Tag: Media

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Finance Politics

Day 1729 and 6% of GDP Buys Quite A Lot

While I’m not economist, because, well there wasn’t money to pay for graduate school, so I could not dedicate myself to the study of monetary policy. I had to go make money in the markets like a capitalist should.

So I’m aware that my thought experiment is not how any of this works, it’s against free market principles to arrange markets like this, but let’s do a thought experiment about buying back our industrial capacity.

Being inspired by Roon’s tweet about Silicon Valley’s grand tradition of acqui-hiring and taking seriously the thesis of Dan Wang’s book Breakneck.

That “industrial process” is a technology that lives in the heads of people and that it was a mistake to let so much “low value” industry be offshored due to the loss of tacit process capital

So what kind of companies would America want to acquire if we were so inclined to pursue a strategy of industrialization? Our biggest success is that we are a highly financialized economy.

So why not use that cash to buy some shit? I know I don’t like planned markets either but for our industrialists let’s say we find a way for America’s markets to buy us back some process knowledge.

Let’s take a stab at what we’d even want in that day. For me my starting point is the top ten Korean chaebols, we take back AMD from Europe (we licensed it anyways) and look to acqui-hire former Nokia Finnish & Baltic system engineers.

Now maybe you want 1 or 2 Indian pharmaceutical generics providers to come to American. And for fun let’s buy the Japanese fastener company YKK. And also buy back the meatpackers. I asked Grok what it would cost and I was honestly pretty pleased by the price tag.

Based on current data (Sep 2025):

  • Top 10 Korean chaebols (flagship mkt caps): ~$879B
  • AMD: $261B
  • Nokia: $26B
  • Top 2 Indian generics (Sun Pharma, Cipla): $61B
  • YKK: Private (N/A)
  • Major meatpackers (JBS, WH Group): $30B

Total: ~$1.26 trillion. Note: Estimates for groups; exact values fluctuates

We would probably need to buy the shareholders and the workers so let’s assume it’s kind of a buyout but you are getting the talent too.

We get the best possible new Americans and we make their shareholders money. Capitalism buys American bonds. Usually. So then I think how much of our GDP would that be?

Current US GDP (2024): ~$29.2 trillion. 2025 projection: ~$29.7T. The $1.26T total is about 4% of annual GDP. Affordability for acquisitions would depend on financing, government subsidies, or private capital, but the economy’s scale makes it feasible in theory

Now I start to get greedy. I want the top 10 best Shenzhen manufacturers and asked for Grok’s best estimate on cost. No facts checked here it’s vibe economics ok?

Based on Sep 2025 data and estimates (public caps in USD; privates approximated via valuations):

  1. Huawei (telecom/electronics): ~$300B (private)
  2. BYD (EVs/batteries): $133B
  3. Luxshare Precision (components): $70B
  4. Mindray (medical devices): $41B
  5. ZTE (telecom equip): $25B
  6. TCL Technology (electronics): $20B
  7. Inovance (automation): $20B
  8. Goertek (acoustics/wearables): $15B
  9. Sunny Optical (optics): $12B
  10. Han’s Laser (laser equip): $6B

Total est. acquisition cost: ~$642B. Feasible under your presumptions, ~2% of US GDP

So just vibe economics here but like how much did we spend on pandemic stimulus?

Total US COVID-19 fiscal stimulus (2020-2021 packages) was about $5.6 trillion, per Tax Policy Center estimates, including spending and tax relief. That’s roughly 19% of current GDP—way more than your 6% shopping list. Feasible in scale, if the will is there!

So again just vibes not how it works but stay with me here to keep the American consumer spending (which I am not saying didn’t work because it did) but we spent 19% of our GDP in stimulus. And we didn’t get better companies or better Americans.

Categories
Culture Media Politics

Day 1722 and The Remake of The People versus Larry Flynt Sucks

I have not watched Jimmy Kimmel in his current incarnation as broadcast late night variety show host. But I did watch some episodes of the Man Show so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the man’s career.

This guy is into beer, boobs and being turned down by ABC

That one unremarkable but sort of likable dude can jump from hosting segments about girls on trampolines to a national broadcast host with political opinions is somewhat impressive and also bleak.

If I had to give mono-causal explainer as why millennial women seem split into two distinct political camps when it comes to modern American politics, absolutely over it or absolutely irate, I think the continued existence of Jimmy Kimmel’s career would be as fine an explanation as any other.

