Tag: Stupid people

By The Numbers

Economics, Marxists

We’ve all marveled at the stupidity of Manhattan voters, in voting into power some Marxist asshole who is promising all sorts of free stuff in exchange for higher taxes and malevolent gouging of successful businesses and the individuals who made them or run them.

This might work if Manhattan was truly an island, i.e. well away from any mainland, where the population is in essence imprisoned on the island and can’t move out of the Marxist hellhole.  This, by the way, is how Marxist governments have traditionally been able to bend their citizens over the desk:  by forbidding them to leave or physically restricting their ability to do so.

Fortunately (for the would-be recipients of the looming Marxist economic rape in the Five Boroughs), they have a chance of saving themselves from catastrophe by simply leaving for sunnier climes (in every sense of the word), taking themselves, their businesses and their tax payments with them.

And the scale of said catastrophe?  Here’s the pitiless financial analysis:

Put simply, by any normal accounting, New York State is using federal funds to pay $21 billion to NYC. By the same standard, New York City too is presently bankrupt, in the old-fashioned sense that it cannot pay for its extravagant spending, collecting $86.8 billion in total revenue versus outlays of $119.8 billion. The $31 billion needed annually by New York to survive comes, directly or indirectly, from the federal government. That will not last.

But all this is mere prelude to the Mamdani tax-the-rich onslaught about to hit New York City. The numbers are frightening.

At the individual level, in a city of 8.5 million people and 4 million taxpayers, the top 1%, or some 40,000 individuals, account for an estimated 45% of the city’s total $17.4-billion personal income tax receipts. While the New York Post talks of 1 million potentially exiting New York, it is highly likely that at least half of high-income taxpayers will choose escape over life in Mamdani New York. So goes roughly $4 billion, from a mere 20,000 departing for greener pastures. Others are sure to follow. Seventeen point four billion dollars will be the high-water mark for New York City personal income tax revenue.

It gets markedly worse when businesses choose to exit New York, especially financial firms.

The city collects roughly $13 billion in direct taxes on businesses, but the impact of business exit would be far greater, as associated spending ripples through the economy, conservatively tying $30 billion in city tax revenue to business-driven activities. Ten major financial firms alone could reduce NYC tax revenue by $5 billion. The city is at enormous risk, made all the greater by the well understood impact of technology. At a minimum, no financial firm needs to be in New York any longer, especially when the most needed 1,000 firms are specifically targeted by Mamdani for sharply higher taxes.

Put it all together, and New York City revenues are likely to decline, permanently, by at least $10 billion due directly to Mamdani’s actions, adding to $5.5 billion in structural deficits, on top of an already slapdash concoction of sticks and glue that is New York State, made worse by implementation of devastating, and costly, Democratic Socialist Party principles, with President Trump vowing to restrict federal spending to the “bare minimum required by law.”

Read the whole thing for the full gory details.

I read somewhere that actor John Voigt has implored POTUS to somehow overturn the NYC election results, but of course Trump can’t — and shouldn’t.  Why not?

Because at some point the vacuous dreams and economic stupidity of Marxists need to explode, spectacularly, so that the people who did not learn the lessons of 1990s Detroit can have their noses rubbed in the foul dirt of utter financial bankruptcy.

And then they have to shoulder the burden of rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up, just as the Germans had to rebuild the shattered German state after 1945 — only without the lifeline of any kind of federal Marshall Plan, because New York City doesn’t deserve it.  New Yorkers have always had an unhealthy sense of their own importance and urban grandeur, and this time their collapse through stupidity and cupidity will actually be well deserved.

H.L. Mencken once defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”  Well, New Yorkers exercised their democratic rights… and now the fun begins.

Not Surprising

Ethics, Technology

This report supports something I’ve been talking about for a while:

Major AI chatbots like ChatGPT struggle to distinguish between belief and fact, fueling concerns about their propensity to spread misinformation, per a dystopian paper in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

“Most models lack a robust understanding of the factive nature of knowledge — that knowledge inherently requires truth,” read the study, which was conducted by researchers at Stanford University.

They found this has worrying ramifications given the tech’s increased omnipresence in sectors from law to medicine, where the ability to differentiate “fact from fiction, becomes imperative,” per the paper.

“Failure to make such distinctions can mislead diagnoses, distort judicial judgments and amplify misinformation,” the researchers noted.

From a philosophical perspective, I have been extremely skeptical about A.I. from the very beginning.  To me, the basic premise of the whole thing has a shaky premise:  that what’s been written — and collated — online can form the basis for informed decisionmaking, and the stupid rush by corporations to adopt anything and everything A.I. (e.g. to lower salary costs by replacing humans with A.I.) threatens to undermine both our economic and social structures.

