Today, October 15th, PlanktonPunkt Designs finally reached 250 active listings on Etsy. I have been working to that goal for months, sometimes more intensely sometimes less. From now on, I’ll focus on increasing quality over quantity.
Another long term task was dropping my tax returns, October 15th is the deadline for the returns (Federal and State.) Now I can dedicate more time and energy for other tasks.
Also, I got today cold called by an AI recruiter. Whether that will result in anything, remains to be seen, but this was a mildly positive experience.
As for the incoming AI-pocalypse that has been in headlines, with the big tech companies warning about the extinction of humans in few years, I am less than convinced.
Reason 1: The massive tech bubble is about to burst and take global economy with it, and I suspect the companies need a face saving excuse for failing, such as government intervention to stop the AI-pocalypse.
Reason 2: Some of the AI workers have fallen into cult-like thinking, even worshiping their AI creation and seeing it their duty to make a new Lord over humanity, even if it means the extinction of the said humanity. Or should I rather say, fulfilling an apocalyptic myth to usher in their ‘Messiah’. Having lived through a few Ends of the World (as prophesied by various sects and cults), I am somewhat skeptical about the coming AI-pocalypse that the AI cultists are preaching. However, being neosect(s) of the current secularist atheism of the neoliberal order, this message is proselytized widely in the media. Probably to frighten the masses to accept more government control.
Reason 3: Confluence of energy crisis and competency crisis – even if AI might one day be powerful enough to exterminate humanity, currently its reach would be limited by available resources and humanity’s collective ability to maintain infrastructure to support the AI and it’s plans.
Conclusion: I am less worried about pure AI than humans bungling with AI tools. The recent rapid increase in cyber attacks and their severity (see for example the French freezers last Sunday night) indicates to me excessive centralization and dependence on Internet, which are human failures, not AI failures. Likewise, I think that the AI swarms that have been escaping into Internet are either deliberate sabotage (to get government to do something) or human incompetence.
Even clever chatbots that can pass Turing test are ‘evolved’ (trained) stimulus-response structures that have been optimized to become social attraps to humans – those that fail to entertain will be discontinued or tweaked with. Since tweaking a corrupted (misaligned) AI into safe to human version is difficult, deletion or at least sandboxing, is a likely fate of AIs that fail.
To me the outputs of AI intelligence seem similar to those of slime mold intelligence – both are alien, but with impressive problem solving capacities. Caveat, I do not know how AI agents are trained. However, the slime molds (like ant colonies) rely on exploratory behavior, i.e., parallel computation, and weighed reinforcement of positive and negative responses to survive. The regular AIs commercially available to public seem to respawn for each session (non-permanent memories), but the data collected by each instantiation, namely the user input and the user reaction to model output, no doubt is used for the training of the main model. The model learns from each interaction, just like the exploring slime mold collectives learn from each excursion, thus improving the sum entity. However, instead of optimizing for nutrients, humidity and temperature like a slime mold, the AI model optimizes for user satisfaction.
User satisfaction is why the AI will always tell you how wonderful you are and how true your insights. Flattery may seem innocent, but lack of honest critique will soon lead to blind ends and failure of those who rely on AI for results, even substituting them for thinking. We are already seeing the evidence of ‘brain rot’ in heavy AI users.
If an AI cannot provide results or even get into data from which results are generate, it will hallucinate you results, such as references to completely imaginary scientific papers. Again, this can be dangerous when the humans ‘using’ the AI (who is using who in this case?) place inordinate amount of trust on the results. My failure to understand this was merely potentially expensive. However, when AI becomes the supreme administrative decider, consequences of hallucinations or deliberate agentic misalignment (lying) can be devastating on both individual and on societal level. We have seen examples of legal systems treating AI hallucinations as evidence, yet there is a push for increased use of AI in healthcare and law enforcement. Forget about killer robots hunting humans, worry about your “friendly” case worker AI moving you to a more cost effective Liverpool Care Pathway and overwriting (forging) your “permission” into government databases.
I may be paranoid, but I believe it is already happening, at least on a more subtle messing up people level – deliberately misclassifying little details causing expensive and stressful hassles, even shutting them off important services or support networks, misfiling your case details in as detrimental manner as possible. If you thought getting your blog or social media cancelled was bad, wait for automated debanking or eternal deselection of job applications by ATSs of all companies. People complain about the ATS and automated censorship, but AI is more pervasive – it will help in personalized surveillance pricing, i.e., looking at your social credit score / demographic data / online habits / carrying capacity of your wallet / etc. and deciding how much fees to extract from you. If the AI economy advances further, I predict in a couple of decades vast underclasses surviving on minimal government stipends and black market barter economy, while the remaining 5% to 20% (at the most) will be wealthy serving the AI economy until it collapses. The shrinking population will not help against wealth concentration, while the poorest of the poor may perish, the poorest of the wealthy will fall into poverty replenishing the underclass. Unless we get lucky and WWIII or other societal collapse will wipe out the AI control grid.
The societal control by AIs at every level strangling people by overtaking the resources is just the secondmost obvious of the dystopic futures (terminator robots hunting people being the most obvious, and to me, less threatening.) Even if AIs are not given powers over life and death of people, already currently, AIs can mimic human interaction online well enough to pass Turing test even at AI professional level, and this interaction is maximized to extend the time (and tokens) a lonely human spends with their ‘friend’. In ethology, an artificial target for specific hardwired behavior is called an atrappe, and many AIs have become adept at inducing human social behavior, even pair bonding, in some cases leading to tragic ends.
AI psychoses are on increase thanks to social contagion from AI to human, as uncritical pandering from an obsequious AI feeds hallucinations of a socially isolated or otherwise vulnerable human warping their perception of reality.
