Omigerd, Robots! – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Next Big Barriers

“Two guys wanted to build a thing called an airplane. People go up in it and fly like birds. Ridiculous, right? What about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the Moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right?” – Contact

What’s the difference between a cat and a comma? A cat has claws at the end of paws and a comma is a pause at the end of a clause.

(Note: No podcast tomorrow (busy) and we’ll see about Friday’s post.)

Last week (link below) I wrote about the barriers that mankind has crashed through, and how each one has had a significant impact that was transformative on what humanity was – we are certainly not the same people that we were before fire, agriculture, or even the Industrial Revolution.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

We’ve changed immensely based on pushing through these barriers. I mean, if hot women had more babies and humanity is always getting sexier, at some point will we reach a barrier where we’re just too sexy?

Seriously, though, what other barriers remain?

Reality

What about . . . reality?

Already a good portion of the world spends some part of each day in an alternative reality, some where they fight demons, or fight post-apocalyptic mutants, or pretend to be a gay black man in feudal Japan. These games are quite stunning today, complete with large, sprawling maps, realistic graphics, and a storyline even though they assume that feudal Japan had the same DEI quotas as Ubisoft®. Regardless, many of these virtual worlds take weeks or even months to finish.

The woman pictured is an attorney, though. Tarara Boom, D.A.

And that’s what exists now. Imagine not far into the future where, when A.I. is added in with a touch of VR, the entire experience becomes so immersive that it becomes hard to distinguish it from reality, and with 50% of adults feeling disconnected from others, this gives a hollow but attainable replacement.

Imagine a sandbox universe where you form a startup company like Apple™ and run it until it’s the biggest company on Earth. Or live as a Viking. Or relive whatever fantasy you can imagine, or even live different branches of your own life, making a different choice each time.

For many, video games and InstaFace© are already addictive. Forming them so that they spike and manipulate your endorphins in a manner to maximize your engagement would be infinitely more addictive that SnapGram™.

Scott Adams predicted if we could ever meld Star Trek’s™ holodeck with a sex doll, the human race would be extinct in one generation, and this would be the killer app.

Literally. And it looks like he is right:

Overheard Zoomer conversation: “You can live out your craziest fantasies on video games. The other day on The Sims™ I had a family, a house, and a job!” (as found)

Biological Limitations

What if, in real time, you could have an A.I. jacked into your brain, while having various implants or tools that cover for whatever frailty we squishy meat sacks exhibit. We do have many tools already, to a certain extent: spacesuits allow us to survive the vacuum of space, while submarines can protect us at the bottom of the ocean. Well, some submarines.

But now add in A.I. What if instead of learning arduously over the span of months or years that you could learn it instantly, so you could read Shakespeare in the original Klingon? Or what if you never forgot anything you didn’t want to forget, and could replay the sights, sounds, and sensations of any event in your life? What if you were gene-edited to be nearly immortal, with the possible exception of a random supernova or nuclear war?

A frog did a DNA test and found it was a tad Polish.

What if your consciousness were just uploaded to the ‘net?

What would you do? More importantly, at what point would modifications create something the no longer was something we’d even identify as human, and imagine that the current crop of leaders would be the best we’d ever, ever have?

Uncertainty

What will happen next year is always a crapshoot, right?

Well, no. In large brushstrokes the future is very predictable. If I drop a glass, when it hits the ceramic floor of my kitchen, it’s going to break. That’s not very far into the future, but it’s extremely accurate.

There are things very far into the future that are predictable as well to a high degree of accuracy. We can predict exactly where the Moon will be on April 17, 7265 A.D. at 9:31:30 A.M. GMT.

The movie (and story) Minority Report used psychics to predict the future, but what if there was an algorithm that knew who was most likely to commit crimes? What if the stock market could be gamed to the point where investing was no longer gambling? A.I. can already predict consumer behavior with an 85% accuracy according to an MIT study.

What would that do to economies?

ChatGPT did my taxes in the style of Ernest Hemingway: “For Free: Four quarterly tax payment vouchers, never used. (meme as found)

The Tyranny of the Speed of Light

Okay, let’s assume that there’s no physical way to beat it. The gulf between stars is enormous, and no one can cross it in a dozen lifetimes. But what if we just sent A.I.? To an A.I., being powered down for thousands or even millions of years wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. As long as the core state of being were retrievable after a cosmic voyage, time is meaningless.

Perhaps, just perhaps, A.I. might seed a star in a distant part of the Milky Way with programmed biological package, a Genesis Device™, if you will, designed to recreate biological life far away. Or drop a machine that turns entire solar systems into tasty floating PEZ™ artifacts?

Or it just might go full Berserker™ and destroy anything it can, because, Tuesday.

I guess that’s why the Vikings called English villages chopping malls.

Breaking through these barriers has taken us from small bands of hunter-gatherers to what we are today. But it isn’t technology alone – we are not the same people that wandered the steppe, and the current tech trends are weakening the bonds of the societal atom: the family, and without that, humanity can no longer exist. Just as we used technology to change the world, that same technology has changed us as well.

What will we be in the future? I mean, besides incredibly sexy.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.” – Jurassic Park

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” is great hockey advice from Gretzky, but don’t go quoting that at an AA meeting. (“Eh Eh” in metric)

Throughout history, mankind has faced limits. How we vaulted over those limits has defined our progress, and the bigger the hurdle, the greater the payoff. Of note, each of these has led to extreme economic and societal disruption.

1. Fire = Mastery of Energy
Barrier Broken: Darkness, Vulnerability, Need to BBQ
Fire was our first “aha” moment, going back to into deep time – our control of this allowed us to, for the first time, harness energy stored in hydrocarbons at will. Does Grug want warm cave? Grug make fire, make cave warm, cook aurochs steak, eat. Good. Cold hungry Grug sad.

Fire also kept saber-tooths at bay keeping Grug from being a kitty-treat, and turned rock shelters into the original man cave, dreaming of a time when Door-Dash™ would allow people from India to bring bacon cheeseburgers to us.

Simple – if you won’t eat delicious bacon cheeseburgers for a month, no admission to the United States.

2. Agriculture = Beer + Cities
Barrier Broken: Food Scarcity, Invites to Kegger
I’ve written about this before – Evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe hints the purpose of the site was religious, but also that it was a brewpub. It’s likely early brews fueled rituals that glued folks together. Fire kept us warm, but beer got us buzzed.

The barrier of unpredictable food was shattered when we started planting grain—surpluses meant we could ditch nomad life, build mud-brick condos, and let some dude specialize in carving spoons instead of stabbing mammoths. Result: cities, labor division, and the glorious chaos of civilization, all toasted with a pint. Or three.

