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<p>Jon -</p>
<p>Well said. I often look at our collective (in different
chunkings) in terms of opportunities lost. Evolution is
intrinsically wasteful by some measure, so it does not surprise me
that from a judgemental/discriminating/big-picture/hindsight
perspective *virtually everything that happens in human endeavor*
seems incredibly wasteful. I spend (nearly) half of my energy
boggled by this apprehension and (nearly) the other half trying to
refactor my perspectives of these things so that they *don't* seem
wasteful/squandered. Looking for "method in the madness" and
then working the meta-problem of pruning a variety of obviously
delusional overfits to the data at hand. I recognize that
many/most/all of my throwdowns/gurgitations here are lame
projections of the latter half. <groan> <br>
</p>
<p>I especially appreciate the link to the PDF text of your Borges
reference. I can rarely put my hands on the original paper texts
I read some of these things in due to multiple hashings of
combining libraries, owning a bookstore, living with a bibliovore
( voracious book/collage artist),
shelving/reshelving/boxing/storing elaborate excesses, etc. Here
is someone else who has taken a whack at (or reflection on) one
aspect of the problem: <a href="http://makifat.blogspot.com/">Bibliophilia
Obscura.<br>
</a></p>
<p>This particular Borges short reminds me particularly of Vonnegut
and perhaps <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron">Harrison
Bergeron</a>, but then I suspect Vonnegut was significantly
influenced by Borges' abstractions. <... tangent snipped
...><br>
</p>
<p>Oh yeh, and you "can't grep paper" (even if my fragmented
associative memory also often fails to find the right search
terms: e.g. Franklin:faction).</p>
<p>On the topic of "wasteful decadence", I finished watching AlphaGo
and YouTube rolled me into the PBS documentary The Amazon Empire
which I suspect implicates us *all* in one way or another. <...
yet another tangent snipped... ><br>
</p>
<p>Carry on!</p>
<p> - Steve<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:1597935225917-0.post@n2.nabble.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Sure my tongue-was-in-cheek wrt redirecting 1/9 of the U.S military budget to
fund solving this problem, maybe it does detract from my main point. Fixing
the problem of wasteful decadence is also not on the docket for me this pass
through. I feel a lot can be said about what a culture burns its resources
on. Hell, if we must, à la Ghostbusters, choose the form of the destroyer I
choose the societal engine described in Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon"[£].
To be clear, the challenge set before me was to sketch out an alternative
voting technology option. While liberating elections from a winner-takes-all
modality is also something I want, it relates to a mostly orthogonal
problem. Ranked-choice voting can be implemented for polling stations, phone
apps, and snail-mail alike. Sooner or later the technology I am advocating
for will be here, what it will be when it arrives is what I wish to direct
concern toward. Witnessing an endless procession of squandered opportunity
is what I find so abhorrent. If the first actionable steps are being taken,
great, we now have the opportunity to take others.
[£] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://web.itu.edu.tr/~inceogl4/modernism/lotteryofbabylon.pdf">https://web.itu.edu.tr/~inceogl4/modernism/lotteryofbabylon.pdf</a>
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