Democratic technology

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I have a weak spot for “democratic technology” – meaning that you can be a kid with very little or no money, and still be able to buy it and use it to learn and start getting your initial experience making money. As a teenager, I had posters on my bedroom wall with HP Integral PC, Compaq Portable 386, IBM PS/2 and a HP 28c calculator, when other boys had posters of cars, girls and football stars; you can see where my priorities were. 🙂

I still have a weak spot for good quality pencils, calculators and computers, into which I projected almost magical qualities of compensating for my limitations. The irony is, I ended up in a place where I do almost all the heavy lifting in my head, and use computers as glorified typewriters, but I digress. 🙂

So, what’s the “democratic technology”? It’s basically the stuff you can actually buy and do all the work you would otherwise do on the hardware you dream of, but can’t afford.

Today, democratic technology is a cheap Xiaomi smartphone, a desktop computer you built from cheapest new or used components, running unlicensed Windows or Linux, or a laptop along similar lines, all bought with pocket money, allowing you to access stuff on the Internet that allows you to learn. Interesting, it’s very rarely the stuff that’s designed and marketed as “democratic”, such as a Raspberry pi. I would actually not recommend that as a computer for kids, because it’s seriously underpowered and not inexpensive enough to be worth the effort. You can actually get a used i5 laptop for the order of magnitude of 100 EUR, which would be greatly preferred. This would be something along the lines of a ThinkPad X240 i5-4300u, which would run either Linux or Windows, and you can install an SSD and add more RAM if required. Such a machine could be used to surf the web, learn Python, PHP or C, and basically get you started in a position where you are very low on money, and very high on motivation. Interestingly, laptops seem to be a cheaper solution than desktops, when you add everything up.

Similar examples can be found in other areas as well; photography, for instance. You can buy a ten year old digital SLR with a lens or two, get cheap macro extension tubes from Ebay, use some free raw converter such as RawTherapee, and that will get you started. Heck, you can use a smartphone to learn composition if you can’t afford a proper camera, but I’ve seen things such as a Canon 30d with a kit lens for the order of magnitude of 50 EUR, and that would be a very good way to get you started. What can you do with a 8MP camera and a kit lens? If you can add a cheap tripod, you can do this:

With only a smartphone, you can do this:

Sure, I wouldn’t attempt large magnifications from phone images, but we’re talking about learning here; in that phase, you could take excellent equipment and produce shit, because you don’t yet know how to pick light, don’t understand dynamic range, don’t know how to compose, or even how to hold the camera still. A phone will do for composition, colour and dynamic range; an old dSLR with a tripod will allow you to learn everything else.

It’s not my field of expertise, but with a piece of paper and colour pencils you can learn how to draw, and then use a cheap flatbed scanner to digitise your drawings and use them as illustrations on websites you design, to give your work a unique look. Or you can learn how to draw in some digital tool, such as Inkscape.

Sure, you need to compensate for technical disadvantages with skill and talent, but the “democratic” part of my point is that you don’t “pay to win”; people usually get the fancy gear only after they got rich using the basic stuff everybody has, or can get. If you have something meaningful to say, you don’t need a Macbook Air to write it down; any computer will do. Heck, a smartphone with a bluetooth keyboard will allow you to write books and articles if you don’t have anything else, although I wouldn’t recommend it if you have options. However, after you had been doing that for long enough, you’ll probably start healing your frustrations caused by inadequate gear the way I’m doing. 🙂 Sure, I could do it on a 386. Been there, done that, didn’t really get a t-shirt, but I did get trauma induced by having to delete the unnecessary multimedia files such as moricons.dll and *.wav from a Win3.11 installation in order to be able to fit my code builds on a 85MB HDD, and edit rich text files of the Ventura Publisher in a DOS text editor because the machine simply didn’t have enough RAM or CPU to edit the tables in the GEM GUI. Sure, it can be done, and you can get started and dig yourself out of the pit with very few resources, compensating for the drawbacks of your tools with some ingenuity. However, fuck me if I’ll do it anymore, now that I have the money. 🙂

Self-confidence is useless

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I’ll tell you a story about self-confidence.

When I was 20 and in driving school, I thought it would help to boost my confidence by giving myself suggestions such as “I’m going to do great”, “I’m going to succeed” and so on, before the driving test. As you can imagine, I messed up the test and failed.

This was quite a shock to me, in a sense that I really took the time to think about what happened and learn the lessons. The next time I took the test, I focused on doing every particular thing right, and nothing else. As a result, I passed the test and got my driving license.

This coloured my thinking about self-confidence, and, now that I think of it, about ego, to this day. Basically, if you want to do anything properly, there is no place for you in the process. Thoughts about success or failure are mere ego-musings and are irrelevant. What matters is to see what the situation requires and do it to the best of your abilities. Everything else contributes to failure.

