EU "Leadership" Either Totally Corrupt or Totally Incompetent

A few years ago now, the US and its proxies destroyed a huge natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, the NordStream 2 pipeline. That could have been viewed as an act of war against Russia, but it also disrupted German industry, and essentially was an act of war on them.

I wouldn't be surprised if the war in Ukraine is totally "fake", that is the sides are in on it together to completely destroy the economy of Europe at the expense of the people of Ukraine and Russia. It's hard to explain the European political "leadership" pushing for the war to continue, or possibly expand as they are now, except that they might be in on the scheme as well and getting compensated for their role, or they're pretty dumb.

1893 Financial Collapse

 

The above graph is from Peter Turchin's blog: https://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/

In 1893 the US financial system imploded, mainly because the rail industry and really the whole industrial economy turned into a money burning machine. That happens periodically, and is happening now. I don't think it's a coincidence that the "elite overproduction" metric coincides with the popping of the rail bubble, just like the currently unpopped AI bubble today. IMO, the explanations for that are simple: there's too many people overall, and there are too many people trying to make money with money instead of actually working. Today there are a host of FOMO scams and retard traps, like gambling, crypto currency speculation, stonks and there's an endless supply of money. 

As in 1800s America, there is a current wave of immigration to feed the beast and absorb money. That causes friction with the native population, for obvious reasons. I think that's pretty tapped out, though. In tech, the cost of outsourced workers has been steadily rising and, while it's not at parity with the US salaries, it's pretty close, so the risk involved in moving half way around the world might outweigh the potential lifestyle reward.

There's a corresponding growth in bullshit and ideology in these elite overproduction eras too. Today it's not religious ideology, but it's political nonsense, especially on "the left" which is basically gays and women, but "the right" is loaded with a bunch of cults--Zionism is a big aum shin rikyo style murder cult. The "temperance movement" went bananas in the late 1800s, early 1900s. A figure like Carrie Nation became nationally prominent. It makes sense that the most extreme, in her case, literally insane, psychopathic authoritarian twats gain prominence in such a time. They're useful idiots for schemers, plus the competition for attention among such loons is pretty fierce at such a time.

Here's the wikipedia article on the "Panic of 1893". The idea that wild "investing" waves like the AI bubble or the rail bubble can grow ad infinitum is a mathematical impossibility. The "systemic" problem arises from bank participation in these scams. Joe Public assumes the banks are stable and make prudent, limited investments, but they're not. They weren't back then, they aren't today. The depositor money is actually pissed away on car loans on Dodge Challengers, and on corporate schemes, like AI stonks, etc... When the first big scam implodes, it leads to a predictable unwinding of the system as everyone scrambles to preserve wealth.

Since the whole economy runs on bank credit, basically, when all that shit eventually goes bad, no businesses can operate. The very old school approach to business, where a person self funds operations, like some Amish do might still function. It seems likely that supply chains of basic stuff like gasoline and natural gas and electricity might lock up completely in the event of a big disaster finance bro MBA retard implosion.

Anyway, today, the feds and banks won't allow a deflationary collapse, so we'll get crushed with hyperinflation as the cretins who run the system try to herd people into government crypto currencies and the like.

"Don't Do" Simple Rules of Thumb

Back in 2015, I thought about doing a christmas tree farm. We don't have a huge property, but it's big enough to support thousands of fir and pine trees were I to clear some acreage. I planted 300 trees all over the property to get a feel for the potential productivity of the soil. The trees grow really well on some parts of the property, and struggle on others. 10 years later some of the saplings I planted are well over 10 feet tall and have a 6" trunk. In others, they're basically the same size they were when first planted.

As a few years went by, I decided the christmas tree farm wasn't viable, plus I wasn't really interested in it, and liked the trees and how they grew. The christmas tree business is actually pretty weird. The trees are pruned specifically to form them into an unnatural shape. It's not hugely labor intensive, but by the time a tree is sold maybe a couple of hours of labor are spent per tree.

At the end of the whole project I was done with christmas trees in general. I could do a nursery for fir trees or something like that, but probably not the whole chop a tree and sell it thing. In fact, that's a pretty typical pattern for me, and I'm sure many other people as well. I can tell when I am on the wrong path when I do a thing, but it is difficult to see the correct path by itself.

I guess the correct path eventually emerges, like a negative space drawing. My formula is really simple: does a thing actually add more life, or does it grow or feed the dead world? It's also really simple to see the answer to that question on almost any topic, there's no painful wrestling with lies and justifications. Who wants more dead world? There's a lot of twisted freak people who keep building Mordor, but hardly anybody really wants Mordor or wants to serve Sauron/Hades.

I started applying that "don't do" concept on my property and with my personal projects a couple of years ago. Initially I didn't see how to apply it, so it was a bit of a struggle for some time, but eventually it became more obvious. The overall scheme is to imitate, insofar as it's feasible, the natural order. Nature creates a profusion of forms and beings. Apply that to the christmas trees: am I going to cut down the existing forest to plant a monoculture crop, then mow around the trees and sling fertilizer and chemicals at them? No. That's really a crazy thing people do.

Here's a better example. Our property has some drainage issues (we receive lots of precipitation per year). There's a failed network of drainage pipes here. Should I "replace" those with many hundreds of feet of plastic pipes to route the water from the surface to a creek? No way. Plant some water tolerant trees, route the water on the surface through some swales so nutrients stay in the soil. Maybe dig a pond or make a wetland in really problem areas... It costs less and follows the life path.

Inevitably this thinking spills out of personal projects and into my professional life. I've been working in tech for years. In its latest incarnation, it's firmly in Mordor "death land" in spite of flying pride flags and wanting to be "inclusive". It's going to be impossible for me to stay in Mordor. Any tech thing that might help some Orcs escape mordor, is doable, but corporate tech world is pretty bleak these days.

Anyway, the life path is leading me to interesting places.

