By and large, billionaires are bad

 I was pretty sure Warren Buffet was a wholly-owned Promethean from the moment he talked about not leaving his wealth to his kids. But his reported financial support for BLM seals the deal:

The received wisdom, echoing the official mythology around Black Lives Matter Global Network Inc.—co-founded by Garza along with fellow activists Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors—is that BLM is a grassroots movement that rose up organically out of the widespread rage sparked by viral videos of Black American men killed by police officers. According to this account, the political priorities of activists in Brooklyn screaming at cops and calling to defund the police have been fused with those of suburban moms in Peloton T-shirts, hand-painting signs with their kids using the BLM hashtags of large multinational conglomerates—an unusual union of protesters and the corporate boardroom spurred on by nothing more than everyone’s shared outrage over racism.

There is, however, another version of events, in which the heartfelt dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders.

These bedfellows, whose stories and fortunes are never publicly presented as related, are in reality intertwined under the umbrella of a fiscal sponsor named the International Development Exchange. A modestly endowed West Coast nonprofit with origins in the Peace Corps—which for decades supported local farmers, shepherds, and agricultural workers across the Global South—IDEX has, in the past six years, been transformed into two distinct new things: the infrastructure back end to the Black Lives Matter organization in the United States and also, at the very same time, an investment fund vehicle driven by recruited MBAs and finance experts seeking to leverage decades of on-the-ground grantee relationships for novel forms of potentially problematic lending instruments . And it did so with help from the family of one of the most famous American billionaires in history—the Oracle of Omaha himself.

Not every billionaire has sold his soul to Satan, but it is readily apparent that most of them have. This may be what Jesus Christ warned us about when he said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. 

It’s not an accident that they profit from evil and misfortune:

Billionaire wealth reached record high levels amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a report by UBS and PwC found, as a rally in stock prices and gains in technology and healthcare helped the wealth of the world’s richest break the $10 trillion mark. The report, covering over 2,000 billionaires representing some 98{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} of the cohort’s total wealth, found billionaire wealth grew by more than a quarter during the early months of the pandemic to reach $10.2 trillion in July, breaking the previous record of $8.9 trillion at the end of 2019.

They don’t produce anything. They aren’t providing capital to anything useful, or good, or beautiful, or true. This isn’t about capitalism or socialism, it’s about evil serving Evil.

Still in Stage One

Whereas the NBA has already reached Stage Three, the Bargaining phase of the Kübler-Ross model, the NFL is evidently still in Denial:

Sports Business Journal recently reported that NFL media operations man, Brian Rolapp, sent a memo to all the teams to allay their fears over the consistently bad ratings. Rolapp reasoned that both presidential politics and coronavirus hysteria was naturally diverting the attention of fans and resulting in fewer viewers.

“The 2020 presidential election and other national news events are driving substantial consumption of cable news, taking meaningful share of audience from all other programming,” reporter John Ourand claimed that Rolapp told the teams. “Historically, NFL viewership has declined in each of the past six presidential elections.”

Rolapp also pointed to the coronavirus as another reason for the lower ratings.

“The pandemic has caused several major sports to postpone their schedules, resulting in an unprecedented fall calendar,” Rolapp said. “The result is a crowded content marketplace driving a bifurcation of sports viewers across multiple events.”

Rolapp noted that the NFL season’s portion during the 2016 presidential election that put Donald Trump in the White House also took a significant ratings hit. And this year, the NHL and NBA have encroached into traditional football time because COVID pushed their seasons later in the year. That, Rolapp added, also took viewers from the NFL.

Rolapp, predictably, did not mention the players social justice protests as a cause for the ratings drop,

The most recent ratings for the league showed that Week 3 lost more than one million viewers over Week 2. Thursday Night Football’s game between the Miami Dolphins and the Jacksonville Jaguars, for instance, fell to 5.3 million viewers, a drop from the 6.67 million that last week’s Thursday Week 2 game.

It never ceases to amuse me how long SJWs are able to deny the obvious. Apparently a 50 percent decline is necessary before they’re able to begin contemplating reality.

TOTAL DECLAS

Red October appears to be in session:

I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!
– President Donald Trump

Meanwhile, Facebook has gone to unprecedented lengths to dismiss QAnon because it is obviously nothing more than a silly LARP.

Facebook said Tuesday that it is banning all QAnon accounts from its platforms, a significant escalation over its previous actions and one of the broadest rules the social media giant has put in place in its history.

