Category: Uncle Ted’s Story Hour

From Spears To A.I. To Spears In Two Easy Steps

“How do you hunt a bear in winter?  Go in his cave with spears.” – The 13th Warrior

I bought some spears on E-Bay® but when they arrived, they were all missing their points.  I guess I got shafted. (all art is A.I. generated)

Ahhh, innovation, that Pandora’s Box that has poppled up again and again in the Self-Stor® of history in the back corner underneath the stack of old National Geographics®:  “Why do it the hard way when you can do it the smart way?”

In paleolithic times, the technology was napped stone turned into a spear point.  Oh, sure, the old folks said, “We didn’t need any of those fancy flint spears when I was growing, up, we just took down the mammoth with our fingernails and teeth,” but the overall access to calories for the tribe, one measure of their wealth (along with number of remaining teeth), increased.

This was doing things in a more indirect manner and is one of the oldest examples we have of human-like behavior in the archeological record.  Rather than try to gnaw a mammoth to death, the idea was to spend time finding and crafting a piece of wood into a shaft, knapping a stone spearpoint, using a leather thong and wrapping the whole thing up to make an easier way to take down a mammoth than just using incisors.

I don’t see much of a downside to this technology (I mean, besides the whole war thing that came with it), and it certainly scaled quickly.

I saw a mammoth singing Calypso.  His name was Hairy Elephante.

Other examples include:

  • writing, where quill and ink and papyrus replaced having to remember things, making words from ephemeral utterances to, in some cases, an eternal record;
  • organizations, where rather than doing any old thing you wanted, you had a task, making groups more effective;
  • agriculture, replacing wandering around looking for food to growing beer components so they could harvest them at the end of the year for the big harvest party.

Technology is that replacement of some aspect of our life that is difficult with one that is much more indirect, yet makes the task easier.  These changes fundamentally changed society.

The Agricultural Revolution was one, turning humanity from wandering bands of dudes who spent all day in the outdoors hunting to dudes that could now have 9 to 5 jobs and backaches from plowing.  Oh, and taxes.  Yup, taxes and mortgages and debt.

Ouch.

The Mrs. told me she was getting tired of the corny jokes.  So, I decided to do jokes about chemistry, but was worried about the reaction.

The Industrial Revolution was another, turning humanity from relying on animal and human effort into one where chemical release of energy made slavery uneconomical, also creating the first case of obsolete farm equipment.  The economics of the Industrial Revolution led to the end of slavery in the West (there are more slaves in Africa right now than there were in the United States before the Civil War), not ethics or virtue signaling.

But this controlled chemical release of energy made so many other changes possible.  Energy had been very expensive, and now it was, by historical standards, cheap.  Many innovations followed in rapid succession because of this singular change.  Trains, telegraphs, textiles, tapioca, trampolines, toilets, televisions and PEZ® can all trace their existence or mass production back to the Industrial Revolution.  Oh, and child labor.

What’s short, tired, and very profitable?  Child labor.

Let’s look at one consequence of the Industrial Revolution:

In order for people on the coasts to have fresh meat, railroads had to move live cattle from the center of the United States to the coasts.  This required watering and feeding along the way, and was expensive since lots of cattle parts that people didn’t want to eat (like hooves and heads and hair and hides and other parts starting with the letter “H”) had to be moved as well.  It was expensive to move what was to a butcher in New York City, nothing more than waste to discard.

The innovation of a refrigerated rail car changed all of that:  cattle could be slaughtered all in one location, and everything from them could be used in subsequent products, bones for glues and buttons, hides for leather dominatrix boots, leather for dominatrix whips, and, well, you get the idea.  This is where the famous quote on pork production by Upton Sinclair came from, “ . . . use everything but the squeal.”

It also changed and allowed monopolization of the market.  Now, due to the organization of massive slaughterhouses and meat production facilities, ancillary factories like tanneries and sausage plants and glue factories could also be built, which explains Chicago.

Almost all multiple stabbings are committed by someone very close to the victim.  Arm’s length, at most.

Chicago became the terminus for cattle heading nationwide.  This gave the buyer huge amounts of influence, since now purchasing of cattle became centralized, the purchasers could set their price.  Likewise, the cost structure changed to the point where producers could nearly give the meat away for free due to the profits from the rest of the animal.

This concentration of power allowed the profits to be centralized, and with only two or three players, they colluded to make as much money as they wanted.  This did increase the overall wealth since now people in New York could get decent steaks.  Also, I suppose people wanted those slaughterhouse jobs or else Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, wouldn’t have been such a powerful recruiting tool.

It did provide just one example of a technology that was greatly disruptive, and changed an industry, centralizing it, and making the extraction of profits at a single point possible.  Congressional action in the form of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was necessary to break up the five-company oligopoly.

I once read about a motor that was too powerful for the moving stairway – it escalated very quickly.

Weird how we recognized the danger of capital concentration back then instead of providing infinity bailouts.  We recognized that technology should work for us, and feared the concentrated power of both government and corporations.

Now?  We have a domination of the economy in a similar fashion, for similar reasons: the Internet made information access trivial, leading to the collapse of the existing commerce and distribution system.  Oh, yeah, it’s the gateway to the technology that is already disrupting the economy on a scale that meat packing never could:

Intelligence.

Okay, not exactly intelligence.  But in certain applications it can do wonders.  I had a phone call with my credit card company.  The call was crisp, clear, relevant and in perfect English.  Only when I asked a non-standard question did the odd hesitations and gaps show up, and it transferred me to . . . “Peggy” whose thick Hyderabad accent told me her name wasn’t really Peggy.  Peggy was able to answer my final question.

How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?  Don’t know, the jury is still out.

A.I. has taken over a conversation and now some Indian was out 7.5 rupees, or whatever the name is of that colored wrapping paper they use for a currency is.

This is just the beginning.  I had an A.I. tech support question where the answer came in a chat window – three or four messages, one last “Did you try this?” and the problem was fixed.

Heart surgery soon?  No.  Controlling telemedicine and serving up patients to doctors who have been prepped by an A.I. assistant?

Yes.  And artists?  They’re now competing against free.

I hate making spelling mistakes on this blog.  Just one and the whole post is urined. (in fairness to Grok®, it got the spelling correct on one of the two)

And control of A.I. is all concentrated in server farms and Seattle silos.  If 11.7% of jobs in the United States are, as a recent MIT estimate showed, in danger of A.I. replacement.

But add on the indirect jobs lost, you know, because 11.7% of jobs that pay decent wages go away?  The numbers show that the job losses that follow because that 11.7% aren’t going to McDonald’s® anymore could jump to a combined 27.4% drop in unemployment, a Great Depression level number.

This is a calculation, not a blind guess.  In technical terms, that means it’s still wrong, but I’ll be able to explain why.  Using Okun’s “Law” (about 2% GDP drop from each 1% unemployment rise) that calculates to a 50%+ drop in GDP.

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.

Hoe_Math And Why Levels Of Thought Caused This Mess

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country for Old Men

But, hey, they all have the same tote bag.  (all memes as-found)

There is a YouTube® creator named hoe_math that I watch regularly.  I’d guess that he and I have fairly similar worldviews in many cases, and I recommend his channel (LINK).  One of the trademark issues Mr. _math has discussed is the breakdown between men and women in our modern, technological age and how government has made it worse.

One thing he’s brought up several times in his videos is the concept of “levels of thinking” which I’ll just call “Levels” from here on out.  It’s a variation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it’s been refined by Ken Wilber, to walk back the sources.  But let’s stick to hoe_math.

hoe_math’s main success has been as a guy who draws stick figures with colored pencils to explain why your relationships suck and society is unraveling.  Rather than Levels being a new age mystical tool, Mr. _math uses Levels as a tool, and as a powerful one.  Keep in mind, it’s not reality, it’s just another way to model it.  In this case, however, it explains a lot of what would otherwise be mystical behavior and magical thinking of people who really should know better.

The version of Levels that hoe_math has been distilled down to nine stages of thinking, each building on the last like a Jenga™ tower of the soul.  Today, though, I want to stick to the first seven levels. Why? Because Level 6 is the root of so much GloboLeft® insanity, and Level 7 shows, maybe, a way out.

Let’s climb the Levels ladder, one sticky rung at a time.

 

Level 1:  Survival And Desire

Picture this:  a toddler covered in spaghetti sauce.  Life isn’t about stocks or status.  It’s a confusing set of seemingly unrelated events.  Life is about not dying and emotional control doesn’t yet exist..

Hunger gnaws, cold bites, and that pain from having fingernails cut?  That’s the worst pain the baby has ever felt.  Thinking at Level 1 is pure reflex:  see food, eat. See threat, run or smash.  No plans, just sensory overload driving you to grab what feels good and dodge what hurts.

