The Meat Grinder

Make conditions as bad as possible to ensure that every participant has to exert themselves at or near maximum effort to stay alive. Survival of the fittest. Most of the time it is a by-product of a random or semi-random set of circumstances. Sometimes, as in the case of the US Army training and other like programs, it can be a directed outcome.

I want to live in the opposite of the meat grinder. Give everyone all that they want, and provide the tools to advance. We have to want to do more than smoke pot and browse the internet, and I think most of us do. It would be tempting to have people disappear into hedonism, but that feels much more humane than oppressing the people that depend on you.

The meat maker? The meat grower? Neither sound good
It's like unschooling for everyone. 

We have a house, or housing. We have enough to eat and we are safe. We have video games for those who need outlets for behavior that is abhorrent to the mean sensitivities of the group. We have counseling available (and mandatory if needed).

We have tools available, and automation to take care of repetitive tasks. The Cohen brothers would disagree with this notion, that any form of utopia would be rejected. That we need struggle to give ourselves meaning. We have the internal struggle! Anyone who has what they need and the ability to get what they want has this struggle. We want meaning. It /is/ the question(s) that drives us, and it's an evolving conversation: what is enough? what can I create? what can I commit to, to truly throw myself into. I need the question, the problem to solve.

I also like to dig holes, and I'd be happy to help dig a ditch, or help the neighbor fix a broken piece of furniture.

It probably isn't utopia, though it isn't a place. We just build what we can and take solace that we can fall back into soft arms when we fail, so commitment isn't as scary.

The cat died, people.

 biological computing but with a digital read. We can get more variability than silicon, less transitions between states. The image I was seeing was a slice of brain with a camera pointed at it. That's more a late night graphic accompanying the joke about how silly this idea is. I like the idea of the curves being smooth. Maybe that's the simpleton's guide to a quantum computer (I'm including myself in the simpleton category, and maybe it's a club of 1). It smooths out the rough edges every time you need to stop everything and get a value. Maybe that's why the cat dies. It wrecks everything to stop and get a measurement. Although, I'm a firm believer that the cat /is/ alive or dead; we just have a shitty clock.