munificent

Respectfully, but I think you are not introspecting deeply enough here.

Why is cooking enjoyable? Some of it may be purely the tactile sensation of stirring spoons in goop. I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?

You wouldn't take a gondola to the top of a mountain because you want to be a person who can climb mountains. How much of that desire comes from purely internal accomplishment versus wanting to be seen as a person who can do that hard thing? And what happens to that drive when no one around you cares?

Anthony Gatto was arguably the world's best numbers juggler for many years. Now he runs a concrete company, because it turns out most people just don't really give a shit about juggling. It's not enough for a task to be hard, it needs to be esteemed too.

> Perhaps we will value eachother on an even more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.*

How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything? How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?

I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships. But given that candy companies are some of the largest private companies in the world, I know that human nature means many people really will just check out and turn into vegetables.

Humans are like border collies. We need some amount of work and struggle to be psychologically healthy. If AI really does deliver us a post-scarcity life (unlikely, given the infinite greed of many of the elites), then I think a whole lot of people are going to lose their minds.

The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.

It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.

I suspect that says more about me as a music listener than about the overall distribution of time signatures. I'm sure there's newer stuff using 6/8 too, but I don't listen to much pop music these days.

There is a decent amount of pop music in 6/8. I always joke that it's like a hack to making a song better because 6/8 is rare enough that it makes the song sound interesting but common enough to not alienate the listener. It ends up sounding mostly like a hard swung 4/4 but then fills and some melodic lines are just a little bit more rhythmically spicy.

Some examples:

* The Doors - People are Strange

* T. Rex - Hot Love

* Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop

* Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus

* Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People

* Green Day - Longview

* Oasis - Lyla

* Blur - Parklife

* Living Things - Bom Bom Bom

* Britney Spears - Womanizer

* Goldfrapp - Strict Machine

* Feist - My Moon My Man

* Gotye - Heart's a Mess

* The Black Keys - Gold on the Ceiling

* Paul Kalkbrenner - The Grouch

Great, even less control over the things we use and more power ceded to corporations.

Yes, I do.

The goal is roughly the same: financial security, a good home, as much of a family as one cares to raise.

But for basically my entire life as a middle-aged American, there was a well-lit path to that goal:

1. Do good in high school.

2. Go to a university and get some four year degree. Obviously some degrees are duds, but basically any of them was considered a worthwhile investment.

3. Get a white collar job doing something intellectual. Make a decent salary at a stable company. Change jobs periodically as needed.

Now:

1. Doing well in high school is still important, but it is very easy for kids to get good grades using AI while not actually learning anything and not realizing they are setting themselves up for hardship.

2. College is so expensive now that determining which college and which degree is actually a sound financial investment is very hard. An 18 year-old-kid is being asked to make a financial choice with life-long consequences at a point when they have none of the expertise about their long-term goals to know what to do.

3. AI will very likely eliminate many of these jobs. People will be competing for fewer and fewer jobs and who knows what on your resume will actually help you stand out? Also, most of the blue collar jobs are already gone, either automated away (ag) or moved overseas (manufacturing).

There was also a sense in the US that even if the government wasn't great, it was at least functional and a source of relative stability run by somewhat mature adults. That is clearly no longer the case at the federal level.

People don't all commit suicide for the same reasons. Durkheim's book Suicide which in some ways created the idea of sociology itself categorizes four types of suicide.

* Video files are absolutely huge compared to basically every other domain. Just dealing with media is not trivial in the way that we take for granted in software. It's easy to fill terabytes for a production. Just copying stuff around can be a noticeable logistics problem. People still mail hard drives.

* A lot of people working in video production are there to be artistic creators and are not very technical. They are often extremely skilled at producing beautiful work using specific tools, but they often don't have the computer fundamentals we presume.

* Unlike the software world which increasingly a small number of very large companies who can invest heavily in centralized processes and tools, the video world still has a lot of small companies.

* Margins are very narrow and many of these small businesses are barely scraping. Production gigs can be very feast-or-famine.

Put all that together, and it's not at all surprising that a lot of productions don't have the backup discipline you would expect.