Anti-Mercantilism is Illegal, Which Disproves Mercantilism

I would be more than happy to demonstrate the superiority of anti-Mercantilist economics at any time. 

I can't, because it's illegal.
It's doesn't have to be illegal to be poor, because being rich is just better. You have to outlaw being rich if you insist on folk being poor.

If Mercantilists (basically Communists) weren't afraid of being proven wrong, they wouldn't have to outlaw the alternative. Nobody has to outlaw jumping to the Moon, because it can't be done. You can't disprove gravity, because it's true. If trade were genuinely a bad idea, traders would suffer. At best, folk would constantly put up fences between themselves and traders. 

In reality suppressing trade is astonishingly difficult, because trade just is the economy. Well over 99% of wealth is trade-based. Trade doesn't magically stop being cooperation when it happens across imaginary lines on a map. Trade just is the invisible hand. Cartel economics require extraordinary violence, which means it's extraordinarily expensive, which means it goes out of business if it has to pay for itself instead of stealing your pay.

See also: if single-family homes were as popular as car-addicts claim they are, if the American Dream was the dream of many Americans, non-single-family homes wouldn't have to be outlawed. It would happen by itself. It does have to be outlawed, demonstrating that Americans don't dream of the American Dream.

Elder Scrolls vs. Degeneracy

"Tamriel is super gay. Daedric Princes are gender non-conforming. Vivec is all genders. Gay men and women exist in Tamriel. Argonians can change gender. Trans people like Alchemy exist. That is all"
https://twitter.com/TamrielTraverse/status/1541847053050994691

Hey moron, all those are villains. Except the Argonians, who represent a real thing that commonly happens in reptiles and amphibians. 

That homos have to be vilified at all, instead of taking it for granted that gross things are gross, is a serious indictment of the culture. That said, it's better than giving deviance to all the heroes.

False Intimacy of School

You shouldn't track favours with your friends with money. You should both be well into the green, so who exactly is benefiting more doesn't matter. The costs your friends impose on you should be so much lower than the benefits that asking for compensation is genuinely insulting outside very special circumstances.

A key feature of narcissism is false intimacy. Such as allowing a stranger to impose a cost on you without paying for it. The narcissist has a very twisted relationship with attachment, typically having boundaries that include everyone. "Everyone is identical so everyone is me." It would be weird not to be intimate with yourself.

At school, you don't pay and don't get paid. As if you're in an intimate relationship with your school. As small children (say, before 8) should indeed be in an intimate relationship with their caregiver. Except, of course, you're extremely not in an intimate relationship. School isn't in the least bit interested in letting you impose costs on it, and will react to even minor transgressions with extraordinary violence, just like an insecure government does.

The school is intentionally designed to model narcissistic sociology. Encourages you to destroy or disregard your boundaries.

Vs. Moldbug "Right"-wing Policies

Ultimately the point of ideas is to affect behaviour.
Caveat: I also play with ideas as a hobby, though this has the practical effect of improving my ability to deal with ideas I use for behaviour. 

If reading about an idea neither changes your plans nor constitutes a rep of one of the sets, then it was a waste of time. 

However, don't stop there: it's only truly a waste of time if you do it habitually, because no well-designed experiment can fail. You can use the pointless idea by going up one level and doing a rep of the sets anyway. You predicted that reading about this idea wouldn't be a waste of time, and it was. You learned something after all. Figure out how you erroneously assessed it as a not-waste so you can fail to do so in the future. 

I myself have recently become better at this. I shall demonstrate.

This piece has many ideas which are fundamentally confused, off-topic, or straight lies. Who cares about those? They are a waste of time.

In the past I have enumerated the errors, to suggest that the plan of reading this stuff respectfully should be changed. However, I had not fully grasped that you cannot wake one who is pretending to be asleep. The fact that ideas are for behaviour is not rocket science. Mortals are not blank slates who believe whatever is written upon them. (Albeit they frequently pretend they believe whatever they're told to believe.) They can tell if reading a thing is serving their interests. If they continue to read without changing their behaviour, it means they have some irrational values. Cope and demand for propaganda. Defence against changing behaviour. They are weak, and you cannot make someone un-weak via argument, and especially not by fisking a third party. 

Put another way: either you secure your shit and verify the claims, or you don't. If you do, fisking is unnecessary. If you don't, fisking is irrelevant. It's about signalling and authority or whatever. Truth is not a reliable social signal; as a political ally it regularly offends your other allies. Truth inherently knocks down every mortal authority from time to time, displaying their weaknesses. 

 

First and most importantly, I will repeat all the ideas which are true and personally relevant.

Oh, uh, we're already done. Unfortunate. 

I guess it's time for the ideas which accidentally reveal something of use.  

 

"In most cases, he will probably not even start from the status quo—he will create a new structure from scratch. Only minimal continuity of staff is required, mainly in the security forces."

Note that this is equivalent to failure of governance. Market shocks cause recessions. Bigger shocks cause depressions. Realistically USG is 50% of the economy or more; shocks of that size cause total collapse. E.g. the sudden cessation of food stamps would result in millions of starvation deaths; multiply that across all government contractors.
Slowing this down enough that it's not a shock would likely take longer than a human lifetime.

In fact the security forces are the one thing you absolutely have to replace, because holding most of the government constant while eliminating the rest one piece at a time would require tremendous physical pressure, which means they need to be tremendously loyal to you in particular. Fundamentally the previous Regime's departments are all rebels, yet you have to continue to pay them to come to work. Have fun preventing malicious compliance. 

As a result we can see the options are: status quo, failure of governance, or failure of governance. Which is why Rome died not with a bang, but with a whimper; anyone in a position to cause failure of governance decided it was a bad idea. Anyone except Gnon, that is.

 

"The only form of public policy that offers any interest is absolute public policy—the policy choices that are available to any new regime, regardless of the old regime’s standards, practices, policy, personnel, philosophy and organization."

Occasionally it is useful to work out how a sane, non-coercive government would lead, because it turns out you can lead yourself there. (E.g. I accidentally converted myself to my current religion. Turns out religions, although they're supposed to be social phenomena, don't have to be. A real religion has a real divine patron; if you do what your patron says to do, you're devout, and what others think or say about it could not be more irrelevant. A Pope is a crutch for weaklings, even under ideal conditions.)

Most of the time it's none of your business. The market is smarter than you. Whatever untested prototype government you come up with will have to be radically modified before becoming a production model. The diminishing returns are harsh; if you work twice as hard on perfecting your prototype, that merely means 90% of the effort will have to be immediately trashed upon contact with Reality, instead of 83%. 

On the plus side, one of the useful bits is property rights. "Secure your shit." Talking about relative policy in public is also useless. Either it's your bit of government and you don't need anyone's agreement to change it, or it's not your piece of government and talking about it is empty wind. If you know the owner personally then invite them to lunch for a chat about it. If you don't, then you are outgroup and will be treated as an enemy. 

As the meme goes: have problem, don't care, no problem. How should USG be reformed? Can't do it. Don't care. Not my government, not my business, not my problem.

Talking about present, existing policy is useful, because it lets you secure your shit by predicting how your country will behave. More precisely it tells you what not to try to secure, because it's apt to be stolen or trampled. E.g. NGO employment is inherently insecure. It's a career the way piracy is a career, and for the same reasons. E.g. if you need a car to get to work, then get a job where you don't need a car to get to work.

