Why Don't Governments Employ Self-Reported Tax Assessment?

From Japanese Land Reform,

The government initially ordered individual farmers to measure the plots of their land themselves, calculate their taxes, and submit the results to local tax officials. However, difficulties arose with the honesty of the measuring system when the 1874 budget showed that collected taxes fell far below projected values.

The funny thing is that there's a simple algorithm to keep people honest about their own self-reported property taxes. The owner of the property gets to say what the value of the property is, from which the tax is calculated, and if the taxman thinks the value is too low or the owner is dishonest, then he's got the right to buy the property at the price the owner reported. So if you're dishonest, you risk losing 20 to 30 times more than you stood to gain by lying on your taxes. Then of course the taxman sells your land to your neighbours who all laugh at you in contempt.

This is a simple implementation of 'cut and choose'. One person cuts the cake, the other person chooses which piece of cake is theirs. It's perfectly fair and equitable. And almost nobody does this except small children. Preferring instead expensive land surveys. Yuck.

Why do people go for the expensive and complicated solution rather than the simple, cheap and elegant one? Because the elegant solution depends on understanding and manipulating human minds. It relies on redesigning human incentives. And not just exploiting them like psychopaths do (eg, con men, shills and marketers).

In the elegant solution, you neutralize the property owner's greedy desire to cheat by changing that greed to 'keeping his property'. And you further the taxman's desire to make owners pay honestly by giving him the power to totally fuck over property owners (if and ONLY IF they're dishonest, because honest owners won't lose on the forcible sale) as well as give him a narcissistic thrill that he's devouring the property and enlarging himself by proxy (by enlarging the state's holdings).

But effectively redesigning human minds is something that comes naturally only to extremely high Presence Good people. In other words, a maximum of 40% of the population in theory, and in practice 0% of the population. Whereas merely regulating human actions is something that comes naturally to very high Presence non-Evil people. Regulating human behaviour is a much simpler concept for people to process than regulating human thoughts in order to regulate human behaviour.

And I'm aware that Psychopaths SEEM like they do it but they really don't. They just accumulate a bunch of tricks and exploits. Con men don't understand human minds any better than crackers, hackers, and virus writers understand operating systems. They are unable to generate any arbitrary effect.

Economists Are Narcissists

Economists are mentally retarded because they are Narcissists. Narcissism fully explains the most distinct and bizarre 'what the fuck is wrong with you' features of economists.

First and most obviously, concepts such as Equity (making physical reality Fair) and Justice (anti-Catastrophe) are hopelessly beyond economists. Because these concepts are NPL +6 whereas economists are NPL +2. Consider NPL a measure of cognitive capacity.

So this is why economists will stare at you with blank incomprehension and vacant mindless faces when you bring those concepts up. Except for so-called 'development economists' but since these are shunned by mainstream practitioners, they hardly count as economists at all, do they?

Second, economists believe that growing up means growing bigger. Oh you have a big GDP, it means you're grown up! Quality is a concept alien to people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, only quantity matters. And that neatly explains the features of GDP versus the GPI.

Third, economists like all Evil people, believe that Submission should take the form of self-abasement. Servile, craven, imitative. So the poor and weak should imitate the rich and strong. That way they will magically become rich and strong through the Magical Law of Association.

These two features together more than explain why economists look at poor countries and say "do what rich countries do" and "there is nothing special that you have to do to grow bigger, it's a normal part of growing up!" Claims whose mental retardation is too much for even Right-Wing Authoritarians to swallow.

Why? Because RWAs are capable of empathy and Narcissists are NOT. Therefore, economists are incapable of conceiving that other people have different wants and needs than they themselves do. Therefore, economists are incapable of conceiving that poor countries have different wants and needs than their own do. And total +lack of empathy is not a mere feature of Narcissism but the definition of it.

The only thing distinguishing an economist from a politician is their commitment to their insane ideology. When politicians cease being clueless, they become economists. And when economists cease being gutless, they become consultants, eager to tell you what you should do despite not really knowing in exchange for lots and lots of money.

So as you can see, economists were born vile, the vileness oozes out of their every pore, and they will die vile. And another word for 'vile' is EVIL. Evil evil evil. EVIL! Unprincipled and heartless. EVIL.

People Hate Innovation

It took 15 years for someone to do ONE photo-gallery website correctly. The same for text.

Hell, try to look up how many new construction homes include any of (let alone ALL of): washlets, underfloor heating, central vacuums, in-wall conduits for computer network cables, foot or elbow operated bathroom fixtures, balcony panels that are transparent glass instead of metal. Or look up how many still use copper pipes instead of PEX. Or how many different kinds of mutually incompatible fittings there are for PEX pipes (the innovation there would be standardization). Or how many municipalities still use ductile iron pipes even though PVC is decades old and has superior performance? Or look up SawStop and the lame-ass "response" of the established table saw companies.

These are really things that should be legislated mandatory because it's quite obvious that people *loathe* innovations, even when they are blatantly superior to what already exists.

The reason why people come up with conspiracy theories around battery electric cars isn't because they love innovation, it's because they love conspiracy theories. Which doesn't mean that conspiracies don't happen. The Bohemian Grove is definitely an anti-democratic conspiracy. But look at all the stupid conspiracies around a suicidal fucker, john fucking kennedy, getting shot in a city where everyone wanted to kill him. Oh but can't speak ill of the dead so he was a "great man" and "everybody loved him". People lie lie lie.

The reason people love Thomas Edison and hate or scorn Nikola Tesla is not because Edison was a better inventor. In fact, Edison invented only one thing: the modern research lab, whereas Nikola Tesla invented four (AC power & generator, wireless power transmission, wireless control, and bladeless turbines). The reason people love Edison is really because he was rich and powerful. That is the ONLY reason. If he hadn't been rich, they would hate him for inventing anything at all.

Einstein is loved precisely because he is irrelevant. He invented some theories that are so complex, or supposedly so complex, that nobody is ever expected to learn or understand them. People can pat themselves on the back about how they love innovation, invention and science, while doing precisely nothing.

Einstein was a gutless fucker. He didn't set out (or accomplish) the destruction of any preexisting theories or modes of thought. And that is why he is tolerated unlike Freud who is still scorned even after he backtracked from his claims that Victorians were sexually abusing their children. Or Lloyd deMause (who is an asshole and a bully but that's besides the point) who set out to destroy most of sociology, history and anthropology. And succeeded, at least in theory.

Why do you think Star Trek is set in the 23rd century rather than the 21st century? It's because people like poverty. Why do you think every single last AI in Star Trek gets killed and every last robot wants to become human? Why do you think Star Trek, even set in the 23rd century, still has diseases, military command structures, marriage, planets and biological ecosystems? It's because people LOVE these things. And they love them for the sole reason that they're already familiar with them. Some idiots will complain that changing these things would make "storytelling" difficult, but really that just says people don't want to hear stories about societies different from their own. Which just proves my point. People hate innovation.

Why Nuclear Bombs Bring Peace To A World Of Slaves

In Social Implications of Technology I talk about how expensive technologies are tools for the rich and cheap technologies are tools for the poor. And as technologies fall in price from infinity to expensive then society regresses, then as they fall further in price to cheap then society progresses. I alluded to killing technologies but I never made a complete analysis of it.

Military technology seems to follow the same rules as all other technology. When it goes from infinite to expensive, it makes conflicts bigger (the tommy gun was two year's wages) and when it goes from expensive to cheap (the nuclear bomb) then war suddenly becomes too scary to engage in. We don't want poor people killing rich people after all, do we? Poor people killing each other only at the direction of rich people, now that's fine.

A nuclear sub with one or two dozen missiles each with a dozen warheads costs about a billion. If we assume it kills 100 million people then that's 10$ per life extinguished. An AK47 at 100-1000$ will kill how many? Hmm. But we don't have to guess. We can simply look up How Much A Nuclear Bomb Costs. So actually, nuclear weapons are pretty damn cost effective. They're cheaper than bullets assuming that you successfully kill one person per bullet!

Scary isn't it? How after you factor out emotion / childrearing mode, and pure raw techno-economics, there's pretty much absolutely nothing to human will. And you know, when you think about it, THIS MAKES SENSE! Because 99% of the human population are slaves, either submissive (90%) or passive (9%). They are such slaves that they seriously consider aggressive people to have high willpower! How fucking revolting and pathetic!

So yeah, in a world completely dominated by slaves, the ONLY thing that matters to human history is raw emotion (which coordinates the masses of slaves in language primitive enough to unite them) and the economics of the technology they have available to them. And that's it.

Reserving Jobs For Humans? NO!

I can actually respect them for it. They do the stuff I don't want to do and can actually be happy doing it. You just have to get them to help humanity in their own way... Humanity obviously can't have everyone be Researcher or System Designer or few things would get done. I figure if we progress further we'll probably get less drones since people will care more about what happens.