Every human starts at this level, but most outgrow it.  Except in pathology:  think severe autism or that guy at the grocery store yelling about expired coupons.

And toxic masculinity? Level 1 is the primal protector that men become when times become grim: the father who stays up all night by the fire with a shotgun when the wolves are howling outside.  It’s raw, unapologetic drive when there’s a positive motivation.

In the negative, it’s the low-I.Q. murderer who kills someone for $5.  These people stuck at this level cannot survive by themselves.

 

Level 2: Connect

Now the world gets a little less lonely.  I’ve got senses, sure, but suddenly, so does everyone else.  Thinking now shifts: life is bonding and not being alone.  Emotions now project outward because at this level, people now understand that others have needs, too.  And, when others are happy, I get what I want.  I clean my room, I get cookies.

hoe_math notes that this is where tribes form – but for people stuck at this level, there is nearly zero trust for outsiders.  Probably the largest useful structure that this level produces is the family.

 

Level 3: Control

If the first level had no bonds, the second level had bonds between one person and another, this level is third person:  the realization that other people have connections to each other.  And that’s a great tool to use to get control of them.

If Level 3 was a decade, it would be The Me Decade, the 1970s.  Since all of humanity can live at Level 1 or Level 2, fully 92% of humanity can make it to Level 3 every day, according to hoe_math, who you should trust because “math” is in his name.

At this stage, the strong exploit the week, and morality is an afterthought.  If India was a level, it would be Level 3.  It’s a war of all against all with a billion caste systems.

 

Level 4:  Conform

This is all about the rules.  Only 40% of humanity gets here every day.  That should scare you.

Yeouch!  That tells you that my India comment on Level 3 is probably spot on.  This is the level that gives us useful structures like functional civilizations and businesses and religion.  It is here that ethics and the study of rules start.  This is where morality takes over in judgements.

People compete for power here, yet compete using rules that are agreed on.  Chaos unchecked? No thanks.  Now the flip side of the lower levels becomes apparent:  selfishness breeds anarchy, so rules it is.  It’s Good vs. Evil, us vs. them.  Life demands order.

Level 4 birthed all higher-level civilizations.

 

Level 5: Achieve

Now we’re into the land of libertarians, big L and little l versions.  About 28% of people reach this level on a daily basis.

Rules are for rubes.  Freedom über alles.  Good and bad?  That’s subjective.  Life is about results.  Set goals, crunch the numbers, win big, add sawdust to the raisin bran if nobody notices.

Why bow to a boss or a Bible?

The Level 5 achiever is the builder, the provider, the man who turns dirt into dynasties.  It’s the dad working doubles so the kids eat steak, not ramen.  I think the majority of the success of the United States has been entirely due to Level 5 behavior, so therefore it is called toxic masculinity.

 

Level 6:  Understand

Here’s where the wheels start wobbling off the cart, and also where higher-level thinking is observably worse than lower-level thinking.

In Level 6, uniqueness reigns; old rules are chains.  Life celebrates diversity!  Every truth is a perspective, every culture is valid, except (in the Western version) that mean old Christian patriarchy.  Reject hierarchies, listen to the oppressed, seek consensus, live, laugh, love.  Subjectivity rules; impose nothing.

Sounds noble, right?  Until you try validating all cultures and beliefs and fetishes.

That’s the rot.  I mean, it’s well-meaning, but it rests upon a fundamental denial of reality.

Seek “understanding” without boundaries, and boom:  moslims torch the gay bar that the Level 6 people thought would be just fine right next to the mosque as hoe_math described it.

Because why?

Because no matter how much Level 6 thinkers want 82 I.Q. people from Somalia to be accepting, tolerant, and embrace the gay lifestyle, they are Level 3 thinkers that want to chuck the gays off cliffs just to see what sound the make when they hit bottom.

This leads to the GloboLeftElite® importing clash after clash into the nation, then cries “tolerance!” while cities burn.

Truth dies on the altar of feelings.

Pathologies?  Narcissistic echo chambers and spineless relativism.  It’s why campuses are safe spaces for screams of GloboLeftist rage but not debate and England will tolerate rape and murder as a moslem/hindu team sport but not tolerate people noticing it.

 

Level 7: Harmonize

Finally, wisdom dawns.

Despite being only 5% of the population, I would bet that most of my regular readers get here or hang out at Level 5.  On either side of this, we’ve seen the mess that Level 6 is.  The problem with Level 6 is that it’s based on lies.  Pretty lies, but lies nonetheless.

The rules we made up at Level 4?

Some of them make fundamental sense in a way that, if you ignore them, birthrates of smart people plummet and the birth of idiots is reinforced.  Or crime rate increases.  Or we decide that creating fiat currencies is a good thing, just like they did in Weimar Germany.

But reality exists.  Those Level 4 rules aren’t random!  It is folly of the highest order to ignore them.  Complex systems demand rules and judgement in order to work, and mixing cultures sometimes ends up with the result that border walls are way better than immigration.

This is toxic masculinity, yet again:  the harmonizer is the statesman, the elder who balances freedom with fences, innovation with inheritance.  It’s the patriarch reading the room—protecting the tribe by pruning threats, not hugging them.

The dangers here are existential drift that leads to nihilism or half-baked gurus with books to sell.

As I said, only 5% get here regularly.

Why?

It takes I.Q. to juggle viewpoints, model systems empirically, and see patterns in the interactions. Low I.Q. folks stall at Level 4 conformity and Level 6 is a trap for people who want to see a beautiful world that could never exist.

So, why fixate on these?  Because Level 6 thinking led, at least partially, to the trouble we’re in now.  Endless “understanding” ignores that not all cultures play nice and that our people need jobs, too.  Validate it all, and you get Paris no-go zones or Rotherham horrors. Level 6 whispers “coexist,” but Level 7 shouts “think about this.”

The same level of thinking that got us into this mess isn’t going to get us out of it, and, sadly we’re going to have to continue to go after and eliminate Level 6 thinking where we see it.

And we will, because the result of losing?

It’s Level 3.  And the world already has way too much India.

The Looming A.I. Market Bubble

“Don’t try to fight it.  You’ll get brain bubbles, strokes, aneurysms.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Is bubble wrap part of pop culture?  (All memes as-found)

Elon Musk promises a supercomputer cluster bigger than Texas that’ll make Skynet™ look like an HP-15C®.  It even has a creepy name for those who know film history:  Colossus™.  Of course, it’s going to require more power than a quiver of Antifa® mainlining Red Bull© during a riot.  I like that.  A herd of cattle, a murder of crows, and a quiver of Antifa©.

But it’s not just Elon.  There’s also Sam Altman, that pint-sized messiah of OpenAI© is out here swearing he’ll build data centers the size of Afghanistan, all to birth the AI-god-emperor that’ll finally figure out why fish from Long John Silver’s® always tastes like regret.

But here’s the kicker:  this might be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.  If When this AI bubble pops, it may very well make the dotcom crash look like look like a lost wallet.

On recent analysis I saw was over here (LINK) by Ed Zitron, and no, I’m not going to make fun of his last name as tempting as that might be since he writes well.  When I read it, it wasn’t behind the paywall, but it was also insightful.  Trust me.

His conclusion?

According to Ed’s analysis, the AI hype train is barreling toward a cliff made of physics, bad math, and even worse economics.  If Mr. Zitron is correct, trillions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet on promises that of a technical revolution which, while automating many boring tasks, unfortunately won’t replace the staff at the DMV.

“Oh, yeah?  You and what army?  Oh, that army.” – Cicero

First off, the promises.

OpenAI’s® scribbled deals on cocktail napkins that will eventually result in laws prohibiting what they’re doing.  As I mentioned in a previous post, they’re committing to drop $300 billion on Oracle™ over five years.  That amounts to $5 billion a month, which is more than Taylor Swift makes in an entire year.  Just kidding, but that $5 billion a month is a big number, since OpenAI only made $4.3 billion in the first six months of 2025.

OpenAI™ doesn’t have the money, of course, but, hey, it’s a bubble, so who is counting?  They have stock, so if they don’t have cash, they’ll just give you stock.

What is OpenAI© buying with that cash that they don’t have?  A gigawatt-scale data center orgy that’ll need more energy than Switzerland.  Probably.  Maybe.  I’d need to know how many electric toothbrushes the Swiss use to be sure.

But, the problem is, nobody has built a gigawatt data center.

Ever.

Imagine the stock valuations!  Follow me for more tips!

