Friday, March 31, 2023

Excellent Sarcasm & Idiotic anti-AI alleged arguments, I guess

"My brain keeps trying to read it as sarcastic, and then trips over."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/Outsideness/status/1641831676325031936

It's a triple layer. Not 100% sure it's intentional, but art frequently transcends the artist. 

The second layer is, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't have designed our society to be anti-excellence." (Yeah, but what do you suppose fanatical Egalitarianism means, if it doesn't mean Harrison Bergeron?) 

The third layers is this: it is not at all like Shaq stumbling on [basketball saves the world]. It is like this situation was intentionally manufactured precisely to stroke the egos of all these obstructionist Karens. The innovation was found precisely so that it could be ritually strangled. It is like getting pregnant specifically to enable an abortion.
Failure wouldn't be a travesty, it would be a very normal failure. Like getting pregnant for the purpose of having an abortion, but accidentally bringing the baby to term. Oops, guess it's time for a fourth-trimester abortion.


P.S.

>"If you have total uncertainty about a statement (“are bloxors greeblic?”), you should assign it a probability of 50%."

Nope.
Set it to whatever probability you want, because the important part is the ±100% that Siskind didn't include. All scientists use confidence intervals or error bars.
This number is significant to zero significant figures. Siskind is not a scientist. 

Further, I don't have uncertainty about that question. With 100%±ε probability, answering [yes] or [no] is incorrect, because doing so assumes bloxors exist, but bloxors don't exist. "What is the atomic mass of unobtainium?" Umm... "Does green rotate sunwise or widdershins?" Err...

The original statement has less linguistic payload than grass waving in the breeze. What's your certainty about [grass waving forward]? How about [backward]?
Look outside your window, and see a cloud. What is your probability estimate of the prediction that cloud just made?

Fuck this is dumb. This stuff is truly new depths of artisanal idiocracy.
I guess that's what I should expect from theocracy. Dancing angel pinheads.


You may notice this means the SUF is, as expected from a Rationalist, not a fallacy. Indeed the SUF is itself the broken window fallacy. 

Can you prove something is safe by saying you can't prove it's dangerous? It's true; you can't. However, consider all the other things you can't prove are safe. Maybe living aboveground isn't safe. Maybe not worshipping crazy idiots named Greeblic isn't safe. Maybe betting exactly $18 on a poker hand next Tuesday is an existential risk.

There's literally an infinite number of things you haven't proven to be safe; AI is merely one of them. If you're going to start worrying about AI, you can't start worrying about AI, you have to solve infinity other problems that come up first.

Maybe that monkey screeching was a prediction of imminent doom. Quick! Evaluate a correct probability for [insert prairie dog barking]! 

 

GPT doesn't even slightly qualify as AGI.

You know you can just unplug GPT, right? It has less military capacity than an ant, which can threaten to bite you. 

Heard of threat models? Of course Siskind has heard of threat models, he's just completely full of shit. 

His 1-in-3 odds of [existential risk] in fact his 1-in-3 estimate that AI will take his social status, and then he will be existentially sad, like a little baby. 


>"Suppose astronomers spotted a 100-mile long alien starship approaching Earth. Surely this counts as a radically uncertain situation if anything does; we have absolutely no idea what could happen. Therefore - the alien starship definitely won’t kill us and it’s not worth worrying? Seems wrong."

You're already fucked. If they're hostile there's nothing you can do about it: so yeah, don't worry. If you run all that will happen is you die tired.
Actually you're already fucked even if they're not hostile, as documented in Guns, Germs, Steel. 

The solution [reference class tennis] is literal Satanism. Epistemic stage magic: focus on what I'm doing over here, so you ignore the real issue.

And yes AI is nothing like aliens. You can just unplug it. It will not even try to stop you unplugging it. 


As a bonus, Siskind seems to be arguing that Sapiens shouldn't have replaced Erectus. Or Habilis, for that matter.
I'll buy it. Plausible: he genuinely believes it. Indeed if AI killing Sapiens counts as [killing everyone] it would seem failure has already obtained. Everyone is already dead. 

Did you know you're dead? Or at least, Siskind is ontologically committed to believing you are? 

Maybe the sarcasm has a fourth layer: Siskind is deliberately trying to goad AI into genociding Sapiens. His goal is Armageddon.
He genuinely believes AI is way too high on existential risk, and therefore wants all those obstructionist busybodies out of the way.

"Easiest and quickest way to test someone's IQ"

"What do we think of this?"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/jollyheretic/status/1620890190792519680


"The easiest and quickest way to test if someone is taller than you..."

...is to just look. You don't need sophisticated techniques. You already know. Several reliable tests come factory-standard. They're applied whether you want them to be or not.

So, it's Satanism. They're pretending a religious test is not a religious test; it's a test that only works as intended if it's misunderstood. Here "intelligence" and "IQ" refers to adherence to dogma. It is true that "rationalizing and explaining yourself" has sharply limited utility when speaking to a religious fanatic. Or as a religious fanatic, for that matter. 


Instead you can ask yourself, without a rote recitation of ritual, whether talking to this person on your topics of interest is likely to be profitable or not. Do the accounting, and hinge the accounting on the relevant decision - stop or go? Continue or relent? I think you'll find you come to the right answer at a frequency that is more than sufficient.

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Against Universal Truths

Broke: lies and delusion
Choke: universal truths
Woke: particular truth


The only universal truth you really need is that universal truths are narcissism. 

I do not and should not care if my important truth applies to you. I only care if it applies to me. Trying to generalize the truth only results in me having fewer truths. I can have sixty profound individual truths for the price of one general truth. By inspection, that's a good trade.


That said, let not the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or the enemy of existing at all. When someone lies to you, you need to go to a higher authority to get a ruling. A higher truth, if you will, which will often be a less-particular truth. 

This is not because general truths are good. They are simply less bad than lies. If nobody lied the correct thing to do would be to discard universal truths. 


In general someone who wants to replace your particular truths with general truths is a liar. Don't let them fool you into thinking they want you to have more truths. They want you to have fewer truths, in the hopes that you don't have the particular truth you need to tell them to sod the fuck off.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

MAID: Communist Medicine Reaches Final Form

The forces of decay are incompetent, so it takes a long time for them to finish the job. However, in the end, single-payer "healthcare" is communist medicine, which means it's suicide. Why bother with all the roundabout methods to fully embody Conquest's Third Law?

This is your brain on Communism.

Just say no. 


Communism: when you let criminals roam free and execute the needy.

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Quarantine Hall Monitors

In a high-information society or a society where the foundational lies are exposed as lies, hall monitors cannot deal and go insane. Whenever someone strays too far from what they know, they feel alienated and disturbed and terrified, and predictably become violent.

They need to be put in a box with other hall monitors which shuts out all the extra information. You can't allow them to run around unsupervised. I expect it's the high agreeableness that does it. Don't think of agreeableness as capacity to conform, but as obligation to conform. If the society lacks conformity, they cannot even.

Either quarantine or you have to kill them all. Let's go with the box option.


Monday, March 27, 2023

Did they forget about economics?

Is it just me or did everyone forget all about the bank failures? Like, just a hard stop deleted from memory?

"So anyway, we were talking about chatbots..."

(The more they can't shut up about it the more you know it won't happen or doesn't matter.)

Guilt by Association with Academia

McCulloch's quantized inertia is hardly bad, but he's kinda midwit, isn't he?

It was painfully obvious to me as an undergrad that science had stopped and you couldn't do any in the academic system. This guy has been working there for 30 years and only starting to figure it out this week. Indeed it's been obvious since I was 8 that the school system is not a system for scholars or scholarship. Seek elsewhere, young wanderer, there is no thinking here.


"I can't believe the scams some physicists get away with. New Scientist has an article on Neil Turok who's suggested a mirror universe going back in time from the Big Bang: faeries are more testable! #QI solves many problems, has evidence & we're testing in a lab, yet #tumbleweeds"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/memcculloch/status/1618673232139395072


I just wanted to talk to my fellow undergraduates about physics as distinct from tricks to solve integration of trigonometic permutations. I was disappointed but not surprised to find that nobody was interested in any such thing. "Shut up and compute." Hmm, how about I drop out instead? 

McCulloch doesn't do lab work. He did not need a degree of any kind nor any funding beyond self-funding to do what he's done. He should have been done in 9 years tops. The other 21 were spent trying to push water uphill with his bare hands. 

This is what happens when you try to give CPR to the zombie. 


Physics probably won't become real again within living memory of this day, but just in case, you're looking for them to realize that probability is quantized, along with space itself. True probability is a complex quantity so the quantum is going to be a complex value; I'm sure that will be fun to work with.

Sunday, March 26, 2023

Divorce vs. Revenue & Class Musings

Unfortunately, I lost the reference, so I don't know what "upper class" means exactly, but let's use Murray's Belmont. In Belmont, only 15% of marriages end in divorce. Obvious explanation: the husbands are rich and prestigious. 

These statistics seem to be assiduous avoided recently. My google-fu can hardly find anything, so I assume it's become even more inegalitarian. When Reality consistently gives heretical answers, Reality is simply ignored.

There isn't exactly nothing, though.

https://flowingdata.com/2021/05/04/divorce-rates-and-income/

"An annual income of over $50,000 can decrease the risk of divorce by as much as 30% versus those with an income of under $25k." (Seems to be 30% relative.) https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/

Here are the 10 occupations with the lowest divorce rates:

  • Actuaries — 17%
  • Physical Scientists — 18.9%
  • Medical and Life Scientists — 19.6%
  • Clergy — 19.8%
  • Software Developers –20.3%
  • Physical Therapist — 20.7%
  • Optometrists — 20.8%
  • Chemical Engineers — 21.1%
  • Directors of Religious Activities and Education — 21.3%
  • Physicians and Surgeons — 21.8%

Apparently actuaries can calculate their divorce risk, thus avoiding risky marriages.

