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Electric Cars and "Renewable Green Energy" as Virtue Signalling Scams
As some of you might have heard, the autistic girl promoted by globalists aka Greta Thunberg is making news for taking an ultramodern yacht to cross the Atlantic and publicly demonstrate her commitment to a supposedly "zero carbon" lifestyle. Just do that you know, most of her handlers and promoters are flying to NYC. Any ya.. once her fake sanctimonious speeches in NYC are over, she too will quietly fly back to Sweden. While I could write a lot more about how this delusional and mentally-ill girl is being promoted as the face of environmental activism, it is best to leave that for another time. Instead I will talk about how electric cars and "renewable green energy" are nothing more than virtue signalling scams. Yes.. you heard that, they are scams.
Readers might remember that I have written a (still ongoing) series about how anthropogenic climate change is a form of secular apocalypticism. Some might also remember my thoughts on Tesla Motors being an image driven scam. This is not say that electric automobiles are somehow impossible. Indeed, electric vehicles with performance equivalent to their internal combustion powered equivalents have been technologically feasible since the late 1990s. My objection to the popular delusion that the future of automobiles being electric is based on factors other than technological feasibility. To put it very briefly, the electrochemistry which underlies rechargeable battery technology puts an upper limit on the amount of energy stored by this method.
Long story short, the amount of energy stored in carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bonds (fossil fuels) will always be at least a magnitude greater than that possible with an battery utilizing the most optimal electrochemistry. But that, by itself, is not the Achilles heel of electric automobiles. As you know, it is easy to build electric vehicles with pretty decent performance using currently available battery technology. The far bigger and related problem is as follows: how do you get all that lithium, cobalt etc to build batteries on a large enough scale to displace internal combustion engine powered vehicles. This becomes tricky rather quickly, even if we assume better than 95% recycling of all metals used in such batteries. Then there is the issue of obtaining enough of those pesky lanthanides aka 'rare earth elements' for their electric motors.
But the electric car scam gets truly exposed once you consider how the electricity used to power and recharge it is generated. As things stand today and in near future, most of that electricity is going to come from coal/gas fueled power stations. Some will come from hydroelectric or nuclear powered stations. My point is that only a small minority of the power used to recharge those vehicles is going to come from "renewable energy sources". In other words, using electric cars instead of normal ones merely shifts the location where carbon fuels are being burnt, not the amount. And it gets worse. Let me ask you another related question. How big is the "carbon footprint" of the industrial and transportation infrastructure necessary to build, install and maintain all those solar cells and windmills? Are you starting to see the problem?
And it just keeps on getting worse. Ever wondered why hydroelectric power has long been the dominant way to generate renewable energy? Well, think about it this way.. the amount of water which flow through a river, while varying from season to season, is reasonably constant over a period of several decades. Furthermore, it can be easily stored for future use, and over multiple years. To make another long story short, generating a constant and predicable amount of power is far easy if your source of renewable energy is water rather than wind or sunshine. The same is true for power plants using coal, oil, gas or nuclear fission. In contrast to this, the two most touted sources of "green energy", namely wind flow and sunshine, are fickle and dependent on weather.
Do you think it is possible to run massive power grids based on the whims of weather? Some will say- why not build "green energy" power plants with.. say.. 10x the capacity you need? Well for starters, it starts becoming far more expensive and maintenance intensive than conventional power plants. But more importantly, building even 10x capacity doesn't give you the same level of confidence in power grid stability as conventional power plants have been known to provide for many decades. Imagine running an electric grid which will fail on a massive scale at least a few times per year and during extreme weather events when such power is necessary. But couldn't we store this energy?
Well.. sure, we can store energy from fickle sources and release it in a more gradual manner. But doing so introduces even more complications. Building huge rechargeable batteries of any known electrochemistry is expensive and they not as reliable as many want to believe. To make matter worse, if that is possible, their malfunctions can be far more catastrophic and harder to repair than is the case for conventional peak power plants. The other way to store excess energy or moderate its fluctuations involves the use of pumped storage. While this particular technology is very mature and routinely used in hydroelectric plants for providing extra juice for certain times of the day, constructing such an installation requires certain topographical features in addition to lots of water. In other words, you can't set them up in most locations.
But what about a "smart" grid? Wouldn't having a "smart and connected" grid solve the problem? Well.. not really. Leaving aside the part where you actually have to first possess enough energy to distribute it properly, there is the issue of whether these "smart" grids are robust enough to deliver power without massive and frequent failures. You don't have to a genius to figure out that anything connected to a large network or the internet can and will be hacked. And even if does not get hacked, a "smart" grid is far more sensitive to cascading failures due to component malfunctions than your old-fashioned "dumb" grid. Of course, you can always use coal, gas, nuclear and hydropower plants for generating the base load and backup. But then, how much "renewable green energy" are you actually using and more importantly- WHY?
If your use of "green energy" is not sufficient to reduce your sins.. I mean carbon dioxide output.. by over 80%, what is the point of spending all that money on building and maintaining these white elephants? Did I mention the part where most countries in Asia and Africa do not go much further than giving lip service to the cause of "renewable green energy". Yes.. you heard that right. For all the noise the leaders of some developing countries make about "green energy", when push comes to shove they simply build more conventional power plants. For them, "green energy" is, at best, a way to provide some peak energy and keep a few more people employed.
