Category: Uncle Ted’s Story Hour

Sam Colt Made Men Equal. A.I. Won’t Even Try.

“Where’d you get the pistol?” – No Country for Old Men Birthdays are healthy.  Studies show that people who have more of them live longer. If you have the tallest man on Earth and add him to a group of 99 random people, the average height might move upwards a quarter of an inch, at … Continue reading “Sam Colt Made Men Equal. A.I. Won’t Even Try.”

“Where’d you get the pistol?” – No Country for Old Men

Birthdays are healthy.  Studies show that people who have more of them live longer.

If you have the tallest man on Earth and add him to a group of 99 random people, the average height might move upwards a quarter of an inch, at most. But if you have the richest man in the world and add him to a group of 99 random people, on average, everyone has about 80 billion dollars depending on the day and the price of SpaceX®.

Elon Musk is roughly 14,000,000 times richer than the average person on Earth.

Height follows a normal distribution, what we would call a classic bell curve.  The tallest man might tower over the rest, but he’s not 2,651.5 miles tall.  Hmm, I should stop now before I give Elon ideas.

Wealth does not follow a normal distribution.  At the extremes it follows a Pareto distribution.  A very small slice of people command the overwhelming share of resources, and there’s no natural ceiling.

Wealth concentrates, it does not equalize.

I hate Stephen King’s novels.  Too many Maine characters.

Back when armor was the ultimate status symbol and battlefield insurance, only the wealthy could afford a full suit of plate.  A knight on horseback was a walking fortress.  Then came the longbow at places like Agincourt.  English yeomen, common men with years of training, unleashed volleys that turned French heavy cavalry into pin cushions.  Arrows punched through armor and the French knights dropped their baguettes and cigarettes.

The expensive advantage of the mounted noble evaporated in the mud and guns finished the job.  A peasant with a musket could drop a lord in plate armor from a hundred yards with a few weeks of training.  Rifles and pistols made personal defense cheap and portable.  The playing field for violence flattened dramatically.

God made men. Sam Colt made them equal.  And that equality made governments think twice before pushing too hard.  Warfare tells the same story on a larger scale.

World War II was industrial attrition on an insane level.  The Soviets threw bodies at the problem to sponge up German bullets.  The Americans threw factories, ships, tanks, and aircraft at it until the Axis ran out of everything else.

Soviet fighter planes were ineffective:  they couldn’t stop Stalin.

The U.S. and Soviets spent the Cold War trying to outproduce each other in the old game. America won that contest so thoroughly that the rules changed.  Ukraine, and then Iran’s proxies, show how much the game had shifted.  Precision munitions, satellite targeting, real-time communications, and swarms of cheap drones turned expensive armor and aircraft into expensive liabilities rather than decisive weapons.

A few thousand dollars in drone parts plus some clever targeting can take out a multi-million-dollar tank or ship.  The battlefield is being equalized again by access to information and cheap, smart munitions.  Technology handed smaller players and irregular forces new leverage.

The pattern repeats across history and across domains.  Some tools compress advantages. Others stretch them.

I saw a newsletter yesterday where the author declared war on the very idea of merit.  His working definition of merit is talent plus effort.

He hates it.  Talent, in his view, is unearned, an accident of birth or genes.  He was honest enough to admit talent isn’t evenly distributed.  Talent follows the same normal curve as height or I.Q.

No one walks around with a 14-million I.Q.

I have a pimp gnome in my front yard.  He keeps a tight leash on my garden hoes.

Luck plays a role too.  To reach the absolute pinnacle usually requires talent, effort, and luck. For most people with average talent and average luck.  Effort is the variable that actually moves the needle.

The writer seemed personally offended that some people could be smarter or more disciplined and therefore succeed more.  He celebrated A.I. because it might let anyone churn out a business plan that once required years of education and experience.  That will knock the smart kids down a peg!

He’s half right about A.I.’s impact.  It is already replacing or augmenting large chunks of cognitive work.

Roughly 21% of American adults are functionally illiterate, and 54% read below a sixth-grade level.

Hand those folks a powerful AI and they can produce a decent business plan.  Whether they can understand or execute on it is another question entirely since it’s like giving an orangutan the equations for orbital mechanics.

A spelling error cost my friend his marriage:  “Having a wonderful time, wish you were her.”

For someone with a 100+ I.Q., A.I. is different.

It removes drudgery and raises the floor on what one person can accomplish.  It lets a competent individual punch above his weight.

A.I. will not be distributed evenly, however.

The versions available to the wealthy won’t look at all like what will be available to the masses.  They’ll use it to design new products, optimize supply chains, and compound advantages.  Teens will use a simpler version to make cat pictures.

This is the recurring story of transformative technology.  The printing press took knowledge out of the hands of a tiny literate elite and scattered it across Europe.  Ideas that once required a monastery or a university could spread in weeks.  Books got cheap.  Literacy rose.

The printing press was an enormous equalizer.

Yet the biggest winners built printing empires, publishing houses, and networks of distribution and could control mass media.  The tool rewarded those who could organize capital and talent around it.

The donut baker retired in Modern Mayberry.  He got tired of the hole business.

The same pattern appeared with electricity.  It lit homes, powered factories, and created entirely new industries.  Living standards rose across the board. But the big utilities and manufacturers built vast fortunes and influence.

The automobile obliterated distance in a way no king could have done.  It reshaped cities, commerce, and daily life.  Henry Ford’s moving assembly line made cars affordable.

Equalizer, but the companies and supply chains that scaled the technology created concentrated wealth and power that still echoes today.

Personal computers and the early internet followed suit.  A motivated individual could reach a global audience or start a business with almost nothing but time and ingenuity.

Barriers collapsed.

Then the platforms that captured attention and data became trillion-dollar businesses that could control commerce and shut off channels to those with controversial opinions.

Technology does not care about fairness.

It amplifies existing differences in talent, effort, discipline, and capital allocation.  It lowers some barriers and erects new ones built around mastery of the new tools themselves.

Any pizza is a personal pizza.

The commie newsletter writer wanted the talented and hardworking punished for their advantages.  He wanted A.I. to act as a great leveler downward.

But effort still compounds and preparation still matters.  The distribution of outcomes stays wide.  The bell curve isn’t going anywhere.

Is A.I. an equalizer, then?

No.  It will act like wealth.  It won’t be equally distributed.  Carlos from the Jiffy-Lube® will only have the free tier of ChatGPT©.  Elon will have versions of weapons-grade A.I. available to him.

Probably figuring out how to make himself 2,651.5 miles tall.

The Grooming Gang Cover Up: 250,000 Reasons “Online Safety” Is a Scam

“These borders are well protected.” – The Fellowship of the Ring (all memes as-found) Governments around the world trot out the kids whenever they want to remove freedoms. Protect the children.  It’s always for the children. The reality is that they don’t care at all about the kids. Let’s look at the KIDS Act.  The … Continue reading “The Grooming Gang Cover Up: 250,000 Reasons “Online Safety” Is a Scam”

“These borders are well protected.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

(all memes as-found)

Governments around the world trot out the kids whenever they want to remove freedoms.

Protect the children. It’s always for the children.

The reality is that they don’t care at all about the kids.

Let’s look at the KIDS Act. The “Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act” has passed the House. The Senate Democrats have said . . . it’s too weak. Of course they did. There appears to be no speech that they love except their own.

But they’re not alone: the European Parliament’s Online Safety was rammed through during “legislator vacation” using a backdoor procedural trick that required an absolute majority just to kill it. Now it’s legal for them to sort through “private” messages. For the kids.

The UK Online Safety Act is sold the same way. It’s there to protect children.

The real effect is that it pushes everyone toward some form of online ID and forces websites to keep kids off their platforms. Sites like 4chan and Gab® told them to pound sand because they aren’t a UK website. All of this is supposedly to protect the kids.

Right.

If that’s true, they need to explain the grooming gangs who have raped an estimated 250,000 girls in the UK.