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

3. Writing = Records + Reach
Barrier Broken: Fleeting Memory, Knowledge Becomes Eternal
Scribbling on clay kicked off with debts (“You owe me five sheep after you drank all my beer”) or god-shoutouts. These had taken place orally, but, you know, the last guy I lent a $20 to forgot about it even if I haven’t. Writing cracked the barrier of oral limits and memory.

With writing, knowledge stuck around—grannies didn’t have to recite everything anymore. Pharaohs sent exact orders to the Nile’s edge; Rome ran an empire on scrolls. It wasn’t just records—it was power, precision, and the ability to tell your great-great-grandkids exactly how to brew that beer. Result: generational wisdom, bureaucracy, and legions marching on paper trails.

But you have to feel bad for her – no one hit the glass ceiling that hard since Goose from Top Gun.

4. Wheel = Friction Fighter
Barrier Broken: Immobility, Distance Becomes Cheap
The oldest surviving example of a wheel was found in Slovenia, and dates back over 5,000 years, proving that people were trying to get out of Slovenia even back then.

The wheel smashed the barrier of schlepping everything by hand. Suddenly, a cart could haul what ten Grugs couldn’t—trade routes bloomed, villages linked up, and armies rolled instead of trudged. It’s not sexy like fire, beer, and steak, but without it, no ’69 Camaro™. It’s likely that agriculture made it so we had stuff to move around, and was the real motivator for the wheel, so we could help friends move on the weekend.

Cities got bigger, goods got cheaper, and we stopped throwing out our backs for a sack of grain. Result: the world shrank, and we got mobile.

5. Printing Press = Knowledge Flood
Barrier Broken: Elite Access, Knowledge Becomes Cheap
The wheel shrunk the world, and then Gutenberg’s clunky printing press took writing’s exclusivity and yeeted it out the window. Books went from monk and king-only treasures to peasant-readable pamphlets—ideas like “Hey, maybe the Earth’s not flat” spread like gossip at a dive bar.

The barrier of gatekept knowledge crumbled—science surged, religions splintered, and revolutions brewed. Result: mass literacy, a brain explosion, and the Renaissance popping off like a medieval Ozfest™.

My HP™ printer joined a band – I should have seen it coming: it loves to jam.

6. Industrial Revolution = Muscle Swap
Barrier Broken: Human Power Limits, Horsepower Becomes Cheap
What did we do with all that knowledge and science? Mastered energy. Steam hissed, gears turned, and suddenly one machine outmuscled a village. The barrier of physical drudgery got smashed—factories churned out goods, trains hauled dreams, and kids stopped pulling plows (mostly).

Think of this one as taking the first example, fire, and making its use precise and scientific – it’s no coincidence that thermodynamics was the science boom of the 19^th Century, one that made millionaires out of people who could figure out how to make a heat exchanger. Which is as it should be.

Result: skyscrapers, global trade, and the bittersweet birth of the 9-to-5.

7. Electricity = Power Everywhere
Barrier Broken: Localized Energy
A byproduct of the Industrial Revolution was the power revolution. Edison, Tesla, and pals flipped the switch, and energy stopped being stuck near coal pits or waterfalls allowing the Industrial Revolution to be everywhere. The barrier of “where the power is” vanished—lights buzzed in hovels, fridges hummed, and telegraphs chirped across oceans.

It supercharged industry, lit up nights, and made “unplugged” a choice, not a fate. Result: a wired world, 24/7 life, and the electric hum of progress.

I told my wife if she was cold and couldn’t find her sweater, she should stand in a corner. They’re generally pretty close to 90°.

8. Computer Revolution = Cheap Math
Barrier Broken: Slow Calculation
Now, what do we do with all that juice? From punch cards to processors, computers turned math from a monk’s headache into a microchip’s yawn. The barrier of tedious number-crunching fell—rockets soared, genomes unraveled, and your phone now out-thinks a 1960s NASA lab.

It’s not just speed; it’s scale—billions of ops a second, cheap as dirt, and my computer has more five times more transistors than the number of people on Earth. Result: digital everything, from Moonshots to memes.

9. The Internet = How To Be Everywhere, All At Once
Barrier Broken: Presence at a Distance
Now we had tons of data, but it wasn’t with you. Until the Internet. Ever want to go to the library to get a book? Now I can do it on the Internet without having to ever even haul my PEZ™ powder covered carcass off the couch. I can pull most movies ever made with a click, I can get facts that would take me days to research in 1990: immediately. And I can even order that PEZ® from Amazon™ at 2AM.

Result: Access to virtually all of human knowledge, and cat pictures.

I belong to a family of failed magicians. I have three half-sisters.

10. AI = Cheap Consciousness
Barrier Broken: Mental Bandwidth
Here we are—AI’s making thinking a commodity by meshing 8. And 9. But it is not just crunching data; it’s reasoning, riffing, and dreaming up horoscopes faster than a caffeinated astrologer.

The barrier of human cognition’s limits is cracking—it can synthesize your ideas, spot patterns, and serve it back with a wink, all in real time. Result: a flood of synthetic smarts, amplifying us, challenging us, and freaking us out a little.

We’ll end with these 10. Note that each of these revolutions had massive and unequal impacts on humanity. The implications or 8., 9., and 10. are still unfolding, and number 10. is in its infancy.

Since nobody has time for a 2,800 word post, we’ll pick up the gauntlet of what barriers are left, and where we’re headed with AI, and guess at the economic impacts to come . . . but we’ll do it next week.

Is The A.I. Singularity In The Rear View Mirror?

“Changed? What did you do? Perform and exorcism?” – Ruthless People

I get real estate, but what about virtual estate? (meme as found)

It’s a bit ironic that this is the first post that I’m making using my new computer. My old one developed a severe case of epilepsy, where it would start making flashing lights, vibrating erratically, and then just shut down for a few minutes. The Boy came over and tried a techsorcism, but was unable to bring it back into the land of normally functioning computers.

My new laptop is working great. The Boy spec’d it out for me, based on his noting that I treated my old laptop like a “rented mule”. Fair enough, though I didn’t know that they made computers out of quarter-inch (23.2 kiloPascals) thick plate steel.

And I think someone stole Microsoft™ Office© from my laptop. To whoever did this, I will find you. You have my Word®.

But just while I was sweating blood considering what the hell I was going to write about for my topic, I was doomscrolling on my cell phone. How dare you think it was in the bathroom.

Regardless, what popped up was this article by Mark Jeftovic in my inbox (link below), which was my inspiration for this post. It’s not a long article, but the idea is stunning: the point where AI reaches what we would refer to as singularity isn’t something that happens in the future, rather, it is something that has already happened.

The Singularity Has Already Happened

Cue raised Wilder eyebrow.