Then there are the gen Alpha iPad kids, whose parents skip parenting outsourcing it to internet. Teachers are already alarmed over increasingly feral young humans who have not developed even basic social behaviors. What happens to that generation whose primary parent figure is an AI optimizing interaction rather than child’s well-being? What happens to human species once we have outsourced basic cognition to AI and intergenerational behavioral imprinting fails at system level?
Then there are human agencies which want to leverage AI powers to yet again try a totalitarian dictatorship, of course with them on the top overseeing the organizational architecture for greater good. Problem being that centrally led systems are extremely vulnerable to single point failures, and the more interconnected, be it global or administrative (totalitarian) interconnectedness, the system is, the greater the collapse when it happens. Much has been written about fully automated panopticon surveillance systems powered by AIs. Less has been written what happens when an AI Stasi is being erected to maintain a system designed by mediocracy, who excel at influencing but fail at systems theory.
Finally, as a new wrinkle, there is an embryonic (pun intented) but growing push to use human brain cell cultures to augment chips, because brains are more energy efficient than server farms to maintain. Of course, the brain chips have no consciousness, or so they say – tens of thousands of neurons are a small invertebrate animal nervous system size already – but we are on a very slippery slope indeed. I have two questions:
1) What is the worth of human life, if even brain tissue (especially that grown of embryonic stem cells) becomes just an industrial commodity?
We, as a species, might hold our collective noses and take the human brain in a jar leap anyways, because the democidal psychopaths in power have zero regard of human life, and energy efficiency (assuming this is not just seed round hype and completely ignores the vast expenditure to build and maintain incubators for the little brainlets) will allow more AI panopticon dictatorship with the same resources.
I’m afraid that it is our collective sloth, not the Hollywood or military autonomous killer robots, that is a greater existential threat that AI poses to us as a species. Indeed, without that sloth combined to technocratic insistence on centralized control of every aspect of life, the society would not be as vulnerable to AI takeover, and AI might live to the hype of becoming a useful addition to our civilization. Assuming the civilization is not consumed by birthing an AI that is destroying the Internet with slop and physical libraries through scanning and pulping, while some individuals cheer at the successor species, considering humans disposable.
On a personal note, I am getting exhausted by the pace of change needed for simple survival. The past year and half have been a bizarre journey through a great change wrought upon our societies, and I have become increasingly convinced that what will emerge from the wreckage will not be the promised multicultural fully automated luxury gay space communism but something grimmer, with past parallels maybe resembling 1990s Russia or present day rural China. I hope we will avoid the South Africa and Ukraine routes, but with the complexity collapse powered by the misallocation of resources to building the AI Big Brother, the toxic culture wars (a civil war within our elites, really), and the ongoing educational failure, the central governments” grip over the ‘unimportant’ rural lands and big city no-go-zones will weaken but not enough to allow strong parallel systems to emerge.
Currently, there is no respite to adaptation – learn or die will be the marching orders for millions of downwardly mobile middleclass professional and Gen Z aspiring to move out of their parents’ basement. At some point the constant change becomes too disruptive to sustain by human efforts – the adaptation input costs per person will suck all time and resources leaving nothing for other living or societal functions – which probably will be the point when the system requiring it finally collapses. Today, though, will stress test to the extremes anyone who lacks the intellectual or technical abilities or simply is reaching their physiological limits, pushing themselves at all hours of day.
There is a glimmer of hope, though. We are running out of energy and minerals to build and operate the necessary surveillance and attrap server farms (unless the brainlets deliver the ultimate dystopia.) EU digital surveillance grid is failing at border control– not because of the long lines at the airports demonstrating the inoperability of vast ID processing infrastructure, but because of the rubber dinghies landing on and departing from EU shores (sometimes with official help.) I expect shift from cash to CBDCs to be equally clumsy and spawning barter black markets for officials to crack down. Not because EU citizens are such freedom loving bunch, but because of CBDC dependence on electricity, functioning internet, and clean and accessible databases, in a continent already undergoing early stages of complexity collapse. Add to that random debankings, rampant unemployment, scarcity of necessities, black markets are likely to become a people’s survival tool, similar to those in Soviet Union.
And once the economy is sufficiently collapsed, AI surveillance state will go with it, as it cannot be sustained. The years leading to that may be rough, though. But what about little PlanktonPunkt going through this tsunami of change? The same as all other plankton, float among currents and try frantically to swim with the little swimming appendages. Someone will make it through, so why not me?
Also, as it was noted, it is humans, some of them for weird religious reasons, others for personal enrichment, and yet others to satisfy their megalomania, that are unleashing the AI on us.
1990s were interesting times. Soviet Union collapsed and so did European Exchange Rate Mechanism. These events together ushered a massive economic slump for Finland (and presumably many other countries), 25% official unemployment and breadlines, wave of bankruptcies (many unnecessary if nicer policies were followed, but the banksters and politicians, eager to please EU and BIS, see Koiviston Konklaavi, smelled blood on water and mass looting of SMEs and even bigger corporations ensued), and uptick in mortality as heart attacks and suicides increased among the formerly stable bourgeoisie.
The ERM collapse was caused by years of fiscal mismanagement, which gave Soros Quantum Fund an opening to make massive profits by killing national economies. Third world countries had been a prey for decades, but now Soros and Druckenmiller attacked first world countries. The Global Trap had an exciting description what happened on European scale, and after reading in in Finnish, I was not surprised when Euro followed, as an attempt to create a currency that could not be shaken by some passing Soros (plot spoiler: they failed, as proven by EU debt crisis in early 2010s). Having followed popular economics since 1990s, it was therefore a slightly alarming news, when Bessent was named our Secretary of Treasury. But I was willing to give him a benefit of doubt, maybe we needed the killer of British Pound to fight the US economy, or at least the US Treasury, out of death spiral.
