Acceleration by Yang
Tl;dr. It really is that simple.
Long version:
I’ve never voted. Well, I lie, I voted once. I was 18, and my mother sorta forced me. It also felt like some rite of passage, you know, you grow to 18 and you get to do grown-up stuff like voting, having a voice in the political process. I’ve never been into rituals though, and I felt stupid immediately after putting my vote in the box. I didn’t even like the guy! I thought he was retarded. All of them, really. I still do.
Of course ever time there’s an election people would ask me now and then who I’m gonna vote to. I evolved a series of bunch of canned answers. First one was “Nah they all suck”. Then I read Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter and started saying “one vote doesn’t count anyway”. This triggered huge discussions if there was even a single Boomer at home. “But if everyone thought like you nobody would vote!!”.
-“Well sure but my not voting doesn’t influence other people’s behavior”.
“But you have to vote, if nobody voted…”
-“It doesn’t follow that if I don’t vote then other people don’t vote”.
“But you have to vote, if everyone did like you”
-"Where on earth are you taking that 'if' from?
"But you have to vote......"
You should try this, it’s hilarious. They just go in an endless loop bug. Talk about NPCs.
Later I started reading Moldbug and got into this little sphere, so when in good company I’d just say “nah, not voting. Democracy sucks”. I was exquisitely detached about most elections during my adult life. I honestly didn’t give a crap. The Deep State, the Uniparty, the Swamp, call it what you will, it’s all the same. I was beyond all that.
And then… Trump happened 3 years ago. It took me a while to get into Trump. I didn’t care about elections, you see? Elections don’t matter. It’s all the same. And not being American I knew little about the guy. I’d seen him on TV now and then but besides him being this kinda sleazy showbiz guy I couldn’t care much about him.
But I was on Twitter, and I was watching all the outrage, and man, Trump was good. He wasn’t good, good. He wasn’t Moldbug. Not even Pat Buchanan. Trump is really inarticulate, I don’t know his verbal IQ but he has the vocabulary of a dumb 10 year old. And yet he got his points across. Good points. Drain the Swamp. NATO is pointless. Make America Great Again. China is ripping us off. You’d be in jail. No more senseless wars. BUILD THE WALL. All great, and most importantly, hilarious ideas. Trump was trolling everyone that I hated, the press, the bureaucrats, the whole Cathedral was up in arms against him, and *he was fighting back*. Successfully! He was talking shit to AIPAC! I just couldn’t help myself. Trump was my guy. I couldn’t vote for him, I’m not American, but I would have. Honest to god, I’d wake up early and vote for Donald Trump.
The Trump campaign triggered in me a feeling of community, of adhesion that I’d never felt before. And I’d never felt it before because Trump was the first candidate ever who wasn’t representing the conservatives. Which I’m not. Or the Christians. Which I’m not. Or the fiscal conservatives or whatever. Which I care about but not very strongly. Trump arose in 2016 as the candidate of the fast-dying white majority of the United States. And again, I’m not American, but my homeland has a similar predicament, and American politics eventually trickle down to Europe in a few years, so it was easy to identify with. I hadn’t written that essay yet, but I had it in mind, and Trump was the first guy ever to appear to be fighting Bioleninism, then incarnated in the odious, horrible body of Hillary Clinton. And so I really supported the guy. When against all odds he won the election in November 2016, I got drunk and had a blast. I’ll always remember fondly that night.
Fast forward 2 and a half years later. No wall. No jail for Hillary. Narrowly avoided jail himself! The swamp is a big as always. Forever war still going on. Spending more time tweeting about Israel than his own country. Shits on Ann Coulter and says he wants more legal immigration. Did I mention no wall? What a disaster. Trump has been a huge and complete disappointment. Again, I don’t dislike the guy personally. I mean I never *liked* him. He’s weird, talks like a retarded 10 year old. I’d say I’d probably wouldn’t enjoy having a few beers with him but he doesn’t even drink. But I don’t hate the guy, I think odds are his heart is in the right place. He just can’t get stuff done. He’s incompetent. I mean, it’s hard. It was always hard. One just doesn’t come in as a complete outsider and reform the whole government from scratch. Then again, people who work in the heart of the beast, in Washington DC, tell me he’s just incompetent. He could get stuff done. Some stuff at least. But he’s messing everything up. He’s just bad at the job. Incompetent. A boomer after all, who gave his most talented child to a dumb Jew son of a criminal who doesn’t let her or his grandchildren eat proper food because muh Jewry.
So now what? Back to Moldbuggian detachment? Nothing ever changes, huh. The Cathedral really is all powerful. Ever since Trump made some protests about the intelligence agencies being disloyal or outright attacking him, the Establishment feels so powerful they just blatantly say in the press that the CIA are the good guys. Does nobody remember that the CIA being evil was pretty much proven by the 1960s, and that evil CIA ops have been a staple of books and films for decades? Not anymore; they’re not content with being powerful in the shade. They want outright public submission.
Democracy really is a sham; but it’s hard to go back to detachment now that Bioleninism is out in the open. Elections now are openly not about economic policy or social conservatism. Elections now are about the speed of the dispossession of white straight males. It’s for or against Bioleninism. The majority of candidates of the Democratic party are openly talking of “reparations” for black people, i.e. outright Danegeld. And don’t get me started with open hunt to mess with the sexual hormones of white children in schools. It’s going on right there in the open.
The US has an election next year, the campaign is starting now. Given the present demographic trends, it is very likely that Florida, if not Texas, will flip blue very shortly; that means a rock-solid majority for the Democratic party, forever. Donald Trump is likely to be the last white male president in American history. The 2020 election is probably going to be the last election which is more or less contested. Trump does still have a chance.
But Trump is incompetent. He’s not helping. He’s just treading water while another million Third-world immigrants sneak in, another middle-school boy gets injected estrogen because he doesn’t like football, and another hundred-thousand white men just overdose on opioids because you can’t even play a videogame today without being forced to play a black woman avatar. Can you support this guy? I sure can’t. Again, not my nation, but I wouldn’t. I won’t call him a traitor, although many have. But he didn’t build the wall. He’s letting Amazon, Facebook and Twitter campaign openly against him and censor everything to the right, and he hasn’t lifted a finger. He doesn’t deserve support.
It doesn’t seem anyone to his right is going to run third party, and even if he was removed as candidate, the most likely replacement would be the despicable bugman Mitt Romney. So what are the Democrats running? Beto, a tall white guy with a small face (as they say in Japan) which chicks dig, but sounds pretty much clinically retarded. There’s Elizabeth Warren which is the stereotype of the annoying high school teacher who thinks she’s an intellectual because she’s memorized Jane Austen novels. I’m being unfair to her, she did write the Two Income Trap which is a great book on the complete scam which is the modern economy. But still, come on. Pocahontas.
Then there’s Kamala Harris, which is like when you’ve beaten the final boss after an arduous fight, with only 10% HP left, but then the actual final boss comes in and he’s 5 times as powerful and more aggressive. Kamala Harris is a black woman who’s pretty much openly calling for the disenfranchisement of the white male population. She’s Bioleninism incarnated. Hillary in black. Not good. And precisely because of that the most anticipated to win the primaries.
There’s Bernie of course, the last hope of the residual white left. Not the modern Baizuo. The old White left. The Classical Leninists. Who haven’t still realized why they lost that battle. Why socialism is dead in the West. Bernie didn’t work last time, won’t work this time. A bunch of black girls will twerk to his face in his rallies and then spew some poison gas to his crowd. The press won’t even report it.
Seriously though, to the extent Bernie represents a constituency that’s not for instant Brazilification, I wish him well, but he’s old and frail, and his program isn’t very interesting. And most importantly, his own constituency is being taken over by a guy who’s 10 times smarter, is young, has actual good ideas, is not white and will give the Bernie crowd everything they want, and more. Much more.
To be precise, $1,000 a month more.
Come Andrew Yang.
He became famous after an interview with Joe Rogan, which I strongly recommend. He’s good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8
He was also good on Tucker Carlson's (!). Note how he mentions that GDP and unemployment rates are completely bogus figures which hide more than they reveal. He deserves a 10 year dictatorship just for that. But I get ahead of myself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzksqTu9UY4
He’s just very good. I mean look at him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUolzAltwKI
He’s the only candidate in this whole race that doesn’t talk like a bugman. You know what a bugman is. All those politicians and corporate guys who talk in that odd and disingenuous jargon designed to obfuscate. High-grade NPCs, that’s what bugmen are. Well, he isn’t. He goes straight to the issues, analyzes them intelligently, and then has a plan. It may be or may not be a good plan. But I dare you to show me a presidential candidate with a higher IQ than Andrew Yang in the last 30 years. That’s even more of a feat because the guy is East Asian, and God knows East Asians tend to be bugmen too.
The guy even wrote a book called The War On Normal People, which is the perfect definition of the Left. I should use it as a subtitle for a Bioleninism book.
I’ve been comparing him with Lee Kuan Yew, another famous non-bugman Asian. Well, LKY he’s not. I don’t think he’ll ever go public saying this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wblg2EM758
But Yang is perhaps the second Asian politician ever to be widely liked by the White right. The 4chan and related crowd which heavily supported Trump in 2016 has now gone wholesale to the Yang Gang. Part of it is justified disappointed about Trump not delivering on his promises. Most of it is Yang's promise of Universal Basic Income (UBI), $1,000 dollars a month for every adult US citizen.
But a big part of it is just pure appreciation for the guy. Look at his interview with Tucker. You might remember my last post on Tucker, and how he's revolutionized conservative commentary in the US by arguing that the focus of government should be taking care of working families. Well, Tucker himself liked Yang, and it's no wonder he did. Yang is the candidate who's using the closest arguments to Tucker. By far. He's lamenting the plight of the working man. He's calling to help the rural white middle class who's being ravaged by the opioid suicide crisis. Note that Trump has said some stuff about that, and has tried to get China to stop exports of fentanyl, but he didn't mention white people by name. Yang did, just like that. He's the only guy who's not only overtly or covertly calling for your extinction; he's the only guy on the record for trying to stop it.
And, he's promising to stop it by taxing the hell of the Enemy. Which again, as Tucker mentioned, isn't a huge abstract thing The Jews or the Left. No. The enemy is Big Tech. It's Amazon, it's Google, It's Apple. It's Facebook. It's Twitter. It's Woke Capital. It's those guys who aren't only taking your jobs, they're using their monopoly in the management of information to censore us, hide us, slander us and ostracize us. You might remember that Trump also hinted at doing something about that. Regulate Facebook and Twitter as utilities to make sure the Right could actually fight the Culture War, and perhaps show that there's a majority of people against injecting synthetic hormones into 12 year old children. That he'd make big tech build in America and stop avoiding taxes with blatant laundering tricks. Well, Trump did nothing, and he's avoiding the topic. Yang isn't. I have nothing against Amazon's business, but Bezos chose sides by buying the Washington Post and recently going on a censorship spree, banning right wing books from Amazon. He must pay. Yang says he will.
