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Lodge 49 S01E07 The Solemn Duty of the Squire

The Alchemical Magnum Opus says it has seven phases …but then says Fermentation has two sub phases, which sounds like it ups it to eight to me.

This is the Putrefaction sub phase of Fermentation, where impurities are shed by vermin and rot feeding on them, like how the grape rots in the vat. This rot looks bad and smell awful as the impurities are expelled, but will eventually leave behind purified clear wine, which will then be Fermentation’s Spiritization (as in wine spirits) phase. And for personal development, the rot will first consume our bad habits and limitations as we shed them, making way for new inspiration in a man from higher spheres. Except who is that man? Avery the Alchemist, or Jocelyn the Emissary and bookkeeper? Jocelyn’s French origin name means “of the Goth tribe”, the guys who sacked Rome, so Jocelyn is not here to build things (nor does he think much of the lodge building after sleeping in a dirty post-lube sex bed surrounded by mice, cockroaches, and old Reader’s Digest books). This Fermentation phase where rot is a necessary part of personal transformation is also known as the “Dark night of the soul”.

Alchemists believe fermentation is improved by adding the Sun and the Moon. Is Blaise the Sun and Avery the Moon, their lying together increasing the putrefaction? (and calling out all sorts of vermin?)

Spagyric is just another word for "alchemical", and the herb Dud drinks dissolved in water isn't written on the outside envelope; it's just an infinity sign, a triangle, Solomon's seal, and a fourth symbol. Decknamen means "code name". To keep their ciphers from being easily broken, alchemists would use lists of 24 possible names each for iron, copper, tin, lead, mercury, and sal-ammoniac, rotating between the words.

Bunco Night happens on the third Friday of each month, making Jocelyn's day going through lodge records Friday July 18, 2003. Dud gets kicked out of Ernie's place Saturday, the same day Liz has a dinner date. Ernie and Dud are reunited, and Ernie finds Gary, most likely on Monday July 21st 2003, exactly one month after Dud's awkward speech when he first entered the lodge.

Now we know why Liz thought Dud’s restraining order was “the best kind”. It’s purged from his record after three years. Her high school prank was a felony, which stays on her record for life if she was 18 or older when it happened. However there are legal ways to clear a criminal record, and with good behavior it would be easy to expunge her record several years after the fact. CA has also passed the Fair Chance Act restricting employers from using criminal background checks …in 2017, making it a bit late for 2003 era Liz.

Liz has yet to remove the broken mirror or throw out the skeleton of her coffee table. Most people would have dumped them and replaced them with something from Ikea already.

"Me? Yes, YOU!" by Janet Price (complete with obligatory Steve Jobs black turtleneck) has some interesting subtitles: "Eclipse the Darkness, Live Your Paradox" and "Chthonic Strategies for Abolishing Failure and Establishing Dominance". The promoters have now added the cover to Twitter. that adds "CEO of Omni Capital Partners|Food Service West, recruiter, and motivator."

The Lynx play drunken (fermenting?) softball with the Signal Hill Mud Men. Signal Hill is an odd city that is entirely surrounded by Long Beach, but was incorporated by the residents to avoid Long Beach oil taxes, which was important since Signal Hill Petroleum is still producing over a million gallons of oil annually. That's a lot of pump dragons! Unfortunately the cost per barrel in 2003 has dipped.

Overly competitive Scott slides into home to steal a run ...while the catcher ignores the ball and steals himself another beer from the Lynx keg. They're on the same field, playing two different games.

Grand Lodges most definitely do not own and can not sell the buildings of their member lodges out from under their members. Ownership brings too much liability in being sued any time anyone in the world slips of a sidewalk at a member lodge. Instead lodge buildings are owned by the local fraternal Hall Association, and Grand Lodges grant charters to their member lodges, generally for a $200 or so initial fee to start, after which the chartered lodge pays an annual per capita (or “per head”) fee to the Grand Lodge for every member. For 2013, the Elks “per cap” fee was $16 per member , so with slightly under a million members their Grand Lodge annual budget is slightly under $16 million per year. Most of the fraternities have annual “per caps” of $35 or less per member to their Grand Lodge. There is a whole annual battle between every Grand Lodge and its member lodges about paying the per capita fee, mostly from members being tardy in paying their lodge dues but Grand Lodge wanting to be paid at the beginning of the new fiscal year.