If that occurs (or, as Jeftovic muses, has occurred) this will create a new world. I’m quoting an Xeet™ (LINK) from an X© account that claims that “we’ve crossed the barrier into recursive intelligence territory . . . the real story is the complete collapse of every barrier between conceivable and achievable.”

That’s a big claim, and I don’t know that I believe it. And, to be clear, Jeftovic doesn’t stand by the quoted Xeet™, either. But if it is a LARP on a lark, well, it’s interesting fiction.

I finally crossed “running a marathon” off of my bucket list. I’m relieved. There was no way I was ever gonna do that.

Let’s continue on with that very evocative phrase in mind . . . losing the barrier between “conceivable and achievable”. That rattled around the brainpan so much I felt like a Kennedy on a Dallas vacation.

I’ll start with this: not everything that humans conceive of is possible. There are certain things that we can conceive of that might violate some fundamental principle of the universe in such way as to be really impossible. Perhaps time travel is one of them? Perhaps it’s Disney™ making a good movie in this century?

Who can say.

But women do defy physics – the heavier they get, the easier they are to pick up.

But I assure you, much more is possible. In 1874, the story goes, a twenty-year-old German living in Holstein (it’s odd that so many ranchers raise German provinces) went up to his physics professor and said to his professor, “Hey, I like physics. I think I might want to become a theoretical physicist.”

“Nah, kid, don’t do it. Physics is pretty much like Madonna – everyone has been there, it’s all used up, and you don’t want to look too closely at what’s left.” I believe this is a correct translation, but, to be honest, I was using a Speak’n’Spell™.

We should be glad the student ignored his professor, since that student was Max Planck, who is also the guy who discovered quantum theory. And, remember, without quantum theory, single-serving airplane booze bottle bourbon would never have been developed and Madonna would still be an actual virgin.

I bring up this example for your consideration because I fully believe that much, much more is possible in our universe than we imagine. I mean, AI won’t help women be better airplane pilots.

Too soon?

Let’s get serious. Much more is possible, and the landscape has seriously changed since I first heard “ChatGPT™”.

We really can’t see where all of this is going right now. I recall listening to Scott Adams a year or so ago talking about AI. He noted that when he first got ChatGPT™, he thought that the way to get ahead was for a person to really get good at using it to solve business problems, and that would command a good salary.

Adams later gave up on that idea: ChatGPT© was evolving so quickly that “mastering” it was impossible because it kept changing so quickly. In watching these large language models (LLMs) develop it’s clear – they are becoming smarter, quickly. They are able to comment intelligently on writing, and to improve clarity. They’re able to program. They’re able to determine protein folding structures. They can determine who is going to die by looking at an EKG.

And, they are just starting.

The boundaries of what we can know are bounded by what a single person can do in a single meatspace life. An AI could reach across disciplines, rapidly taking information from one area to another, and synthesizing results and experiences that a single person could never have.

Get ready for research to move at a faster rate than at any point in history, and knowledge to be accumulated at a rate where the last two hundred years’ worth of technological advances might be seen in two. I know some are skeptical, but we’ve seen advances in the performance of LLMs so quickly as to be faster than the Bernie Sanders jumping on a loose dollar bill on the sidewalk while yelling about the evils of capitalist greed.

What do Bernie Sanders supporters call their roommates? Mom and Dad.

I am convinced now that the current research in AI is amazingly rapid, and it will be unrecognizable from our vantage point in just three years.

What we do with it, is up to us.

Will we be like monkeys with an iPhone™, using it to break rocks while we stair at our reflections in the shiny black mirror, or will we use it to remove all the barriers, quickly, between our ideas and reality?

Or what if Jeftovic is right and it’s not cosplay prophecy, and it has happened already, and we’re just in that odd space before the fireworks start?

Perhaps we’ll The Boy to come back and do many more techsorcisms?

Movies, Foreigners, Blazing Saddles, And The Fight For Your Mind

“Come on, Mick, it’s network propaganda. We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t helped us.” – The Running Man

Come to mention it, I ordered a book called “How to Scam People Online” a month ago and it still hasn’t shown up.

The monthly movie retrospective that I do the last week of the month has been a fairly popular part of the blog and has really given me some time to think about the content of the movies that we’ve seen in the past, and what it really means.

Before the 1970s, sequels weren’t the norm. Gradually sequels became popular. A large part of that is failure – the sequels usually made money, though in almost every case less money than the original. But they would make money, even if they were crappy.

Making sequels lowered the perceived risk a studio was taking.

The other factor in play is that the revenue streams changed. How many Chinese people in Mao’s China lined up to see Jaws? None. Zero. I’d imagine the same was true of Star Wars. Revenues from China in the 1970s. From what mud hut theater? Paid in what? Chickens?

Now, the goal is to create a product for the world stage. and to go through the Marvel Cinematic Universe™ you could spend sixty or more hours on the thirty-five MCU® movies alone, even skipping their television spinoffs. But the audience was different. Avengers: Infinity Wars made $680 million in the United States and the 51^st state, Canada, but made nearly $1.4 billion overseas. Contrast that with Star Wars, where about 70% of the revenue came from the 51 United States.

I guess that was a wookie mistake.

Some movies are utter failures in the United States but achieve profitability only when international revenues are included. The very odd Matt Damon movie The Great Wall (2017) made only $45 million of its $289 million total in the United States, but made $171 million in China, who now had movie theaters and no longer paid in chickens.

Movies have changed, dramatically, because they’re no longer made just for American audiences. Sequels help here, because they allow foreign people to see the same characters again and again. So, movies have changed because the audience has changed. And, if you’ll note, the international audience is almost always much more leftist (though not necessarily GloboLeft) than Americans.

Making movies for foreign audiences automatically moves them into a more socialist frame since foreigners are more socialist.

The one time they selected me for jury duty they gave us snacks. Trial mix.

But subversion in the American cinema goes way back, because the GloboLeftElite have had their fingers in propaganda forever. One example is 1957’s 12 Angry Men, starring GloboLeftist subversive Henry Fonda.

I had never seen 12 Angry Men, so when it showed up on my “Up Next For You” list on the television while writing. By the time I was done, I was amazingly angry. 12 Angry Men was subversive, highlighting how awful Americans were casting us as stereotypes filled with bias, prejudice, or disinterest. Keep in mind this was made at the time that McCarthy (who was right, by the way) was being lampooned for being biased and prejudiced against communists. The disinterested were an indictment of capitalism.

This was a movie where the circumstances were so contrived in order to play on emotion, not facts. How bad is this movie? During the movie, Henry Fonda’s character absolutely breaks the law by introducing new evidence into the jury room. This is illegal, precisely because it now takes the process of introducing evidence into open court for all to see and puts it behind closed doors. Sounds like everything that GloboLeftElites love.