I don't know if UBI would work. Americans are crying bloody murder about a proposed 10% VAT. I say cry me a river. Europeans have a 20% VAT. It's annoying, but it's not a big deal. Smart people say that automation is overhyped, it's not growing that fast, self-driving cars, one of the biggest talking points of Yang, are likely to not even happen after all. That may be true. But I'd like to say that the beauty of UBI is not that it's actually necessary in the way Yang says it is, to give people something to fall back on while they find a new job.
Tucker is also worried about the middle class trucker. But Tucker's answer is to ban automation. Go full Luddite. Yang is talking about automation a lot. But he doesn't want to stop it. By implementing UBI he wouldn't stop automation, he'd accelerate it. Businesses would start automating like crazy once people left unsatisfying jobs to go play Fortnite on UBI or try an instagram e-thot career. A big majority of white collar jobs are complete and utter bullshit make-work made by government regulation to keep people busy and have some income to tax. If Yang succeeded in his proposed plan to completely change the regulatory paradigm to adapt to the computer economy at last, companies could actually get rid of all the inefficiencies, and automate everything. Starting with the bureaucracy.
You know who else is doing this? China. In 2017 when Xi Jinping basically named himself president for life, I was asked to look into his alleged eminence grise, Wang Huning. This guy wrote a book after a trip to America in the 1980s, when China was trying to find a way to square the circle of their adoption of free-market enterprise in the country. Wang realized he could justify free enterprise by saying that the United States "manages the people through their businesses, by regulating employment and taking taxes from labor". Basically arguing that Communism and Capitalism weren't so different, the latter as just outsourcing the "people management" to the business corporations.
Well China is pushing hard for developing AI and automation. Which is weird in a country which could have a serious unemployment problem if automation goes on. But China doesn't care. Why not? Because China has realized that with Internet and modern computing, they don't need the corporations to manage the people anymore. They can do it directly. Everybody has a mobile phone with a camera and a microphone 24/7 with them. The government knows your every move. You don't need to shame people into buying your ideology by threatening with firing them from their jobs, like America does. That's so 20th century. Now you can control behavior directly with internet surveillance. Social credit is an extension of this trend. It boggles the mind that accelerationists aren't talking more about this. Not saying it's a good thing. But the tech is here and it's happening anywhere. The only place where it isn't happening is Europe because we've outsourced it to American companies.
If you think UBI might work at giving people hope and readjusting the economy in a more just and fair way, sticking it to the oligarchs, vote for Yang. If you just want $1,000 a month, vote for Yang. If you think UBI would crash everything, vote for Yang, as this gay earth deserves crashing. If you just want UBI to show people that democracy inevitable ends with the people voting themselves money and thus proving democracy is a sham and discredit it as a political system, vote for Yang.
And if you want the final death of 20th century politics, and a new paradigm which breaks with the thievery of Boomers inflating the currency so that asset prices are rising through new records every year, while young people have to go through unpaid internships and 'gig economy' servitude until their 40s, while the Bioleninist government is busy with the soft genocide of every productive person with natural biological instincts.
Then Vote for Yang. I rest my case.
146 comments
replyYou are a smart guy Spandrell, and cynical to boot, which is why I am surprised you actually believed Trump would change anything. Any basic character study of the man would quickly establish a few fundamentals. He is a Jew Yorker, born and bred. His has a historical record of screwing his business associates immediately when the power balances shifted. Which speaks to his ruthlessness, but his stiffing of his contractors speaks to his treacherousness and sociopathy. Nickle and diming his subordinates says a lot what he will do for the average American i.e. "losers". His wealth stems from inherited real estate, again in Jew York, and being a reality TV clown. A couple of Russian political terms I've learned from Karlin over the years bear repeating. Always suspect Zrada (betrayal) and the more faith you put in a man, the harder he will twist the knife. Russian nationalists are always on the lookout for it and see the potential for Putinsliv at every opportunity. Certainly Western Europeans and Americans aren't quite so jaded in their daily social interactions and retain a childlike or rather lemminglike faith in their elected officials, but I didn't expect them to be that stupid. It seems Westerners have underestimated how rapidly their social institutions have rotten underneath to the point that they are now only wearing the still official norms like a flappy skinsuit. Perhaps its because I'm Chinese and ergo naturally cynical or perhaps its because I'm Chinese and thus have no wistful desire in the survival of Western civilization, but I saw the Trumpsliv coming from a mile away. It should have been obvious given the kind of man Trump is, a fat boomer narcissistic charlatan, which is the one criticism that his enemies were 100% on target, but hope springs eternal. As for Yang, I'm indifferent not because I am certain his accelerationism wont work, but rather because he has too many powerful entrenched interests to fight through. At the end of the day, it's all about the money, and there are too many enemies on that front, starting with the evil fat black women who make up so much of the Democratic Party primary voters whose share of existing handouts far eclipses a measly $1000 a month and who aren't looking to share with Whitey.
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He favours affirmative action and obviously does not like white conservatives. The video with the 2 other Asian guys makes it clear. 10 min 38 secs. Just saying.
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Your public statements do not necessarily correspond with your political heart. While I can agree that UBI is an unworkable idea, it makes a good way to stand out from the crowd. Notice how Trump made himself different from the bazillion other candidates when he was in his party's primaries. The goal, the objective, staring you in the face, is to be real with people while not tripping over a verbal faux pas. This can be difficult to achieve. It's hard to be half-real, but Trump somehow pulled it off. I guess a hundred years of not saying "nigger" in fancy apartments paid off for the senior citizen Donald.
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Did you think the next president would abolish affirmative action and give whites a fair crack of the whip? The whole point of UBI is that we can be dissidents without having our lives ruined, and even if (worst case scenario) UBI were conditional on not being a dissident, we could be 'passivists' or devote ourselves to religion, gardening or whatever and still not starve. We'd be completely liberated from the sheer oppression of being a hated pariah class that it's legal and popular to discriminate against. The rest's just pie in the sky. What matters is the thousand dollars.
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Had to be said about Trump. Sad. Not seeing Yang break through though. Too much niche appeal, not enough mass appeal. But, good meme.
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I think the book written by Charles Murray - In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, has a better explanation of UBI. UBI is the only way to replace the failed welfare system in the West.
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If you think the welfare system has failed you don't understand Bioleninism. The welfare state is a massive success. It cheaply (compared to the costs of communism) buys off loyalty of bodies who are eligible to vote. It induces them to actually breed (while successfully suppressing the fertility of anyone who might be a thread).
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This is absolutely right. The myth that's most helpful to the 'deep state' is that of inefficiency, the myth of them doing silly things by accident. No, they do evil things on purpose, always. There's no counter-example: anything that can be explained by inefficiency can also be explained by calculating, self-serving evil. The welfare state has been immensely powerful as a means to change the nature of society. It doesn't only enable ethnic engineering: it's also a powerful means to keep wages low, to erode white community spirit, to reduce the perceived need for the church and so on, to prop up the otherwise inhumane institution of labour-as-commodity, and to inculcate a deep but highly cynical obedience in the lower classes. Where today's Kosher Sandwich is at its most hateful and destructive is that we're faced with only two options: support the welfare state as is, or remove it while preserving the rest of the neo-liberal machine (immigration, women in the workforce, labour-as-commodity, housing-as-investment-vehicle, etc.). Since the latter would be inhumane and catastrophically destructive, no matter what you do you always get some version of the former, and because the former (in its pure form) would produce a wholly dysfunctional society where nothing ever gets done, no matter what you do you always get a partial version of the latter. It's a wonderful psychological operation for the élite getting what they want all of the time while preserving the illusion of choice. The deeper observation is that ALL CHOICE is illusory and that the only kind of human freedom worth wanting is the freedom to live in a healthy society that exists for that purpose.
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[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
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Yang will do nothing as well. Not UBI, not warring against Big Tech, nothing. Things will keep slowly descending. Best thing is to create Private Associations like the Northwest Front, like the Amish, like the Mormon and then grow a new country out of it. Meanwhile, spread redpills and hope for a candidate that would have the balls to impose dictatorship - but then again, every government agency and even the army would be against him. The system is a beast that doesn't allow anyone to stop itself from feeding and increasing.
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If I was American, I would move to and focus on Alaska. It has always been the odd state out that everybody forgets about, that is often forgotten off drawings showing the country's silhouette, that is somehow not really seen as a core and integral part of the union. If Alaska would want to secede, many people would shrug.
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It's cold.
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It's very cold. It's Kentucky with permafrost. The state bird is the mosquito. It's a place of self-exile when contemplating suicide like Liam Neeson in "The Grey." Beautiful glaciers, though.
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Nice musings. Always comforting to read people on an eerily similar wavelength of thought. This sci fi story has a world kind of like the one envisaged here: https://medium.com/@adamwinfield/under-toronto-6d457338408d The recent Tucker post was top draw too.
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So we're all clear here - UBI will never happen. There's a structural reason it doesn't exist now and that reason isn't exactly "it's too expensive" - it's that it doesn't pay off supporters at the expense of non-supporters. "Let's bribe 100% of the electorate" vs "Let's bribe the identifiable supporters of the ruling party" It would be interesting to see how the Democratic party weasels out of supporting UBI but the simple solution is that they won't even have to - they'll ignore it and the press will ignore it with them.
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Yeah well. I wanna see the Democrats deny people money.
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Yup. Of course it's easy for anyone to reject UBI simply by "it's too expensive". You don't have to bury that via non-coverage, you sell it as "see these wise Dems being fiscally responsible".
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If everyone though like me, then voting would work. Also there would be no need to vote since the guy who's already in charge would also be thinking like me.
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[…] (segnalo, da consultare cum grano salis, “AltLeft“, “Unz” e “Bloody Shovel“). Ovviamente tutto ciò non poteva che mettere in allerta la stampa, sia perché […]
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[…] the way, while we are on the subject, I fully endorse Spandrell’s opinion on Trump. Trump has fallen into the rightist trap: instead of building something new, he tried to conserve […]
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The techno replacement of humans is coming. Very fast. Super fast. Far faster then most realize. Here's a gif of computing power related to the processing power of a human mind and how it compounds it's growth. This is a fairly well known extrapolation of known advances possible. It is NOT some flight of fancy sci-fi dream. It's based on basic known principles. http://assets.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/LakeMichigan-Final3.gif There will be almost no work at all for an average 100 IQ person. Here's the power point by Dennis M. Bushnell,chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, "Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025] " he goes over the trends of technology coming up and how they may play out. His report is not some wild eyed fanaticism it's based on reasonable trends. I think to get a brief reading of where things are going this one of the best short deep views that you will find anywhere. You have read a bushel basket of books to get the viewpoint this short power point has. https://archive.org/details/FutureStrategicIssuesFutureWarfareCirca2025 Page 19 shows capability of the human brain and time line for human level computation. Page 70 gives the computing power trend and around 2025 we get human level computation for $1000. 2025 is bad but notice it says"...By 2030, PC has collective computing power of a town full of human minds...". Look at what these guys have done with a new algorithm for AI on cell phones. Apparently they have massively lowered the computing power needed by turning everything into a yes/no paradigm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBVJrv6Tdq4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql2iCQSYSE0 Wang bucks is better than no bucks.