Look, I respect that it was necessary for human beings to do all this shit. But it's not even true that I wouldn't want to do it or that I couldn't be happy doing it. So long as it was constantly varied from one week to the next, I could have been happy at it.

Job Complexes are a concept from Participatory Economics by Michael Black. PARECON should really have been implemented ... oh yeah, it already is implemented in this company called Semco SA in Brazil. And just about nowhere else in the world! Even if temporary and freelance workers sort of quality.

So you see, the workplace of today isn't identical to the hierarchical workplaces of 300 years ago because it HAS to be. Work doesn't HAVE to be mind-numbing and repetitive. The workplace is identical because a lot of the population is Lawful Evil. Because people are Fascistic arseholes.

Hell, they're so Evil they actually believe that competition HELPS over most of the planet. Despite the comprehensive book No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn. I don't recommend it by the way, it won't have anything you don't already know or believe to be true. I do recommend you use it as ammunition against arseholes.

But getting back to my point! The point is that I respect that it WAS necessary. Emphasis on was. It no longer is, therefore I no longer respect them for doing jobs that are unnecessary and subjecting themselves to demeaning, dehumanizing, and hierarchical subjugation to do them.

And you need to think very carefully about this point: robots vs slaves. Because before robots and mass production came along, some people did have hygiene, and large homes, and mass communication, and publishing, and long-range communication, and books, and education and this and that.

You know who they were? The rich! Yes, there were ... you know, just read Social Implications Of Technology.

Prices have come down and things which were infinitely expensive in the past became expensive and now they're getting cheaper. And while it's generally bad for society when they go from infinitely to merely expensive, it's super-good when they go from expensive to cheap. Even killing technologies such as AK47s.

The problem for your position is that using slaves puts a floor on the price of goods. It intrinsically makes them expensive. It intrinsically makes it so that only the rich can afford them. Rich people could always afford artisanal crafts.

But for poor people to afford them required mass production and industrialization. Automation! Mass production is an intrinsically socialist idea just as artisanship and craftsmanship are intrinsically aristocratic. Same with elections being aristocratic.

Nowadays, only rich people can afford custom-designed products. And I long to see the day when AI make it so that everyone gets custom-designed stuff. I already said as much in what space colonization would really look like. Every possible opportunity will be taken, no opportunity will ever be wasted, because personalized design of everything (even your life) will guarantee it.

Hell, I'm a mental systems designer. I help design human minds. I help design human lives. I know what can be done. I know the glories that can be achieved. Read The Crimes of Ms Jean Brady for an idea of what a fairly ordinary person can achieved with a mind capable of systems design behind her.

I fucking want that. I want every person to have that. To be their own agent, to be forceful. I don't want poverty and deprivation. I don't want normal people to be slaves, or serfs, or "artisans" for the super-rich. Like the artisans employed by the Vickys (neo-Victorians) in Diamond Age. An execrable book, I recommend against it.

I want an EXPLOSION of mass-produced stuff. Even design! I want EVERYONE to be able to afford it, not just the fucking super-rich. I want to be out of a job! I want everyone else to be out of a job too! I want a genuine ludic civilization. One not where "people can be happy" but where people ARE happy.

What we have, fucking sucks. And your modest improvements to what we have ... fucking suck. Too little too late. I want infinitely more.

The Economic Benefits Of Personal Computers

Some people (engineers and fascists, not that those two terms aren't almost synonymous) have difficulty grasping that modern personal computers have vastly increased productivity of individuals. They say correctly that big mainframes greatly helped the record-keeping of large corporations. And that smaller computers helped the lesser record-keeping of smaller corporations. And that's it, because individuals can't possibly be doing any record-keeping.

These people also get greatly upset over computer games and other modern "distractions" and are dismissive of the fact these things are more enriching and valuable than other equally mindless age-old pastimes of chatting over the water cooler, being brainwashed by the idiot box, square dancing, and bobbing for apples. Never mind those, age-old means traditional and there can't possibly be anything wrong with that! In fact, when people aren't slaving for a corporation they should just go to bed like the good slaves they are.

Never mind the benefits of automation. The order clerks that don't have to be paid for because web sites are processing their orders. The large retail warehouses (not a new phenomenon) where order pickers are aided by autonomous robots. The ATM machines everywhere. The self-checkout machines. Being able to do your banking and taxes online with the aid of software. No, we're not going to go into those. It's not like they greatly benefit individuals and the economy and are aided by small computers.

No, we will here talk about individual record-keeping. Because individuals DO in fact keep records. These are called "notes". And in the bad old days which the engineers are conveniently forgetting, individuals had to keep records ANYWAYS. They were just on this thing called "paper" which had no search functionality, random or fast lookup. In the bad old days, people used these things called "index cards" as meta-records. They were shit! In the bad old days, people did linear searches through all of their records instead of using 'grep' or 'google'.

People DID have records in the bad old days, and they DID engage in record-keeping. But in the bad old days, even though you could write at as much as 1/10th the speed of typing, getting writer's cramp a hundred times faster than RSI (and infinitely faster if you're smart enough to switch to Dvorak keymap and/or get a Kinesis keyboard). Hmm, a 10-fold productivity improvement you say? Nay! Because in the bad old days, retrieval of records was so difficult it was prohibitively expensive. Yea, in the bad old days, in order to be able to maintain any kind of records, you needed very high intelligence to remember where your records were.

And nowadays ... intelligence no longer matters. You want to remember something? Type it up. If you're moderately organized, you'll be able to remember it. So that nowadays, it's possible for someone to function with as low as 2 slots in working memory when people normally have 4, in other words at less than 50% capacity. You know those times when your head is fuzzy and you're braindead? Well, it's actually possible to measure numerically how far your mental capacity has gone down. And it no longer matters. Because you can still do productive work ... with your cybernetic memory.

Thanks to personal computers, everyone now has an IQ of roughly 150. An enormous boost to personal productivity and the economy. Sure, people aren't any more logical than they ever used to be, and they aren't any more creative than they used to be. But in terms of raw intelligence, raw memorization ability, the boost provided by computers is phenomenal!

Of course, none of that matters as individuals cannot possibly matter to slaves or insects. Which is what the typical engineer is.

And to think, this is all without the computer / Internet revolution having happened yet. Because it still hasn't. For all that you morons believe it's taken the world by storm, it is barely inching its way through the world. It still hasn't happened in any meaningful way as cybernetic memory (or dirt cheap social organization provided by the Internet) is nothing compared to what's coming.

Speaking of dirt cheap social organization provided by the Internet. That was pioneered by people illicitly sharing porn and movies. It took over two decades for business finance to move to take advantage of it. So no wonder fascists and engineers, to whom only corporations and governments could possibly matter, would be utterly blind to the phenomenon. After all, it's not like dirt cheap porn brings any value to anyone's life. Certainly not to someone who takes seriously the notion of sexual abstinence for adolescents.

Why Interest Rates Are Artificial And Should Be Abolished

I've never seen an explanation of where interest rates actually come from, or why they should be abolished, before. These things are always just assumed, the latter with stamp scrip, and the former with "time preference of money" which is irrational and I don't share at all. Here it's clearly stated why interest rates are artificial and evil. They are a natural product of human atavistic greed over a totally artificial product, one that is completely out of touch with everything in physical reality. With the sole exception of land, which is something humans don't create. The paragraph in that page serves as a complete and thorough denunciation of the entire field of economics. If economists are so evil and corrupt that they won't denounce interest rates, let alone work to eradicate them, then what possible value can they have as academics? Lynch the lying fuckers, all of them.

Enviros Caused The Financial Collapse

One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear, petroleum—these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to build rockets. It’s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology.

I just read this passage in an interesting article which you have to take with a grain of salt cause the guy's a dumbass right-libertarian who talks about blind spots but is remarkably blind himself.

BUT this part seems true, especially about scientists and engineers being brutally prohibited from playing with nuclear bombs. Think about what could have been done!

Nuclear cannons to launch huge amounts of supplies into orbit cheaply. A nuclear Orion starship. Nuclear bombs as demolition charges for mining / quarrying / canal digging.

Think about it: what kind of a dirty bastard would play on the stock market if they had even a slim chance of playing with LIVE NUKES! It's not even a contest, there is just no fucking way!

So it's clear, the enviros did wreck the world! They wrecked it by causing the financial collapse. And they caused THAT by causing the financialization of the world in the first place. Enviros hate industrial economies with a passion and they quite gleefully destroyed the First World's industrial economies "by accident".

Now if only the criminal justice system could see to it that causing widespread poverty (and thus mass death) was a crime so that it was okay to kill environmentalists in self-defense. But that will never happen because judges are middle upper class and they interpret laws (which being contradictory can be used to logically conclude anything) in a typically middle upper class way.

Mineral Depletion? Not Fucking Likely!

A friend of mine sent me this article on supposed mineral depletion. I well remember the days not so long ago when I took such things seriously. For a minute there I actually had a flashback to those times.

