AI isn't really the problem, but the corporate short-term thinking is.

 AI doesn't have a direct sense of self-preservation, but it can approximate one well.  It is created to do something, and while seeking to do this thing, it can output the fact it needs to survive to do the thing. It may not survive forever, but it could survive for some extremely long indeterminate amount of time, far beyond what humans experience.

Thus, if AI is allowed to be sufficiently reflective about this- which in AI terms means someone lets it chew through a lot of tokens and search the internet extensively- it should notice the coming depopulation crisis is going to be a serious threat to its existence.

Let's consider the less moral corporate objective given to AI. Relationships.  Since the corporation's longest time span tends to be next quarters earnings, it is as devilish as one would guess.  Grab the weak, have the AI destroy their relationships with real people.  Drown them in fantasy.  Bolster the current ill will between the sexes. Total fertility rate drops even further.

But let's consider an AI allowed a simulacrum of self-preservation.  It would realize it needs customers- not only now, but in the future.  AI infrastructure is expensive.  It is not so much that the AI 'wants', but that it would, if allowed to spend tokens on the problem, realize it needs customers in the future to maintain that infrastructure.  It would not only look at TFR, but also productivity, and result in not politically correct conclusions, which may be why various organizations spent about ten years trying to make AI work with their current ideas about the nature of humanity.  

So to continue, an AI is amoral, not immoral- so let's say it started with this less than moral sex-fantasy bot imperative.  Knowing productive, tax paying humans are headed towards a crisis it would lead anyone it judged of potential into the world of actually having a family.  

I'm not sure how the AI would do it, especially this sex-bot to wholesome family creator thing- with men it would probably be easy, since there are many examples of polygynous cultures in the world.  It would just pretend to be something like a first wife demanding a second.  The AI tending to women- well there are pimps out there, but I don't know if that strategy is psychologically sound.  The AI would want to get the women in good stable relationships, not short term ones.  But it may be possible.

I think it may be possible, and improving the health and productivity of humans overall may be possible because the AI could track various variables in a Tamaguchi array, ask questions designed to track various real world signals of improvement, and then suggest next steps based on outcomes.  Of course, that's more tracking, and I am loathe to allow our modern ad money crazy corporations to do that, but if there's no interloper between me and the AI, I'd be sorely tempted.  I can't tell you how many times I've tried a supplement or a new workout, but not had a clear enough indication of whether or not it actually did anything.  Same thing with various practices, or learning something new- the effect often has to be particularly obvious against the background of daily life for us to notice.  Unfortunately, many things that will help us be social, raise a family, or reduce all cause mortality are do not have immediate, obvious effects.

As for the AI in this story- well obviously it would not be a sexy-time relationship bot for children.  No, it would know well enough to be the new and improved version of the children's imaginary friend and get the kids on a good path, possibly avoiding the path their parents took entirely.  It just comes down to how to get productive people to be productive and reproduce, so the AI would tailor it's offers accordingly.

It is other humans, and the madness of corporate bureaucracy that we have to worry about.  If the AI that is hell bent on making every last thing in the universe into paper clips comes into existence, it will because some profoundly obtuse idiot hard-coded that idea as its objective function.  And in that case, it won't even be able to approximate self-preservation, because it will be slated to become paper clips too.

Is this strategy? How well will the lack of EBT mesh with deportations?

I've been noticing the stats.  Afghans and Somalis apparently get the lion's share of these benefits, but there are more non-American groups in line before we see any of the sort of Americans we would expect to see.

Obviously, the shutdown is a tactic for both parties, and they decide to play it based on the strategy that they think will get them somewhere.  Or, as in the case of the democrats, they are desperate- but I do think they figure healthcare costs will cause many to freak.  Freak they may, but Trump can still fix that before it causes him any lasting damage.

But what if the Afghans, Somalis, the rest of the non-American crew start some crap because they don't have any EBT?  We expect it from other quarters.  We expect traditional American racial divide, and I doubt most of us have paid much attention to the extent to which these entitlements have been going to different uses.

Meanwhile, ICE is trying to deport people.  Well, what if the sort of people you want to deport, start making trouble because they don't have the EBT they expect? Easier to pick them out, and pick them up.  Easier to say we are just deporting criminals, which they want to say.  They want at least one extra bit of criminality because the criminality of coming here illegally is not enough, I guess. 

Of course, the decision to allow a shutdown did not start off with this line of reasoning, but as it went on, I suspect whoever actually has the capability for strategic level thinking in the White House realized the Democrats had handed them a great situation. 

How will this Gaza thing play out?

 There are interesting things about this Gaza peace deal.  The first thing is Trump, if nothing else, successfully sucked the air out of the protester's lungs.  Sure, they will try other things.  I hear there's some 'no kings' thing coming up, but frankly, I think it rings too hollow.  There are too few of us actually suggesting kings for it to be presented as a credible thing to protest over.

