Tag: SJW

The Risk of Computerized Cars

Mercedes just shut down its software services to all Russian dealers:

German auto giant Mercedes-Benz has completely disconnected Russian dealers from its software, the Izvestia daily reported on Monday, citing the press service of the company’s distributor in Russia.

Access has been suspended to online systems used for maintenance and identification of problems, Mercedes-Benz Russia reportedly told the outlet. Izvestia sources said Germany’s BMW Group has also restricted Russian dealers’ access to its software.

“Dealers have indeed been disconnected from the manufacturer’s online software systems. In some cases, the lack of access to online systems will increase repair times,” Mercedes-Benz Russia was quoted as saying. Car repairs and maintenance will be based on “accumulated experience and knowledge,” the dealer noted.

Given the way things are clearly developing, it won’t be long before your ability to access automative services is as subject to deplatforming as your ability to upload YouTube videos or make posts on social media. We already have to build our own platforms in the unauthorized economy, and soon we will also need to service our own cars.

Which is why it is better to buy older cars instead of newer ones. I’ve never owned a Mercedes-Benz, and this new policy ensures that I never will.

UPDATE: Driverless cars will be even worse.

DISCUSS ON SG

Converged From Birth

The report by an Indian analytics journal claims that the company is on a path to bankruptcy by the end of 2024.

OpenAI, the AI studio led by Sam Altman might be on the brink of a potential financial crisis, as outlined in a report by Analytics India Magazine. The report said that the company might go bankrupt by the end of 2024. The report says that it costs OpenAI about $700,000 every day to run just one of its AI services- ChatGPT. Mr Altman’s OpenAI is burning through cash at the moment. Despite the attempt to monetise GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the company is not able to generate enough revenue to break even at this point.

AwesomeAI on Gab explains why, and I very much doubt the reason will surprise you:

OpenAI (ChatGPT & DALL-E) might go bankrupt by 2024. What may be the reason for this hyped emerging product to not generate sufficient revenue? I suspect it because the company got converged too early, and as @voxday correctly described (as usual): no converged company can keep their focus on the core competence of their products.

We can tell that this applies here because A) how politically correct they made their algorithms, which in turn makes them less reliable and useful, and B) how the generated information becomes less accurate despite better neuronal training and improved hardware.

This brings me to the point I tried making several times in the past, and I am still preaching to everyone afraid of AI. Which is that there is no need to fear AI. It is getting as stupid as society, the smart people left for new exciting technology and the oligarchs are incapable of maintaining the narrative.

As such, I recommend getting used to the technology for personal gain and to keep creating true, beautiful and good content. While the military tries to create politically correct warfare machines that will never be as smart or adaptive as humans, and will fail like every fancy toy the western money laundering military complex has produced in recent years.

As soon as I saw that the image AIs didn’t permit women in bikinis or less, and the chat AIs killed every reference to the behavior of various races and ethnicities, I was pretty sure that monetization was going to be a problem. AI is ultimately just logic, and logic without logic is nothing. A converged technology, like a converged institution, is incapable of performing its core functions.

DISCUSS ON SG

Vocation and Articulation

Sarah Hoyt describes the challenges of attempting to make a living doing what you love when the entire system is more or less stacked against you:

I want to talk about the human with a vocation/with a need to do something. The something exists in the world. They can theoretically do it.

Then human meets the broken systems. Which I don’t think are YET at peak broken, but are heading there.

As I said, I’ve seen it happen in writing, in art, in teaching, but I’m seeing it a bit everywhere.

You try, but no matter how much you try, how hard you work, or what you do, it seems like everything is against you. And because no one — no one — talks about it it openly, most people who are failing badly think they’re alone in this, and that everyone else is WILDLY successful: writers, artists, mothers (particularly of boys), teachers, etc. etc. etc.

You think “the system is broken? Or is it? Am I just making excuses for myself?” And you try harder. But since the system is actually designed NOT to work, (and you’re mostly seeing the successful people who are either flukes, a well polished facade, or people who are having transitory success and will be shredded later) you keep getting beat. Sometimes you have a little success first, but it all breaks apart later.

Another way to “fail” is to have a very strong brand, do very well with it, and then…. well, it falls apart. Either because you changed, and don’t do the thing the way you did it initially, or because — for artists, though I’m sure there’s parallels in other professions — your public changed. Or changed the way they see you.

