Tag: corpocracy

How Galaxy’s Edge Damaged Disney

It was, of course, Kathleen Kennedy. Again.

Disney invested billions of dollars in the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge design and construction, based on a fictional world called “Batuu.” They hyped up technology and immersive elements meant to enhance the guest experience and allow for fans to spend hours in Galaxy’s Edge…And now, after just a few years in operation, new leadership at the top is completely changing the entire plan behind Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. In the process, admitting they completely missed the mark with their multi-billion dollar project.

One former top executive at Walt Disney World once explained in an interview why Galaxy’s Edge focused on the new trilogy and not the beloved original movies and characters. Because Kathleen Kennedy gave awful advice to Bob Iger.

“We got a call one day,” said former WDW VP Dan Cockerell. “They said, ‘Well, we got some news for you all.’ And the Imagineering guys, they’ve heard this line many, many times during their careers. And I had never been through this.” “They said, ‘Well, yesterday Bob Iger met with Kathleen Kennedy, who as a lot people may know was sort of George Lucas’ protégé and headed up Lucasfilm. And they had a conversation. They had a meeting. And Kathleen Kennedy, her point of view was, there are way more Disney Star Wars stories ahead of us than behind us. So we really should think about do we want to build a Tatooine, and build what all the fifty-somethings remember Star Wars is or do we want to build something else which is going to appeal to all the upcoming generations who are going to know the new stories.'”

Don’t focus the land on characters people like, focus it instead on the new movies, Kennedy said. And Iger listened. Well, those new movies have come and gone, and “Star Wars” has never meant less in the national conversation. Sure enough, under new CEO Josh D’Amaro, Disney announced this month that they were bringing Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker into Galaxy’s Edge, as well as finally incorporating John Williams’ beloved score from the original films.

That’s how you know they’re admitting they made a gigantic mistake listening to Kathleen Kennedy.

Bringing these characters into Galaxy’s Edge makes no logical or thematic sense, particularly since they’re being portrayed as their younger selves from the original trilogy. But Disney is desperate to make their gigantic investment in Galaxy’s Edge worth it, so they’re hoping characters people actually like will bring new fans and keep them there longer.

It’s a series of unforced errors. They made mediocre movies that have been mostly forgotten, assumed that people cared about Rey and Kylo Ren or Fin or Poe Dameron, and then bet billions of dollars that their newer stories would be more popular moving forward than the old ones.

Whenever you see an executive making an argument about the need to appeal to the new audience, which is young, superficial, and mostly hypothetical, at the expense of the old audience, which is older, better-off, larger, and loyal, you know a business disaster is in the making. Although, in this case, the ill wind did blow some good for Nick Cole’s book sales due to the fortuitous name chosen by Disney.

It’s necessary to appeal to new arguments in order to grow. That’s why we try new things. That’s why I’ve got something like five different sites now. But never, ever, are those things done at the expense of the tried-and-true elements of the community. Even to this day, I still usually post here first.

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IRGC vs Corpocracy

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declares war on the corporations of Clown World:

IRGC Warning to the Aggressive US Ruling Regime: You have ignored our repeated warnings regarding the necessity to stop terrorist operations, and today a number of Iranian citizens were martyred in terrorist attacks carried out by you and your Israeli allies; and since the primary element in the design and tracking of assassination targets is American information technology and artificial intelligence companies, in response to these terrorist operations, the main institutions involved in the terrorist operations will be legitimate targets for us.

We advise employees of these institutions to immediately stay away from their workplaces to preserve their lives. Residents of the areas surrounding these terrorist companies in all countries of the region must also leave a one-kilometer radius from their locations and go to a safe place.

Companies that actively participate in terrorist designs will be subject to countermeasures for every assassination operation. Announced as follows:

  1. Cisco
  2. HP
  3. Intel
  4. Oracle
  5. Microsoft
  6. Apple
  7. Google
  8. Meta
  9. IBM
  10. Dell
  11. Palantir
  12. Nvidia
  13. JPMorgan
  14. Tesla
  15. GE
  16. Cymer Solutions
  17. G42
  18. Boeing

All I can say is that if ARTIST Graphics had won the 3D chip wars, it would never have been on that list. I find it difficult to believe that Jensen actually has a dog in this hunt, but then, I haven’t spoken to him in nearly 30 years. But it is interesting to see how much more clear Iran is on its real enemies than either Russia or China appear to be.

