Communities Can't Afford Their Own Infrastructure

We had a couple of days of very heavy rains in late March, which is quite common here in northeast Ohio. However, it caused a "flash flood" of sorts through the East Branch of the Chagrin River and pushed dozens of trees up against Wisner Road Bridge in Chardon Township and washed out a section of the road. Wisner Road is a tertiary road at best, but I ride my bike through there regularly because it leads to the base of one of the longest hill climbs in our area.

Anyway, the township does not have money to repair the road and it certainly won't have money to repair the bridge if it's damaged, which would cost millions of dollars to replace. It really doesn't have money to maintain the road, either. It's been in rough shape for several years, so the township is turning to the County and the State of Ohio, neither of which really have the money either.

This is a problem all over the country and around the world. All the infrastructure out there, especially the public infrastructure, is really just an ongoing debt and expense--basically because of the model of "payment" that comes from and makes the financial system function and extract wealth from the entirety of the economy.

For all practical purposes, the local jurisdictions, like the county and the township "own" the infrastructure and more or less collect tolls to operate it in the form of property taxes. However, they don't maintain a surplus or any form of savings apparently and every entity needs to borrow money to operate. This is actually very weird. Typically, taxpayers are funding debts in the form of bonds in their jurisdiction. The bonds is the source of money in the accounts of an entity like a township. The taxes don't just accumulate in the form of savings accounts, or gold or whatever, and are then spent as needed.

This results in the kind of crappy, nonsensical outcomes we see in a state like Ohio, like the "indefinite" closure of Wisner Road and bridge. A common model appears to be much of the infrastructure is left to rot until it falls apart completely. Then treated as "an emergency" even though it's 100% guaranteed to happen in a given time span. Households behave in a similar fashion. Rather than save up a bunch of money to regularly repair and improve a house, people will go into debt with "home equity" loans and the like.

Anyway people have been trained to follow this model, even though it's entirely contrary to their interest. The debt based money is created ex nihilo, then the public works to pay it off through productive activity. The debt is essentially magically monetized labor and resources, the banks essentially do a leveraged buyout of all the people in the country.

It's actually quite weird people keep going along with this trashy scam system. This system makes the real cost of infrastructure higher than it otherwise should be, just like cars cost more, houses cost more, college costs more because of "finance". It's all so dumb.

AI is like Death By Rabbit

There's a famous nutritional paradox: if you're starving you'll die more quickly if you eat rabbit meat than eat nothing. Rabbit meat is so lean that a starving person gets protein poisoning from it. I think this is an OK analogy for "AI". It looks like it performs some essential function, like filling a hungry belly, but it's actually a slow acting poison.

I see this unfolding pretty rapidly in my tech job. Rather than write code by hand, now, many people use AI. I can now tell when someone is doing that because it doesn't really work, nor does the AI code generator stuff have a good template, apparently, for packing things up like a person would. There's weird emphasis on nonsensical details, and big things are missing.

Similarly people do "research" by collecting a bunch of AI slop into documents, so now the whitepapers and other things that corporations do to generate and work with ideas are now just computer generated stuff that's often filled with incorrect information. For some strange reason, people assume the AI generated stuff is complete and authoritative in spite of numerous contrary anecdotes out there on YouTube, or contrary personal experience.

In my personal experience the LLM generated slop has maybe a 50/50 chance of being "correct" in a useful way about specific queries. Some code it generates contains syntax errors, for example, which is pretty bizarre to me; I thought it would somehow run things through a compiler to cross check its generated code, but apparently not. Estoreic subjects with very little online content are generally just outright incorrect.

The AI looks "productive", but it's actually akin to rabbit meat for a starving man, or ocean water to a thirsty man. The "value" for a person or institution like a corporation in people working on ideas is to build up a sort of shared concept model of whatever it is people are doing. This enables people to work together and make things. The reports, white papers, plans, and other similar dross that corporations produce is actually worthless and often people never look at it again.

The AI sloppification of work will result in piles of the same dross, but no associated creation of a shared concept model because people will be engaged with basically a hallucination of their ego projected into a chatbot, rather than constructively building concepts with their own brain. There are some reports out there of people descending into psychosis after chatting with their chatbot hallucinations for hundreds of hours. They end up acting like the Hollywood depictions of insanity. Back in the 70s and 80s one of the movie tropes about insane people was they thought they were Napolean or Jesus. People are chatting themselves into a similar scenario.

It will not take long for this scenario to reach its logical conclusion. The stuff companies make, especially tech companies, or similarly IP heavy companies like law firms, or tech dependent companies like manufacturers who rely on programmed machine tools will slowly and steadily become moribund and dysfunctional. Most corporations are already some version of that. The zero nutrition AI stuff will exacerbate that tendency. 

"Investors" and Suckers

One thing that's become obvious to me over the years is the only real "investors" are insider traders. Everybody else is a sucker. They provide so called "liquidity" the insiders ride in and out of positions on. The current war is a great example. Trump or his handlers spew nonsensical diatribes on social media. The market reacts, and they ring the register. The insiders make guaranteed fortunes based on knowing the timing of the media releases. Every other chump out there earnestly buying stocks with their 401(k) or "trading" with their money in a E-Trade account or whatever are absolute suckers. If you don't have that insider info, it's gambling at best.

