Maybe there was a time when I was excited about new product, but those circuits have burned out a long time ago. Besides "new product" isn't any better than old product in a lot of ways. And it turns out I didn't even need the old product.
Take for instance the plain old dishwasher. I found I have to rinse the dishes before I put them in, then run the cycle, then unload the dishes. It's just plain faster to wash the dishes by hand, put them in a drying rack, and then put them away a few minutes later. If you have guests, hand one of them a dish towel and now you can wash infinite dishes and put them away instantly.
People talk about new technologies over the horizon. Well, I've looked over the horizon, and it's not as cool as you guys think. AI isn't A and it isn't I. It's just a bunch of people running regressions that are over-parameterized. It's a miracle it works at all, and it's well-known that even with 10x or 1,000x compute capacity you won't get much better results. The best image detection software is beaten by newborn babies.
Maybe we can use the same algorithm over and over again to write our code? Tried that, and it doesn't work. It never did. Genetic algorithms are a niche solution to a very niche problem, and even then, plain old "figure out what's really going on and write code to solve it" wins. Right now the best chess engine is a rules-based engine with handwritten rules. Nothing beats that, not even close. As we find more and better rules, and we can experimentally verify that the rules are actually better, the engine gets better, but randomness or regressions can't beat them.
Video games have peaked a long time ago, and it has nothing to do with "woke". Have you noticed that the video game market today looks pretty much the same as it did 15 years ago? Despite all the advancement in technology, there really isn't much difference. In many ways, the old video games running on old hardware is better than new video games on new hardware.
Maybe there's something around the corner in physics? No, unfortunately, there is nothing there. We've mapped out particle physics until the end. We know what makes up everything and how it all fits together. We can explain every physical phenomena in terms of those elemental pieces and basic interactions. General Relativity did what over the past 100 years? Absolutely nothing. We found some gravity waves, maybe. Whoop-de-do. We aren't getting anti-gravity rays, we aren't going to travel faster than light, and there's no new exciting physics that can change everything, not like electricity and nuclear stuff did at least. We can't even build a battery that actually works!
Chemistry and all the physical sciences are pretty much stagnant too. I am sure that there may be some new wonder materials out there but it takes a lot to beat diamonds, concrete, gasoline, and old tech that's been around for hundreds of years. I saw recently that people are talking about using stone in construction again.
The point is this: There are no new exciting things on the horizon, certainly nothing that any Indian or Chinese is going to discover. (They lie about everything anyway...)
The ONLY aspects of life that have some exciting potential are things like this:
1. Eliminating government. The days of centralized government are over, and have been over for a very long time now. It's time we try distributed government, localized government.
2. Reducing taxes to zero. In our post-scarcity world, we can have a government that maximizes the freedom of the people AND doesn't charge for it. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out how to make it work.
3. Nationalism for once. That is a new concept we haven't tried for a long time. Last time we did, we revolutionized everything.
4. Instead of fighting racism, let's see where it leads us. I would LOVE to live in a society without anyone but Anglo-Saxons. Let us form a colony by ourselves and live independently from everyone else, and let everyone else do the same.
5. What happens when we turn our attention back to traditional living and focusing on religion and family? We haven't done that for what -- 500 years now?
6. Zero interest banking. Banking without fees. It should absolutely be possible. Let's do it!
None of these things need pajeets or H1B's or winning elections to get. We jus start doing it and let things happen naturally.
Take for instance the plain old dishwasher. I found I have to rinse the dishes before I put them in, then run the cycle, then unload the dishes. It's just plain faster to wash the dishes by hand, put them in a drying rack, and then put them away a few minutes later. If you have guests, hand one of them a dish towel and now you can wash infinite dishes and put them away instantly.
People talk about new technologies over the horizon. Well, I've looked over the horizon, and it's not as cool as you guys think. AI isn't A and it isn't I. It's just a bunch of people running regressions that are over-parameterized. It's a miracle it works at all, and it's well-known that even with 10x or 1,000x compute capacity you won't get much better results. The best image detection software is beaten by newborn babies.
