Sunday, October 25, 2009

Part 2

Now, while the media focuses on Chinese manufacturing drones and Indian IIT graduates outcompeting midwest labor unions and medium quality amercan engineering graduates, no one talks about how screwed the rest of the third world is in the new flat reality. A recent nytimes article highlights how far we have to go in alieviating global poverty:

I live in a third world country and my job entails screening people for an application process that is primarily computer based. In this country, most people are so computer illiterate that they can't even go on to my company's web site and fill out an application. They frequently go to public notaries, and still make basic mistakes with spelling and biographical questions. The big question I always think is: where is Thomas Friedman now? My friends keep saying: don't worry, they'll catch up eventually. I think: they can't even use a computer and are brain dead when I talk to them, how can they compete with an IIT graduate who designs machines to automate them?

Well, here is your answer on what happens to those left behind in the new economy:


The number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, or nearly one in seven people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, despite a 12-year concentrated effort to cut the number.

The global financial recession added at least 100 million people by depriving them of the means to buy enough food, but the numbers were inching up even before the crisis, the United Nations noted in a report last week.


You go hungry. You starve.

Now, I'm not another wide eyed liberal in the likes of Nick Kristof or Jeffrey Sachs who pushes campaigns to eliminate poverty as the duty of the west or "something we can achieve in our generation."

I'm just a person who genuinly cares about innocent children starving to death (about 25,000) per day from preventable causes. This is a moral tragedy on an unimaginable scale, but what really infuriates me more are the grandstanding liberals who don't give HBD a chance to UNDERSTAND the root causes of poverty and put into place measures to alleviate this.

Not to mention the meat eaters who misalocate resources into meat production that could easily go towards alleviating third world hunger.

Nytimes continues:


The so-called green revolution of the 1960s and ’70s ended the specter of mass famines then, but the environmental cost of chemical fertilizers and heavy irrigation has spurred a bitter divide over the right ingredients for a second one.


The green revolution just merely delayed a bare minimum economic reality: In a capitalist system, you get what you produce. And in a system in which an unemployed laborer has no land of his own, there is poverty.

I vast swaths of the third world, there are simply masses of people who produce less economic value than what they need to sustain themselves, and they grow hungry. Why do they produce less? HBD.

And it's just going to get worse. While machines become more intelligent, they will make redundant vast swaths of the labor market. The third world and low intelligence races will suffer the most, because they won't even have a shot at developing IT intense industries. They will be simply bypassed.

So if you're stuck in Latin America, Africa, or South Asia, and are an unskilled laborer with nothing to offer, good luck. Thomas Friedman doesn't even have enough time to write about you, because in the new economy you're already screwed.

Change we can believe in.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Flat world clashes with HBD Part One

So I've been saying for awhile now that we are living in a "flat" world in which distances and national boundaries aren't as important or constricting as they were before. This reality is easily demonstrated in the world economy through the devastation of American manufacturing and the outsourcing of tons of low end white collar jobs.

But no one talks about the real scary culprit of the decline in manufacturing: increasing automation and inability of american workers to keep up.

Considering that 85% of Americans have cellphones and while lagging behind some others, we are still one of the most connected countries in the world. Yet, Thomas Friedman has words of warning that are quite prescient:


“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”


Basically, this is the challenge we face right now in maintaining the US as the top dog economically.

But this is where it hits us on a personal level:

“If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be.


I think that's scary. Steve Sailer agrees too, but points out some basic problems in Friedman's analysis.


I kind of have the impression that quite a few Americans, like, maybe, two or three hundred million of them, don't possess either the IQs or the personalities to be rainmakers. Are they permanently obsolete in the world that Friedman has been such an energetic cheerleader for?


And there you have it folks. While Friedman is fundamentally correct in his assertions about what hurts us, he's blind as to why it will be nearly impossible to overcome. Because everything can be low skilled can be done cheaply in the third world or automated. White collar work that involves thinking can be done over the internet. No one is untouchable from the need to compete with the world.