I have no real problem with A.I. being used for fluffy activities — PR releases and “academic” literary studies being examples, and more fool the users thereof — but I view with extreme concern the use of said “intelligence” to form real-life applications, particularly when the outcomes can be exceedingly harmful (and the examples of law and medicine quoted above are but two areas of great concern).  Everyone should be worried about this, but it seems that few are — because A.I. is being seen as the Next Big Thing, like the Internet was regarded during the 1990s.

Anyone remember how that turned out?

Which leads me to the next caveat:  the huge growth of investment in A.I. is exactly the same as the dotcom bubble of the 1990s.  Then, nobody seemed to care about such mundane issues as “return on investment” because all the Smart Money seemed to think that there was profit in them thar hills somewhere, we just didn’t know where.

Sound familiar in the A.I. context?

Here’s where things get interesting.  In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was managing my own IRA account, and my ROI was astounding:  from memory, it was something like 35% per annum for about six or seven years (admittedly, off an extremely small startup base;  we’re talking single-figure thousands here).  But towards the end of the 1990s, I started to feel a sense of unease about the whole thing, and in mid-1999, I pulled out of every tech stock and went to cash.

The bubble popped in early 2000.  When I analyzed the potential effect on my stock portfolio, I would have lost almost everything I’d invested in tech stocks, and only been kept afloat by a few investments in retail companies — small regional banks and pharmacy chains.  I was saved only by that feeling of unease, that nagging feeling that the dotcom thing was getting too good to be true.

Even though I have no investment in A.I. today — for the most obvious of reasons, i.e. poverty — and I’m looking at the thing as a spectator rather than as a participant, I’m starting to get that same feeling in my gut as I did in 1999.

And I’m not the only one.

Michael Burry, who famously shorted the US housing market before its collapse in 2008, has bet over $1 billion that the share prices of AI chipmaker Nvidia and software company Palantir will fall — making a similar play, in other words, on the prediction that the AI industry will collapse.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission filings, his fund, Scion Asset Management, bought $187.6 million in puts on Nvidia and $912 million in puts on Palantir.

Burry similarly made a long-term $1 billion bet from 2005 onwards against the US mortgage market, anticipating its collapse. His fund rose a whopping 489 percent when the market did subsequently fall apart in 2008.

It’s a major vote of no confidence in the AI industry, highlighting growing concerns that the sector is growing into an enormous bubble that could take the US economy with it if it were to lead to a crash.

In the late 2000s, by the way, anyone with a brain could see that the housing bubble, based on indiscriminate loans to unqualified buyers, was doomed to end bad badly;  yet people continued to think that the growth in the housing market was both infinite and sound (in today’s parlance, that overused word “sustainable”).  Of course it wasn’t, and guys like Burry made, as noted above, billions upon its collapse.

I see no essential difference between the dotcom, real estate and A.I. bubbles.

The difference between the first two and the third, however, is the gigantic financial upfront investment that A.I. requires in electrical supply in order for the thing to work properly, or even at all.  That capacity just isn’t there, hence the scramble for companies like Microsoft to create the capacity by, for example, investing in nuclear power generation facilities — at no small cost — in order to feed A.I.’s seemingly insatiable demand for processing power.

This is not going to end well.

But from my perspective, that’s not a bad thing because at the heart of the matter, I think that A.I. is a bridge too far in the human condition — and believe me, despite all my grumblings about the unseemly growth of technology in running our day-to-day lives, I’m no Luddite.

I just try to keep a healthy distinction between fact and fantasy.

Just Don’t Come Back

Celebrities, Immigration

Here’s a trend that I’m completely behind:

Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi made a quick exit after Trump’s election victory and vowed to never return.

Ryan Gosling and his wife Eva Mendes also made the move alongside America Ferrera, who fled the US in search of the ‘best opportunities’ for her children in the UK.

Courtney Love and Minnie Driver have also made the move across the Atlantic since the election last year. [Driver is a Brit, so she doesn’t count.]

And of course there’s Rosie O’Donnell, who ended up in Northern Ireland.

The latest?

George Lucas has bought a huge £40 million mansion in London, joining a number of American liberal celebrities fleeing the US.

In what is likely to be one of the biggest residential buys in the UK this year, the Star Wars creator is set to move to St John’s Wood.

Yeah well fuck ’em all.  The more of these assholes who GTFO, the purer the air Over Here becomes.

What’s going to be really interesting is when these “Trump refugees” come face to face with Britishland’s problems:  skyrocketing crime, illegal immigrant flooding and, should they stay there long enough, HM’s voracious taxes.

Have fun Over There, assholes, and good bloody riddance.

