210 thoughts on “Ungovernable Costs”

1. Seems clear the idea is to make life increasingly difficult and expensive, and in so doing, create a population of indentured servants. Problem is the indenture will never be paid off.

   (Minor correction: Three Rivers Stadium was blown up in 2001, replaced by two new stadia. First order of business was to auction off the names to the highest bidders – Heinz and PNC Bank. It was Heinz Field that changed name to Acrisure.)

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2. Today’s essay is quite thought provoking. At the end, I am left hanging: If the entire nation is indeed repeating the mid-20th century experiment of the cities, it leaves unanswered the question of this time, where do the businesses (or citizens) relocate to? Z gives a hint: “Ungovernable.” Well, the essay makes clear that it’s not directly governments trying to govern in the present case. Perhaps “difficult to market to” is the new escape.

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3. Z-man, you and the Worthy House guy are wrong. This can go on forever, and will. Just like politics. There will be no Red Caesar. There will however be a Blue Pol Pot. And a Blue Terms of Service Regime.

   Structurally, the West is rapidly moving towards the old Babylonian model of productivity but in reverse. Then, it was raise an army (that was loyal), raid and capture neighboring peoples, deport them as slaves to Babylonia to work the fields and crucial canals till they died, then raid more peoples. This produced great wealth at the top, obvious dynastic churn (as competing captains of the army sought to become ruler), and little loyalty from the people to their rotating cast of rulers. What was not to like among our rulers now? Babylonia would rise upon an able and charismatic ruler, and fall and be conquered by vengeful, motivated neighboring peoples when the ruler was incapable, or unlucky, or faced too many internal rivals for the throne.

   By contrast, the Egyptians lasted as long as they did by having deserts to the West and East, the Sea to the North, and desert/Africa to the South. While maintaining more serfdom than slavery among their peoples and clear dynastic rule. Letting people have just a little built the pyramids and staffed Pharoah’s army. They lasted a very long time and had far less turn-over. In the end, they just could not resist the Persians, then Greeks and Romans, as they did not update their weaponry or military structure and way of fighting (still clinging to outmoded Chariots that were obsolete by the Late Bronze Age collapse). But still they lasted far longer than they otherwise would have aided yes in part by geography but also by the structure of how they organized their manpower: serfdom not slavery.

   It has been revealed that illegal aliens with anchor babies consume more welfare than Americans. That the Fortune 500 after the Summer of George (Floyd) hired only 6% Whites, approximately 100% of that being (((gay/lesbian/trans))). College Professors always the reliable indicator of where the Regime is heading are demanding “de-colonization” of America and “eliminating colonizers” while JCS Gen. Brown is pressing ahead with reducing Whites to only 40% of Non Commissioned/Commissioned officers. Illinois pays illegals $9000 a month for housing expenses including a “furniture allowance.”

   This can go on forever, just by internalizing the Babylon model. Instead of invading neighboring peoples, invite them in. And have THEM enslave your own. Imagine Hillary’s “re-education camps” for Trump supporters, brought to you by Nike. Or AWS. The AI says you support Orange Man Bad. So off to the camps for you! You will own nothing and have no privacy, they told you up front. You will use the pronouns, eat the bugs, live in the camp’s pod. While daily you toil assembling Air Jordans, or the latest junk gadget, so some Central American can enjoy. All for Corporate Free !!!!!! (You’re killing me Larry!). Later, the US military can recruit out of the camps, offering a free one-way trip to Ukraine or Israel in exchange for the enlistee’s family not being put on starvation rations. This is the plan, anyway. Corporate America will be staffed by vibrantly diverse on the top, with Alphabet plus, and various enforcers in the camps lower down. All the real hard, technical work will be done by slaves of the paler shade of White. After all, are not Whites genetically evil and with hereditary blood guilt? Is this not what Hollywood, Academia, the Government, GOP/DEM uniparty, and every other power structure drone out 24/7?

   Heck, the camps might be virtual. With CBDC, you cannot buy or sell without the mark (666) of the HildaBeest. All enforced by vibrant diversity.

   Hillary is now deep in the Biden WH and campaign, as the Bidens fear Obama will toss their grifting mitts aside for Kamala. So expect scorched earth from Hillary! There will indeed be hell to pay.

   [Yes, this will cause military collapse so rapid it will make your head spin like Linda Blair. China is well behind this stuff, so that’s the point. Soros wants collapse to build his new WEF compliant society of the Colors of Benetton. He thinks his money and rent-a-mobs will deter the Chinese and others. Yes he is that stupid.]

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   • Well said, but I take an exception to rapid and collapse without bottom Not going to argue the point extensively, but point to some recent examples from 3 levels of societies. USSR (1st world), Venezuela (2nd world), Zimbabwe (3rd world). These societies collapsed for various reasons, but the people endured and did what was needed to survive. I don’t see us as different in this ability.

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     • whiskey —

       Mark of the HildaBeest lol.

       Spot on tho. I’ve said for decades that the New World Order is the New Woman Order. She is Leftism. An XX future, don’t ask Y.

       A feminine demon of vexation and terror rules over America and the anglo nations (Strong’s Hebrew 6869, tsah-rah: female adversary, female vexation). This is the beginning of what Scripture and eschatological Christians call ‘The Tribulation’.

       The dominant, and still rising, power in the West is the ‘divine feminine’ under various fronts and guises. Spencer Smith does a good job covering this in his vids.

       The rising power in the East, both temporally and spiritually, is the Red Dragon. Commie China is the ideo-political locus of this power, but obviously this power and impetus is distributed variously throughout the world. Also, don’t forget the Russkies are -sinos too.

       Woke Amerika follows after the red-dragon vibe in everything except the little red book. Combines the worst of East and West.

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   • That’s their perfect world, but the rub is that there’s still way too many white folks to pull it off, also too many “Trump supporters,” and will be for the foreseeable future, unless they can find some way to reduce them and only them. If that was the intention of the jab, it seems to be a very long process. Without getting into the crisis of competence such a dusky regime would inevitably suffer. Is already suffering, I think.

     Besides which, I am not seeing a lot of solid camp commissar/guard material out there among the baizuo. The CBDC angle runs into the same problem as the current debanking regime, to wit, there are just too many deplorables. They can debank, or turn off the CBDC of a handful, publicize it, and scare everyone else, but debanking 100 million people is no more feasible than putting 100 million in camps.

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   • “This can go on forever, and will. Just like politics. There will be no Red Caesar. There will however be a Blue Pol Pot. “- Whiskey

     I think we all know this. But it’s a good summation.

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   • @Whiskey

     Outstanding post sir. I salute you. This is about as spot on as it gets.

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4. It seems history is rhyming so hard the bell is about to break.

   Robert Silverberg is both a grand master of science fiction and an excellent historian.
   He put out and anthology based on the Cultural Revolution…of the era spanning 600 B.C to 400 B.C.

   Priestly class zealots overthrew the engineering class and rose to power.
   Instead of a scientific-industrial revolution, that part of the world got a cultural revolution.

   Note, that was the period in which the Babylonian Talmud is supposed to have been written, as well as other political events occurring in New Babylon.

   Who created the Mad Men marketing and advertising industry that we have today?
   What is its product? Why. Bernays and Mazlow brought forth this rough beast.
   Advertising is entirely a virtual industry; its mechanics are art and sound, its product is tenuous.

   It is also the commanding heights of cultural revolution.
   The driver of political movements. It is an industry of base appeal, of democracy.

   One could then posit that America is its whore…the Whore, of Babylon.
   Of Babylon’s descendants. Now that the greater world is turning against Babylon and her whore in the Red Sea, are we about to see the culmination of a certain well known script?

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   • America is the ‘whore Babylon’ or ‘Babylon the Great’ cited in Scripture. N.Y.C. is the ‘great city’ of Revelation.

     The satanic concept of ‘equality’ was born in Old Babylon, the first gender-bender culture.

     The ‘Babylon spirit’ is generally dispersed in the world, but concentrated in the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, N.Z., Western Europe.

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5. When I talk to people who don’t just pirate everything on primewire or watch dog washing videos on youtube, it always turns out that they’re spending twice as much as before to have a dozen streaming services compared to just the cable package they used to have. All that just to watch Captain Picard as an old man crying like a little girl. Blech.

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6. This gets to me talking about Slick Willy yesterday. He famously said that the era of big government is over.

   What people didn’t realize is that there was fine print attached. He made the government look smaller by using f500 and NGOs as cutouts.

   This is what I think Haywood means when he says “unlimited means for limited ends”. A GOP president effectively dissolving all the megacorps and NGO would be seen as betraying the idea of limited government but at the end of the day, you would effectively have to do those kinds of things if you wanted any semblance of Jeffersonian America

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7. Way off topic. This is more one for the Beautiful Losers category, but in case you want this one for a podcast Z: https://americanmind.org/salvo/white-pills-for-the-new-year/

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8. I ordered one of those little wafer batteries for my car key fob from Amazon recently. It cost $2.87 and was delivered overnight for free. How is this a sustainable business model? Well it turns out the USPS heavily subsidizes Amazon’s shipping costs. Why would they do that? Because the increased volume, justifies the bloated USPS bureaucracy, even though it causes huge annual losses. The only loser is the US taxpayer, who keeps both ridiculous business models afloat.

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   • The USPS is one of the few things the government does that it is constitutionally mandated to do.

     To the extent it loses money, so what? Nobody ever complains that the courts lose money or that the police lose money.

     I don’t think they lose money delivering packages. If anything, its probably first class mail they lose money on because they are required to deliver mail to all postal addresses in the US at the same stamp rate.

     There are thousands of things the government does far worse and where there is no legitimate role of the state to be doing it in the first place.

     The libertarians and some conservatives are absolutely wrong about the Post Office.

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     • family member works for post office. The least of our worries and something that is still worth while. Of course it not run well and loses money, as Tars says, which one of our hundreds of fed operations does any better. They are all worse. Pay scale is way less than any other government operation.

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     • “The USPS is one of the few things the government does that it is constitutionally mandated to do.”

       Subtle quibble. It’s something the Constitution authorizes, not mandates.

       “Congress shall have the power…To establish Post Offices and post Roads…”

       Same with the later clause, “Congress shall have the power…To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia…” They are not mandated to supply M-16s and M-2s to the citizenry, but they are authorized to do so if they choose.

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     • No doubt there are bigger government wastes. But you don’t have to be a libertarian to question an organization that, with a monopoly, lost $6.5 billion last year, all so you can receive junk mail. If the main function of the courts/police was to deliver paper ads I don’t want, I would question their losses as well.

       One further knock on the USPS. They are overwhelmingly left-wing, while also allowing for mail-in ballots, which is the primary reason we cannot vote our way out of the problems we face. But yeah, the few times a year I need to paper mail something, it’s nice to only pay $.66 instead of a few dollars.

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       • DLS: Varous maternal aunts and uncles worked for the post office. None of them were particularly bright or capable; one has been drawing disability for years claimimg to have hurt her back.