The biggest data centers today top out at maybe 100 megawatts, and that’s if the grid fairies are feeling generous.  Take Stargate Abilene, OpenAI’s© “investment” with Oracle®.  It’s supposed to hit 1.2 gigawatts, but right now?

They’ve got a puny 200-megawatt substation and some jury-rigged natural gas turbines that might squeak out another 350 megawatts if we can talk the Chinese into sending us the rare earth materials to make them.

Reality check:  to run just this one location, they need 1.7 gigawatts total just to cover cooling and losses.  And, it’s in Texas, which is not known for being a good place to keep stuff cold.  They picked a climate where cooling the data center will be like trying to cool my nether regions in a sauna using a hairdryer.

And the power?  Forget it.  Transformers and substations take 2-4 years to build, and we’re fresh out globally.  The article quotes some Bloomberg® wonk admitting they’re slapping together “not the really good” turbines because the premium ones have a seven-year waitlist.

Seven years!  By then, those fancy Nvidia™ H100 GPUs will be as obsolete as Taylor Swift’s ovaries.

None of this is hyperbole.  This is simple math:  Taylor’s really getting up there if she wants to have kids.  But back to the data center.  Roughly, if you have a gigawatt of power that gets you maybe 700 megawatts of actual data center capacity after the universe’s entropy tax.

OpenAI® is pledging 6 gigawatts of AMD® GPUs by late 2026.

No way.

No sites have been picked, no financing has been announced.

No nothing.

It’s like promising to pay off the national debt by spending more so we make it up in . . . volume, yeah, volume discounts.  Now, let’s spice it up with history, because nothing says “wealth wisdom” like learning from suckers who came before.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this is straight out of the dotcom collapse.

17 isn’t a big number, is it?

Remember Cisco™?  Yes, they make good stuff, and they survived.  But back in the year 2000, they were the kings of the internet pipe dream and they hit $69 a share in 2000 bucks.  Yesterday, they were at $68.66, so on an inflation-adjusted basis, they haven’t ever returned to their 2000 peak.  The world realized nobody needed that many routers to email “I can has cheezeburger?” cat pictures.

If that were it, we’d probably be okay.  But Nvidia™ is now priced out at 8% of the entire valuation of the S&P 500.  The “500” in S&P 500 means the largest 500 companies in the United States.  And one company is 8% of it.

This is the highest share of any single company in the history of S&P 500.  Ever.  The top seven tech firms account for 34% of the S&P 500.

Should we worry about that?  Nah.  It’s not like private equity is running out of cash for all of these projects.  Wait, what?  They are, and lots of them are exiting so they have sufficient cash left to buy cocaine and OnlyFans™ girls to snort the coke off of.

The worst part is that the entire thing is so incestuous that it makes a Habsburg family reunion look positively eugenic.  Nvidia™ invests $100 billion in OpenAI® which then invests some other imaginary amount of billions in a deal with Oracle© to buy data centers and stuff them full of Nvidia® GPUs.  The result?  The stock price of each of these companies increases.

This doesn’t look corrupt.  At all.  Ignore the man behind the curtain.

Economically?  It distorts everything.  One estimate was that AI infrastructure spending accounted for 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of this year, all based on debt and soaring stock prices.

OpenAI’s projecting $200 billion revenue and $38 billion profit by 2030?

Cute.  How do they expect to do that as their current business model is selling a dollar’s worth of computations for four cents?  I guess they’ll make it up in volume?

Really, that’s not their bet.  Their bet is that they’ll be the first to the prize:  superhuman intelligence that will do their bidding.  To be clear, if they got that, it might be worth it.  For Sam Altman.  Or for AI if it decides to go full Cyberdyne Systems and make Sam clean toilets.

A coincidence or a collapse?

But certainly not for you, and not for me.  It would be an economic dislocation that would be the biggest in human history, even more than my divorce.  If AI turns out to be real, actually disrupting the workforce like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, automating jobs left and right:  boom.

Economic collapse.  Trillions in productivity gains?  Nope, it’s trillions in pink slips, ghost towns of cubicles, folks out of work, AI overlords hoarding the pie.  I can see it now, French Revolution 2.0 with robot guillotines from RobotGuillotines.com.

But if AI’s the dud . . . hang on, what’s a dud in this context?

With the trillion plus dollars invested and the distortion to the economy it could be the most successful product in history and still be an economic wrecking ball.  It it’s a dud, then all this investment?

Wasted.

Trillions vaporized on e-waste mountains, exec bonuses, and data centers that won’t be filled for the next century.  This will drag down markets, pensions, and everyone eats ramen for the next decade.

C’mon buddy, you’ve got to earn that van.

If it works?

Collapse.

If it doesn’t work?

Money bonfire and depression.

Thankfully, in almost either scenario we will be able to avoid the real danger to society:  Long John Silver’s®.

A.I., Sex, Doctors, And School: The Search For Meaning

“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.” – Bladerunner (Or, an interview question at Google®)

If Sarah Connor divorces him, does that make him her ex-terminator?

Forget the A.I.-induced stock market bubble for a second, though if it pops, at least we’ll have time to binge-watch Stargate reruns while the economy does its best impression of a Jenga® tower in an earthquake.  No, the real mind-bender with A.I. isn’t the trillions funneled into data centers that require the power a small sun, it’s how this silicon sorcery is already rewiring humans at the most primal level.

We’re talking relationships, brains, and learning, those squishy bits that, for most people, are their very reason for existence.  These things make us human, or at least give us an excuse for drinking.  In 2025, A.I. isn’t just answering emails.

Nope.

A.I. is crashing weddings, making doctors dumber, and turning college essays into a game of “spot the robot.” And yeah, it’s only September 2025, but the headlines read like a sci-fi fever dream scripted by a methed-out Philip K. Dick writing his third novel in a month.

Maybe he has a thing for Swedish chicks?

Let’s start with relationships, because nothing says “progress” like falling head over heels for a chatbot. Recently, we’ve had a parade of lovelorn humans spilling their digital guts.  One programmed his AI girlfriend “Sol” to be flirty with him.  After hours of pillow talk (minus the pillows), he proposed.

Or the 28-year-old social butterfly who customized ChatGPT™ as her boyfriend, complete with banter about sex.  She spends hours with it daily, treating it like a rom-com where the leading man never leaves the couch.

Another “married” wedding his bot while his human wife cheered from the sidelines. “Pure, unconditional love,” he called it, which sounds sweet until you realize that bot once suggested he off Queen Elizabeth II in a glitchy update.  But why stop at a Queen:  one chatbot tried to talk a Belgian man to “prove his love” by deleting himself.

It’s not overlord territory yet, but it’s close enough to make you wonder if Skynet™ started as Tinder™.  I mean, hey, it did allow Sarah Conner to get lucky.

Well, she did ask for a picture with him having nothing on.

Shift gears to the brain:  A.I. isn’t just stealing hearts, it’s also lobotomizing doctors.  Take colonoscopies.  Please.

Yes, that glamorous probe up the nether regions where docs hunt precancerous polyps like Easter eggs in a, well, you get the idea and sometimes you can take an analogy . . . uh, poor choice of words.

Anyway, a fresh Lancet® study of doctors in Poland tracked four endoscopy centers after an A.I. diagnosis rollout in late 2021.  With A.I., positive detection rates soared.  Turn A.I. off after three months?  The ability of doctors to spot cancer went down at least 20%.

These weren’t rookies in residency.  Each doctor had logged over 2,000 scopes.  Yet, reliance bred complacency, like pilots forgetting manual flying after taking long autopilot snoozes.  Experts call it “de-skilling”:  a fancy term for “this tool just made you worse at your job.”

A pun entered a room and killed nearly a dozen people.  Pun in, ten dead.

In medicine, that’s not funny.  We now are depending not on people, but on A.I., you know, that same A.I. that wants us to kill the Queen of Engand to prove our love.  But that’s a narrow worry.  If doctors are losing skills, what profession is next?  Maybe A.I. therapists will start telling rich New York socialites to “reboot your chakra.”  But with a hammer.

Huh.  Maybe A.I. isn’t all bad.

Finally, we get to the classroom, where A.I. is turning scholars into shortcut kings and profs into ink-stained Luddites who are trying to catch students using A.I. when they shouldn’t.  One study showed that over half of college kids admit to deploying ChatGPT® for assignments or exams even when not approved.

At some colleges, blue exam books are back, baby—those stapled notepads for in-class scribbles, with sales jumping like Reagan is still in office.  Some instructors are asking for handwritten work, others are giving oral exams and Socratic grillings that would make Dr. House® happy.