One thing a prototype government is useful for is showing, by contrast, that the existing government cannot possibly be sincere. This lets you predict that terrible results will continue, because they are intentional. 

An experienced prototyper can make a prototype that's designed to act as the real government actually acts, then perturb the model to try to make it match even better. Having done this, I found: perturbing it toward greater psychopathic, sadistic Satanism made it predict more accurately. Perturbing it with charity and kindness made the model buggier and demands exponential epicycles. 

The first motivation is pure sadism, as predicted by the mechanics of egalitarianism. "Egalitarianism for thee, but not for me in particular because I can make you hurt. Neener neener, you can't stop me." The second motivation is venal corruption. 

E.g. America is car-addicted because GM makes lots of campaign contributions, so policies were chosen to maximize GM revenue and thus maximize campaign grift and embezzlement. Sociology is easy so these policies worked as intended. Naturally if you dance with the devil... GM was later betrayed, but even still you can see most of its revenue is political, not economic. Cars are merely an unfortunate by-product of their inefficient tax-farming. They would have long ago been eliminated if they weren't necessary for optics reasons.

"if the Chinese are willing to do all the work of making our stuff, in exchange for pieces of green paper, they are suckers and we should let them. We get all the utility. They get the disutility, and some paper. What’s not to like?"

"Common sense tells us that work is good for the human soul."

Broken window fallacy. The reason you should let the Chinese do as much work for you as possible is so that you can turn to other work. Every moment you're not spending making your own cars is a moment you can spend making a glorious tower or whatever. (Also ride bikes not cars.) In Reality, air is not scarce and work even less so.

What's not to love, incidentally, is the long-term effects of funding yourself with inflation. The thing-called-universal-morality, when it's not corrupt, is about the conflict between long and short term. America can only have China make all its stuff in the short term. If it were a long-term viable plan it would be fine, it's just not. It's not the fall that gets you, it's how the stop at the end is so sudden.

 

Note this has personal implications. If you can reliably and dependably make someone else do your work for you, then...like...do? Don't do this so you can be idle, do this so you can work on something less basic than the replaced chore. That doesn't make you a 'dependent' you're not 9 anymore, time to put away childish things like wanting to do everything yourself. There is the question of the service being dependable, however. If you don't have an Eccles Building normally the other personally eventually realizes they're giving you stuff for free.

--

Plato examined the Republic as an analogy to the human soul. It didn't work, but the principle is sound. Likewise, if America should be isolationist, then maybe your state should be isolationist. Maybe your town should be isolationist. Maybe your street should be isolationist. Maybe you should be isolationist. 

Start with a posture of isolation. Don't worry about what your neighbours are doing, let alone your town, your state, your federation, your empire. Maybe start by cleaning your room. 

You have a problem in your life? You want to do something about it? Okay, well, frankly, I don't believe you, and you shouldn't believe you either. I'll tell you something you can do: clean your room. Maybe it won't help much, but it can't hurt.

If you can't even clean your room, then consider that cleaning your empire might be a tad unrealistic.
If you can clean your literal room, maybe clean the rest of the house next. Maybe clean up your affairs next - stop being friends with folk who aren't friends with you, get a proper job, pay off your debts, that sort of thing. 

I chose to clean up my skull. Boy that was a job. Worked really well, though. I find a bit of dust in a corner from time to time, but not very often. I kind of miss the mess, since cleaning it up was so profitable.

Immigration Driver: Suburbia

Car-dependent suburbia is insolvent and requires incredible subsidies to avoid bankruptcy. This is because they're built by subsidies in the first place. They are Communist, not Capitalist.

To draw more of these subsidies, so they can pay the maintenance costs on the wealth-negative suburbs, cities need growth. Native populations are in decline, so they need to import foreigners. 

It's nothing to do with labour. It's about scamming higher levels of government out of more money so they can pay for the suburbs. Note that it is functionally illegal in America to build anything but shopless condos or car-addicted suburbs. Having mandatory Communist living quarter designs is just what freedom means. 

(For more, Seeing Like a State. Governments like things simplified so their boneheaded bureaucrats don't get confused. The book refers to legibility. Hence exactly two kinds of houses, completely unmixed with other kinds of buildings. Cartel and monopoly interests like to exploit this stuff too.)

While immigrants vote correctly (as opposed to voting right) the Regime scams the elections twice over anyway, so this explains very little. Merely a happy coincidence. 

P.S. I believe the other driver is envy. Modern governments try to maximize envy. Importing incompetent immigrants makes them envy the more-competent natives, because now they're close enough to see the difference.

Rafflesia as Perfect Metaphor for States

"The plant has no stems, leaves or roots. It is a holoparasite of vines."

Since it doesn't have to work to eat, like any great empire, it has superlative monuments.

"The flowers look and smell like rotting flesh."

Oh.

 

"They are thus, in a way, hyperparasites, because Tetrastigma are themselves, in a way, structural parasites of the trees they use to climb up to the light."

To get a State to form, first you need to sin badly. It's a symptom of disease.

 

Rafflesia attracts corpse-feeding flies. You know, disease vectors.

The disease vectors then mistakenly lay their eggs on the fake corpse, killing their own offspring for the sake of the rafflesia, the same way states reliably betray their closest allies. 

Which are themselves disease vectors. Saying it again because I wanted to make sure you caught that.

What if parasitism is ugly. 

Indonesia has made rafflesia one of its national flowers. Because, you know, when I think of what I want to represent me, I think of a fucking dead body. I guess there were jealous of the self-owns some other parts of the world are known for, and wanted in on that.

Reform is a Myth

Because personnel is policy, to reform an institution you have to kill everyone in it. Or at least fire them. 

Imagine you had an apple tree and you want a pear tree instead. Imagine you try to make the apple tree into a pear tree by lopping off every branch and grafting pear branches there.

Yeah, don't do that. Plant a pear sapling. Same result in half the time - oh that's assuming the grafts would hold, and they wouldn't.

Employees become acculturated to the firm they work for. If you want them to work for a different firm, you're fucked. In most cases you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. You merely code as outgroup to them. All you can do is move them and make the old firm over again.

It's a waste of time. If you want a different tree you need to plant the seed of a different tree. 

I think most reformers know this. Reform is Last Psychiatry. Defence against reform. Changing your carrier is annoying and makes your neighbours look at you askance; reform is an excuse to shirk your responsibilities. "This ship is going down, but those lifeboats look like they'll be awfully crowded. These deck chairs are nice and comfy." 

Okay bud. 

Most cannot be helped. At some point you have to treat them like they enjoy drowning.

If you're very lucky the skills the old dogs have would be non-defective when applied to a different field. Someone whose skill set is basically [be a bully]? No problem: I have lots of reformers who deserve a good bullying. 

If you're not very lucky, then the old dogs either have to be pensioned off - regardless of their legal age - or simply allowed to fail. (Shocking news: businesses are supposed to go out of business sometimes.)

drafts during the american civil war

democracy lol 

union lol

Think For Yourself Because Old Wisdom is Bad Too

"The Honoured Founders said that small pleasures were permissible, so long as they did not lead to excess."

This is about obedience. Subservience, really.

What is "excess" when it's at home? Clearly, it's whatever you're told excess is. It's about serving someone else's interests instead of your own. Defection, not cooperation.