The Problems with a "Managerial" Economy

In the railroad era, the "maximum profitable miles" of track was unknowable until after it was surpassed and there was a financial implosion of the railroad economy in the 1890s in the US. The "maximum" extent of the rail network was only through an elaborate process of trial and error. The Roman Empire hit some maximum extent, then proceeded to gradually decline, year after year. Today, nobody knows how many Starbucks there should be in the world. Starbucks probably went through the maximum number quite a while ago, maybe in the early 2000s, and in fact has been in decline for years.

The "managerial" economy pops up from time to time throughout history and marks the peak of a given systemic application of resources. We're way into a hyper-managerial economy. The managerial class imagines they can "perfectly manage" the world with some combination of cryptocurrency and AI, that is, by running a bunch of models on a shitload of NVIDA processors. Governments need to extract a bunch of wealth from taxpayers to build a bunch of nuclear power plants to try to make this thing work. Oh, also, they need absolute authoritarian control.

We're firmly in the "pluto" or "hades" world.  Hades was the ultimate seed counter/bean counter. I wonder how far we'll all be dragged into the world of the dead before life and nature come along and wipe their abomination from the face of the Earth.

Cheapest Possible Road

A few years ago the "Cleveland Area Mountain Biking Association" and Geauga County Parks built a mountain bike trail at the park that adjoins my property. I've been a road cyclist/amateur racer since 1990, but never really got into MTB, because of the lack of trails. Now that there's a trail a mile from my house, I can ride over there in a few minutes and do a lap any time the trail is open, so I've been going a few times a week, weather permitting.

One of the things that's interesting to me about MTB is that people got very skilled at making trails over the years that there have been mountain bikes--really only about 40 years now. A small crew of volunteers, mainly, built and maintain about 6 miles of what's essentially a "road" through the woods. The trail contends with stream crossings, drainage, very steep climbs and descents without intensive use of materials.

The cost per mile is not zero, but it's probably as close as you could get to zero. It's not built for a practical purpose, so it twists and turns all over the place, climbs and descends needlessly, goes over bumps and jumps and difficult terrain on purpose to make the route interesting for riders and to pack 6 miles of trail into a 600 acre park. If it were built for practical transportation and utility, the path and approach would be somewhat different but it would be really usable. A person could get from A to B pretty easily over a $0 road.

The way "the system" works is apparent when you contemplate things like the transportation network. The transportation network tends to be completely replaced at each major iteration. For example, once there were trains, the canal and stagecoach era in northeast Ohio went away over the course of a couple of decades. In the car/truck era the trains routes collapsed to a minimal network.

A fairly large amount of the total production of "the system" is spent on the transportation network. The sub-components of the network all fit together. To use a certain tire composition, a certain wheel size, certain vehicle ground clearance implies a certain road surface, gradients, etc... All that leads to a certain cost per mile, which leads to a certain road density for a given population, and so on. This aggregate "solution" is arrived at incrementally over time and basically by accident, or via a process of mass trial and error. The solution is not optimal, plus the "optimal" scenario will change all the time.

Don't Do

Anything a man builds begins decaying and falling apart the instant its finished, even if it's not used. For example if you make something out of wood, UV radiation, fungi, mold, water start wearing away at it immediately. Even durable building materials start to crumble and fall apart once exposed to the elements and arranged in a man-made pattern, like perfectly square and plumb concrete walls or stone walls.

It doesn't take many years for untreated wood to start to fall apart once it's exposed to the elements. Stuff that performs some function, like a road, gets destroyed by traffic and the elements. As the footprint of all the stuff expands, more and more resources and human time and energy are consumed to try to keep it "alive".

The amount of time and energy that goes into maintaining various things people take completely for granted, like on demand electricity, is staggering. A few years ago I observed maintenance of high voltage power lines from Perry Nuclear Power Plant. The lines and insulators and other hardware are replaced on a regular schedule. Every single tower carrying the power lines is periodically repainted and concrete piers are repaired and replaced. Work crews travel around the country performing that demanding and expensive task.

When we moved to our current property, I started building out farm infrastructure every spring and summer. The first year I built a small woodshed. Then I built a garden fence, an enclosure for ducks and chickens, a greenhouse... but soon I realized each new building was not only consuming money and resources for materials to be built, but would be a future drain of time and money for maintenance while producing only a modest amount of food. I pulled the plug on my plans for building a big barn and other infrastructure with the same approach.

The traditional method for analyzing these projects is to look at productivity improvement of some tool or infrastructure versus the costs involved. The "measure" of productivity is typically money, however, that's a bad measure. When "real" terms are used, like energy or materials, there's probably no positive return ever. It's all consumption. Higher "productivity" just consumes more faster with maybe fewer hands involved. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

In the natural system terms, it's really only possible to rearrange the annual flow of sunlight and use materials that nature provides. Living in the context of the natural system generally leads to a "don't do" mentality, a concept that is core to Masanobu Fukuoka's farming methods.

Almost any piece of technology or infrastructure you might look at will fail the "should I do it" test when real terms are used. A couple of basic questions a person might ask about a given piece of tech or infrastructure: "does it really save energy or time of an actual person?" and "does it save energy or time in aggregate?" Almost any project will fail those questions.

Nuclear Subsidies for Tech Bros

The feds announced taxpayers will fund 10 nuclear power plants for tech bros. There won't be as many tech bro yacht club members if the AI bubble pops, so it's a "national emergency". This was telegraphed some time ago. I think the most plausible explanation for this nonsense is the central bank parasite wants to use crypto currency and AI as part of the next monetary/slave system.

Nuclear power is the most expensive, longest lead time, etc... form of electricity generation. The fixation on nuclear power is weird. I can imagine the psycho death cult that seems to run all the institutions in the world might want to literally exterminate every living thing with some kind of mass nuclear meltdown or some shit.

None of the current mania makes any sense at all.