Trump: Death Throes of Boomerworld.

Lots of people who were absolutely tired of the Bush era neocon wars voted for Trump as an alternative to endless wars for jews and the petrobux funnymoney monopoly that NYC and DC have exploited for years. Trump though is just another puppet. It's hard to tell exactly who controls the agenda or what's going on but it's pretty clear the US is going to devalue the dollar like crazy to pay for a bunch of destruction in Iran, most likely for naught, as with the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc... just a crop of destruction by psycho trash ruling class twats.

I think Trump's administration and the floundering of the current neoliberal/boomerworld system mesh up pretty well. Individuals are beginning to realize one by one that this system is a rigged pile of shit and non-participation is an option. We don't have to slave away in the salt mines for oligarch trash.

Anyway, the unintended consequences of yet another waste-fest war might lead to the demise of this current dumb system. Good riddance.

"AI" in Tech

I think it's fairly easy to guess how "AI" is going to affect the tech industry even after just a few months of people actually using it to try to do things.

There are basically two categories of tech work: stuff that's already been done and stuff that hasn't been done (much) if at all. The stuff that's already been done is obviously "easy to do", because there's a template for it that exists already. In my experience the tech industry became saturated with available "off the shelf" tools by around 2010, so by now 85% or more of tech work is just "systems integration".

The stuff that hasn't been done before, either by anyone, or by a company, or an individual developer is generally more difficult, but the work tends to be more focused and outcome oriented and I think necessarily better, meaning less buggy and janky.

"AI" does the stuff that's already been done. It can spit out endless reams of things that have already been done, like web GUIs.

"AI" fails horribly at niche, novel, or weird things; it will barf up code that's simply incorrect. An inexperienced person will take the code at face value and will have a hard time even trying to determine why it doesn't work.

The template-like code that's generated by AI will be even more janky than the "developer as integrator" code that tech has been churning out for more than a decade. The "novel" code it spits out just won't work at all.

Both these things are worse outcomes than just slogging along with the status quo methods of software development. To me it seems obvious the world will be better off with less tech/electro-mechanical stuff in general. It seems like the equivalent of tail fins on cars in the 1950s; it's kind of a weird fad and status symbol posturing. However, the tech industry is run by people who chase trends and who believe each other's bullshit.

Some managers in tech will grasp the limitations of "AI". Others will go pedal to the metal because they're lemmings. Their companies will go flying off a cliff and crash and burn hard.

I think all this is part of a bigger picture reshuffling of the economy as well. The totally financialized western economies are reaching their logical conclusion with the lifespan of the boomers who created these fucked up things.

Practicality, pragmatism, reliability and value are going to replace the era of bullshit and scams little by little. That's the next "big wave".

Animism versus Cults

The animist view of the world is everything has a "spirit", whether it's a bird, tree, rock or human. In that worldview places can have a spirit, and things like a cave or a mountain can have a spirit. I think that perspective is the organic/natural spiritual view of the 3D reality world for people. It's an extrapolation of an individual's experience of reality. "If I'm conscious everything else might be as well."

That said, the ability of any human to directly interact with others' consciousness, even another human's consciousness is severely limited/non-existent.

It is challenging to attempt to tune into the world's mind or to even imagine the perspective of something like a tree; it's an act of imagination and subtle intuition. What do the trees want?  Who the fuck knows? The attempt to plug into the world's minds will eventually bring some ideas bubbling up into the well of consciousness and imagination.

It's an interesting thought experiment to ponder how people try to resolve the ambiguity of this animist scenario... if nobody knows what the spirits want or try to say, then how can it ever be decoded? Well, it can't... but a bunch of political mechanisms inevitably fill in those gaps.

Some people can "agree" aka vote on what the spirits want. In another scenario people cede this interpretation to an authority figure like a priest or augur or shaman who will claim to know what the spirits say or want. Another tactic, which is the one at work in the world today is for a central power to essentially never shut up and jam up all channels with pronouncements and claims. Today it's scientism that's on 24/7 full blast with various claims about the nature of reality. Various religions make somewhat outdated claims for a full explanation of the world like people who believe the bible is literally true.

All such noise doesn't really solve the original ambiguity though. It could mainly be categorized as distractions from that central problem.

The claims about "the spirits" or consciousness of the world is really an extension of the ambiguity of one's own mind and consciousness: "Where is the mind? What is it? Where do ideas come from?" etc... 

Cult Leader Concept Formation

The Heaven's Gate cult is the subject of lots of scholarly papers and journalistic investigation because it's very well documented and was a shocking public spectacle case. The cult reached its deadly end in the early days of the world wide web and made videos about their beliefs. Investigators conducted interviews in the wake of their mass suicide and the material is out there in various formats.