Know what you're doing and why you're doing it, then do the accounting. How much does this pleasure obstruct your goal? If it's not at all, it's not in excess. Further, maybe you find a small obstruction is worthwhile. This is clearly the autistic phrasing; however, the allist clearly has no interest in following a rational creed, and thus giving them a proper phrasing would be waking someone pretending to be asleep. 

If you know what your goal is, this practice is super easy. It will frequently happen by accident.

If you're not sure, try asking someone older than you who has the same hobby. In extremis, set up an experiment. Get hypothesis, try to falsify hypothesis.
Contra puritans, something isn't a vice just because it's fun. Worse, just because it's a vice doesn't mean you shouldn't indulge. Do the accounting and don't plan to be perfect.

If you can't do the accounting, attach yourself to someone who can do it for you. It's easy to be a pain in the neck about this, so take steps to be less of a pain in the neck. You're not a baby and can't get away with being a whiny bitch. Not around anyone whose company is worth keeping.

"It was intensely uncomfortable to have such a tight grip on his Qi, and yet, discomfort was to be endured, and then mastered."

Nope.

The fact you are tempted to use the word "intensely" demonstrates that, contra the puritan fantasies of the writer, you're harming yourself, not helping. Even Christians say flagellants are heretics, Einstein.

Discomfort is a cost. Pay it when you buy something worthwhile with it. If not, then don't.
Does paying your bill at the grocery store count as "discomfort"? Does it have to be "mastered"? Paying value for value feels so different it would never occur to anyone to describe it with the above words, even when it's far more intense than spending money. 

If you're repelled by a fair trade, you have psychological trauma. The solution isn't to "endure" it and then "master" it, that's just traumatizing yourself a second time. Traumatizing yourself makes you sicker and weaker. More vulnerable to being traumatized again. (Gee I wonder who gives the above quoted advice.)

The solution is Stoicism. Convert the feeling to a rational statement, then sit it down for an interview. Hear it out thoroughly. If the impulse is part of you, then, once you've heard it out completely, it will be willing to listen in turn. You can tell when it's external brainwashing because it's like an earless zombie. Unresponsive. That you can kill, because it's already dead.

Been Enjoying Xianxia Recently

Turns out cultivation is absolutely real and I've already written a real-life cultivation manual. 

Has tribulations and everything. IRL all tribulations are demon tribulations, but sadly not the cool holodeck kind. I'm sure there's even a golden core equivalent.

Qi is true beliefs. Impurities are false beliefs. Eating "mortal" food is consuming e.g. journalism. So-called "spiritual" cuisine is reading or listening to stuff that's not full of lies and self-hatred. No matter how highly cultivated you are, if you read a journalism, you will have to expel impurities later.

Unlike in the stories, there are no areas with "thin" qi or "thick" qi. You never need an immortal cave. Location is not particularly important. In fact truth is 100% present everywhere. If you can parse A implies B, then you're good to go. There is no qi sensing stage. If you can do addition you're Turing complete and being Turing complete is the foundational skill.
On one hand, there is certainly writing of thin qi or thick qi. At first, the thin qi provided by journalism can be sufficient. As cultivation proceeds, writing with worthwhile qi becomes rarer and rarer until you have provide your own, slowing the cultivation process.
Ultimately the available qi becomes too thin to advance in any reasonable timeframe. On the other hand, the amount of available qi IRL depends on how many cultivators there are and how high their realm is. Rather than cultivation leading to qi starvation, analogous to food availability, more cultivation increases the availability of qi in an exponential fashion. 

On the plus side, due to the nature of my manual, cultivation only halts (in practical terms) when you already predict everything that happens. You don't get halted before there are still returns to realize, only after there are no further gains to be had. Imagine you could go to the gym until you could lift literally anything in existence. Turns out it's okay to stall out on lifting heavier things because there's nothing heavier to lift.

A cultivation cycle is doing one rep of a set. Turns out, with a good manual, meditation is easy. You normally don't need to meditate that hard, and thus don't need an isolation chamber or anything of that nature. Do it on the bus or waiting in line. If nobody is paying attention to you, do it at a party.

P.S. Qi just means air or gas. Spirit, prana, mana, breath. It's all the same word. The non-metaphorical meaning is mundane, not profound. 

P.P.S. Being a wallflower is counterproductive. You stand out and attract attention. If you want to be ignored go stand near a rude group. They won't be able to shut up about themselves and you can just tune them out. Maybe prepare some generally-applicable platitudes on the off chance they have a lucid moment; normies can't tell if you change the subject. "So you have some strong opinions about this." Snrk.

Spiritual roots are being willing to be laughed at by the ingroup. E.g. being willing to literally call yourself a cultivator. "That's goofy, cringe." "Sounds like quitter talk to me." If you're too weak to withstand social disapproval, then you are too weak to even try to cultivate. Mortal == NPC. 

NPCs are always boring and normally stale. Cultivation isn't boring. Makes NPCs afraid.

My cultivation method has flaws, just as they're supposed to. Nobody else has written a cultivation manual, or I would be able to tell you exactly what the flaws are, by comparison. Some things which look like flaws are merely incompatibilities arising from having no immortal peak to live on. If you have to live among mortals your qi waves will cause them pain and they will, almost rationally, lash out. Have to hide your power level. 

If they were rational they would realize you're strong and can crush them at will; starting a fight is suicidal. I guess slapping mortals for impudence is also real. Yes, they are indeed too stupid to avoid offending cultivators. A cultivator community integrating with a mortal community results in a bunch of dead or maimed mortals, because we can safely assume that not-100% of cultivators have 100% of restraint.

Cultivation really does give you an aura of command that's capable of suppressing NPCs. You can even flavour your aura with intent if you like, though I've never seen a situation where it would be useful except for your own amusement. If you meet a second cultivator you can tag-team the NPCs, pranking them arbitrarily. On the downside yes flaunting your aura will make the mortals want to worship you, it turns out worship is super irritating, and that goes double when they're trying to pretend it's not worship. "Your offering sucks." "You suck!" "You're the one trying to worship me, idiot." "No I'm not!" They try to guilt you into accepting their trash disposal as gifts. "This is the socially-acceptable gift." "Your society is impure and I've already purged its rules."

Defeating someone in a higher realm is possible in real life, until your soul is perfected.
1) Unlike the stories, it is impossible to do so consistently. If you can consistently beat someone else, you are in the higher realm. If it doesn't seem that way, someone screwed up the realm measurement.
2) Beyond the lowest realms, defeat becomes victory. The idea is to expel impurities and absorb qi. If you're "defeated" that means someone helped you find and expel an impurity. Cooperation, not defection. Winning a debate with someone is a gift that does not benefit the winner. IRL you gain XP when you lose a fight, not when you win.

Qi deviation occurs when you attempt to stop cultivating. If you try to go back along your path it will absolutely fuck you up. A Destroyed lie is permanently destroyed, short of physically damaging your brain.

Cultivating a flawed base means incorporating impurities into your qi foundations. IRL it's troublesome but hardly dangerous to extract the impurities later. At least, no more dangerous than cultivation always is. You can (and likely should) re-form your foundation as many times as it takes. 

IRL there is no clearly-defined foundation in the first place. What has been purified is foundation. It's as big as it has gotten so far.

