Human Housecats and Outsourcing

I had a 50 cc Honda mini-bike when I was in maybe 6th grade. I do not remember why or how I got it. I know it was bought used. I also don't know what eventually happened to it. I will have to ask my dad if he remembers if it was a birthday present or whatever.

It was kind of unreliable. It was a 2 stroke, of course, and back then I'm sure most people just slopped way too much 2 stroke oil into their gas mix, which, quite paradoxically will burn out pistons and rings because the fuel-air mix is too lean. Consequently, the thing probably needed a full rebuild, but my dad taught me how to get it running even in its janky condition.

That experience was typical among my male and some female peers. That is, if you had a broke thing, somebody taught you to fix it and explained how it actually worked. Depending on your household situation, you might be exposed to a wide range of DIY fix-it or build-it projects and learn to pour concrete, frame a house, fix a car, an electric outlet or whatever. One of my school friends had a hyper-competent family in the performance automobile business. He learned how to operate tools like metal lathes and mills when he was a kid, and I was able to experience some of that too.

I experienced a shift in demographics in the tech/engineering world toward the end of my career where the white american guys were gradually replaced with people from Asia who often had no similar background. The white american guys often had that project-doing background like me and my peers, by contrast the "new" workforce is urban housecat types who never did a single project. The urban housecat types among the white people are the effete coastal city types.

two economies

When I started working in the early 1990s, I gradually realized much of middle class life was a trap and a scam, basically to keep living the dopey middle class life style. For example, I signed up for a new car loan and realized I was working to pay for a car so I could drive to work. In the mid 1990s, I signed up for a home loan. For most middle class people, their house is just where they go to sleep so they can go back to work, then it's also where you can struggle to do a hobby or get some exercise.

The trap part of that life is the loans. You really don't "need" a loan to get a house or a car, in fact the loan is a severe life impairment. The other part of that life that's a trap is "status" associated with being a participant in the system. For example, if you're one of "the good ones" you can get a loan for a new Toyota Landcruiser or Sequoia to go buy groceries rather than drive a cash car to do the same chores. The French fur traders used the same system on native americans back in the 17th and 18th century. They offered credit to the indians in their company stores who then paid it back with work--trapping beavers. One aspect of the trade goods was "status symbols", like fancy blankets.

A side effect of all the middle class people working in "the system" all around the world is the emergence of a parallel universe "outside" that credit and lifestyle trap.

The "tech industry" offers a great current example. Many tech products are super cheap commodity items--in many cases they're cheaper than ever. For example, single board computers for process control and automation are dirt cheap. CNC machines, plasma cutters, on and on are all dirt cheap. Lots of software is free. If you as an individual want to do something productive with "tech" the barrier to entry is less than a speed bump. By contrast, everything associated with or competing with "AI"/Datacenters is stupidly expensive, like GPUs and computer memories are off the charts expensive. Similarly, salaries associated with all that are very high, while if you're actually using tech for a real purpose, the money really isn't there.

The "economy" appears to be a bunch of middle class people enmeshed in mass psychosis at any given moment, so it appears foolish or uneconomical to do the thing the mass of people aren't hallucinating about. For example, if you have skills to do useful tech stuff, does it make sense to labor for peanuts and do something productive when you could sit in meetings with people in a mass hallucination and get paid to LARP as an "engineer"?

The working and lower class people in the US are basically outside the psychosis/hallucination bubble. They lack the training and indoctrination to get into the corporate debt Matrix basically. Groups like the Amish reject the hallucination for the most part.

Last of the Mohicans

We watched the Daniel Day Lewis movie Last of the Mohicans (1992) last night. It's a great movie adapted from such a great book. Like The Lord of The Rings Aragorn character, the main character(s) in Last of the Mohicans are Rangers.

People from all over the world love those characters. There are monuments in Germany dedicated to Hawkeye, (the Daniel Day Lewis character). The Soviet Union had a stamp series based on James Fenimore Cooper's novels from the 1820s. For contemporary testimony, browse the comments section on the youtube theme song.

5G Systems and Tech ROI Issues

I worked on wireless telecom systems from about 2001 to 2020. Over those years, system capabilities kept expanding as a side effect of increasing capability of CPUs and other computational hardware. All the stuff I worked on was broadcast based so the cost of the system was linearly amortized over each user, so the more users the better in terms of cost per user.

