A recurring dynamic within the ongoing technological revolution is the process in which the forces of centralization sweep up the various nodes within a particular area into a dominant organization or industry. Centralization follows the initial success of some new technology or use of a technology. Once a set of dominant players control a market, the forces of decentralization kick in and pick away at it. It is like the expanding and contracting of the universe.
In the early days of computing, you had big machines maintained by an army of engineers at special facilities. As more computers were created, the next step was to network them into the first distributed network. What followed was the age of the mainframe and midframe, which centralized all the users of an organization into one main computer, which they accessed via terminals. The original internet was a consolidation of these machines.
The PC started to nibble away at this structure. Instead of the user storing all his data on the central machine, he kept it on his local machine. He shared his data with others by copying it onto a disk and then walking it over to that user using what was eventually called sneaker-net. Soon, the local area network allowed the office to share resources and disconnect from the mainframe. The internet then allowed those offices to share data with one another in a distributed network.
Of course, the forces of centralization roared back as servers came to dominate the office network and then the organizational network. As quick as everyone had a personal computer, they were soon forced to make it fully accessible to the impersonal network and then make it little more than a terminal attached to the organization’s network of servers. This soon led to the return of the mainframe era, which was pleasantly renamed cloud computing.
This consolidation – disaggregation cycle is a pretty good model for the history of human civilization, so it makes sense that it plays out in technology. In the disaggregated world, there are those who see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in bringing the disparate parts under one roof. At some point in the consolidation process, there are those who begin to see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in breaking the blob into pieces or creating alternative pieces to the blob.
A good model for this is the internet community. The first “social media” was the BBS created in the early days of computing. The Bulletin Board System was modeled after the old-fashioned bulletin board. The main difference was that when someone posted something, others could post replies and then others could reply to those replies for as long as the topic required replies. Sites like 4chan are pretty much just the old BBS with a cheap graphical interface.
The problem with the BBS was that it did not take long before the topics grew too diverse to organize, and the users started to hate one another. Soon groups of users started to spin up new boards for their specific topic or to get away from a rival fraction they used to war with on the old board. The central board broke into a million bespoke boards organized around the tribal instincts of their users. It is not hard to see how humans spread around the globe once you understand this.
What we now call social media has been defined by the consolidation – disaggregation cycle that is the nature of humanity. Just as the centralized BBS splintered into many small communities, subsequent technology followed the same pattern. Big email groups eventually broke into small email groups. Usenet, a technology that aimed to solve the limitations of the BBS, went from a set of large channels into an impossible to track number of small channels.
The message board, which made it easier for the tens of millions of new internet users to be herded into communities online quickly followed the same pattern. The big forum for sports soon broke into forums for specific sports and then forums for specific teams and then rival tribes within the team fanbase. The main driver was always the inability of any group of people larger than the Dunbar number to interact with one another inside an internet community without conflict.
We are now seeing another round of this with microblogging. After the election, the doxers, deviants and lunatics that came to dominate Twitter in the pre-Musk age have jumped ship to something called Bluesky. They have all sorts of reasons ranging from technological to conspiratorial, but the main reason is they cannot face the reality of their moral turpitude, so they are seeking shelter among the like-minded, in a similar way described in the study, When Prophecy Fails.
In one of life’s amusing ironies, they can thank Andrew Torba for the opportunity to create their own fever swamp. The tireless efforts by Torba to keep Gab going, despite the relentless attacks by the crazies, was the first step in the disaggregation phase of the modern social media platform. Gab became a fun refuge for those excluded from Twitter, something like Alfred’s fort at Athelney, from which he waged his heroic resistance to the great heathen army.
Gab surviving and thriving in its inimical way was a proof of concept that opened the door to the coming disaggregation. Mastodon and now Bluesky are hoping to attract niche communities that seek an alternative to Musk’s Twitter. The people into “right wing” conspiracy theories first tried mastodon, but found it too challenging, so they have landed on Bluesky, which is easier for them to navigate. They can now share their conspiracy theories in a “safe” environment.
Twitter will remain the dominant player, owing to the fact it is owned by Musk, and he is besties with the new president. Advertisers are returning to the platform, so it will probably start to turn a profit or at least break even. The ascendent economic interests want one central platform, so they will support it, but those forces of disaggregation will keep gnawing away at it. Nature, at least human nature, does not like centralization, at least not the reality of it, so disaggregation always prevails.
