Tag: corpocracy

Trade Deficit = Whip Hand

Donald Trump makes the textbook economics explicit:

The countries that deem US tariffs on their goods to be too high can just stop doing business with America altogether, President Donald Trump has suggested. He further insisted that his latest trade policies have made the US “strong,” bringing “billions of dollars a day” into its coffers.

On Wednesday, the US president slapped stiffer “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly 90 nations, only to announce a 90-day pause and a “substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%,” in a post on his Truth Social platform several hours later. The pause however does not apply to China, with which the US has engaged in a tit-for-tat exchange of ever-higher tariffs, with most of Beijing’s imports now subject to a 145% duty.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump proclaimed that “ultimately, we pretty much can do what we want to do. We can set the tariff, and they can choose not to deal with us, or they can choose to pay it,” he explained, asserting that “if they think it’s too high, they don’t have to do business with us.”

It’s a simple and obvious power equation. When you have nothing to lose, and you’re the one who owns the market in which everyone is interested, then you’re in control. No country with a trade surplus with the USA has any leverage at all, because the US is obviously better off not trading with it than continuing to trade with it on the basis of the system that has impoverished and hollowed-out the US economy.

This is why the threats of returning the favor are so empty and stupid. The USA would BENEFIT from pure autarky, so trade restrictions are not a viable threat. The President’s move is brilliant, because it not only protects the US markets, it prevents US companies from leaving the USA as well.

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Foreign Interference

It’s fascinating to see the Clown World puppet states of Europe complaining that the US government is interfering with the activities of their corporations by applying its laws to them, while at the same time attempting to directly interfere with the activities of US corporations like Gab.

France’s Ministry of Foreign Trade has denounced a request by Washington that French companies working with the US government eliminate their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, calling it “unacceptable interference” in a statement to AFP on Saturday.

The statement came after French media outlets reported that the US embassy in Paris sent letters to several companies urging them to end internal anti-discrimination policies. The request follows a January executive order by US President Donald Trump aimed at dismantling DEI initiatives across federal agencies and contractors.

According to Le Figaro, French firms working with the US were given five days to scrap their DEI or explain in writing why they could not. Each letter reportedly included a “compliance form” and warned that failure to meet the new requirements could result in larger customs duties or even the termination of US government contracts.

“American interference in the DEI policies of French companies, such as threats of unjustified customs duties, is unacceptable,” the French Trade Ministry told AFP. “France and Europe will defend their businesses, their consumers, but also their values.”

The strange thing about control freaks is that they are always shocked when someone else applies to them the same principles that they apply to everyone else. I mean, a) how do they not see it coming and b) why do they expect any sympathy from anyone when they cry about having done to them what they’ve been doing to others?

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The Unreliability of the Corpocracy

It’s not just a problem for the outcasts and the unauthorized anymore. The ease and speed of AI production are removing any need for low-level artists producing buffet-style art for mass consumption. This article refers to how Spotify is now directing listeners toward its own fake artists, but Amazon is doing exactly the same thing with ebooks and audiobooks.

In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists. I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.

Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?

In April 2022, I finally felt justified in sharing my concerns with readers. So I published an article here called “The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize.” I was careful not to make accusations I couldn’t prove. But I pointed out some puzzling facts.

Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names. Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).

How was that even possible?

I continued to make inquiries, and brooded over this strange situation. But something even stranger happened a few months later.

A listener noticed that he kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. But when he checked the name of the song, it was always different. Even worse, these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers. He created a playlist, and soon had 49 different versions of this song under various names. The titles sounded as if they had come out of a random text generator—almost as if the goal was to make them hard to remember.

  • Trumpet Bumblefig
  • Bumble Mistywill
  • Whomping Clover
  • Qeazpoor
  • Swiftspark
  • Vattio Bud

I reported on this odd situation. Others joined in the hunt, and found more versions of the track under still different names. The track itself was boring and non-descript, but it was showing up everywhere on the platform.

Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.