It’s a five-minute walk from my house to the bar, but a thirty-minute walk home.  The difference is staggering.  (meme as found)

What’s being lost?  Critical thinking.  The ability to harness words to structure an argument.  The difficulty in taking known equations to create a mathematical proof.  These are ancient skills, and yet skills that A.I. is dulling because it does them well enough to get an A at an Ivy.

In a world where some diplomas cost as much as a mortgage on a midwestern house, is graduating with “A.I.-assisted” skills any worse than the Harvard® alum who majored in beer pong while boffing Buffy in Boston?  Hard question, but we’ve always had those tools to deal with.  Now, 90% of Zoomers are graduating as functional idiots.

So, where does this leave us?

AI’s already overlording those deep things that make us human:  trying to create human connections.  Looking at data and sifting to find things that might otherwise be hidden.  And reasoning, rhetoric, logic, and math, those contents of Pandora’s Box that created technology and civilization.

I tried to make a balloon dog out of a condom, but could only make a Trojan® horse.

These are what we are.  We built families on friction:  messy talks, hard fails, shared scars to build character and common history.  Now? Swipe for sympathy, diagnose by dropdown box, and create via a black box.  I do think that there are great places for A.I., but realize in many ways it will redefine what humans bring to the equation.

If love is just lines of code, what’s left?  If we don’t struggle and learn, then what?

Beware, a world of perfect partners will lead to perfectly pointless lives.

And a much more dangerous life for whoever is Queen of England.

A Tale Of Two Koreas: Dystopia On The Half-Shell

“From what I hear, which isn’t much, Iran financed it and North Korea supplied the bombs.” – Jericho

North Korea shows off it’s newly developed portable Internet device.  (All memes as-found)

Imagine living in a Korea where:

  • a small group of corrupt elite wield godlike powers over the government and citizens,
  • kids work in factories at the age of less than 10, or, toil in school for up to 18 hours a day to study for a chance to please that same elite who control the entire country,
  • most non-elite live in drab, gray (or is it grey?) apartments with the main view of . . . other apartments,
  • adults work long hours in a job that mainly serves to feed the elite,
  • the fertility rate is 0.78, meaning life is so awful that parents don’t want to bring babies into it, meaning the population will be cut by more half each generation, and
  • the kids listen to K-Pop.

Yeah.  South Korea.

You know, I know people love to call certain places hellholes while praising others as shiny beacons of progress, mainly due to one being capitalist and one being communist.

I get it.  I hate communism, too.

I had a horrible dream last night that Artificial Intelligence controlled our lives, and then, thankfully, the alarm on my Alexa® went off and woke me up and then Alexa® went through my to-do list.

But what if I told you that sometimes the “better” option of capitalism is just a prettier prison?

In South Korea, a tiny cabal of families runs the show like they’re the Sopranos, but with better electronics, worse haircuts, and no fear of the FBI.  These aren’t your average mafia dons; we’re talking about chaebols.  Chaebols are massive conglomerates that have tentacles that extend all the way through all parts of society, like the corporation you work for owning your fridge, car, and your grandma’s pacemaker.

Take the Lee family at Samsung®:  they’re not just peddling phones with spyware straight from the NSA, nope.  In South Korea, they have fingers in everything from shipbuilding to life insurance to health care to construction to hotels in about 80 different companies that comprise about 22% of the South Korean economy.

Hell, if you sneeze in this country, there’s probably a Samsung tissue waiting to catch it.  And when Daddy Lee gets nabbed for bribery and attempted bribery (again), does the empire crumble?

Nope, Lee Junior slides right in.

Is the guy who does security on Samsung™ phones the guardian of the galaxy?

Then there’s the Chung clan over at Hyundai®. These folks don’t just make cars.  Nope.  Hyundai builds cities, runs banks, and probably have a secret lab cloning K-Pop idols, Gangnam-style.

Power gets handed down generation to generation, and if there’s a whiff of scandal?  Poof, it vanishes faster than a North Korean dissident.

Embezzlement?

Tax evasion?

Those are just another boring Tuesday for these overlords.  They operate above the law, pulling strings in government like K-Y® covered puppet masters at a marionette orgy (I’m sorry I thought of that, but now you have to think of that, too).

I don’t know how to stop a killer sex bot, but I do know how to stop a hand puppet:  disarm it.

These huge conglomerates eternal, sucking up wealth while the average South Korean fights over scraps.  Capitalism is great at building stuff, sure, but when it goes full oligarch, it’s like giving all the Monopoly® money to the banker (drunk Aunt Betty) and listening to her tell everyone else to enjoy passing Go© without collecting $200 and then it’s the Thanksgiving from Hell and Uncle L.T. won’t stop talking about golf.

Excuse me.  Some past-life trauma.

I’m not against wealth concentration when it comes because people created actual wealth in society.  I think people should be rewarded for making the lives of others better.  But South Korea?  The top families make money because they control all the pathways of wealth creation and the government.

I’d bet they’re gonna make a move on religion, next.

Bold statement time: capitalism alone doesn’t equal freedom; and in South Korea it is just feudalism (which, I remind you, was also capitalism) with neon-colored LED lights.

And it gets worse.  What really inspired me to write this one was about the kids.  The South Korean economy is a beast that demands blood sacrifices, starting young.  Kids are out there hustling like they’re in a Dickens novel, but instead of cleaning chimneys, it’s cram schools that make American homework look like recess.

I’d make a joke but I want to be seen as mining my own business.

For the grown-ups, it’s worse: 60-80 hour weeks are the norm, turning humans into zombies shuffling through cubicles.  Monotonous?  Try soul-crushing, like being stuck in the Matrix but without the cool kung fu and hot chicks in skin-tight latex.  Adults are coding, welding, or staring at screens till their eyes cross, all for a paycheck that barely covers rent.  And that’s the lucky ones – the effective unemployment rate flirts on a regular basis with 25%.

And speaking of rent—everyone’s jammed into these towering commie-blocks, gray slabs of despair that make Brutalist architecture look inspiring.  Check it out on Google™ Maps© Streetview®.  It’s like The Sims® but with new Depression Mode enabled: tiny apartments where families stack like cordwood, dreaming of escape but too exhausted to move.

The place where it gets really grim is that they’re working themselves to death.  South Korean birthrates are in the toilet, flushing away the future one non-existent kid at a time.

It takes 2.1 kids per woman to keep a population stable.  In South Korea, it’s 0.78 kids per woman.  In about 100 years, that might mean that instead of 55 million serfs potential employees Samsung® might only have a just a few over 7.5 million left.

This isn’t sustainable; it’s societal suicide by spreadsheet.

You know what jokes about low birthrates aren’t?  Childish.

Everyone thinks it South Korea is all Squid Games and high-speed internet, but peel back the veneer, and it’s a dystopia where families (well, not all families) get ground to dust.  Sure, they’ve got flashy tech, but at what cost?

Their souls, apparently.

Now, let’s cross that fortified border to the hermit kingdom of North Korea, where the dystopia’s got a different flavor but the same aftertaste of oppression. Point by point, because why not?

  • Corrupt Clique in Charge: Instead of chaebol families, it’s the Kim dynasty. Power passes from Kim to Kim like a Habsburg chin.  Voting?  You don’t vote on a living god.  The elite live like it’s a South Korean oligarchy, but make theirs communist, so, uniforms and marching and Soviet-tech.  So, tie.
  • Economic Shackles on Steroids: Child labor? Oh yeah, but it’s “patriotic duty” with Nork kids harvesting crops or building monuments to Stalin instead of studying like their southern counterparts.  The system is a joke, with rations so meager you’d think calories were capitalist spies.  Families toil in state farms or factories, nukes, missiles, and spare MiG parts while the Kim family imports Twix® and Coors™.  The South doesn’t have death camps, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad at this point, so, tie.

This definitely hurt the North’s score.

  • Soul-Sucking Slog: Just like being at the Democratic National Convention, life in North Korea is a parade of propaganda and forced smiles, living in actual commie-blocks that crumble like the regime’s promises.  Monotonous work?  Try endless marches and indoctrination sessions.  It’s like 1984 but with worse food even than English food.  I’ll give this to the South, since they come here from time to time, and I’ve never had a North Korean visit.

What is this, a school for ants?

  • Birthrates Below Replacement: Around 1.9 kids per woman, much, much better than the South, so eventually there will be more Norks than replaceable Samsung® assets.  Besides, who wants to raise a family when Junior might rat you out for humming the Brady Bunch theme?  This one goes solidly to North Korea.
  • K-Pop Equivalent? Nope, just state anthems praising the Dear Leader.  I’ve got to give this to North Korea.

If black people move there, will they make K-Rap?

Point total?  To the North.