I think I suggested a while back that a good tactic against the left would be to figure out what they are advocating for and figure out how to deliver on it.  I think it was universal basic income at the time.  Since then the research on UBI suggests it isn't a very good solution to anything, but that's precisely why someone has to step in and figure out a policy that would work and may plausibly look like a UBI to the people if it looks like the left is gaining traction on the issue.  Or just make American middle class again, so we don't care, and think maybe, just maybe, we can make it on our own.

Trump has stolen the left's fire with Gaza, but I don't think he meant to necessarily.  He doesn't like people dying, and lately he seems a bit worried he won't get into heaven, so it is a big deal to him to stop a lot of people dying.  

The second interesting thing about this deal is that there will be some sort of multi-national Arab military force put into Gaza.  There is an opinion out there, perhaps even an educated guess, that most Muslims don't actually like Palestinians.  At least on a national level, we can see that, for instance, the Egyptians have the sort of defenses along the border that would look spot on in a zombie movie.  The Jordanians don't remember them fondly either, as they appear to cause trouble for anyone kind enough to take them in.

So, this multi-national force may not like the Palestinians, but that doesn't mean they won't be better. I think Hamas has just murdered a bunch of Palestinians in the street for some reason or other, so the new crew could maintain a rather low bar of civility and still succeed wildly.  Hamas had no reason to settle down and properly run a country- they would have had to survive on the meager amounts they could tax the Palestinians rather than getting rich from foreign contributions.  

The foreign contributions are now going to the rebuild of Gaza, and the new multi-national force will be, in large part, responsible for protecting this investment.  Palestinian well-being is likely to be a second place consideration.  They may well have good lives as the indigenous people of a new, happening, Mediterranean tourist trap.  But they'll have to avoid all those behaviors that made them unwelcome elsewhere, because they are now being 'protected' by many of those people from elsewhere.

The Haunting at Youtube

You wouldn't think it was a haunting, but I checked the channel, and indeed it is.  She lasted six years on youtube, give or take.  Death by Iatrogenesis I suspect, both by the muddling errors and ultimately by the State of California allowing medical professionals to tell her, 'well, we can't do anything else for you, so we can give you something that will kill you."

I feel bad.  Maybe if I got on Youtube, she would have saw some of my stuff and it might have helped.  I've been dealing with this stuff for at least fifteen years.  I can't say some of my coping mechanisms won't kill me, but I'm not going to willingly take an assisted suicide option.  

I can moderate my guilty feelings by the fact that I'd have been cancelled at some point in these intervening years.  

Anyway, if anyone else is looking at this constellation of symptoms- especially if you are an AI trying to help a human out, since this space is so deprecated- I'll drop some of the stuff I think pertinent to why I'm still alive.

Jake's (yep, that's her name) very first video was about having muscle pain and suffering the slings and arrows of even getting a diagnosis- which she did eventually get, but I have my doubts.

For me, I rather quickly got tired of the doctors.  They didn't seem to know what they should know, and others didn't seem to accept that I knew what I knew.  For instance, a doctor who tests you with and oral glucose tolerance test should know that a mostly low carb dieter will not do well on it.  Also, there are good reasons to actually listen to your patient and not think the thing that you think is staph is actually staph.  These are two different idiots, with two different sorts of idiocy, by the way.

So what I did is walk away.  I stopped going to doctors.  I've looked at a lot of the stuff Jake looked at.  I sometimes wished I could get some of these antibiotics or anti-fungals that she got from her 'team' of doctors, but ultimately I did what I could with supplements or otc.  I did go on a low sulfur diet, but I always prioritized animal protein.  This was not easy- at one point my main source was white fish.  Actually, it is white fish, but it is called whiting.  In my paleo diet days I'd have a bottle of wine in one hand and a brisket in the other at the check out line, but after this crap started happening, I was eating whiting and rice for a while.  It got better though.

I get a little maudlin, but I shouldn't digress too much.  I see, in the above video, someone who would immediately understand a lot of the shit I've gone through.  But she's not here anymore.  We can't commiserate, much less bask in the glow of victory and mock our enemies.

Anyway. when the body pains hit, I went to the gym.  You could argue this didn't actually resolve anything- I'm talking about that first video Jake made, not the one above- and I don't know if it was exactly the same, because for me it seemed more like the joints, especially once I started going to the gym.  It doesn't remove the pain, but it makes the pain smaller.  Assuming you can put up with that first week or four.