I was surprised to learn, recently, that the computational requirements of 5G networks substantially increase with each user so lots of expensive equipment is required to handle just a handful of users. For example, the ORAN reference open-source software requires around $100K of servers and GPUs to handle just 15 users! A few years ago, those servers and software would probably only cost $30-50K but the AI/datacenter bubble has distorted the price of tech junk dramatically. Even if costs return to normal eventually, tens of thousands of dollars for 10-15 people is stupidly expensive too.

The reference software is probably not optimized, and generic GPUs are inefficient. Presumably a more engineered system could be significantly more efficient maybe by a factor of 10, but the core problem of increased cost per user doesn't go away, it's just not "as bad".

Note that this pattern follows the "LLM" pattern. For example, now when I search for something on google, their LLM spits out a result. The cost per LLM search result is probably significantly higher than the cost per search in their good-old system which probably has that "broadcast" amortized price structure, since the scanning of the Internet, indexing web sites, etc... was done once per many thousand searches. The cost to encode information in the LLM is high, and that's amortized over all the uses of it, that is, each "search" using google's LLM, however, the cost to run the LLM is also high per search. Presumably, google plans to reduce that cost, then charge people monthly subscriptions for their service, which is probably why their search engine has been getting worse. So the "Internet" will effectively turn into a privatized rent seeking scheme. Good luck with that.

Another interesting side-effect of declining tech ROI is actual productive and useful stuff is extremely cheap. Effectively a garage shop scale operation can build almost anything. There's endless examples of this phenomenon on YouTube where a small team of dudes build airplanes, boats, cars, motorcycles, and on and on. It's not hard to imagine an "engineer centric" world emerges from that, where the corporate and finance overhead and parasitism go away.

It's possible the "hit them where they ain't" strategy could work out really well for localities that foster that approach.

Vote Harder!

The people in my county habitually vote for republicans in every election. When there was a "tea party" branch of the republican party they voted for politicians who preached about a small government. Since then, a little after 2008, though, the county government grew larger and more intrusive which is exactly what would happen if people voted for democrats. The state government is republican dominated, but they're also pushing democrat-esque policies. One of the very annoying issues is the county will implement some type of septic system monitoring program, which is happening at the behest of the state government, I believe.

The pretext for the program is poorly maintained septic systems are contributing nitrogen runoff into lake erie. This monitoring system was initially proposed maybe ten years ago. I was skeptical about that claim then. Maybe in some worst case scenario a house with a totally failed waste treatment system could generate runoff directly into a ditch and thereby into a waterway, but that might only be a 1/1000 case.

In almost every other case, even an inefficient, poorly maintained system would still drain through a leech field and might be several feet away from any type of waterway. Human waste isn't any different in nitrogen content than animal waste, so evidence that septic systems are contributing to nitrogen in rivers might be hard to come by in a low population density county like mine. I think there are as many deer in Geauga County as people, for example and I don't see deer using public restrooms. I looked for any research papers on the topic.

For example, there should be elevated nitrogen levels in the various rivers originating in Geauga county, or a lake like Bass Lake which is surrounded by homes with such waste disposal systems should have elevated nitrogen levels or high bacteria counts, but at the time I didn't find any information suggesting that was happening. It doesn't even look like the state or local agencies monitor that, or if they do the results aren't published in a way that's easy to find online.

The main culprits in lake erie nitrogen pollution are cities with sub-standard waste water treatment and farms in western Ohio. This is fairly obvious and well known. I think the idea that septic systems contribute to this issue is mainly a guess. They probably do, but if their contribution goes to zero it might not result in some measurable change in lake erie water quality.

So why are the small-government state and county officials pushing this scheme instead of fighting it tooth and nail?

Well, people will get paid to implement this testing program, septic installers will have a few years making lots of extra money, and land developers need centralized sewer and water systems to build higher density housing, and testing the septic systems is a first step in that scam. Smacking homeowners with $20,000 septic repair bills will get them clamoring for centralized solutions because they're retards.

This is really a great example of how the government actually "works". The blah blah of ideological talking points from politicians is all nonsense for dumb ass voters. The only thing that pushes government to act is groups with sufficient money to be organized year after year and also to bribe or blackmail the government employees and politicians.

