Charlie Kirk Assassination

A few years ago I read about historian Peter Turchin's theory about "elite overproduction" and how that predicts political and economic turmoil. In a nutshell, he came up with ways to quantify elite overproduction, like the per capita law school students, or elite university students. When that metric spikes, there's major trouble ahead.

I don't really know anything about Charlie Kirk. I tuned out of the "mainstream" alt-media during the first Trump election. It's a pretty obviously controlled group, and the so called individuals like Kirk, were really some type of minion, typically of some Zionist puppet master and pushed typical propaganda.

He was killed by somebody and some convenient divide and conquer propaganda artifacts were left at the scene as "evidence" like the 9/11 hijacker passports were found in the world trade center rubble. It seems like some force wants the dopey "left" and "right" in the US to escalate conflict, but I doubt it will work. People don't really care that much, well, the people who do are all too old to really get all that fired up about it.

Maybe it will serve as some kind of pretext for another round of bullshit, like 9/11 helped ruin air travel.  

Nepalese are Slaughtering their Government

Every government in the world is a collection of all the worst people in the jurisdiction. Corruption is commonplace. It's heartening to see the people in Nepal trashing their government and government officials. Hopefully they'll do something sensible in the aftermath, but they probably won't. 

Three Eras of Tech

We're in the third era or phase of the tech industry.

Phase one was the CPU phase. That was in the 70s and 80s maybe into the early 90s. A couple of companies packaged up CPUs and microcontrollers so it was cheap and easy to put them everywhere. One great example of that is electronic fuel injection: those systems replaced a clunky mechanical control system for a car engine with a computer, sensors, and a electro-mechanical devices. It improved fuel economy and reduced tail-pipe emissions, plus it made cars more reliable. That was a huge improvement. The same sort of thing happened in hundreds of other applications. The real return on investment in the CPU phase was large.

Phase two was the networking era which was in the 90s til today. In that era we got the internet, and data centers, and wireless networks, etc... In that era the newer tech replaced and cannibalized older methods of moving information around. The internet replaced newspapers, radio, TV for example. The real return on investment is much lower than phase one, and the "real world", quality of life improvements are murkier. Social media for example, is probably a net negative.

Phase three is the datacenter AI era. I think the tech industry believes "AI" models are like CPUs in Phase one, it's a universal tool. However, unlike a CPU that consumes a few watts of power to operate, some AI model might take kilowatts to operate to do something that's kind of useless. The tech industry wants to proliferate the AI models, but there's not enough resources to do it.

Unfortunately, as each phase of the tech industry unfolded there's been a corresponding move by governments and similar institutions toward an autocratic model in the western world. A corporation or new technology doesn't really have to provide a real benefit to customers or anyone, it just enacts a plan. The government will put taxpayers and ratepayers on the hook to shift and build resources for the tech industry.

There will be a huge real loss in quality of life, purchasing power of the dollar, autonomy, etc... to build a bunch of shitty datacenters to do nonsense badly. 

Feds going to Invest in Intel?

 Wut? Why?

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/tech/intel-trump-us-government-investment

Weird.

Crap Dishwashers

 When I was a kid, my family had the same dishwasher machine for many, many years. The components just kept working. Now, since my wife and I have lived at our current house, we've had three in under 10 years. The drain pump just failed on the current one, too. I think the motor windings burnt out. It was the top-end dishwasher at home depot when we bought it, well the top end one with no nonsense electronic/computerized features. I ordered a new drain pump a couple of days ago. The new pump is about $120 delivered. People generally throw appliances away because those parts cost a significant fraction of the cost of a new machine, especially if they pay a handyman or similar person to install it.

30 years ago, companies made parts that last. Now they make parts that purposely don't last. Eventually even appliance makers will try to charge rent to operate their shitty appliances, just like the god awful auto industry.

Youtube History Professor

This guy is a Canadian-Chinese history professor who's a gen Xer. It's interesting how many observer/commentator people who are as neutral as can be come up with similar conclusions. Here's a video about elite overproduction in the bronze age collapse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwfB-vXXKWU

That's a theory from the historian Peter Turchin. I think that theory explains the current times very well. The US is suffering from it, while places like the UK are choking on it and turning entirely dysfunctional.

Things that Don't Make Sense

I think almost everybody follows a "life script". It's necessary to do that because young people don't have any practical experience. In our time, the script provides a sequence of steps to do what's needed to survive by plugging into the economic system. For example, when I was in high school in the 80s, it was obvious "tech" and "computer stuff" was going to be big, so there were a sequence of broad brush stroke steps laid out to do that.

The generic "professional person" life script for me was go to college, then additional details for specific fields are added. For a tech person back then it was get a math, science, or electrical engineering or computer science degree, then get a job. Then there's a list of accouterments and items a job person "purchases", typically meaning they get a loan, then make payments on things like a house, or a car. 

Most individuals wandering down their life script path are only dimly aware of the bigger picture of thousands of people doing very similar things and nobody can really see or predict the aggregate consequences. The outcome of those scripts is only obvious when they are failing.

In the mid 1800s in the US, for example, a "techie" of the day might have worked on a railroad as an engineer of some kind, either designing and building bridges, switch yards, or whatever. They and their peers poured their life into that system, but by the 1870s no more tracks or bridges or switch yards were really needed. So that life script went stale.

The neoliberal system and its main industry: tech, have the same problem today. The life script for tech dude went stale about 10 years ago IMO. That's about when the tech work was fully systematized and became an institutional rote exercise.

One of the really obvious constraints on tech is electric power consumption. Currently, data centers suck up about 4-5% of electrical power in the US! That's absurd. People are competing with shitty tech applications to run their refrigerator and A/C. I think that's a hard limit on tech expansion. About 40% of that data center power budget goes to cooling the equipment, by the way.

When you zoom out and look at the overall system lots of elements of it are obviously nonsensical. The push to outsource jobs, then manufacturing of everything was nonsensical and self-defeating the whole time. Neoliberal economies are currently organized for the benefit of a small fraction of the population. By reducing the mass of people to poverty, they also eliminated their customers. To compensate for that, they look for customers overseas where they shipped manufacturing. It's absurd.

A parallel absurdity is the workers in such companies "investing" in a 401(k) to monetize the executive compensation (in stock) of the corporations shipping jobs overseas. As an individual it seems to make sense to "win by cheating" basically, but in aggregate it's absurd nonsense.

The segments of the economy where prices outpace inflation significantly don't make sense. College and university education, home prices in many cities, passenger car and light truck prices, Healthcare, Veterinary care--all nonsense. Government is usually nonsensical, but giant growing bureaucracy and nanny state regulation is absurd. Pretending EV battery disposal is free and green is nonsense.

An individual in the western countries can look at their current system and see what's crazy/absurd and invent a new approach to life that actually harmonizes with the natural order of things, or at least do something that's closer to common sense. One example of that is provided by the automotive industry. New cars are too expensive. Many older cars are significantly cheaper and more reliable than new cars. It seems pretty obvious that older cars will be on the road indefinitely and will be repaired indefinitely. Car manufacturers will not support them, though, so a parallel universe industry of replacement parts will spring up in a much larger way.