         Mail service in DFW sucked. We often wouldn’t get mail until 6 pm. We often got others’ mail and they got ours. A visit to the local post office was a nightmare – a line of dot Indians chatting with the Indian post office employee, a line of east Asians talking with the Han employee, a black supervisor. I used Fedex exclusively instead.

         My local rural post office is great. Never a long line, friendly and quick service by White Americans.

         tl;dr: When it comes to mail delivery demographics matter, just as in everything else.

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         • A mandate to deliver mail (if that really is so) is one thing, but nevertheless separate from a mandate (?) to deliver such in an inefficient—and therefore—more expensive manner.

           When discussing the USPS, one should separate the two. I see no reason for the USPS to not be farmed out to the lowest bidder for operation.

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         • 3g4me: Agree on the demographics. I live in a white suburb and have no complaints about the service or visiting the post office. Though I will note that we lived next door to a mail carrier who said a lot of the carriers consume marijuana gummies every day. Could just be anecdotal for this area.

           I thought a little further on my earlier post regarding politics, and it occurs to me that allowing a heavily Democratic leaning union to deliver and collect mail-in ballots is a recipe for fraud. I have no evidence, but it would be pretty easy for a lefty carrier to just not deliver mail-in ballots to houses with rightwing yard signs, or to collect them, fill them out and return them themselves.

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     • A Republican director under Trump “reorganized” the USPS, selling off much of its sorting equipment, etc., preparing for its customer base be taken over by private corporations such as Fedex or UPS.

       Privatization and DEI hiring is an attack on the USPS core function from both flanks. One of my mail carriers, harried and overworked, told me about what a hot mess her workplace had become- to the point she was seeking anxiety meds- a couple of years before I found a comment detailing what the Trump selected director had been doing during his tenure.

       He might still be there, I don’t know. The USPS union uproar reminds me of the teacher’s unions reacting to Trump appointee Betsy DeVoss, who was also in a battle to privatize the Department of Education.

       More examples, I suppose, of the strange revolution from within occuring upstairs in the managerial class.
       That is, entrenched interests at war with each other, while their core functions are completely forgotten.

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   • Amazon isn’t exactly subsidized. It doesn’t make any money on its shipping business. Like covid lockdowns and the crime wave brought to us by “Soros prosecutors,” it exists to obliterate the local general/department/drug store. It’s government-*maintained* for that purpose.

     The rhetorically Marxist part of the ruling class is obsessed with destroying the “uneducated” petit bourgeoisie—and the possibility of its ever arising again. To accomplish this they align with finance capital, multinationals, etc., outright stating that it’s because monopoly/monopsony is more state-controllable than “free enterprise.” And in fact Google, Apple, Pfizer, Amazon, et al. are all-but-nominally nationalized. And the government is all-but-nominally Google, Apple, Pfizer, Amazon, et al.

     Trump is their antichrist not for any of the usual mainstream-media reasons but because he’s the avatar of the “dealership”—a word they use like Israelis use “Amalek.”

     Elon Musk emerged from this milieu. It’s why the government loved him. Before his current incarnation, back when he was still Reddit Man, when he talked business he talked most about making Tesla a single-owner worldwide retail chain, replacing franchise car sales, fuel sales, etc.

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9. What we see in AINO is unbridled greed and commodification conjoined with ideological monomania. Henry Potter (It’s a Wonderful Life) may have been a cruel, avaricious bastard, but he had no interest in affixing a naugahyde vajajay to your son and submitting your daughter to gangrape by a pack of baboons. In other words, what we now see is raw capitalism impregnated with perverse, anti-white poststructuralism. I don’t know about you lot, but I can think of better arrangements.

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   • “capitalism” requires creative destruction IE you run your business badly you go out of business. We don’t have that. If the banks had gone down in 2008, they would have taken all the mega corporations with them. They can’t function without each other, and neither can mega government. That is why they bailed them out, to bail themselves out. The market was trying to enforce the nearest thing we have to “democracy” in this country. Our economy died in 2008. We’ve been juicing a corpse with 0% rates and QE for 15 years. You guys think its bad now, wait until they can’t do that anymore.

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     • Mark my words, some sort of “crisis” will come up next year and they will have to cut rates to 0% again and print a few trillion more, just like 2020 and 2008. Those were both election years by the way. The half life the printed money has is getting shorter and shorter. The end is near, thank god!

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       • In the Fed era, have we ever had a market crash in an election year when a D was up for re-election? I don’t believe we have. In all that time, the tape says that 2008 and 2020 have been the only two real election year crashes. (the market crested in 2000 but didn’t really start down in earnest until 2001).

         In all that time (back to 1913) there have really been only 11 crashes, the way I define it. So I don’t know if this tells us much.

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         • 2020 wasn’t even a crash. The market ended the year higher then it started and the god damn economy wasn’t even open. What does that tell you about the stock market? I don’t think it matters anymore which party they prefer to have in office. The monetary system is coming to an end. Prepare accordingly.

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         • This is the only thing that matters for the stock market:

           https://cmv.imgix.net/posts/2023-02-15-Other-FedBS-vs-SP500.png

           I love how everyone here decries the fraud of society and blah blah blah, but when it comes to the stock market, its as pure as the driven snow!

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     • The safety net you describe applies to a handful of corporations, not the vast majority of business entities that comprise most of AINO’s economy.

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10. The NFL is even worse than mentioned. The actual time when plays are being run is only 11 minutes. Replays account for 17 minutes, and watching players stand around is about 75 minutes. The remaining 80-90 minutes are mostly spent watching ads. What a colossal waste of time. Not to mention the absurdity that the best part of the whole charade is spending 11 minutes watching negroes chase a ball.

    https://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-commercials-and-just-11-minutes-of-play

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    • Tangentially, how about the Texas Rangers paying that Jap sportsballer 700 mill? It is a moral obscenity.

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      • Sorry Otsei, your racism is not appreciated.,
        We refer to them as Nips.

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        • I prefer Nine Irons.

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          • Had to look that one up. The most slanted of irons. LOL

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      • Incidentally, the obscenity has to do with the money, not the fact that the guy is a slope. It would be just as abominable if the Rangers shelled out all that dough to Z because he could hit a curve ball, although it might do the DR some good.

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      • Correction: It is the L.A. Dodgers, not the Texas Rangers, shelling out the huge contract to the Jap. Hey, it’s their money and it’s not as if it would go to some truly worthy cause if Ohtani didn’t get it. Would you rather the Dodgers’ owners just keep that money? Not sure why that’s any better. Now, if you want to argue that sportsball teams make way too much profit due to our society’s lame priorities, that I could probably sign off on.

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        • “Hey, it’s their money and it’s not as if it would go to some truly worthy cause if Ohtani didn’t get it. Would you rather the Dodgers’ owners just keep that money? Not sure why that’s any better. Now, if you want to argue that sportsball teams make way too much profit due to our society’s lame priorities, that I could probably sign off on.”

          I could be mistaken, but I believe this was Ostei Kozelskii’s point. It really is obscene that anyone in our society pays 700 million for anything related to sportsball. It’s also obscene that CEOs rake in obscene amounts of money while offshoring jobs and paying substandard wages. The whole system is rotten to the core.

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          • Its about getting the nips to pony up.

            https://dodgersnation.com/dodger-branded-merchandise-is-already-booming-in-japan/2023/12/26/

          • Though Ostei may well have been making the same point I made, it wasn’t clear. A lot of folks seem to believe it’s better for sportsball owners to make off like bandits rather than have the athletes get too much of the loot. The athletes provide the actual product (facilitated by the owners, of course). I recognize that I may have misconstrued what Ostei was getting at.

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          • Right. I thought my point was rather obvious.

        • Yes to your final sentence. It is society that is depraved. As to the owners, no idea, although they’re probably members of the Power Structure and as such, anti-white.

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11. Amazon Prime is a scam. I signed up for it once but cancelled after a year. I didn’t notice any difference in benefits. They make you jump through a few hoops to NOT sign up for it anytime you order something but that’s the main inconvenience. You get the same customer rewards discount if you pay attention and select that at checkout. If you’re willing to wait a few extra days for the delivery, you usually get that option for free. Then it’s almost always delivered before the projected delivery date anyway. I don’t know anything about the ads because we don’t watch any of their streaming services.

    I watch stuff free on Youtube and it’s easy to hit ‘Skip.’ The only time I don’t hit ‘Skip’ is when I’ve fallen asleep watching their sh*t. Seeing what I can’t avoid of their stupid Woke bullsh*t commercials keeps me angry and that’s okay. Tip: find the ones with a few thousand subscribers that don’t have ads yet. Some are pretty good, some are comically awful. I watch those for the wrong reasons.

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    • the ads on youtube are out of control. Want to listen to a minute and a half long song? First you have to watch a unskippable 6 second ad (usually for something that doesn’t apply to you) and then you get the 30 second skippable ad. If they’re collecting so much data on us, how are the ads still not even relatable?

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12. I think about this a lot, usually in the context of equities markets, how at some point the cost of managerial compliance and dead weight pink hair/vibrancy exceeds the productive capacity of the company/corporation/system. And like they say about markets, “nobody rings a bell at the top.” When we arrive at the “managerial event horizon,” nobody will know it in real time. There may not be a “crash,” per se, but just a long, slow “downward” grind into the idiocracy oblivion.

    Something that is real and ongoing yet largely unseen and definitely underreported is that when an organization becomes “woke” (for lack of a better word), more and more of its time and energy is consumed by policing “micro aggressions” and such within its ranks, slowly and inexorably crowding out its ability to perform any other functions. As more woke indoctrinated youngsters enter the “workforce,” and more non-indoctrinated olds retire/die, this only increases. This is a fundamental flaw that cripples the effectiveness of explicitly left wing organizations, and it’s happening right now. So I guess that’s good news. It also cripples organizations that are not explicitly left wing, but not as quickly.

    I hate to so frequently come back to the same thing, but this can probably go on indefinitely so long as the fedbucks printer works. Maybe we already passed the event horizon and don’t know it yet for that reason, the printer still papering over and supporting the non-productive parts of the system. Real 1932 style deflation is one thing that would break the back of this behemoth but of course it would be very painful for the innocent as well as the guilty.

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    • Don’t overlook the extent to which corporate tax policy affects things. The effective corporate tax rate is hovering around 18%, which means if you hire some green-haired tranny to ru(i)n your HR department, on average, you are credited back in taxes 18% of it’s salary.

      Of course, the feds aren’t the only ones who levy corporate tax. Cities, counties, special taxing districts and states all take “their” share. Unless you chose your business location with this in mind, you may be facing marginal rates of over 50%, i.e., buying ads or any other expensible items costs you less than half of the sticker price. If you can get even a handful of morons to click on the ads, you can easily end up money ahead.

      Deflation would be no big deal. Yes, people would be dropping off the keys to their cars and homes and sticking the financial institutions with the tab, but that’s what all that interest paid was said to cover. And as a result, all those homes and cars would be resold at fire sale prices.

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13. Ah! Here is another one that is the result of making software more diverse and inclusive. Schedule a meeting on Google’s Calendar. Change the time zone of the meeting. Look at all of the various places in South America you have never heard of between you and central time zone.