The NBA waves the white flag

They haven’t learned anything. But they desperately want the beatings to stop.

Rachel Nichols: The NBA has certainly been the most visible billion-dollar organization championing social justice and civil rights. As you noted in your press conference the other day, though, that has not been universally popular. How committed are you to being that going forward?

Adam Silver: We’re completely committed to standing for social justice and racial equality and that’s been the case going back decades. It’s part of the DNA of this league. How it gets manifested is something we’re gonna have to sit down with the players and discuss for next season. I would say, in terms of the messages you see on the court and our jerseys, this was an extraordinary moment in time when we began these discussions with the players and what we all lived through this summer. My sense is there’ll be somewhat a return to normalcy, that those messages will largely be left to be delivered off the floor. And I understand those people who are saying ‘I’m on your side, but I want to watch a basketball game.’

Translation: “We still hate you and want to destroy your nation, your culture, and your faith. But we’ll stop rubbing that hatred in your face, for the time being, if you’ll just come back.” And the sports fans whispered, “no”.

Another church damns itself

Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, this is what happens when you allow the wolves to infiltrate the church leadership.

A shocking new inquiry has found that, not only did the Church of England forgive some 400 pedophiles, but it allowed them to continue working with children. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found that between 1940 and 2018, some 390 people employed by the church, as clergymen or in trusted positions, were convicted of child sex abuse.

They were ‘forgiven’ for their crimes by the church and allowed to continue their duties, often in close proximity to children, the IICSA found.

“The culture of the Church of England facilitated it becoming a place where abusers could hide,” the report reads. The inquiry found the church repeatedly failed to respond in a consistent manner to victims and survivors of abuse, compounding their trauma over a period of decades.

Never continue to attend any church that “forgives” the moral failings of its leaders. The only correct response to a pastor, a priest, a deacon, or an elder publicly wailing about “sinning against my God” is: “you’re defrocked and you’re fired.”

Penitent men should be forgiven. Fallen leaders must be replaced, whether they repent or not.

The limits of simulation

In a rather clever confluence of Bostron’s simulation theory and the Fermi Paradox, Anatoly Karlin hypothesizes the possibility that the reason there is no extraterrestial life in our simulated universe is that it lies beyond the simulation’s limits:

In a classic paper from 2003, Nick Bostrom argued that at least one of the following propositions is very likely true: That posthuman civilizations don’t tend to run “ancestor-simulations”; that we are living in a simulation; or that we will go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage[58]. Let us denote these “basement simulators” as the Architect, the constructor of the Matrix world-simulation in the eponymous film. As Bostrom points out, it seems implausible, if not impossible, that there is a near uniform tendency to avoid running ancestor-simulations in the posthuman era.

There are unlikely to be serious hardware constraints on simulating human history up to the present day. Assuming the human brain can perform ~1016 operations per seconds, this translates to ~1026 operations per second to simulate today’s population of 7.7 billion humans. It would also require ~1036 operations over the entirety of humanity’s ~100 billion lives to date [8]. As we shall soon see, even the latter can be theoretically accomplished with a nano-based computer on Earth running exclusively off its solar irradiance within about one second.

Sensory and tactical information is much less data heavy, and is trivial to simulate in comparison to neuronal processes. The same applies for the environment, which can be procedurally generated upon observation as in many video games. In Greg Egan’s Permutation City, a sci-fi exploration of simulations, they are designed to be computationally sparse and highly immersive. This makes intuitive sense. There is no need to model the complex thermodynamics of the Earth’s interior in their entirety, molecular and lower details need only be “rendered” on observation, and far away stars and galaxies shouldn’t require much more than a juiced up version of the Universe Sandbox video game sim.

Bostrom doesn’t consider the costs of simulating the history of the biosphere. I am not sure that this is justified, since our biological and neurological makeup is itself a result of billions of years of natural selection. Nor is it likely to be a trivial endeavour, even relative to simulating all of human history. Even today, there are about as many ant neurons on this planet as there are human neurons, which suggests that they place a broadly similar load on the system [9]. Consequently, rendering the biosphere may still require one or two more orders of magnitude of computing power than just all humans. Moreover, the human population – and total number of human neurons – was more than three orders of magnitude lower than today before the rise of agriculture, i.e. irrelevant next to the animal world for ~99.9998{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} of the biosphere’s history [10]. Simulating the biosphere’s evolution may have required as many as 1043 operations [11].

