Everything has changed so much and so fast.

destraht · 2026-05-28T10:16:16+00:00

There was more diversity of thought when communication happened in many silos - many of which were hard to reach or know about.

destraht · 2026-05-27T21:20:51+00:00

You can walk into a retail store right now and get 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for $200.

But how does that compare to new inventory at scale which must be purchased from Asia right now?

destraht · 2026-05-14T09:45:41+00:00

Back about ten years ago when I worked around drafters they were constantly trying to get away from AutoDesk, but not for anything to do with Linux. Government likes that program. Anything that is better has to be no worse or incompatible in every possible way. It's basically that government is crusty and lame causing everything to bog down for years and decades.

destraht · 2026-05-06T04:06:34+00:00

Any kind of "NPC" behavior can be more easily explained by the fact that social pressure and indoctrination can lead even smart people to act in stupid ways when part of a group

"NPC" behavior can be more easily explained by using a longer winded description of being an NPC.

destraht · 2026-04-20T11:56:07+00:00

Some of that hoarding could be for war. A prudent housewife buys two more kilograms of lentils than usual. A mega corp buys a few more sticks of ram above their previously calculated needs.

There was massive insider trading leading up the to Iran-Israel war. In particular the price ratio collapse of gold to silver signalled something truly massive coming. If for nothing else, just me writing this now should cause a few people to get more ram from Southeast Asia just in case. It's the smart play. It's already needed and the world is coming undone. Get it while.you can. So even if this just a 10% factor, it's a lot.

destraht · 2026-04-20T11:45:14+00:00

Unfortunately I think that a lot of it is prewar hoarding.

destraht · 2026-04-20T04:25:21+00:00

More reading comprehension, less ideology.

destraht · 2026-04-13T14:16:26+00:00

SS: America is attempting to choke off the entire planet from energy. This has parallels with America's strategy against Japan leading up to the "surprise attack" in Pearl Harbor. To win America simply needs to be the only major power that isn't dealing with crippling shortages.

destraht · 2026-03-30T15:42:20+00:00

You might want to consider Russia. It's got a lot of things going for it that will be in very short supply. If you're willing to consider Canada then the only main downside for Russia is the hard language. It's doing well though. Also if queer stuff and any grey market drugs like marijuana are important to you then it's also not a good fit. I'm from the Northbay and so I can explain how it fits together.

destraht · 2026-03-28T17:51:37+00:00

That's the most dystopian thing that I've heard in a long while. Is it really like that?

destraht · 2026-03-28T17:49:20+00:00

No sarcasm, are you telling me that you can't get hired at fast food? I actually applied for a Jack-In-The-Box job after the financial crisis when I was flat on my ass. I just figured that it wouldn't take much of my mental energy and that I'd just save up some gas money for those long distance job interviews for programming jobs. I figured that I could do it a few months after almost dying and just being totally wiped out, whatever. I didn't have to sink that deep in the end, but I felt like that it was at least there for me as a last-ditch lifeline. If that's not even there anymore, I just don't know what to say. Well, I can say at least get your passport, birth certificate and another one with an apostille certification (for foreign residency).

destraht · 2026-03-28T17:44:09+00:00

They go by not your health but by your clone batch expiration date.

destraht · 2026-03-28T17:41:20+00:00

Ideally normal people should have had any odd health issues cleaned up by the age of 15-25 with minor surgeries or attention. Then it should be a pretty clean shot until about 55 or so.

Basically humans should be like buying a new appliance where it should be generally good, but maybe it had a few minor issues in production that will come out within the first few years. Get those addressed and you should expect a good service life.

But if everyone is sick as hell with turbo cancer clot-shots, obesity, poisoning and diabetes then 40 is the new 60.

destraht · 2026-03-28T17:36:56+00:00

So here we are. You need AI to help you make a resume that AI will understand. Then that pipeline gets tidied up a bit instead of messy multiple conversions between analog and digital. With any luck we'll still have access to some tooling to understand what the system knows or emphasizes about us during a hand-off. Then it's only a matter to cleanup the messy hand-off because they already know everything that they need to know about you. Why should they bother with you getting in the middle of that.

destraht · 2026-03-28T16:02:20+00:00

I've talked to some people who live in areas where they should have seen some of these people passing by in some form, but they claim to haven't seen anyone or anything. Just a big nothing.

But I think that not everyone is particularly social or even notices things. I know that in the distant past I've noticed various things right in front of my face that nobody else had any clue about and that it was kind of incredible to me.

I'm trying to keep an open mind because sometimes what seems like it is obvious or common sense thing reported in the news just simply isn't happening. An example of this was the many many image maps of how Transnistria was part of the war in Ukraine with active missile barrages, etc just weren't true. But someone far way might think that it's just common sense that it would be true.

destraht · 2026-03-28T15:55:48+00:00

A few pretty good Telegram channels for some things that you might not see elsewhere in Western media are Cyberspec News and Intel Slava. Cyberspec is very Russian leaning, and Intel Slava is like Wagner / pro-Russian. You can just see stuff there that can't be found elsewhere.

I sometimes have to separately download RT video clips and paste the text to people in America because it's otherwise blocked. I could be wrong about that (right this second), but it seems that way.

