I’ve spent this past week (actually these past two weeks intermittently) helping my brother build his first PC1, which was much harder than I anticipated. I was scared we would break something or that the final build wouldn’t boot. Long story short, all of my fears actually came true and we had to replace some parts. That’s why the whole process took two weeks.

It was all worth it, though, because we saved a lot by going self-built and the specs are quite impressive for the price. We could’ve probably gotten the same GPU, CPU, and RAM on slightly higher price tag, but prebuilts usually cheap out on other less marketable parts like the motherboard or the case.

While this project took up most of my energy and I was actually trying to relax during the Easter break, I still wanted to be entertained. I downloaded a couple of very interesting papers about oligarchy to help me understand it a bit better. We never did anything about it at school, other than my Latin teacher explaining the difference between oligarchy and aristocracy in the ancient philosophy block (in Latin) focusing on state theory. It was all very superficial and high level and I was craving more.

I might write about what I learned once I’m done gathering the information I needed to know. I’m not reading them in full, just selectively. Some of them are just too long, too broad, or cover things I’m not interested in. If you’re interested, these are the papers:

  • Beyond Oligarchy (Ford and Pepinsky, 2014)
  • Oligarchy or Elite Democracy? Aristotle and Modern Representative Government (Barker, 2013)
  • Wealth and Power (Bennett et al., 2023)

  1. It’s not his first PC ever, just his first time building one (and mine, too). ↩︎