nope";
}
const here = "this";
codeBlock(here);
There you have it!
Hello.
I don't know what I'm writing about but I was suddenly inspired to read scribblings past and now have decided in the blur of the moment to write out an entire blog update.
My partner is probably wondering from the bedroom what I'm doing typing away on a Saturday morning. "He better not be working overtime!!" She tends to slide her meddling hand into my mismatched wardrobe like that - assuming I'm up to no good. Like some dog on a morning mission to find that wastebasket full of used tissues...
I'm not. And her meddling is more necessary than the extent to which I give it credit. Probably.
Still don't know what I'm writing about or why. Who reads these?
I suppose I'm trying to recapture or elicit something anew. Maybe there's a purpose to my ramblings, but they're likely just an addition to an algorithm of the complexities of our evolutionarily derived awareness.
Or is it discovered awareness? Is awareness a result of mutations, or is it the "higher power?" I suppose I'll capitalize the word from here on out to signify the importance and significance of said term.
The Awareness.
There we go. Also capitalizing the word because of my own perceived greatness, I'm sure. I'm not super great, though. I can write and I find it interesting. Maybe book readers would enjoy my skipping through grammatical aloofness as a child hoisting a gun while tumble-trotting, as children do, carelessly fingering that trigger guard. I can't foresee whether this would be observed as "oh, so cutesy and innocent" or simply "another result of bad parenting..."
Alas.
For you see, I have moved away from belief in deities and absolutes to a dependency on other assumed finalities. I think it may simply be a part of the human coding initiative. Our presupposition that there is more than this temporal existence sustains a thirst for surviving and, at risk of developing a greater insatiability, being comfortable and safe. Having a destination.
Knowing that home awaits us at the end of our day of existence.
Comfort. A condition of ease and thoughtlessness to which we aspire with all of our most determined thinking. What a paradox, that. The understanding that it is a dichotomy of a complex idea is also something astounding. How did we arrive at the place where we now entwine with the world, absorbing and expressing nuance and coveted poly-rhythms of speech and hearing?
Most of it is lost in the immediacy of the conversation. But it builds on what was known and what is assumed and is a complex sifting organism that filters our communal thought into a massive, world-covering creature of intellect. We are Aware.
In the spirit of maintaining my uncertain disposition toward all things and ideas, I'll end this post here.
do you remember you?
30 individual humans will “earn” over half a billion dollars between just themselves - just this year. This is only a tiny fraction of this type of extreme wealth in the world and isn’t even the most extreme example of the wealth gap with which most of us are familiar.
Meanwhile, people who weren’t lucky enough to gain massive international popularity by being chosen to play the lead in a new, wildly popular cinematic franchise will flip burgers/operate a teller’s desk/repair your HVAC system for less than 1% of one of these annual incomes over the course of decades of back-breaking work.
This is ok in our world. Can you believe that?
I can't anymore.
I don’t mean to troll any responses into correcting me, so I’ll clarify that I’m totally fine with very wealthy individuals attaining those riches through hard work and dedication to their craft. A company's CEO should be paid more than the teams that help run the company. I don’t want that job - tell me what to do and pay me less for it. I totally get this sort of hierarchy. I want the head of a company to have the incentive to lead me and a team. That's a position I'm unwilling to take on due to the stress of it.
But that isn’t what we’re dealing with.
We’re dealing with Tom Cruise being told what to do (and doing it well, according to many critics and fans) and making $100M dollars for performing well at his job. I don't want to discount the difficulty of the job of an actor. I absolutely validate the position of the thespian and performer and think they deserve fair wages as any other worker does.
But that's not what we're talking about.
We’re talking about Robert Antokol obtaining a salary of $372M in a year for running a game development company. Now, if you divide half that amount ($186,000,000.00) amongst the 3800 persons Playtika (the game dev company over which Antokol presides) employs, that’s $48,947.37 per employee per year. Nice bonus, amiright???
And the CEO still gets $186,000,000.00 dropped into their lap for the year. Not a bad deal at all! I'd take a portion of a percent of that and be living better than anything I could imagine in my current state.
It seems diminutively fair to me to give a $50,000-ish bonus to each employee while still paying such a massive sum to one individual who certainly would be no where without his devoted workers.
This doesn’t even touch on the fact that each board member of Playtika also takes home hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and how little time each of them contribute in comparison to the team members fashioning the product that's defined by the board.
No one man or woman does enough work to be valued so far above their lowest paid worker. No one.
We have a problem in this world. The ultra rich are a major contributor to it. I don’t really believe in an abject realization of evil, but this is very close to one of the few things I would define pretty close to such a concept.
If you run a company where you pay your average worker an annual salary equivalent to 0.03% of what you take home in the same amount of time, this is a shade of evil. There is no justification for it.
I fully support the movement that has been taking place since The Great Resignation began a decade before the pandemic. People deserve better. So much better.
Is this movement even effectual though?
Skill trades and hard work should be valued much more equivalently to the elite, idealistic roles than what is currently attributed to them.