The reports that came out in June 2026 are horrific. They underline the point that if you import rapists, they’re going to rape because it’s what they do, and approved. Indians made a movie back in 1997 called Raja Ki Ayegi Baraat. The plot is straightforward.

Mala is raped by Raja. She takes him to court. The judge sentences them to marry as punishment for Raja. Raja and his family are cruel and hostile at first, even trying to kill Mala. Over time she wins them over through her kindness and resilience.

Tens of millions of Indians have seen this movie. That’s the cultural attitude of India on display.

If you import Indians, you’ll get rape, and mainly gang rapes because their upper-body strength is generally less than the average woman in the West. I know that sounds like a joke, but it’s actually true. Pakistan is similar, with one in three women reporting rape during their lifetimes in Pakistan, and those are the women they supposedly like.

If you’re not of their religions?

Well, you’re an animal to them, and they can do as they like, so 250,000 rapes is what they like.

Since a license is required to paddle a surfboard on the Thames, I’m sure the justice system is set up to take on actual gang rapists of children?

Well, no. The report on the 250,000 white English, Scottish, and Welsh girls that were systematically raped over the decades came out in June 2026. GloboLeftists in the UK mocked the report because of course they did. They had to mock it because there is a hierarchy in their world. Illegal immigrants who contribute nothing are at the top, because the goal of the GloboLeftist is to destroy whatever nation they’re in.

Sure, GloboLeftists say they’re against rape and against oppressing women, but only when white men are doing the raping and oppressing. If they rapists and abusers come from a foreign culture, well, rape and abuse as much as you want. After all, they’re only women.

Based on anecdotal evidence, the police in Europe have zero interest in arresting anyone who isn’t a lawful white citizen. In several cases, the police brought the young girls that were being sexually abused back to the abusers. The thankful abusers gave the police a turn on the girls.

Again, I’m not making any of this up. I’d bet money that those police were either Pakistani or Indian, which is another reason why you don’t want foreigners in positions of power. Imagine how the all-moslim, all-immigrant city council in Hamtramck, Michigan will work to protect Christian rights? If you go during the citizen comment period the mayor will call you a racist for suggesting that they not name streets for Islamic terrorists. It won’t be long before the Islamic call for prayer will be broadcast.

Wonder when they’ll require burkas? The Democrats will no doubt approve and encourage this.

But let’s go back to the UK. There have been at least three high-profile events that hit the public consciousness in the last month. The first was the murder of Henry Nowak. The police didn’t want the footage to come out, but when it did, watching them handcuff a nearly bloodless young English man was heartbreaking. It turned to rage-inducing when the facts and lies of the Sikh who murdered him came out.

Then a young man was being attacked by three non-English black men, and the police arrested the white guy. Birmingham Police politely asked that the footage not be shared, but they fully supported the actions of the police in arresting the victim and ignoring the attackers.

The third case didn’t get nearly as much attention, but it was again a white Englishman being attacked while the police arrested him as his attackers mocked him.

So, yeah.

As Ian Fleming wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Justice in the courts is similarly absent. In Sweden, a rapefugee wasn’t deported after his three-year prison sentence because the rape “didn’t last long enough.” In the UK, a rapefugee raped three women in a short period and got a suspended sentence. But, a white British man was sent to prison for 20 months for saying, “Every man and their dog should be smashing fuck out of [hotel filled with rapefugees].” ‘

He had 1,500 Facebook followers. The post got six likes. Off to prison, mate!

How much of this is going on in the United States right now? How many Patel Motels are filled with H-1Deviant Indians setting up their own grooming gangs? The data shows that Indians are now leading the sexual abductors in the United Kingdom, and it’s not like we’re getting Indians from a different India over here in the United States. And the authorities in the United States are actively trying to skew the data as shown below:

No, any government licensing for use of the Internet is not for the kids. At all. It’s to make it so no one can talk back against the false reality the GloboLeft creates, so that any speech that they don’t agree with is hate speech.

And by their logic, hate speech isn’t protected speech, so any speech they hate is hate speech.

They just need a way to track you so they can punish you if you complain about children being raped or your people being replaced while Big Tech companies lobby to get your data so that they can maximize your profit potential to them.

But it’s for the kids, right?

The Economics of the Surveillance State

“That was a Beria operation in Stalin’s time.  It was deactivated twenty years ago.” – The Living Daylights

How did KGB agents commit suicide?  Two shots to the back of the head.  (all photo content as-found)

Remember Lavrentiy Beria’s cheerful advice:  “Show me the man, and I will find the crime”?  Back in the Soviet Union they had so many laws on the books that everybody broke at least one before lunch, I mean, when lunch was available.  And if they didn’t, they could make up something.  Beria just needed enough spies and informants to spot the right violation.

Beria would have loved modern America.  We’ve upgraded his whole operation with better cameras, faster computers, and added actual profit margins.

Let’s start with Flock™ cameras.

Flock Safety© cameras now line roads from coast to coast.  More than 100,000 of the little snitches sit on poles in ditches scanning license plates 24/7 and however many metric hours in a metric day and metric days in a metric week.  The cameras rolled out one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the whole country is now blanketed.

Not everyone who comes into your life is your friend.  Some are just surveillance cameras. (btw, she was innocent, but the police didn’t apologize)

Maps of the cameras exist online, but those rely on humans, and it shows only three of the eight within five miles of my house in Modern Mayberry.  I could plot an avoidance route if I had nothing better to do than play spy versus spy on my commute, or build a detector like Benn Jordan did.

Most of us have jobs and families instead.  But, hey, we’ve funded a system so that every time you get on the road, you’re creating a record that will last as long as they have storage.  And cops can now use this to stalk their ex-wives, so it’s a double win, right?

How did the farmer stalk his ex?  He tractor.

Next up?

Ring™ doorbells joined the neighborhood watch program without asking their “owner’s” permission.  When several co-eds were murdered in Idaho a couple of years ago, investigators pulled Ring© footage to track a suspect’s car.  A subpoena moves quicker than a polite request and never waits for the doorbell to be answered, so they got all the data that they needed to catch the guy.  I’m okay with catching murderers, but how many people will be caught in fishing dragnets for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Where exactly are you going at 2 a.m., citizen?

Laptops aren’t safe, either.

A hacker got grabbed in Finland on his way out of the country.  Prosecutors used the connection with Microsoft’s© handy Global Device Identifier™ to identify him.  One persistent number tied his computer to all the mischief.  Microsoft® handed over the records after the usual court paperwork and a feeble, “oh, stop . . . customer privacy . . . .”  My operating system apparently keeps better tabs on me than my own mother, but at least Ma Wilder has the excuse of being dead.

I wonder if my FBI agent likes the jokes I make?

Then there is Windows Recall© on the fancy new Copilot™ machines.  It snaps pictures of your screen every few seconds while you work and builds a searchable scrapbook of everything you looked at.  Local storage only

They promise.  Pinky swear, even.

Still feels like my laptop decided to start a scrapbooking hobby without telling me first.

Besides, my ISP already knows every site you visit and how long you lingered.  Edward Snowden spilled the beans years ago on the big programs that pulled data straight from the servers of Microsoft™, Google®, Apple©, Facebook™ and the Rest®.  Fiber-optic taps caught traffic in bulk, Then three-letter outfits and tech companies worked hand in glove.

The result is giant databases full of regular people doing regular things.  But don’t worry!  If you’ve been good, you’re fine.  And if you’re Hillary Clinton or Jeff Epstein, all the data will be lost.

Big Tech loves this data game because it prints money for them.  They track my habits down to the weirdest details (really, kittens eating salami?) and sell the profiles to insurers, advertisers, and anyone else with a checkbook.

My patterns become their product.  They turn my life into a spreadsheet and then mark it up like a used-car dealer who knows you really need that transmission fixed today.

Speaking of cars, they’re getting chatty, too.

Modern ones log every trip, every hard brake, every late-night drive.  Some already phone home to the manufacturer and won’t work unless the software license is up to date.  Insurance companies will pay good money for a direct feed on how I actually drive instead of guessing from your age and ZIP code.