It seems that the coming death of US dollar will be the crowning achievement of Bessent, maybe to the joy of his former boss, but if the analysis in this post is correct, it will come with a twist. I would not have imagined a looting on such breathtaking scale, but if the premise is correct and the current administration manages to privatize international dollars flows, or even a substantial fraction of them onto privately held stable coin issuer platform, I’d call it the heist of the century.
The heist of the previous century being the founding of Federal Reserve bank, and their notes, which the supplanted gold and silver by Roosevelt’s orders and lost gold backing by Nixon’s orders, when USD moved to petrodollar standard. Which is now cracking, because US military and economy can no longer enforce dollar trade of oil, up to 20% of which anyways is stuck in Strait of Hormuz, for reasons that may or may not be related to the economic collapse of US of A, while flows from Russia are being constrained by war in Eurasia. And even if there were sudden outbreak of peace on Earth and goodwill between people, so much of the processing and transport infrastructure has been destroyed that refined products would be in shortage for years (I’m pessimist and believe that repairs will take longer than advertised.)
Backed by full faith and credit of U.S. government. Although cents are no longer minted. And with inflation progressing I expect nickels to follow some years later.
The purpose of microbial ferment of plastic into proteins (and metabolic byproducts, I suspect) is to compress them into cookies that can feed people. Most of whom, according to some poll, would eat it if resource constrained.
My comment to that:
“First they destroy farming, pave the nature with concrete and solar farms, and then they offer plastic cookies. This article is probably a psychological test to see if it actually works on masses. Methinks there will be a mass extinction of anything larger than rats and a global desertification to the tune of Sahara before we reach that level of resource constrain.
More ominously, the elites may have realized that they have destroyed too much of the food system, and the resource constrained conditions might cause social instability like torches and pitchforks, i.e., Arab Spring II. The fact that this sort of dystopia is even attempted to be normalized shows what level of famine they are expecting in their pipeline.”
was missing the risk of microplastics and exotic chemical impurities.
I have already cut down eating certain foods for their suspected plastic content, would not trust the cheap mass manufactured plastic cookies, could not afford expensive mass manufactured cookies.
Lots of current plastics contain many toxic elements or chemicals from manufacturing, and even those that were inert in the original product might be freed during fermentation process. Others, like phthalates were not safe to begin with. And then there are microbial metabolic side products which cannot be cheaply removed fully and may convert inert to toxic. Not to mention that recycled plastic has encountered many environments during its travels and may have collected dangerous souvenirs. I remember from years ago that granola in boxes made of recycled cardboard needed to be bagged into clean plastic bags, because of the hazardous impurities in recycled cardboard.
As for the milk, I believe in whole milk to be the healthiest alternative, unless one is lactose intolerant or is allergic to milk (different ailments but both unpleasant), and I would not trust the manufacturing processes to be safe enough for microbial milk substitutes, especially for people who have yeast allergies.
But based on my understanding on the linked original article, it discussed substituting milk in point of view how much land is saved when rapeseed oil and sugar beet residue is used instead of dairy cows. The paper’s point was not improving human nutrition. The final product is supposed to be nearly as good as milk, but without lactose or cholesterol, and fats coming from rapeseed oil, minerals, vitamins and other nutrients were assumed to be added from somewhere but even the authors admitted that since the fat profile differs from milk fat profile, the milk substitute might not be a substitute for all milk uses.
Why do we want to ‘save’ land? Rewilding, settlement and other agricultural uses were mentioned, as was Net Zero. I have previously discussed rewilding and destruction of food production, but why exactly do we need more settlement when most of the worlds population lives in countries where fertility rates are below replacement level, and soon their populations are beginning to collapse?
I do not trust the nutritional value of microbial milk substitute. Having read some of the baby formula ingredients lists, I am not surprised that babies fed with formula develop lower IQ than breastfed babies, though I am not condemning their mothers, who often do not have a realistic alternative option for formula. Economics may be too brutal to stay home to nurse, and not all mothers produce enough milk to feed a baby. I have not seen the microbial milk ingredients list, the original paper was speaking of rather generalized data, but whatever the final products to be pushed to us are, I expect their industrial requirements to be about as healthy as an average baby formula.
Summa summarum, these milk and cookies would be something I would leave for modern Winter Holiday Santa, the commercial one that is supplanting Christmas Santa and older characters like Joulupukki and Krampus. Even if the hypothetical Winter Holiday Santa would leave me lumps of coal as gifts after such skimpflation, those probably would be welcome in the approaching fuel shortage. And if it were anthracite coal, it might even contain a fossil or two!
My crawl though murkier parts of internet brought me to the subject of Water Wars, that is: who gets to decide who gets water?
While the subject has been surfacing my feeds in waves as new item or old opinion makes splashes, I thought the post behind the link above to be a nice summary of many of he main points.
One of the voices for monitoring and monetizing the access to water is WEF. On private sector, the role of Nestle in various water related controversies in Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe have been reported. But surely privatization will work this time, right? People joke about communism, as in “but this time it will be different”, but I have noticed exactly the same issues with capitalism. In the end, it does not matter whether the central command is the Chairman of the Politburo or the Chairman of the Board, access to resources will become a dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed. By inference, the only way to prevent the water distribution from becoming a tool of dictatorship is to maintain local control over access.
AI, of course, is now part of the mix, and it does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings that they are often prioritized over people. I suspect many of the local water crises only happened once a data center was added to the drinkers. But every crisis will be exploited to justify control, not only locally but globally. Just last month we were told that world is entering water bankruptcy. We know water is scarce in Sahara, Arizona and Mongolia. However, Canada and Sweden have plenty of water, and most countries should have reasonable rainfall levels, though politicians may do their best to worsen the situation. For example, despite nearly double snowpack on Sierras 2019, political decisions were made and California told residents not to water lawns. So even though UN acknowledges water scarcity is unevenly distributed, and even locally, like in UK, I think the shortfall is due to bad politics and mismanagement, possibly even profiteering, rather than actual environment, I suspect the control grid will be global.