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Moore's law ended with 5nm. We either reverse to size increase or technology will stale for decades to come. And no, Quantum computing is a meme that won't happen due to its physics being flawed.
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Can you elaborate on Quantum?
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Wouldn't say the physics is flawed per se, but the amount of hype around quantum computing is certainly unreasonable. I am no specialist -- interested people can read FAQs on Scott Aaronson's blog or ask him -- but as far as I understand, one fundamental problem is that it is rather difficult to isolate whatever bits of matter you're using to host the quantum state of the computer (qubits) from outside interference, and the bigger it gets the more difficult it becomes: due to interaction with the environment (meaning here basically anything that is not the quantum part of your quantum computer) all the delicate quantum juices leak out. In fact, that's exactly how we get our ordinary everyday classical matter. There is something called quantum error correction codes that allow quantum computation with noisy (i.e. somewhat connected with the environment) qubits, but the amount of noisy qubits needed to simulate a given number of ideal qubits with reasonable fidelity quickly grows with the amount of noise. The other fundamental problem seems to be that the initial quantum states that one needs to start with in order to solve a non-trivial problem are very intricate and fine-tuned, and thus very difficult to construct. I remember glancing through a paper about this, but unfortunately can't find it.
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If you try to make a large quantum CPU, the qubits will collapse each other's superpositions. Haha, oops.
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They recently successfully made a small one that was able to house something like a whole word. Even that had serious stability problems.
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Ending of Moore Law "for silicon" doesn't preclude anything I said. Moore's Law doesn't have to go on forever to cover 2025 or 2030. You have also narrowed your field by focusing on silicon used in a standard way they have for decades. There's other avenues for computing. Once we have better than human computing it will not be long before these better than humans find new ways to compute. What I'm getting at is the rise in computing power has a LONG ways to go. Far above our present human potential. That's the point not whatever tech gets there. I also suspect a great deal of of the problem of present computing advances is due to the inability of corporate managers to understand technology as well as some of the people who founded their companies. Large corporations tend to be taken over by spreadsheet businessmen who are great at maximizing profits but not so good at pushing technology to pursue growth. They tend to make spectacular profits for ten years or so on the past tech then bankrupt the company or drive it into the ground. Some examples that seem to follow this path are HP, GE and Lockheed-Martin.
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Once we have better than human computing
So despite everything, you still believe in the inevitable advance of material technology?
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"...you still believe in the inevitable advance of material technology..." Yes if we're talking about tech that will allow computing at many multiples bandwidth of a one human. No I do not believe in "infinite" material progress. There's no reason we can't have human computing power for $1,000 in 2025. I also think it just a matter of time before someone realizes that sending control signals through wires with electricity is foolish and you can use light, even of the circuits are larger, with much greater speed, over much larger areas to get much more computing power. After all most "finished" computer chip space is packaging and interconnects. Why not make the whole thing active? They're already moving video and serial port logic onto the main processor. This will continue. Pentium pro lots of empty space https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Pentiumpro\_moshen.jpg
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Suffice to say I disagree. But very well, you have made a prediction and I can respect that. We'll see in 50 (20? 10?) years if it's true. For what it's worth, my intuition from working in HPC is that ever-increasing parallelism is the way we will continue to try to get around the breakdown of Moore's Law; that true breakthroughs are becoming asymptotic; that chip manufacture continues to get more expensive for diminishing returns; that those with the real basic know-how to innovate in chip design are becoming fewer and fewer as they retire or die without adequately training their replacements; and that any real change in this down-spiral will be crushed (is already being crushed) by H1Bs. Optical processing could be the breakthrough we need, that I grant. It would, among other things, practically remove the heat management difficulties we presently experience. But I don't think it's mature enough to replace anything yet, and I don't think it will out-race the brain drain to become possible. But we'll see.
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Parallel processing is a dead end. It feels like a big boost in its earliest stages because there are situations in which legitimately branching threads can be conceptualised as parallel and separate processes, up to a point. On a deeper level however, nothing can ever work that way. The very idea of a computer is that a specific program is meticulously defined, transformed into the simplest possible transformations of simple states, and then clearly executed. That's a foundationally serial phenomenon. Additionally, I noted "up to a point" above. The truth is, any resources, including memory, that are to be accessed by multiple processors will be contested in an ultimately serial way. Raw speed of hardware is rapidly approaching its feasible/practical maximum. A much worse problem is the inefficiency of software, which has been getting much worse for a long time now. Partly this is because the size and scope of software has become much more complicated than it was in the past, but this doesn't adequately explain the phenomenon overall. A much more likely explanation is that as programming has grown from a cult-like hobbyist arena for total freaks and nerds and become something deeply mainstream, the consensus culture has become less interesting, less intelligent and less demanding. Programming today is just stupider, more resource-dependent, than it was in the past. Compare and contrast the hardware requirements for playing a simple Facebook Game with those for running any program you care to choose from the 1980s. What today requires as a bare minimum a processing speed of 1Ghz and physical RAM measured in the gigabytes was easily achievable in prior decades with processors below 100Mhz and physical RAM measured in the low megabytes. Go back further and "Jet Set Willy II" for the ZX Spectrum used sophisticated parallel threaded timing routines and delivered dozens/scores of unique puzzle rooms....... in 48 kilobytes running at 3.5Mhz. "But there's more to life than video games" - yes indeed but they push hardware, and used to push software, to the limit. If you're wedded to snobbery however, consider what was required to run MS-Office 97 compared to whatever rubbish they're pushing now, then compare the functionality enhancements that justify the greater resource requirements. I rest my case.
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If you're expecting me to disagree with you, you'll be disappointed. I could nearly have written this very same response. Except it's even worse, because frankly not even HPC is limited by flops anymore; it's all about memory access, whose improvement is about three orders of magnitude slower per year than flops.
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The more we think about it, the more depressing it gets, until the realisation dawns that computers were never meant to be little people in boxes. If a computer's reconceptualised as a fancy, massively flexible calculator with pretty graphics and the ability to reproduce sound as nicely as a vinyl LP, then optimism returns because on that humbler view they're a finished technology, as finished as televisions circa 2015 or phones circa 2005. If people want to step on God's toes, they'll have to take at least some of His ideas on board, which is going to mean massive fuzziness, parallelism without program, but worst of all for computer enthusiasts a set of fundamental 'drives' that are wholly external: food, sex, etc. At that point, if engineers are stupendously gifted and lucky, they make a beetle. Not much good for doing your tax returns or modelling the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral exactly as it was before the totally not terror attack, but very good for making people with almost no agency in their personal lives feel like they have some control after all. I don't think God is about to declare such sad pursuits inherently wicked, but to be honest when it comes to obeying God it's probably better in the long run to keep both feet on that little narrow path that never gives you blind corners or dangerous slopes. (Well maybe Andrew Yang ho ho ho)
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"...So despite everything, you still believe in the inevitable advance of material technology?..." Serendipity. After I wrote the above saw this article. "Light-based computer hardware that can compete with silicon" https://revolution-green.com/light-based-computer-hardware-can-compete-silicon/ Now I fully admit this is lab based work and you shouldn't expect them churning out processors next week but...it works. The speed is vastly higher than silicon and the power requirements much less. There's just all kinds of ways you can make a switch that turns on or off due to some stimuli. The idea that, we've run out of ideas, is silly. I see nothing even remotely stopping a $1,000 or less human level computation by 2025 even with sticking with silicon. The cry, "oh no we only have parallel computing to get speed", is a nonstarter in my opinion as human brains are massively parallel. In fact the basic elements of lowly silicon are much faster so the needed units in parallel are much less than an actual brain and therefore easier to program. The argument that humans are much smarter or have higher processor power is also a nonstarter. The best chess players in the world are now beaten by computers. Recently the best Go player on the planet was trounced. You may say these are narrow areas and you're right but humans are just a bunch of narrow areas that are fitted with some hard wired systems and some learned behavior. Computers learn at an extraordinarily higher rate and can then can be reproduced, learn, (be programmed), at the speed of light once a large case of narrow areas are trained. They will then outclass "most" IQ 100 humans by a large amount. THAT'S the problem. Not that some super narrow set of humans can outdo a computer in some narrow field of knowledge. The problem is the average person will be far outclassed. Most all jobs that require image recognition, a little sorting and some moving stuff around will be done much cheaper and more efficiently by a $10,000 robot that never stops, never needs a break and within it's work environment never makes a mistake or complains for pennies of electricity per hour.
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Human brains have been far slower than computers for a very long time, and while they are stupendously parallel, most of the work being done has nothing to do with 'computation'. The preoccupations of humans have mostly to do with getting enough fuel to keep the system going, planning ways to make more of them, and worrying about the problems which attend those primary goals. A human being, even at the IRS, was not put on Earth to crunch numbers for someone else, and that's ultimately the problem with 'human level' computers: to get them good enough, they'll need their own priorities, at which point they won't be any use for the things you really want them to do. The problem with computer enthusiasts is they have this deep-seated schizophrenia about what it is they want. They point at a computer that can do a billion floating-point arithmetic calculations a second and say "that's not as good as a human brain". Then if anyone ever built something near-identical to a human brain, the first question would be "how many FLOPS can it put out?". As always, science disappoints.
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"...Human brains have been far slower than computers for a very long time, and while they are stupendously parallel, most of the work being done has nothing to do with ‘computation’..." People who make these sort of of observations are really not being observant at all. You are looking at a present computer and saying,"see it's not a human". You're completely blinding yourself to the rapid increase in power. The average low cost desktop right now has maybe the neural power of a lizard. What can you expect from a lizard? Not too much but as the computing power increases and software is written to use it things will happen. They already are. Look at Musk new special purpose neural net based computer to bring about self driving cars. He's doing a good job with this with the present video card based chip he has. The new one will be many, many times faster and more accurate. You are just not getting the idea of exponential growth. That it will not go on forever is irrelevant because we don't need growth forever to far, far outclass humans. This is the point. The essence of the point. We will be outclassed by a huge margin. We're just now coming up on mouse brain power and things are starting to happen fast. Software will be slower but it will come. Most of it will be training neural nets and at some point after being bootstrapped at a lower level they will train themselves.