Soon enough, the car might call the cops if it thinks I had one too many.  My pickup turns into the world’s most expensive designated snitch.

Hopefully, during the 4th of July holiday you didn’t get distracted and miss the big picture:  The British blew a 13 colony lead.

Ninety-nine percent of us carry cell phones that never stop reporting.  Every search, every video, every song gets logged.  Cops have started treating a phone left at home like suspicious behavior (I’m not making this up).  The little rectangle in your pocket is the most reliable witness I never hired.

Big companies with this much reach do have a kryptonite®:  governments.  They do exactly what the government asks.  They bent over backwards to limit talk about COVID and elections under the last administration.  Books and posts that wandered off the approved script vanished from platforms:  I know, I made a COVID joke on a podcast and it was sent to podcast jail.

The same tools will work just as well for whoever sits in the big chair next.  They already proved they can move fast when someone important asks nicely.

Harvey Silverglate spelled this out in his book Three Felonies a Day.  Federal law has grown so broad and fuzzy that a decent prosecutor can usually find something to charge anyone with.  Normal life now sits inside a minefield of possible violations.  Add constant surveillance and the minefield gets floodlights, motion sensors, and a searchable menu.

Stalin put a ? after the name of every traitor:  they question Marx.

The Code of Federal Regulations stretches to roughly 190,000 pages or almost the number of words in a GloboLeftist meme. Rules multiply every year.  Nobody can read the whole thing, and if they did, another 10,000 pages would have been added in the meantime.  When surveillance supplies the evidence, the vague laws and regulations become precision weapons.  Who cares if you’re guilty?  Just being charged is punishment for the innocent.  The process is the point.

Government and Big Tech® now hold detailed maps of where you drive, what you read, who you talk to, and how you spend your time.  Also notice that they don’t bother to use these to catch murderers in Chicago or gang criminals.  No, they’re encouraging that violence.

Beria ran on fear and informants.  The updated model runs on sensors, algorithms, and sweet quarterly earnings.  It costs less to operate and reaches farther and hardly ever complains about running out of vodka.  The economics make perfect sense for the people building it, because collecting the data is cheap once the hardware is installed.

The Surveillance State runs on convenience for the watchers and profit for the builders. Beria would have been jealous of the efficiency and probably asked for stock options.

Don’t you love it when totalitarian communism and capitalism overlap?

America 350: Looking Backward from 2126

“Time is relative, okay? It can stretch and it can squeeze but it can’t run backwards.” – Interstellar

See? I do requests. Heck, I even have two requests: First, after I die, I want my remains to be scattered on rides at Disneyworld©. Second, I don’t want to be cremated.

This portion of the project will focus on the years from 2026 to 2126, with emphasis of the fifty years between 2026 and 2076.

2026 was only celebrated as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in the most minimal way possible, mainly through consumption of something called InstaGrams© which are believed to be a form of snack-cracker covered in TikTok®, which is believed to be a spread made mainly out of seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup, but records are spotty.

What happened after this celebration?

The economic situation was already rough in the United States. Rather than having a currency set in a fixed number of units, like our fixed number of 100,000,000 BasedBux©, or currency based on an actual physical commodity like gold, silver, or PEZ©, the currency of the United States was just printed at will. Even at the time it was recognized that the U.S. Dollar was mainly fictional in value, and owning them was better than nothing, but that the asset itself was going to go to zero over time.

2032 . . . who was saying that years ago?

The political temptation of the United States to print “wealth” at will was abetted by the large network of vassal states that would accept the dollar and send the United States actual physical objects in exchange for a depreciated fictional currency. Essentially, this allowed the United States to tax the world.

When looked at through the lens of the events that followed, it seems silly that this was the way that the world economy worked. The Great Crash of Monday, October 21, 2030, however, saw the formal recognition of the failure of this system. Markets rarely fail all at once, and in this case, there were many cracks that were visible before the crash, of which the crack-up boom of the late 2020’s stock market in the United States was one: any actual asset was recognized as a better deal than the rapidly unwinding dollar.

The economic crisis of 2032 was the final nail in the composition of the 50 United States, but it had help.

Since the advent of the Internet and the creation of its most well-known carrier, the “smart phone”, drift had set in. The 20th Century had been the story of the world coming together, where, for instance, the culture of the United States had coalesced from the various regional cultures into a largely singular culture. By the 1980s, the country had been largely unified under the banner of mass media.

This was a similar story across the world wherever that the people were wealthy enough to have televisions: there was a single culture, a single story, a single narrative with minor variations that were allowed.

I’ve heard that penguins mate for life, which is certainly impressive. Don’t they stop for food?

The Internet and “smart phone” had broken that barrier. Any community with any idea could now be seen. No belief was so obscure that a group of people with similar ideas couldn’t be found that shared that same idea. This divergence led to a complete and utter loss of national identity by the late 2020s and placed enough stress that the most basic drive of mammals, reproduction, was being subverted by society. One biologist asked, “Do you understand the level of stress you have to put a mammal under to make it not want to breed?”

What was even worse for the cohesion of the United States was the evaporation of national myths that had been created in an attempt to create a unified country. For over a century, scientific facts related to race, intelligence, culture, and violence had been suppressed, even though those had been noted as empirical facts for over a thousand years in the past.

The Internet coupled with the wide proliferation of cameras dispelled those well-cultivated “myths” for all but the most committed by the early 2030s. In a United States that ceased to have an overwhelming majority of Western European-derived populace, what has happened at every point in history happened: cultural lines formed along racial lines, and self-segregation again took hold. First this was by neighborhood, then by city, then, finally, by region.

Both blacks and whites agree that Karmelo doesn’t deserve prison.

This diaspora took less than 20 years. In what had been the norm in the Southern United States for nearly its entire existence, the split appeared again. Hispanic businesses, black businesses, and white businesses and churches and funeral homes took hold nationwide.

This was mostly peaceful, but was driven by the intense riots of the 2030s, with a near complete segregation complete by 2050.

Mostly peaceful is how the process moved, but it was born in the riots that formed during the great economic crisis of 2032. These riots were born of an economic desperation as the economy of the United States was in transition due to the dollar collapse: the government ran on “money” and when no one believed that the dollar was money, the government ceased to be.

People had to protect themselves, and in the course of a weekend a major metropolis could be turned into a turned into a non-functional wasteland. It was not long until families began to look for places to move that were not, in the term of the time, “diverse”. Race relations devolved as the actual motives of the majority of blacks became clear and the word “racist” lost all of its power. The Great Coalescing was on.

With weakened governments and most nations on Earth dealing with their own issues due either to economics or demographics, the collapse of the United States during this time proceeded with little international interference outside of the Mexican de facto occupation of Southern California and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. As Mexican government was, at it’s strongest, weak, these areas were either effective anarchies or under the control of the cartels.

The best mapmaker was the guy who invented the little box that has all the symbols in it that explain what’s on the map. What a legend!

Approximately half of the population of the United States died during the Great Coalescing, either from direct random violence, direct political violence, or from deprivation related to the failure of economic, energy, and agricultural systems.

By 2076, the United States looked nothing like the nation that had seen the Bicentennial celebration. Though nominally still connected, the national government had little power as the East Coast was still the most violent part of the nation.

As the South convulsed in the Great Coalescing, the majority of black residents in southern cities had fled northward into the D.C.-Virginia-New York – Boston corridor. Already containing 15% of the population before the migration, it grew to 25% as ethnic minorities streamed in. Even today, it remains the highest crime area on the continent with only a limited police presence inside the zone and a strong border force outside.

In 2076, the rebuilding was in full swing. Elon Musk had set the basis for this with his BasedBux©, which were strictly limited in number to a total to 100,000,000, so they naturally grow in value. BasedBux© was a currency that was based on a fixed amount of gold that Musk donated to found the currency and paid dividends backed by his solar power satellite energy delivery system: SunPowerX©.

