Tech Toolkit Evolution Versus the Bubble Economy

The civilization tech toolkit seems to advance in a slow, halting fashion with lots of missteps and failed experiments happening along the way. This is true even today in the tech industry.

From an outsider perspective, tech seems to advance in some planned, logical fashion. Like a laptop from 2005 is a total POS compared to a brand new one because the processor is faster, as are the memory, hard drives, etc... Tech necessarily "advances" in every way.

Like there's were 4G wireless networks then a 5G wireless network replaced that. EVs will also replace the ICE cars because they're new. The advances are necessary and all good: everything is cheaper with the new tech, everything is better, etc...

The financial hype bubble economy really mind fucked billions of people. I think they're really incapable of evaluating reality at all. It doesn't matter if they're Joe Public or CEO of a car company or a tech company. They all buy into the same narratives and live inside the narrative.

Believers are receivers for deceivers.

To me it's pretty weird. Ford, for example, went all in on green BS and EVs in just a handful of years, and lost $19B. I guess because progressive democrat retards were running the federal government then? Ford's leadership had no knowledge about cars, or the car market that superseded some corrupt ideologues in the government? WTF? It's wild, but apparently true.

New tech gets trialed in the real world. A lot of it goes into the fucket bucket because it really doesn't work as its tested over a wide range of operating and economic conditions.

I am currently tangentially associated with development 5G technology. Some segment of the wireless data industry got idee fixed on a couple of concepts that seem implausible because they're wildly expensive. One is "software defined radios". Then if you have SDRs, you should "run them in data centers", which is a concept that is ubiquitous in the tech industry. Somehow corporations decided it's cheaper to spend millions renting computers rather than owning computers.

Anyway, the software defined radios sound good in theory, especially if you're developing a new system, however, they're pretty expensive and energy intensive compared to dedicated hardware. From a tech person's perspective, the software defined radio approach in ORAN is "cool", but it also looks like a real world fail, because it's probably too expensive. Most of the use cases I heard for it so far sound like bullshit scenarios.

The financial bubble/hype economy morphed into central planning through the course of the 2000s. The taxpayers of the US are cast in the role of "investors" in various tech boondoggles, like AI datacenters, however the taxpayer gets no returns on their "investment" and lots of funny money goes into private accounts of CEO tech bros and finance people.

As an individual working in the bubble/central planning tech project economy, I don't see a bright future for the tech industry. Central planning and potemkin villages can only hide reality not eliminate it. Spending time and life energy putting a coat of paint on a facade building is a painful experience. I have been surfing from one hype bubble to the next throughout my "career". I am at the tail end of that waste of time.

Trump Administration Thug Makes Melian Dialog Speech

The Trump administration is claiming potential ownership of Greenland, basically via "might makes right". There's a famous dialog from Thucydides called the "Melian Dialog" which presents a similar scenario in ancient Athens (a few years prior to its destruction) with respect to a weaker neighbor.

Anyway, I think the capture of Venezuela is a pretty good indicator that the gangsters in DC are ready to do whatever they want for:

• Themselves,
• Their family,
• Israel and the zionist mafiosi and maybe jews in general.

probably in that order.

US citizens will be sacrificed by the gangsters if need be to accomplish whatever goal these mass murderer larpers are after.

It's kind of hard to imagine the knock-on effects of basically Nazi/Sabbatean Psycho Jews going to war versus the world with an Uncle Sam mask on. Good luck visiting Europe or Asia, except Japan maybe Thailand, any time soon with a US passport. Will the US military finally get kicked out of Germany other western european countries? Maybe the dummies in the EU would actually make peace with Russia if the US drops the mask and the whole world finally sees Schlomo Hitler runs the country?

China might stop exporting various parts, components, precursor chemicals to the US.

I'm not sure why the US would go completely crazy with "conquest", like snatching up Greenland, Cuba, why not Mexico while they're at it. None of these other countries really has a prayer defending itself versus the US military in a conventional war, but there's already so much trade and inter-relationship between a country like Mexico and the US that any gain from outright conquest would be minimal. The US financial system is already ubiquitous and dominant throughout the west. Why could US companies get contracts in Greenland today to do business? It seems insane.

The dumbest war the US government might engage in would be against Iran. There's very limited upside. That would be purely for Israel.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm at the waning end of my taxpaying working career. Some ancient grandpappy of mine was probably out there in German woods killing the Romans. Now, being born in today's Rome, I'm not eager to support conquest and subjewgation by the psychos in DC.

The MLM Economy and a "Non Business"

I saw a craigslist ad for a fast food franchise business in my hometown. I briefly pondered "buying" the place. It's listed at only $85,000 but based on the ad, you do not get much for that. Maybe the equipment in the leased building? The details in the ad were sparse.

