Bloody Shovel 4

http://www.cnet.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-45b-initiative-makes-investment-andela-facebook/

Says he. I wonder how does he know.

Maybe he found at reading one of these papers while at Harvard?

I guess we're all aware of this not-Onion piece of news:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/starbucks-to-encourage-baristas-to-discuss-race-relations-with-customers/

The original press release is here:

http://news.starbucks.com/news/what-race-together-means-for-starbucks-partners-and-customers

I think the most productive way of thinking about this is asking: what would a Martian think? What are these humans up to?

A second-best option is to put yourself in the place of a 18 year old Chinese high school kid st...

Apparently this blog still has an audience for short posts, so I'll put my two cents on a recent controversy which has been lacking common sense.

A lot of ink has been spilled about Paul Graham's essay where he begs for increased immigration into the US. His argument is that Silicon Valley need more geniuses, so please give us 1 million more Indians a year. Or something.

Now Graham is a good writer, and tends to make sense, but he doesn't make any here. You can read Sonic Harm's slightly incoheren

A long standing debate inside the reactosphere is the question about what is driving the push for mass immigration into developed countries. Why would anyone argue for bringing millions of, to use PC speak, low-skilled migrants from Third World countries? Yes they are cheap, but it's well established than in the long run they cost more in externalities than whatever you could save with their cheap labor. Not to speak of criminality, dragging down of school performance and just general tackiness.

I wrote recently about the High Level Equilibrium Trap in which China had fallen to in the modern era. Point was that Chinese labor and infrastructure was just efficient enough so that developing new machinery was never worth the trouble. Not to say they didn't invent machines, but they never caught on, in a similar fashion to Classical Europe which we know was full of cool gadgets which the Graeco-Romans just couldn't be bothered to use. Accumulation of capital makes less sense when you're bang...

I don't remember who said it, that writing isn't something you consciously control; very often you just think of something, start writing, and once you get into it, the story just has a life of its own, and through inertia it goes on evolving in ways you didn't foresee when you started the whole thing. That's what happened with my previous post, I didn't set out to write a thesis on the intersection between Clausewitz and Dunbar. It turned out a pretty good post (the ways of the brain are inscru...

Power is fascinating. It shouldn't be though. Nothing good comes from the fascination towards power, especially for those who don't have it. But we can't help it. We are a political animal. Which means we share a common descent with these fellas down here:

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TufiAgq--FU\]

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We being monkeys, we aren't really fascinated with power, in abstract. After all it's quite hard to even define what 'power' is. What does it really mean to have power? What does power do? ...

I think people are not getting the point of my last post.

Everyone is putting forward their ideas for the "moron problem" as Jim Donald puts it.

Honestly I don't think that's rocket science. We know what to do. We do what we have been doing for centuries. Ask Gregory Clark for details.

But that's not the thing. Nobody gives a shit about the long term sustainability of society. What people care about is feeling good about themselves.

Now imagine there's a choice between:

1-Being part of a tribe/thede/...

A while ago I had the mother of all chats with Nick Land in our local classy bar in Shanghai.

It felt like we just reached the singularity just by ourselves. Might have been the whisky though. Yeah it probably was that.

Perhaps because I'm shy, but I tend to overcompensate the awkwardness of meeting strangers by talking too much. And the usual reaction to someone who just doesn't shut up is agreeing and letting me talk. I guess it's also me being the junior partner, i.e. I talk more mundane stuff ...

I've made the argument that democracy is just a conspiracy by the plutocrats to push down the price of buying political influence.

George Soros being the best player on the market. You know, buy cheap, then profit.

Well he sure knows a bargain.

See on BI:

So he's buying up leftist grassroots activist organisations. Astroturf is a booming business.

But of course the real point is not Soros buying influence. It's that he's spending a whopping... $2 million! Which is like his weekly income. Or the amoun...

Say there is a power struggle in some country, and you don't like who's winning. How much should you spend, and how much influence can you buy?

Let's say North Korea.

There's the little fatso Kim Jong-un, and the elder fatso, Kim Jong-nam. Jong-un was the frontrunner, but he's too young, and many people would like Jong-nam to be the new king. What can they do?

Nothing. Kim Jong-nam has long been an exile in Macau, where he is survives only because China, t protects him against his brother's assassi...

The Economist just opened a new exclusive section for  China, taking China out of their Asian. So China is the new focus country of The Economist, besides the US. Here they explain why the interest: they will use the section to argue for political reform.

Read the whole thing, it's the most disingenuous piece of journalism ever. I'll take some representative quotes:

Now what a huge bunch of non-sequiturs. Some points are reasonable, most of them are not. What reading between the lines gets you is...

Ed West, the journalist with the biggest balls in Europe at this moment, left this piece of wisdom in a recent article of his: The life of a man can be broken up in three stages: Worrying about sex, worrying about money, and worrying about health. It's really a brilliant way of putting it. Well it happens that I just got into the second stage, so I've been thinking.

I am no economist, although I have a fair knowledge of economic theory and the various schools. I don't really know whether Uncle B...

After writing the last post on Burma's opening, it just came to me why are Western governments always promoting democracy. I mean, democracy is a pretty crappy way of government, particularly in the Third World, where for tons of reasons, historical, cultural, biological even, it never works. Democracy also is generally bad for the economy, and Western governments are ostensibly obsessed by trade and economic growth.

Yet they do promote democracy with a fervor that is almost religious. It makes n...