Warfighting ability
Imagine you are world hegemon and some shitty little country sidles up to you with an idea of making war on some other country. How can you tell if this is a bad idea? I mean, it’s already a bad idea, how can you assess how bad an idea it might be? Despite all the nonsense sprouted in thinktanks there are very old fashioned measures of warfighting ability which have significant predictive power. Consider a very simple one, which was standard for military planners back when it was a meaningful role: tons of steel per year:
(Millions of tons per year by year):
 China |
960.8 | 1,005.1 | 1,028.9 | 1,018.0 | 1,035.2 | 1,064.8 | 995.4 | 920.0 | 831.7 | 786.9 | 803.8 |
 India |
164.9 | 149.4 | 140.8 | 125.3 | 118.2 | 100.3 | 111.4 | 109.3 | 101.5 | 95.5 | 89.6 |
 United States |
82.0 | 79.5 | 81.4 | 80.5 | 85.8 | 72.7 | 87.8 | 86.6 | 81.6 | 78.5 | 78.9 |
 Japan |
80.7 | 84.0 | 87.0 | 89.2 | 96.3 | 83.2 | 99.3 | 104.3 | 104.7 | 104.8 | 105.2 |
 Russia |
67.8 | 71.0 | 76.0 | 71.5 | 77.0 | 71.6 | 71.7 | 72.0 | 71.3 | 70.5 | 71.1 |
 South Korea |
61.9 | 63.6 | 66.7 | 65.8 | 70.4 | 67.1 | 71.4 | 72.5 | 71.1 | 68.6 | 69.7 |
 Turkey |
38.1 | 36.9 | 33.7 | 35.1 | 40.4 | 35.8 | 33.7 | 37.3 | 37.5 | 33.2 | 31.5 |
 Germany |
34.1 | 37.3 | 35.4 | 36.9 | 40.2 | 35.7 | 39.6 | 42.4 | 43.6 | 42.1 | 42.7 |
 Brazil |
33.3 | 33.9 | 32.0 | 34.1 | 36.1 | 31.4 | 32.6 | 35.4 | 34.4 | 30.2 | 33.3 |
 Iran |
31.8 | 31.4 | 30.7 | 30.6 | 28.3 | 29.0 | 25.6 | 24.5 | 21.8 | 17.9 | 16.1 |
 Vietnam |
24.7 | 22.0 | 19.2 | 20.0 | 23.0 | 19.9 | 17.5 | 15.5 | 10.3 | 7.8 | 5.7 |
 Italy |
20.7 | 20.0 | 21.1 | 21.6 | 24.4 | 20.4 | 23.2 | 24.5 | 24.0 | 23.3 | 22.0 |
Steel is a good proxy more or less because you need to make things out of steel to blow up your enemies. It’s not perfect and has externalities. South Korea is going to have a hard time making as much steel without cheap oil from the middle east, coal and iron ore from Australia. Same with Japan. The US, Russia, Iran and Turkey don’t have this problem, they get all their raw materials locally, or can anyway. None the less, Japan gave the US a pretty good fight back in the day: if you make a lot of steel, even from imports that can get shut down, you have a lot of steel to deliver to your enemies in the form of bombs. Arguably same story with Germany, though they had historically decent local-ish supplies of coal and iron ore.
You could make this per-capita and it probably wouldn’t change much. Steel represents more than the ultimate tonnage of shit you can drop on the enemy’s head: it also represents a form of social/industrial organization which doesn’t exist in places that don’t make so much steel. The level of industrial organization required to make 30+ million tons of steel a year is probably indicative of the ability to produce a shitload of drones or rockets or whatever (fighter planes are cool, but ridiculously expensive and of only moderate utility in current conditions).