You'd still have to pay a lease, franchise fees, buy slop food to resell, etc... to start to get some paltry monthly positive cash flow. I think it's a pretty good illustration of what so many "businesses" actually are in the United States. You're not an "owner" when you sign up for such a deal. The concept of "ownership" is all but gone in the US in general. Many things, like real estate, personal property like cars, and in some states business inventory, are collateral for a debt deal somebody else made and there are people with guns who will seize "your" property to make good on the debt if you "chose" not to pay your part of that burden. It's been like this since the US was founded and of course long before.

Were you to sign up for that franchise sandwich shop you're just a participant in a vast MLM scam called the US economy. I doubt anyone would take $85K out of their savings to buy a business like that, they'd use a line of credit from their own existing business or originate some loan to buy it. The same thing happens with larger businesses. When one corporation buys another one, some version of that happens.

At best you're a manager and just like the people up the pyramid, you skim the difference between the cost of the funny money debt to operate the business, and the funny money you manage to take from the public who are all doing the same thing. The money you skim from the MLM system into your personal accounts, your savings, is just collateral for the bank to make more debt.

That business exists almost entirely within the MLM economy system where nothing is really owned and all real things are just collateral for more debt agreements. This is the core problem with the MLM system: the overhead and parasitic costs of all the people skimming their MLM "lines" are enormous. "Owning" the sandwich shop isn't worth the trouble. Working for the proverbial sandwich shop is even less worth the trouble.

People were trained/brainwashed to accept this system as normal and desirable, but reality is starting to seep through the cracks in the brainwashing. For example, the student loan situation in the US is absurd and is disincentive for participating in the MLM. Inflation has a similar effect, if you're getting an annual loss of purchasing power of like 15% or more, there's no point in working harder. You'd have to be a retard to do it. The rational decision is to bail from the system. That causes an even faster decline in purchasing power.

This is why the US government smash and grabbed Venezuela's oil. It put it into the empire MLM pyramid. The overhead cost of the empire MLM system is mind boggling, though, so the net gain the average American will see is minute if anything, but it will probably keep the scheme going a while longer.

An individual can pull quite a bit of stuff out of the empire's MLM system for now. You probably won't ever get your real estate out of the system, but every one of your MLM dollars that you convert into gold or another hard asset is potentially a new system basis, meaning, it's stuff that's not part of the MLM system and isn't collateral for more debt.

It would be a boon to organize people outside the MLM scheme to do productive tasks and create wealth without a million scammers in the pyramid claiming their part.

What are "The Gods"?

This winter, we've had a couple of consecutive weeks of cold weather and snowfall that accumulated (in the northeast Ohio snowbelt) so I actually went cross country skiing (skate skiing) a few days in a row. I often run into people who were in the northeast Ohio road cycling racing community back in the early 2000s. Skate skiing is great cross training for cycling.

I ran into an old acquaintance from my road racing days yesterday. We were driving the same car and had the same skis and were doing the same hobby. We probably don't have much in common outside our hobbies though. Different work. Different ethnic background, etc...

Lately, I've been thinking about what "the gods" actually are and what "worship" actually is and this chance meeting reinforced my idea. Some version of animism or ancient Shinto in Japan is an apt description of what the gods actually are.

I grew up and currently live in an area with landforms created by ancient sedimentary bedrock that was cut up by glaciers thousands of years ago. There's a handful of patterns that arise from that. When the bedrock is soft, there are short steep ravines cut by even just a small stream. When the bedrock is tough, like sandstone, there are taller climbs, some up to 400 feet, from a river to the hilltops. Then there are flat alluvial plains along rivers and streams.

If you ride a bike in this area hundreds of hours a year, it trains you on some fundamental level. It provides certain expectations like the steepest hills are the shortest. The landscape shapes human consciousness in specific ways. That set of habits and perspectives could be abstracted from the specific trained human and treated as an independent entity, aka "a god".

A person who grew up somewhere else, with mountains for example, like upstate New York or Colorado would form some slightly different set of ideas about riding a bike after decades. It would be some other type of consciousness and a different "god".

The road racing people I knew back in the early 2000s were from many different backgrounds and walks of life, but I think a very intense hobby like that makes an indelible imprint. For example, a person who is racing or testing him or herself daily or weekly versus physics is unlikely to think much of poseurs after a certain amount of time and might be more likely to focus on improving technique or physical capabilities versus pursuing their career goals or climbing up the pyramid of corporate world.

In that case "worship" of the cycling god leads to a certain type of life: a very capable person who is probably not super interested in trading all their time for money and might be happiest living like a monk in the shaolin monastery.

Those are the actual gods and actual worship. They are more subtle and powerful than the mainstream religions which are actually quite strange by comparison. They're narrative based and rely on fairly shallow archetypal characters to train people in "belief".