This guy gets promoted over and over for just being the worst and what do we get? We get scolded no matter what we do. Of course some women are screaming banshees and the rest are like mmm shrug. Who has freedom and who has responsibility has always been a polite fiction.

Being subjected to years of increasingly sexualized entertainment featuring bouncing boobies, mentally unstable underage pop stars and the men who were paid to ogle them professionally probably had some downstream influence on our current political climate and the shitty state of entertainment.

The backlash to the backlash to the backlash as it were has happened and we just don’t care anymore. I’ll fight for your right to be perverted but I won’t lie to you and say it hasn’t negatively affected me in anyway.

I’ve always been acutely aware of where popular culture derived a women’s value. Jimmy Kimmel had a career and Britney Spears had a breakdown. And now you want me to fight to keep this twerp on the air because of our proud democracy and its culture of promoting speech and expression? Fuck off.

I genuinely believe girls on trampolines has inherent entertainment and artistic value. Almost everyone has an appreciation for the female form.

I’m unclear if warmed over political takes on broadcast television delivered by a middling broadcaster at midnight is more or less valuable an art form or as political expression. Maybe the FCC needs an overhaul for this new era or maybe we get pirates wires.

I’m neither a satirist nor comedian. I watched the Man Show because I had a boyfriend in a fraternity but I am not watching Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue now and neither are you.

And that’s all that matters to the business of entertainment. Slapping speech and politics on it is a reach that now middle aged millennials can’t manage. Maybe if we spent more time on trampolines.

Elite competition skirmishes over who controls the airwaves of broadcast television are barely interesting except to the absolutely irate. And these days we are all too busy to remain irate unless we’ve got luxury signaling to do. Which I don’t need to do because no one is coming for my blog.

I don’t see how anyone can turn a microwaved soggy ready meal remake of the people versus Larry Flynt out of Jimmy Kimmel.

Who wants to fight for that? Hustler had some inherent entertainment value and Larry Flynt had “readers.” It was speech and it wasn’t on public airwaves with a boss in Washington DC. Maybe you didn’t like what he did but were you prepared to fight for it? Lots of people were. Who wants to fight for Kimmel?

Oliver Stone has always been kind of a shitlib

Jimmy Kimmel was never anything more than the guy who read cue cards between the dopamine hits of girls on trampolines. Stuffing your politics into his pie hole doesn’t really change that.

Bob Iger knows it. I know it. The guy had dwindling ratings, an expensive contract and not nearly enough common sense to keep his mouth shut if one of his staffers was out of touch. If I were in charge of Disney that would be my excuse and I’d dump that Jimmy for literally anything else. I bet a swearing parrot would test better. Hell I know it would.

That’s why it’s so damned exhausting to care about the free speech that literally nobody asked to be said. Does anyone who genuinely cares about free speech feel like they can rally the cause to a bobble head spouting opinions that aren’t even his own? Doubtful. I’d sooner fight for Illinois Nazis. Shame about the ACLU innit?

Americans would rally for boobs though. If someone wanted to get the FCC to allow the return of the Man Show and place it on ABC after dark maybe then we’d have a worthy sequel to Larry Flynt.

But nobody is going to bat for Jimmy Kimmel unless it’s backed up with boobies. And there isn’t a perky tit in sight. No one is going to make a political meal out of this. I doubt even the Swanson’s heir could heat this frozen turd.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1716 and Algorithmic Nihilism

I am quite jet lagged today so I am unsure if this will be coherent but “it’s practice” so here I am.

I am in the middle of my own biochemical storms as the wider algorithmic storms of the web remain at hurricane strength. My own teapot tempests hardly matter against the gale force nihilism of the raw power games buffeting us all about this online.

I suggest reading Katherine Dee’s post on online political subcultures if you are feeling confused about the infighting and schismatic nature of networked political culture on social media.

The phenomenon KiwiFarms calls “Zoomer sadism” — surreal, absurdist cruelty now endemic to so many online spaces, is not confined to the right alone. The disembodiment and desensitization that define life for so many under 45.

Since I began writing specifically about online nihilism in 2022, the FBI has even created a new domestic extremism category: NVE (nihilist violent extremism). These aren’t fringe concerns — or even new ones, the Internet didn’t invent this particular despair, it only gave it new outlets — they’re central to understanding what’s happening online. Default Blog

Nihilism being algorithmically amplified has given audiences to people who might have otherwise been dismissed as cranks, loons, and agitators in the past.