    Now, I promise you their usability and QA teams filed numerous bugs about how unusable this became with the massive scroll down. I am sure some of them said, can’t we use some simple algorithm to determine the user’s country, current location, to give them a limited number of options? Even better, can’t we put a search term on the dropdown so they can quickly find their meeting time zone?

    Of course they can. But they want to show how inclusive they are by forcing you to scroll through multiple dozens of locations in Mexico and Peru and Uruguay … … before you find the traditional American city for a given time zone for your American meeting with an American.

    The same is true with more and more country drop downs. Many no longer default the United States. You start with Afghanistan. Someday they will get rid of the filter on that drop down as well – just to force you to see the other countries. Of course, they won’t teach our children geography – at least not any that relates to our heritage.

    Okay. Done ranting about, “Inclusive Software.”

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    • Yep. Here at my “ugly teller” I see the scrolling of ad’s for my bank’s services. I exaggerate not, there are a series of pictorial ad’s displayed that show only Black faces. Not a single White to be found. The exception was that the bank was sponsoring the Youth Soccer Team of Mexico! In that were smiling Hispanic faces in front of a Mexican flag. 🙁

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      • Yep. Yesterday I went to get the New Year party favors that I signed up to contribute. The giant window photos had a black boy in the center, a SoAmerIndian to his left and a blonde/blue girl to his right. The entire staff inside was black – something I am seeing everywhere.

        First packaging I saw was a brunette and a blonde to the left and right of a smiling sub-saharan. It took a while but I did see a happy white couple on one set of packaging. Happy New Year!!

        You will almost never see a white male. He is the height of privilege, so he must be banished. That the entire ad industry has adopted this is insane. This is the first impulse to genocide. You so vilify a group that you refuse to put their image anywhere. That is when we are still a majority. Wait until these ad industry people’s children and grand children are a minority.

        The sad part is, whoever brings back a more 90s and before mix, is going to trigger brand loyalty from a massive market. They won’t do it though. Not a single person employed in that industry, probably scared to death they will be replaced, will chance mentioning the general public’s natural and healthy disgust response to this as well as the unreality of it. I’ve even seen blacks have it – they think they are being genocided by being shown as breeding out with whites.

        For me there are two layers to the response. The first and most visceral is that this is happening because this population will elevate and martyr vile, criminal scum in order to make political advances. It is absolutely sickening to anyone with a moral compass that Obama/Holder and the entire black supremacist movement deify this kind of scum in order to advance. This tells you about Africa. That to advance you will not build, but rather, you will tear apart every last strand in the fabric of society to get to the top. It is astounding. The disgust is in the red because we are being erased because of their criminal class and its lack of impulse control. Sickening! The second layer is just the natural revulsion to being erased and replaced and being forced to sit there and take it.

        Last night I watched an episode of, “The Americans.” It is an 80s cold war spy show and it is littered with the Magical Ones at the highest levels of Cold War importance. In this episode the spies go to a parent teacher meeting thinking their son is going to be in trouble. The teacher is a negro dressed in a fancy three piece suit and tie telling the white parents, afraid their son is a delinquent, that he is proud of their son and promoting them to Algebra II because he is doing so well in school. Yes. That is it. Russian white people totally out of touch with their son and reliant upon a top tier sub-saharan math teacher to look out for him and advance him.

        It doesn’t even stretch credibility. It is a complete departure from reality. Even if they were these fine teachers, based on all of the discourse I see from the black elites, they would be utterly hostile to a white family. It seems the people in the ruling class are going to play this fantasy in their head and in public in hopes it becomes reality for a long long time. I wonder how long until enough of them get replaced that someone cries uncle. Who knows, by then, it may be too late to salvage anything at scale.

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        • That is it is a recent show, but it is set in the early 80s – when Reagan was shot.

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        • Why are there no black spies???

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          • You forget “Undercover Brother.”

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          • “ Why are there no black spies???”

            Because there are no Black countries worth spying on. 😉

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      • Banks appear to be at the forefront of negrolatry/whiteophobia. It’s gotten so bad on my bank’s website that whenever I check my checking account, I punch in the wrong password/username in order to speed past the diversity as quickly as possible. When I do this, it automatically forwards me to another login page where no faces, negro or otherwise, are to be seen.

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        • It would be an interesting (and funny) experiment to put together some diverse ads but with the various ages, sexes, and races so obviously wrong that everyone would notice. I’d like to make an ad featuring a “family” at the dinner table. Maybe it’s Thanksgiving or Christmas. The dad is a 10 year old Asian kid, mama is a 500 lbs black woman, the kids are all Mestizos, except the oldest son, a fine 6’5″ Aryan. His albino pygmy sister is next to him. She is only visible because she’s standing on the chair. Finally, we have a 105 year old Eskimo woman dressed up as “the baby”.

          Go ahead and object, raciss!

          4

      • It’s not just that all the smiling faces are black. I have no doubt that Shaniqua needs a credit card and Chulthuvius requires an account for his “business” proceeds. No, it’s the laughable presentation of an intact nuclear family celebrating the bank-financed purchase of a million dollar home. As if.

        4

    • Inclusivity, yes. But it’s also about eschewing “Americacentrism.” Don’t want to let on that AINO is somehow more important than Zambia, wot.

      7

    • Accompany I once worked for used the translation service, and the phone operator would always ask. What market are you calling from and I would answer I’m not calling from a market and I would insist and finally the phone operator would have to ask you you know like what city are you calling from like New York Houston Chicago at which point I would answer cheerfully oh Brooklyn New York

    • This is one of the many little insults you endure when job hunting. You need to stay vigilant to make sure you don’t end up applying from Afghanistan for that job in Florida. Once you finally get to the u’s they also seem to REALLY want you to be from the UK, the United Arab Emirates, or just about any other place with “united” in the name. Some companies are also so pozzed now that it’s quite a challenge to figure out how to pick “I’m straight goddammit!” from the list of 57 genders. Then again, you could say this is helpful at identifying places you DO NOT want to work.

      3

14. “One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content.”

    They’ve been doing this for a while now. When they bought up IMDBTV and renamed it to Freevee, they moved almost all the back catalog content to Freevee (or just removed the vast majority of the free, adless content from their streaming and went with Freevee’s back catalog). All the new second tier stuff is released on Freevee, which has ads.

    The only things you can find on Amazon without ads now are a handful of their premier “Amazon Originals” items, or subsidiary pay services, like HBO Max that you have to cough up for in addition to your Prime fee.

    So, nothing new here.

    7

    • I have had amazon prime for years and there were no ads when I rented a movie. Ever.

      Today I get a notice I must pay 3 dollars a month more, or they will insert ads in order to help me out with my viewing experience etc. etc.

      It’s new.

      8

      1

      • I was talking about the “included with Prime” content, and there have been ads on that for quite a while, unless I’ve been hallucinating.

        There will still be no ads on content you specifically pay to rent:

        “Ads will not be part of content that is purchased or rented. Live events on Amazon Prime, like sports, already include advertising and will continue to do so.”

        https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/amazon-prime-video-will-start-showing-ads-in-january-will-you-have-to-pay-more/ar-AA1m9D3p

        2

        • OK appreciate the clarification.

          3

15. “Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads.”

    I simply cannot fathom paying a monthly fee to watch television, ads or not. I watch almost no television at all other than the weather forecast. Sometimes I catch enough of a glimpse of the “news” just to hurl obscenities, profanities and vulgarities that the propaganda.

    Television is basically a sewer pipe discharging feces into your living room. There is almost nothing on it but Negroes, and the content is controlled by Jews.

    54

    • We watch YouTube and we do fork over money to have it be ad free. The only time ads enter our lives is when are in a city or my husband watches a sportsball game. When we do watch ads, it’s clear the worst of the culture war has landed ther.

      It is possible to live an ad-free life if you are not interested in traditional TV viewing. Further, some of the worst instances of forced TV viewing, such as the MD’s office/airports/gas station pumps seems to have been rolled back recently.

      6

    • I think I prefer to see some ads, sometimes, just so I have at least a vague awareness of what’s out there. Yes it would probably be better for my mind, in an ignorance is bliss kind of way, if I saw none of them, but not in a situational awareness way.

      3

      • When I’m in a restaurant–and the vast majority of them are bedizened with TV screens, alas–I sometimes watch the ads in much the same way many people rubberneck at a car accident. One’s eyes are drawn, almost inexorably, to the horror.

        10

    • Indeed. My job requires me to watch sportsball on the sewer pipe, September through March, so I subscribe to Youtube TV for those months. But those events are all I watch, and I cancel my sub as soon as possible.

      3

      • Requires you to watch sportsball? Why don’t they require you to get repeatedly punched in the groin by a midget for the remaining 6 months of the year? What’s the difference?

        5

        • I tread a stony path…

          1

    • Interesting. We wonder how apps and google-twitter-facebook make any money, being free; yet, we lived with free rabbit-ears tv and never asked the same question.

16. “In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks.”

    And what supports all these costs? The surplus profits of monopoly and cartels. The Woke/DEI stuff has grown in direct proportion with the cartelization of American business.

    Every day, most Americans wake up, work for and do business with monopolies and cartels all day long. Banking, education, insurance/healthcare, Amazon/Netflix/cableTV, pharmaceuticals, government, etc. – all monopolies or cartels. The competitive sphere has been reduced to fast food/restaurants, retail (those not already crushed by Amazon), hair/nails and home service/repair. Conveniently, the competitive sphere is dominated by “low-cost” (that is, subsidized by taxpayers) immigrant labor.

    24

    • That’s why a parallel system that a lot of people talk about will never help us break free of this corrupt system unless it’s done in person with the people around you… Online Parallel systems are just illusions of the real thing and won’t bring the change you are looking for…

      10

17. I’m going to sound like a broken record, but there is a fairly straightforward way to avoid much of this: Consciously secede from GAE kulture. We don’t watch tv so have no worries about ads. Like Felix, I use the Brave browser so no ads. I watch YT videos but I am not subscribed or signed in to anything, so I see no ads. The only time I am subected to online ads is when I waste time by playing ‘free’ online card games. They are miserable and woke but generally last 1 minute and I use that time to take a stretch or do something else.

    None of our home electronics are ‘smart’ or connected. No thermostat or water meter. We have never connected our phones to our cars. When the finances are there, we hope to swap our paid-off 2020 Toyotas for older (2011-2018) ones with fewer electronics (but 4-wheel drive etc.). Thanks to living rurally, I have yet to discover a gas station here that forces ads on me. Yes, the still ad photos in the banks and Walmart featuring various non-Whites remain hideously grating, but are much more easily ignored.

    While I loathe Bezos, I equally loathe all the large corporations and they are all equally hostile to me and mine. So I utilize what best serves my interests for now. In the DFW ‘burbs it was not having to go out and ‘shop’ amongst the diversity. In our new rural abode, it is acquiring things we feel we need that are often unavailable locally, so Amazon Prime just makes financial sense. We have everything shipped to our son’s rented house in town, not out here in the woods. I don’t use Amazon music nor tv – I watched Clarkson’s farm the first year (ad free) and enjoyed it, but somehow haven’t gotten around to the more recent seasons.