That is the engine of history. Whether it is family dynasties, empires, authoritarian regimes or the unipolar world order, the desire to centralize and control always crashes into the rocks of disaggregation. The tribal nature of man, evolved over millions of years, has not been completely beaten out of after ten thousand years of civilization, so conflict and separation are baked in the cake of human organization. Separation, peaceful or violent, is always the end of the story.
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I took a quick look at Bluesky and yep, all the crazy escapees seeking asylum from X are there. One comment stands out; this place is like therapy. Of course Don Lemon made his grand entrance there. For him it’s better to rule in hell then serve in heaven.
Always remember, if the name ends in “i”, it’s gentile. If it ends in “y”….
Funny but true. Reminds me of my brother telling a story about him and his future wife renting a hall for wedding. Wife was of Ukranian heritage and last name ended in wicz. Rental guy asked her how to spell it correctly for forms. Later her mother stepped in strong arming him on price and as he was writing he asked if she was sure it wasn’t witz referencing an earlier discussion about the difference of jewish designation.
Sounds like the poor bastard was at his Witz end…
How does the psychological need to proselytize fit into this? If I start up a BBS to discuss baseball, say, it makes sense that eventually it disaggregates into rival Yankees and Red Sox boards, and then into different groups within those fan bases, as you say. But, crucially, the Red Sox guys are happy, indeed eager, to leave the Yankees guys alone (I know, shitposting is a thing, but in general). I want to say that the “Left” (for rhetorical convenience) simply can’t disaggregate. We’d love it if they went off to have their own version of Twitter; hell, we… Read more »
I was going too long, so I did not touch on this, but I suspect a diving force behind the centralizers is the innate desire to impose their morality on the rest. The people driving desegregation, on the other hand, want to be left alone. It is why the crazies escaping to Bluesky tell each other that the invisible of army of Hitler will soon join them. Not only do they need a devil, they need someone to lecture.
Not only do they need a devil, they need someone to lecture.
It is why eventually, some sooner than others, many if not most will return to Twitter. The pleasantness of their absence will be remembered and tolerance for their usual bullshit will be much thinner than in the past. As I suggested earlier this week, Polymarket (if the Regime does not shutter it beforehand) should take bets on how long it is until, say, The Guardian pops back on to preach to the unwashed, all out of the goodness of its heart.
It’s happened once already. There was an exodus of these sorts after Musk bought the platform. They also claimed that Musk’s firings meant that the platform and company would collapse because of all the expertise that he got rid of. They gloated when he brought back a few of them afterwards. As always, this says a lot more about them than it does X.
Leftists are deranged. I once dismissed the claim that “liberalism is a mental illness.” How stupid of me.
That’s hilarious and predictable, by the way. Cucks are already preaching unity and forgiveness. Fuck them right along with the wannabe communists.
What it says is that censorship is very, very effective. They think the thing they think everybody thinks, and “everybody” is now so constrained—dissenters of all kinds are so thoroughly banned from everywhere—that everything they think is wrong. If you argue on 4chan that Twitter works about as well as it did before Elon bought it and its financial state is fine or irrelevant, you’re definitely getting dogpiled (only partly by ActBlue botjeets), you’re very likely to have your post deleted, and you’re not unlikely to be banned. The “consensus” of the most right-wing site on the internet is identical… Read more »
In its geopolitical aspect, the desire for wealth, power and status, perhaps moreso than morality, ideology, religion, has been the stimulus for centralization. The Mongols had no interest in imposing the worship of Tengri on the Russians; they just wanted their land and resources.
I wonder if Musk knows that, and is waiting for the temper tantrum to die down before he rolls out a much more robust subscription model. I got a good laugh at Don Lemon’s hilariously overwrought and narcissistic “resignation letter,” like everyone else, but I noted that his official reason is “a change in the terms of service,” re: the adjudication of claims. Once they’re gone, he might go full subscription, and so when all the Leftists come crawling back because there are no Deplorables to lecture on Bluesky, he can say “You pays your money, you takes your chances”… Read more »
I think this is accurate because the people we are discussing are very effeminate in the negative sense of the word. Not feminine, the negative energy part of being female. Emotional, volatile, child-like, petulant. They will stomp their feet, scream, and just be overly dramatic running away to a safe space. Then, over time, in childlike fashion they will calm and return to the playground. For a while… until the next outrage cycle. I have seen tremendous self-sorting in the last week or so since Trump re-ascended. Liberal ‘friends’ of mine removing themselves from chat groups because they are so… Read more »
Alas, that same current also captured the conservatives.
