Month: April 2025

Tariffs: How’s That Going For You?

“One watch, gold.  One cigarette lighter, gold.” – The Usual Suspects

I’d like to thank France for the help giving the United States independence.  If it weren’t for them, we’d still be speaking English right now.

Tariffs are now in place, and in various stages of implementation.  They are a very big change from the previous game, which was a seemingly sweet deal:  Americans send cash that was just “printed”.  Foreigners send stuff that they made.  Since 1973, they have been super polite:  they didn’t even ask us for gold.

They trusted us!

Essentially, this was an “Americans have nukes and are the unipower” tax.  As I’ve written before, this had a negative impact on the composition of the American economy, moving from manufacturing to making accounting anomalies.

The rise of China as a manufacturing and economic powerhouse was the biggest challenge to the “unipower” concept, which was born out of the “sweet” deal – they sent us plastic junk while developing world-class manufacturing skills.

China is now number one in manufacturing, with 30% of the global output, as well as being the largest producer of wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, and pork.  This is despite the continuous headline of the last thirty years about “Now China Will Really Face The Music”.

No, not really.

To be clear, it wasn’t just Joe.  Meme as found.

So, China has grown, but the United States overplayed its hand to make problems accelerate, and I’m not talking about Trump’s tariffs.  No, I’m talking about when Biden embargoed Russia from the international payment system while taking Russia’s money and buying Ukraine something nice with it.

When Biden chose that action, the whole world took notes.  Cutting Russia off from the SWIFT payment system seemed like a good idea.  Except China thought, “Hey, they still owe me for all those iPhones™ they promised to pay me for.”  Immediately this bought the BRICS closer together, and they’re working on ways that they can more seamlessly work together – around the United States if need be.

The reason gold prices are up is that the dollar is worth less, not that gold is suddenly even more scarce.  Trust in dollars tanked:  people are looking for a hedge so that they won’t lose their wealth through exposure to meme dollars.  The proof?

They don’t trust the dollar, or graphs.  They think the graphs are plotting something.  (graph via Dollarcollapse)

Gold didn’t take off in 2025.  Or 2024.  Or 2023.  Gold took off exactly when Biden sanctioned Russia in 2022 after the Russians invaded Ukraine.  Part of the game for the world using the dollar is that we wouldn’t weaponize it.

Oops.

That’s a card you get to play exactly once.

And it backfired.  Bigly.

Tariffs are about changing that game, yet again.  And it is possibly a pretty long shot, but when it’s the bottom of the ninth and you’ve got a man on first, the temptation is to swing away.

Tariffs have already changed the game.  Imports in April are already down 40% year over year, and although a string of ships are still headed our way from China, rumors are that the numbers are down even more.

I first threw a boomerang when I was seven.  I live in constant fear.

To give an example of an individual’s complaint about the tariffs, one father was buying his daughter a dress.  To be clear, they didn’t specify it was a girl, but it’s 2025, so who can say.  Anyway, the daughter had found the perfect dress to wear to a wedding on TEMU™.  It was $19.  But when the father went to check out, the price had gone up to $59 with tariff.

Now, since TEMU’s© slogan is “Shop Like A Billionaire™” it shouldn’t have mattered, though I can’t see Elon spending time on TEMU™ buying himself sundresses.  But was the price reasonable?

Probably.  TEMU® has been accused of copying and stealing designs from fashion designers and artists, so I’m sure that there’s no karma in this.  Beyond that, though, if we want to be a nation that has consumed itself to death, we should avoid tariffs so TEMU© can grow stronger.  So that’s in import.

TEMU® is for people who can’t afford Goodwill™.

Let’s switch to exports.

In one of the weirder stories, pork imports by China from the United States are down.  That’s not weird because they slapped a tariff on pork, but the weird part is that this will probably hit the largest US pork producer the hardest.  That’s Smithfield Foods©, which is owned by  . . . Chy-Na.  So, they’re not importing pigs they already own because they put a tariff on those pigs.

That they own.

Which means cheaper bacon in the United States at the expense of the profit margin for multinational corporations.  I can deal with that.

Back to the big picture.  The imports being lowered by 40% will have a knock-on effect.

  • Truckers will have fewer loads to transport across the country,
  • Which means that there will be less demand for diesel fuel,
  • Which means lower diesel prices.

