Managing Expectations

 

I don’t have homework until the new year, so with the leftover processor cycles that have been freed up in my brain (such as it is), I’m writing again.  Don’t get used to it. Also, remember, these are polemics, not debates or arguments – I may or may not put references in the paper, or I could just decide funny pictures are more fun and make the point as well or better than I could.

I’m sure you’re aware by now, dear reader that I’m what is lovingly referred to as a “conspiracy theorist whackadoo”^tm but I do try to keep it under control.  One of my most difficult tasks, though, is doing just that, especially when the Elite of the World have essentially taken my fever dreams and run with them.  There may be one or two conspiracies I believe in that haven’t come not only to be proven true this year, but to be old news.  I’ll rummage around and see if I can dust the cobwebs and accumulated rust off of some of the older ones I haven’t rolled out in a while, but that’s a task for a different day.

Today, I’m taking a quick look at one of the old chestnuts that I really didn’t expect to trot its sorry ass out into the open, let alone get so many high-level sign offs: the Great Reset, aka: “Implementing World Wide Communist Dictatorship Enforced by Corporatist Thug Companies by pasting a smiley face sticker on it.”  You can see that at the very least, they got their advertising dollars’ worth for the name alone, since it’s a damn sight less unwieldy than mine.

Preamble aside, the Pedophile Monsters that Currently Own the World (PMCOW) have chosen a Danish woman who looks like an unfinished character in a vidya game to try the old soft-sell in an article that was previously titled “The Great Reset” but as that was a little too on the nose for her masters is now called “Here's how life could change in my city by the year 2030.”  Despite the headline, this is not an uninspired and grudgingly turned in 6^th grade social studies report, but appears to be an aspirational message to the world, of just how golly-gee great it would be to throw away everything they own and join the Softer Side of Communism.

How can you not trust an obviously joyless harpy to tell you what's best?

I will say, that the authoress, pictured above in all her pasty glory, likely after realizing that communism is still a living memory event for many, especially in Europe, had just enough self-awareness to edit the article to add this totally 100% believable disclaimer under the lede:

 

Author's note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.

 

First off, you communist whore, we’re all very aware of what your intentions are, you just got called out for accidentally letting it slip that you’re advertising slavery as freedom, poverty as wealth, and yourself as a rational human, so now you’re trying to cover your ass.  Inversion is the greatest tool of advertising, as it takes advantage of the human brain’s love of juxtaposition – “These two things are nothing alike, therefore they’re exactly the same!” Just because inversion works, though, doesn’t mean people don’t resent it when they see it.

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city". I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.

If you don’t own any of these things, and in fact don’t own anything, how can this be described as your city?  You have the use of items and services, but not control of them. 

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city.

That’s because you’re clearly retarded.

This is the entirety of communist thought in one photo.

Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

You know the difference between a product and a service?  If I own a product, I can use it whenever I damn well please. I can do what I want with it. I could even use that product to provide a service that others can use.

If I use a service, I can only use it when it’s available, I am at the mercy of the service provider to not have the service arbitrarily removed, degraded or made suddenly more expensive.

Picture a home.  I own it, but you get to use it as service from me.  What happens if I decide to double the rent? Or if I decide I’d rather someone else live there? Or reduce your bandwidth on the housing service to just the living room and bathrooms on alternate weeks?  As a service user, you’re fucked. As a service provider, I’m at the very least entertained watching you try to dance around my new rules while you frantically look for a new service provider.  And when you switch, you’re stuck dancing to their tune.

Also, it’s 30 years after the fall of the USSR, do we really still need to explain that “things” are not free?  Hell, even the Chi-Coms have figured that out, that’s why politicians have gotten so much more expensive these days.

Oddly enough, I didn't pay for this image.

First communication became digitized and free to everyone.

How?  Out of the goodness of the shriveled little prunes that pass for the hearts of telecom executives?

I have nothing but your best interests at heart...

Then, when clean energy became free,

Really?  Out of the goodness of the even more shriveled little prunes that pass for the hearts of energy companies?  This ditzy bitch thinks the Bush Family et al. are going to just give up on their zillion dollar a year industry, just because Cindy-Lou Who doesn’t like paying the light bill?

Eager to pay your bills for you

things started to move quickly.

This I can buy.  Commies move quick.  Hell, with enough Kulaks, you can have a labor camp and a mass grave dug in no time at all. 

Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

More hand-waving to avoid having to explain the transition from owning things to not owning things.  Imagine the horror involved in throwing away the things you own, or worse, having them taken from you.  Each items represents a certain cost to you, which required your effort, or in Marxist terms your labor, to buy or acquire.  All in the trash heap.  All that time and effort wasted so that someone else can have control of your life, and you can have the joy in no more control over your decisions.

Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey.

