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Travelogue

New York… and San Francisco! Can’t have one without the other. “And L.A., oh, fucking L.A….” The Beatles! What an important moment that was! And Steve Jobs, who came later! Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. When you go to the bank to ask for a loan, you cut your hair, but I don’t plan on doing that any time soon. Everyone in California was cool and communist, and for a while in NYC too… they all moved West… fuck, I need to know more about the history of Silicon Valley… It’s not the same now. Jordan Peterson would prescribe it as a moral collapse…. But the Beatles around ’65 grew their hair out, and all the communist hippies were like “holy shit that’s a great idea we are going to adopt that as our moniker”. Everyone in California did that. “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” hey, as long as you can write a script, ~120 pages, in L.A., you’re good. There are a lot more water views around the Bay area though. Because, you know, it’s a bay. There’s only one Long Beach… So your Stanford/Berkeley dyad will get a hell of a lot more done than your USC/UCLA dyad (Ponoma? Caltech?) - Plus, George Berkeley, protestant ministers reading books during the gold rush, communism… I guess L.A. wasn’t going to be the hub. Point the cameras northward now, go ahead, and appoint an internal ambassador to Hollywood, Anthropic has hit a $1T valuation before OpenAI. And build those datacenters, too. Be careful to demoralize the local populations only at just the right moment.

I am still obsessed with America.

All this talk about “Peter Thiel is a fascist” but no one is talking about how if he’s really a fascist how come he isn’t going to get the army to sweep San Francisco of all the losers and nerds. If you go to the top of Twin Peaks in SF and look around, you can see water on three sides. The houses there go for $10M a piece. You can see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Transamerica Pyramid from the same vantage point. It’s one of the most beautiful sites there are. And this city is overrun by fucking nerds and fucking clout chasers. Yeah, call in the Army!

You can keep your communism! It used to be neat and interesting!!! No one is asking San Francisco to change their minds, turn it back into a Spanish mission settlement, them to cut their hair, have families and kids, and have the kids go up and down the hill to go to school and go to walk and go to church.

WHY THE FUCK IS THERE CODE? make an EXE file and give it to me. STUPID FUCKING SMELLY NERDS

no one is expecting you to get rid of that.

mr. thiel, you ran from San Francisco!

That thing about Peter Thiel sending the army is just projected power fantasy. Perhaps that one can still happen? Much worse was the whole “we are putting the libs in a crystal” “we are nuking libs from orbit” please leave the libs alone.

Drugs was another thing California got right. I can’t touch dispensary weed, it makes me sick. I’ve never had low 7-9% THC concentration weed, which caused all this amazing music and art from the 60s…

The wild card, Austin. They had this tech complex called “The Domain”, inconveniently 30 minutes North of downtown. It was very ugly; it was all unornamented office buildings that look like parking garages except for the logo on it. And what a bunch of bullshit brands. ARM is the saving grace of Silicon… Alley? desert? Does the Austin tech ecosystem have a “Silicon…” endonym? clearly The Domain is where these companies would shell out some place where some random project or other crap needed to be done and not needed to be thought any harder about. The vibes are immediately picked up from just an afternoon there. I was told that Austin was to be the techs tech hub because it was a t the iron foothills, which reminded the Silicon Valley types of the hills of SF and the Santa Cruz mountains. (a couple sentences about downtown)

I have met more people who have quite literally said “the vibes in SF are off” than I have met people who have voluntarily moved to San Francisco since I’ve met them. Last time I was in San Francisco, there was this movement when the group I was with walked past a restaurant window and someone went “OMG, it’s internet startup figure” and tapped on the glass to get his attention and went inside the restaurant to say hi. San Francisco is the type of town where you can walk across the entire town (good, excessive) so you can bump into people with internet cloud (bad).

I met this Colombian who read a lot of Aristotle and was “anti-enlightenment”, he thought the Enlightenment was a bad thing, and we were talking about the achievements of America post-WWII, such as the SR71 and the integrated circuit and the ICBM and hydrogen bomb and moon landing and UNIX, and the Columbia pointed out that the administrative state set up by the U.S. post-WWII was more impressive because it necessitated some of them and allowed for the rest, and I had no rebuttal. Engineers and craftsmen are inferior slash lower caste than scientists, theorists, and priests.

Bill Joy, John DeLorean, Claude Shannon, Larry Page, Kelly Johnson, we didn’t start the fire!

We cannot conflate our techno-overlords with philosopher-priests. As if Peter Thiel ever had an original thought. “cocaine was a substance used by the priestly class to commune with the market…”

But, I suppose this is why San Francisco and not Los Angeles does all of California’s thinking. El Segundo requires engineers but not thinkers. Kudos to the Los Angeles engineers who read books.

But the 0 and 1 is truthiness and falsehood, which is very important to our universe. Should we take a bunch of drugs and order our lives around this profound idea and start a pseudo-religion about it? And make the physical manifestations of this amazing idea ever more-and-more optimized? Surely nothing will be omitted if we forget that truthiness and falsehood are properties of language, and trying to make a physical manifestation of that (in binary) won’t lose anything, right?

When you show up to the University of Michigan, make sure to cut your hair. They cannot distinguish anything higher than the engineer who does not read books.

The Hispanic’s role in the United States is not… clean-cut.

Peter Thiel is no philosopher-king. He is no King Solomon.

Back in the USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are