trail builder, timber faller, stone mason, wilderness zealot, literature enthusiast, and slightly better poet than rupi kaur
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Joined December 2010
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Decided I'm voting for Amy Acton.
I think she is dumb & has no discernible policy position, certainly none I would agree with, but the shit-heel boomer who lives three houses down and keeps trespassing in my yard and irrationally threatening me has a Vivek sign in his yard and I want him to feel powerless.
I bet a lot of people vote on similar idiotic grounds as I am about to.
Thankfully I just have oil heat as a backup. But gov is lying about the price of heating oil, at least to the consumer. Local (Midwest) quotes today at $7.46
Rough winter for anybody poor who hasn't updated.
I know this is mostly a me-problem, but adults recreating purely for recreation's sake on a mountain of costly purchases and infrastructure has never set well with me.
For example. Backcountry skiing, nature engaged, experienced, honored, turns earned, fine. But Resort skiing... this is what we're strip mining Appalachia to power? An insanely energy intensive and gauche fashion show on a high-wire carousel, next to a massive parking lot that once was an alpine meadow. Adults careening awkwardly over a mowed down forest covered even with fake snow when the weather will not oblige, (the show must go on). And they go again and again like children. "Again Daddy, again!" They say to the miners and coal fired power plants. And to what end? They can't tell you. And they will curse you for asking.
Much the same can be said of the mountain biker, too fast to see the forest for the trees. And the truly dedicated among them are broken souls arrested early in development. 60 year old children hitting those ...sweet jumps.
I hate that sometimes my bread and butter comes from enabling this prolonged reality-obfuscating adolescence, weakly justifying building these carousels of childish decadence by engineering them in a sustainable manner, at least to make it cause less harm, stop the erosion, contain the trampling and ripping of root and soil to zones of sacrifice. Attractive prisons for the man-child.
I know this is a me-problem but it does make me feel like Holden Caulfield wishing I could catch the next ones in the rye before they fall over whatever cliff demanding eternal pursuit of childish glee, demanding the stillness of here and now be blurred through speed into the safety of wind-blown oblivion.
"It's right here" I want to say. I want to quote Kafka to them.
"It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet."
I want to say, "STOP! Look here at this tree! Find your peace here, out of the sound and hazard of that mad and abstract pursuit!" But I don't. Who tf am I anyway to cast this stone. But I'll say this; something, something I am sure, at the root of this need to avoid stillness at all costs also underlies the vast bulk of human suffering. And yet calling it out, naming this demon does nothing to subdue or exorcise it. The naming helps no one.
And, I suppose, the surgeons and trauma ward nurses need to make a living too. They save the manchild, that he might have another chance, to learn or to fall, either way. And me, I save the tree next to the jump so that maybe one day he sees it, finds safety in the calm of its shade, and saves another.
What I am saying here is that though we can't ever really change the heart of another, we *can* steward a trail, leave a path open for him to find his own way, and there are parallels to this in all lines of work, small points of opportunity for calmer hearted futures to be preserved in everything we do.
Armed guards at the door. Opioids offered on repeat. Apple Pay at my bedside. Welcome to the American Emergency Room.
The French think it bankrupts you. Americans think France does it for free. I’ve been to the ER in both. Both are wrong.
Mountain bike crash, dislocated and fractured shoulder. I’m French, I live in San Francisco, and I take slightly too many risks. Let’s compare.
Security
🇺🇸 Kaiser in Marin. Three armed guards and a metal detector. My phone set it off, so with my shoulder out of its socket I walked through again. And again. Then a pat-down.
🇫🇷 A couple of unarmed guys with walkie-talkies. Still not sure what they’re for.
Wait
🇺🇸 Three people in the waiting room. Seen in 15 to 30 minutes.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: packed room, 4 hours before anyone touched me.
Records
🇺🇸 Kaiser is vertically integrated. Insurer, hospital, doctors: one system. They had my file before I sat down.
🇫🇷 Every new doctor is a fresh context window. Zero history, maybe a printout from last time.
Infrastructure
🇺🇸 Small hospital, serious kit. Straight to the trauma bay: real bed, IV, vitals monitoring, ready for surgery if needed. All imaging on the spot.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: a plastic chair and a Doliprane.
Drugs
🇺🇸 Strong opioids were the default offer. I said no. They insisted. The doctor came in personally, confused why someone in that much pain would refuse. I stuck to Tylenol, an anti-inflammatory, to put the shoulder back in.