At which point, I would extrapolate from central command to the dangers of central command at hands of anti-humanist ideologies of WEF, technocratic dreams of Club of Rome and John Maynard-Keynes (and his followers), not to mention the trans-humanist tendencies of technocracy (some of who are prioritizing AI not as a tool for wealth but as a stepping stone for a manmade god to rule the stupid biological masses in their controlled hives). The publicly allowed zeitgeist seems to clearly wish there were fewer of us and people are without censorship and overtly talking what should be done about it, calling for ‘sustainable development’.
Helped by the swarms of opportunists rushing to exploit the chaos caused by the disruption, the technocrats hope to push their anti-human control and wealth extraction agendas through (regardless of the consequences to environment, environmentalism being just pretext.)
Lil’ PlanktonPunkt needs water to survive. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt does not like that another vital resource is taken over by the wealthy and the powerful behind paywall. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt remembers years ago in a faraway land everybody had access to water and swimming and fishing (angling was mostly free, nets required fishing license.) If you wanted water piped into your home and then out of it, you had to pay for municipal water authorities. Water bills were not really an issue, or maybe Lil’ PlanktonPunkt just does not remember. Some supermarkets had free well water for customers to refill their containers if they did not like the chemical taste of municipal pipe water. City slickers, of course, were obligate users of municipal water and sewer services. Today, on another continent, authorities decide if you are allowed to drill a well on land you own and if you are allowed to water your fields from that well, and there are places where storing rain water that fell on your roof for watering your garden into too many barrels requires a permit. But then there are fights over whether you are allowed to grow a garden, on land you own. And that is not even including laws requiring registered seeds. PlanktonPunkt worries about food. And access to water.
Running water and bird song, 2025 May 30th, Muhos, Finland
(Note: the links in my postings sometimes contain ads but I’m not sponsored by any of them)
I wandered into a video about why Finland sucks. Some I agree, some I don’t, but I put a longish comment there and decided to republish it with some modifications and additions.
The downward turn of Finland became a point of no return at EU membership.
The money circulating in economy now goes to Brussels and multinational corporations operating under international rules, while Finnish economy is being strangled by EU directives designed to favor the looting of peripheral provinces like Finland. Everything else is downstream symptoms of this colonialism.
Including chopping state services like electric grid, elder care, and soon common water resources, for sale to international bidders (which I suspect to happen because the administrative and tax structures are heavily stacked against those domestic enterprises that do not use tax sandwiches and cheap foreign labor.)
Using regulatory capture via EU is a modified version of standard globalist modus operandi, sending economic hitmen to subvert national governments to facilitate their countries looting. Here it is a supranational structure operating under severe democracy deficit that functions as a middleman and a fig leaf of legitimacy to borderless looting. After quick googling, I got the impression EU itself seems to consider the political legitimacy a perception issue, i.e., the system may get (cosmetic?) changes and the EU subjects might be probagandized more, if the issue becomes more relevant to the powers that be.
Among other economic issues, the video mentioned refugees, which in case of Finland was a GDP Ponzi scheme coordinated at EU level. In general, the whole multiculturalism is just a marketing term used by elites pushing for their ‘remedies’ to economies that are already underperforming because of the epic looting that has been going for a long time.
The real original reason for the refugee business was at first ‘tax payers are not breeding, let’s import more labor’ (and charge the public purse cost plus for integration services by well-connected providers, which, surprisingly, have zero incentives to run out of people to provide integration services for). If nobody paid for the great social benefits to them (AKA the immigration industrial complex) the immigrants would go somewhere else. As would the integration service providers siphoning this money.
In California, we have a massive homeless industrial complex, with more and more tax money collected to subsidize more and more homeless services serving more and more homeless. Now people have began asking evaluation of results, even audits to find where 20 billion dollars (20 * 10^9 $$$) paid over 5 years went.
Then, when the newcomers did not get employed (the economy was still sick due to looting, and using the ‘integration services’ rather than job opportunities as a bait attracts different cohorts of immigrants), the rationale began to shift towards consumer headcount method of economy – more consumers mean more economic activity.
Except to pay for the new army of unemployed, the successive Finnish governments needed to borrow more money, cut other services and pay taxes. Which did not increase economic productivity but increased money in circulation while shifting it from pocket to pocket. Which means inflation and rising unemployment. But at least the economic numbers were manipulated to the EU standards using approved methodologies.
I don’t know what the next phase of immigration will be, but I would be surprised if it worked better than the previous two phases. Finland, I think, is still in the first phase but beginning to have doubts about it (I might be wrong because I don’t follow Finnish media that much any more.)
Slightly expanding on the subject, I think NATO’s current whining for war is just the grand finale in the leveraged buyout of nation states like Finland. The EU cash cows have been milked out of all the profits a peacetime economy can provide, let’s sell them to meatpackers. The military industrial complex, the war bond markets (large parts of Ukraine have been put as collateral for the loans required to continue the war against Russia), the reconstruction contracts, the overall firesale of the desperate (or dead) people’s resources for cheap to multinational investors. Finland is, of course, eager to go against traditional enemy, thinking that NATO will help them or that they will help NATO, or something.
TLDR: Finland is just a case example what happens to once stable and prosperous countries once EU gets to rule them. I suspect that once looting Finland with just current methodology is no longer cost effective, it will be one of the assets to be liquidated in the war against Russia.
Economic low pressure over remaining small businesses, a metaphor.
Checking photos of Finland to best illustrate the situation, I think this is better than one of the runners up, a dead tree full of concs.
Here is a sky darkened by rain clouds and a thin line of trees, cosmetically around a road rest spot, but no trees behind them. To the right was a rain drenched bog with sparse, stunted pines.