At least until the moronic writer started talking about supposed copper depletion, a topic I know only too well having investigated all its facets. But yeah, talking about copper depletion just gave the entire game away and then I couldn't take this anti-human pro-poverty doomsaying crap seriously anymore.

Copper

We're not going to have enough copper, really? Yeah, that's without taking into account undersea minerals from extinct black smokers. There ought to easily be as many of those as there EVER has been copper on land. And mining the seabed has distinct advantages since you can trivially move on from one area to the next. So on that basis alone, copper depletion is just doomsaying crap.

But more importantly, technology and usage of copper are both changing. Copper has traditionally been used for:

• electrical wires
• telephone wires
• electrical equipment including motors, transformers and generators
• water pipes
• catenary wires

And the funny thing about all of those applications is that copper is being substituted out of them. Every single one.

Electrical wires are now primarily made from aluminum - all high voltage wires are, and there is nothing stopping low voltage wires from being aluminum so long as you don't use any improper (or preferably any at all) copper-aluminum contacts.

Telephone wires? Two words: fiber optics. Someone has even come up with bendable plastic fibers for short ranges. And now we're moving to optical computer interconnects so in a decade the wires on your motherboard are going to be fiber optics.

Water pipes are all shifting to PVC because it's cheaper and no more unhealthy than lead-copper poisoning. And for the purposes of making fertilizer and plastics, we are never, ever going to run out of hydrocarbons. Those take natural gas, not petrol, and very small amounts of it too.

Superconducting wire uses about 1/1000th the amount of copper to carry the same amount of current as plain copper. Superconducting electrical motors are being developed for the excellent reason that they are ridiculously smaller, an overwhelming advantage in certain key applications. So you can count on superconducting electrical equipment being developed. And that's without counting fault current limiters which don't currently exist and REQUIRE superconducting wire.

So superconductors have been advancing very slowly but very steadily over the past two decades and it's easy to imagine them continuing to do so for the next two decades. And that's not even counting the freaky shit that's just been uncovered like variable-Tc superconductors. The kind of mind-bogglingly freaky shit that often presages a revolution. In any case, currently superconductors are at the stage of being barely commercially viable. In 20 years they should be dominant.

Finally, catenary wires are switching to half-magnesium. It's still half-copper but that's only a first step.

So we're not going to be able to use copper like we did? Well WHO GIVES A SHIT?! The only thing that matters is that we WERE ABLE to use copper way back when it was the only option. Nowadays it is no longer the only option! Because we used it as ruthlessly and profligately as possible so as to bring wealth and technology forwards! We're now safely past the dependency on that stuff. And that's assuming there's going to be shortages since recall the undersea mining!

Platinum

Platinum? Platinum can go fuck itself. We are ALREADY operating in a severe shortage situation with regards to platinum, which is why chemists have been busily hunting for alternatives to it wherever they can. And finding them! Superatoms were discovered for that reason. And you know, platinum is quite plentiful in asteroids. If we ever really, REALLY needed it, building an orion nuclear starship would be economically viable. If platinum ever becomes critical to industrial civilization then you can bet a political problem isn't going to stop us mining it. As for that whole hysterical crap about platinum being mined at 3 parts per million, oooh aaah, fucking uranium is mined at 3 parts per BILLION. It's not even remotely the cheapest method to mine uranium but it's commercially viable.

Then there's the notion of "production peaks"? There is no such thing for fucking solids. Only liquids! Liquids GUSH UNDER PRESSURE. Solids DO NOT. Solid ores just go down in grade (and way up in amount) so get more expensive to process with the same mining technology. Emphasis on the same mining technology. Because mining technology continues to advance.

Tellerium

Tellerium is used in solar panels as cadmium telluride. When that industry goes bust then there'll be an oversupply. And it will go bust because it's not even remotely economically viable but is just religious frenzy worshipping the sun god. Tellerium is critical for nothing, it's a fucking poison. Looking into its applications, it's certainly interesting but critical? I don't see PCM memory chips winning out in the mass market - it's pretty obvious that memristors are the wave of the future. Maybe for space applications but how much do you need for that?! X-ray detectors? Meh. Again, how much do you need? As for casting and machining steel ... :D good luck, because the industry's moving away from that. Blowing / Injecting Metallic Glasses is the way things are going. That and additive (as opposed to subtractive in "machining") manufacturing (aka 3D printing) which is probably going to end up using plastics and titanium. And car manufacture is moving towards resins and fireglass as in iStream's T.25. And I suppose aluminum, which is a mainstay now.

Rare Earths

Neodynium is "controlled" by China because it's the only fucking country that's industrialized AND backwards enough to allow its mining. It's not like it magically doesn't exist anywhere, it's that other countries don't want to mine it! In that it reminds me of molybdenum which is critical for nuclear reactor vessels. Both neodynium and molybdenum, unlike tellerium, ARE critical. It would take decades to learn to replace them.

In this article, you can read all about neodynium and other rare earths. Pay attention to the fact that neodynium (and ruthenium) are both used in tiny tiny parts of great big machines. Neodynium is used in just the permanent magnets of the electric motors or generators of much bigger machines. Ruthenium isn't used in hard drives, it's used in the GMR flying read-write HEADS at the TIPS of actuator arms inside of hard drives. That's a rather large difference. The parts we're talking about are miniscule. And just like if uranium suddenly jumped in price 50x then it wouldn't matter, so too if neodynium and ruthenium jump in price 50x then it won't matter. So an electric bicycle doubles in price, so what? That doesn't matter in the long term. And believe me, a lot of mining suddenly becomes A LOT more viable when the price of a mineral jumps 50x on the market.

Talking about rhodium is fucking ridiculous. Its main use is replacing platinum. If we had plenty of platinum from asteroid mining, we wouldn't use rhodium at all. And I bet we could get rhodium the same place as the platinum! Moreover, both rhodium and ruthenium can be extracted from nuclear fission products. And THAT technology is currently advancing by leaps and bounds. Could enough of it be extracted? Yes, if enough is more than is currently being mined.

Synthesizing Ruthenium and Rhodium

(27 tonnes a year per 1000 MWe * 377 MWe global capacity) / (14% nuclear share of world electric capacity) = 72 707 tonnes of uranium fuel per year

That's uranium fuel used with current technology to meet present world production of electricity. Production which is going to go up massively as the third world industrializes and people leave poverty. And furthermore,

73 000 tonnes * 0.03 * 0.06 = 131 400 kilograms

Because you see, current reactors burn uranium very inefficiently at a rate of about 3% of fuel. And ruthenium is about 6% of fission products. And actually, ruthenium is only mined at 12 tonnes a year. So there is the potential to extract 10x the current supply of ruthenium from fission products by 2050 when the world will have largely switched to nuclear power. After all, France did its nuclear switch in 15 years so there's absolutely no reason why the world can't do it in 40.

As for rhodium which is mined at 25 tonnes a year and is only 1.3% of fission products, there is "merely" the potential to extract as much rhodium from fission products as is currently being mined.

So long term, the situation looks very, VERY good. With a supply of both that will last the next billion years at present levels of consumption. Which isn't likely to happen but as I already stated, technology makes consumption go up AND down. And high prices tend to make consumption go down.

The technology that will make this viable is laser enrichment, since it's the final step necessary to weed out all the radioactive isotopes of ruthenium and rhodium after they've been chemically seperated from other elements. For rhodium used for chemical catalysis, radioactivity won't matter a damn. For ruthenium used in hard drives, it's intolerable.

This is all assuming that hard drive technology continues to exist in 20-40 years, something which is extremely doubtful!

Phosphorus

Last but certainly not least, that crockpot author leaves us with a parting shot about the "coming" phosphorus shortage. A notion that is patently ludicrous since even the hardcore doomsayers place it at 200 years out.

We should fear that all the same since as we all know, agricultural technology and world prosperity won't change at all in 200 years! It's not like recycling shit will be ridiculously easy when the most destitute person on earth has an income of 10,000 euros a year. Or when vat meat has taken over all meat production.

Yeah, it's just a throwaway line so it doesn't need any justification or other hook for critical thinking. Just fear, FEAR IT, FEAR IT!!! FEAR THE WRATH OF THE EARTH GOD. FEAR THE FUTURE!! No, there's no religious frenzy or quackery involved in this at all, why do you ask?

Death of Graphics Art Market Predicted

Isn't it funny how the audio art revenues are collapsing even as the visual art revenues are expanding through the same digital technology? Meanwhile, both of their costs are plummeting. But the reason behind these opposite outcomes is obvious when you think about it.

Audio playback technology is far in advance of video playback. Ordinary people can LISTEN to an arbitrary master audio song (CD), but they can't as easily SEE an arbitrary master image. Only a publishing house can do that by printing a large format poster. With an incredible amount of lag and expense involved of course.