If you want to force the USA to end the war quickly, I doubt it would be necessary to take out more than two or three CEOs or corporate headquarters before they’d be demanding the politicians put an end to the hostilities.

If it were an Arab country, I’d assume it was just noise. But with Persians… the threat might actually have some teeth.

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OpenAI vs Anthropic

As is usually the case, the big two of AI are rapidly taking shape, with the only real question being who will play the role of the number three spoiler, Grok, Gemini, or some as yet unknown player.

Both companies are now building AI that acts inside applications rather than generating text about them, and six launches in eight days confirm that the two labs have arrived at the same conclusions about the future of their products.

But as the capabilities of their tools approach parity, everything else about these rival titans is rapidly diverging. In the span of three weeks, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history and signed a classified-use agreement with the Pentagon. Anthropic simultaneously lost its military contracts and was designated a supply-chain risk, then launched a $100 million enterprise push backed by private equity talks.

In January, this publication argued that OpenAI and Anthropic had chosen fundamentally different financial strategies. What we are seeing now is a concrete expression of those strategies. How each company is financing itself is now shaping its trajectory more than anything it ships…

As ChatGPT and Claude approach functional parity, enterprise customers are gaining the freedom to choose between them based on whom they wish to buy from rather than which tools they need. Upstream cloud infrastructure, vendor commitments, political exposure, and long-term flexibility will become increasingly important factors in any given company’s choice of AI platform.

It’s become obvious that Facebook badly misplayed its hand despite its initial advantages. The $80 billion they sunk into the idiocy of 3D avatars to no avail, including rebranding the company around it, would not only have gone a long way into AI investment, but is likely to go down in business history as one of the all-time corporate catastrophes with Blackberry ceding the mobile phone market to Apple and Bill Gates failing to notice the importance of the Internet in The Road Ahead.

It also underlines the falsity of the idea that Zuckerberg was ever a technological boy genius rather than the CIA catspaw that everyone now understands he and the founders of Google were. Anyhow, read the whole thing there.

In other AI-related news, I’m very pleased to observe that Claude’s one-million-token context window is now available through the web interface as well as through the API. I’m already making excellent use of that, as it should reduce translation time by as much as 50 percent.

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No Children, No Economy

By the time the next economic depression bottoms, it will be illegal for women to not have children in many countries:

Underneath all of this, slower than any war and more permanent than any crisis, is something the financial press doesn’t really mention:

People aren’t having any children.

US fertility hit an all-time low in 2024. The general fertility rate is still falling. IMPLAN puts 1.4 million fewer Americans contributing to housing demand, retail spending, and service consumption in 2025 than trends would have predicted. To put that in numbers: $104 billion in GDP. Not exactly gone, not really disappeared. It just never existed in the first place.

It’s a vicious circle: housing is too expensive, so young people delay children. Fewer children means less future housing demand. Which should eventually reduce prices, except the lag is 20-30 years, and in the meantime housing stays expensive, so the people who couldn’t afford a house still can’t, still don’t have children, and the loop tightens at its own pace regardless of what the Fed does or what happens somewhere in the narrow waterways in exotic places.

Added: the boomers are saying bye sayonara.

The generation that inflated every asset class for 40 years through automatic 401k contributions is, somewhere around now, flipping from net buyers to net sellers. Of course it’s impossible to say like “March, 17: boomers start to cash out their 401ks”… Nope, the tide just turns. The same passive machine that provided an inexorable, automatic bid for equities and bonds and real estate – every payday, every year, for four decades – begins to redeem. Quietly. Continuously. For the next twenty-some years. Every asset they inflated on the way up faces a headwind on the way out. Not a crash. A long, grinding, demographically-inevitable ratchet.

That’s why the central planners of the world turned toward mass immigration. You need consumers to keep the GDP growth going, and with fewer children, there were going to be fewer consumers. Of course, the problem is that the macroeconomic models don’t account for quality of consumer, so it’s only very recently that the mainstream economists have begun to realize that lending to immigrants from grasshopper cultures is absolutely guaranteed to crash the banking system because none of those loans will ever be repaid.