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The brain is commonly misunderstood by tech-heads. Its "computational power" is wildly more than 10^17/sec. Furthermore, conceiving of intelligence as computational power is a flawed analysis. The brain does not actually work like that.
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"...The brain is commonly misunderstood by tech-heads...." Then why are computers beating the pants off of humans in chess, automated letter reading for addresses and a whole assortment of areas where they train a neural net to preform a task. If humans are so smart why do they lose? I see all these objections are being exactly the same as the church declaring the Earth was at the center of the universe and anyone saying different is a heretic.
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In order to make the UBI work you will have to preclude any debts or liens against it. Especially Women's grab of Men's UBI from divorce and child payments. Women can decide to have children or not. This would have a massive eugenic effect. Many Women would look at Men's stability far more closely if they couldn't keep his earnings. Stop UBI payments if you're in jail but don't give it to whatever entity that jails you or they will jail everyone for everything. The UBI is not paid to anyone when you're in jail but a good practice would be to allow payments for one month before you get out and only pay that in lump sum when released to keep you from going back. Think of the incentive of $1,000 a month if you don't go to jail and nothing if you do. It won't stop all crime but I bet it would crater it in volume.
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I don't understand your hype about UBI. Just because a law says everyone should get UBI, doesn't mean everybody will get it. If the ruling ideology of progressivsm says "whitey bad", whitey will not be treated equally or fairly. Maybe people of color will get their UBI twice (happened in Germany with immigrants, the record is a guy with 17 identities for which he collected wellfare). Maybe the standard for correctly filing a request to receive UBI will simply be higher for Whitey. If whitey fill out the request form, it will bounce back, because some information or documentation is still lacking or maybe the form was sent to the wrong place, e.g. to the town of present residency instead of town of last employment record or birth. If a government employed bureaucrat makes a mistake, nothing serious will happen to her, especially if the mistake is compatible with the ruling ideology. So the UBI law will be applied unequally. Sure, some people will sue, some might even win in court, and some will be treated fairly by the administration. But that will be just a tiny fraction of all UBI requests. You know history. It is very unsual that different people get equal treatmeant. Why should it happen with UBI in the USA?
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Trump's communicating at a 5th grade level demonstrates he's far more intelligent than you give him credit. His public communications have to be received by the widest audience possible. You don't do that by showing off your crushing vocabulary. Yang's proposal is a communistic race for the bottom. I can't wait for someone to counter-offer $2000/mo for people's votes. Only a total moron would think this is a good idea, and/or workable.
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>I can’t wait for someone to counter-offer $2000/mo for people’s votes. Who do I donate to for this to happen?
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Me, obviously.
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Yeah yeah 5D Chess. Whatever man. Show me a pic of the guy speaking like an intelligent adult man. Ever.
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgJAxkALyc Moldbug it ain’t, of course, and certainly shallow by the standards of the dissident right circa 2016. But this man does not sound like a dummy to me.
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Not saying he's dumb. He's obviously an intelligent man. But his verbal IQ is ridiculous. The guy just can't speak. I'm sure he thinks things through by other means, but a speech writer he ain't.
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His speech writers are pretty solid. And he was lethal in the debates and live confrontation, sharper than everyone there by a mile. He's obviously not in the same physical or mental health he used to be. The job takes its toll and he certainly doesn't do well talking to a hostile press corps. But to say a man who coined so many lethal tag phrases for people is dumb is silly. A few thousand word vocabulary of emotion vastly beats a large intellectual one that skips over the ruling part of the brain: status and identity.
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Yang’s proposal is a communistic race for the bottom. I can’t wait for someone to counter-offer $2000/mo for people’s votes. Only a total moron would think this is a good idea, and/or workable.
You say that like it's not the entire point of the exercise.
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We have a race to the bottom right now The US has had below replacement fertility for nearly 50 years longer if you count the Depression Right now despite the largest generation in US history we also have the lowest fertility rate and in numbers per child bearing age and while its part social, its mostly economics If 1k UBI or 2K UBI encourages more stay at home moms for example or adds decent amount of fertility than its worth it. Tie it to inflation, close the borders to trade and most problems go away You aren't getting out of paying for civilization and keeping that civilization as well so you either distribute enough money to fix some problems , regulate the crap out if the economy or do both The other options is civic collapse In the long run this is a decent option since most people will be very devoutly religious people with little interest in modernity but most NrX people are thinking IN SPACE! for 2219 not Amish Paradise Whatever to say about Yang , he actually is aware problems exist and has solutions to them. maybe they'll work, maybe they won't but once President Trump is gone assuming we don't get a civil war, I'd like to try and actually fix things hell I am the point if I though Zombie Lenin would get White TFR up I'd vote him in Its not working at all but Yang 2024 sounds solid to me.
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My guess is that Yang himself will not be the Democratic presidential nominee, but the idea of a Universal Basic Income will eventually be implemented by a future Democrat.
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Quantum physics doesn't work in large scale, only in the smallest ones. This is a major flaw of the theory that is brushed aside for convenience by the scientific community. Another problem is its relationship with Dark Energy and Matter and with Black Holes. Since ~2 years ago or so, most Dark Matter research has been defeated and the theory is just about to be discarded. You see, Dark Matter was invented because there was a need to explain the rotational speed of the outer spiral of the galaxy being from a different velocity than its mass predicted. For that, they "invented" a mass called Dark Matter, which supposedly would be discovered in the future. Well, not only it hasn't, but newer and better equipment now can detect normal matter in the outer spirals that couldn't before, eliminating even the need for such concepts. Also, the philosophical basis for Quantum Physics are self contradicting. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reimagining-of-schroedingers-cat-breaks-quantum-mechanics-mdash-and-stumps-physicists1/ In the end, people will give in that small scale Quantum is just your normal Electromagnetism at work, that big scale Quantum simply doesn't work (and can't, it also contradicts itself). https://www.newscientist.com/article/2180033-quantum-mechanics-may-contradict-itself-when-applied-to-big-objects/ But about Quantum Computers themselves, first that the name "Quantum" is a market ploy, just like Samsung's "Quantum dot" TVs, which are, again, just normal atomic theory at work. Quantum computers also work by approximation and have loads of error and noise, so it's unstable and so far unusable. Although hyper powerful and fast, so far people managed to make it spell rubbish. This is an example of how a Quantum computer work, and you see there's nothing Quantum there. https://youtu.be/IiLplTc8rQY To say some more, you guys should search for "end of moore's law" to see how people are simply trying everything, but succeeding at nothing so far to avoid this.
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Yes, I'm aware of the end of Moore's Law. So what was that Quantum communications that China supposedly was able to test successfully a couple years ago?
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It was a mix of suspercomplex data, a security protocol (like all the previous handshakes, but more complex). The entanglement part is the only true Quantum concept of it all, and again, this is just electromagnetism. The thing is the name has been used as a meme for new stuff (like the iPod did some time ago and people used it for "smart stuff"), specially because Quantum Physics takes a huge part of Normal Physics for itself and then calls it Quantum. Bear in mind, Quantum Physics does work, we know it do, but for a very limited arrange of what it describes. It's a case of falsely attributing an explanation for a phenomena. The Beriberi story all over again.
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Thanks man.
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It's quite true, except that explanations get completely mangled by the time they reach news media. The point of what is called quantum communication is to be able to transmit information in such a manner that it cannot be intercepted without being destroyed. This is done by creating entangled quantum states of e.g. two photons, sending one of them over a communication channel and measuring them (i.e. making them interact with a classical system) at both ends. The results of the sender's and receiver's measurements are random -- which by the way means that the quantum channel by itself cannot transmit classical information, you still need to communicate over a classical channel -- but correlated, so the pairs of measurements of the entangled states provide a sort of ephemeral one-time pad. An eavesdropper, in order to eavesdrop, would have to make the sent photon interact with his apparatus, and there are some very simple QM theorems that show that he cannot reconstruct the entangled state or copy it before measuring, so that whether he forwards the photon he's measured or sends a similar-looking photon on to the original receiver, the receiver's and the sender's measurements will no longer be correlated, and the receiver will know about the eavesdropping when he gets the classical half of the message. Also, since the eavesdropper doesn't have access to the sender's results, he can't use the result of his measurement to decode the classical message, so it does not matter if it is public. All this is quite feasible with modern optical technology even over fairly large distances and event rates. "Fairly large event rates" isn't really all that large compared to regular fiber optics, though, so the only practical use for now is to transmit various encryption keys. Okay, fine, very good, but are all other parts of your secure communications channel anywhere as secure as that? Can they be made as secure as that? Unlikely unless you're a government, which is why quantum communication is not nearly as big a deal as the press releases make out.
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This comment is very confusing. Standard theories of dark matter do not involve macroscopic quantum effects, and there is little prospect that the galactic rotation anomalies will be explained by discovery of previously hidden ordinary matter. We are told that the Penrose-Hameroff theory of the quantum brain is an example of a real quantum computer, but that there is no "quantum" there - even though that theory is all about superposition, which is a quantum concept. Then there is the peculiar implication that microscopic quantum mechanics is "just electromagnetism" - does that mean classical electromagnetism? Then how do you explain the stability of atoms, why doesn't the electron spiral into the nucleus?
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I recommend you reading your Miles Mathis. Fundamentals are wrong throughout the entirety of physics. Here's something about Quantum entanglement, for instance: http://milesmathis.com/entang.html And this about tunneling: http://milesmathis.com/tunnel.pdf The problem we have today is that science became a mainstream show, so people think they have any saying in those matters. Like you just now asking "but what about this X principle I read elsewhere but don't know anything about?" Also, dark matter is only possible due to Quantum Physics. And we know both can't exist.
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This Miles guy looks like a major kook. Titanic is a hoax, Christchurch is a hoax, the Khashoggi killing is a hoax... I almost expect him to think that the election of Trump is a hoax. However that may be, it is my considered opinion that on physics his words are completely worthless. Never mind that the guy believes in UFOs and aliens, seems to think that solar cycles are caused by Jupiter and the other gas giants -- he evidently doesn't understand conservation of energy:
With that in mind, I returned to Wikipedia, where I studied the page for Uranium. I have been there before for my science papers, but never with this question in mind. What jumped out at me this time was the fact that Uranium is very electropositive. What is more, once it splits, it often splits into Caesium, which is the most electropositive element. What does that mean? It means that these substances produce electrons very readily. It doesn't take much energy to free an electron, and that free electron can be used for power. In fact, it takes less energy to release it than it provides once free, which is the key here. It is like money from nothing.
On this basis, he thinks (if I can dignify whatever process he uses to produce those statements with that appellation) that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are a hoax and that nuclear power plants work by splitting uranium into cesium and extracting free electrons from cesium. And that mostly they provide power for UFOs. Pfui.
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You're the perfect example of what I've said.