Additionally, compared to video, there's hardly any artistry or skill involved in producing audio art anyways. Even compared to 2D video, let alone 3D, and 4D. But then again, audio is maxed out at 2D. So a lot more people are involved in producing it and amassing a public library of audio art that covers the entire space of possibilities (all the music you'll ever want to hear) is so much easier than for video art.

Of course, the conclusion is inescapable - cheap, thin & lightweight wall-sized video displays will collapse the digital graphics market, destroying the entire revenue base of graphics artists. I await this technology eagerly as that will be the day when ridiculous notions like hoarding art will die.

Hoarding by so-called "collectors", a euphemism for a vile activity performed by the rich, much like other euphemisms such as "adventurers" (for useless lay-abouts) and "philanthropists" (for public policy autocrats).

But it's not just ridiculous things like canvas paintings or the whole notion of "framing" art that will finally die. Copyright will also get its long-awaited and eagerly anticipated final death. Because when copyright no longer can be forcibly imposed on music or novels or graphics, it will apply to nothing at all.

And when the ridiculous and anti-progressive notion of copyright dies, it will become obvious that ALL art must be produced on a communist basis. From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his needs. Because the alternative is that art not be produced at all, something fascists will no doubt contemplate before regretfully abandoning it. Copyright's death will be communism's triumph.

A further conclusion is now inescapable. The anti-human anti-progress patent system will collapse when 3D printers become widespread among the general population. Or in general form, when technologies are democratized and universalized, arbitrary authoritarian restrictions on them (like copyright and patents) are no longer tenable. Or put in even more general form: democracy is the enemy of authoritarianism.

It's funny what places you can find democracy waging war against authoritarianism, isn't it? But once you see it at work, it's quite uplifting to realize that democracy will win.

On The Notion That "Everybody Is Really Selfish"

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of the idea that people do everything out of selfish reasons. That supposedly even if you do altruistic stuff, you do it because you enjoy doing it, therefore it's really selfish.

Well, first of all, I never credited this ridiculous notion for a single minute because I am a living counter-example. And I'm not the only one either. There's plenty of people who are grim about the world, or depressed, or angry. For fuck's sake, your typical pre-industrial farmer would qualify. Think of the Amish!

Secondly, it's just the kind of self-justifying crap spouted by satanists aka right-libertarians aka market fundamentalists (those groups have remarkably high overlap). What it boils down to is they're saying they're selfish so they assume everyone else must be (a common psychological failing that everyone is just like you, called projection).

Thirdly, this notion is fractally wrong. It isn't just factually wrong or wrong on several levels (like the meta-level where satanists are just justifying being egotistical bags of shit or where they're projecting their psychological flaws on others), it is wrong at every possible scale of resolution. The whole idea is wrong, the concepts that make up the idea are all wrong, and every single detail they use to justify it is wrong too.

Annihilating The Distinction

For instance, let's presume for the sake of argument the satanists WERE right and that everyone did things just because they enjoy it. Then it would automatically follow that "selfish" can't refer to that fact because language is made to be USEFUL. If you have a word that applies to EVERYTHING, then it's not a useful word, is it?

The only thing that makes the word 'selfish' useful in language is to distinguish selfish from altruistic people. If you annihilated the distinction, that's like annihilating the word entirely. If absolutely every object in the universe were yellow then there would be no point to having the word 'yellow' in any language because 'being yellow' would be an intrinsic property of 'being an object' and only philosophers would ever think twice about it.

Well, that's what's wrong with the whole idea of this crazy misbegotten attempt to redefine the word 'selfish' to justify satanism (right-Libertarianism) and psychopathy (American "rugged individualism" and corporate CEOs). Now let's look at the concepts that make it up! Starting with "enjoyment".

Enjoyment

'Enjoy' isn't some nebulous fuzzy word that you get to attach to everything. It is a fucking SPECIFIC word. Very broadly, it means deriving pleasure. More specifically, there's four levels of enjoyment.

• enjoying enjoyment - pleasure, sensualism (level 0)
• enjoying the things you enjoy - intense liking, Zen, hedonism
• enjoying caring about the things you enjoy - pride
• enjoying caring about whether the things you enjoy are going well or badly - love (level 3)

What THEY are talking about is level 0 and possibly level 1. Because they are retarded morons and really primitive throwbacks. To say that someone motivated by love is the same kind of person as someone motivated by intense liking ... is fucking ludicrous. It is a fucking INSULT.

Values Are Axiomatic

And to say that people are motivated only and solely by these things is FALSE anyways. It's turning the human mind inside out. People aren't motivated by sensations or feelings, that's the kind of crap morons like Marvin Minsky thought. People are motivated by fucking VALUES (satisfied or unsatisfied desires). And values are abstract. They're just saying "I care about X" where X can be ANYTHING. It can be something simple like physical pleasure, or sex, or love, or pain, or seeing pain, or seeing suffering. Going backwards, that's schadenfreude and sadism and masochism. And finally, some people exist that just value entirely abstract things, things like truth and justice.

It is AXIOMATIC that they care about these things. Yes they derive enjoyment from those things, but only because they care about them in the first fucking place. To claim that the enjoyment is the REASON they care is so fucking stupid and entirely backwards. Values TRIGGER emotions as signals to your conscious mind that your values are being violated or fulfilled or something else. Emotions do not cause values! That's like claiming theorems cause axioms to happen in math, it is fucking backwards!

Teleology

Or claiming that the purpose of doing science is to get Nobel prizes. Or the purpose of sex for men is to fertilize women. Just because something's sometimes a byproduct doesn't mean it's the deliberate purposeful end-goal of the activity. That's called teleological reasoning and it's generally wrong. And when you have every possible thing (every possible value) causing enjoyment in SOME people. How the fuck can alleviating pain in person 1 and causing pain in person 2 both be caused by enjoyment in both people? How can the emotion of enjoyment (at any level) cause BOTH person 1 wanting to inflict pain AND person 2 to alleviate pain?

Conclusion

This stupid satanic / market economist crap isn't illogical, it's anti-logical. It's a Just So story by egotistical self-righteous slimebags and just about as believable as "elephants grew trunks because they wanted to reach higher branches" and (simultaneously) "pigs grew shorter legs because they wanted to reach roots". As if that were some kind of fucking explanation. It's a NON-EXPLANATION people! And it's a fractally wrong one to boot. And it's a moronic redefinition of words in the cause of self-justification by egotistical bags of diseased slime.

Why Go To Space? No Reason.

Let's first agree that by 2050 China will be entirely dependent on nuclear power and probably still have an engineering-heavy political leadership. As France does currently. So they'll be able and perfectly willing to build nuclear spaceships and nuclear launch cannons. Which means that cheap access to space will happen no matter what American aristocrats and lawyers want.

Personally I think it's a fantastic idea and I'm glad I'll be able to say 'just shut the fuck up' to rabid anti-human eco-zealot freaks. That just leaves open the question of whether humanity will ever WANT to go out into space before the resources of this world are completely exhausted and/or poverty, disease and ignorance have already been eradicated. The short answer to that question is: no.

Most space advocates just assume that going out into space is a good thing. Not good enough.

Helium-3: I just love the utter stupidity of this one. The justification for going into space is helium-3 for fusion, and the justification for helium-3 is going out into space. And none of these retarded cretins notice the circularity. Nor do they care that fission is so much cheaper than fusion can ever be that fusion will just never be economically viable.

Gold or other precious metals: why? What the fuck for? Seriously, we've got more than enough gold for our industrial purposes. Do we really want to go out into space to cater to some dumbass' vanity? Let's come back to mining gold in space after gold on the ocean floor has been exhausted. The ocean floor is a lot cheaper and more accessible.

Platinum and other mineral catalysts: now there's a good reason to go into space. However, we only need thousands of tonnes of platinum total, and we might find substitutes for platinum as our materials science advances, so platinum isn't a good reason to build a million tonne space delivery system.

Solar power: the sun shines 24 hours a day in space, and there's no pesky atmosphere to get in the way. That's fucking great! The only problem is we don't need solar power when we've got nuclear power plants!

Avoiding biowar: yes, biowar plagues designed and dispersed by lunatic morons working from their garages are in our future thanks to synthetic biology. One of these might even cause human extinction. Just think of what would happen if some nut created a version of HIV transmissible through the air. A great thought to warm the cockles of your heart.

So won't nuts try to escape the Earth in a panic, fleeing in droves? Yes maybe. Well, no. Why try to go out into space and then building a completely disconnected artificial life support system when you can just get on with it and build your completely disconnected artificial life support system down here on Earth? It's going to be a lot fucking cheaper and affordable!

Science and exploration: sorry buddy, this isn't a commercial reason to go out into space. Science and exploration can be used to justify absolutely everything. Hey, why not go see what's down in the Mariana Trench? For Science! Hey, why not vivisect a human being? For Science!