Yes, actually, cultivation does make you run faster and live longer. Though, unlike the stories, not directly. Rather, your mastery of qi - true beliefs - means you eat things you should truly eat, and as a result become healthier. I gave up being woken up and always sleep until rested. Makes a huge difference. It seems much of aging is merely cumulative sleep deprivation. 

If you stop hating your body and expel impure ideas about it, it turns out that's good for you. 

P.P.P.S. Yes, it's internal alchemy. External alchemy is a merciful trap. Not very useful, but much less dangerous than internal alchemy.

"The Pill Destroyed Marriage"

"And so, they go from the 18th century of [the upper class] having three children per family, per person, down to having one by the time we get to the decade of the 1850s."
https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/greg-clark-genetics-and-predicting-social-mobility-14/transcript

Ah yes, the 1825-era progesterone pill.
It was such a black site op even the people taking it didn't know they were taking it.

P.S. It really is a night and day difference between professionals and amateurs. Knowing things vs. knowing buttfuck all. There's no gradient.

Gun Control About Magical Shamanic Totems

Step 1: peasants are afraid of guns because they're afraid of bloody everything.

Step 2: peasants want the terrible fetish removed so they're not affected by the bad feng shui, aka their own cowardice.

Step 3: vote for gun control.

Step 4: public shooting.

Step 5: peasants see terrible fetish, overwhelmed by fear. 

Step 6: vote for gun control again, even though they've never seen a gun in person in their life. 

 

It's hard to tell the difference between politicians who are cynically exploiting peasant superstition and those who are themselves peasants and aren't merely performing. The rational response is the same, so it doesn't matter. If anything lying about it makes it worse and would be a capital crime in a healthy society. 

 

Step 7: public schooting.

Step 7.5 or 8, I dunno: journalists slather scary fetish all over the so-called news. 

Step whatever: ----....

Peasants can't shoot straight because they're more afraid of the gun in their own hand. It's closer and closer scary things are scarier, obviously. Holding the bad-man fetish corrupts their body with bad feng shui, you see. If you die a victim you go to heaven; better to get shot than to defend yourself.
Except Bantu of course, who get trapped in the bullet, like a soul gem, if they're shot by police, but not if they're shot by other Bantu. All men are created equal, which is why murder isn't a crime for Bantu. They're not men, I guess. Meanwhile those loving, empathic peasants don't want cops to go to hell for defending themselves, see. They want the cop to die like a good victim. 

How kind.

Twitter Twits: Expecting Different Results

"Hey look at this graph." "You're fucking disgusting!"

https://nitter.42l.fr/waitbutwhy/status/1538593624333615106

The person offering the graph wasn't doing it in good faith either, you ridiculous child.
"Hey let's remove friendship and surround everyone with strangers from distant lands. Damn why is everyone so stressed and aggro all the time?" Truly, the world is a mysterious place.
This is why Reality's teaching stick has to get so bloody. Nobody listens.
Or is it a social signalling thing? They posted the graph (in bad faith) exactly because they knew the response would be of this nature, and they wanted to paint the responder as some kind of unusual deviant instead of a perfectly reasonable and normal human? (As far as grass monkeys go, at any rate.) It's a trap!

I favour the trap thing. They can't possibly be this stupid or they would all live in the street.

ICBMs and Pork

The American military splits cleanly into two camps:

1) ICBMs and nuclear submarines
2) Pork-barrel projects.

Almost all personnel are welfare queens. It's a make-work jobs program. No wonder they hate dying for it so much.

Since 1945, all wars have been wars of entertainment. Aggression? Defence? Doesn't matter, they were optional. Done for fun and profit.

"We made all these guns for congressional welfare. Might as well shoot them at someone. Iraqis? Yeah let's go blast some Iraqis, lol." 

Exactly like someone playing Civilization. "I have all these units. Might as well start a war with them. Sitting here quietly deterring is boring." The more they bang on about love and empathy the more horrific you know their soul is. Nothing but an empty sucking wound where a mind is supposed to be. 

How are you supposed to show off how well your weapons work if you don't huck them at real people, right guys? Millions dead, lol, I guess they work okay.  

Only okay though. Still kind of pussy shit, really. Stalin > Mao > America > Hitler > Pol Pot. If you want these alleged people to respect you, don't be nice like Hitler was - don't futz around with rookie league numbers.

Dear Commentators

I'm happy to let you discuss amongst yourselves.

However, just as commentators have no right to offer blatant libel or repeat propaganda to me, you have no right to blatantly libel each other. Requests to have someone else's comment deleted will usually see a favourable response, as long as that comment is addressed to you. I don't try to rebut crazy and you don't have to either.

You can if you want, though.

Soviet Tech Superior, Contra American Videogame Propaganda

To be precise it tends to lag slightly behind American tech in raw capacity but costs like 1/10 as much. Americans are too anti-intellectual and childish to be familiar with the idea of diminishing returns. 

E.g, La Wik has to lie about what the AK costs. It's $350 vs. the M-16s $1500. Is the M-16 a better rifle? Sure. Shoots harder and more accurately. Weighs less. Also, you can get four AKs for every M-16. Is it four times better? Fuck no.

The M-16 shoots faster, so if you have too much money and need to get rid of it, you can send it down-range in the form of lead. Though of course four AKs shoot even faster than one M-16...

There are 100 million AKs to 8 million M-16s because there's over 10 times the demand for the superior product. Never mind four times, the M-16 would have to be over ten times as good to be worth the price due to nonlinear effects. 

It's not. It jams instead. Not only more expensive up-front, it's prissy about maintenance. A diva gun.
Makes sense. 

Not coincidentally, the AK looks better.
The AK looks like it was made by real people, for real people, with real materials. The M-16 is bureaucracy incarnate. "Timmy, write me 16 pages on what a gun looks like." "Yes miss Umbridge." "No no Timmy, you didn't assign any work to Representative Pork Chops' district, add some bizarre crap nobody uses to the handle." "Did you laser-measure the iron sights? We can get the tolerances lower!"

The Pope is always an atheist and Stalin wasn't a Communist. Didn't go for egalitarianism. He knew he needed his German-Russian scientists working his weapons systems, and that's what he did. The result being that Soviet weapons are perfectly capable of blowing a fool up. 

The downside being that Stalin, being the head of a masculine Fascism, couldn't be quite as unprincipled as America. E.g. he wanted a controlled opposition party like the Republicans but couldn't figure out how to set one up. Since Fascism is a bad idea, being more principled makes it more destructive and less stable. 

Stalin was conscious and intentional about his unprincipled exceptions. Or possibly merely more masculine about it. A feminine Fascism can't do war? No shit. Worked that out on my own, did I? 

Anyway the point is Stalin assigned competent folk to design his weapons and consequently the weapons are competent. I may have said it before: personnel is policy.

Are Masks Humiliating?

"The experience of being forcibly masked was so unpleasant and so humiliating it distracted you"
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-faucis-covid-infection-means

-sends his kid to Prussian school

Displacement status: excels. Got an A+ on the displacement test. Even answered the bonus question.  

The humiliation is coming from inside the house, Carlson.

It's a bit too late to worry about humiliation rituals in the GAE.

