Futurology, or the very scary story of how doomed you are.

It all started like all great things start these days. On irț.

Naphex: Lmao. That ByExpress scam is insanely funny and totally retarded.
mircea_popescu Teh accent lol. &Teh mouthbreather speech speed...

Naphex Apparently they are official google partners as well :O
mircea_popescu every half serious mfa spammer has that.

Naphex I'm just amazed. That people will "invest" that high amount and do zero dilligence. Thing is this guys seem to be starting from local, so basicly ruining any market. Is this the early stages, or just selectively picking idiots?
mircea_popescu MLM is mostly idiots pretending. Sort-of like Reddit.

Naphex Do they get busted? They use real names I assume. And essentialy just defraud their aquantances when it busts?
punkman Acquaintances, family, whoever.
mircea_popescu Yes, it's what one of these things is, "con your family and friends". "They won't give you money directlyⁱ ? That's fine, trick them into giving it to us!"

Naphex Yeah but they just send it upwards. Which is even more retarded.ⁱⁱ
mircea_popescu As average IQ keeps dropping and average intelligence drops with the square of the IQⁱⁱⁱ, and as complexity increases like a fucking cube of time or something, there's bound to be more and more of these. When i was 18, the average 18 yo could support himself. Now im 35 and the average 35 yo CAN NOT support himself. Kinda why disenfranchising of most of the population / having money and resources controlled by a tiny minority / having most people live in ever larger harems, as ever more abject slaves of whoever's brain still works is unavoiable. This is the case for it : people of average intelligence are not actually smart enough to survive. And you can't... you know, "make everything illegal so idiots have a chance". It will be tried, obviously, but with no expectation of working to any degree.

chetty Have people actually gotten dumber or has the world just gotten more complex?
mircea_popescu People have factually gotten dumber. AND the world has got more complex. Something like smart = Cx / t^2 while complexity = Cy + a t ^ 3. Clearly smart/complexity -> 0. The reason one can be ^ -2 while the other is at ^ 3 is the hugeness of population : you only need one guy to push complexity up. So in this sense, lower population is in fact insurance against decreasing average life quality.^iv

chetty Well the time between your 18 and 35 is not enough for actual species change, so its environmental ?
mircea_popescu But megatrends may well be observable in a short interval even if they are not in fact contained in that interval. If some drunk driver loses control over vehicle at t=0, goes over embankment at t = 1.8s and explodes at t = 3.5s, it will be BECAUSE he lost control, but the losing of control would have happened long before. Whenever he got drunk, t = - 7200s.

punkman Re: 10m people, what kind of world can you run on that considering current complexity?
mircea_popescu Depends how you select them. If well selected, something pretty cool I imagine. Like, a world in which nobody is going to spam. MP points to Anonimity, or the urban versus rural dispute because it's illustrative of the concept. A global village is probably better than the current metastatic urban sprawl. Imagine a web without all the idiotic "web start-ups".

chetty May not be that far off, if US declares it public utility.
mircea_popescu No further need for makework jobs, no more government crapolade, etc. The need for police, for instance, is a strict function of population density. Places with < 1 person / sqkm do not need any police.^v

punkman Downsizing would of course remove large swaths of complexity/scarcity, but I was thinking if "global village", how many people do we need so I can have computer and underwater fiber network, 10m doesn't sound like enough.
mircea_popescu Robots. You don't seriously imagine that "people" out and about are in fact efficient ?

punkman doesn't take much to feed them
mircea_popescu Currently you have machinery that can cut up, melt and re-set the asphalt. Much like a sort of "3d printer for roads", really. The only reason it's not automated ? Roads aren't straight. And that is because ? Take out 99.85% of the population, suddenly roads can be straight np.

CoraCrisT :)))))))))
chetty No more cities ... everyone lives in the country on their own estates?
mircea_popescu Global VILLAGE.

CoraCrisT And this is how you become the favorite architect of every dictator in the world.
punkman Friend wanted to buy one of those, but local council wasn't gonna fire 12 man-crew.
mircea_popescu Exactly. No more need for make work jobs ? Robots. I seriously don't see why anyone would be laying optic fibre by hand. And we actually have the technoogy to make the robots work together and automatically

CoraCrisT Because as a cable company, we pledge to offer jobs ;))
mircea_popescu Much like that vacuum cleanner manages to keep the house clean. What's it called. The little derpy robot guy.

punkman Hard to replace human repairman with robot currently
mircea_popescu Only because so dense.

CoraCrisT Hmm.. I would disagree. Robots are pretty capable of diagnosis and automated repairs.
mircea_popescu Once space no longer such a constraint, very easy to do. There's no doubt in my mind that the "every fuckhead's sacred, God needs every one" current mantra is headed the same way monty python saw catholicism go.^vi

punkman Because human can do things robot can't, even if it has a brain to remote-control it.
CoraCrisT Also robots can do things humans can't. Imagine a waste disposal team made of robots, in chemical situations, etc :) Fukushima robo cleaners.
mircea_popescu Yes, but those things don't have to matter. This is like saying "artisan can do things cnc mill can not". Very true. However, you don't HAVE to fight a war to suit the artisan. You can fight the war so as to suit the CNC mill. Which is fundamentally the point of ww2. And re "doesn't take much to feed them" : this is true. Cigarettes also don't take much to buy. Dealing with the after effects of having bought them, however, different story. It is incontrovertible fact that most people alive today will have cost more than they were worth by the time they die, and this by orders of magnitude.

It's simply not sustainable. Eating more than you produce only works for as long as someone's there to put up the difference. As Bitcoin closes the windows for the welfare state to finance the difference, the future prospects and the life expectancy of the -EV human quickly collapse towards zero.

In short : if you're not one of us, you have much more pressing matters to attend to than the block size. Like, for instance, how not to starve. Learning a useful skill is a good first step in that direction. Walk this way.

1. Perhaps the best sum-up of the character is to be found in Search and Destroy. [↩]
2. He means, of course, "Personal Responsibility And The Ponzi Scam". Google it, it's a thing. [↩]
3. IQ doesn't really measure smarts. The difference is best understood by the following metaphore : a computer's speed, measured in GHz is the IQ. The computer's utility, however, is much more a function of how many of those cycles it burns doing idiotic shit. Thus a 2 Ghz cpu running Windoze is not nearly as useful as one running a sane OS. In fact, a bad OS can cripple the processor entirely, turning what originally was a Turing machine (therefore capable of covering the entire infinite space of complexity) into a castrated thing that may not even be able to cover finite spaces. The software you're running, ie, your culture, may be deemed to play a much larger part in your actual intelligence than the prowess of the brain you're running it on. Which is why calm experience beats impetuous youth every time. [↩]
4. A point readily understood by every class of idiots ever. It's called "throwing the curve", where performance by one participant throws the effort required by the other 29 so far out that it is actually cheaper for them to spend their time trying to kill him instead. [↩]
5. Historically this is explained in the exactly psychotic reversal of "can't afford". Guess what ? Those people still need food, and sex. Somehow those things they can afford. Somehow. Clearly if they actually needed it they'd have actually afforded it, the only thing "can't afford" means is "no need". [↩]
6. Remember that ? "Every sperm is sacred" ?

   Mmmmmyeah. [↩]