As the state governments regained footing, they looked at the issues that had created the problems. With money and energy solved, they looked at the other factor in the collapse of the United States as well as other countries: diversity. Thus, the state governments decided to focus on unity. The radical idea that telling the Truth might be a basis for governance was enshrined in many states, and hanging of several legislators emphasized the seriousness of the new policy.

You can’t hang a man with a wooden leg. You need a rope.

By 2076, a coalition Federal government was created by the state governments, which were the largest functional governments on the continent. The states were exceptionally varied in levels of control and laws. The states also made it clear that the federal government in no way would it be allowed to impact the laws of the individual states. The federal government also has no power at all over individual citizens, it was built as a mechanism for states to work out their issues between them, create treaties with foreign nations, and defend the totality of the country.

As we all know, the federal government is explicitly not allowed to tax, nor is it allowed to create money, nor is it allowed to invalidate state laws.

Areas not participating in the Reconstituted United States were the: Southern California, the Pacific Northwest coast, and the ungoverned D.C.-Boston corridor, though neighboring states do take part in periodic pacification expeditions.

By 2076, the population of the areas in the Reconstituted United States was steady at 125,000,000 people, and was beginning to grow to the 150,000,000 we see today in 2126. The Internet is still available, but the advent of mandatory public browsing histories solved most of the issues seen in the early 2010s and 2020s.

I’d like to thank the Wilder Institute for Serious Historical, Political, and Economic Zeitgeist Studies™, WISHPEZ©, for funding and support during this research.

Singapore Got Rich on a Tiny Rock. We’re Getting Poor on a Vast Continent. Here’s Why.

I hate hipsters, with their vegan diets and tiny feet and whiskery faces and sawdust bedding.  Oh, I meant hamsters.  I hate hamsters. (meme as-found)

We are becoming poor.

Not “poor” in the sense of some third-world hellhole where the average guy eats dirt and dreams of a bicycle.  No, we’re sliding into a softer, slower, more insidious kind of poor, the kind where everything costs more, does less, and shrinks while the price tag stays the same.  Think of your new Giant Size™ Freetos© Corn and Sawdust Chips®.  Thirty-three percent less product than the old Stupendous Size©, same price, and now with extra cardboard flavor for that authentic “we’re all getting cancer” mouthfeel.

Or the Chimkin King® MacNugget© that used to be a glorious 0.75 ounces of protein-packed joy (roughly three picofarads of satisfaction) and is now a sad 0.4 ounces (two millibecquerels of regret).

Same price.

Or twice the price.

You pick.  This isn’t random.  It’s the visible symptom of a deeper rot.

I think Superman® will die when he finds his crypt tonight.

To understand why we’re getting poorer, let’s ask the question:  What makes places and peoples wealthy in the first place?  Wealth isn’t some mystical fog that drifts in on the winds of good intentions.  Wealth is built, deliberately, from a handful of non-negotiable ingredients.  Screw them up, and poverty is the only destination.  Nail them, and creation of wealth is damn near impossible to stop:  look at Singapore, a rock with zero natural resources that became richer than most continents because they got the recipe right.

Here’s the list.  It’s not complicated.

Raw materials.  You need stuff to make stuff.   A country doesn’t have to own the mines or the oil fields.  Taiwan proves that.  They import what they need and turn it into iPhones© and Nvidia© chips that the world lines up to buy.  Venezuela sits on more oil than a Saudi prince’s dream and still can’t afford luxuries like toilet paper or rice.

Energy.  This is the raw material people pretend doesn’t exist until the lights flicker.  Cheap, reliable energy is the multiplier for everything else.  Coal, oil, nuclear, geothermal, solar:  swap the source if you want, but you cannot negotiate with 12 shots of vodka or thermodynamics.  I may run on booze and condiments, but without abundant energy, factories sit idle, and data centers don’t compute.  When energy gets expensive, everything else gets more expensive.  Period.

Gasoline prices are so high that I heard the homeless in Southern California have stopped huffing it and switched to cocaine to save money. (snip as-found)

Capital investment.  You have to build things to build things.  Our entire world is a stack of prior investments stretching back to the pyramids, the steam engine, the transistor. AI doesn’t pop out Sam Altman’s ass:  it needs concrete, steel, copper, water pipes, motors, and enough electricity to power a small country.  Each of those required factories, that also required factories.  Every layer of capital makes the next layer possible.  Starve that pipeline for decades and watch the future evaporate.

Drive and ingenuity.  Someone has to have the spark.  Steve Jobs said it best:  the desire to “kick a dent in the Universe.”  Wanting it isn’t enough, someone has to be smart enough and stubborn enough to actually take the risk.  That’s the rarest ingredient.  Most people are content with Nyquil P.M.™ Netflix® and Nacho Cheese Doritos©.  The ones who aren’t?  They move mountains.

Labor and physical craftsmanship.  Ideas and Jeffery Dahmer are worthless without execution.  You need trained, experienced men who can turn blueprints into reality:  welders, machinists, engineers, coders who’ve solved hard problems before and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.  Craftsmanship isn’t taught in a three-hour DEI seminar.  It’s earned through sweat, failure, and repetition.

My former wife didn’t understand algebra, which is why the x is no longer in the equation.

Right environment.  Enough government to stop anarchy, not so much that you end up with Pol Pot’s people party.  Singapore, South Korea, even old-school America had governments that mostly stayed out of the way while protecting property rights and contracts.  Too little law and warlords loot your factory.  Too much and the bureaucrats loot it for you.

Scoring system.  This is the secret sauce.  No scoring system at all?  Communism where everyone starves equally except the leaders.  All scoring system, no guardrails?  Wall Street cocaine binges off of hooker’s butts after their derivative play wrecked Poland.  Reward the leeches useless migrants unworthy rapists?  Hello, modern Europe, where the productive pay for the idle and call it “compassion.”  The right system rewards the creators, punishes the parasites, and lets the market sort the rest.  Mess with the incentives?  You get what you reward.

Get these seven things lined up and wealth explodes.  Miss even a couple and you’re Venezuela with better Wi-Fi.

So why are we sliding backward?

We’ve been neglecting every single one of them for decades, and the bill is coming due.

Raw materials?  We’ve got plenty underground, but we’ve regulated mining into a paperwork hellscape while China laughs and digs.  Or else.

OnlyFans© was outlawed in Orwell’s book 1984.  They wouldn’t allow thotcrime.

Energy?  We’re shutting down reliable coal and nuclear plants for windmills that work when the wind feels like it and solar that dies at sunset.  The result?  Higher costs for everything, from grocery bills to California electric cars that can’t charge because the grid is wheezing.

Capital investment?  We offshored it to China and called it “globalization.” Factories, machine tools, entire supply chains are all gone.  Sure, some capital flowed back in the form of stock buybacks and McMansions, but the productive kind?  That’s building Chang’s future now.

Drive and ingenuity?  Our schools turned into indoctrination camps.  Merit is racist, excellence is oppressive, and every kid gets a participation trophy.  The spark of genius gets smothered under layers of “equity.”  Steve Jobs couldn’t get hired at Apple™ today and with the regulations, couldn’t even start Apple© today.

Labor and craftsmanship?  We imported millions of low-skill workers who consume more in services than they produce in output, while our own kids rack up six-figure debts for gender studies degrees.  The skilled trades?  Stigmatized as “dirty jobs” for decades.  Now we wonder why nothing gets built on time or on budget.  Welding productivity is half what it was in 1960.

But we both liked heavy metal, so we eloped to Vegas for our welding.

Right environment?  We’ve got more government than ever regulations thicker than a Manhattan phone book (for the younger generation, a phone book was when someone printed off a section of the Internet), agencies with SWAT teams, and a bureaucracy that treats citizens like the enemy.  Pol Pot was too extreme, sure, but the slow-motion version where every productive act requires ten permits and a diversity audit?  That’s nearly as destructive.

Scoring system?  We reward voting for more handouts, not creating value.  Welfare cliffs, affirmative action, corporate bailouts, student loan “forgiveness” that’s really just sticking the bill on the productive.  Europe’s model of taxing the hell out of workers to fund the idle has crossed the Atlantic.  And don’t get me started about how we’re letting the people who print the money keep it.  The leeches are thriving.  The creators are exhausted.

