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.

People wonder where the laid off people will go. Some suggest this is the beginning of guaranteed minimum income.

Imagine how wild US cities would be if the US Gov’t didn’t directly or indirectly employ most of the working age population and pay them with debt.

There’s no greater motivator for random violence than an empty stomach.

I agree, one cannot underemploy more than 10% of your population and hope for social stability. In fairness, Spain has had youth unemployment of 30% for decades and has not blown up yet, but the restlessness and dissatisfaction is palpable. Young people live with their parents, who have some kind of security and share the wealth. But it makes for a weird society. Strange as Spain seems like it should be prosperous. The people are intelligent enough, the underlying infrastructure is excellent (buildings, roads).

What’s weird is the fetishistic worship of private enterprise in the United States. When it’s clear that private enterprise in mid-twenty-first-century capitalism mistreats its employees and betrays its customers. Just look at Enron, Uber, Bolt, the big banks. All of them are scamming everyone most of the time. A few executives at the top pillage public companies before parachuting out with their gold.

Still Yanks continue to post blind private enterprise and libertarian nonsense. E5 answer the post above with this tirade against the state:

Massive innovation, increase to standard of living, and wealth is what happens. That hungry stomach gets cut open by 7 other hungry stomachs who are protecting the property rights of the successful. 1 million government shovels and donkeys building hovels are replaced by mechanization allowing for your internet, computers, satellites, cars, air conditioning… government has never produced anything. Even the manhattan project was invented by the private sector as are all weapons.

A surprising take. History has shown that energy, transportation and medical infrastructure are better managed by state monopolies.^* In first-world high trust societies. The reason that the government gets such a bad rap today is that the West are no longer high trust or first world societies. If you have a bunch of corrupt and venal civil servants who think nothing of betraying their country and flouting the law, of course state ownership doesn’t work.

The fish rots from the head. Since we have self-interested, unpatriotic, corrupt and venal career politicians everywhere, few others think they should work like the country’s, their neighbour’s and their own well-being depended on them.  Which it does.

Civilisation is in a devolutionary phase now, like the dark ages. A reminder about roaming armed bands, every man for himself, rape and pillage, brigands on every road, sanitation issues with attendant plagues. Of late, civilisation doesn’t look like it will stop sinking until it hits rock bottom unfortunately.

^* Medical costs per capita in the United States are three to five times higher than the rest of the Western world, with no better outcomes. The hospitals work on the profit principle and most of the psychological energy is expended between the insurance companies and hospitals on how high the astronomical bills should be and how to bankrupt the patient. Medical outcomes are secondary. This is just a simple clear example of how the private sphere does not always outperform the state. Here’s a couple more. Privatisation of energy utilities lead to disrupted service, failed infrastructure, higher costs to the state to repair the damage. The privatisation of the railroads in England has resulted in colossal neglect of the lines, cut backs of service, extortionate pricing for casual travellers. This is not to say there are not counter-examples. Produce markets and distributed farming perform far better in private hands. Clothes making which again does not require massive infrastructure and top engineering specialists is better in private hands.

UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming discussing how we can make our information ecosystem safer and more humane

There is a genocide going on in Palestine, with at least 200,000 women and children dead, either form direct bombing, or sniping or malnutrition.

The US elections have turned into mudslinging events, with votes cast by non-citizens and widespread ballot fraud.

The EU has turned into an unelected oligarchy of despots, who are stealing our tax revenues to turn our peaceful lands and trading zone into a “military union”.

Taiwan is being disinherited as we speak, with its billion-dollar chip factories migrated to Texas. Taiwan will no longer be a trading and manufacturing powerhouse, running positive trade deficits, but a military camp running deficits.

Women are having their faces smashed in by gold-medal winning XY chromosome boxers, while Thomas Bach the head of the IOC, mumbles in Teutonic English that it’s impossible to determine what a woman is.

Israeli athletes, many of whom are IOF members and war criminals, participate in those Olympics with no restrictions.

All of this is before turning our attention to the Southern Hemisphere and Africa.

In the middle of these issues, the best Medium’s editors and publisher can come up with is online safe spaces?^*

It’s a crying shame as there are some very good writers on Medium (great, I’m not sure yet), writing about the latest themes. The annual membership at $50 is great value. Unlike Substack where one must pay for every single author individually (libertarian individualism), Medium is one payment takes all (collective, communal) and writers are rewarded by foot traffic to their articles.

One day Medium will hopefully have a publisher who cares about the world and the people in it, instead of a navel-genital-gazing twit.^**

^* The publisher Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine rattles on an on about making Medium a trans-positive space. Not about changing the world to reduce poverty, not about raising educational standards, not about world peace. Trans is the one issue the chubby publisher really cares about. For the moment, I can’t determine if Stubblebine (a name straight out of the Shire) is a useful fool or a paid-for-spook-fool like Keir Starmer.

