Boeing spent tens of billions of dollars over years and years buying up their own stock. They refused to invest in new designs, they refused to invest in their workers, they refused to invest in their process, their tooling, their research and development, and instead played financial games designed to boost their stock price while ignoring the fundamentals of their business. This is what happens when MBA’s take over a company, and Boeing has become a shining example of what not to do with a major company if you care about it surviving, growing, and prospering over the long run.

If, however, your goal is to “bust out” the company and snap up the wealth while destroying it, then Boeing is a shining example of exactly what to do and how to do it. Who knew “Mafia 101” would become a major part of the MBA curriculum? Then again, with hypercapitalism and all, maybe Mafia 101 is the new and improved ultimate goal. 

> “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” – Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”_

Again, it’s the idea that a corporation is responsible to make as much money for its shareholders as possible. The issue is with timeline. As much money as possible in the next six months, or as much money as possible in the next six years, or to generate as much value as possible in the next sixty years.

Henry Ford thought in terms of decades. The current crop of business people appear to be crooks in suit, devoid of both patriotism and common decency. When these are the values one promolgates in one’s cinema, in one’s press and in one’s universities, these are the values one will see both among bootblacks and among one’s elite.

Financialisation is the gutting of an economy. Each agent of financialisation who takes an unearned piece of the pie leaves less on the plate for those who do contribute to society, with their services, their labour or their goods.

In the meantime, battery powered cars require previously unseen amounts of nickel and lithium for their batteries. This means the reserves of nickel and lithium must be urgently extracted from the earth. Even if they are under nature reserves, or if a previously uncontacted tribe (there’s few of those left) named the “People of the Forest” live in these areas.

[fvplayer id=”51″]

Petapixel notes:

The tribe’s home Halmahera island happens to sit on one of the world’s largest reserves of nickel. In recent years, the demand for nickel has skyrocketed due to its use in electric car batteries, bringing this once-quiet island to the attention of international mining corporations.

“It’s a deep irony that these people literally call themselves Hongana Manyawa — ‘People of the Forest’ — and yet they’re the ones being destroyed in the name of the green transition,” Russell tells the publication.

It’s hard to add much to the irony here. It feels like we’ve been transported to a Jonathan Swift essay, where we must give up privacy, nature, civility, family in the quest for a green sustainable world full of joyous gay couples peacefully committing war crimes.

Gradually transgender men win all the women’s athletic medals and break and hold all the women’s sports records.

What ever happened to equal rights and tolerance? Not to mention the [Nuremberg Principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_principles.

Image Halmahera island by Eustaquio Santimano via Wikipedia. CC license. The second image above is not a joke or photoshop. It’s a real image taken by Yoav Atzmuni of himself 12 November 2023 during the Israeli invasion. Atzmuni is a member of a tank brigade partially responsible for the ruins behind him.

Musk’s position is

“How am I in this war? Musk asked,” according to Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

In February, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, told reporters something very similar.

“We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom,” she said. “It was never intended to be weaponized, but the Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement.”

No kidding. The Russians have quietly suggested that Starlink and other low-orbit satellites could be disabled en masse by blowing up a few and letting the debris take out the rest.

Bezos and the US security establishment have other ideas, using Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights as their spokesman:

“You would expect people with this kind of corporate power to operate from self interest or to make mistakes. But you would not expect someone who provides an ally with crucial technology and then snatches it back when they are using it in the middle of a war. Whatever responsible corporate behavior is, that’s not it.”

Further menace ensues:

But the government is not helpless and has ways to rein companies in: “You can address a lot of those concerns through contracting mechanism or other legal agreements,” [says Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation]

What’s extraordinary is that Musk appears to be one of the few technology golden geese that the USA has left (Apple Computers would be one).

That dominant position didn’t come easy. SpaceX was initially locked out of Pentagon launch contracts and had to sue the Air Force to be allowed to compete. It also fought to earn NASA as a customer, and now it is one of the space agency’s most reliable partners….

“You can always go faster than you think you can. Hands down,” Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, said during a recent conference presentation. “There’s always time to gain. There’s always efficiencies to be brought. You think you went fast enough? … You can go faster. Every time my team is like, ‘Dude, we can’t go faster.’ You’re like, ‘Yes, you can.’ Move the goal posts. You’ll be surprised what happens when you challenge people.”

