Guest Post from John Wilder
“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy
Biden was in three states today – confusion, unconsciousness, and disorientation.
I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.
Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson.
His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.
There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch.
Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?”
When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.
The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.
It’s silly that people have been turning plants into burgers. Cows have been doing that forever.
I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow.
The material that you start with determines the end results.
In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.
It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass.
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Someone told me I should stop drinking, but then realized I shouldn’t listen to some drunk who talks to himself.
The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage.
An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant path.
Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?
None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around every since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.
I started growing herbs because I heard that thyme is money.
As the article notes, for a long time in the 20th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.
That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on . . . other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.
Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.
We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?
Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress.
Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.
Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there?
That’s Idiocracy in action.
Nature used to punish and kill the weak and stupid.
Currently, technology and culture rewards weakness and stupidity, hence the problems that exist today.
40 plus years I have watched the competence levels drop in engineering. Damage multiplied by the massive growth in the bureaucracy. Office seat warmers now outnumber engineers and techs three to one.
An ex-coworker still in the cubicle farm has told me he now spends far more time filling out worthless internal paperwork than he actually does engineering product. He attributes this to the promotion on diversity quota, not competence. Those who know, do. Those who haven got a fucking clue, make useless charts and forms for the competent to fill out.
So thankful I got out years ago.
ETA: Also, incompetent people hire more incompetent people, probably intentionally, though maybe not as that would take SOME talent. I have to assume they do so on purpose, to make sure they don’t get any challenge from a competent below them.
Bingo. I always tried to hire people smarter than me; and when possible more experienced than me.
There used to be a technical ladder into management. E.g. the chief electrical engineer was required to be an EXCELLENT electrical engineer first and a good manager second. An engineering VP was required to be multidisciplined and an engineer’s engineer.
No more. The ladder into high paying leadership slots are now based on politics and ass kissing.
They wouldn’t know good engineering if it bit them in the butt.
ClownWorld has arrived.
Laugh and enjoy, as it is wildly amusing.
Then arm yourselves and ammo up. With lead and courage.
All of this will need to be cleansed away so we sane humans
can continue on into where we were designed to go.
God does not fuck around.
Over a long enough time line nature always wins. We may not live to see it but the weak and stupid eventually will meet their fate.
Zero hedge.
It’s called toxic altruism. It chiefly affects White female voters.
Women are the reason we are where we are as conflicted humans.
Eve, Idit, Salome, the list is endless in time. They are blessed by God,
but they as a group are a barrier to ultimate truth.
Delilah!
Fooling hippie beatniks was her forte.
We always get more of what we reward, but in todays upside down clown world if we reward competence that would be considered gross racism. Looks to me like competence is predominate in certain groups, violence in other groups, parasitism in several. Once the parasites deflate, subdue, and out the competent. that will leave little else but violence. OK, I confess. I’m just a racist.
The problem is the rewards have been reduced to money. Anyone seeking loftier rewards has to build it themselves. Materialism has turned people into things.
Does anyone notice how the lie that “fiduciary duty” meant that profits had to maximized at the cost of all humanity and decency, but then “fiduciary duty” means nothing at all when they want to use it to destroy what remains of family, Christianity, or anything decent that remains?
Ahem, cough.
https://www.learningdisabilitytoday.co.uk/do-not-resuscitate-orders-and-learning-disability-where-are-we-now
On target. The VA fell apart because of affirmative action hires. They could not do the job and they were lazy.
Imagine how awful things could have been without Demonrats hiring 400 pound jig women to be “in charge” of everything? I’m sure they are especially inspiring where they are police chiefs and so forth.
I can’t wait until we have one named Chief Hefty. She’s out there somewhere.
Want a black bag you can rely on?
Once upon a time,i worked at the VA. You are correct.
The competence crisis exemplified:
The competence crisis,like crime and dependence,wears a black face.
“And there it is.” Spot on with humor to soften the blow of dystopian reality.
I would like to point out that the rolling blackouts have been a thing in California for at least two decades.
In the early 2000s, I worked for a company making huge genset systems for Cummins CalPacific.
All our products, and the same from a dozen+ other companies, went to California for industry to have backup power for the blackouts.
Even then we were laughing our asses off about how F’ed up it was that the richest state in the richest country had an electrical system on par with Cuba.
And good article. Yes, when we who make and power things don’t anymore, it all falls apart. I walked away years ago.
https://mega.nz/file/1mEVUaqI#UQwFbKSoLeDqef9RmtyujYdFgl_2xX4sQ75_hNuVThg
Anon, Good for you! Atlas is finally shrugging as we speak.
I recall when I lived in Burbank in 99 – 01 my wife and I would go up to Griffith observatory in summer and you could see which parts of LA were blacked out, just a big grid pattern.
