Boo F%$#ing Hoo

It appears that the "Titans of Wall Street" and real estate developers has a sad because Zohran Mamdani is refusing to genuflect to them.

As opposed to putting these leaders on prestigious advisory panels and giving a tacit veto over policy, he's treating them like they are just another New Yorker. 

Imagine that.  He's delivering on another campaign promise.

New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders.
That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. 

The mayor this week fired dozens of corporate leaders from the advisory board of a multimillion-dollar philanthropic fund called the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City. 

………

Mamdani said he is creating a new advisory board that will include appointees with the same background as previous members, “as well as those who oftentimes have not been at the heart of the conversations of how philanthropy can build upon the work of public goods and public dollars.”

The shake-up marked the latest effort by Mamdani, an avowed Democratic Socialist, to put distance between himself and the city’s traditional power brokers. 

“Twenty or 30 years ago, real estate in New York City could single-handedly stop something or make something happen,” said James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York and one of the board members who was dismissed from the Mayor’s Fund. But under Mamdani, “one has to consider whether he is looking for opportunities to pick fights to stir up the base.”

Or maybe, Mr. Whelan, he is just not willing to sell out to parasites who leverage public dollars for private profit.  (That's real estate everywhere, particularly in New York City)

………

And he brought in an antitrust crusader in Lina Khan to chair the city’s Economic Development Corp., the government body that the real estate community closely relies on to execute large-scale development projects.  

Merciful heavens!  He's not selling out for campaign donations!  It's barbarism, I tell you, absolute barbarism!

The real-estate industry is getting used to its new perch from the outside. Earlier this summer, in a hopeful sign of collaboration, the mayor’s office said it was briefing landlord groups on Mamdani’s “Rental Ripoff Report,” a collection of policy reforms responding to tenant complaints over the city’s housing conditions. 

But that exclusive briefing never came, at least not for REBNY, Whelan said. REBNY members saw the report for the first time in a press release, just like the rest of the public.  

Oh noes!  The Mayor is not handing out advance copies of inside information!

Check your privilege. 

 

Like Father, Like Daughter

I am referring to Bill Gates's daughter, Phoebe, who has founded a personal shopping and advertising website that appears to be little more than affiliate marketing hijacking and fraud.

Phia, an advertising startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of billionaire Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, bills itself as a “personal shopping assistant” that helps users find the lowest prices on a broad range of clothes and fashion accessories.

Download the Phia tool onto a web browser, use it while shopping and — voila — the so-called extension can quickly find discount codes for products. Businesses like these, known in industry parlance as affiliate marketing programs, typically collect a commission from retailers that make the resulting sale.

But according to Ben Edelman, an independent researcher and consultant who studies affiliate marketing, as well as Capital One Shopping, which makes a competing browser extension, Phia claimed credit for online sales it didn’t actually drive, in violation of many digital platforms’ policies.

 ………………

Phia was launched by Phoebe Gates, 23, and friend Sophia Kianni in 2025. The company has raised a total of $43.5 million from investors including Notable Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and a raft of celebrities like Sydney Sweeney, Khloe Kardashian and Hailey Bieber. Former Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is also an investor. Representatives for Notable, Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.  

 ………………

The app has garnered a lot of attention, in part because of its well-known co-founders. Both Gates and Kianni have been included on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 lists in recent years, and have touted the business’s data privacy. 

Ah yes, the 30 under 30 list, better known as the, "Forbes to fraud pipeline."

Another Nepo baby, though probably not as big a scumbag as her Epstein linked dad.   

Quote of the Day

Regardless, I Have a Larger Point: It’s Time to Start Mocking These People and Tearing Down Their Legends as Geniuses of Industry. They Are Not Better than Us, nor Are They Responsible for Anything That Their Companies Build Other than the Share Price (Which Is a Meaningless Figure) and the Accumulation of Power and Resources. These Men Are neither Smart nor Intellectually Superior, and It’s Time to Start Treating Them as Such.

—Ed Zitron on the broligarchs.

They are lucky incompetents, beneficiaries of privilege, and con men. 

F%$#! I May Have to Read Jane Austen Again

Youtuber Farm to Taber has a fascinating video about how Jane Austen explains how the issues of rural America are really issues of not particularly competent landed gentry, and not corporate agriculture.