話說天下大勢． 分久必合，合久必分
The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 14th c.
很有意思！谢谢！
Bu keqi
Damn! Beat me to it!
Now that I think of it, Sulla Aficionados might want to investigate a certain Cao Cao.
說得有道理！
I never heard of it. Never had a Twitter account either. But I am a grumpy fat old white guy that hates everyone on general principle. I’m all over Blab for the rude jokes and realistic commentary. Given my politics even the loons there are entertaining and if they’re not I am an adult with a ‘mute’ button. I did a cursory fly-by of Bluesky and immediately recognized it for a faggot/femcnut enclave and left. I don’t think it will survive long or ever be a force in our social space. I note with some cheer that similar lefty social… Read more »
The need to belong, to be accepted and liked/approved of is strong, whether a mean girls high school clique or a presidential cabinet, or even here on this website. There are very few outliers willing to walk alone.
Yes. Thymotic pride. The desire to be esteemed by one’s fellow man or dame. Undoubtedly a key aspect of what we call human nature.
That vocabulary! Below, milord is compared favorably to a troll; I say no, that milord is a Jester of astonishing literacy. (Sans the belled cap, a man doth have his pride.) Rather than a key aspect, I say such desire is the arboreal essence of our kind. We had not fearsome fangs nor claws, but instead, each other. As a Prey species, like herbivores, our greatest fantasy is to unite against some awesome Predator. Our fur is smooth that we might dive into the waters of Miocenene swamps to escape, our brachiatial build is that we may climb the tree… Read more »
A couple of thoughts: Centralization and Decentralization, thus as it ever was: Or as David Byrne would sing: “SAME! AS! IT! EVER! WAS!”. And then slap himself in the forehead. In the disaggregated world, there are those who see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in bringing the disparate parts under one roof. At some point in the consolidation process, there are those who begin to see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in breaking the blob into pieces or creating alternative pieces to the blob. Speaking of business, as in, we make real, tangible things here for our customers,… Read more »
Wow. I didn’t know that about Ford.
Those Industrial Age barons were true Titans.
plus, that cartoon…one for the ages
We see something similar wrt a new phenomenon, the “independent researcher” in HBD science, specifically wrt genetic explanations of IQ and behavioral attributes. The University research system no longer allows such explorations among faculty and the number of journals that will touch/review such papers—much less publish them—are vanishingly small and cannot keep up with demand and time constraints of journal publication as the field expands. Most of my readings are via direct subscription to these researchers. Some charge for such subscription, some do not. The difference between what I receive via the quarterly journal subscription route and now is simply… Read more »
I saw a article that said Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s infamous father, was the one responsible for installing the peer review system and its awfulness.
Apparently he bought up and published the professional journals with the intent of consolidating them under his wretched grip, just as he bought up the high-school textbook publishers that gave us our faux history.
Following that, one of the Covid doctors says it is PubMed that monitors and suppresses the necessary and contrarian studies in the medical field.
Why does this dynamic exist? Because it works, in the evolutionary sense. Whenever an assembly of human beings gets gets comfortable and stale as a result of high societal efficiency (borne of centralized productivity), that affluence leads to a decline in robustness due to the absence of hardship and culling. This decline eventually leads to a fracturing into weak and strong communities, with the latter prevailing. Business cycle.
Generally, aggregation favors a narrow class of oligarchs, who are always trying to expand their wealth and influence…As Dr. Johnson said about a possible union of the UK and the American colonies, “we should unite with you only to rob you…”
Aggregation via apparent disaggregation would be ideal from the oligarchs’ perspective. Resistance would become incomprehensible. It would always be understood as resistance to something definitionally different, to whatever. Like to “Our Democracy.” If I were them I’d propagandize differently, maybe with an absurd, self-contradictory, literally unthinkable concept like “counter-elite.” People who think they think that will follow any order. Hell, they’ll continually anticipate, in every sense, their submission. Maybe I’d put on a great show—the greatest, they tell me!—post the great mythical proof.mov. It’s not like there’s a budget limit, and if it works, maybe it works forever. Any of… Read more »
I post on gabs nature subs, but otherwise it’s really boring. Telegrams is too much of a firehose of info for me, so I’m not really doing these message boards anymore.
im going out in the woods today tho!