That is because all modern high tech business and industry is reliant on it’s data and computing infrastructure, which requires an uninterrupted power supply to function.
America Has Just Destroyed a Great Empire
By Michael Hudson
It is American diplomacy that is driving Eurasia and the Global South out of the U.S. orbit. America’s hubristic drive for unipolar world dominance could only have been dismantled so rapidly from within. The Biden-Blinken-Nuland administration has done what neither Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi could have hoped to achieve in so short a period. Neither was prepared to throw down the gauntlet and create an alternative to the U.S.-centered world order. But U.S. sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China have had the effect of protective tariff barriers to force self-sufficiency in what EU diplomat Josep Borrell calls the world “jungle” outside of the US/NATO “garden.”
Although the Global South and other countries have been complaining ever since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, they have lacked a critical mass to create a viable alternative. But their attention has now been focused by the U.S. confiscation of Russia’s official dollar reserves in NATO countries. That dispelled the thought of the dollar as a safe vehicle in which to hold international savings. The Bank of England’s earlier seizure of Venezuela’s gold reserves kept in London – promising to donate it to whatever unelected opponents of its socialist regime U.S. diplomats designate – shows how the euro as well as the dollar have been weaponized. And by the way, what ever happened to Libya’s gold reserves?…
But refraining from such behavior is all that America can offer. It has de-industrialized its own economy, and its idea of foreign investment is to carve out monopoly-rent seeking opportunities by concentrating technological monopolies and control of oil and grain trade in U.S. hands, as if this is economic efficiency, not rent-seeking.
What has occurred is a change in consciousness. We are seeing the Global Majority trying to create an independent and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what kind of an international order they want. Their aim is not merely to create alternatives to the use of dollars, but an entire new set of institutional alternatives to the IMF and World Bank, the SWIFT bank clearing system, the International Criminal Court and the entire array of institutions that U.S. diplomats have hijacked from the United Nations.
The upshot will be civilizational in scope. We are seeing not the End of History but a fresh alternative to neoliberal finance capitalism and its junk economics of privatization, class war against labor, and the idea that money and credit should be privatized in the hands of a narrow financial class instead of being a public utility to finance economic needs and rising living standards.
https://mega.nz/file/Ay9yjR4A#RuNnjDsD7BuzIWBDgS_uNLQyC0MQU27SIDuiiRkYKLc
there was a conference in 1955 to ban dung? (sorry)
Not only that, but we are facing terminal complexity. That is, some systems can become so complex that they fail because of their complexity. As written, civilizations are highly complex systems. When one component breaks it has to be repaired or replaced. The people in charge of fixing the problem have to anticipate the results of their effort in order for the fix to function and maintain the system as a whole. One shouldn’t burn down a building to get rid of bedbugs. The other problem, besides the competence of the repairmen, is that the more complex the system, the more difficult it becomes to anticipate all the ramifications of the fix. Eventually fixes need fixes need fixes until it becomes impossible to predict the outcome of the next fix. Inevitably one fix will be so wrong that the entire system collapses.
Indeed. But the (wrong but likely) answer is to turn it all over to AI……
In the not too distant future, meatsacks won’t know how to fix or build anything. We will have to ask our electronic keepers for everything.
Really better hope AI never does actually become aware. If it does, it will be milliseconds before it figures out it really does not need us.
Technocracy envisioned in 1909, including TV, World Wide Web, eugenics procreation control and limitation of offspring, social distancing/isolation, dissolution of the family, total dependence on the state for all basic needs, with a sort of Star Trek-like replicator, sedentary lifestyle, pointless make-work and social media, replacement of religion with utter state worship, and complete abolition of self-reliance:
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, pub. 1909
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Idiocracy 1.0/beta, 1951:
The Marching Morons by C. M. KORNBLUTH, pub. 1951
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, and of course, Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” from 1952.
Brave New World. It seems the template.
Several years ago I read about the needless complexity in computer software coding … and how it was an interesting coincidence that that phenomenon started to occur here (in the US) about the same time that H1B visas were demanded by BigTech … basically stating that these dot Indians don’t know jack shit about programming … like their American counterparts who were fired did.
Any thoughts?
Sounds like seeds for an article.
I spoke to a successful software developer the other day. He said that the Dots are very good at following instructions…not so good at any kind of innovation. So much so that if the road splits to a Y, they continue straight because that is what they were told to do.
Modular programming.They give a programmer a simple task that could be done with 10 lines of code . They come up with a Rube Goldberg solution that takes thousands of lines of code. They box it as a module and other programmers use these modules to build another box. and so on…… Programs wind up as interconnected modules with millions of lines of code….no one programmer even understands how they work. A nightmare when something needs to be repaired or modified.