Electric cars and "green energy" are solutions in search of a problem which does not exist. Sure, they have some good niche applications. For example, using electric cars in densely populated cities would certainly improve air quality. Similarly using solar panels to augment peak power usage for air-conditioning and refrigeration in warm countries with lots of sunshine makes sense. But let us not pretend that people are going to give up a comfortable life to perform penance.. I mean, pay much more and get far less.. to please the insatiable gods of environmentalism. Moreover, attempting to do so via rules and regulations is guaranteed to piss of the majority and result in the election of more right-wingers nutcases such as Trump.
What do you think? Comments?
MultiCellular Life Arose More than Once and is Far Older Than We Think
During some background work for my series about why belief in anthropogenic climate change is a form of secular apocalypticism, I came across some interesting new evidence for multicellular life evolving far earlier than is common "scientific consensus". But before we go there, let me first give you a bit of relevant background and explain certain concepts. First, life on earth is over 3.5 billion years old since the oldest undisputed microfossils of single-celled organism which resemble modern-day bacteria (Prokaryotes or Archaea) are at least that old. However, there is evidence for bacteria-like microfossils in even older rocks. And evidence for 4 billion year old life exists at more than one location. And yes.. there are still many in the "scientific community" who do not want to believe that life could have existed in the Hadean eon (4.6-4 billion years ago).
It is, however, important to understand that life on earth for the first 2 billion or so years was almost certainly unicellular. But how can we be so sure that this was the case. The simple answer to that question is, atmospheric oxygen, or more precisely its lack. See.. all existent life on earth has a common ancestor (DNA/RNA based), but that common ancestor was unlike almost all of the life on earth today, for a simple reason. Oxygen constitutes about 21% of our atmosphere now, but it was a trace gas (likely less than 0.1%) when the Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago and remained so until about 2.5-2.4 billion years ago. And we know that was the case, because there is a huge amount of evidence for the point in geological history when oxygen levels finally rose above 1%. And this change had a profound effect on the Earth, because it is linked to the longest period of global glaciation in Earths's history– one lasting almost 300 million years.
But back to the type of microorganisms which lived on earth prior to the Great Oxygenation Event. The first ones were almost certainly Chemoautotrophs who survived under anaerobic conditions. They were followed by Haloarchea which use Rhodopsin rather than Chlorophyll for photosynthesis. Bacteria which use chlorophyll came later, but were almost certainly around by 3.5-3 billion years, based on the presence of fossil stromatolites and microfossils. The key connection between these distinct groups of bacteria is their ability to survive and grow without atmospheric oxygen. Moreover, cyanobacteria release oxygen during photosynthesis. So what happened to all the oxygen released by them for the first billion or so years of their existence? Well.. it reacted with available sinks of gaseous oxygen in the atmosphere, on land and in oceans. In other words, all that oxygen reacted with atmospheric methane, terrestrial deposits of iron and other readily oxidizable elements. Atmospheric levels rose only after these sinks were saturated.
While I am not going into the many effects of rising atmospheric oxygen on levels of methane and CO2, the short version is that levels of methane fell a lot, while those of CO2 increased. FYI- methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and the sun was less brighter in the past. All of this led to a long series of ice ages that lasted about 300 million years. But why do the levels of atmospheric oxygen matter? The simple reason is the energetic of anaerobic vs aerobic respiration is such that only the former can support multi-cellular life. This is not to say that rise in oxygen levels had no major effect on microbial life. Indeed, the rise must have killed most of the previously existing species of anaerobic microorganisms on earth. Today strict anaerobes exist only in certain environments such as under the soil, below ocean sediment, in decaying organic matter, bowels of ruminants etc.
Now let us, once gain, get back to the topic of this post- namely, ancient multicellular life. While bacteria can form mats and films with some external characteristics of simple multicellular organisms, they lack the defining feature- cellular differentiation. Multicellular organisms, you see, are defined by being Eukaryotic and exhibiting cellular differentiation. This is important to understand, because unicellular Eurkayotic organisms (with endosymbiotic mitochondria) have been likely around for about 2 billion years. And you will soon see why that approximate age for Eukaryotes becoming capable of aerobic respiration, through endosymbiotic mitochondria, is very relevant. Now let us talk about the history of scientific belief on when multicellular life first came into existence. Until 1959, geologists and paleontologists were certain that multicellular life came into existence at the start of the Cambrian era. But one pesky problem remained..
How did so many different phyla (many of which are still around) suddenly appear in the fossil record, without any precursors? But for decades, most scientists chose to ignore that question. The funny thing is.. odd shapes which looked like multicellular life-forms had been found in pre-cambrian rocks as early as 1868. But "scientific consensus" being what it is, such discoveries were ignored or explained away as bubbles or concretions for almost a century. It took the discovery of Charnia fossils in 1956-1958 for the evidence of pre-Cambrian life to become strong that it could no longer be ignored. Since then, fossils of multicellular life from the Ediacaran era have been discovered all over the world. While almost nobody today doubts these fossils to be of multicellular life, they raise more questions than answers.