A Number of Amish Fired for Vaccination Status

Of course the Official Press lies all the time, but they have a bunch of articles whining about how the Amish didn't get vaccinated. Seems less incredible than usual. "Less than 1% of Amish have received any doses of vaccine, according to Michael Derr, the county's health commissioner."

Fuck yeah. Eat it.

"it's risky" they lie. Suck it, φαγγωτ. This is a level of weaselliness that's worth criminalizing.

Who wants to guess how many Amish got fired for failing to vaccinate? How many were even denied service?

Amish: using their unimaginable wealth and deep political connections to carve out legal privileges. Totally uncancellable. lol.

The bureaucratism "a number" in this case means zero. Zero is a number. 

If you're reading it, it's for you.

If you're being oppressed by it, it's for you. 

Secure your shit. That HR departments would demand insane religious rituals is not some kind of surprise or shock. If you rely on corporations, have a backup plan. Corporatism == Fascism, duh. You have seen a school before, yes? Free country, lol.

"It's a free country if you're a billionaire" lol.

Well, it can be free if you want it to be.
Do you want it to be?

At Best, All Christians Have Been Heretics Since Nicea

It's not impossible to make the case that Yeshua's teachings and the modern bible are wildly divergent. You can argue that originally he said something that wasn't batshit insane. 

All this does is push the "know them by their fruits" line even harder. Even if the original Christianity of Haeland was in fact virtuous, then it was not virtuous enough to prevent or reject Constantine. You had one job.

More likely Yeshuans couldn't reject heresy because Yeshua was a heretic. Can't fight back without stabbing through your own so-called faith. If you condemn Constantine, you condemn Yeshua. Gnon condemns Constantine; I repeat, know them by their fruits. The fruits of this tree are bitter indeed. 

Not that Europeans didn't clearly deserve it. Abused wives deserve to be hit, shot students deserve to die, and Europeans deserve their narcissist-Communism. Yeshua rightly wanted Europeans to suffer for sucking so bad, and, using his immortal talents, got exactly what he wanted. 

If you disagree with Yeshua and think you don't deserve to be punished, then stop eating his poisoned fruit. He can't force-feed you. As per the bible, you have to accept the devil, because he is weak. If you don't, he is powerless.

Seems Like Biden Solved the Immigration Problem

lmao

"Another analyst who studies the trend at the Migration Policy Institute says so many Americans are relocating to Mexico right now that locals are being priced out of their own neighborhoods."
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-democrats-should-be-forced-live-kamala-harris

Nailed it!
Biden 2024! Americans deserve no less!

P.S. If you're ever unsure if they're just lying, read the rest of that piece. "Ah, of course, they don't believe a damn thing coming out of their own mouths." Let the epicycles fall from your eyes.

Regular humans are untrustworthy because they are stupid and gullible. Politicians are negatively trustworthy. When they say something, it is weak evidence for the opposite. It adds up if they say it often enough.

Man Being Social Means Man is Not Rational

Being a social animal is the opposite of being a rational animal. They exist in direct conflict. 

Being rational doesn't necessarily preclude social cooperation, but being a social animal absolutely precludes rational behaviour. 

Being rational is the dominant strategy, but Earth is a paradise. The environment is way too easy, so Man became ecologically dominant with a strictly inferior strategy, thus releasing most selection pressure on the species. 

The Heavens fucked up. They were too merciful. By a lot. 

P.S. Earth is a paradise. In Reality, Adam was never kicked out of Eden. You're still there; look up. See a sunset for once in your life. If you think life is hard, it's because you're too stupid not to shoot yourself in the foot. Your problems are all self-inflicted.

In Post-Soviet Russia, Propaganda Fact-Checks You!

The Chinese ruling class may all have engineering degrees, but all the Russian ministers have a sense of humour.

(Humour was banned in America in a little-known 1842 decision.)

NRA is Bankrupt, State can Commandeer Pentagon Armories & Responsibility Laundering

The Ukraine operation is obviously a State operation. Their little dog <strike>Toto</strike> CIA has their fingerprints all over it.

Ukraine is getting American weapons.

Which means Foggy Bottom is commandeering Arlington property.
Sad. Catastrophically sad.

Seems like the Red Empire surrendered recently. They've become disgustingly pathetic lapdogs. I wonder what happened? Clearly this is causative in the whole Wokeness thing. The actual elite would dearly like the New New Left to sit down and shut up. However, their Red Empire task forces have all shot off their own legs and cut off their own balls, so the elite don't have any enforcers anymore. The left-left-left-leftist Communists can't be caught attacking Wokeness or it will spoil the game.

Ironically they can be caught because American peasants really are that supine and servile. They blatantly stole an election and the peasantry was all like, "Yes massa can I have another massa." Remember that? However, it seems the American elite aren't elite enough to notice. They're paranoid and paralyzed by terror. 

Could have just Epstein'd Fauci when he went off-script. It's not like Epstein was a <strike>rightist</strike> less-leftist. Didn't. Had to do this whole trucker song and dance.

Like bro what do you think all the compromat is for. Why bother collecting it if you're never going to use it?

I've said earlier that wartime America functionally has no leadership because the responsibility-laundering cycle is way too long to respond to changes in wartime conditions. Certainly America's response to Ukraine has looked like a headless chicken. 

You can see what I mean with the trucker thing. They got it set up, but it took almost two years. Two years to create one protest. That's what happens when you have to spend most of your time covering your tracks and making folk think it's their own idea. 

Re: less-leftists, you can see it's trivial to freeze a less-leftists bank account and other DEFCON 1 procedures. They feel they need excuses for doing in their own, but, again, Epstein. It's not like they can't have someone whacked if they really want to; America is merely banana republic, rich ver.

On an election cycle it's fine. Probably took at least three years to set up the George Floyd riots, but elections run on a schedule. They could plan to start early enough to finish by 2020. Wars don't run to schedule. Having a schedule is just begging the enemy to put their forces exactly where they would do you the most damage. "By March 12 we want to stage at coordinates XY." "Neat, let's bury remote mines at XY. Won't even have to shoot at them." 

The real reason they bombed Iraq for 47 days or whatever is because it took 47 days to issue the next command after, "Turn on bombing mode." After, at most, 6 days, it was merely making the rubble bounce, but you certainly can't get caught telling the army what to do.

As per Moldbug, sclerotic red-giant-stage State.

Error and Correction; Historical Propagandist Fails to Obscure Marriage

This article is in the Official Press and thus mainly propaganda. However, truth is all one thing and propagandists are stupid; by keeping their eye on the ball they lose track of the field, accidentally letting things slip. They use up their mental RAM keeping track of the logical links of their target belief, and their inferential horizon is elsewhere quite diminished. 

What I learn is that American marriage is perverted in the pornographic sense. The "marriage night" thing means: "Hey we all know you're about to have sex." Voyeuristic. They often even know where the couple is about to have sex. Further, you're having sex because it's expected. What if you're not in the mood? Too bad; it's the marriage night. I believe there's a term used by moderns for compulsory sex...

When the government is not meddling with your marriages, consummation doesn't have a fixed date. As long as the kid has both a mother and a father nobody much cares.

On the other hand, I am curious about how peasant families handled sex given the whole family would own one (1) bed. (The piece's author isn't interested, because woman vs. low status. Non-celebrity gossip; bleh.) Maybe Americans are double perverted, acting like it's a big deal for children to witness sex. After all, farmers' kids see sex all the time. After seeing the donkeys going at it every year, they don't exactly need an education to work out that tab A goes in slot B. Nobody can tell who grew up on a farm without having to ask, so it's clearly not significant.