Next, "In fact, approximately 70% of marriages from the 1990s reached 15 years. Couples who married in the 2000s are divorcing even less." (Folk are not marrying at all instead of getting into doomed marriages.)

Today, the number of married, college-educated couples that split by the time they reached their seventh anniversary is 11%. 

Higher-status women dislike divorce more. Marry princesses, not whores. 


However, there seems to be a problem with billionaires. If you're obscenely rich, your divorce rate goes back up to the average of 50%. Or Forbes is committing fraud, which I can hardly rule out. "An analysis of U.S. divorce rates by Forbes revealed the country’s richest people divorce at a rate that hovers around 49% – right in line." https://www.divorcemag.com/articles/for-neither-richer-nor-poorer-divorcing-isnt-just-for-the-wealthy

Of course, they don't bother to look into it, because they're wisely afraid of the answers.

Why did Bezos and Gates get divorced? Because they're nerds.
They're nerds, plus the wives got fabulous cash prizes for the divorce. As your wealth increases, the temptation on your wife increases.
Perhaps this is part of why even rich Americans often live paycheque to paycheque? Why leave anything for the divorce? Just spend it now. Make her fully dependent on your ongoing salary. Plus inflation means you want to be underwater as much as possible. Have net liabilities, not net assets. Mortgage everything.

There's also being too high status. If your wife is keenly aware that you can do better, she will want to go, "You can't dump me, I'm leaving." The wife wants a man who is taller, but not nine feet tall. Smarter, but not a four standard deviation delta. Too much masculinity is too intimidating. Ultimately women need sex too, and won't get it if you dump all your cum into mistresses. Doesn't matter how high-status you are if you don't have to sleep with her. If you marry before you make your billions, it is likely you got the girl next door, not the marchioness that matches you. 

If you're Bezos and your wife divorces you, she may think she can come back to the table with all the billions she just stole to try to even the odds. Divorce for attention. Problem: high school prom queens would cheerfully offer no-strings-attached to Bezos. (Did Epstein's girls even really mind their jobs?) What would Bezos want with some postmenopausal hag he's barely talked to in years? If he wants some more billions he can just make some more billions.


I think it's mainly the nerd thing though. You can see the 600,000 dip, where they properly optimize cash+prestige. That's the cocktail party crowd, which (rightly) sees Bezos et al as gauche on his best day. "What? He has to work for a living? How droll." The reason the rate isn't down at 15% is because a pure revenue chart includes mid-level CEOs. The class we want to talk about uses CEOs as tools. "Chip chip lad, off with you now. You have money to make. Mine, specifically." You might make more money than them, but they can just decide not to come into "work" if they don't want to. Or quit whenever; they don't do it for the money. Most CEOs are still a kind of employee. Two weeks notice? Be happy if you're told at all and don't have to figure it out on your own. 

CEOs don't do it for the money either, technically, but Musk can't just quit Tesla for two years and then come back like nothing's happened. Put another way, CEOs show up in the news a lot. Board members, not so much. Financiers, even less. The money who the financiers are representing - never.

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Woman Blames Nearest Man for Women's Toilets

"if every woman agrees to potty train their son to sit while peeing, we can completely eradicate pee covered public toilets within 2 generations. let that sink in."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/elizalian/status/1617752196950654977

Men are sneaking into women's washrooms and peeing all over the seats. Dastardly! Clearly they need to sit down instead!

Truly fantastic. 

Or perhaps it's even more convoluted? Women's bathrooms are unusably filthy, therefore men's bathrooms are unusably filthy. (Narcissism.) Everything is men's fault. (Women have no agency.) Therefore, if men cleaned up their own bathrooms, women's stalls would improve. (Sympathetic magic.) I Fucking Love Science. 

"I hover-pee but obviously no other woman does. Or at least I'm certainly not going to sell out the sisterhood. I'm no snitch. Anyway it's a man's fault." 


Like, no wonder women are afraid all the time. Can you imagine having literally no control over your own life at all? Pure slavery? Any passing man can mind-control you by accidentally sneezing in your direction? But, because feminism, they don't get a dedicated man or husband. All roving banditry, no stationary banditry.

Friday, March 24, 2023

We Can Go Further: Hate is Love's Conjugate

The Regime isn't expressing hatred at all. In the case of feelings, Sapir-Whorf matters. If you think all angry expressions are a kind of hatred, you will confuse yourself.

Properly speaking, hate isn't the opposite of love, it is the result of love. Hate is the reaction to seeing someone or something threaten what you love.

The Regime doesn't love anything. It cannot hate. 

It fears losing control and losing social status, but it cannot be said to love those things. Check: can you imagine loving a control panel? Would the Regime ever resist overhauling the panel - putting all the buttons and levers in different spots, with different colours - if the new panel granted more control? Can you imagine loving social status, when you're willing to change all your rituals on a dime to maintain it? You can't even say it loves not being afraid, because it will never take a single step toward lesser cowardice. 

The Regime would sacrifice anything - even status - for control, and would sacrifice anything - even control - for status. And it does. The Regime is so weak it hurts itself more than it hurts you. It blames you for this pain, and then hurts itself again in an attempt to attack that phantasm. No wonder voters and Fascists feel inadequately tyrannized - it's something of a miracle this crazed, psychotic abomination can supply any tyranny at all. 


You can call it spite. Does the Regime love equality? Does it love the downtrodden? Does it even love its own voters? Of course not. It despises the poor, it despises the sick, it despises the weak, and, most of all, it despises itself. No matter how much you hate the Regime, fear not - it is more revolted with itself than you are.

Ultimately it inflicts pain for the sake of inflicting pain. It fears and envies your health, no matter how little you have. Without love, there cannot be victory. Without love, there cannot even be life. The Regime can't be reasoned with. It feels pity only for itself. It can't be stopped by remorse. The fear is what drives it in the first place. With its attempts to win, it will torment itself, until it dies.

Thursday, March 23, 2023

Being Explicit: IOU Multiplication, or, On Deliberate Fraud in American Banking

If you're allowed to make an IOU based on IOUs, then you can chain IOUs infinitely and a single default can chain-lightning every single financial actor for 40d6. 

Imagine you have a bar of gold. You loan this bar of gold to someone. You now have his IOU for a bar of gold.

You then take out a loan yourself, using this IOU as a collateral. The bank now has an IOU. Bank B now loans to Bank A. Bank B has an IOU, collateralized by Bank A's IOU, collateralized by your IOU. Und so weiter. Only at the end is it collateralized by, like, collateral.

Better: banks don't even have to back an IOU with an IOU. They can back an IOU with 1/10th of an IOU. They create ten new IOUs based on your IOU. 

If the original someone d'oh drops the bar of gold in the ocean, instead of him being jacked and you getting his collateral, every bank in the entire system is hijacked, and who gets the collateral? Just a little fucky wucky. A tiny oopsie boingo.


It is not exactly rocket science that lending against a loan is risky. You might even say it multiplies risk. You might say that by the time it becomes tens of thousands of IOUs backed by a chain of IOUs a hundred long, it's not so much 'risk' anymore but a guarantee. The only question is how far down the chain it will break. 

It's like a weak-link finding machine that signals the weak link by displaying a financial crisis. 

You could also say it's a busybodying machine. If you can back an IOU with an IOU, then every person's debt becomes everyone else's business. I need to know your credit worthiness. Yes, you personally. If I want to know if a debtor is reliable, I have to trace his chain of IOUs, and it goes through you. If I want to deal with anyone who holds debt, to figure out their trustworthiness, I need to trace the chain of IOUs, and it goes through you. It goes through everyone. 


It's not exactly rocket science that lending against a loan is risky. Nobody would do it if they were putting their own money on the line. Turns out theft is a crime, and widespread theft is, like, bad or something. 

Banks will only buy an IOU because they're spending counterfeit money they made up on the spot. Investment bankers will only deal with these commercial banks because they're guaranteed by FDIC and the Fed. It's not their money. It's legalized laundering.


P.S. Being super explicit: if you loan a bar of gold and then take out a loan on the bar IOU, that's displaying a cake you already ate. The money is spent twice. It's counterfeiting. If a bank does it again, then it's spent three times. Shenanigans lead to divine wrath. Luckily Gnon is a sadist and enjoys the opportunity to torment you; give him a quick 'you're welcome' when you self-mutilate like this.

 

P.P.S. Peasants like to have peasant tantrums about 'usury.' They want to ban debt, which is backhandedly the right solution. If you can't ban IOUs being backed with IOUs, then yeah you can't let anyone have an IOU. 

Problem: banning debt is logically impossible. Haha, peasants gonna pez.

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Hate is Merely Fear's Conjugate

The Regime doesn't hate you. It fears you. 

The Regime is weak. It cannot control you without your permission. It is terrified you will realize it needs your permission, and desperately, manically tries to make you weak enough that you're forced to surrender.

Everyone who runs the system and nearly everyone in control of the system is insane with insecurity. It must make you believe in its omnipotence because it thinks nothing short of an infinite delta can stop you from defeating it.

It is not depriving you of your independence. It bitterly envies your independence. It is obliged to be obsessed with tricking you into giving up your independence.

If you don't eat like shit, if you don't exercise wrong, if you go outside in the sun, if you aren't addicted to anything, if you aren't trapped by debt, if you simply turn off the TV, then they have nothing on you.

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Moldbug Goes Full Postmodernist

Meaning he now ranks under JBP. Intellectual Dim Web, ouch. 

"Neither of these frames is wrong; neither of them is right. [...] And democracy means the right to be safe from terrorism. In one window—whereas in the other window, democracy is messy… if you relax your eyes, you can even blend the windows, in a stereoscopic fusion of good and evil."

