Category: Uncle Ted’s Story Hour

Thursday Music: Eyes in the Machine

Sometimes it takes a lot of work to get it to sound right, sometimes it happens on the first take.  I spent much more time writing this than most, and I like the way the lyrics work with the style.  It’s techno-metal, which seems to fit the lyrics and subject.

Behind The Music:
All the songs so far are here (LINK).  You can buy this song right now.

As of today, you can buy ALL of them (except for those that just came out since Sunday, which will go live in a few days, and the parodies) anywhere you buy music by searching for “Wilder’s Hammer” or “Wilder’s Brigade”.  I listen to them on Spotify, and I see others do, too.  Although buying them doesn’t support this blog, it does support the owner the LLC for the music.  Who might also own the LLC for the blog.

Eyes in the Machine
by John Wilder

Cameras on the corners, watching every step I take
Doorbell eye staring, no move I can fake
Traffic lights judging, glass eyes log my trail
Cell towers see secrets, no lone exhale

Track swipes, every dollar I spend
Knows every name that I call friend
Speed down highway, clock my rebel soul
Political whispers? They’re in control

No corner unlit, no shadow to hide
Net closing tight, pulling all inside
They know my poison, how I drown my pain
Turn humans into data for gain and chain

Eyes in the machine, no escape from the glare
Surveillance state, anytime, anywhere
They build a profile, my soul on a notepad
My value to them is to consume the latest fad

Propaganda whispers, shaping belief
Profit off all emotion, from fear to grief
Eyes in the machine, the web is a chain
The digital prison, injected in a vein

Web trackers hunt clicks, from dawn until sleep
Music in your ears, what they want is sheep
How fast I drive backroads, move against flow
Fed to corporations, watch profits grow

Doorbell sentry inspects neighbors, streets a cell
Never blinking always thinking have me in their spell
Never blinking always thinking tracer in my pocket
Never blinking always thinking can’t block it

They craft the messages, twist in my head
Make me buy the lies, leave my spirit dead
No private thought survives the endless scan
We’re just data points in their master plan

Eyes in the machine, no escape from the glare
Surveillance state, anytime, anywhere
They build a profile, my soul on a notepad
My value to them is to consume the latest fad

Propaganda whispers, shaping belief
Profit off all emotion, from fear to grief
Eyes in the machine, the web is a chain
The digital prison, injected in a vein

They want compliance, cogs in the wheel
Feeding on our data, making the deal
No rebellion whispers without them knowing
Net always growing, control overflowing

Break the code, smash the screen, reclaim the right
Before the glass eyes consume us, last midnight

Eyes in the machine, but we’ll tear down the wall
Surveillance state, hear the rebel call
No more profiles, no more chains on the mind
We’ll burn the data, leave the ghost behind

Propaganda crumbles, truth gains control
We won’t let you forever own our soul
Glass eye in the machine, your reign will end
Your time is expired, we won’t bend

Tranquility Was Never The Goal

“Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives.” – Fight Club

The ultimate participation award.

As humans, we’re wired wrong.  Or right, depending on how you look at it.

We chase peace like it’s the ultimate prize at the carnival of life.  We say that we want a world without war, without struggle, where everyone has a comfy couch, unlimited Wi-Fi, more liver capacity, and steak that cooks and delivers itself.

Sounds like Heaven, right?

Wrong.  When I was a wee Wilder, Grandma McWilder would talk about how I should do nice things in life rather than bathing the cat in a paste made from DDT® and Lysol™ so I could go to Heaven.  Obviously, I asked, “What is Heaven like?”

Grandma told me it was nice and peaceful and that nothing bad ever happened up there.  I believe I said something like, “That sounds boring.”  Grandma did not look pleased, but I don’t know if it was about my statement or the cat.

Let’s just say I was a technicolor handful as a kid.  Oh, the stories I could tell.

But I wasn’t wrong.

But wait, there’s more!

Tranquility isn’t the goal.  Tranquility is the trap.

Peace isn’t just boring; it is deadly to the human spirit.  We need the fight, the blood, the steel. Without it, we rot from the inside out.  And that’s not me, John Wilder making crap up again.  We have actual studies where the government tortured mice to verify that I’m right.