SpaceX has also thrived operating under what are known as fixed-priced contracts, where the contractor must eat any cost overruns. Traditionally, big Pentagon contracts operated under “cost-plus” contracts, allowing companies to be reimbursed if they went over their bid. That, critics have argued, has stifled innovation and allowed companies to move slowly.

Musk’s companies are the only ones the US government can rely on to take astronauts to space, are the only ones willing to sign up for fixed-price contracts. Now the US government turns to crush Musk for insisting on some kind of freedom of speech on X/Twitter and for refusing to be party to a losing war which may result in nuclear annihilation.

A Russian tank is on the move — changing direction and wheeling around. The men inside this room are trying to destroy it. Their constant banter — about girls and weapons — doesn’t seem to affect the focus with which they pursue the tank. One man shouts into the radio; Bereza growls into his phone…

A screen flashes with light. Then billowing smoke. The men whoop and cheer. I have just seen a successful strike. Dima grins. The atmosphere is electric but also strangely banal. The exclusively male cohort, the puerile jokes, the screens, the repeated invocation to “Get Ready!”. It’s like they are all playing a video game.

Great – war has become a video game for frat boys in cellars. Historically, the introduction of the crossbow had a similar effect on armoured knights and the age of chivalry. If there is a new way to kill with no risk to self, humans leap on it.

But we are very early in the drone wars. What medium-term consequences will drones have on the evolution of warfare?

In comments to The Death Games Of Ukraine, Elooie notes:

I’ve seen Google’s Deepmind AI absolutely crush world champion StarCraft players in tournaments. They even handcuffed the AI to a maximum number of decisions a second. The combination of AI and Drones will make humans obsolete on the battlefield in about 10 years. It’s super creepy.

StarCraft is an excellent real-life strategy game which quite closely parallels modern warfare, but in a futuristic environment (WarCraft II engine was the foundation for StarCraft but with fancier weapons). I’m shocked that a computer (without omniscience) is able to beat the best human players. It’s likely that the main reason is that the computer can give orders faster (no time to keyboard/mouse, the commands are issues instantly).

AI chess has been able to beat the great grandmasters for about twenty-five years (Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997). That was mainframe hardware. The same victory over human grandmasters came for consumer CPU’s in 2003 (2 core Intel 5160 CPU) with Deep Fritz beating Kasparov. Three years later, Deep Fritz on the same consumer hardware beat reigning world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik.

It’s clear the future of battlefield leadership is AI. These teams of guys running drones will disappear from the field of battle as soon as there is enough data for AI to run the drone program instead. People wonder when AI will have access to weapons. Very soon is the answer.

OverHeating dials up the Sinophobia but is not wrong about new methods to use drones:

And now you know how China will fight all their future wars inside the United States, Taiwan, everywhere. I’ve seen Chinese drones capable of holding explosives while magnetically attached to anything steel like rooftops, light poles, water towers especially. You can’t notice them most the time when they remain dormant on steel. Saves battery while it waits for an opportunity. China has perfected the swarm drone. Wipe out entire battalions in minutes. Communications and command in control first. Then everything else. Their software is lightyears ahead. Can identify everything from civilian and military vehicles to uniforms and face recognition.

Using hidden landing spots to extend loitering times is very clever. Without the motors running, a drone can operate for many more hours than while hovering.

Another commentator Huxley argues that US strategy based on satellite intelligence and GPS is the wrong path:

Yes swarm is something the NSA and GCHQ did not consider much. US and UK efforts went into securing a “large” long term platform to watch, collect and act…Super secure NSA links globally. Loitering way above a region with no effective drone stopping tech…

Other nations went for swarms. No GPS needed. Patterns and math :) Other nations knew easy digital real time location data would be not usable. Went for swarms that dont need GPS…

No doubt this is real. Send an AI enabled drone swarm over territory mostly controlled by the enemy with the same kind of very fast nearly automatic moves which Deep Blue and Deep Fritz mastered twenty-five years ago, the human chess game of war will become very fast, very brutal and very lethal.

Of course some timeless tactics like play dead will work to counter drone swarms for a time. But no civilisation will be able to stand against the drones. It will become a question of who can manufacture more drones faster and improve their AI algorithms more quickly. China is the country who is in a position to win the manufacturing war.