Come April, I’ll have my replacement up & running on.his own. I’m popping smoke & going to grow pumpkins be a dental floss tycoon
I thought this is why Metaberg made Threads. That went nowhere. But it also seems now that Zuck took up BJJ and found his balls, he’s not interested in that role anymore.
Jiu jitsu can be obsessive…I’ve been there! That’s when many of us started following Joe Rogan….
Hell of it is Usenet is still around. So is IRC. Fun times back then, though.
One good thing back in those days was you needed a minimum IQ to participate. You had to understand something about the technology. That acted as a barrier to entry against really stupid people.
Yep, but even in those days with those types, we saw all/most of the problems we see today with personal—but anonymous—interaction between individuals. I still remember my first encounter with a troll, who read the exchanges unceasingly looking for posters to bully and insult. The topic of discussion was irrelevant for him, only that an aggressive insulting comment could be interjected. Got me memorialized by the Electronic Freedom Foundation who always took an unwavering stance supporting such folk and unlimited (disruptive) commentary. Last I looked, I was on their list of “bad people”. It was badge of honor.
Trolls are a thousand times better than true believers. Trolls just want to have fun. Like you said, the topic is absolutely irrelevant to the Troll. They are not emotionally committed.
Today, the term Troll is completely abused. A Troll is now anyone who disagrees with you.
I agree. My definition of “troll” might not be everyone else’s. In this case, he was not amusing. Ostei is amusing and fun to read—but he is no troll. This person was disruptive to any flow of exchange, and deliberately so. He’d stop the flow of meaningful exchange, hurt feelings, shut people up, then move on.
I have to nominate myself as a longstanding troll, in the true sense. I enjoy hijacking and riling up threads on Twitter for the sole purpose of making people irate. I never get worked up over the matter.
Here is why you should pay the troll’s toll: A troll is your chance, if you think, to recognize that all online is fake and g@y, and the troll relishes in exploiting this incongruity to cause amusement for those who understand and anger in those who are too vested in the beast.
So sayeth the Troll.
If you’re that punk who ruined the latest Simplicius, then go fuck yourself. A troll is as bad as some African who shits in the airport lobby and then thinks himself superior.
I don’t know what you are talking about. I troll under the same name. I don’t post on Simplicius (I read him).
And, go jack off, for you clearly have a sperm-retention anger, and clearly no woman wants you.
That’s why I could never catch on to Discord for Dummies.
The great thing about usenet was that the sissies couldn’t ban you when you made a fool of them. No way to get rid of wrong-think either.
When I was on Earthlink, which was up until about 2017, they were still carrying usenet and the binary groups. I got tons and tons of music, movies and books from them. But my phone company forced fiber optic to my house and DSL is incompatible with it.
Urbit fills the niche of forcing someone to have reasonable IQ to be able to communicate due to its relatively complex ramp-up effort. Some of the irritable old-school guys in our sphere went there after they got sick of the idiots on both sides.
Yep. Most of the time the natural instinct of humans is to protect themselves against change. Only after disaster strikes is there an opportunity to build without fighting the regulators and the NIMBYs. E.g., Germany and Japan after WWII.
Nothing was more apparent than when I was in Germany as a teenager. Bombing your older, inner city, flat does wonders for rebuilding a modern designed city center. 😉
O/T, but tangential, listening to some techno-pop on Pandora this morning, a voice-over played above the drum machines and synthesizers: “There’s messages in every game. Like Pac-Man. Do you know what “Pac” stands for? P-A-C: program and control. He’s Program and Control Man. The whole thing’s a metaphor. He thinks he’s got free will, but really he’s trapped in a maze, in a system. All he can do is consume, he’s pursued by demons that are probably just in his own head and even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens?… Read more »
it was DEC with their Vax370 that started to chip away at the mainframes, It had about the computing power of the average washing machine.