This proxy for war-fighting ability isn’t the only one available, but I’d argue that it is the first one that should be reached for. It’s a proxy for being able to make things in general. Another possible one is automobile manufacture, as instruments of war tend to have complexities which are reasonably well approximated by the complexity of an automobile. Car manufacturers also make good contractors for complex weapons systems. You could argue that many countries don’t bother making native cars due to various technical/economic issues, or they have artificially propped up native car manufactures. The numbers also change more in times of conflict or economic problems; Russia’s car production was 2.25 million a year in times of peace and dropped to 3/4 of a million as the car plants were pressed into service making weapons. Russian steel manufacture was flat during the same time period. because it needs about the same amount of steel as before; about 70 megatons. As such, I prefer to simply look at the above list of how much steel is made.
I’d also look at variance in steel production as a useful second order proxy. If a country makes more steel in difficult times, this probably means they’re relatively stronger than the case where the opposite happens. In the former case it probably means they have all the resources needed to make things. In the latter case it probably means that they don’t, so if the oil and ore boats stop coming, they can’t make as much steel. So this denotes weakness. South Korea and Japan make less, and Turkey and Iran make more in hard times. But this is the cherry on top of our proxy model; you can leave it out, or just think about it a little bit (hurp derp, Japan not known for its iron ore), putting a little sharpie point on the weak sisters.
Asking our foreign policy elite to notice things like steel production is, of course, futile. These are yalevard edumucated ninnyhammers who have more exotic spreadsheets which are capable of giving any answer their bosses require. The same educational colossus that netted us a fine arts major who never read Homer. We’re not dealing with the best and brightest any more. None the less, these halfwits should overcome their hubris to avoid nemesis. All you need to do is look at the wikipedia page and avoid engaging in combats with countries in the “makes about half the steel that you’re capable of” column.
There’s all kinds of stuff like this out there, most of it much more complicated than tons of steel. “Geopolitical thinkers” use all kinds of complex nonsense to rationalize bad ideas. Ray Cline’s Equation attempts to be quantitaive by adding together a bunch of qualitative factors. Easily gamed to produce the desired result. Hans Morgenthau same thing. J David Singer has a composite index of national capability which at least includes things like steel production, confounded with a bunch of stuff that either doesn’t mean anything or which is confounded by purchasing power parity. There are other things; people try to estimate industrial base throughput, critical materials supply chain, they develop differential equations, various ideas about STEM graduates, gold holdings, strategic stockpiles, airlift/sealift capacity, civil-military fusion, strategic communication -all ideas which seem tailor made to keep dipshits in thinktanks fully employed writing reports that don’t mean anything. It’s tons of steel, the end. Just like it was when Paul Kennedy wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers which more or less predicted the relative weakness of the US today.
supposedly Iranian steel mill
Bringing it back around to military misadventures: of course Iran is giving the hyperpower a hard time. It makes 32 megatons of steel every year (trending upward in a wartime economy). The US makes 82. When you consider the home field advantage and the fact that they’re fighting for their lives rather than for …. nebulous reasons relating to domestic political donors, this poor performance was eminently predictable.
Statistical picture of Quantum Mechanics
The statistical picture of quantum mechanics is an idea I had in my mind more or less as the correct picture, while occasionally simultaneously holding the gaseous nonsense that the Schroedinger equation somehow describes things the individual particles are doing. Stated simply, the modulus of the solutions to the Schroedinger equation describe a statistical ensemble of many similarly prepared quantum systems. That’s what the Born rule says, and that’s what the experimenter always measures. The quantum weirdness nonsense mostly comes from the idea that the wave function has some independent reality of its own, and that it is describing the motion of an individual electron or hydrogen atom or whatever. Copenhagen (sort of) and all the other weird interpretations of quantum mechanics say this. They also say the wave function collapses somehow (or we split off in the multiverse, which is even more absurd), which is actually not something in quantum mechanics. That’s something pasted on afterwords.