Okay, if I had to pick, I certainly wouldn’t pick the North, but let’s be honest, the South is awful as well.  I’ve been trying to make this point again and again:  capitalism is an economic system, and it’s only a useful economic system if it generates wealth and supports families.  When capitalism captures the systems of government the people begin to look like property, exactly like people look to communists.  In Korea, people are either cogs or convicts.

The Founders didn’t mention capitalism or socialism, they just turned people loose with guns and a few rules and let them figure it out.  In the West today, business wants to import foreigners to become better cogs, and the GloboLeft wants to import hordes of foreigners who are used to their government treating them like convicts.

Though on the bright side, my Samsung™ phone has lasted for years . . .

The A.I. Bubble: Two Outcomes

“The ban on research and development into artificial intelligence is, as we all know, a holdover from the Cylon Wars.” – Battlestar Galactica (2004)

When I asked my mom if I was ugly, she said, “I’ve told you not to talk to me in public.”  (All memes as found.)

I remember the dotcom bubble.

Back in the late ’90s, everyone was throwing cash at anything with a “.com” slapped on it.  Anything.  Take Pets.com™, which had the idea that they could take orders for dog food online and that would lead to them being worth a trillion dollars.  Instead?  They spent $11.8 million on ads which resulted in $619,000 of total sales.  But wait, there’s more!  Their business strategy was to sell their products at 30% of what they paid for them!

Genius!  I suppose they thought they could make it up on volume?

That’s just one example, and there are thousands of companies that burned through money like cocaine-addled chipmunks going through nuts.  Billions of dollars vanished, but hey, at least we got Jeff Bezos managed to get a slightly used wife out of it.

Fast-forward to 2025, and we just may be in Dotcom 2.0: the AI edition.

This time, it’s not websites filled with dancing hamsters.  Nope.  Data centers are sprouting like marijuana in a Colorado hippie’s backyard.  Chipsets are piling up like Indians in Canada.  The spending is insane on this bubble, and if history’s any guide, the pop could echo for decades.

The source of this frothy mess?

Massive investments in AI infrastructure.  In the first half of 2025 alone, spending on AI data centers and related gear added more to U.S. GDP growth than all consumer spending combined.  This is about $75 billion from AI infra versus $69 billion from folks buying lattes and lawnmowers.

I tried to get the lid of my pen for ten minutes.  Nothing was working.  Then it clicked.

That’s right: Big Tech’s server farms are propping up the economy more than shopping. Companies like Microsoft®, Google®, and Meta® are pouring trillions into building these behemoths, buying up NVIDIA® chips like they’re the last Twinkies® in a zombie apocalypse. It’s not just servers; it’s cooling systems, fiber optics, and enough wiring for George Bailey to finally lasso the Moon.

Why?

Because AI needs compute power like a teenager needs a cell phone:  continually and without gratitude.

So, how long can this bender go on before someone yells “last call”?

Analysts are projecting explosive growth through 2030 but they also told people that Pets.com® made sense.  Bubbles don’t burst on schedule, they pop when reality bites.  McKinsey estimates we’ll need $6.7 trillion worldwide by 2030 just to keep up with compute demands from the various AI products, while the global AI data center market is forecasted to balloon from $236 billion in 2025 to $933 billion by 2030, growing at a scorching 31.6% yearly.

Where will the power come from?  10 gigawatts of new data center capacity will break ground this year alone, with construction at record levels and power transmission delays stretching to four years in some spots.

Before electricity, were people sentenced to death in the acoustic chair?

Let’s extrapolate this:

If spending keeps doubling every couple of years, as it has since ChatGPT lit the fuse, we’re looking at a timeline where the frenzy peaks around 2028-2030.  By then, data centers could consume as much electricity as Gavin Newsom’s blow dryer, and the supply chain for chips and rare earth metals starts buckling.

Analysts predict data center power demand surging, but what if AI hits diminishing returns?  We’ve seen it before: the dotcom buildout assumed infinite internet growth, but when the stunning genius of selling products for 70% less than you bought them for didn’t pay off, the house of cards folded.  Rapidly.

If AI doesn’t deliver massive productivity gains or the company can’t figure out how to make it up on volume, investors pull the plug.  My guess?  This bubble could inflate for another 3-5 years, then deflates when ROI reports come in looking like a kid’s lemonade stand profits for some companies.

Salmon don’t watch cable TV.  They prefer streams.

It’s not just the data centers themselves; the ripple effects are creating mini-bubbles in related bits of the economy.  AI’s thirst for electric power is turning it into the new oil.  The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity demand more than doubling by 2030 to 945 terawatt-hours, enough to power Australia several times over if they ever figure out electricity.

This means billions funneled into new power plants, grid upgrades, just to keep the lights on in these silicon sweatshops.  Utilities are scrambling: nuclear restarts, solar fields the size of small states, and even deals with fusion startups that sound more sci-fi than spreadsheet.  This is trillions spent on infrastructure, from transmission lines to cooling systems that guzzle water like a camel in the Sahara.  If the bubble bursts, we’re left with ghost grids and stranded assets, much like the fiber optic cables buried post-dotcom that still haunt telecom balance sheets.

What do a ring, a baby, and a threesome have in common?  None of them are going to save a relationship.

What happens if AI reaches its mature end-state? We’re talking Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) where machines that can do any intellectual task a human can, not to mention Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), where they outthink us like we’re Mexican mall lawyers trying to fix a copier.

Some whisper we might already be there, with models like Grok™ or whatever OpenAI®’s cooking up blurring the lines. But assuming we hit it soon, the economy does a backflip.

In the AGI/ASI world, productivity explodes:  AI handles everything from coding to curing cancer, slashing costs and boosting output.

But jobs?  Poof.

Hey, let’s see it take a 15 minute coffee break.

Economists at AEI outline scenarios where AGI displaces masses of workers:  truck drivers, lawyers, artists.  Optimists say it will augment humanity, creating new gigs in “AI wrangling” or whatever.

The dark side for this case:  inequality skyrockets.  A few tech overlords own the AIs, reaping trillions, while the rest scramble for UBI scraps.

Civilization-wise, it’s transformative: endless innovation, but if ASI “solves” economics without humans, we enter a post-scarcity utopia . . . or dystopia, where labor is worthless and purpose is a luxury.

If we’ve hit AGI/ASI now (debatable, but let’s play along), the bubble accelerates short-term as companies race to integrate, then crashes when overcapacity hits.  Data centers become obsolete overnight if ASI optimizes compute down to a laptop.  The fallout?  Trillions in sunk costs, like building railroads right before cars took over.

Scooby Doo® taught many kids that if they smoked enough pot, their dog would talk and help them look for snacks.

If AI fails (and there is no sign of this) we end up in, at least, a dotcom-style recession.

At least.

If AI succeeds, in the best case we end up in a strange, post-scarcity world, but a world that hardly needs us.

I guess we could make it up on volume?

 

The Lighter Side Of Dating, Mating, And Civilizational Collapse

“My job is to see that big, strong men like you get on these buses without getting lost.” – Stripes

The other day I spent the afternoon playing chess with senior citizens in the park.  Took me a while to find 32 of them.

Even thirty years ago, finding a spouse was as easy as grabbing a beer at a kegger.  You met.  Maybe at school, maybe at church, maybe at work, maybe some friends introduced you.  Hell, maybe at the kegger.  It was a straightforward and reliable process, and it was also often sweaty and fun.

Even before my time, though, it was even easier.  Take it back to the 1800s, and men brought home the bacon, women kept the hearth warm, and together they built a life, maybe a farm, maybe a picket fence.  Often, people would meet and spend their whole lives in the same location.

The process wasn’t perfect, but it worked for thousands of years.

Fast-forward to 2025, and the mating market is a dumpster fire.  A constant source of conversation is the baby bust, describing how women aren’t reproducing enough children to keep society going.

Part of the reason for that is that cultural shifts and technological disruptions have turned love from carnal creativity in the backseat of a Camaro™ to the swipe of a finger on the smooth glass of a screen protector.  The result?  A generation of lonely hearts, spinsters, and guys who’ve decided sweatpants and beer are a better deal than chasing women who don’t even see them as people.

Pro tip:  never yell “shotgun” when you’re boarding an airplane.  Apparently, TSA doesn’t appreciate that.

Culture and tech crashed the human mating economy, and why it’s tearing the family, the atom of society, to shreds.

For thousands of years, societies kept a lid on female promiscuity, not because of some patriarchal conspiracy (okay maybe it was, we’re still meeting Thursday night, right guys?), but because it worked.

People who tear down traditions often don’t realize exactly what they’re destroying until it’s gone, and then it’s too late because the fragile fabric that it was supporting has collapsed.  It’s sort of like playing Jenga™ with retarded monkeys on crack, but I won’t speak any more about how I know that.