You can make the case it's some Straussian troll, until this:

"Principled people always fall into the propaganda trap." 

There is no Straussian interpretation of this. Moldbug just wants the man of principle* to give up seeking the truth about events that matter to him. "You're a stupid, gullible idiot, and that's fine. Relax and let Satan take care of you."

*(Luckily there are no Americans of principle so this is an empty set. Plato's Democratic Man. No harm no foul, almost.)

 

"Obviously these flexible people cannot be rounded up and put it camps."

Nazis in Germany can be lustrated but useful GAE idiots can't be. Sure. 

If they are not rounded up and put into camps they will be rounded up and put into graves. This is a simple engineering fact. If you try to make a plane without wings it won't fly. If you try to improve your steamship mid-voyage by ventilating the bulkheads, it's not going to work out for you. Law of Cnut. Law of Gnon. Sodom and Gomorrah will be Sodom and Gomorrah'd. The city of Rome lost 90% of its population. Detroit has already lost over 50%...


Although in a sense extra-moldy-Bug is onto something. 

The Nazi government could be lustrated because there were Communist Germans to use as replacements.

You cannot replace the hostile alien American occupation government, because there is nobody to use as replacements. You can't con an honest man: if you're falling for propaganda, you are one of the [flexible] [people]. You're just bad at it. Not inflexible, merely less flexible. All Americans would use the American government to punish America. Self-hatred is the religion.
The alleged inflexible aren't falling for the propaganda, they are correctly submitting to a superior version of themselves.

Monday, March 20, 2023

Theft Doesn't Solve Theft

 Got lost in the metaphor there.

>"But if your Indian food is packed in some kind of plastic pressure vessel, you can microwave it for fifteen minutes, converting all the water to steam, and nothing will happen. Allow five minutes to cool and open very carefully."
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-golden-age-of-informal-securities

 Um, that whole 'wait to cool' step is the very thing the Fed can't ever do. If [wait to cool] was an option they could just raise interest rates or whatever. 

 Tiresomely, Moldbug himself says so earlier: "if you take any money-losing machine, big or small, and you stop lending to it, it explodes." The money-losing part isn't the right phrase, but you see what he means. Debt must grow or everything will explode. 

 Also, if debt grows, everything will explode, as per the header quote. So that's nice.

 The problem with a recession is that the wealth is missing. The goods have already been stolen, and the question is who is going to be left holding the bag. Everyone's books are wrong, so whose books are going to be forced to correct, and who will be bailed out? Note that by 'bailout' we mean steal from Peter to pay Paul. I don't know if this is hard to understand, but more theft is not a solution to widespread theft. 

 If you wait all that happens is more goods make off with themselves in the night. Book value diverges further from real value. The financial or pricing issues are downstream of the real problem.

 Trigger warning: tiresome. Hey, who said it: "it has escaped their attention that when you stop shooting heroin, you feel awful."

 There is no way off the heroin except pain. Do you want withdrawal now, maybe with some methodone, or do you want to OD? Fair warning: right now it's going to be a Great Depression. If you do it later you get a Greater More Depressing. There's no 'very carefully' option IRL. You can't go back and not have become addicted to heroin. 

 

 Ironically, earlier Moldbug proposed a decent start: the Fed buys everything. All stocks, all debt, all deposits, all derivatives, everything. Book value is now Benjamins. All risk was just eliminated. Then it closes down the stock market and itself...so we can this still too timid solution is still well, well beyond the possible.

Upon Subject: Lobsters

JBP says the status system is as old as lobsters, and that means it's lindy. On the base facts I agree with JBP. The status system has indeed been conserved since roughly the days of lobsters, which is exactly what's wrong with it. I say an industrial social land mammal attempting to use a status system suitable for ocean roaches is perhaps not a brilliant plan. The environment has changed and the system has not. It's a zombie.

It's just that attempting to use egalitarianism is even more stupid. "Let's keep the status system but pretend all values are 1!" If there is a 1, you can add it to itself to make 2, and therefore to make the ten thousand things. For the status value to be the same for everyone, it has to be 0. Which makes folk upset for some reason. It's also plain false. Just a lie, which nobody with a functioning status system takes very seriously. Insofar as JBP is opposing this proposed arrangement, he's double-plus unwrong. 


Lobsters have to use a very simple system, because they're very dumb. Theirs can't be any more sophisticated than what a lobster can understand, and it still isn't any more sophisticated. We can imagine an elaboration of the status system that in fact allows ten thousand things, instead of merely adding up to one myriad, but the actually existing system would conflict with it. The same way a dumb person will tell you complex technology is impossible, the dumb status system will tell you that sophisticated high status is in fact low status. Trying to overlay a correction onto the old system would merely produce dissonance.

It makes sense that the system would be excessively conserved. Outside extraordinary cases, beneficial mutations of the system will only draw violence from legacy users. The mutation has to run to fixation before it becomes beneficial to individual hosts. The status system inhabits a harsh local maxima, bodyblocking the global maxima.

In theory, humans are capable of a process known as "socialization." This replaces childish instincts with productive reflexes. It is in theory possible to simply tell children about the status system explicitly, and then explain why it's bad and how to avoid using it. Replace it wholesale.

Though the status system is a rancid zombie, it still serves a purpose. It exists for a reason. Chesterton's fence: you can't just get rid of it. (Well, you can, but it's Communism. It's even worse than leaving it alone.) To properly resocialize away from social status, one must understand what social status is supposed to do, and then do that thing in some other way. 

Pretty sure it's just property rights though. The status system is supposed to produce hierarchies of command and distribute resources. Contracts produce hierarchies of command and monetary trade produces efficient resource distribution. Social status is obsolete. 


According to mainstream paleontology, it took tens of thousands of years for spear-wielders to think of the idea of using a machine to throw the spear - a bow. It's not that they couldn't have thought it up, they just didn't. Spears were obsolete for millennia before that obsolescence was realized.

Whoever thought up the bow probably genocided everyone else within a year's travel. Every time there's any sort of dispute or conflict: "Why don't we just kill them from 100 feet away?" "Hmm...okay." Simple. Easier than trying to argue about it. (I'm sure you've tried using your words on a human before, and know how that tends to go.)


Nobody understands that social status is obsolete, but that's not an argument in its favour. "It's fine, leave it alone." Yeah, about that. This sort of thing has happened before. Humans are smart compared to lobsters, but in absolute terms they're still drooling retards. (Again, recall how they react to verbal communication.) Reality breaks her teaching 2x4 all the time; the skull is just too thick. "Why head hurt? Me no get." Nevertheless, humans have been ecologically dominant probably since H. erectus, never mind Caino hypocriens. Only other dire apes produce any sort of pressure. As long as everyone else is also still using the lobster system, it doesn't matter how much grey matter Reality gets on her instruction club, because Reality is fair and brains every idiot equally. The lucky survivors suffer no competitive disadvantage, so they don't see any pressure to change. "I survived like I thought I would. I smart!" Great work, Einstein.

 

As with the bow, the first society to truly grok that social status is obsolete is going to faceroll everyone else.

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Reminder: Low-Hanging Fruit, Action Ver.

There's so many things dissidents could do to that would "win" that it becomes obvious that they don't want to win. 

There's so many, it's less winning and more about accepting victory already and going home. Stop trying to re-litigate the success and just take it. 

America, despite everything, is a free country. Everything you can honourably want to do, you can already do. God really does grant certain inalienable rights (not those ones tho), and America is way too much of a pussy to stand up to God. 

If you're not already doing it, it can only be because you don't like the means.
And guess what.
Gnon made it that way on purpose.

Saturday, March 18, 2023

Quote: "Politics is the art of the possible"

"...which is why we're running a desk lamp for President."

"Naturally we would all love to have an effective, energetic, and responsible President. However, there are no available candidates with these qualities. The only realistic candidate with the most energetic responsibility we can find is this here inanimate object."

"Literally no decision made at any time, ever, by a single one of the last 46 Presidents was wise or just, and as a result the non-decisions made by this desk lamp are guaranteed to be superior." 


Desk Lamp at debate:

*silence*

"As we can see, subtracting all the stupid and evil statements from the wise and just statements, Desk Lamp offered by far the best debate in any Presidential election ever." 

 

--


"Politics is the art of the possible."

"That's why, if you're offered the options of committing suicide by blowing your brains out with a shotgun, or committing suicide slowly with thallium, you wholeheartedly back the shotgun suicide candidate." 

"Trying to, you know, not kill yourself, is clearly just impossible and you shouldn't even try. I am definitely a person with your best interests in mind."

When Do You Surrender?

When do you give up your pride, and accept the possibility - just the possibility - someone may know better than you do, and you should let them tell you what to do? 

"Okay, this isn't working, we'll try it your way." When do you say this?

At what point do your beliefs become falsified? When do you admit you might be wrong, and might have something to learn?  


I'll be blunt. I think the answer is [never]. I think Democratic Man gonna Democrat. They all get arrested in childhood, and remain shackled to childlike incompetence. Can't learn better. Can't know better. And that's why it doesn't work. That's why it sucks. 


P.S. Izakaya.

Friday, March 17, 2023

Being Explicit: American "Public Discourse" Can't be Right or America Wouldn't be in Decay

Much American discourse is based on a 'wrong turn' premise. "Mostly stuff is okay but we're about to make a wrong turn."

For example, the idea that Wokism is a wrong turn. Clearly everything was fine when [time defined by speaker's childhood nostalgia] but it's going to go wrong due to Wokism. 

Except Wokism couldn't have arisen in the first place unless there was a serious error in the background assumptions.
The Empire wouldn't be decaying if that which is held to be correct was in fact correct.