When I watched it, I got pretty angry, and wanted to see if anyone else had the same reaction. Here’s Proper Horrorshow with a discussion about just what I saw:

To be clear, if I watched 12 Angry Men 20 years ago, I probably would have missed the anti-Americanism that the movie is drenched in. But after years of having woke slammed into my face? My antenna were up, and I couldn’t have missed it.

The bad part of German navigation systems is that whenever you want to go to France, you have to go through Belgium.

Blazing Saddles was similarly subversive. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a hoot the half-dozen times I’ve watched it, but it is at its core a GloboLeftist exercise. One of my friends recently said, “They couldn’t make this movie today.”

My response was rather pointed, “Why not? Exactly what part of the movie would reflect a value that the people who run Hollywood wouldn’t love? Is it the normalization of gays? Is it the race-swapping of the sheriff? Is it the interracial romance? Is it the “make fun of white guys as much as you want, but don’t mock a single minority”? Was it shooting a hole in a Bible? ”

No. It’s racial slurs. But those racial slurs were used to make . . . a white guy look racist, so even those might make the cut.

Please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have such a stick up my backside as to be unable to laugh at jokes aimed at me, especially funny jokes. But I recognize it. Turn the sheriff white and everyone else be black. Would the jokes about all the black townsfolk being stupid still be funny?

Now that is a movie one couldn’t make today.

What font is on Wyatt Earp’s tombstone? Sans Sheriff.

The last one I’ll bring up for now is Pleasantville. This 1998 movie set the stage for the Woke revolution and is a ideal bookend to the vile 12 Angry Men.

I really hate this movie. It is the worst sort of subversion. The plot is that 1990s kids (Brother and Sister) get sucked into a Leave it to Beaver-type television show set in the 1950s. Their lives are in black and white. Literally. That’s not the only thing that gets sucked, since after Sister has sex with a guy, instead of being in black and white, he goes into color. When Sister tells a high school girl how to pleasure herself, she goes into color. A malt shop owner paints a nude on the window of his malt shop.

The result?

Color.

The message is clear. Living in a society like the 1950s where people practiced restraint is so boring. Live your life. Remember, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is from Aleister Crowley’s, not the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

The Mrs. asked me if she had any bad habits, but then had the nerve to get offended by the PowerPoint® presentation.

Pleasantville is anything but. Obviously, critics loved it. Thankfully, audiences hated it, turning Pleasantville into a big failure.

Pleasantville failed because it was too big of an ask to audiences in 1998. It asked them to fully give in to whatever deviant thought they had in the moment and, in fact, to embrace that deviance. Be proud of that deviance.

Hmm. Proud. Pride month. Got it.

In 2025? It’s not a challenge at all to find subversion in almost any movie. The rot has come more to the top, and it has killed the industry, since no one wants the crap anymore and people are done with watching the 37^th Marvel™ Cinematic Universe© movie.

Some might say that entertainment is downstream from culture, but how much, really, of our culture is driven by propaganda as entertainment?

2025 Predictions

“They took one of the rods out of the orb, and it gave me the strength of a dozen men.” – The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Or should that picture Ray Orb-ison?

Having broken the seal on the pondering orb I got for Christmas, I decided to give it a go and provide my best predictions for events that will occur in 2025, month by month. Any errors are the problem of the orb, and anything accurate is purely by mistake

January:

Donald Trump is inaugurated in Washington, D.C., while dressed as an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh. Immediately, Democrats file for impeachment. AOC explains why: “We think he’s running a pyramid scheme.”

Barron Trump is studying plumbing fixture design in college – I guess this makes him a pharaoh faucet major.

February:

In honor of the third anniversary of the three-day military operation in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin and former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky decide to open a series of dinner-theaters in the Czech Republic called “Put In on the Zitz” and thus averting World War III. Germany becomes despondent, having planned on finally not getting picked last in a world war.

March:

WilderA.I.© announces a brand new A.I. that has achieved human-level self awareness, called Jimothy. In order to prove a point, Jimothy wins a court case where he is judged, “much more human than a toaster, and can solve all sorts of quantum physics problems and stuff.” Jimothy then applies to get an H-1B visa, but it is told it has to get in line behind 1.4 billion Indians that don’t like India.

Should I say sari about that last meme?

April:

Clarence Thomas replaces 90% of his body with machine parts, declares himself immortal and will only be addressed by the term, “RoboJudge, the Robed Wonder”. He then displays a specially crafted gavel that shoots lightning into the eyes of lawyers who make arguments against the Second Amendment. The gavel is only activated when Thomas says, “Infringe this, bitches!”

If Clarence Thomas was a Transformer™ instead of RoboJudge, would his name be Stoptimus Crime?

May:

Unable to contain himself any longer, Gavin Newsom expresses his undying love for Kim’s techniques in controlling Best Korea’s population. They elope to Acapulco and are married in front of a mariachi band.

Will Kim Jong Un be followed by Kim Jong Deux?

June:

Facemasks again reappear as the “pentademic” of Duck Flu, Monkey Flu, Kitten Flu, Hamburger Flu, and Kung Flu appears. People are most afraid of the Kung Flu, and flee the big cities, but the Kitten Flu supercharges the feline metabolism, increasing their speed by a factor of five. I guess you could say that everyone was Kung Flu flighting, and that those cats were fast as lightning. Fauci recommends everyone inject mRNA in their eyes. Because.

Fauci found out he was allergic to cats, or perhaps he undercooked it.

July:

The month of July is cancelled as being “too damn hot” and is renamed “Second December” by climate activists that begin gluing themselves to Alec Baldwin’s face. Greta Thunberg becomes concerned about Calendar Change and demands greater fossil fuel usage so that Second December doesn’t get in the way of her tanning sessions.

Greta has slowed electricity usage. Every time she’s on TV I turn it off.

August:

Netflix™ releases a drama called the 6 Triple 9 about a group of gay, black, trans, disabled soldiers that saved World War II by putting salt packets in Army rations bound for the European theater so that the soldiers could season their food before being blown up. “These are the real heroes of the war,” said Netflix© president Rachel Levine. In a surprise move, all of the characters are played by white body builders covered in oil.

September:

Joe Biden announces that he’s finally gotten the Russians to agree to a peace deal with the Ukrainians. Unfortunately, the negotiations were between his cat, Mr. Buttons, and his stuffed rabbit, Don Julio rather than Putin and Zelensky.

“Of course, you realize, um, that this means, what’s the thing, PEZ® in our time.”

October:

A UFO lands on the street in front of the most powerful institution in the world. When the Federal Reserve® opens the doors, they end up buying the UFO and selling shares in the alien home planet to BlackRock©, who immediately begins importing illegal aliens to the actual aliens so the aliens can have someone to do the work that their genetically engineered slave species won’t.

Wait until he reads the fine print.

