Tech Company Collusion?

 Apparently the "AI" bubble soaked up every available hardware component, including GPUs, memory, FPGAs. The company I work for probably won't be able to build new hardware this year. To me it seems likely that the big tech companies, like Microsoft and Amazon just bought all the hardware inventory to force people to use their trash cloud services. They apparently want a "hardware as a service" model---that can't work.

Will the government intervene and launch a RICO case against them? Very unlikely.

It seems like a case of terminal malinvestment.

In prior eras, the tech companies colluded against their workforce to keep wages low.

The Pyramid People Part 2

One of the things that got me thinking about "the pyramid people" is the state of Washington legislature is debating laws that will prevent local jurisdictions from cleaning up homeless camps. It's like they want to compete with other west coast cities to attract crackheads. Wild. I thought that was the ultimate left wing retard move.

I traveled to LA several times over the past couple of years. When I'm there, I stay in a hotel in a "nice" part of that town, then walk to the office about 1 mile away. I like to try to get some exercise while I'm there and that little walk sort of counts. There's about 80,000 homeless, supposedly in LA county. There are several along that walk. Sometimes there are screaming tweakers. Sometimes there's human waste on the sidewalk. Sometimes there are needles laying around. People in etremis are pretty gross. I'm not sure why anyone would encourage that. It's completely demented.

Normal people live in that neighborhood in small, packed together homes that cost $1M. They walk their dogs in the morning, etc... It would be really annoying to constantly deal with the homeless people on top of the traffic, concrete everywhere, etc... All for "nice weather"? Fuck that.

I probably spent almost two months solid now in LA, walking along that sidewalk and so far I saw two birds. One hummingbird on some flowery shrub plant and a raven, I think. That's it. I saw at least 20 homeless people along those sidewalks.

The dystopian sci fi movies of the 80s and early 90s envisioned a future corporate dystopia... In many cases it was a "leftist" critique. Holywood's lefty often jewish writers and directors thought the corporate dystopia of the 2000s would be dominated by "right wing" WASPy white dudes. Nope: Jews, gays, women, not-white people are currently running the dystopia corporate empire thingy. The pyramid system seems very lefty oriented at the moment. I think it just adapts to conditions, though. The white majority countries have a lot of wealth to steal, so they divide and conquer.

The divide and conquer scenario, though, seems to create total dysfunction and overall "wealth" destruction rather than extraction, as far as wealth equates to order and productivity. For example, LA is so inept and corrupt that very few homes in the Palisades have been rebuilt after the fires a year ago. It doesn't seem likely they'll rebuild. The fire department chief was a lesbian--I think that was her main qualification--but was otherwise inept. She was inept or corrupt, so many homes burned down.

LA completely flipped out over COVID, too. I think that was a good litmus test for how many dopes live in an area or work someplace or run some entity. That whole thing was the ultimate Pyramid power play. The guy who is the CEO of Pfizer worked at a company that made drugs for animals and developed a strategy to force mass vaccination of horses in Australia that was identical to the one used on dumb fuck people all over the world. 

Anyway, flaky dopes run institutions in these pyramid people enclaves where religious affiliation, essentially, is more important than skills. That permeates the entirety of the city. During the reformation in Europe, people sorted into protestant and catholic states as time went by. The same thing is apparently happening in the US. The pyramid religion: gayness+woman ideas is slowly taking over megolopolis regions in the US. Their main thing is "belief" in gayness instead of competency.

Now throw in a huge major disaster in LA--the "big one" earthquake... or in Washington state, a Tsunami. In LA, they'll have seminars on pronouns as the city burns to the ground, and academics will talk about competency being a "white privilege" thing or whatever. Loss of some major infrastructure in LA will render regions of that county uninhabitable.

Anyway, it's probably a good time for the non-pyramid regions of the US to attract competent people from the coastal regions in some low key way... if they attract too many people all at once, it tends to favor the pyramid. The state of Tennessee for example, will probably turn into Pyramid territory because Nashville is growing so rapidly. Eventually a bunch of lefty retards will run the government there.