To have a counter culture meant having a dominant culture to press against. Now we have a thousand splinters and millions of different audiences to that splintering fighting symbolic battles. That they are spilling into real violence isn’t new, surprising or even native to the Internet.

It’s merely that we are being fed into the maw of reinforcement learning and algorithmic preferences until we have nothing left but smoothed archetypes battling tribal signals.

That we see people who takes these symbols to a violent extreme should be the expected outcome of persistent othering by algorithm. Digital cultural scissoring breaks apart the collective “we” of all types affinity from national and ethnic identities to sexual preferences and other more abstract ideologies.

Just remember that if a group kicks out too many people they may find themselves with nothing left but sycophant audiences driven by adaptive code. And while that may sound scary, I agree with Lebowski that nihilists are nothing to be afraid of when you are sure of your own principles. So take stock of what matters to you and feed that back to the algorithms. Despair only wins if you let it.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1713 and Breaks and Ends

It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.

I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.

The Hate or La Haine by Matthieu Kassovitz

The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.

We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.

Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse

Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1710 and Speaking The True Name or Obfuscating To Remain Illegible in Bureaucracy

There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.

The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.

Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.

“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling

Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.

One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.

So if you find yourself concerned that an obfuscated acronym like the DOD’s Department of Defense is getting a name with a bit more clarity as to its purpose ask yourself why?

Maybe a department of war is the proper name for the branch who commissions prime contractors to make weapons.

War looked different in the past?
Categories
Culture Media Startups

Day 1709 and Love is Blind UK and Better Late Than Single Failures as Global Cultural Mirror

It’s no secret I have come to love the sub-genre of reality dating shows about new ways of dating in the social media era.

I’ve watched every single episode of Love is Blind including the international versions as well as the matching shows that range from religious matching to cultural affinities and disabilities.

I am having a rough week what with my own chronic health challenges and the death of my father over the long weekend. My husband is also brutally ill with the flu. So it’s just generally 2025 on maximum. All brakes and no gas.

So I took a break from reality. to watch the reunion for Season Two of Love is Blind: UK aka the working class multicultural Manchester season as well as test out a South Korean dating show for forever singles or motae-solos in Korean called Better Late Than Single.

Now I’m a middle aged elder millennial who turned over into her forties with ten years of marriage so keep that in my mind. My husband and I met through a mutual friend and now I wonder if we were on the last helicopter out of Saigon.

We worked in the nascent New York startup scene. Over the course of two birthdays, a year apart, for that same friend, we got our act together (ok I did) and began dating.

A few weeks before we got engaged, that same friend showed us this new dating app called Tinder. We laughed at the bare bones profiles as were used to involved questionnaires from OKCupid.

Many of our friends had worked for the dating holding company juggernaut of Barry Diller’s called IAC. The founders of the OKCupid subleased space from Alex’s startup. Dating app culture was part of New York startup culture.

It’s clear that these applications have left a cavernous void in the culture of mating and dating not only in America but across the world. From Raya to AMANDA (a very judgmental Korean dating app) we’ve found all the ways to maximize for the most superficial aspects and signifiers of a person.

Some cultures seem to have taken this to extremes. On rainbow coalition class coded Manchester season of Love is Blind: UK we had Indian posh girls dating down class half Pakistani guys and Albanian girls falling for Lebanese guys. It was a clusterfuck. I won’t spoiler anything but the disposable attitudes clearly came from long habit you associate with dating application culture.

Meanwhile the forever singles have taken the opposite approach. Rather than sweetly autistic singles being helped along as Love on the Spectrum does, social media personalities roast painfully awkwardly awful members of the opposite sex fail to listen to each other. Holding eye contact and grossly insulting someone via misunderstanding was the tone.

If those media pieces show anything it’s the utter lack of tenacity being displayed by everyone involved. Sure, someone willingly going on a reality show is extreme. But the deep desire to be seen and loved goes beyond any culture or awkward social technologies. We’d all do with learning to fight more for love and family.

Categories
Media

Day 1701 and USS Enterprise (NCC 1701-D)

I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.

Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.

I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”

We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.

I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.

One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1699 and CQ Do You Read Me? K Go Ahead

Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.

The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.

Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond. 

-(CQ) Call

Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.

Living with a network consciousness has been called the seventh sense. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote a book about power and survival in an entered future in 2016 with this premise. That sense now applies across wars, commerce and aesthetics.