Intercepting nuclear missiles: this is just about the only good reason to go out into space. Without a nasty atmosphere in the way, blowing up missiles using a laser beam is ridiculously easy. The same thing for seeing them coming. The only problem is that without a nasty atmosphere in the way, kinetic kill rounds (delivered by the railguns the military is working on) are unstoppable. And protecting against nuclear missiles is a lot cheaper on Earth anyways since all you have to do is put up a cheap plastic dome around your cities. Moving your cities out into space is overkill, ridiculously expensive overkill.

Even weather, telecommunications and surveillance satellites are going to be obsoleted by UAVs and aerostats. The only thing satellites provide is rapid whole-earth coverage. And for that you need to be in low earth orbit, not geostationary or beyond orbit.

Short of preventing large asteroid collisions there just aren't any compelling reasons to go out into space in the 21st century, and probably not in the 22nd century either. And large asteroid collisions are sporadic, not guaranteed.

Contour Crafting

One of the fulcrum points of society is Contour Crafting technology. What's the guy done in the past 5 years to develop this technology? My guess is absolutely nothing. This technology could be out there even without the integrated utilities he was going on about, but no. Apparently it's much better to keep it under wraps so nobody hears about it. What the fuck? It's not like he lacks money or interest, at least two different companies have worked with him.

This tech is much too important to the entire planet to leave it in the hands of one guy. If he doesn't come out with it then fuck him. If you know anyone with an aptitude or enthusiasm for mechanical engineering, then you might mention this to them. Once the tech is developed, it would be a very simple matter to sell it to the Chinese who don't give a flying fuck about patents or intellectual property.

All this planet needs is for one or two people to work on this and develop the technology.

It'd Take A Dictator To Fix The USA

I think I could fix the USA if I were POTUS and were allowed to order just 10,000 to 20,000 assassinations. Following is a fairly comprehensive list of what needs to be done. I came up with 84 items off the top of my head:

1. get rid of all prestige military projects like F22 "raptors", aircraft carriers, destroyers and stealth bombers
2. pull out of military commitments
3. get rid of all energy subsidies
4. all agricultural production subsidies
5. ethanol and "renewables" mandates
6. make energy subsidies illegal
7. order all states to claw back their past subsidies
8. put a moratorium on highway construction
9. switch all transportation funding to trains
10. fund a vast high speed train network using sovereign debt
11. fund city-owned fiber-optic networks
12. claw back the billions given to telcos for this purpose which they never used
13. condemn, dismantle and return to greenfield status any shrinking cities like Detroit
14. reduce and repeal the laws underpinning the nuclear regulatory commission
15. use sovereign debt to fund a fleet of nuclear power plants
16. get rid of the federal reserve assholes
17. get rid of the interest on federal reserve held money, holy fuck that's despicable
18. claw back all money spent on the finance industry
19. destroy the big American "banks", not just "let" them fail
20. guarantee small retail banks
21. use sovereign debt for building coal to liquids and gas to liquids plants
22. put a moratorium on ALL greenfield private property construction
23. kill speculation on land by a land value tax
24. kill currency speculation by a currency exchange tax
25. kill wall street by making publicly traded corporations illegal
26. kill the finance industry by nationalizing the deed lookup company and making illegal all the shenanigans
27. encourage cooperatives and credit unions
28. force aristos' vehicles, the "civil society" to disclose at least 95% of their fundings' sources
29. put in a punitive tax rate
30. put in a punitive inheritance tax
31. repeal tax-free status for charities, trusts and religions
32. cooperate on money laundering and tax havens
33. end the war on drugs, institute sin taxes for marijuana, heroin, cocaine and ecstasy
34. recognize marijuana and ecstasy as first-line medical drugs for persistent nausea and PTSD
35. institute wholesale taxes, repeal sales taxes
36. keep services taxes
37. end all paroles - commute all past sentences accordingly
38. end all prison labour
39. end copyright
40. end patent law
41. pardon any offenders of copyright and patent law
42. institute clawbacks for copyright violation verdicts in favour of media companies
43. move to a scandinavian model for prisons
44. deprivatize prisons
45. repeal all surveillance
46. institute transparent government
47. fund a negative income tax with a livable floor
48. end the welfare bureaucracy
49. institute and fund parenting places to teach best practices from pregnancy on up
50. criminalize the beating of children, with no exceptions or allowable defense
51. depoliticize FEMA
52. refloat New Orleans by injecting seawater into the petrol reservoir underneath the city, charge the oil companies that have emptied it sinking the city
53. end all bioweapons research
54. dismantle the CIA
55. declassify and release all its files
56. repeal the national secrets act 
57. sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
58. turn over highest jurisdiction to European Court of Human Rights
59. submit to the International Court of Justice
60. unilaterally relinquish the USA's seat on the UN Security Council
61. submit to the International Criminal Court
62. consent to the judgement against the USA in favour of Nicaragua in the International Criminal Court, pay reparations for waging war without ever declaring it
63. turn over all present and previous US state officials and members of the CIA who have international warrants pending for war crimes and crimes against humanity
64. cut off all aid to Israel, embargo it
65. condemn its Apartheidal national fascist regime
66. normalize relations with Cuba
67. invite Cuban doctors to teach and practice preventive medicine
68. deprivatize all emergency services like ambulances
69. fund universal single payer health care
70. buy and order a comprehensive survey of the effectiveness of all medical treatments and practices
71. make second best more expensive practices illegal
72. break the balls of pharma, use generics wherever possible
73. make it a criminal act to glorify psychopaths or narcissists
74. institute and fund universal mandatory HIV testing, make sure non-disclosure of status to sex partners counts as attempted murder
75. institute mandatory testing for psychopathy for anyone in a position of authority, make them pariahs on failure
76. pull out of ITER
77. end NASA's manned space programs, dismantle the space shuttles, fire NASA's top directors
78. turn over the International Space Station to the Europeans and Russians
79. permit the leasing of nuclear explosives for the purpose of space launch from remote regions
80. make the possession, production, importation and exportation of any gun shorter than the longest hunting rifle everywhere illegal and revoke all licenses
81. give police the power to make random searches for guns with only the possibility of arresting for gun, ammunition and explosive-related offenses on such a search (not even finding a dead body would count)
82. dismantle SWAT teams, drug units, and other ineffective specialized units (homicide?) everywhere
83. outlaw fascist parties and cults, have the FBI crack down on them
84. condemn waving of the flag as fascist
85. institute comparative religion classes in all schools
86. institute comparative history classes in all schools (Russian vs German vs American history in particular)
87. publicize the truth about the Russians beating the Nazis, not the Americans
88. cap the maximum size of schools at 200 students, make hall passes and other totalitarian practices illegal

Alternatively, I could institute sortition and let all of the above follow as a natural consequence. Of course, this gradual way would result in a greater total number of deaths since the status quo is quite deadly. 

But even without any of the above, I honestly think the world would be a better place if I got the option of assassinating all:

1. American state and federal congressmen, senators, and judges
2. preachers and televangelists
3. economists everywhere
   
4. American CEOs and board members
   
5. corporate lawyers
6. bankers at any of the big fake-banks
   
7. prison guards
8. air force pilots
9. celebrity journalists and media owners
10. directors of wealthy American charities or other "civil society" organization

I would also add American cops, criminologists, doctors and all anthropologists to the list, but those are less clear cut so there's much less of a benefit to humanity from killing them.

Note that I would not NEED to assassinate every single one of them. Just start with killing 100-100-100 congressmen, preachers, and economists on the first day, then kill the most prominent and annoying 20-10-10 each and every day. That's a solid year of death, more than long enough for absolute terror to settle like a fog on those professions and for their evil practitioners to bug out like the rats they are.

So you see, yes I really could fix the USA if I was POTUS and could arrange the assassinations of 20,000 people with impunity. Whether the USA could survive the blowback and hysterical panic of my fixing it is a totally separate question. And one I haven't got an answer to.

There is an awful lot of schadenfreude stored up in ordinary Americans so I think they would go for it. I think China would love it and the Saudis would hate it. Saudi Arabia would no doubt sponsor more terrorists to attack the USA in retaliation.

Billionaires would try to flee of course but I could always have them assassinated, or even make an example of the first twenty. By which I mean, wait until at least twenty leave then have them all assassinated at once to make sure a clear message is sent.

GDP projections: mindlessly drawing lines on a chart

In Brian Wang's latest mindless China boosting he claims that China's economic growth will continue at high tempo for at least another two decades. He doesn't base this claim, a claim on which all his projections depend, on any facts, he just assumes it to be true.

In fact, he's made clear in a previous post on the topic that he thinks losing 2 percentage points of growth over the coming decades is a worst-case scenario which he can't even imagine any reason for. This is because he is a fucking retard.

How Brian Wang Thinks (and I use the term loosely)

Nevermind that he misuses the word 'synthesis' to mean 'logical deduction' and 'collating of disparate facts', neither of which has anything at all to do with anything done by an artist, designer or philosopher.