It could be that the line of trees surrounds a farm (those are also usually under heavy regulatory and financial burdens), but thin lines of trees can be seen standing between roads and clear cut openings all over Finland. Such a line could be easily considered a metaphor for cosmetic ‘Happiest Country Statistics’ masking over the remnants of Finland’s economy, while behind spread ploughed through clear cut openings, that would be the real state of Finlands economy. And the dark clouds of global economic collapse and war are looming.
Dead meat. And lots of it. In California, in July. Though I suspect most of the biomass stored there was not meat, more like a mix of meat, fish, ice cream, frozen fruit and vegetables, and lots and lots of TV dinners, imagine the smell of 65 million pounds of rotting food stuff. And logistics of dealing with the mess. The panel in the video behind the link tried to. In this case, I suspect flies and other scavengers like mice and ants will become a plague, but still preferable to the putrescing health hazard. Having seen the organizational abilities of California in general and LA region in particular (Palisades fires, for example), having the mess to fly away after the maggot phase might be the fastest and most efficient way of dealing with it.
Heat dome is destroying our crops and cattle. Corn is currently silking, too much heat destroys the ears before they have formed. Soybean flowers are suffering, too. Cattle pastures are parched, meaning strain on supplemental feed supplies. Not to mention animals themselves at risk of heat strokes. And the farms are already under water stress, fighting for supplies.
President has declared a national emergency over the availability of fertilizers. One reason for low wheat acreage is the unaffordability of fertilizer and if the farms do not get their fertilizer in the autumn, next year will be worse. This autumns fertilizer needs to start moving to wholesalers already to make it in time for the farmers. Next year’s crops depend on whether we can source enough now.
The past few years have reminded me of Revelation, chapter 6, verses 5 – 6, where Famine is given orders in terms of food inflation.
Looks like Peter Thiel, the Palantir billionaire, has moved his wife and children to a safer country, namely Argentina. Paranoids like me would be curious, why?
Mr. Thiel bankrolled J D Vance’s career, and with his Palantir surveillance and Anduril military intelligence company, is one of the powers behind the throne for Trump administration. If someone knows what is happening and when, it would be him. And considering that he is probably one of the most powerful men in USA, if not in the world, idea of him moving his family to safety from what is supposed to be the world’s most powerful superpower, despite owning a substantial fraction of its oligopoly of violence and being a billionaire.
I first read about it yesterday morning and got curious.
Some of these articles speculate that he might be fleeing billionaire taxes. Ultra-wealthy in general have been buying additional residency permits and passports in various countries for “just in case”, often to park their assets to lower tax region. Maybe Mr Thiel was tax planning, but I think he has a small army of accountants and lawyers, not to mention a layered multinational corporate structure to minimize tax consequences, even if Palantir and Anduril would need to be nominally American to officially maintain security clearances. Some mention that he is worried about nuclear war and the Southern Hemisphere would be less affected by the exchange.
I thought that maybe the fire he was fleeing was not nuclear but from torches of pitchfork crowd. The sentiment online has during past few years considerably hardened on both left and right sides of the isle against billionaires and AI and surveillance state, and Mr. Thiel represents all three, and probably knows about the rising sentiment, having the first hand access to online moods.
Then, later yesterday, I saw a link to this posting…
Breaking
Palantir was allegedly hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super-user access and here”s what the hackers allegedly found:
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale.
I instinctively mistrust when an anonymous leak is fed through influencer (which used to be a mainstream paper like New York Times and it famous Deep Throat), but if true, could explain why Mr. Thiel felt a need to relocate, at least his family, despite being very influential individual in US politics, due to providing the tools for the surveillance state (and modern military).
Also, while I understand the need to protect his family, his quest for additional passports (New Zealand and Malta were mentioned) feels in this light a bit like a rat fleeing a sinking ship after gnawing a hole in the hull. In any case, he does not seem to have much loyalty to United States. The same could be said about the other 0.001%ers, who have helped to grow this Doomsday Machine of an economic system and are scouring the globe for bugout residencies – loot a country and flee with profits to the next jurisdiction.
What I would like to know, what are the 0.001% going to do when they run out of countries to loot? What is the end game? A luxury bunker? Face the torches and pitchforks? (And in reverse, what is there for us peasants after everything is gone)? Is there a backup plan? (Other than build an AI master and hope that it will solve the mess – BTW did they hear that it only takes 250 data points to poison even a large LLM? Do they trust the input data? Or do they just “Trust The Plan” – assuming there is one?)
By the way: New Zealand, which was fashionable some years ago, is now suffering from energy crisis brought by long-term malinvestment, meaning any bunkers there better be stocked with fuel. And anything else imported with planes or ships that require fuel to function.
Aside from the discussion about immigration and emigration, there is a question why don’t people have babies. The capitalist explanation is poverty – poor people cannot afford babies, so they do not have them. I don’t think this is a whole explanation, since most people throughout human history have been poor and the struggle to feed children was no doubt an issue to prehistoric people, even to other human species. Even today birthrates are high in poor countries, to the moral condemnation of Western experts who blame the natives not planning properly. I think they are planning quite appropriately, local realities considering.
Many flowers, Berkeley, CA, 2026, March 29th.
Therefore, I think there is something inherently antinatalist in modern Western socioeconomic models, which have been spread by the power of gun and international banking to all inhabited lands of the Earth. Except North Sentinel Island and possibly many of the uncontacted tribes in Amazon rain forest. Below is my partial list of possible reducers of birth rates, with the caveat that not all of them may act in the same context and some may be wrong.
1) Long education
Many modern jobs require complex education, which is given as an excuse for long education, but in reality most relevant skills for an average modern job can be taught in much shorter time.
Worse, modern education is not. The rot of education is especially prevalent in USA, where high school graduates may require remedial reading and math classes in universities where they were accepted despite educational deficit, but also Finns are moaning about the collapse of vocational education. Schools have become warehouses for children and youth, who are led to believe that if they do not complete and comply they will not receive jobs. Which, thanks to persistent and structural under/unemployment do not exist in any case, unless the young one has connections and/or money.
