The Value of Voting (zero)

I know a handful of people who are political partisans, that is, they're really "into" political parties like the republicans or democrats. Thankfully, these groups represent small minorities now. Only about 27% of the population "identifies" as a democrat, and about 27% identify as a republican. That ~20% number is a consistent value across many disparate scenarios. I would guess about 20% of the population gets COVID shots now, for example. Indeed:

As of early 2026, about 17.5% of adults reported having received the 2025-26 COVID-19 vaccine, which includes booster doses.

The 20% number is evidence of some phenomenon that follows a power law. These are all examples of what I would call an "erosion of belief" scenario. COVID offers a great recent example. Initially there's a lie: "COVID will kill you if you don't get an untested, ineffective concoction from pharmaceutical companies." The lie is sold via the herd behavior of the populace. However, over time one-by-one people exit the herd as their personal experience contradicts the narrative pushed by self-interested salespeople like Fauci. For some reason though about 20% of the people continue to insist the herd opinion was correct.

The herd formation mechanism is easy to understand. Humans seem to have some "voting" mechanism in their brain just like ducks or chickens or cows. When confronted with an unknown situation, humans will decide what to do based on observation of other people in an ongoing informal "vote". Our flock of ducks does the same thing all day, everyday. They decide what to do as a group, especially what's "dangerous" or safe.

Imagine a scenario with 20 people caught in a rain storm who could take shelter in a cave or a spooky dilapidated cabin. The process by which the group "decides" the spooky scenario is safe is essentially a vote. The way the situation really unfolds is the "braves" or "independents" or "risk takers" actually decide what to do by going into the cave, then the others follow along once it's proven safe via a sort of "vote" that's quite similar to the duck's voting mechanism. The followers memory performs an "experience laundering" and they convert their following into a "decision"; this would correspond to the one-by-one reassessment of the COVID lie... okay, so what about the remnant 20%?

The remnant 20% seems to be stuck in what's essentially an imaginary voting loop. That is, they formed their opinion as a member of the herd. The herd moved on, they didn't notice. This seems to be the case for political partisans. During an election cycle, the herd gets convinced to vote for dirtbag "A" or "B". The election ends, ditbag "A" doesn't do anything promised or discussed in the election cycle. One by one, the herd understands that, except the remnant.

Anyway, an obvious conclusion is the value of the vote is zero. The only thing that matters is real information and an ability to evaluate it. The voting mechanism comes about because the common scenario is lack of info, and inability to evaluate it in adequate time. This scenario is rare/never happens for humans in the modern world, however, our ancestors lived in that world all the time for millions/billions of years so people "feel" like that's the ongoing situation.

The Rich Kids Table

We recently watched the TV show "Landman" which is about an executive at an independent oil company in Texas. It follows the same template as the TV series "Yellowstone". Ostensibly the writers of the show are "conservatives", at least that's the sales pitch associated with the string of shows from the same producers.

Even though the show is supposed to be "right wing" or conservative, and promotes the oil industry, it also includes ideas as you'd see in the other slop on Netflix or any of the other streaming services or networks which is labeled as "DEI", for example, there is always a tranny or gay character in these shows. Apparently that's obligatory, or the show gets paid to include that content.

It's odd there's some group of people with apparently endless money or influence who insist on pushing a handful of random concepts onto the public and there's endless minions who just go along with it and dutifully follow orders to promote those random concepts. Of the random concepts pushed, the tranny thing is the hardest to explain or understand. It's an issue that affects a micro-fraction of the population, so it barely has a real-world presence, but there's apparently at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year available to propagandize it. I spent at least 4 hours of my precious life watching corporate HR slop with similar propaganda.

Lots of observers, including me, struggle to understand how such a system "works". That is, how is it possible rando companies have to pay money to make employees watch videos about pronouns? It makes no sense at all.

The alt-media has been discussing this apparent system of control for decades now, but generally veers into realms of the fantastical and supernatural to fill in the "no sense" gaps. Works of fiction like the movie "They Live" show some version of this alt-media explanation. In that movie, a group of extra-dimensional aliens bamboozle humanity with a mind control ray fed through TV and ads.

I think a better model is offered up by high school cliques. The rich kids table in the cafeteria "runs the school". Their random opinions end up on blast over the PA. Lots of the other "kids" in the world high-school end up falling in line with the rich kids to get a share of the largess on offer from the rich kids.