People Systematically Buying Older Cars

I recently thought about buying a 1990s Jeep Cherokee. They're a simple 4x4 car with a reliable engine and transmission. The engines and transmissions can be rebuilt, so they're viable "forever" cars. I started scanning different web sites for rust free ones. The prices are ridiculous, but they're all selling. It's about $10k minimum for a decent example. I imagine by the time it's brought up to daily driver level, the all in cost is closer to $20k.

To me that seems insane, but when I look at newer model used truck prices, I see why it's happening. A high mileage, 10+ year old Tacoma is listing for around $20k. It will have similar problems to an even older Jeep and require multiple thousands of repairs, potentially, to bring it to daily driver reliability.

When you compare those vehicles to a new truck, though, the $20k is a significant "savings" versus a new car. The average new car "price" is about $50,000 today. Most people are making a $700+ payment every month--for their entire life!--to go from A to B. The used car is likely to appreciate in price (not value) as the dollar is obliterated while the new car is a guaranteed loss of several tens of thousands of dollars. The used car is still pretty expensive to own and operate but it's probably 50% or less per trip versus a new car. 

The entire society is slowly shifting away from the trash that control the economy and government. I think the managerial/financial economy is in its first stages of failure and replacement. I see first hand, day to day, that it doesn't work. It's a good question why anyone should work for it.

Are They Actually Going to Invade Venezuela?

It seems like DC is trying to conjure up an excuse to invade Venezuela. How bizarre. I never would have guessed such a thing would happen. They're really trying to sell it though. I can't imagine the Trump administration would have any support for it. Much of the "right" in the US is anti-interventionist and anti-empire. There's not that many magatard boomers. Nobody will believe any pretext those liars in the government try to sell.

1930s Neglected Fridge Still Works

Every once in a while I watch videos from YouTuber "Mustie" who does car repair and random stuff repair videos. He just did a video about a Westinghouse fridge from the 30s that still runs, and is still quite usable. It required mainly a cleaning and some minor electrical repairs, even the seals on the fridge were intact after 90 or so years. An old "consumer" product is significantly more durable than a modern version. Generally new products are engineered to be "just good enough" and so they are more prone to fail and the overall system promotes their replacement rather than repair.

The financial and insurance industry in the US steadily turned everything into garbage at least since the federal reserve system started. Fractional reserve debt money is a serious problem for all the nominally "western" countries. It's basically systematized rot and rust because perverse incentives seem to dominate every large institution. The core issue is the accumulation of currency isn't the same as accumulation of wealth or any true good. A related issue is bureaucracy and overhead grow to absorb money like fungus and mildew. Similarly, the population is turning into incompetent retards because the system is predatory and wants prey.

Another side effect of the consumer/corporate system is individual and small business capabilities are higher than ever because of the profusion of material goods. For example, back in the 90s I worked at a company that made plasma and oxy cutting tables... At the time it was a somewhat exotic piece of equipment that was used in what was essentially heavy industry. Today its a ubiquitous consumer level item. There are portable versions that a hobbyist can use to cut precise and elaborate parts with a robot arm.

There's so much stuff out there that it's entirely plausible to never buy any new consumer product, but still live the generic "American" lifestyle by remanufacturing all the consumer goods and maximize value and reliability.

Formula for Future Success

Human life is pretty simple.

A man only need a few things: clean water, food, basic shelter. Everything else is a "want".

The "human system" is embedded in the nature system. The nature system runs on second hand sunshine. Since the sun is distributed fairly evenly over the earth's surface there's a profusion of forms of life. The nature system also runs on opposed forces that create conditions of dynamic equilibrium, so everything in nature runs in cycles.

The human system is mainly a product of the verbal and symbolic mode of consciousness. A thing like a city is a great example of that. The city attempts to expunge the natural system from its footprint and imposes grids and concrete and asphalt.

The further humans or an individual moves from the natural order, the more precarious is their situation. Consider a body builder who pumps huge amounts of roids into his or her system to build muscle for some bizarre fetishistic reason--the muscle man concept exists only in his or her mind. The body which is the epitome of a dynamic equilibrium system, is pushed far out of the natural and balanced scenario to an extreme, so it fails early, or organs fail, or cancers develop, etc... The image of the muscle man kills off the pile of 'roid muscle growth.

A collection of individuals acting the same way ends up with similar results. An attempt to force a region way out of dynamic equilibrium leads to a precarious situation. Relying on far flung infrastructure to deliver water to millions of people who decide to live in a desert climate like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Israel, etc... is a great example of that. All those cities, and most cities and collections of humans in some corporate endeavor are associated with and endless demand of "wants".

The amount of time and energy that goes into the pursuit of "wants" is staggering. The collective time and energy of everyone in the western world has poured into building a giant garbage pile of consumer products for quite a long time. None of it is durable. In fact, as time goes by consumer products get worse and more wasteful.

It seems plausible that aligning human activity and wants with the natural order would lead to a more durable scenario for an individual. The "problem" in that case is contending with the mass of depraved crazy people in general, and in government in particular. The government and the crazy mass basically wants everyone else to work as slaves to fulfill their wants.

The 401(k) is the best example of that insanity. The mass of people implicitly wants corporate profits to grow so they can live on financial gains, but depend on corporations for jobs and goods. They are a slave that everyone else to be a slave.

Fortunately for the man who wants out, the mass of crazy people won't even see the path toward the natural order life. The natural order life is basically the anti-matter version of the merchant.

A Country Run by Dopes

In my career in tech, I worked on a couple of corporate proposals that I thought were implausible and stupid ideas made up by money men or sales people. 

The first one was to broadcast video from a satellite some company managed to launch, but never use. It was just floating around in space collecting space dust and running out its lifespan as a viable piece of tech junk.

I was puzzled how a company could put together all the resources needed to build and launch a satellite on spec. Back then it was probably many billions of dollars to build and launch a satellite. The company's concept was to broadcast a few channels of videos to cars to keep little kids entertained. Already around 2010 (I think that's roughly when that happened) mobile networks capable of delivering video were rolling out very quickly. Plus you could just install some cheap DVD player in a car to keep kids entertained, so who would subscribe to a service to watch a few broadcast channels of cartoons? Anyway, the satellite lacked sufficient power to transmit such data to mobile terminals with compact antennas, so that project just died.