Then came along Sun Microsystems and sold you a $20k Unix desktop that had less computing power than your typical cell phone. 😉
Kamala helpfully explains cloud computing:
https://youtu.be/liL2VXYNyus?si=ueUxn0W3l0pkTMC4
A terrific analysis! I’ve witnessed a lot of the events. When I first worked in DC in the 1980s, PCs and then BBSs were just getting started. Most federal departments had at least one PC enthusiast who set up a BBS with all the department’s information. If you had the BBS phone number and were a reporter (as I was) or a spy, you could discover a lot. Online interactions were also a lot more civilized; we might try going back to some form of that:
https://the-1000-year-view.com/2019/03/06/a-retro-idea-to-improve-the-net/
Torba doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his work with Gab, and the his concept of parallel economies will hopefully take hold some day so our dollars can be kept away from the majority of moneychangers.
[…] Source: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=33026 […]
I glance at X occasionally but find it mostly thin gruel. For me, social media is a way to share family pics and news with my widely scattered siblings and their offspring (refugees from California) and get some laughs from memes and organizations that interest me (e.g., army veterans). I mostly ignore any political stuff, esp. from my relatives who are mostly Christian Zionist nutjobs. It’s a pity, because they are otherwise nice people.
I run a group on Facebook for a niche hobby, 28,000 members, which ain’t bad for a niche. We have the most or second most members of the couple dozen groups and pages in that genre. I have no idea how engaged those 28,000 are or what that means, but it’s far more than I ever expected when I started the page. I started my group for the same reason I get amused by all the downvotes I often get when I post something here. I got tired of having my posts censored, deleted and getting kicked off of boards.… Read more »
The problem I found with FB before I left was that any particular group I was in exceeded 40-50k easily and as such, impossible to read all postings/commentary and there were a lot—not unusual to find 1.6k comments or more. Most postings/comments however were of the “me too” type and added nothing very informative to the discussion.
I soon unsubscribed to FB and found I was better off in smaller venues where there was more back and forth commentary from a smaller, but perhaps more focused group.
“Lincoln’s call for volunteers to suppress the ‘rebellion’ of the Cotton States caused the secession of the Upper South. The Cotton States felt that the federal government violated their agreement, and the Upper South believed that they had every right to leave, even if the Upper South disagreed with their reasons for leaving. As R. L. Dabney explained, ‘However wrongfully any State might resume its Independence without just cause, the only remedy was conciliation, and not force, that therefore the coercion of a sovereign State was unlawful, mischievous, and must be resisted. There Virginia took her stand.’” https://identitydixie.com/2024/11/14/part-1-causes-of-southern-secession-in-the-upper-south/ As Jeb Smith… Read more »
I noticed earlier I got some downvotes but now it’s back to even. I have gone over what I wrote and the only thing I would change is in second paragraph from bottom I would substitute “resurgence” for “dominance.” It’s hard to know what I wrote that was so offensive when no one actually criticizes my comment. I suspect it’s because I wrote that the Old South was “naive” to leave their seats in Congress. But if you can’t critique your own mistakes then you can’t make any improvement in your game. I could have used a different word: arrogance.
Talk about an aggregation-disaggregation cycle!
In spades, like the difference between medieval kings and imperial monarchs.
“A recurring dynamic within the ongoing technological revolution is the process in which the forces of centralization sweep up the various nodes within a particular area into a dominant organization or industry.”
Geez Z that’s some world class word salad there — worthy of any HR. 🙂
This is another one of your posts that I have no idea what you’re talking about. This happens about three or four times a year. Well, there’s always Monday.
Thank God, somebody else doesn’t know what the hell this thread is about. Thought it was just me.
I did understand the dood who said he was going out into the woods today, though. :O)
Words have exact meaning. That was a cogent statement and the opposite of “word salad.”
If you skim through that sentence, it may seem like a word salad, but upon reading it more carefully, it makes perfect sense. Things like Harris’ actual word salads are crude pantomimes of sentences like Z’s that the stupid employ.