A Grand Lodge can choose to suspend the charter of a lodge, but that doesn’t sell the building, it just means the lodge can’t be opened to members of the fraternity. This loss of income to the lodge Tavern and lost rental fees is generally enough to get the local lodge officers to fix the problem.

Why is having a $300,000 mortgage a big deal? All they need to do is refinance the loan. Problem solved. Banks practically leap at you to get you to refinance with them.

Dud could have started paying off his car loan with his $450. Instead he redeems Ernie's flat screen TV trying to do his friend a favor. Some people feel that Dud could have bought Ernie a new flat screen for less than the $900 Burt charged him, but in 2003 the new flat screen technology was all priced above $2000.

Could Larry have mortgaged the lodge on his own? Real lodges have all sorts of legal protections and procedural checks and balances precisely against this kind of thing happening, but the largest one is a motion would need to be made and approved at the monthly business meeting and recorded by the Secretary (or "Scribe" for the Lynx, which is Connie) for it to be a legal motion. Since it wasn’t, the Chinese Banks can only sue Larry’s estate for the money based on his forgery –which doesn’t have much left.

To make sure the quorum requirement is met, most lodges bribe their members with a meal before the business meeting. An ideal business meeting is short, and consists of presenting and reviewing the bills against the lodge and quickly voting to pay the bills without controversy. The real risk to lodges is embezzling by the employees and the Treasurer, but that isn’t interesting, it’s just a sad story told many times over.

Eugine Mar/Corporate’s reading stack is: Das Kapital, a book similar to Connie’s proposed story series on unemployment written in the 1930s called The Road to Wigan Pier, and a book about Harwood Fitz Merrill written by “George Howland” that probably comes close to The Afghan Diaries of Captain George Felix Howland. But given their position on his desk to impress visitors, it is unlikely that Eugine has even cracked the cover of his copy of Das Kapital, otherwise he know this particular edition, while it has a pretty cover, is entirely written in German.

The equations on the white board are basic physics projectile equations related to the trebuchets (not catapults) they are building. Since they're using them indoors, the trebuchet's projectile parabola path's apogee has to stay below the ceiling height if they want maximum horizontal distance.

Building trebuchets is fun. Building them big became a trend after Survival Research Lab’s 1989 performance piece Illusions of Shameless Abundance had one large enough to hurl a burning piano, and the really big ones continue to pop up at Burning Man from year to year. Here former Orbis staff are going all Makers Faire to hurl obsolete PC towers for their game Death From Above. Given they’re drinking Blind Fox beer, their aim is probably not very good. If it were the current year, they'd instead be networking the scrap PCs into a server farm to mine for the cryptocurrency that Blase won't accept.

It's a problem, but it doesn't have a solution, at least not in the proper sense.

Unfortunately this is a complex question despite how simply it can be worded. If you asked: What would it take to make a Dyson Sphere, you get papers on papers of the different technologies that require this level of tech. We can generally simplify these things down to sentences, "you need X and Y and Z." But with questions like this, you're talking about a natural force, humans, and trying to act against their nature, which doesn't work. Humans can't actually go agaisnt their nature, sure, to some degree we can repress ourselves, but anyone in psychology will tell you the same story, it rebounds, and hard.

Just as an experiment, try believing that something you think is absolutely immoral is moral. You can't. It's a part of you. This part is what is known as your personality, or the way you interoperate and solve problems. There can be change, radical events in people's lives can result in radical shifts in views, but only within a certain limitation. Personality is at least 50%, if not more, based in your genes, it's hard coded, you can't change it without changing the hardware. We do find solutions to problems as we get older and make additions, but you can't change the base structure you're working with. Think of it like having a car, you can put new kinds of fuel in it, you can give it new paint, but you can't really change it's handling or how fast it can go without changing the physical nature of the car.

