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The Tralfamadorians, according to Salo, manufactured each other.
No one knew for certain how the first machine had come into being.
The legend was this: Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines.
They weren’t dependable.
They weren’t efficient.
They weren’t predictable.
They weren’t durable.
And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.
These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was.
And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.
And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it.
This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes.
But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.
So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.
And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.
The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all.
The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.
And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying.
So they turned that job over to the machines, too.
And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
Through decades of corporate greed, production has become almost entirely separated from capital, meaning that executives (and higher-ups) are no longer able to understand the nature of the businesses they are growing.
By not actively participating in the creation of the labor that enriches them, they are unable to truly understand trends within their business, because they’re only aware of how it works on the most distant level.
And because they do not participate, they do not appreciate *profit* — they only appreciate *more profit than they previously had.*
Absentee Capitalism
Ed Zitron
this is how you would use it with a Python script. We first define the match:
```yaml
- trigger: ":pyscript"
replace: "{{output}}"
vars:
- name: myvar
type: echo
params:
echo: "my variable"
- name: output
type: script
params:
args:
- python
- /path/to/your/script.py
```
And then, inside the script:
```python
/path/to/your/script.py
import osmyvar = os.environ['ESPANSO_MYVAR']# Do whatever you want with the myvar variable
```
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