You’re in Denmark, the bicycle capitol of the Western Hemisphere. Of course you have a bike.  What about people in, say, Texas where they measure distance by hours travelled instead of miles?  If I need to go to Houston, but live in Dallas, should I get a ride sharing service?  One of those driverless cars you mention?  What if, because I like visiting the unsavory parts of the internet, the service providers decide they want to deplatform me?  Do I hoof it?  Also what about cripples? 

I know, I know, the services are “free,” meaning that in exchange for having no income or possessions, I get to “enjoy” the services provided by what will undoubtedly be a souped up version of the DMV.  Need to go to Houston next week? Should have got in line three weeks ago to get your travel papers.  Don’t have travel papers, explaining why you should be allowed to use a service whose customer base extends to every single person in the nation/world?  Why should you get a ride, when Mary over there has a more pressing need for the same car? Or because Shontasia wants to visit her baby-daddy in the pen? 

Funny how some things seem never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants.

Ooh, I can make a list, too: bread lines, gulags, mass graves of bad-thought criminals, unending censorship of basically everything, the extended PTA meeting with Satan and his minions that every political venture of the left always becomes…

In Hell, they're all named Karen.

Also, it’s funny how the things this Danish tart lists are things that I guaran-god-damn-tee she has at some point said women were liberated from in joining the workforce.  It appears that once women are given 50 years of evidence, even they can come around to the idea that homemaking is not a prison, jobs outside the home are not liberating, and that they gave up a pampered and protected life to compete against men in the workforce, and to do it so poorly that their labor is worth 78% of ours (allegedly).

It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.

Part of culture is artifacts and the rest of it is passing things on to your kids.  Tell me, if you own nothing, and do nothing of value, what will you pass on to the next generation?  Lotus flower recipes?  More likely, you’ll pass on a wonderful combination of hubris and ennui that makes the current suicide epidemic pale in comparison.

"Environmental problems seem far away"

Yes. That’s called the externalization of cost, and it is a prime factor in why the things lefties insist are clean, are really significantly more insidious and without fail more poisonous to the environment than the “dirty” technologies they’re supposed to replace.

Electric cars are the clear category winner here.  “They don’t pollute and don’t burn fossil fuels,” is the selling point for soft-headed hippies.  Bullshit.  Teslas and other electric cars require significant amounts of rare and costly chemicals for their batteries.  These chemicals are found everywhere, but since mining is ugly, NIMBY laws have offshored most mining operations.  Now, the “developing countries” (what used to be called the third world) don’t care about ugly, they want jobs and money and food, and are willing and excited to take over the wildly profitable venture of poisoning the land, rivers, air and oceans to dig these minerals out of the ground, condemning themselves and their posterity to a life time (mercifully short) of cancer, birth defects and other delights of a blighted ecosystem so that chinless men and iron-jawed womyn in the west can pretend they’re not polluting when they drive the 40 miles a day the fucking death traps allow them.

“What about fossil fuel reduction?  Surely the use of ‘lectric and the corresponding disuse of gasoline is worth the price of a few blighted landscapes, which after all are overseas where they don’t even have cable tv for chrissakes.”  Funny you mention that.  Roughly 60% of all electricity in the US is produced by burning coal to heat water and spin turbines.  Teslas aren’t powered by clean energy – they burn coal.  Unfair comparison?  How about this? A gas powered car has electrical motors in it.  These motors are directly powered by electricity from the car’s battery and alternator, but the car itself is powered by gasoline and thereby dirty.  The same logic applied to electric vehicles means that they are a significantly worse source of pollution that any car since the 76 Vega.

Almost as clean as a Tesla

None of this even approaches the idea of a limited resource.  There is only so much planet to go around, and you can only offload so much industrial waste into Africa and Asia before someone gets angry and decides to either a) prevent that or b) monopolize the resource you’re currently killing their children for and make you pay more for it.  Will you go to war for those resources?  Will your children fight in the Congo so you can have “free” cell phones and fancy electric cars?  Ideological wars are bad, but resource wars will be far worse than you can even imagine.  How many genocides is free wi-fi worth?

In our city we don't pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Oh, good.  Business meetings.  I can’t imagine that a group of people conducting business in a place they too have no control over would ever mistreat the area where I’m supposed to sleep and eat and shit and play with my kids. Do you have any say over what sort of “business meetings” go on in your cell while you’re away?  Is it Monsanto  executives deciding the acceptable number of extra vertebrae children in India can grow due to their products? Is it the smart boys from Exxon desperately coming up with a scheme to cover up the “Valdez II, this time it’s personal” shenanigans?  Or do you assume the only business that will go on to support your utopia will be flower gardening and fairy husbandry?

Thanks for letting us use your place, Linda

Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself.

Watch out boys, she’s obviously a keeper…

It is easy - the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home.

And if it’s snowing?  If there’s a disruption in transportation services?  If you visited a right-wing website three years ago and didn’t denounce it hard enough so now you’re blacklisted from using the service?