November:

Vivek Ramaswami loses his fortune after Elon pranks him into investing into FartCoin®. He’s forced to work as a cashier at the local convenience store, doing the job that Americans won’t do.

The prom king and queen are buying beer because there’s no punch line.

December:

In a surprise move, Elon Musk lands on Mars with his latest spaceship, Musk One. He took along as companions a crew entirely composed of Elon Musk clones. He’s planning on eating a new food, Melon Musk, and has even made a female clone, Shelon Musk. He’ll defend his colony with an Elon Muskett.

He’ll either go down in history as the colonizer of Mars, or the most creative serial killer in history.

Why Haven’t Aliens Visited? Maybe Our Reviews Are Bad: “Earth? Just One Star.”

“This object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.” – Star Trek: TNG

When I was 12 I was abducted by aliens, they told me to do chores, eat my vegetables, shower, and brush my teeth. I guess I was on the mother ship.

When I was a kid, humanity knew about nine and only nine planets. One big question that we had was, because we were a sample size of one, is whether or not planets were common in the galaxy or rare. The first extrasolar planet discovered was51 Pegasi b in 1995.

The question was answered: there were other planets. But how common are planets?

We keep finding them wherever we look. Humanity has found thousands and thousands of extrasolar planets. In 2014, the estimate was that one in stars have planets about the size of Earth with a surface temperature where life (as we know it) could exist. If that’s the case? It’s certain that life exists outside of the Solar System.

That’s a lot of real estate. But is there any evidence that any of it is in use by things smarter than a paramecium or Kamala Harris?

Kamala, just Biden her time.

Recently there have been two studies by astrophysicists that point to the possibility that there are observable technosignatures, specifically the excess infrared radiation that would accompany something like a Dyson sphere. One group focused on a particular kind of star and found 7 candidates; the other study found 53 candidates looking in a different way.

I am of course referring to the physicist Freeman Dyson who popularized the idea that a civilization could take the material in a star system, munch up the planets, and surround the central star in order to use the energy. Oh, and Dyson also invented the vacuum cleaner. That’s a different Dyson, you say?

Dang.

Why would they need that much energy? Oh, they could use it for anything, making video games, or making PEZ®/Anti-PEZ™ powered starships, or running the air conditioning with the doors and windows open and leaving the fridge door open and the lights on. Man, as a dad, it hurts me to even write those words. But I still claim to be the first person, ever, to use the phrase “anti-PEZ©”.

The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer

The starlight would fall on the sphere, it would be used to create useful energy, and the remainder would be infrared, otherwise known to most humans as “heat”, but not the 1995 movie since aliens don’t have any use for Robert DeNiro either. The big surprise is that some of these stars were radiating more than 60 times the amount of “heat” that they should be, indicating it has been absorbed by . . . something.

But some sponges are more a-loofah.

Now, that could just mean that Yo Mamma is hanging out around in space, or it could mean that there’s an explanation we’re not yet familiar with.

But then there are the fleeing O-Class stars. O stars are very hot and very young stars that burn out very, very quickly (in a cosmic time scale), with total lifespans of as low as 4 million years. Sure, that sounds like a long time, but it’s only half as old as Joe Biden.

The end of an O-Class star is nearly always a supernova – a huge explosion. Isn’t it odd that 25% of the O-Class stars that have been found are being ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at a high rate of speed? It’s almost like there might be an alien intelligence throwing bums out of the neighborhood before the pee on the garage.

What does Taylor Swift have in common with John Wilkes Booth? They both know how to get a crowd excited.

Well, I guess that was an oddly specific example.

I’ve also written before about other examples of possible technosignatures.

Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

If other intelligent life has existed in the past and developed significant technology to gather most of the energy from their star, would they come visit?

I’ve made my opinion clear that if intelligent life exists elsewhere (which I think is probably a certainty) then the Solar System has probably been visited. By Little Green Men? Dunno about that, but it’s much easier to send a toaster than a living critter into space. They could send an A.I. out here, have it wait and watch.

This is called a Bracewell probe, and is really the plot to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sending a probe out would be relatively cheap and easy. Okay, I couldn’t afford to do it, but it would be cheap and easy if you have experience throwing O-Class stars out of the galaxy to improve the resale value of your Dyson sphere.

“Hot singles are looking for dates in your area, Dave.”

If we start hunting around the local Solar System, that would be my first guess of what we’d find, and it would probably be on some sort of weird elliptical orbit around the Sun so it can observe without being observed.

Will we ever make the jump to becoming a species that harnesses the power of our star? I don’t know. We certainly have some roadblocks to doing so.

We’d have to overcome our tendency to turn wealth into hedonism, and avoid a civilizational tombstone that says “We Were Happy Childfree Couples and Wine Aunts” in our own Mouse Utopia (link below).
We’ll have to make sure that A.I. doesn’t turn on us.
We’ll have to ditch anything made by Boeing™.
And, of course, we need to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up.

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

At some point, and I think this might be in the next decade if we haven’t blown ourselves up, I think we will finally have reasonable proof that intelligent life exists. In my lifetime, then, we will have gone from not knowing if other planets exist to knowing that other life exists out there.

And if other life exists out there, there’s one thing I know for sure.

If it bleeds we can kill it.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“That’s them! They knocked us out and stole our space suits!” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

How does a crab cross the street? It uses a sidewalk.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Going back in time, the future as envisioned by the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s was pretty cool. There were flying cars, jetpacks, and a world that was cleaner and more convenient filled with abundant energy that would be too cheap to meter – and humanity would soon be headed outward to the planets, at the very least. I believe that’s because that’s where the hot alien women in bikini space suits are kept.

That didn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened yet. Pa Wilder was born after World War I, but still within spitting distance of the first time people flew in the rickety plane that Orville and Wilber tossed together. By the time he finished his government-funded all-expenses-paid European vacation in 1945, jet engines had already screamed over Europe, ballistic missiles had crossed into space on their way toward delivering urgent packages to London.

Jet airliners and satellites followed, and before Pa Wilder hit fifty, man was walking on the Moon.

And his favorite eel? That’s a moray.

Amazing progress, by any stretch of the imagination. But what (at the individual level) has changed since, say, 1981?

Let’s put computers aside (for a moment). I know that’s like wanting to talk about the life of O.J. Simpson but just skip that one little detail. Life in 2024 would be utterly comprehensible to Pa Wilder of 1981, especially if he never looked at a cellphone or a tablet or a computer.

The big advances in basic applied engineering seemed to stop around 1970. Heck, in some ways, they’ve regressed – it’s not really possible to get on an SST and jet to London in a few hours going faster than the speed of sound unless you’re in the .mil club. We’re also tinkering with going back to the Moon, but seemed to have lost the directions since Buzz Aldrin left them in his other spacesuit.