While a few, such as Dickinsonia, can be tentatively assigned as animals (as opposed to plants), most Ediacaran biota does not resemble existing organisms. Even the body plan of many exhibits peculiarities such as fractal branching and radial symmetry, which are basically non-existent in animal phyla today. Also, they seem to lack a circulatory or digestive system, but have a far more structured body than sponges or jellyfish. To make matters more interesting, we do not know what they evolved from- especially given that the Earth had just emerged from an almost 100 million years long glaciation at the start of Ediacaran period. Nor can we can say with certainty, if they evolved into something which survived into the Cambrian period, which started about 540 million years ago. But wait.. there are even older fossils of multicellular organisms.
For the past few decades (1960 onward) the "scientific consensus" slowly accepted the reality of multicellular organisms during the Ediacaran period. But they still maintained that not much happened before 800 million years. Of course, there are multiple sites with fossils in the 'boring billion' between 0.8 and 1.8 billion years ago, including red algae from 1.6 billion years ago. And we cannot forget all those trace fossils, found all over the world, of what appear to be tunnels and tracks made by worm-like animals from around 1.5 to 1 billion years ago. However recent discoveries have pushed that date for multicellular life even further back in time.
In 2010, a French-Moroccan professor at University of Poitiers came across what appeared to be fossils of multicellular organisms from 2.1 billion years old black shales of the Paleoproterozoic Francevillian formation in Gabon, Africa. You might member that this was the time when Earth emerged from Huronian glaciation episode. The oxygen levels in the atmosphere had also finally reached about 2%, barely a tenth of today, but enough for primitive multicellular organisms. His group kept returning to that site and finding even more evidence of such fossils at that site, now known as Francevillian biota. Here is a figure from one of his papers in 2014.
and here is another.. FYI, many of disc shaped fossils are a few cm across.
While these fossils are not much to look at, in addition to being controversial because they go against "scientific consensus", their existence is compatible with what we already knew about atmospheric conditions at that time. As it turns out, 2.1 billion years ago was immediately after the Huronian ice ages, when atmospheric oxygen levels had finally reached somewhere between 1 and 2% and Eukaryotes had recently gained endosymbiotic mitochondria. It is therefore within the realms of possibility for simple differentiated multicelllar animals such as slime molds, proto-fungi, jellyfish-like animals and proto-wormlike creatures to have evolved from unicellular Eukaryotes in the 50-100 million years years after the Huronian glaciation ended.
To be very clear, nobody is suggesting that they possessed dedicated circulatory or digestive systems like those seen in even the most primitive multicellular animals around today. But their overall size and morphology, in addition to the environment under which they were deposited strongly suggest they were multicellular. While we do not know if their descendants evolved into creatures such as those seen in the much later Ediacaran biota, that is irrelevant to the fact that they represent the evolution of multicellularity. My point is that multicellular life began much earlier than believers in the "scientific consensus" are willing to accept. Never forget that it is scientific theories which must adjust to observed reality, not the other way around. Here is a recent paper containing evidence for motility in some members of the Francevillian biota.
What do you think? Comments?
Anthropogenic Climate Change is a Form of Secular Apocalypticism: 1
Over the years, I have written a few posts about why anthropogenic climate change is a form of secular apocalypticism whose origins can be traced to the ongoing terminal demise of the 'white' west. However, I never got around to writing an in-depth series about that topic- until now. My biggest concern about writing such a series was its potential length and the necessity of explaining many concepts as it unfolded. But it gradually became obvious that 'kicking the can down the road' was not a viable long-term strategy. So, I have decided to start writing it- even if the results turn out to be initially less brilliant than hoped for.
With that out of the way, let me quickly describe the structure of this series. While it would have been preferable to first tackle the psychology underlying belief in anthropogenic climate change, doing so would have created a series of long and turgid posts which were unlikely to capture the readers interest. Instead, I have decided to mix posts about interpretation of scientific evidence with others about related psychological concepts. The first couple of posts in this series will be about the lack of correlation between atmospheric concentration of CO2, average surface temperature of earth and mass extinctions over past 550-600 million years of geological history.
But before we go there, let us be clear about a few things. Measuring atmospheric CO2 directly and accurately is only possible if you have an actual sample of the atmosphere. All measurements of atmospheric CO2 from the past are therefore indirect, albeit to varying degrees. For example, while it is possible to measure CO2 dissolved in ice-cores samples, the numbers have to adjusted for the atmospheric temperature at which the tested snow originally precipitated using isotopic analysis, because the solubility of CO2 in water and ice is temperature dependent. Ice-core measurements, in contrast to other methods, do have good temporal resolution.
There is however a upper-age limit to using ice cores and the oldest one, we are somewhat certain about, is about 2.7 million years old. Also, there may be a hard limit on how far we can go back with ice cores since parts of mainland Antarctica within 483 km (300 miles) of the south pole were seasonally ice-free as late as 2.6 million years ago. The next part of this series will explore how those parts of Antarctica were 30 degrees Celsius warmer than today, even though the atmospheric CO2 levels were not that different. Measuring atmospheric CO2 from a time before 2 million years requires different, and even more indirect, methods of measurement.
