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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

The Sky Isn't Falling:

Politically, it is a steady torrent of bad news on all fronts.  Most likely, this new immigration bill will pass, which will invite fifty million more low skilled, unproductive, non-English speaking, high crime Hispanics to flood into the country and vote Democrat, which will give the Democratic party a permanent majority.  I realize this.  The amnesty bill floats like a sword of Damocles over everything I do.  There's still a chance the amnesty won't pass, but odds are, just like Obamacare, even despite the bill's unpopularity, it will somehow go through Congress anyway.  And once the amnesty gets through and Democrats gain one-party rule, all sorts of random new laws will be shoved down our throats.  Expect higher taxes, free speech restrictions, gun control, gay marriage, carbon taxes, public health care, quotas for the hiring of minorities and women, etc, etc.  Anything liberals have ever wanted will shortly be granted, America will soon become their plaything, a SimCountry they can design however they please.

Meanwhile, for the first time in American history, more whites died this year than were born.  In other words, this year was more lethal for white Americans than the Civil War, wherein we tried our hardest to kill as many of each other as we could.  Pretty impressive, huh?  This is the result of a basic trend that can no longer be stopped, because it is too ingrained in Western culture to even be debated anymore.  So long as women have the freedom to not marry and not have kids, they are going to exercise this freedom, to our population's detriment.  Women were never born with the instinct to desire children, evolution never saw the need to give them this instinct, because there was already sexual lust, and women's subservience to men who themselves had sexual lust to satisfy.  Now that birth control exists, and women can support themselves without men's help, and men have ceased being bandit rapist chieftains, there isn't a single tool evolution has left in its arsenal to promote childbirth.  Judging by women's actual behavior, what women want isn't kuche, kirche, kinder, but self actualization alongside the desire to 'be loved.'  The first part means graduating from college, getting a high-octane job, and proving you've got the 'right stuff' by raking in the dough or prestigious awards of some sort.  The second part means they want everyone to think well of them, and will continuously indulge in foolish side romances that make them drunk with the feeling of being appreciated, understood, or affirmed.  It's very strange, because women have no real desire to love someone else, but they greatly appreciate being loved themselves.  This means they'll be in constant relationships in order to feel loved, but they will never commit to a relationship that would actually require that they feel love for someone else for a change.  This lack of commitment goes far beyond the ever-lengthening age before marriage.  Even if a woman marries, odds are the marriage will just end in divorce or separation.  And before then, odds are that the woman will cheat on her husband.  This is the brutal reality of modern statistical findings, not paranoia speaking.  Almost all breakups, whether of marriages or relationships, are initiated by women.  Men have wanted to commit since the beginning of time, it was men who invented and enforced monogamy and virginity before marriage in the first place.  It was women's liberation that shredded both these concepts, it was women's wish to end both customs.  Marriage is just one more tool women use to 'feel loved,' they have no interest in actually loving their partners in life.  This, too, is just a pit stop on their continuous quest for the spice of romance and drunken brew of magical encounters.

Below replacement birth rates are an obvious existential threat, but with 7 billion people on Earth it just isn't an issue right now.  In fact, compared to employment opportunities, the world is already massively overpopulated.  The labor force participation rate is around 64% right now, but the actual percentage of Americans employed compared to the overall American population is 38%.  Until falling birth rates get our population back down to 100 million, the economy will only improve as supply finally transitions to meet demand.  Most of the third world, including Mexico, also has below replacement birth rates, so even with a surge of immigrants into the United States, eventually our population is going to plummet to a more rational equilibrium with both the environment and the economy.

You could say that feminism is the philosophy we need right now, because it is the only way to stop runaway population growth, which is a much bigger problem than runaway population decline.  In the past, Nature regulated human population via disease, famine, and war.  Now that we've solved all three of those problems, if we hadn't implemented feminism, the world would have become a hellhole of nothing but swarming fetus maggots.

