i agree about the drug thing! even beyond the connection there's a certain sense of wonder that comes with realizing that what you're doing is in no way caused by some sort of substance, so for me there's like... the primary connection, and the secondary connection to the capacity to connect with the person to begin with.

vis-a-vis your comment about personal atheism, yeah definitely. years ago, back when i used to live in ohio, i went to this dope dope soul food restaurant that was actually the cafeteria of a church. anyway i was getting a fried pork chop and greens etc. and realized that it was sunday afternoon and church was actually in session, and i opened the door and peaked through it and felt.. something? something. so like i waited there until church let out and watched all of the people come out into the cafeteria and mingle loudly and comment on the quality of the fried pork chops and greens etc. and then walk around a table that had a tablecloth and a setting on it and give it a kind of solemn look

so i watched this for a while and later asked what the deal with the table was and the woman who ran the kitchen told me that a little black boy had disappeared a few years back and they'd set the table up for him in case he ever found his way back and i thought

hmmmm. it was the first point at which i felt like maybe i was genuinely less bc of growing up outside the black church. after i started reading the post-colonial shit it kind of clicked that what that the faith in whatever had made that moment possible was and could be transformative outside of conventional religious contexts. i wanted desperately in that moment to have known that boy and to have been able to look at that table like they all did.

it all feels frustratingly half-baked for me but like, there's a radical politics of the metaphysical somewhere in there.

btw I can't really keep up with the prolific conversation about capitalism, space dicks, carbon emissions, consumerism, for-profit media markets, and china (esp china, like I don't even know how to begin to talk about china, I'm not looking forward to having ordinary conversations about china all the time and I can feel it creeping into my daily Real Life), but I probably agree w you mope and hobo about most of it

rudy I mentioned the supernatural bc over the years I've come to feel less dismissive of the I'm Not Religious I'm Spiritual crowd and willing to acknowledge that spirituality is an ill-defined and inadequately considered category of human emotional experience that is for whatever reason treated as its own distinct category separate from other forms of emotional connection. I esp think this is a problem on the left bc most perspectives I encounter fall into the category of a) feh feh feh atheism, b) I grew up catholic and am gay/trans/queer/whatever now and fuuuuuck that noise, or c) I mean I get why some marginalized groups gravitate towards it but it's still Problematic, and so anything even mildly associated with that sphere either falls into the realm of distasteful artifacts of a history of conservatism and control, socially acceptable opium for the masses, or white women who won't shut up about crystals

so that sucks, because sometimes I think the metaphysical can serve as an alternative means of social change. you've got the fukuyama-adjacent shit that gestures towards the inevitability of capitalist liberal democracies, and the idea of the market has more or less been naturalized despite its status as an historical aberration that requires considerable government intervention to maintain.

and like you think about the le guin quote about imagining a world etc. etc. and part of the reason that's difficult is bc if you take a materialist perspective then it's hard to envision an environment that is not either an iteration of or a direct response to capitalism, and imo a means of escaping this landscape is to migrate to a sort of orthogonal one in which, if we have naturalized a fundamentally unnatural concept (am avoiding the complex philosophical distinction between 'natural' and 'unnatural,' sue me), then the supernatural becomes a space of reclamation, a dimension along which even if one cannot imagine a world outside of capitalism they can at least envision an afterlife beyond that world. when you have lost the natural, as we have, perhaps surrender the natural, reject the validity of the natural, find a space in the supernatural, in spiritual traditions that have by their lack of material value remained external to the Global Economic Regime.

this is essentially about finding a language to observe and articulate the rooms that are not included in the floor plan. to be the post to their modern. we already know that shit exists; we just forgot it because a) eurbody in the club gettin' white consumers between the ages of 18 and 34, and b) someone was smart enough to put it in a time capsule and bury it.

this is abstract but so is the concept of faith (~faith~, reclaim it from #blessed my oppressed, repressed, suppressed brethren). even if you don't believe in shit -- which I don't, honestly, even tho I kind of wish I did, or could -- I have rarely encountered venues more capable of effectively excluding market logic.