But what, ultimately, is the quality that determines who wins and who looses their job in the global economy?

Intelligence and IQ.

Flat world folks, meet HUMAN BIODIVERSITY and the fucked up reality:

THE BASIC SKILLS THAT ARE NECESSARY TO SUCEED IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY ARE GENETIC.

Demography is destiny

Oh shit.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

I am a SWPL

Because I don't like eating feces:


records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows.



Philophically, the HBD and Steveosphere has to come to a basic realization about the implications of HBD for our modern notion of what constitutes individual rights.

So here are three statements. Pick 2. You CANNOT believe in all three and have a logically coherent belief system:

1) Condemn Vegetarianism

2) Acknowledge that due to HBD, all humans are not equal

3) Condemn slavery


Now, we can get all fuzzy, Watson, and Saletan and say that intelligence is not a sign of inherent worth. But face it. In an information economy there are only so many athletes and entertainers. By far, intelligent people have more to offer than dumb people. They create civilization and technology and elevate us above animals.

If intelligence is genetic, then we are not equal. Deal with it. This post is for atheists and agnostics (aka thinking people) who think for themselves rather than look to a book to worry about the scheme of humans in the universe.

So back to my original point. I suscribe to statements 2 and 3.
Most people in the Steveosphere have been vocal about believing in 1 and 2 but have been moot about number 3.

Most hippies suscribe only to statement 3. The mainstream media and republicans suscribe to 1, with half and half for 2 and 3 depending on if you lean KKK or lean center.

But you can't go all out on all three. You can't say:

Even though all humans are not equal, I still think it's wrong for us to enslave one another and still perfectly fine to brutally slaughter innocent animals.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Conservatives on Derrion Smith

I don't have to re hash what happened.

But it is starting to wear away, this idealism that I had after the election. Here is the key phrase from a anti Obama blog I look at:


It is high time for black activists and so-called leaders to put to rest the idea that this is all due to racism. Racism on the part of whites is the very least of the problems facing black America today. There is nothing white America can do other than treat each human being fairly. When you watch the video of the beating death of Derrion Albert, you see no whites involved. This young boy was not the victim of racism.


No racism here.


Notwithstanding the title of this essay, I don't know the solution to this intractable problem. I reject the notion, however, that the government has the solution, that money or programs is the solution or that this is another moment for white America to look itself in the mirror. We have done that. We have recognized our past history and, except for fringe elements, rejected the idea that we are "superior". We do believe in fair play for all. One thing I learned from working in inner cities as a DEA agent is that those areas have lots of good people trying to survive, live in security and keep their kids out of trouble. Unfortunately, there is the criminal element that preys first and foremost on the people in their own community. They are enabled by the radicals and hate-mongers who tell them they are victims of a racist society. They are enabled by liberal judges, academics, journalists and politicians who echo that sentiment. It does no one any good.

The fact is that nobody in Washington has the answer. Nobody in Chicago's city hall has the answer. The answer, whatever it is, is to be found in the south side of Chicago.


And here is the problem. Conservatives shake their heads and blame dysfunctional black culture and black apologists for the problems of black society.

But they are fundamentally wrong. The problem is biology, the fact that 100,000 thousand years ago some enterprising homo sapiens decided to head north and cross into Asia while many more stayed behind. Those that left were quickly culled by the more brutal climate that they had to face and only the intelligent and cooperative survived.

For those that remained, mother nature wasn't a problem. Rather, it was their fellow man. Dominating other men became the means to survive.

And so fundamentally different survival strategies led to fundamentally different beings that emerged.

And now, we are forced to deal with it as a society. How long will the charade of white racism persist? I don't know, but when it crashes, it will crash hard.

So the singularitarians have to be ready to put forth an alternative philosophy, one that involves conquering nature and changing our genetics to erase all these inequalities. We will technologically merge with each other to create a giant living universe where the ego is irrelevant and the concept of equality is incomprehensible.

We are one. Om.