Category: Wealth

Companies Hate You

“Hello, can we have your liver?” – The Meaning of Life

On weekends sometimes I drink water, you know, to keep my liver guessing.

In 2018, a Goldman-Sachs© researcher asked the question:  “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”  This was in relation to what should be considered great news, a company coming up with a one-shot cure for hepatitis C that was over 90% effective.

Where is the profit in making people better?  As someone who depends on my precious liver to take abuse like a housewife in Egypt every Friday and Saturday night, I’m all in favor of things that keep them healthy.  But it doesn’t make sense to Goldman™, because they’d much rather have me be an income stream forever than solve my problem.

This is an example of a world where the Libertarian ideals fall apart, precisely because they presume the lowest common denominator when it comes to morality in society.  There are many flaws with Libertarianism, and this, along with optional personal bodily hygiene intervention are two big ones.  I mean, it isn’t a violation of the non-aggression principle to request they replace the mustard-coated shirt, is it?

A friend of mine stole a lightbulb once.  He said it was because he was in a really dark place.

Let’s look at other places where the free market falls apart.  What about Tinder™?  What happens if Tinder© brings together a guy and a girl and they fall in love and get married and stay married for the rest of their lives?

Tinder® loses two customers.  Forever.  It is not in the algorithm’s interest to make people happy.  It’s in the algorithm’s interest to get two people to meet and not like each other.  Wait, better yet, to like each other superficially enough that they hook up and then both feel hollow and empty inside, driving them to find someone a little closer to what they want.

Yes.  That’s what Tinder© would like best in the whole world.  Unhappy people swiping on their product, generating revenue.  It’s sad, especially because a 9 or 10 guy will break down on a dry-spell Friday night and swipe on a 4 woman, bang her, and now she thinks that she’s worthy of a 9 or 10.  So, she stays on Tinder™ waiting on Prince Chad to sweep her off her feet instead of out of her panties.

Tinder™ is profitable, though, so there’s that.  Match Group©, which owns nine other dating apps, made about $3.5 billion in revenue.  They didn’t make that much money because people got married and abandoned them.  They get rich because of psychological manipulation and the destruction of fertility.

He was sad, he said she was matadorable.

Also in this group with Tinder©?  Social media that feeds your outrage.  I’ve written about quite a bit, and won’t retract a syllable.  While we’re on software, Tinder© is freemium, but there’s worse.  There’s SaaS.

SaaS SuckS.

What’s SaaS?  “Software as a Service”.  Remember the “you won’t own anything, and you’ll love it” soy-face guy with an expression of, “I hope my wife’s boyfriend likes this chai latte I made him”?  Yeah, that’s where this fits in.

I bought Microsoft© Office™ a decade ago.  I had to re-buy three years ago when I bought a new computer.  Couldn’t find that pesky key.  Yes, I know there are free alternatives, but it was worth it to me.

Anyway, I bought it for $149.99.  It costs $99.99 a year.  I’ve already made back almost $150.00.  Well, $150.00 if you round up because pennies in 2026 are as common as black Cambridge© professors that can read.  What Microsoft® really wants, though, is for me to be a customer forever, paying each month, like a little software child that shows up for its allowance and then runs off to the shareholder meeting.

How often do airplanes crash?  Most of them, just once.

And, to do this, they’re willing to sacrifice and continually make the software worse with teams of Indians hired to, well, I guess be Indian and dispose of their trash in National Parks.  How will they pay those H-1Bs in their eternal quest to make your software worse?  With your monthly payments.

It’s not just Microsoft©, but many other software companies like Adobe® are out there, sniffing around your credit card.

But there was a time when at least some people realized they could get rich by being good.  Crazy idea, that.  An example?

Henry Ford famously raised the daily wages of his workers, doubling them while cutting the hours worked each day from 9 hours to 8 hours.  To be fair, his desire wasn’t entirely due to altruism.  He had to hire about 50,000 people a year to keep 14,000 making cars.  In reality, doubling wages ended up lowering Ford’s© cost and doubling his profits.

There was a catch.  To qualify for the full wage increase, you had to be a married man properly supporting your family, or a man over the age of 22 who could prove they were thrifty.  Your wife couldn’t work.  She had to stay home.

I accidently glued myself to my autobiography.  It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

What a monster!  Ford wanted to make sure that his company produced quality American families based on quality American values.  Of course, he got sued.

Today?  It’s a race for the bottom wage by companies that don’t see the United States as their home, just a profit center or division.  And, it has spread.  Universities are now attempting to hire H-1B volleyball coaches making less than $50,000 a year.  Why?  Because no American understands volleyball?

No.  Because they can get someone cheaper.  The idea is that jobs in Missouri should have wages based on Mogadishu or Mumbai.  Jobs in Nevada should compete with Nairobi or Nigerian wage levels.  As pointed out in the last post, when men don’t get raises, women don’t make babies.

It’s a simple way to replace a people, but only after you’ve made them poor.  Medicine should make people feel better, and a cured patient, is better than one on a perpetual prescription.  Unless you’re Goldman-Sachs©.