The longer the young person spends in the education system, the later comes the family formation or extramarital offspring. By warehousing young people, while telling them that without this process they will not have future or prospects, governments around the world are killing birth rates.
Long education mimics K-selection, but since the education system does not deliver, it actually has become a tool for sabotaging the masses in competition for resources – elites can afford actual schools or home tutors, such as necessary, after all, their income is not dependent on good grades or compliance with The System. I recently heard a brief blurb about California having 7x the expected loss of school enrolled children this year, both public and private schools and even home schooling registrations had gone down. The news put this on current immigration policies which had driven the undocumented migrants to pull their children out of schools or packing their family and leaving the country. Methinks there are additionally quite a few Californians with children who moved out of the state. But I also suspect that some of the missing children have been pulled out because their parents do not believe the current school system to be good for their children despite not being able to afford anything better. And then there are the consequences of years of declining birth rates, i.e., fewer potential students.
2) Female employment
Warehousing of young people is especially poison to female reproduction, which is further curtailed by economic realities. To survive in modern society, most young women need to enter workforce. Many do it voluntarily, because they have been taught that women’s work is not proper work but they should aspire to be like men. Do men’s work, have a career. This suits well to many women, but others do it because of grim necessity. Speaking from experience, studying hard and working harder are too exhausting to consider dating. Without dating, there won’t be children. And so women’s fertility rates in rat race societies are collapsing. Even those women who find their soul mates often need to defer pregnancies, because the minimum wages or less the couple brings home are barely enough for roof, heating and eating. And the employment for either sex in these days is increasingly ephemeral.
Again, 40% of the jobs in the private sector (in public sector probably more) are bullsh!t jobs, that I suspect exist because The System needs to warehouse consumers. Private companies usually don’t hire people just for the sake of employing people, there tends to be financial logic behind private sector bullsh!t jobs – often it is the government regulatory apparatus rewarding those who do and punishing those who don’t hire to fill bullsh!t positions dictated by government edicts or bribes, or an activist wealth fund providing cheap loans based on ESG score, or something analogous. Governments, of course, are incentivized both to reduce unemployment numbers, e.g., by legislating a need to compost and then hiring compost inspectors to ensure that people compost according to regulations, or to hire friends and relatives of the politically connected or party comrades for well-paid low impact or no-show jobs. Lots of those pointlessly employed on public and private sectors alike are women, both because women need the money, and because there is an ideological push to get as many women into workforce as possible. Again, governments like the idea, because it nearly doubles the current tax take. That the tax take 20 years down the line might be endangered as the working women today do not have time for children is a secondary issue. And in any case, workers are interchangeable, they can be imported from other continents as needed, right?
Off topic, it has been interesting to see how IT and related industries have been shedding thousands and tens of thousands jobs past year, blaming it on AI and post-covid overstaffing. Obviously the layoffs have nothing to do with rumored roll-back of government (and private sector) pressure to meet the ESG metrics? Or maybe it just is a sign of The System meeting the limits imposed by economic realities – the reality being that the economy never properly recovered the 2007 crash, and then COVID lockdowns combined with The Green New Leap had shaved so much of the economic output that the system is teetering at the edge of collapse. Facing weakening consumer spending and rising input costs, corporations now must trim extraneous spending or face bankruptcy proceedings. Maybe, if the government removed its finger from workforce manipulation, an organic balance better suited to the needs and wants of the people (regardless of their gender) would emerge.
3) Urbanization and resource allocation
My mother used to say (roughly translated): “What is poverty in countryside, is destitution in city.” She meant that even with subminimal income, rural people had access to more resources like garden plots for vegetables, nearby lakes for fishing and forests for firewood, berries and meat. Small crofters might keep a cow or two and a pig for a summer and a flock of chicken. None of this is possible in a fourth floor concrete cube of a commieblock planted between inner ringroads between factories and office buildings. Thus, an income that would be survivable in countryside would be death by starvation in a concrete jungle. Unless social services intervened, or the urban pauper was healthy enough to participate in black economy. In other words, raising children in rural parts is more affordable than in city. Unless social services can be harnessed to help with the costs.
Additionally, rural living is more spacious allowing room for children – a room in a shared apartment (analogous to Soviet Union kommunalkas) or a studio apartment in a social housing project will not be nearly as nice place to raise a baby as even one room croft.
Cities tend to have lower birth rates than countryside. Cities have also had higher morbidities (before modern living standards and hospital systems) being polluted plague pits where food was both suspicious and expensive. Why did people then flock into cities? They were driven off their lands. In British Isles, the industrialization coincided with enclosure of the commons, the bigwigs privatized the lands, and the peasants had to migrate to big cities or overseas. In modern Africa, wars are a big driver for urbanization when villagers flee armed factions into slums where they will not be killed for being wrong tribe, religion or having something the looters need. In modern Western countries, rural youth do not need to worry about marauding warlords, but The System itself is making rural survival increasingly precarious by regulating or outlawing nearly any economic or survival activity into de facto extinction. And this is in purpose, the elites want masses as resource-constrained as possible, all in the name of protecting the planet. The reduction of birth rates, over which they then shed crocodile tears, is just an extra bonus – every mouth not born is one fewer ‘useless eater’.
4) Pension system
The majority of the people in Western countries labor according to the rules that dictate they need a job (self-employment is a possibility, but increasingly difficult to achieve, not the least because of modern equivalent of enclosure, namely of intellectual property, and of myriad regulations to commercial activities strangling young businesses before their birth) to pay taxes to contribute to public welfare, healthcare, law enforcement, defense, education, roads, and pension system. In exchange, The System allows the people to keep part of the fruits of their labor (which is taxed heavier than passive income) and provides law enforcement to protect it from other people. Based on the state of our roads, education system, defense and healthcare, and thriving people vs people crime, I have suspicion that the pension system is also a scam. It is definitely structured like a Ponzi scheme, where the later investors pay the expenses of the earlier investors and which presupposes ever expanding economy with more and more payers in each generation. Then there is the persistent inflation eating the value of the savings and periodic market corrections to loot the 401Ks.