More recently, I worked on a project to move the control system of a factory to a data center. The entire time I was discussing the project, I thought "why?" Some dummies came up with this model and managed to sell it to a bunch of other dummies that will just do it, even if it makes no sense or isn't viable. To many corporate people "AI" is any computer program or any computerized function. They now think to run any computer program you need an "AI" data center, because it's all AI.

I come back, time and time again to the concept of "elite overproduction" as a way of understanding the current situation in the US. I think a useful associated concept is the "cargo cult". The mass of people running companies and other institutions really don't know what they're doing, so they ritualistically imitate what they think they should be doing.

Trump Nuclear Plants: LoL

The feds are going to finance nuclear power plants to subsidize the shitty tech industry. They're planning to loan "hundreds of billions" which means 3 or 4 nuke plants in about 30 years. I guess we're going with the hyperinflationary collapse with vast resources squandered scenario.

Billionaire Scammers Don't Give a Shit About Global Warmaids Now

Bill Gates recently dropped the global warming bullshit story because there's not enough power to squander on "AI datacenters". Those clowns are always lying and want free money from taxpayers all the time. I wonder if it will ever be so obvious to all the people in the US that it's open season on them all.

50 Year Mortgages

Rumors that banks will start offering 50 year mortgages on homes are making the rounds. I think it's plausible/likely that will happen, which will drive house prices up even more. The neoliberal economic system is heading for the dustbin. It probably took a decade, maybe even two for the post WW2 system to mostly die off. It will probably take about as long for our current POS economic system to go in the trash.

The demented leadership of the US and really the western world wants to replace it with techocratic central planning and digital currencies, but I don't think that will happen. Who knows what will though.

"Management" and the Mediterranean Slave Culture

For most of my adult life I've been working on "projects" of one kind or another. At work, I do tech projects. At home I do things like garden, or home improvements, or property "improvements". I organized several bicycle races over the years, which is actually a pretty big undertaking. One thing I learned is when there's a lot of "management" involved in a project, it will probably fail because the people couldn't do it in the first place--I only see that happen at corporate jobs. On the flip side, when there's no management required, the project is certain to succeed.

In those projects that were certain to succeed, everyone knew what they were doing. So the "management" involved was making a check list, then the team checked the items off, then the project was done.

The corporate idea that incompetent people can be "managed" to be productive seems like an idea from the never ending slave societies that extended back before the bronze age. This idea is the main idea of the current day neoliberal corporatocracies. I think it's incompatible with the northern european people's DNA. It's a shame they're all wasting their time and energy keeping these shit corporate systems running.

The technocrat society is the ultimate expression of that ancient slave culture. Build huge infrastructure to "manage" every aspect of life... Gross.

OpenAI wants Taxpayer Funding for their Hobby Project

Apparently there's not enough 401(k) and pension money to fund a bunch of GPUs and electricity to run chatbots, so tech industry parasites are asking for taxpayer funding. If they aren't funded to finish their hobby project, "china" might do it.

Unfortunately, I think the feds will throw money at these projects and accelerate dollar devaluation--to build chatbot datacenters.

Unlike the dotcom era, when investors threw money at pets.com, WorldCom and Global Crossing, lots of resources are needed to build out the infrastructure for AI data centers. In the dot com era, stonks could soar on a speculative future business where a company just sucked money up with big, but cheap in resource terms stuff, like selling pet toys online. To do that business, you just needed a few warehouses, a few servers and internet service, and mainly a bunch of employees to run it.

The AI model is society needs to build a bunch of expensive, resource intensive stuff to run a silicon valley bro corporation, mainly to feed some billionaire trash more money. It's utterly retarded. Multiple new power plants are needed just to run some dumb AI models, basically to replace some workers with a data center that's sucking up resources. It's very dumb.

"China" Competition

Recently, the tech industry trotted out the "China" bogeyman as justification for taxpayer funding of datacenters and other tech industry projects.

All the people who shipped jobs to India and China are now worried the US, which they have zero allegiance to and even despise and scorn, will "lose" some mythical race to China. Seems implausible. Also seems that generations of such business people are dumb asses that constantly make bad choices... so why slave away on their behalf?

The US corporation made endless terrible decisions the whole time I've been conscious, mainly because the people who actually run the country are delusional sickos. When the cold war ended, there was a real chance to bring the former Soviet Union into the western "liberal" system, however, the western liberal system ended at roughly the same time and shifted into central planning and endless warfare mode and neocons completely took over US war and economic planning.

The idea that there's some existential threat associated with China "winning" the non-existent AI contest is just some dumb talking point by tech industry grifter scumbags.

The tech industry is just meandering all over the place, not really providing a whole lot of value. A whole lot of the US economy turned into some kind of potemkin village scenario where people go to an office and turn a crank that poops out power point presentations because they work to keep the central banking system running and to help fund billionaire lifestyles rather than solve simple problems of their life or their community.

People frenetically "invest" in these crap corporations and barely even know anything about their home, or the geography of their immediate vicinity or their neighbors, etc...

 

The US Gov't is Full of Psychopathic Trash

Apparently, the Trump administration is plotting a war on Venezuela. I'm not sure what the pretext is. I guess they want oil? Who knows anymore. 

Israel is Full of Psychopath Trash

The Zionists jews are an Aum Shinrikyo style death cult. Footage of torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners by IDF soldiers was leaked by, to her great credit, a member of the IDF Major General Yafit Tomer-Yerushalmi. Then Israeli citizens broke into the prison where it was happening, not to protest the horror of their nation raping and torturing prisoners, but instead to demand it continue!