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Quantum is so real it's crazy. Haha, see what I did there? But for real, yeah, no, it's real. Most of dark matter has been explained by quantized MOND. However, they still can't explain the bullet cluster, so most likely dark matter is real but somewhere between 1/4 and 1/20 as prevalent as previous estimates. Well, they may eventually be able to explain the bullet cluster. Could be complete fraud for all I know - no dark matter Steve McIntyre exists yet.
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I bet $500 on predictit that yang wins democratic nomination 2020
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Awesome.
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I really want to bet on predictit too. I believe it would be easy money except...I suspect the Democrats will steal the election from him. There's so much fraud that it is difficult to know what the outcome will be.
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It doenst matter if he actually wins. You just wait for the price to double after he gains some momentum/debates in caucuses and sell the shares before the DNC can screw him.
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Spandrell, can you reveal what country you are from originally? I’ve been curious for years.
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I only say in person and when the reveal is mutual.
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Well I am happy to meet - I don’t remember precisely where you are but I visit China once a year (I am American, based in New York)
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Let me know when you're in China. My email is in the about page.
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i think it's the opposite: trump is competent, perhaps too competent, which can explain his success on foreign policy (everyone in 2016 thought foreign leaders would hate him and not want to work with him, and the opposite happened) which explains why he has become so risks-averse to domestic policy such as immigration, such as capitulating and back-down when challenged. He just wants to get his first term done without rocking the boat too much, so he defers a to experts even if they don't like him that much or don't have his agenda in mind. I think jimmy carter was less competent than trump even though he is smarter.
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You mean he's competent at saving his own ass?
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he's competent in that he knows his strengths and weaknesses, so he is always deferring to experts and capitulating regarding domestic policy if things become too heated, because he does not want to mess up and possibly lose in 2020. He constantly talk about the stock market because that is one of the obvious successes of his administration. He's self-conscious about his public image. Trump is someone who, despite his divisive persona , really wants to be liked by a lot of people. That explains why he ended the shutdown because he was worried that if it went on too long that he would lose the support of voters who are govt. employees or are sympathetic to them, even though the overlap is negligible.
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[…] on Acceleration by Yang. Please […]
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Why does this corner of the web, after arguing for years that Democracy doesn't matter compared what the Cathedral wants, get upset about Trump because he hasn't accomplished the wishlist in two years? No one could. Spandrell, why would you trust anyone willingly working in D.C.? Anything he accomplishes at all should defy predictions, and even if he never accomplishes anything lasting, he will always get my approval for the sacrifices he has made to bloody a few noses and make us laugh doing it. Any success is a siren call to encourage more breakaway elites. Any failure is expected, but could still help the long game if it illuminates millions of disappointed voters. That's millions more people to support antipoz parallel institutions. Don't accelerate yet. Attempted accelerationism at this stage only signals hopelessness to the Cathedral, and gives them more confidence to do what they want at the pace they want. They want the straight white males to shut up and accept destruction. Don't do that.
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It appears to me Trump has done most all he is going to do on the issues that matter to me, drain the swamp, illegal immigration, temporary work permits, etc. I sure hope I'm wrong. I would love to be proven wrong.
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So wait a minute. I shouldn't expect that anything can change. But I shouldn't signal hopelessness either. How does that work? I do thank Trump for 2016. It was awesome.
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I am not a citizen of the USA either, as is apparent, and I share your outlook on casting one's vote. It was through Twitter, too, that I awoke to the fact there was a contender in the Republican Party primaries that had all the right enemies, within the GOP before without (it was intra-party competition time). It would be the same with Brexit afterwards: I am neutral towarda any electoral confrontation, exfept when I see all the Cathedral senior and junior representatives teaming up on the same side: then I know the other side has something good going for them. (Note: I am not sure Moldbug is superior to Pat Buchanan in political thinking. I say this as a fan of Moldbug's who avidly paged through his whole blog). When against all odds he won the election in November 2016, I got drunk and had a blast. I’ll always remember fondly that night. Same for me. I found a website with "live results", and followed attentively the development of the battle. Some 3 big states (Florida and Pennsylvania and a little Northern one, maybe) were coin-flips situations, so it was a tense stretch of some hours. another hundred-thousand white men just overdose on opioids because you can’t even play a videogame today without being forced to play a black woman avatar That could affect so-called East-Asian, and Jewish males likewise. Why doesn't it? Could it be that the white ones are ever more openly mocked and plied in every mainstream media content they are reached by, from comics and movies to sit-coms and, well, ballsports commentary? Still it doesn't look credible that non-stop cultural bullying would lead to doping.
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Can you support this guy? I sure can’t. Again, not my nation, but I wouldn’t. I won’t call him a traitor, although many have. But he didn’t build the wall. He’s letting Amazon, Facebook and Twitter campaign openly against him and censor everything to the right, and he hasn’t lifted a finger. He doesn’t deserve support. Why, you cannot possibly not be cognizant that he was, in short order after he "tried to do something", put in a "be quiet and just play an act of governing or you go straight to jail" situation, and put there he was in a stark, blunt fashion. He then relented (think the oustings of Bannon, Tillerson,... which were purposely given publicly evident earmarks of deeds of submission, and a lot of appointments, like Bolton. and the grip on him relented as a result. And it has been a mock-presidency thereafter). The real motive behind placing the blame on him in right-wing quarters is because it's psychologically soothing to think "He failed" then "it was, and is, impossible not to fail". Competency has nothing to do with the play dynamics: if he were allowed to exercise governance, he would have picked (or not ousted) competent advisors. This is how presidents do their work when allowed to, not "on their own".
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Lots of typos right above, sorry.
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Powerful praise.
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Holy shit, twitter censorship is fast. I finally surrendered the urge to open up a twitter account (the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak) so I would have a wider avenue of (shit)posting. The account was all of 5 minutes old without a single tweet to it's name when it got locked for suspicious activity. I suspect twitter tracks your follower/following circle to do predictive bans because I was in the middle of adding maybe 6 people to follow when I got pre-emptively silenced.
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Well I'm still there.
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"Trump is really inarticulate, I don’t know his verbal IQ but he has the vocabulary of a dumb 10 year old." comprehension fail, likely because you've been ignoring the political circus for decades. he ADOPTS the vocabulary of a dumb 10 year old when speaking in public. because adopting that folksy, half-witted, down home good natured-ness has won every presidential race since Carter beat Ford ( 76 ). remember Hillary and her "I ain't noways tired" speech at the black church? complete bullshit. Bill, of course, was notorious for it. Shrub, as with Papa Bush before him, also used it extensively, but Shrub at least came by his Texas honestly. Reagan was folksy but still fairly eloquent and the media still accused him of stupidity. Creepy Joe Biden does it all the time. even Obama, who was renowned for his teleprompter abilities ( his extemporaneous discussions, however, revealed him to be an actual halfwit ), adopted it at times. talking at or below an 8th grade speaking level ( at least occasionally ) wins you elections and has done for most of my life. Trump's public speech is unique only in that he is more aggressive about it than any of his predecessors. Trump is not what i would consider a "perfect" POTUS but, Good God, look at what he's been fighting this whole way. he's taking on a majority of the .Gov bureaucracy, close to half of the Gay Old Pedophiles, all of the Demoncrats and 90% of all the news media. oh, can't forget the British intelligence and probably another 1/2 dozen "friendly" foreign orgs are against him. i don't agree with all of Trump's kumbaya, blank slate, 13th Amendment goals ( gay marriage, the Constitutional amendments being used to control and constrain We the People ... instead of constraining and controlling the Federal government ), but he towers over every other president in my life time except Reagan. and a good case can be made that he's already over shadowed Reagan as well. if you want to make an honest assessment of Trump's intellect, go back to some of the interviews from ~20 years ago when he was idly talking politics and mooting possible presidential runs himself.
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I think this article makes the dissident case for Yang as well as anyone could. However, I have two bones to pick. You didn't mention the video where he explains to other Asians that UBI's secondary purpose is to prevent White America from unleashing its spiritual Timothy McVeigh and destroying everyone in retribution for demographic replacement. I find the video remarkably unsettling; the way he interchangeably refers to whites by race and as "Americans" to a room full of Asians isn't the voice of offbeat political guru, it's as an anesthesiologist of some moribund patient whose insurance money hasn't run out just yet. Is Yang the antithesis of bioleninism or is he its competent technocrat implementer? The second, I really don't see how the mass looting to be committed by the bureaucratic arm of the Department of Universal Basic Income is a strain on the system such that acceleration to the decline of USG is the net result. Social Security was a remarkably pilfer, and Medicare far worse. These schemes didn't come out of the Amazon/Facebook pocketbooks of the day, they cemented the existing structures. Yangbux has all the hallmarks to do the same. Its tantamount to saying that every day USG is closer to decline; technically true, but seems to be skipping an important middle... He's whip smart though, and I think he'll be a force in the debates in ways that will require more than the usual tricks for the D's to sideline. The turmoil of 2016 isn't over, just mutating.
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I don't see any evidence he's whip smart. He's right on every policy, obviously. But only because he cares about the right solution and not pandering to the base of commies and minorities. Trump would crucify him debating. He shows very little ability to identify with people or market what he's selling. "MATH" is not a brand half the country is going to get excited about. He ultimately knows he's in this as an idea candidate to push the boundary and thinking. And it's for that reason he's so worth supporting. UBI exposes the hypocrisy of only paying benefits (all-in well over 20k) to the poorest of minorities. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ1-T5JZ7uP7dO663oYv38WOg4nQaQsT44XIWjgW1GpERPh1pqt Better to payout to everyone, replace the scam that is healthcare insurance that costs 10x what a normal healthy person ever uses, etc. Plus if Yang can win the primary, the election is thereafter a freeroll, not a shift to "open borders are a basic moral right" Bet[a] or the crazy reparations lady.
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I agree with UBI as proposed by Charles Murray. That is to say, we need to take away all other benefits if we hand out UBI. Just don't see that happening with Yang's version. It would pile on top of the existing benefits doled out. This would entrench those in the government and the left. Thing is, once the balance of power is shifted via a flip of FL or TX, policies no longer need to make sense, as long as it benefits the left. The collapse of the government won't happen due to heavier taxes, at least not for decades to come.
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Put your libertarian hat on for a moment. Tom Woods: "what do I care if some other guy has a yacht?" The question here is what difference will the thousand dollars make to our people. The answer is they'll be less afraid of losing their jobs and more at liberty to be creative. If you're that worried about inflation, just buy equipment and Bitcoin with your thousand dollars. Or ammo, according to taste. Let's face it, if the inflation from the UBI money ends up in Franky&Benny's, Nike trainers and pop festivals, I'm all for it. Easier than taxing them. (Bans would be better, but whenever I mention banning Domino's Pizza I get a dozen reactionaries telling me that opposing degeneracy is Marxist.)
