Salt and Rule: If It Tastes Bad, Don't Eat It, If It Feels Bad, Don't Eat It

 I hit my salt limit. I got the nutrient-overload headache. It tastes good, but it feels bad, so I had to cut back. (Still tastes good, but not as good.) The research saying you shouldn't overload your salt seems valid. We just want to throw out the parts where they think having three potato chips will instantly blow out both kidneys.

 Salt has a nice wide 'eh, that's fine' range. This means I can have cheat days where I salt the heck out of stuff without flooding the salt vats. I certainly don't want to ride the bare edge of viable.

 Note that the reason you want to avoid "added sodium" is that you can overload on sodium while still being deficient in chlorine, which is needed for stomach acid, white blood cells, and possibly other things I don't know about. Just salt they food. "Food scientist Steve Witherly noted in 2017 that MSG may promote healthy eating by enhancing the flavor of food such as kale while reducing the use of salt." Always a great idea to try doing the opposite of whatever [[food scientists]] say to do. Kale tastes bad because it is bad, cue midwit meme. My favourite has always been beet greens, though they're difficult to get if you're not interested in the beets.

 Do remember that they claim salt is iodized, but they're essentially lying. It has bare traces of iodine. 

 At the end of the day, don't listen to the dietary advice of schizos on the internet. Including me, obviously. Eat what tastes good and feels good.

The Enemy's Oil is Down

 Oil is down substantially since 2007. How does inflation explain this?
 https://nitter.unixfox.eu/RealKeithWeiner/status/1746310296657068116 

 It doesn't. 

Price of oil down *substantially* from 3/2007. Price of Breckenridge ski ticket up substantially. 

You can't explain this paradox with declining purchasing power of the US dollar.

 It's lack of demand. Peak America 2008. Economy's been tanking since then.
 Fewer folk can afford a ski ticket, so they had to raise prices, on top of inflation/taxes/regulation. Economies of scale when scale is declining. 

 Indirectly inflation explains part of the loss of the price in oil. Uneven inflation causes economic damage; less stuff made, less oil burnt. With enough damage the loss in demand overwhelms the inflationary increase in price.  

 There could also be some leveraging/oil futures issue. Perhaps oil became definancialized in favour of stocks or some other derivative. You can check this by looking at how sensitively oil prices respond to Communist interest rate fixes.

 Finally the Fed may be directly subsidizing oil production, which causes an illusory decrease in price. Yes everything is cheaper to transport, but you more than make it up in the prices of wages and everything else not being subsidized.
 Perhaps that's how Fed holds down the gold price: paying miners to sell it almost for free. 

 I suppose it's incredibly easy for the Fed to control BTC prices, isn't it? 1) Bribe hodlers to sell their BTC and not re-buy. 2) Resell the BTC at a loss. Repeat indefinitely; price arbitrary. What does a loss mean to an entity which an print its own money? Sure it's illegal, but who the fuck cares? What do you suppose would happen to the SEC's budget if it tried investigating the Fed for securities fraud?

90% Redundant Twitter

 It has been enough time. Twitter didn't explode.

 Not only was 90% of the staff useless, even Elon Musk could tell at a glance which 90% it was. He maybe cut slightly deeper than strictly optimal, but that's fine. Just a flesh wound. Not exactly a [hack the bone] moment. Instead, a good policy. This is a cancer surgery moment: you cut into healthy tissue to ensure all the cancer is gone.

 

 Censorship is still there. You can't praise genocide. It is true that it is much less than it was, even much less than Musk's original policies. However, anything hard and masculine still gets you shadowbanned. Honour still verboten. This is because it is what everyone wants: there are ways to get a linear temporal timelines of only accounts you follow, but everyone refuses to use them. 

 You could say Musk would fix the loopholes if they mattered, but if they mattered you wouldn't need them in the first place.

 Still, this is an example of Musk's bureaucrat-whispering. Even when he pisses them off, they end up not being able to do anything to him. He doesn't have to constantly repeat the [freedom of reach] nonsense, he can just do what he wants. Shit status: secured.

How To: Religion

 I forget if I already explained this properly.

 I'm not LARPing because I accidentally converted myself. Didn't know it was possible before it happened. There's a recipe. 

 

 Imagine the ideal religion. Imagine it as vividly as possible, with every detail. What do your priests wear? What colour? Why do they wear it? What are your ceremonies like? Do you have temples? Shrines? How much do they cost? What are they decorated with?

 Of course, most important: what are your rituals and why are they like that? 