    Don’t live the consumer-driven “American Dream.” Don’t allow your children’s minds to be poisoned by any modern media. Electronics are tools and conveniences, and it would behoove most of us to learn to do things the old ways. While I will greatly miss the internet when/if it is totally censored or gone, I will find it a fair trade if it means the destruction of social media and sail foams.

    34

    • Clarkson’s Farm season 2 is definitely worth watching. He basically cannot do anything without government approval. The yeoman farmer in the Tudor era had more freedom. But having a beautiful farm has to be close to the pinnacle of human achievement.

      17

      • Which is why you need a Community of your people so you don’t have to worry about permits and fees…

        8

    • DVD players have gotten extremely cheap sometimes under 20 dollars and even some that work just on batteries, I have been accumulating a library of watchable movies and tv series on dvd’s (including some for children, and some holiday classics that haven’t been tainted yet) and so can basically ignore the television except for local weather and crime and a few PBS Masterpiece things that don’t feature diversity. I may be able to entirely cut the cable cord next year. Also, I never buy the kindle or online reader versions of books, I always opt for the actual paper copies and have already assembled a large library of readable books including some for children and teens which I add to each month. On an aside, my search engine has narrowed my options down considerably, as when I search for a product or fact I basically get about 8 or 10 websites over and over and over. However it’s still not as bad as using the Encyclopedia Britannica or trekking to the local library.

      12

      • I began collecting CDs and DVDs back in the 90s and still do. Have never used Netflicks and wouldn’t know Spotify if it sidled up to me and bit me on the ass. Then again, I’m something of a collector, by nature. I like to possess the physical things, and streaming/play lists just wouldn’t scratch that itch.

        10

    • “I watch YT videos but I am not subscribed or signed in to anything, so I see no ads.”

      Also don’t sign in to online platforms on principal. But it’s the Brave browser, not the fact that you’re not signed in, that’s skipping over the ads. YouTube actually experimented with blocking Brave for that reason but seems to have given up after a short while. Ad blockers can also be helpful, and they’re browser agnostic.

      Frankly don’t see any reason to pay for Prime. I mean, people just need to plan their lives a little better. And learn patience. Even so, I once ordered two of the same item, one of which Amazon tricked me into paying faster delivery for via their defaults, and it actually arrived a day later than the “slow” one.

      Likewise, I see little utility in streaming services. The “best” content, which I presume is what’s most in-demand, is helpfully uploaded via torrenting sites within the time it takes to transcode it after the stream has ended. Downloading takes a few more minutes, depending on your internet connection. Like I said, patience.

      Just one caveat! The same nice folks who have no objection to our genocide may become quite difficult when it comes to ripping their content, so I’d advise using a VPN when doing so. Good deals can be found on VPNs, especially if you pay for the longest period on offer. But even the pricier ones will be far cheaper than Prime.

      2

18. The little bitchlings just sent me an e-mail telling me how they were doing me this tremendous favor by expanding their catalog and creating huge opportunities and bs bs.

    And oh yeah serf you gotta pay another 3 bucks a month, or we are gonna stuff ADS into the service you already paid for on the implicit assumption that it disallowed ADS. But not to worry valued serf, we will impose LESS ADS on you than network television.

    Now go dig up your password and get it done.

    If they’d sent a message saying we’re raising fees 3 dollars a month, ok and I move on. But nupe. It has to be done in this passive-aggressive, backhanded, lying, we’re here to help you feminine way that I just despise.

    Fire in mine eyes.

    24

19. My wife was watching It’s a Wonderful Life just before Christmas and it hit me, Pottersville, and we are now a country run by Henry Potter’s.

    19

    • Complete with local girls being lured into the sex trade.

      15

    • Actually, I don’t know who was worse, Mr. Potter or George Bailey. Potter’s faults are obvious. But George Bailey basically mismanages his bank’s funds by handing them over to his loopy uncle, tries to commit suicide, and then gets a big public bailout. I am probably the only person on earth who thinks this is a horrible movie.

      13

      2

      • No, the Ayn Rand Objectivists hate it too. Careful the company you keep.

        2

      • Bailey is a GrillerCuck in other words. You could make an updated version with not-so-subtle analogies between the bank and America. Replace the loopy uncle with a flock of stronk-independant wammen and Potter with pozzed elite WASPs and Jews. Maybe the twist is that when Clarence shows up he realizes the situation is FUBAR and Bailey is a fool and he’s the one who kills himself.

        2

    • Funny coincidence department. The wifey got IAWL on DVD for Christmas, and we watched it last night. First time I’d seen it, believe it or not. At any rate, yes, crass, ugly, tawdry Potterville in 1946 looked very much like Louisville in 2023. All that was missing was the dieversity.

      How ironic that a message of anti-capitialism in 1946 looks very rightwing in the here and the now.

      15

      • You guys never saw this?

        https://youtu.be/Icqrx0OimSs

        Came out in 08

        4

20. I’m not sure how this could be done, but big tech and big ad are surely searching for some way to guarantee that the volume cannot be muted or even reduced on their ads.

    9

    • Meanwhile, I’m praying for a technology that shuts off the screen as soon as the ads appear and turns back on when they cease. Something tells me I’ll be waiting a while…

      3

      • It’s called “the Off button.” Not to be too condescending, but these conversations of how to best consoooome mass media from those who hate us sounds a lot like the waiting room ofba methodone/narcan clinic. Maybe stop putting the needle in your arm.

        9

        1

        • As I made abundantly clear upstream, I’m required to watch a great deal of sportsball, and that’s all the television I watch. It would be nice to be able to avoid propaganda bombardment while doing this, and no, the “Off” button doesn’t solve the problem because it doesn’t turn the boob toob back on once the ads are through.

          3

21. South Park had an episode back in 2015 I think it was. It was Season 19 Episode 9. It was a great season in general as it covered the service economy, gentrification and the rise of consumerized SF/Berkeley hippie culture. They lampooned it better than any article ever could. The above mentioned episode is the best, “everything is an ad”, statement I have ever seen.

    Ads were always a terrible and soul crushing thing. I remember when they introduced ads into the movie theaters. For me it was during the LOTR-II back in 2002. They had 45 minutes of commercials. I can’t go to a movie theater anymore. I am not going to pay $20 to see 20 minutes of white erasure and regime propaganda in the form of ads. Then there is the first time a gas pump started rolling ads at me. This was a few months ago. There is a full service station up the road. I go there. Better to hand my card to a disgruntled Hindu who pumps my gas than to see Carol the red, Sheila the brunette and Candice the blonde on vacation with Dayquon or to see an aging black couple with body suits and surfboards happily surfing away in Bali.

    These aren’t advertisements anymore. They are something that I haven’t come up with a good name for yet, but they are not advertisements. They are TPTB telling you, this is the world you are going to live in, and this is how you are going to like it.

    Like the world they are creating that is ungovernable, it is also a world that is untenable.

    40

    • Movie theatres are really bad…When we went to Oppenheimer, it was more than 30 minutes of adds for horrible new pictures we wouldn’t dream of watching…At a very high sound level…

      17

      1

      • I go to the flicks once very several years to watch the newest Bond movie. That’s it. And now that they’ve killed off 007, after first having replaced him with a sassy mammy, even that may be kaput.

        6

    • The word you’re looking for is propaganda.

      7

22. This is why I’ll never buy a new computer. You get to pay over a grand for the privilege to subscribe and pay money to microsoft and adobe for what should be free functions of the computer that was just purchased.

    16

    • This is why I will never buy a new car..The old one is trouble free, doesn’t spy on me or order me around, and is made by an extremely reliable Japanese manufacturer with a solid local dealership…Soon, new cars will monitor and report your driving, and subject you to being shut down at the whim of “authorities”…No thanks!

      20

    • I tried this. My Adobe is no longer supported on Windows 7 and crashes my computer. Not reading my work-related PDFs is obviously not an option for me. I think Ralph Nader called this “planned obsolescence”.

      12

      • My grandma gave me her old laptop with windows 7. Microsoft gave me an “update” which essentially removed all of microsoft office because it was still free when she bought the laptop and hadn’t been connected to the internet. Isn’t it funny that old versions of windows didn’t need weekly “updates” they now try to ram down your throat? I found a way to shut them down though for the time being 😉

        4

    • You can download Open Office from Apache software, it has programs similar to word and excel except you can only print them on a home printer as most commercial print/copy shops are locked into their service agreements which require them to ONLY use Miscrosoft office and they will not even open anything else..

      4

23. As today’s post makes clear, the deck is stacked against us and getting worse with each passing day. But it’s the slow boil technique, which is carefully calibrated to keep normie on the couch and not rioting in the streets. And voting harder is not going to fix this; only a collapse can trigger the eventual cure. So instead of endless erudite analysis (or whining), why not get busy and find a way to survive the interregnum following collapse?

    That is Step One. Now you have to come to terms with the reality that only tangible actions can save us. And then you should ask yourself, what is the best way to get tangible? Getting fit is a good start. Disappearing in plain sight is nice follow-on. Keep it simple and use what you know. Everything solely within the confines of your cranium is your only defense against Big Brother. And round all of this out with some opportunism and spontaneity.

    The models say that things start getting real in about 18 months or so.

    15

    7

    • Eighteen months, huh? Alright, I’d better mark that down on my calendar.

      8

24. This is a fun topic mainly because last night during dinner my adult kids were talking about this very problem. They’re all home for the Christmas holiday week, which is a treat for Mrs. Hokkoda and I.

    Anyway, they were lamenting that they now pay for a premium streaming service and the darn thing is now showing them commercials. The worst part is that regular old commercial TV from the 1980’s or 90’s would time the drama to align with the commercial breaks. The producers at least had the good sense to build up the tension and cut to a commercial. Now they just drop in an ad mid-dialogue. It’s weird. As they were complaining about the commercials, they launched into a “nowhere is safe” discussion about the commercials forced on you as you pump gas. No aspect of day-to-day living is free from advertisements. My wife and I joke that the home improvement shows on Discovery+ are “commercial-free” as long as you ignore the fact that the entire show is a commercial for Lowes or Wayfair. The product placement is hilariously awkward.

    The conversation went on for about half and hour and towards the end I encouraged them to re-watch a movie they probably had not seen since they were very young: Wall-E. Hard to believe it’s only been 15-16 years since that movie was released. It’s almost painful to watch as an adult because just like the characters on that cruise ship, we are inundated with advertising. The President is the CEO of a major corporation – B&L. (Buy ‘n Large). A commercial flashes across everyone’s screens, “Try blue, it’s the new red!” and half the passengers push a button to change their fat-suits from red to blue. Everyone rides around on hover-beds and they are all morbidly obese. As babies are born in the nursery, and go to school, they are put in front of TV screens where they are told “Buy n Large is your very best friend!”