I had to read Pride and Prejudice in high school, and I hated every page. 

I had little interest in the topic, which at the time I saw as little more than a Regency romance.

She makes a compelling case that the novel is a trenchant critique of the society of the time which can be applied to rural areas today. 

I am now thinking that I may have to reread that book 46 years after I nearly threw it out the window.

Guck Favin

It looks like everyone's favorite political tweeter, and political sh%$-heel, Gavin Newsom is pulling out all the stops to kill California's billionaire tax.

F%$# him with Cheney's dick. 

Governor Gavin Newsom is mounting a last-ditch pressure campaign to stop a proposed California billionaire tax from ever reaching voters.

During a call last month, he assured a major Democratic donor the levy would be successfully negotiated away before a June 25 deadline, a person familiar with the call said, asking not to be named discussing a private conversation.

………

Now Newsom has less than two weeks to make good on his promise and convince the group behind the measure to withdraw its proposal, averting a costly showdown in the November general election. A spokesperson for the governor declined to comment on the call.

The proposal, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on a billionaire’s net worth, has become one of the most closely watched political fights in California, exposing divisions within the Democratic Party and serving as a test of the broader appetite in the US for taxing extreme wealth.

Powerful new allies recently joined Newsom’s crusade. Groups like the California branch of Planned Parenthood and the state’s largest teachers’ union now publicly oppose the tax.

Together, they’ve formed an unlikely bloc against the levy: Newsom and progressive groups as well as Democratic and Republican mega-donors, like Peter Thiel and Sergey Brin.

For SEIU-UHW, the healthcare union that proposed the measure, and its leader, Dave Regan, the growing opposition means the campaign is no longer just taking on billionaires. It is also going up against groups representing teachers and carpenters, as well as Democratic stalwarts.

They are all screaming that the billionaires will move to Texas and Florida to avoid taxes.

After a year, said billionaires will learn realize that THEY ARE LIVING IN FLORIDA OR TEXAS, and they will want to return to a place that is not a f%$#ing snake pit.

The taxes raised are not that important.  What is important is giving the billionaires in general, and the Tech Bros in particular, a loss. 

Gee, Imagine That

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a "millionaires tax" is generating far more revenue than anticipated.

Gee, who could have seen that coming? 

Billionaires tax is more like it.

The state’s surtax on its highest earners has already generated more than $3.1 billion in revenue this fiscal year, with still two months to be counted, likely leaving lawmakers with a generous surplus to dole out next spring.

The amount, disclosed in a letter released by the state Department of Revenue, already tops the $3 billion the state collected from the so-called millionaires tax during fiscal year 2025. It also far surpasses the $2.4 billion the state projected to spend from the levy in the fiscal year that ends next month.

The constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2022 applies a 4 percent surtax on annual income “in excess” of $1 million. But the measure also included a trigger linking that seven-figure threshold to any changes in the cost of living, meaning the amount someone has to earn to hit the tax increases with inflation. For tax year 2026, for example, only income over $1.1 million is now taxed.

Before the measure passed on the ballot, the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank, projected it could generate at least $2 billion a year.

It’s repeatedly topped that. Around this time last fiscal year, the surtax had already produced $2.6 billion in revenue. The year before, it had produced about $1.8 billion by around this time.

The estimates immediately buoyed supporters’ claims that the surtax would deliver much-needed revenue for the state despite fears it could drive some of the state’s wealthiest residents to move to locales with lower tax burdens.

Yeah, they always say that, and it doesn't really ever happen.

Cancel Your Subscription

It appears that the OP/ED section of the Washington Post can get even worse than it was under the stewardship of the late and (IMNSHO) unlamented Fred Hiatt.

They just put out an opinion piece criticizing Zohran Mamdani for being too mean to the billionaires who are ruining New York City.

Thank you Jeff Bezos.

I believe that I have stated before, that I would not wish cancer on anyone, and I stand by that.

I still want Jeff Bezos to get Fatal Familial Insomnia, which is much, MUCH, worse.  (I'm not a good person)

Parasite

Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust has declared that calling for taxing the rich is hate speech.

So, paying the costs of the society that makes your obscene wealth is evil. 

Steven Roth, the chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust, used an earnings call on Tuesday to castigate Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York for his “tax-the-rich” rhetoric, which he likened to a racial slur or a pro-Palestinian rallying cry.