The only self-confidence that matters is a result of having done many difficult and possibly dangerous things over the course of your life; you succeeded at some, failed at others, and you have a healthy attitude towards things – basically, you’re going to try very hard and be completely focused on it, but you know that either success or failure are not really up to you, at the end of it. To be very proud of your successes leaves you vulnerable to feeling humiliated by your failures, and I see little use for either.

Options

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Every now and then I run into claims that God and Devil are fighting for human souls, which are so precious that everybody wants them for some reason, and I roll my eyes. You see, I’ve been there, only from the position of Vedanta, which states that all souls are in essence bound and deluded aspects of brahman, the Absolute, and are precious as such. This was the implicit assumption I worked with, and it was seemingly confirmed by the visible efforts “the guys up there” went through in order to bring someone to the point where they would make up their mind. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that they saw a final decision of any kind – for or against God – as a good thing. My implicit assumption was wrong; what they wanted was for souls to be removed from the pool of the seemingly undecided. Liberation of the good and destruction of the wicked was fine, but wicked finding perpetual excuses as for why they didn’t really have the right opportunities and so their choices aren’t really valid so they need to go at it yet another time, or the almost-good ones perpetually finding ways to get stuck in something and needing progressively better, “cleaner” options to choose from, that seemed to be very bad and they wanted to drain that swamp as soon as possible. The implications of this reality to my worldview were not good, but I had to learn what it meant and how to deal with it.

The thing is, humans seem to live in some kind of a narcissistic illusion of the kind typical for teenage girls, who found out that all the guys want them, which they interpret as a sign that they are something special and valuable, while the male teenagers have the opposite situation where nobody wants them and they have to learn how to deal with it. The problem the teenage girls have is that they don’t seem to get that they are in exactly the same position as the male teenagers. The one they would truly want doesn’t care about them. The ones that want them, they just want to fuck them and leave. For the one who really matters, they would have to work – acquire virtues, prove value and loyalty, and so on. However, it’s very hard to understand that you can’t have what you really want, when everybody is seemingly throwing themselves at you. You think you have so much choice, not realizing that all the choices you seem to have are bad, and the option you really want is the one you have to work for as hard as any teenage male who seemingly has no options. You are both in the same position, where the one you want isn’t available, it’s just that having all the undesirable options gets into girls’ heads.

You see, in a spiritual sense you have all kinds of options, and they are not God and Satan, they are mostly various flavours of Satan. God isn’t an option for you. In order for God to be an option, you would have to really work for it, to put yourself out there, to give up all the false, undesirable options the way a teenage girl would if she kept herself for that one guy she really wants to marry and spend the rest of her life with. God becomes an option only when you reject everything else first, and without any guarantee that God is even achievable; however, you know that anything else isn’t an option for you, and you refuse to settle for cheap substitutes.

It seems that pretending to be undecided and trying to disqualify all the available options is a standard strategy of the evil souls that reject God, but who want to avoid the consequences of outright rejecting God. “Oh, I really wanted God and Guru but nobody was pure and good enough for me, and I couldn’t settle for anything other than perfection” seems to be a standard trope, and it seems to be working, for a while at least. Eventually, everybody makes a decision. Either you ignore the real thing because you can’t be bothered to look, and that’s a decision, or you see the real thing and you find faults with it, or you choose it but your heart isn’t in it and you just fumble around until you fall off. Or you choose the real thing with all your heart and stick with it forever, changing yourself to remove anything that’s in the way of that choice.

Some musings about money

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I’ve been thinking about something for quite a while now.

When I was much younger and had just started working with people and writing, I had very little money, and the people I worked with at the time for some reason found it impressive how I seemed to not care about it at all – I would wear torn clothes, buy a used computer somewhere and work with it, drive a shitbox, and seem not to perceive the entire material sphere, instead focusing on spiritual realities and energy work.

What troubles me there is that they thought this was a good thing, that it’s fine for “spiritual people” to be poor, that it’s somehow a positive status symbol of spirituality or whatever. It’s not. They saw that I don’t care about matter but they were wrong – I didn’t care about it while I was working with them, because they were the priority. The entirety of my focus was placed on trying to get them to overcome their limitations and get the taste of transcendence, so to speak. However, when I was alone I had rent and bills to pay, groceries to buy, car to service and fuel, and not enough money to cover almost any of it. I didn’t wear ragged clothes because I didn’t care about my appearance; I wore them because I had no money, and I truly didn’t care about my appearance when I was doing more important things, so they kind of made a flawed conclusion that this is how things are supposed to be, and anything else represents a spiritual downfall.