Imagine you’re doing some classical quantum experiment, say, electron diffraction. You can detect a single electron on the multi-channel plate, but you’re only going to see the weird interference pattern when there are a whole bunch of electrons. Similarly when I do electric discharge on some hydrogen, I get the Balmer series in my spectroscope, the image of the Balmer series shows up on my photographic plate or CCD camera in a statistical way. There are no wavefunctions of individual electrons collapsing when it hits the detector as in Copenhagen or whatever Multiverse deranged acid trip view of things. The individual electrons or photons or whatever go about their business, and you only see weirdness when you look at a whole bunch of them. Some people say the individual particles have no particular individual states as they fly through the void, many others say they do. I’m inclined towards “they do” based on observation, but maybe that makes me a weirdo.
I’m on well trodden ground here: the literal and exact interpretation of the Born rule was the view of Einstein which he took great pains to state clearly, and which many of his colleagues (including Born and Bohr) actually agreed with, but they also disagreed with for weird reasons unknown to me. Perhaps he stiffed them on a dinner check or pinched their wives bottoms, or perhaps they just misunderstood each other. We know one of the Born-Einstein debates on this, Born was straw-manning something that was never said, adjudicated so by Pauli. It doesn’t really matter; most people’s views of the actual history of what uncle Albert believed is as false as their views of the Great Depression or World War-1, which were roughly contemporary events. Here’s what he clearly said:
It seems to be clear, therefore, that Born’s statistical interpretation of quantum theory is the only possible one. The Ѱ function does not in any way describe a state which could be that of a single system; it relates rather to many systems, to “an ensemble of systems” in the sense of statistical mechanics. If, except for certain special cases, the Ѱ function furnishes only statistical data concerning measurable magnitudes, the reason lies not only in the fact that the operation of measuring introduces unknown elements, which can be grasped only statistically, but because of the fact that the Ѱ function does not, in any sense, describe the state of one single system.
Then Einstein again:
The attempt to conceive the quantum-theoretical description as the complete description of the individual systems leads to unnatural theoretical interpretations, which become immediately unnecessary if one accepts the interpretation that the description refers to ensembles of systems and not to individual systems.
Looks right to me, and I don’t see any experimental proof that the situation is otherwise. It’s possible there could be such an experiment demonstrating that wave functions apply to individual quantum particles somehow, but nobody I know of is thinking about doing such a thing (PBR is fake and gay and doesn’t count).
At some point everyone reading this who has actually looked at quantum mechanics to the point of solving differential things, you will have seen the Hamilton-Jacobi equations. If you take the Schroedinger equation to the classical limit (ℏ→0), it is the Hamilton Jacobi equation. The Hamilton-Jacobi equations are also to be interpreted statistically. It’s solving for equal-action surfaces: that’s the wavefront piece. The ℏ piece represents our ignorance of the “microstates” of the individual particle: otherwise Schroedinger is giving us the equal-action surfaces like in the regular Hamilton-Jacobi picture. That’s why the solutions to energy conserving systems are stationary.
Objections to the statistical picture:
People rattle on about decoherence theory solving the “measurement problem.” It is an interesting effort, but the Shroedinger equation remains time-reversible and unitary. The nicest thing you can say about decoherence theory is it is a reasonable if convoluted way of deriving the Born rule, but Born didn’t need decoherence theory to derive the Born rule. There ain’t no collapsing wave functions in decoherence theory, and anyone who thinks there is doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Of course if you just look at quantum mechanics as something that tells you what the outcome of a statistical ensemble of similarly prepared systems will be, you don’t need to think about collapsing anything.
There are various experiments on single quantum systems in some sense. For example, there are quantum non-demolition experiments. These also effectively are statistical in nature, and show that you don’t get interference at the detector when you block one of the arms of the interferometer or two-slit whatever. Sure, you’re observing single photons at a time, but they behave like, well, light, which very obviously has a wavelength. They seem pretty classical to me. Bell inequality: this is 100% a statistical experiment, one involving very weird noisy detectors. Same story for Leggett-Garg inequality experiments, which is a sort of Bell inequality smeared out over time rather than space.