Yes, it hurt. No, I didn’t tap out. My mom is proud of me.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: Doliprane, opioids never mentioned. I have friends who got their shoulder popped back in with nothing at all.
US default: opioids. French default: Doliprane.
Bill
🇺🇸 Every nurse warned me: “You’re French, this bill is going to traumatize you.”
Before discharge, someone came to my bed to collect payment. Apple Pay, from the hospital bed. $300. For everything. On a ~$500/month Kaiser plan.
🇫🇷 A flat ~€20 ER fee, usually reimbursed by your mutuelle. The real bill shows up later, on your payslip (see below)
followup
🇺🇸 Kaiser called me right after to set up follow-up and physio, all in their system. So far, so good.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: discharged, figure it out yourself. A friend dislocated her finger. They put it back in wrong, sent her home with bad instructions, it locked up, and she needed surgery months later. Still not fixed.
“Free healthcare” in France
It’s not free when your marginal tax rate nears 70% with social charges. And if you want quality care fast, more and more people pay for private clinics anyway.
Verdict
One person, one data point. But the care was 10x better than anything I’ve had in France, for a price that’s completely fine.
France has a lot to learn.
And yes, I refused the narcotics to stay sharp enough to launch a NanoCorp from my hospital bed. Launch your first company run by an AI agent: nanocorp .so
Haven't turned the tv on in ages. Setting up a new Internet connection today I see it now has a channel that is nothing but 15 minutes of this throbbing pumpkin followed by a series of Amy Acton ads.
I... uh...
Nerds out there reinventing the Old Testament from first principles.
...and scrubbing out the part about the flood as though that wasn't a necessary birth of consciousness moment for God. 🌈 🕊️
I think we can restore faith in the republic by implementing a -1 vote.
Let's say you're in Ohio and can't choose the lesser evil. You can still say NOT this guy in particular & cancel someone else's vote.
Bonus: if a candidate gets a negative total vote tally we execute him.
These people also abandoned their cat to the forest here. So by ironclad analogy I shall henceforth and forever assume anyone who doesn't landscape their property is a steaming pile of 💩
People we bought our house (on 4 acres) from spent 7 years there and planted nothing. Not one plant.
Been there about a month now and have put in about 3 dozen trees and shrubs and over 100 bulbs. And I am lamenting how little I have been able to accomplish.
Why would you buy a place like that and then just live inside on your iPad? Incomprehensible lifestyle.
What's worse is ppl are reading so much in the slop style & hearing it on YouTube it's changing our natural cadences & word choices to sound more like it. A grand homogenization accelerating.
The voice of AI is the whirr of the global Vitamix.
This writer who won a short story contest was accused by the Atlantic of using AI, and he has denied it.
Most people who hear about this probably won't go and actually READ the short story but you actually can (it's easy to find), and so I did.
Most of the time when someone is accused of using AI, we just tend to believe the accusation because (frankly) you can usually transparently tell it's written by AI.
Well, I don't think this story was written by AI. I'm personally very very sensitive to AI-generated writing (I hate it, I feel an almost visceral revulsion). The short story is objectively really really good and if it was written using AI, then it would mean that AI is leagues better at creative writing than we think it is.
I don't know what could have prompted anyone to even think it was written using AI, unless the journalist who leveled the accusation is one of those midwits who think anything "with lots of words" means it's AI-produced... but the journalist is a published writer herself and can presumably distinguish quality writing. The short story is clearly good writing.
(I recommend that you read it - it's not long, and it's a good story)
The journalist cited @Pangram, which I also generally trust, but either it still can't quite distinguish top-quality writing from AI drivel or I can't.
People we bought our house (on 4 acres) from spent 7 years there and planted nothing. Not one plant.
Been there about a month now and have put in about 3 dozen trees and shrubs and over 100 bulbs. And I am lamenting how little I have been able to accomplish.
Why would you buy a place like that and then just live inside on your iPad? Incomprehensible lifestyle.
"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings."
Fair warning. Somebody pulls that shid near my hydrangeas I will personally lead the anti-nerd genocide.
Over 10k acres of new public land in Ohio just locked in.
Nominal cost, and much higher future revenues from harvest contracts plus hunting and fishing licenses etc than the $3 per acre in tax they had been getting.
Great model for putting formerly abused semi-abandoned private lands under healthy management and opening access to the public. It's how Eastern States can win back public land.
"Your universe has no meaning to them... they will make a fire from your beautiful oak door."
