Recently, I read about venture capitalist #Marc#Andreessen putting his 12,000-square-foot mansion in Atherton, California, which has seven fireplaces,
up for sale for $33.75 million.
This was done to spend more time, one supposes, at the $177 million home he owns in Paradise Cove, California;
or the $34 million one he bought beside it;
or the $44.5 million one in a place called Escondido Beach.
Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all a story I’ve been meaning to set down for a long time now about the time I visited that house
(the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean).
Strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Because you really need to know how deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are.
I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it.
But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject.
He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.
It’s a libertarian commonplace,
a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job:
If you don’t like it, you can leave.
If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.
I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide:
things that make human beings human beings.
I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving.
I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth;
that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
I’m taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks,
though I can’t be sure those were his exact words.
Marc, if you’re reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory.
Maybe he said “quiescent,” or “docile,” or maybe “powerless.”
Something, certainly, along those lines.
He was joking, sort of;
but he was serious
—definitely.
“Kidding on the square,” jokes like those are called.
All that talk about human potential and morality,
and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with,
for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.
There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.
Das #Oculus ist mehr als nur die #PATH Station vom World Trade Center. Hier geht es auch direkt zu vielen Subway-Linien und natürlich Einkaufszentren. Laut Wikipedia waren die Amerikaner über die Baukostenüberschreitungen so erbost, dass Stararchitekt #Calatrava keine Aufträge mehr in den USA bekam.
Der Nahverkehr in #Washington: #MARC und #VirginiaRailwayExpress. Nach der Anzahl der Doppelstockwagen braucht man sich über zu geringe Nachfrage wohl nicht beschweren.
Funny thing is, one of the bugs is broken Unicode. 12 or 15 years ago Tim Spalding wanted to hire me to improve Unicode handling in PEAR::MARC, I said I would do it if I could license the code freely/openly, and he decided against the project.
@dbs The last time I had to write some quick and dirty #MARC import/export code, I ended up having to use #Ruby, because only ruby-marc was able to handle the encoding mess of the input records.