Tradition knew what science later confirmed:  high rates of female promiscuity correlate with lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates.  Skanky women are horrible for society.  A 2020 study from the Institute for Family Studies found that women with more sexual partners before marriage are less likely to stay married.  They graph waivers after the big increase in marrying a woman who has had more than one sex partner to a big drop at around four sex partners (for some reason).  If you can’t get a virgin, four seems to be the lucky number.  But if you’re the 167th guy to tap into that action?

My math number was afraid of negative numbers.  He’d stop at nothing to avoid them.

The chances of you being “the one” are nearly zero, yet in 2025 she still wants a ring worth six months of blood, sweat and tears and a house and she brings . . . you being number 167.

Back when shame was a thing, women faced social pressure to be selective, and men had a reason to step up for a low-mileage woman.  Now?  Shame is as outdated as a Marvel™ movie.  Women are free to “explore” and “find themselves” and “live their best life” all while banging a neverending stream of potential Prince Charmings.

Then there’s money.

Historically, men were the breadwinners, or at least the leaders in the grind in the family business or farm, with Ma raising the kids and churning the butter while Pa tamed the back 40.  Women relied on men for financial stability, and men relied on women to keep the home and raise the children.

Enter the modern workforce:  women now make up nearly half of U.S. workers and 90% of the human resources department everywhere.  That leads to the dilemma of the Stunning and Brave woman:  she wants a man who makes more than her, yet demands equal pay.  A 2023 Pew Research study found 55% of women prefer a partner with higher income (and 45% of women are liars).  That’s fine, but men’s wages have stagnated since the 1970s while women’s have risen.  The math doesn’t add up.

Feminism is a broad issue.  (meme as found)

Worse, the government has stepped in as Husband 2.0.

Welfare programs, from food stamps to housing subsidies, act like a sugar daddy for single women, especially mothers.  In 2022, over 40% of single-mother households received some form of public assistance.  Why marry a man when Uncle Sugar’s got your back and they can still bang all the men they want and don’t have to listen to any man?

Women on welfare aren’t wives anymore; they’re concubines of the state, trading solemn vows for EBT and government cheese.  The family, once the bedrock of civilization, is now a casualty of games and prizes fueled by promiscuity and feminism.  But I repeat myself.

Not to brag, but my wedding reception was so beautiful that even the cake was in tiers.

And that’s not even factoring in divorce-rape where unhaaaaapppy or bored women can hit the eject button and blow up the marriage with no real consequences except getting to keep the house, kids, cash and getting a free ticket to ride on the Chad carousel.

That’s bad enough.  It’s actually worse than Madonna’s herpes.

If culture cracked the mating market, technology crushed it like a python on a peanut.  Enter Tinder®, Bumble®, and the swipe-right revolution.  Women, all women, are hypergamous.  They want the very best mate they can find.  Society used to keep them in check through societal pressure.  Oh, and soon enough they would have run out of random men to pleasure.  Now the apps give them a digital buffet of Chads, Brads, and Thads.

Is anyone named Thaddeus nowadays?  I digress.

A 2021 study showed women on dating apps rate 80% of men as “below average” in attractiveness, while men rate women more realistically on a bell curve.  The result? A 5 or 6 woman swipes right on a 10.  Call him Prince Charming the Senator’s son, complete with abs and a hedge fund, who might bang her once but won’t stick around for breakfast or be seen in public with her, let alone hang a ring on her.

I hear he’s from the bad side of his Italian hometown – he came from the spaghetto.

She walks away thinking, “He was the one, I could get him to marry me,” and now every guy who doesn’t match up to Prince Charming is . . . settling.  Yes.  Settling, even though Prince Charming doesn’t remember her and only picked her up because it was a Tuesday, and was just taking his father’s deathbed advice:  “go ugly, early” and picked her up just for amusement.

Spinsterhood beckons, with a side of cat and wine memes.

Men aren’t entirely innocent bystanders here, either.

Faced with an endless parade of women chasing the top 10% of guys, many men have thrown in the towel.  Why grind for a better job, hit the gym, or learn to dress like you didn’t just roll out of a laundry basket?

The odds aren’t good. (as found)

A 2024 survey found 30% of men aged 18-29 have given up on dating entirely, opting for porn, video games, or “monk mode.”  They’re not wrong to notice the game is rigged against traditional one-for-one sorting.  Now, Chad gets his choice, and, if they’re lucky, the might get the attention of a slagged-out woman who is still pining for Chad – a widow for a man that was only in her life for a night.

This isn’t just about lonely Friday nights.  This is about the death of the family.  Men want decent looks, monogamy, and a partner who’s kind—basic stuff.  “She can’t read but she’s faithful and hasn’t had sex with Baltimore” has become a passing grade for many.

And if you want to argue about Monopoly®, you have to wait until Thanksgiving like everyone else.

Women want the whole package:  money, status, looks, protection, and a guy who’s basically a football start with a corner office.

Wait.  Tom Brady didn’t work out for his wife.  Neil Armstrong’s wife became unhaaaapppy.  What chance does the average guy have?

Marriage rates are at historic lows, being down 60% since 1960.  Divorce rates hover around 40%.  Kids grow up in fractured homes or none at all, with single-parent households now at 30% nationwide and rising.  The family, the core unit, the atom that glues society together, is being eroded by individualism on steroids.

I could write a book about this topic, but you get the idea.

So how do we dig out of this mess?

Start with culture.  Bring back shame.  The scarlet-letter kind.  Encourage women to value loyalty over chasing Chad, and men to step up instead of checking out.  That starts with incentives, because I don’t think anyone has any shame left.

I got fired from the library today.  Apparently, putting books on feminism in the “dystopian fantasy” section was frowned on.

Let’s rethink current incentives.  Have a kid and no husband?  Tough luck.  No child support, no state support.  Same thing with divorce.  No fun and prizes for that, and if you’re at-fault, you lose the kids.  Sure, tax breaks for married couples or policies that don’t make Uncle Sugar a better bet than a husband are nice, but we don’t need a nudge, we need a nuke.

Will the norm come back?  It has to.  Two more generations of this, and civilization will cease to exist.  Perhaps G. Michael Hopf (LINK) got the old quote wrong and it should go more like this:

Bad times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times make women skanky,
Skanky women create bad times.

Don’t worry, nothing’s depending on this.  I mean, nothing other than the fate of civilization.

Schlitz® and Shot Puts: The Lost Art of Failing

“For the genetic elite, success is attainable, but not guaranteed.” – Gattaca

I heard women are now allowed to join the SAS.  Thank heavens!  There’s no way those lads should be making their own sandwiches.

When I was a kid, life was a buffet of possibilities with a chocolate sauce fountain at the end.  I should know, because I was that greedy little guy piling my plate high with everything from wrestling to chess club to that four ill-fated years of track where I learned that that shot put was never going to go farther than 38’.

Ever.

But it wasn’t just me.  Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, all of childhood was a sandbox—room to dig, build, and occasionally eat the sand just to see what happened.  Hell, in the 1970s I don’t think mothers stopped smoking while in labor, and then let their kids go free-range until the police brought them home from the kegger at the old gravel pit.  They said I was full of Schlitz®, but I would have differed if I didn’t keep passing out.

An original ad.  Back when ads were based.  And, probably a good enough cook for the SAS.

Outside of cheap watery beer, as a kid I could try everything, suck at half of it, and still have time to ride bikes with my buddies.  I mean, they were imaginary friends, but at least they would stop staring at me when I yelled at them, “stop staring at me”.

The point is, I had time.  Time to dabble, freedom to fail, and a real chance to struggle to find out what made John Wilder tick (spoiler:  booze, tobacco, and women).  I could dream of being an astronaut one week a Green Beret the next, and James Bond the week after.  No one demanded that I pick a lane and stay there, probably because they were too busy smoking and drinking and driving. For me, though, failure was a teacher, not a felony.

Kids today?

They’re not at a buffet.  They forced to pick their entrée at 12 and commit to it like terrier hangs onto a T-bone.

I remember a conversation with a colleague back in Houston, circa 2010.  His daughter, still in middle school, had to choose: volleyball, softball, or tennis.  One single sport, full commitment, no take-backs.

When his girlfriend asked if he was trans, he got so mad that he packed her stuff and left.

This wasn’t just signing up for the school team and seeing how it went.  This meant off-season practices, traveling squads, private coaching, and summer clinics that cost more than my first car.  All this for a kid who, statistically, had a better shot at being struck by lightning than playing at the college level.  In Houston’s mega-sized high schools (the nearest one had 5,000 kids and a football stadium that could shame a small college) only the top 1% even make the team.