Although societies break apart and splinter from one another, there is always a centrifugal force whipping them together. People are nosy and curious. Mega-cities form as entertainment hubs develop. The urge to have fun defeats the urge to be left alone. Even in the South, a region known for its spread-out isolationism, there are mega-cities like Atlanta and Houston to cater to decadent cosmopolitan tastes. Expect to see smaller towns in the South empty out as the metropolises swell in size. In the end, as much as they hate to admit it, people like people, and will pay top dollar… Read more »
They may be the “glue” that drive civilization, but they’re also it’s ultimate doom.
Most succinct explanation is Spandrell’s concept of cities being “IQ shredders.”
A more ancient account would be the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
“Rural” today doesn’t really mean farming anyway. You can enjoy 90% of the amusements living in the countryside as you can behind your home’s iron barred windows in Houston or Atlanta.
“The urge to have fun defeats the urge to be left alone”. ”people like people”. As a fellow grumpy old man (hat tip to Filthie), I can say with confidence that those two statements apply to young, and inexperienced people. One of my adult daughters moved into the city in 2010. She had a beautiful apartment, worked a block from her home. All was good, until it wasn’t. We laugh about it now, as she says “what was I thinking”. The truth is, she didn’t know any better. As for hubs that cater to “decadent cosmopolitan tastes”, well, I think… Read more »
Bartleby: I’ve been fortunate enough to visit many beautiful (and not so beautiful) cities around the world. And I’m grateful I was able to do so while -even though they weren’t all at their prime – they were still far more organic and innate than they are today. There are still places I wish I could have seen but will now never do so (having to fly, immivaders, etc.). But far more than people, I now value natural beauty and quieter places. Crowds and public spaces are not safe for White people. And people are vastly overrated.
Speaking of alternative platforms…Greg’s still pimping his unread blog here. Some people never learn.
‘In the end, as much as they hate to admit it, people like people, and will pay top dollar to live in desirable places like Greenwich village, New York; San Francisco; and Austin, Texas.’
OK then well, I guess it’s true I am Your Favorite Martian. I avoid those type places like leprosy. A buddy or two generally is all I can tolerate re: humanity.
Ps Greg Nikolic if you stop advertising your website they’ll stop downvoting you. I think. Maybe. You are welcome.
Indeed. You’d have to quintuple my earnings to get me to even think about moving to Austin. I’d rather live out in the sticks with the horny toads, cicada killers, rattlesnakes and polecats than with the lumpenleft, pervs and nuggras.
I have fond memories of Austin. That was fifty years ago. I wouldn’t go back there now even for a visit.
I visited NY city twice – and I absolutely hated it. The people, the noise, the filth. Visited San Francisco briefly on the way back from Asia and was not impressed. Vienna was a gem 35 years ago. Same with Budapest and Prague. Loved the history in London but not the people it was filling with. Loved Edinburgh. Wish I could have seen Copenhagen. Hong Kong was a nightmare. I’d like to see Alaska but you couldn’t drag me onto a cruise ship. I’m content in the woods and the hills.
Best years of my life were isolated in a cabin in east WA state up near the canadian border. Pnut the Squirrel, grand firs and pines for company. Little crick nearby, happily burbling like a newborn babe, dotted with snow in winters.
As close to heaven as this planet gets.
NYC was the industrial age’s vision of a perfect city built solely for efficiency and profit. Actually it was a perfect nightmare.
I’m not a “people person”, but love when in the “big city” to walk about in the crowds. It’s just so different from my norm and reminiscent of when I was young and growing up.
Alas, the “crowds” ain’t quite what they used to be in NYC back in the 60s. But I get what you’re saying. When you’re in a good crowd where there’s a sense of ease and shared goodwill, it can be an invigorating even exhilarating experience, particularly in chilly weather. I’m afraid such experiences are now almost nonexistent in AINO, unfortunately.
… and then you fled. Right?
I was blessed when younger to live four years in a major Italian city, and several months each in a couple of scenic smaller cities, before the barbarian invasion. For work and family reasons I got to spend some time in other European and Middle Eastern cities. Got to live in Austin and Los Angeles, too. I love big cities that are both organic and authentically native. For example a McDonald’s in Rome or Paris is disgusting as are cosmopolitans in Austin that think themselves better than the local country people and scorn the local accent. Roma autentica, Paris vraie,… Read more »
‘I can build a fence, cut firewood, plant an orchard and go to church alongside folks with a fortune or next to nothing.’
Delightful. Cheers.