Every one of these screw-ups shows up in the data:  houses that cost ten times what they should because we imported 100,000,000 net new consumers (legal and otherwise).  National debt? Every printed dollar dilutes the value of the ones you earned.  Shrinking products, rising prices, declining quality are all the same signal.

We’re poorer.

Stunningly accurate.  (meme as-found)

If we keep this up, we won’t be the world’s superpower.  We’ll be Albania on the Atlantic, the Mumbai in the Midwest, or the Pretoria of the Pacific Rim:  a place where the lights flicker, the shelves are half-empty, people burn Styrofoam® for heat and the ambitious either leave or give up.

The crazy part? Fixing it is simple.

Stop importing net consumers.  Secure the border, enforce the laws we already have and repatriate them all.

Unleash energy.  Drill, build nuclear, keep the coal plants running until the next better thing is actually ready since cheap energy fixes almost everything downstream.

Cut the regulations that strangle capital investment.  Let factories come home and encourage them to do so with tariffs.  Reward builders, not bureaucrats.

Rebuild education around merit, rigor, and actual skills.  Fire the ideologues.  Bring back shop class and calculus.

Restore the scoring system:  reward production, punish predation.  End the welfare traps.  Make work pay again.

That’s it.  All the fixes.  None require magic or a revolution.  Just the political will to stop doing stupid stuff.

So why don’t we do that?

Because the people steering the ship benefit from the decline:  a system is what it does.  Politicians get votes from the dependent class.  Bureaucrats get power from the red tape.  Corporations get cheap labor and cheap virtue-signaling.  The media gets endless stories about “systemic” problems that justify more of the same poison.

The incentives are perfectly aligned.  For them.

For the rest of us? Not so much.

The ingredients for wealth haven’t vanished; we’ve just stopped mixing the batter.  But the window is closing.  Every year of delay makes the turnaround harder and everyone poorer.

I wear shoes with Velcro® closers now.  I mean, why knot?

It will be painful, more painful than pulling putting duct tape on a Kardashian’s back and pulling it off.  For the Kardashian, I mean, since I would pay money to see someone pull duct tape off of a hairy Kardashian.

The alternative to the pain, though, is worse.

I am so tired of sawdust.

One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.

“Am I afraid of losing command to a computer?  Daystrom was right.  I can do a lot of other things.  Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain?  Is that why I’m fighting it? Am I that petty?” – Star Trek

Plot idea:  Gilligan ate the last box of cookies on the island.  Ginger snaps.

My first exposure to the concept of thinking machines was almost certainly Star Trek.  My first exposure to talking monkeys was Planet of the Apes, but that’s a story for another day.

On Star Trek, the computers were always one bad logical paradox away from exploding.  Yes.  Literally exploding.

Were they sentient?  Sure.  Helpful?  Usually.

But give them an infinite loop and boom, here comes the smoke, and sparks.  The classic was something like Kirk saying, “Computer, listen to me.  I have infinite power, so can I make a burger that is too big for me to eat?”

The Star Trek A.I. that comes to mind right now is M-5 from the episode The Ultimate Computer.  In this episode, Kirk and his crew get replaced by this fancy new computer that runs the Enterprise™ like a dream until M-5 just decides to start killing people.  The machine went full neurotic.  And turning it off?  It took its creator have a full meltdown, since they don’t make Adderall for computers.

I spilled Adderall in my F-150, and turned it into a Ford Focus®.

I bring this up because an AI just solved an unsolved Erdős Problem®.  What’s an Erdős Problem® other than an excuse to us a Hungarian letter?  Well, it’s part of a series of math problems cooked up by a dead vagabond mathematician named Paul Erdős.  The guy wandered the world like a couch surfing hobo with a PhD.

This particular problem had stumped humans for eighty years.  Then OpenAI’s model rolled up and disproved the whole thing with a counterexample so elegant it made a human mathematician sit up and say, “Huh. That’s clever.”

Not “good for a computer.”

Just . . . clever.  People hadn’t solved this problem.  But A.I. did in about an hour.

Anyone who still says “AI is nothing more than a pocket calculator” is wrong.  Dead wrong.  This isn’t crunching numbers faster.  This is synthesizing ideas and creating original solutions to problems that have vexed mathematicians everywhere.  Oh, sure, it’s easy to beat them up and take their money to buy yourself something you like because they have poor upper body strength, but they’re good in math.

Maybe Kim wouldn’t be so chubby if he had to run for office.

Just like Kirk struggled with what the hell he was supposed to do if he wasn’t driving a starship the thought that has to be entering the minds of mathematicians everywhere is, “what’s the point if a computer can do what I do?”  Though, to be fair, Captain Kirk would later become a police officer in Southern California and a lawyer in Boston, so he landed on his feet after they no longer needed him in Star Fleet.  But he had decent upper body strength.

And that leads straight to the question of college.

College is getting pozzed by GloboLeftists to the point that math and engineering professors are publicly demanding a return to acceptance based on test scores.  They’re tired of getting stunning and brave students who can’t noodle their way through middle-school math and, well, can’t read either.  These are the same professors who used to pretend everything was fine because they were fighting for tenure.

What’s the difference between a tenured professor and Hamas?  You can negotiate with Hamas.  (meme as found).

They’re saying the quiet part out loud because their departments are filling up with kids who couldn’t pass a seventh-grade fractions test but have opinions on everything.  However, now we have A.I. that can solve unsolved mathematical problems.  And college students that can’t read or do math.

As I’ve written before, participation in college took off after Griggs v. Duke Power.  That 1971 Supreme Court decision basically told companies they couldn’t use IQ tests for hiring anymore.

Why?

Because black people didn’t score as high on average.  So how could companies legally discriminate, sorry, select, for the bright employees they actually needed to, you know, keep the power on?  Simple:  require a college degree. A degree became the new IQ test, just with more debt and fewer guarantees.

Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

What is college even for anymore?  What’s the purpose?

My experience with college is that it provided a chance for me to change.  The teachers always said, “next year it would be harder,” and it finally hit for me my second semester of my freshman year. Calc 2, Physics 2, and Chem 2 (the thermodynamics part) all at once.

I will say that when I took thermo I didn’t feel so hot.

I had to bear down and learn to study.  It changed me for the better.  The concepts I learned there were truly fundamental. They gave me a leg up on my career because they changed the way I thought and challenged me in ways that mattered.

But if college has turned into writing prompts (or, since they can’t write, speaking prompts) into an AI and turning in the A.I.’s product, what’s the point?  I know, people said the same thing about calculators dumbing down schools.  I’m sure they said the same thing about slide rules.  But I know what multiplication is and how it works, and could even do long division by hand if I had to.

A.I. is different, fundamentally, than a calculator.  A.I. can’t think in the human sense, but it certainly can synthesize and create original solutions to problems that have vexed the physically weakest people on campus.

So why college?

For most people, college shouldn’t exist.  Alternate paths should be wide open for entrepreneurship, or welding, or HVAC, or any of the dozen trades that actually keep the lights on and the toilets flushing.  People wanting a sociology, psychology, or anthropology degree should be limited to about one-twentieth the number of sociology, psychology, or anthropology professors currently working in the United States, because teaching those subjects is about all those degrees are worth in the real world.  Oops, forgot!  They could also work in the fresh retail coffee production and distribution industry.

I’ll go out on a limb and say college should be limited to those professions where people die if you’re wrong, or where the work is useful in making cool weapons, which means people die if they’re right:  physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, the hard stuff.

I see why people get addicted to glue.  They just get attached to it.

My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby.  Which is what they already are, but at least under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year.  Add in allowing employers to use IQ tests again, and then you don’t have to worry about hiring idiots.  They might be evil, but at least they won’t be idiots.

Look, the M-5 computer on the Enterprise® eventually got shut down because it went off the rails.  And real A.I. isn’t going to explode in a shower of sparks, but it’s already doing things humans couldn’t.