Were these AI generated? Was Spotify doing this to avoid paying royalties to human musicians? Spotify issued a statement in the face of these controversies. But I couldn’t find any denial that they were playing games with playlists in order to boost profits.

By total coincidence, Spotify’s profitability started to improve markedly around this time.

If your brand and your sales are dependent upon a major platform, you need to be prepared for the fact that you are going to lose it sooner or later, because once established, it is always much more profitable for a platform to generate its own content than serve as a middleman paying out the majority of its own revenue to external content creators. And the combination of algorithmic influence with the total indifference of the modern mass consumer means that there is no brand loyalty on a major platform.

As the analyst observed: “This is what happens when distributors take control of a creative industry, and outsource content.“

And it is why it is absolutely vital for a creator-centric community to stick together and relentlessly find ways to work together, because the larger economic forces are now operating in a way to eliminate independent creators. Fortunately, we have a small, but strong and battle-tested community, as well as several loyal creators who understand the importance and the necessity of standing together.

We have a lot of talent in the community. This is why I’m always encouraging people to take on new projects of which they conceive, like Vox DAI, just to give one example, and to support external creator projects like A WORKING MAN – which launches today, by the way – because it gives us all a much better chance than those poor bastards who still think they can rely upon YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon going forward.

And that’s why, although some of my music can be found on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes, all of it is available in the very highest quality on UATV, including the 8th track on the Soulsigma album, THE WORD DESCENDED.

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Microsoft Shutting Down Skype

This is not good. Microsoft is shutting down Skype:

Microsoft has announced it is shutting down the popular video calling service Skype.

After a 21-year run, Skype’s 2 billion users will no longer be able to access their accounts starting on May 2025.

Microsoft is encouraging users to migrate to its free Teams app.

‘Over the coming days you can sign in to Microsoft Teams Free with your Skype account to stay connected with all your chats and contacts. Thank you for being part of Skype,’ the video calling service posted on X Friday.

Feel free to post your suggestions for any reasonable alternatives, because I have zero desire to utilize Teams. I suppose we’re lucky it took Microsoft this long to getting around to killing it.

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These are Not Our Principles

But they do make for a good point from which to begin contemplating them. From Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs.

Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs… “Mike really took me under his wing,” Jobs recalled. “His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

It’s not for us to say, but I think we’re doing reasonably well on all three scores. The biggest failure, I think, is impute, with regards to which we very much need to improve our Internet store game. And, obviously, we need to reduce our release times, but we’re already focused on that.

The only way to improve is to contemplate one’s failings.

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The Japanese Know

Japanese corporations are preparing for the Chinese takeover of Taiwan:

Over half of major Japanese firms said they are prepared or are making preparations for a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan amid Beijing’s growing military assertiveness, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday. Of the 114 companies surveyed between late November and mid-December last year, 53 percent said they had concrete measures in place for a potential Taiwan contingency, including drafting manuals, planning evacuations, and stockpiling inventory. Another 12 percent said they did not have plans but saw the need for consideration, according to the survey, which covered a range of industries and included companies such as Toyota Motor Corp and ANA Holdings Inc.

There are also reports of China building large Mulberry docks of the sort that the US utilized in the invasion of Normandy. Which means I’d better provide my promised analysis of the latest US military simulations before the actual results are in.

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No Meritocracy Without Nationalism

With apologies to Lee Kuan Yew:

“In multiracial societies, you don’t hire in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you hire in accordance with your race and religion.”
– Vox Day

Despite its grandiose and universalist pretensions, ideology is ultimately nothing more the detailed rationalization of an identity group’s immediate interests, and it will always be subject to further modification and mutation as that group’s interests evolve over time. A co-ideologist from a different identity group can never be more than a temporary ally, as his identity will always hold priority over his current ideology in the end.

A Russian commenter provides a salient and logical perspective on the matter.