Without going into too much detail here (you can always read the source paper), this category of methods is based on atmospheric CO2 being directly correlated to preferential weathering of certain minerals in rocks (through rain) and carbonate deposition in the oceans. It also factors many other things from stable isotope measurement of certain elements in dated rock/soil samples, size and position of continents in past, outgassing through known large-scale volcanic activity and many others to estimate the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The relevant part is that this model, even in its crude older form, gives an acceptably accurate measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere upto 600 million years ago. Ya.. the error margins can be upto 50% of the measurement, but it is still good enough to tell us that the earth used to have far higher atmospheric CO2 in the past. Reconstruction of average surface temperature during these eras is based on fossils records of plants and animals, various isotopic ratios and recreating positions of landmasses using paleomagnetic data.
But how much more CO2? Well.. it was almost 20 times higher than today in the Cambrian era and about 10 times more during the Ordovician. And it remained in the 8-12 x range for the Silurian and Devonian. Notably, these were the four geological ages when most animals and plants lived in or near oceans and other water bodies. It was also the heyday for Mollusks and shelled Cephalopods. Evidently, all that atmospheric CO2 had no negative effect on oceanic pH.
More curiously, the Ordovician-Silurian (O-S) extinction was largely due to a short spell of global glaciation. And this global ice age occurred when CO2 levels were over 12 times higher than today. It was only in the late Devonian (after plants had finally established themselves on land) that atmospheric CO2 levels started to fall, and there was another moderate sized extinction towards the end of that age. The next age, Carboniferous, saw a massive expansion of plants of land and resulted in a further decrease in atmospheric CO2 until it was about 2-3 times current levels. It was also the age of high oxygen levels and giant insects.
Atmospheric CO2 levels during the Permian remained low for millions of years but then started to go up. The end of this era saw two very closely spaced and massive extinctions, the End-Capitanian and Permian-Triassic aka 'The Great Dying'. While CO2 levels went up to about 4-5 times today, temperature increases (especially in tropical and sub-tropical oceans) were insane. There is evidence that the surface temperature of ocean water in subtropical regions exceeded 40 degrees Celsius for a few hundred thousand years. While temperatures did fall afterwards and life recovered, they remained pretty high by current standards. However the climate eventually became wetter, especially after the Carnian Pluvial Event.
The Triassic-Jurassic extinction ended the Triassic and ushered the Jurassic. That geological age saw an increase in atmospheric CO2 but no accompanying rise in average surface temperature. While forests on earth never reached the density and levels they did during the Carboniferous, the Jurassic comes a semi-close second. Earth transitioned into next age, aka Cretaceous, with only a few minor and small extinctions. Initially the cooling seen during the late Jurassic continued, but soon reversed itself and it became almost as warm as the middle-Jurassic. The Cretaceous was also the longest geologic age since the Cambrian explosion and lasted about 145 million years. Atmospheric CO2 levels slowly declined to about 2-3 times today, in spite of the temperature remaining fairly high and constant. Isn't that odd?
The Cretaceous ended with the Cretaceous-Tertiary/Paleocene extinction. After that the earth recovered from it the climate was still pretty warm and humid. Then we had the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum at around 55 million years and for about 200 k years it so warm that Palm trees grew in Washington State and Southern Canada. Then around 45-35 million years ago, there was another round of cooling and a further slight decrease in atmospheric CO2. However temperatures went up again between 35 and 6 million years ago. The most recent round of global cooling began about 6 to 7 million years ago when a land-bridge between north and south american continents started to form between southern tip of what is today Mexico and northern tip of Colombia. This bridge started to cut off equatorial connection and circulation between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Once that land connection was fully formed about 2.6-2.3 million years ago, global temperatures dropped even further and we started having regular and long ice ages (after almost 300 million years) with brief inter-glacial warm periods. This is also when a lot of tropical and sub-tropical whale species and large marine mammals went kaput and consequently took out predators such as Megalodon. Did you notice that the drop in atmospheric CO2 cannot explain the current stretch of ice ages started around 6 million years ago, nor why they intensified in past 2.3-2.6 million years. Are you beginning to appreciate why I think that the whole anthropocentric climate change theory is bullshit. In the next part, I will show you that as late as 3 million years ago, Antarctica was a significantly warmer continent.
What do you think? Comments?
Some Thoughts on How a War Between Iran and 'USA' Might Unfold
In a fresh round of escalation today, the orange buffoon unveiled another bunch of meaningless "sanctions" against Iran. While it is still not certain that the buffoon-in-chief is delusional enough to actually start a war with Iran, pressure from people who have promised him tons of money etc after his term is over (such as that idiot in SA and his equivalent in UAE), pleadings of Zionists (including his son-in-law) in combination with chicken-hawks such as Bolt-on and Pompous-Idiot is likely to result in a war with Iran in the near future. While it is far more desirable, for everyone, that such a war does not start in the first place- it increasingly looks like we will get there, one way or the other. Notice that I said 'war' rather than 'conflict', 'skirmish'. You will soon see why.