Take John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments, please.  I’ve written about them a couple times before, you can use the search thingy in the upper right hand of the screen to find them.  I would have done that for you but you’re not my supervisor and I could type this sentence way faster.  Short summary:

In the 1960s, Calhoun built paradise for mice: unlimited food, water, space, unlimited beef jerky, no predators, SNAP benefits.

What happened?  At first, boom, the population soared.  But then, the weirdness set in.  The mice stopped breeding normally.  Males became either passive or hyper-aggressive or “beautiful ones,” preening themselves instead of fighting or mating.

Females abandoned pups.  Society collapsed into violence, isolation, and extinction.  All of this happened in a “utopia”.

No threats, no struggles:  just free cheese forever.  And they died out.  Stop me if you’ve seen this recently in other mammals.

I’m not going sugarcoat my jokes about diabetes.

Humans aren’t mice, but we’re close enough if you ask my parole officer.  Look at the downward spiral of the United States after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.  The Cold War ended.  We “won.”  Yay!  No more Soviet boogeyman lurking with nukes and unibrows.

Instead?  Peace!  Prosperity!

What did we do?  Got fat, lazy, bored and divided:  music went from “I’m gonna kick your ass” in the 1980s to “Oh, man, I need lithium because I’m sad”.  The ‘90s brought endless economic booms, but also the seeds of today’s mess:  identity politics, endless entertainment, and a generation starting to get hooked on screens instead of life.

Without a real enemy, we turned inward, fighting over pronouns and safe spaces.  Tranquility bred complacency, and complacency bred decay.

Same story with the Moon landing. July 20, 1969:  Armstrong steps on the lunar surface.  Humanity’s greatest leap.  We beat gravity, the Soviets, and the odds.  Then?  Crickets as the ratings dropped.

We went back a few times, planted flags, played golf (shoutout to Alan Shepard), and then just . . .stopped.

And then she refused to talk to them for six hours.

NASA shifted to the gay space trucks shuttles and looking for non-binary muslims and lesbians to shoot into orbit.  No more bold frontiers.  Why?  We won.  The Sea of Tranquility turned space exploration into a budget line item.

Need another example:  a Syrian teen in London.

Picture this:  an eighteen-year-old from war-torn Syria, resettled in a taxpayer-funded flat in London.  Free food.  Free education.  Free X-Box®.

Utopia, right?

Wrong.  He drops the controller and goes to Syria andjoins ISIS or stays in London and joins a gang and becomes a rapefugee with a machete.

Why?

Blood calls to blood.  Iron to Iron.  That flat was Mouse Utopia 2.0:  safe, soft, soulless and, let’s face it, that kid was inbred and not very bright to start with.  He craved the jihad, the struggle, the validation of existence through fire and fight.  Comfort didn’t kill his spirit, comfort starved it.  In part, this is why allowing refugees from incompatible countries is immoral.

I played hide and seek and ended up in the hospital.  ICU!

Why do we have wars?

We want wars.  If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.

Why do we want them?  Not because we’re monsters, but because we’re human.  Struggle validates us.  High stakes forge character.  Leaders like Alexander or Churchill didn’t thrive in peace; they rose in the crises they created.

Without enemies, we manufacture them, internal or imaginary.  Look at modern “wars”: culture wars, gender wars, class wars, cola wars.  We can’t help it.  Tranquility isn’t our default; it’s a rare condition that, when it lasts long enough we pop our collective corks.

Think about it:  our history has wired us for survival, not spa days.  Hunter-gatherers fought for food, territory, mates and because it was Tuesday.  Civilizations brought people together and made a professional league and channeled that into empires, exploration, and innovations. Remove the fight?

We devolve.

Mouse Utopia showed it: no threats equates to no purpose.  Humans need the arena, the sweat, the sand, and the blood.  We were built for the Colosseum, not the couch.

But here’s the rub:  the struggle creates a spot for growth, it’s literally the engine of history.  Without high stakes, we fail to thrive.