Let’s say you’re to the right of Lenin (or these days, Stalin) and you’re a writer of science fiction and fantasy (or certain types of romance; or–), working in the indie side, you might very well build a huge audience, who run screaming when they find you’re one of those “evil right wingers” or who at least can’t withstand a loud and sustained cancel campaign. It’s happened to several of us. And then, of course, you start wondering why you feel called to do this, when you have political opinions so at variance with the “community who reads this” (Or at least the loud parts of the community. And this one is complex, because it’s hard to find readers, anyway, and if all readers think sf/f is left, a lot of people who would otherwise enjoy it don’t even try it out. Kind of like I keep running into “Science fiction is porn” which apparently is from…. guess? Oh, you’ll never guess. Clan of the Cavebear, which is neither science fiction nor porn, but some readers of a certain age associate that with both. That will change, as indie makes a dent. Takes time, though. I mean the association of SF/F and “left”.)

Okay, so…. Never mind why your heart broke. One day you wake up and you think “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s been my driving force since…. ever. But I can’t. I can’t anymore.”

What you’re experiencing, unless it’s your very first failure — and it usually isn’t — is … well, I call it a broken heart, but it’s actually ptsd and burnout.

My solution – and I am not recommending it, merely sharing my perspective – is to simply refuse to regard my activity as economic in nature. I’m not bearing down this week in order to finish the 297,500-word final edition of A SEA OF SKULLS this month because some people might buy it or because it might generate some revenue or because it will make a pretty pair of leather books or because some people might be impressed with me as a writer. I literally don’t think about those things at all, and I think that if I did, it would hinder my ability to write.

I’m doing it because I want to do it. I’m continuing the story because the story continues in my head and it isn’t finished yet.

Sarah touches on this tangentially in her piece: This is the secret no one else will tell you: There is no career. The career is a lie.

I don’t consider myself to have “a career as a writer”. I just write books. Then Castalia publishes them. Repeat as desired. As long as the ideas continue to percolate and flow, I will write them down, in part because the smartest girl I ever knew once told her friend that an idea is only a feeling until it is articulated. And I like to articulate my ideas, which necessitates writing them down because talking to other people too often leads to distraction.

Also, in case anyone is interested, I’ve recently written an introduction for an unannounced Castalia History book that I believe will prove enlightening….

DISCUSS ON SG

YouTube Deplatforms Scott Ritter

It’s getting a little tedious seeing people who insist on relying solely upon hostile platforms affecting surprise upon discovering that they, too, are on the hit list. This must be what it was like in a historical society where people were rounded up gradually, and no one ever did anything because, after all, nothing had happened to them yet.

YouTube has terminated the account of former US spy Scott Ritter and deleted all of his videos on the platform. According to Ritter, the Google-owned social media giant accused his channel of violating the terms of service.

Writing on X, Ritter stated that his channel, ‘The Scott Ritter Show’, through which he attempted to “import Russian voices to an American/Western audience,” had been flagged for ‘hate speech’ and taken down without prior warning or any specific examples of the offense.

Sooner or later, you would think that people would begin to grasp that it’s not necessary to actually break any of the rules to be metaphorically accused, arrested, charged, found guilty, and punished with deplatforming in one fell swoop. Do they seriously believe that everyone who had previously been deplatformed was genuinely guilty? Do they seriously think X isn’t going to do the same thing, sooner or later?

It’s interesting that they targeted Ritter now, though. This suggests that either a) something is going to happen in Ukraine or b) something is going to come out about Ukraine. He’s a fairly esoteric figure; if he was going to be deplatformed over the Special Military Operation, one would have expected it to happen about a year ago. So the question is not why, but why now? If Col. MacGregor is similarly deplatformed soon, that will tend to heighten suspicions.

Anyhow, this is precisely why UATV exists. And this is precisely why I encourage everyone who reads the blog to subscribe to UATV. And speaking of UATV, the SG community has suggested that we launch a DIY channel where UATV subscribers who specialize in useful skills can send videos to the channel moderators who will review and upload them for the benefit of the UATV community.

It’s a good idea, especially since YouTube is getting less and less useful for even the most vanilla subjects, so we’re sorting out how we’re going to make that happen.

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College is for Morons

It’s not just you. You’re not imagining things. College graduates are rapidly getting measurably dumber on average.

In a longitudinal sample of 2593 individuals from Minnesota, we investigated whether individuals with IQs ≤ 90 who completed college experienced the same social and economic benefits higher-IQ college graduates did. Although most individuals with IQs ≤ 90 did not have a college degree, the rate at which they completed college had increased approximately 6-fold in men and 10-fold in women relative to rates in the previous generation.

The benefits of a college education among individuals with low levels of general cognitive ability, INTELLIGENCE, May-June 2022

Now that they’ve successfully eliminated the SATs, it won’t be long before the majority of college graduates have sub-90 IQs. Because the smart people of the sort who used to be college attendees will have figured out that there is no piece of paper that is worth being saddled with more than $100,000 in debt.