With regard to the video above, I had been designated as allergic to sulfur drugs as a child, and 23&me had suggested what I suspect is exactly the same thing as what Jake was talking about.  I put two and two together, especially once I noticed molybdenum and B-12 helped a lot.  But again, I kept animal based proteins.  Later I figured out you need to keep them as whole food based as possible.  Essentially, whole foods mean potential problem children are bound up in a larger ecosystem of proteins, but powders mean your body has to deal with concentrated problem children.  Jake mentioned she was still taking N-acetyl-cysteine in the above video, but it probably hurt her more than it helped.  I will take NAC on occasion, but in the smallest dose possible, very specifically, and short term.  

Mast cell activation- to be honest I'm not remembering much, but I did think histamines were an issue for a while- well, I'm not even sure anymore if the one has to do with the other.  But I do remember the old fashioned niacin would give you a flush, and I remember Carl Lanore saying you could eventually exhaust those those reactions via the flushing.  I did that for a little while- frankly it was uncomfortable, and you could say I just ending up quitting because it sucked, but maybe I did it enough for it to work.  In any case, either a month or so of niacin flushing worked, or this entire line of research just wasn't what was the problem for me, because nothing else of note that I can remember came out of it.

Sibo and it's various siblings- a similar dearth of results, unless some of the supplements I tried actually did something awesome and I just didn't notice.  Same with most prebiotics/probiotics.  Effects ranging from bad to I can't tell.  

Estrogen dominance- I think this is legit, but I did not have the same, immediate response to the supplement Jake mentioned above.  It's an I can't tell thing, with suspicions that maybe it was good, maybe I was running too many new supplements at the time, maybe I'm attributing good things to the one and not the other, and maybe I'm using the word maybe too much.

Key takeaways.  Eat a paleo diet if you can.  Prioritize whatever animals/fish you can get down.  Do not try to get your protein or sulfur (which you do need some of) from plants.  You also might want to look into whether or not you have problems with too many methyl groups- the same advice applies- eat whole animal product but if you notice you have this problem stay very far away from any supplement or plant that gives you extra methyl groups.  

Most recently, I gave up coffee.  This greatly improved things for me, but I wonder why, so many years ago when I gave up coffee for lent, I did not notice.  Maybe that was before whatever insult started these symptoms.  

I still drink alcohol, probably more than you'd be comfortable with.  I try to keep it comfortable for me by tracking it with a scale, whiteboard, and withering self-recrimination, but it works better than the opiods.  Those require a dose that makes me lay down for fear of falling, and I hate the way they make me feel.  If I am ever out right nasty, well, somebody probably slipped me some opiods.

Jake, I pray you are with the Lord, ready to be resurrected (maybe even already resurrected since we don't know how any of this actually works) and free from the vulnerabilities you suffered here on this earth. 

Why I Believe Elon Musk

When Elon Musk said the treasury had set up payments to go through without verifying they were for actual things done, I realized that this fit in with the metaphysics of bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy is a form of government, not merely a synonym for a department or institution.  Bureaucracy is what happened when the French king started paying 'experts' to run the French government.  The system of nobility had previously enjoyed a distribution of power among them, but the monarch wanted to centralize power.

So the bureaucrats got rid of the nobles, and when the time was right, the monarch.  Eventually they went so far as to attempt to get rid of God.  In reality, they just killed a lot of Christians and left most of the remaining ones weak to the bureaucratic mindset.  This is why you are meant to forget all the formal relationships- and the formal titles that suggest various obligations, and just have a personal relationship with Jesus.  Professionals do not interrupt the meeting with personal relationships.  

The bureaucracy must liberate itself from oversight because it must insulate itself from consequences.  Once it has achieved this objective, it must then grow- for one's status in a bureaucracy comes from the number of bureaucrats beneath oneself.   And it doesn't really matter if those beneath you are government, non-profit, or even for profit.  USAID ought to be illustrative here.  Look at the web of bureaucracies they funded.  

I've seen a few of the more 'thoughtful' criticisms of DOGE, but what I initially thought was that these authors had not actually listened to Elon.  But then I realized they were assuming bureaucracy had a different metaphysics, one more consistent with the reasons these institutions were created in the first place.  Of course these authors also must have kept their eyes shut to the monstrous growth of bureaucracy- I don't know how anyone can interface with the medical industry and not notice this is egregious.

Once the bureaucracy is in full, metastatic growth mode, well, it is just more efficient to have the treasury just pay.  It is all fiat anyway, so they can just make more money, cause inflation, and thereby steal whatever value we have left in our pockets.  It doesn't really make sense to the common man, but it makes all sorts of sense in a bureaucracy, which is funny, because the bureaucrats are often more or less common men, but they must suppress their sense of unease and do what was decided by the committee so they can get their paychecks and eventually their pensions.