ever notice thoughts form like fractals? have you had that kind of connection with someone where at times it's almost like the barrier that separates you from being two different people or beings dissolves and you'll have a conversation that rises and falls like a mandlebrot set, and a long time passes and you haven't even consciously been using words or inhabiting physical space? ever think, as you zoom back out and the room materializes around you and you realize your throat is dry, that if you focus the hardest you ever have in your life you can form concrete thoughts that represent the true, pure form of this other that you've just witnessed and communed with, but it speeds away as fast as the world returns? tell me you have please!

 
yes I too have done drugs
 
but also no I'm just teasing. in all seriousness sex is the most obvious and relatable parallel, bc it sounds like you're kind of describing a certain type of sex, or relationship to sex maybe would be a better way to describe it
 
 
outside of that, I kind of get where you're coming from, as in I think I relate to it in different terms, but it's hard to know if the differences are semantic or substantive. it's a bit difficult for me to fully relate bc it's hard to think of ideal types as ascertainable and i thus do not tend to think in terms of there being a pure, essential self. but. I have felt like me and the other person were briefly seeing the same mirage and talking about the same imagined objects and felt this profound feeling of connectedness that I really only was ever able to describe in terms of its distance from the sort of fundamental loneliness of being a person in a body.

actually I just remembered that I liked ayn rand when I was 17 and vividly recall having used the phrase 'personal responsibility' with steel at one point and getting laughed at so I'm p sure gamingw.net saved me from being a black libertarian who thinks herman cain has a lot of good ideas actually so uh

net impact officially positive

p.s. i have a french friend who when that fox news interview with some guy talking about grandparents going to work and dying for their grandchildren was vocally aghast and nobody else really knew what to tell her bc we were just all kind of used to it and she found our indifference even more horrifying than the interview itself

did anybody ever read the age of surveillance capitalism btw

also mope i find it literally impossible to engage with everything you say because any actual response i'm capable of generating requires considerable expansion and any response that addresses your points in their entirety would be 1000+ words

wrt what you're saying hobo2 I know a very, very little bit about ecological economics and it's not just that industry avoids paying for their carbon emissions but that those emissions among others things have cascading effects and the very act of calculating the externalities of industrial development is so complicated as to defy possibility some of the time. like there's this concept called ecosystem services and it's essentially conservationists trying to articulate the economic value of ecosystems by determining the value they contribute to the market, which, lol. but that's the primary means of accounting for externalities that development avoids -- treating the "value" we derive from ecosystems like a commodity that needs to be paid for even tho complex dynamical systems are impossible to assign a monetary value to but oh well it's as close as we can get (i think?? like I said I know v little)

it's good and worthy work but it's kind of depressing

yknow i’m not even certain how i feel about technological advancement. there’s this thing that happens in evo. bio. called adaptationism and it’s basically the tendency for ppl to try to come up with adaptive explanations for traits in organisms that for any number of reasons do not necessarily have any adaptive purpose whatsoever.  like AHA! this is why a giraffe has a long neck and the truth is it may have nothing to do at all with eating leaves  way above the ground or w/e

but, even so adaptive utility is a useful lens and over the course of attempting to dispel the innate sense of human exceptionalism/superiority, i’ve had to explain to students why technological advancement is not necessarily positive if like, going to the moon only occurred in the context of that point in history when we almost bombed our world into an uninhabitable rock, or like iphones existing on the basis of an economic regime that has gone far, far beyond the conditions that can sustainably support an even remotely equitable human civilization

so idk if i want technological growth. i’m not trying to be a luddite or get on some ishmael shit and be like oh well dying from minor injuries wasn’t really that bad if you think about it but i also think our definition of advancement does not and cannot exist outside of a ~*~consumer landscape~*~.  but i also do not see such growth as inevitable. idk if you’ve read anything about accelerationist politics, but i find it kind of compelling for some of the reasons you’re talking about, but then i kind of reflect on it some more and feel ambivalent

i think when you reference the disparate phenomena all being part of the same dynamic you’re actually just talking about global systems ecology or deep ecology if you’re familiar.  this has been sort of a thing with me that real scientists would laugh at bc part of what i do is agent-based modeling which is just modeling individual behavior in a given system within a given set of constraints and like, so much research in general is entirely contingent upon scale of analysis and for me this has been esp obvious in ecology when a given ecosystem has literally no boundaries but the ones we artificially set and eventually one starts to think about higher order agents and whether the behaviors of the global ecosystem as the organisms that exist within it define does not constitute some form of agent