It exemplifies the "cult leader"/henchman system. Without the henchman, in this case, there's probably no "Heaven's Gate" cult.

The leader was a guy named Marshall Applewhite. His top henchman was a nurse named Bonnie Nettles. They actually met in a mental hospital where she was working as a nurse and he was a patient, although this part of the story seems to be disputed.

In the version where they met in the loony bin, Applewhite suffered a psychological breakdown in the wake of being fired from his music professor job for having an affair with a male student. She was a "seeker" interested in astrology and the occult. For some reason, the two hit it off, and that gave rise to what became Heaven's Gate.

In fact, it looks more like Nettles was the real creator of Heaven's Gate, but she needed a "leader" to glom onto. It's interesting there's not more information about her life out there on the internet and that most people think Applewhite was the brains of the operation and creator of their mythology.

Their beliefs are an interesting mishmash of biblicisms and sci fi, in other words, classic sci fi and modern sci fi. A few of the cults I've read about created a similar blend of ideas where Jesus is an alien, or will return in a space ship, or whatever.

The "UFO"/aliens/area 51 concept seems to be promoted by the government from day one, maybe as a joke, and continues even to this day. The concept there is "the government" has contact with "aliens", but can't reveal it to the public for some bizarre reason. It follows the pattern of priests who are in contact with god, who lives in a cave, or can only be contacted on a mountain top, or whatever. Select "priests" get to talk to the god. Similarly, Trump gets to talk with Aliens, I guess. Lol.

Anyway, I think it's useful to discuss the "concept formation" of people like Applewhite/Nettles from the point-of-view of human consciousness being "alien to 3D reality world". That is, our consciousness exists in an "information dimension" which arises from, but is distinct from the 3D reality world of physics and matter.

The ego/self/mind, whatever you want to label the consciousness in it's information dimension struggles with the limitations, insults, and trauma of the 3D reality world. I think this is the result of a very specific method of raising children.

It's pretty common for parents to shield their children from the brutality and/or skeezy animalistic aspects of the human and natural world. Children often don't differentiate between their fantasy/inner world and the external 3D reality. When a child is shielded from the ugly parts of life, or never has to reconcile their model of reality with real life, they can enter adulthood and adolescence with that cartoonish model intact.

When that model collides with reality, there's a couple of basic paths for dealing with the trauma of life: adjust the inner world model to match the brutal realities of life, or adjust the model to wish that trauma away. In the case of Applewhite, he was a gay dude, but was outed in humiliating circumstances. There's not enough info on the biography of Nettles, who seems pretty "normal" in her early life, but for some reason she formed a quasi-marriage with Applewhite, who eagerly played into her astrology/new age fantasies.

The ego/self/mind of man often can't accept the "you don't matter and you will die" aspect of 3D reality. In the case of Appliewhite/Nettles they created a mythology where, in version one, they'd be physically raptured to a space ship. (The Church of the Subgenius lampoons this belief in their materials: you get raptured to a UFO and have sex with sexy aliens.) There's a version of this story floating around on youtube about space Nazis. Anyway, this idea didn't work out for Nettles, who died of cancer before being beamed up.

In typical cult leader fashion, after Nettle's death, Applewhite had to adjust the mythology rather than accept the grim fact of Nettle's pre-rapture expiration, to more of the traditional view of "the soul" being from another dimension, so Nettles shed her meat chariot but still existed and participated in the cult. In some of the cult videos on YouTube, Applewhite sits in a lawn chair and talks. There's an empty lawn chair next to him, presumably for the ghost of Nettles.

Anyway to summarize the above: the self/mind can't deal with it's temporality and the traumas of life. Rather than adjust the idealized inner world model to reality, the cult leader adjusts the model to flee reality, essentially--this is the seeming basis for at least Christianity and Judaism. The cult leader looks to create various narratives that negate the aspects of life that contradict the idealized version of reality in their mind model of reality.

Cults and religions tend to "go big" in their narratives to elevate the self/ego  to "cosmic import", so the narratives tend toward comprehensive schemes and stories with a beginning, middle, and end of the world where only the cool people survive and are rewarded and everyone else is killed in a flood, meteor storm, alien invasion or whatever. Those narratives tend to gratify the ego of the believer who of course assumes they will get the golden ticket and end up in the land of the blessed.

The millenarian/doomsday cults tend toward biblical/alien themes while ignoring the realm of middle of the road mythology, which I think is actually pretty interesting and telling. By middle of the road mythology, I mean a whole cast of creatures and characters of earthly proportion are omitted from their themes and narratives, AFAIK. For example, I don't think I ever heard of a cult which focused heavily on vampires, dragons, or monsters like Bigfoot. The Norse and Germanic mythology actually includes stories of that type of creature, plus the "gods" of the Germanic mythology are more human-scale entities than the more abstract characters of the bible stories. (Here is an article about a vampire "cult", but it was more like a gang than a cult)

In fact, the people who "believe" in bigfoot or ghosts seem to be more into LARPing and having fun with their mythological subject matter than to be serious. Having fun and playing is antithetical to the cultish mindset.