    We’re all adults here so watching a “kids” movie may have limited appeal, but that film has some insightful commentary about modernity. The environmentalist message is not overplayed because the basic theme of the movie is that the planet gets overrun by corporations. The result is that humans sh^t on everything, the robots they build to clean it cannot keep up, and the humans have to leave the planet. Once in space, they’re trapped for 700 years and their only purpose is to serve the corporation that put them there.

    This conversation branched off to one about how much of what we see is a big grift con job. Hunter Biden can sell scribbles for big money…and bureaucrats can become millionaires writing tell-all books that nobody reads…because it’s all a grift. It’s good that my kids can see this, but I worry that they – like everyone else – isn’t quite sure what to do about it.

    So they put Disney+ back on (they pay for the pedos, which boggles my mind) and lament the commercials and don’t understand why I leave the room and go back to my office and ignore it all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

    23

    • “Wayfair”

      They have any of those $10,000 throw pillows?

      3

25. How many milliseconds does it take you to hit the “skip” button when presented with an ad on “free” programs?

    1

    15

    • You can’t skip the ads on Prime. They call it FreeVee or FreeView or something. Basically, you don’t have to pay to rent the program if you agree to watch the commercials. But you can’t skip them.

      They’re mostly using the ads on programming that is not enough of a draw – not enough people would pay outright to rent it. So instead of charging $4.99 to rent it, which nobody would do, they give it to you “for free” if you agree to some ads. IMO, it’s a reaction to the declining quality of streaming content. Nobody will pay to watch that crap, but they’ll use the commercials to take a bathroom break which seems like a good trade-off. Just like on broadcast TV, I don’t have to watch the ads. I can mute them and go get something to drink in the kitchen.

      9

    • I’d push a button that kills everyone who’s ever bought or sold an advertisement before I’d watch a single second of one.

      5

    • sometimes they allow you to skip after about 5 seconds or more of watching. So about 5,000 milliseconds (more like 5,450 to allow for reaction time).

      2

26. Off the topic of the post, but this morning at work, in the break area, a large number of black coworkers were gathered and talking about some current events in the ghetto.

    One of them said, and I kid you not, that a gun that was found by police in a local black neighborhood was “planted”. (Which garnered a response akin to “yeah like crack was”)

    This led to one of them piping in on the “opioid crisis”, and how “this wasn’t a problem until it started affecting white people”.

    Akshually, Shaquishia, white people only started talking about it when it became a problem for other white people, but black people weren’t doing shit about it when it was mostly their problem. This is the element to all of this that they don’t understand, that doesn’t get talked about in the news. Blacks have always expected white people to care more about THEM than we do our own, and blacks resent it when they sense we don’t. Yet they never look around their own community and ask, “what are WE doing to solve this?” It’s always, “why isn’t whitey fixing our problems for us”. They get angry at the idea of “white supremacy”, yet they tacitly admit that only white people are capable of fixing the problem….i.e. smarter than they are

    52

    • What they don’t understand is that if you put 10 white people in a room, we don’t talk about whiteness or blackness. We mostly talk about our families or the weekend or hobbies or sports.

      If you put 10 white people in a junky old storage room and locked the door so they couldn’t get out, by the time you unlocked the door 6-7 hours later, they’d have cleaned up the room and somebody would be serving as the unofficial leader of the group. They’d mostly know each other’s names and a lot about each other. The concept of race would never come up. They might talk a little politics but they would push it aside if it seemed like it was getting in the way of the problem right in front of them. If it seemed like there was a way out of the room, they’d have explored all the possibilities. Sure, leave them in there long enough and conflict will emerge – bad things happen when food and water run out. But for the most part, they’ll try and find an honorable way through the situation.

      This explains their “opioids weren’t a crisis until they started affecting white people” complaint. The white people look at a bad situation and GET TO WORK trying to fix it. That is not the response of most of the other peoples on this planet to any given situation. Nobody has a hurricane or earthquake hit their country and thinks, “Oh man, I hope the Chinese get here soon!” The Chinese DGAF. Just about everyone on the planet hopes the Americans are coming. And by Americans, they don’t mean the ones burning down Minneapolis.

      37

    • That’s why every black run city functions like a Rolex watch, they are problem solvers and really good at solving their own problems, yeah right.

      12

    • It’s interesting to watch programs featuring science or archeology explorations like dinosaurs, nature programs on volcanoes and hurricane research, in these tech type programs nowhere is a black or brown or even yellow person to be seen except as a diversity plug-in. We seems to have been cursed or blessed with a bigger than normal amount of curiosity and inventiveness and own-group high trust genes. If a POC had been locked in the cupboard what do you think they would have done?

      5

      • I have to disagree with your demographic observations on these documentary type programs.

        If you went back more than 20 years ago, you’d be scarce to find anything but token blacks. Nowadays they ram “black science guy” up our asses like a dildo at Barry’s bathhouse.

        I don’t watch much TV, but I do watch documentaries on various streaming platforms. Just last night I was watching a documentary on Pluto TV about the origins of Robin Hood. Not a black in sight, but do you know who made a cameo appearance? The Sheriff of Nottingham! But not just any old Sheriff of Nottingham. It was the (then current) Sheriff holding that office, and his name was….circa 2002/03 “Ali Asghar”. I wanted to throw my screen across the room. From 2015/16 a fine English noble named Mohammed Saghir held that title. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_of_Nottingham_(position)

        But more currently, I have been binge watching a lot of “series” type documentaries that go on for multiple seasons. These documentaries have a stable of about 10-15 commenters from various disciplines. The subject might be about a rarely seen giant squid recorded at 3,000 feet below sea level as an example. None of the “experts” know shit about this squid. They’re all reading a script. Their disciplines are all tangentially related in some way (like a geneticist or a geologist) Their expertise is just relevant enough that you can’t claim they’re ignorant of the subject with any real evidence, you just know they’re ignorant because they are experts on EVERY SUBJECT that the series covers. The same geologist who commented about deep sea squids will comment on another episode about the Tunguska meteor that hit Russia in 1908. Their geology background only relevant to these two subjects tangentially (meteors are rocks).

        ANYWAY, these non-expert experts need only be “interesting characters”, they don’t need to be honest to goodnesss expert about anything. This opens it up to have sassy powerful independent black woman with big curly Afro hair giving us all the knowledge she can muster about Russian meteors, squids, Genghis Khan, Machu Picchu, Toenail fungus, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Betsy Ross, and whatever other subject she can read a teleprompter about.

        Nowadays there is a deep underrepresentation of white male experts on just about any subject.

        6

        • You’ll be pleased to note that the current Sheriff of Nottingham is Shuguftah Quddoos.

          1

      • A few years ago I was in a museum in Taiwan dedicated to electricty. The first room you entered was dedicated to the scientists who made major breakthroughs in that field: Franklin, Watt, Ohm, Ampère, Edison, Tesla, etc. It took me a minute or two to realize why I felt odd. Then I realized it was because every last person featured was a white male. They didn’t even shoehorn an Asian into the exhibit, much less a magical negro.

        The blessing of an ethnically homogenous nation…

        7

    • This sums up why I despise them with the intensity of a 1000 suns. Unlike some here, I openly despise them with a hatred that is immeasurable. If I had one wish granted from a genie it would be to eradicate their entire existence right down to the last molecule that could eventually reproduce them again. I hate them that much. They are the single most destructive force on earth and their existence makes life much harder and more difficult for the rest of civilized society. They cannot be fixed.

      6

    • It’s one of their species more nauseating traits, they want to be worshiped because they believe all of their own bullshit.

      3

27. I have to say that I used to badmouth the “go woke, go broke” mantra. It just didn’t seem to be true. The big companies were becoming increasingly anti-white, but it seemed to have no impact on their profits nor did their white customers seem to care.

    But, a few years back, I began to question my original opinion.

    Being independently employed, I don’t get a glimpse into the day-to-day workings of companies, so I assumed that they remained reasonably normal. Sure, they’d have a DEI department and normal white people would be forced to sit through stupid lectures that they secretly mocked and didn’t think about again afterward. I figured that the same was true for important gov agencies like the FBI or State Department.

    However, it’s becoming clear that while big companies can control the market and thus not need worry about their customers too much, the Wokism religion is eating them away from inside to the point that they are having a harder and harder time functioning – which is likely why they need to keep upping their rents.

    The same seems to be true in the FBI, CIA, State Department and the military. Decades of hiring women, minorities and white soy boys indoctrinated into the modern religion is now taking its toll.

    My guess is that normal white guys in the 1990s and early 2000s figured that it was just easier to hire a few of these folks, shove them into a corner and get back to work. And it probably worked. But over time, they broke out of their DEI ghetto and started pushing various programs or work rules or whatever. On top of that, even the supposedly “normal” new hires believed in all of this crap, so the old school workers were getting hit by the DEI folks and their own co-workers and their underlings.

    The foundation of the company workforce was being eroded, which is where we find ourselves now. With the retirement of the Boomers, many big companies and govt agencies find themselves overrun by religious fanatics. There’s just not enough normal workers to keep the system functioning like it did, thus the extra costs.

    Again, it’s not so much that these big companies have to worry too much about their customers. I mean, if you only have two or three big companies controlling 90% of the market and they all adhere to the same religion, those companies will be fine. Same for FBI or CIA or State Department. In that sense, “Go woke, go broke” doesn’t work. But in the sense of companies or govt agencies being able to function, it does work.

    The sand in the gears is starting grind things down. It just took longer than I thought and appeared not as customers leaving but the companies/agencies having a harder and harder time providing the service/product in a reasonably cost-efficient way.

    36

    1

    • It’s becoming a glaringly obvious problem of competence, which I think Zman has written about before. You can’t bring people like that in and indoctrinate them in DIE and make that their reason for being and expect them to be competent in the work that needs to get done.

      The military has always had shiftless idiots woven into the mix. Herman Wouk was writing about this in “The Caine Mutiny” in 1952.

      “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, “How would I do this if I were a fool?” Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.”

      What happens when the people designing the system are no longer geniuses but woke DIE disciples?

      18

      • An example of that is the destruction of the Assault Ship Bonhomme Richard, in San Diego in 2020. The ship was undergoing a refit and a disgruntled sailor started the fire. The crew failed to activate the fire suppression systems for a very long time allowing the fire to get out of control. The whole ship was written off.

        15

      • So just as I suspected Herman Wouk was tribe. And this snarky hyperbole about geniuses and “idiots” is typical. For example, in aviation, a pre-flight checklist isn’t designed for idiots it’s designed for those of ordinary intelligence because sometimes the systems are too complicated to rely on memory alone to make things work smoothly. Sometimes the rules are there for reasons that the average person doesn’t see but which are potentially disastrous under the wrong set of conditions.

        15

        • Note that in The Caine Mutiny it’s Jewish lawyer Barney Greenwald who saves Maryk from being hanged, even though he doesn’t want to. He’d rather support Queeg, who signed up to defend The Tribe before the draft made it mandatory.

          9

        • To be fair, the character who makes that statement about the Navy is Tom Keefer who was actively poisoning the well aboard the USS Caine. To some extent, he is the villain of the story. The guy who actually should have been court-martialed. It’s been a few years since I read the book, but I think that the dissent he was sowing may have even come up during the trial.