Maybe peasants went far out of their way to keep it private. Did they keep their voices down? Regularly ban kids from the house? Were content with rare sessions? Of course now it seems I'm being voyeuristic... However, the issue is American sex habits are clearly unhealthy. You don't have to check, you can just assume. Null hypothesis: fuckin' crazy. This means I need to know what healthy sex habits look like, for comparison. What's actually a big deal and what's pathologically twisted social signalling?

E.g. aristocratic families would clearly try to prevent their kids from witnessing sex, but this was mainly to show off that they had big enough houses to accomplish this. "Look how innocent I can afford my children to be. Isn't that cute?" It's not a moral thing, it's literally applying coercion for personal benefit. "You're not a poor who can't afford separate thick-walled bedrooms, are you?" Naturally Americans now consider it immoral to act the way normal non-upper-class folk behave. Naturally. 

It's clear children shouldn't see their parents naked after the childhood amnesia period, but beyond that I don't know how it's supposed to work. Maybe that's why sex under covers is traditional: because it was assumed the kids would be wandering around and would otherwise visually witness something everyone would prefer they didn't. In modern times it's just women having a woman moment. 

 

Another thing we learn is that "holy matrimony" was a power grab.
In Reality, marriage occurs between exactly two people: man and woman. If they sign an oath saying they're married, then they are, because lies are bad mmmkay. Yes, marriage is sacred, but of course Christianity is profane and thus has nothing to do with marriage. Because it is profane, it tried to manically seize marriage for itself. It is not a coincidence that the end result of Christianity seizing marriage was a divorce-positive regime. Know them fruits etc. Later the hyper-Christian Fascist State seized marriage from the Church. The problem is regular folk letting anyone meddle in the first place. 

"It could be hard to tell, in other words, whether one was engaging in legal married sex or illicit and illegal fornication."

It is not fornication if a) you don't have sex with any woman you don't at some point have kids with and b) you marry and stay married to every woman you have kids with, in the sense of the kid living with both a mother and a father. Anyone claiming you need to do more or less is a liar and a Satanist. The exact timing doesn't matter as long as you don't try to rules-lawyer it. 

It's fornication because Gnon will have words with anyone who fornicates. E.g. women hate casual sex. Of course Americans hate themselves so Americoid women like Tinder exactly because it is obligatory self-harm.

P.S. The idea that most people are unattractive is a modern notion. It's because they're malnuourished. Overstressed, overworked, sick, and fed scraps even the pigs won't touch. Deodorant and sometimes birth control makes you stinky and shampoo makes you greasy. Folk who eat sleep until rested, real food, exercise, and don't pollute their skin look perfectly acceptable unless they have a bone deformity. 

Don't be a dumb prat: Catholic families don't have 13 kids out of a sense of duty.

"Its the old theological question: why do sins exist?"

https://www.unz.com/isteve/why-the-last-taboo-will-stay-taboo/#comment-5289772

Real answer: because imperfection is superior to perfection...or would be if perfection wasn't nonexistent and effectively the question is wrong. What is superior to the null set? 

Imperfection is boundlessness. Perfection is bounded. Perfection is so bounded the boundary collapses to nothing. 

But of course, imperfection is imperfect. Hence the sin. In a sense, you are granted the power to sin so you gain the capacity to stop sinning; in the long run it is well worth the cost. This is the capacity for boundlessness.

Put another way, is it infinite and eternal if it cannot sin? It is not: it has a boundary at sin. If it's not infinite, it cannot be eternal. Again, perfection is only possible outside existence. Timeless and placeless nothingness can be perfect, nothing else. 

Your capacity to sin is what connects you to the infinite. Through the ability to sin, you touch the Dao. Would you sacrifice the Dao to buy a sinless nature? 

While the idea is to not actually do it, of course, you cannot perfectly adhere to this plan. Perfection doesn't exist, and you wouldn't want it even if it did. 

P.S. Timeless and placeless nothingness is a half-decent description of Khaos. Kosmos is imperfect; Khaos is perfection. At least, includes omnipresent perfection.

Uncle Sam Identifies as Auntie Sammie

Uncle Sam is super gay, so I figure we just let her have that one.

Parents are Responsible for Their Children

Apparently <a href="https://www.unz.com/aanglin/china-responds-to-joe-bidens-declaration-of-war/#comment-5359735">this is shocking news</a>.

It's not the government's responsibility to keep your kids alive.
Or: even if it is, they don't live up to this responsibility, so it's long past time to stop relying on them for your children's safety. Flagrantly demonstrated untrustworthiness. 

That being the case, whose fault is it if your kids end up dead? That would be your own damn fault. Your own failure of security. 

On the plus side, the person most affected by said failure is yourself. Don't worry: nobody else cares. 

As always, peasants need lords. It's also clear that peasant parents are also flagrantly untrustworthy when it comes to keeping their own kids alive. It's not their fault - so-called God made them that stupid, so...

However, setting this issue aside, it's long past time for parents to be proactive. Don't wait for a fear impulse to arrive, go looking for risks, and do the research. Compare risks using, like, numbers and shit. I know math is hard, but having your kid die is harder. 

Or maybe this isn't rocket science. Maybe American parents already thought of this, but rejected it. Instead obediently allowing their kids to die (or be sterilized) for the sake of their "education."

What's the Fastest OP FFT Job?

Just get a summoner you dolts, you absolute rubes. 

What kind of absolute imbecile thinks calculator is a decent response to this question? Can you kindly ban yourself from the internet? Do the world a favour and take a vow of silence. 

Basically a white mage / summoner team does everything you could possibly need. Other three team members can be squires with mediator skills if you want, you'll be fine.

An Exception Where Comments Exceed OP: People are Stupid

"I've been a first responder for ~6 years, most spent riding an ambulance. I figured going into it that I'd have some unique takeaways from the experience, but I didn't anticipate this understanding of how hard life can be for the less intelligent."
https://nitter.42l.fr/_NathanCulley_/status/1521927810809569281

While suffering from Plato's excessive rambliness, OP is speaking about experience, rather than analysis, and thus remains on the ball. 

"Reasons for actions and beliefs are never more than a sentence or two. They're almost always appeals to authority or a specific personal experience (e.g. I don't support the welfare program that I use because I saw an undeserving person get it once)."
https://nitter.42l.fr/anemptyriver/status/1522207975154208771

 

While it's true that America has been deliberately complexified in an attempt to attack stupid people and make them suffer,* mainly the problem is that peasants need lords.

*(To show they have power over them. They're so insecure they need to prove they have power over someone with an IQ of 75.)

Like all government programs, the attempt to complexify the world has mainly backfired. They can't even break things competently. The world is plenty complicated enough without having to go to any trouble to make it worse; nobody had to create a bureaucracy to make that guy sit on his own O2 line. It didn't have to be designed to be easily sat upon.

The problem is he needs a lord to tell him what to do. He's too stupid to run his own life. Except Americans are not allowed to have a lord. They're supposed to be "free" and "self-actualized" and all that nonsense. As if smart folk couldn't always escape their so-called masters. 