I'm sure there are good people in Israel in spite of it being the site of endless horrors for thousands of years, however, it's clear the people who run that country are antinomian psychopaths or the most vile weirdos on Earth. The US government should not support Israel. It probably wouldn't if the government of the US wasn't a totally compromised pile of similarly shit people. 

Learned Helplessness and the School System

We recently watched Lethal Weapon (1987). That movie, like many of the TV shows and movies of that era, features saxophone in its theme music. The sax was relatively common in the pop music of that time as well. I ended up playing sax from middle school all the way through college. I only played in college because I had a scholarship. I was pretty much done with it by the end of high school.

The music program in my high school was really good, but I knew I didn't even want to be a professional musician, or even an amateur hobby musician, so it was kind of a waste of my time even though I was relatively good at it. When we were watching Lethal Weapon I had flashbacks to the "Solo and Ensemble" contest that were held every year.

Every year, musicians from local schools would travel to one of the schools in Northeast Ohio and play a solo or an ensemble piece. I did it every year I was in high school. It's not a contest in the sense that one person per category can "win", you just get a grade and maybe a ribbon or medal, I don't really remember the details clearly. I know, though that the best grade is a "1", and maybe the worst is a "4".

Anyway, I was thinking about how that experience was similar to much of the other school related things I did. The students jump through fairly arbitrary hoops and are "judged" by fairly arbitrary groups of adults. It's a great example of "gamified reality" in fact it's training to live in the game-ified reality world. It has nothing to do with real life. I began to understand the difference sometime during the senior year of high school. I went and took scholarship tests, auditions, interviews at various colleges that year... I was mostly done with the phony formalism by then. The absurdity of it all was really starting to sink in.

If you want to be a professional musician, you go out and play and try to get jobs. If you want to be an amateur musician that plays for fun, you just play. Maybe you put it on YouTube if you want an audience. There's nobody "judging" that you got all the notes right and giving you a meaningless grade. Many musicians that made millions of dollars performing really kind of suck from the solo/ensemble contest perspective, or maybe had no formal music training.

The reality of being a musician is the same as being an engineer, or a scientist, or really anything. The idea you need "credentials" is just part of the gamified reality world. Some of the real world training you'd need to be capable in surgery, dentistry, or whatever, would be difficult to obtain outside the institutions that are part of the system currently, but it's not fundamentally different than learning to be a master craftsman at carpentry or metal working or whatever.

The gamified world is 100% arbitrary and not real at all. The vast majority, I'll say almost all the formal training I received from pre-school through college had nothing to do with real life. That sort of training applies to almost every "civilized" person. You're trained to play the game that's run by psychopaths and inbred ruling class weirdos. People have been living that way for thousands of years.

It's noteworthy that the game world imposes on "real life" as much as possible and winnows it down to a minimal percentage of people's time and experience for adults and kids alike. If you were raised in "the real world" solving real world problems instead of being raised "in the game", the game world would be an incomprehensible waste of time and energy. The game participants would be seen as bumbling dopes and utter fools.

Inevitable Result of "Managing" the Economy

The main thing I learned in my adult life is nobody, including me, knows anything. A person can know a tiny handful of real actual facts about the world. Every other claim to "know" is a lie. People believe things, or have models of things in mind, but time and changing circumstances generally invalidate those models.

The economic and political system manufactures credentials and hierarchies of so called experts to help bolster an illusion that the twats and scumbags of the "ruling class" are capable of making decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions, even billions of people at a time. Nobody is. People are hardly capable of making decisions for their family. Many members of the ruling class have broken, failed families with drugged out kids; Joe Biden is a great example of that.

The systems, like the financial system, that have simple controls can be "managed" in the sense that something like the quantity of dollars in circulation can be set by simple policy adjustments. The outcomes from that control mechanism, though, are a completely different story. Some loose concept like "productivity" or GDP doesn't really measure anything substantive, especially as the focus of the economy changes. Lots of economic activity in the US today, for example, is makework, make believe nonsense, or is parasitic. Huge numbers of people are employed by industries like insurance or finance which don't make anything at all.

Currently, the company NVIDIA is "worth" about a quarter of the entire US GDP... That's stupid. The government and the financial industry went all in on "AI" and datacenters. At the same time, there's a pretty steady flow of news about how AI's actually not fit for purpose.

I think in a nutshell people confused the type of technological advancement that happened from the 1970s to about 2010 with how tech functions today. From the 70s to sometime in the 2000s, tech "advanced" because of Moore's law, basically. That is, CPUs and other integrated circuits got faster or more capabilities every year, plus the cost per chip inevitably declined. The number of applications could expand with each iteration.

People believe that "full self driving" is "inevitable" for that reason. Nope. It's not a problem that's solved with more transistors per unit area. Maybe it's an unsolvable problem. It's the same story with "AI" or human-like robots. Another important aspect of those applications is they don't seem economical. If it takes a data center to do some office worker job, it's nonsensical.

A more fundamental point is how long will mom and pop people in the western world allow the countries to be ruled by inbred trash families? People sit idly by while their future is decided for them by some inbred retard board of directors whose main competency is nepotism. It's pretty dumb.

Big Tech is a Wasteful Dead End

A few days ago I watched a youtube video about a young asian guy who built an Ekranoplan and actually flew it himself. One of the great side effects of the advancement of "tech" is individuals are empowered like never before. It's cheaper and easier than ever to build and invent new things.

At the same time, giant corporations, which seem to be indistinguishable from the government are sucking up all the world's resources to build a monoculture control grid. According to their fantasy plans, everyone in the world, especially in the western countries, will be forced into poverty to carry out their schemes. This is the "beast system" digital control grid that various people have been warning about for years.

That monoculture, top down, central planning society has been tried numerous times through history and it always fails. It's the anti-nature system.

Tech Companies are The Government

States like Texas, Ohio, and California are rolling out the same type of digital ID laws as the UK, all at the same time.

Similarly, "tech companies" are building data centers all over the place, nominally for "AI" applications. Taxpayers are funding much of that activity, again in dopey states like Ohio.