          I spent 10 years in the USAF flying spacecraft and training to end the world with ICBMs, so I’m pretty confident that I understand the importance of procedure.

          My point is that over half a century ago, the problems of mediocrity in the ranks were well understood. Tom Keefer gives voice to this, but when put in command later on proves that the smarty-pants can’t lead his way out of a paper bag.

          Arrogance is no substitute for competence.

          2

    • > and appeared not as customers leaving but the companies/agencies having a harder and harder time providing the service/product in a reasonably cost-efficient way.

      Thus the pivot to “advertising” as a new revenue stream everywhere. Unlike an actual product, “advertising” is the one thing you can sell that doesn’t require you to actually deliver tangible benefit to your “customer”. It is basically corporate money laundering, where funds magically appear to people pushing the correct political narrative (like the beer tranny), and disappear when assets stray from the collective (rocket man’s freeze peach platform).

      9

      • It’s actually clever. You’re getting payment from the customer without having to ask for more money. There are still a few smart people in these companies.

        6

    • Silly Country — ‘The same seems to be true in the FBI, CIA, State Department and the military. Decades of hiring women, minorities and white soy boys indoctrinated into the modern religion is now taking its toll.’

      Cuckservative medea never talks about WHY the CIA, FBI, NSA etc. all are increasingly woke-totalitarian. The answer is too discomfiting to the millions of parents of hard-charging daughters. . . parents who still imagine themselves conservative or Christian.

      Obvious reason is what you stated. Forty years of forcing masculine males and whites outta education/employment, and stuffing females and ‘other minorities’ in.

      The FBI, CIA, State Dept. and so forth now are composed of individuals at all levels — not just upper management — who see masculinity, ‘patriarchy’, whiteness and heterosexuality as the nation’s top enemies. And they see themselves as heroic ‘levelers’ of society, as every modern film evidences. The agencies are run and staffed by Karens and castrati soyboys.

      9

    • I work in software for a large company that isn’t a software company. We have a DEI Vice President – who is an angry, fat, black sheboon who has been doing the diversity grift since the early 2000s at large companies. This woman literally does nothing to increase the bottom line. She builds nothing. She creates nothing. She generates zero revenue. What she DOES do is collect a 500k base salary plus bonuses while admonishing evil white males who do all of the heavy lifting at the company. Costs are going up, business is slowing and expenses are starting to hurt the bottom line. Our white executives won’t do the unthinkable and fire this rotten black scum, though. Instead, she will be allowed to suck resources dry until she decides she wants to buy her retirement mansion on the backs of the hardworking White people she despises.

      9

28. You can go to jail for speaking harshly to your wife. But the powerful can abuse you and your family in every which way. The government is bought and paid for and not by us.

    The good news is that this cannot go on. The bad news is, when it gets u governable, strange, desperate people from all over the world will be right next to you.

    22

    1

29. Great post today. Congress should pass a law making it impossible to surrender constitutional rights, like access to the court system. This already applies to crimes. You cannot consent to a crime. All of these godawful contracts force you to give up your rights and agree to have any disputes settled by the company’s good friends over at some arbitration firm which the company has financial relationships with. Worse, an arbitrator can do anything, they are not bound by the law and you have to move heaven and earth to get an arbitration overturned.

    Now they are expanding this system to products you buy in the store. By opening and using the product, you are agreeing to arbitration.

    Ford has taken out a patent for showing ads on the infotainment screen based on location. If you are on the turnpike and there’s a “rest stop” ahead that has a McDonald’s, you might be shown a McDonald’s commercial.

    Hyundai has an EULA that say if you have sex in the car, anything picked up by the microphones and cameras in the car is the property of Hyundai. All the car companies now have EULA where you agree to be tracked and everything written down in a computer. When you sync your phone to the car’s computer, it wants everything on your phone.

    Congress needs to act to stop all this. But they never will because they don’t represent us, they represent the corporations.

    33

    • What good has having access to the “real” court system done for Trump or the J6ers? Or any of the various people and entities who tried to stop the steal before and after the election?

      9

30. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Ungovernable Costs

31. The good thing about this is it opens the Regime up to a new twist on the good old-fashioned “work to rule” strike the labor unions used to pull. Back in the days, you could totally disrupt an industrial process simply by complying with ALL the rules, to the letter, and refusing to do anything that isn’t spelled out in detail in the Policies and Procedures manual. You’re not “striking,” because you’re still at work — indeed, you’re making safety job #1, just like it says on the posters!

    In a similar way, you can turn the Apparat’s constant lectures against them. For instance, last year a bunch of high school boys got in trouble in Portland, or some similar Deep Blue Shithole, for destroying the free tampon dispense in the boys’ bathroom, because of course Portland mandates putting tampon dispensers in the boys’ bathroom. And while it’s good to see some fighting spirit in the young fellows, what they should’ve done is used the tampons. As in, taken all of them out… and then dimed the principal to the school district for not fulfilling the tampon requirement. The law says “there shall be tampons in the boys’ bathroom,” and lo, it has come to pass that there are no tampons in the boys’ bathroom. Lather, rinse, repeat, until someone gets fired — raise the “cost of compliance” on the enforcers, because you know they’re not going to tax themselves.

    See Vladimir Bukovsky’s classic gulag memoir To Build a Castle for many more fun tips and tricks. Get it before it’s banned!

    42

    • Malicious compliance is a useful tool!

      20

    • But consider the second order effects of “work to rule”. It drives up labor costs, which incentivizes moving operations to somewhere with a more work-friendly populace. Initially, Southern and Midwest states, but soon the culture permeated there, too, so it became Mexico, Malaysia and China.

      So long as people keep buying their crap, these kinds of stunts only further marginalize the US worker.

      2

      • Financialization and offshoring has the same causal nexus to labor difficulties as having ads with perverts taking bubblebaths has to do with the target demographic for bud light.

32. Give “The Fateful Nineties” a read, October 2023 First Things.

    5

33. So Peter Turchin’s work, especially his recent book End Times, seems ever more on target.

    6

    • That is a name I have not heard in a long time. I must admit I have never read any of his books. Years ago someone sent me a link to a site I think he was maintaining, but it has been a while so I may be misremembering. I must not have found it compelling as I remember nothing about it. Is there a good first book of his you would recommend?

      5

      • Historical Dynamics is a good one to start. You will probably get frustrated with his pseudo-mathematical attempts to “prove” his theories with data. They are pretty thin. But the main theory of societal surplus causing Elite (and self-styled elite) over-production thereby leading to intra-Elite competition and violence I think stand on their own.

        4

    • I have been telling y’all to read Turchin for a long while now.
      He also has some lectures up on Youtube.

      4

      • “Cliodynamics” just sounds like a myth, difficult to find, hard to understand, impossible to manipulate with any regular certainty or replication of results.

        Like other things that begin with “Cli.”

        (Enjoy his books though. It’s like he’s trying to update Spengler or Toynbee only with modern “science” language.)

34. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.

    Oh Z, you are thinking too low. BMW floated, then retracted, a plan to charge you a usage fee to use the heated seats on their cars: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated-seat-subscription-microtransaction

    The theory was sell every car wired for heated seats and they’d be “activated” by paying a fee and the Benevolent Bavarians would send an over the air update to allow the onboard software to open the seat heating circuit.

    That’s an MBA and not an Engineer thinking. An engineer would design two wiring harnesses, one with leads for a heated seat, one without, and based on the build sheet Klaus on the line in Munich would snap in the correct one as the car rolled past him.

    Would what we’re seeing lately be that maturing industries like tech and automobiles can’t make any more profit doing what they ostensibly should be making money on (building and selling cars or software) and nickel and dime customers in hopes of opening a new revenue stream?

    Anyway it stinks, and cars (and other consumer products) are made worse by pinhead bureaucrats meddling around since they have nothing better to do.

    23

    • Everyone involved in the software as a service scam belongs in a camp. There is a was picture posted online recently of an electric Ford that was inoperable because a software update failed to install correctly. The corporate mentally is not “how can we best serve our customers” it is “what can we get away with.” They got pushback on charging you for using features of your car this time, to them that simply means that will wait and try again.

      17

      0

    • Not only car manufacturers. Look at software companies for other examples. Microsoft wants you to subscribe to their Office package, although you can still buy your own copy of a version of it. As far as I know, you can’t buy Adobe anything, it is all subscription. “You will own nothing”; you will rent everything. That is the goal.

      18

      • It’s a bit different with Microsoft, though, because their customers expect product support over time, and it’s quite difficult to cover operational costs when you have single-instance revenue and continual overhead. In this case, selling a subscription for software makes sense, as it aligns seller’s costs with buyers benefits.

        1

        1

        • That is one side of the story—their side, but there is another. That one is expanding the software “features” to encourage more purchases. Something akin to the old saw of “planned obsolescence”.

          If I am a minor user and have “Office 97” and it works (and I do) just dandy for the one or two “official” letters I need to write per year, why must I subscribe? That used to be the case, i.e., I simply froze my software at a current version and went on with my life and level of usage.

          This was not enough for greedy corporations as they had long ago developed software that had more features in their software that all but the most professional and advanced users needed. Something like putting even more chrome on a Buick. So the development aspect is but a ploy to gin up revenue and profit.

          They have now turned to subscriptions and credit card numbers especially—most companies do *not* allow yearly payments even, just a monthly billing on CC. Why? To do exactly as Z-man has suggested. To convert it into an unthinking *tax* that one pays automatically! (Those of you who “tap the card” for every purchase from a latte to your groceries check your monthly statement? I thought so.)

          This is not me thinking/saying this. I have an old friend who was product manager for MS Office. He visited the department and gave a presentation of the product and exactly the development/release cycle he was responsible for. Basically, they worked around the clock to add *features*. The release cycle was solely decided when sales began to lag! This strategy worked for awhile, but as I said, was unsustainable.

          And here we are today. The best suggestion I can make for the average low level user is to avoid all the large software company’s products and look to open source free or nearly free software. Might as well not get hooked on a product that will take time and effort to learn just in order to have you pocket picked regularly to avoid the learning curve of a different product.

          12

          • I might also add that Bill Gates a couple of decades ago signaled the above when he famously said, “if every PC user gave me $200 a year, I’ll give them all the software they could ever want…”. (The above is paraphrased slightly due to context limitations.)

            3

          • That is what we had been doing with Adobe. For the minor projects we needed it for, a ten year old version of Acrobat was working just fine. Now they made that impossible. The whole thing is designed to extract as much money out of you as possible.

            5

        • “Support” used to constitute free minor updates (quashing bugs in the original release, maintaining compatibility, etc.) and paid major version updates adding significant features. The new features were perfectly useless to most buyers and simply moved the product closer to the status of being practically unusable. Therefore, said users avoided upgrading for as long as possible, thereby depriving the companies of revenue. The subscription model gets around that problem by forcing the buyers’ acceptance of features they neither want nor use. The company, however, benefits by selling essentially the same product multiple times (since each individual buyers’ use case will not change much if at all); thereby supporting the original hypothesis.

