/** 
  * file: karbytes_18_november_2023.txt
  * type: plain-text 
  * date: 18_NOVEMBER_2023 
  * author: karbytes 
  * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN
  */

I noticed that, the more "white male" my mental state is, the less willing particular white men who I used to be friends with are to respond to my telecommunications. 

That is probably because those particular white men are jealous of the fact that I am not as wounded and disadvantaged as they prefer me to think and act. They don't want another white man to have to compete with and to feel envious of. Instead, they want someone who lavishes them with unrequited desire for communion and someone who thinks and behaves as though "she" always needs some other person in her life to give her guidance, support, and condescension. Essentially, "she" is only "loved" by a man if she acts like the weak, insecure, and easy to ridicule foil to what that man feels himself to be and imagines other people feel him to be.

Strangers (especially men) tend to be the nicest to me. I think that is because they do not see me as a threat even though I look like I have the potential to be because I make a deliberate attempt to cultivate inner strength and a sense of being interdependently connected to every other creature which shares a biosphere with me. As a result of such attempts, I generally avoid signaling to other people that I intend to hurt them because I reason that everyone is already inevitably, to some degree, experiencing stress from having to take specific actions to stay alive and at least somewhat satisfied at doing so. I avoid being in spaces which are predominantly populated by people who I think think and behave like "gold diggers" (i.e. people (almost exclusively women and prepubescent children) who do little more than preside over some private estate while expecting to be treated like royalty merely for being dependent on a high earning and high status income earner (who is almost certainly a man)). That is because "gold diggers" tend to feel that they are relatively untouchable and immune from economic or social adversity compared to people who are not nearly as affluent as those "gold diggers" appear to be. Still, I feel that such people are living in a gilded prison and have little to be proud of themselves for other than dutifully baring and raising offspring who are expected to be at least as affluent as their parents when they become adults.

I prefer to minimize how much psychological "baggage" I have carrying around with me. What I mean by that is that I prefer to minimize how much prejudices I have about other people and to experience the world from the vantage of someone who is genuinely curious about how the world works and genuinely motivated to become knowledgeable, skillful, healthy, happy, and helpful to others.

* * *

Money can loosely be defined as social (or perhaps political) credit (although I typically use the terms "political" and "social" interchangeably).

Money is not the same thing as energy (although, up until quite recently in the past, I used to think of money and energy as being interchangeable).

A gallon of gasoline to power my car currently costs approximately five dollars. A gallon of gasoline stores a finite number of joules of energy which can be used to turn the wheels of my car (for a finite number of rotations) when that potential energy (which is stored in the bonds of hyrdocarbon molecules) is transformed into kinetic energy when that gasoline is combusted (and that energy which is released by breaking the bonds of the gasoline molecules causes pressure inside of tubes to push turbines which cause the wheels of the car to turn).

It seems that most people do not care where the energy in their car comes from nor what the harmful environmental costs might be because, if they did, they would feel chronically angry, depressed, and socially isolated (and combusting gasoline is known to release significant amounts of chemicals into the environment which are harmful to human health and which damage the things in the environment which humans depend on for survival and staying healthy such as the ozone layer (which filters out high energy radiation on its way to Earth's surface) and trees (which suck carbon out of the air from carbon dioxide and which release breathable oxygen molecules back into the atmosphere as well as providing shade and habitats for many animals to take refuge in)). Instead, what those people constrain their attention to is what enables them to survive and to avoid being punished by other people for behaving (or even thinking) outside the bounds of what is considered to be socially appropriate (and what is socially appropriate for a particular person, X, depends almost entirely on how much money X makes and who X socializes with the most). Hence, because I am considered to be a poor working-class American, I am expected to hardly do much more than survive on a very low budget and while practically being malnourished (physically and mentally). Hence, it is considered to be pompous displays of "gold diggery" on my part for daring to call attention to the ecological impact of normalized widespread fossil fuels dependence instead of dutifully keeping my attention strictly focused on content which does not challenge the petroleum-fueled status quo (because that would be akin to a dog biting the hand of the human which feeds that dog). Basically, I get told to "shut up" a lot from random strangers for "acting too rich" or "white" or "elitist" or focused on my personal brand (because I am apparently supposed to be too destitute physically and mentally to operate my own personal brand).

I presently feel that I am (and have been) doing the best I could with the resources I had available and that I could say the same for every other person (i.e. that every person without exception is always doing the best it can with what it has (because I assume that it is physically impossible for any courses of action to have occurred which have occurred in the past in order to make the present state of this universe exactly what it is)).

* * *

Computer science and mathematics are "soft sciences" compared to natural sciences (especially physics and chemistry) because computer science and mathematics deal with abstract or virtual objects exclusively while physics and chemistry deal with empirically observable phenomena which occur purely at a physical level instead of partially or wholly at a virtual level. 

Software objects are (presumably) different from more abstract entities such as numbers (unless you go so far as to suggest that numbers either do not exist or else they exist only as specific patterns of atomic or subatomic particles within some finite allocation of space-time which is treated as part of some information processing agent's working memory (and that information processing agent interprets that temporally-finite pattern instantiation as a specific symbol representing a uniquely corresponding quantity such as five)).

Software objects do not presumably exist without some underlying and relatively physical information processing agent which interprets temporally-finite patterns of energetic patterns as specific uniquely corresponding symbols (though I do think it is possible and likely that all physical entities are comprised of fundamentally the same "material" and constrained by the same exact fundamental laws of PHYSICS as are all software (i.e. virtual) entities).

What I mean to say is that, if I could only study one subject for the rest of my life (in virtually limitless depth) that subject would be physics (because physics underlies all phenomena whether or not those phenomena are physical, virtual, or abstract because, fundamentally, all of those things are presumably describable in strictly physical terms).

Related to what I have been journaling about in this note section is some factoid I read last night about the longevity of tattoos.

I wanted to know why dermis tattoos seem to last for a lifetime while dermis cells seem to have life cycles lasting only a few weeks. What I read was that, when the dermis cells which contain tattoo ink die, those cells disintegrate and release ink which new replacement cells soak up. Hence, the original tattoo pattern is preserved virtually forever while the skin cell substrate into which that pattern was inscribed is routinely swapped. I think that is a good metaphor for what the karbytes brand is about: using transient pieces of matter and energy to keep specific pieces of intellectual property (in the form of digital files) instantiated for an infinitely long time period.

(By the way, I wanted to mention that I currently have exactly one tatto