The only things that really matter in the long term aren't demographics or population, but the economy and its ability to produce 'higher order civilization.'  The more surplus wealth an economy creates, historically speaking, the higher order of civilization we receive.  When we lived hand to mouth as hunter gatherers, nothing changed for millions of years.  But the moment we adopted farming and produced a surplus of wealth compared to labor, a leisure class was born that concentrated on more interesting things -- art, philosophy, mathematics, theology, etc.  The path to civilizational progress is economic productivity.  Our productivity is on an ever-upwards slope because of innovations in computing.  It can't be stopped anymore.  Productivity will always grow for as far as the eye can see.  As such, there will be ever-more surplus wealth to go around,  and in an age of falling birth rates, this surplus wealth will be distributed between fewer and fewer people, giving each individual a higher per capita income than history has ever seen before.  Nor does it matter if the vast majority of people alive in the future are idiots who can't participate in higher civilization.  The past also saw ages like that, where only the elites talked to each other and the peasants didn't matter.  It had no impact on civilization's progress whatsoever.  In fact, there were many golden ages of artistic and industrial innovation wherein the majority of people living in them couldn't even read.

No matter how bad demographics get at the bottom of the pyramid, at the top there's actually a dynamo of eugenics occurring.  For one thing, the firstborn child is genetically superior, or perhaps just better nurtured, than any later child.  Scientific studies have shown that they have higher IQ, earn higher incomes, receive higher degrees, and so on than all their followers.  As such, if every rich smart family restricts themselves to just one child, this makes the children all the more likely to flourish.  In addition, assortative mating means that people rarely marry outside a narrow 6 IQ band of themselves.  Women are not interested in marrying down when it comes to IQ, and women have never had more power in deciding who their mates will be.  Unlike men, who might be transfixed by a woman's beauty, women are cold calculating machines that only look at a man's accomplishments when it comes to mate selection.  Harvard graduates will only marry other Harvard graduates.  People with college degrees will only marry people with college degrees.  And even when these patterns are broken, and a valedictorian ends up marrying a high school dropout, it turns out that the dropout had ridiculously high IQ, still has a high paying job just like her, and is still on par with the lady who fell for him in conversations/witty sparring humor matches.  With the magnets of prestigious colleges and the interconnectivity of the internet, virtually every smart lady can find a smart match for herself without having to compromise in any form or fashion.  If she simply can't stand being around a man, rich women still have the option of buying sperm donations from guaranteed MIT graduates, professors, etc, which again has a massive eugenic affect on their offspring.

In the world today, the smart keep getting smarter and the dumb keep getting dumber.  Because there are more dumb people than smart people, it looks like dysgnenics is in full swing.  But in the spectrum of reality that really matters, the crowds where Newton and Galton lived and associated with, we are in an age of full swing eugenics.  We have never been more meticulous about breeding for intelligence and well adjusted, diligent personalities.  This is even before the incoming genetic engineering revolution that will soon make the whole subject of demographics irrelevant.  It's important that we exercise eugenics for now so that we have the intelligence and economy to invent genetic engineering later, but I'd say the coast is already clear.  Eugenic breeding practices in the present guarantee a swarm of intelligent people at least 60 years into mankind's future.  It's hard to believe genetic engineering won't be mastered within the next 60 years.  Or AI.  Or spaceflight.  Or any other important innovation the world still needs.

So the reasons we should be in a panic right now all fall flat.  Yes, the world is losing population, but that's a good thing.  Yes, demographics are becoming a monstrosity, but it isn't affecting the rich, smart, and powerful.  Yes, Democrats will be in power for life, but they won't sink our economy.

First off, the Democrat platform isn't very radical, and would just put us in line with the rest of the civilized world, which has an enormous per capita GDP of its own.  We could dip from $50,000 to $30,000 by implementing carbon taxes and public health care, but there is no realistic way we collapse as a nation when Japan, Denmark, and France are still doing fine.  Socialism is no big deal.  What the economy cares about is productivity, and productivity is still skyrocketing.

It's hard to imagine, but Intel has plans to shrink computer chips down to 5 nanometers in size, from their current 22 Nanometers.  This is coming in just a few years.  Does anyone think this won't have an effect on the economy?

Cheap energy is here to stay.  We have found endless new supplies of cheap oil and cheap natural gas, that will cover all our needs for at least another century.  Even supposing we suddenly desire to stop global warming, there are cheap ways to use fossil fuels without releasing any CO2 into the atmosphere.  Furthermore, as the price of solar power continues to half practically every year, it will rapidly become an affordable alternative to fossil fuels.  Before cheap energy runs out, and before global warming becomes a serious problem (ie, in the next 100 years), solar power will be ready to fuel our entire economy for free (nothing more free than sunlight!) and for eternity (nothing more reliable than the Sun!).  As energy becomes cheaper, the cost of turning seawater into drinkable freshwater also goes down.  This will allow us to irrigate more crops, which can generate virtually endless more food to avert any overpopulation crisis.  The difference in land fertility between irrigated parts and non-irrigated parts is something like 100:1.  So long as we have water, we will have food, and the ocean is a lot of water.  More water than we'll ever need or use. The UN says population will probably peak around 10 billion before falling birthrates makes it finally drop back down again.  With cheap solar power purifying seawater, which is then used to irrigate crops, we could feed something like 50 billion people on Earth.  Honestly, if we used greenhouses and didn't even rely on soil to grow our crops, I have no idea what the upper limit of our carrying capacity might be.