One that should come to mind is the Serge Haroche cavity experiments. He shot a Rydberg atom into a single photon in a “Schroedinger’s cat state” (aka circular polarization) in a cavity which performed a “measurement” on the photon’s state. Then does it again and it is measured again to be in the same state. For some reason people call this collapsing the wave function of the photon, but in reality the photon was happily doing its own thing, and Haroche measured it doing its thing, then measured it again and it’s still doing the same thing. While a considerable technical achievement, I could do the same thing with an ensemble of red and green M&Ms. Take one at random, look at it and look at it again: it’s the same! You don’t need any quantum anything to observe the M&M either.
This Simon Fraser guy Leslie Ballentine has kept the statistical picture idea alive under the term “ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics.” I remember him from the days when I was following the quantum chaology stuff. I probably even thumbed through the first edition of his quantum mechanics book. Karl Popper of all people was also involved in the development of the ensemble interpretation. Popper rightly pointed out that quantum probabilities were kind of weird propensities rather than probabilities as conventionally defined (Bayes law doesn’t work: this is true in a lot of machine learning type probabilities as well, which should be concerning to people who use them). Ballentine’s the go-to guy for this stuff though, if you feel like reading up on it. He’s got a good textbook on quantum mechanics in general which contains some of the insights, but it’s fun to read through his various attacks on objections to the most common sense view of quantum mechanics.
….we may be reassured that mystics, psychics, and other irrationalists who have attempted to use misinterpretations of QM in support of their views have nothing to gain from this subject.
I’m a simple man, and physics is supposed to be simple rules describing reality, so we can, like, invent transistors and stuff. The Born rule pretty much says what the thing you’re measuring is. Attributing mystical many worlds to solutions of the Schroedinger equation or the act of measurement seems to be self indulgent piffle to me. At the very least, “shut up and calculate” seems to apply here, even though the observer created universe idea impresses women with large collections of quartz crystals. Born rule is the answer: the end. The other stuff is making the category error that the wave function describes the dynamics of an individual particle, or is physically real somehow. It just doesn’t. There is no evidence that it does. People should stop stabbing themselves in the eye asserting otherwise. Don’t take the cork off the fork. Personally I happen to think there’s work to do on pre-quantum stuff a la Khrennikov or t’Hooft, or Stochastic electrodynamics or Zitterbewegung (fine, the wave function is ontic here, but it doesn’t bother me in this case) or whatever, but that’s another argument. Leave Born’s rule alone and keep the cork on the fork.
Do feel free to try to convince me in the comments about Quantum Zeno (watched pots) or PBR nonsense; I’m pretty sure I have good answers to all of them. Throwing away the obvious interpretation of quantum mechanics because the fruity one sells more books is just moronic. I mean, maybe there is a good reason to do so, but Einstein’s view seems quite reasonable to me.
Progress: real and Potemkin
I ran across this essay, Freddie deBoer offering a bet to Scott Alexander that the AI singularity isn’t coming in the next 3 years, based on a decent decent set of economic measurements:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-187862732
I used to find it somewhat mind-boggling that allegedly intelligent people think we’re on the eve of some giant technological leap forward. This was going on while I was in grad school with the nanotech thing. Autonomous cars (yes google is violating my patent): same thing. Cruise is dead, Argo is dead, Otto is dead, Embark is dead, Starsky is dead, Peloton is dead, Ike is dead, Waymo Via is dead. Now it’s going on with LLM chatbots, which, while fun to use, haven’t been showing up in productivity statistics or Anthropic head counts or gross margins either.