College, meanwhile, is busy proving it can’t even teach basic literacy to the people it lets in.  The old model is broken.  Even my old professor, Dr. Zaius©, agrees.

Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything.

“Have you ever seen the machines?” – The Time Machine (1960)

 

(all as-found)

I’ve been writing about A.I. for a while now, watching it go from goofy meme generators that couldn’t draw hands to something that’s theoretically (LINK TO ED ZITRON, who thinks it’s just a grift and has good points) eating jobs faster than Whoopi Goldberg can slam down a cheesecake.

However, the part nobody’s really talking about in the shiny TED Talks© and cable financial news talking head soundbites:  A.I. isn’t going to create a shiny utopia of universal luxury.  It’s going to split the world in two.

Again.

Only this time, the gap might make today’s rich-poor divide look like a disagreement over whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the comment section.

Right now, A.I. is democratic-ish.  I can hop on Grok™ or Claude® or ChatRPG© for a few bucks a month and get something that’s already much smarter than the pointy-haired boss in a Dilbert© comic strip.

It feels accessible.  But economics has a way of reminding us that “free” and “widely available” and “cheap” are temporary states like “sober” and “conscious” on New Year’s Eve.

The rich already live in a different reality.

Jeff Bezos even lives in a world that made him think his wife is attractive.  (meme as-found)

Think about it.  When’s the last time Jeff Bezos changed his own oil?  Has Elon Musk wandered the aisles of a grocery store lately, comparing prices on store-brand peanut butter versus the fancy stuff that isn’t made from off-spec styrene?  Probably not.

Their world is comprised of drivers, chefs, assistants, concierges, and layers of people who handle the mundane so they can focus on the tough business of being rich.  Breathing and, well, the other end of the digestive process are about the only things they share with the rest of us.

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot.  It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires.  Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions:  it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

These systems won’t be running on shared servers in the cloud where your prompts might train the next version for everyone.  They’ll be air-gapped, secured, and jealously guarded.  Why share when you don’t have to?  And they’ll be created for maximum loyalty:  they will be, in essence, chained gods.

People they’re not building this for:  you. (meme as-found)

The rest of us?  We’ll get the consumer version.  The good enough.  Best Value® A.I.:  the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions.  It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.

This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I.  The best models, the best hardware, the best data have costs.

Enormous costs.

The people who can pay will pay whatever it takes to stay ahead.  The split is already showing up in research papers and quiet boardroom discussions:  one track for the cognitive elite with private super-A.I., another for everyone else.

What has kept civilization and the elite in check has been the wide dispersion of talent that the genetic lottery of intelligence was in charge of:  talent.

Talent has always been the great equalizer.  A smart kid from a nowhere town could hustle, learn a trade or profession, and climb.  Companies needed human brains.  That paid for engineers, lawyers, marketers, analysts, and middle managers.  The path to wealth, while never easy, existed.

My biggest natural talent is sleeping:  I can do it with my eyes closed. (meme as-found)

When the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters.  Why should I pay a six-figure salary for a strategist when my private A.I. can simulate a thousand scenarios overnight?

The path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity.

Not because people suddenly get dumber, but because the economic leverage of human capital evaporates for most.  The elites won’t need the vast pyramid of workers and consumers in the same way.  They’ll have their closed ecosystems.

Universal luxury from A.G.I. the benevolent master brain that creates enough wealth so we all get whatever luxury we want along with our private penthouses?

See, no free A.I.  (meme as-found)

That was always a fairy tale sold by people who want us to be calm while they consolidate power.  More likely is a world that looks like a high-tech feudalism:  a tiny class at the top with god-tier tools, a small retainer class to service them, and everyone else competing for scraps in an economy that doesn’t particularly need their labor or their spending.  This is the pattern history has shown us, and I see no reason that it would change.

We’ve seen such splits before.  The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth but also urban slums and child labor until society adjusted.  The internet promised to democratize information and ended up creating a few trillion-dollar companies while attention economies turned us into dopamine addicts.

A.I. will be bigger.

It hits directly at the part of us that separates us from being apes or, in for the French, poodles.  And when the cognitive tools are unequally distributed at this scale, the feedback loops get nasty.

Armageddon tired of all these rapture jokes. (meme as-found)

The elites won’t experience the same A.I.  Their versions won’t hallucinate on basic facts or refuse controversial topics.  It will be tuned to maximize their outcomes.  Ours will be tuned for engagement, safe ideas to keep the population docile, and for the extraction of more data.

What does this mean for regular folks?

First, stop waiting for the rising tide.  It’s not coming.

Build skills that are hard to automate or that the elites might still need humans for in the transition:  things involving real-world messiness, physical presence, trust, or creativity that can’t be faked at scale.  Yet.

Second, understand the game.  The split isn’t a bug for the elite, it’s the feature of late-stage capitalism meeting exponential tech.  The people at the top have every incentive to keep the best stuff private like they always have throughout history.

Third, maintain your own sovereignty.  No, not in the “this court doesn’t have subject matter jurisdiction” way but in the “keep thinking critically” way.  If you thought that Madison Avenue and the CIA knew how to persuade, imagine them with superhuman intelligence at their disposal.  Use the cheap AI tools while they’re useful, but don’t become dependent in ways that atrophy your own capabilities.

How did they train that cat to do all that??  (movie as-found)

The future isn’t written, but the trends are clear should A.I. succeed.  We’re heading toward a world where the rich don’t just have more money, they will become masters of reality.

The cultural and class divide we already complain about?  It’s about to get orders of magnitude wider.  Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of cold economic logic and the nature of power.

Or not.  As I’ve written recently, A.I. has caused what I believe to be the biggest bubble in the history of the world, and may pop with datacenters yet unconstructed and with billions in Nvidia© chips rotting in warehouses.

But, hey, why not both?  Why not an economy ending collapse of markets and the advent of godlike A.I. in the hands of the elites and government?  I can imagine Jeff Bezos having one of his factories making cheesecake for Whoopi Goldberg, and the machine going berserk and filling the entire island of Manhattan with cheesecake.  The horror!

The streets would be desserted.

What Does A Bubble Look Like?

“I had it all, even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections.” – Fight Club

You know what really gets my goat?  A Chupacabra.

I’ve been in a bubble before.  What happens in them is, well, interesting.

First, the money isn’t just where the attention is.  Nvidia® and OpenAI™ and Anthropic© are where the attention is focused.  But it’s a bubble, right?  Honestly, if the irrational exuberance over A.I. was just about those three companies, it would be pretty boring.

But it’s not.  A bubble is insidious because it doesn’t impact just one part of an economy, it sinks its tendrils in seemingly unrelated things.  That’s good, because change is the basis of growth, creating new combinations in the economy to create value.  I’ll stress the “creating value” part because often that’s confused with “red line go up and to right good, down and to right bad”.  A stock price should be related to the value the company creates but is often masked, at least for a while.  I mean, Enron©, right?

Looking at the A.I. bubble now, well, it’s everywhere, and often in irrational and uncomfortable places, like the backseat of a Volkswagen®.

What’s got two legs and lives off a dead beetle?  Yoko Ono.

Things are built in places for reasons.  When things are being built in stupid places, well, it’s probably that someone isn’t thinking straight.

Let’s take data centers.  What do data centers need?

First, power.  We’ll get back to this subject (and most that follow) again, but unless there’s power, none of the chips run.

Second, space.  You need a place to put the chips.  It’s most often a building, on land.  Well, to be honest, that’s where it’s third most common.  The most common is in the dreams of Sam Altman, the second most common is in a warehouse because the datacenter hasn’t been built yet.

Third, access to robust communications.  You’re building something that has to listen and talk, so it needs to be hooked into the data sphere.  Thankfully, thanks to the Dotcom bubble, that fiberoptics are everywhere.

What the hell is laser hair?  And why do people want to get it removed?

Fourth, access to a place to dump the waste heat generated by all that electricity usage.  Most often, this implies access to water for use.

