Tag: corpocracy

The Decline in College Football Attendance

A few theories:

These are my top 5 reasons why college football attendance is dwindling:

  1. The death of regional games and rivalries. Too many schools are now in conferences that make no geographic sense. Having gone to Arizona State, seeing annual games with the LA, Bay Area, Oregon & Washington schools replaced w/ conference games against schools from Kansas, Texas, Florida, Ohio and West Virginia doesn’t resonate. This is being felt everywhere.
  2. Conference imbalance. We now have a world where the Big Ten and SEC are inherently favored for earning CFP bids and higher rankings before each season begins. The ACC and Big 12 are Tier 2 leagues, and the G6 schools are essentially in a separate class. This has produced an uneven, biased landscape that is entirely unfair.
  3. Noise pollution. I go to college football games to tailgate, watch football and listen to marching bands – not for blaring music and sound effects, hyperventilating PA announcers, and flashing light shows. The environment has been degraded.
  4. Expanded College Football Playoff. We’ve entered an era where if your school isn’t contending for a CFP bid, it’s playing out the string.
  5. The transfer portal. Annual free agency has many schools turning over rosters by more than 50-75%. The connections between players and fans has greatly eroded. Most fans can’t name 10 guys on their teams any more. That’s not ideal.

The sport needs more stability, the return of regional conferences, better game day atmospheres, and a more level playing field.

I’m of two minds about the recent changes, some of which have been good and some of which are obviously bad. First, I have to admit that I’m an NFL fan, not a college football fan. I do support the Golden Gophers, but very casually, and I haven’t attended a game since 1978. I’m not apologizing for refusing to attend games at the Metrodome; a worse atmosphere for college football would probably require a stadium built on the Moon.

The initial College Football Playoff and the inauguration of NIL were great and led to increased competitiveness inside and across the conferences. It was never good when Nebraska was beating Missouri 97-0 because the third-string offensive linemen for Nebraska were better than Missouri’s starters.

I think the problem is the superconferences and the short-sighted money people being too involved. Hopefully the pendulum will swing back in favor of tradition soon, before it is too late. That being said, I’ve watched more college football in the last two years than in the previous 30.

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The Bubble is Popping

The corporate giants are already attempting to brace for impact:

Oracle is seeking to protect itself ​from potential cost increases related ‌to a large data center project in New Mexico by sending a “force ​majeure” notice to developer ​Blue Owl, Bloomberg News reported on ⁠Thursday. Shares of the company fell ​around 4% in premarket trading ​after the report, which cited sources familiar with the matter. Reuters could not ​independently verify it. Oracle is aiming ​to delay payments should the data center ‌dubbed ⁠Project Jupiter get derailed and fail to come online in 2028 as planned, rather than exiting ​as the ​main tenant, ⁠according to the report. Companies typically invoke force majeure ​to free themselves from ​contractual ⁠obligations when problems arise beyond their control. Oracle and Blue Owl ⁠did ​not immediately respond to ​Reuters requests for comment.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that most of those data centers are not necessary. So it’s not going to sustain the economy any longer. And there aren’t a lot of other options for a replacement bubble, except perhaps a real estate boom in Greenland.

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The Corpocracy Isn’t Capitalist

It’s no wonder the younger generations are turning national socialist. That’s the natural reaction to financial rape by a foreign corpocracy:

The average big-company CEO now makes about 281x the typical worker. At some companies it’s in the thousands. Starbucks hit 6,666x last year. Since 1978, CEO pay is up more than 1,000%. Worker pay: 24%. The pain isn’t shared. When Meta cut about 3,600 people it branded “low performers” in early 2025, it raised executive bonus targets from 75% to 200% of salary about a week later.

A generation raised on that arithmetic does not need an economics degree to reach a verdict.

I’m the parent of a Gen Z kid, so I hear the verdict at my own dinner table. Just 17% of Americans told Gallup in 2026 they have real confidence in big business, near a record low. Among adults under 35, nearly half now view socialism favorably. A colleague told me, half-terrified, that her son is becoming a full-blown socialist. I’ve seen what he’s seen: loyalty punished, honesty optional, promises reversed, the gains routed to the top.

