Frank and Eric
Aug. 29th, 2023 07:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootMy judgment is all over the place. Yesterday I broke one of my favourite vases/jugs through sheer stupidity and clumsiness. So annoying, still in a kind of mired shock even though it's been a couple of weeks. Biopsy results were on the 17th and here I am, still weepy and weird, stuck with the theme tune from Chinatown as an earworm: even my brain is trolling me.
Mum was terrible yesterday. Her favourite undead online quack, Frank Suaraz, reached out from beyond the grave to offer the world a huge discount on his online nutritional training courses, a bargain at $89! Mum wanted to buy three of them, one each for her, bro and me! Not that these endless videos are about cancer specifically, no, these are about controlling the metabolism, issues with diabetes and obesity... but she loves this guy despite him being thoroughly dead, having fallen or jumped from a ninth storey window. The man may be gone, the moneymaking lives on! Not only did Mum want to spend over £250 on this stuff, she was talking about making direct money transfers, or setting up online banking. My mum can barely operate her mobile phone, she is absolutely going to forget any and all passwords, and when she does, she will blame it all on some invisible person trying to kill us. I explained as best I could but she was getting very difficult. My bro contacted me at the same time and I told him what she was doing...then magically Mum sent me a text telling me to forget the courses. The volte-face was astounding, within minutes of him hearing about it. I suspect he contacted her telling her to leave me alone, that he would buy her a course, set up a secure email etc.
If so I am very grateful for it. She ate my whole morning yesterday, and even now is crowding out my Whatsapps with anxious texts beginning; are you there? answer me!
And I can't, I just can't do it yet. She is the very opposite of repose, a constant fretful scratching. I forgot that in telling her the truth while I might be occupying her mind more constructively than horrible fantasies about monkey pox, I was doing myself few favours. Yes, she is probably right about green smoothies being good for me; but I couldn't bring myself to make them, because I wanted part of my day that wasn't clotted with my mother's madness.
Bro tried to cheer me up with a link to an Eric Weinstein interview; he loves Eric! I haven't listened to more than 25 minutes so far, but I'm not as impressed yet. The only thing I can say for certain right now is that Eric has many ways to say 'adapt!' It is never that easy. One of the subjects is AI, and he says, I think, that it holds within itself the downfall of capitalism. Hmm. Does he mean capitalism or concentrated accumulation? I'm not convinced they are the same thing. If AI can take jobs, then we don't have the human exchange of time or skills for resources, which means lots of people with nothing. Eric seems to be telling us to embrace the newness, but it isn't new. We have been here before. Most people having very little is an ancient and oft-repeated part of our history. He's all about us getting out to the stars, exporting the human experience to new worlds, but what does the human experience mean? If it's a constant reiteration of mental and physical poverty across a given living place with added resource-hoovering which leaves that place a lifeless ruin, we're just turning Homo Sapiens into a species of particularly malign space locust. We shouldn't be exporting the human experience anywhere else until we are sure it's worth the move. We should be improving it here.
Still, bro is impressed with this chap, and I am not as sharp as usual. I will keep watching, see if he has anything more solid to contribute. While I am not impressed with him, at least he's not Frank Suarez.
Mum was terrible yesterday. Her favourite undead online quack, Frank Suaraz, reached out from beyond the grave to offer the world a huge discount on his online nutritional training courses, a bargain at $89! Mum wanted to buy three of them, one each for her, bro and me! Not that these endless videos are about cancer specifically, no, these are about controlling the metabolism, issues with diabetes and obesity... but she loves this guy despite him being thoroughly dead, having fallen or jumped from a ninth storey window. The man may be gone, the moneymaking lives on! Not only did Mum want to spend over £250 on this stuff, she was talking about making direct money transfers, or setting up online banking. My mum can barely operate her mobile phone, she is absolutely going to forget any and all passwords, and when she does, she will blame it all on some invisible person trying to kill us. I explained as best I could but she was getting very difficult. My bro contacted me at the same time and I told him what she was doing...then magically Mum sent me a text telling me to forget the courses. The volte-face was astounding, within minutes of him hearing about it. I suspect he contacted her telling her to leave me alone, that he would buy her a course, set up a secure email etc.
If so I am very grateful for it. She ate my whole morning yesterday, and even now is crowding out my Whatsapps with anxious texts beginning; are you there? answer me!
And I can't, I just can't do it yet. She is the very opposite of repose, a constant fretful scratching. I forgot that in telling her the truth while I might be occupying her mind more constructively than horrible fantasies about monkey pox, I was doing myself few favours. Yes, she is probably right about green smoothies being good for me; but I couldn't bring myself to make them, because I wanted part of my day that wasn't clotted with my mother's madness.
Bro tried to cheer me up with a link to an Eric Weinstein interview; he loves Eric! I haven't listened to more than 25 minutes so far, but I'm not as impressed yet. The only thing I can say for certain right now is that Eric has many ways to say 'adapt!' It is never that easy. One of the subjects is AI, and he says, I think, that it holds within itself the downfall of capitalism. Hmm. Does he mean capitalism or concentrated accumulation? I'm not convinced they are the same thing. If AI can take jobs, then we don't have the human exchange of time or skills for resources, which means lots of people with nothing. Eric seems to be telling us to embrace the newness, but it isn't new. We have been here before. Most people having very little is an ancient and oft-repeated part of our history. He's all about us getting out to the stars, exporting the human experience to new worlds, but what does the human experience mean? If it's a constant reiteration of mental and physical poverty across a given living place with added resource-hoovering which leaves that place a lifeless ruin, we're just turning Homo Sapiens into a species of particularly malign space locust. We shouldn't be exporting the human experience anywhere else until we are sure it's worth the move. We should be improving it here.
Still, bro is impressed with this chap, and I am not as sharp as usual. I will keep watching, see if he has anything more solid to contribute. While I am not impressed with him, at least he's not Frank Suarez.
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