Texas will require an ID to install a fucking smartphone app.

People imagine there's some difference between the political parties when there's obviously not. The same agenda rolls out regardless of which professional liars are in office.

It looks like there's really no difference between corporate america and the government, and it's much the same story all around the world.

Filling up "The Void"

The verbal and symbolic mode of consciousness, the human "mind", essentially falls into a "divide by 0" kind of scenario when trying to address the big questions of life, like why are "we" (that is the human minds) here, or what happens to the mind when the body dies? It's analogous to a divide by zero because it's undefinable in verbal and symbolic terms. (video of mechanical calculator divide by zero)

Those big questions are fundamental to human life, but are unanswerable. That doesn't stop anyone from trying though, obviously. That animates much of human behavior. Religions like Christianity try to fill up that void with an assertion from a corporation, like the catholic church, and then physically penalized people who didn't go along with their assertion. For example, the catholics in france slaughtered the Cathars because of their divergent views about particular aspects of the official story book of Christianity.

That sort of corporate definition of "truth" is really an interesting and unfortunate component of "western" people who often claim the label of "free".

Cult like religions follow a similar approach, but it's usually a minority, often a small minority of the population who adhere to the assertions of perhaps an individual. Mormonism was like that, Zionism today is like that: the zionists are basically a death cult like Aum Shinrikyo. There's an unfortunate tendency for Mormons to go off the rails into extreme cult-like behavior.

In 1666 there was a jewish cult leader named Sabbatai Zevi who captured something like 50% of the european jews with his antinomian teaching. It's pretty likely that cult never really went away and is still quite prominent. Today, the zionists brainwash children that everyone else in the world wants to kill them, so they have license to kill everyone else first. One of their prime cult leaders is the prime minister of Israel who likens their country to ancient Sparta--which is some weird LARPer fantasy. The cult leaders in these scenarios is in the weirdest position with respect to this divide by zero problem. They are necessarily aware their ideas are nonsense they feed to their insane followers, but find some satisfaction in duping people maybe even to their early demise to give them ersatz "meaning".

Anyway, for a thinking person, it's unlikely these cult formulas would provide a satisfactory answer to the "Big Questions". They're more like a distraction, or an "activity", rather than something that would fill up that void. Like the catholic religion in medieval times, the "believer" has "faith" in some crackpot's particular assertions.

Several philosophers, and philosophical schools put this void, or divide by zero problem at the center of their endeavors and then don't really try to fill it up at all. This, to me, seems like the wisest approach. Yes, your life is meaningless. Pick up a fossil sometime and think about an ancient trilobite swimming around in Devonian era tropical seas 300 million years ago. The "mind" can freak out at its insignificance (which is why there are those death cults and corporate religions). Many people equate this divide by zero scenario with "fear of death". I think that's the wrong interpretation.

When you couple that divide by zero scenario with the need for recognition, which for some people is all-consuming then leads to the fabrication of elaborate fantasies and lashing out. The Zionist jews are the best example of this right now.

To me, the most sane approach to this divide by zero problem is to retire from the madness of crowds and organizations and to go live a free, minimalist, and interesting as possible life. There are numerous examples of people who decided to do that. Dick Proenneke is a good recent example.

"Left Wing Terror" as a Pretext for More Authoritarian Bullshit from the Awful Shit Government

 Now that Trump is president, there's "left wing terror". In earlier years there was a supposed threat of "right wing terror". It will probably just be a pretext for pushing more authoritarian crap, and cash grabs from dirtbag companies... plus online ID, and all sorts of other shit these trash people want.

Total Corruption: US government "investing" in companies

 Imagine you were a government scumbag who knew that the US government was going to "invest" in some company... You go buy some shares, tell friends and family, then ring the register if you want. That's how congress people end up with multi-million dollar net-worth after a handful of years of professional lying.

Things are getting pretty bad in the US when this kind of behavior is so common. It's hard to imagine how bad it will get before average Joe and Jane or Shanequia and Darnell realize how bad it is. I wonder if people will even notice.

I don't understand how it's even legal for the US government to just buy some shares in rando companies, like Intel, or some Lithium Miner, or US Steel. What the fuck? I'd have to be delusional to imagine my clown, POS congress rando lawyer puppet fuckwad will even say anything negative about it. I think the US died in like 2001 and is now a total joke.

Charlie Kirk Assassination

A few years ago I read about historian Peter Turchin's theory about "elite overproduction" and how that predicts political and economic turmoil. In a nutshell, he came up with ways to quantify elite overproduction, like the per capita law school students, or elite university students. When that metric spikes, there's major trouble ahead.

I don't really know anything about Charlie Kirk. I tuned out of the "mainstream" alt-media during the first Trump election. It's a pretty obviously controlled group, and the so called individuals like Kirk, were really some type of minion, typically of some Zionist puppet master and pushed typical propaganda.

He was killed by somebody and some convenient divide and conquer propaganda artifacts were left at the scene as "evidence" like the 9/11 hijacker passports were found in the world trade center rubble. It seems like some force wants the dopey "left" and "right" in the US to escalate conflict, but I doubt it will work. People don't really care that much, well, the people who do are all too old to really get all that fired up about it.

Maybe it will serve as some kind of pretext for another round of bullshit, like 9/11 helped ruin air travel.  

Nepalese are Slaughtering their Government

Every government in the world is a collection of all the worst people in the jurisdiction. Corruption is commonplace. It's heartening to see the people in Nepal trashing their government and government officials. Hopefully they'll do something sensible in the aftermath, but they probably won't. 

Three Eras of Tech

We're in the third era or phase of the tech industry.

Phase one was the CPU phase. That was in the 70s and 80s maybe into the early 90s. A couple of companies packaged up CPUs and microcontrollers so it was cheap and easy to put them everywhere. One great example of that is electronic fuel injection: those systems replaced a clunky mechanical control system for a car engine with a computer, sensors, and a electro-mechanical devices. It improved fuel economy and reduced tail-pipe emissions, plus it made cars more reliable. That was a huge improvement. The same sort of thing happened in hundreds of other applications. The real return on investment in the CPU phase was large.