Yet we get all these fervent believers thinking the AI apocalypse is upon us. Pay no attention to the guys who actually built the technology: muh singularity is coming! It’s been coming for what? 15 years? I figure the reason behind all this is part marketing brainwashing, and part ideology. The upper middle class has an ideology of continual progress. Most upper middle class bureaucrats only have their jobs because of their origins in the times of actual technological progress. Probably the idea of continual progress originates in some Protestant millenarian heresy. You had people like HG Wells and Isaac Asimov singing songs of the imagined future of technological progress back then when it was still obviously happening outside of marketing departments. The only science fiction writers of note these days are obese nerdoids who can’t put the bag of cookies down who thinks gzip is going to genocide us all. You’d think this would be a big old hint that continual progress is a lie, sort of like the fact that we’ve been flying around in essentially a 1947 airplane design since 1947.
Actual technological progress exists in the actual world, and makes people more productive. The B-47 was actual technological progress over the B-29. It flew faster, carried more bombs, and was more efficient in fuel, support staff and logistics. That’s why people mostly still fly around in what amounts to a fat B-47 with more efficient turbofans instead of turbojets or propeller planes. You can measure the productivity increase of B47s over B29s. Less fuel, fewer moving parts, more stuff moved through the air at a higher speed. Similarly, when we made the transition from steam engines with pistons to steam engines made of turbines, huge productivity increase. More electricity and motion from less fuel. Jaccard looms over ladies with knitting needles: big increase in productivity -more cloth from fewer workers, with a reasonably small capital outlay.
When you examine something like MUH AI APOCALYPSE the picture is considerably less clear. Yes, some companies are making do with smaller headcounts. Companies often do this. We get harbingers of doom like “Atlassian lays off 10% of its workforce” touted as resulting from a push towards more AI use. The fact of the matter is, Atlassian has a headcount of 16000 people, for two pieces of software which a talented spergeloid could probably reproduce by himself in a few days (without using LLMs).
yes, Claude made this for me
I was using Atlassian in 2013 when it was 700 people. The last time I used it, it was around 5,000 people, providing precisely the same experience (shitty). In fact if memory serves I was using it in 2010, when I’d estimate it had about 200 people: same software, same shitty experience. I assume over time they ended up serving more people, maybe you need a few more engineers to keep the back end working. Maybe you need more salespeople, technical support staff, managers, diversity coordinators, offices in Bangalore, people to sweep up after the salespeople and keep their booze cart up to date, tech support, catering chefs and travel agents. But the reality is they could probably have 250 people and get similar outcomes. Atlassian could go back to 2010 pricing models, make more money with the same number of customers, even lowering the prices and provide the same “service” -which, BTW, probably makes every company which uses it for bug tracking less productive and more bureaucratic than they would be using github issues bug tracking which I believe is provided for free. There is no increase in productivity visible at Atlassian, a tech company that uses computers to provide management services for other tech companies. Yet, we have numskulls kvetching about them laying off 10% of their ridiculously bloated workforce as being evidence of the AI apocalypse.
You could pick any tech company and go through the same exercise. Plot their products and headcount over time: the headcount grows with their revenues and stonk valuation, but more than anything else it grows with time. It’s Parkinson’s law, undefeated after 70+ years. That’s why we have the Solow “paradox” -computers don’t actually increase productivity, they just change the work requirements and ritual obeisances towards the latest management happy talk and object oriented database front ends.
breaking news
Making it personal, while claude-code and qwen-code have enabled me to do a bunch of stuff I had been wanting to do for, like, years, almost none of it has been economically productive. It very obviously hasn’t helped anybody else either, other than the guys I bought a Strix-Halo toaster from, and the assclowns at Anthropic are getting my NEET bucks. I’d have probably spent that money on wine and women. Economy is down because of AI; women and minorities (wogs make the best wine) hit hardest!
I’d love to see some actual technological and scientific progress before I drop dead; not incremental crap like better batteries, or democratization of shit the military has had for 40 years like fancy cell phones or the heads up display in my car (which is great BTW). Actual technological progress is deflationary: more things are supposed to be produced with less inputs. Cloth, for an example, was outrageously expensive until they invented mechanical things for making cloth to replace your wife’s weavings. Now a days cloth is basically just the raw material input price. If “AI” were making software as cheaply as current year cloth, it would be made for about the same price as the electricity required to make and run it. Like current year machine made cloth compared to ancient cloth, it would be better as well.