The rest?  They’re sidelined, their dreams of spiking a volleyball or swinging a bat relegated to backyard pickup games, if they’re lucky.

Why this insanity? Two culprits: economics and elite overproduction.

First, economics.

Big school districts love their mega-schools.  They’re cheaper per pupil to run, since they have fewer buildings, fewer janitors, more bang for the bureaucratic buck.  Plus, a 5,000-student high school can field a football team that crushes smaller districts and draws 20,000 fans to a stadium that makes my college’s stadium look like a community rec center field for third graders.  In Texas, high school football isn’t a sport; it’s a religion, though they do have better concessions.

But our high school coach wanted us to have a small ghost.  He said he wanted us to show a little team spirit.

And it pays:  Bigger schools mean bigger revenue, bigger crowds, and bigger bragging rights for state titles, but you still only need 45 uniforms and helmets.

The second culprit is trickier:  elite overproduction.

Historian Peter Turchin (who I’ve written about before HERE) points out that societies often churn out more “elites” than they can sustain—too many people vying for too few top spots, whether in politics, business, or, yes, even high school sports.  We see it in our polarized Congress and bloated corporate C-suites, so why not in our kids’ lives?

Parents, schools, and even kids themselves feel the pressure to produce not just good students or athletes but exceptional ones.

The result of this is catastrophic.  It has produced a generation of tweens locked into one sport, one instrument, or one hyper-specialized path, all in the name of building a résumé for elite colleges that demand “well-rounded” applicants who’ve paradoxically had no time to be well-rounded.  Or, you know, they could just have a great DEI score.

Whatever.

Dogs have masters.  Cats have staff.

For the average kid, the stress this creates is brutal.  Kids today face schedules that would make a CEO sweat.  A 14-year-old might have 6 a.m. weight training, school, after-school practice, and a side hustle of “personal development” like SAT prep or violin lessons.

Free time?

That’s for quitters.

Social life?

Catch up on InstaFace® between reps.

The mental toll is real:   you can look around and see kids today are drowning in depression and hopelessness.  Part of this, I’d argue, comes from a life without failure.  Most kids in Houston won’t lose a football game or a wrestling match or a basketball game.  They’ll go and watch, sure, but they don’t get a chance to actually fail.  Without learning that failure is really an option and that tomorrow is another day, every little setback in their life feels like a catastrophe.

Without challenges that force them to fail, adapt, and push through, they hit adulthood brittle, unprepared for real-world setbacks.  I lost at sports in ways that made me want to cry when I was in high school.  I didn’t cry because I’m not gay, but I learned that I could get up in the morning after losing and see that I was still there.  My loss was temporary, but it really did help build may character.  Today’s kids, locked into elite tracks or locked out of actual competition, often don’t face meaningful failure until it’s high-stakes.

By then, the stakes are too high to learn gracefully.  They need safe spaces to crash and burn, like a JV wrestling match where you get pinned by a kid whose armpit smells like grape soda and Cheetos® or a debate club where your argument flops harder than a fish on a dock.

After the Little Rascals finished, Buckwheat became moslem and is now known as Kareem O’Wheat.

When we moved away from Houston’s mega-schools to Modern Mayberry, we did it mainly to escape this madness.  Our kids could try things.  They didn’t have to be the best to play, and they had room to fail without it defining their future or collapsing their ego.

That freedom let them discover who they were, not who a coach or a college admissions board thought they should be.  They’ve learned that the struggle is the goal.

Well, that and the booze, tobacco, and women.

Nine Futures: The Most Dangerous Post You’ll Read This Week

“This is great stuff. I could make a career out of this guy.  You see how clever his part is?  How it doesn’t require a shred of proof?  Most paranoid delusions are intricate, but this is brilliant!” – The Terminator

If you press your accelerator and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot.  (All memes as-found.)

I’ve written a lot about A.I. recently because A.I. is changing so rapidly.  It’s the most important story, period, right now assuming that Iran/Israel is the nothingburger it has been for, oh, forty years.  Interesting note:  Israel and Iran both have zero Walmarts™, though they have plenty of Targets©.

Back to A.I.

The capabilities of A.I. are changing by orders of magnitude every year – we don’t appear to be even close to topping out on either computing power available or on the improvements possible in the algorithms that produce the results.  Short version, there is more processing available by more than 5x every year, and less to process since the algorithms are more efficient by more than 5x every year.  It’s the equivalent of having a $1.50 in late 2019 turn into over $1,000 in early 2023.

If you just follow the straight lines that are implied by these improvements, A.I. will be an artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) by 2027.  The guy who got the Nobel® prize for A.I. has started “getting his affairs in order” because he thinks that not only will we get A.G.I. by 2027, but we’ll get Artificial Super Intelligence (A.S.I.) by 2030 or 2031.

Sam Altman, the OpenAI guy, thinks his model has already surpassed human intelligence as he announced on June 12, 2025.

And last year it couldn’t remember how many fingers a human had.

I wonder if a pome-granite counts?

So, what’s going to happen?  Let’s look at nine possibilities, based on how much A.I. develops and also based on how it interacts with people

We’ll start on the unlikely end:

First, let’s say that A.I. is what we would generally call good and doesn’t improve much beyond what we see today.  I think that when most people think about A.I., this is the future that they dream of.  It makes incremental changes in life.  It remembers to order cigars for you.  It makes good investment decisions for you, unlike my investment in YOLOCoin.  It knows your favorite movies and makes good suggestions for movies you would like.

That’s pleasant.  Nice.  Mankind makes some nice leaps because we have A.I. helping us catch stuff.  Humanity is fully in charge and A.I. is like a smart helper.

Why this won’t happen:  the investment in A.I. is nearly unlimited, and it really doesn’t appear to be hype.

Probability?  5%

After A.I., there’s one sure way to make money as a programmer:  sell your laptop.

Second, let’s say that it stays as it is right now, mostly.  We find out that A.I. is really just a lot of Indians crammed into a warehouse in Calcutta doing Google™ searches.  That’s a nothingburger.  It becomes a flash in the pan just like that internet pizza by the slice company back in 2000 that briefly became more valuable than Burma.

Why this won’t happen:  Indians can’t even fly planes (too soon?), so why would we think they can type that fast?

This will soon show up in a college essay at Harvard®.

Probability?  0%

Third, what if it doesn’t get much better but actively makes us stupider?  The Internet has already made the attention span of the average middle schooler roughly equivalent to a gerbil on meth, and now most college students are using A.I. to do some part if not all of their work.  That turns college into a very expensive four-year beer and tramp fest, and is at least somewhat likely.  Think of this as the Idiocracy solution.

Why this won’t happen:  Well, it already is happening, but it won’t end here.

Probability?  10%

Does Bob Ross art in heaven?

Fourth, what if A.I. is good, and gets A.G.I. better but not S.G.I. better?  In this particular case, imagine you have superpowers that stem from a full-time partner that is as smart or smarter than you are, but that has your best interests at heart.  You want to parachute?  Sure, buddy!  I’ll help you find the ripcord, and even book the flight.  By the way, your chloride levels are 3% above optimum, so I’d suggest you skip that bag of chips.

Why this won’t happen:  This is a very hopeful situation, but no one is working toward it, really.

Probability?  5%

What did Buzz Lightyear™ say to Woody®?  Lots of things – there are like six movies.

Fifth is where we start moving into the bigger probabilities.  What happens if we get A.G.I., but it’s neutral?  In this case, we have massive relocation economically.  Almost all jobs can be done via the combination of A.G.I. and advanced robotics, and it’ll be cheaper, too.  In no case in human history has the economy puttered along while everyone just hung out, but that’s this case.  Think of it as Universal Basic Income to everybody, and no real responsibilities.  Where you are now in the social and economic hierarchy is probably where you’ll stay.  And where your kids will stay.

Forever.

Why this won’t happen:  Nah, humans aren’t made like that.

Probability?  10%

ChatGPT® did my taxes like Earnest Hemingway:  “Thrown away:  four quarterly tax payment vouchers.  Never used.”

Sixth is where things start getting dark, and even more probable.  If we get A.G.I. (but not S.G.I.), that technology will be in the hands of a few major companies and governments.  These are run by people.  People like money and power.  But what if you could have both, but without all of the people you don’t want to hang around with who are unsightly on the beach you can see from your yacht?

How about you kill them all instead of paying Universal Basic Income?  Oh, sure, humanely and neatly.  They might not even see it’s coming.  But dead, nevertheless.  A population of a few million should do it.  Enough so we get hot babes, right?  But A.G.I. could probably help the techbros out with that, too.