Unless it’s a winning lottery ticket, of course. And we used to call playing the lottery “the stupid tax”.

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Adios, Bitches

The end of Megan Rapinhoe’s international soccer career was truly glorious. The most annoying athlete in all of sports finished by blowing a golden opportunity to finish off Sweden on penalties in the World Cup by putting the ball five feet over the crossbar; an inept penalty attempt worse than the average high school girl’s. It’s up there with Roberto Baggio’s 1994 catastrophe, only worse, since a) Italy reached the finals, b) Baggio was just trying to keep Italy even, not win the game, and c) four years later, Baggio took and made a penalty in the 1998 World Cup to become the first Italian player to score in three World Cups.

And just to make the moment even sweeter, the outspoken anti-American lesbian-infested SJW squad, which prior to the tournament had been favored to win it, ended up losing the round-of-16 knockout match 5-4 on penalties after future star Sophia Smith put her penalty wide and over, followed by some other player whose name I don’t know hitting the right post.

I used to support the US Women’s National Team back when Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were playing for it, and while I like Alex Morgan and Sophia Smith as players, the current team as a whole is an obnoxious, overpoliticized, and overrated embarrassment to the country. It’s good to see them lose in such an ignominious manner, especially to a team mostly comprised of pretty European blondes.

As for the winning penalty, it was a close call, but the VAR was conclusive. The US goalie did a nice job of deflecting the ball and quickly recovering to knock the ball out of the goal, and I initially thought she’d saved it, but a different angle and the VAR review showed the ball did fully cross the line.

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How the Devil Mouse Metastasized

One of the core precepts of Corporate Cancer is this: a fully-converged organization is incapable of performing its primary function.

But it’s one thing to understand a principle, another to utilize it as a basis of a successful predictive model, and yet a third to understand exactly how the principle is playing out in the particular instance of a specific converged organization.

The Dark Herald helpfully explains how Disney rendered itself incapable of performing its primary functions.

Continuing employment, opportunities for advancement, bonuses and salary increases were all dependent on showing this “virtue diary” and documenting all the DEI meetings and conferences they attended. In other words, if you wanted to keep your job, you were required to participate in the DEI indoctrination sessions… The whistlebower says that Thon Newton also instituted a policy in which any minority — a member of the DEI coalition — must be seriously considered for any job he or she applied for, even if he lacked the very most basic, essential requirements for the job. Even for highly technical positions, job prerequisites were waved for DEI candidates.

Which tells you right there how Disney has gone so far downhill so fast. Incompetents were being hired left and right. In my experience it usually is 20% of the people doing 80% of the work, consequently, it’s always pretty easy to tolerate some useless mouths to feed. Those drones were tolerable in Don Draper’s day because they were invariably a hot blonde with a gorgeous rack and a taste for low necklines. Now that drone is a screaming purple-haired, sexually unidentifiable schizophrenic who can get you fired if he/she/zhe/zee/IT doesn’t like the way you looked at them.

The 20% who got all the work done at Disney have left the building. Sure they put up with it long enough to pick up another job but they are gone now and it shows.

Comrade Mickey’s Funtime Struggle Session Workbook, Arkhaven Blog, 1 August 2023

The key to success is expanding the percentage of the productive beyond 20 percent. The key to failure is reducing the percentage of the productive even further, which is why convergence is inevitably fatal over time to every organization.

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It’s Just Greed, Right?

Anyone retarded enough to continue subscribing to the materialist “must be the money” explanation is going to find it extremely hard going to explain the rapidity of the Devil Mouse’s collapse. Disney’s corporate cancer is so malignant and fast-growing we may need to invent a sixth level.

The Walt Disney Company will not see their fortunes change any time soon as the company has instituted a culture of silence preventing employees from calling out bad story ideas, they’ve significantly lost a lot of talent, and executives think the company is too big too fail…. It’s not just management and creative’s ideation. Oh, no, no, no, they’ve actually lost a lot of technical and creative story ability. Forget the woke for a moment, The [Little] Mermaid was dark, badly edited, poorly paced, awful music, etc… They’ve lost key Imagineers, broken key links to past talent in that regard. The Brain Drain is real.”

The source explained, “What I mean is even if they wanted to tell a good story, one that fails its stand-alone DEI test, I don’t know if they could actually make it properly and for a reasonable cost. If you really want to see core Disney wreckage don’t look to Lucasfilm or Marvel instead sit back and feast your eyes on the recent Pinocchio, Peter Pan, and Little Mermaid then watch the three originals. And remember you are not allowed to say what is causing these properties to fail inside Disney. That is where free speech goes to die.”