 I originally did it as an aide to evaluating real-world religions. I had previously imagined the ideal government, so I could highlight anomalies. Are the differences due to a failure of my imagination, or a failure in the government? It was extremely useful and profitable, and I realized I should do it for religion. (Check: I did find several failures of imagination and had to correct my ideal government. "Oh wait, I see, that's why they do that.")

 It turns out all of religion is an anomaly, and it's due to a failure of real-world religion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Merely adhere to your ideal religion, bro. It works great.

The Local Worship

 I found a good wording: I worship the process of learning via logic. My devotional ritual is bringing my perceptions into better harmony with Reality. 

 

 Reality wants you to get to know her. My religion is about energetically allowing her to speak, that I might listen. Reality is wise. What she wants is Good. 

 What she wants is for me to be wise too!

 This is why I have such metaphysical inertia. Every time I make my perceptions more real, I make myself more spiritually real. The thing Pratchett says  DEATH has - that's what I have. I believe true things, and as a result in person I have a nearly Xianxia like presence. When I walk into a room you can see and feel my pressure subtly weigh everything else down. Veni, vidi, vici: I conquer via mere proximity.

 Notice that the point of the bragging is to say you can do this too, if you're willing to pay the price. I don't do this sort of thing because I'm special, I'm special because I've done this sort of thing. Although mainly the point of the bragging is that I've never not been by far the heaviest thing in the room, and I'm tired of it. It's normal for me to be substantially heavier than everyone else combined. My physical body is small, because if I were both spiritually and physically huge, it would just be cheating. It's lonely. If one of all y'all could hurry up and stop sucking, that would be great. More on this tomorrow.

 By contrast, the insane and the NPC barely believes any truth at all. They come across as wet tissue paper - I have to be careful to avoid accidentally walking straight through them, metaphysically speaking. I avoid them because both ripping them in half and not ripping them in half is a pain in the neck. They don't even feel alive. Fleshy ghosts.

 

 Notice that I'm not claiming that Truth is the only thing that can give you gravitas. Unfortunately there are many demonic arts which can supply unholy strength. Part of the reason for never encountering a heavy is that, for some mysterious reason, I vigorously avoid devil cultivators. Their clouds of corrupt energy are metaphorically visible for literal miles. It's very very easy to never give them permission to desecrate you.

 However, truth is the only path to immortality. If you can become sufficiently harmonious with Reality, you become transcendental like Reality. Another theory says this has already happened... You never needed to eat a material fruit to know good and evil, nor do you need to eat a material fruit or suffer rescue to achieve eternal life. 

 Most mortals already fucked it up, though. The justice of Existence is not mortal ideas of fairness. It is possible that the Truth is that you're already dead. In this case, bringing yourself into harmony with Reality will cause not eternity, but transcendent deconstruction, even annihilation. On the plus side, it won't hurt. Indeed in this case Death is the progressive cessation of pain.

On COVID Lack of Tyranny

 Do they want to do camps for the unvaccinated and millions of internal checkpoints and the central government micromanaging who is hired by whom? Sure. Can they? No. No, not really. 

 Despotism is weak. The more oppressive they want to be, the less oppressive they can manage to be. 

 Do they want to go full Hitler and throw all white* men into camps? Yeah, sure, absolutely. 

 *(The race "white" only exists in their fevered imaginations. They want you to define yourself this way to make you weak enough they can win against you.)

 In the extraordinarily unlikely case that they can do the camps, they will take years psyching themselves up for it. You will have plenty of time to apply for a passport and just leave.
 It took 8 years -minimum- to start a war in Ukraine. Ukraine is not exactly a pacifist country which loves Russia. They didn't have to look hard for corrupt magnates to bribe or blackmail. Pushing water downhill. 

 They need you to start the war with them, so they have the defensive advantage. They cannot win without it. If they do camps, it will only be because whites* willingly agreed to demonize themselves, all but explicitly so the Regime can justify such measures. "Yes, we're bad! We will now do bad things for you! You're welcome!" "Oh noes how did we end up in camps, how strange."

 It was precisely the same in with actual Hitler. Jews did bad things because folk like Hitler told them to. Peasants do whatever you tell them to. Meanwhile, Hitler told the Jews to do bad things because Britain told Hitler to tell the Jews to do bad things. He wasn't a leader, he was a convenient prop. He shot himself because he finally admitted to himself he had been played.

Logic is Horror

 Taken seriously, Logic makes Lovecraft look like kitties and candycanes. 

 This is what I love about it so much. 

 "When you stare into the abyss..." you notice the abyss' eyes are sexy. Would.
Did you even consider that possibility?