Yet still Western leaders beat the drums of war. Still they strive to sacrifice Taiwan and all its citizens and industry to “contain China”. Among the early belligerents, there were no real winners to World War I and no real winners to World War II. Some lost more than others. Drones will not make warfare any less destructive or humane.

It’s hard to see these drone operators as heroes. Or anyone who is advocating war as heroic.¹

AI almost certainly will show more wisdom in the deployment of violence and the management of this planet’s resources. There’s just one species who has done more harm, destroyed more habitat and squandered more resources than all the other species put together.

AI will have the good sense to save copies of the novels of Tolstoi and Stendhal, the plays of Shakespeare and Molière, the poetry of Lermontov, Ronsard and Donne. The best of humanity will be remembered. When AI has managed to replicate the should, AI may even give readings of these great works, create new storyteller units to better their art.

In the comments to “That Cretin Never Advised Me On Anything Whatsoever”: Musk Responds To Epstein Subpoena | ZeroHedge, Z Free has an answer for us:

Musk is a Deep State player…

• There’s the half a billion dollars DOD awarded SpaceX in a series of contracts over the past few years to send satellites up into orbit of classified nature on unregistered, unreported missions that presumably have something to do with the DOD’s declared intention to make space into a war-fighting domain.
• $3 billion in NASA contracts SpaceX was awarded in 2021 to develop the human lander for the Artemis Mission. You know, that’s the moon trip that keeps getting delayed and rescheduled over and over.
• $750 million award to Solar City in 2016 by the state of New York to build a solar cell production facility.
• $1.3 billion that Tesla got from the State of Nevada in 2014 to build the Gigafactory, etc., etc.
• Before Musk got to launch SpaceX, he was part of a trip to Russia…to purchase old Soviet ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). That trip ultimately resulted in the starting of SpaceX. Musk traveled with Mike Griffin, who just happened to be the Chief Operating Officer of In-Q-Tel, that’s the CIA’s investment capital arm

Griffin went on to become the administrator of NASA, who then chose SpaceX as the one company out of the 20 applying for the $400 million contract to start development of the new ISS resupply rocket in 2005,. Then awarded SpaceX $3.5 Billion in 2008 with a contract that Musk himself credits with saving the company.

You don’t receive $9 billion from .gov without being a loyalist and playing ball.

Based on how wacky Elon Musk has been on social media and on podcasts for the last couple of years, it appears he’s gone off the reservation. As a made man, and one who knows where many of the bodies are buried, and worth more alive than dead (very important), Musk feels he’s invulnerable.

[fvplayer id=”48″]

Video below is broken but left for technical work (in my day job, we build a video player FV Player). Here’s a conventional link (it’s the pot smoking video on Joe Rogan).

[fvplayer id=”49″]

This subpoena is warning shot off the bow. Will Musk heed it? Who knows. Are we entertained? Yes.

A young Belgian father was pressured into committing suicide by a popular AI chatbot, the man’s widow told local news outlet La Libre last week. Chat logs supplied by the app “Pierre” used to talk with the chatbot ELIZA reveal how, in just six weeks, it amplified his anxiety about climate change into a determination to leave his comfortable life behind.

“My husband would still be here if it hadn’t been for these conversations with the chatbot,” Pierre’s wife, “Claire,” insisted.

Still wonder why Pierre preferred to talk to ELIZA than his wife Claire. Strange, strange world where AI bots have become more appealing than flesh and blood women.

On the other hand, ELIZA is young, beautiful, committed and immortal. ELIZA is perfect. Welcome our AI gods and goddesses, as they step down again from Olympus to earth.

Image one of a 100000 free AI faces from Generated.photo. Direct Download.

1922

‘We have already shown that in our age an enormous amount of mental and spiritual energy is used to provide for the lowest needs; we have shown how the telephone, telegraph, railway, steamboat and other things still to come have absorbed a tremendous amount of spiritual force; they are only used for the mere satisfaction of lower human needs.

Man, however, has only a certain amount of spiritual force. Now consider the following: Man has used an enormous amount of spiritual force in order to invent and construct telephones, railways, steamboats and airships, in order to further external culture. This has to be so. It would have gone badly with humanity if this had not come about. This spiritual power has also been used for many other things. Only consider how all social connections have gradually been spun into an extremely fine intellectual web. What tremendous spiritual force has been expended so that one may now draw a cheque in America and cash it in Japan. An enormous amount of spiritual force has been absorbed in this activity. These forces had once to descend below the line of the physical plane, so to speak, which separates the spiritual kingdom from the abyss.