Chemists are continuously coming up with innovative new materials that don't exist in nature.  Once we replace all steel with graphene, we will possess practically superhuman powers.  Cars will be light as feathers and yet still tougher than monster trucks.  Power lines will transmit power across continents without losing a single percentage of their energy.  Computer chips will move with so little resistance that they'll make calculations at the speed of light.  Skyhooks will use thin wires to lift things straight off the surface of the Earth into space for free.  Graphene is ridiculous, it can do basically anything.

3D printing will make manufacturing 100% efficient.  There are no wasted materials in a 3D printed object, and there is no labor cost, the machine does the whole work on its own.  How much more productive will the economy be then?

Automated cars will make traffic lights a thing of the past, traffic jams won't exist, and traffic accidents will become impossible.  Millions of lives will be saved and even more importantly, the hour long commutes to work will all become a thing of the past.  People can sleep in their cars on their way to work, no time lost at all.

Computers are becoming so strong that it isn't hard to imagine an age when they can project entire virtual realities into our brains.  At which point it doesn't really matter what happens in this world, does it?  We can live in any paradise of our choosing.

SpaceX is inventing a rocket that can land itself after reaching space and delivering its payload.  This removes 99% of the expense of spaceflight, with just the jet fuel lost.  IE, spaceflight will become as cheap as a plane ticket.  Once space travel becomes cheap, colonization of space will no longer be a pipe dream, and the Kepler space telescope has already identified tons of liquid water, Earth sized, temperate planets we could start flying towards.

The economy cannot drop.  Technology is progressing too fast.  We are improving our abilities to master nature in so many directions, in so many ways, that it's impossible that they could all fail.  If our chemists don't succeed, our physicists will find some way to harness dark matter to our will.  If our physicists fail, our biologists will master genetic engineering.  If our biologists fail, then our engineers will master cheap space flight.  If our engineers fail, than our computer programmers will master virtual reality.  It can't be stopped.  We're past the event horizon.  Technological progress is simply baked into the cake at this point.  Only a worldwide nuclear war or asteroid collision or some other comically stupid event could stop mankind's progress now.  Worries about gay marriage, rising inner city crime, drug use, falling birth rates, unemployment, race replacement, or whatever -- what the hell do they matter anymore?

The world has been rapidly changing, really, ever since the 1500's.  But if you insist, let's say the world has been rapidly changing ever since the discovery of oil in 1900.  The world will continue to rapidly change for the better.  There's still plenty more oil where that came from, so the surplus wealth I said was so key to civilization's progress will just keep on pumping, and pumping, and pumping into our economy's veins.

It used to be the purpose of intelligence to plan far ahead, to look at long term trends, and avoid behavior with bad consequences in the far future.  This was the advantage the smart had over the dumb, who kept bumbling into mistakes and destroying themselves.  This advantage, however, is a disadvantage in the present.  This is because intelligent people are prognosticating trends with the idea in their head that 'all else being equal, . . .'  Since nothing is going to remain the same in the next hundred years, any planning based around trends that control for 'everything else being equal' is absurd.  Recently an article appeared on the news worrying about the health of social security 75 years from now.  75 years!  Are you kidding me?  It's doubtful whether humans will even exist in 75 years, by then we'll probably be beams of pure energy or something.  Smart people are too smart for their own good.  They can very carefully predict the consequences of current politics on the the current world centuries into the future.   "Our debt will burden our grandchildren, what will we do???"  Our debt?  Seriously?  What does a debt look like when we can throw black holes around like billiard balls for fun?  "Eating meat or drinking soda leads to bad health fifty years down the road!"  Really?  By then we'll be brains uploaded into a computing cloud anyway, and our bodies will be made of metal, and metal is strong, so I'm not too worried.