Of course I cared about money – I had constant problems caused by the lack of money, that I could never truly solve. However, the fact was that people I worked with tended not to have money, and the people with money tended not to care about me, and my priority was to focus on people most receptive to what I wanted to teach, not teaching people who could be of most material use to me. Sure, I made some compromises, namely continuing to work with some people whom I would otherwise have sent away sooner due to them showing no perspective, due to them “bankrolling” my work with talented but broke people, and in only one instance this turned out to be a bad idea because the person in question turned out to be coercing and manipulating others with money and created a really toxic atmosphere that made everybody’s lives more unpleasant and difficult. The concept itself isn’t bad – you see, anything else makes an implicit assumption that the teacher himself should bankroll the entire operation so that he would be independent of any kind of financial pressure or free from financial concerns that could otherwise bias his selection of students and general approach, or that money is such a bad thing that you should never give it to good people who are doing useful things, especially if you’re not the only one incurring benefit. The concept that people with money should support things that are of spiritual use not only to them, but to other people who might be better positioned to benefit from it than themselves is perfectly rational. Furthermore, people who support good and useful things with money incur a karmic benefit.

But to return to my situation – I had very serious and persistent financial problems, but I did not allow this to influence my choices and work to any great extent. I never rejected a poor but qualified student, or spent less time with them than was needed to produce optimal outcomes. It’s just that I allowed some more affluent, but unqualified people to hang around, thinking no harm can come from it, and they might pick up useful things in the process and acquire spiritual benefits. You see, it wasn’t that I really had that many options. I could have abandoned the whole thing, returned to software engineering, made a career in that and have no problems with money, however I felt this would have been a waste of life, because I felt I had to contribute to the world in the most meaningful way I am capable of, not merely in the way that people would pay the most money for. The result was that I was poor for decades, but, in hindsight, I can say that I did the best I could and followed the line of righteousness that made me essentially immune to all kinds of karmic attachments and backlash that normally destroys spiritual people.

So, no, I wasn’t poor because that’s a good thing. I was poor because people with money didn’t give a fuck about what I did, and even some people I did work with thought poverty suited me just fine. Of course I could have used a car with air conditioning back then, and a computer that is actually capable of editing a book cover 600 DPI TIFF, and has a screen bigger than 15”. The thing is, good things tend to be owned by people who have the money to buy them, not the people who need them the most. However, that’s not the part that irritates me. What I found really, truly humiliating is the attitude of some of my then-students, who sincerely thought that good things were too good for me, and shitty things are just right, and liked the feeling of being financially above me. Of course I could se that in their minds, it was more than obvious, and this truly pissed me off, because it reeked of contempt and disrespect.

Another thing that pissed me off were the people who arrogantly criticised me as being materialistically disposed and trying to personally benefit from others by charging money for my books. Putting those books on the market was hugely expensive for both me and my students, in both money and labour. It was a significant sacrifice to make those books available to a wider audience, and it came with a spiritual blessing that was to awaken the presence of God in people, that would grow and overcome everything else if they chose to allow it. What I expected in return was that they buy the books, so that the financial load on my students would be reduced, and, possibly, that I could pay the bills without being a burden on them at all; it looked like a karmically beneficial thing, a way to spread both the benefit and the load. What I got instead was an opportunity for all kinds of worthless assholes to denigrate and humiliate both me and my work, and this made me very angry, especially since some people made it a point of pride for themselves to offend me for making the effort. It made me so angry I withdrew the books from the market and physically destroyed all the available copies, and I also withdrew the blessing. No, the books are not available for free in the digital form now because I’m more spiritual now or anything. They are free because of my contempt. You see, I earned substantial amounts of money in the payment industry, by charging a percentage for a service of navigating through the maze necessary for supposedly high-risk businesses to get a merchant account in order to sell their goods and services online. It was frequently some highly questionable stuff, such as the online dating sites, but I always had a feeling of a clean and transparent business transaction. I was never insulted or humiliated for any of it – quite the opposite, I was the respectable businessman and a gentleman who provides a valuable service to others. The only time I was exposed to deliberate ridicule and humiliation and treated as if I’m defrauding the naive and doing it all for money, and called a worthless and stupid poor person who wants to get rich by scamming others, was when I made the choice to endure financial hardship in order to provide the greatest benefit to others that I was capable of. This truly traumatised and offended me, and I feel that this is a mere shadow of God’s cold rage directed at those who offended me then, because what I did was expose the presence of God in this world and make it available, and all the contempt was in fact directed at and felt by God, and God didn’t like it one bit, let me tell you that. All the contempt, ridicule and abuse hurled at me went straight to God. All the thoughts of how shitty stuff is good enough and just right for me went straight to God, and let me tell you something: I am very glad God isn’t that angry at me.