Phase two was the networking era which was in the 90s til today. In that era we got the internet, and data centers, and wireless networks, etc... In that era the newer tech replaced and cannibalized older methods of moving information around. The internet replaced newspapers, radio, TV for example. The real return on investment is much lower than phase one, and the "real world", quality of life improvements are murkier. Social media for example, is probably a net negative.

Phase three is the datacenter AI era. I think the tech industry believes "AI" models are like CPUs in Phase one, it's a universal tool. However, unlike a CPU that consumes a few watts of power to operate, some AI model might take kilowatts to operate to do something that's kind of useless. The tech industry wants to proliferate the AI models, but there's not enough resources to do it.

Unfortunately, as each phase of the tech industry unfolded there's been a corresponding move by governments and similar institutions toward an autocratic model in the western world. A corporation or new technology doesn't really have to provide a real benefit to customers or anyone, it just enacts a plan. The government will put taxpayers and ratepayers on the hook to shift and build resources for the tech industry.

There will be a huge real loss in quality of life, purchasing power of the dollar, autonomy, etc... to build a bunch of shitty datacenters to do nonsense badly. 

Feds going to Invest in Intel?

 Wut? Why?

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/tech/intel-trump-us-government-investment

Weird.

Crap Dishwashers

 When I was a kid, my family had the same dishwasher machine for many, many years. The components just kept working. Now, since my wife and I have lived at our current house, we've had three in under 10 years. The drain pump just failed on the current one, too. I think the motor windings burnt out. It was the top-end dishwasher at home depot when we bought it, well the top end one with no nonsense electronic/computerized features. I ordered a new drain pump a couple of days ago. The new pump is about $120 delivered. People generally throw appliances away because those parts cost a significant fraction of the cost of a new machine, especially if they pay a handyman or similar person to install it.

30 years ago, companies made parts that last. Now they make parts that purposely don't last. Eventually even appliance makers will try to charge rent to operate their shitty appliances, just like the god awful auto industry.

Youtube History Professor

This guy is a Canadian-Chinese history professor who's a gen Xer. It's interesting how many observer/commentator people who are as neutral as can be come up with similar conclusions. Here's a video about elite overproduction in the bronze age collapse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwfB-vXXKWU

That's a theory from the historian Peter Turchin. I think that theory explains the current times very well. The US is suffering from it, while places like the UK are choking on it and turning entirely dysfunctional.

Things that Don't Make Sense

I think almost everybody follows a "life script". It's necessary to do that because young people don't have any practical experience. In our time, the script provides a sequence of steps to do what's needed to survive by plugging into the economic system. For example, when I was in high school in the 80s, it was obvious "tech" and "computer stuff" was going to be big, so there were a sequence of broad brush stroke steps laid out to do that.

The generic "professional person" life script for me was go to college, then additional details for specific fields are added. For a tech person back then it was get a math, science, or electrical engineering or computer science degree, then get a job. Then there's a list of accouterments and items a job person "purchases", typically meaning they get a loan, then make payments on things like a house, or a car. 

Most individuals wandering down their life script path are only dimly aware of the bigger picture of thousands of people doing very similar things and nobody can really see or predict the aggregate consequences. The outcome of those scripts is only obvious when they are failing.

In the mid 1800s in the US, for example, a "techie" of the day might have worked on a railroad as an engineer of some kind, either designing and building bridges, switch yards, or whatever. They and their peers poured their life into that system, but by the 1870s no more tracks or bridges or switch yards were really needed. So that life script went stale.

The neoliberal system and its main industry: tech, have the same problem today. The life script for tech dude went stale about 10 years ago IMO. That's about when the tech work was fully systematized and became an institutional rote exercise.

One of the really obvious constraints on tech is electric power consumption. Currently, data centers suck up about 4-5% of electrical power in the US! That's absurd. People are competing with shitty tech applications to run their refrigerator and A/C. I think that's a hard limit on tech expansion. About 40% of that data center power budget goes to cooling the equipment, by the way.

When you zoom out and look at the overall system lots of elements of it are obviously nonsensical. The push to outsource jobs, then manufacturing of everything was nonsensical and self-defeating the whole time. Neoliberal economies are currently organized for the benefit of a small fraction of the population. By reducing the mass of people to poverty, they also eliminated their customers. To compensate for that, they look for customers overseas where they shipped manufacturing. It's absurd.

A parallel absurdity is the workers in such companies "investing" in a 401(k) to monetize the executive compensation (in stock) of the corporations shipping jobs overseas. As an individual it seems to make sense to "win by cheating" basically, but in aggregate it's absurd nonsense.

The segments of the economy where prices outpace inflation significantly don't make sense. College and university education, home prices in many cities, passenger car and light truck prices, Healthcare, Veterinary care--all nonsense. Government is usually nonsensical, but giant growing bureaucracy and nanny state regulation is absurd. Pretending EV battery disposal is free and green is nonsense.

An individual in the western countries can look at their current system and see what's crazy/absurd and invent a new approach to life that actually harmonizes with the natural order of things, or at least do something that's closer to common sense. One example of that is provided by the automotive industry. New cars are too expensive. Many older cars are significantly cheaper and more reliable than new cars. It seems pretty obvious that older cars will be on the road indefinitely and will be repaired indefinitely. Car manufacturers will not support them, though, so a parallel universe industry of replacement parts will spring up in a much larger way.

Zeno's Tech Paradox

I bought a new bicycle recently--a Cervelo Soloist. It's got some "aero" features. I bought it for a couple of practical reasons, but mainly I was curious if it's really any better than a bike from 2008--another Cervelo that was the winning bike in Paris-Roubaix and many other races. I bought the old bike used on e-bay for cheap. I put thousands of miles on it since. It was a real bargain. The new bike was pretty expensive.