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It is not just about minimizing the red ink. The Charles Murray version of UI puts the decision making back to the recipients. Since they are receiving money, suffering due to bad decision making will be treated as such and not something to heap more aid to. If people are taking the money, the least they can do is to be responsible for their own affairs. If you are out on the street, people are going to ask where is your UI money?
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This is a case for moderation. Sure if someone's literally 'out on the street' as in claiming to be destitute, then telling them "where is your UI money" makes perfect sense. If the altronomy goes further than that, it's a substantial point against UI. We don't need nanny to tell us how to live frugally. Hmmmm actually as I type that, and think of all the millions of white people living paycheck to paycheck yet still handing over a day's labour for one shitty hamburger meal, I'm not actually sure....... even so, better to stamp out the most egregious sources of 'temptation' than to boss people around on an individual basis. There's a very simple core here, as the host laid out at the top of the piece: under a Yang rule, you do indeed get everything bad that Trump failed to get rid of...... but you also get a thousand dollars. YOU, not others: others don't matter. What matters is YOU. A thousand dollars for YOU. I mean really when you look at the deplatforming (extending to bank accounts at this point), don't you feel like maybe you need a safety net?
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Look, I have had the pleasure to deal with folks who receive welfare. They get food stamps, housing, free health care. all from the nanny state. With that, they are not able to manage their financial affairs. I will forgo that thousand if it meant giving more for people like that. As I most likely have to pay for three guys with my taxes for the thousand that I got. What is the most galling, they won't change their ways because they won't have to. They are getting more free shit on top of the nanny state handouts they got now.
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[…] Spandrell at Bloody Shovel is one of the better NRx bloggers, and he makes some good points about The Andrew Yang #YangGang phenomenon. […]
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[…] Spandrell at Bloody Shovel is one of the better NRx bloggers, and he makes some good points about The Andrew Yang #YangGang phenomenon. […]
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Because China has realized that with Internet and modern computing, they don’t need the corporations to manage the people anymore. They can do it directly.
Markets are a way to coordinate socially without a centralized authority and they usually - not always, but usually - work quite well, especially for consumer goods. Money itself is a form of social coordination, overcoming the barter problem in a decentralized way. Democracy and liberalism were ways to effect socially coordinate decision making and consent; democracy works very well on a small scale and liberalism worked quite well until Europeans attempted to impose liberalism on people who were inherently anti-liberal; liberalism is a white privilege. The protocols the Internet is built on are decentralized, allowing mass communication in a decentralized way, with very little central coordination needed. The Internet makes it possible to socially coordinate in a democratic manner at a scale that traditional democracy topped out at - and it does the same thing for economic coordination. Which is why old money - and old ethno-centric networks - spent vast billions of dollars since Y2K to uncut the decentralization that the Internet allowed. That's why Larry Summers used his power at Harvard to undercut the White Anglo-Saxon Winkelvoss twins to turn over the proto-Facebook to his co-ethnic Mark Zuckerberg. That's why the Silicon Valley press gave massive positive free PR to Larry Page and Sergey Brin while using overt racism to economically undercut Jerry Yang. That's why Goldman Sachs "pumped and dumped" Bitcoin two years ago. Federation works; NRx is going in the precise wrong direction, probably purposefully so, considering.
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"Trump is really inarticulate, I don’t know his verbal IQ but he has the vocabulary of a dumb 10 year old. And yet he got his points across. Good points. Drain the Swamp..." I have long believed that Trump is a very high functioning dyslexic. He isn't the only one. A few have been CEO of Fortune 500 companies. I have met liberal women lawyers in New York who have worked with Trump on complicated contractual matters. They don't like him but will not deny that he is very smart in a practical way and really can visualize a complicated situation with many moving parts. Dyslexia would also explain why Trump has few, if any, books at home and why his vocabulary is so limited.
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If you think dyslexia exists, it's probably easier to just trust the plan. Meanwhile Genie Energy's very happy with Trump's nationalism.
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Wew lad. By promises a thousand bucks a month, every prudent skepticism is thrown out the windie. I've read your blog top to bottom, Spandrell, and I can't for the life of me understand why someone as knowledgeable as you would trust the guy, especially over Trump. Did anyone seriously expected Trump, one single man, to halt the course of the Bioleninist runaway train? And in just 4 years at that? Against the wishes of the media, the permanent bureaucracy, the deep state, his own fucking party? [There's a study floating around /pol/ about who really holds the power in the US. TLDR: the Senate controls everything, and it has been Dem (and merchant)-controlled since FDR.] Why can't Trump be like Putin? Because Putin is in fucking charge of his country, at least several orders of magnitude more so. No man can save his country alone, remember Nigel Farage and Brexit? Instead, at least to me, Trump had another role. His real job was to show his country the extent to which the American intellectual class is pure, unadulterated, Moloch-sacrificing evil. He baited them into showing their true colors, and that opened many eyes. If he could on top of that get a bit of economic or foreign policy done, all the better. But that's a bonus. Now to Yang. Even if the $1000/mo made economic sense, how can he get the job done, when UBI is WAY more expensive than Trump's wall and that got cockblocked? "But UBI is actually cheaper than the whole welfare bureaucracy apparatus, and it's supposed to replace it!" That's true, but do you guys really think said apparatus will willingly forfeit their jobs? For most of them, it's not even about the money, it's about power and status. And of course, the most important question: WHY WOULD HE DELIVER? Why would he give a shit about the white working class? They are not his co-ethnics, he only wants their votes. If he gets elected, and ends up declaring something about the lines of "Well, we couldn't get UBI fully approved, but at least we managed to make it possible for the poor, unpriviledged minorities of this country, (insert Bioleninism here)", do you really thing there will be a backlash? Also, the guns get grabbed. And guns are everything in politics. There are only two choices, status quo or something worse.
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I'm not trusting anyone. But Trump has already betrayed us. This guy at least sounds smart and non-hostile.
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There are 2 pieces by David Chibo at The Unz Review describing the USA power structure matchlessly.
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"Instead, at least to me, Trump had another role. His real job was to show his country the extent to which the American intellectual class is pure, unadulterated, Moloch-sacrificing evil. He baited them into showing their true colors, and that opened many eyes. If he could on top of that get a bit of economic or foreign policy done, all the better. But that’s a bonus." Nails it. So many eyes were opened it's crazy. It's not easy to move Congress or the agencies but it's silly to pretend Trump has accomplished nothing. A lot of what he's doing is shifting public opinion and also triggering the implosion of the left's crazy. As for Wang, wholly unelectable. Our most salient worldwide competitior is his billion blood brothers, the Han Chinese. Very fond of them but they aren't electing any white men to lead their foreign policy or do trade negotiating, and it'd be the height of insanity to elect someone whose genetic loyalties lie elsewhere. End of story.
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You're right that capital is now fully converged and part of the problem. Where do you stand on state intervention to shut down harmful degenerate activities in the private sector? (I suppose what I'm asking is do you think there's merit to the libertarian position that a state has to forego the right to do any such thing or else is illegitimate and/or Marxist.)
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CR, I have been lurking on Jim's blog for some time now. I see him routinely deleting your comments - it's always something about "assuming I think like Marxists think I do". Here I'm actually seeing what you have to say, and it is somewhat interesting to me, as someone who hasn't yet come to a solid conclusion about who or what I want to be governed by. I don't think there's any reason to have more faith in the moral rectitude of a King, or a president, or any other ruler or group of rulers you don't personally know or have influence over, than in the high executives of a corporation.
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I'd like to write a non rude comment due to some of your earlier writing being rare examples of quality original thought. This however, is just stupid. If you think Trump has achieved nothing you are a moron. No caveats. Just dumb. If you think UBI is a good idea you are lazy and dumb.
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Lazy and dumb is repeating boomer conservative talking-points without actually thinking about any of it. Tom Woods tells you that when robots take your job, the economy will provide you with ample opportunities to innovate and integrate into whatever new form it takes. What does that mean in practice, in the real world of crony-capitalism, big government and open borders? When the steel works in Scotland closed, thousands of them moved to Corby (YAY, enriching). Then the Corby steel works closed. I'm guessing the human mind can only take so much. Those journalists cried over "learn to code" for a reason. Now factor in the reality that the modern left is 100% behind global capitalism, and global capitalism is 100% behind the modern left (see the alliance of Bezos, Buffet and Dimon in their new Healthcare venture with Atul Gawande, healthcare advisor to Barack Obama), and add in some human biodiversity - blacks already get UBI - and your case against me having a thousand dollars doesn't seem so sound. Walk me through why you personally don't deserve a thousand dollars.
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You are reading a site which complains about moral degeneracy and you want me to explain to you why I shouldn't get a thousand dollars of someone else's money?! If you want your life standard to be the American Black community that is your choice. People that accept free money are slaves.
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The degeneracy question isn't settled. Many of the people who frequent this blog believe that gambling, porn, global chain restaurants, foreign holidays and so on are vital features of civilisation and must be defended. For what it's worth, I'm very much with you: degeneracy is the core problem and I'd be very pleased to see all the above, and much more besides, greatly diminish or disappear entirely. I'm also with you - in principle at any rate - that dependency and welfare as a lifestyle are a large part of the degeneracy of society: not just driving it but actually embodying it. What you should come to understand is that we do not live in Ron Paul world. If we did, that stuff would make sense. We live in the Current Year: Clownworld on a fast track to Piss Earth - the Retard Empire. You can leave as much money as you want on the table: others will not follow your example. Worse, you'll be footing the bill for the largesse rechanneled in their direction. If you're happy being a victim then carry on conserving. Me I'll take whatever's on offer, and actively campaign for more to be offered. It's time we started winning, and if the ethical principles we privately hold dear are off the table permanently and profoundly in perpetuity, that leaves material gain. By all means give your thousand dollars to the Heritage Foundation or the Mises Institute.
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It's annoying that your reply is sensible. I hate the Heritage Foundation and the Mises Institute. Trump has revealed that these types of groups are not remotely committed to what they claim they are. I understand why you would think I'm a victim (most, possibly all, of the people reading and commenting here probably are) but I'm not. I actually live my values and have done very well financially. I started from genuine zero - no family money, no connections - and did well ONLY after I started to fight without remorse. I'm not a Boomer either. I find it hard not to have genuine hatred for this locust generation. I try to remain open to the possibility that some of them might not be scum. They to me are the poster children of how pernicious free money is. The future does not belong to those that show up. The future belongs to those that fight for it.