buuuut that gets way out of my dpt and also probably way out of mainstream thinking but at that point you again return to the idea of what makes a person a person at any scale and brb lemme go to the local crystal store and work on my vibrational frequency

maybe that's the point

also tho mainstream discussions about sustainability never lead to the obvious conclusion of there's no ethical consumption under capitalism and it's not because it's taken for granted

agree completely but it makes a lot of those convos kind of fundamentally unsatisfying for me in the same way discussions about diversity and inclusion in consumer products and media does. near-sightedness/analytic myopia/inability to extricate oneself from lines of thought that have already been absorbed into a capitalist ideological structure blah blah blah

this btw is where I think one might begin to find value in the concept of the supernatural

also, never thought about the packaging thing. that fits into how I think about things so thanks for adding another brick to the wall!

also mope there's a lot to think about in that post!  gonna gloss over the crt stuff bc I think it's a much longer conversation and the framework is so esoteric and so infrequently understood that it's like impossible to talk about in any normal setting. mostly I just think people outside of academia don't seem to fully engage with it even when they're defending it. a lot of what I've read would sound crazy and threatening to normal people. even that reference to the wretched of the earth gestures towards Fanon who was a prominent influence on crt and the very first chapter is on the necessity and permissibility of straight up political violence against colonizers aaaand fuck that's more than I meant to say but the point is I don't think the public debate is v good on either side but like I said a lot of it is precisely the type of shit that conservative white ppl are justifiably terrified of
 
anyway i find myself kinda impatient with the scoffing white liberals who think disbelief about covid is exclusively a function of trumpist rhetoric. as I mentioned before i have to teach this shit and most faculty in my dpt do not have a significant understanding of the relationship between ethnic minorities and the medical establishment and why black people and low income people display high degrees of mistrust of any information coming from medical institutions.  doctors are like #3 on the list of parties black people have been fucked over by after police and banks
 
I have a lot to say about the education stuff but it's complicated so nah

idk man I'm so disillusioned about technocrats that I can kind of understand the anti-intellectual shit. on the one hand getting to the point of, like, the khmer rouge is disastrous, but I also think that intellectualism is often wielded as a cudgel against ppl with less education and as a means of delegitimizing their ideas/excluding them from conversation, and that a lot of intellectuals -- even those on the left -- have absolutely no fucking idea what they're talking about and waste too much time on navel-gazing abstractions of social dynamics, and I even like doing that shit too.  I get frustrated with people who are anti-book learnin' but also v frustrated with the people who look at them and are like ugh unwashed masses or, worst of all, pay lip service to The People while still displaying obvious disdain for the actual individuals that comprise The People once they realize how non-academic they are

I read the wretched of the earth a while back and he talks a bit about intellectuals in the colonized population being kind of suspect bc even after the colonizers have left, the sophisticated natives have internalized an ideology that is functionally constructed in support of their colonizers.  intellectualism for them was a means of using the educated subset of the domestic pop. to launder what are p clearly intellectual traditions that originate in a sharply ethnocentric european context.

p.s. yeah i stan ksr real hardcore but mostly silently and in this case only bc he’s explicitly relevant to the convo. he published ministry for the future last year and i got some friends of mine to read it together, with moderate success. as far as “cli-fi” goes it’s the high water mark and touches on a lot of stuff you and i are talking about rudy about capitalism and land management and alteration and different models of sustainability and their relative effectiveness and all sorts of other dry policy shit and stuff about glaciology etc. it’s technically a novel but it’s not really about ppl as characters. it’s a trip and it’s made me more invested in the intersection between capital and conservation/curation movements.

also I feel v ambivalent about things like rooftop gardens and Conscious Living bc I think it often obscures or otherwise diminishes the fundamental and decisive role global economic development plays and that it can kind of placate peoples' anxieties in detrimental ways in the same way reading white guilt or something instead of considering police as an extension of a repressive state can be. like I don't give a shit if your floor is made of the bottoms of discarded beer bottles and actually think its actively distracting bc its not scalable and requires some initial quantity of capital that is so uncommon that for our purposes it would need to be excluded from the equation in which case all this shit immediately becomes nonviable

he also wrote the years of rice and salt which spends a considerable portion of its time attempting to reconcile the islamic golden age with the more repressive elements of contemporary islam and is a great alternate history novel that centers eastern and middle-eastern societies and ideas and history so there’s also that!! it had some good stuff in it about feminist readings of the quran and the ways they could potentially allow for a different form of or relationship to islam

