Monthly Archives: July 2024

Struggles with Medium: An Honest Account of Loss and Transition | Blogging and Social Media Income Insights

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I gave up on Medium a few days ago. My revenues were going down to where I was actually losing money this month. It was getting to where it was no longer enjoyable. I feel for anyone who using blogging, vlogging, social media, etc. as their primary source of income. I bet for every Mr. Beast, there’s thousands of people no one will ever hear of.

A friend of mine has been really cold and distant for the last several months. We’ve been friends since we were teenagers. This isn’t her normal. I once suggested she seek medical help. She became so angry I thought she was going to end the friendship. So I let it drop. But she just gets darker and more despondent with each passing month. She has plenty of time to post memes and videos to Facebook. But she almost never responds to anyone who writes to her, not just me. Getting her to return texts is damn near impossible. And she NEVER answers her phone. Something’s definitely wrong. When she does text, it’s to complain about her job, the homeless in her city, the state of the world, etc. It was discouraging for a long time. Now it’s just irritating.

I recently got some in home health help. Through the state, I have a lady come in a couple times a week to do some cleaning, laundry, help putting away groceries, etc. We also keep each other company. She and I are getting to be kind of friends. She’s almost 60 years old and widowed. She’s been encouraging me to socialize more online. She knows I like gaming and is encouraging me to get involved in online gaming chats and forums. I don’t usually do online gaming against other people.

I started doing some online gaming against other people in free games on my PS5 like Monopoly. I bought NCAA Football 25 a couple days ago. I’m thinking about getting involved in some online tournaments. Nebraska is my favorite team. My dad is a University of Nebraska alum, as are several of my cousins. My favorite PS5 games are still Cyberpunk 2077 and Skyrim. I beat Cyberpunk 2077 earlier this summer. I got a second game going trying out different things. Took me two years to beat it the first time. But I didn’t play the entire time I was in physical rehab.

My brother recently bought a Tesla with self-driving capabilities. It’s mainly his wife’s commuter car. She rented a Tesla while on a business trip. Fell in love with Tesla right on the spot. My brother made a couple road trips with the Tesla. Said of the four motels he stayed out on that trip, two of them offered free charging with a night’s stay. He’s almost giddy that something like this became a reality within our lifetime. I often joke to his 13-year-old son that he won’t need to get his drivers’ license if he really doesn’t want to.

When I was still quite active on Facebook, I joked to one of my futurist groups that I wanted to ride in a self-driving EV with my robot best friend, smoking a marijuana cigar while riding past a police station on my 60th birthday. That would be in 2040. Heck, now it’s looking like that fantasy will become possible by 2030. Especially since I read an article last week stating that Tesla wants to start selling it’s Optimus humanoid robots starting in 2026. We’ve come a long way when it was just You Tube videos of cats riding on Roomba machines.

Now that my experiment with putting most of my writings on Medium has failed, I’m concentrating on longer posts on Word Press. The money was nice while it lasted.

The Future and AI and Automation from A Mentally Ill Point of View

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Been studying up on Automation, Robotics, and AI for most of the last year and a half. At least, that’s when I got serious into tech stocks. Tesla, Nvidia, Palantir, and AMD were some of the big ones I got in on. Made good profits so far with all of them but AMD.

Been watching a lot of videos on AI and Automation on YouTube the last several months. My favorites include David Shapiro, Julia McCoy, Issac Arthur, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, among others. Currently reading the recently released ‘The Singlualrity is Nearer’ by Ray Kurzweil. Reread the original ‘Singularity is Near’ back in the winter.

It’s insane how fast all of this is unfolding. Makes me think the real bottle neck in AI and Automation advances won’t be programming, learning models, or even microchips anymore. I’m now thinking the real bottlenecks will involve physical infrastructure for data centers and even availability of electrical power and water.

A friend of mine works for a landlord who already uses AI for much of their office work and tenant services. She thinks she probably will be replaced by automation eventually. But she’s been preparing for an out for years just in case something like mass technological unemployment does happen.