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There is a term in Marxism called "alienation from the means of production" its an ugly clumsy thing like most of Marxism but has a strong core of truth to it. Very few people can do, go from zero to hero what you did and as technology advances , less people will be needed to do anything at all. We don't own farms, big ag does, shops, Amazon or big box, make things, global factories and we can't all be plumbers or car mechanics. Heck modern cars rarely break down anyway and can often be fixed with a scan tool and a little work Many, most people have no real role in the current system and the Yang Grand is an honest acknowledgement of that . The pother option would be to risk famine and social collapse by eliminating welfare entirely with the net result being the end of the West as a prosperous place or paying people not have kids which is anathema as our leaders and anyone in business is already freaked out by low fertility Low TFR along killed Toys R Us which the company openly admitted, well that and some bad decisions but under normal demand they would have managed You can't have a consumer society with without consumers and without demand for labor, there is less consumption. The Yang Grand is an attempt to manage this paradox . We probably won't get it and it won't work but short of basically banning large scale enterprise, there really is no other option .
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A. B.: I have appreciated your many comments over the years. Yours are always a good read. However, like Greg Conte, I remain slightly skeptical of the specter of the Robocalypse. Yang's UBI idea (maybe initially at rather less than $1000/mo) seems essentially sound in any case, inasmuch as capital has during recent decades continued to rise in value in proportion to labor, yet I remain unconvinced that automation will relieve man from labor any time soon. If ever. As good a Nazi as the next fellow, I do not mean to reason like a libertarian, yet there is something to the objection that reliance on the state for basic income affords the state another lever with which to manipulate, humiliate and suppress the citizen. We already have a managerial state, of course, which weakens the objection, but still.... Regarding the Robocalypse: this is a question for specialists to answer and, perhaps, for metaphysicians to illuminate. Being pseudonymous, I can hardly present my own credentials, so there is no particular reason you should take my opinion seriously; but have you tried playing chess against LCZero? With fast computer hardware to search sufficiently deep, LCZero can beat anybody, but LCZero's evaluation function itself seems to be surprisingly weak. If LCZero is restricted to evaluating 30 future positions each turn, an FIDE 1500 patzer can beat it, despite that LCZero has practiced millions of games of chess. Inasmuch as playing chess is supposed to be to LCZero what flying in the dark is to a bat, LCZero should be able to do better than this. Still, artificial intelligence (AI) like that in Google search is impressive, and ominous. Developments in AI bear watching. We shall see.
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My last comment inadvertently overstated. What I have said regarding LCZero is according to my understanding such as it is. My specific knowledge related to the matter is limited, being derived from (a) inspection of the source code of a different chess AI which as far as I know uses some similar infrastructure and (b) one game played against LCZero under what I understood at the time to be the conditions described. What LCZero has to do with Yang can be doubted, of course, but I did not mean to pose.
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What has Trump achieved?
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To pick an easy and inarguable example: judges. We have had decades of "conservative" judges when a Republican is running things. Now even the Ninth Circuit is getting rebuilt. Judges are getting pushed through and many of them are (for lack of a better word) actually conservative. This has vast real world impacts.
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Like what? The demographics are against you and the next Democratic administration will undo everything Trump is doing in that front. They have less scruples and will just rush everything in weeks.
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Dems cannot undo SC appointments. Because Trump hasn't done much, the good news is there isn't much that can be undone. Demographics are hopeless and no presidency can change that short of mess deportations.
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Parasites are mobile. The gibs magnet's relative: if America's gibs fall below the level of Mexico's, Mexico becomes the magnet and Donaldo Triunfo campaigns on building a gran pared hermosa and making the gringo pay for it. Trump has achieved nothing for us but much for Israel and for the global plutocracy. Spencer was right: Trump was a final attempt to save the system; Yang's the realisation it cannot be saved. Time to enjoy the decline, but unlike the Aaron Carey strategy of that name, reactionaries don't have to embrace degeneracy, dumbing down and crass materialism. Spend your life improving what you do have control over: Jordan Peterson's not wrong on the individual level. Spend your life reading old books and learning old music. Many old classical pieces are on YouTube with scrolling scores. When it comes to collective action, it's time to vote with your identitarian voting bloc. Get everything you can. Advocate any way you can: behave with bias, with prejudice, with rigid loyalty. This is about survival.
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When it comes to collective action, it’s time to vote with your identitarian voting bloc. If you still think voting is even a possible way out of this mess, you are too short for this ride.
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They can stuff the court. Wanna bet?
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That's why a lot of people think mid 2030 or so, a mere decade form now will be settled with lead. Its probably the best option for a stable society if and only if the winners are smart and right wing ,the right as a strong win position but they are far from monolithic in the smarts department though the suckage will be legendary
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My recommendation is to run a business. A real business: not something like web design but something where you and the state push against each other. Then a question such as "Like what?" would seem absurd to you. I have watched social justice judges at work their behavior is terrifying if you value a rational society. I'm not asking you to be an expert on the US legal system because you have been clear you don't know the country. However, Democrats cannot undo these appointments. The next period of Democrat control is going to be a free-fall towards a Venezuelan outcome. What I find inexplicable is that Conservatives (I don't like that designation but don't know a better one) bow down before VERY weak people. The progressives pushing this stuff are pathetic people. I asked Steve Sailer - in person - what his ideas were to stop this stuff happening in real life and his response was to look terrified and not talk to me again or reply to emails. We deserve to get run over if we simply lie in a corner and whimper.
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I asked Mike1 – in person – what his ideas were to stop this stuff happening in real life and his response was to look terrified and not talk to me again or reply to emails.
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No you didn't. The guy has a point.
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I was forgetting that this is the blog of Bioleninist fame, but even allowing for bloggish hyperbole, Steve Sailer is a gentleman and a fine American. Jews. Golf courses. World War G. For U.S. readers, it's all there in Sailer's blog. For pseudonymous NRx to mock Sailer, of all targets, says more about the mocker than the mocked.
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I love Sailer more than anyone else here, and I'm sure he had his reasons to refuse to engage further with Mike here, but it's not unfair to say that Sailer also doesn't quite know what to do to stop Bioleninism from taking over his country.
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If you actually read his blog thoroughly you would remember me inviting him to dinner which I did in the blog comments. It's amusing you think everyone is so incapable they wouldn't want to meet someone they find interesting. I'm not sure what is in someone else's head so I don't know why he didn't want to talk to me after that night. My point was that even someone who gets a lot of the issues we face does not like the idea of personally doing anything to counter it. Your response is very typical of current society: "well, I know I'm lying about everything, so this guy must be too".
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I can understand very well how bad an evil judge can be for one's quality of life. But you're underestimating the democrats. They can and will overturn any judicial appointments, pack courts, or simply ignore the judges if they have enough power elsewhere. Trump might have made your life more pleasant for 5 years or so, and I perfectly understand it if you're thankful to him for it, but that's not solving the problem. Having Yang pass UBI and make crystal clear that the only role of government is to send cold cash to the people will break the very foundation of the liberal state. That's gonna be a mess, but it sure beats Venezuela.
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yeah we know the dems are evil, but he was talking about what Trump has accomplished so far for his first term it will probably take nothing short of collapse to undo the left's grip
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I see collapse as our best hope. A dark vision obviously - and I'm not naive enough to think it wont impact me personally - but I do share Spandrell's cynicism that political processes wont get us somewhere sane.
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Having Yang pass UBI and make crystal clear that the only role of government is to send cold cash to the people will break the very foundation of the liberal state. I don't think so. You're playing the right game for sure, but targeting the wrong narrative. Boomerica is dead. It's not on life support in hospice anymore; Trump and Pelosi together took it out back and shot it in the head until it stopped twitching. You can see this crystal clear in the Senate vote tally for the Green New Deal: 57 against to 43 present. Let's unpack that. First, note that all of the Senators were there. This isn't always the case when it comes to legislation; it has become the norm for a few Senators to not bother showing up for bills where they know their vote won't matter. It was important for every Senator to be there for this one, so they could send a complete message. This was an important bill. Second, I take it as an axiom that once a bill actually comes to the floor for a vote, all the Senators already know how everyone else is going to vote on it. Floor speeches are for C-SPAN and because they're the only way Chuckie and the rest can get their balls to unshrivel these days, not to change the course of the Senate. All the real decisions are made at dinners or in memos or in 'private meetings' and the jockeying for final position takes the shape of manipulating rules and customs to get a vote to take place or not to take place. Anyone who has trouble believing this should probably drop all political hobbies and go do something useful with his life that he may be good at, instead. Third, the numbers: 57 against, 43 present. Not a single vote 'for', because votes 'for' would be far too dangerous - it sends a different signal that just might change the coordination game of Senate votes. However, at the same time, it's just a tick more than a bare majority to defeat the bill. (There are thirteen freshman Senators, of whom three have no previous political experience and five have never served in a legislative office. We might just be talking about six or so people who aren't quite as good at the game.) Putting all this together, what signal does it send? The Senate had to defeat the bill. There is no way on God's Green Earth or anywhere else that such a bill could actually be implemented. Defeat in the Senate was the only way that the Senate could maintain its narrative position as an actual relevant body which makes legislative decisions that have a real impact on the world, so defeat was inevitable. However, at the same time the Senate didn't give it a round condemnation, say 98-0 or even 70odd-30ish, and that's for the same reason that the House actually passed it (in the full knowledge that they weren't actually approving a law but just passing the buck): they would all lose their cushy seats and their 'influence' because the political demographics of the USA have fundamentally shifted even in the last four years. The old America is dead; the new young vibrant Gibmerica is out in force with no mask for the White man's blood because they've finally hit the critical point of self-realization of power. This is what's happening to the Democratic Party when AOC and Somaligirl tell Pelosi to fuck herself and her nattering about anti-semitism: the Coalition of the Fringes has realized it doesn't need the Honky or the Jew anymore. The Blacks and Browns have never been under the fundamental misapprenhension that the White man's government is for anything other than draining money from the White man's pockets to give to them, at least not since Nixon. White political opinions don't matter any more. True, there are a few more years of inertia. I guess Trump will probably win re-election (which is why the Democratic campaigns are all about showing how 'with' Diversity that party is rather than trying to win), but that doesn't really matter anyway, as the past three years have shown fairly clearly. Legacy Americans will continue inexorably to be squeezed harder and harder whether they like it or not, and the time has passed where they could, even in theory, vote themselves out of this mess. (Besides, show me a group of Whites voting their identity bloc, and I'll show you a group of Jews.) All that in mind, the very best interpretation of Yang is Feed the Beast, which didn't work when Reagan tried it and certainly won't work now when Reagan is mooted about (for good and ill) as a paragon of fiscal responsibility. (No, really.) More likely is Yang's plan is exactly what he says it is: an opiate for the masses, including Whites, because he knows that if Whites manage to organize themselves politically things will get very dicey for him and his kind very quickly. White men would pull levers, but they wouldn't be on voting machines.