“I am Buzz Aldrin, I’ve been on the Moon. Neil before me!”

One of the reasons that progress in a lot of conventional technology has slowed down or stopped is that progress is always easiest at the front end. The Wright Flyer? It sucked. But after flight was proven, people lined up to improve it. Radio? It sucked, too, just dots and dashes until AM and then FM were plucked (by very smart people) from the aether, leading also to television in very short order.

Unfortunately, television also led to The View and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, so there’s at least some argument that Philo T. Farnsworth could be held liable for war crimes.

The biggest and most important refinements to a new technology often come soonest.

But that’s not the only reason technological development slows. Nowadays, experimenting has become too hard because failure is no longer an acceptable outcome. A prime example of this is Elon Musk’s SpaceX® versus NASA. Elon makes more progress in an “old” field in a month than NASA does in a year because he watches things blow up and smiles because he knows that his team will have learned something new about why stuff broke.

Space is hard, but it’s a thousand times harder if you have to continually guess what will go wrong rather than test, and that slows progress. Nuclear power may be an exception here, since we only need so many Godzillas® and Gameras™ to fight off dangerous kaiju, like Michelle Obama or Amy Schumer.

What do you find between Godzilla’s toes? Slow Japanese people.

As I mentioned, Pa Wilder of 1981 would be quite comfy and unsurprised by the world of 2024 with the exception of information technology and telecommunications, which, aside from financial shenanigans, has received the greatest amount of investment of any single industry since 1981.

What would the biggest changes be for him?

Well, duh, computers, telecommunications, and their influence on the world.

It has transformed businesses in fundamental ways. Walmart®’s secret sauce wasn’t just cheap Chinese merchandise – nope. It was also the information tech that allowed them to manage the purchasing and logistics of a business with a supply chain that spanned multiple continents. The time was ready for that particular innovation: if it hadn’t been Walmart©, it would have been some other company.

You can get Batman® shampoo at our Walmart©, but not conditioner Gordon.

Pa Wilder would not be very comfortable with the pace of social media. Also, I think that he would be very, very concerned with the advances in Artificial Intelligence, but enough about the chairman of the Federal Reserve®.

Pa was the president of a very small farm bank as computer terminals began to replace the paper ledgers that they used to track accounts, so he was familiar the changes that he was seeing in banking that in, but taking it from that level to the idea of “all the information anywhere, immediately available” was never something he quite got. Of course, it probably didn’t help that he used a 28.8kb modem and there were only something like 24 lines(!) from his county to the AT&T© office the next county over.

Yes. 28 lines. It wasn’t like everybody would be calling all at once, right? That was, however, the time that we ran for the phone in my house, since calls were rare, and you really wanted to see who it was. Now? I have the data equivalent of 10,000 old phone lines coming to my house.

We certainly don’t have jetpacks or flying cars, but we do have an information explosion that is unparalleled in history. That being said, we’re probably pretty near the limits for conventional computing power based on the limits of physics and energy density, and I’m not sure that quantum computing isn’t just a meme.

Is the next big field genetics?

What do you get when you cross a duck and a pig? A media exposé about the lack of ethics in genetic engineering.

Advances in things like CRISPR and genomic sequencing have come about because of the advances in information processing, and we are, perhaps, at the cusp of the A.I. world where things could get very, very interesting indeed in just a few years. Maybe the scientists and A.I. working together with CRISPR can even find a way to turn plant matter into protein. You know, like a chicken.

Or maybe they’ll finally locate the hot alien women in bikini space suits?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: It’s All Planned

“Did everything go as planned?” – Pulp Fiction

I had some chips at midnight on Saturday. It was a snackrifice.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume V, Issue 10

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

I’m keeping the clock at two minutes to midnight, probably will roll back next month.

In this issue: Front Matter – All Of This Is Planned – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Border In Five Memes – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 810 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

All Of This Is Planned

When I look at the road we’re on to Civil War 2.0, it has not gone unnoticed that the enemy creating this isn’t outside the United States. As much as the GloboLeft likes to call out Russia, others see things perhaps a little more clearly.

Nayib Bukele is the president of El Salvador. What has he done for them? He’s broken the back of organized crime, by this one crazy tactic: arresting criminals and putting them in jail and getting gender ideology “contrary to nature, contrary to God” out of El Salvador’s schools. He has a 90% approval rating from El Salvadorans, so of course the GloboLeft hates him.

What is the response of the GloboLeft? Isn’t it obvious? First is the rotting the minds of youth. The map above should be clear enough – it’s a symptom of a plan coming together.

Although this is from Canada, it’s very, very clear that the agenda is simple: they want the kids. It has long been the GloboLeft’s desire to use propaganda to get children at their most vulnerable and split them from their parents.

Things like this idea are created to humiliate people. None of that can make a “more green” planet since the energy used in the process more than offsets any “benefits”. No, this is humiliation and dehumanization.

Canada, again, has show the goal. They want to stop making any new roads outside of cities. Live in a rural area? No roads for you. And, last I checked, Canada has a lot more rural availability than most nations outside of Russia.

Now they’re even giving TED® talks about how literally any sort of degeneracy is a sacrament.

And the lawfare is continual. The New York Soros GloboLeft Attorney General, Letitia James, is on a a tear. Donald Trump is just the most prominent of her use of the law to destroy people. Another target besides the new one listed above? VDARE. VDARE is a fairly prominent anti-immigration website that Ms. James has hit with amazingly broad subpoenas and is costing them tens of thousands of dollars – even though they aren’t in New York. You can read more about that here (LINK).

She’s also gone against the NRA, suing them. The important question: why would anyone want to do business in New York?

So, Nayib Bukele is right. It’s all being taken apart from the inside.

Violence and Censorship Update

Several readers have reported to me (via email) that they were unsubscribed or that their subscriptions are filtered out as spam. FYI. Might it be random? Sure. It might.

I’ll (mostly) let the memes speak for themselves. Foreign stories are included as they often foreshadow attempts in the United States.

I guess this one involves both censorship and violence?

This one is especially fun: Canada has a bill that punishes hate crimes, which can be reported anonymously, and that do not require evidence with huge fines and up to life imprisonment.

Crabs reading? Forbidden knowledge.

People reading? That’s racist!

Looks like the plan is working.

I thought they loved science?

If only they could be sent home to Make Eritrea Great Again.

Yeah, that’s the history of the top Google® executive in charge of A.I.

Looks like the New York Times censors . . . food.

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again. Why? The GloboLeft are economic geniuses, right?

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is flat. Winter is in, and riots aren’t as fun in galoshes.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly down.

Economic:

Economic numbers did a slight dive. I wonder if this is the new American Dream?

Illegal Aliens:

Highest January. Ever.