I am not sure whether 1036 or 1043 operations is the more important number so far as generating a credible and consistent Earth history is concerned. However, we may consider this general range to be a hard minimal figure on the amount of “boring” computation the simulators are willing to commit to in order in search for a potentially interesting results.

Even simulating a biosphere history is eminently doable for an advanced civilization. A planet-scale computer based on already known nanotechnological designs and powered by a single-layer Matryoshka Brain that cocoons the Sun will generate 1042 flops[60]. Assuming the Architect’s universe operates within the same set of physical laws, there is enough energy and enough mass to compute such an “Earth history” within 10 seconds – and this is assuming they don’t use more “exotic” computing technologies (e.g. based on plasma or quantum effects). Even simulating ten billion such Earth histories will “only” take ~3,000 years – a blink of an eye in cosmic terms. Incidentally, that also happens to be the number of Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way[61].

So far, so good – assuming that we’re more or less in the ballpark on orders of magnitude. But what if we’re not? Simulating the human brain may require as much 1025 flops, depending on the required granularity, or even as many as 1027 flops if quantum effects are important [62,63]. This is still quite doable for a nano-based Matryoshka Brain, though the simulation will approach the speed of our universe as soon as it has to simulate ~10,000 civilizations of 100 billion humans. However, doing even a single human history now requires 1047 operations, or two days of continuous Matryoshka Brain computing, while doing a whole Earth biosphere history requires 1054 operations (more than 30,000 years).

This will still be feasible or even trivial in certain circumstances even in our universe. Seth Lloyd calculates a theoretical upper bound of 5*1050 flops for a 1 kg computer[64]. Converting the entirety of the Earth’s mass into such a computer would yield 3*1075 flops. That said, should we find that one needs significantly more orders of magnitude than 1016 flops to simulate a human brain, we may start to slowly devalue the probability that we are living in a simulation. Conversely, if we are to find clues that simulating a biosphere is much easier than simulating a human noosphere – for instance, if the difficulty of simulating brains increases non-linearly with respect to their numbers of neurons – we may instead have to conclude that it is more likely that we live in a simulation.

Norman Castles

Episode 11 of The Forge of Tolkien is now live on Unauthorized.

Tolkien famously insisted in the Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings that, “in the intention of the author,” the story had no “inner meaning or ‘message’… It is neither allegorical nor topical.” Rather, Tolkien said, he had always preferred “history, real or feigned”—without explaining which he thought he was writing in the story of the Ring.

In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown tackles the puzzle of what Tolkien meant by history and its relationship to myth through a close reading of Night 64 of The Notion Club Papers. We meet the barber Norman Keeps and his stories about the Dark Ages, compare the barber’s version of English history to the history everyone remembers in W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930), and look out with Lancelot and Guenever on Arthur’s Merry England in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1939-1958). Was Tolkien simply crafting an elaborate joke claiming that he was writing history—or did he have a more serious purpose in interweaving the mythical with the historical?

Bringing the agencies to heel

It’s long past time for the elected representatives of the People to make it abundantly clear to the intelligence agencies that they do not have the right or the responsibility to refuse to disclose any information requested by the President, the Senate, or the House of Representatives.

Two top House Republicans issued a rallying call on Sunday to combat resistance from intelligence agencies to disclose classified information that they argue will blow wide open a controversy surrounding Russia’s role in disrupting the 2016 election.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, went so far as to raise the possibility of an overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community if leaders are not more forthcoming with their findings, even as national security experts warn of sources and methods being put at risk and Democrats charge Republicans with pushing Russian disinformation to boost President Trump ahead of the 2020 election.

“We want every damn bit of evidence that every intelligence agency has, or it’s maybe time to shut those agencies down,” the California Republican said on the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures. “Because, at the end of the day … our liberties are more important than anything else we have in this country. And they have been stampeded over by these dirty cops.”

Nunes and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, another California Republican who also appeared on the show hosted by Maria Bartiromo, both confirmed they have seen underlying evidence to a letter released last week from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe that said in late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies received “insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis alleging that Hillary Clinton, then a candidate for president, approved a campaign plan to “stir up a scandal” against Trump tying him to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

“Every member of Congress should read the underlying information behind this,” McCarthy said. “This is really a bombshell of what we have wasted so much time on, that it was created by Hillary Clinton.”