and rudy yea!!!  i struggle with a lot of the popular conception of and conversation around sustainability. this occurs in my department and i generally avoid convos about the barriers to the generalizability of that sort of behavior and also why a lot of people they think should Care More don’t give a shit and probably shouldn’t give a shit and individual behaviors are meaningless in any event unless you consider their value as political signals and in any other event it strikes me as similar to arguments that europe had moved past slavery before the US did despite its entire early industrial sector being dependent upon cotton exports

like ~there is no ethical consumption under capitalism~ so i get frustrated when the conversations occur without an acknowledgement that even sustainable models of development generally cannot be disentangled from far less sustainable areas of a market economy and that maybe dumb poor people and minorities don’t give a shit about the environment bc you literally stole it from them and they have so significant investment in land that is mostly owned by you. last year i was trying to leverage floydian white guilt into developing a collab course between my department and africana studies that would be about black ppl and their relationship to nature bc i think it’s a lot more complicated than a lot of people in those circles understand. anyway that went nowhere but i’m trying to get a piece about this published so we’ll see!!

like even in the same convo when she was talking about laws it was v clear that her thoughts on the subject were (understandably) constrained by the environments she’d been directly exposed to: mostly affluent suburbs.  it gets really condescending and judgmental and explicitly and obliviously classist. it’s fucking exhausting and they say they want Diversity so that their perspectives can be expanded but they’re often genuinely intransigent and confused when you actually interrogate any premise derived from being white and making a six figure income

It’s wierd; usually I come in through rural Louisiana but I just take in the kind of makeup and layout of the towns and more densely populated living spaces themselves. The winding roads and disjointed suburbs and businesses kind of stacked upon each other. Big stacks pumping smoke and small, fucked up; makeshift marinas along the river.

yeah, the half of my family that isn’t nigerian comes from rural w.v. and i can sort of get where you’re coming from because it’s what the state starts to look like when you’re transitioning out of rural places and into the outer suburbs and it starts to feel like what I imagine tampa is like. i went to pick up a record console a few years back and it was in the middle of nowhere and i realized that i could actually probably live in out of the way areas p easily, and i can handle urban settings well too, but the suburb/exurb parts immediately prompt a sense of ennui

tbh tho i am 100% down with the idea of making do in the presence of a sinkhole. i’m not romanticizing it but esp coming from the rust belt there’s something of profound value and respect for me in being able to build a life among the bones of what was promised to you. ~rust belt gothic~ and all that

btw the tree thing both a) is funny, and b) reminds me of discussions around what constitutes personhood. i got into it through the convo about the delineation between the natural and the man-made, but it’s a really dope area of thought, especially when you consider organisms like clonal colonies, e.g., pando. astra taylor wrote democracy may not exist but we’ll miss it when it’s gone which is a great book and spends a lot of time considering who and what gets to be a stakeholder in society, and specifically references trees

oh man i love walzer! i read him at the same time as i was reading rawls and nozik and found his account of political and economic life considerably more compelling than either, and certainly more useful than a lot of the continental shit i’ve gotten into in recent years (except agamben. has anyone read agamben?). altho i've revisited rawls in the past couple of years when trying to develop a sort of ontology of progress as we understand it, mostly bc it gets conflated with what amounts to standard of living stuff, e.g., well at least the peasants have big screen TVs now, and i think that obscures the fact that justice is not necessarily based on the distribution of resources. rawls seem to have displayed a degree of ambivalence on the matter, but leaned towards resourcist views. if u go into more contemporary discussion of his ideas, e.g., nussbaum, you start getting more pushback against the idea that an ugg on your face is any less unjust than a jackboot. walzer was still probably the most influential thinker for me tho and there existing different domains for what constitutes a just distribution of resources, material or otherwise, is still mostly how i think about things.