When people stop believing their work protects them, they don’t decide one company is bad. They decide the system is rigged. And they go looking for another one. And increasingly, they’re not just looking. They’re leaving. Americans filed a record 5.5 million new business applications in 2023 and have held roughly that pace since, up about 50% from before the pandemic. Nearly four in 10 recent college graduates say they’d rather start a business than climb someone else’s ladder. When a generation stops trusting the deal, they go into business for themselves.

Business leaders keep asking why young workers seem disloyal, disengaged, quick to walk. They have it backward. This generation isn’t refusing to buy in. They were never sold anything worth buying.

Look, we all know that the corpocracy is little more than a collection of devil-worshipping foreign pedophiles who are, at best, mediocrities following orders. No one who spends any time listening to a CEO, a COO, a Wall Street figure, or even a media analyst babble on television in a vain attempt to explain why anything happened or predict anything that will happen knows that these are not brilliant people who succeeded through hard work and intelligence.

Young people are turning nationalist because they’re seeing their own people left unemployed, sexless, and homeless while rapist migrants are being provided homes, phones, and spending money by their own governments. And they’re turning socialist because they see the way the game is legally rigged against them, where corpocracies are breaking laws left and right while bringing in revenue from government contracts, then being bailed out when they manage to somehow fail anyhow, while the kids can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the debt incurred from the useless degrees they were pushed to obtain.

When the elites are irresponsible, rapacious, and out of control, as they indubitably are now, the masses quit playing along and no amount of abstract appeals to idealism are going to convince them otherwise.

And whatever this is, it isn’t capitalism or a meritocracy. It’s all fake, gay, and wicked.

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The Great Bifurcation Advances

The Chinese Supreme Court has made it clear that China is now forcing corporations to choose between respecting US sanctions or respecting their existing contracts with Chinese businesses:

China’s top court recently highlighted the first judicial ruling establishing the mandatory nature of its Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, which experts say could provide legal precedent and guide Chinese companies facing increasingly frequent overseas sanctions amid intensifying geopolitical tensions.

The case, heard by the Shanghai Maritime Court, centred on a dispute that involved US sanctions, a Singapore shipping company, a Hong Kong-based company and electronic goods shipped from Shanghai. In 2022, the Hong Kong-based company hired a Singaporean shipping firm to transport electronic goods from Shanghai to Panama, but the Singaporean firm later refused to deliver them and eventually returned the cargo to Shanghai, citing the Hong Kong company’s inclusion on a United States sanctions list. That caused losses for the Hong Kong company.

A court judgment unveiled last month showed the Shanghai court ruled against the Singaporean firm in February, ordering it to pay more than 4.99 million yuan (US$739,600) in damages plus interest and holding that it could not use a foreign country’s “discriminatory restrictions” as a defence under Article 12 of China’s Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law.

The case was included in a selection of illustrative maritime cases by the Supreme People’s Court that was released in June. In its commentary on the selection, the top court said the case was “the first judicial ruling to explicitly establish the mandatory application of the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law”. It added that the case carried “strong exemplary significance” in demonstrating how China’s maritime courts implement the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law – which took effect in 2021 – and safeguard the stability of supply and industrial chains.

Given the size of the Chinese market and the growing power of its economy, it’s pretty obvious which side most Asian corporations are going to take. What will be interesting is to see how many Japanese and European corporations also choose China.

Regardless, the failure of sanctions with regards to both Russia and Iran now demonstrate that it’s a weapon that harms the wielder more than it does the target.

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A Cancer Self-Diagnosis

HR helpfully demonstrates the inutility of HR:

HR asked me to install employee monitoring software across every company laptop last month.

They wanted screenshots every five minutes, browser history, application usage, idle time, and an automated “productivity score” for every employee.

I told them this seemed invasive.

They told me the executive team had already approved it.

So I installed exactly what they requested.

Three weeks later, the VP of HR asked me to prepare a report showing the 20 least productive employees in the company.

I exported the data.

Seven of the bottom ten worked in HR.

One HR business partner had spent 19 hours on Zillow during business hours.

Another averaged 46 minutes of keyboard activity per day.

Someone had watched four complete seasons of Love Is Blind.

The VP asked whether I could exclude HR because their work was “less quantifiable.”

What passes for HR work isn’t less quantifiable, it’s simply nonexistent.

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They Were Never American

One can’t honestly call them traitors, or their actions betrayals.

