Tag: corpocracy

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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The Stupidity of Greed

According to the court documents, in approximately 2014, David TR wanted to give his sister-in-law, who was working for the company, a big raise. But he felt that his wife and son who sat on the board, wouldn’t approve it. So, David Tran came up with an idea that he was going to make a new company and just give the company to the sister-in-law as a way to get her to make more money. And that new company was going to be called Chili Co. And Chili Co.’s entire job was going to be acquiring red jalapeno peppers and ingredients for Hoyong Foods. And that was going to be that that’s how he was going to pay his sister more money.

Okay, I’m going to say that again, but slower so we’re on the same page. Uh David TR has just elected to hire somebody who presumably is not qualified to take over the operation of acquiring Red Jalapeno Peppers, which is not even a job that needs to exist because he has one guy that gets him all the peppers that he needs on a handshake agreement. But for some reason, we’re gonna interject this person that doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing to try to acquire the peppers that they already fucking have.

Okay, I’ve said this a million times. If it’s not broke, don’t try to fix it. Everybody’s making literally billions of dollars selling hot sauce and growing chili peppers. Just don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Continue making money. But that’s that’s not what somebody that’s a new hire that doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about is going to do. Absolutely not. Chili Co. starts looking at the numbers and they’re like, “Well, you know, actually, we could buy these dehydrated chilies from China and they would only be $300 a ton.” So, I think that Underwood Farms should try to compete with these dehydrated chilies from overseas while he’s supposed to also deliver brand new fresh chilies that are picked and then turned into hot sauce in 6 hours while he’s growing them in California of all places.

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.

So, Chili Co. goes to Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, we could get this competitor’s chilies for $300 a ton. We want you to be able to sell your brand new fresh chilies and deliver them to us with your semis for $500 a ton. To which Craig Underwood is like, “Absolutely not. It literally cost me almost $700 a
ton just to grow these things. That’s not possible.”

At which point the appropriate response would have been, “Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense. I’m an idiot. Forget I said anything. Is that what they did?”

Absolutely not. The next year, in 2015, Chili Co. pulls Roberts, aka Craig Underwood’s right-hand man that helps him run his entire farming operation aside and tries to hire him away from Craig Underwood. Roberts declines and kind of attributes the entire thing to a miscommunication.

He’s absolutely right.

Around the same time, David TR gets a hold of Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, can we fly a drone over your farming operation? We just want to, you know, look at the crops that are growing.” Which is weird. He’s never done that before, but also like drones are new. I’ve been working with this guy for 20 some odd years. Fuck it. Why not?

Yeah, as long as it’s for like your personal use or you just want to look at it like that’s fine. Go ahead.

So, Hoyong Foods, David Tran flies a drone over, records all this footage of their farming operation and then nothing seemingly ever comes of it. Then, 2016, Craig Underwood is on vacation out of the country. They know that. So, they have Roberts come to the Hoyong Foods factory where the Chili Co head and David TR basically sit Roberts down and say, “Hey, we’re starting this new company, Chili Co., you’re gonna work for us. Not asking him to work for them. Pretty much telling him, “You work for me now.” To which Roberts is like, “No, I don’t. I’ve been working for Craig Underwood for two decades. That’s my guy. I’m not leaving him.” They get super pissed. They then turn around and they’re like, “Okay, well, we could still buy this stuff from China for $300 a ton. You’re going to sell us your stuff at $500 a ton or we’re going to go elsewhere.” They literally can’t sell it to you at $500 a ton. It costs them almost $700 a ton to grow this shit. So, not only is demanding that price delusional, this also breaks the entire thing just by going from paying by the ton to the original agreement of we’re going to pay you for every acre that you plant because it shifts all the risk back onto Underwood Farms and now they’re screwed because they only grow jalapenos at this point and they’re stuck. So, in the coming months, Underwood Farms tries to negotiate a new price with them, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. So, by the 2017 season, he’s not able to plant any jalapenos. So, there’s no jalapenos in the ground, there is now a massive gap in the supply chain that’s going to have to be filled somehow. So, Chili Co goes about trying to buy peppers from everybody else that they possibly can because you’re never going to believe this. Um, nobody has a 100 million pounds of fucking jalapenos lying around and it’s really hard to find that many.

I am stunned. Just stunned.

So, in an effort to help find that, they give all the drone footage of all the proprietary techniques and technology and all the intel that they had gathered through espionage to all the other jalapeno farmers without Underwood knowing. So, essentially, Underwood Farms is basically dead in the water and they’re on the hook for all these thousands of acres of farmland that they leased for the next like 20 to 30 years. Like, they’re going to go out of business. While that’s going on, Chili Co and Hoyong Foods are getting jalapenos from anywhere and everywhere else that they can, which means the quality isn’t that great. Some of the peppers are picked too early. Some of them are dehydrated. They’re having to use green chilies instead of red jalapenos. It’s a giant fucking nightmare, which leads to the hot sauce tasting different, looking different. It’s like a burnt orange color. People are mad that the Sriracha doesn’t taste like Sriracha. Nobody knows what’s going on. So now, presumably, Hoyong Foods is also financially hurting. So they just start digging through all their accounting and they’re like actually we think a couple years back I think we overpaid Underwood Farms like $1.5 million. We’re going to take them to court and sue them. So they have to give us $1.5 million and that’s going to help with our financial burden.

What a stupid son of a bitch. Okay. And I cannot stress to you enough that this is probably the dumbest fucking idea imaginable. I’ve been threatened with quite a few lawsuits in my day and I have avoided all of them by saying one simple statement back to their lawyers. And that statement is, “Okay, sue me. I would love to go to discovery with you.” Because discovery is this magical part of the judicial process where both parties have to come to the table with all of their evidence and you can subpoena and get all of their internal records and figure out exactly what was going on, which presumably is exactly what happens.

And when Chili Co and Hoyong Foods have to turn over all of their shit, oh, it becomes very apparent that they have been plotting for at least three years to screw over Underwood Farms. At which point it goes from them suing Underwood Farms for $1.5 million to Underwood Farm suing them for $23 million and winning in court. It was perfect.

Perfect.

And this is what caused that magical time like 10 years ago, 2016, 2017, where nobody could find Sriracha on any shelves anywhere. And if you could, it was like this weird different color. It didn’t taste the same. It was all because it wasn’t the same. The whole thing with Sriracha was they had fresh red jalapeno peppers that were grown in California in a particular part of the world that were plucked, transferred to the factory, and turned into hot sauce in 6 hours flat. It was literally a multi-billion dollar money printing machine with a beautiful backstory with two hard-ass working men on a handshake agreement that built a fucking empire together. And the entire thing was harpooned by one stupid bitch.

It’s greed. It’s pure greed. Like why? Everybody was winning. It wasn’t broke. Why would you try to fix it?

You’ve got some bitch that didn’t build this company whispering in your ear like, “Oh yeah, we all have mansions. We’re all rich as shit.” But you could have a little bit bigger mansion and be a little bit more rich if you fuck over all your friends.

And then you blew up the entire thing. Congratulations.

So yeah, that’s why you couldn’t find Sriracha on the shelves 10 years ago. And that’s why the Sriracha today tastes a little bit different. Oh, but you know the funny part. You know what Underwood Farms did after they won the $23 million lawsuit with Sriracha? They turned around and started making their own Sriracha. And guess what they called it? Sriracha because you can’t trademark the word Sriracha. So now made with Underwood Farms with the actual chili peppers. You can get Underwood Farms Sriracha. And I’m going to be honest, it tastes very similar to the original Sriracha, but it’s a little bit spicier and I kind of like it more.

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