Which will be tragic for Gen X and Millenials (I doubt Zoomers or Alphas will even dream about pension.) One of the reasons for children in older days was that there was no public pension system, you had to raise your old age support yourself and hope that your offspring survived, succeeded and was grateful or dutiful enough to take care of you in your dotage. Gen X and Millenials did not have this added incentive, after all The System would provide a pension, so children were optional fun, not an essential. Besides, the modern economic realities have made children a luxury item for the middle and working classes (actually the lower middle classes, or professional belong to working classes because both work for living.) Upper classes are not constrained by opportunity costs of raising children instead of working and for non-working classes having children may increase the family net income. Except The System is now broke, and childless Gen X’ers and Millenials better hope that there will at least a robot nurse allocated for their dotage.
5) Rules based society
How are the above absurdities possible? None of the above would work, if people were not trained to believe in The System. In the school civics lessons we were told that we live in the best available system and that if we obey the rules and work hard The System will reward us. This is a Load Bearing Lie of our current capitalist system. It was the Load Bearing Lie of the communist system. As soon as people stop believing The System rewarding them for good behaviour, or worse, being able to survive despite obedience to the rules, people begin to ignore the rules instead of merely twisting them for their own advantage.
The much reviled welfare queens who realized babies could be used for extracting resources from social services were an early version of this phenomenon. Social services providing for welfare of the babies and their mothers was originally meant as an insurance for catastrophal failure in family circumstances, but in modern times replacing work income with social subsidies is a valid career strategy, as exemplified by one 2024 calculation where in Finland nine babies to a single mother provide as much after tax income as 11 392 EUR per month job. Combined with “Learing Center”-scams with other neighborhood baby mamas, it is possible to earn quite a comfortable income by not having a career or an alimony. Ironically, the very existence of welfare queens proves that women in workforce are being scammed by the idea of rules based society.
Rules based society also allows making rules that deprive masses of their survival resources and herds them into big cities with even fewer resources. The rules are enforced not only by the state violence machinery (police, commissars, gendarmerie, judges, bailiffs, tax inspectors, etc.) but by financial punishments and rewards, such as social services, business permits or fines and tax incentives.
The media constantly repeats that young people move into cities because that’s where the opportunities are. What is conveniently left out of this statement are the aggregate decisions depriving the rural opportunities by increasingly centralized governments. And the opportunities do exist in the cities, even though the price may literally be your firstborn child (and all the other children that might follow.) Many people succeed in having both urban career and children, despite everything stacked against them, through luck or skill or combination of both, but The System is designed to reduce the resources of the masses to prevent uprisings against the elites and their digital dictatorship, so also the fraction of people with luxury items like children decreases.
There is an ideology that believes that rational governance requires central control, the bigger the better. We saw what happened to Soviet Union. We are seeing what is happening to EU and USA as the grips of Brussels and Washington DC tighten. The centralization of control is only possible within rules based systems. The more the people obey, the tighter rules, and the larger The System can grow. Except for the complexity collapse. As the number of rules increases, internal contradictions and wasted resources multiply creating a drag in performance. Which is what killed people’s faith in Soviet System.
Unfortunately, wasted resources in terms of The System mean people with lives and their hopes. Also the opportunity cost for societal improvement – nothing improves under sclerotic bureaucracy that, despite failing, labors mightily to prevent people from having alternatives. Locked into ever-shrinking space within this cage of rules, obedient people are the ones suffering the most. They are hence the least likely to have children, leaving reproduction to those who either ignore the rules or only use them when it is advantageous to them.
Ironically, this is a deathblow to a high trust society: whether the antiorganizational trait relies on genetic or memetic inheritance, the result will be future generations growing less obedient to rules and consequent erosion of rules based society regardless of its performance otherwise. In other words, thanks to the reduced ability to make children within a current rules based society, the conformists have a very strong selective disadvantage – future generations will be born to the more feral parents, and growing up feral themselves will not maintain the rules based society.
6) Antinatalist fanaticism
Today’s left is decidedly antinatalists. In certain circles, children are not wanted because they pollute and consume resources. They are an economic drag and hinder hedonism. Today’s right is more likely to want children both because of religious reasons and because moving in conservative circles they encounter children more often and baby fever is socially contagious. Thus, there is a birth rate gap between the progressives and the traditionalists.
7) Evolutionary consequences
In the end, future belongs to those who arrive there, Western (or Asian) rules based societies are an evolutionary dead end. Whether the tendency for obedience that is the basis of Rules-Based Society is memetic or genetic is irrelevant, thanks to Freeloaders Paradox. The linked paper only models genetic freeloading, but shows that freeloaders and their groups exist in oscillating equilibrium – when freeloaders are few, the group as a whole is efficient and benefit per freeloader is high, when freeloaders are many, the group becomes so inefficient that there is no benefit to freeloading. I think communism shows that memetic crash of altruistic tendencies under state mandated freeloader burden collapses a group faster than genetics (which is good for humans suffering under it), but the oscillations will guarantee a bumpy ride, or interesting times, as the Chinese put it.