 

Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

Because sometimes you want to make pasta without waiting for someone to decide to either push a button for the driverless delivery service to bring you the wrong parts to a machine you’re not familiar with to the wrong address, or to get off their ass and mis-deliver it themselves.  Have you ever met a pizza delivery driver?  Do they strike you as dedicated professionals, proud in their work and motivated to do it?  Do you expect that whatever motivation they do have to survive a week without physical needs? 

Attention to detail is his defining trait.

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier.

If it’s anything like circular reasoning, this is going to be a real treat.

When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability.

You’ve never experienced advertising, have you? 

The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily.

Wait, if no one’s interested in short life span items, and everything is built for durability, why would new products enter into service at anything like the rate they do now, let alone an accelerated rate?

Also, if you own nothing, pay for nothing, and produce nothing, in what way can you be said to have an economy?

Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods.

More hand-wavery intended to disguise the fact that she prefers the poisoning of foreign children to having anyone in the west to ever have to work for a living.

The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well being.

Have you met people?  People are terrible, and make bad decisions. 

In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over.

This is the case now, not 2030.  It happened because we’ve given over the countryside to sprawl.  It’s cheaper to build outside the city, and stuff grows in abandoned lots.  “Green spaces” are simply well-manicured abandoned lots. 

 I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

Because concrete is durable and allows one to put useful things like manufacturing plants and office building inside a city where we keep lots of people.  If the factories and office buildings move to the suburbs, so do the people, with the exciting new features of not knowing their neighbors, longer travel distances, and the atrophy of social skills that has lead us to today’s atomized and hateful “culture.” (in quotes, because we don’t have a culture in the strict sense, we have an anti-culture)

The death of shopping

Wait, maybe I can get on board with this…

Shopping? I can't really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use.

That…that is shopping.

Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

If the entirety of your “taste” is easily discernible by an algorithm, you have no inner life and thereby have no taste.

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people.

But no money.  And no purpose in life.  Like I said, the suicide epidemic this lifestyle would cause would be enormous.

The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don't really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

Notice here, there is nothing about “creating value time” or “improving anything, anything at all-time.”

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

I ask again, have you actually met people?  I cannot for one second think you have any conception of the depths of escapism to which the average person is willing to sink before either developing a purpose (less than 1%) or deciding since they’re dead from the neck up, they might as well be dead from the neck down (99%).  I admire the commitment to offing the less motivated members of society, but this seems like an awfully long way around the barn in order to do it.

"They live different kinds of lives outside of the city"

They always do, don’t they?

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Serfs and squatters.  Got it.  You city dwellers are rich and pampered, while the rest of the world are serfs.

Anyone here know the French term, admittedly fairly archaic, for “City Person?”  Bourgeoise.  Now this commie wants the bourgeoise to literally rule over serfs and peasants, and wants us to believe that this is paradise.

You must be at least this tall to eat today...

I mean, how dumb do you have to be to not be smart enough to be a communist?  Real dumb. Real, real dumb.

Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

And as we all know, hope is a wonderful defense against the prurient and depraved…

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth.

Penniless, homeless, monitored and observed 24/7, and dependent on the good faith of institutions that have repeatedly failed to show good faith over their entire existence is a “good life?”  Incorrect.

We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases

Hey, now…what's with all the homophobia?

That bitch talking about me?

Oh, you didn’t mean AIDS, but instead diseases like obesity?  How fit do you think the average layabout who doesn’t have to work for their daily bread or entertainment or anything, really will actually be?

climate change,

“If you volunteer to be a slave to your betters, the oceans will recede!”

the refugee crisis,

Because surely no one in the third world that produces all the electrical gadgets your utopia demands will want to actually move to that utopia.  Little brown brother will be more than happy to earn 12 cents a month giving himself cancer and his children birth defects…

environmental degradation,

“…in the west…” – there, fixed it for you.

completely congested cities,

Well, I suppose once 2/3 of the population dies in the resource wars and the suicide pandemic, traffic will ease up a bit.

water pollution, air pollution,

You already said this.  You already said this. You already said this.

This actually is how you can tell it’s an advertising piece.  Repeat something often enough and it convinces people. The #1 rule in advertising is “repetition works.”  It’s such a good rule that it’s actually the top three rules.  Repeat something often enough and it convinces people.  It’s not fair, and it makes no sense, but repeat something often enough and it convinces people.  No matter how smart you are, repeat something often enough and it convinces people.

social unrest and unemployment.

Your entire fictional society has no motive for employment, no possessions to protect from “social unrest” (i.e. BLM deciding it needs reallocated or something) and no possible reason not to participate in a riot just to break the boredom of pointless days filled with using services someone else owns.

We lost way too many people before we realised that we could do things differently.

Apparently, losing 120 million people to communism in the 20^th century wasn’t enough people to make them consider doing something different, since this is just communism with the labor camps outsourced to the third world.