As it is, I’ve been out of the job market since 2012 due to schizophrenia. Even though I found minimum wage working too overwhelming for my illness to manage (I used to violently vomit from the anxiety of going to work every day when I worked in retail and fast food), I have found other things to occupy my days. Just because I’m on disability doesn’t mean I drink beer and father children I can’t take care of. I’d love to see that trope die.

Over the years of not having a regular job, I’ve taught myself several subjects. Namely literature, writing, economics, finance, history, some science, studied on tech advances, futurism, etc. Got some of my Spanish up to date. Foreign language is one of those ‘use it or lose it’ kind of deals.

One thing I did teach myself was investing. Turns out I’m pretty good at it. I do think most people, certainly here in the US, are too short-term thinking to succeed in the market. I’ve seen it in my own family. I’m learning from their mistakes.

I originally went to college with the idea of going into medical research. Turns out that AI can do research pretty well. It can also write reports and even short stories pretty well due to ChatGPT. AI can do a lot of the academic work I wanted to do in my youth already. It’s not going to get any worse.

Even my skills with picking investments are surpassed by AI. And most of the companies with huge gains and profits the last couple of years are AI and Automation companies.

Companies are laying off thousands of workers even though they are profitable. I’m dead convinced these jobs are being automated away. Much like the factory jobs of decades ago, white collar office jobs are starting to get cut.

I do think the far future will be a really cool and excellent place. Yet, we seem to have zero plan as how to get there with as little disruption as possible. I’m convinced we are going through upheavals and changes now as big as the Agriculture and Industrial Revolutions of past eras.

I think there will a lot of pain involved in this transition. And hardly any politician is talking about this publicly. I saw that Greece recently legalized a six-day work week. That’s not even going to be relevant in five to ten years once automation is good enough to take the majority of jobs.

Don’t think for one moment that businesses will keep on human employees if they don’t have to, certainly not in the numbers they currently do. The fact that slavery was legal and accepted for most of civilized history alone proves bosses don’t want to pay workers unless they absolutely have to. Now, the slaves will be algorithms, chatbots, AI, machines, and robots.

Speaking of robots, Tesla recently announced they will start building humanoid robots to serve as common laborers. This isn’t science fiction or fake news. This is happening right here and right now. And most people are still in denial or don’t realize just how good the tech already is.

The bottlenecks of power requirements will slow down the real-world implementation, at least temporarily. Self-driving cars and trucks are already here. Heck, even my brother owns a Tesla with self-driving capacities.

Satellites and drones are already doing agriculture work. A farmer friend of mine back in Nebraska has owned a self-driving tractor that can navigate by GPS for at least five years. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly spread out yet.

As far as power goes, the growth in solar and wind power implantation has gone almost parabolic in the last several years. Next generation nuclear is already being prototyped in many places. And China has already built some thorium powered nuclear plants. Pity the USA and USSR gave up on thorium years ago.

We have all this science and tech advancing at breakneck pace. Something new comes out almost every day now. Our science and tech are pointing us to the future. It’s the social and politcal attitudes that want to drag us back into the ‘good ol days.’

Screw the good old days. They sucked for almost everyone. That is unless one was rich, a ruler, or a member of a privileged class and race. I swear our science and tech says The Jetsons while our politics are screaming Huckleberry Finn. It’s an insane paradox.

I grew up in the pre internet days. I’ll be damned before I go back.

Getting In Touch with My Best Friend from High School

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Mentally I was feeling quite depressed and hopeless for the last several days. Finally, last night, I had a decent chat with my best friend. She and I have been best friends since high school. We went to prom together one year but were never romantically involved.

My friend, who lives in Denver, has come to the conclusion that her city is getting bad enough with the crime, homelessness, drug abuse, unemployment, etc. that she’s getting her conceal carry permit. She already owns a pistol and goes to a shooting range every so often.

She works for a landlord who owns several properties in Denver. My friend often has to deal with repair orders, deadbeats, and forced evictions. Says that drug abuse is not even hidden in most of those properties. Trash is all over the facilities as are broken appliances and rampant vandalism.