And this is just on the consumption side. Imagine what lowering IQ, time preferences, and productivity does on the production side, although you don’t need to imagine it anymore. We already know what a calamity diversity and inclusion have turned out to be for the US corpocracy.

Indeed, based on a 2025 Danish study, it may even be necessary to ban paid female employment. Such a policy would indubitably be sexist, anti-feminist, and currently illegal in most Western countries. But no one living in any society that elects to show up for the future is going to care what the norms of a few long-dead 21st-century societies happened to be.

Egalitarianism is already conceptually dead. It won’t be many more decades before people stop believing in it.

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300 Down

One-third of the Washington Post’s staff is being laid off. Over 300 employees were let go today.

Good to know. Only 600 to go.

Sit by the river long enough and eventually the bodies of your enemies float past you. There are few things I enjoy more than reading about the layoffs of journalists.

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WhatsApp is Not Secure

Don’t kid yourself. There is no such thing as online security. Everything you do online is known, so don’t even bother trying to fool yourself otherwise. Yes, I know what Signal and WhatsApp claim. It doesn’t matter, because they are highly incentivized, and quite possibly legally obligated, to lie to you about it.

US federal authorities are investigating allegations that staff at WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms Inc. had access to message content despite the company marketing the app as protected by end-to-end encryption, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Special agents from the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security have been examining claims from former Meta contractors who alleged that they and staff at Meta had “unfettered access” to WhatsApp messages.

One contractor told an investigator that a Facebook team employee confirmed they could “go back a ways into WhatsApp (encrypted) messages,” including in criminal cases, according to an agent’s report reviewed by Bloomberg.

WhatsApp, which was acquired by Meta in 2014, insists on its website that “no one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share” what a user says.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone had also denied the allegations, stating that “what these individuals claim is not possible because WhatsApp, its employees, and its contractors, cannot access people’s encrypted communications.”

The only thing the US authorities care about it is that they, too, have access to the unencrypted files.

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Karma is a Bitch

Amazon just laid off 16,000 more workers. I would be willing to bet this explains our groundless termination, as well as how quickly it was upheld upon “review”.

Amazon said Wednesday it plans to eliminate about 16,000 corporate jobs, marking its second round of mass job cuts since last October. In a blog post, the company wrote that the layoffs were part of an ongoing effort to “strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” That coincides with a push to invest heavily in artificial intelligence.

The job reductions come just a few months after October’s layoffs, when 14,000 employees were let go across Amazon’s corporate workforce. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found “additional places we can remove layers.”

Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, didn’t rule out more job cuts in the future, but said the company isn’t trying to create “a new rhythm” of broad layoffs every few months.

It also might explain why the executive to whom I appealed the KDP decision was a little too busy to pay any attention to one minor KDP account right away, because apparently, he did us the favor of stepping in again and telling whomever was left at KDP to stop screwing around and reinstate us. I was a little confused this morning to see Castalia’s inbox had been bombarded with email alerts from KDP informing us repeatedly that a new book was available through Amazon and Audible, as well as this one from a different member of the Content Review Team.

I can confirm that your account is now active and you have full access to your Bookshelf. Please let us know if you still cannot access your account, so we can further investigate this issue.

None of this means that the lesson about platforms doesn’t apply. But it does give us more time to build our own correctly.

Being back on Amazon also lets us see that PROBABILITY ZERO received its first one-star review, courtesy of one of Dennis McCarthy’s readers.

Bryan H. Wildenthal
1.0 out of 5 stars This book is pseudoscientific garbage
This books is complete and utter GARBAGE and pseudoscience. The author doesn’t understand basic statistics and blatantly misuses scientific papers he relies on. Dennis McCarthy, author of widely praised articles and a book on evolution and biogeography, has demolished Vox Day’s argument in a short recent blog post. Google “Dennis McCarthy why Probability Zero is wrong evolution.”