Choking on Bureaucracy and Policy

Over my Holiday break, I got sucked into the YouTube world of police bodycam videos. There are endless freak-show videos out there of drunk drivers and car chases. The vast majority of arrests, DUI stops, etc... are probably pretty boring and mundane where the person being arrested or charged with DUI realizes the gig is up and tries to minimize the damage to their life. The videos that make it to YouTube are certainly the extreme cases. There are lots of DUI women in these videos, for example, but the vast majority of DUI arrests are men, it's like 80% men according to published stats, but every DUI arrest video I watched was a woman.

Anyway, one of the themes in these videos is "the system" is pretty broken. I think this is a pervasive problem. Anytime there's a "system" at all it ends up broken. Rules and policies can't replace judgement and thinking. They also create the perverse scenario where criminals easily out-compete "good" people who follow rules and laws.

Police go through hours of kabuki theater nonsense to arrest some completely shitfaced drunk drivers, who then get a slap on the wrist even after multiple DUIs, driving with no license, etc...

Many states and cities seem to have insane and nonsensical policies that lead to high speed chases that endanger the general public. For example, in one completely insane video, cops in Illinois intervened in the middle of a robbery at a Porsche dealership but obviously made the overall situation much worse.

Since the cops there seem to be really restricted in their use of deadly force, they allowed the thieves to drive off in cars at high speed and endanger the general public. One of the thieves managed to steal a cop car and then he crashed into a random person's car. It easily could have been a fatal accident.

Ohio high speed chases seem especially insane and dangerous. The cops pursue at a distance rather than try to end the chase as quickly as possible. That allows the driver to amp up their speed while moving through traffic and neighborhoods which leads to obvious bad outcomes. The city of Columbus has some policy that prevents police from deliberately crashing a driver if they are in a high center of gravity vehicle... so anyone in a lifted truck can flee essentially indefinitely.

When I was in middle school many of my friends and I played Dungeons and Dragons, which has an "alignment" system. It made quite an impression on me because it's a pretty good representation of reality. Even when I was 11 or 12 years old, I thought the "lawful" alignments were the worst and I tended to favor the "neutral" axis. That concept persisted through my life.

Anyway, once there are too many laws, rules, policies shit's fucked. It's like the scenario in the previous post--engineered solutions will fail fastest compared to a pile of rocks. The law and rules are more of a symptom than a cause though.

US attacks Venezuela

The US attacked Venezuela and captured the country's president Nicolas Maduro last night, apparently.

Why? I have no idea. I guess the US will install a compliant puppet government that will pay somebody or give oil rights to a US oil corporation or something.

The US is the current world Empire. The Empire seems to move from place to place. It was last in England. It's been in the US for a little more than 100 years. The quality of life of americans has been steadily eroding the whole time.

Overly Complicated

Over my adult life I completed many construction or property improvement projects and learned what is plausible for me to do in a given amount of time with my current resources. I also see what approaches hold up over time. Stupidly simple things tend to persist, while something that's "engineered", meaning a complex arrangement of components is involved, will eventually fail.

I put a culvert and stream crossing on the service road into our woods . The culvert and road is holding up well because it's so simple. It's a huge pipe in a stream course covered with many tons of dirt and gravel. The culvert created an erosion problem, though on the downstream side. It's basically like a giant fire hose on very rainy days, so I built some erosion control measures as well, but those did not hold up well over time.

I stacked up dozens of bags of concrete to get the water to drop about 6 feet in controlled steps. I was hoping it would slow enough to deposit sand and gravel and eventually reshape the drop to a gradual slope. For several years, it actually worked. However, one big rain storm obliterated the "steps". Dozens of 80 pound blocks were pushed several yards down the stream. I'd probably need to pour the concrete in giant man-made boulders for it to really work. Basically it's not possible to maintain an "arranged" structure like that over such widely varying conditions. I notice in the stream beds that are adjacent to our property, only the fridge-sized boulders stay put. Almost every other rock eventually moves somewhere.

Over the past several weeks, I've been building a trail through the woods and contending with some muddy patches. Over the decades, people who owned the same property did as well, and they tried a handful of different solutions to the mud problem. Again, the simplest ones seem to be the best ones. The "planned" ones stink. For example, burying drainage pipe of various kinds is almost invariably bad. It will eventually fail and can't be repaired or even maintained and nobody will even know where it is. The easiest approaches, like digging a ditch to divert water from a path, or filling a low spot with rocks will last.

I built a couple of corduroy roads (logs or straight branches placed on muddy patches). Those work very well, even better than rocks or pavers in many cases, because rocks sink into the mud over not too many freeze/thaw cycles. The maintenance of the corduroy road is easy and inexpensive. Variations on that theme, like a bridge or elevated walkway are also pretty decent solutions, though they're more expensive and can be overly elaborate and fail-prone as well.