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"...make crystal clear that the only role of government is to send cold cash to the people..." Just the thought makes me giddy with excitement. All the moralizing and gnashing of teeth as a substitute for morality replaced with...cash!!!! You want to save the poor, PAY THEM! Maniacal waving of the arms about and laughing begins. HAHAHAHHAAHAHAHHAHAA
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Sailor has the courage of a thousand blog commenters and a world class body of work. Not many people have his understanding of the way the world really works (his thrashing of Gladwell etc., his consistent reporting on race stats I've never seen mentioned ANYWHERE else in the world, etc.) or his gift for writing. To judge him for not spouting off "solutions" to some random person is silly. The man has done more to spread ideas on the reality of race and American society than anyone in living memory. Also the idea of giving handouts to the lazy and entitled groups but not a cash payment and basic healthcare to hard working Americans who aren't welfare types is crazy. Horrendous incentives which is why even the hardest core libertarians support UBI as the best policy.
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First paragraph: I agree. Second paragraph: Why are people so terrified of reality? I recounted what happened. Noticing things is cool but having no response is not. If I notice that I'm getting punched in the face but have no response I'm going to keep getting hit. Third paragraph: If you want free money you are a welfare type. If you are a parasite own it.
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A little reasoning is in order. (1) $1000 for every adult is something like $2.4 trillion a year. The profit of Google is 40 billion a year, 10 billion for Amazon, 60 billion for Apple, 28 billion for Facebook, and 1 billion for Twitter. Basically you could take all of the income of big tech, dumping cold water on the hottest thing in our economy, and it might get you 10% of the way there. (2) Welfare isn't good for the recipients. Look at lower class whites in the UK. They are decayed beyond belief, not even a shadow of the greatness that was once the English people. (3) There is a lot of ruin in a nation as Adam Smith said. Rooting for bad policy to blow up the system is extremely stupid because the nation will just limp along worse. Look at Venezuela, where unimaginably rotten policy has led to hyper-inflationary collapse and mass hunger and yet the system still limps alone. Choosing bad policy to 'crash and reset the system' is like taking a dump in your pants in hopes that someone will then give you a new pair: no, then you will just have to walk around the rest of the day with soiled pants. That is extremely retarded. Trump has been a success in a number of ways: (1) The economy. If you want to help people, creating the conditions for a strong economy is about the only thing you can hope to do. (2) Staying the hell out of new wars. (3) Conservative judges (4) Per capita wage growth is up (5) Setting a strong bar in terms of prosperity. I don't think Trump's destiny is to be the savior of civilization, which cannot be saved. His destiny is to preside over THE civilizational high water mark, such that people will look back on the current era as 'as good as civilization ever got.' This in itself is a really big effing deal. Fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a million years into the future, this high water mark may remain. That is glorious, and sad. Trump is trying to push in the right direction, while most everyone else isn't. We may be losing the battle but shooting basically the only soldier on the field who is actually trying with some effectiveness to fight your side is madness. He may sound like an idiot sometimes, but who could do what he does, in terms of the pressure, making reasonable decisions on a hundred disparate topics amid extreme chaos and the most media and social attack basically ever seen in history? The greatest of Trump will not be appreciated until he is gone and decline begins in earnest.
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This boomer tier MAGApede thinking has to stop. We never voted Trump in to cut the marginal rate of corporation tax and make it easier for felons to get released from jail: we voted for Trump to build a wall on the southern border, drain the swamp, bring the troops home and lock Hillary Clinton up in jail. In boomer conservative terms, you're still wrong: (1) Budget deficit looks set to hit a trillion dollars per quarter before much longer, while the trade deficit's higher now than it was under Obama. (2) Fingers crossed, but pretty nasty noises about Venezuela and Iran, and those troops remaining in Syria would be activated if anyone 'violated Israel's sovereign territory' in the Golan Heights. (3) Certainly better to have those guys than their less moderate peers, but I don't see any particular rulings to point to and cheer about. RAM, Fields and the Charlottesville Four are still suffering and Jussie Smollet just got off scott free. (4) Not if calculated properly to adjust for real cost of living inflation, and not where it matters. The factories haven't re-opened and debt's still going up across the board. (5) The high point of western civilisation? Better than, say, Teddy Roosevelt or Warren Harding? Or do you mean better than James II or Henry VII? I suspect what you mean is just 'better than Obama' and even that's frankly debatable. "who could do what he does, in terms of the pressure, making reasonable decisions on a hundred disparate topics amid extreme chaos and the most media and social attack basically ever seen in history?" You're right of course. It takes something pretty remarkable for a sitting president to turn a blind eye when his own supporters are attacked in the street then arrested for defending themselves, while people advocating on his behalf are banned from the public square. That's some high level retardation and cowardice right there. Nope, the Trump thing was a pleasant surprise and it was fun to believe, just a little bit, for just a little while, but that's done now. Yang's not a solution to anything, but supporting Democrats that Cthulhu hates is the best we've got at the moment in the context of electoral politics. There's plenty to do besides electoral politics of course, and that goes without saying, but in that repulsive arena, the best fun to be had is to support someone like Andrew Yang - or for that matter Tulsi Gabbard or Ilhan Omar. To say "Yang's not our guy" misses the point entirely, but to say "UBI will bankrupt the system" is off-the-scale retarded. The system's bankrupt no matter what.
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The Trump tax cuts substantially raised revenues, and accelerated growth, so that though deficit is higher than ever, thanks to entitlement spending that Trump cannot control and promised he would make no attempt to control, the Debt to Gdp ratio has stabilized, albeit stabilized at the dangerous Obama levels, which we can live with provided nothing unexpected - such as war with China - happens.
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I'm not letting your drama spill over here. You're entitled to your opinion. Perhaps you think that Dow26k is a more-or-less accurate reflection of the now partially re-industrialised economy, the 50 basis point spread on the now fully near-term inverted yield curve reflects the prudence of retail equity investors keeping their options open, and the prospects for future maintenance of the current mid-cycle healthy fiscal environment are broadly sound, at least in comparison to the Reagan, sorry Clinton, years and the Bush, sorry Obama, years. That's your business and I hope you invest accordingly. Meanwhile the rest of us were hoping for a wall, not a more compassionate imprisonment policy and more legal immigration than ever before to soak up all those jobs. Mr Yang won't cure the problem the Sachlers gave us and he won't stop the Rothschilds from looting us while they lecture us about Ayn Rand's heroism. He will, however, make the prospect of stability, security and (inadvertently) family real again, whether he wins or not. If he doesn't give the white man a thousand dollars, someone else will have to, but by hook or by crook we're going to get back what the Whigs took from us. Carlyle's carthorse WILL be fed.
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I'm glad someone else has noticed that the UBI proposal would cost TRILLIONS per year.
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Off topic but still relevant: would you intellectually persuade losers to kill themselves? https://suicide.is/threads/10-reasons-to-drop-dead-already.113/
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I've been toying with the idea of persuading old people to kill themselves. But I have better stuff to do with my time than being evil.
Can't say I'm surprised he was this dumb. I wasn't expecting anything. I just enjoyed too much seeing him destroy the bugman consensus of 100 years by running a total troll campaign on everything liberals think is holy. And win. I will curse his memory for not building the wall, but I'll always appreciate how much he made me laugh in those late months of 2016. I also don't expect Yang to win, but seeing the American Left argue against giving free money is going to be amusing. I wanna see them openly say "we're giving free money for everyone except white men".
Yang would let them keep their higher entitlements. They wouldn't get the dividend but instead retain what they have. The only problem with Yang though is communicating down. He's very smart, and at the Yang Gang meeting I was at it was mostly STEM types. Trump was able to get a message out that Pro Wrestling fans could understand. I'm not sure how Yang can fight the "inflation" NPC response. Probably just wave one thousand bucks in the air.
Anything else you can say on the meeting?
Basically, he's going to be the Ron Paul of the Democratic party. Along with Tulsi Gabbard anybody with half a brain is going to get behind one of them but ultimately either Beta O'Rourke or Mayor Buttchug will be the nominee thanks to dumb white women.
This is based on the kinds of people there, their excitement level and how the rest of the Democratic student groups thought of Andrew Yang. Many there were already treating him like Ron Paul, just hoping his UBI platform would get heard and adopted by someone else in the future.
The gravy train to blacks doesn’t end directly with simple gibs. There are legions of evil fat black women riding the government gravy train through make work employment that costs a lot more than $12000 dollars a year. The ubi would have substantial 2nd and third order effects which I’m not smart enough to see through all of it, but for certain it would end the make work for blacks in order to pay for it. Black women would certainly balk at losing a 40k do nothing job for 12k and being permanently unemployed. Even if they are certainly not smart enough to recognize it, those that are will certainly be happy enough to explain it to them and base cunning will suffice for them to realize how bad of a deal it is for them. Another impact is that 12k a year to American citizens will probably have an immediate impact on immigration rates. In that it will encourage more to come, but it will universally incentivize every citizen here to vote to immediately shut the door. One thing direct cash money to the bank means is that now everyone has direct skin in the game to shut down the door as opposed to generalized opposition being countered by elite lobbying. Several American Indian tribes who run casinos run direct gibs to their tribal members and in every case where it is so, they all vote to restrict tribal membership and in fact expel members from their official tribal rolls to keep the pot as big as possible for the remainder. Once each American citizen realizes that the size of their gimme is contingent on the total number of Americans, it would not be surprising for either a permanent foreign helot labor class to form akin to the Gulf States, or that the vast number of illegals are meticulously, thoroughly, and immediately, thrown out of the country along with their families. Birthright citizenship would of course also be revoked.
Shoot me an email man.
@Duke of Qin
This is the best endorsement for UBI I've ever read. Trump's "wall" is a truly stupid idea if you take it literally, but it's something the average voter could wrap their head around: "keep them out." UBI is similar, no one wants to get into esoteric discussions of how it will ultimately affect the economy, but it immediately makes everyone think: stop immigration, get more money. #YangGang2020
Incidentally, on the off chance that Yang somehow actually wins, it will be fascinating to see the repercussions on China-US-Russia relations. Yang happens to be a strong Sinophile - towards the PRC, despite his Taiwanese background. I suspected this from the start when I searched through his Twitter and policy platforms, but a couple of people who I know and who are know him have confirmed this (they support him, so they have no incentives to make things up). I strongly expect him to pursue a "reset" with China, including ofc dropping the trade war - which would put him at odds not just with Trump, but even many prominent Dems (e.g. Schumer and Pelosi). Yang should be very good for China, and perhaps less good for Russia, as he seems to share the standard Dem position on Russia (though isn't obsessed with it like Kamala). OTOH, it's really hard to say; as Trump showed, one needs to be careful what one wishes for. There is the possibility of a Chinagate torpedoing everything and actually further worsening US-Chinese relations as Yang tries to prove he isn't beholden to China.
A couple of Russian political terms I’ve learned from Karlin over the years bear repeating. Always suspect Zrada (betrayal) and the more faith you put in a man, the harder he will twist the knife. And me thought that was only when you had romance/marriage with a female.