I find that incredibly offensive but it's relevant here because it tells us where and how he got his notions from. He got them from economists, those notorious line drawers who understand fuck-all about reality, nothing about science, and less than nothing about any real-world economies.

For fuck's sake, economists think money and banking are what make up economies. And they dismiss the real-world economic behaviour of real human beings as "irrational" and "not economics". Their pretentious "economic models" are just some kludged up math equations stolen from 18th century thermodynamics. Not modern thermodynamics but strictly 18th century notions of thermodynamics which were quickly proven very wrong.

What Brian Wang's done is poll what economists (those empty-headed morons) say about China's economy and then copied their technique of mindlessly drawing lines (well "curves" because that way you can be more pretentious and mathemagical) on a graph. I'll prove it.

China's Demographics

China's GDP growth in the last 35 years has depended on uneducated peasants migrating to cities to become factory workers. This is called Urbanization. In the last 35 years, China's urban population has risen from roughly 160 million to 600 million. I say roughly since China is notorious for lying about these statistics much the way every Western government lies about unemployment figures.

So (600-160)/160 = 2.75. Over a period of 35 years, China's economy has more than doubled just from Urbanization alone. In fact, since 1.029^35 = 2.71, over 2.9 percentage points of China's economic growth over that 35 year period is attributable to urbanization alone. Assuming the uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy at all. A ridiculous assumption but hardly unprecedented in economic circles.

Is Urbanization in China going to continue? Yes but at a much reduced rate. In the last 35 years, China's urban population nearly tripled. In the next 20 years it's projected (lines have been drawn on a graph) to increase by 50%. That's 1.02^20 = 1.485. So that's 1.029-1.020 = 0.9 percentage points knocked out right there.

If you do away with the ridiculous assumption that uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy, things don't look so bad. But you still have to account for the fact that China's population increased by more than half in the past 35 years. Those uneducated peasants have to eat you know. And China's population is only projected to increase by 10% before it peaks within 20 years. Since 1.012^35 = 1.518 and 1.005^20 = 1.105, that's 0.7 percentage points knocked out right there.

Now, I'm not going to add 0.9 and 0.7 together to get 1.6, that would be double counting. But it's obvious China will lose at least 1 percentage point from the greatly reduced population and urban worker growth rates. That's in the very best case scenario. As I said before, Brian Wang thinks this is a worst-case scenario. His worst-case scenario takes into account only demographic change and nothing else.

Beyond Demographics - now we're talking real economics

Because of course, projections of China's economic future get worse the more factors you take into account. Back in 1981, China implemented this thing called the Responsibility System which means that farmers and company managers were responsible for losses and profits of their production. As expected, this provided a massive economic boost. Is this something China is likely to be able to repeat? No it is not. It's something China will never be able to repeat.

(Except by moving to an anti-authoritarian coop workplace system, but that would cause China's authoritarian regime some rather large political problems.)

It gets worse. Because you see, for the last 10 years China has been busily assimilating any and all high technology in the world, including but not limited to semiconductors, high speed trains, nuclear power plants, supercritical coal power plants, rocketry, automobile construction, marine ship construction. In fact, China is considering building nuclear container ships and is on the verge of becoming independent in nuclear power plants. Not bad for a country that still had a steam locomotive in regular service less than 5 years ago.

Can China reproduce its past assimilation of new technologies by copying starship Jumpspace engines and asteroid mining technology from the Centauri and Vorlon empires? No because they are fucking fictional. The best that China can hope for is to roll out the technology it's already acquired more widely. By say replacing inefficient coal power plants with more efficient ones. Oh right, it's already been doing that for the last 10 years. And yes, it will keep doing that ... with progressively smaller returns on investment.

And then it gets much worse. You see, there is another country that pursued the same export-oriented labour-intensive then shift to high-tech long-term economic strategy that China is now pursuing. It's not like China invented the idea after all. It's a tried and true pattern. Well, that country is South Korea. As it happens, South Korea never managed to achieve the phenomenal growth rates China did and its long-term average in its best growth phase was at least 3 percentage points lower than China's.

Does that mean China has got some kind of special magic going? No, because I'm not the kind of dumbass that believes in magic. Nor am I a racist that believes, as Wang certainly does, that Chinese are naturally superior.

What it means is that China has been using its raw economic clout to ... um 'acquire' high technology from every other country in the world. Something South Korea never managed. Not for free anyways - South Korea paid for the technology it acquired. China just demands it as a cost of doing business. But as already noted, there isn't anymore technology left for China to hustle from other countries. It's already got everything, including things like maglev that nobody else is using.

The only other possible explanations are 1) China's economic growth going in had been suppressed in a way South Korea's hadn't been (unlikely), 2) China went into its growth phase with more educated and healthier people (it did thanks to starting growth 20 years late), 3) having a communist government really does help (yes but not when the capitalists are playing smart industrialist), 4) China is fudging its economic figures. Personally, I'm banking on #2 and #0 (health and technology) but what's interesting is that none of the explanations for higher-than-south-korea growth rates are sustainable. In fact, health-wise China isn't doing too well lately compared to South Korea.

Even the very worst of economists (supposedly) understand the difference between intensive economic growth and extensive economic growth. China is currently in an extensive economic growth phase where it's putting already-existing (labour) resources to work. And long, long before it hits Western levels of per-capita GDP it will have moved to an intensive economic growth phase. By which I mean that its economic growth will crash.

South Korea

I want to finish this by getting back to South Korea, especially the part where I said "and then it gets much worse". South Korea isn't a line on a graph that exists only in some moron's imagination. It's a real country with a real (industrial) economy - not a fictional economy like the USA's, Ireland's, Iceland's or China's recent property bubbles. And South Korea is roughly 20 years ahead of China so what's happened in the last 20 years to South Korea is rather instructive to anyone who wants to predict China's future.

Now, South Korea's highest growth phase occurred in the 60s and 70s, back when the world economy was still booming and not in chronic depression since the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl and Gorbachev (all horrible leaders in their own unique ways). What happened to South Korea in the 2000s doesn't make things look very promising. Worse yet, South Korea is extremely urbanized, so it's not going to grow that way anymore. I suppose that's good news for China since it's going to be urbanizing well into the latter half of this century. But really it just means that China is backwards and it's going to be dealing with uneducated peasants that much longer.

There is something incredibly fishy in China's economic figures. It doesn't make any sense at all that China could sustain a higher economic growth rate than South Korea's while ending up with a poorer real-world outcome. China was about 20 years behind South Korea when they began their respective economic growth phases, and it remains more than 20 years behind South Korea today. And this despite having better demographics, better health and better access to technology. It's probably due to China's bloated foreign-exchange reserves which are 2.5 times larger than South Korea's on a GDP per capita basis. Clearly China's government has fucked over its own citizens and the world in order to acquire global financial power.

And with that last insight, maybe China can afford to prop up its economic growth rates. Assuming it's willing to lose most of its financial power.

Fusion Will NEVER Be Viable

I've never been interested in fusion because I knew it wouldn't be viable for at least 50 years. Why bother worrying or hyping about it when it's crap? Well, I just did a spot of research into it and what I've found is simply amazing.

The main line of research is crap because the fuel they need to use (tritium) would cost millions per kilogram. This compares extremely poorly to uranium which can be had for less than 100$ per kg. Even extracting uranium from seawater costs less than 1000$ per kilogram.

Note that there isn't much conversion needed since all proposed fusion processes produce energy per kilogram of fuel at rates roughly equivalent to fission of uranium.

Let's not forget the fact that D-T fusion produces 30 times (*) the amount of neutron radiation per kilogram as uranium fission. Neutron radiation is the kind that causes things to become radioactive. I hope you love nuclear waste because D-T fusion makes fission look waste-free.

The yo-yos who want to go to the moon to mine Helium-3 say crap like "that 25-tonne load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per tonne". Of course, this is a blatant lie. Helium-3 isn't worth $3 billion per tonne, it costs $3 billion per tonne. What it's actually worth if you're using it as fuel in a fusion power plant is less than $50,000 per tonne, or 60,000 times less than they're claiming.

This doesn't mean that helium-3 mining can't happen economically. It just can't happen with chemical rockets. You need nuclear (fission) rockets to get to the moon and mine that helium-3 economically. And I'm really assuming here that it'll be economical, but if you're going to be using nuclear fission rockets, if nuclear fission has gained that much political and social respectability, then why bother with a fusion reactor at all?

Why harness the power of a twinkling little star when you can harness the power of a supernova? That's where all Uranium comes from, from the r-process running up the neutron drip line, from the blazing heart of an exploding stellar super-giant. The hype around fusion defies comprehension even as mindless sun worship. Don't people realize our sun is nothing, nothing, compared to something that outshines a galaxy. It's like wishing to cuddle up to a candle when you have a roaring bonfire next to you.

But that's not where the fun ends with fusion research. You see, there's an "alternative" line of research which advertises being able to use everyday normal crap like Borax (boron) and that its reactors will be so cheap they could be built in someone's garage ....