Clearly this is some new use of the word “demolished” with which I was hitherto unfamiliar. But it’s an apt demonstration of how midwits operate. They don’t understand any of the words they use, which is why they rely upon others to do their thinking for them, then posture grandly, and confidently, with absolutely no awareness of how ridiculous they look or how insupportable their position is.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure what happened is that some KDP employees of the “I fucking love Science” variety were informed that they were laid off and decided to strike a blow for Science while they still could. So it was SJW shenanigans after all.

By the way, after all that, 死神と悪魔 is finally available. So, if you’re one of the six people who read fluent Japanese reading this blog, you’re all set now.

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Why the Economy is Collapsing

We have terminated your KDP account because we found that you do not have the necessary rights to publish the book(s) listed below. If you have documentation proving you have the necessary rights to publish this book, please reply to this message and attach it to your email.

If you’re having trouble finding Probability Zero on Amazon, or any of our other books, this is why. Somehow, its system saw that Castalia had submitted 死神と悪魔, the Japanese edition of Death and the Devil, and decided that we were infringing upon the rights of Editions Alpines, which publishes the German translation called Der Tod und Der Teufel and somehow concluded that we don’t have the necessary rights to publish a different language translation of the book we originally published.

Anyhow, we hope to have this resolved today. But it’s another object lesson in the extreme fragility of trying to work in today’s centralized business environment. And it’s a reminder of the importance of building your own platforms and never being reliant upon the mainstream ones.

UPDATE: I heard back from KDP. Now they suddenly need to look into it. Which could take until next week. But I think they’ll find a reason to expedite the restoration.

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Immigration and Outsourcing

Immigration and outsourcing are not the answer to greater profits over time. To the contrary, they are a certain path toward destroying the very organization for which they are supposed to be generating increased profits.

Ubisoft is on the verge of complete collapse due to terrible decisions like trying to develop the new Prince of Persia in India, as legendary WoW producer Grummz explains:

Prince of Persia, why it was REALLY cancelled. Insider tells all. “The game is so bad…” This from my Ubisoft sources:

  • 90% developed by Ubisoft India.
  • Project was a disaster.
  • Transferred last minute to Ubisoft Montreal to “fix” it.
  • Game unfixable.
  • Cancelled.

Note that Ubisoft Montreal spent FOUR YEARS trying to fix it and they couldn’t. I can attest that my one experience working with Indian developers for 3M on a sales training software project was an absolute and utter catastrophe. They couldn’t implement even the simplest, most basic features with any degree of reliability, and as far as the graphics went, they appeared to be limited to the stick-figure level.

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H1B is Invasion

Immigrants always hire other immigrants. This is why you shouldn’t hire immigrants, and you definitely shouldn’t ever permit immigrant executives. Their first priority is always finding a way to hire more of their own, not the success of the company, much less the society they’re plundering:

FedEx received a significant federal delivery contract worth more than $2 billion in late 2022. The company’s hiring procedures started to drastically change thereafter. According to The Dallas Express, official documents show that FedEx significantly raised the number of foreign workers it hired under the H-1B visa program while concurrently decreasing the number of American positions held in different parts of the US.

In response to the report, FedEx stated that its hiring decisions are based on business requirements and the necessary skills. A spokesperson for the company told The Dallas Express that FedEx is committed to fostering employee development and constructing a workforce aligned with its operational needs.

“Across our business, we employ a wide range of roles, requiring a variety of skillsets and are committed to complying with all applicable federal immigration laws.”

Also Read: H-1B visa row drastically impacts California schools, ‘it’s a form of discrimination to…’

Indian-origin FedEx CEO Rajesh “Raj” Subramaniam is now facing flak on social media for firing American employees in order to bring in foreign workers. The move comes at a time when firms are hesitant to hire H-1B workers due to the hefty $100K charge under current Trump administration.

We’re about 20 years away from the advocacy of mass immigration, and the organizational support for it, being correctly identified and prosecuted as treason. Because that’s exactly what it is; mass cross-cultural immigration is more harmful for a nation than military invasion and occupation.

Japan and Eastern Europe were occupied for generations. They are still observably what they were. Canada, France, the UK, Australia, and the USA? Not so much, and in one-third the time.

Foreign soldiers go home voluntarily. Large-scale migrations don’t.

Just ask the American Indian…

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