We back ourselves into existential corners: depression epidemics, fertility crashes, societies crumbling under their own weight and people who need drugs to stop that nagging feeling that they should be doing something that matters.  Oddly enough, our very humanity appears to be built upon the fight.

If you meet a dolphin and feel a connection, can you say that you just clicked?

So, what now?

We can’t “prosperity” the struggle out of us.  We need leaders who rally us to real frontiers and put real goals out in front of us, not fake fights over tweets®.  Stakes high enough to matter: colonize Mars, cure aging, harness fusion.  And something for the masses to do, like watching re-runs of Ow, My Balls.

Something.  If we don’t have something, we’ll make something.  Give us blood (metaphorical or not), steel, the feel of it all.  In the end, tranquility was never the goal.

The struggle is the point.  It’s what makes us scream, fight, and conquer.  As I’ve seen in memes:  “I want to go out of this world the same way I came into it: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”

And Heaven?

I think it isn’t at all as Grandma Wilder described.  I think it’s more like:

Player 1:  Ready Level 2.

The Simpsons, Radioactive Potato Salad, And Running Out Of Electricity

“I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” – Andromeda

Had Oppenheimer been a theoretical physicist he would have been frictionless, perfectly spherical, homogeneous, isotropic, involuntarily celibate, and have extended to infinity in all directions.  I guess one out of seven isn’t bad.

You know, Oppenheimer probably didn’t realize that his little gadget would one day power cat videos on YouTube®. But yet, here we are, preparing to stare down the barrel of an energy crisis that makes the 1970s oil embargo look like a minor hiccup at the gas pump.

America’s tech overlords are building A.I. data centers faster than a caffeinated beaver on gas station Chinese boner pills.  These behemoths suck down electricity like it’s free beer at an open bar to toss electrons so we can make A.I. cat videos because there weren’t enough cats in real life.

The scale is enormous:  gigawatts upon gigawatts, enough to finally get Marty all the way back to 1985.  But that begs this question:

Where’s all that juice coming from?

My walkie-talkie once took a lump of coal to a movie.  It was a classic example of radio-carbon dating.

Coal?  Ha!  That’s so 19th century, and the eco-warriors have pretty much chained themselves to the last coal plant, screaming about carbon footprints.

Natural gas?  Did everyone forget demand peaks in winter when everyone is cranking up the heat and prices spike like Nvidia® stock?  Are we going to have to keep our homes at 40°F (3.14 millipedes) just so ChatGPT® can make GloboLeftist women on the East Coast even more neurotic?

We need power, so, naturally, the bright sparks in Silicon Valley and D.C. turn to the holy grail: The Simpsons.

Sure, Homer® looks incompetent, but he hasn’t melted Springfield down.  Yet.  When The Simpsons started, they were mocking nuclear power in the typical GloboLeft drive to get it shut down.

Deep down, though, nuclear really always has been the only viable transition plan into the future.  Oil really will run out at some point, abiotic or not.

I had an allergic reaction and the doctor asked how I was.  “Swell.”

But nuclear?  If done right, it really can be clean, reliable, and if we don’t let Soviets do it, pretty safe.

So, problem solved.

Not.

We’re facing an immediate energy cliff.  In 2025, nuclear isn’t a parachute, it’s really more like a bedsheet and some twine.

With a little help from Constant Reader Ricky, who sent me an email.

I’ll quote him directly because, well, he nails it better than I could.

Ricky writes: “Existing commercial power reactors in the US have two key characteristics – their uranium is enriched from the natural 0.7% U-235 assay to a level of 3%, and they are cooled with pressurized water as the heat transfer fluid to run the turbines. The reactors were INITIALLY fueled via uranium enrichment done long ago in . . .  monstrous factories that are now closed.  An effectively experimental centrifuge enrichment operation in Piketon, Ohio shut down in 2016 without ever producing a pound of reactor fuel (we bombed a similar setup recently in Iran).

“Believe it or not, the US CURRENTLY fuels its commercial nuclear power reactors for the past ten years with Russian 3% enriched uranium, even through the Ukrainian war.  The Russians basically dilute some of their bomb grade 93% enriched uranium stockpile down into 3% reactor fuel as an export profit center.”