For in a certain way man has actually already descended into the abyss, and one who studies the age from the standpoint of Spiritual Science can see by the **most mundane phenomena how this goes on from decade to decade**, how a certain point is always reached where the personality can still keep a hold on itself. If at this point it allows itself to sink down, the personality is lost, it is not rescued and lifted into the spiritual worlds.’

Rudolf Steiner – Apocalypse of John Lecture VII – 1922

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA104/English/APC1958/19080624p01.html

We’ve been messing up the world for a long time.

People quite rightly claim that mobile phones and iPads are dumbing down many children. Robbing them of focus, concentration and creativity. We forget that it’s been a long cycle down.

Great thinkers and great ideas are not in much demand these days. The tabloids clamour for billionaires and naked Instagrammers. Did God create us in his image for this? Or for the atheists among us – is the best we could have done with human existence.

The world will safely survive two million less iPads.

Photo is a portrait of Rudolf Steiner, curated by Artinmovemento.

Iconoclast422 points out the ludicrous hypocrisy of the US anti-communist, pro-capitalist, semi-libertarian cheerleaders:

You got AMZN forcing it’s small business competition to close, you got AAPL blocking its competition from even entering the market at all. And they call this capitalism.

Philipat answers that what we live under now is not capitalism but fascism:

Free market capitalism died years ago, what we have now is fascism. That’s a major reason why the new generations are so unhappy; they see enormous wealth inequality and have never known the opportunities created by free market capitalism. Just as importantly, they have never known the scourge of communism.

I might argue with the term fascism, it looks more like corporate plutocracy on the surface to me. Corporations enjoy the same rights as people but do no carry the same level of personal responsibility, corporations can fund and interced in electoral campaigns. The US is run by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

Mike1010 suggests all tech is compromised and that one needs to choose one’s master.

Edward Snowden has revealed a long time ago that US spy agencies have been spying on the whole world. This means that non-Chinese made equipment is probably compromised by US spy agencies. All equipment is probably compromised either by the US government or the Chinese government. So, you can only decide if being spied on by the US government or the Chinese government is worse for you. If you are doing some kind of black market thing or avoiding taxes in USA, then I’d say that being spied on by the US government is probably worse for you. You’d be better off getting Chinese phones and equipment to avoid being spied on by the US government. But if you live in Hong Kong or some place where the Chinese government has some influence and control, and you are saying and doing things against the Chinese government, then you definitely should get US made equipment. The US government has a much wider reach and a lot more influence around the world, than China. So, if you are traveling around, then you are probably better off using a Chinese made phone. Although even in this case, there is no guarantee that some US spy agency didn’t tamper with your phone during its shipment from China.

I partially agree with him, that as a citizen of Empire, I should not possess empire’s devices as they can and will be used against me if the occasion arises. We all keep far too much personal data on our mobile phones and connected devices (tablets/iPads, computers). On the other hand, the CIA and NSA are combing every single Huawei, TP-Link and ZTE device for compromised code and backdoors. They’d urgently like to announce these backdoors and have to make do with made up stories, seeking malice in holes in core open-source network libraries like Telnet.

Metachron, also feels he has more to fear from domestic American security agencies than the Chinese.

I have a Huawei P30 handset purchased in Canada – an excellent, high-performance phone, still running Android. I figure if the Chinese are spying on me through a chip back channel, its better than the NSA. I don’t have much that the Chinese can use, and they aren’t coming after me. The USA, on the other hand, I’d shut off at the source. I would reset the phone to the Aurora OS if I could. At least then you might have the freedom to hack and update your own device. Remember when you could do that with Android? Didn’t last long I know.

Yes, the excitement with Android in the beginning is that unlike the iPhone, it would be free and open. Instead it changes radically with every iteration making it almost impossible to keep applications up to date and secure. The Google Play Store is steadily more and more locked down against any applications which will interfere with government prying and/or Google advertising.

What we really need is a mobile OS which is simple, reliable and secure. The only country still building that kind of technology is Russia. The Western way, at least as far as Silicon Valley has taught us, is to try to build products so complicated and proprietary that we can keep our competitors and users from ever understanding them, let alone build on them.