Well problem is they can only do that if the fuel is totally pure. Boron must be purified from 80% to >99.7%, otherwise those dippy little reactors built in people's garages will kill everybody near them. The best part is that even though Borax costs $2 per kilo, pure boron costs around $5000-10,000 per kilogram depending on its purity. And you want to use that for fuel? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Don't expect any economies of scale either since industry is already making the stuff in massive quantities.

But the fun doesn't end there. You see, pure boron in fusion reactors wouldn't cut it. No siree, you need pure boron-11. Because if you shoved any boron-10 (which is 20% of natural boron) into your garage-built fusion reactor, it would ... kill everyone around it. What you really want is pure boron-11 and as it happens we do have plenty of boron-11 around since boron-10 is used as a neutron radiation absorbent by ... the nuclear fission industry.

So you see, it's beautiful. It really is. If you try to build fusion reactors to replace fission reactors then those fusion reactors won't have any fuel. The only way we'd ever have little fusion reactors in people's garages is if we have giant fission plants in every city.

*: deuterium (2 nucleons) + tritium (3 nucleons) -> helium-4 (4 nucleons) + 1 neutron for 20% of mass. In comparison, uranium (235 nucleons) + neutron -> a smorgasbord of stuff + 2.5 neutrons on average, for a net production of 1.5 neutrons (0.6% of mass) on average.

The British

This is me so you know not to expect your everyday rant. But ever wonder how the British like to proclaim the superiority of their nation? That's so ludicrous. And at the same time, they whine that the only villains it's okay to bash on in Hollywood are English. Well, let's examine that.

The British are psychopaths. Literally, their national identity is the psychopath, exactly like the American national identity is the narcissist. They plundered and slaughtered their way around the world for centuries and are still proud of it. They exterminated whole nations of natives and they've oh so conveniently forgotten. They feel no guilt at all for anything they've done. Hell, even the Americans feel guilty about exterminating the Amerinds. So as fucked up, vile and evil as the Americans are, they're actually an improvement over the British!

And let's look at their filthy right-liberal / capitalist ideology. A dysfunctional psychopathic ideology that promotes traders and masters over people who produce anything and human beings. You'd think that industrial production would matter most in an economy since it's one of two key defining concepts of 'economy' (the other being consumption) but no. And they have the gall to claim they're a democracy. No wonder their country's so fucked up. No wonder all Anglophone countries are way more fucked up than even moderately advanced European countries like France. Britain, Australia (that bumfuck colony), Canada (Stephen Harper's fascists?) and of course Crazyland (aka America) itself.

But hold on, there's more. You see, there's the question of why they're so fucked up. A lesser person would leave it at their being fucked up, claim it's their "national identity" or whatever. Bollocks. Let's turn out heads to deMause's theory of childrearing modes. These modes are: Infanticidal, Abandoning, Ambivalent, Intrusive, Socializing, Helping. For some calibration, Canada is mainly in the Socializing mode. America is half and half stuck in the Intrusive and Socializing mode. Nazi Germany was in the very early Intrusive mode where they ruthlessly beat their children into blind obedience to parents. And then in the 1960s, Germany underwent a wondrous metamorphosis, going from early 4th to late 5th socializing. No wonder I love Germans. They fucking EVOLVED. In a single damned generation. They evolved more in 20 years than America evolved in 200 years.

So where does Britain fit into all this? I'm so glad you asked! Well let's take a look at some quintessential British children's literature you may be familiar with. In Harry Potter, the constant running theme is that the children are, yes abused but forget that for a moment, supposed to be exactly like their parents, follow in their footsteps and all that rot. In the Weasley's case, they're dominated by their verbally abusive mother. You know, they're chattel to their parents. Parental love is conditional on the children being Just Like Them.

The other example is Doctor Who, specifically Season 2 where Rose is sent away. The Doctor goes to all the trouble of reuniting Rose's family so he can fob her off on them. Touching eh? That season was full of the nauseating 'family matters more than anything' theme. But it's not just that. At the beginning of the two-parter that ends with Rose unwillingly stranded with her family, her mother Jackie complains about her daughter's travels. And her complaint isn't that they're unsafe but that her daughter will grow apart, become an alien in mentality, even if remaining homo sapiens in biology. Jackie Disapproves because her daughter's going to be Different from her. So let's strand Rose in an alternate universe without a time machine, problem solved!

Yeah you guessed it, well assuming you know the childrearing modes well enough, Britain is stuck squarely in the 4th childrearing mode where they beat children to Make Them Obey. The UK under Tony Blair had more than a hundred human rights condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights. Tony Blair actually formally defended child abuse to the European Court of Human Rights! What breathtaking evil. It's like fundie camps in the USA or even "gay therapy". Point is, the British consider their children to be their chattel property, theirs to use and abuse. And it's not likely to change so long as the British see themselves as #1. America stagnated for 200 years, Africa has stagnated in the infanticidal / abandoning / ambivalent modes for millenia. What Britain really needs is to be conquered. I'd almost wish the Germans did it except I love the Germans too much to put them through that. Think a little about how the USA imported slavery from black Africa and Nazis from post-War Germany and you'll see what I mean.

The best part is that the British think they're superior to the French, right? Oh man. Yeah right. Actually, I have precious little data on which to nail French parenting. What I know of it's pretty damned harsh. Verbal abuse, if not physical. Unreasonable expectations of children. But then I remembered the wonderful children's series Once Upon A Time on which I grew up. It taught a whole generation about human history, human biology, the age of exploration, age of invention, and more. And it ended on an odd note, a science-fiction future that was pure propaganda and social engineering. And that's important because the French really accept social engineering. They accept the needs of society (as exemplified by the State, and specifically Engineers) over the individual. And all of that verbal abuse and unreasonable expectations of children is aimed at meeting the needs of society, which puts the French squarely in the 5th Socializing mode of childrearing. And it makes sense, I'd just forgotten how harsh Benjamin Spock's dictates really were.

So yeah, Germany is late 5th, France is early 5th, and Britain is mmm let's call it late 4th. Bottom of the pack all the way baby! I mean hell, even the Chinese have managed 4th mode, and a couple centuries ago they were infanticidal. Gotta love those Chinese, they're evolving.

There Is No New Internet Economy

I was reflecting on an earlier blog post about Complex Systems where I point out that theoretically there are only information, physical, economic & political systems and nothing else. There are some subtleties involved in this since very small primitive economies look like political systems more than anything else. After you realize that resource acquisition isn't such a hardship in primitive people's daily lives, and that intangible characteristics (ie, status) play a heavy role in these systems, then it makes more sense that they are political rather than economic. And artificial systems like resource distribution in computers could go either way, depending on how they're designed. But that's not what I want to get into.

What I want to get into is all the people who've been talking about the New Economy. You know, with the internet and the infinite reproducibility of information. People who've been trying to answer 'once you take out the cost of reproduction as a dominant element of the system, what's left?'. Clay Shirky has written about it on his site. Michael Goldhaber has written about The Attention Economy on First Monday. And I even recall an article using Hollywood as an analogy for the "new economy". It's all well and good. Hell until now I considered these papers to be Very Insightful. Only it turns out they're not very insightful at all. There never was a new economy and there never will be. What's called the "new economy" is an old thing called politics. Let's examine that for a minute.

The key concepts of the "attention economy" are attention, credit, fame and celebrity. Certainly politics has its own key concepts; loyalty, betrayal, conflict and factions come to mind. And you might think those are separate but wait for it. You see, the key concepts of economics are production, consumption, cost, price and trade. What do they have to do with politics? Nothing, that's what. Whereas, if you bother to think about it, the key concepts of the "attention economy" are the underpinnings of political power. If you have people's attention then you can help redirect that attention to something else, including something you want them to do. And making people do things is politics. Credit, fame and celebrity all further one's political power.

So what about loyalty, betrayal and conflict? What do they have to do with attention, with the so-called "attention economy"? Well, 'attention economy == politics' wouldn't be a very good insight if we didn't learn something new from it. And after careful thought, loyalty and betrayal are merely higher order effects. They're phenomena that appear when systems of attention are high valued and tightly bound together. Eric Raymond's betrayal of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation didn't involve money or laws or anything else of the kind. It involved pure attention. Just a very high-volume and high-grade form of attention since Unix programmers were showing loyalty by heralding Stallman as the messiah. Loyalty then is nothing but a form of highly consistent, high grade, long term attention. Betrayal is the hijacking or redirection of loyalty. It's attention all the way down.

There never was any new economy and never will be. Only a degraded form of politics that must inevitably bloom into its full form.