The road construction worker operating under life-threatening conditions to keep our travel routes traversable and safe deserves just as much recognition and compensation as, or even more than, a project manager or accountant who, while deserving of the dividend proffered them due to their attention to education and understanding of and ability within complex business systems, statistically will not be risking their well-being at nearly the same rate, nor contributing tactically skilled, physically demanding, and spatially difficult labor to their occupational focus as the blue collar person does.
Whether physically or mentally demanding, occupations of any type should offer the worker comfort and prosperity as they give of their lives to the mechanism in which they exert themselves. Nice thoughts, eh?
I do wish that words were enough to fix this. I wish legislative referendum had the capacity to affect the injustice of it. I may even hate the state of poverty and its oppressive master, high wealth, enough to wish a military force could enact a change through occupation and injunctive coercion. Even that would not be enough though.
There is no sudden fix or resolution to this fabricated yet tangible slavery that entraps most of humanity. The curse of the power of money is ineffable and unrelenting. It is without predator aside from an unexpected act of natural motions - which may include self-immolation, introspectivisms and self-realization, and/or self-transcendency. I am optimistic toward the continuance of a certain valuing of community and cooperative evolution as we have seen only recently emerging through the evolutionary course of life on earth. I am also cautious in this positivity because, well, we could enact nuclear warfare and then be done with this attempt at expanding the spark of awareness.
Thank you for joining me on this ferocious unwrapping of mind-speak as I confront the state of the human race as it has always been. No answers are given here. Merely perspectives and convolutions. And that is all I've ever had.
Please remember to do "good" with the vastness appointed you by chance. Remember to lift your companions in this life to equality and commiseration. We can become the species to attain true peace, interdependency, and equilibrium with this strange force pushing against gravity defined as life. I really believe this.
The only question that bothers me in the dark corners of my home is, will we?
I do agree that I am necessary to the extent that the collection of particles and immeasurable pieces, which have yet to be found, collapsed together to form my spatial tangence in the way that achieves what they (the particles) intend. The specific collection of mass and motion that is “me” is here right now -being- | so, yes. “I” am not replaceable. However, I am placed here. And I can be moved from here.
I’m in a system that runs on my position and through positioning me, that is connected to quadrillions upon quadrillions of other positioned placements. My awareness of and subsequent interactivity with this is a phenomenon, as many organisms can’t, at least from our perspective, understand the vastness and acuteness of everything. They just are. I have to reason then that awareness, consciousness, or spirit has a purpose. Is it an elevated response to the inward motion of all things? Is it a separate entity sent from beyond tangibility to inhabit these cardboard shipment containers we deem bodies? Is it randomness? Chaos? Just a chance reaction of chemical interactions that have made a very small part of a massive universe able to observe and actuate itself? The expression of a God who created an evolving version of himself that will come to completion in self-awareness at some inconceivable point in the future?
All fascinating speculations to me, but what really gets me thinking is how my necessity right now in space and time depends little to nothing on my contribution actuated through this state of awareness. Yes, we made societies and cities and art and science. We have religions and ideals and philosophies and social media. We have balance and greed. We have fairness and murder. We have awareness. And my existence -is- because of the current ordering of particles commanding particles we call “humanity.” So awareness begot awareness. But awareness didn’t become aware from nothing. And nothing didn’t form something. It’s a continuous trade off of intentions with tendencies; on a cosmic scale! Galaxies forming constantly from motion throughout the expanse. Entire solar systems and galaxies contracting from space into blackholes where matter is compacted into ultimate density.
The world builds itself without us touching it. If our species died, the world would use the tools of itself to turn us back into it, which is all we’ve been all along — some combination of elements that have assembled into this complex organism allowing us to manipulate the world as we see fit in a much shorter span of time and with more expanded intention than what the universe does to us through tendency... and some small hint of intention.
I can’t get past it. That idea that everything is intentional. There are, however, cosmic forces that move at much more rapid speeds of particle destabilization than what we can enact. Our skills in disassembly, organization and reassembly of elements and particles into new forms measures as nothing compared to the potential force that a small chunk of space debris contains were it to enter our planet’s atmosphere and make impact with the surface. And then there are super novas and the like. And then there is the microwave spectrum. Forces we can’t even see and predict that could end us in a nanosecond. Fascinating.
Yet, here we are. Inside the big bubble of earth’s protective atmosphere, shielding us every moment from unending assaults by the cosmos. Protecting us out of an evolutionary and survival of the fittest interest, perhaps? Or, mayhaps, let us reason that a God set this up in such a way. Definitely plausible. All things point toward a being of infinite power making a system that would work in the way I’ve laid out here. I won’t get into that right now though. This one isn’t about God. Well, unless you’re of the persuasion that everything is through and from and for and about God. Then this whole argument works in your favor. I’m not attempting to talk about God though because it doesn’t matter. Unless you believe it does. Then it matters a ton. Except that it doesn’t.
Agh!! Look what you’ve made me do! I won’t go into that right now. I must resist. This blog post has gone on long enough.
Let me end by saying that I believe there is a struggle between intention and tendency and that struggle is an intersection on which awareness persists unto necessity. There. That should wrap it up nicely.