this actually lead to a lot of reading on my part about different theories of currency and how its intrinsic fungibility allowed for all sorts of weird shit that’s probably not socially ideal but can’t really be mitigated unless one simply limits the spaces in which money is a meaningful means (lol) of acquisition. this eventually culminated in me considering the absurdity of transitive valuation by calculating approx. how many grains of rice it would take to buy a lamborghini, where the cost of rice is pegged to the median cost of a pound of rice in the US, and the # of grains in a pound of rice was just pulled from some source that i think calculated the average size of a grain of rice and the volume of a container that would hold a pound of rice. the lambo was just the median cost of lambos in general for the past... decade i think? i was too lazy to go back further bc i didn’t want to get into the used market or have to account for inflation. anyway the answer is about 12.5 billion. a lamborghini costs, on average, 12,500,000,000 grains of rice. i'm not sure how i feel about "how much rice equals a laborghini?" being a perfectly valid question. so, thanks walzer!!!

anyway yeah the politics of bioenergetics stuff is too long or w/e, and a lot of my thoughts on it are pretty young. if you're into leftist sci-fi you should check out the mars trilogy by ksr; he talks about the most basic unit of currency, and the only truly egalitarian one, being the kcal and there’s some writing about conceptualizing value through energy flows. that's getting into a really radical political space tho. has anyone read any of the laboria cuboniks/xenofeminism stuff? or like, meta-modernism, or the politics of the supernatural? i have like two people to talk about this with and they're both v busy when i'm not! i still talk to darkwhite/idiot_kid from old gw about mark fisher and stuff, though. if you're into it i'd legit love to talk about Nature as construct, and how that intersects with anthropogenic alteration of the Environment. my ex-gf-current-roommate has a lot of strong feelings about lawns, and landscaping.

and yeah idk, they can talk to each other but one of the points of collaboration is that you very often have an interest in projects that you in no way have the means to do, and often it entails enlisting ppl whose skillset you only barely understand. these dudes go to seminars and stuff so they can talk to each other but academics in general are pretty myopic in their interests/expertise. it’s kinda the point of interdisciplinarity too (that and nobody knows how to use databases and it’s impossible to find ppl in other fields doing the same research. once i saw someone in a social science essentially rediscover calculus and somehow get published).

teaching is good, btw; you should do it! i genuinely enjoy it. but also my job is doing exactly what tucker carlson tells white folks i'm doing to our youth so ofc i do. currently procrastinating on course design tbh. get at me if you wanna shit on charles murray or talk about fascists’ somewhat successful deployment of "human biodiversity" as part of an attempt to legitimize fundamentally racist ideas!!! god i'm so lonely. not really but it gets a little boring writing in a journal and then filing it away under n for nobody gives a shit but you jeff and my students are often p into but are also… 22. my friends are super into it but adults can only really kick it once every week or two. sry this is rambly and i genuinely don’t wanna sound like i’m word-dropping but it would be cool to chat if u(’s guys) have ideas

ps i response to the data question i'm a theory scumbag and have never worked w/ any data whatsoever. also, yeah, white insulated classism, misogyny, etc. etc. your experience is accurate, tho I've been lucky to find more sincere ppl than self-aggrandizing. tho its complicated bc certain groups of people aren't going to automatically get credit for the work they do and they have to be their own advocates and that can often read as vanity

Would you say it’s a combination of some sort of trauma or regret over your past self?

I mostly just think it was kind of a waste of time and wish I hadn't needed to extensively participate in what was in retrospect kind of a gross internet community to reach some relation of self. I'm in a good place now, but I was dumb and ruined all my relationships for years after I left here, and I can specifically attribute a lot of it to ways of being a dude on the internet that I just kinda uncritically carried over into my real life. blech. blech. 

sometimes I remember esiann if only because her name was excerpted from patty mayonnaise from doug spelled backwards, and I can't even begin to understand how one would reach such a decision. also as it turns out I don't have issues with gluten, I just had (read: have) what is apparently moderately severe IBS. still tho, having a Completely Fucked Stomach is v relatable. I don't remember anything about you super clearly except that you were talking with someone about Kate bush before I knew who that was and I'll sometimes wish I could remember the conversation.
 
what did you end up doing? i think it's kind of impossible not to romanticize academia unless your opinion is that it's kind of terrible. I used to think finding some tenure track faculty position would be really cool, but as an institution, it's so grossly exploitative and hostile to people working in it that it's hard to imagine actually staying in it. part of this is the cynicism that comes from being a negro in a white people department/field, and it's esp. bad for minorities. idk, I'm ambivalent but leaning towards the negative. I love that I get to think about things I think are interesting for a living, but also think it means something that nobody's called a polymath anymore; hyper-specialization ends up obscuring a lot of the beauty of thought, imo.
 