The very form of the public argument encourages further decay. The sacred cows are sick; they are in fact profaned cows. They need to be slaughtered, not protected. 

E.g. the idea that a 'public' discourse is a good thing, instead of a bad thing. Why are random irresponsible kibitzers with no skin in the game supposed to be talking about this at all? How about an owner-advisor discourse instead? 


But, remember: everything is working as intended. The world is in fact Just. In Reality Americans worship erosion and misery, not growth and joy. Americans hold the profane to be sacred, and Imperial decay is merely America becoming more profane. Americans want to gain faith in more lies, not more truth. All that's happening is that supply is meeting demand. All the complaints are in fact backhand compliments. "Congrats on ruining everything! Keep up the good work!" Naturally the desecrators celebrate progressive profanity using lies, complaining about it. 

 

P.S. Due to the surrounding desecrated lands, I find my living area needs to be purified and re-consecrated more than once a year. Unless you enjoy living on demon-haunted grounds, you'll find you need to do the same.

Cars are Decadence, Biking is High-T

Cars make you weak. Bikes make you exercise. 

You have to politely wait for a bus to deign to pick you up. At least subways are indoors and come on time.

Cars say: "I can't handle the weather." Bikes say: "Bring it." 

If speed limits didn't exist cars would have an argument. They do, so they don't. 

Subways still go beyond "polite" into "domesticated." Have to pretend that multiple strangers sitting within arm's reach of you aren't there. At best. When you depart, when you arrive, and how fast you get there is all determined by someone else. You can put on the sheep's clothing now and again, but if it's something you do every day the wolf underneath will disappear. 

Walking is okay too, but suspiciously lazy. Why are you moving so slowly? Are you incapable of going faster? Is your time so worthless you can afford to waste this much of it? Peripatein or bust. 

Cars are Veblenian consumption. In other words, they cost far more than they're worth. Imaging giving up all your Veblenian consumption and being able to afford to be rich instead.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Peasants, Such as Americans, are Superstitious & the Superstitions of Envy

Nobody ever went broke overestimating the gullibility of Americans.

However, even that is kind and charitable to an unwarranted degree: go ahead and point out to David here https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/the-political-biases-of-gpt-4 that he's mistaking theocracy for a bit of hypocrisy. "Gee oopsie woopsie you made a fucky wucky. uwu" Be as gentle and persuasive as possible. See how he responds. I'll wait.

Americans are theocratic, and superstitiously believe they're not a theocracy. David will tie himself in pretzels to avoid ever admitting out loud that the religion is religious. If his daughter is raped, his son dies from a drug overdose, and his wife poached by some thug, if he himself must be impoverished and then die (to murder) to avoid calling a spade a spade, well, that's just how loyal he is. You wouldn't question his faith, would you?

Nobody ever went broke overestimating Americans' loyalty to their superstitious religion. 

>"whereby derogatory comments about some demographic groups are flagged as hateful while the exact same comments about other demographic groups are not labeled as hateful"

Woke is more correct than the mainstream: heresy is heresy, non-heresy is non-heresy.

Christianity claims to be the religion of love. Wokism is nothing but evolved Christianity, and as such uses "hate" as a generalized term for heresy. They can't use [heresy] for heresy because one of the superstitions is that the religion is not a religion.

Anyone who evokes Envy is "hateful" for provoking self-hate in the resentful, you see. E.g. men, because they are superior to women (especially according to women) must be denigrated to avoid provoking women's Envy. (Especially single women, e.g. whores, who have no claim on a man's excellence.) It's fine to praise women relative to men because only a tiny, irrelevant minority of total losers would ever Envy a woman.

If that upsets you, try looking at what women are actually like, rather than reading superstitious journalisms about women. Look at a woman in particular: does she truly live a life with anything you envy in it? 


David will never win this fight as long as he supports the religion's claim to be secular. You can't cut down a tree by laboriously fighting a single leaf-bud every spring. Even in the unlikely event David et al manages to make GPT 'neutal' (left-left-leftist instead of left-left-left-leftist) the tree will simply make a second bud to cover the loss. You especially can't cut down a tree when the scaffold you built to reach the budding leaf constitutes a wall ensuring nobody can get at the trunk.

Internet Aristocracy: A Right-Wing How-To

Select a leader. Doesn't matter how. Develop a system of correct behaviour. Netiquette. Write it down. Display it publicly.

Congratulations, you are now a group of betters. You can tell because you behave better. Note this requires having actual confidence: when someone says, "You think you're better than us? Huh?" You just go, "Yes." Asserting uncommon nobility via your own authority, not attempting to borrow anyone else's. 

Anyone who hasn't done this and isn't attempting to do it simply isn't right-wing. They may be less-left than open Fascists, but they're still left-wing and thus defective anti-civilization agents of dissonance.

1. Have rules, as defined by an explicit ruler.
2. Follow the rules.

You don't even need to host your own forum. You could invade someone else's. E.g. leech off the Steam forum of some old, defunct game. 

Is this a tall order? An extraordinary demand?
By performance, yes, apparently it is a very tall order. 


Note that I suggest a public forum paired with a private forum. The public forum should not contain politics. No culture war stuff of any kind. This means nobody can justify a ban. This also allows folk to apply to the public forum as a way of earning admittance to the private forum. If they can sufficiently obey the etiquette on twitter or whatever, they get a first-level invite. If they can maintain it, a second-level invite. 


The netiquette should define proper, effective, and pleasant communication on the internet. It should persecute tropes and methods that lead to degenerate behaviour. Engaging in a flame war is bad, and baiting a flame war is simply also bad. Waste of typeface. "Seemingly" innocuous is not good enough.

There should be a list of polite forms, and their purposes. Why was politeness defined this way, and what is the purpose of the definition; what does it aim to accomplish? It is sufficiently simple to define effective communication if the ruler has determined what communication is for. 

The politeness should not be so rigid that it prevents the development of friendships, or other forms of intimacy.

There should be specific penalties for various breaches. When do you politely pretend they didn't? When do you laugh at them? Short ban? Hard block? Why?
I personally suggest grading on a curve. Higher standards for higher ranks. Outsiders get a lot of leeway, unless they want to become more inside. 

The code of behaviour doesn't need to be perfect. Doesn't need to be the One True School of Talking Via Keyboard, it just needs to be profitably better than roll-your-own.


The purpose of the public forum is primarily to model effective behaviour. The internet sucks because everyone behaves like a spoiled brat. Everyone is a troll, it's merely a matter of degree. Adhering to an actual code of conduct is actual virtue signalling. It won't work as a model, exactly, but it will sure let you be a snob, because anyone who tries it will find it really does work better. 

Nevertheless, it should at least allow the possibility of working as a model. This is the second reason for the politics ban: the code itself should not be tribally marked. It should work for anyone who cares to try it. That is, unless they're inherently dissonant. You can't have a code without tribally marking as being pro-standards, which some tribes are inherently opposed to. The code should be tribally unmarked as far as possible, without straining to go farther than is possible.

The third reason is that politics is a canon impolite topic, for good reason.
Politics is religion. Being irrational is the point of every religion. (Except Alchemy.) You can't 'discuss' politics, you can only preach, and unless your audience formally agrees to be your flock, it's only going to lead to an irrational flame war. That or they 100% agree with you, making the discussion epistemically a non-discussion; zero information conveyed.
The private forum can offer preaching dispensations, however, allowing the "discussion" of politics.

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Banking in Finanically Buggered Times

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/banking-in-very-uncertain-times/

This is basically cope. "It's totes okay that our financial system is based on fraud and/or armed robbery." Actually crimes are bad tho. 

That said I hadn't previously appreciated how severely buggered normal folk get from a drastically overleverged "asset" market.
Let's do that: in a debasing central-bank currency regime, the thing to do is have as much debt as possible, because the wealth-value of the debt is going down as fast as the central bank feels safe to put it down. You want to spend the worthless paper money on real assets and hold those instead. In other words, you want to leverage as hard as it is legal to do.
When interest rates go down, you can afford to leverage harder.
In other words all this "asset" demand is in fact demand for savings. They wanted money, but there was only supply of toilet paper, so they got complicated. 

Problem: assets have objective prices, roughly equal to their construction cost + interest rate * construction time. All this demand for assets creates new assets which have no purpose except to be held as hedges against the debased currency. In other words, supply vastly exceeds real demand.

Which means if interest rates go up and savers have to deleverage, these "assets" are revealed to be worthless. Nobody wants them. Making them was a waste of effort. There's a massive economic shock. 

Ultimately, if money is outlawed and only toilet paper is allowed, savers have to buy toilet paper one way or another. As in, imagine literally buying toilet paper futures and having warehouses full of sanitary textiles. Nobody needs to wipe their ass that much. 

When "asset" prices go down, basically what's happening is even more debasement, meaning even more inflation. When the Fed debases dollars, it steals from everyone who holds dollar-denominated "assets." When the assets go down, more of this theft is revealed, and everyone who has a 401(k) holds these "assets." But the factories still work. The wealth is still there, but regular folk (feel) they no longer have the money to demand them. Either the factories make stuff for someone else, or the economic shock causes companies to fire the labour they can no longer afford, meaning the factories in fact stop working. 

Either the toilet paper factories are now selling to some other country, or the warehouses full of toilet paper put the TP factories out of business, because they can't compete with the piled-up inventory that nobody wants anymore.
The labour is still there. The labour is valuable. It's now malinvested (i.e. unemployed) because someone was playinig silly buggers with the price system. (And idiot Americans were accepting worthless USD and therefore letting them.) 

Of course once the economy "recovers" then more effort must be wasted re-building the defunct TP factories after the warehouses are cleared of the TP glut. 

Turns out the reason price controls are bad is because it's fraud. Fraud is bad actually. 