I am not an American and I have never crossed the Atlantic – but, as a general point, any line of reasoning that assumes:

1) that a country with a population the size and quality of America (or Russia, France, Germany, etc) cannot produce its own highly-skilled IT, research, engineering, etc. professionals;

2) that it is normal and and acceptable to brain drain the entire world using economic incentives and globalist ideological propaganda;

3) that it is normal and acceptable to deprive your own population of socioeconomic opportunities to save a few bucks by claiming 1) and engaging in 2);

is not only morally reprehensible and psychotic, but also the sort of self-serving, hypocritical lie that incites homicidal rage in the people who are being damaged by it, and permanently erodes the social fabric on every level.

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An Apple Manager’s Experience

Let’s just say he isn’t inclined to fall for Ramaswampy’s self-servingly nepotistic nonsense on the basis of 11 years as a hiring manager at Apple:

During my ~11 years as a hiring manager, I personally hired maybe 20 fulltime & intern employees. Filling empty reqs was a huge source of pressure, both due to workload being down a man and the risk of corporate operational changes yanking an empty req (which did happen). HR handled 100% of sourcing resumes for me, performing a first pass to exclude obvious mismatches. HR turnover was worse than mine, so I quickly told them to just send me everything remotely relevant and I’d filter them myself. “Everything” turned out to be quite a lot.

I never saved any firm stats, but on average I probably looked at 500-2000 resumes for every person hired. When I was inexperienced, this took several minutes per resume, carefully pondering & weighing each detail, and extrapolating to some hypothetical future on my new team. After a few years of experience, I would discard a resume within ten seconds. After a while, you’ve simply seen the same exact sort of person hundreds & hundreds of times. Once you know what’s not the right fit, there’s zero point in hemming & hawing.

I would speak to maybe 2-4% of the candidates I reviewed. Probably 90%+ were filtered out after the first call. Someone credible would talk to another guy on my team, and on or two more if things went well. Someone promising came in for a day with the whole org, two at a time. And this was just my own team. I also far more regularly interviewed on behalf of other teams in my org, & even other orgs, as other managers grew to appreciate my feedback & opinion. All told, I talked to probably over a thousand candidates from tens of thousands of resumes.

Lessons learned: it’s all about which schools’ programs produce the right minds for which specific tasks. Plenty of bright, capable candidates went to schools that simply taught them nothing relevant for an OS platform vendor. We’re not talking databases & web dev for this. Over the years, HR evolved its own prospecting strategies to prioritize schools that produced a high hit rate, plus serving executive bias. Tim went to Duke so after a while all of finance went to Duke. Virtually nobody in SWE came from Duke; different domain entirely.

Over ~2004-2014, the volume of resumes from Indian schools skyrocketed, virtually all the “superstar” IITs. I was always unbiased about the protected categories. Looking back, my all-male team was quite “diverse” although everyone was probably INTJ, now that I think about it. I talked at many dozens of Indians, and quickly learned a few things that are invariant: they are helpfully accommodating to the point of obsequiousness, and this holds regardless of whether they have any clue what they’re talking about. This is crucial to understand.

When you are speaking with an Indian, you are not communicating. You are engaging in a choreographed dance where they are exclusively tasked with mirroring your moves, and leaving you to walk away thinking that your needs will be satisfied. And that is all that has happened. If you don’t know which follow-up questions to ask, you’ll have no idea that you’ve just been handled by an entity that understands how to “close,” but not how to deliver anything promised. The idea of the latter is never even part of the equation. Utterly alien minds to us.

One of Britain’s greatest crimes was teaching them to speak with that hackneyed, goobledygook accent, because it simply fries the brains of most Americans. It is scamouflage for the fact that they will lie, lie, lie as easily as you or I draw breath. It’s indescribable. Thankfully, I became good enough at technical interviewing that a couple simple questions would break their lies wide open, & I could simply nope out in good conscience. After a while, a glance at such resumes told me how the conversations would go, optimizing away the rest.