I just found out I’m colorblind.  Boy, that came out of the orange!

Them?  They want my liver to stop working.  Not entirely, just enough that I have to pay them every month to keep it going, while using crappy software, surrounded by unmarried Gen Zers who can’t get jobs because they’re not from Punjab.

Libertarianism might not be dead, but it’s dying since the only people foolish enough to buy it can’t afford the mortgage on their liver.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Urban Versus Rural Edition

“Your predecessor assumed that rural policing was easy.” – Hot Fuzz

There’s a new urban reality show where judges free inmates who like fishing, called “Off the Hook”.

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

Volume VIII, Issue 3

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Rural Versus Urban:  Who Wins, And Why  – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 820 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Rural Versus Urban:  Who Wins, And Why

In July I watched some summary videos on the Chinese Civil War, especially the 1945-1949 period as well as the Russian Civil War which lasted between 1917 and 1922.  It was interesting, because these wars followed completely different strategies.

Let’s start with the Russians.  The Soviet strength was in the cities.  The rural population was, while drunk, mainly anti-communist.  The Soviet strategy was simple:  stay in the cities with the large recruitable population, maintain control of the railway transportation network, and when Moscow must munch mutton, they’d take the train to Tombov and steal several sheep.

Long, protracted conflicts end up being resource wars.  Cities provided the Russians with munition factories and lots of young men without jobs that could be conscripted to fight for the Soviets.

In Russia, the Soviets won using the cities.  Commies like the Soviets, which they swear would have worked out better if only Stalin were still alive.

I hear Stalin’s favorite vegetable was a Soviet onion.

China was the opposite.  For almost the entire war, the Nationalists owned the cities and most of the rural area.  But after World War II was done, Mao got serious and used the rural area as his base.  The commies in China spent a lot of time on propaganda in rural areas, even having plays to make the rural folks pro-Mao since they didn’t have TikTok© to make them love commies.

The biggest stroke of genius, though, was in giving their newly-recruited peasant soldiers land.  Chinese agricultural land had been mainly owned by a large landowners, and this gave their soldiers skin in the game, and also the belief that they would be executed if Mao lost.  The cosmopolitan Chinese Nationalists lost to the rural communists because the rural commies thought they were fighting for their lives.

What can we takeaway from all of this?

First, I think that with the nationalist/conservative/rural versus GloboLeft/urban split, the resources of electricity, food, and even water in some cases are fully in the hands of the rural block.  Stocks of food are no longer kept in cities as they were in the past.  The Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war lasted four months before they had to shoot the zoo animals to eat them.

The Germans threw bread at the French during the siege.  They called it gluten-tag.

Today’s cities have about three days of food in them in the stores, and three days in the individual homes.  So, inside a week, people would get hungry.  Not starve, but get hungry unless they got sea and air lifts of food inbound.  Given the levels of self-control of certain segments of the population, well, how long before cites go full Alferd Packer?  Since they’d be surrounded by millions of residents with more weapons and ammo than all the militaries of the world, combined, they could be easily contained.

Cities also suffer from tHeiR GreaTeST StrENTh:  Diversity®.  Why would Somalians fight for Minneapolis or Minnesota?  If their cushy scam life was threatened, they’d just leave.  Or fight against the rest of the people in town to take it over.  Same with Dearborn, Michigan.  Think those moslems would fight side by side with blacks from Detroit?  And the GloboLeft Feminista© and TranBrigades® would fold as soon as the air conditioning went off.

But this is a “national” civil war that had sufficient coordination to make a national or largely national confrontation happen.

What about local wars?  Most of the trigger-pullers in the armed forces are rural.  In a regional or state-based conflict, like Texas declaring independence, how many will break training?  The 101st Airborne was certainly fine fixing bayonets against high school students to force integration, so will they follow orders against Americans?  In the hypothetical case of Texas leaving, probably so, but it’s far from certain.

What do cities control?  Well, money.  They could shut down the banks.  Since this is imaginary, I’d imagine the disruption would be huge, but manageable at some level since the grain is still in the silos in at the railyard.  Of course, leadership, communications, and cohesion across a regional or national level is crucial.

The biggest threats that the GloboLeft present is either on a short term or a long term.  In a short term, a coup of the systems by the rising Democratic Socialists is becoming a real threat, especially since they’d immediately co-op the existing government systems and promise that things would return to “normal”, but their definition of “normal” would require a lot of executions.

The other threat is the long march through our institutions that’s been ongoing for years.  In this case, any kinetic civil war is just a mop-up of an already occupied area, which is why stopping that long march is imperative.

Violence and Censorship:

What didn’t they tell you about that black woman surrounded by Patriot Front members?

If you don’t like Flock, the media is selling that you’re a flocking terrorist:

Against PRIDE marches?  Fort Worth PD would like to arrest you:

And then block you:

I’m glad Bondi is gondi, especially because she bought the hate speech meme:

Moslems are child rapists, and it’s your fault:

Wipe your phone when wheels touch down, people.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery.

