Extortion is the keystone of America’s Mafioso Economy. And scene: here are the dons, each the ruthless head of their own vast organization, seated next to their wives in a show of bourgeois respectability, assembled by invitation to kiss the ring of the Godfather. This isn’t just fiction, of course; we’ve all […]
We’re humoring our self-delusion. How do great powers come undone? We can start with a destructive force without equal: self-delusion. Emperor Norton comes to mind in this context. In 1859, in the Gold Rush-enriched city of San Francisco, Joshua Norton, a bankrupt businessman, declared himself “Emperor of these United States” in a […]
AI is not so much a tool that everyone uses in more or less the same way, but a mirror in which we see our own reflection–if we care to look. Attention has been riveted on what AI can do for the three years since the unveiling of ChatGPT, but very […]
As a thought experiment, consider these changes to our economy’s incentive structure. Warren Buffett’s partner Charlie Munger had a maxim: Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome. With that in mind, let’s look at two charts. The first is a chart depicting the use of ChatGPT. (Source: OpenAI Usage Plummets […]
Let’s summarize our thought experiment: the AI Mania scores 100% on all eight metrics of a Psych-Ops. Before you scream, “Oh no, not again–could somebody please take off his tin-foil hat?”, hear me out. Let’s do a thought experiment exploring this question: Is The AI Mania a Psych-Ops? If it walks […]
That this extreme inequality is itself the primary threat to both democracy and social stability is poorly understood. Scraped of pleasantries, the ultimate purpose of any status quo is to 1) distribute most of the economy’s gains to the top tier and 2) offload the sacrifices this requires to the bottom […]
This is of course the totalitarian game plan: if you can’t get your way with persuasion, then silence your critics. RussiaGate–the Power Players’ conspiracy to spread fake news about fake news–is back in the news. RussiaGate didn’t just harm America, it also negatively impacted me personally, as Oftwominds.com was on the fake news PropOrNot list of 200+ “Russian […]
Fantasies die especially hard when the dream was over-hyped. The most self-defeating way to launch a new product is to over-promise its wonderfulness as it woefully under-performs these hype-heightened expectations, which brings us to AI and how it is following this script so perfectly that it’s like it was, well, programmed […]
AI is the whiff of perfume that’s supposed to mask the stench of terminal moral decay. It is appropriate to discuss the United States of Impunity on Bastille Day, which commemorates the start of the French Revolution in 1789, for the United States of Impunity is just as impervious to real change as the French […]
Our status quo is so thoroughly corrupt that it’s no longer even seen as corruption, it’s just BAU–business as usual. It’s a big ask, but let’s depoliticize the phrase “make America great again” and consider what this would actually entail, not as a lobbyists’ grab-bag of tax breaks for the […]