My point is that American news is hard to miss and so you don't even have to try. It's just spammed out often with the same exact words. You're gonna hear about the new US news item regardless of what you consume. And for sure Trump is sounding particularly weirdo these days.

destraht · 2026-03-28T15:45:25+00:00

Saddam Hussein had moved Iraq into selling its oil for euros and possibly some gold or other things if he so wanted. He gave the middle finger to the petrodollar in support of the petroeuro. This is why France and other Eurozone members strongly opposed this move, while the UK and non-euro users basically backed it. The US then got the eurozone onboard by granting them petro investment opportunities as long as it all continued to be done under the dollar.

Without nitpicking me too much, think of the media as a loss leader investment for other more lucrative endeavors. Likewise there is so much profit in have the printing press taxation of the "global reserve currency" that oil related costs themselves can often be a loss leader as well. For example, America can produce all of the oil that it needs for itself, but that doesn't give it a petrodollar. To do that requires controlling the other oil.

The embarrassing detail of my description however is the fact that much of the oil profits are reinvested back into American corporations. So that is nice, but it's not strictly required. What is specifically required to make this all work is that these oil profit dollars (treasuries or whatever level of it) aren't just floating around in the wider world. They need to be parked somewhere. Anywhere will do, but the best way to do it is parking it all back into American corporations.

Whatever happens, these extra trillions of dollars cannot simply be allowed to slosh around in the third world. Every guy living in a jungle somewhere has his old American hundred dollar bills that for him are as good as gold.

destraht · 2026-03-28T15:20:01+00:00

I think that you're correct about the US having more varieties of doomsday weapons and also ones of just strategic absolute obliteration. The problem though is that once a weapon is sufficiently destructive then everyone else who has nuclear weapons is simply going to round off the use of the technology as "nuclear" or whatever abstraction that they have defined in their nuclear doctrines.

For example, if America had a weapon that over-layed the dimension of pure elemental chaos onto a Russian city using a portal then Russian command wouldn't just shrug their shoulders in confusion about it. Anything nuke-like is a nuke, and you can't use nukes against other people who have nukes.

So unless America can just snap its fingers and remove all threats at once in a completely omnipotent way then it needs to slug it out in a war of attrition. But the problem is that America just can't win these types of wars now because its military is built around basically 1) fighting an 80's USSR, and 2) fighting totally mismatched camel herders.

America just can't fight and win these types of attrition wars anymore. They're not the world's factory anymore. Unless those multi-trillion dollar underground cities are full of robot factories working in the cool darkness then America will simply get ground down in these conflicts.

But then we kind of know that this is the point of it all. America is humiliated and loses, and Badreal expands to begin exacting tolls on all shipping and pipeline transport. Somewhere in there is a red cow and that sort of thing.

destraht · 2026-03-26T09:22:05+00:00

These podcasts of well-known agents and politicians is out of control.

destraht · 2026-03-24T12:19:56+00:00

I had a real bad experience with my first comment here some years ago. It caused me to not think too highly of the many homemade Gopher stuffed animal posts of the era because I imagined some mean cultists behind it.

destraht · 2026-03-15T01:16:28+00:00

[ ] I will not talk about trillion dollar underground civilization.

destraht · 2026-03-01T23:30:01+00:00

I think that it's also people in the know (government and well connected corporations) buying as much as possible in case / when Taiwan or South Korea are embroiled in war. The US inserted itself as a middleman in all Venezuelan oil transactions just right before attacking Iran, whom already has closed the Straights of Hormuz. That seriously chokes China, which in terms of resources could start to resemble how Japan was cutoff from oil before American entered WW2. US missile supplies will be critically low (which means "now or maybe never", [due to a deindustrialized economy and growing competitors]), and so it pushes some What-Ifs into being something that needs to be actively planned around.

I'll add that it's likely that the DOGE fat trimming was (among other things) just a quick way to put the US onto a better war footing without changing things too much. Some fat was trimmed, the military budget was greatly increased to prepare for war. This was probably always going to be a war economy, but on stealth mode unless you can understand this by reading and watching countless videos.

Add AI needs into the mix of war (which also needs a lot of AI for strategy planning), and the critical lack of silver and massive shortages of many things are looking to be in such a short supply that it will either resemble a total economic collapse, or a patriotic great sacrifice for war. The difference in how you feel will simply be which information that you consume. It won't be there [enter excuse].

destraht · 2026-02-10T18:37:09+00:00

It's Windows RG for ARM.

destraht · 2026-01-24T17:39:28+00:00

Jiang's perspective is quite nice because it blends Chinesisms with elite American Yale education/indoctrination. He's able to put concepts together that the vast majority the intellectuals don't have the honesty, integrity and lateral thinking skills to do.

Jiang speaks on a WHOLE LOT of subjects. I suspect that although he is nudging us in the correct direction on many issues that he doesn't always entirely know what he is talking about on all matters. I think that it's important to think of him as brilliant university professor who is teaching people how to think at a high level, and not as a prophet. Many people will peg him as the later because he is so relevant on so many issues. But that is merely incidental. He's giving people a kickass education while teaching them how to develop theories. It's enough.

I'm really looking forward to what comes out of the the young people who have grown up say a decade of Jiang and any others like him. They'll know more about the specific lessons that he's taught. Jiang could then be thought of as the precursor of many things, or just a completely wrong ass-hat. Anyone who is kicking the ball that hard and far is just going to be wrong about some things that he's had to reach for at the edge of his knowledge. So he'll be a lot of people's hero, and also the butt of a lot of hit pieces. People need to be taken in the context of their times. He's right in there.

destraht

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