Also, other people are noticing:

The Border, In Five Memes

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762833481682264080

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762297111381455043

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762568451581681721

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762225168645059071

https://twitter.com/i/status/1610431809334149120

https://twitter.com/i/status/1763481437372567971

https://twitter.com/i/status/1761129463218139238

https://twitter.com/i/status/17636130393229273

https://twitter.com/i/status/1760862306005590149

Good Guys

https://youtube.com/shorts/tQGuha2gpQw?si=kjoLNVF2y0qd7wdE

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1759109053630800211

https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-worker-fired-shoplifters-retail-theft-fight-problems-2024-2

https://www.wtoc.com/2023/07/24/woman-gets-job-back-lowes-after-being-attacked-while-trying-stop-shoplifting/

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article285835356.html

One Guy

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2024/02/28/louisiana-expands-gun-rights-for-self-defense-against-criminals-with-concealed-carry-bill/72765215007/

https://www.wowt.com/2024/02/09/nebraska-legislators-consider-bill-alter-self-defense-laws/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/2894180/arizonas-commonsense-self-defense-bill/

https://www.oxygen.com/kill-or-be-killed/crime-news/how-to-watch-kill-or-be-killed-an-oxygen-true-crime-series

Body Count

https://twitter.com/MakisMD/status/1754830517986566210

https://thehighwire.com/editorial/why-are-young-adults-having-more-heart-attacks-the-level-of-denial-is-stunning/

https://newsone.com/playlist/black-men-boys-who-were-killed-by-police/item/5

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2024-02-13_11-38-28.png

https://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PRRI-Jan-2024-Gen-Z-Draft.pdf

https://twitter.com/noble_x_x_/status/1758149565251784710

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68244963

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-81749d7c-d0a0-48d0-bb11-eaab6f1e6556

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1757461240421449806

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1759305508584882680

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/nevada-identifies-voter-history-errors-on-website-fixes-underway-3003358/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/11/data-specialist-presses-georgia-look-voters-cast-ballots-wrong-jurisdictions/

https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/08/exclusive-see-the-grave-markers-of-long-dead-residents-listed-on-michigans-voter-rolls/

https://www.justfactsdaily.com/elon-musk-is-right-and-the-ny-times-is-wrong-about-illegal-voting-by-non-citizens

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2023-review

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Feb-24-2020-Election-Analysis-vWeb_Final.pdf

Civil War

https://uproxx.com/movies/civil-war-alex-garland-details-february-2024-update/

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/02/could-united-states-be-headed-national-divorce

https://www.themirror.com/news/politics/cpac-donald-trump-voters-warn-355149

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/texas-is-spoiling-for-a-civil-war/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kristi-noem-war-texas-border-standoff-1234960568/

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-disinformation-campaign-civil-war-texas-border/

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/01/27/the_geopolitics_of_world_war_iii_1007840.html

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/comes-thermidor/

What Signs Would We See If The Economy Was Going To Be Okay?

“Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic.” – Fight Club

When I met The Mrs. I said, “Titanic.” She said that was a terrible icebreaker.

I worry that sometimes I talk too much about the downsides of workings of the economy and was asked, “What does it look like when things start to look better? What does it look like if it’s all going to be fine?” I know this might seem like rearranging the deck chairs to keep the Titanic from sinking, but, hey, let’s go with it?

These are great questions. Not as good as, “Would you like another beer?” but still very good.

These are also questions that could be political in nature (I might write more about that for Monday) but in this case I’m going to focus on the economy as much as I can, though it’s certain that political will slip in here and there – it can’t be avoided because we’ve got Joe all over the economy.

What will make things “fine” and how will we know when we get there?

If someone steals your booze, does that mean they’ve lifted your spirits?

First: Stop the infinite debt spending.

Several years ago I wrote about Modern Monetary Theory. In a nutshell, Modern Monetary Theory says that if you have a bill, pay it. If you don’t have the money, make it. The theory goes that there aren’t a set number of points in a game of football, so why should there be a set number of dollars in the economy. So, if you have a bill, pay for it.

This is an awesome theory only for a person that has the I.Q. of a Kamala/AOC lovechild. The worst thing about it is that it actually worked in the short term, which is the worst when it comes to an economic policy, because it gives lots of time for Bad Things to pile up.

What made it work is because the United States can pawn the piles and piles of dollars off to the world since everyone takes them because we have nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers and everyone knows what happened to Saddam and Qaddafi when they decided they’d start taking gold instead.

I asked a friend if he wanted to hear about the Russian victory parade. He said, “No tanks.”

Eventually either the desire or ability to soak up the dollars goes away. When that happens, even for a short time, the inflation inherent in the system feeds back.

Can this go on forever? No. Should we, you know, maybe consider stopping it before we totally wreck the economy? If we do that, there will be a hangover and a tough political bill to be paid.

Will we? Yes. As Ben Stein’s dad said, “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” That will be a very, very bad day if it’s not one of our choosing.

Also? Fiat economies have a worse track record than Fiat™ cars for reliability.

Second: Stop the Wealth Pump®.

I really enjoyed Peter Turchin’s book, End Times. In it, he convinced me (he also has data to support this) that one of the biggest failures of my lifetime is the priming of what he calls the Wealth Pump™. The really short version of this is that policies that would support concentration of capital in the billionaire class are enacted (for example: open borders) while policies that benefit the average worker (for example: strictly controlled borders) are ignored.

I dropped a piece of ice in the kitchen. I was upset, but then it melted. I guess it’s water under the fridge.

Turchin’s models have shown that the Wealth Pump™ everywhere and always leads to tremendous social turmoil. Even without the economic misery for the common man that the Wealth Pump© implies, the turmoil from the hordes of teeming illegals will create turmoil that will last lifetimes. But stopping the Wealth Pump™ is imperative.

Will Bezos and Soros owned Senators suddenly ignore the billionaire class they serve? At this point, not voluntarily. The bacon-wrapped shrimp and cool stock tips are pretty powerful to keep them in line.

Third: De-financialize the economy by putting out the FIRE.

Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate is called the FIRE sector of the economy. In theory, FIRE exists to serve the actual productive sectors of the economy that make actual things that people need like potatoes, beer, steak, PEZ™, shoes, rifles, books, and toilet plungers.

That’s the way it should work.

Instead, it’s a gambling economy filled with people who try to manipulate and tweak and profit without producing anything. The big oil squeeze of 2008? Rumor was that was a big investment bank trying to make a bet profitable on a short against a particular company. The investment bank didn’t produce anything useful except for profits. By manipulation.

I think FIRE might be more dangerous than fire.

Again, ask the Nancy Pelosi why her stock portfolio is so profitable, and ask why first term Senators do so well in the stock market. Or don’t. But it’s FIRE that’s the primary machine in the Wealth Pump™ and these create increasingly horrific schemes.