Back to an upward trend, though.  Kids can’t afford houses:

But at least they can get Cheetos®.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are down.  Too hot for all that?

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month.

Economic:

The economy ticked down slightly last month, and there are headwinds.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started, no thanks to women.

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month.  Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS
https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/07/the-dsa-wants-to-abolish-america/
https://x.com/canarymission/status/2073885328109085043
https://x.com/BillSmi72331024/status/2073694924717867490
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/HOGqYcJXwAA4WPv-1.png
https://www.city-journal.org/article/teen-takeovers-streets-us-cities-looting

GOOD GUY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ee7VNcc1PQ

ONE GUY
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2083709213792977086
https://nypost.com/2026/08/02/us-news/hero-armed-citizen-opened-fire-on-idaho-in-n-out-gunman-during-deadly-shooting/

BODY COUNT
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/deaths-now-outnumber-births-17-us-states
https://archive.ph/BeLhx
https://www.statista.com/chart/20183/us-population-growth-shares-births-immigration/
https://www.kellyservices.com/insights/new-batch-of-college-graduates-faces-an-increasingly-shaky-job-market
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/labor_force_chart_annotated-800x.jpg
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/image-1-800×288.jpg
https://x.com/DeepBlueCrypto/status/2039454816707969158/photo/1

VOTE COUNT
https://www.fvap.gov/guide/appendix/state-elections
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/07/we-finally-have-evidence-after-examining-155000-absentee/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/21/thousands-of-non-citizens-registered-to-vote-in-nj-due-to-software-error-governor-says-01006373
https://www.themidwesterner.news/2026/07/250000-noncitizens-found-on-voter-rolls-in-four-states-as-jocelyn-benson-refuses-to-share-data/
https://www.westernjournal.com/mamdani-election-bombshell-fraudulent-votes-cast-margin-mamdanis-victory-says-election-auditor/
https://apnews.com/article/california-primary-rejected-mail-ballots-voting-2291684fe4544cab2301f8965abc8f79
https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/28/the-state-of-american-elections-for-the-left-the-worse-the-better/
https://www.vanityfair.com/story/midterm-hijack-plan

CIVIL WAR
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/magazine/heritage-foundation-trump-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1FA.eGuT.I6EiteSM-ryC&smid=url-share
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-and-john-thune-throw-gop-into-full-blown-civil-war/
https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2026/07/a-minnesota-secession-its-not-as-impossible-as-you-might-think/
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5879397
https://nypost.com/2026/06/15/us-news/californias-newest-congressman-plots-massive-secession-of-rural-areas-to-form-new-state-serious/
https://modernity.news/2026/07/16/what-is-this-really-about-uk-government-announces-mass-stockpile-order-wargames/

They Broke The Deal: The Economics Of Loyalty And Patriotism

“Because we live here!” – Red Dawn

And it’s no accident.

Over the past few decades, studies are showing something unusual happening:  people aren’t willing to fight for their country anymore, especially in the West.  Back when I was a kid watching Red Dawn, I couldn’t see myself not fighting for my nation if it was in need, and I was far from alone.

What changed?

Well, I think the deal that I had has been broken so completely that they simply don’t see a country worth fighting for anymore.  At all.  Why?  Because the economics and culture I grew up in have evaporated, been swallowed in a sea of foreigners, or been the subject of a leveraged buyout.

Let me explain.

When I was a kid, sure, there were ups and downs in the country’s economy, but getting a job was easy.  I had one at the age of 14.  Now, the “J-1” visa seeks to import kids to take the paper delivery jobs and other jobs American kids can no longer do.  Like what?  Like mowing.  If I wanted to mow the lawn for the local Exxon® station and I was 14, would they hire me?

Hell no!  Child labor laws and corporate policies would dictate that I was child labor.  I didn’t have a $2 million liability policy.  I didn’t have an OSHA-approved health and safety plan.  Oh, and mowing is too dangerous for 14-year-old kids anyway according to every state.

And where is my W-9 and my banking information?  Corporations have the same sense of humor as the DMV.

We see cities back down after health authorities or zoning authorities crack down on kids running lemonade stands.  We chuckle, but the health inspector isn’t laughing, he’s got a clipboard and a pension.  It’s reality.  Every regulation is stacked against them, and when they get to be 18, it gets worse.

Now, farmers and ranchers want to hire illegals.  Sure, they did it when I was a kid, too, but it was harder to get them, so they had to pay local kids to buck bales, too.  Now you have Senators trying to replace Americans because Americans want too darn much money.  The TradNationalist values of “what is good for America” have been replaced with, “Why shouldn’t Americans in America compete in a global race to the bottom for labor cost?”

Youth today are getting ads to finance a pizza order at 21% interest.  But we need to import more illegals.

When your senator doesn’t represent you at all.

Houses?  Houses went from a shelter you could build yourself to an investment asset class suitable for Blackrock®.  Because of that, houses have to comply with about 15,000 pages of building codes.  Oh, and the builder will hire illegals to build it, too.