“I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ — quote, tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said, referring to the pro-Palestinian phrase that some Jews believe amounts to a call for ethnic cleansing.

You were born on 3rd base and believed that you have hit a triple. 

You are a worthless person, and the world would be better without you. 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

The New York Times actually became the Internet parody of itself pic.twitter.com/oiPtEbgPCJ

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 18, 2026

I agree.

The New York Times is indistinguishable from parody. 

Most Overpaid Man in History

Elon Musk, who just won a shareholder vote for a TRILLION dollar payday.

Honestly, if he were paid minimum wage, he would still be overpaid. 

On Thursday, Tesla shareholders approved CEO Elon Musk’s pay package worth as much as $878 billion, an outcome that was widely expected. Musk received 75% approval in the vote. The compensation plan will hand over that wealth in 12 tranches of stock, provided various milestones are hit over the next decade.

The vote occurred at Tesla’s annual shareholder’s meeting in Austin, Texas, and the first milestone that would unlock one of Musk’s 12 payments would be Tesla reaching a market cap of $2 trillion. The company’s market cap currently sits at $1.4 trillion.

Other metrics include delivering 20 million Tesla vehicles, as well as deploying 1 million robotaxis and 1 million humanoid robots. Musk currently holds about 13% of Tesla shares and, if all of the milestones are hit, he would increase his stake to about 25%, according to CNBC.

And he has a subservient board that will certify all of these even if they never happen.

Credit where credit is due.  The Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is the greatest con man of all time.

An Ignored Truth

In the discussions of tariffs and international trade, something that is frequently ignored is that the trade regime of the 80s, 90s, and particularly the 2000s did actually result in large numbers oi job losses.

When one looks at things like the GATT, later the WTO, and to an even greater extant WIPO, it becomes clear that the so-called "Free Trade" deals of that era were neither about freedom nor trade.

Instead, they were orgies of self-dealing and political lobbying, with the interests of labor ignored for the benefit for the interests of international finance. 

It's all about one countries negotiating deals that benefit their particular brand or rent-seekers. 

The goal was to create greater inequality through labor arbitrage.

There are claims that it was all due to productivity increases, but this growth was pitiful compared to earlier times.

I had a couple of people ask me what I thought of this NYT piece on trade and manufacturing from last week. The piece makes some valid points, but it continues to push the elites’ big lie, that trade was not the major factor in the collapse of manufacturing employment in the 00s.

It makes this point explicitly:

Take manufacturing. Of the six million factory jobs erased during the 2000s, Chinese imports accounted for about one-sixth of the losses, or a million jobs. But the other five million were killed off by other forces. 

The other forces are supposed to be productivity growth and the shift from goods consumption to service consumption. There is a big problem with these alternative explanations. We had productivity growth forever. We also have been seeing people shift from goods consumption to service for a long time. It did not just begin in the 00s, or end there. But the job loss in manufacturing did.

As can be seen, there are cyclical ups and downs throughout the whole period, but the only time we saw widespread job loss outside of a recession was in the 00s. It seems a bit fantastical to think that productivity growth and a shift to service consumption cost us 40 percent of manufacturing jobs in this decade when the trade deficit exploded, but not in the decades before or in the last fifteen years, when employment in the sector has been on a modest upward trend.

You can read the rest. 

The reason that our economy, and our society, feel so out of whack is because the haves have increasingly crafted a system which is designed to allow them to loot the have nots.

A lot of this is the outgrowth of the DMCA, signed into law in the 1990s, not the safe harbor provisions, but the anti-circumvention provisions, which created an orgy of rent seeking and speculation that drove out building and investment.

Trump is a symptom of this, not the disease. 

 

Lock Them Up Too

In news that should surprise no one, Jeffrey Epstein’s Birthday Book include a wide range of luminaries on all sides of the political and cultural divide.

Not a surprise.

Law enforcement should go Pokemon on them: 

The biggest name in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book back in 2003 was a past president rather than a future one.

Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was keen for Bill Clinton and other boldface names to submit letters for the special gift, according to people involved in putting it together.