That "appeal to authority" thing is a feature, not a bug. He's supposed to have a specific, local authority to which he appeals. By "local" I mean when he appeals to the local lord, the lord should be physically standing close enough to overhear if he gets the appeal wrong. Which he will, because he's genuinely that stupid. The lord can then correct him. This won't even be shameful since it will happen to everyone who isn't also a lord. 

E.g. rather than calling 911, he would call the lord. Who would physically visit, the expectation all around being that his problems result from disobedience and the lord is going to correct his wayward behaviour.  

That said, this job obviously sucks balls. Being a good lord is a shit job. Broke: medieval aristocrats were overpaid. Woke: medieval aristocrats were underpaid, and that's why they quit and let you have democracy.

Part of the problem is by implying that "stupid" means "IQ 75" I'm exaggerating. Midwits - meaning up to 130 - also need a lord. 130 lets you work out the deliberately obfuscated bureaucratic commands:
"and a thick packet of discharge instructions that neither he nor his wife will be capable of understanding, much less following."
However, they're still not smart enough to do anything but follow commands. 

As I'm fond of saying, maybe 1 in 1000 Americans are lord-tier in modern times. Naturally exact numbers do not exist, but it's well below 1 in 100. (IQ 130 is one in fifty.) 

Below OP there are of course a few crazies and politicians (but I repeat myself) but mainly it's good examples. How strange. I like the one about forklift drivers being unable to handle the baby game of putting the cube in the square hole.
Forklifts aren't dangerous. Forklift drivers are dangerous, because forklifts are unnatural and your instincts aren't compatible with their hazards, but America has a dire shortage of smart people; only dummies have to drive forklifts. (It's okay, human life isn't actually valuable, so...)
Forklifts are of course designed by 135+, who primarily think about the affordances of other 135+. Man is a rational animal, right? Sure it's odd but you just train yourself a bit...
Forklifts could be designed to slot easily into monkeybrain instincts instead. That would be harder, though. More like 145+.

This is why I'm anarcho-feudalist. Yes, barons would buy entire cities. Great. Maybe the demand for lords would start being met to some degree. 

P.S. The idea we need stupid folk to take out the garbage is garbage. Forklifts are already designed for Einstein child ver. A society averaging 180 would find it an interesting challenge to make garbage-collection an engaging activity.
If that's impossible for some reason, it's plausible to suggest they would stop producing garbage at all, just to avoid having to collect it. Just as folk don't get how stupid stupid people are, they don't understand what it's like to be truly intelligent, either. (Just imagine life was easy; too easy and you got tired of winning.) 

P.P.S. A proper Oriental isn't smart enough to do anything but follow commands even at 210+. That's what "conformism" means. Note that conformism to non-local lords is psychopathy-positive. Hundredth-monkey logic: if 99 agree to be conformist and the 100th decides to hack the bone, the 99 get jacked. 

P.P.P.S. A lot of the reason the Gini coefficient in full Soviet Communism seems "good" is because if you get too poor you die. The far left of the bell curve is culled and thus doesn't show up to be counted.
Likewise, the O2 line "complexity" is the result of life being easier for the stupid, not harder. Without the "difficult" modern conditions, the dude would be dead, not accidentally sitting on his medicine. He lived long enough for someone to look down on him.

I haven't verified, but isn't this obvious? Much of the gulag population was folk who got poor enough to be too desperate to follow the rules. Took a chance instead of simply waiting to perish. Inefficient execution for theft. The other side of Son Also Rises is that political prisoners are disproportionately incompetent.

When you roll a 1 on attack and he also rolls a 1 on defence

"An Armenian slave took one of his testicles off in an attempt to stab him in the heart. He never forgot that."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/GraniRau/status/1534231897034964994

How Narcissism Makes You Proud

The narcissist can't see anything outside themselves, so they themselves are the most impressive thing they've ever seen. To the extent they see anything else, it's other folk trying to be them, but badly. "Wow. Don't they know basketball is the best sport? They would be so much happier if they obsessively followed basketball instead of spending time with their kids! Like I do!" 

Profundity and pride end up being opposites. Profundity requires insight, and if you have true insight you notice many, many things being more glorious than you are. Either you develop humility as a matter of course, or you develop narcissism.

Musk vs. Epistemology

Musk is a naive child who has to be repeatedly fucked up by Reality's teaching stick to learn anything. 

Apparently this puts you in the running for top 10 American. 

Standards. 

Edit:

"We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option. 

Perhaps someone wiser than me can explain this dichotomy."
https://nitter.42l.fr/elonmusk/status/1535733409083011073

They're just lying.
Musk is just lying too, as if that doesn't reinforce the claim that they have the authority to just lie to you. The key word in the phrase [false humility] the term [false].

Short Musing on the Fed

The Eccles Building loans other people's money, without their consent or knowledge, and gets paid interest on it.

America's wealth is primarily based on mining these loans. Ore depletion comes in the form of hyperinflation.

Quick IQ test: do they accept USD as money and not an astoundingly shameless scam? 

How can you live with yourself after pulling this shit? Spoiler: you can't. They despise themselves. To the extent the auto-spite becomes a cause instead of an effect. If you're so worthless you have to pull an Eccles Building scam, obviously there's no way you're getting paid unless you pull an Eccles Building scam. Might as well worship Satan and diddle kids because it's not like it can get any worse.

BTC vs. Loans

The primarily logical reason you can't take out a BTC loan is because it's highly volatile.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/degenerate-cryptofinance

There's lots of other reasons too, all individually fatal. 

It's highly volatile because it's not yet the bubble that doesn't pop. It partially-pops all the time.

We know effectively nothing about our fellow citizen because we all live in extremely thick-walled bubbles, and it's not like journalists have any interest in writing about other bubbles. Some of those bubbles come to see BTC as a bubble and, inside those bubbles, the BTC bubble pops. However, the thick-walled bubble prevents the popping from going all that far, meaning BTC, like gold, never loses all of its value.

Because BTC is volatile, pricing a loan is a complete nightmare. You can't just say, "I give you 100 BTC now and you give me 110 BTC in ten years." The risk of default is a function of current BTC price, which means interest has to be a function of current per-capita BTC market cap. (Which you don't even know.) Better: the default risk goes nuts if BTC goes too low or too high. It's not exactly a nice well-behaved linear function. 

There is also a political reason. If you offer BTC loans you will 100% be classified as a bank and have to follow all the Communist bank regulations. As per Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, this includes paying bribes and kickbacks to your krysha. Only you have to pay decuple because the SEC, IRS, Eccles Building absolutely despise BTC, as it threatens their hog trough.

Tertiarily, since nobody gets paid wages in BTC, there's always round-trip conversion costs, meaning unnecessary friction. You can make a dollar loan that's isomorphic to a BTC loan by setting the interest rate correctly. 

Quaternarily, you may note that none of the above interest rates are competitive. Who would buy a loan with 20-25% interest? Lots of folk would love to sell such a loan, but the Eccles Building is right there. They have lots of spare no-money-down 0.5% interest-rate loans with an "eh, fuck it" attitude toward defaultees, since they loan virtual money instead of real money. Fundamentally someone in e.g. Honduras owns dollars so they can buy oil, and then the Eccles Building loans that dollar to you without their consent or even necessarily their knowledge, so why would the Fed care if you default? Not their money.