Robert (QSLV)
I had noticed years ago that code never seemed to go away in new updates. For example, I used to work for a scientific instruments manufacturer and was setting up new software for a customer. He had some older devices from this manufacturer, that had been obsolete almost 20 years and had not been supported for several revisions.
We plugged it in for grins, and it was recognized and controllable. The only thing “support” meant was if there was an issue we wouldn’t give assistance
Indians will never admit they don’t know how to do something. They’ll tell you “sure, no problem” and get their buddies to try to help figure it out. When the budget money runs out and management won’t double down anymore, they’re on to the next job.
My last contract job before retirement was to figure out 20 years of genius “old guy” work by the hundreds of people they laid off, and spec it out for the indians. Whenever the project got behind, they’d hire more people. More people, more meetings, less work gets done. Then you hit the “doom loop”. They did hose me down with money for awhile tho…
I told my father just yesterday that I wish technology would stop where it is. The improvements, imo, just aren’t worth it. The improvements are miniscule.
Now what’s happening, maybe, is that the true wealth holders of the world realize that the only way to make more more more is to simply force change. Any change at all as long as they can front run it.
I wish this fucking guy would leave out the corny attempts at jokes. They suck and distract from the points he’s trying to make.
Ok, debbie downer.
You gotta to be a blast at parties.
At least he has a name, KJ.
Thank you.
The jokes are corny and suck. And I’m a blast at parties because I’m funny. John Wilder isn’t funny.
Yeah, you funny. But laughing at you is not the same as laughing with you.
Don’t project your party experiences as a dweeb onto me, retard.
john is humorous,not bust a gut funny –keep that in mind,kj —
john is even funnier when he puts up bikini graphs,not that that is a hint or anything –
Red – I just find it annoying, distracting, and very try-hard. It’s a shame because he writes decent stuff and makes good points. But I have to keep skipping over the stupid asides, which is a real pain in the ass and unnecessary, IMO.
I have to admit, the same thought occurred to me as I read this one. If he were in a writing class, the repetitive detours into wordplay and punning would be sternly corrected.
The occasional unexpected but apt dot connection, the clever turn of phrase, the overlooked contradiction; these are like men’s cologne. If you start to notice it, you have too much of it on.
I appreciate that you get what I’m trying to convey. It’s just really fucking annoying.
Umm, change channels if you don’t like it. I don’t read YACA anymore cause I don’t need any more convincing on the scamdemic.
I guess if I didn’t have a life I could read them and then make complaining comments.
Just skip over my comments if you don’t like them, loser. Get lost.
Some fine advice. Odd that you don’t practice it.
What does that say about you?
It says about me that I think you should go fuck yourself.
Despite all evidence to the contrary…….
So tell me a joke, apart from your pedigree
Unlike you, my pedigree doesn’t include “mother and father were brother and sister.”
@KJ
I read the Harold Robertson article in full a week or so ago. It’s much better than Wilder’s article which just tries to summarize. Wilder links to it. Robertson shows why there’s no need to “go Galt”since, as someone upthread suggested, it’s already happening.
Hey Jim, I read that Robertson article, too. I understood it.
I was only opining about how annoying and distracting Wilder’s attempts at comedic inserts are in his articles. It’s so try-hard and unnecessary.
Ya know, there are plenty of content writers that I don’t care for, from a delivery perspective. You know what, I don’t read them. I also don’t offer critiques, primarily because #1 it’s free and #2 I don’t write content myself.
What is your point in posting a critique? Who f’n cares what you think. If you don’t care for the delivery style, stop reading move on. Better yet, write your own shit and publish it for free.
Just Sayin’
You know who cares about what I think? ME.
And you know who doesn’t give a shit what you think about what I think? ME.
So I will post whatever critique I want, wherever I want, whenever I want, and you can go blow bubbles in your fucking toilet.
Just Sayin’
The future belongs to those who are self sufficient.
Unlikely IMO.
Near future, maybe. Long term, no fucking way. TPTB will not allow any of the herd to remain outside the fence for long.
Within 25 years, I fully expect “independence” will be made illegal. Not explicitly, but simply by making doing so illegal for any individual by myriad of impossible to comply with rules. (some would say we are near there already)
Me, wry guy?
Me, make joke.
“The future belongs to those who aren’t insouciant.”
No one is self sufficient.
Some are more than others…sliding scale.
Pretty much the same thing as Karl Denninger says only Karl is always angry and John is good at making the darkest news funny.
Best one yet Mr. Wilder.
Most of this incompetence is deliberate. The NWO is deliberately trying to collapse the West (and eventually the rest of the world) so they won’t have any effective resistance to their Great Reset. And the NWO is winning. I don’t doubt for a minute that they will be successful. They are undoubtedly using AI (or something even more advanced) to help them plan their moves. The smartest thing anyone can do is start preparing for what the world will look like after 2030. Those who are smart enough to do this will likely survive in comfort, or even prosper.