But before we go there, a quick geography and history lesson. Iran isn't a small country. It has about 1/5th the area of lower 48 and about 1/4th the population of USA. To make matters more interesting, it is one the only three long-standing nation states in Middle-East, the others being Turkey and Egypt. There has been a Persian state of some sort covering most of modern-day Iran for over 2,500 years. Compare that to modern cockatrice states such as Iraq, SA, other Gulf Sunni emirates and even modern-day Syria. Did I mention that Persians and are not Arabs. Oh.. and also Iran was able to withstand the 8-year war with Iraq (and all states which supported the former) during the 1980s. Also unlike arab neighboring countries they make almost every single weapon system they use. Sounds a bit like DPRK, doesn't it?
So let us start with the predictions..
1] Iran is not going to wait for Trump to change his mind or finish his presidential term. It will keep ratcheting up the tension, because they have nothing to gain by playing the waiting game. Expect more mysterious fires, explosions and mishaps at petroleum and petrochemical facilities in SA and other gulf Sunni emirates. They understand that west-European countries are spineless decaying entities who will not openly defy the also terminally declining USA. The best way to separate west-Europeans and other american catamites from USA is to cut off the former from being able access all middle-eastern oil. Iranians fully expect the USA to attack it, sooner than later- and they want prefer it sooner than later.
2] The ideal situation, as far as Iran is concerned, is for USA to attack it without significant preparation (troops on ground) and not expect a serious response. But once they do attack Iran, expect it to systematically target and destroy Saudi and UAE ports, oil storage installations, pipelines, desalination plants, brine-pumping plants etc. Iran wants to cause enough damage to shut down the oil output of those countries for at least a few months. And they have enough cruise and ballistic missiles with the requisite range and accuracy to pull that off. To be clear, I expect them to primarily use anti-shipping missiles (boat and land launched) to target structures on or near the shore. Have a look at a map of the area and compare it to the range of various short and medium range missiles possessed by Iran, in abundance.
3] To make matters more interesting, they will also send large number of irregular soldiers and militias into Iraq and Afghanistan to attack american military facilities, but also civilians and spread chaos in those countries. Expect Iranian irregulars to conduct a lot of bombings of oil infrastructure, assassinations of local american-stooges and create general mayhem in those countries. They might go especially hard on the Kurds parts of Iraq (who they see as american collaborators) and engineer a refugee crisis. The motives here are two-fold. Disrupt oil production and export from Iraq. Secondly, greatly increase the size and complexity of battlefield for USA.
4] Doing 2 and 3, almost simultaneously is possible for Iran and achieves a few synergistic objectives. Wrecking petroleum production and transport facilities all across the middle-east quickly cuts the world's supply of crude oil etc by about 30-40%. More importantly it delivers an especially nasty blow to west-European countries, Japan, South Korea, India and other wannabe american catamites. Do you think countries like France, Germany, Japan and India can keep running properly if 60-80% of their oil supplies just disappear for at least a few months? Furthermore, USA is now faced with the prospect of fighting locals and militias in at least three countries in addition to dealing with a massive exodus of expat workers from those countries and more refugees from Iraq. And it gets even better.
5] Imagine what will happen to global trade, commerce and the stock market of many countries if such a large percentage of oil supply suddenly vanishes and the price for remaining supplies go up by 400-800 %? Oh.. and you cannot normalize the supply unless Iran is defeated (very hard, if not outright impossible) or peace is reestablished in that region. Do you think Trump and the Zionists will remain popular in USA if oil cost 20-30 bucks per gallon? Some of you might say- doesn't USA have enough military might to prevent this outcome? Won't they be able to blow Iranian boats out of the water or something like that? Well.. have a look at distances involved. Iran could do most of this by using nothing more fancy than civilian vehicles to transport most of the troops and missiles necessary.
6] It goes without saying that such a large-scale but unconventional attack across neighboring countries would cause mass panic and result in the abrupt departure of many ruling families- in addition to yet another refugee crisis. The perceived inability of USA to protect the interests of their local stooges will further damage whatever residual credibility it still has in that region. To summarize, given available options and capabilities, Iran is likely to rapidly exacerbate war with USA, by going after its oil-producing client states in that region.
What do you think? Comments?
Good Explanation of Physics Behind the Chernobyl Reactor Explosion
A week ago, I came across this very good YouTube clip about the nuclear physics underlying that disaster. While I have seen dozens of reviews of the currently popular HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster, this is one of the very few which goes into the physics of why things went so wrong. To make a long story short, the reactor design was less idiot-proof than should have been the case for something designed for routine power generation. FYI, Chernobyl-4 was the only one of the RBMK type to actually suffer such an accident. It might interest readers to know that all other reactors of this design type never experienced any major issue and ten are still completely operational and generating power as usual. The most important lesson of Chernobyl is that any product or service meant for mass use has to be way more idiot-proof than otherwise necessary.
What do you think? Comments?
Conflict Between Right Wingers and Tech Monopolies Won't End Well: 4
In the previous post of this series, I wrote about how the large number of aspies.. also known as programmers etc.. in the tech industry will be one of the main reason for its coming downfall. To quickly summarize, most programmers are poor at reading other people- especially as it concerns transgressing boundaries that no sane person would dare cross without expecting blowback. As a result, these mentally disabled people (just being honest here) will often make and stick to really bad decisions, you know.. the type which will get them removed from the gene pool. Euphemism aside, this is an issue that is especially relevant in the rapidly declining west due to market share of tech monopolies such as Google, FakeBook etc. See.. monopolies make the effects of stupid decisions that much worse, creating conditions for a quicker and far harsher blowback.