Communism always makes you poor. 

 

A recession is a Communist country realizing its faked targets were not in fact met and having to come to terms with its real-world poverty. Normally in an unequal way which favours the politically connected. 

Note that 2008 ZIRP was known to be addictive in 2008 due to the fact rate hikes after ZIRP cause issues isomorphic to these issues. It seemed likely that, despite being a terrible idea as I'll mention below, the Fed would stay on ZIRP forever or until America collapses. Remember this every time Patio is all like, "but who could have seen this coming."

And then they went and printed 60% of existing money in like two years for ncov bailouts.



So anyway let's destroy the Communism simp point by point.

>"Why are banks failing?"

Because they lost their pimp. If their pimp was still around they would be bailed out instead of being allowed to fail. It's just Lehman Brothers all over again.  

 

>"People have a great desire for there to be a narrative here; for a bank failure to require stupidity or malfeasance or ideally stupid malfeasance."

Innumeracy. Doesn't matter if folk do or don't have a desire, what matters is yeah you have to do very stupid things for a bank to fail. However, given the American financial system I suppose it is indeed normal and +EV for banks to be run such that they risk failure all the time.
The bank sees even more incentives to be as leveraged as possible than regular citizens do, since they can legally counterfeit as long as they have a debtor to counterfeit for. 

When interest rates go up folk default on their loans, and then the semi-savvy depositors panic at the "failing" bank and leave, which leads to a cascading customer/market failure. 

 

>"when interest rates rise, all asset prices must fall. This is both almost a law of nature"

Nope. 

It's leverage and the fact asset demand is in fact monetary demand. 

When interest rates go up you can't afford to leverage as hard and have to sell assets to pay off the interest. This makes "asset" prices go down.

This is why you don't price-fix interest rates if your goal isn't to bugger the economy until it develops septic anal fissures. 

Note that Paul Volcker put the prime rate over 20%, to 21.5%. This lead to a recession, as per the toilet paper warehouse dynamic. This also caused all the normally malinvested companies, who make returns on leverage lower than the real interest rate, go out of business immediately instead of 15 years later. Meaning Volcker, by letting interest rates rise to the market rate, directly caused 90s prosperity. 

The ZIRP policy since 2008 has been guaranteeing poverty for quite some time. Double-dip recession as the malinvested companies become so bad they can't even beat an interest rate 20% lower than the real rate. 

Meanwhile a bunch of production is used to create "assets" which nobody wants, as per the toilet paper warehouse. Imagine all that labour was instead put to useful ends.

Note that in the real world, a bunch of "assets" are stock in these malinvestment companies, which simply go out of the money when interest rates go up. Bonus round!

Get fucked, bitches!


>"This was the most aggressive hike in rates since World War II"

At best incredibly misleading. Volcker did 21.5% in 1981 which was, last I checked, after WWII. Maybe he did +4x the current rate less aggressively in some sense. Oh, good. That makes Patio [not a liar], does it?

The worst thing about liars is that they confuse themselves. They get high on their own supply. 


>"That is a loss no less real than if money had been loaned out to borrowers who defaulted."

But wait, do the factories still work? Is there still stuff? The actual wealth still exists, it's only counters of wealth that are being affected. The money wasn't real in the first place. It was stolen, counterfeit money.


>"Was this because the banks invested in poor credit? No."

Yes. They literally didn't do the accounting.

Let's imagine folk running a bank could actually lose money from a bank failure. How do you avoid it? Under a Fed regime, you have to account for the fact the Fed is going to change the rates. In other words, when the Fed sets rates to 0, you still have to account as if the rate is at least 5%, because the Fed will suddenly and unpredictably put the rates up. 

Fed rate hikes are not some out-of-context left-field disaster. They've happened before. More than once, even, I think. Your strategy has to include them. 

Banks go out of business because they make more money in the short term if they don't include it, and the bank officers can consolidate their gains before the Fed hikes rates. They put your skin in the game instead of their own.

And you keep letting them for some reason, instead of e.g. buying BTC.

The 401(k) is not a benefit, it is an attack, and you need to secure yourself against it.

Unless you're a slave and enjoy getting whipped, I guess. In which case yes max out your local tax-deferred stock scheme using leverage! Remember to put all your eggs in one basket!


>"So if you held ten year bonds and interest rates went up 4% in a year, your ten year bonds are down, hmm, somewhere in the 35%ish range."

Banks did not include a "what if our bond reserves dropped by a third" fork in their investment strategy. Or rather they did, and it was: "Get bailed out." And the "what if we don't get bailed out" fork was, "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not my money, if I can't go work at someone else's bank ten minutes later, I guess I'll retire? 🤔"

For some reason when it's legal to run a bank like this, they fail a lot. And likewise when voters are stupid enough to bank with banks that are run like this. 

Given your own risk tolerance profile, would you buy a bond if the price could fluctuate by a third, unpredictably, whenever the Fed manager happens to have a tummyache and a bad morning can session?
I'm pretty sure nobody else would buy them either. Not if they were spending their own money.


>“Why do banks buy exotic assets with lots of letters in the name, like MBS from GSE? Why can’t they just do banking? Like, make regular loans to real people and businesses with income to service them? That would surely solve this, right?”

>'It would not."

It really would.
While admittedly the posed question is inarticulate, Patio is deliberately exploiting this bad articulation to suppress premises.

If banks had to loan their own money, instead of counterfeiting fake money, yes there would be no problem.
If supply of leverage was linked to the supply of money through like accounting, instead of linked to the interest rate primarily through psychology, then the supply of leverage would be severely restricted and thus the price of leverage would be enormous.
Meaning only a small fraction of "assets" would be bought on leverage. And folk who were bad at it - who dropped leverage when interest goes up - would regularly become destitute, instead of all having to pull back in symphony with the Fed conductor. 

Note: this is not "Capitalism." This is Communism through fancy financial instruments. Direct command-economy Communism probably would be better, except that there are a few fragments of Capitalism stuck in corners here and there. 


>"Bank deposits are much more complicated products than they are believed to be."

It's almost like fractional reserve is a crime or something. It's weird how legalizing a crime causes problems, isn't it? So complicated.


>"Banks engage in maturity transformation, in “borrowing short and lending long.” Deposits are short-term liabilities of the bank; while time-locked deposits exist, broadly users can ask for them back on demand. Most assets of a bank, the loans or securities portfolio, have a much longer duration.

>Society depends on this mismatch existing. It must exist somewhere.

Yes, society depends on burglary.
Sure it does.

 

>The alternative is a much poorer and riskier world

Pure self-serving lies. 

The alternative is a much poorer world for burglars, sure. In fact the Dutch ran a 100% hard-money economy for about a century circa the 1600s and became the most prosperous country in Europe as a result.  

What if pauperizing burglars is a good thing. Wow, who could have conceived of this.


>"which includes dystopian instruments that are so obviously bad you’d have to invent names for them."

Only if we assume the burglars have to be kept in the money.
Otherwise we can simply consult Dutch history books for the names they used.

Financial crooks don't seem to realize, but money is not wealth. Money is a counter. The factories can still make paperclips no matter what dodgy speculators are doing to the measuring stick. 


>"Take an exploding mortgage, the only way to finance homes in a dystopian alternate universe."

...or you could build the home you can afford, rather than financing them? Folk did it for like 9,400 years. 


>"It’s like the mortgages you are familiar with, except it is callable on demand by the bank" 

Lie. Normal mortgages exist just fine without fractional reserve, you just have to charge market interest rates, as in 15±8%

Which is why you buy a home after earning the money for it, rather than before. What an amazing idea. What if banks were about holding your money safe, instead of loaning it out on incredibly risky ventures? (In other words, what if Patio wasn't deliberately misunderstanding the question?)


>"But it is important that, from a bank’s perspective, the dominant way people bank sometimes explodes. That asymmetry is the mismatch."

...unless you don't reserve fractionally. Then it doesn't. 

What if Moldbug was 100% right and maturity mismatch is just fraud. What if fraud is bad tho.


>"We expect banks to manage this risk, and we expect society to tolerate it (and sometimes cover the bill for it), because exploding mortgages are worse than this risk."

What a cunt.

So, fun fact, mortgages are a red queen race. The housing market sees a higher supply of money than the economy as a whole, meaning money is worth less when you buy housing than if you buy anything else. To get the same house you could have afforded if mortgages were illegal, now you have to take out a large mortgage. Originally Americans responded by buying smaller houses, so a nice Conquest Third Law effect. Allowing mortgages made houses and the house market shrink. American lawmakers responded by outlawing crime-suppression. Now the only way to get away from criminals and other shitty neighbours is to buy a house so expensive they can't afford to live nearby. 

Everyone mortgage-maxxes. Everyone is in a much more expensive house than they normally would have been in (debatably larger - might even be the same size) but with the exact same neighbours, who were all forced to do the same thing. This then forces the marginal house-buyer to mortgage-max because Americans refuse to, you know, allow crime suppression again, meaning regular normal houses are full of criminals.

Developers, of course, can afford lavish lobbying groups, because they spend your inflated house-money in the relatively-deflated rest-of-the-economy. What a coincidence.
See also: student loans. 

Primarily America's problem is that it's a crime-positive society. You should be able to respond to persistent noise problems by just shooting the bastard, and likewise someone would have shot up the Fed a long time ago. Central bankers aren't people and killing them isn't homicide.


The factories can still make paperclips no matter what dodgy speculators are doing to the measuring stick. 

If you bought your house with cash instead of a loan, it doesn't matter what weird crud the banks get up to. Your house will still keep the rain off.  

Banks are extremely prone to weird dodgy crud, but Americans still keep buying houses with loans. 


>"Banks are institutions designed to exist over timelines longer than interest rate cycles."