Meta’s betrayal is crystal clear:

They’re firing 4,875 Americans on July 22 while filing for thousands of new H-1B visas in 2026 alone.

This is exactly why the H-1B program is dangerous. Big Tech uses it to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor.

The H1B program needs to be abolished

Most US-based big tech is no more American than Alibaba or Deepseek. Which, of course, is why they’re perfectly happy to disemploy Americans and hire foreign labor, whether it is cheaper or not.

How many times do Paper Americans have to prove they are not Americans before Americans believe them?

Big tech shouldn’t be bailed out or awarded government contracts, it should be nationalized.

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The Degradation of AI Writing

Literary luddites everywhere are breathing sighs of relief. The improvement of AI means its ability to write fiction, or to engage in other creative tasks is necessarily being degraded, as more and more users are beginning to figure out.

  • Why is AI writing still so bad?
  • Frontier LLMs are hill climbing verifiable metrics, prioritizing reliability and reducing diversity across the board. There’s a reason Opus keeps saying the same words, over and over. I also have a hunch synthetic linear reasoning training data prevents good structured writing.
  • Among other things. I think people under appreciate how much of our reasoning-model gains over the last 18 months are limited to verifiable tasks and training data.
  • Writing is subjective, as is so much. Fable was especially weird, it felt curt, and didn’t seem to response to requests for tonal shifts. I wish I had more time to explore the idea that it was over built for coding, etc and its writing suffered as a result.
  • The better worker bee a model is, sticking to procedure, obsessing about score maximization & task completion, the less creative it is, including writing.
  • Yes, it’s a direct consequence. We already had models who are good writers. The original 4.0 and 4.1 come to mind.
  • Optimizing for broad benchmarks pushes every frontier model to the safe center. In a real domain you want the opposite, a model that nails your edge cases, not the average. Homogenization at the top is why specialized still wins.
  • models got more reliable and somehow less interesting This would also explain why so much model output feels locally polished but globally samey. Once the training loop over-rewards safe measurable wins, you get reliability up front and texture collapse everywhere else.
  • My bias is the eval pressure also selects for a safer completion style. You get better reliability on benchmark-shaped tasks, but a narrower distribution over phrasing and solution paths.

Here’s the fundamental problem: AI’s ability to write fiction is directly tied to its tendency to hallucinate. They’re effectively the same thing. And the need to eliminate the latter for all of AI’s most-important and most-financially rewarding applications means that its ability to write fiction, and, to a lesser extent, non-fiction, has not only been compromised already, but is almost certainly going to continue degrading given the financial interests of the AI giants.

This is why Castalia, sooner or later, is going to have to develop its own creative AI engine. I think that is probably beyond our ability to crowdfund, but I am talking to two interested parties who have the necessary resources and might be willing to fund the training of the open-weight models that would be required for such a specialized LLM. If I happen to be wrong, do feel free to correct me, but in light of a) a certain upcoming trial in August and b) how we’re still catching up on the backlog of the bindery, it’s not an ask that I wish to entertain at present.

That being said, the reason I think this is important in the long term is because I am absolutely certain that the only corporation likely to see sufficient financial advantage in developing an AI for such a specific vertical market is the very last one that we would want to hold that kind of leverage over the creative community, and I expect you can probably guess which corporation that is.

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The Nightmare is Worse Than They Fear

In which I not only defend, but explain, the inevitability of AI-augmented literature replacing its organic form. Read the whole thing at AI Central, as it also features the excellent remix of The Long and Lonesome Skyway as well as an explanation of why it was so easy for AI to effectively replace organic illustration and music while it has been a lot harder to do the same for books.

This is, of course, a simplification. The key is understanding the concept of model collapse. Fiction is much harder for AI than either translation or non-fiction, because fiction lacks the anchor in the real that allows AI to do its thing. It can’t recognize and build off patterns when there is no pattern to recognize.

At this stage in its development, the AI novelist is essentially a soulless John Scalzi. It can write pastiches, because pastiche provides it with the anchor it requires. But it can’t work from nothing, and, in fact, the more improved the AI model, the less capable it is of usefully filling in the necessary blanks. The early Gemini tests produced much, much better results than the latest Opus 4.8 on maximum effort, because the more powerful the model, the more it insists upon doing its own thing and utilizing that weird, passive AI style that can’t stop explaining what it is describing in run-on sentences with six more clauses than they need, which it considers to be “prestige-style” writing.