In that post, I also briefly mentioned SJWs- specifically, how they too lacked a theory of mind, but for far different reasons than aspies.. I mean programmers. But why is the nexus of aspies and SJWs in tech monopolies so problematic and ultimately suicidal for those corporations. It comes down to how these two groups of losers make each other mistakes that much worse. So let us talk about that dynamic. Large tech corporations seem to hire people with SJW mindsets for administrative jobs at a much higher frequency than other corporations. Part of the reason for this phenomena has to do with them being located in coastal California and heavily urbanized parts of the east coast etc. But the more important reason, in my opinion, is that tech monopolies want to present a public image of being trendy,"with it", "woke" and morally "superior".
It also helps that they have not suffered any serious or sustained blowback to acting like high-handed assholes.. yet. And that is likely to change, far faster than most want to believe. Many forget that just a decade ago, the state of internet (as far as it concerns tech monopolies) was quite different from what we see today. And let us be honest about something else, the public image of tech monopolies and that sector in general has taken a pretty severe beating in the past five years. There is a reason why cable shows such as 'Silicon Valley' have become popular and increasingly caustic in their depictions of that sector. A decade ago, many people worshiped techies and wholeheartedly supported that sector. Today, I am willing to bet that, over 50% of americans will pay money to watch them be burned in a public square.
But why does this fast and large shift in public attitudes towards tech monoplies matter? After all, who really liked Standard Oil, Bell Telephone Company, pre-1950s Movie Studies and IBM during their heyday. In case you didn't catch it, there is a reason I chose the names of those erstwhile monopolies and oligopolies. Is anybody today saddened by their breakup or downfall subsequent to anti-trust actions by previous governments? My point is that the public perception of any corporation, even one that is effectively a monopoly, is ultimately the single biggest determinant of its future survival. Tech monopolies have made far more enemies in past decade than many other monopolies did over multiple decades. But why and what does it have to do with SJWs?
To understand what I am getting at, let me ask you a few short questions. Which corporation will be hated more, one which charges you a bit too much for some services (any old-fashioned local bank) or one which unilaterally screws you over with no recourse (Paypal)? Which one will be hated more, an old-fashioned record label or movie studio run by greedy people belonging of a certain ethno-religious (insert name..) or corporations that fill a similar niche today but will shut you down and screw you over at the metaphorical drop of a hat because you offended some stupid piece of shit (YouTube, FakeBook)? I could list more examples, but you get the point. The later types of corporations elicit far more revulsion and hatred than the former. But why?
Well.. for two reasons. Firstly, internet monopolies do not follow due legal process or even bother to carefully justify their actions. Human beings remember slights and insults far better than "rationalist" idiots want to accept. Secondly, many less reputable corporations of yesteryear were not monopolies and one could easily find competitors eager to work with another new customer or partner. Also, as mentioned in a previous post, monoplies such as Standard Oil, Bell Telephone Company and IBM were always more than willing to sell their products and services to whoever could pay- irrespective of whether they agreed with their worldview or not. It was all about making money and getting repeat business, nothing more.
Now let us go back to SJWs or more precisely, how they will be the death of internet monopolies- in more ways than one. Ever wondered why corporations in previous eras seemed to lack SJWs, or why corporations in some sectors still have no SJWs within their ranks? It comes down to corporate structure, specifically how it has changed over past four decades. Prior to 1980, almost every person in management and administration rose to their current positions from within that corporation or from another similar one. In other words, they were loyal to the corporations they worked for and it was rewarded with job or career security. However the neoliberal "revolution" changed that and the management and administrative staff of corporation were increasingly external hires who saw each job as a temporary stepping stone towards an independent career- which never works for most of them in the end.
But what does this have to do with SJW-ism and "woke" capitalism? Well.. think of it this way, what does a person who does not expect to stay at a corporation for the rest of their life care about? The simple answer is- finding their next and hopefully better job. But what value does somebody, who likely has never worked in a corporation similar to the one in which they are seeking a job, offer to their new employer? Only two things, impressive-sounding educational "credentials" and manufactured public image. This why, for example, a mediocre candidate getting an MBA from an ivy-league school translates into a great job offer while an intelligent one from a "second rate" state university languishes in obscurity.
And this often ties in with a carefully curated public image aka people indulging in grandiose acts of "virtue" display or anything else that is seen as fashionable. It is all about showing off, lying and bullshitting. Earlier, I mentioned that SJWs lack a theory of mind, albeit for different reasons than aspies. Well.. here is the reason. SJWs are all about careerism supported by ever more ridiculous displays of fake "virtue". If being "woke" and "tone policing" did not exist, they would support and promote anything that appeared fashionable. Heck, if enough idiots educated at ivy-leagues thought that Nazism was hip, they would go full Nazi.