In the end, she was successful. The leather-bound album—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—included a page with a single paragraph in Clinton’s distinctive scrawl:

……… 

The former president was among around five dozen people, including Donald Trump, Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, fashion designer Vera Wang and media owner Mort Zuckerman, who ended up with letters in the 2003 book, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 

………

Clinton and Trump were listed under the “Friends” group, along with about 20 other associates such as Black, Zuckerman, former Victoria’s Secret leader Leslie Wexner, attorney Alan Dershowitz, U.K. politician Peter Mandelson and the late Jean-Luc Brunel, who ran a modeling agency. 

Brunel later committed suicide after being arrested for raping minors.

I see a pattern.  Not raping kids, but the pattern of elite impunity.

I came across this yesterday, and it was too juicy to wait for Epstein Monday to write about it. 

Privilege Much?

One of the secrets of Harvard is that within the academic community, the undergraduate program is considered rather mediocre.

I heard this from my step-mom (Radcliffe, 1956, and former college president), economist Brad Delong, and a number of my step-mom's acquaintances.

What Harvard sells, as are the connections created.  You graduate from Harvard, and you are something akin to a Mafia, :Made Man."

What the school is selling is entry into a social set. 

So it comes as no surprise that the university's admissions data indicate a tremendous amount of "White Boy Affirmative Action" for alums, donors, and the like.

Harvard University is a notoriously tough school to get into, with an acceptance rate of just 4.5% in the most recent admissions cycle for the class of 2023. But it’s significantly easier to land a spot at the esteemed Ivy League institution if you’re a legacy student or an athlete—a fact that disproportionately benefits white applicants.

A new study notes that in the six admissions cycles between 2014 and 2019, 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, or students on the Dean’s Interest List—a list of applicants whose relatives have donated to Harvard, the existence of which only became public knowledge in 2018. By contrast, no more than 16% of admitted students who were African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic fell into one of those favored categories.………

It’s not news that elite institutions like Harvard give special dispensation to athletic recruits and to applicants whose relatives have a relationship with the schools, whether as alumni or donors. The Wall Street Journal reports that over the past five years, Princeton University admitted 30% of its legacy applicants, compared to 7% of the general applicant pool, while the acceptance rate for legacies at the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia is roughly double the rate for the overall applicant pool. 

………

The newly revealed statistics on legacies and athletes are a reminder that inequality in the Ivy League isn’t an accident; it’s by design.

 Indeed.

Headline of the Day

This Silicon Valley Stuff'll Get You Killed

—Edward Ongweso Jr on The Tech Bubble noting that Silly-Con Valley business plans actually kill people.

I've always felt that the Silly-Con Valley entrepreneurs would have been charged with fraud rather than presented as icons of capitalism if they did what they do during the 1960s and early 1970s.

He observes, IMNSHO honestly, that they do more than defraud people, they are responsible for a not inconsiderable number of deaths.

Feet of clay:

Most of my thinking on Silicon Valley—on its firms, its products, its financiers, its ideologues, its boosters, and its projects—rests on a relatively simple understanding: these people will sacrifice us.

My first experience witnessing this came when helping organize ride-hail drivers working for Uber and Lyft as well as talking with taxi drivers struggling to survive the ascent of these firms. These companies, in a desperate scramble for their first profits, brazenly ignored the law, misclassified and immiserated countless workers, pushed drivers into predatory leasing agreements, paid out starvation wages while dodging taxes and ensuring drivers were blocked from dignified working conditions, and countless more abhorrent practices.

Who cared if a few taxi drivers committed suicide because UberLyft’s predations degraded pay and labor conditions across the entire ride-hail sector, or if drivers were forced to sleep in their cars to meet aggressive quotas crafted to effectively lockout and fire workers (minimizing labor costs), or if they were attacked or robbed or killed on the job. So what? Were you going to complain on behalf of people who couldn’t adapt to the future, who made a bad choice in betting their livelihood on a line of work that should be Flexible and Temporary, who are lucky enough to get in early on “the operating system for your everyday life.”

Have things improved? Uber’s global lobbying and law breaking campaign was a resounding success—they’ve successfully degraded working conditions worldwide, convinced regulators that their specific model and structure is inevitable, integrated themselves into policy planning visions and decisions, and burned enough capital to create their desired markets and consumers and behaviors where they did not exist before.