The high-end road bicycle industry makes lots of claims they backup with "science", or really proxies in the bike media (there is such a thing) make many such claims about new bicycles.

Am I any faster? No. It's identical to my older bike. If there's some systematic improvement in power or speed, it's minute. I knew that would be the case, but it's interesting to see the numbers. I use the Strava service. It compiles a database of ride segments for all the participants. I can see how I compare against others and against my previous performances.

One of the amazing things about doing a sport like cycling is that I can go out and go absolutely ape-shit full gas over a course of almost any length, and physics and biology conspire to limit my speed to a very narrow range. I used to do a local low key time trial (an individual race against the clock). I trained very hard over the winter one year, so I thought I'd be much faster when the TT season started, but my first outing was about 1 second different than the prior year over a 20 minute ride. (1 second faster out of 1200)

A bike can be "faster" through: reduced rolling resistance, better mechanical efficiency, improved aerodynamics, better fit for more optimal power transfer, and maybe some other factors. The physics says aerodynamics is the most important factor for speed, but the bike's contribution to aerodynamic drag is probably a smallish fraction of the overall system's drag, including the rider. In my case, I'm 6' and over 200 pounds. When I get into my best aero position, I'm still the most significant contributor to drag, probably by far. So if the bike really is say 5% more efficient than the old one, it might only amount to a 0.1% overall improvement. (I don't really know the numbers.) A rider, like a pro Tour de France rider might see a more significant improvement from an aero bike, because they're more aero than a fat ass old guy like me.

When I look at the same strava segments I rode on my old bike and on my new bike, the power outputs required to go a certain speed (using the same power meter on both) are the same... so my times over the same segments are the same. I'd have to write my own software to really compare in detail, but that'd be a waste of my time.

Anyway, is the bike better in any way? Yes. The frame geometry is slightly more "relaxed" and it has a longer wheelbase so it's much easier to ride, especially at high speed. My old bike gets twitchy on downhills where the speed gets into the 35+ mph range. That's scary and induces some stress. I don't want to be stressed when I'm out trying to enjoy a ride.

I think lots of tech "peaked" in the early 2000s. Bikes included. Carbon fiber allowed bike manufacturers to produce nearly optimal frame designs... so there's not much left to improve on. I think all tech suffers from a zeno's paradox like effect. It never achieves perfection.

Cantillon Effect + Elite Overproduction + Tech Saturation

 I was surprised to learn that an Irish/French economist who lived in the 1600s to 1734 named Richard Cantillon observed that fiat money is a wealth transfer machine. This aspect of such monetary systems is named the "Cantillon Effect". In a nutshell, the people who receive such money first benefit most. Over the years, I heard explanations for this phenomenon, but wasn't aware a description of it was formulated in the 18th century.

This aspect of the current financial system is probably its biggest problem. Once a person learns they're playing a rigged game, they stop playing. Inflation, a necessary side effect of fiat money, eventually and inevitably leads to lower productivity. If you didn't get a 10-15% raise over the past couple of years you effectively got a pay cut because the purchasing power of the dollar is tanking so rapidly. Why work harder for something that's worth less and less every year?

This economic system is basically about managers and owners of corporations scamming people into working to add value to financial products, that is, pieces of paper. One great example of that is a "leveraged buyout" of some corporation. The owners of a corporation cash out, and transfer ownership to some new group. The cash for the purchase is created from a loan, then the workers at the company labor to pay it off. Their share of the production is naturally smaller than under the prior ownership because they're paying interest and other fees basically to just transfer a pile of paper representing the ownership of their collective labors to some new party.

Another big problem is "elite overproduction" which is a phenomenon noted by historian Peter Turchin. He realized it's a periodic problem. Sometimes the economic and political system of the day can't handle more "elites". It produces way too many lawyers, PhDs, MBAs, etc... It's just a good sign of underlying systemic stagnation and is a sign the "life scripts" of an era are out of sync with reality. There are lots of youtube videos made by people with an expensive, useless degree. When they can't get an academic job with their PhD in some esoterica, they imagine they'll get a high paying job in "tech" with zero experience or relevant expertise even though the tech industry is mass laying people off now.

IMO, elite overproduction is probably a side effect of overpopulation and real economic stagnation. There are inherent limits to the economic system and no amount of financial activity or money printing can propel indefinite useful "growth" of the economy so every economic system is growing in proportion to the population.

The tech industry grew for years. It seemingly fulfilled a 500+ year old myth of "the new Atlantis". Concepts like "the singularity" were promoted as an inevitable outcome of tech stuff and "science". The reality is tech is pretty stagnant and in fact, lots of tech stuff today is significantly shittier and less reliable than things produced in the early 2000s.

I think the "next big thing" will actually be doing less and wanting less stuff, making products that a are smaller, simpler, cheaper and more reliable, long lasting and easy to maintain. People will realize the system is a giant parasite and all their stuff is endlessly hungry for their time and energy.

Tech is Getting Railroaded

For a few years at least, I saw parallels between the tech industry and the railroads in the USA. Mainly tech is too big and its markets are fully saturated. The same thing happened in the US rail industry even before cars and trucks were a significant competitor. Rail lines were overbuilt even before 1893. The rail industry underwent a period of consolidation then decline. The number of people employed by railroads was once in the millions, now it's about 83,000.

Lots of people imagine that the tech industry is laying people off because of "AI". I think in a way that's true. The "AI" portion of the tech sector is currently absorbing lots of investor cash and turning it into hardware and data centers so there's not as much investor money for other schemes. 

Many of the new areas of tech are speculative and implausible sci-fi stories and are really just schemes to sell stock. Even worse, many new areas in tech are part of the gross technocratic surveillance corporate/government hybrid monstrosity.

Anyway, I'm currently on my final tech job. I'm not sure how much longer it will last. I'm looking forward to moving onto the next thing, whatever it might be.