So, at this point I live in a place that’s too good for what those people would wish for me. I drive a car that’s much better than they would let me have, I wear a watch that’s much more expensive than they would approve for me, and write this on a computer they would deem much too powerful and good for what I need. Fortunately, nobody really gives a fuck about their opinion any more.

There’s another implicit premise the worthless people assume – that if a man of God works for God, he should be paid by God, not by them. No, that’s not how things work. A man of God is the presence of God in this world, and God doesn’t actually like you or think you’re worthy, because He knows what you are, and you need to pass His tests, because that’s how things work – you don’t test God, or place demands God should meet, because you’re not the ones in charge and nobody asks you how things should be done. No, God tests you, to see if you show promise. God tests you by taking something that is a known absolute quality, such as His own tulku. A test for you is for this person to be presented before you, and you have to decide what it is, and how you will treat it. Basically, it’s like having two places presented to you, and you need to decide which is heaven, and which is hell, and then of course you go to heaven of your choice. God tests you by showing up among you every now and then, and you have to decide what that is, and how much it is worth to you. And then you go to a heaven that’s created for you by your choices.

CIA controlling your sources and money

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There is strong evidence that CIA is editing the Wikipedia.

However, if you think it’s the only source they are manipulating in order to provide you with their “facts”, you are too naive for this world. You see, what is usually called the “main stream media” in the West, is basically the CIA. They give you the “main stream”, and if you want actual facts, you need to carefully sift through “discredited conspiracy theorists”, of which some are crazy, some are giving you the truth, and some are both.

The political class in the West, both opposition and the government, is pre-selected by the CIA, except for the politicians and parties that are laughed at and discredited by the media – those actually represent your interests, but if you vote for them, like people did for Trump, nothing will come of it because the actually elected politicians are sabotaged and the next election is carefully rigged to remove them from office, and then possibly imprison or kill them.

If you want to know what’s actually in your interest, make an intersection of all the things main stream media tells you is bad, laughable, ridiculous, criminal and dangerous, and go for it, because that’s your only hope. If they say only criminals would use encryption, use encryption. If they say only criminals would use crypto, use crypto. If they say only criminals would use gold, use gold. Those people divide people into three groups: sheep that trust them and are exploited and occasionally culled, when it’s good for the environment; “criminals”, who are the competition and who act independently; and sheep dogs, the police and the military, that keep the sheep obedient and “criminals” controlled. They have only two weaknesses: they are sensitive to revolution, which is why they try very hard to brainwash the sheep and keep them docile, playing video games in virtual reality and not paying attention to the physical world, and feeding them propaganda about the next group they should hate. The other thing they are traditionally sensitive to is running out of money.

The present situation, as I see it, makes all the governments in the West highly sensitive to bankruptcy, because they have been persistently eroding every productive force in society and feeding parasites and madmen for quite a while, in their anti-meritocratic, anti-capitalist policies, and this genuinely looks like they forgot how and why things work, which is good because it imposes a limit on their efforts of eliminating individual freedoms. You can’t finance the giant oppressive system that feeds useless immigrants if you’re broke. However, before they go bankrupt, they will do their best to completely drain all the useful resources from the system, and impose unseen methods of totalitarian control. Imagine a credit card that is rejected if you’re not sufficiently vaccinated, chipped, or if you didn’t make enough public displays of support for the current thing. Yeah, not hard to imagine because that’s how things work now, it’s just that now you have alternatives, such as cash. However, cash is being increasingly limited because “it’s good for money laundering”, which means it’s something you can use to escape totalitarian control, so they are working on eliminating it by making steps toward some central bank digital currency that will be controlled from a central place and all alternatives will be outlawed.

That’s their most vulnerable point, because if that digital currency is not adopted, and people start transacting in gold-backed stablecoins, they are fucked, and that’s exactly what we need to do – face them with a situation where over 90% of population is non-compliant, because they can’t deal with that. They can only deal with situations where 90% is compliant, and they violently oppress the rest. When nobody accepts their shit, there’s nothing they can do. Furthermore, people only use their fiat money due to inertia, because that shit isn’t backed by anything and has no actual value other than people accepting it out of habit, because it all works. However, since the governments have inflated the fiat currencies to the point where this system will break, they intend to replace it with another system, which will give them totalitarian control over whether you eat or not. Basically, obey or starve. You see, Bitcoin is shit represented by a gold coin, but why not use crypto that’s actually redeemable in gold on demand, eh? Something that’s actually a pointer to a gold coin. Yes, it’s excellent for money laundering. It’s even better for blocking totalitarian, anti-democratic shadow world government that works on your enslavement and extinction.

Transact in crypto. Settle in gold.