Let Me Introduce You To LPvg & ELTgd To Save The World

by Mike Levin

Sunday, May 01, 2022

Hello May! Come what may. This is month 1 of the 2 months I’ve got left at this comfortable little mountain cottage in the Poconos in the same neighborhood where I skied with my family growing up. I was a Philadelphian all my life, then I was a New Yorker for 15 years. Covid struck and I made like a shepherd and got the flock out of there.

Now my lease is up and it’s time for a change again. I honestly don’t know whether I’m going to be in the mountains for another 2 years or back on Staten Island where my kid is homeschooled. But either way, I’ve got an itch that’s been with me for the better part of my life, and it’s time to scratch it. You’re here for the scratching.

So let’s launch this site properly, with my seminal article on a topic of passion. I’ve got 2 new little acronyms for you that will change your life: LPvg and ELTgd. Of course LPvg stands for Linux, Python, vim & git as is the domain name of the site you’re on.

ELTgd stands for something whose reality is confirmed by the fact you’re here reading this. For you see, I’m an SEO (search engine optimizer) and getting you here is what I do. Making connections invisible-handedly is what I do. So, hi. Nice to meet you. You’ll be seeing me again because whatever you searched on or whatever link you followed, you will again because you did ones. So stop reading if you will, but I’ll see you soon.

Every Little Thing Gets Done. Or, ELTgd. That’s my new mantra now, Instead of ELPGD for Every Little Thing Gets Done which resonates Help God, which I’ve been toying with lately. I’m improving it to ELTgd which resonates Felt Good. Yup. When every little thing gets done, it feels good. Recently, I’ve started dispensing with a number of those little “makes all the difference” projects.

LPvg stand for Linux, Python, vim & git as anyone who follows me even a little bit probably know by now. The v and the g are lowercase because vim and git are always presented in the format of the UNIX/Linux commands they represent. Linux and Python are more commonly presented as proper nouns. I lowercase the g and the d in ELTgd just to make the acronyms pair well as a set—a strong mental model, one leading into the other, making the connection between the two and downplaying the actual effort that goes into the “getting done” part once you’ve mastered LPvg.

I’m a Jew and I’ll write God freely, but each time I do I feel it in my gut. Thing is I’d feel it if I wrote G_d or ה’ or what have you. All the same. Invoking the name of something beyond comprehension of us limited beings inside the system. It’s not blasphemy but if there is God or some super-being outside the system looking it, it may very well be grepping references to itself, curious about our striving to divinity ourselves. A lot in the Bible rings true, not on a dogmatic belief sense, but in a good, solid SciFi sense. There’s a lot of likely scenarios in there and solid channeling of human nature truisms.

So do I believe? Okay, here’s my religion. We exist. We exist in such a way that we can ask and struggle with these questions. We arrive for meaning and purpose, or at least enough reason to stay engaged in a game that seems like a whole lot of unnecessary suffering. And so I believe that the nature of life and existence is somehow tied to that very fact. Life is tragic and horrible and there is much that can crush the soul, blah, blah, shut up! Shut up and calculate. Yup, Douglas Adams probably states my worldview and religion best. We’re some kind of computer here to answer exactly the sort of questions that have always plagued humanity. And we’re mortal and we die and there’s suffering because it’s required… at least for awhile.

The unanswered question is whether that thing we sense and value as a sense of self is merely an emergent property of cohesive blobs of autonomous matter or whether, probably at the moment of conception where the 22 genes are spun like the bullets in a game of Russian Roulette, we act as a sort of antenna tuning in and becoming automated my what turns out to be the essence of who we our. Our “vibe” such as it were.

People deliberate whether there’s fundamental particles smaller than quarks. How could there not be if e=mc^2? Does that not mean that the smallest wavelength of light/energy is the universes’ pixels? And within one quanta is it not reasonable to assume there’s still some infinitely variable component that keeps popping up as a string or a vibe or a loop or whatever? It seems to me we intellectually have the whole picture and the grand unified theory of everything is just a formality.

So time is if the essence. Real or not, it’s at least a derivative commodity of great value we’re issued a bitcoin hash on the blockchain. Who cares if we’re a hologram on the surface of infinitely nested black holes and virtual realities. The fact we so fiercely feel we exist validates our very existence and makes us at least of interest to other beings possessing that quality we call consciousness. But again who cares? If such creatures don’t exist as non-terrestrial beings, it seems quite certain we’ll make them here on Earth, and we’re going to have to throw our hat in the ring with some real badasses, in a Darwinian sense. We need not be paper clips if we raise our machine children like responsible and living parents.

So RBI’s and more we’ll see in our lifetimes. To the nattering nabobs of negativism who keep proclaiming the end of the world and are currently jumping on the Gorey 2050 deadline, I give two simple counter-arguments. One: we’re still here. If your level of pessimism were correct, we’d have wiped ourselves out with atomics a lifetime ago. We didn’t. Almost coulda woulda shoulda won’t even win you a tiny stuffed animal at the carnival. Nope. We won. Pessimists are wrong. Optimists have a firmer grip on reality in their faith in human nature. Glad pessimists don’t have their finger on the button or they would be right and you wouldn’t be reading this.

The second argument is free energy around the corner. In just the next 30 years relying cycle is done. Big oil and Detroit can no longer stem the tide. A thousand points of light will be collecting a functionally infinite amount of light. Solar getting more efficient is not 30 years away. It’s a steady tic tok of incremental progress. Actual trees and plants that do it naturally are being recruited to the cause.

Tech progresses exponentially and some of it is irrepressible. What pays it’s for it? The sun! Just 3D-print more solar panels and zap the power around with forever improving batteries and superconducting material. A crossover will occur where hydroponic like tech will outpace deforestation and killer drones will cut down those who illegally cut down the irreplaceable resources of nations. In time, the Sahara Desert could be green again, such is the exponential power of tech once you plug in the functionally free energy.

Carbon in the atmosphere? No problem. Turn it back into trees in a thousand creative and world healing ways. It won’t be so hard once high schoolers can tackle the problem and at the same time earn themselves a vocation, a calling, and obsolescence-proof skills for a lifetime. The only thing keeping atmosphere-bound carbon bound is energy. Life uses energy to collect carbon. Burning once-living matter (mostly ancient gooified scale-trees) releases that carbon. Sounds like the perfect problem for humans to tackle, and we can badmouth our predecessors all we want if you really need something to bitch and gripe about.

So how does a humble single individual help move the world towards this vision? By example, of course! Have some impact as an individual, no matter how small and seemingly indirectly connected to the solution. For my part, I’m going to teach people how to have the knowing and doing of things in a way that requires no college diploma, is completely compatible with pursuing one anyway, and will give you the decisive advantage over those who only have the diploma.

I will teach you Linux, Python, vim & git. I will tackle and get done every little project. Whenever a little thing comes up that I think will improve my life and the lives of others, I will do it. I will get it done. You will know it because I am a search engine optimizer and you found me once, so you will find me again. That will be part of the effect of me getting every little thing done.