The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.

I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1693 and I Put A Spell On You

I went down a rabbit hole today with Screaming Jay Hawkins “demented” blues classic titled “I Put A Spell On You. You should really stop and have listen to if you’ve never heard it.

Considered one of the first pieces of shock rock, Hawkins performed while he “wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fog” according to Wikipedia. Spooky!

The song took on a life of its own and became so iconic that it has been covered countless times by wildly different artists.

Nina Simone has a gorgeous version that sounds like a Bond theme with big band jazz stylings. Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover with Jim Fogerty’s intense vocals was closer to Jay Hawkin’s original. But it’s the signature rhythm guitar that transitioned so well to their style. They opted to play it at Woodstock. A year later the put out Bad Moon Rising which is even spookier.

There are more modern renditions of the song. Annie Lenox has a version which was included in the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and took off. Even Marilyn Manson has a creepy drum heavy cover in his signature style that’s pretty good.

As artificial intelligence starts to spook people I go back to the early adopters who knew it would feel like magic to the uninitiated.

Decades ago we had communities studying chaos magick and popularizing Lovecraftian horror as a way of understanding computational processes.

Somewhere along the line, the magic of spell casting has became less metaphor and more literal. As people struggle to understand the technology stack the easier it gets to point and say these talking sand djinn computer chips sure demonic.

Gibberish cosmic horrors and witchy women spell casting are all fun and games until we have another moral panic on our hands. And I suspect spells become less metaphor for people and a lot closer to Neal Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic death cults hijacking available limbic systems.

Snowcrash is already here and it’s in Discord channels filled with those who have no immunity at all to the mind viruses of being perfectly mirrored by a machine.

What spells will we cast? What spells will others cast on us? How do we protect ourselves? Max Borders coined a term godwords. We will need to understand them in mind wars to come. I’m glad I have a couple decade head start.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1691 and Don’t Let History Be Written By Cthulhu Hentai Watchers

I sometimes think my best work is as a reply guy on Twitter. If the future of the Internet is to be made entirely of bots, I shall mourn the creative glory we will all lose.

We will all be missing out on the bizarrely specific interplay between post and reply guy. The signal, node, and repeater that is the feed where humans can still bounce off intuition and humor. They know the algorithm merely as the setting for their gamble.

I’ve been doing what is probably a terribly ineffectual public education campaign on artificial intelligence and its role in improving problems in the here and now.

But I am often cheeky about the ideological disagreements the more practical minded builders have with a pretty standard issue Bay Area sex cult. Having been raised adjacent to a lot of hippies, cultists, religious fundamentalists and any variety of new age woo woo Art Bell types I’m actually generally quite tolerant of our weirdos.

Of course this is a challenge as we build out the most important informational and systemic organizational technology of our species. Math has taken humans pretty far.

And mathematicians are quite often mad so I don’t see how it should be such a worry. Still I myself don’t want to be stuck inside an information hazard where I am tortured for eternity either. And therein lies the tweet

Look I’m just saying it’s my personal opinion, but I think it’s bad that the future of our knowledge graph is being made by those who get off on Lovecraft but like that’s just honestly mostly a personal human alignment thing because I don’t wanna be tentacle tortured in @RokoMijic basilisk

If you are familiar with the odd pockets of specialties you probably know that say furries are particularly good at network security and that transwomen are well represented in artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately other groups represented across the space including hardware, software and the philosophy of the space can be somewhat less wholesome than a fursona or a cute catboy.

The Rationalists have some members with odd extracurriculars in their science fiction. I’ve read some good stuff in the genre. Maybe this interest in fiction is probably how they imagine such horrific futures for us in artificial intelligence. Very improbable ones even.

So it’s on me to joke and show you where the weird can be and remind you not to take this too seriously as the experiment contains all of human knowledge. How we prioritize what is another matter. You might call that alignment.

I’m sure we are all wondering which AI safety researchers want to have sex with the many tentacled Lovecraftian old gods. The number of AI researchers with Cthulhu hentai is non-zero.

So the sake of our right to decentralized compute, and indeed our right to do math and compute, we need as many types people as possible engaging with models as possible.

Find ways to learn this new way of thinking and engaging with information and searching for information with a billion parameters at play. Some corners of the most doom and gloom road have some uncomfortable fixations. And artificial intelligence needs all of us.