The disparity between military and civilian certifications. If you're a mechanic on a specialised machine, it's easy to become a DOD contractor on that same platform. If you're an officer, you can say you've managed X people. If you're a medic, your scope of practice is command-by-command. You might work above an LPN level but leave the military with an NREMT EMT-B certification at most which qualifies you for a minimum wage job way below your scope of practice. There are only a handful of slots for advanced schools that give you any worthwhile certification, and the paperwork required to become an LPN ($55k/year~) is very difficult to amass. If you're a machine gunner, you spent 4+ years mastering a skill that doesn't transfer to any civilian job and you can only sell yourself as a whipped horse with a broken back.
Military culture itself is traumatic. It's closer to feudalism than it is anything in the civilian world. There's a rigid hierarchy and set of standards for every aspect of your life. You have a pathological obsession with being 15 minutes early because your lord can have you arrested if you don't do everything perfectly. You're supposed to embrace the toxicity of every part of your day, much less being a cog in the demon machine that hates you as much as it does its victims, and tie your self-worth to that scripted performance. The outlet for dealing with any of that is alcoholism and/or smoking. You can't afford or make the time for civilian therapy, while military therapists are inquisitors that can have you arrested or end your career.
There's no blueprint for civilian life. The allure of military life is that you know exactly what every expectation is. You can turn your brain off because you know what to wear and how to wear it, what to do and how to do it, and how doing A will result in B for your career. Your chain of command is a line of narcissistic older siblings and parents strictly directing you down that path. You have that stick incentive of being arrested if you violate any part of the carrot plan. All of a sudden you're removed from that very traumatic environment and it's replaced by a much more abstract system where nobody follows the rules you're conditioned into.
Maybe you make that deal with the devil knowing you're a good fiddler and you get a golden fiddle for it. If you didn't explicitly do that for that reason and get the right paperwork for that goal, you leave with nothing and probably hate the field you were trained for but not meaningfully certified in.
Even if I wasn't an absurdist at a universal atheistic level, it'd be hard to be a communist without being an absurdist at the societal level Camus is writing at. Trench warfare and line go up and electoralism are absurd things which drive you crazy enough to believe in them if you can't admit how arbitrary and meaningless they are. When you break from that idealism, Camus has the right confrontational framework for what comes next.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing
Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe
suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious,
secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no
sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will
henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one
which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his
days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his
rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate,
created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the
wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end,
he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus
teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This
universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each
mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights
is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The gods cursed us to roll a rock up a hill. We don't know why and they probably don't either by now. I push the rock because doing so makes me hate them more effectively and at some point I might become strong enough to kill them for that. If I was arbitrarily born into 18th century France and my rock was to starve for the aristocracy, I'd push it because there's a guillotine over the horizon. I'm arbitrarily born into the late 20th century and my rock is to starve for the corporate aristocracy, I push it because I or someone like me will get to turn their bunkers into brazen bulls. At no point in history could I have been born without some rock to push and it'd always mean existential damnation for me, but I'd purify my hate pushing it.
Ban it outright in the rules of individual instances, bully AI piglets for printing the lowest-value content online in the same way NFT goobers are ostracised, run AI image and writing detectors on suspect posts. The common denominator of any AI post is that it's going to be shit and it should just be treated like someone repeatedly posting a Lorem ipsum copypasta or spam email.
A pilot clinical study showed that DBSLH immediately improved walking in two participants with incomplete SCI and, in conjunction with rehabilitation, mediated functional recovery that persisted when DBSLH was turned off.
It's awesome that the effect persists even without active stimulation. The body seems to relearn those neural pathways.
My water bill is increasing 30% this year and we met our snowpack targets last winter. This city's population can only increase by around 50k more people before there's a hard limit on our water infrastructure and every booming town near those data centres- 80% of the state's population- has to compete for that water along with the large landowners. Those rivers are tributaries of the Mississippi and Colorado Rivers supplying some of the most productive farmland along the way.
All for bazinga machines. That classic apocalypse scenario of the paper clip machine turning everything into paper clips at least results in all the matter in the universe being converted to something useful, but we're doing that so that eugenicist vampires can make shitty chat bot and dog money-themed pyramid schemes. We can't declare jihad on thinking machines soon enough.
![happybadger [he/him]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/62b0eff3-f09e-422d-ae20-6509939e5a44.png?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
The Streisand-Maoism Effect