          14

          • All the more reason to move to a Linux platform and use the packages available to Linux users.

            5

        • But ultimately it comes down to the fact that the populace has come to accept the subscription model.

          That is similar to the reason you can’t buy a car with crank windows without special ordering it. The car salesman makes the pitch that it only costs you 4 cents per day (spread over 7 years) to give yourself the luxury of electric windows. “After all, you deserve it.” Repeat with enough “features” and you arrive at a median price of $50k or whatever it is. All a nickel at a time.

          4

          • That is similar to the reason you can’t buy a car with crank windows without special ordering it. The car salesman makes the pitch that it only costs you 4 cents per day (spread over 7 years) to give yourself the luxury of electric windows. “After all, you deserve it.” Repeat with enough “features” and you arrive at a median price of $50k or whatever it is. All a nickel at a time.

            Not really. First off salesmen and dealers HATE special ordering vehicles. It’s a gigantic pain in the ass to them:

            1) I already have a lot full of vehicles here. That I had to finance. And now you want to order one from the factory.

            2) Even if I sell you a vehicle I have on the lot at invoice, I get “dealer holdback”, aka a little “kickback” from the manufacturer if I move it in a specified period of time (30 – 90 days) that’s usually 3% of the invoice. You think I want to give that up?

            3) You Mr. Consumer are going to have to wait to get your special order placed in the factory’s assembly queue. In the late 1990s I had a coworker whose husband special ordered a Ford F-150. Took him nearly three months to get his truck. More recently, my wife’s cousin just “had” to special order a Lincoln SUV. Between the scam-demic supply chain issues and being placed at the end of the line I know it took over six months, heck, it might have been nine months, to get his Lincoln.

            I don’t know any vehicle that’s nice enough to wait six to nine months for. I hope the red paint job was worth the wait.

            On options though, there’s a reason vehicles don’t come with manual locks and windows, or without air conditioning. The auto industry lives and dies by “take rate”, which is by industry definition “The percentage of new vehicles or passenger cars equipped with a specific feature in a given year”.

            Once take rates get to a certain point known only to manufacturers and bean counters, it usually means we install those things standard. If take rates for air conditioning reach 90%, it’s not cost effective to build 10% of our cars without it. Same thing with power windows and locks.

            (As an aside, I did own two different four door sedans with manual locks and windows.

            NEVER
            FREAKING
            AGAIN!

            I for one welcome power windows and locks in four door vehicles. And air conditioning for that matter.)

            The problem with take rates is you show up on Smilin’ Sam, the Big (insert make name) Man’s lot and every freaking car is optioned out the same and is black, grey, sliver, or white. 🤦‍♂️

            BMW is being extra pimpy because they are saying “Well, everyone wants the heated seats. But we only get a one time charge for that. Now, if we could make those seats payable by month . . . 🤑”

            I expect to see more of that crap because people HAVE to hold on to their cars longer so how we gonna make the dough ray me?

            4

            1

          • My wife likens subscriptions to a bunch of drinking straws stuck in our bank account, constantly sucking money out of it.

            5

          • @mmack, “On options though, there’s a reason vehicles don’t come with manual locks and windows… “take rate””

            Right. Standard equipment is whatever salesmen talk the majority into buying. Largely because of the “monthly payment”. The last time some salesman’s first question was not, “How much per month can you afford?” was probably 20 years ago. And never in my life have I not had a salesman try to tell me how little it would cost per month or per day for an option I didn’t want.

            “I did own two different four door sedans with manual locks and windows.”

            Sure. I can see power locks may be worth it if you have people riding in the back seat. Couldn’t do like my dad did and reach around to unlock one door, and sent a kid to crawl across and open the other 3 doors.

            However, I have little to no need to unlock the back doors at all, and usually not even the passenger door. And yet, because so many other people were trained to view things like that as necessities, it makes no sense to even bother trying to opt out, other than to get the dealership to take off a few grand.

          • The real kick in the nuts is the realization that BMW has concluded it is cheaper for then to install heated seats in every vehicle rather than have it as an option. But instead of just going for the costs savings amd everyone gets a nicer product, they want to double dip and squeeze the consumer as well.

            1

    • To have a warm seat in your BMW you first need to watch a five minute video on how Helga becomes Helgum and is much happier now.

      12

      • MEIN GOTT! Verbrenne es mit Feuer!

        5

    • Bringing back to the tax point in the column, keep in mind that most new cars in 5 years will be hooked into the “internet of things” which means the government will be able to tax you on how many miles you drive and your insurance will be based on how safely you drive. Those “safe driver” programs are the prototypes. I asked my kids if they use them and they tell me it’s a rip-off because the systems are so sensitive that normal driving is considered dangerous, so you never get a discount. As my son put it, “Imagine having to slow down 1/2 mile before the stop sign on a dry road in daylight because you have an egg balanced on a spoon in the back seat and don’t want it to fall off. That’s how you have to drive.”

      I don’t think people realize that what is considered a choice today – letting Allstate spy on your driving and linking it to your insurance rates – will become the mandatory feature tomorrow.

      14

      • Bingo! I can second this. Wife’s new Lincoln has this software built in and appears on the screen with a rating of your driving. Took me by surprise the one time I drove it. You get a rating for “hard stops”, “quick acceleration “, too many “lane changes” and lord knows what else (iIdid not scroll down the list).

        Sure enough on the way home a some joker cut in front of me to make a right on the road turnoff he missed. I jammed on the brakes and my “rating” went down from 96% to low 80’s. None of this event was especially dangerous, but more the norm in traffic. One could anticipate having such occurrences on a regular basis in any city setting. However, quick to decline was this rating, but slow to improve. The rest of the trip—several miles—was uneventful, but my *new* rating was improved very little.

        10

        • Interesting but not surprising that in corporate America’s effort to “gamify” everything, the model games they’ve chosen aren’t the ones people enjoy but the most punishing gacha-grind psych experiments.

          China has been in the news lately for trying to outlaw those—not least because it wants a state monopoly on tech-terrorizing its population, but also because digital addictions are crippling the minds and lives of too many men, and the country might need them for something someday. The English-language stories are all about game company stock prices: China is DESTROYING ITS ECONOMY by not letting companies destroy its citizens. America would never.

          5

        • In the near future, your “rating” will be directly connected to State Farm’s database and your premium will be adjusted accordingly lol.

          Your “miles driven” will be reported to Klaus Schwab.

          5

          • It’ll be part of your social credit score. If you drive a gas-powered car too much, you’ll have to pay higher interest rates for a mortgage and maybe TSA pulls you out of the line for “additional screening” when you fly.

            1

        • Good old Ford…

          If we still had a functioning Constitutional Republic, we would need to have Amendments added to the Bill of Rights allowing for things like freedom of movement within the country (transportation). Even back in the 70’s and 80’s my dad was talking about how the government would come after guns, but that would be camouflage for coming after our right to get in a car and go where we want.

          During COVID remember how they were using cell phones to track whether people were obeying the lockdowns? It was broad-based not targeted on individuals…but easily could have been.

          2

    • Every car’s dashboard screen now displays some Nanny Statement about how you will drive carefully and be a good and safe little consumer. I wonder how many dents are caused by someone clicking accept to get it off the screen and see the map. For all we know, they know this and there is a revenue share with the National Association of Body Shop Owners and the auto company.

      That is where this is all headed. When growth can’t be had by productive means, then we get The Commodization of Catastrophe.

      ‘To start the car fasten your seat belt. Should any conversations take place in the vehicle which do not have as a subject some commodity we can show you ads for, talking will not be permitted in the interest of safety. Your, eyes on the road report is below an acceptable minimum. If you keep your eyes on the center lane for the entire trip, you will bring your safety score back up. Should you not, your car will not start for a week. That concludes today’s pre-start safety summary brought to you by Michelin. ‘Do your tires cost you opportunity for more casual sex. She is watching you and your tires say what kind of a man you are. Hi, I’m Jamaalquon. I be taking yo women, because I only use Michelin radials. I may not always have lights cuz uh my tire bills, but who needs lights when I am busy getting busy with your lady. Get back in the game. Do what Jamaalquon do and be a weekly rotation Michelin man.” You may now start the car – brought to you by Starters the hookup app for startup executives. Find a match for your status drive and ambitions.’

      This is a mess because everything is predicated on debt and overpaying for valuation. You aren’t paying for the product, you are paying for the inflated valuation of everything. Without the, “growth”, the value collapses back to what the market can support, the stock price collapses and the lenders eat the losses. It is a system that is untenable.

      6

    • I had a GMC truck, in order to use the remote start feature you had to pay 15 bucks a month. This is a thing.

      4

35. A bit off topic perhaps, but some of the points you raise here are related to my conviction that this “AI” and “Machine Learning” you’re hearing about all the time are just over-hyped bulls**t. I’ve been in the stats game a long time now, so I’ve seen the hype about this grow massively over the last few years. Companies are now hiring so-called “data scientists” right out of college at six-figure starting salaries to run their fancy new computer algorithms. Now don’t get me wrong, because many of these kids are very very bright. But why are they running these fancy algorithms? Are they trying to find a cure for cancer? Are they working to improve the efficiency of space travel? Are they finding ways to make nuclear fusion a reality? No. 90+% of them are running these fancy new algorithms to find new ways to spam you with ads. It kind of goes directly to your point. What kind of economy do we have when the career aspirations of our best and brightest STEM graduates center around finding better ways to sell you d**k pills.

    25

    • What kind of economy do we have when the career aspirations of our best and brightest STEM graduates center around finding better ways to sell you d**k pills.

      “The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.”

      Idiocracy, like 1984, is NOT a How-To Manual.

      20

      • Idiocracy, like 1984, is NOT a How-To Manual
        It’s becomes one though so to no one or not enough wanting to do the solution to stop it which is getting together with others who want to stop it and enacting the solutions needed…Tribe Up or Die Off White Volk…

        5

    • AI is automated B.S. But half of human existence consists of B.S. so it does have some utility.

      2

36. There are still aging tv-less Gen Xers out there, ripping the labels off of their clothes before they wear them because it is impossible to buy new clothes without labels.

    Silly maybe. But they were and remain on to something.

    14

    • lol, I do that. Nothing a razor blade or a sharpie can’t fix.

      6

37. I think there’s a few other drags here that add to this confluence of effects…

    My brain is soft mush in these days between Christmas and New Year’s; apologies in advance…

    The “line must go up” mentality of that dark science of economics forces the hand here as well. The age old question of how to beat last quarter, last year drives these ‘innovative’ price structures.

    Similar to the using GDP as the measuring stick of civilizational best allows a number to replace the qualitative measures of human flourishing. In hundreds of years when (if) people look back what high-culture will they remember us by?

    And further, I think the shift from producing something tangible as an economic engine to consuming something is profoundly negative. Especially for the wage earners with no stockpiles of capital or assets.

    If all the majority are is an economic unit to earn a wage and spend that wage to drive the GDP, then they’re just a cog in a big ‘do nuthin’ machine.

    9

    • “And further, I think the shift from producing something tangible as an economic engine to consuming something is profoundly negative.”