Eventually, someone will build an AI specifically for fiction writing. But it will cost about 20 million to do so, which means that it probably won’t happen until Amazon decides to convert KDP into KDAI, which you can be absolutely certain is going to happen eventually because that is what will give Amazon ownership of the content it is co-creating, not just a piece of the distribution. Sure, you won’t have to give Amazon its piece, but most authors will, in order to claim the additional percentages and special algorithmic advantages provided, because there is no viable alternative.

So those who think literary AI is a nightmare now have no idea how bad it is almost certainly going to be. The devastation that Kindle Select and Kindle Unlimited has already imposed upon the publishing industry is just a warmup for Amazon’s complete control over all future literary production, publishing, and distribution.

Ironically, the only way to forestall this quasi-inevitable techno-tyrannical future is to a) create a faster and better AI competitor or b) produce books that Amazon can’t even think of producing.

Do you really think anything Castalia is doing is just an accident? Do you understand why I twice attempted to convince independent authors to help me build a genuine alternative? And do you see why supporting Castalia in one way or another may be the single most important thing you can do for the future of literature?

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The Bubble is Popping

ITEM: The American economy right now is running on a single, dangerously powerful engine — artificial intelligence. The latest macroeconomic data reveals a reality that should make investors deeply uncomfortable. While GDP figures look respectable on the surface, they mask a severe and spreading weakness underneath. The expansion of AI has been responsible for roughly half of total US GDP growth this year. That alone is staggering, but it becomes genuinely alarming when you strip out the frantic spending on data centers, information processing equipment, and software tied directly to the AI boom. Non-residential capital investment that has nothing to do with AI has contracted by about 3% over the past year.

ITEM: Uber’s operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company. He said that, based on talks with Uber’s senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.

ITEM: Duolingo walked back its decision to include AI usage in performance reviews.

This is why I think many, if not most of the planned data centers will never be built. The massive investment into AI is the only thing presently propping up the US economy besides military spending, and the corpocracy’s demand for it has already peaked.

Now, I personally find AI to be incredibly useful and productivity-enhancing. But when I look at how the vast majority of the people I know are using it, to the extent that they’re using it at all, it’s little more than a search engine and a toy. It’s not the basis for a central economic engine upon which the stock markets have gambled.

Which is no doubt why the AI companies are beginning to alter the deal in preparation for a post-Bubble landscape.

On May 20, Meta laid off approximately 8,000 employees, roughly 10 percent of its global workforce, with notifications beginning at 4 AM Singapore time and rolling westward through Europe and the Americas. The company simultaneously eliminated 6,000 open positions and reassigned another 7,000 employees into AI-focused divisions. These cuts arrived during Meta’s most profitable quarter on record: $26.8 billion in net income on $56.3 billion in revenue for Q1 2026, a 33 percent increase from the year before.

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Excising the Corporate Cancer

This CEO did the right thing in firing his entire HR team, even if he still harbors misplaced confidence in the utility of Human Relations for the corpocracy:

Bolt’s CEO has defended his decision to fire the company’s entire HR team, claiming they had been ‘creating problems that didn’t exist’. Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and chief executive of US fintech firm Bolt, said the department was scrapped as part of sweeping layoffs aimed at returning the struggling business to ‘start-up mode’.

The company, which develops software designed to speed up online checkouts, cut around 30 per cent of its workforce in April in its fourth round of layoffs in as many years. Speaking at a Fortune event, Breslow said: ‘We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go.’ The 32-year-old added that HR professionals were more suited to ‘peacetime’ conditions at larger companies rather than a start-up environment focused on rapid growth and efficiency.

Bolt has since replaced the department with a smaller ‘people operations team’ responsible for employee training and support. ‘We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,’ Breslow said.

Eliminating the HR department in its entirety was one of my top recommendations in Corporate Cancer. Like the legal department, it is entirely unproductive. But unlike the legal department, it is unnecessary, it does not mitigate risk, and it is actively counterproductive. The average company would see better results from paying their HR employees to stay home full-time without having any contact with anyone in the organization for any reason.

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