there is no there there, but several people in my section don't know this yet. they bask in the glory of formalism, seduced by their first encounters with proof. nothing can convince them that momentous ideas are often OBSCURED by the trappings of language. you use epsilons and deltas to verify the big ideas, not to come up with them in the first place. the tail doesn't wag the dog!

i'll tell them what einstein said, that he understood relativity just fine until the mathematicians got ahold of it.

My city is wonderful. I'm so proud that we have mass pillow fights as well as dedicated groups of anti-consumers. I've always been distressed by spending as a social activity; my friends buy not what they need, but what they can talk about. That's important but it still seems wrong to pay $200 for an electric gadget when children are starving in Boliva.

I know that if everyone stopped buying $200 toys, our economy would be seriously perturbed, and even more children would end up starving, but it still FEELS like the wrong thing to do. I've always aimed for a self sustaining robinson cruso type of existance, and so it's been hard for me to accept that people in groups do more for less effort than people individually. but i do accept it. i realize that zero sum games are few and far between.

The game of "use up our natural resourses" however IS govorned by simple arithmetic, and any economist who argues otherwise can't do math. We're running out of what we need to live, and at some point, this will cause an adjustment to our exploding population. Doesn't anyone else worry about this? I feel like collective humanity has massive inertia towards a cliff, and that we're only gonna wake up after plunging off into the void.