Housing is at the least affordable in the history of the United States, and of course the “Conservative” politicians want to import more people to build more houses.

Huh?  Every housing problem in the United States is downstream of immigration and investment bankers, and the immigration the investment bankers demand.

But hey, what 18-year-old doesn’t want to sign up to fight for Blackrock’s™ investment return or the building inspector, or infinity foreigners?  Yes.  Timmy from Athens, Georgia should be proud to sign up to die so Ganesh from Mumbai can use his fraudulent diploma to take a do-nothing job at Microsoft© that he got from his uncle Vivek.

And if he has kids?  What then?  I went to school in a 90% white school with 80% kids that were from intact families.  Today in order to avoid diversity and be around parents with traditional values a new Timmy would have to shell out for a private school tuition.

It’s worse than that, though because it’s now corrosive on every phase of their lives.  What pension do kids today expect?  The good ones have been hollowed out.  Back before the floodgates to the world opened, companies put pensions in place so that they could compete for scarce American labor.  As immigration, both legal and illegal, increased the reason to have pensions disappeared.  Now it’s “invest your own money in a 401k, and, hey, good luck with that.”

And Social Security?  Why would Ganesh want to pay for Timmy’s retirement?

Beyond that, children in the West are taught that they are the evil products of slavers and colonizers and misogynists and that Western Culture is inferior to the quaint cannibalistic ways of New Guinea.  Why, then, would they think of themselves as anything but evil?

Why would Timmy fight for a country that is evil?

And why fight for a country that doesn’t look like you, at all?  Pakistanis are (86%) willing to fight and die for Pakistan.  People in the UK aren’t (33%) willing to fight and die because they wouldn’t be fighting for the traditional English peoples, but for the Pakistanis in the UK.

This graph is not an accident.

The constant import of people turns a nation of people who have the same heritage into a country of mixed peoples.  Oh, and the people are randomly plucked from the gene pool of the entire world, including especially the shallow end of the gene pool.

The teeming cesspit of India (76%) and the perennially unemployed Armenians (96%) are much more willing to fight than the United States (41%) because India is filled with Indians, Armenia is filled with Armenians, and in America, at least 29% of the people in the country are illegal, on visas, or are first or second generation immigrants with little tie to the country.

Going back to a bacon and egg breakfast and comparing it to our nation:  immigrants are the chicken, they’re involved and can fly back home anytime.  Americans?  They’re the pig, they’re committed.

They have no place left to go.

India, Pakistan, and Armenia are all giving their youth a better deal than American kids have, and more of a stake in their nation.  Even China, “repressive” China, likes Chinese people better than the Western governments like their citizens.  China is interested in the Chinese, whereas the governments of the West, no matter how loudly and how often their citizens tell them they don’t want immigrants, simply will not stop importing them.

Yes, 1.5 million a year is slow walking it.

If having immigrant Indians and Mexicans was something that would help their country, wouldn’t China be importing them?

I’ll note that when the connection that a citizen gets from the government wanes, that’s where civil wars and revolutions start.  If the government isn’t worth dying for, it’s not long until the people decide the government has to die.

As it stands now, though, we now have a country (not a nation) that the youth don’t feel is worth fighting for.  Unless we can convince Timmy he should be enthusiastic about dying for his loyalty to the DMV.

Strippers, Credit Cards, Basement A.I., And Economic Collapse

“I’ve calculated the precise distance, taking into account the acceleration and wind resistance retroactive from the moment the lightning strikes, which will be in exactly 7 minutes and 22 seconds.” – Back to the Future It’s easy to confuse Stephen Hawking and Tony Hawk.  Both loved ramps. Everything is fine before the car hits the … Continue reading “Strippers, Credit Cards, Basement A.I., And Economic Collapse”

“I’ve calculated the precise distance, taking into account the acceleration and wind resistance retroactive from the moment the lightning strikes, which will be in exactly 7 minutes and 22 seconds.” – Back to the Future

It’s easy to confuse Stephen Hawking and Tony Hawk. Both loved ramps.

Everything is fine before the car hits the wall.

And everything looks fine. Let’s think about the economy compared to a car.

The car is at a stop sign. It’s moved zero feet. It’s at rest, and it isn’t accelerating. I know, I know, still no reason for a woman to be behind the wheel.

Now it starts to move. It’s moved 200 feet (10 kilometers). It’s now moving at around 15 feet per second (10 millicuries/fortnight). Since it was initially at rest, we can assume it has accelerated. Accelerated is just a fancy term for “put the pedal down”. I accelerate smoothly at the same rate since I’m neglecting air resistance and have determined that the world is perfectly spherical, frictionless, isothermal and isosomethingelse.

I hear the Orc© siege engines used Mordor oil.

Eventually, some time down the road the car reaches my desired speed, which is five miles over the limit, just like everyone else. I pull my foot back so that it’s moving along at a constant velocity. I’m chewing up the miles, and soon enough will be there at the appointment to have my backhair waxed off again.

Reasonable, right?