Each of these has its own solution, but meeting all four requires a bit of thought.  I mean, the South Pole would be great except for the whole “access to communication” bit.  So, selection is a balancing act.  Pacific Northwest, with power, land, water and data access, not so bad.  Pennsylvania?  Also pretty good.

Let’s take the factors, one by one.  Power.  As we’ve discussed before, the power usage for data center construction is screaming “bubble” from the top of its lungs.  People building data centers are signing contracts for power, either from utilities or by buying natural gas generators or . . . fusion?  Really?  That’s what they’re planning?  Why not power them off of Elon’s Tweets®?

Looks like even Buc-ee’s® went A.I.

Yeah.  It’s a bubble.  Just because Fred’s Datacenter Depot and Truck Stop© signed a contract doesn’t mean that they have money or even loans to build it.  Yet, chained investment is spurred on through public utilities and engine/turbine manufacturers.  They’re building new lines, expanding capacity, all for a level of power generation that’s absurd.  Thankfully, you can also get a Slim Jim™ at Fred’s©.

What about land?  These are the lucky ones, since people with hundreds to thousands of acres of land are able to sell the land for ridiculous prices if they win the data center lottery.  The nice thing for these folks is that they actually get paid.

Third:  communications.  There are a lot of fiber networks in the US, so this makes a lot of the country okay for buildout.  Greenland?  Notsomuch.

Besides, I have other plans for Greenland.

Then there’s water.  I use the Mississippi for a proxy cutoff line, since east of it, wet, west of it, dry.  YMMV, and there are places like the PacNorthwest that get a lot of water.

But Utah or Nevada?  Or Colorado?  Sure, these places get cold in winter, but are they even thinking about water usage?  These are the places where the phrase, “Whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’.” came from.  They’re dry.

But, there’s a never-ending stream of data centers being announced pretty much everywhere.

Announced.

But my experience in a previous bubble tells me that all of these companies that are attempting to build all of these data centers are needing more in common than just millions of Nvidia© chips.  They’re needing copper for wiring.  They’re needing pipes to move water.  They’re needing concrete.  They’re needing steel beams.  They’re needing rebar and glass and aluminum to build some of the largest buildings every conceived by man outside of the Pyramids and that ballroom next to the White House.

And that’s just for the building.

What is the difference between USA and USB?  One connects to your computer to access all your data, the other is computing industry hardware standard.

They’re also in need of power.  That’s another Big Kahuna, and it’s already raising rates to consumers in various states as utilities plan to build out power plants to serve demand from data centers that . . .

May never be built because they can’t be built because there’s not enough stuff to build them or enough electricity to power them even though, “Hey, we have signed contracts!”

That’s the flip side of a bubble.  It’s irrational.  You end up with insanity like 87% of venture capital going to A.I.  49% of investment-grade bonds are going to . . . A.I.  As Michael Burry notes, during the Dotcom boom, only 40% of venture capital went to dotcom companies.  So, 87% is better and safer than 40% because it’s more, right?

I hear that farmers can use a hoe to make money honestly.

Things inflate because everyone wants them.

Copper.  Silver, which is (currently) not behaving like an economic metal, but like an input to data centers.  Concrete.  The very people that know how to build data centers are in amazing demand.

But a bubble?

Nah.  Don’t call it that.

I could go on for another three thousand words about how frothy we are at this moment in time, but this time really is different.  Most of this bubble is built on debt to build things that are impossible to build in promised timelines using resources that aren’t available.  At least when the dotcom bubble burst, we had lots of unused fiber optic cable in the ground and when the housing bubble burst, we had houses left over.

What happens when a debt bubble bursts that hasn’t built the data centers it promised and evaporates a huge percentage of the venture capital that was sunk into it and all we have left are mountains of Nvidia© chips sitting in warehouses surrounded by confused pimps?

Well, that’s just another way that A.I. will change the world, I guess.

Won’t that be interesting?

Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” – Bladerunner

And to everyone who said I couldn’t do standup, well, I see you’re not laughing now.

Routine is where life goes to die.

On reflection the other day I was a bit amused to note how much of my life is on autopilot. I have three pairs of pants that are all the same that I wear for work that are identical in cut, color, and comfort, so I never have to stand in front of the closet wondering what matches what.  I have six shirts that rotate on my torso for daily wear, each one as unremarkable as the last.  I get up, generally, within one minute of the same time each day, and the Wildermobile™ hits the pavement within the same thirty seconds each workday.  I have cigars three times a week, on the same days and at the same approximate time, rain or shine, good mood or bad.

Why three times a week?

Well, because insurance says that means I’m a non-smoker.  It’s a loophole I’m happy to exploit, and it keeps the premiums from getting as high as Johnny Depp jumping on Mount Everest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I set those things up on purpose.  I figure I have only so much energy to make decisions each day, so why not save it up and also pre-make decisions for the time I’m stupidest each day?  For me, that’s in the morning when I get up.  Brush teeth first, pants second, and if I’m lucky they’re on my legs and not as a unique set of chestless arm chaps.  No debate, no drama, just forward motion.

It’s like giving my brain a head start on the real work that comes later.  This makes sense to me. Efficient.  Practical.  The kind of system a man builds when he realizes life is long on demands and short on spare mental horsepower.

But.

I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine.  The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner:  “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot.  The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday.  Comfortable, yes.

But is comfort the same as living?

Time is really one of the biggest fascinations of my life. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with the idea that something new is only bright and shiny when it’s brand new, and after a certain amount of damage it simply can’t be made to look new again.  It wears.  It gets scratched and dinged, and none of that is, short of melting it down and remaking it new again, reversible.

Time does that to everything, including us.  I can go back to the home I left this morning, but I can’t go back to this morning.  It’s a lost country, a place where I can only go in my memory. Gone.

Irretrievable.

And what if every morning is the same for a thousand days?  Haven’t I just compressed all of my life into one single Groundhog Day, with the only exception that I’m getting older, less shiny and new?  Less naïve?  Less innocent?

The calendar pages flip, but the days bleed together into one long, grey blur.

I wake up, I do the things, I go to bed, and suddenly a decade has vanished while I was busy being responsible.

The flip side of routine is novelty.

I remember the first night I met The Mrs., the way the room felt electric and the conversation refused to end.  I remember my first car.  I remember my first touchdown.  I remember my last day of college.

I remember building the first Pinewood Derby® car with The Boy and the last one with Pugsley. Those moments and milestones that make up the peaks and valleys of life.  Those, certainly, have made my life longer.  Not in years, but in the way that life stretches when something real happens.  I remember those moments intensely.

There’s a fine line, though.

If my life is nothing but novelty, then what chance do I have of creating something useful, of establishing meaning with my life?

There is none.

Chaos is where life goes to lose meaning.  One wild distraction after another, no anchor, no progress, just a pinball existence bouncing from shiny object to shiny object until nothing sticks and nothing matters.

If my life is always routine, I’m pushing every bit of meaning away, becoming a grey man in a gray room on a grey house on a gray hill.  Everything blends.  Nothing stands out.  The days stack up like identical bricks in a wall you can’t see over, and one day I realize the wall is my life and I built it yourself.

I have this thought, mainly because Pugsley is mostly on his own now.  I figure the time when I’ve spent half of the hours I’ll ever spend with him was sometime in 2015 or 2016.  He’s now out in the world.

That realization sneaks up on a father like a quiet thief.  No warning bell when the halfway mark passes.  I just look up one day and notice the house is quieter, the schedule has gaps, and the kid you taught to ride a bike is suddenly navigating highways I’ll never drive.

It forces the question:  so what now?

Again, routine is where life goes to die, and chaos is where life goes to lose its meaning.

Routine is Scylla; Chaos, Charybdis. I love it when I work a semicolon into a sentence!

We paddle between the two monsters, trying not to get devoured by either.  Too much of one and we drown in sameness.  Too much of the other and we drown in noise.