it also means that in practice you frequently have nobody around to talk about your interests with, either. the guy across the hall does phylogenetic shit, the next two do theoretical population genetics, the people at the other end of the floor do conservation economics, the people downstairs do gut microbiomes in various species of beetles, the person upstairs does I don't even know... probably something about nitrogen cycles in the soil (this is actually really cool bc you start getting into world systems ecology and like bioenergetics and some really interesting sociopolitical territory that nobody in my department wants to talk about even a little bit!!)? the people across the street do invasion biology and some shit about botany and moss that I never paid enough attention to to remember, and I do mathematical models of sociocultural evolution. none of us have any idea what anybody else is talking about beyond some baseline education in evolutionary biology. it's kind of worse than it was before because you'd expect it to be a space for Enlightened Discussion.  sometimes we get to argue about the ethics and implicit construction of ~the other~ in invasion biology, tho, and I've gotten pretty into some philosophy of science stuff.

it's like... have you ever been at a party and talking with someone about music and you realize that despite both of you being into indie/alternative/whatever the fuck, neither of you have ever heard of any of the same bands? like you just keep naming them and neither of you recognize any of them at all? it's like that. like, it's exactly like that. ahhh!!!!

but you should still got to grad school someday if you want!!! most other people around me seem like they're happy fine. or just join a book club or an obscure subreddit. imo it's been easier to find Your People over the pandemic in some ways just because the barrier to interaction via zoom is essentially nonexistent and people are now used to navigating relationships through video chatting.

I still write too much, tho. years of education have still left me in a place where I have to go through repeated rounds of edits for even, like, an important email.
 

I'm joking, I'm joking! I'm jealous. Do you remember the general time period you were an active member, waitress? there were certainly a lot of awful things from the real old days. lotsa prolly prot-incels on the internet at the time, but I also think there were things of value from then as well.

I think I was probably extremely active from about 2003 to 2010? after that, not so much. I definitely ditched the whole admin thing towards the very end, and I feel like that was around 2009 or so. I think by then I was just aging out of the place, and a lot of people I used to talk to had moved on as well. I also just like... didn't want to be the internet persona headphonics, so I spent a number of years avoiding any socializing in internet communities whatsoever. it was like a cleanse. I remember catamites showing up and being way too cool for anyone else here, and after that other people started coming around and it seemed like a cooler place, but I was already gone so I mostly just felt good about the community developing into something better and more interesting and considerably stranger. I didn't feel like I had any real place in it, but I thought that the people who did were probably a lot less terrible than I was. unlike other members I feel like this place so consistently incentivized sneering critiques of ________ that it actively stifled my ability to think creatively. I think that probably changed a lot after I left tho

but yeah, what I remember most at this point was the incel-adjacent shit. it seems obvious in hindsight. there was a lot of dope shit, though; I'm not trying to say there wasn't. I learned to love video games and began developing a critical lens for art in general here, I had friends and a place to kick it. I've spent a large majority of my life being incredibly certain I don't entirely belong in the room I'm in, and that's fine, but this was one of two places where I was able to feel like I was in the right room, even if I'm embarrassed about it.

maybe the most important thing is that this place left me discontent with my real life friendships and I think it taught me to expect more from connections off the internet, and to try to feel less hostility towards strangers because they didn't get me or whatever. also, steel dying was of the most important points in my early adulthood. I remember sitting around finding it strange that I couldn't talk to him and eventually coming to terms with the fact that it was such a waste to feel ashamed of loving people and of loving other men and of refusing to accept the vulnerability that came with that. so the place was toxic, but I think I came away from it with a better sense of how my anxieties and insecurities about all that stuff had ultimately been the cause of my needing this community to begin with, and that paradoxically the community itself was probably the biggest source of loneliness. so I guess you could say the ~most important lesson~ that I learned here was that I should leave immediately

so all of that was cool, but I can't bring myself to feel any nostalgia, like, at all. even with everything I said above, I remember the doxxing and borderline-hate speech and rampant misogyny and the actual child pornography the most vividly. it's hard for me to talk about that shit with people while still being able to credibly articulate any positive impact being here could have had, and at a certain point you kinda start to understand where they're coming from. I'm glad other people don't necessarily feel the same, though

didn't you buy a camaro once instead of investing in government bonds