NO! This is a catastrophe! It’s hitting a brick wall. I mean, it’s a catastrophe if my car is made by Nvidia©.

Nvidia® has a Price to Earnings ratio (PE) of 31. That means that people are betting that not only will Nvidia™ keep accelerating, it will do so for a while since it would take 31 years of earnings to equal the current stock price.

Nvidia© is the largest company in the world at nearly $5 trillion in valuation . . . has to get about 40%-50% bigger to match the same PE as, say, Microsoft®. That’s the bet on companies like that.

But A.I. is different. The bet isn’t that the company will keep growing, the bet is that the growth will keep accelerating. Forever. That’s what keeps Jensen Huang in champagne, leather jackets and hot chicks. Okay, he’s apparently happily married, but I’m not letting the truth get in the way of a good line.

What gets burning hot right before they freeze? Laptops.

But even the projected growth of A.I. is . . . not going to keep up.

In 2023, the big 4 spent $145 billion.
In 2024, the big 4 spent $230 billion.
In 2025, the big 4 spent $410 billion.
In 2026, the big 4 are projected to spend $725 billion.
in 2027? $920 billion.
In 2028? $1.08 trillion.
In 2029? $1.22 trillion.

Now, I don’t believe these numbers. At all.

But in them is an interesting nugget. If you look not at the spend, but the rate of increase in the spend, it goes down starting in 2027. You can do the math. The foot is coming off of the accelerator.

In reality, these projections are already bogus.

The implied new capacity of electric power required for this nonsense proves it:
in 2025, 37GW
in 2026, 66GW
in 2027, 84GW
in 2028, 98GW
in 2029, 111GW.

Hahahahahhahahahaha!

Not happening. Marty will never get back to 1985!

How does A.I. make sweaters? On the Interknit.

New electrical generation and transmission often takes 4-10 years to come online. If Nvidia® is making their chips, the place they’ll have to go is a warehouse center on a pallet, not a data center, since current projections show a 30GW-60GW gap already in 2027.

111 GW in 3 years? This is not happening.

And it’s even worse. Elon’s big data center running old Nvidia® chips, and not even the new extra-spicey chips? He’s renting that one out. Yeah, SpaceX® is an A.I. company, but apparently, they don’t need the whole place. But we need to spend nearly a trillion this year to make places like the one Elon is renting out.

Hmm.

If that was it, we could all just sit back with popcorn and watch the whole thing catch fire. But that’s not it. By shoving over a trillion dollars in spend and probably $2 trillion more in orders for concrete and steel and Transformers© and Autobots® the economy has been horribly distorted.

Don’t worry, they say. This is all funded from private credit and equity. So what if Nvidia© drops back into the tres comma club after being in the quatro comma club. What’s a few trillion between friends? A.I. is soaking up all the money in the country.

But wait! Private credit is being bundled up into batches and sold into pension plans. It’s investment grade, just like those CDO mortgages. Remember those and how well all that went back in 2008? This is innovation. Besides, 401ks already all in. A.I. and tech stocks are already more than half of the S&P 500, probably 20% more than back before Dotcom.

One of my commenters said my posts were medium-rare. Well, what he actually said was “They’re not well done.”

A.I.? Your economy is soaking in it! The aptly named Larry Fink noted that the funding for A.I. is coming from “your savings accounts and pension accounts.” He’s betting $10 trillion in the next decade will be spent on this.

But, as amazing as that sounds, that’s not everything. A.I. is fluffing up the profits of nearly every other business in the country. My laptop is more expensive because of this. Electricity is more expensive because of this. Natural gas is more expensive because of this. Gasoline? Yup. Those jobsite gennies don’t run on SpaceX® stock.

A.I. has infected everything. Hey, don’t have a frown. OpenAI® lost only $38.5 billion in 2025. That’s the sort of performance I want to bet the entire economy on. Oh, and OpenAI© just barely missed their ad revenue target by 90%.

It’s got a comfy feeling. Especially when a six-year-old Chinese kid shows up with a free and open-weight A.I. model that’s nearly as good as the top-line A.I. models. It’s called Kimi K3 and I could run it in my house with a few Apple® machines.

Comfy, right?

I mean, it’s comfy if you’re Sam Altman who has a bunker to protect him from people with missing pensions and plentiful pitchforks. I mean, a 3-d printer can print a pitchfork, right?

“You can say hate, can’t you? I thought you could.”

We got off “easy” from the Dotcom bubble because it was based on equity. Pets.com® just imploded, and people lost a few bucks in the market. Painful, but it didn’t really strike at the core of the economy, and it left us with a batch of fiber optics that we’re still using and still (at least in some places) haven’t maxed out. The Dotcom Bubble was going out on a weekend bender when your wallet was flush with cash and being broke on Monday morning.

This is more like the Great Recession, which also used housing prices to creep into every activity, but also was focused on using debt to fuel the party. This was going out on a weekend bender and waking up to find out that you’d maxed out your credit cards on Charity. Not UNICEF®, no, the stripper, Charity. And that she might be pregnant.