She’s always having arguments with tenants who can’t or won’t pay rent, can’t or won’t vacate properties when the lease is up, rampant sanitation problems, people always wanting to fight, etc. She always carries a bottle of bear spray on her person when she’s visiting her bosses’ properties in case the tenants get too unruly or violent. She’s received lots of death threats from tenants.

Things are getting really bad out there, I’m sure almost everyone knows this. The assassination attempt on Former President Trump and President Biden’s declining health are making things even worse.

I’m so not looking forward to the November election. I’m preparing to bunker down and stay off peoples’ radars for a real long time. I think things will far uglier in the coming months and years. I don’t see any way out except batten down the hatches and plow through it with pure grit and guts.

Since I don’t go out in public much anymore, I might be able to blend in and disappear easier than some. As much as I dread living in a suburb of a large city for when social chaos does happen, I just didn’t see any other option if I was to stay in touch with my immediate family.

I used to live in Nebraska. All of my friends left that state years ago. I didn’t have much for extended family except for a few elderly aunts and some cousins that I’m just not sure I can count on when shit gets really bad. But, I never had much of a support system in Nebraska my entire life even when things were good.

Strangely, I saw a lot of this starting to develop when I was still in high school. Since I grew up in a predominately right-wing community, I was taught that those on the left wing were evil, hated democracy, hated small business, hated agriculture, and generally were not friends to the working class.

Ironically, kids growing up in left wing communities were told the exact same shit about right wingers. It’s like we were predestined to turn on each other.

I’m glad I heard from my best friend. She has the exact same concerns I do. I just don’t know how many more opportunities I will have to communicate with her until things get ugly, I’m talking collapse of nations type ugly. Nations rise and nations fall. It’s pretty much the story of history summed up in one sentence.

Writing On Medium and Making My Peace with Declining Health

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I’ve now been a member of Medium for ten months. Even though my earnings haven’t been very high, I still like that forum. I enjoy being able to connect with fellow writers and pursuers of knowledge. It gets lonely not having people in person I can bounce ideas off or talk about things like history, philosophy, spirituality, science, tech, etc. without fear of a possible argument or fight in person.

I know it’s not healthy to get most of my socializing over the computer. Then again, neither was the community I spent much of my life in. Since I signed up with Medium, it’s the first time since I graduated college that I met a large group of people who don’t hate knowledge or smart people. It’s actually comforting getting to talk to people with more knowledge than I have.

My best days usually involve a lot of back and forth with fellow writers on Medium. Sure, we don’t always agree on many things. But isn’t being able to take part in a community even while disagreeing part of being a grown up?

Summers are always a rough time for me. I usually sleep in the days to avoid the heat and crowds as much as possible. I know my sleep pattern isn’t conducive to having an active social life. Well, neither is being schizophrenic or wheelchair bound. I just do the best I can and complain as seldom as possible.

I’m losing weight again. I almost never snack, and I usually eat only twice a day. Even though I’m losing weight, my mobility isn’t really coming back.

While I continue to put in work every day to strengthen my bad heart and bad knees, I have come to the acceptance that it’s possible I may never regain my mobility. It is possible I may experience an earlier than expected death with my illnesses. I’ve made my peace with that.

In my country, talking about death and dying is taboo. I never understood why. I mean, death is part of living. I’ve seen too many people try desperately to cling to life in their elderly years even when it was obvious to even themselves that death would be a welcome relief from the chronic pain and mental decline. In many ways, it’s comforting and freeing in that I’ve made my peace with my inevitable death even before I got gray hair.

Granted, I don’t talk about making my peace with death in public or to any doctors. I fear I would be committed if I did. I have zero intention of harming myself or anyone else. It is a good feeling knowing that if I don’t want to get out to meet people I don’t like, I don’t have too. It is a good feeling knowing that, because I was helpful to people when I was still healthy, that many people are more than happy to help me out now that I’m disabled. And I don’t feel a shred of guilt for being interdependent on others. I never should have been convinced to feel this.