During this time, in other parts of SWE & IS&T, I watched as a couple Indian hires within 18 months turned into an almost wholesale replacement of any other race in the blighted departments. The degree of their apparently illegal hiring practices cannot be overstated. But of course, who is going to complain, and to whom? One of my last cross-functional meetings at the company, myself & one or two other guys from our org met with one of the terraformed orgs. There were 25 of them packed into a room for a meeting that required 5 people tops.

Regardless of context, every American needs to understand that they will lie under any circumstances for any reason or no apparent reason whatsoever. It is “cultural,” so get over your Christendom-centric notions of morality; those exist nowhere else on Earth.

If you don’t hire and protect your own, you will soon be swamped by those who do. Unlike the tango, it doesn’t require two to play the nationalism game. And if you’re not playing, you’re losing.

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Ramaswampy Doesn’t Know America

A primary example of fake and manufactured “success” tries to convince Americans that emulating India is the way to make America great again.

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

When America didn’t allow millions of Hindus to invade the USA, American culture venerated the prom queen and produced the world’s best engineers. Ramaswampy doesn’t know anything about American culture for the obvious reason: he’s not an American and the USA he grew up in was culturally dominated by the self-serving foreign elite that has driven the USA into second-world status.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswampy are not the good guys. They’re not Americans and they’re not on the side of America at all. They’re the Deep State’s attempt to control the nationalist opposition, which is why you’re seeing them come out hard against Americans, nationalism, and sooner or later, Christianity. As to why “Trump” is putting them front and center of his incoming administration, well, either Trump has been fully corrupted by the Deep State, Trump is playing his would-be gatekeepers, or the individual playing the role of Donald Trump is not, in fact, the genuine Trump.

No doubt that sounds far-fetched, but then, most people thought it was pretty far-fetched when I said that Joe Biden was a) senile and b) did not win the 2020 election.

Regardless, Americans just want the USA to be American again. Ramaswampy and his fake elite are part of the problem, not the solution.

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The American Began to Hate

The mainstream media is shocked, shocked, to discover that Americans are massively unsympathetic to the corpocratic elite:

The brutal assassination of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson has triggered a wave of morbid criticism about the state of America’s health insurance companies – and cynical support for the attacker framed as a ‘man of the people’.

Mr Thompson, a 50-year-old father-of-two, was shot outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday morning by a masked assassin, whose motive remains unclear as he continues to evade police. Authorities found three live bullets and three spent casings at the scene, which they said had the words ‘depose’, ‘deny’ and ‘defend’ scrawled on them. This drew comparison to the similarly titled 2010 book ‘Delay, Deny, Defend’ – a scathing criticism of ‘why insurance companies don’t pay out and what you can do about it’ – and sparked wide speculation online.

As news of the cold-blooded killing spread, medical professionals took to social media to criticize the insurer’s alleged denial of coverage to dying Americans.

The moderators of the r/medicine forum had to close a Reddit thread after news of Mr Thompson’s death collected more than 500 replies, often critical of UnitedHealthcare. The top comment, from a nurse, was a lengthy parody of a template response denying pay-out for the victim.

‘We understand that you were actively “bleeding out,” but this does not exempt you from exploring lower-cost care pathways,’ the post coldly jibed.

UnitedHealthcare, the biggest health insurer by market share in America, was rocked by protests over the alleged systematic denial of pay-outs to patients earlier this year. An unlikely following of swooning commentators online soon followed, with the pictured suspect drawing comparisons to A-List celebrities including Timothée Chalamet and Jake Gyllenhaal for his ‘gorgeous’ good looks.

However, don’t get too excited. This almost certainly wasn’t an act of revenge, but rather, something more akin to the non-suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. It was much more likely just another case of Clown World silencing, or as Miles Mathis would have it, vanishing, one of its own for some esoteric reason related to enforced non-disclosure. And is it not an anomaly that the murder was a statistically-improbable one in which the victim was a Fortune 500 CEO who was not resident in New York City and in which the crime could not be categorized as anti-semitic?

It’s probably just more Narrative theater performed by the clowns for our edification.

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