Tag: economics

I didn’t come to communist ideas out of some form of idealism but because l’ve actually done the math. I played and made money on the stock market then realized that because of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics capitalism is doomed to fail and if we want to have a society left when it does, we gotta structure one around stability instead of endless growth. We’re on a finite planet. The markets can’t grow forever and when they run out of space to grow, the whole system falls apart. We’re already at the breaking point. That’s why they’re betting the farm on Al. It’s a desperate bid to invent a way around it, but it won’t work. As someone who was working on Al long before the big tech companies were, I know it just can’t do what they’re trying to make it do. What they call hallucination” and “model collapse” is actually the problem at the root of the entire thing. It’s too technical to explain in a Facebook message but basically unless you can build a machine that can rewire itself in real time, all you can build is a fancy plagiarism machine. Computers work by taking in instructions, doing fixed algorithms to those instructions, then outputting the result. You can’t algorithm creativity because that comes from neurotoxicity, which is something our brains are constantly doing; literally rewiring themselves. It’s how we’re able to improvise, adapt, and overcome. No machine we currently have any idea how to build is capable of that. If you look into the Al industry, what you find is a circle jerk. There’s no money actually being made except for a small amount of government funding for surveillance programs (something no freedom loving American should tolerate). Even if every single person with a smart phone bought a ChatGPT subscription at the highest level, they would still be losing money because of the astronomical operating cost. So if it’s so unprofitable and doomed to fail why are they doing it? Because they’re panicking and think throwing money at the problem might make it go away. But you can’t money your way out of a physics problem. So yeah, l’m a communist, but only because I tried it their way and found out the hard way that it doesn’t work. But had already stumbled onto things like permaculture which fill in the gaps that used to exist in old world communism. We didn’t have that kind of technology back then but we do now. We can literally terraform the entire planet into a food forest. There’s already people doing it and it’s proven to be 100% scalable and works astronomically better than factory farming, because you’re working with nature instead of against it.

Farmers in America are committing suicide at a much higher rate than any other profession and the problem keeps getting worse. The reason is that they’re not getting enough return on investment to be profitable. People always say that if you make a product everyone wants to buy you will be successful but literally everyone has to eat food and yet they’re not making enough to keep the farm. Why? Well it’s a complex issue but a big contributor is the depletion of topsoil. Monoculture farms (farms that grow a lot of one kind of plant) deplete the nutrients in the topsoil overtime and the longer you try to grow just one or two kinds of crops in a field the worse return on investment you get. Permaculture answers this problem by studying how nature solves the problem in a natural forest and repeating that with intent. The answer is layering and plant allies. Naturally different species of plants use and release different nutrients from each other. By clustering groups of plants that complement each other together in layers (not unlike how buildings are constructed in layers) you can engineer self replenishing soil. It takes more work to setup initially but after you get it going it basically takes care of itself. Plus you don’t need to worry about weeds and pests because you engineer around them, so you don’t need to dump chemicals all over the field. Weeds are plants that get in the way and cause damage in a nonoculture farm because you’ve artificially left niches open that they’re spreading into. With permaculture, you’re manually filling every niche with plants that naturally compliment each other. Since there’s no open niches to spread into, weeds just don’t have anywhere to go. And with such high and diverse yields, permaculture ends up producing so much more than it can use that pests just become a non-issue.

So now I imagine you’re asking if it’s so great why isn’t everyone switching? Well three big reasons: first, it’s a brand new science that’s only recently just started being deployed at scale in certain areas. Secondly, companies like Monsanto and John Deere have built entire industries around monoculture farming and they’re not in any hurry to suddenly switch to an entirely new way of doing things overnight. Finally, most people, even in the agricultural industry, simply don’t know it’s a thing. That’s changing though, thanks to that topsoil problem I mentioned there’s now a growing number of activist groups working to turn things around and spread awareness of the problem and its solution. Joe Rogan recently did a podcast with one such activist who has been riding across Asia and Europe on a motorcycle teaching people about the topsoil depletion problem and how to respond to it by moving away from monoculture farming. lt’s a great listen of you’ve got the time. So how does this all tie back into communism? Well if you solve the food problem by turning every backyard into a food forest and you suddenly have more food than you can eat, suddenly we’re in a new kind of economy. Star Trek depiction is probably the closest metaphor. In a post scarcity economy we don’t need everyone working in order to keep things chugging along. People will still need to make things but nowhere near at the scale were currently producing. Plus the current economy is overproducing at an absurd scale. So much gets produced only to end up in landfills. What a waste. Uber capitalism in order to stay in business you gotta keep growing That growth drives inflation thanks to that thermodynamics I mentioned earlier. (You likely know it as supply and demand, but fundamentally it’s just a physics problem; matter and energy exchanges) In order to keep up the demand you gotta balance the supply. The primary way they do that in today’s economy is to intentionally make the products worse so they slow down or even outright break so you have to buy another one and another one and another one. We all kinda know this by now; planned obsolescence. It’s why everyone always rushes out to buy the new iphone even though it’s practically the same thing you bought last time. They artificially slow it down so you’ll buy the new faster one. Why I realized communism does what capitalism don’t was actually something I stumbled into by accident. You see, while 1 work in IT as my day job, I moonlight as a musician. T have a decent collection of guitars from all over the place. Well I got tired of having to pay Guitar Center to fix them for me so I bought a soldering kit and learned how to do it myself. After fixing up all the ones in my collection and deciding it was a fun hobby,I started looking on eBay for stuff on the cheap I could fix up. 1 found couple Soviet guitars and I just fell in love with the design. They were only about $200 a piece so I figured why not. That’s practically nothing in guitar terms. There are Chinese knock off Temu guitars for more than that. 1 got them expecting them to be junk and needing major repairs and bought parts and tools in preparation for their arrival in advance while I waited for them to get here from the Ukraine. Again, this was just gonna be a fun little project; let’s get some old Soviet junk working again with modern parts bought here in the good old USA. Then they got here and they were not at all what I expected. They were in practically pristine condition. I couldn’t believe it. For how little they cost and how old they were how could they possibly still be in working order? I’d just spent like an entire month repairing my capitalist made guitars that were all less than 15 years old and these things were from a country that doesn’t even exist anymore and yet they still worked? Amazing. But it didn’t stop there. No, these things sounded better than anything else in my collection at any price point and even sound better than some of the most expensive guitars Ive ever played in my life. Even more shocking is they play better too. They’re the most comfortable things l’ve ever played and they hold their tuning like nobody’s business. And these things are rock solid too. I’m pretty sure I could drop kick one of them off a lighthouse and it would still work after it hit the ground. That’s how well put together these things are. was absolutely shocked. They were so much better than my other guitars that for a hot minute other guitars that for a hot minute I genuinely considered just selling everything else in my collection After having to replace damn near everything to get my capitalist guitars working again after less than 15 years, having Soviet guitars that didn’t need any work at all just broke my brain. The contrast was unreal. Literally the only thing l’ve done to them since getting them was swap out the strap pegs with strap locks. The Soviet ones used a different size standard which didn’t fit Western straps and I always put straplocks on any new guitar I buy regardless. That’s literally the only thing l’ve had to change. So yeah, that’s when it finally clicked; we’ve been doing it wrong this whole time. We’re wasting so much time, money, and resources making garbage for landfills on purpose just to keep capitalism alive when there’s better alternatives.