It's interesting their random beliefs and opinions end up defining them as a clique. It's kind of the opposite scenario "real-politik" observers think is going on. That group believes the beliefs and opinions of the ruling class are calculated and are promoted for cynical reasons that keep the ruling class in power.

The real-politik explanation is the ruling-class are clever schemers with no real beliefs or opinions other than a lust for power and wealth, and all they do on the public stage is an act, or any beliefs they promote are meant to divide and conquer or whatever, that is, it's all calculated and fraudulent.

I think the real-politik explanation is incorrect. Basically the rich kids table world-view is a selection of random concepts from the inner world of a handful of people. It's packaged up as a religious creed for the rest of the school, but the ideas are just an incoherent list, like global warming is somehow associated with gays and trannies and pronouns.

Gadget Bicycles and Dilettantism

Last Sunday, I did one of my favorite bike rides through an Amish neighborhood near Middlefield, then back home via the Maple Highlands Trail bike path. The weather was ideal, so lots of people were out. I was on the bike path for about 10 miles, or about 30 minutes of my hour and forty-five minutes of riding. I realized most of the recreational rider people I passed were on a "gadget bike" of some kind. That is, it really deviated from the classic safety bicycle double diamond design that's been around for so long.

The two big gadget categories are recumbent trikes and ebikes. The people riding a classic road bike are few and far between. Road bikes are still the largest single category of bicycle by sales volume per year, but constitute less than half of aggregate bicycle sales according to the stats I see.

Sports like cycling are fad driven consumer activities in the US. This is a pattern I noticed over my life. Road cycling went through two booms, for example, since I've been riding. The first was the Greg LeMond boom in the late 1980s. The second was the Lance Armstrong boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During the booms, it was possible to go racing regularly. In between the booms, the number of active participants gets really low so in lower population areas, there's not even any races. Sports like rollerblading came and went in a  handful of years. Various "e" vehicles are the current fad/sport consumer stuff apparently.

Fad sports are part of a larger pattern of behavior in the US that's driven by the financial system and apparent debt driven "wealth" of the US which I'd label "dilettantism".  It's common for a person to try a bunch of different activities and hobbies in the US. It's rare for someone to pursue mastery of a sport or hobby. People can imagine they'd "like" pursuing a given sport, buy the gear, then don't really have time or the inclination to do it. It's like playing at playing.

Ironically, the reason people don't have the time to do what they imagine they'd like to do is they are spread thin through dilettantism. They don't gave time to be a good cyclist because they also imagine they want to golf, go fishing, work on classic cars, ride ATVs, mow their lawns, etc... A significant portion of the US population with at least a middle class income is like that. This leads to the phenomenon of "inch deep, mile wide" where people have no depth of knowledge, but some experience on many topics. This scenario is very common.

I think this tendency seeps into professional life as well and is exacerbated by LLMs, which allow amateurs and hacks to imagine they "know what they're doing" because they have a chatbot barf up an apparent answer to a question they type in. In reality, hardly anyone knows what he's doing.

Why is $5/gallon Gas a Pain Point?

I drove past several gas stations with gas at $4.999/gallon today, aka $5. That is a magical pain point for many people in the US. For some reason, only at $5 a gallon, masses of people begin to realize it's pretty expensive to own a car. Even a trivial trip, or god forbid, a long daily commute is observable cost. "Oh that was $10 in just gas" people will think.

At some point, though, gas prices kill the economy overall and oil prices will plunge again. That happened in the early 2000s with more empire wars in the middle east. I can't recall the peak oil price, but around 2007, crude hit something like $150/barrel. Gas got somewhere around $5/gallon back then too. I don't recall the details though.... that all led to the exposure of the big financial crime wave of the day, aka "a crisis".

Average mom and pop people can ignore certain expenses, but probably not gas and food. Eventually high cost of basic necessities squeezes the rest of the BS out of the economy... Can't afford gas--cancel Netflix and Hulu etc.... Can't buy groceries? No more crap from Amazon then.

I think they'll keep this dumb-fuck war going for quite a while. Americans have very little control over their own government.

Messy Life

For many years my "active" time has been divided up between work and one or two main hobbies. Although, I find as the years go by, I'm really only able to really support one hobby. I feel like I'm spread pretty thin. I work the typical 9-5ish kind of hours, then maybe do 5-10 hours of my hobby. Miscellaneous chores and errands take up the rest of my time.