Overall, the economy has been projected to have shrunk by 2.5% in the first quarter, and with a big hit to imports, chances are nearly 100% that the economy will shrink in the second quarter as well.  That means a recession.

I don’t give money to homeless people because I know that they’ll spend it on alcohol when I could spend it on alcohol instead.

But don’t just take my word for it:  when I mentioned that the economy would be hitting a recession, The Mrs. scoffed:  “We’ve been in one for over a year.  Maybe two years.”

She’s right.  On a regional basis, and in the places where GloboLeftists don’t strap on the taxpayer money feedbag, the economy likely has been in a stagflation-recession for the last two years.  Nobody at USAID noticed it, because they just got continual increases in salary like clockwork and a pension plan better than anything in the private sector.

Going forward, Biden’s sanctioning of Russia made it so we couldn’t print cash anymore:  he killed the golden goose.  To be fair, it was already sick.  Trump (or somebody he knows that says nice things about him) realized it, and, boom, tariffs.

The game is afoot.  Can we become net producers again before people don’t want dollars?  It’s a race.

But there’s always gold.

Notice:  This is not financial advice, since I’m an unpaid humor blogger that writes for my own personal amusement and if you do the things that I’ve done that might make you part of the punchline, and not in the good way.  I am not an attorney, accountant, financial advisor, mime, or clairvoyant nor do I pretend to be and I have not stayed at a Holiday Inn™ Express© recently.  This website is not a substitute for consultation with an investment professional that is saner and more stable than I am and who is actually, you know, an investment professional who hasn’t tossed back a few shots of bourbon.  I expressly suggest you seek advice from a competent professional and accept no liability for any loss or damage that you incur.  Gold has gone up in the past.  It has also gone down.  Not my job to make your decisions:  it’s on you, bub. 

Dunbar’s Number, Trains, Rome, Spears, And The Rise Of Civilization

“Yours is a fascinating tribe.  Even now you are defiant in the face of annihilation and the presence of a god.” – 300

My nerdy friend just got a PhD on the history of palindromes.  Now I call him Dr. Awkward.

One of the mysteries of humanity is how we arrived.  Modern, anatomically similar homo sapiens existed for quite a long time prior to doing anything.  As near as we can figure out, they weren’t particularly bright, but they did have fire, which also might explain the George Floyd riots.

What the archeological record shows, though, is that through all of this time they never even considered the concept of PEZ™.  There was no progress, and something was missing . . . the Apple.

I need to take a step back to Dunbar’s Number.  Dunbar’s Number is the number of people who you can have a reasonable relationship with, and Dunbar reckoned the upper limit was probably 230, but more realistically 150 in most cases.  Dunbar didn’t just guess this number, and he couldn’t send Gallup® out to poll the cavemen.  Nope, Dunbar looked at the cranial capacity of primates and compared that size to the size of group that they hung out with.

Is an ape’s favorite treat rhesus pieces?

He looked at the average size of a human noggin, and came up with his estimate and range for people.  From personal observations, this is anecdotally a quite reasonable estimate on the size of a group where group cohesion is possible.  Other evidence comes from the fact that historically this is an important number when it comes to bringing people together:

A Roman Century was only 100 men (later it dropped to 80ish), and the military unit called a “company” is historically around 80 to 250 men depending on era and country, but most of them are in that 150 or fewer range because cohesion is so important:  There’s a reason that the book Band of Brothers was about a company of soldiers.

I got stuck in Rome for three weeks once.  All the roads have this weird design flaw . . . . (meme as found)

In what I think is an original (I looked and can’t find it anywhere else) idea of mine is that if you map human “mental illnesses” over a Dunbar Number-sized group, you end up with:

  • Schizophrenia – 0.4%, so a tribe would have at most one nutty Shaman to see the spirits and burn the tent down.
  • Anxiety – 10%, so the tribe would have 10 or 20 people worrying and planning for the future.
  • OCD – 3 to 6 people in the tribe would be the ones with keeping rituals remembered, and reminding everyone to wash their hands.
  • Paranoia – another 3 to 6 people who worry about everything, who keep the tribe prepped for a long winter or wondering if the tribe next door was going to attack or wondering why you’re staring at them again in that weird way.
  • Narcissism – would be just 1 or 2 people, because someone has to rule.