In other words, being "woke" and "politically correct" is fashionable for the same reason polyester suits were fashionable in 1970s or those weird padded suits were big in 1980s. It is all about constantly giving off the appearance of being "hip","current" and "with it". But surely, they cannot be that stupid? Are they so out of touch with reality? Guess what.. they are, and hanging out in their own social bubbles merely reinforces their belief system- if you can call it that. But more importantly, they have so far been insulated from the consequences of their behavior and actions. I, however, predict that it will soon change and they will increasingly have to face the wrath of people abused by them in past- for reasons that have to with probability.
In the next part of this series, I will lay out the many statistical reasons why SJWS and their corporate enablers will soon face an extremely nasty and likely violent backlash. And ya.. their doom is linked to probabilities generated via their own actions and behavior.
What do you think? Comments?
2019 and 2020 Will be Much Bigger Shitshows than 2015 and 2016
As regular readers know, I often make predictions on a number of topics which later turn out to be right (or pretty close) with a high rate of success. More importantly, I am able to accurately identify the underlying dynamics, trends and forces responsible for the ultimate outcomes. Now let me make another seemingly obvious prediction, but with far greater insight and details than possible for quacks.. I mean credentialed "experts". My prediction is that 2019 and 2020 will be far larger and more problematic shitshows than 2015 and 2016. Some of you (MikeCA?) might argue that every day since the election of Trump has been a shitshow.. and that is technically sorta true. But if you think that 2017 and 2018 were shitshows, you ain't seen nothing yet.
There are many reasons why this period of 1.5 years will be an epic meta-shitshow of the likes we haven't witnessed in living memory. However, it is not simply the sheer number or magnitude of individual shitshows that will make this period memorable, but how one shitshow will feed into another and so on.. you know, synergy. But before we go there, let us talk about why 2015 and 2016 marked the beginning of our current era of shitshows. It all began with an orange Buffoon riding down a gaudy escalator alongside a trophy wife with a face pumped full of cosmetic Botox. Initially it seemed that his campaign for the republican presidential nomination was just another publicity stunt to obtain a larger payout from the reality show in which he was starring.
However it became obvious to me within 4-6 weeks that his outrageous and colorful persona had far more public support than effete Washington DC 'insiders' realized. And yes.. I never changed my opinion on that issue and turned out be right. And ya.. I also predicted he would win against Hillary in early 2016, even at times when even the most radical presstitues.. I mean journalists.. thought that HRC might somehow prevail against him on election day. I also explored the real reasons why HRC would lose to that buffoon– before the election took place. FYI- majority of my accurate predictions have been about issues and topics other than Trump. But enough about the orange buffoon. Let us now talk about Brexit- more precisely, why the 'remain' side lost.
MSM news outlets in that rapidly decaying country (UK) want you to believe that Brexit was due to the stupidity of poorly educated people in that country. However a simple look at the geography of that vote tells you all you need about Brexit. Long story short, post-2008 austerity measures in UK hit parts of the country that are not London pretty hard. People who live in those regions, aka most of that country, got progressively disillusioned with the shitty status quo. They expressed their discontent by voting against something which stood as a placeholder for the widely reviled status quo. You know.. just like people in the Mid-West finally got tired of Obama's 8-year long lie about "Hope and Change" voted for Trump over the symbol of continuity aka HRC.
But both these shocks to the Establishment, their aftermath and colorful rhetoric accompanying both those changes are nothing compared to what we will witness in 2019 and 2020. While I will restrict my predictions to USA, things are also likely to get interesting in other parts of the world- maybe a bit too interesting. But before we go to the list, a word of caution. The most obvious reasons are unlikely to be the most consequential. The less glamorous reasons, further down the list, carry far more weight than the shiny but superficial ones which are obvious. So let us start by listing them in order of apparent obviousness.
1] Ever since Trump won the republican nomination in mid-2016, democratic establishment and deep state types have been trying to find enough dirt to stop his victory in the 2016 presidential election (which they failed) or impeach him. As things stand today, they have not uncovered anything more scandalous than Trump getting his disgraced lawyer to pay hush money to two women he had sex with while married to his current wife. While this revelation does provide fodder for supermarket tabloids, it is totally unsurprising and in line with Trump's past behavior. More importantly, the Mueller investigation has not uncovered evidence of "collusion" between Trump and Russia or Putin. Nor has it shown any definitive evidence for obstruction of justice by Trump. And I know MikeCA will have something to say about my characterization of that report.
But these severe setbacks have not stopped an increasing number of democrats from demanding his impeachment, because face it.. they always knew he was "guilty" of something impeachable. Today, the patron saint of pro-impeachment brigade aka Robert Mueller came out and all but openly encouraged democrats to start the impeachment process, even though his report does not contain enough evidence to prosecute Trump for either "collusion" or obstruction of justice. And ya.. I am aware of the legalese bullshit about not being able to exonerate him- but let us get real, people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. It also helps to be rich and white, but that is a topic for another post. My prediction is that democrats will initiate pre-impeachment proceedings against Trump, irrespective of potential negative effects it might have on their electoral prospects in 2020. But how does this translate into a nasty shitshow?