^** Quora is just as badly slanted in favour of nonsensical woke liberalism to a constant thump of Orwellian war drums, Facebook is worse and X is on a steep hill downhill after a few months of relative freedom.

This is a shallow, empty, meaningless article, that basically screams to anyone paying attention that: all your transactions are public.

The thing to pay attention to here is this is a one-way trap: the moment the wallet address ID gets associated to your name (think ‘mark of the beast’ or so-called “biometric security”), all of your transaction history becomes retroactively public.

Lets say I’m evil FBI agent #320, and I run #AlQaedaSockAccountProxy. All I have to do to incriminate you is either:

A) Send you a “donation” from my US gov financed sock account of a terrorist org, or

B) Convince (trick) you into donating, such as pretending to be a poor, poor orphan dying from AIDs in Africa, or something (you know, usual charity scams all the gullible NPCs fall for)

Once that’s done, ‘evidence, mi’lord, that the person has financial ties to a terrorist organisation’ become public knowledge, and suddenly you can be convicted. Why?

One of the biggest hurdles to the secretive surveillance state prosecuting dissenters is practically all of their illegal acquired “evidence” is inadmissible under various warrant protections, and also when the NSA, FBI etc don’t want to reveal their insidious means of collection publicly, they often withdraw their so-called “evidence”.

By making transaction data public, they bypass the warrants required. Bitcoin is a “privacy trap”, it pretends to be pro-privacy, but then airs all your monetary laundry publicly for everybody to see.

If the gov then wants to work out who your associates are… it’s a really small step.

They want a Digital ID.

What better than one unique wallet ID per person tracking everything they buy and sell?

They could tax you 100% of your earnings.

Unmask your associates.

All they have to do is bridge the gap between Wallet ID and personal ID. And guess what? US gov wants digital online ID to become mandatory because “muh child safety”. Digital wallets have never been so obvious.

Confiscating physical assets is hard work. Paperwork, lawyers, bailiffs, disgruntled employess and tenants, appeal courts. Showing up at your door to order you to give up your Bitcoin wallet keys is easy, whether for crooks or the government. There’s never been a less secure way to store one’s wealth.

let’s just grant that someday, the tech will be mature enough that this is possible, and let’s even say it goes beyond videogames to movies, to visual art, to graphic design, to writing, etc. Let’s say that AI gets to a place where any joe blow can put in a prompt, and get a competent, and even let’s be generous and say good product out of it. A solid 8/10. So… who the hell is going to buy it? Because videogames as an industry is already entirely saturated with products that range a whole spectrum from utter dogshit to amazing works of technical expertise, writing, design, etc. There are over 70,000 games on Steam alone now, with 9,000 added in the last 9 months. If this tech actually got to this place, there will be exponentially more games, because all you have to do is tell an AI what you want to play.

And you can take that further: Movies are also highly saturated as an industry, especially as larger studios move ever further into less making “movies” or “series” and just making “content” endlessly remixing their intellectual properties. So now, all of those companies (and all the people who like their stuff) can now just make their own Iron Man movie? Their own Wandavision? Just endlessly making and remaking and remaking, as though tons of people aren’t already sick to death of all the television programs and movies that are being made?

And again, you can just keep extending this to any media: print, music, art… we have more of everything now than we ever have before and the goal of companies like Adobe, like OpenAI, etc. is to put even more powerful creative tools into even more hands, broadening the group of people who can create stuff but like… even if you take it as granted that this can be done…

Who the hell is watching all of this stuff? Who is playing all of these games? And why in the world would you pay to watch someone else’s AI movie when you can pay to generate your own with whatever you want in it? Why would you ever buy a game off Steam again if you can just ask your game making AI to make you the exact game you want, even just copying the damn description out of steam?

All I see this doing is potentially killing off dozens of creative industries and funneling shit tons of creative control and platform-style power to a handful of massive corporations, running warehouses full of fucking graphics cards, to generate the same games, the same movies, the same music, over, and over, and over, to suit everyone’s personal taste, and absolutely destroying entire rainforest’s worth of electricity to accomplish it. And like… why do we want that?

This is a great point. When something becomes common it loses all value. The great Tulip deflation. Critical mass was reached.

When one can design movies in less time than it takes to write a review, it means there will be millions of movies created every day instead of thousands every year. You might watch your close friends’ designer movies, the same way the pre-Great War intelligentsia used to read our best friends’ poetry.

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.

Of course he sold that car by the time I was nine. There was a market for it in Toronto, where we had moved for his work and to be closer to his parents and my grandparents. The market was the heir to a small fortune for his first car at seventeen. He wanted to make a statement with the roar of the V8 under the hood and the gorgeous sky blue metallic paint.

My father was able to sell the car for not a lot less than he paid for it.

With my father we were reminiscing about cars, as we’ve just changed cars as our otherwise delightful Sharan has run out of road without a full refitting.

The Cougar XR7 was an extraordinary car. My father wondered what it would be worth in 2023, as a collector’s car. There are whole websites dedicated to Cougar XR7’s.