One way I compensate for being spread thin is by letting my organization go to shit. For example I have a pretty good workshop. I have metal and woodworking equipment and tools for car and equipment repairs, etc... Sometimes it is very organized and tidy, but generally tends toward chaos. It's currently in a very bad state because my focus is on other things, but I do have to randomly tackle repair jobs on a car the house or whatever.

I noticed many active people end up in a similar situation. Being messy seems like a cheat code, but it really is detrimental overall. For example, a lost tool might add an extra half hour to some repair job, and that extra churn compounds the problems. Plus in theory it's even "dangerous" as in there is more stuff to trip over in a messy shop.

I know professional fabricators who are very good at being neat and clean in their workshop. That said, they can spend an hour or two of the day cleaning and putting stuff away and still be productive for 6 hours or whatever, while my general goal when I'm trying to fix something in the house is to be as fast as possible so I can go do other things.

I believe if I had a better system for organizing things, my workshop wouldn't be such a mess. I find, for example, the classic big toolbox for storing tools doesn't work for me. My problem is my collection of tools changes pretty rapidly as I need to tackle new jobs, but the storage for it doesn't... so it ends up shoved into toolbox drawers.

Anyway, periodically I spend some time refactoring my stuff and do a big cleanup. Now that spring is finally here in northeast Ohio, I'm starting on that project. I'm going to use boxes and shelves and bags instead of a toolbox.

Common Sense and Genes

I concluded a "multi-cultural" society leads to general dysfunction, mainly because there's no agreed upon common sense, because I think that common sense is essentially genetic. This conclusion is drawn from my personal experiences in the tech industry over the years working with people from different ethnic backgrounds. There are endless, more general/basic-world examples out there on YouTube as well.

My family watches random youtube videos in the evenings. We regularly watch a handful of clip channels. Now that people have cell phones and cameras are everywhere, things that probably seem entirely random an accidental to the individuals experiencing them are, once deposited on the internet, revealed to really be in some sub-category of human experience.

For example, there's a whole category of "third world janky bridges". It's apparently very common for people to try to cross a perilous, failing piece of crap bridges while carrying way too much weight. Most of the videos we watch focus more on the comic outcomes of such situations, so the bridges collapse in slapstick fashion, and everyone is OK. A quite common reaction by people in "the west" is: Why don't they just spend a little more effort and make a better bridge? In many cases, even the local materials like trees could be used to build a more robust structure. An Eagle Scout in the US would be able to make a significantly better structure to get a merit badge. To an American, the scenario defies "common sense".

By the way, I don't mean to cast aspersions on people in "the third world" and imply the "west" is vastly superior. I'd cite another very common category of video: police bodycam footage, as contrary evidence to such claims of superiority. Those videos feature the underbelly of the US. Many international viewers post comments on the videos wondering why there are so many crazy people in America; And why do so many of those also have guns? Or why do completely dysfunctional, even actually medically "retarded" people have a driver's license in the US? Those examples also defy "common sense".

The western countries are quite "rich", and that generally implies "organized". High quality of life and lots of infrastructure comes from a population that managed to cooperate for some period of time, mainly after WW2 up through the 1980s. The areas of the world with ad hoc infrastructure seem to struggle to organize to do something relatively simple and cheap like building a decent footbridge over a ravine.

The police bodycam videos in the US depict what I'd call the "mouse utopia" scenario run amok. Many problems in the US appear "solved", like infrastructure, in the sense that there's some system to handle it and generally the system works, although bridges still collapse and overall the country's infrastructure is in decline as the ruling class and monetary system sucks the wealth out of the nation. However, problems which have no solution, like mass mental illness, and toxic materialism have no solution, and the ruling class's "answer" to all that is more police and surveillance systems and the like.

One theory about the poverty of the "third world" versus the wealth of "the west" is warm weather is corrosive to societal organization, and cold weather produces the opposite effect. The cold forces people to organize and cooperate and maybe importantly, inoculates the population against cheaters. The opposite scenario plays out in warm climates. This is possibly because the "common sense" understanding of the two groups is different and born of people's ancestors living in different biomes for thousands of years.

from: here

In the cold climate case, people might have learned over time that it makes sense to cooperate on shared infrastructure because failing to do so meant death for individual's families in the winter. The apparent "sucker" behavior of contributing to a common good leads to a better chance of even individual's survival. OTOH, in the warm weather case, perhaps there's a significant penalty for being the sucker that devotes one's time to public projects, and a benefit in being a scammer/cheater because there's an abundance of food calories readily available. Also possibly, there's less of an emphasis on mastery of technical material or achievement for similar reasons.

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.