The Pyramid People

This week, there was a big snow storm and cold temperatures across much of the US. In my area, we have maybe 24"-36" accumulated snow on the ground in spots. A bunch of "alerts" kept popping off on my phone with doom porn about snow and cold. It's weird how people have devolved into a panic/effeminate norm in just recent years of just my life. This kind of storm is a pretty common event in Northeast Ohio.

Many people were miffed that some local Sheriffs didn't declare a "snow emergency". In a "snow emergency" you can't even go on the road without getting a traffic citation, so you couldn't go to the grocery store or whatever. The reasoning of the Sheriffs is "we live in a snowy area." The roads were fine really. I'm glad I didn't have to commute in this mess, but I did normal errands through the snowy days. It's really not a big deal.

I think that split between the more practical, pragmatic people and the pyramid people will keep growing. The pyramid zones will be bad places to live.

In northeast Ohio, the winter of 2025-26 has been pretty cold and snowy so far. This winter is a break in a 10-15 year pattern of milder winter temperatures which more panic mongers attributed to "global warmaids". People don't know shit but claim perfect knowledge and foresight about almost any topic.

The long term winter snowfall average is about 110 inches per year, however, it generally doesn't accumulate on the ground the whole winter. The normal pattern is snow accumulates for maybe a couple of weeks starting in late December, then warmer weather and rain melts it, then it snows and accumulates again, then melts a couple more times through January, February, and March. The pattern of snow accumulation and melting varies quite a bit from year to year and also seems to wobble up and down in a decades or maybe centuries long cycle.

Winters from maybe 2010 until the early 2020s were generally milder than winters I grew up with in the 1970s through the early 2000s. I cross country ski, specifically go "skate skiing" in the winter as an alternative to road cycling or mountain biking. It requires well groomed trails--a park employee on a snowmobile drags a roller around to pack the snow, then uses other various implements to keep the trail in nice shape. Good ski conditions require about 18" of snowfall, very cold temperatures, and occasional new snow. A couple of warm days, just in the mid 30s, will destroy the trail. In the 90s through the early 2000s, I would be able to ski many times through a winter. Over these mild winter years, I didn't bother dragging the skis out of storage and waxing them, etc... I probably only went a couple of times over 2020-2024.

Anyway, I'm starting to see "the pyramid people" are almost entirely useless. Their life is all about opinions of scammers and partaking in scammer plans.

Zhuangzi (book)

There's a maxim that civilization climbs the hill in hobnail boots and falls off the cliff in silk slippers. Hobnail boots were the footwear of workmen and the military, i.e. masculine professions.

I think we're in the "fall off the cliff" time for western civilization, which gets increasingly effeminate, and dysfunctional with every passing decade. One example of that is happening today. There's a "named winter storm" happening right now across the US from about Iowa to Boston. I am not sure what the name is, maybe it's Fran? Anyway, the governor of Ohio declared a "state of emergency" over something that happens all the time in Ohio.

Most areas in the state have to deal with snow during the winter, so counties and towns and cities have snow removal equipment, as do households. When you know it might snow and accumulate a foot or so, it's not something to panic over here.

When I was in high school, we routinely attended class and went to extra-curricular events when conditions were much worse than today. I recall driving home one night after some activity at the high school and I was cutting tracks through 6" deep snow on the road. I realized, "Oh I better not stop and lose momentum." and just kept driving. It was no big deal. I eventually got to a plowed section and continued on to my parents.

Anyway, an interesting side effect of the chaos associated with gays and women running society is a subset of the population bails out and recreates some version of Daoist thinking. There's a book from ancient china called Zhuangzi written by a philosopher of the same name which encapsulates many of the concepts that I bumbled into, and that many others have elaborated at different places and times. In ancient Athens there were Socrates and Diogenes (who were both alive at roughly the same time). A more recent elaboration of similar concepts is in the TV series "The Prisoner".