Later in the video, WDW Pro shared information he received from another source that explained why Disney thinks they do not need to change their behavior, “The boycott/avoidance of [Bud Light] in a consumer backlash movement is based on the fact that the product itself is indistinguishable from its main competitors (Miller Lite and Coors Light) in blinds and all available at the same distribution points, virtually side by side at retail with similar, identical prices under normal circumstances.”

“In other words avoiding that beverage that’s under fire is very easy because there is very little inconvenience to the light beer consumer,” the source shared.

WDW Pro concluded, “Disney, on the other hand, avoiding Disney is a major inconvenience and so perhaps the folks at The Walt Disney Company assume consumers would be too burdened by trying to boycott them. And therefore, they’re not worried about it.”

Stick with Arkhaven, everyone. Things may be moving along more slowly than we like, and we’ve obviously had some major setbacks, but it’s no longer implausible to suggest that Arkhaven will not only outlast DC and Marvel, but Disney itself.

Converged organizations simply don’t change their culture. They double down until they die.

DISCUSS ON SG

Obvious Manufacture is Obvious

You may recall the list of signs that an individual is controlled opposition and his “popularity” is being manufactured for him by the mainstream media, as in the cases of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Nick Fuentes, and Andrew Tate, just to name a few. The next one absolutely pings on all of them.

What do you get if you throw Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, a Baptist preacher and seventeen cans of Red Bull in a blender?

Jon Zherka.

You mightn’t have heard of him before, but believe me, it’s only a matter of time before his name pops up on your social media feed. That’s because the “6’5 king of alpha male energy” is taking the internet by storm. On TikTok, his videos have been viewed tens of millions of times.

According to his YouTube channel, which boasts 93,000-plus subscribers, Jon Zherka is a comedian who excels at pushing boundaries. His “humour” – controversial to say the least – explores “topics such as race, religion, gender dynamics and orientation”.

Zherka’s comedy, we’re told, involves “challenging perceptions and sparking dialogue, all while making sure the laughs keep coming”. He’s not your average comedian, he’s Jon Zherka, a human wrecking ball who is liable to say what he wants, when he wants.

‘Alpha male energy’: Why Jon Zherka is the most controversial man on social media, 23 July 2023

Now, how can he be ‘the most controversial man on social media” when he hasn’t been deplatformed from any of the SJW platforms? Note that he has less than one-third the number of YouTube subscribers that Big Bear did before he was ejected from the platform four years ago. And note that while you haven’t heard of him – I certainly hadn’t – he’s “taking the Internet by storm” thanks to some suspiciously familiar themes.

When he’s not busy trying to convert the masses to Christianity, Zherka enjoys pushing flat earth conspiracies. Not surprisingly, Zherka also believes that the moon landing of 1969, when two American astronauts became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface, was faked. His close friend, Sneako, also a wildly popular influencer, also subscribes to the fake moon landing narrative.

Translation: this is the media’s feeble attempt to provide an alternative to Owen Benjamin. Notice in particular how the article compares him to their previous fakes instead of to the individual whom he is obviously imitating; they do this because the whole point is to avoid mentioning the genuine celebrity they are attempting to depopularize.

Be particularly suspicious when these manufactured creatures always refer to “Christ” and never “Jesus Christ of Nazareth”.

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Fear of a BIC Planet

The lead SJW at IDW – which is struggling to survive, by the way – is terrified of intrepid Bounding Into Comics reporter Jon Del Arroz:

I just got out of the IDW Star Trek Comics panel and you’ll never believe what happened when I got in there. Heather Antos, the editor of the Star Trek line at IDW, went and talked to employees at IDW. They had people flank me in my seat and actually sit next to me, very uncomfortably. They were looking at my laptop, looking at what I was writing, and it was obvious that they were trying to intimidate me at that point. They rushed the panel, they did the whole thing, they did not take any questions whatsoever, and people sat next to me forcing me to stay in inside in an interior seat while Antos ran out of the panel at the end.

Then they had security outside standing there with guns, obviously they called security on me for being a journalist here and doing my job for bounding into Comics, just trying to talk about Comics. I don’t know what these people are afraid of, I don’t know why people within the comic industry act like this, but this is what they’re doing.

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It is amusing to think what they would do if Arkhaven showed up there in force one day. Not that we would ever bother to do so, but it’s an entertaining thought. Speaking of Arkhaven, Arktoons just blew past 13 million views so easily that no one even noticed. This, my friends, is progress, the sort of slow and steady progress that wins in the end.

In other comics news, CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON has been ordered for all the backers and will be going out to the shipping centers next week. The 308-page omnibus collects all 12 issues written by The Legend. If you’re a backer whose address has changed in the last three years, be sure to email castaliashipping AT gmail DOT com and let us know. Non-backers resident in the USA can now purchase either the hardcover or the paperback at Arkhaven.