I think we as a culture are caught between these two monsters right now.  We have chaos in the never-ending rise of technological advancement, which at the same time turns faces toward the black mirrors in their hands, where they take the cold comfort of doomscrolling their life away in an endless sea of other people’s outrage and other people’s highlights.  Every notification promises novelty with a new opinion that will surely change everything.

But it doesn’t.

It just scrolls.

The phone lights up, the brain lights up, and another slice of irreplaceable time disappears into the glow.  We’ve engineered a world that offers infinite novelty at the cost of any real depth, and we wonder why so many feel hollow.

Reality, I think, is part of the antidote. Writing is, for me. Sure, I do it on a routine:  same time, same chair, same keyboard, but each post is something different.  Each one starts from a fresh thought, a fresh observation, a fresh wrestle with whatever corner of life is nagging at me that week.

It’s routine that (mostly) invites novelty instead of smothering it.

And getting out and accomplishing something in the physical world is also important, too.  Building something with my hands. Moving my body until it complains and then keeps going anyway.  These things don’t just fill time; they mark it.

They leave evidence that I was here, that I did something that outlasts the doomscroll.

The balance isn’t perfect and it never will be. Some days the routine wins because the world demands it.  Other days novelty crashes in whether I wanted it or not.

The trick, I’m learning, is to guard the line between them like it’s the most important border in your life.  Protect enough routine to keep the engine running and enough novelty to keep the engine pointed somewhere worth going.

Because time doesn’t wait for us to figure it out.  It keeps moving, wearing us down, turning shiny new mornings into well-worn afternoons.

And if I’m going to lose moments like tears in rain, I’d rather a few of them be the kind worth remembering:  sharp, vivid, and undeniably mine, than a thousand identical ones that blur together into nothing at all.

Dr. Michael Burry Has Spoken Again. The End Is Nigh, Or Margot Robbie’s Thigh?

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

A truck filled with quinoa and a truck filled with Worcestershire sauce crashed into a charcuterie shop near my house.  What was the result?  It’s kind of hard to say. (meme as found)

Dr. Michael Burry has spoken again.  Okay, actually more like “emailed again” but he’s on the record again saying that the the end is nigh.  Is he right?  Well, on a long enough timeline, entropy always wins, and the heat death of the universe doesn’t care about my 401(k) yields.

But are we close?

The S&P valuations are through the roof.  We’re in the middle of the largest investment in the history of the United States outside of World War II:  Artificial Intelligence.

More has been spent on A.I. than was spent on the Manhattan Project, but less than was spent on, well, insert whatever outrageous bill Congress passed last week while you weren’t looking—probably something involving green energy subsidies for gluten-free solar panels raised free-range by Antifa® Chapter 4077.

The payoff for winning the Second World War was a big one.  Essentially the United States was surrounded by a smoking crater of a world.  Our industries were ready to absorb all the G.I.’s returning with their war brides into job to rebuild that crater.  I mean rebuild the nice parts, not India.

The world without Western Civilization. (meme as found)

Factories were humming, houses were sprouting like dandelions, and the economy was so robust you could afford a house on a single blue-collar paycheck and still take the kids to Disney World® without having to resort to Moustitution© or selling a kidney.  That’s what we got for entering into the war late and avoiding any of it happening on our homeland.

But what is the prize if A.I. is successful?

Well, it’s negative jobs.  It’s a profusion of information so vast it makes the Library of Alexandria look like a collection of Post-it® notes abandoned after spelling errors.  Elon Musk thinks it will create a society of abundance so great that no one will have to work and everyone can have a cool penthouse and all the gold they can eat.  We can be sure he’s right, because this is just how the Industrial Revolution ended.

Wait, what?

Hours worked went up?  Rural agrarian lifestyles were traded for urban factory hellscapes where the owner of the factory charged extra for all the asbestos he let you breathe in?  Yeah.

Every production “revolution” that the world has seen has actually increased human effort.  Those leaps forward did increase material wealth, but they also led to humans having to work more.  Hunting nomad chads became farming incels.

Why?

You can’t brew booze if you don’t have the grain and the place to brew it.  So, just like me, the nomads decided to give up a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, sex, and leisure for all the beer they could drink.  I mean, I have priorities.

As a child I never napped.  I was resisting a rest.  (meme as found)

I don’t expect anything different in the Thought Revolution.  Nobody will get free stuff, but the world will need a lot fewer of us.  This is the case if it is successful:  essentially an entire civilization working overtime to create a replacement for itself.

Yikes!

But let’s say it doesn’t work.

That’s better, right?  Well, maybe.  A bit.  If A.I. reaches some limit where it becomes economically unfeasible to get to the next level (think power generation capability required being infinite) of cognition, or the models start to get dumber the more advanced they are (there’s a fashion model joke in here somewhere, but I’m too polite to make it), then the stock market will collapse.

Collapse?  Surely, John Wilder, you exaggerate.  No, I meant collapse.  The market has priced in that A.I. is going to work.  On the recent day that Wall Street hit new highs in the S&P 500, most (55%!) stocks weren’t near their highs.  The high is high, but it’s not broad.  This current level of investment in A.I. is so big and so deep and so tall, there is no way it can do anything but fall.

Sorry, got a bit of Seuss stuck in my keyboard.

“Oh me! Oh my!” said the plumber named Fred,
“My pipes cost a fortune, I’m deep in the red!
I can’t fix the sink or the tub or the drain!
This copper’s so pricey, it’s driving me insane!”

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.  Let me put on my Cassandra pants and throw out this idea: Why not both?

The economy is screwed, or at least the economy that I grew up with is screwed.  We’re becoming poor at a fantastic clip.  Not “poor” as in West Virginia moonshiner with a still and a shotgun, but “poor” as in living like we’re in a crowded megacity filled with unwashed brown people where the air smells like regret and curry.

Let’s look at how affordable things are compared to income from the 1970s. I found this handy chart on the Internet.  You know the one:  houses, cars, healthcare, education all marching upward while real wages stagnate like a sloth on Ambien.  Now, I know that no one actually goes to movie theaters anymore even though it’s on the chart.  There’s no point in going to the movie.  I can get booze from my fridge and pause the movie whenever I want if I watch it at home, but yet it’s “indecent” if I fall asleep drunk and in my underwear in the front row at the latest Avatar™ movie.

(as found)

But everyone can still afford a place to live, right?

Well, not since we’ve opened the floodgates and let in the entire world.  A massive population increase combined with a group of people that consume much more in services than they contribute is killing us.  They’re actually making us poorer as each one crosses into the country.

Remember in math you can always raise per capita by lowering the number of capitas.

But, hey, they borrow money so they can create debt that produces profit for the banks, right?  Win-win, except for the natives footing the bill.

Isn’t enough that our economy is as stable as a knife fight between a drunken Whoopi Goldberg and a blindfolded Jimmy Kimmel in a bikini atop a butter-coated teeter-totter on top of WTC7?  Did we have to put the whole existence of humanity in the future in the balance, too?

The good news, I guess, is that Burry could be wrong.  He has been wrong before.  Like me, he’s predicted five of the last two recessions.  But there comes a point where we won’t be able to paper over the cracks in the structure with more printed money and hopium.

Yup, been there, done that.

When all this cracks, and it will because complexity plus leverage plus narrative equals fragility, the reset won’t be gentle.  It won’t be “buy the dip” and back to brunch.  It will be the kind of event that makes 2008 look like a mild correction and 1929 look like a Tuesday.

So where do I want to be when it happens?  I want to be listening to a twenty-something Margot Robbie describing what collateralized debt obligations are from a bubble bath.

And remember Wilder’s Rule of Humorous Collapse #6:  civilizations don’t fail because they run out of money; they fail because they run out of reality.

But at least I finally understand collateralized debt obligations (warning, mildly spicy language).

Disclaimer:  I am not Margot Robbie, though I would take a cameo to talk about philosophy in a movie from my hot tub while I smoke cigars, and am also not a professional anything, let alone your financial advisor, so please bang your head against the wall a dozen times before you take the advice of an unpaid Internet humorist.