Thus, what are today “mental illnesses” may simply be byproducts of a group traits that led to better survival for the Dunbar-sized tribe.  What’s not on the list, however, is autism, or, to be more specific, its useful cousin, Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now, there are several things that are true about Asperger’s:

  • It is a hyper-focus of the human brain on a subject,
  • It is inherited,
  • Tier 4 locomotives can process a billion data points per second in their fifteen million lines of computer code,
  • Lots of successful people have it, and
  • It is becoming more common, with numbers as high as 1% of the population now, but probably around 1 in 5,000 if you go back in time, so, rare around the dawn of humanity.

I think there was a time when humanity simply didn’t have Asperger’s at all.  And it showed – back then innovation was a sharper spearpoint.  Nobody needed a TED™ talk to survive.

I bought an antique spear on E-Bay™, but when it got here the spear head was gone.  I got shafted. (meme as found)

But when it comes to the “leaving Eden portion” of humanity’s journey, perhaps the real Apple was another A word – Aspergers.  This quirk may have changed everything.

Now you had someone who really could focus on learning to knap flint in just the right way to better make stone tools, and not chit-chat.  The tribe with “that guy” ate better.

Now you have someone who can really focus, and there’s evidence for this – 35,000 years ago in Chauvet Cave, some Aspergers guy was drawing star maps inside the cave.

“What Grug do?”

“Grug make map of stars on cave wall.”

“Why Grug do that?”

“Me no know.  Grug goofy sometimes.”

(Grug as found)

Thus, we were on the road.  These geniuses would show up only once every few generations at most in any given tribe.  But the nice thing was that they were pretty successful in mating, at least enough to bring it forward.

And, unlike the saber-toothed turtle, the Asperger’s kids didn’t go extinct – in fact, the opposite.

As I mentioned above, aspies are becoming much more common today.  Might vaccines be a part of that?  Well, they could, but probably not so much.  Society has created a sorting effect, mainly through colleges and work.  Smart people who would have stayed around the farm 150 years ago are now congregating at colleges.  Colleges and jobs sift by intellect, and so more aspie-gene-carrying dudes are hooking up and marrying aspie-gene-carrying chicks.

Nerds found nerdettes.  The result?  Jet fighters.  Atomic bombs.  The space program.  Computers.  Trains.

Especially trains.

The train is fine.

Silicon Valley was built by people ‘sperging out, who made it possible for the Dunbar’s Number to be blasted apart, and allow communication and teams from around the world to “meet” and work together.

There is, of course, a downside.  As an old /pol/ copypasta greentext noted, in a world where we don’t have the Internet, if you have a sexual attraction to toasters, well, you ignore it because it’s weird, and you get over it.  If you have a sexual attraction to toasters in 2025, there’s a Reddit® forum for it and a Discord™ server where people get together and share toaster porn.

So, maybe A wasn’t for Apple, after all.  But, it’s okay.  The train is fine.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction And Booze Jokes

“No fear.  No distractions.  The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.” – Fight Club

Did you hear about the emo cake?  It cuts itself.

2025 is the 23rd year of the smart phone, as the CrackBerry® was introduced way back in 2002.  To put that into perspective, 23 years before 2002, Jimmy Carter was president and Hillary Clinton had only eaten six children.

But the BlackBerry© didn’t take over immediately – it was mainly a hit with the executive-set at first, since it allowed them to get emails while they were on the slopes at Gstaad or write ANGRY EMAILS IN ALL CAPS while munching on bigfoot filet roasted over Moonrocks at the beach down in Monaco.

The real killer smart phone, though, was the iPhone©.  It was introduced just 18 years ago in 2007.  The design standards for the iPhone™ quickly became the standard for cell phones, and it knocked BlackBerry® into oblivion within just a few short years because teenaged girls liked it much better because, selfies.

To be fair, it was a pretty big jump in functionality and aesthetics.

Why does Hillary have two “L”s in her first name?  One for 2008, one for 2016.

The impact, though, of smart phones, however, is undeniable.  They became the single most effective way to distract a person.  Ever.  You’ve seen the effect enough that it’s cliché – walk into a restaurant and it’s not a group of people talking to each other.  Instead, it’s a group of people eating near each other while they take in content produced with the explicit objective of taking over their attention.