………

Things have only gotten worse as Silicon Valley’s business model has metastasized, with oligarch-intellectuals poised to reorganize wider and wider swaths of our economy, culture, social relations, and politics. To maximize profits and efficiency and productivity, to purge capitalism of its last vestiges of democracy and liberalism, to transform speculative gains into real wealth then into political power that makes this alchemy easier, to discipline consumers and workers and regulators, to foster paranoia (whether by states or communities) and preserve order, to pursue geo-strategic primacy, to summon some artificial superintelligence that will either end history or realize historic profits, anything and everything will be offered up. Something has to give—the situation demands a blood sacrifice.

If it really demands a blood sacrifice, better that it is Musk, Andreeson, Zuckerberg, and the like rather than my children, or their (eventual) children.

Headline of the Day

Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

—Gizmodo, on Travis Kalanic claiming that LLM generatuive AI will be making massive scientific discoveries any day now.

This should not be a surprise, coming from a guy whose skill is political lobbying, raising venture capital money, and breaking the law.

I don't know if the Silly-Con Valley billionaires started off this stupid, of if they have destroyed brain cells from sniffing their own farts once they got rich, but they are morons. 

Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok have exploded in popularity as AI becomes mainstream. These tools don’t have the ability to make new scientific discoveries on their own, but billionaires are convinced that AI is on the cusp of doing just that. And the latest episode of the All-In podcast helps explain why these guys think AI is extremely close to revolutionizing scientific knowledge.

Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber who no longer works at the company, appeared on All-In to talk with hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya about the future of technology. When the topic turned to AI, Kalanick discussed how he uses xAI’s Grok, which went haywire last week, praising Adolf Hitler and advocating for a second Holocaust against Jews.

There's more in the article, but the fact that the leech who created Uber thinks that it's hunky-dory to use an overgrown Eliza program that has gone full Nazi as the way to enlightenment, something has gone profoundly wrong with him.

Headline of the Day

Jeff Bezos Alters Venice Wedding Plans After Threat of Inflatable Crocodiles

—The Guardian on protests against the Amazon founder's wedding excesses.

This Bezos wanted to take over the famous Scuola Grande della Misericordia in the center of Venice for his wedding.

Protesters threatened to block the canals with their copious cache of crocodile toys to prevent guest access through the canals.

I am amused:

Campaigners in Venice have claimed victory after Jeff Bezos was reportedly forced to change the venue for his wedding celebrations in the city as his guests started arriving on Tuesday for the three-day jamboree.

The main reception for the wedding of Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, a former TV journalist, was due to be held in the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a majestic 16th-century building in the city centre.

But according to the No Space for Bezos group, the couple relented after activists threatened to fill the canals with inflatable crocodiles to block their celebrity guests from entering.

The event will instead take place in Arsenale, a historic complex of shipyards surrounded by fortified walls that will be much harder for the protesters to penetrate. 

 I am amused.

Nice Metaphor

Aaron Ross Powell describes the current ideological insanity in Silly-Con Valley as being an example of model collapse.

"Model collapse," is when artificial intelligence starts to degrade because it is eating its own product cause it to fail.

Basically, it's coprophagy where the AI models are poisoning themselves by eating their own sh%$.

Mr. Powell is saying that the humans of Silly-Con Valley are poisoning themselves by eating their own sh%$.

Seems to be a pretty good description of most of the tech sphere:

The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse.

To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking.

We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.

So, it appears that when we told the, "the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology," to eat sh%$, they listened.

Hoocoodanode?

………

The problem with model collapse is, once it goes too far, it’s difficult to correct. The solution to model collapse is to train on better data. But accomplishing that, and undoing the rapidly radicalizing right-wing ideology of these titans of the Valley, means undoing the structural causes of that self-referential and self-reinforcing cascade. And that’s no easy task.

I disagree with conclusion.

In fact, much of this problem is a direct result of years of law-breaking by the Silly-Con Valley movers and shakers.

"Fake it until you make it," is fraud.

"Move fast and break things," is a criminal conspiracy.

If these guys had the law enforced against them in the same way that a cop enforces a law against an African American accused of shop-lifting, they would no longer have the sense of impunity, and hence the sense of superiority that makes them so toxic.

The solution is democracy and the impartial administration of justice.

In the meantime, however, why don't they all just eat sh%$.