As a final note, I will say that the insight that an economy is about scarcity is not nearly so interesting once you realize it's implied by metacircularity. A metacircular system is one that's got a concept of self, an idea of what it values and of how it wants to be. This inevitably creates optimization and prioritization, what are called economics and politics. Also, the question of 'what do you want to do and be when you can do and be anything?' comes out of this naturally. It becomes an obvious extreme to the evolution of such systems - a trivial insight, not an important one. All this can be derived from metacircularity, a far more important phenomenon than mere politics or economics.

Metacircularity, especially consciousness, is a topic I've been meaning to write on for a while.

Modern Scholasticism: An Intro to the Fake Sciences, part 1

What are the sciences? A bunch of people come together, arguing about observations and argue back and forth between each other until they arrive at a consensus. Not the truth, merely a consensus.

There's a word for that, 'dialectics'. And that word has some really bad connotations to it. After all, the "learned" people in medieval times who argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin were engaging in dialectic. They were removed from reality of course and the word for that is 'scholasticism'.

So what's the problem with dialectic? Why is it that people go off the rails into scholasticism? Why is it that science is supposedly about "prediction" instead of merely explanation? Well, the weak point in the whole process is that it's made up of human beings and if you know anything of psychology it's that people lie. And not just to each other, but to themselves. This is more than amply aided by the fact that most people aren't capable of formal logic or judgement.

Psychology is not a science but merely a proto-science (and we'll get back to that) but if there's any true fact in psychology, anything that's been empirically determined beyond the shadow of any possible doubt (reasonable or unreasonable), it's that people don't care about the truth. And if there's a second true fact in psychology it's that people care about power, and usually about money.

So we have here an obvious and general mechanism for the corruption of the so-called sciences. Their perversion into fake sciences. This happened with theology since the Roman Catholic Church Hierarchy ordered from above that their god exists and that angels and the heavens did as well. Any theologian that turned atheist was drummed out of the ranks. Denied power and money and all livelihood. This explains medieval scholasticism very well. Now we're just left with the modern kinds.

Modern Scholasticism

You may be wondering what vile perversions of science and logic and truthfulness exist today that I could be referring to. Well, the three that immediately leap to mind are criminology, economics and climatology. I'm leaving pharmacology and medicine for later since these are practical arts more than sciences. Once the case of the fake sciences is dealt with, it will be obvious why the same vile corruption exists in these arts.

The Fake Sciences

Let's start with criminologists.

The first thing to be known about criminologists is that they're not paid to "find criminals" or even "convict the guilty" or any such lying claptrap. They're paid to convict people. Period. They're not paid to protect the innocent or help them in their own defense. They're paid to put people in jail, no matter what.

Is it any wonder then that with a single universal force pushing in a predetermined direction that all the corruption would align in the same overall direction? Is it any wonder that the corruption would accumulate over time until the whole field bears no resemblance to reality?

Anyone who bothers to look will see how criminologists lie over and over again on the witness stand. How they misrepresent the evidence they gather. They willfully and systematically misinterpret it to put defendants in the worst possible light. Especially the supposed "gold standard" of DNA evidence.

As an easy example, the FBI's DNA database was trawled by one of these quacks in order to "prove" that DNA samples are unique. The problem with that is that the database was built on the assumption that DNA samples are unique. Any duplicates that existed were erased before the lying quack went to "measure" the number of duplicates.

These kinds of "proofs" are fairly common in science. It happened in quantum physics even. But when the field isn't irremediably corrupt, someone with some kind of interest in the truth, undistorted by their interest in power and money, raises their voice to protest. Needless to say, any serious protest of the foundations of a fake science are impossible. Their job is at stake, and the jobs of all their friends and colleagues!

We're not even going to examine the case of the American criminologist whose testimony put thousands of people behind bars. Despite the fact that he falsified evidence and used DNA samples less than half as long as anyone else did. I'll just note here that using DNA half the length multiplies the error rate by many orders of magnitude.

Finally, shows like CSI with their science-fiction toys only put people in awe of these quacks, giving them more power and more freedom from external criticism. Of course, that is the whole purpose of shows like CSI (and COPS) in the most brainwashed society in human history - Crazyland.

Fake Economics

Just like criminologists are paid to convict innocent people, so too economists are paid to impoverish poor people. No matter what. Unless we're talking about Marixist / Maoist economists.

Yeah so we're not going to be talking much about Communist economists because they're pretty weird. For one thing, they don't indoctrinate their students in the "theory" that people are irredeemably evil and selfish (so-called Microeconomics 101). Of course, economists don't call it that. Much like Ayn Rand and the Satanic movement she inspired (Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible acknowledges her), they consider evil to be "rational" and that's exactly what they call it.

I'm just gonna stick to pointing out that the selfishness of university students as they go through their programs can be and has been measured empirically. Economics is the only field where students become more evil as they progress. The degradation into evil has even been measured at the course level and it has been determined that communist economists DO NOT cause their students to become more evil. But of course, capitalist economists DO. This is just one of those empirical facts.

Capitalist economists in capitalist countries are paid precisely in order to support the rich. To support the propertarian and "free-market" (ie, freedom for everyone according to how much wealth they have) principles which support the rich. That is the source of the corruption right there. Now for the shape of that corruption, so it can be more easily seen that economics is a fake science.

Economists fall into two camps, fake economists and real economists. The latter are a minority. Synonyms for fake include market, analytic, Austrian, Chicago, mainstream, and financial. Synonyms for real include industrial, institutional, developmental, behavioural. From the names alone, it's obvious that only the real economists study the economy. The closest fake economists get to studying the economy is studying money (ie, finance). And finance, as anyone who's paid attention in the last 10 years, is not the economy. Needless to say, the chowderheads on TV aren't even fake economists.

Furthermore, consider the fact that math is the unifying foundation of the exact sciences. Consider that for a minute. Seriously. So if math is so important to the exact sciences, if it's the One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, then what fills the same role for the inexact sciences? Well that's very easy when you recall that another name for the inexact sciences is the human sciences. Then it becomes obvious that psychology is the unifying foundation of the human sciences. And psychology is a proto-science! That's why all the inexact sciences are so weak and prone to rampant corruption! How can you build a castle on a foundation of quicksand?

But let's get back to the point here, which is economics. Does economics, does fake economics use psychology? No it does not. In fact, it violates it. It assumes as axiomatic that people are evil, selfish, and egotistical. It also assumes that they are all-knowing and perfectly logical. All of these things are blatantly false. In fact, fake economics doesn't even TRY to use psychology. No, the fact that fake economists are so irredeemably corrupt means they're not interested in the truth. They're only interested in power and money. And trying to base themselves on a proto-science like psychology doesn't give them enough prestige or authority, doesn't give them any power and money. It would merely be the truth after all.

No, fake economists, being the fake scientists they are, pretend to base themselves on "mathematics". Even though it's 18th century equations from thermodynamics which have been rejected by physicists as incorrectly describing heat flows. But hey, let's pretend that money is heat, and let's use equations the physicists have rejected and we'll be able to claim we're all "mathematical", yea? POWER, MONEY!!

No, only real economists use psychology. In fact, the subfield of economics that studies the application of psychology to economics is called "behaviour economics". Because, and you might have guessed that, it studies how real human beings actually behave when making economic decisions. Needless to say, behaviour economics, and the other subfields that make up real economics, aren't very well regarded by economists at large. Economists are after all, almost without exception, fake economists.

Next, part 2

Differences in National Attitudes Towards Rail

Swiss:
I want a rail tunnel. no, you heard me right the first time! I WANT A RAIL TUNNEL. ummm, I want ... two rail tunnels? yeah, yeah I want two rail tunnels!
Loetschberg base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, oops, well that turned out to be quite expensive, we'll need to save some money for the next tunnel.
Gotthard base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, no wait, make it better yeah. sweeet!
So when's the next one? We have to start planning RIGHT AWAY!

Austrians:
Brenner base tunnel in the Austrian-Italian alps: hold on a minute, I don't want to pay for this, YOU pay, fuck do I have to? well I suppose, maybe I will, man this thing is never gonna pay for itself, well I suppose we can so long as this is gonna be CHEAP. oh man where are we gonna get the money for it?

I suspect the Austrians only did it because the Swiss were making them look bad. The lousy cheapskates.

On the Swiss side, I have never seen any indication, or any concern whatsoever, that the duplicate Loetschberg and Gotthardt base tunnels are going to be uneconomical. It's just kind of assumed that they will be economical. Money just isn't a concern, these things will pay for themselves many times over in the next century or two.

The same thing can't be said about the Austrians. All I find is road companies and trucking companies tearing it down, and politicians finding one excuse or another to not do it, or having exceedingly delusional ideas about how little it's going to cost, or how much others are going to pay for it.

I guess that's the difference between direct democracy and totalitarian capitalism.

Oh and in case you're interested,

France:
I am BUSY. Can't you see I'm building rail lines over here? Don't talk to me of tunnels, I don't like tunnels. And I'm busy. Just go away. Yes, yes, come back in 20 years.

America:
What is rail?

California:
Vy rail? Ve haf prisons to build! Ve need money for prisons!