And that she gave you herpes.

Unpleasant, but when we could just borrow again, we could get through the 2010s, plus I think they’ve got some sort of pill that controls outbreaks.

Now? It’s probably both of those put together. And while the data centers might be useful to train up yet a newer A.I. with more parameters, the data centers won’t be needed to run the models. I can run a top-of-the-line A.I. in the basement of my house for a modest investment and a few kW.

With all the race swapping Disney® is doing now, the lead character from Beauty and the Beast will now be a Mexican, Taco Belle.

Not GW, kW. That I could have running in a week, for about $40,000, all while Larry Ellison is sacrificing virgins during the Blood Moon© to help keep the critical path of the construction schedule from slipping. You can bet that if this is real, they’ll make it illegal.

It’s going to break. When?

2026? 2027?

How bad?

Best case, the economy contracts 1% or 2.5%.
Base case, the economy contracts 2.5% to 5%.
Run and hide case, the economy contracts 5% to 8% to . . . ?

I asked my doctor why he uses the little rubber hammer. “Oh, I get a kick out of it.”

Who loses, besides us?

Well, Jensen Huang might have to start drinking Boone’s Farm© instead of champers. Larry Fink might have to skip a dip in his money bath. Elon Musk might have to take his 47 kids to Denny’s©. I kid. Nothing will change for these guys.

And that long, straight, flat road I was talking about? It might just turn into a roller coaster once the foot comes off the accelerator. Here’s hoping that you’re tall enough for this ride, because Charity is probably going to want her back payments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wealth concentrates, it does not equalize.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The printing press was an enormous equalizer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barriers collapsed.

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

Technology does not care about fairness.

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

Any pizza is a personal pizza.

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

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

Is A.I. an equalizer, then?

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

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

The Economics of the Surveillance State

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

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

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

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

Let’s start with Flock™ cameras.

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

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

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

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

How did the farmer stalk his ex?  He tractor.

Next up?

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

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

Laptops aren’t safe, either.

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

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

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

They promise.  Pinky swear, even.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birthright Citizenship, The Economics Of Infinity, And The Inevitability Of War

“I want immunity from prosecution, asylum in the U.S., and citizenship.” – xXx

All media “as-found”

June 30, 2026, just shy of the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, will live in infamy.

All five women of the Supreme Court voted for birthright citizenship on June 30. This includes the Chief Justice, John Roberts, who I assume identifies as a woman on Tuesdays and alternate weekends.

The five voted that popping a kid out anywhere that the United States has as a state or territory makes the invader kid a citizen. It’s called “birthright citizenship”, and wasn’t really a thing for the first 60 or so years, at least, of the 14th Amendment. The 14th was really about removing doubts about the citizenship status of freed black slaves and their children.

But now, if you’re Consuela from Caracas giving birth in Carlsbad, California, your cholo child is a citizen. If you’re Ning Naun from Nanking, giving birth in Nashua, New Hampshire, your nursling nipper is now a national. That’s the law of the land, even if you are here illegally.

This effectively removes the border.

If an illegal steps one foot into Arizona and squats a tot, the squatted tot is just as American as Neil Armstrong. If a woman on a legal visa drops a moppet, even if she overstays? It’s an American citizen, just as American as Mark Twain.

The American people, therefore, have no say in who becomes an American.

It’s like someone breaks into my house and pops a preemie there and now that preschooler is now my child and I have to treat it like my child and give it exactly the same (or better!) treatment as my other kids even though it’s much stupider, much needier, and much more violent.

I guess I would be fine with that if I hated my own kids.

But I don’t. I love my kids. And, I love my people.

I’ve gone over at length in previous posts how immigrants, both legal and illegal, are a net negative on the country as a whole economically. It’s not really arguable because the facts are so stark.

Why they’ve been allowed is simple.

For the GloboLeftElite, they represent a new voter bloc that’s skewed to vote against nationalism and for communism.

For the Institutional Elite, they represent more demand for their services and more job for their gay friends.

For the “Idaho Rancher” they represent a way to get cheap labor and avoid paying the prices it would take for Americans to do the work, and the “Idaho Rancher” doesn’t have to pay for the services like medical and child care and prisons.

For the “Wall Street Firm” it’s a way to get cheap labor that will never say no, and will never report you for doing something shady.

These groups are all traitors.

You could say “enlightened economic self-interest” but you’d be wrong. They are the ticks that view the United States as an economic zone to be sucked into an empty skin sack for profits or as a place to build political power for ideas that are inimical to our way of life.

I’m not an extremist.

I’m not opposed 100% to immigration. I think we should consider starting it again in 2326 after a 200-year moratorium. I mean, we should consider it then. Maybe.

The problem with this ruling is two-fold. I’ll start with the economic. There are between 400 million and 700 million people that would move to the United States if they could. Iowa would soon look like Islamabad, Pakistan. Lubbock, Texas would soon look like Lagos, Nigeria. Diluting the ability of the nation to make wealth won’t make us wealthier, it will just turn our country into a slum.