Astonishingly enough a good-looking Cougar XR7 is only worth about $25000 to $35000 in the United States and €25000 in Europe.²

Would it have paid off for my father to keep that car? It would have been another 45 years. Not at all.

Today he could at best receive $35000 in today’s dollars. We’ll calculate in today’s dollars to avoid a tedious expedition into inflation.

Good quality garaging costs about $100/month, whether it’s part of a larger estate, whether it’s borrowed from a friend or if you just pay for the space in cash. Keeping the car running and the filters, oil and rubber pipes in working condition is at least $1500/year (some years less, yes, but some years more.

So the cost would be $2700/year of upkeep not including insurance (which on a V8 Cougar should probably be included, but let’s assume that it’s parked on an estate and doesn’t see the open road most years, as it’s a collector’s car). The years where it’s driven enough to insure, the car has real use and we won’t bill the insurance as bare maintenance.

45 years x $2700 would be $121500 in today’s dollars (of course one would pay along the way in much smaller amounts but relatively more valuable pre-inflation dollars).

I had an elegant silver Mercedes 280 CE Coupe with black interior. I picked the car up for 25000 francs in 1998 (about $5000). I took the car with me to Canada a few years later for $2000 in transportation costs. The car sold later for a song to a neighbour but needed a lot of work after not being driven for a decade. Had I returned to Canada I’d still be driving that car (probably not winters) which is why it stuck around so long.

These Benzes are worth about €23000 now in perfect condition with just 41000km. Let’s do the math again.

1998 to 2023 would be 25 years. 25 years x $2700/year would be $67500.

The numbers speak for themselves. There’s nothing wrong with a 1985 Mercedes 280 Coupé per se. I’d still like to be driving one. But there’s absolutely no economic sense in holding on to one unless you are driving it.

Collecting cars is a very bad idea economically. It almost always makes more sense to let someone else pay to maintain and store a vehicle until you are ready to drive it,³ regardless of how many decades that may be.

Photos credits: Mecum (Cougar XR7) and Graham Woodward (Mercedes-Benz 280CE).

This UFO thingy might be a little more nuanced… As with all disinformation campaigns of the DS, I think there is always some “truth” hidden behind their twisted machinations.

Let’s say the UFOs are really made by ETs as what they had suggested (and even whistleblower Bob Lazar claims, which were very consistent throughout the decades since his initial disclosures back since the 80s).

Simple logic would inform us that ETs with their far superior technology as evidenced in the performance characteristics of UFOs, should not be a “threat” to humanity because:

a) If they were really a threat, they could easily wipe us out anytime they had wanted to anyways. The fact that did not do so over the thousands of years they’ve probably been zipping around our planet is already telling.

Or

b) ETs are just observing / studying us the way we (as kids) find an ant colony fascinating, but not worth their time / effort to communicate with

Or

c) ETs are merely “farming” or “herding” us the way we humans domesticate our cows, sheep, dogs and keep pets for company.

Various human races will love their dogs, some humans will their fortunes to their pet dogs, some humans train their dogs for circus tricks, and some keep sheep dogs for utility and some humans breed their dogs into wierd shapes and forms, some even make love to their dogs while some humans even eat their dogs (for instance the Inuits in the polar regions will eat their old dogs occasionally).

If ETs are a ever “threat” to us humans, its probably the same way we are like a “threat” to the dog species on this planet. Lol.

willisjr is on the right track. He doesn’t go far enough though. Dogs are a bad example as there’s a close emotional bond and two-way interaction. Alien interaction with humans would like be more of an observer-mode.

More like humans have ant colonies, some of which are huge. Or elaborate mouse/rat/hamster habitats. Or aquariums with huge ecospheres.

Earth more fun and more real than digital Civilization VI games.

The greatest threat to human civilisation, sadly, are humans themselves.

Apparently this left space for the sales team to make a two decimal point typo and sell the NFT for 0.75 of an ethereum coin instead of 75 ethereum. In the real world, clerical price errors like this are usually undoable on high ticket items. Not so in the dog-eat-dog digital world. The sale happened instantly, with no redos.

In the comments to “Bored Ape” NFT Sells For Just 1% Of Expected $300,000 Price Tag After Fat Finger Listing, [jzerohedge](https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bored-ape-nft-sells-just-1-expected-300000-price-tag-after-fat-finger-listing) notes:

The fact that people buy things like this and bitcoin shows just how stupid we all are and is the reason why all of these psyops by TPTB work so well.

It is things like this that they use to measure the stupidity of the people. When people adopt things like this, we have reached peak stupidity and they can influence the masses to do anything… like take an experimental vaccine and force your children to get it.

jzerohedge is right. To my eye, buyer gets worthless digital junk for 1/100 of what idiot buyer was prepared to pay. The whole episode sounds like part of a poorly conceived, dystopian science fiction movie. The worst Twilight Zone episodes made more sense than real life today.