Why is all this relevant? It's because the problem isn't just humans not having jobs, it's humans not having a purpose. This is devastating for people. Purpose is a part of that naturally built structure because we're made to solve problems that matter. Solving trivial problems, without actually going anywhere, will lead to depression, people will develop chronic pain on their own, they can develop other forms of symptoms and even get sick. Most people do not think about this aspect, and only think about money, how will people feed themselves. This is because we have that as a problem, we're programed to view the world through the problems that are present and change, slowly, what new problems are as they present themselves or show themselves through humanities unique ability to imagine the future.

The top comment so far on this thread, made by u/Charles07v, ignores these problems entirely. Comments like these forget that humans are limited. Machines that simulate muscle and mind, and can do jobs better than humans, will replace humans. We are not special, we are just very advanced, there's a difference. We have the capability through collective knowledge, see the first paragraph with the Dyson Sphere, to layer tech to make ever more complicated tools and systems. Eventually we will find something that can replace us, to where we won't be needed, and there is nothing that can stop that from happening.

>I’m sure there were people panicking over the rise of automobiles over horse carts too.
>>And electricity, and oil from the ground, and the printing press, etc...

And then Chernobyl happened. Nagasaki, plastics were invented, green house gases. Examples like this laid out by both u/qdobaisbetter and u/jeffreyhamby are comments made from the result of not experiencing the problem. For most people, we do not think of not having anything to do because there is nothing to be done, but there is nothing to do because we don't want to. We can always choose to get something done, get a new job, work towards making more, get a better education, and it amounts to something: the collective knowledge and effort of humanity. But in a world where these things don't matter, where your effort is drops of water in the vastness of the universe, it brings up a new problem. Songs like Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" and even the saying "just a cog in a machine" highlight some peoples anxiety with this, we, in part, are already seeing the symptoms of this. Effort to contribute to society, meaningfully, is becoming harder and harder because of how much you have to know to even get started, or how specialized the jobs are becoming.

We can't expect humans to take the problem seriously until they experience it. And practically speaking there is no solution. We cannot prevent progress, even if it means horrible conditions.

But why libertarianism? The framework going into this problem will determine how our future is laid out, just as Christianity laid out the foundations for our modern democratic republic. Libertarianism ensures that any authoritarian solution would be limited, and maybe brilliant minds who engage in this problem, experiencing the symptoms the problem is causing, can find a proper solution. Do not dismiss this, it is real, and we are woefully under prepared for the transition to a post scarcity society.

> liberals give far less to charity than those who want tax cuts

I acknowledge that that is true. Everyone who gives generously to charity is admirable, including people who want tax cuts. Nevertheless, this doesn't change the fact that taxing everyone to pay for programs increases spending on the poor compared to relying on charity.

> in many cases the increased taxes are used to fund programs that create more poverty. Programs like The War on Drugs...

That is also true. Sometimes people are wrong about what programs will work. When that happens we should reform the bad programs. With respect to the War on Drugs, I'd guess that the main remaining stronghold of support for long prison sentences and lots of police powers is among a subset of people who also want tax cuts.

I think that, all told, including programs that don't work and programs that have bad consequences, the poor are better off with tax-funded government programs than without. I don't have slam-dunk evidence, but there are two mental models I have that inform my opinion here. First, think back to when there was genuinely small government in the West: this is the world of poverty that Dickens (and Orwell in an underrated book) wrote about, where you were totally f*ked if you were poor. Second, think of Western Europe now: they have unproductive workers just like we do (and also screwed up labor laws that keep unemployment too high), but they don't have the terrible health, infant mortality, and other poverty-associated outcomes we do. (We're a great country, but we should score better on these measures given how rich we are.) They accomplish this by taxing people and paying for transportation, education, and housing for people. Even if you don't want to go full-Sweden (I sure don't), this is at least evidence that tax-funded antipoverty programs are better for fighting poverty than tax cuts are.

> I'd like to see some data that backs up your claim that people don't increase giving when they have more available to give.

I don't believe that is true and I never said it. I think if you cut people's taxes by $10 they will give some amount that is greater than zero and lower than $10 to charity. My wild guess is $5 for rich people and $2 for most people. I'm too lazy to look up actual numbers, so I'm happy to be educated here. But if we freed up the money for that tax cut by cutting spending on social programs by $10, you get a net* result of lower spending on the poor (including both government and private charity spending). That's all I'm saying.