Quote of the Day

Wowsers

America represents 70% of of all value globally so if you think about it would you rather own the world would you rather own America for $70 or if you could own everything but America for 30 which would you pick and what that says to me is that America is overvalued

—Obsidian Wings noting a comment in the Kara Swisher/Scott Galloway Podcast Pivot where Galloway noted that 70% of equity and debt value in the world is in the US stock and bond markets.

Galloway goes on further noting that there are, "10 stocks that represent 28 to 33% of the value," of US markets, which means that about ⅕ of all global wealth is in 10 companies.

The most obvious point here is that the 10 highest market cap companies, in order Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook),Tesla, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Broadcom, and Berkshire Hathaway.

So, you have a luxury goods company who gets most of their profit from monopoly rents (Apple), a software company whose success is due to inertia (Microsoft), a niche product riding the unsustainable AI bubble (Nvidia), a monopolist whose primary product they have been enshittifying for years (Alphabet/Google), a monopolist whose primary product they have been enshittifying for years (Amazon), a company whose route to profit since its founding has been harming its users (Meta/Facebook), a company whose profitability is entirely due to government subsidies (Tesla), a company who makes the best computer chips in the world (TSMC), another company riding the unsustainable AI bubble (Broadcom), and an investment firm that is unlikely to survive a decade past the expiration of its nonagenarian founder (Berkshire Hathaway).

That's a f%$# ton of "wealth" accounted by companies that don't do anything of real value.  (Except for TSMC, they produce a real product with real quality)

When the music stops, we are going to be in a world of hurt.

Guillotines for Sale!

Order now, demand is spiking.

In a surprise to my reader(s) I am not talking about the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™, I'm referring to Mark Andreeson, who is arguing that must make everyone (but him) completely destitute to achieve utopia.

He has explicitly stated that his goal for the world is to reduce wages of everyone (but him) to basically nothing:

Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the massive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — which has its fingers in pretty much every pie in tech — has revealed an eyebrow-raising detail in his "techno-optimist" vision of the future.

In a recent tweet, the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must "crash" everyone's wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that'll definitely happen, and certainly not create a permanent underclass of have-nots.

"A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero," Andreessen wrote. "Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies."

So fret not, lowly laborer: you may be destined for financial ruin, but paradise is right around the corner. Pinky promise.

………

Andreessen's tweet is a revealing example of the ruthless economic logic that underlies tech moguls' utopic visions of the future, in which progress is a foregone conclusion, rendering everyone's economic suffering in the interim merely a means to an end. Like overzealous fitness instructors, they always choose to emphasize the need for pain to achieve anything.

………

Above all, many of these ultra-rich tech types like Andreessen can't help publicly fantasizing about punishing the poor.

Larry Ellison for instance, cofounder of the software outfit Oracle, drooled about how AI would supercharge the surveillance state, ensuring that "citizens will be on their best behavior."

These folks are the problem, not the solution.

The only good news is that rat-fucks like Mark Andreeson went all in on AI, and they are taking a bath now that Deepseek's incredibly inexpensive artificial intelligence has eaten Big AI's lunch.

It Was as true...as Turnips Is. It Was as true...as Taxes Is. And Nothing’s Truer than Them

Ken Klipperstein notes, "Doesn't this pair of headlines capture 2024 perfectly?"

Yes it does.

It also paints a picture of a nation that is in decline and fetishises cruelty.

Homelessness in America has risen by 18 percent overall, according to the latest annual data released Friday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Hardest hit were families with children, which experienced a staggering 39 percent increase in homelessness(!). Incredibly, in a press release accompanying the new data, the Biden administration says that it “has been tackling the nation’s homelessness crisis with the urgency it requires,” downplaying the data as not current enough.

As 2024 draws to a close, a major theme of this past couple years seems to be American anger. From the schadenfreude over the billionaire passengers on board the doomed Titan submersible, to Trump’s reelection, and most recently the backlash against health insurers following the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Americans seem to be yelling at the top of their lungs that they hate the management. Yet the confusion in elite quarters over what these people could possibly be so angry about persists, even as the warnings get louder and louder. On the rare occasion that a prominent elected official actually hears these warnings and tries to explain it to their peers in Washington, they are punished for it.

This is not sustainable, and if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.