The "building phase" of a society seems very serious, mainly because of physical difficulty. For example, when this township was being settled by white men back in the early 1800s, a family built a mill on Big Creek a few miles from my house. I ride my bike through that area all the time. During the course of building the mill, one of the young men was crushed to death. Another group of men dragged a millstone from a quarry more than 10 miles away over a rough path in the woods. All the ideas and philosophy of that time are serious and look to a future, ironically, free of such struggle.

The "collapsing phase" comes about because life is too easy, and basically the equivalent of an HR department or sociology class tries to run things for a while. At the same time, the former value and reliability based economy devolves into a bunch of scams. Only a sucker will do hard work because the whole system is loaded up with parasites. All the former carriers of meaning and value are replaced with trash and scams, like the US dollar. The scam of the gameified reality becomes all too apparent and some group of men realize they're in "the matrix" or "Plato's cave".

They realize the ultimate trickster is in their own inner world. The model of external reality presented by the brain to the "I" is false. Various conclusions about the self are faulty. Absurdism and jokes are the only valid philosophies.

"The Way" versus Ideological Retards

I was on the "Riddle of Steel" path from the time I first saw "Conan the Barbarian" back in 1982. I finally defeated the Thulsa Dooms of my internal world about 10 years ago.

In that movie, there's a moment in the climactic scene where Conan shakes of the spell (2:33 into this great clip) of Thulsa Doom's bullshit speech. That scene is extremely dense with concepts. Thulsa Doom is representative of "the pyramid" system, which bizarrely enough, is founded on "sex energy" represented by the flame and Thulsa Dooms magical scamming ability.

The Thulsa Doom cult is supposed to represent an old sex cult that continues to this day--which is also pretty gay and theatrical. It appears to control all the western governments and certainly the financial system and other key institutions. Members of the cult sometimes give a nod to their penis worship either by a name like "Shakespeare" or "Rodenberry" or they build a penis monument like the Washington penis monument. Like every cult, it's bizarre to outsiders.

Notably James Earl Jones plays both Thulsa Doom and Darth Vader-the same archetypal character in two different movies. Note the "I am your father" aspect of the speech he gives to Conan. Similarly Conan, just like Luke, start life at the fringe of the Empire. In Conan's world he's in a small village with his actual family, in some Hyperborean Eden until the Pyramid snake cult invades, kills his family and kin and enslaves him as a child. When Conan kills Thulsa Doom, he basically "resets" the circle of his life. He's back outside the pyramid system as a new child going down a new "Riddle of Steel" path.

Anyway, I finally realized "the world of man is the world of lies" about ten years ago. That was several years before the COVID bullshit onslaught hit. It was wild and scary to observe the throng get pushed into yet another cult where all those fucktards went and chanted "doom" at the feet of yet another false prophet little gnome weirdo Fauci. That was a bizarre spectacle to witness.

It's apparent, we're at the end of the "neoliberal" system and the vast pile of lies and institutions that kept it going for my whole life. It's "the pyramid" system, well the current version of it anyway. The premise of the neoliberal system is a bunch of "highly trained" "expert" managers would restructure the world economy for "maximum efficiency". Really they just looted all the equity in the western world and replaced it with funny money. Every time some corporation is sold, for example, equity vanishes into a cloud of debt.

It's falling apart like a rusted old jalopy, now. Some evidence of the rot is precious metals prices shooting to the moon and inflation in general, plus the spastic mega-theft perpetrated by the US empire overseas. Inflation is particularly bad for the pyramid, because it forces people to think for themselves and to see that the pyramid's institutions, like public schools or colleges and universities funded by student loans, are actually toxic and deadly.

Now we're at the point in the ongoing breakdown of the US economy as Jalopy where it's important to understand what happens to the cult of Thulsa Doom after Conan chops his head off? What's the mass of normies going to do when the pyramid falls apart? They won't "wake up". They'll look for a new Daddy or Mommy.

The population can be lumped into a handful of groups: poors, middle class (people who work), ruling class. The middle class is characterized by the habit of trying to make sensible choices and trying to be productive. The ruling class and poors are similar in that they have no such compulsion and suck wealth out of the productive dopes in the middle.