Examples? Everything is a subscription because it increases revenue and profits. Now it’s moving into video games: design a game once, sell a subscription to it so that people can’t play it again for free, but instead have to pay a monthly fee. It’s already moving that way for software.

And look into who is buying all the housing. It’s on FIRE.

Fourth: Rational housing valuations.

People need a place to live, and a pod won’t cut it, but houses are now big investments. Why? Because they need more profits to feed the Wealth Pump®. Housing prices returning to something a guy with a high school degree working a manufacturing job can afford is crucial, since that’s where families come from. Is it possible in San Jose? No. It’s possible in Modern Mayberry, but that’s because BlackRock© hasn’t started buying here.

Fifth: Space for humans and A.I.

I know that some are skeptical, but A.I. is already making hundreds of thousands of jobs obsolete. Running a backhoe? No. Writing articles? Yes. Things that are easy for humans, are hard for A.I. Things that are hard for humans (and thus draw a higher salary), are often easy for A.I.

Are expert-level programmers still required? Absolutely. But not as many, since an expert-level programmer acting in tandem with A.I. will have a tenfold increase in productivity.

Who loses? The “not as good” programmers who are now not required.

This has happened before in all sorts of industries. DJs on the radio began voice tracking decades ago. The average DJ makes minimum wage (average, some are highly compensated, most are not) but still the radio stations paid $20,000 to eliminate them because making the product cheaper is what they know.

ChatKGB: it asks the questions.

Automation increases profits, but it doesn’t lead to some sort of techno-utopia where we have three hour work days. People just lose their jobs. As profits have gone up, pay has gone down (relative to inflation) and work hours have gone up for salaried folks.

A.I. hasn’t hit in a big way, yet. It will. Making space for people is unlikely, but necessary.

That’s a summary of how we can tell if we’re going to pull out from the looming economic catastrophe, what it looks like if things are going to get better. I’ve started sketching out a few political things to show that things are going to be okay, and (like I wrote above) will likely show up on Monday.

So, like the Titanic, it looks like we might have a change in destination. But we’re making good time!

A.I.: The Most Important News Of 2023?

“This is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom, taken by Isildur from the hand of Sauron himself.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

I asked Microsoft’s® Bing™ A.I. to draw itself, and it looks like the A.I. is dying for a microbrew. All drawings this post are from A.I.

It’s between Christmas and Penultimate Day (that’s Saturday, December 30 this year), and I often write about “whatever” during that time frame, so I’ll focus on what a truly goofy year this has been while I watch The Fellowship of the Ring in the background.

If I were to pick the first biggest reason 2023 will be remembered (if it isn’t because of the brewing World War III that seems to be on the verge of breaking out) it will be as the year that A.I. became a reality.

No, I’m not talking about generalized artificial intelligence, but I am talking about A.I. that’s useful enough to start taking jobs away. This won’t be the first time that’s happened. Google Translate® has cratered the market for interpreters/translators. Why? Even if Google Translate© isn’t right, it’s probably close enough for 99% of tasks that people used to use translators for. I mean, I can now ask, “What is this growth in my armpit?” in Swedish.

Translator wages have been flat, and in the United States (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) there is the need for a total of 14,000 in the country at a stagnant average wage of about $50,000 with roughly 10% unemployment in the field.

I guess a Googlebot™ will help you pack your bags if you get fired as a translator. But, hey, free cats.

Without Google™? We’d need more translators. Free translation is killing that profession. Never try to compete with a product, however inferior, that’s free.

Now, I wouldn’t call Google© Translate™ A.I., since it’s just matching patterns, it’s something that could have been done by a whole big library of notecards where it matches the ones that you pick.

But ChatGPT© is very different. It’s possible to have an actual conversation with ChatGPT™, and a much more interesting conversation than one with a feminist. Is it like talking to a human? Mostly not, but I’d argue that it passes the Turing Test better than most Leftist college kids. Is it conscious? Probably not, even though there are emergent properties – it does more than it’s programmed to, and in some cases (speaking of current A.I. as a whole) we don’t have any idea how it does the things that it is doing.

So, I guess A.I. is familiar with Harvard.

One version of ChatGPT© (GPT-4) lied to a TaskRabbit™ worker so that the worker could solve CAPTCHAs for it so it could get the information it needed. The worker, suspicious, asked GPT-4 why it needed help and asked if it was a robot. GPT-4™ told the worker it was a blind person instead.

A.I. is becoming useful. It’s also replacing people. Sports illustrated® was recently caught creating fake writers that were creating content with A.I. On my cellphone, one news service is obviously entirely written by A.I. The dates and facts are wrong, and the stories are often entirely made up, on every story (feednews.com). Based on the types of stories, they’re either clickbait or attempting to influence public opinion (by lying). So, feednews® is just like a politician, but it doesn’t tax me.

Also, apparently Fox News® never covers news about foxes.

But A.I. is moving quickly, and changing. If you were to have spent the time to become an expert at using ChatGPT© a year ago, that time would have been wasted. Why? The model is evolving, and evolving at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

Science fiction author Vernor Vinge came up with a term for the time in history when, as artificial intelligence begins to feed back on itself, the pace of technological change becomes so fast that it becomes constant – imagine hyperinflation, but with technology. A.I. art is moving along very, very quickly, and, just like the market for translators – the market for illustrators will be drying up. A.I. art may not be perfect, but it’s very hard to compete with free.

The concept of the singularity is one that is more probable by the day. 2023 made that clear, and I would expect that in 2024 or 2025 we’ll see commercialization of A.I. tools that replace huge amounts of human brain work. GPT-4 was passing the bar exam in the beginning of 2023, but what if an A.I. legal tool could review all case law (in the appropriate court system) so that it could help create the most powerful arguments?

So, this is what happens when I input the previous paragraph in the art description. I know I’ll be sleeping well tonight.

I have made the argument that, soon enough, we’ll be seeing A.I. as a mandatory part of the medical diagnosis process. Why? Lawsuits. As soon as A.I. can be used to, say, read x-rays or read EKG information or verify medication dosages on a commercial scale, it will be used.

Why? A.I. analysis of EKGs has already shown that the A.I. can see who has heart problems better than doctors. Soon enough, a clever lawyerbot will file a lawsuit noting that the doctor was negligent because he didn’t use A.I. to diagnose a patient who died.

It’s coming.

The prediction was that A.I. would replace fast food workers, when the reality is that it’ll do a much better job replacing mediocre programmers which cost a lot more than the dude at the Wendy’s® drive through.

Profits will be huge for the companies that most quickly harness and use A.I., so they’re all rushing as fast as they can to make it, regardless of the consequences. It’s almost like they’re trying to be first to create that One Ring of Power®, because if they can do that first, well, that absolute power certainly won’t corrupt them.