If it were only economic, I might be able to make the case that this was okay. We’d eventually catch up in wealth production. Eventually.

But it won’t, and that’s because of the second problem:

Genetics leads to culture leads to virtue leads to politics leads to outcomes.

That’s it. You can’t take 100, or 1,000 or 10,000,000 Nigerians and expect them to create anything but Nigeria. Same thing with Indians. Or Danes. Or Chinese. Studies of twins separated at birth prove that heritability not only of intellectual ability, but also attitudes and behaviors. Why are Indians turning Canada into India?

Because that’s what Indians do. Because that’s what Indians are. If you want your country to look like India, import more Indians. If you don’t want your country to look like India, don’t let them in.

And if you go back to my map, culture leads to virtue. This is the true failing of multicultural societies, since they cannot form a shared sense of virtue. Why are there rape gangs wherever Indians or Pakistani or Sub-Saharan Africans congregate, even in countries that don’t consider rape a spectator sport?

Because rape is okay in their culture, and if they bring their culture to Dublin, they’ll rape in Dublin. Look it up. It’s not a “because they’re in the United States or Europe” thing, it’s who they are. If only the most rape-y breed, well, then the people will become genetically more rape-y. So what happens when their people become the cops?

Pit bulls are different than golden retrievers. Wishing won’t make it less so, and why are we allowing a never-ending stream of pit bulls into the country?

Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore said:

I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils . . . I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.

If a country cannot determine who is allowed to become a citizen, then the result will be a multi-cultural society. What happens then? If the societies are close and have time, they can grow together, the British and Irish. Oh, wait.

To enforce a true multicultural society requires strong, swift, and sure enforcement of the rules. There was a 19-year-old American in Singapore who was caned in Singapore in 1994.

Why?

The American was being an ass. He deserved it. But also because Singapore has to be strict and severe because it is multi-cultural. To maintain a multi-cultural society that doesn’t turn into Mad Max® requires at least three of the four: justice, discipline, authoritarianism, and prosperity.

The alternative to that?

War.

War is not solely men in uniforms ranked in order on opposing sides of a line. If we encouraged people to move to a foreign country to take control, that would be war. How is that different from what India is doing? How is that different from what Islam is doing? How is that different from what Haiti . . . okay, skip that, Haiti isn’t bright enough to have a strategy more complicated than cannibalism.

In a multi-cultural society, it becomes a free-for-all, a war of all against all.

Multicultural societies don’t blend into harmony because we wish it so. History shows the exact opposite. But, hey, we’ve either got caning or cannibalism to look forward to, so there’s that.

SpaceX®: The Final Frontier?

“Time to musk up.” – Anchorman:  The Legend of Ron Burgundy

You know who gives kids a bad name?  Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has just launched his SpaceX® IPO at a price of $135.  If you were in on the initial purchase, you’ve already printed money, as the current price is now at $216 as I write this.  This is bitcoin level price increase.  And, it shows Elon Musk’s meme effect.  I expect soon enough that he’ll announce he’s moved his headquarters to an orbital space bombardment platform.

For tax reasons, you know.

As much as the GloboLeftists like to make fun of Elon for buying Twitter© and turning it into X© and destroying 30% of its market value, Musk has certainly had the better of that conversation since he’s now a trillionaire and his having an amplified voice on X© certainly hasn’t hurt.

Regardless:  quatro commas.

That’s a lot of money.

Step 2:  Profit.  Step 1:  Time Machine.

As I write this, SpaceX© has a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion dollars.  That’s more than Amazon©.  It’s more than Saudi Aramco®.  There are only four stocks bigger than SpaceX©: Apple®, Nvidia™, Google©, and Microsoft© and I think it passed Microsoft® this afternoon.  And, in the scheme of things, it’s pretty close to being the biggest company.

Ever.

To put this into perspective, SpaceX© by itself is now worth as much money as all the aerospace companies and defense companies in the world.  Combined.

Part of this is due to the relatively small number of SpaceX™ shares available.  SpaceX© sold 5% of itself, getting $85 billion to pay off debt and buy Elon something nice.  If Elon had dumped all of the stock, I’m betting it wouldn’t have near that valuation because someone would have had to buy the other $2.7 trillion worth of shares, and it’s not like Jeff Bezos has that in his couch cushions.

To be fair, no one has that in their couch cushions except the federal government, and they’re too busy giving it to Democrat agitators to bring in foreigners and agitate for communism.  You know, things that benefit society.

The North Korean gymnast didn’t win in the Olympics©, but her execution was flawless.

That small float has led to the stock, in my opinion, being a meme.  It’s the Dogecoin© of equities.  It has enormous value because Elon is associated with it.  It also, unlike the usual IPOs accessible only to folks with a half million bucks or so, is accessible to anyone that can fog a mirror.  Beyond that, it’s also going to be required to be picked up by several stock indices soon.  This will require things like pension funds and mutual funds to buy it.

What is “it”, though?  What makes up SpaceX™?