And, it has certainly worked if the goal was to distract.  People now spend more time doomscrolling on their phones than they spend with their children, spouses, and friends.  Combined, and Tinder™ has led to more one-night stands than wine coolers.

I love cooking with wine.  Sometimes I even add it to the food I’m making.

The reason smartphones grab our attention is somewhat seductive:  every time a new notification hits, it sets off a small hit of dopamine in the brain.  Just like lab rats, we love our dopamine.  And the designers know it.  On earlier versions of Twitter©, if I got multiple “likes” on a Tweet®, they would be delayed and doled out so that the action-anticipation-reward loop was optimized to keep me engaged.

And the format of Twitter© (that X™ retained) of scrolling through content, why, something super interesting might be at the bottom of the next swipe of my finger on the screen.  So, I’d better just go two more minutes.  And then an hour goes by . . .

X© is an attention harvester – they built the perfect trap to stick the rat to the app.  And so is Facebook™.  And Instagram©.  And Snapchat®.

These are designed to meld into our nervous system, and keep our eyes focused on the screen, day after day.

I know this, because it works, and it worked on me.

And when it breaks down, you can have a Ford® Siesta™.

After I realized that, though, I decided on a strategy:

I would jealously guard my attention like CNN™ guarded information on Joe Biden’s ability to remember, you know, the thing.  The reasons are many:

Information overload leads to depression and anxiety.  I had to ask myself, “Can I do anything about this?” and “Is this something I really care about?”

Here’s where I draw the line:

Consciously, I decided I really don’t care about Ukraine and Russia.  And you can’t make me care about them.  I also decided the same thing with Israel and Gaza.  They’re not here, and if I’m going to spend my attention and emotion, I’d rather do something to make the United States better, first – like doing everything I can to get as many illegals deported as possible and shutting down as many H-1B visas as possible so maybe someone at a call center could be intelligible.

Or I could spend my time spreading the word about the wonders of PEZ™.

Never trust a minotaur – half of everything they say is bull.

I also make a conscious decision (mostly) on what media I’m going to consume and when.  I do personal emails three times a week because my inbox isn’t a slot machine for spam.  I browse non-news websites three times a week (mostly – there are exceptions).

I have, at least at my age, also decided that multitasking isn’t something I’m going to count on unless the task is really mindless.  I try to focus more on just one thing at a time – then I’m really there.

The problem in 2025 isn’t time management, it’s attention management.  And I have to have time to:

  • Think deeply, so I’m not just reacting to stimulus and so I can better see propaganda. Honestly, I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t trust any media unless I can verify the claim.
  • Relax, so I’m not so wound up about things. Life shouldn’t be so tense.  That’s what caffeine is for.
  • Create, because I really enjoy it, and because that’s the way that maybe I can change the world. Without distractions, I can crush out a first draft of a post in about an hour.  Pounding and sanding the result takes one or two more, and then I gotta add memes.

To do any of those things requires attention.

We are the sum of what we spend our attention and effort on.  If I’m distracted, I know that I simply won’t have the focus I need in order to make the best decisions.  Who, indeed, would like the American public distracted and not paying attention to what exactly is going on in the world?

Why does The Mrs. think I walked into a barn and ordered a bear?

Smartphones have become weapons of mass distraction.

Yet each time we’re distracted by one, it’s the result of a choice.

So, why let them win?  I’ve got to look forward to 2048, 23 years into the future from now.  I imagine Barron Trump will be in his third presidential term by then . . .

How Expensive Housing Leads To An Oversupply Of Wine Aunts

“You won’t lose the house.  Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

When Zoomers start to pass away, will they have eulogis?

FYI – no podcast tonight.  I’m sure you’re shocked.  I’m out travelling.  Next week???

The American economy is broken in several ways, but one of the biggest is housing.  When I was a wee Wilder in my twenties, I bought a house that was about twice my income.  The mortgage payment was doable, just barely.

I just looked up what it’s going for today, and the answer was . . . over 10 times what I paid for it.  Was it a nice house?  Sure.  But not that nice.  Why did it go up 10 times in value?

Several reasons, and not because it grew a hot tub and a golden toilet, either.

This particular house was nice because it was in a suburban neighborhood where the schools weren’t . . . bad.  The local elementary school and high school were pretty safe which was why we bought it in that area in the first place.  Places with “good schools” tend to have much higher property values than those that don’t have good schools.

