Transition Boundary

It’s only controversial if it bucks the trend of collectivization and group identification?

Consider the following statement:

Here’s my question to those who are wedded to diversity and inclusion: Are people better off the less they have in common with one another?

https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/01/20/diversity-and-inclusion-insanity

I think we can agree that many people would say this is “controversial.”

And why is that?

Why would common sense statements like “people are happier when they are around those similar to them,” or “rewards go to those who achieve more,” arouse such angst in people?

I don’t believe these attitudes are real in the sense that people alone with their thoughts believe any of it to be true from them personally.

That is, rich liberals aren’t hanging out in the inner cities, nor are they giving away amounts of wealth that impact their lifestyles to reward the poor for their lack of achievement.

Obviously many in the so-called “victim classes” applaud efforts to be treated preferentially, whether that’s a woman getting an undeserved promotion or a black kid getting a pass for disrupting a classroom.

But note what we are saying here: we are lowering standards… and that might not necessarily be a bad thing. But it also may not be a good thing if we are merely replacing one set of preferred categories (white, male, heterosexual) for another (Non white, gender fluid).

Why?

The answer is we are seeing the death of the mass production paradigm: the System never saw you or me or anyone else as an individual because the entire mass production metaphor is centered around large numbers and categories.

Factories produce large amounts of product that are “suitable for purpose”

Schools produce large numbers of graduates who are just smart enough to produce large amounts of product…

And pop culture creates HITS to generate large numbers of consumer/fans to sell to:

While politics is neatly divided into two teams (red and blue) to generate large blocs of voters who can be sold pandered listened to.

These models only exist because humanity saw how fantastically efficient the machine is at outputting large amounts of stuff and decided two things:

• more is better
• efficiency is the highest goal

As it turns out, having a small number of processes accounting for more instances of a product (where physical or human) is much easier for a small number of people to control. Handy, that.

But we screwed up because the mid 1990s introduced the world to the internet- which is the model for a new paradigm.

The network.

The network gives humanity a completely different model: one where each voice can have an equal platform against the masses in the market place of ideas.

A model where individuals can learn a curriculum designed to their talents and interests which will help to produce shining examples of brilliance as opposed to a mass of mediocrity.

A model where each of us can contribute to our own communities- communities we choose rather than the arbitrary buckets that the machine throws us in.

So now you know why the powers that be are tightening their grip on EVERYTHING: they understand they are finished hat once we see how much opportunity is out there… if we just open our minds a little.

They have to put us back in the box. Twitter and Facebook are becoming echo chambers/circles of shame where anyone with unorthodox ideas is shouted down as literal Hitler or Science Denier (which may be the dumbest, most insanely ignorant epithet ever).

Which leads me to the painful aspect of all this: Most of the freethinkers have to align with the assclown in chief, Orange Man because he represents the freedom to say something different from the crowd.

God help us all 🙂

A Sweet Deal Gets Sweeter (for some)

As we saw in Part 1 America created Magic Money after closing the gold window in 1971: the ability to create money in a computer and buy anything in the world with it because oil sales are denominated in dollars.

All those dollars sloshing around the planet in a process called exporting inflation. The US creates extra dollars which sit in overseas bank accounts or are invested in US companies or come back to the US banks to be lent out again…

And here’s the rub: making money from money has lower risk than starting productive businesses.

The cornerstone of the so-called “service economy” is the Finance Insurance and Real Estate complex, though now it’s being supplanted by the so-called FANGs: Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google. All four of whom could go tits up tomorrow with the world not missing a beat.

FIRE and the FANGs merely illustrate the principle that what is made matters far less than how it’s sold. After all, we can ship factories overseas, pay some Vietnamese schlub $2 a day to make $150 shoes with the majority of the money going to marketers and pitchmen! If Americans don’t earn enough to buy them, we can lend them the money!

Or we can make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and flood the market with seemingly cheap government backed college loans? Put the risk on the taxpayers and inflate the price of college to the point where 18 years olds have to take on $30,000 in debt to get a degree in an economically-worthless field? As a bonus we can hire the otherwise unemployable to skim off any excess dollars as various college administrators!

Or do the same in medicine by setting up byzantine insurance systems to skim money while providing NO VALUE WHATSOEVER. Not only that, what idiot would buy insurance against something that’s guaranteed to happen like checkups and routine illnesses? We’ll tell them that it’s a benefit to overpay and they’ll believe it because their out of pocket cost for substandard care will be so low! HA HA HA!

And here’s another idea- let’s con people with body dysphoria that they can change their sex through the magic of hormone therapy and surgery!

and if it turns out that defying nature doesn’t work out so well? We are all getting paid, so screw it!

So this is where we are in 2020: riding an economy that makes little of value in favor of skimming operations and activities that are so disconnected from reality. Productive enterprise is largely shipped overseas to take advantage of lower-cost labor so the managers and celebrities get a bigger skim. Then any residual profits profits (or even borrowed money if not enough profit is available) is plowed into share buybacks so the senior management gets paid more from their bonuses and stock options.

All fueled by magic. Illusion.

But that’s about to change, hopefully for the better.