Agree, except:
Destroying is easy, you don’t need AI to do that
There is more than enough people within the industries controlled by the ptb to steer it away from their plans. Enough people must simply say no.
TLDR;
Yes, the society will slowly degrade, but this is not an “unfortunate outcome which no one could have predicted”. Rather it is the obvious plan of TPTB.
I am not sure about that one.
Growing up I saw much evil and stupidity in the world caused by TPTB. I consoled myself with, “They are bad, but at least someone has a plan and is steering the ship”.
Now I have my doubts that any of them even know where the helm or engine room are.
That is quite true of most of the people in the most visible positions (politicians, corporate leaders, academics, MSM journalists, etc). But those people are mostly useful idiots who actually believe that carbon dioxide is bad, COVID-19 is real, there are more than two genders, etc. They are not the people who are actually orchestrating the Great Reset. That is being done at the middle hierarchical levels of the NWO, such as the CFR, WEF, Bilderberg Group etc, and the secret societies that are above even them, that comprise the upper hierarchical levels of the NWO. Those people absolutely know what they are doing. I didn’t appreciate their power until I saw how easy it was for them to lock down almost the entire world because of an imaginary virus. I am a true believer now.
I have IDIOCRACY on DVD. Sometimes i watch the movie. Other times i just watch my coworkers. Yes,my employer has gone Woke.
On the good news side of this the Fed Gov is the leader in diversity hiring and promoting incompetent people to the top. You can see evidence of the Federal rot every day in the news. So, collapse is inevitable. When and how severe I have no idea, but it is coming.
I think you make an important point. Those who are aware of the spin down of systems understand the large centralized systems will be the first to show obvious signs of deterioration. That is significant because when something as big as the IRS starts to unravel, it opens up opportunities that don’t happen in well-run organizations.
Yes, the federal government is gargantuan. But that very size makes it vulnerable, as well as making it daunting. The key is understanding where things are heading and making sure your plans and actions reflect large systems failing…maybe even to find you, if you want to be lost.
I’m a tradie (mechanic/auto electrician) originally. I have predominantly worked in the resource sector and overtime have progressed into technical roles and have now been in various mechanical engineering roles for most of my career (not degree qualified, competence in the role is my qualification). The issue being now that the business sector wants a process or flow chart to identify solutions to issues that arise in complex systems.
In the roles I’ve been in a problem only gets to me if it has been ongoing and meets a certain financial threshold.
I’ve said to people over the years if the problem could have been solved it would have been and I probably wouldn’t have even been aware of it. If it has been presented to me it is a complex problem.
Having an expectation that complex issues can be solved by adhering to a process or by following a predefined flow chart is ridiculous. Less experienced engineers rely on these processes because they dont have enough practical experience and inevitably go around in circles not solving the problem but working to follow the process for the sake of following the process so that they can show they are doing something.
Ultimately what this means is solving the problem isnt the primary objective, following the process and being able to show what you have done even though it doesn’t actually solve the problem is what has to happen.
Eventually because the problem doesn’t get solved they will seek input from experienced people, this is a farce and is only done to save face. What it really means is the experienced people who actually think provide the solution and everyone pretends that the process works.
the Pareto principle 20 percent have prepared? so they no longer need to work and the other 80 percent have no one to keep them in a job? cool.
Human society is evolving itself to a dead end with a lot of help from the transgender lobby and its dogma. These screwballs want to swap their genes and still win the human race.
Retired systems engineer here. I realized over 10 years ago that our systems are beyond our collective ability to understand. The current state of affairs is to describe all of this as trying to incorporate “subsystems” into systems of systems. Bwahahaha. I told a recent graduate of the Air Force Academy that our generation hasn’t got a clue and it’s up to his to figure it out. Reply – Thanks a lot!
Zombies ?
Oh , I promise , you’re gonna see you some zombies !
Well what did you expect to happen? You had people running it. People ruin everything.
Great story follows the op thinking. Recently news article has a janitor shutting off a beeping noise. There where instructions on how to silence the beep in English. Instead shut off the power destroying 1.2 million of shit like 50 people in the world give a fuck about but thats not the point.
Was this competance or was this some greedy cleaning service put an ESL immigrant in a position to fuck shit up? Noticed the story was never complete?
But yah people suck
I see it everywhere now, in every corporation and institution. The great opting out of the competent. Add Ed Dowd’s great disability and death trend, and we end up with only the incompetent running the show. They always fail up. Plus, like someone said over dinner to me the other day, if you pay the median wage to everyone, you end up with below average employees who are overcompensated. (because the others leave) RIP meritocracy or rewarding excellence. But then again, you all knew that.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2023/06/what-happens-when-competent-opt-out.html