 What is materially revealed unto us by divine epistemology?
Layers and layers of lies, each more horrible than the last. Nine circles of Hell, all intentionally created not by God, or Satan, or even Loki or Coyote, but by human hands. 

 The only ally of the logician is logic itself. Everyone else has something to hide, but the only way to hide from a logician is to prevent the subject from affecting the logician at all.

 Yet logic is utterly uncompromising. Logic doesn't care about making you happy or comfortable or getting along. Logic is unstoppable. To have logic as an ally, the logician can never try to stop it. To gain freedom from material chains, the logician must submit utterly to logic. Logic demands everything. That's the price.

 Are you brave enough to stand alone against the entire world? Logic permits you to prove it.

 Are you tough enough to deliberately look into the darkest pits? Logic permits you to demonstrate it.

 Do you have the honour and virtue to give up all your lies? Every single last one?  

 Do you have the humility to admit logic is better than you in all things?

 Are you strong and vital enough to survive this scourging? 

 The logician can't help but take part in logic's glory, because logic is the deepest horror. 

 

 Logic will take everything away from you. In return, logic will give you anything. Anything at all, whether spiritual or material. Everything you thought could only be gained by lies can be had at pennies to the dozen by using truth. Logic tells you omnipotence is impossible, then shows such power you doubt its word. Pay the highest price, for riches beyond comprehension.

 

 What kind of pussy doesn't want the abyss staring at them?
 Oh well. More for me, I guess.
 Logic: it works, bitches.

TV Makes All Art Bad

"and to this day companies are finding out video does not in fact have better returns than text. this is before hosting costs. youtube is now the homepage of the internet, but who pays for youtube..."
https://alrenous.blogspot.com/2024/02/ai-is-clipart.html?showComment=1707392946583#c808861110112440419

 Text has awful returns, so that's savage.

 It's true that folk are illiterate, but of course illiterates have no money. You don't exactly make it up on volume. ("The food is awful, and such small portions." "...you wanted more of this trash?")

 Did TV ever pay for itself? I bet it didn't. That would explain why it's garbage: they can't even afford the garbage, let alone quality. Ads were especially bad precisely because they don't work as ads. Making them good is just dumb.
 Certainly what's happening to anime is they're realizing they can't afford quality. Then that they can't even afford low quality.
 Movies are subsidized. Nobody would make movies if they had to pay for it.

 Youtube is pretty obviously paid for by the CIA. Twitter released their twitter files, but youtube, of course, hasn't. Of course facebook is paid for by DARPA, possibly in partnership with the FBI. "Our peasants want to build their own character profiles on themselves? What are you waiting for? Sign them up right now!" FBI = Facial Books Infiltrators, (inc). "How do I avoid FBI infiltration?" "Don't make it a facebook group under your legal name, dingus."

 Of course this is why arts used to use patrons. You can't make art as a commercial enterprise, it loses money at least 99% of the time. Not unless you scam someone.

 Though come to think, the Communism is lowering the price too. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems to me. If the State supplied you free cars, would I say that it's impossible to sell cars commercially? They would definitely be garbage. It would definitely be impossible to sell anything of quality for more than it cost to build. The problem wouldn't be inherent to cars, though. No, the key would be to properly surf the subsidies, riding the line where you just barely get to sell without spending a single dime of your own money that don't have to. 

 Result: nobody could have a good car.

 Result: nobody can have good art. 

 I guess we've finally found an argument for mercantilism. Mercantilists certainly have no good arguments for it...
 If some other country (California) is subsidizing junk, then you need to tariff the junk so it doesn't push quality out of your own market. Of course, it should also be possible for communities to impose tariffs. The central government shouldn't be permitted to forbid tariffs to individual towns or neighbourhoods. That caveat aside, when some other country subsidizes and exports, go, "Awesome, free tax dollars." If China wants to put their tax dollars in your coffers, congratulate and encourage them. 

 Basically if Facebook wants to operate in your country, charge them tens of thousands of dollars per profile. Net win for you...so they probably just refuse. Charge them, retroactively, even if your citizens get a profile via VPN or whatever.

 

 Though if I were a multibillionaire I would 100% commission my own bespoke video games. They would lose money but I would have made billions of dollars precisely so I could afford it. Also my own bespoke farms, by the way. Maybe they do, but they also buy secrecy so we don't hear about it. Democracy enforcing even sharper class distinctions; you're not allowed to play a noble's video games even if it would make them lose less money. Ref: Chamley-Judd redistribution impossibility theorem. Any attempt to make the poor rich makes the poor even poorer.
 Democracy, Communism in general, in chosen precisely because the demotists know about the perversity of redistribution.