But good schools lead to high home prices because a mother will sacrifice her husband’s kidney to the Hong Kong black market to get her kid into a good school.

Why does that picture remind me of the media during COVID?

A lot of that is bounded by driving distance – people will drive a long ways to have good schools, but there is a limit.  The suburbs were set up based on just that mathematical tradeoff.  The fact that the ‘burbs had much higher appreciation just means people will pay a lot to avoid . . . bad schools.

Around this time, people stopped looking at homes as a place to live, and started looking at them as an investment.  What they noticed was that prices in the ‘burbs seemed to go up faster than their salary, so houses began to resemble shake-shingled slot machines.

Places like California saw this effect first – as big city with a very desirable climate, people flocked there for the jobs created by a variety of businesses, from defense to entertainment to manufacturing to importing illegals.

Enter the predators.

Blackstone® is now there in California.  Recently, they’ve been building housing in San Diego.  Rent?  $3000 to $4000.  A month.  But it’s not just California – the median housing payment for people who bought homes is now a record – $2,819, not including taxes and insurance.

There are, of course, two sides to the equation:  my freshman economics prof would note that supply and demand have led to this situation.

During COVID, there were a lot of trials held on Zoom™.  Does that mean the case was settled out of court?

Demand is up because tens of millions of illegals have flooded this country in an unabated wave.  Whereas a typical American family has three or five people living in it (nine if you’re the Brady family) the average foreigners will often rent a cot in a kitchen so that the houses are packed with people, India-style, so that 10 or 15 people are paying $200 a week to live in these homes.  A landlord could make $8,000 or $12,000 gross profit if they rented to people to whom that would still be better than living in Haiti or India.

Yup, turning suburban houses into Mumbai Motel 6 one cot at a time.

Oh, and I mentioned Blackrock™.  Not content to strip mine American companies by loading them down with debt and ejecting them like Osama Bin Laden’s corpse off a flight deck, the private equity firms have entered as a competitor, buying houses with one goal:  to turn people from one-time purchasers into full-time wagie wealth engines who end up paying but never owning.

You’ve heard their slogan:  You’ll own nothing, and like it™.  Hey, at least you can put a happy face on your rent check.  Wait.  It’s all direct withdrawal now.

So, there’s the demand problem.  Americans didn’t ask for this, but here it is.

What do you say to your English teacher when she’s crying?  “There, they’re, their.”

What about supply?

Supply isn’t increasing to match demand.  There are lots of reasons for this, among them zoning laws, environmental laws, contractor requirements, building codes, and other Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) restrictions that make it complicated and expensive to build anything.  In fact, in places like California, it’s turned into BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

That reduces supply.

If you bought a home 25 or 35 years ago in a place like this, congratulations.  The restrictions in supply of housing make your investment worth a lot more than it would normally be worth if the market were functioning properly.  I suppose the upside is that very expensive houses create the perfect environment for . . . good schools.

That has other consequences, though.

The Mrs. asked me if I had a police record.  “No, but I do have one by Sting.”

Whereas I could get into a house at the age of 24, that’s simply not the case for kids today in most areas.  My modest first home (I checked its current value) would lead to a full-in payment of at least $5,000 a month.  That’s $60,000 a year, after tax.

Not a lot of just out of college kids can afford that, so forgetaboutit.

Young families are locked out in that area.

That has a knock-on effect:  lower family formation, lower numbers of children being born, and miserable young men.  Oh, there are miserable women, too, but they’re older than forty and they’re miserable when they find out that the only role left for them in society is Cat Loving Wine Aunt™.

As I said above – the economy is broken, and housing is part of it.  Oh, wait, now we have an oversupply of wine aunts.

Will that result in making box Chardonnay too expensive?

Misplaced Empathy: It’s Killing Us

“Is this to be an empathy test?” – Blade Runner

An MS-13 sociopath that was incapable of understanding the feeling of others was diagnosed with empanada.

Empathy.

I first heard that word when I was five.  I asked Grandma McWilder what empathy was, and was told that “Empathy is what bleeding heart GloboLeftist women do while their men do the dishes.  Now get to work resizing that brass – this ammunition won’t reload itself.”

