Chinese Excavators and the Next Big Thing

There are several projects I would like to do this summer that more or less require a mini excavator. I want to fix some janky old infrastructure on my property, fix some drainage issues, build a pond, and maybe cut in some roads to join up the sides of my property that are bisected by a ravine. If I rented an excavator to do all that, the total cost would probably get into the $5,000 range. For a couple of years I looked for a used excavator for this purpose, but they're in the $25-30,000 price range and they do not sell very quickly. The used listings on Craigslist, for example, or heavy equipment specialty websites are around for months.

Used heavy equipment is sort of like a used car. A machine might cost $25,000 but require $5,000 in repairs the first year of ownership and ongoing maintenance and repairs. A new machine is more likely to be trouble free and might be fixed for free if there's a faulty part. Anyway, I've been reluctant to pull the trigger on that purchase.

Another, relatively "new" option for heavy equipment is Chinese made stuff. For example, there's a company called Rippa that has dealers in the US that sells machines that are the equivalent of a used Kubota for maybe $10,000 less, like their R18 is in the $17,500 price range currently. The machine uses a Kubota engine and Eaton hydraulic pump, so the core pieces are proven. A major downside is the used market for them seems non-existent, so it's hard to say how long it would take to unload it when I was done with all my projects. That said, $17,500 is very cheap for all the capability an excavator has and it's almost a no-brainer for me to buy one.

I think these Chinese excavators are a good example of what's coming next. The US economy and system is in full retard mode. The entire economy is focused on very high cost, resource intensive negative ROI nonsense, like LLM models in the workplace, data centers, spying on people, and mass murder overseas for Israel. Additionally, the economy is loaded with parasitism and rent seeking.

At the very same time, good old Mr. Chang from China is trying to give you a really good deal on an excavator or some other value-adding tool that can solve your real world problems. I recall the same scenario with Japanese cars when I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s. Initially there was skepticism and incumbent car makers paid PR people to undermine the reputation of the Japanese vehicles, but inevitably real-world experience wins out, actually the formula is like this:

1. Initially 80% of people believe the con, and 20% of people form their own opinion;
2. Over 1-2 years, the 80% who always believe authorities update their opinion based on real-world experience.
3. Finally the positions reverse, so 20% of people are in the cult, 80% match up with the original 20%.

Good examples of this were provided by "W" Bush Iraq war and the COVID hysteria. The AI hysterical psychosis is just beginning that transition.

Anyway the guiding star for people with respect to Japanese vehicles in the 70s early 2000s was value and reliability, or an overall practical and pragmatic outlook on life. Today, Japanese manufacturers are like their Western counterparts, although the car manufacturers' management is not quite as stupid as GM's or Ford's or Chrysler/Stellantis whatever. Toyota, for example skipped the EV debacle, which maybe will bankrupt Ford eventually. That said, the Japanese companies seem to be following the rent-seeking, low value approach of western companies.

The "green field" is now that pragmatic, back to basics, reliability/value scenario.

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...