Well.. for a few reasons. Firstly, it is unlikely Trump will be impeached, tried and made to resign before November 3, 2020. Secondly, the pre-impeachment investigation is going to be long and highly contentious. It will also overshadow democratic primaries and possibly the presidential election to such an extent that other issues will be effectively sidelined. So be prepared for a democratic primary in which candidates offer endless paeans to bipartisanship, civility in politics, reestablishing "norms" and impeaching Trump at the expense of all the other stuff most voters in the general election actually care about. You know.. stuff like antitrust action against various monopolies and oligopolies, medicare for all, doing something about student debt etc. Think of HRCs "what will the children think" 2016 campaign on steroids. But in some ways, this will be smallest shitshow of them all.
2] Stupid old losers who constitute a majority of democratic primary voters in large states seem to be enamored by "gun control" aka banning civilian ownership of guns. Given that everyone in the packed clown car of democratic candidates is expected to appeal to them, one should expect increasingly shrill and strident anti-gun ownership rhetoric. While appealing to these losers might help one win the primary and a few coastal states in general, it is almost guaranteed to backfire in swing states- especially those with large rural and semi-urban populations. Now add in a few random mass shootings (almost inevitable?) between now and Nov 3, 2020 and you can imagine how nutty this could get. Expect the Democratic house to pass one or more atrociously written anti-gun ownership laws and a few high profile court cases.
To make matters worse, if that is possible, we have seen a recent trend by private corporate monopolies/ oligopolies based in heavily democratic states to deny services based on ideology. Here are a few recent examples.. Software Maker Salesforce Tells Gun Retailers to Stop Selling AR-15s, YouTube Alternatives for Gun Videos & Content Creators and Bank of America to Stop Financing Makers of Military-Style Guns. I, for one, don't see how pissing off millions of well-armed and single-issue voters who live in gun-ownership friendly jurisdictions is a smart idea when your party has to win their votes in 2020. Then again, this is the same party which think that Joe Biden in 2020 would make the best general election candidate. Or maybe the Democrats don't want to really win national elections. Who knows..
The large number of democratic candidates vying for the party nomination will make things even weirder than the republican field in 2016. We have all seen how small campaigns which use far less costly traditional advertising and advisers can prevail over larger "mainstream" operations. Between this and the proliferation of small donors, expect far more candidates to remain in the race even after the first major primaries are over. And the DNC and other party establishment are going to try hard, and ineffectually, to stop Bernie by hook or crook. Don't be surprised if the 2020 democratic convention is held under even more acrimonious circumstances than 2016. And there will be anonymous leaks, just like last time. It is going to get real ugly by mid 2020.
3] Let us now turn to the less obvious, but far more consequential, trends which promise to make 2019 and 2020 the biggest shitshows in living memory. Long story short, we are due for at least three independent nasty blowbacks from Trump's foreign and trade policies. Let us start by talking about Iran or more precisely how his stupid policy towards that country has the potential to backfire in a spectacularly disastrous manner. It is no secret that idiots such as Pompeo and Bolton, urged on by Zionists and Saudis, are trying to start a war. What they don't understand, or are willing to understand, is that any war with Iran in addition being unwinnable would make the Iraq misadventure look like quaint in comparison. The outcome of such a war would include Iran finally developing nuclear weapons (perhaps with Chinese assistance), prolonged and massive oil shortages with resultant price hikes and many other bad long-term effects (on USA).
Moving on.. Kim Jon-un has repeatedly conveyed to USA that unless economic sanctions are at least partially removed by end of 2019, he will restart testing ICBMs. My guess is that DPRK will demonstrate an entirely solid-fueled ICBM in early 2020, unless Trump and the idiots running "foreign policy" in USA openly abandon the idea of DPRK giving up its nukes and ICBMS- because the later ain't going to happen. Which means that sometime in 2020, Trump will have to decide on how to respond to new ICBM and perhaps even nuclear tests by DPRK. To make matters even more interesting, this escalation will likely occur around the same time as Iran is likely to finally leave the JCPOA and restart its uranium enrichment program at maximum capacity. But wait.. it gets even better, or worse, depending on your viewpoint.
As most of you know by now, Trump is involved in an unwinnable trade-war with China. And here is why.. China's economy and manufacturing capacity is far larger than USA in real terms. While the american economy and system will implode without Chinese imports, the converse is not true. There is also no other country in the world that has as large, varied and sophisticated a manufacturing base as China. Did I mention that USA and rest of the "West" are economically stagnant, demand saturated and in overall decline. China is not going to compromise on Huawei, give in to demands of american corporations or basically change anything significant about how it works or does business. It is the USA and rest of "West" that will have to ultimately eat crow. And they will start hurting USA by screwing over Boeing and make life interesting for every american corporation which does significant amounts of business there or dependent on its exports.
Tensions with Russia could exacerbate further given the current political climate in USA and provide opportunity for yet another shitshow. Did I mention how conflicts between internet monopolies and right wingers could spill into the real world with potentially disastrous results for the former. To summarize, the rest of 2019 and whole of 2020 will almost certainly witness far larger and problematic shitshows than anything in living memory. Even worse, many of these shitshows could feed into each other to create meta-shitshows.
What do you think? Comments?

subset: commoncrawl


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