That’s supposed to be good, right?  We’re supposed to feel good about ourselves when we care about others enough to mentally put ourselves in the position of another to share what they’re feeling.

Empathy really is part of what makes us human.  Empathy allows us to model other humans and understand how they’re feeling.  And, in some cases, anticipate how they’re going to feel.  Like asleep.  Or perspiring.  Or sticky.  You know, emotions.

Empathy is important.

If he sold weed from Ireland, would he be Ma’am O’gram?

But the problem starts to occur when empathy becomes our sole guide for how we conduct our world.  One example are the transgender people.  I still recall when the blonde gentleman with longish hair who was larping as a woman in a store back in 2019.  He got famously irate because a flustered clerk couldn’t process that Macho Ma’am Trandy Savage was pretending to be a woman.

Because he was in this very weird place, his brain short circuited.  He had been taught at a very young age that it was polite to call an older man sir.  Confronted with the cognitive dissonance of what was obviously a man in makeup, his synapses fried by adrenaline, he did what he had learned as a babe.  He called the dude, “sir.”

I doubt Trandy Savage would like this song.

While demanding empathy, the dude showed none himself.  Empathy on the part of this brittle freakshow would have solved the situation, but the reason that it felt itself privileged enough with his lipstick and five o’clock shadow is because society has shown far too much empathy for people like him for far too long.  Misplaced empathy has turned him into a sociopath.

You want to play pretend?  Fine.  Keep away from children, and don’t expect me to participate in the charade.  And don’t yell at some minimum wage clerk who is really just trying to help.

We also show empathy for the wrong things.  Who was the worst person in the movie Titanic?

You know, if you think the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy, remember about the lobsters in the kitchen.

Rose.  She was the villain.  She’s married, but cheats on her fiancé with a random Chad urchin and then spends the next 84 years pining for Chad, all while being married to someone she didn’t love nearly as much and then drops a necklace worth (according to the Internets – it’s fictional) $3.5 million dollars into the ocean.   This could have been a life-changing inheritance for her great-grandchildren.  But no.

Everything is about her.

The audience is supposed to feel empathy for her?  Hell, she could have jumped in and let Chad live, or died with him.  No.  She’s awful.  But she’s not alone.  Hollywood loves trying to make people feel empathy for the bad guy.

And don’t get me started on Dead Poets Society where the teacher played by Robin Williams (who is the walking, talking essence of the French Revolution) removes all the value systems from his students while giving them nothing to take their place.

The real bad guy in this movie is the teacher.  But you’re supposed to feel bad for him because he got fired, but not bad because his removal of a belief systems without replacement caused a kid to commit suicide.

Because the teacher convinced the kid to throw everything away and become an actor.

Kirk couldn’t sing, though.  He had trouble with trebles.

You don’t hate Hollywood enough, but let’s move to hospital beds.

And don’t get me started on the misplaced empathy in health care, where literal titanic efforts (no necklace) and tons of treasure go into the last, miserable year of the lives of most people.

We also have addled ourselves with empathy via the Internet.

There are those that share so much online, that I honestly believe that they cease to exist if they’re not posting.  Who cares what other people think of your lunch?  Who cares what other people that you’ve never met think about you?

As found.

This weird, parasitical empathy where people feel good about themselves only because others think well of them is the sympathy of a society where values and laws are being replaced by the feels.  Look at the way the GloboLeft work to keep a criminal illegal in this country, and whine and cry to keep him from being returned to his own country.

It’s misplaced empathy.

This also has implications with race.  People felt badly for black people, having empathy for discrimination.  Now?  Black entitlement is so strong that they feel that a killer is the actual victim, rather than the person he stabbed, and expect people to feel their pain.

This is at least in part because of the way misplaced empathy has let blacks act in violent fashion and subsidized their lifestyle through welfare.  Misplaced empathy tells people they don’t have to conform to societal norms.  The GloboLeft can’t wait to knit them sweaters and sacrifice their children to them.

Enough is enough.  Empathy is not a blank check.

The good news is that people are finally waking up, and realizing that it is far past the time when we as a society need to end our misplaced empathy.

That’s good.  After all, that ammunition won’t reload itself.