Key point courtesy of Ricky: “The current American commercial nuclear power program is 100% dependent on the Russians and has been for the last decade.”  He adds, “But we want that because that every kilogram of Russian uranium that goes IN a New York City power reactor is one less kilogram of Russian uranium that can go into an incoming nuclear bomb OVER New York City.”

He’s right.  I want the Russians to hit the Somilsotans first.  And then New York City twice.  It’s the only way to be sure.

And just like uranium, Hillary is unstable, hard to find, and expensive.  If only we could power a reactor with her tears.

It’s like we’re in a bad spy novel, relying on our geopolitical rivals for the fuel that keeps our lights on.  We can stamp our feet as much as we want to, but as long as Mom and Dad are paying the power bills, they call the shots.

With AI data centers projected to gobble up an extra 200-300 gigawatts by 2050 (that’s tripling our nuclear capacity), we’re supposed to ramp up nuclear like it’s no big deal.  It’s like the steady high school girlfriend you’ve been dating off and on for a year who you can always call for a date at the last minute.

Nope.

Building that kind of capacity?

Recent estimates peg adding just 63 GW at $354 billion.  We’re talking trillions when you factor in overruns. The Vogtle plant in Georgia – two reactors, “just” 2.2 GW, clocked in at $35 billion after fifteen years of delays.

Nuclear power makes NASA look prompt and frugal.

Okay, we’ll just do micro-reactors.

Except these micro wonders ditch the “obsolete” 3% enriched uranium for something hotter: 20% enriched stuff, packaged in pellets like, I don’t know, energy kibble. Supposedly, they’re meltdown-proof, corrosion-resistant, great with kids, fun at parties, and perfect for high-temperature gas or molten salt reactors.  And they’re much smaller than kibble, like poppy seed sized, but kibble is a funnier word and I really don’t want to think how stupid it is to build highly radioactive balls that you could put into someone’s potato salad at the neighborhood picnic?

I did figure out where I got the plague:  the flea market.

Cool, so where do we get this 20% enriched uranium for our nuclear kibble?

We downblend our surplus bomb-grade stuff from the Cold War.

The US has 480 metric tons total, but half is reserved for nuking India (it’s the only way to be sure), and 100 tons reserved for Navy reactors.

Bringing those numbers up to date and turning it into nuclear kibble leaves 86 metric tons up for grabs.

So, we have a safe plan.  What’s stopping us?

Adding 250 GW of new nuclear by 2050 (a Department of Energy guess) requires 5,350 metric tons (it’s like a ton, but it has a French accent) of enriched uranium kibble.

Do the math:

86 tons available vs. 5,350 needed?

It’s like trying to fill an Olympic®-sized pool by spitting into it.

Our energy policy in a single meme.

Okay, let’s restart a program that used to make the stuff.  Great!  The Piketon, Ohio centrifuge plant we mentioned above, let’s use that. They’re planning on delivering 900 kilograms (a ton for those of us from countries that have put people on the Moon) by 2026.

So, we need over 5,000 tons.

We’ve made one.  Oh, scratch that, not even one yet.

Want to take odds on that bet?

Even if we magically create tons of usable uranium, Harry Potter-style®, there’s no supply chain for turning it into nuclear kibble.  Right now, it’s a prototype lab in New Mexico fiddling with demos.

We’d need a whole new industry.

And we’d need to have started on this (checks watch) twenty years ago.  That’s the bitch of exponential growth.  We could play with 2030 numbers (“only” 50 GW), but since no concrete has been poured for this new capacity and there is no path to creating this fuel, it’s more realistic to discuss if Superman© could beat The Witcher®.  It’s a non-starter.

I mean, who would win, Captain Kirk or T.J. Hooker?

We’re dependent on foreign fuel, short on domestic capacity, and staring at timelines measured in decades, not quarters.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole “AI will save us” stock market hype or at least stock up on candles and spears.

And hey, if that microreactor ends up in my yard, Homer© and I will host a barbecue, BYOGC.

(Bring your own Geiger counters, you know, potato salad).

Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.

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.