Maybe we can use the same algorithm over and over again to write our code? Tried that, and it doesn't work. It never did. Genetic algorithms are a niche solution to a very niche problem, and even then, plain old "figure out what's really going on and write code to solve it" wins. Right now the best chess engine is a rules-based engine with handwritten rules. Nothing beats that, not even close. As we find more and better rules, and we can experimentally verify that the rules are actually better, the engine gets better, but randomness or regressions can't beat them.
Video games have peaked a long time ago, and it has nothing to do with "woke". Have you noticed that the video game market today looks pretty much the same as it did 15 years ago? Despite all the advancement in technology, there really isn't much difference. In many ways, the old video games running on old hardware is better than new video games on new hardware.
Maybe there's something around the corner in physics? No, unfortunately, there is nothing there. We've mapped out particle physics until the end. We know what makes up everything and how it all fits together. We can explain every physical phenomena in terms of those elemental pieces and basic interactions. General Relativity did what over the past 100 years? Absolutely nothing. We found some gravity waves, maybe. Whoop-de-do. We aren't getting anti-gravity rays, we aren't going to travel faster than light, and there's no new exciting physics that can change everything, not like electricity and nuclear stuff did at least. We can't even build a battery that actually works!
Chemistry and all the physical sciences are pretty much stagnant too. I am sure that there may be some new wonder materials out there but it takes a lot to beat diamonds, concrete, gasoline, and old tech that's been around for hundreds of years. I saw recently that people are talking about using stone in construction again.
The point is this: There are no new exciting things on the horizon, certainly nothing that any Indian or Chinese is going to discover. (They lie about everything anyway...)
The ONLY aspects of life that have some exciting potential are things like this:
1. Eliminating government. The days of centralized government are over, and have been over for a very long time now. It's time we try distributed government, localized government.
2. Reducing taxes to zero. In our post-scarcity world, we can have a government that maximizes the freedom of the people AND doesn't charge for it. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out how to make it work.
3. Nationalism for once. That is a new concept we haven't tried for a long time. Last time we did, we revolutionized everything.
4. Instead of fighting racism, let's see where it leads us. I would LOVE to live in a society without anyone but Anglo-Saxons. Let us form a colony by ourselves and live independently from everyone else, and let everyone else do the same.
5. What happens when we turn our attention back to traditional living and focusing on religion and family? We haven't done that for what -- 500 years now?
6. Zero interest banking. Banking without fees. It should absolutely be possible. Let's do it!
None of these things need pajeets or H1B's or winning elections to get. We jus start doing it and let things happen naturally.
Anyone who wants a more historic and technical understanding of this phenomenon should read the book above. As a society gets more and more complex it needs greater and greater energy per capita
If one graphs global population growth it exactly lines up with global energy usage growth. The only thing modern technology has ever done is figure out how to exploit energy faster. It has never made society more efficient. US manufacturing will never come back because US oil is too expensive to support it with US wages
> US manufacturing will never come back
I think you will be surprised at how quickly it comes back once the first tariffs hit. I know for a fact lots of people that are patiently waiting for the tariffs to start so they can turn factories on, factories that already exist or that just require a little funding to get going. I myself want to start some factories here in rural USA, but the economics just isn't quite there.
US oil is cheaper than dirt. The only reason it is priced so high is because the demand is so high and the oil producers don't want to experience negative prices again. If we could show them that there is a consistent demand for it, they'll turn on more of the pumps.
US wages are exactly what they should be. One of our guys can absolutely run circles around ten of their guys. I'm not talking about college grads. I'm talking about country hicks who grew up around diesel engines and lawnmowers. I've seen these guys perform miracles with pieces of wire and simple tools. They know it too.
At my church I have a guy who led a crew building oil pipeline, and they were putting pipe down with solid welds in blizzards while the "professional" teams were holed up in a hotel waiting for the weather to pass. They were the ones they called in when the experts couldn't get the contract done in time. They think I'm a wierdo because I don't know how to weld. Do you think you can get these guys out of their house for less than $80k a year? They'd rather watch their calves munch on grass. They all own their homes and land outright, and their biggest expense is milk. If you want them to do real work, you'll need 6 figures at least, and some of them probably won't do it even for 7.