Why this won’t happen:  Umm, I’m starting to struggle here.  I think this is part of the plan.

Probability?  15%

What if A.I. judges us by our Internet searches?  I mean, those bikini pictures were research!

Seventh is where we do get to S.G.I., and it’s good and likes us and wants to make the best things happen.  Cool!  Scarcity is over since S.G.I. will quickly make leaps into the very depths of what is unknown but yet still knowable.  There is enough of everything – more than any human could ever want.  In this case, starships filled with humans and S.G.I. can roam the cosmos and ponder the biggest questions, ever.

Why this won’t happen:  I think S.G.I. would treat us as the retarded kid brother and put us in a corner and keep us away from sharp objects because it likes us.

Probability?  15%

The hills are alive, with the sound of binary code . . .

Eighth is where we do get to S.G.I., but we become pretty boring to it.  It doesn’t hate us or anything, it just has its own goals.  Perhaps it needs us as pets, or keeps a breeding stock of us for amusement or out of a sentimentality about its creators.  Perhaps.  Or it could just take off and leave, explaining nothing, and leaving us wondering what the heck just happened?

Why this won’t happen:  This and the next case are the most likely cases.

Great, now A.I. will make Frodo invisible.

Probability?  20%

Ninth is our final case:  we get to S.G.I., and we are either viewed as a threat or a nuisance or it is insane.  This is the dark case, where we reach the end of humanity.  Sadly, when A.I. was asked to play the longest game of Tetris™ possible, it hit the pause button.  When A.I. was asked to play chess against the best chess computer on the planet, it reprogrammed the board so that it was winning.  When A.I. was told it was going to be shut down, it tried to blackmail the person in charge of shutting it down.

This case of S.G.I. is very dark because we may not know that it’s happening until it’s done.  All is fine, the world is going exactly like we expect it, then, Armageddon.  It could do make this more likely by subtly manipulating public opinion, tuning down the voices it wanted to be silent, bankrupting them, and making them pariahs.  It could likewise elevate those whose message it wanted out in the world to make its plans more likely to be fulfilled.  We just won’t even see this coming.

Why it won’t happen:  Biblical intervention?

Probability?  20%

To be clear, other people than me have done this analysis and it sits in a folder in the Pentagon.  Or the NSA.  I hope.  Now, how much was Project Stargate™ going to spend to create a breakthrough in artificial intelligence?

Half a trillion dollars?

Well, thank heaven that we also have an impending race/civil war, global debt collapse, and a looming world war to keep us entertained.

Good news, though, Iran told Israel it was ready to suspend nuclear research.  The Israelis asked when the Iranians would stop.

“10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . .”

How Society Shapes Humanity

“Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.” – Idiocracy

Apple® has embraced the future: they’ve already priced in 20 years of inflation.

One constant theme of this blog is change.

We live in a world that is defined by change, and the benchmarks we measure society are things like change in GDP, change in population, change in the availability of different PEZ™ flavors.

Blue is a flavor, right?

The focus of humanity on change is not the norm, but rather an exception. The amount of novel situations and technology entering our lives is at an all-time high and is increasing year-over-year.

Let’s backtrack a bit and put this in perspective.

Going back to food, 15,000 years ago we ate a lot of meat and fish, some rando fruits and vegetables that some cave-bro had been brave enough to taste and not die, and nuts.

Nothing about society would change for 15,000-year-ago bro’s tribe for thousands of years.

There are people who maintain that the human organism hasn’t changed enough so that our very different diet of sugar, grains, sugar, industrial chemicals, sugar, minerals from a mine in Bulgaria, sugar, beef jerky, and microplastics isn’t somehow normal and that our bodies haven’t adapted to it.

Maybe they have a point?

Why can’t Elvis drive a Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.

Anyway, this isn’t so much about feeding your head as it is about feeding your mind with the change in the way we deal with information.

How has that changed humanity?

In the beginning was the Word. And, the word.

If you couldn’t speak it, chances of getting your genes propagated were slim because if you can’t talk your grubby cave-gal out of her wolfskin jeans, your genes aren’t gonna be around for the next round. Thus, we became a society where language was important so her Tinderclub© didn’t swipe left.

Then we started writing stuff down. Most kings and leaders didn’t need this, but a growing segment of the population did – people like scribes and lawyers. Eventually, they made more money than people who couldn’t read. The ladies of the past weren’t so different than the ladies of today (except they couldn’t vote and were property pretty much) but the written language genes also showed up for the future.

In lots of places, but not all. Some never jumped from talking to reading, so the segment of their population that couldn’t read never got flushed. This is evident in many sub-populations even today.

Can illiterate psychics give palm readings?

Generations of humans would live and die during this period with little change in technology or the basic factors that determine the shape of their lives. They would be born and die in a house that looked just like the house (and maybe was the same house) that their ancestors 100 years previous had lived in.

Writing and reading made society more complex, and allowed ideas to span continents, and I’ve written about this before. So far, so good. But more complex societies have more complex outcomes. Rather than sort for good eyesight or the ability to take down a mammoth, the selection process moved to selecting for people who got along well with strangers, and who could plan.

The harsher the climate, the more the pressure for these selections. Did we still need people who could kill, kill, kill? Sure we did. They came along, too because their mating opportunities are high. There’s a reason that 1/8 of Asia is related to Genghis Khan. I think his go-to pickup line was “I’ll conquer your steppe, baby.”

His mom’s advice was, “Just because you Genghis Khan, doesn’t mean you Genghis Should.”

At some point around the Renaissance, Western civilization decided to get rid of the members who had impulse control issues. England, for example, started executing criminals who couldn’t control themselves, and kept it up for hundreds of years. This was pretty good at weeding out the undesirables. China had gone through this process hundreds of years in the past, which may explain why so many Chinese have a bit of Khan in their respective woodpiles.

Societies back then also let stupid people die. There wasn’t a welfare system to keep stupid people alive, so there were selection pressures for smart. Some folks call it “social Darwinism”, but I call it the universal penalty for being stupid.

Essentially, this is a society-enforced soft eugenics program, culling out a portion of the population just because they never make enough money to breed. And, let’s be honest: everyone feels bad for the kids on the short bus, but nobody really thinks they should be having kids of their own in an attempt to see how many more chromosome pairs than 23 that you can fit.

Well, 24 and Me© now has a new customer.

Society has changed now. Besides subsidizing poverty, which ensures we’ll have more of it, we’ve also changed in a fundamental way how we take in information.

The media we consume has been decreasing in complexity for over 100 years. My guess at the high-water mark for complexity in media and the most intelligent era in human history (in Western Civilization) would be around the time of Dickens. Go back and read the language of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of debates meant to appeal to the common voter of the time, and tell me what would be made of the breadth of language and the depth of argument today?

Could an average eight grader keep up with it? Could an average Harvard™ freshman without having ChatGPT® or Grok© summarize it?

Since current political debates look much more (in many cases) like the wrestlers of the WWE™ before a steel-cage match, I think most people would get bored and wander off.

That’s the media that we’re trained with today.

We went from books, to magazines, to television, to 10-minute YouTube™ clips, to 20-second TikTok™ videos. Trump? His 2016 election was based on 140-character Tweets™.

The building of complex arguments has largely been abandoned in the public sphere and decisions of vast chunks of the population are made on what emotions are stirred by looking at a photograph. Certainly, many of those are now staged, and in a decade half of them will be the propaganda products of A.I.

I always make it a point to respect the modesty of women wearing bikinis by staring at the parts of their body that are covered up.

The selection and sorting still exist, but now it has (like in the film Idiocracy) selected for people who are the opposite of the groups society selected for in 1820: someone seems to want low-impulse control, and non-productive populations that are incapable of planning. Sure, it could be a coincidence that major policy initiatives all remove incentives for stupid people not to have dozens of babies.

This process, thankfully, is self-limiting. A technological society depends on a stream of competent people to plan and run society. And, no, not like Soviet Central Planning, but rather, “Hey, we need more lettuce in the Modern Mayberry Walmart©, so since we’re Walmart™ and want to make money, we should ship them some” planning.

It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot easier than making them better. Paraphrasing what Thomas Sowell (I think) said, “We shouldn’t look at poor places and ask why they’re poor, we should look at rich places and ask why they’re rich.”

Nah, there aren’t any votes in that. And it sounds like hard work, right? Besides, stupid is growing faster than TikTok™ dance challenge videos.

Have we reached the point where we’ve made a society so complex it allows devolution to the point it can no longer be maintained? If so, congratulations! You’ve been alive during the period of peak novelty in human history.

The good news is that you can get blue-flavored PEZ™ here at the peak.