Individual citizens have a hard time lobbying the government in a similar way because they don't have a lot of time or money to waste on it, so even moderately organized groups or entities like a business with a "budget" to spend strategically are much more influential.

Competent People in Human Housecat World

I know many habitually competent people, and I know lots of people I'd label "human housecats". For the human housecats, most of the world is a black box. The habitually competent people live in a no-black-box world.

Over the years of working in corporate environments I noticed there's a paradoxical situation that arises from this split in the population. The housecats like to manage and be managed and love to create policies and procedures and laws, but as a group they're entirely ineffectual. The policies and procedures can't make up for inexperience, lack of knowledge, or just general tendencies associated with competency, so it's all kind of a pointless make-work exercise. Paradoxically this is what most people do all day at "work".

The habitually competent people tend to "just go do things" which obviates management, policies, procedures and the like--they negate the human housecat world. One of my neighbors, for example, took down a huge ash tree in his front yard yesterday rather than hire a tree company. He rented a lift, then chopped the tree down bit by bit with a chainsaw. I don't think it even took an hour for him to do the whole project. His neighbor is another high competence person who heats his home with firewood, so he helped buck the tree.

Another paradoxical situation is the housecat people, who are incapable, often tend toward control freakery, meaning they love to extend their policy/procedure making into any sphere of activity often under the guise of concerns about "safety". For example, in recent months, housecats decided they were afraid of e-bikes or other new e-vehicles and passed various laws in rando jurisdictions around the world. This is just one example of myriad similar scenarios. People who have no idea what they're doing in general make "policy" on random topics, typically in response to serial panics. The current-day panic in various jurisdictions is "e-bikes". Next year it will be some other random thing.

Note that competency is never suggested as a solution to these panics. That is, if people learned how to manage their own shit, nobody would even think to make these nonsense laws and policies. In fact, to me, the whole human housecat + manager world looks like an enormous "control fraud" situation which enables a lot of ineffectual people to be paid and to gain "power" over others. The lubricant for the movement of this group is incompetence. Someone who knows what he's doing prevents these awful people from getting theirs.

Big Dumb System

Now that I'm in my mid 50s, I am starting to have some brushes with the "end of life racket", which was thankfully out of sight and consequently out of mind for most of my prior life. That racket shows how bleak and regimented the middle class life is.

People march down a toll road over their whole life. They scrimp and save so they can give as much money as possible to hospitals, nursing homes, and finally funeral directors who collect the last fee. A careful person might manage to get a good pile of money to their heirs. A careless person will get worked over by this system entirely and go from a wealthy middle class person to a pauper in a handful of years of decrepitude.

Even body disposal is weirdly expensive. It must be a cartel situation, which is certainly aided by the government and regulation. You could empty out 150 pounds of meat from a freezer, put it in a garbage bag and chuck it in the trash, for example and nobody would bat an eye. Of course there are myriad taboos and legal versions of the same that ensure the funeral racket keeps collecting thousands of dollars per stiff.

I doubt it's legal to build a funeral pyre in most states, for example, but it is legal to incinerate a corpse at a funeral home. A well constructed and fueled wood fire will melt metals. Incinerating a body with a wood fires would be pretty cheap and was fit for kings and warriors for centuries. It's probably also illegal to dig a hole and bury a body like generations of settlers in the US did, although people bury dogs, horses, cows, etc... on their property all the time in rural and even suburban areas.

A few years ago, an unfortunate deer was hit by a car and died on my property. I put her under a large pile of wood chips in the woods, probably double the diameter of her body and three times as deep. I couldn't smell the decomposing body at all, nor did any scavengers disturb the pile. That much carbon rich material basically soaks up any nastiness. I used the wood chips in the garden a couple of years later. Of course there wasn't a trace of flesh left. Eventually even the bones break down.

One of the problems of the "highly organized" economy is the average person becomes a totally unskilled dope whose life is hemmed in by lies spun by douchebags and scammers who want their piece of the money pie. They can't even imagine there's an alternative to the set of cartel offered services and life rituals.

They also are maintained in a sort of fantasy land unreality existence because somebody else "does it" whatever it is. This type of person is the "urban/suburban housecat". They do their job, which is often some abstract nonsense, then pay skilled people to do absolutely everything else in their life. This has apparently led to an overall denial of the realities of life because everything can be managed by "experts" and everything can be "fixed".