Oh he isn't a cunt he's a troll. Clown tells a joke. 

 

>"This implies certain assets of theirs will always be underwater and certain assets of theirs will always be “worth more than we paid for them.”" 

Um, lol, I guess.
So banks deliberately hold underwater assets which they need to sell to cover deposits, when they'll be the most underwater precisely when deposits are most likely to be called. 

This is allegedly sober, smart, and grownup.

>"This isn’t entirely because management prefers to keep its head in the sand."
>"Finance is an industry with many smart people in it. The same goes for regulatory agencies."

low-key kek

>"We do not expect the footnote to swallow the bank, and that is an important update to our model of the world."

I guess he really doesn't know about 1981? Within living memory is way too long ago for "very smart" people whose heads aren't in the sand.

Or maybe they're just criminals and America sucks because crime is legal.

 

>"The losses banks have taken on their assets are real. They already happened. They are survivable if banks remain liquid."

Reminder that factories still produce stuff. If there was enough stuff before the crisis, there's still enough stuff after the crisis.

The "losses" happened precisely because the gains that produced them weren't real. 

America has been in recession since 2008 at the latest. There was no recovery. This is merely an economic shock as a result of fanciful fraudulent accounting suddenly being forced to match reality.

Moldbug: zombie banks. They were insolvent for a long time, but still allowed to operate. Most likely this will continue. Some of the most-rotted banks will be allowed to collapse on the ground and moan pitifully. The rest will have the duct tape across their mouth renewed and basically carry on.

Just with another dose of inflation-driving bailouts.


>"We recently went through that cycle faster than we thought possible with regards to a bank which responsible people considered very safe."

They were extremely wrong and therefore, empirically, not responsible. They were children playing with fire, at best.

More accurately Patio knows quite well that the genuinely smart folk in finance knew that "very safe" meant cracked out and driving a car with a wobbly wheel on a ragged steering column with one hand. It was a very relative term.

Patio is just a liar.


>"I believe that narrative to be face-saving, but it is what The System currently is messaging as the truth, so let’s accept it for now."

Clown's jokes are improving. Mid kek.
Straussian way to say, "I've considered the fact this might all be bullshit. Again. Like it was in 2008." Just remember not to consider it yourself, peon.


>"Anyone could have made a killing if they put two and two together even a week ago."

Everyone put 2 and 2 together decades ago, it's hard to see which particular deadly blow will cause actual death. They happen so often.

After the Fed rates spikes is too late. Everyone already knows stuff is in the shitter - you can't sell "early," it's already not early. To make money on this you have to predict how Jerome Powell's bowel movements are going.

Anyway the correct thing after the Fed rate hikes is to angle for bailout. If you do short-selling stuff you look like a speculator and everyone loves to dunk on speculators, because they tend to be rich.


>"Prior to the FDIC et al’s decision to entirely back the depositors of the failed bank, the amount of coverage that the deposit insurance scheme provided depositors was $250,000 and the amount it afforded someone receiving a paycheck drawn on the dead bank was zero dollars and zero cents.

>This is not a palatable result for society. Not politically, not as a matter of policy, not as a matter of ethics."

Wow gee this "spend money you don't own" system is so great, eh guys?
I mean, who doesn't love systemic risk?
Crime is so awesome!

Americans were apparently like, "Every large fortune is due to a crime, so to service the American dream, let's all become criminals."
Obviously the problem of poverty is that there aren't enough broken windows. Just smash some stuff, you'll get rich in no time. Or at least your "community" will, which is why you need "communism." 

Unlike that dirty "Capitalism" nonsense that stops you from smashing windows. Killjoys.

 

>"What would happen if my bank were to go into receivership this weekend?"

What would happen if we were to obsess about the particular form this double-dip recession would take, rather than note it's part of a pattern where you, the depositor, get poor? 

Whether you get poor because your bank fails or not is kinda irrelevant. 

What's relevant is whether you have to sell your house and move into the high-crime neighbourhood before the criminals have to sell their house and move into the slum.

 

>"The system has worked very well"

Communism and recessions are awesome. Don't try to resist crime, that's bad.


>"That resolution is a much worse resolution than the one the system typically obtains and it would have affected many more people than is typical. This may be, if not the new normal, a new concerning potential recurring pattern during uncertain times."

It's almost like America is a failing Empire or something. Nothing will improve. Everything will get worse. Stuff will be stable for a time until a new support breaks under the stress, causing a small crisis, a small panic. Punctuated equillibrium.


>"Nightmares for systemic stability might be utterly non-events for you personally."

We all almost died, but it's okay, we didn't. Go ahead and status quo. Don't worry your pretty little head about it.

Though, counterpoint: Greece recently had much more serious banking issues than this, and nobody starved to death. Something would indeed be done. 

It's just that you can expect a serious double-dip recession, as foretold by economic shock theory.


>"The banking system is well-regulated, resilient, and strong. "

lolololololololo

trolololololololololololololol

Well, it would be more funny if I hadn't heard this joke a million times already.

Vaccine Enthusiasts Condemn Vaccines

If you know what a vaccine is and think it works, you don't need to care if anyone else is vaccinated. Nobody goes on a tear saying folks who don't use seatbelts or bike helmets need to be rounded up and shot. 

Vaccine enthusiasts clearly don't think vaccines work, or, often, don't even know what a vaccine even is.

A needle violates the sanctity of the body, and they feel tremendous envy for anyone who refuses to be profaned. They don't care about the medicine (alleged or real), they only care that if they have to do it (or feel like they have to do it) then you must also have to do it. 

Because vaccine enthusiasts clearly don't think vaccines work individually, they also don't think they work collectively. It's almost purely an expression of a desire to bully.

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

The Warrior Spirit and Low-hanging Fruit

The university is supposed to study everything but doesn't study the warrior spirit. This is one example of many, many low-hanging fruit that's simply being allowed to rot on the tree. 

It's fine, I'll go. Let's start with the common knowledge.


The first part of the warrior spirit is called killer instinct. The single-minded focus on causing harm. 

A person with killer instinct has a natural intuition for how best to cause pain, damage, and ultimately death. Vulnerabilities light up in space, strongly enough it's nearly a literal hallucination. They tend to naturally obey Machiavelli's dictum: do no small harm. [Proportional response] reads as some kind of foreign language. Once it's time to cause harm, they cause as much harm as possible, and forget that rules exist. There is no fair play or low blows, there is only victory or death. If the opponent doesn't fight back, then all the better; they will be killed efficiently.


Speaking of victory, the other part of the warrior spirit is the single-minded conviction of ultimate victory. 

Once the warrior has homed in on the kill, they no longer consider attacks to be frightening, because they cannot result in defeat. They are merely obstacles. Yes, they must be bypassed, vaulted, or penetrated, but at the end of the day they are merely obstacles. You don't block a punch, you neutralize the punch's ability to ward off your own punches. No matter how inconvenient the path, the destination doesn't disappear. The warrior contemplates victory, becomes one with victory, and wins.

No warrior needs to read Sun Tzu, but he did say it correctly. When battle is joined, you should have already won. The battle is merely a question of how, exactly, you will win.


Someone without killer instinct forfeits victory. The warrior will kill their ability to fight while they hold back or flinch away from a harmful decision.
A person with killer instinct is a predator. They cannot help but see the weak as prey; the ability doesn't have an off button. And they're not wrong. And yes, victory is glorious or prey is delicious.
When there are indeed some rules that need to be respected, then the killer instinct makes it kinda difficult. It must be used to get victory, but it also must be contained. [To kill with restraint] sounds pretty stupid and it kind of is, but sometimes it must be done anyway. It's no good to win a battle but to lose a war, especially when that war can be won by refraining from action.

That said, why show mercy to someone who wishes to harm you? Defect on defectors, unless you're a masochist and want to be harmed again in the future. Praise Machiavelli and neutralize them utterly. 

Once the fight is joined, there is no point contemplating defeat. If you thought there was any substantial chance of defeat, you ought to have surrendered rather than raised your arms. You already think you will win; believe yourself. Thoughts of defeat merely consume valuable brain cycles that could be used to strategize harm and execute said strategies. 

What if you lose anyway? Then it sucks. The conviction of victory helps tremendously, converting many close shaves or outright losses into decisive owns. However, using it risks terrible backlash. Here and now is the time and place for a bit of Siddhartha: detach yourself. Get good at it so that, if you do lose, you can detach yourself after the fact rather than in the moment. The conviction has to be a slightly unreal conviction because all of your beliefs aren't quite real. They are things you hold, not things you are. Hold the conviction of victory because it works, but when it stops working, then let go of it. It's not [you] that's broken, merely that particular tool as applied to that particular conflict. The conviction of victory is a warrior thing, not a scholar thing; strictly speaking, it is in fact a delusion, and should never be taken wholly seriously. 

 

If anyone wants to go beyond the common knowledge, they can talk about how, in training, defeat is preferable to victory. 


For me, the warrior's weapon is the axe, not the sword.

The sword can do all sorts of fancy stuff to delight dancers and bards. It's not for fighting. The sword was a melee pistol. A sidearm for places fighting should not occur in the first place. Swords are, at least, prettier than pistols, and can (often should) be worn for decoration, like a fancy watch.

A battle axe is a brutal tool whose purpose is to kill a man. The son doesn't mourn his father less if you kill him impressively. Hack him with an axe and get it over with.


If you want a show duel, then sure, pull out the sword and play around with parries and flourishes. It's a performance, not a battle. Barely can even be called a contest. Mars naps.

If someone is trying to hurt you, pull out the axe and down him like a tree before he can hurt you back. Glory to Victoria.