The middle class is subdivided in two. 20% of the productive people are Conan types: they realize the system is a scam and is predatory. 80% have no clue. Eventually the 20% chops the head off the ruling class in various ways. In the French Revolution it was literal head chopping. In that scenario it's a complete refutation of the ruling class. In other scenarios the 20% try to renegotiate their deal with the ruling class. That's happened several times in the US. There was a literal "new deal" for example that eventually was coupled with middle class nirvana in the US for decades.

In other countries and other eras, a bunch of system dropouts reboot "the way". In classical Athens, for example, Diogenes was a contemporary of Plato. Athens and Greece went Empire mode under crazy old Alexander. Diogenes ridiculed the whole thing including the official state oriented philosophical school of Plato... Diogenes thinking eventually led to stoicism which popped up as the Roman Empire was falling apart.

How Can China Do It?

I recently bought a electric wheelbarrow kit which consisted of a hub motor with tire and inner tube installed, motor controller, and some human interface gizmos. The whole thing was about $250 delivered.  On Alibaba there are numerous similar devices for roughly the same price. If you want to make some PEV of basically any configuration you could dream up, you can buy some pre-fab motors, differentials, etc... It's hard to imagine how each component could be machined, assembled, tested, packaged and shipped for $250.

It took an afternoon to install on a wheelbarrow. I did some minor metal fabrication and welding. The thing works reasonably well so far. It's far from perfect, but that's fine, in fact, for my needs "good enough" is perfect. I could build three or four versions of it in a couple of months if I really wanted to.

The low cost of useful stuff from China is perplexing from a US citizen point of view. I wonder "how can China do it?" Although I think the reality of the scenario is "How long will the US system last in its current form?" Probably not long.

Chinese companies seem to have no overhead costs, or minimal overhead costs, and that must ripple through their whole economy. I think their economy must be like the US economy of a prior era where there was just less parasitic costs.

There's enormous costs associated with parasitism in the US economy. The entire insurance industry is a parasitic cost as is the financial system in general and the corporate system is really just an extension of the financial system.

I have relatives and friends who went out of the US to get medical or dental care. The costs are a tiny fraction of equivalent procedures in the US. In the US you often can't even get a quote to do various medical procedures because the cost is totally opaque. If you go to Latin America, though, you can get various tests and procedures at a a la carte rate, and can get a quote in advance, just like you would if you took a dog to the vet's office.

Within the US, there are high cost jurisdictions, like California, or Illinois or New York. Chicago recently imposed a 15% tax on "cloud services", for example. That's a burden for the user of such services, plus the operators of those services. A user in Chicago needs to be charged a special rate and Chicago's taxing authority needs a special payment system. How long will that last? You'd have to be a retard to live in that city and state.

Anyway, I think the days of the "overhead" heavy economies like the US's current model are numbered. The EU countries are toast; they're basically an all overhead economy. It's why lefty oriented people cream their jeans about Europe. It's a fantasy land for a would be bureaucrat.

The Amish approach to reducing overhead and regulatory burden seems to be to mostly ignore it. That generally works for them, however, the state often intrudes in their affairs and wrecks their businesses from time to time.

Critter Food Cost!

 For the past few years, I've been splurging on food for birds, which turns into food for squirrels, deer, etc... I go through literal hundreds of pounds of the stuff per month in the summer months. In the winter it's not nearly as much since so many birds migrate away. Just this week, shrinkflation hit hard. The prices have been going up and up for years, especially since COVID insanity hit, but this week the cost of this stuff jumped significantly. Maybe 20% altogether as a combination of increased prices and decreased package size. The packages went from 50 pounds to 40 pounds.

I'll keep feeding the birds since I have a very low cost of living and make a good income, but still, it's pretty wild how the costs seem to keep climbing with no end in sight, but wages are stagnant. I've been buying the same mix of groceries for several years now, going back into the very early 2000s. Back then my shopping trips were maybe $35. Now, it's close to $100 for not a whole lot of stuff. A tiny bag of coffee, now is over $10.

I'm not sure how long out of control food inflation can continue in the US.