The smallest piece is actually what people think of:  the rockets.  Even though Musk has the single largest, most active, and most efficient space program on the planet, that’s not a huge market.  I mean, it’s more money than I have, but Elon’s biggest customer is . . . Elon.

Starlink© is the only profitable piece of this project.  My eldest, The Boy, has Starlink©.  He likes it.  It’s good, if you’re not close to an actual wire.  The problem for other people wanting to make a space-based Internet is that Elon has the big lead here, and there’s probably only room for one company.

Jeff Bezos was going to try to make an orbital communications network, but his rockets don’t work, so he has no way to send stuff to space cheaply.  Cheaply?  Speaking of Jeff’s wife . . .

I digress.

I knew Bezos’ rocket program schedule was in trouble when he hired Elton John.  I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.

So, what else is SpaceX©?  It’s the X™ formerly known as Twitter©.  Which seems an odd pairing with the other two, but not as strange as the last piece:  xAI®.

In summary, SpaceX© is:

Rockets:  Total market?  $370 billion.  Not sure if that includes the Iranian market.  As it is, he’s showing a $662 million loss in the rocket segment in 1Q26, but that includes blowing up all of those Starship™ tests.  If NASA were doing the same thing, it would have already cost a trillion dollars and they wouldn’t have launched the first one yet.

If some of SpaceX® junk destroys a city in north Texas, would the headline be “Debris does Dallas”? (as-found)

Space connections:  Total market?  $1.6 trillion.  Elon can probably earn most of this and it’s already earning him over a billion dollars a year.  As the Internet is primarily made of porn and cat videos, made $1.1 billion last quarter selling virtual pussy . . . cats.

The old Twitter™:  No known profit.  By transferring the old Twitter® to SpaceX™ that does make Elon the X® owner.

AI:  $26.5 trillion.  Right now, he’s losing only $2.5 billion a quarter at this, which makes him a rank amateur when compared with OpenAI®.  OpenAI© lost $38.5 billion last year, so Musk needs to lose a lot more money this year to catch up.

One of these is not like the other.  And I’d argue that one of these isn’t remotely reasonable.

You can do your own math.  But the big thing to me is this is quite like Elon Musk’s junk drawer that has a flashlight and an old 9-volt battery and some slightly-dull colored pencils and an old AC adaptor that I’ve forgotten exactly what it adapted.  Starlink™ and the rockets make sense together.  But xAI®?  Was that just thrown in there to puff up the price?

It was.  And maybe sometime in the future he’ll toss Tesla© and Grimes and some old socks in there, too.

See!  I didn’t make this up.  It takes accountants to make things up. (as-found)

The big connection there would be that, I guess, that Elon can make orbital data centers that don’t require power generation on Earth or cooling water.  And Elon’s only going to build (checks notes) a million of them.  That’s pretty ambitious since he’s only tossed up 10,000 Starlink© satellites at about $2 million each.  If he got the same price (doubtful) it would still cost $2 trillion.  Probably closer to $20 trillion.

Which is . . . not going to happen.  In fact, I think the SpaceX™ IPO will be looked back as the point where the A.I. bubble began to deflate.  But I’ve been wrong before:  I missed some bits and wouldn’t have bet that it would have gone up as fast as it has.

Remember like they said in Apollo 13, failure is always an option. (as-found)

What is the end game, then?

Well, Elon’s end game is to make Elon insanely rich, for one.  To be fair, he’s already gotten insanely rich through selling electric cars and built a space program that exceeds the capacity of every other nation on Earth, and has fathered something like 70 little Musks which might be part of his own diversification strategy:  a genetic junk-drawer, as it were.

What’s the long game?  Maybe an orbital space bombardment platform.  Or a government on Mars peopled entirely by those offspring.

Well, at least now he has space for rent.

This is not advice or a solicitation to buy or sell or rent or trade or loan or barter or whatever other adjective.  It’s a humor post.  I actually hope Elon does send up a million rockets, but I’m thinking it’s more likely he’ll have a million kids, which, with enough investor money is much more possible but I wouldn’t want go on a long car trip with a million kids because I’d be tempted to sell or rent or trade or loan or barter the lowest performing 10% of the children into the PEZ® mines.  Also, I think having a million kids would make me sore.  Which also might be Elon’s plan.  Regardless, this isn’t investment, dating, or reproductive advice.

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

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

We are becoming poor.

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

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

Same price.

Or twice the price.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why are we sliding backward?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re poorer.

Stunningly accurate.  (meme as-found)

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

The crazy part? Fixing it is simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why don’t we do that?

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

The incentives are perfectly aligned.  For them.

For the rest of us? Not so much.

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

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

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

The alternative to the pain, though, is worse.

I am so tired of sawdust.

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

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

 

(all as-found)

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

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

Again.

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

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

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

The rich already live in a different reality.

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

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

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

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

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

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

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

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

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

Enormous costs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See, no free A.I.  (meme as-found)

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

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

A.I. will be bigger.

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

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

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

What does this mean for regular folks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The streets would be desserted.