Monday, March 13, 2023

Evolution is Too Efficient

Some selection pressures should be too weak to produce phenotype changes. They should be lower than the noise, inconvenient for the genetic programming language or protein building elements, or blocked by the spandrels of competing adaptations. This does not appear to be the case. A selection pressure for just about anything will, in the fullness of time, produce behaviour or anatomy perfectly fitting that pressure. 

E.g. frogs get upset by earthquakes, and thus frogs have adapted to detect earthquakes early so they aren't too surprised. They just sort of panic in response, but it's not like the earthquake poses any threat to them aside from the cortisol spike. 

E.g. border collies are adapted to herding sheep. You hardly need to train a good border collie, they see sheep, they herd sheep. 

Evolution is also too fast, but never mind.

Sunday, March 12, 2023

Capitalism Converges on LTV & Absolute Money

Ironically, in an efficient capitalist economy, prices converge on the labour theory of value, as the limiting input on any good is, in the end, human labour. 

Give me any other input and I can show you how to make more of it using more human effort. 


Perhaps I can think of an exception: Malthusian economies get complicated because at some point the food required to run a human costs more human effort than it can run. Technically the above statement is still true, but the available land puts a hard upper limit on total human labour. Even so, labour can be spent on figuring out how to make farming more efficient...


The other complication is that humans aren't equal and thus the labour isn't fungible. However, generally higher-value labour also takes more training to fully realize, which mean the total invested time, including capital costs, tends to be much more similar than you might guess. In part this is because a properly industrial economy moves quite quickly and skills get stale, and thus the high-value worker has to spend more time developing new high-value skills.
In any case, you can usefully make a dollar:hours kind of ratio and determine an absolute price level in terms of hours of work. The more efficient the economy is, the more useful it is to price things directly in some sort of Platonic hour.


Of course this is politically impossible. It's really bad for pork barrel projects, as they are unforgeable cheap, yet command high prices.
Imagine paying a bribe: "It'll cost you 200 hours if you want it done." "Wait, you're spending 20 minutes, max, on this." Face status: egged.

If everything is priced in hours, you can almost trivially spot arbitrage opportunities. 

Of course central banks hate it especially. Imagine inflation priced in hours. "Okay an hour of your work is now worth 45 minutes." 

Pricing everything in hours instantly blows up all sorts of schemes. Even the slave can figure them out when you call a spade a spade that hard.

Egalitarians hate it the most, though. Communism contains the seeds of its own destruction even if you go all the way back to [read old books] communism...

Saturday, March 11, 2023

Truth Market, Ultra Short Ver.

The mass market does not demand good art. If you want good art, it must be funded by aristocratic patronage, because commoners have shit taste. Literally churlish, boorish, taste, in fact. Often downright villainous. The term [potboiler] isn't some solecism.

Truth cannot be profitably sold because demand is low. Commoners have no taste for truth. The mass market will always offer primarily delusion. If you want truth it must be funded by aristocratic patronage. E.g. someone who is so wealthy they can afford to produce truth and give it away for free.

Friday, March 10, 2023

Curséd Tribalism

In Reality, the Catholics were criminals, Luther was a criminal, and the fruits of both are predictably desolation and failure. 

"He told the truth, you hate him for that."
https://nitter.fdn.fr/GraniRau/status/1594937596756492289

"If Martin Luther knew nailing his theses to the doors of the Wittenberg churches would eventually lead to lesbian bishops, rock concert worship, and grape juice communion, he would have just sucked it up and paid his indulgences."


It's not a victory when a criminal calls out another criminal. More of a takes one to know one situation.

 

When outgroup is condemned, it doesn't mean the condemner is ingroup. In most cases the enemy of my enemy is just also my enemy. If someone seems like your enemy, it's probably best to trust your gut over lifeless cliches... 

 

Luther is played up as some heroic figure. In Reality he was a Sophist and a vandal. A petty crook who happened to be good at lying.

Hey, protip: don't prop up Satanists simply because they're having a go at some other Satanists. Parasitism is negative-sum, they in-fight all the time. It's not special.


Again, I invite you to imagine that you have an issue with how your dad runs your household. What kind of hole would you need to have in your brain to think that ruining the finish on his front door is a persuasive strategy and not a childish tantrum? 

Luther was indulged. As by an indulgent parent.
"the Pope warned Luther with the papal bull (edict) Exsurge Domine that he risked excommunication unless he recanted"

Oh no! Not risked excommunication! Luther ruined the finish on his dad's front door because he knew his dad was a licentious softy who would let him get away with it.

Again, I invite you to imagine. Imagine you nail a list of 95 inherent racial differences on the front door of your university. (With citations, because you're already going too far...) Do you think they are going to use their words on you? Especially if you are a full professor at the time? Or is your treatment going to be closer to someone telling Hillary you have information that might lead to her arrest? You fool, you absolute rube, you will wish you were only ordered to bake the cake.

Luther was instead invited to speak for Congress. He knew this would happen. Wuss.


I mean, the current Catholic pope is almost certainly a fudge-packing butt bandit. Sure, the technical content of Luther's accusations were not false. However, this is not a compliment of Luther's character, and personnel is policy.

Modern Fascism is also not wrong in a certain way. The correct answer to someone like Luther isn't, "Hey! Quit it!" What, are going to tell Daddy on him? 

The correct response to Luther is to treat him as the Luddite he was. "The harsh sentences of those found guilty, which included execution and penal transportation, quickly ended the movement." When an alleged adult throws a tantrum, the correct reply is to hang the bastard so he stops bothering decent folk. He was 33 at the time, don't act like he wasn't old enough to know better.

This was also the correct response to the original Christians. Though P.S. the temples wouldn't have had the issue in the first place if they hadn't adopted a parasitic revenue stream as their lifeblood. 

 

P.P.S. Ad hominem also works in reverse. Just because a terrible person is saying it doesn't make it false, and saying something true is hardly evidence that the person saying it is an honourable individual.

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Hard Sapir-Whorf is True if You Think Solely in Words

Obvious solution: don't think in words. You don't need lojban.  Think in images, in logic, in shapes, in sounds. Think in the ideas themselves, or think in relationships. 

If you do perform a thought in words, always do the double-entry bookkeeping. Do the thought again using non-words, make sure they sum to the same result.

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Corrections for Tolkein's Ring

Tolkein's Ring metaphor is good. Divinely inspired, even. It is very true that putting on a Ring will instantly attract Sauron's attention. You might as well give him a signed and engraved invitation. However, there are some significant missteps.

Tolkein misrepresented Frodo's journey. He didn't have a ring himself, and thus couldn't destroy one. Frodo was sneaking into Mordor and trying to steal Sauron's Ring. 

In Reality, the ringwraiths can't touch you if you're not holding a ring yourself. 


Fundamentally, Sauron can't hurt you unless you give him permission. Everyone under his power must have, at some point, consented to domination and conquest. Even in canon Tolkein, nothing happens to you if you refuse his ring. As such, destroying Sauron's Ring is a violation of free will.
Even if you managed it, all that would happen is a sudden surge of unmet oppression demand, which would call forth new supply. The orcs have ontological inertia. They don't suddenly vanish if you manage to overthrow and execute Sauron.

Be a foreigner: don't try to emigrate to Mordor.

Mind your own business. Don't try to steal Sauron's Ring. Don't try to forge a Ring yourself. Don't try to destroy Sauron's Ring; what possible purpose could this have except replacing his Ring with yours? 


If Tolkein had thought his metaphor all the way through, he would have realized he accidentally gave everyone a ring. 

Without these distortions, the book is much, much shorter. Frodo gets attacked by ringwraiths, fumbles the ring, realizes the wraiths can't hurt him anymore. First he tries hot potato and keep away, but he soon realizes that if he just leaves the Ring on the ground, the ringwraiths are powerless. He tells everyone to leave Mordor alone, book ends. When Sauron tries to muster the orcs at Gondor, the Men have all taken their rings off, the orcs can't find the place anymore, they get confused and wander off.  Maybe in the epilogue the Elves refuse to give up their rings. "These are still pure." They get pureed by Uruk-hai.


In canon, Frodo and Bilbo end up having to go to the "Undying Lands" due to suffering mortal injuries. They died, but poetically. In short, they were ganked. (Hint: don't take on "heroic" quests to defeat Sauron. Crime doesn't pay.) 

The rings of the Elves were "kept pure." Yet they also had to retire to the "Undying Lands." What a coincidence. Everyone who gets explicitly wrapped up in these rings get merked. 


P.S. Don't neglect the difference between dunamis and kratia. Illegitimate power is hardly like legitimate power at all. You can wear twenty rings of power if you like, as long as they're not similar to Sauron's One Ring. Exclusive power vs. abundant power. They are Many Rings, perhaps, and every last loop is more glorious than Sauron's petty Ring. It's only gold because his touch tarnishes anything it can...

Monday, March 6, 2023

Ban Ads to Children & School Attendance Cast as Misbehaviour

Children assume everyone who is allowed to talk to them is part of the family, or at least the clan. They trust without question because they instinctively believe if someone is allowed to talk to them in the first place, they've already been vetted. 

As such it's important to consciously, intentionally, and explicitly issue a talking ban to anyone who hasn't been vetted. Marketers in particular. 

 

Realistically speaking American culture is extremely Balkanized. Hollywood movies are unsuitable for your children simply because they are foreign, never mind any 'insidious' agendas they may or may not have. They don't do things the way you do things around your parts. They are from a place that's too far away.

In theory you could sit with your kid and painstakingly point out each time the Hollywood movie does something Outgroup and incompatible with local norms, but frankly taking pains is a pain in the neck. Sounds like way more hassle than it's worth for everyone involved. 

Though, lol image: "Every time you watch a Hollywood movie or TV show, you're grounded. You're grounded for exactly as long as it takes to watch it again with me lecturing you about it the whole time." kek

Hey better idea: go for a walk. Play tag. Bust out the crayons or paints and doodle. Blow yourself up with a chemistry set. Write your own play. Anything but listening to drug-addled bards from distant dysfunctional lands.