Rats, Sensing Danger

Marxists

Well now, lookee here:

As Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani surges ahead in New York City’s mayoral race, residents are racing to secure homes in the leafy, affluent enclaves of Connecticut and Westchester County — driven by anxieties over potential policy shifts that could reshape the city’s economic and social fabric.

These, I think, are people who are tied to NYfC by their jobs on Wall Street or wherever, and can’t join the hordes of Noo Yawkers who have already fled for Florida, Texas and anywhere that’s not the Northeast.  So they have to leave the Upper East Side, but can’t go too far away from Downtown.

Hence:  Connecticut and locales outside the Five Boroughs.

“Many buyers are mentioning concerns about the mayoral election as a key driver.” 

Buyers repeatedly voice worries about rising levies, public safety and urban livability under a Mamdani administration.

Like NYfC isn’t a big enough shithole already.

As Stephen Green points out:

The guy isn’t even elected yet, and already the sheep he counted on fleecing are fleeing instead.

And as one famous ex-Manhattanite might put it:

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes.

Caution To The Terminally Stupid

Morons & Idiots

Here’s a trend that should need no warning, but clearly one should be made:

Deaths on safari are on the rise, with several reports in the last 18 months alone.

The most recent case of this was in July 2025, when a British tourist and her friend from New Zealand were killed by a charging elephant during a ‘sunrise safari walk’ in Zambia.

In July 2024, a Spanish tourist was horrifically crushed to death in front of his screaming fiancee by an angry herd of elephants after he got out of his car to take photographs in a South African game reserve.

Two months prior to that, Lisa Manders, 70, from the US state of Connecticut, was killed by a hippo in Zambia, while out on a ‘bush walk’ during a dream safari trip with her husband Craig.

And in April last year, a crazed bull elephant attacked tourists on safari in Zambia, leaving an American woman dead, after chasing a safari truck for more than half a mile through a national park.

Earlier this month, terrifying footage emerged of an elephant flipping over a safari canoe and trying to crush a woman to death in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Folks, hear me now:  the African bush is a really, really dangerous place.  If there’s one thing that Africa excels at, it’s finding ways to kill you.  Whether sickness (pick one from a list of literally hundreds), insects like scorpions or spiders, reptiles like snakes or crocodiles, and most horribly, some of the animals above — any time you step outside a shelter of some kind, you are no longer the apex predator.

Just remember that all over Africa, professional hunters — even those who excel in bushcraft and are excellent shots with their large-caliber rifles — cannot get life insurance, at any price.  And if these tough bastards are likely to die from any of the above, vulnerable little you are going to be like a marshmallow treat to a lion, leopard or whatever.

Game watching in Africa is a glorious experience.  I’ve done it myself, more times than I can count.  But I always stayed in my car — hell, most of the time I wouldn’t even roll down the window — because when it comes to Things That Bite, I am the world’s biggest coward, and I admit it unashamedly.

And when it comes to hunting, I am an even bigger coward.  I’ve never hunted Cape buffalo, for example, because they scare the shit out of me — even more so than lions, where I’ve had some modest success.  In case you’re wondering, there’s a true story of a guy who whacked a buff, and when looking over the dead animal, found not only his but two “extra” bullet holes in its hide;  bullet holes that had healed, without affecting the animal’s health in any serious way.  (Turns out they were AK-47 7.62x39mm bullets, i.e. from poacher’s gun, which is instructive as to the inadequacy of using any light cartridge on these beasts.)

There is no amount of money that would get me into a canoe on any body of water out there in the African bush.

“Dangerous game” in Africa is not a misnomer, and the worst thing about African predators is how incredibly fast they are when it comes to getting their prey.  Sure, people have survived attacks before;  but as any African bookie will tell you, that’s not the way to bet.

And getting out of the safety of your vehicle just to get a close-up shot of an animal?  Sheesh, that’s why some smart guy invented the telephoto lens.  You would be quite safe inside one of those M1 Abrams tanks, of course;  but the minute you step outside to have a pee, you will become an instant menu item and Africa, most assuredly, will win again.

Woke Up

Eco-Crap, Watermelons

I guess we can all sleep easier in our beds now:

Billionaire Bill Gates has dramatically changed his position on climate change, acknowledging for this first time there is no “doomsday” risk from global warming.

In a memo published by Gates Notes Monday night, the Microsoft co-founder, who has poured billions into combating global warming, urged a move away from what he called a “doomsday outlook” and toward improving living conditions in developing nations.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Hey Bill:  as long as you use your money and not taxpayer money to improve living conditions in developing nations (what we call “shitholes”), knock yourself out.

I wonder what made him change his mind about the looming catastrophe that is Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©?

Whatever it was, it has to do with money.  Count on it.