Strangely enough, the people with the right outlook on life right now are the idiots.  People who don't worry about anything except the year directly in front of them.  This is because they're the only people with the right outlook in life in a world that is undergoing rapid, unpredictable, and momentous change.  There's no point worrying about a future that only scientists have any control over at this point.  The future will be whichever group of scientists invents the first super-technology that changes everything.  It's impossible to predict which one it will be, but it's guaranteed that one of them will succeed.  Once a super-technology is invented, it will be so powerful that all previous human woes will be solved in the blink of an eye.  For instance, we won't need social security anymore because machines will work for us.  Or maybe we'll use stem cells to reverse age everyone back to a healthy, eternal youth of 25.  The point is social security will be solved instantly through scientific brute force.  Imagine a country of limited means struggling to stay alive due to an impending drought caused by solar fluctuations.  They've been planning for fifty years how to conserve enough water to see their tribe through the difficult times, but some scalawag kids keep breaking open the vaults of stored water and playing water polo in them.  The entire debate, the entire furious thinking class, all day talks about how to prevent water polo among the tribe's youths.  And then, before the sun even fluctuates, some guy walks in and teaches the tribe how to drill a well into an undersea aquifer that has a million times as much water as their stored vaults ever held.  Do you see how meaningless all their chattering about water polo really was?  That's the situation we live in today.  Everyone is talking about comical topics that no longer matter, that have already been solved.

Nothing in the future will ever threaten mankind or mankind's happiness again.  So the only policies we should be discussing is how to be happy now, in the present, this year, before these inventions are invented.  Which means we should be discussing how to make people happy right now, with what we have, without concern for any possible 'negative consequences' it might have later.  There are plenty of miserable people around the world, and they could all use our help.  They're probably the majority of mankind.  What do they want to change right now?  They're the people we can actually save, unlike the future which has already been  saved.  And the answer is, right now, they want a minimum standard of living.  What the world needs most right now is a citizen's dividend.  With enough money, almost all problems can be solved.  And once they have regular electricity, water, health care, food, clothing, etc, they need to be entertained.  So the answer to this problem is the removal of all copyright laws and the opening up of information freedom.  We have stockpiled enough entertainment to cover anyone's needs for life, so there's no real need to buy or sell more. But if we're insistent on making more new entertainment, we can have charities where people donate to a cause to make 'story x' or 'game y,' and after the funding requirement is met (it's called Kickstarter, the greatest idea ever), the product can be made and released free to the public while still making a profit.  Give everyone a free internet connection and free access to information, and it's basically impossible to be sad.

The quality of entertainment is now good enough to replace everything material in this world.  After a citizen's dividend provides for everyone's bodily needs, their mental needs, their emotional needs, can all be found online.  Video games, visual novels, anime, tv, movies, music, books, magazines, newspapers, manga, etc, etc.  It's more gold than can fit in Fort Knox.

With these two practical, present-day measures, we could make as many people happy as possible.  Simply get rid of copyright laws, and provide a living allowance for the world.  From there everyone should be able to entertain themselves.  The fact that a billion people worldwide are already gamers, the fact that the average American watches 5 hours of television a day already, proves that entertainment by no means is 'boring' or 'unsatisfying.'  It's easy to disparage things, to say that somehow reality is the only way to be happy and everyone has to work hard to achieve true happiness, but the numbers just don't reflect that.  People aren't happy working hard to achieve their dreams.  They're happy relaxing on a couch watching TV.   They're happy watching sports or playing video games with their friends.  They're happy reading books in quiet solitude in bed.  They're happy listening to their mp3 playlists on their iphones.  Happiness = entertainment.  This is what we've collectively decided.  People are untrustworthy and so relying on them is a waste of time.  Jobs are frustrating and so relying on them is a waste of time.  In the end, entertainment is the meaning of life.

This is why I've transitioned from blogging about politics to blogging about entertainment.  The best way to make others happy is to promote entertainment.  If more people become interested in entertainment, they will enjoy their lives more and then everyone can be happy.  Specifically, if someone isn't happy it's because he hasn't been directed towards the right entertainment yet.  Which means providing a site that directs them towards the right entertainment, like Pretty Cure, Clannad, and Final Fantasy, is the most good you can do in this world.  Building a bridge can help people drive from point A to point B in ten minutes less time, but watching Clannad can change your life forever.  There's simply no comparison.

I'd rather the whole world watched Clannad than amnesty were prevented.  The importance between the two isn't even close.  And so I'll continue ignoring the amnesty debate, and continue loving Clannad, today and tomorrow.  And beyond tomorrow, there's no need to plan anything out ~ tomorrow's been taken care of by other people already.

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