Individual Capability at All Time High

Last weekend I went to the Harbor Freight store in Middlefield, Ohio to buy a new set of mechanic's tools. I bought a similar set from Sears back in the early 1990s. Over time bits and pieces are lost and it eventually gets extremely annoying to spend 30 minutes looking for a specific socket or whatever. While I was in the store, I browsed the inventory. They have a large selection of tools and other supplies. The metal working tools there are quite impressive and cheap. There's pipe bending tools, sheet metal forming tools, plasma cutters, welders, etc... A person could outfit a small fabrication shop from mainly Harbor Freight tools for maybe $10,000 or less and be able to build tubular vehicle frames, fabricate large or small parts, etc... There are decent CNC plasma cutting tables for significantly less than $5000.

That scenario is true across the board: a smart person can jump into basically any project and do almost anything today. You can jump into something as seemingly esoteric as CPU design now with a RISC-V core and an FPGA board. You can build a drone. You can make a car, a car engine, a transmission, airplane, helicopter, etc... and on and on. You can make your own smartphone. Your own laptop, etc...

At the same time, the economy of industrialized countries is more centralized than ever. Giant financialized corporations dominate all the industries and own everything because of funny money printing and corruption. Similarly, governments are giant, bloated, incompetent monsters.

It seems implausible both these things can continue ad infinitum.

Collision of Reality and Belief

There are lots of people that live almost entirely in the world of belief, that is, they can function in 3D reality, but their thoughts revolve around some mental model. Religious people, for example, can see any event as the work of a benevolent "God" character. "God has a plan." For car accidents that kill a family including children while elderly mass murderers in government keep living another day. Religious people will see a fire burn a city down, like LA, and embrace collective punishment by a "benevolent God" for gays or whatever. Climate changers reinforce their belief model on very cold winter days or very hot summer days, or a very rainy day, or a long stretch of dry weather... it's all "climate change".

Their models are low fidelity cartoon representations of reality. The high fidelity experience of reality supersedes a simple model that's amenable to the "belief" machinery of the brain. Generally, the "believer" can't adjust or throw their model out when their personal experience demonstrates their belief model is broken.

Sometimes the models don't have any relation to reality at all. Some religious and political beliefs are completely disconnected from it and are mere opinions are assertions.

I think the fires that just burned down large sections of LA are realities that collide with lots of very flawed beliefs. One belief is the government is omnipotent and capable of protecting people from all eventualities. The reality is the government is just a bunch of people who are typically not very high functioning nor good at their jobs, plus humanity is really quite limited compared to the scale of natural disasters.

Really, all that matters when it comes to building something in 3D reality is nature and natural laws. Wishes and beliefs don't help anybody.

The Formula for Convincing Leftist People of Anything

I'm not a political partisan, but I do see obvious differences between "the left" and "the right" when it comes to selling them something.

To sell a leftist person something, create a character with credentials or fame or an award. That can be done via the media. A good example of that is Bill Nye the Science Guy. Another one is Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Bill Gates is yet another. Anthony Fauci was a good one during COVAIDS. The character can then make pronouncements on any subject with authority even if their area of expertise is limited and irrelevant to the matter at hand.

A second part of the sales job is to ridicule anyone who doesn't agree with the authority as a stupid rube and use religious labels like "denier" as in "climate denier".

The leftist person will feel like part of the good flock by sneering at the dummies who deny what Bill Gates Nye or Al Gore says. Their consciousness is all about "belief" and affirming their "beliefs" rather than knowledge, which is really quite interesting.

"Knowing" puts a person on par with an expert and implies agency and responsibility, while believing is just being a follower and not presuming to make any type of decisions.

Los Angeles Wildfires: Human Impotence and Government Incompetence

I was in LA a few times in 2024. Each time I went, I thought it is the most obviously unsustainable place I've ever seen. It's like a tinder box wooden structure on an oceanside cliff in a earthquake and fire zone. There's not enough water and resources to support the population. The economics of the city is FUBAR. The list goes on and on.

The hubris of people who imagine they can "manage the climate" by regulating CO2 is just part of the zany incompetence of the government of California and the lefty corporate entities out there. The climate is going to do whatever it's going to do. Humanity as a whole is just along for the ride. Even just somewhat out of the ordinary weather events like the Santa Ana winds in LA are too much for a city's worth of firefighting equipment. The idea a handful of "experts" and their opinions is going to steer 8 billion people's activity successfully to set earth's thermostat is utter retardation.

CO2 emissions from cars are only 10% of emissions from global human activity. I didn't know that until recently. The entire automotive industry is being regulated by governments around the world for that? Sure whatever.

The mayor and other officials of LA seem grossly incompetent, even by typical government official standards, and they made awful decisions about budgeting and staffing a critical service like the fire department--but they're black women lesbians and the like, so that's more important I guess. That said, I am skeptical there were competent people to choose from in the elections: why would there be?

Citities are maladaptive. Actually I think any entity composed of large numbers of people is inherently maladaptive and has an inherent tendency toward utter destruction. The worst types of people will always take over any group with more than a few dozen humans.

Bring Back the Sax: Make America Great Again

 This morning, I realized there's hardly any saxophone music in movies or TV show soundtracks, and not even in popular music, which is all synthesized crapola created by AI anyway. There's a paper on the subject: link

Here's the money shot graph:

Car Price as a Function of Average Wage

 

The new and used car market seems to epitomize problems with "the system" right now. Cars are too expensive, unreliable, shaped by pointless government mandates, and are filled with all kinds of electronic doodads that only some people want. In the years since COVID, the car market was drastically distorted by a few different things: trillions of dollars of funny money (aka dollar devaluation) under Trump and Biden's administration, corporate used car lots, extremely foolish consumers willing to have a $1000/month car payment for a mediocre car.

Anyway, it's just another example of the neoliberal system falling apart. It doesn't work for the average person anymore, and it really never did and was destined to reach this scenario. The system, especially the fiat currency aspect of it is akin to a ponzi scheme... more debt is required to fuel the prior debts. More plans and schemes are always needed to absorb the new money. Most of the plans and schemes are doomed to fail. Eventually the creation of new plans and new money surpasses the ability of the people in the system to carry them out either from physical limitations, or because people are just sick of the whole thing and its half-assed nature.

If you pay off all your debts, you are largely outside the neoliberal system. It's still attached by property taxes, but you don't necessarily need an "income" when you have no debts, especially if you can do everything yourself. Well, at least you can minimize your need for income with no debts. The need to transact with all the other people trapped inside the matrix means you might need funny money and that's just all attached to all the other debts and plans.