P.S. Non-BTC crypto are penny stocks. It's not like penny stocks don't have value, but... When someone says "Crypto is X" they are unquestionably equivocating. Are they talking about the real stocks or the penny stocks? Usually they're right about one category and not the other. (Shocking.)

Some Can Be Helped

However, you will ~never run into one, because they've already been helped.

If someone doesn't want to be helped, it's impossible. Not even the heavens can help them. 

If someone wants to be helped, it's easy. So easy that, even in the ultra-rare case you run into someone who you can help, if you miss the opportunity, they'll just be helped by the person next to you. It's very much not an issue. You can go ahead and never worry about it. 

Folk will beg for help sometimes. Normally this is a scam. They're a madman who will sabotage whatever help you offer. Helping someone who truly wants it is easy, so they don't get to the begging stage. Often they don't even have to ask in words; they just make puppy dog eyes briefly and then the process handles itself. 

There is an extremely rare edge case where someone wants help but the help itself is difficult. I've never personally seen one, but it is possible, so it must happen. This would be the time to turn away from mortal help and toward divine assistance. It's not like it would be impossible for mortals, but finding the right mortal would be prohibitively tricky.

America

How it started:

How it's going:

Democracy is Aristocracy + Misdirection, Re: Abortion

The lords want abortion to be cheap and easy because their degenerate sons keep knocking up the maids and they want the maids to get an abortion and get back to work, instead of going on maternity leave or, worse, getting married to a beta cuck and quitting to raise the kid.

Anything else is merely a happy side-effect. 

Due to the misdirection, it's not quite clear who the lords and maids are in this equation. Conquest #1: misdirection is their business and they're good at it. 

Nevertheless, every "democratic politics" phenomenon is in fact the lords being degenerate and applying some misdirection. You can do this transformation for all of them.

That Was Dumb: War vs. Social Media

In the 1600s they could afford paintings of important battles.

Everyone assumed social media would make hiding military movements in populated areas effectively impossible. That was dumb, now wasn't it? Free speech is worth at most what you pay for it.

It looks like, functionally, the public knows shit about what's going on in the Ukraine. I expect the Russian army more or less knows, the Ukies have some idea, and neither of them are telling.

The most detailed reports are basically, "Some people have died." In a war? No shit, you don't say? Did you work that out on your own? I'm so proud of you. 

We can watch weapons go in and bodies come out, and that's about it. 

 

P.S. Deep fakes seem to have been fake news. Looks like we can post another "win" for AI. Regular human stupidity and gullibility explains 100% of the observed events.

Alleged Masters on Psychopathology

Thinking about maybe cleaning this up and posting it here.

I wanted to highlight something in particular: propaganda is about social status. It's the government telling you what ideas are high status. Status, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with fact. Indeed being factual is a social status inhibitor. Nobody cares if the ideas are true (unless it's your job and you can't do your job with the false ideas). Exactly the same way Americans drive cars because USG says cars are high status, whereas Europeans don't because Europe doesn't, subjects say they believe the things they're told to believe. 

Even American "dissent" is merely another way of sucking up to the government, because USG says "thinking for yourself" is high status. Being "free" means disagreeing with the government sometimes. Not meaningfully or for long, but you're supposed to do it ritually or symbolically sometimes. You're supposed to be a windsock but you're not supposed to look like a windsock because it's embarrassingly infantile for everyone involved.

I have fully concluded the car thing is dominated by 8. Whenever a non-American points out anything deprecating about cars, the American helpfully reminds us (in that inimitably rude, inarticulate American way) that USG in fact says cars are high status and you're not allowed to say mean things to them.
 

 

Let's Try This Again: Immigration Doesn't Change Wages

Neglecting racial differences, immigration is just population growth. If immigration (or letting women work) made wages go down, wages would have become 0 a long time ago, since having babies would also make wages go down. Whatever it was when there was 1 person, it would now be 1/x of that wage, which would be basically 0. 

Let's talk about an economy with exactly one person in it.

There is one guy. He makes one iphone a year. Using only his labour somehow, and neglecting profit and stuff since it's a superfluous complication. It costs $100.*

This guy gets a wife. Let's say she also gets a job making the iphone. Supply of labour doubles,** so price of labour halves. (Not really halves, but close enough.) Oh, but labour was the only input. Yes, he's paid only $50. But iphones now only cost $50. The supply of iphones also doubles, which means the price also halves.*** His wages go down and cost of living goes down in lock step.

In the real world this cancelling effect means the prices don't go anywhere. They're both paid $100. This means instead of $100 demanding iphones, there's $200 demanding iphones. The demand for iphones doubles with the supply of iphones, which means the price goes nowhere. She's paid $100 and buys his iphone, which pays him $100 so he buys her iphone.

Likewise in a real economy, you can do fantastically complicated calculations and find out that, yes, increasing the supply of labour increases the supply of product at the same time, or equivalently that increasing labour also increases demand, so demand and supply changes cancel out. 

In the completely real world Mexican immigration actually makes Americans richer in the short term.****  Mexicans typically send their paycheque back to Mexico, meaning the supply stays in America but the demand goes back to Mexico. Meaning America has more raw stuff. Which means America is richer. 

In the long term the increased demand in Mexico will cause imports from America, however. Exactly like the pressure of a gas dropping and sucking in neighbouring gas. 

 

*(I guess he sells it to himself since nobody else has money, since nobody else exists.)

**(If she is really exactly as productive as he is, he's a loser and they're going to divorce when she clues into this, but never mind. Spherical cows.)

***(More precisely, whatever price factor you get for doubling supply will be exactly the same for both iphones and labour.)

****(Neglecting labour supply shocks. The economy can react only so fast, because people are stupid.)

 

Increasing the labour supply also increases the supply of goods that labour demands. If you copy-paste a country next to itself, they don't both suddenly become poor because the supply of labour doubled. If they could support themselves before they will be able to support themselves after.

Immigration isn't a stupid idea because it's bad for the labour market. It's a stupid idea exactly because it isn't bad for the labour market. Someone who is worthless in Mexico will remain worthless if they move to America. Fixes nothing. If they wanted to fix things they should have imported American managers and businessmen, rather than exporting labour. Improving your country is racist, though: it makes all the countries that don't improve super envious. 

Primarily folk think increasing population decreases labour value because they lived under Malthusianism for like 200,000 years and they can't overcome their base instincts. As with any good, increasing the supply of food has decreasing marginal returns. Each calorie costs a little bit more than the previous calorie, meaning, if you increase population, the supply of stuff left over after having eaten is less per person. America is nowhere near its carrying capacity so this is wholly irrelevant in present times. Enjoy it while it lasts.

New Humanity Test Just Dropped

Tag yourself if you aren't human:

"The longer I work in AI, the more I think humans are just simple pattern matching machines with a small scratch pad for memory"
https://nitter.pussthecat.org/npew/status/1531383309363580928

P.S. Only secular humanists are obsessed with "human nature" and the distinction between human and non-human. It seems this both selects for stupidity and causes any non-stupid who accidentally wanders in to become stupid.

Factories Dirty Since America is a Communist Country?

Cleaning isn't very expensive, but when the government is stealing everything not nailed down, it's one of the first things to go, in an attempt to stay above water.

Most likely the reason factories look like Communist hellchitecture is because they're Communist hellchitecture.