Wherefor the sexual economy?

Each year Edge Magazine asks a question and invites the intellectual public to answer it. Eric Weinstein, the director of Thiel Capital, has a fascinating article answering the question, "What is the most interesting recent scientific news?" In Weinstein's case, a fascinating case for a man in charge of a venture capital fund, the news is that capitalism is ending.

Weinstein has two prongs to his argument: first, software is replacing even routine expertise work, like legal document discovery or medical diagnosis. Second, software has displaced a vast trucking industry in mass goods: correspondence and media of course, but now with 3D printing also physical items. Weistein argues that software is almost always a "public good:" infinitely reproducible and hence inexhaustible, and non-excludable, meaning everyone benefits from it whether they pay for it or not. The price and value of software has become disconnected, and since software is inexorably headed toward being in everything, the market will inexorably disconnect everything.

So, sex. There's a reason we talk about bars as "meat markets," and when we discuss the questions of marriage and family we use the phrase "the sexual economy." The question is, does Weinstein's observation have any impact on getting laid?

Of course it does.

We've actually already seen one beneficial disconnect; software has started to replace rape victims. One well-documented effected of Internet pornography is that, in the US, rape and sexual assaults dropped by between 15 and 25% the year after broadband Internet reached a given county.

I've always believed that when it comes to sexual availability, the Internet is starting to satisfice in a lot of ways, and those ways and means can only get "better" as the Internet starts to replace a lot of our other experiences as well.

Soylent, sexbots, and transhumanism: food, sex, and god are being replaced at an alarming rate. The only question is, what kind of market will exist to supply and enhance those experiences going forward?

The Church of No-Homo Is Making Itself Insane

World Net Daily's David Kupelian asserted that "The left is such a toxic experience it's driving people crazy."

Of course it is. But it's not toxicity. It's reality. You see, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Evolution is real, climate change is happening and will suck, vaccines work, gay people are just as valuable (and immutably gay), as straight people are valuable (and immutably straight).

The Church of No Homo is driven crazy by two conflicting desires: trying to stay within the lines of something identifiably "Christian," while not extending the decency and love God demands they do for gays and lesbians.

"We are children of God," Kupelian notes, as if to say, "... and they're not." Liberal society isn't all that confused or unhappy; it's just human, trying to figure out what it means to live in a highly technological, culturally diverse society that celebrates the individual. Poor Kupelian, he can't handle reality.

Software bootcamp is just like a cooking class...

I have less than ten hours to teach a dozen surly high schoolers to go from opening their notepads to writing Tetris. This is the objective: to give them enough HTML, CSS, and Javascript to be able to write a very simple video game.

Here’s what I told them:

A high school programming class and a high school cooking class are more or less the same. At the end of a cooking elective, if you followed all the steps you were required in class, you go home with two things: a cake, and a recipe for cake. All of you are going to eat the cake. Some of you might try to make the cake a second time. A few of you will wonder, “If I change this chocolate to strawberry, and make the cake again, will it work?” And one of you might go on to be a professional baker.

The same thing is true of this class. At the end of a class, you’re going home with a game written in HTML, and the source code to that game. The game will be fully playable. You’ll even have the source code, so you could try transferring the game to other computers to see how it works there. A few of you will look at it and wonder, “If I re-arrange these things, can I turn Tetris into Pac-Man?” (The answer is “Yes,” by the way.) And one of you might go on to be a professional software developer.

Oddly, the teacher who organized the elective tells me that that’s the best and most succinct description of what an elective like this is trying to accomplish. So I guess I’m doing something right.

Of course, there’s already that one guy who has a three-d game written in Unity, and took this class so he could learn how to put up a website about it…