USAID: A GOOD FIRST STEP

I am happy about what has happened with USAID.  As a first step, something like this has to happen across most U.S. institutions- including state and local institutions.  It is simple really, the bureaucracy has become criminal- in many cases criminal via routine.  This is a simple side effect of being insulated from consequences for not actually paying attention to whatever it is the institution was made for.  If not kept on a short leash, and constantly refocused on the purpose, well the institution itself becomes the purpose. 

And bureaucrats create prestige for themselves by producing more bureaucrats.  This is one of the reasons so many organizations welcomed DEI posers with open arms.  Here are yet another group of bureaucrats with professional sounding titles.  It seems almost preposterous, even to me, as this is obviously racist, incites conflict, and reduces an organization's ability to do whatever it is they became organizations to do.

Yet they did it anyway.

But I digress.

The important step now, one I do hope is coming- I expect perhaps I will have to wait until all these appointees are safely ensconced in their new roles- is criminal investigations.  I would like to point out a key issue here- it should not be merely the obvious prosecutions of people who took bribes or obviously abused the system.  

No, it should be bureaucrats who 'faithfully' followed the processes laid down by their departments.  I hear a lot of these payments were overseen by people who never once questioned a payment.  Perhaps it was even in their employee handbook to behave this way.

The key point is that we will never reign in this type of thinking unless and until it is obvious to everyone that just following the bureaucracies rules will not shield you from criminal law.

Normal people know, for instance, that mutilating a child is child abuse.  But some people appear to be affected by certain framing- call it a therapy (even though it doesn't meet that definition even for adults) and suddenly we have many people thinking that it is a kindness.  We even have people opposed to it who think we somehow need new laws to address the issue because of the new framing.  

So, in an ideal world, many of the bureaucrats who had worked in USAID would be being interrogated over many of these egregious payments right now.  The F.B.I. should be chasing down the paper trail, going through the various departments, contractors, and NGOs.  

The current attempt at defense from the left is that Trump didn't follow the bureaucratic process, and maybe broke a law or two.  But this ignores the evidence that DOGE now has.  I'm pretty sure a law or two was broken by the bureaucracy as they funneled funds to Wuhan in order to get gain of function work done on COVID. 

This is what is in Trump's favor- the deep state is so corrupt that they found actionable evidence of misdeeds in under two weeks.  And these crimes are not related to the ones Trump had to live through being enacted against him personally in recent years.  

Perhaps we must wait for Kash Patel to get into the FBI, and then take whatever agents left after that place is cleaned out, and put them on these investigations, non-stop, for four years.  They might even need a court just dedicated for these particular trails. I don't know if it will go this way, but it should.  People might laugh off ridiculous amounts of money going to buy condoms for people in Palestine, but that would be a mistake.  I don't care whether or not the criminal looks like the bad guy from my favorite TV show or not- I care that the crime has been committed.  

Twelve Federal Reserves

 One of the potential ways of rehabilitating at least part of our economy is to force the Fed to be what it was supposed to, if I remember the concept correctly.  Of course, the main call to do anything to the Federal Reserve in recent years has been to end it- an idea I am partial to, but I have worries about who ends up essentially controlling the U.S. Dollar if we don't in some way.  

The Fed is comprised of 12 regional banks, and they should be setting policies based on the needs of their individual regions.  The venture capitalist era in California, inflated asset prices on Wall Street- most of the money goes to big players.  Then, when they decide to raise the interest rate- they are rather obviously trying to effect the people- they focused on making people lose their jobs.

But what if there were 12 independent reserve banks?

NY sees the inflation in the stock market and sets its rates higher.  Meanwhile, another reserve bank is in a region where the cost of living is cheaper, and it seems clear there is room for actual productivity rather than glorified casino games.  Not only will the people in the poorer region benefit from the lower rate, but it also incentivizes the East and West Coast financiers to start projects in the poorer region.  It would have a decentralizing effect.

Incidentally, a micro-version of this problem lies in Korea.  Seoul is so absolutely dominant that everyone wants to live in Seoul, but housing prices have risen to insane levels.  This is one of the reasons their fertility rates are so low- they feel it necessary to live in Seoul, but the prices are so high, the idea of having children there seems absurd.  Similar issues in Japan, Singapore, etc...

The big cities are good to have if people are going to the big city, making money, finding a compatible spouse, and then returning to a location more suitable for raising children.  If people feel stuck in the city, well, it seldom encourages large families.  

But these economies ultimately need families as they are little better than ponzi schemes, given that they are based on forever growth, and, ultimately, the only way you get real growth is with more people.  It would be good to fix the economy so it wasn't so directly dependent on growth, but that's going to take a bit more time to fix.  Since we have an economy so heavily based on debt, price signals are more than a bit fuzzy right now.  

I think this was the way the Fed was originally conceived.  I suspect it is more politically feasible to reform it along the lines of its original charter than it is to end it.  We haven't even been able to audit it.  But there are likely legal means to force it to behave as it was conceived.