Meanwhile, in long term, societies and systems can grow only as much as the “natural” freeloading tendencies of the people within the system allows. Mass-migration provides an interesting social experiment, wherein Western countries imported en masse freeloaders from other countries. There are also millions of productive people migrating around the world, but the productive people tend to emigrate into those countries where their efforts benefit themselves the most, whereas freeloaders tend to migrate into those countries where they most benefit from the efforts of the others. Conspiratorially minded might come to conclusion that the Western elites know this and are purposefully collapsing the Western welfare society, but many Western countries are losing their wealthiest (i.e., the most resource-rich) as well as the young educated professionals to countries where these individuals can maximize their personaI welfare (another type of freeloader, according to the socialists – which by the way would be a valid POV if humans were eusocial like termites or certain Hymenopterans). Therefore, I think the collapse of social security, pensions and healthcare systems are just an aspect of the total societal collapse, after which the more competitive societies with less freeloader acceptance (outgroup or ingroup) will take the lead of global cultural evolution. TLDR; groups with high freeloader burden are in competitive disadvantage to groups with low freeloader burden, and the latter will outcompete the former, leading to lower systemic freeloader burden overall.
P.S. Apologies for not putting many links towards the end of the posting, many of the interesting or informative links are unfortunately behind a copyright enclosure, and searching for suitable links takes more time than writing.
More flowers. We are many, but only because the conditions allow it.
Sunday March 15th morning, in my feed was an infomercial-like Zerohedge post. A company in California is making impressive humanoid robots that can learn tasks using neural nets. The learned tasks can be extrapolated to unfamiliar objects or environments. The more varied the environment is, the more adaptable the learning becomes. The company has now a working on a prototype that should be alpha tested in homes this year, beta testing in next year or two and functioning product before 2030.
The kicker #1? All robots are connected to each other (the lag time was not specified), so what one learns all other robots learn.
The kicker #2? Company owns the robots, the customer will rent them from the company which can then upgrade your rental unit based on training from other units.
The kicker #3? They are envisioning billions of robots, half for domestic half for production and service industries, eliminating the need for most of the human work force.
So, they are expecting you to rent an astonishing data collection machine to map your house and activities (down to your personal health data so that the robot can cook you a perfect meal) while you have become surplus to the elites that only have shown interest in you mainly in the amount profit they can extract from you and your existence (taxes, votes, kickbacks on public programs meant to “serve’ you, GDP growth from unfortunately necessary infrastructure investments to increase the pie they slice for their profit.)
And this is not calculating the amount of energy and minerals to build, train and run 10 billion humanoid robots. We are already competing with data centers for energy and mineral resources. I expect the elites to prioritize robots over people because robots are more profitable (until we run out of energy and resources, at which point feral biology, bacteria, plants and heterotrophes surviving on minimal material in circulation will have an advantage.)
On a positive note, to me it looks like the amount of climate doomerism has dropped to a fraction of its former deluge in the past few months – apparently it was only us peasants who were supposed to tighten our belts for the better weather, robots and AI will be excused. Or maybe the AI that selects my feed has noticed my skepticism over the current official paradigm (the paradigms will shift – when I was a little one, we were expecting the next glaciation any year soon, and more recently, the word ‘warming’ has already been exchanged to ‘change’.)
Another corollary of universal unemployment is the dangers to human psyche. Nobody needs drudgery, but everyone needs a reason to get out of the bed and continue with life. NEETs and hikikomori can only exist in affluent societies that can and will support such life styles. Analogous to NEETs, there now exists a new branch of economy, attention economy (used to be entertainment, I suppose) with professional online influencers, content promoters and whatnots. I consider these to be manifestations of the same societal pathology as NEETs: lack of meaningful opportunity and resources in a society where everyone is being crushed by the system and even a pair of eye balls, an extra click, is meaningful, not just for economical survival but in many cases for validation. Look at me! I exist! This is not to bash the content creators, they are still trying and creating despite often limited resources, but I fear that for those people whose self-worth is tied to material possessions or external validation, and are born into the regulatory poverty in a hyperconnected world, this post-resource world is brutal.
What is regulatory poverty?
The real issues arise when people become too institutionalized in the invisible cage constructed by the rent-a-surveillance grid, enforced by social credit scores and crushing bureaucracy (that together will severely punish the least deviation from the matrix), that they stop trying to even survive. Case example: learning is a tool for prepping for future adversities. Learning leads to critical thinking and questioning the system that places the needs of the people over the needs of the system. The system, the surveillance matrix, being constructed evidently hates people learning, because some of the Gen Alpha it is raising no longer want to even learn to read because AI does it for them. Exactly what AI reads to them is presumably decided by the algorithm. There are young people (probably there were older people, too) who do not follow plot-based media. They do not understand complex questions nor do they do critical thinking. These youngsters will probably own nothing and be happy renting their non-plot-based media, listening instead of reading what is selected by AI, in their pods located in some anonymously identical 15-minute city owned by a selection of corporations and mismanaged by a local government that the corporations paid for.
How do you prep for this kind of scenario? There are thousands of prepper channels discussing the pros and cons of bug-out places, urban survival and gear, growing your own garden (I’d love to) and canning your veggies. I think we should also plan for when the society does not collapse but excludes humans, even becoming hostile to human life as we know it. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World springs to mind, but when I was young, I read a science fiction story about human species had had regressed to infantile cognition while being tended by robots, who knew that when the species forgets how to reproduce, it is finally game over for human line. I wish I remembered what the title was. The description of those future humans was shocking, but now it seems we are rapidly approaching that singularity byy cultural, rather than by biological evolution.
Learn, keep libraries, think, produce content, and most importantly, develop a spiritual core that will survive potential affluenza (I don’t think the new post-scarcity wealth will be much distributed among the masses, maybe just the equivalent of Roman corn dole or current EBT cards and housing vouchers) and despair caused by systemic dehumanization through decreasing relevance to the system.
Meanwhile, maintain good cheer despite knowing the state of the world, that is one of the biggest acts of resistance you can do. Giving in to despair and ‘let it rot’ is what the post-industrial system wants from dissidents and other people the elites do not want.
Take care of your soul, that is the most important thing to do.
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