Broken Windows Science

“There is no guarantee that the ship will reach Zyra, but those to make the flight will be chosen by lots sometime before the worlds collide.” – When Worlds Collide

Everyone’s a gangsta . . . until the room glows blue.  (look up Demon Core if this is unfamiliar) 

My first love was physics in high school.  To my young and naïve mind, it seemed the way that I could best contribute to the world – discover something new that would allow mankind to do things it had never done before:  conquer time via time travel, or conquer space via translight speeds, or conquer the hangover.

I don’t know, but I thought I could figure some way to leave my mark in history.  The beginning of the Universe was certainly attractive, since what high school guy doesn’t like the sound of a Big Bang?  I thus entered college as a physics major.

I came to my senses when I realized I could gain most of the benefits of an education in theoretical physics by beating up physics students, taking their money, and buying myself something nice.

Is the guy working the cash register at KFC® the Chicken Tender?

I was thinking about physics tonight when I clicked on a video from the YouTube™ channel Cool Worlds® by Professor David Kipping who has a day job teaching physics at Columbia.  My parents even wanted me to go to Columbia for college, but I was smarter than them, and stayed in the United States.

Generally, Doctor Kipping’s videos are interesting, and I give the occasional video a look, with one of the more fascinating ones being the one on Przybylski’s (did a cat walk across the keyboard to come up with that name?) Star which has weird elements in it that might be an alien technosignature.  The biggest mystery, though, is if Przybylski’s last name resulted from his father not being able to buy a vowel on Wheel of Fortune™ or if the family cat walked over their typewriter and them saying, “Przybylski?  Why not?”

This latest video, though, was titled In Defense of Science.  Since it was a short video and I had yet to finish taking my Macanudo® down to the wrapper, I tossed clicked the “go” arrow.

Dr. Frankenstein entered a bodybuilding contest, but seriously misunderstood the objective.

I am a fan of science, especially physics, which has revealed so much about the world so as to be second to no other science in its ability to predict amazing things, like nuclear weapons and the famed Anti-PEZ™ particle.

In this video, however, Kipping is kinda mad because he’s bound and determined to defend the most sacred thing he can:  his funding.  To be fair, he says that his bacon-wrapped-shrimp parties are in danger if funding is cut, but then he jumps into a series of arguments that were the verbal equivalent of throwing a plate of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.

Again, I like this guy.  He’s a good communicator, and obviously smart and in good shape because no one has yet beaten him up and taken his money to buy themselves something nice.  But . . .

He makes the argument that basic science research in physics is important in itself.  Well, yeah.  Mostly.

But let’s look at the Future Circular Collider® (FCC), which is the planned follow-up to the Large Hadron Collider.  The FCC is projected to be 56.5 miles in diameter, with a 16 foot (3 electronVolts) diameter chamber built at an average depth of 656 feet (3 meters) underground.  As a person who regularly looks at infrastructure, and goes, “Well why the hell didn’t they make that BIGGER?” I can appreciate the idea.

I’m warning you, don’t do it.

However, just like Kathleen Turner, not all things are better if they’re bigger, though I do think she should form a 1970s tribute band named Kathleen Turner Overdrive.  And she should also avoid ham sandwiches in order to stop her mass from disturbing sensitive gravity experiments.

What will this Future Circular Collider™ do at a cost of $16 billion (and if you believe that number won’t triple, you’ll believe the Vaxx© was Safe and Effective™) when it comes online in 2050 or 2060?  It will give . . . drumroll . . . a slightly better value for the mass of the Higgs boson.

Yup.

Oh, and it’s likely that other experiments using linear colliders will probably get there sooner and cheaper.

Saturn, though, is the Solar System’s undefeated Hula Hoop™ champ.

But this is Wednesday, and this is the day of economics, and this is the day when we learn that people who have physics degrees and work on the public’s dime at Ivy League® universities rarely have more economic sense than, “beware of that guy, he might beat me up and take my money and buy himself something nice.”

Kipping’s next argument?

“These increase economic activity by a factor of $3 for every $1 spent.”  As we’ve discussed recently, this is the broken windows fallacy (link below).  You could have given that money to people visiting whorehouses, and they would increase “economic activity”.  Now, admittedly, they’re not like Ivy League professors who buy BMWs® and ludicrously expensive bicycles to save 0.3 pounds (15 grahamcrackers), but, you know, at least the whores are honest about what they’re selling.