      That’s just an accounting tautology. You can’t consume something which has not been produced. So long as your formula accounts for savings, all is well.

      The problem is mashing everything down into dollars when there is clearly a difference between buying a capital asset which is used to produce more, and buying a true consumer good, which is destroyed in its use. That’s the major thing GDP doesn’t capture — eating the seed corn is assumed to be a good thing, since it is based on the Keynesian notion of “aggregate demand”.

      1

    • I was once a GDP purist, thinking that is the measure of the best policies. But now I look around and our jobs are in China, and we are surrounded by brown people to do the shitty jobs that are left, for lower wages. Does the tradeoff of a few more GDP points actually make my life any better? It just made CEOs lives a lot better. I would give up a huge chunk of my wealth to live in a high-trust, low crime country with my own people, where one salary could support a large family.

      8

38. Good post. The reason inflation/prices/costs are going up is, everyone has a big guy; and they gotta get their 10%.

    9

39. With the dawn of the Internet I expected an online ad bust of the same magnitude as the dot com bust, but it has never happened. Ads will become 50 percent of a sports broadcast within my lifetime and people will lap it up. The reason you never see a no ad pro football game is not because it is not possible, but because it will lay bare the abuse these corporations inflict on the fans.

    5

40. Off topic, but today is Kwanzaa. Be sure to leave some fentanyl under the tree or George Floyd won’t come down the chimney.

    44

    • In our home, we leave Skittles in a bowl by the fireplace.

      When we hear “Oh shieeet!” downstairs in the small hours of the night, we know he’s arrived, and we will enjoy Kwanzaa blessings!

      17

      • No grape soda? Karenga will not shine upon your Kwanzaa!

        3

    • Be sure to leave your fentanyl there until the first. “Kwanzaa” (from a phrase supposedly meaning first fruits) is at least six days long, just enough to ruin the otherwise wonderful time b/t Christmas and New Year’s Day. In Chicago, the weakwilled degenerates who operate the classical radio station, 98.7 WFMT, have been dedicating their broadcasts to this festival of first fruits, supposedly a creation of the FBI, or so says Ann Coulter. Maybe the explanation for this abomination is that there’s an informal overlap with the management of the local NPR affiliate. Still, it’s a good time to remind every Amerinegro that there’s very little fruit on trees or bushes in the far north this time of year but plenty in subsaharan Africa. There they can also seek “reparations” from descendants of humanoids who captured and sold the Amerinegros’ ancestors

      9

      • In Chicago, the weakwilled degenerates who operate the classical radio station, 98.7 WFMT, have been dedicating their broadcasts to this festival of first fruits, supposedly a creation of the FBI, or so says Ann Coulter.

        Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Ron Karenga as the first “pan-African” holiday, with the goal of giving “[b]lacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give [b]lacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” (Wiki)

        Apparently, he broke 2 of the candle holders off of a menorah to create the…kinara (like Dave Barry, I am not making this up).

        Karenga later served 4 years for felonious assault and false imprisonment for an episode in which he and some other guys tortured 2 women.

        From the LA Times:

        “Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga […] also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said. They also were hit on the heads with toasters.”

        Karenga now chairs the…wait for it…Africana Studies Department at Cal State-Long Beach.

        7

        • “According to Louis Tackwood, a former informant with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Criminal Conspiracies Section and author of The Glass House Tapes, Ronald Karenga was knowingly provided financial, arms, and other support by LAPD, with Tackwood as liaison, for US operations against the Black Panthers. Karenga enjoyed a level of trust among figures in government, including LAPD Chief Thomas Reddin and California Governor Ronald Reagan.” — Wikipedia

          They’ve hated you and wanted you dead for a long time.

          4

        • I remember him well from the LA ’60’s scene. He was scary, and this at a time when my girlfriend was hanging around with Eldridge Cleaver.

          1

      • I worked with a South African woman a little over ten years ago. During Christmas some of the other blacks in the office were carrying on about “kwanzaa” and they decided to try and enlist her as an advocate as they attempted to sell some of the people in the office on the legitimacy of their “holiday”.
        You should have seen the looks on their collective faces when after being lectured on the BS, she looked at them with an expression that was a combination of disbelief/disgust as she said, “Oh, this must be one of those things you American blacks concocted! No, there is no such thing as this in my country, we celebrate Christmas.”
        Again, priceless!

        10

        • In the early ’90s, trying to be “politically correct” (how quaint), I made a reference to “African-Americans” in the course of a conversation with a very well-dressed, elegant-appearing black woman with a slight Caribbean accent.

          She drew herself up to full height, looked me right in the eyes and said “sir, not all of us are from Africa, and you might want to keep that in mind when speaking with black people.”

          3

          • Several olympics past, they had to come up with a term for blacks in other countries. When one was the first black to win a gold medal in a particular event, they said, “she is the first African-American from any country” to win that event.

            4

          • She drew herself up to full height, looked me right in the eyes and said “sir, not all of us are from Africa, and you might want to keep that in mind when speaking with black people.”

            I might have told the story of meeting a Haitian woman in my teens who EMPHATICALLY reminded me she was Haitian and NOT Black!

            And then gave me her views on American born “People of Color”. Let us just say it was not favorable. Something about lazy and complain too much.

            7

          • I might have told the story of meeting a Haitian woman in my teens who EMPHATICALLY reminded me she was Haitian and NOT Black!

            And then gave me her views on American born “People of Color”. Let us just say it was not favorable. Something about lazy and complain too much.

            Because the blacks in Haiti have covered themselves in glory with their industriousness, prudence, virtue and good government!

            1

41. I know you’re a science fiction aficionado so you must have seen this dystopian scenario sketched in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and “The Diamond Age.” Probably in other cyberpunk novels as well. Corporate governance, where the formal government has shrunk to an ineffectual shell and camouflage for the real corporate government. Hence Joe Biden as a front man for the military-industrial complex and the other corporate complexes that dominate US life.

    12

    • I highly recommend a SF trilogy beginning with “The Red” by Linda Nagata. A global corporate tyranny running ‘small wars’ planet-wide is thrawted by an AI – quasi-sentient?- created by an agglomeration of…… advertising AI s …..

42. Somewhat related to this, has anyone else noticed that fast food companies don’t advertise “combos” any more? They’ve “updated” their marketing lingo to “bundling”. I noticed this on a McDonalds billboard recently. You can “bundle” an egg McMuffin with a hash brown for just $4.99 (or whatever).
    I have no idea what the psychological motive is behind this strategy, other than it amounts to an adoption of e-jargon from the younger online generations. You “bundle” a subscription to your cell phone plan with an internet subscription, or you “bundle” a Disney+ subscription with another Disney owned streaming service. I’ve even noticed this with insurance companies marketing their home-auto premiums if you have your eggs in one basket as “bundling” plans.

    Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

    3

    • Your explanation makes sense. Young people are accustomed to that style of marketing.

      3

    • “Combo” is a Latinate word and “bundle” is Germanic in origin.

      My only guess is that since we’ve entered the migrant invasion period of our imperial history, our vocabulary will inevitably be debased by the tongues of intemperate and brutish migrants from barbarian lands.

      ITA INQVIT MARCUS

      1

43. Had this discussion last night when I received email from Amazon about ads in Prime movies now. It did say you can bypass it by paying another $3 a month. I made the same analogy with cable slowing breaking the promise of no ads decades ago. Since most of my content is youtube based I finally went with a trial premium on Youtube to avoid ads etc. Nice, but given all of this I’ll probably not continue.

    Michigan gave every car owner a $400 insurance rebate a few years ago based on some (i forget) spurious charges. Everybody is happy with governor’s gift , now after firmly placed in office they are adding it back in.

    9

    • Let me add this little tidbit. After years of leasing various vehicles from Ford I finally decided to buy a good used vehicle instead spurred by the crazy high payments now. They informed me there is a little known charge for ending lease contract (small print , page 9) of $418.00.

      Screw them, six months and they are still calling for payment. Turned in a loaded F-150 with 15,000 unused miles which according to them has no value. Go over the mileage and see what happens.

      8

    • My wife has Amazon Prime to have various household product shipped to the house rather than having to go get them at big box stores with the kids. Occasionally we would watch a movie off of Prime, there will be no reason to do that anymore. I could see this one backfiring on Amazon, their choices weren’t very good to begin with, I doubt they will get many people to pay them the extra fee for commercial free shows. I have to wonder how they are doing in general compared to their rising competitors.

      3

      • I’ve been trying to figure out if I can cancel the prime free shipping if I bundle my Amazon purchases to say one large shipment per month.

        2

        • You probably can. I think they still have free (but slower) shipping over $35. My Dad does not have Prime for that reason.

          2

          1

        • Free shipping i. 2-3 days for orders over $25. But, of course, that may end or be adjusted depending on the outcome of their latest Prime shenanigans.
          They were clever to announce the change a week after the second season of their immensely popular Reacher series dropped. I rather doubt the Rings of Power fiasco would have sufficed as a setup.

          1

    • Hmm. I guess your governor is also an Indian (feather). Who knew?

      1

    • Since most of my content is youtube based I finally went with a trial premium on Youtube to avoid ads etc.

      I use the Brave browser myself, it has an excellent built-in ad blocker.

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      • Youtube is addressing that now. Watching on television is not an option that way also.

        3

        • So I’ve heard for some months, but I haven’t noticed anything yet. Brave works very smoothly for me, I only see the in-video promos.

          4

          • Yes, Brave. I first heard of it on this comment section. It makes You Tube watchable or if in a car listenable. I use the Smart View feature on my phone to broadcast it to a tv, and watch any one of the thousand of old movies or documentaries. Between this and Pluto and other free stuff there is no need for cable or satellite anymore. In fact, the non-fiction content on these services in vastly superior to any cable package out there. And they don’t bundle anything with CNN and force you to pay for their propaganda.

            5

      • Brave also blocks the ad on paramount plus and hulu. It makes watching their channels bearable and you can pay for the cheaper ad based service without having to watch the idiotic and stupid ads.

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44. I can why many dream of a day of reckoning. There is a reason why the Christian tradition includes an Apocalypse.

    9

    1

    • Yep, at this point, the blob has become so massive and encompassing, the only practical solution is the proverbial cleansing fire that burns the system to the ground, allowing new shoots to sprout through the ashes. That’s the only way there is even a possibility of ending this nightmare…

      6

      1

    • The “Christian tradition” includes an end times prophesy because Jesus said it was going to happen. Apocalypse is the name of the last book of the New Testament.

      Further, the default assumption for most of human history was that time had no beginning or end. Both Judaism and Islam assume this world can be fixed and makes no comment on the end. It’s a distinctly Christian assumption that there is an end of the world, even to this day. (Ha!)

      2

      • “The “Christian tradition” includes an end times prophesy because Jesus said it was going to happen.”

        Strictly speaking, it’s not an end times but a transition. New Heaven and New Earth.

        3

    • Can’t reason them away, can’t bargain them away, can’t sing them away, can’t even love them away.

      So instead they’ll get angels, in bad mood and beyond all appeal.

      3

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