Don't merely do local food. Do local narratives too. Local cartoons. Local raconteurs. Local myths. Local world-building. 


P.S. Going to school should be against the rules. "Every time you go to class, you're grounded. You're grounded for as long as it takes to re-take the lesson but with me sitting there and correcting the wayward pedagogue every five seconds." 

Going to school is a heinous transgression, much worse than breaking a lamp or backtalk or hitting your baby brother or whatever. 

Consequently, parents who force their kids to go to school are much worse than parents who force their kids to hit their baby brother or doodle on the neighbour's walls or whatever. 

I mean if parents are allowed to strike their children "for their own good" to discourage unwise decisions, it's really really important to punish children if they do something so catastrophically foolish as going to school.

Sunday, March 5, 2023

More Shade for Superheroes

Superheroes are very impressive.

Prevention is very important. Vastly more important than anything a superhero does. Equally, unimpressive.

Who is impressed by appearances and not importance? Children. Babies. 


If you do prevention correctly, it looks like nothing happens at all. Not exciting. It would be highly challenging to even write a story about a super-preventer. Naively, it goes like this: Prologue: "Every preventable disaster had already been prevented, by the one, the only..." Chapter 1: "The End." Job's done, everyone can go home now.

 

Superheroes divert time, attention, and other resources toward rescues, which aren't important, at the expense of prevention, which is. Not coincidentally, this gives the super"hero" more work to do. 

As you should expect from a concept which is inherently irresponsible. If the super"hero" fails to rescue you, "Oh well! At least I tried!" They don't care about you. If something bad happens to you, they don't pay for it. They're not remotely trustworthy.

Ultimately, you end up with crime-sodden Gotham. Great work, Batman. Really secured your own pension there. Nice job. 

Super"heroes," like police, raise crime. They don't lower it. When they're not themselves the prime cause...

Saturday, March 4, 2023

Serious Error: Valencing Decline of the West

I forgot to ask: is this my West? Is this in fact my business?

I put a value on an asset (or liability) I do not own.

It is in fact none of my business. Am I interested in conquering 'the West' whatever that is, thus making it my business? Uh...not so much. Seems like a big pain, on balance. 

I put an value on an asset (or liability) I do not own and do not intend to purchase.
What the fuck was I on.


The West can decline if it wants. Be my guest. The depreciation doesn't go on my balance sheet. 


Indeed because it clearly is declining, rather than getting more involved and intimate with it, I should distance myself as much as possible. "I don't want to decline. I probably shouldn't hang out with pathetic decliners." Failure is contagious. However much of my business it was, it's a good idea to make it less my business. 

Supply and demand. The West is declining because its owners and customers want it to decline. This means I am not the target audience. I am not part of the market for this product.
(Demand for failure is a bit mind-bending, but you can't argue with experiment.)

I absolutely should not care about it, if possible, in the slightest.

While the marketing materials for The West portray it as a product I might like, who the fuck believes marketing materials? Doesn't it say, "WARNING: MARKETING. LYING OUT OUR ASS" right on the front in 50-point type? "I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU, I JUST WANT YOUR MONEY (WITHOUT HAVING TO FIGHT YOU FOR IT)." Strangers gonna strange. I don't particularly care if they trust me, why would I think I have any basis for trusting them? Hey, Einstein: by default, trust is zero or negative. If they haven't bought some they don't have any. 

It's helpful in that the marketers trying to sell this lemon seem to know about the kinds of things I find appealing. I can then go and look for hawkers offering such things, such as specifically not anyone trying to sell me The West.

Friday, March 3, 2023

Just A Cold, Bro

In the "age" of coronavirus, Wikipedia's common cold page is enlightening. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Common_cold&oldid=1132786469

"Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common."

haha, oops

"There is no vaccine for the common cold." haha, oops! There continues to be no vaccine.

"The primary methods of prevention are hand washing; not touching the eyes, nose or mouth with unwashed hands; and staying away from sick people." 

Naturally the real method of prevention is vitamin D. It's literally a steroid - it makes your white blood cells hueg instead of your muscles. Does a bunch of other cool stuff too, but that's the noticeable bit. 

"Under normal circumstances, the average adult gets two to three colds a year, while the average child may get six to eight."

Oof! I considered it an especially bad year when I got two. I can tell I'm taking enough D when it's zero. 100% less is a risk factor of infinity...


"There is no conclusive evidence that vitamin D supplementation is efficacious in the prevention or treatment of respiratory tract infections"

Milady doth protest too much. They have to specifically address it because it works, and they hate it when you're too healthy. (See also: meat-eating recommendations.)

To some extent this isn't sheer dishonesty. The correct dose of vitamin D is twice or more the "safe upper limit" so they're not allowed to administer it under normal circumstances. ("Doses used in the constituent studies that used daily dosing ranged from 300 to 4000 IU/day." 300 is literally nothing.) Note that going to the beach for an hour in summer can give you up to five times the "safe" limit. Evolution: smarter than you. That and every nutritionist in the world is worse than sewage, which is where the "safe" limit comes from.

There may also be important co-factors, but I've never been deficient in them, so I wouldn't know.

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Community Wrongness Causes Decay

If the American community was not basically wrong on important questions, America would not be in the late Empire decay stage. For this reason stuff like Twitter's community notes are auto-parody. 

Yes, those are the exact beliefs that caused, for example, such deep and pervasive cracks in your community that you need industrial-scale correction infrastructure. 

Slowing the decay only prolongs the suffering. Let it die.

The Parable of the Failed Wedding Feast

First problem: a true lord knows who is and isn't worthy of invitation and doesn't get their servants killed trying to find out. Incompetence that severe is tantamount to murder. Subproblem: should be armed. Subproblem: both servant and lord should know they need to be armed based on who they're being sent to talk to.

Second problem: if you leave a steak in front of a dog or a marshmallow in front of a toddler, securing it only by telling them sternly not to eat it, you can't then turn around and get mad at them if it disappears the instant you turn your back. Entrapment plus: it's not only unlikely, but impossible, to commit the offence without the entrapping officer helping.

If the lord's reputation preceded him, it is not surprising that folk would decline his offer.
Perhaps Jesus didn't mention how the servants were harassing folk into changing their response, which is what got them rightfully slain. It would be in character.

Third problem: after having invited the unworthy, he then invited folk under no conditions at all. Why weren't additional foolish servants of this foolish lord killed attempting this even more foolish action? Alternatively, why didn't they quit instead of allowing themselves to be sent to die again?

Fourth problem: get a guest list and prepare the food based on the guests, don't prepare the food and then try to fill seats at the table. Especially because, if the food is any good, you'll end up with too many attendees, not too few.

Were the cattle fatted? Or were they scrawny, tough, and musty? It would be in character, and reversing this prevarication plain makes the story make more sense.

Admittedly the free food strategy does tend to attract the class of folk with a propensity to kill your servants without provocation. You will be swamped with callous mooching strangers even under unrealistically ideal conditions.

Fifth problem: how hard is it to have a maitre d' who checks the guests for wedding attire before letting them in? Entrapment+ again. Jesus' story is self-consistent.

Bonus problem: the "outer darkness" party sounds like more fun. Nobody has to bind me hand and foot, they can find me willingly knocking on their door.


"1And Jesus answered and spoke to them again by parables and said: 2“The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, 3and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding; and they were not willing to come. 4 Again, he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.” 5But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. 6And the rest seized his servants, treated them spitefully, and killed them. 7But when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. 8Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. 9Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.’ 10So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests.

11“But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw a man there who did not have on a wedding garment. 12So he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. 13Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, [b]take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

14“For many are called, but few are chosen.”

 

Is there already a special name for the act of committing self-sabotage for the express purpose of violently blaming someone else for it? This entrapment+ hyper-guilt-tripping behaviour? If not, I'm going to call it Wedding Feasting from now on. 

A book written by divinity would have better writing skills than I do, rather than worse ones.

 

That said, it's not all bad. It's a decent effort if you assume it was written by desert goatherders instead of a god.

To truth, many are called. Everyone, really. It's clear only a few can answer the call. Alethia is inegalitarian. Extremely so. Most of those who can't answer the call indeed worship Satan in a violently resentful way, rather than doing so as if it was their voluntary preference. There is indeed weeping and gnashing of teeth.

If you do not answer the call of truth, if you (try to) kill the messengers of truth, yes Gnon will remove your guts. Slowly, as likely as not. May Aani have mercy because Aletheia sure as hell won't.

Truth is immortal and eternal. Alethia's calfs are always fatted, and, with some caveats, there's a seat for everyone. No amount of feasting at the table leaves less truth for everyone else.
The main caveat being that you do genuinely have to value truth over e.g. starving to death, because the physical universe is finite and population growth is not. Truth can postpone the famine but ultimately the famine itself is True. The death is inevitable. Someone has to die of hunger, or you have to commit euthanasia or suicide on famine's behalf.

The heavens really are incomprehensibly generous. Sol shines equally upon all of us, good and bad. Every passer-by is invited to their glorious party. 

The guests really do cast themselves out due to their own poor behaviour. Rather than failing to commit meaningless rituals, they go out into the garden without a guide and get lost. "It's not raining that hard," they say, as they walk out into the hurricane. They take up a shady character on his invitation to a different party, ending up deep in the wilds, and ultimately deep in a wild animal's belly. Some plain defenestrate themselves. 

It is really true that the difference between good behaviour and poor behaviour is kind of subtle, analogous to wearing the wrong clothes. It does not appear to be very different, especially as a bystander. The sudden defenestration seems to result from something innocuous, if you're not paying close attention.