The French, Broken Windows, And The Intentional Destruction Of Wealth

But NASA is different, right?  NASA was once the envy of the scientific and engineering world, but it has been infected with people who remote work and do PowerPoints© on how gender is fluid in orbit and that girl testicles need to be protected in space.   These are the same people that wanted to rename the James Webb Space Telescope because James Webb owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy.  No, wait, James Webb’s sin is that he didn’t tattoo a PriDe FlaG  on his buttocks.  In 1963.

Hell, the woke people at NASA would even try to rename gravity if they found Newton’s Ye Olde Tweetes.  “Leibniz, thou art poore at the mathematical artes and thou art desirous of the companie of other men in a decidedly unfraternal fashion.”

Even Jeff Bezos is better than NASA now, having sent Katy Perry into space so that she could experience zero gravity with the first all-female crew.  Notice that there was nothing they could do, since they had about as much control over the ride into space as Johnny Depp did when he got on the Pirates of the Caribbean™ ride.  But, hey, Katy got to say that these women would (and I’m not making this up) “put the ass in astronaut.”

You might not want to Google® her, either.  Drunk wine aunt territory in 2025.

But back to the main point:  economic activity is only useful if it expands human knowledge or creates additional productive capacity.  That’s it.  NASA really does do some great planetary science, but they could likely do that same science with half the staff.  Kipping waxes on that this is the “building the cathedral” part of society – the fruits of basic research may not even be usable for decades or hundreds of years.  But we don’t need chief diversity officers to do that, we need scientists and engineers.

And, we don’t need to understand absolutely everything before we make use of it.  We were boiling water and making steam engines long before we’d figured out thermodynamics, and as a professor of mine noted, “Wilder, if we had waited until we understood the cantilever beam before we built houses, we’d still be living in caves.”

I am still in favor of science.

But it has to be kept in balance with economics so we have a strong economy.  Why?  Because otherwise, the physicists won’t have any money to give you when you beat them up.

Then how will you buy yourself something nice?

Tax Prep Blues

“Your home is two thousand, three hundred and twenty-five square feet. Current IRS code allows us to reduce your taxable income by a percentage of your workspace relative to the overall size of your house.” – The Accountant

How long do leftovers have to be in the fridge before I can count them as dependents?  Asking for a friend.

Spent all day doing taxes and money stuff.  Regular post on Wednesday, but please enjoy these tax-related memes I found.  Regular post on Wednesday.

 

What If A.I. Drew Cartoons About Itself?

“I refuse to believe that I’m only here because I popped out of your imagina….” [poof] – John Dies at the End

So, it’s been a very, very long week. Not at all bad, in fact several things are coming together that are pretty cool.

But.

No time to create a proper post, so I’ll just share some more A.I. work, which will (probably) be the last A.I. stuff for a while. These are comics made by A.I. about itself, and appeared at the X page of Josie Kins (LINK).

Me? I do know that A.I. is not what humans would call conscious, yet I would also say exactly that about people who couldn’t understand conditional hypothetical arguments (how would you feel if you didn’t eat breakfast).

Does A.I. feel? It looks like not. It is, more than anything, very advanced pattern matching. There is a story, going back in time, of the Ship of Theseus.

The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical paradox that explores questions of identity and persistence over time. It originates from a thought experiment described by Plutarch, who is Greek and also dead.

Theseus, the mythical Greek hero and brother of Thesaurus, has a ship that is maintained, repaired, conserved, fixed, and preserved over many years. As parts of the ship decay, they are replaced with new parts. Eventually, every original piece—planks, mast, sails—is replaced.

The question arises: Is it still the same ship?

The paradox deepens when considering a second scenario: What if the discarded original parts of the ship are collected and reassembled into another ship? Which ship, if either, is the true Ship of Theseus—the one with all new parts but continuous maintenance, or the one rebuilt from the original materials but looking like it was ridden hard and put away wet?

Does an object’s essence lie in its physical components, its form, its function, or its history? Most of the cells of my body have been replaced. Yet, here I am, the Ship of Wilder’s consciousness. And do I do more than pattern match?

Tough questions. What happens if A.I. becomes a vessel of works of man, but man himself is absent? Will it laugh at my jokes?

Regardless, here are some comics that A.I. drew about itself. Enjoy!