The only “national security” threat more dire than that of a rogue intelligence agency is a rogue military. And given how far out of control these agencies are, and how questionable their loyalties are, shutting them down would be a lot less risky than permitting them to continue to operate without effective oversight.

Leadership, Patreon-style

One of the three members of Patreon’s executive board has publicly called for killing those who aren’t on board with corporate political activism:

Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo has set Twitter ablaze by suggesting that those who disagree with the push to inject political activism into the workplace will be “lined up against the wall and shot.”

“Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary,” tweeted Costolo, who ran Twitter between 2010 and 2015.

Costolo was replying to a tweet related to how Coinbase’s CEO has decided to separate business from political activism and offer an exit package for those employees who feel they can’t work in a company that doesn’t want to be hindered by politics and activism, as so many other companies have been distracted by in recent times.

“We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission,” Armstrong wrote.

But Costolo wasn’t impressed. “This isn’t great leadership. It’s the abdication of leadership. It’s the equivalent of telling your employees to ‘shut up and dribble,’” Costolo wrote.

Silicon Valley is “extremely left-leaning” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once admitted and, more increasingly than ever, many employees are trying to inject their activistic politics into the culture of many companies.

Costolo’s tweet is incendiary, not only because it was made during a time of political violence, but also because of the vocalization of a growing sentiment of intolerance to others expressing their viewpoints and threats toward those who don’t want to see homogenization of thought across many industries.

In light of this statement, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Costolo was the inspiration behind Patreon’s remarkably self-destructive decision to breach the very contract it unilaterally imposed on its users by suing them in a group action.

Ironically, under Patreon’s own professed standards, Costolo should be banned from Patreon.

Marketing doesn’t hold a monopoly

On corporate stupidity. The engineers, both hardware and software, also exhibit a reliable form of stupidity that has been known to prove terminal. From IN SEARCH OF STUPIDITY, which is the best business book I have ever read, and other than CORPORATE CANCER, which addresses an even more critical problem, possibly the most important.

SMS: Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit?

JS: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug-prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuilt from ground zero.

SMS: What’s wrong with that?

JS: Because it’s almost never true. It’s not like code rusts if it’s not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.

SMS: Well, why do programmers constantly go charging into management’s offices claiming the existing code base is junk and has to be replaced?

JS: My theory is that this happens because it’s harder to read code than to write it. A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It’s supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I’ll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low-memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly, but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

SMS: Well, let’s assume some of your top programmers walked in the door and said, “We absolutely have to rewrite this thing from scratch, top to bottom.” What’s the right response?

JS: What I learned from Charles Ferguson’s great book, High St@kes, No Prisoners, is that you need to hire programmers who can understand the business goals. People who can answer questions like “What does it really cost the company if we rewrite?” “How many months will it delay shipping the product?” “Will we sell enough marginal copies to justify the lost time and market share?” If your programmers insist on a rewrite, they probably don’t understand the financials of the company, or the competitive situation. Explain this to them. Then get an honest estimate for the rewrite effort and insist on a financial spreadsheet showing a detailed cost/benefit analysis for the rewrite.

SMS: Yeah, great, but, believe it or not, programmers have been known to, uh, “shave the truth” when it comes to such matters.

JS: What you’re seeing is the famous programmer tactic: All features that I want take 1 hour, all features that I don’t want take 99 years. If you suspect you are being lied to, just drill down. Get a schedule with granularity measured in hours, not months. Insist that each task have an estimate that is 2 days or less. If it’s longer than that, you need to break it down into subtasks or the schedule can’t be realistic.

SMS: Are there any circumstances where a complete code rewrite is justified?

JS: Probably not. The most extreme circumstance I can think of would be if you are simultaneously moving to a new platform and changing the architecture of the code dramatically. Even in this case you are probably better off looking at the old code as you develop the new code.

SMS: Hmm. Let’s take a look at your theory and compare it to some real-world software meltdowns. For instance, what happened at Netscape?

JS: Way back in April 2000, I wrote on my website that Netscape made the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch. Lou Montulli, one of the five programming superstars who did the original version of Navigator, e-mailed me to say, “I agree completely; it’s one of the major reasons I resigned from Netscape.” This one decision cost Netscape 4 years. That’s three years they spent with their prize aircraft carrier in 200,000 pieces in dry dock. They couldn’t add new features, couldn’t respond to the competitive threats from IE, and had to sit on their hands while Microsoft completely ate their lunch.