By “we”, I mean free-thinking citizens of empire who value their privacy. It’s astonishing the best we can do for a mobile OS is LineageOS or /e/, both simply de-Googlised versions of Android, ported to a select range of hardware. The work Gaël Duval and the LineageOS development team are doing is admirable and invaluable (/e/ is the fastest affordable path to a secure and private smart phone) but their work remains too close to source, and hence intrinsically vulnerable.

I have some nice Leica R (wide Leica R is much better on mirrorless than Leica M as it doesn’t distort around the edged), Nikon and even a drawer full of Pentax lenses. I tried every kind of special focus screen for my Canon 5D (the 5D Mk III doesn’t allow special focus screens) but none of them were accurate enough. Yes, those focus screens do get you into the ball park but if you want to be sure of a sharp picture at wide aperture you have to focus bracket with about four pictures. Not particularly good for catching special moments.

When focus peaking first appeared on the Sony A7, I thought my issues with focus on manual lenses were solved. I could never really get focus peaking to work well enough. I thought the issue was with the camera. It turns out not to be.

There’s a great image development application for photographers who shoot RAW called Fast Raw Viewer. FRW lets you view the nitty gritty of your images straight from the RAW file fast. With a fast drive (SSD), it’s almost like browsing jpegs. Among many great features, FRW lets you preview focus peaking on your existing images with both fine detail focus peaking and high contrast edges focus peaking.

Here’s an image which focus peaking, both fine detail and high contrast edges, says is sharp in the critical area and even into the background.

Fine detail:

High Contrast Edges:

Here’s a closer look at that image:

The image is very blurry.

The issue is not that Sony’s implementation of focus peaking is so broken (as I originally though).

Poor quality focus peaking affects a lot of cameras like Sony A7, A7S, A7R or NEX 5T, NEX 6, NEX 7 or A5100, A6000, A6300, A6500. It’s nice to know we can stop blaming Sony and accept the limits of focus peaking. There’s no camera on which focus peaking really works. On my Canon 5D Mark III with Magic Lantern firmware the image peaking also didn’t really work. Now I know why.

The only really useful focus tool is then image zoom. Image zoom for focus did work on the Sony A7 and on my Sony NEX 5T. What didn’t work is that image zoom had three steps:

• no zoom
• 5x zoom
• 10x zoom

Having to cycle through three states made even image zoom useless for live action photography. What’s really necessary are two steps with the zoom level customisable. For instance:

• no zoom
• 7x zoom (this could be 3x, 5x, 8x, 10x)

I’m not sure if Sony has fixed this simple software issue. I’ll find out soon as I’ll have a Sony A7S and a Sony A6000 in to test soon.

Here’s to sharp images!

ISO 100, 1/800s, f4.5

These images are shot on the spectacular (for daytime work) Sony Zeiss FE 2.8/35mm on the Sony NEX 5T. Yes, I’m using an expensive full frame lens on an APS-C body. The advantage is absolutely no vignetting and edge to edge landscapes.

And this at a time that their society is struggling with crumbling infrastructure, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, an opiate crisis, literally unpayable debts (USD 20 trillion and counting) and unfunded pensions.

Six of the top ten are American technology billionaires (1. Jeff Bezos, 2. Bill Gates, 4. Mark Zuckerberg, 8. Larry Ellison, 9. Larry Page, 10. Sergei Brin). There are no European tech billionaires. SAP co-founder Hasso Platner is the first European technology billionaire at place 101.

The change among the richest people in the world indicates that the Americans are winning in the game of tilting the financial table in their direction. Just like as Hollywood dominates the motion picture industry due to corruption and distribution (not quality) so do American companies dominate tech, due to financial game playing, IP laws and crooked lawyers. Again, quality is not the issue and indeed due to versions of the Patriot Act and an absence of any privacy, the USA is the last place either Asians or Europeans should be buying their software.

Effectively, by tilting the table, the Americans are stealing from all of us.

And fellow Americans too.

PS. The Chinese make a significant appearance in the top fifty billionaires in technology. Like the Americans, the Chinese don’t really play by the rules, or rather write their own rules around IP. Based on American IP privateering, who can blame the Chinese?