• The crystal-clear, still turquoise water.
• The sharp fallen trees in the water’s rim, like pirate ship bowsprits.
• The huge, prehistoric-looking trout in the basin’s depths.
• The sand swirling around the outlet of the spring.

• I have a feeling and a hope that when it comes down to the real work of reigning in tech, young “digital native” congresspeople and leftist academics will do the bulk of the legwork.

• The apostrophe a local bakery put on her cake: “Casey Rock’s!”

• “We wouldn’t create a life support system on a space station where in order to receive oxygen, one would need to work to obtain it. Life support is life support. Dead people can’t work. So make sure people get oxygen so they can stay alive. Living people will do much more work than dead people.”
• If your main objection to universal basic income is that it will disincentivize people from working, you ought to reflect on whether the fear of death is an acceptable incentive to dangle in front of people in the first place.
  • (I would also say to those critics: Do you work because you fear poverty? If you have savings, you probably don’t. You probably work because it’s fulfilling, or because you want more than the bare minimum your savings would offer. So what makes you so different from people without savings, whom a UBI safety net would save from death?)
• Too much of an engineering mindset can confine our vision to the internal concerns of engineering, ignoring the ideas and pleas of real people. But I think Scott’s essay is interesting and convincing.

“Samaritrophia is the suppression of an overactive conscience by the rest of the mind. ‘You must all take instructions from me!’ the conscience shrieks, in effect, to all the other mental processes. The other processes try it for a while, note that the conscience is unappeased, that it continues to shriek, and they note, too, that the outside world has not been even microscopically improved by the unselfish acts the conscience has demanded.

“They rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole cover of that dark dungeon. They can hear the conscience no more. In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, does appear. Enlightened Self-interest gives them a flag, which they adore on sight. It is essentially the black and white Jolly Roger, with these words written beneath the skull and crossbones, ‘The hell with you, Jack, I’ve got mine!’”

• I said, “That’s a super racist thing to say,” and he went the peace-preserving and cowardly “I was totally joking” route.
• Which, on one hand, makes his racism seem shallow — as if it’s only about trying to build camaraderie with other white guys like Jason, who was there, and me. But I know it’s not shallow. Or that we can’t allow ourselves to see it as shallow — because he can actually hurt people.
• And how any shallowness is belied, anyway, by the full-blown, paternalistic insidiousness of it: “let’s keep [them away].”
• I was unsurprised but angry and disappointed, especially because he had asked about upcoming Chicago artists earlier in the week, I had told him about Sen Morimoto, and he had actually gone home and listened. So I thought, Here’s an open-minded paint seller. It turned out his mind only seemed open, to me, because I’m white.

• He was spouting off about “you voted for [unintelligible]” and “you little fucking punk, open your mouth again and I’ll fucking knock you out.” He got so close to me, to do one of those primal “you wanna go?” chest bumps, I had to put out my forearm to block him. Then his buddy told him to calm down; I got my family’s food and left; and hero Superdawg kicked him out.
• I think such an abrupt jump to blind hatred would be shocking for anyone to experience, but it’s especially shocking when you’re as sheltered as I am. I’ve had to deal with practically zero behavior like that in my life. So the moment stuck with me for days. How do you cope with that? With the humongous, practically universe-wide chasm between how you see yourself and how someone chose to see you, based on almost nothing, at a split-second’s notice?

• The status of “cleaned” concrete versus “not cleaned” concrete is not binary. It takes dozens of passes, over minutes, to remove the mastic or whatever type of schmutz from a given patch of concrete floor. And even then you can’t really be sure that some trace of the mastic doesn’t persist in the concrete’s porous surface. So concrete grinding is a matter of pragmatic best-guessing. You grind until it looks clean enough.
• Compare that to scraping paint off glass. The glass isn’t very permeable so it’s easy to see when it’s gone, and it usually only takes one pass. That feels neat, while concrete grinding feels messy. We want to know when the job is done.
• But I wonder whether they’re really so different. If you took a microscope to the glass surface just after cleaning, wouldn’t you still see some paint residue? No? Never mind. Yes? Well, then cleaning glass is a matter of “clean enough” too.
• Then things get really weird when you think about computers. In graphics software, for example, every “object” is discrete and absolutely knowable. You can tell everything about them, exactly, at any time: where they are on the plane, the exact colors they’re filled with, and anything else. And that seems like glass, not concrete; the shapes are either there or not there, red or blue. Nothing like the world of “clean enough.”
• But even those discrete shapes are undergirded by continuous, unstable, physical phenomena. Computers are made of electrical components that have thresholds. That is, they’re not either “on” or “off”; they’re “off until a very specific amount of electricity is provided to me” — and from what I understand, the amount that component “wants” may not even be the same every time (depending on temperature, manufacturing impurities, whatever). So the discreteness and the absoluteness of the shape on the screen are fictions facilitated by things that are messy, the way all physical things are.
• So what? This makes me think about what things we do, if anything, without doing them long enough or enough times to get the result we’re looking for. Or things we do without enough visibility into the process to see when we’ve reached “enough.”
• And it makes me think about permeability. I said the concrete and the glass may not be so different, but they definitely feel different to work with. And that’s meaningful. So what acts or goals or whatevers feel different because their materials are more permeable, hanging on to and being suffused with whatever stuff they’ve come into contact with?