Now, if people can start using neural whatevers to successfully build general purpose robots, that would be pretty cool. Unfortunately despite all the youtube “demos” -those are all fake and gay. Remote controlled humanoid robots look like the real deal, but they have one giant tell: nobody uses remote controlled robots in production. People don’t use remote controlled robots in production because buying a $200k piece of hardware and hiring multiple $150k engineers to run it is more expensive than hiring a $35k laborer to do the same task.
It boggles my mind that allegedly intelligent people (basically everyone besides Vaclav Smil) keep falling for PT Barnum tier marketing trickery, and fail to notice the lack of productivity increases in their everyday lives and everyplace else. Truly the greatest technical achievement of the current year is marketing and propaganda.
Q1/2 2026 books
Getting the best of it by David Sklansky. This is something that’s been in my list of books to read since I got out of grad school. It’s often recommended for getting a quant finance job for the sort of gambling puzzles it contains. Most of the poker stuff is lost on me, as I’ve never played or even thought about poker, but some of the other stuff is pretty good, and I get the basic ideas he’s conveying. Stuff like what’s the optimal fraction of bluffs in play: makes sense. A bit of his math is questionable. It’s interesting, but not a requirement for anything other than perhaps professional gamblers.
Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World by Oliver Bullough. This was touted by some youtube sperdo as being about money laundering. Well, it’s not really. It starts off in Ukraine after the Maidan when everyone was touring the palace of Yanukovych, wondering at all the kitch nonsense and splendor he had acquired. He does give some interesting history of the eurodollar and bearer bonds I wasn’t so familiar with. Goes into corporate shells. Corporate shells bad! It keeps divorcees from cashing in on their rich asshole husbands! It keeps malpractice lawyers from looting every cent from doctors! It keeps tax collectors from looting every cent from business owners! The author basically reveals himself to be a moralizing socialist dimwit. I have no sympathy for women who feel entitled to half a man’s net worth for sexual favors, nor the existence of malpratice lawyers; I feel strongly enough about this I moved to a higher tax country where such things are impossible. Some of the case studies where dictators looted some turd world shithole and moved it to Citibank are pretty funny, but most of them are very much out of date. KYC laws everywhere are becoming onerous enough to make life impossible for normal people. Those are the answer to the problem, along with strict anticorruption laws and modest capital controls in countries with weak law enforcement. Actual money laundering, while it includes things like corporate shells, also includes things like cash businesses (Europe seems to be curiously and suddenly full of Thai massage parlours now), non-profits, property ownership, fancy watches, freeports and art pieces, and he seems profoundly incurious about these actual nuts and bolts parts of this sort of thing; it’s not difficult to find out. As he points out there’s a whole industry around it, all you have to do is go talk to those people pretending to be an African warlord or something. The author seemed awfully concerned with small scale corruption at a Ukraine hospital; I mean, dude really doesn’t like doctors. If you’ve ever been there, literally everything is corrupt: that’s the system. Why I should be concerned about this anecdote is beyond me; presumably it’s a reworked newspaper article he used to stuff the page count. If you know people from that part of the world, it’s obvious they’re doing their best under the circumstances. The following chapter on equatorial guinea is also revealing of his addle-pated sense of morality. Before decolonialization it had a high standard of living and more per capita hospital beds than its Spanish colonial overlords. After decolonialization it was a shithole. He blames colonialism (the dudes who provided a high standard of living and free hospitals), rather than the low-IQ maniacs who took over afterwords, I guess because the colonialists are white or something. BTW this has nothing to do with money laundering; he’s just rattling on about irrelevant bullshit and caterwauling his moralizing nonsense. Lots of kvetching by FBI agents they don’t control everyone’s money. No indication why we should take some cop’s view that totalitarian banking controls (what could go wrong?) are the right way to run society. He’s right that the US and UK are pretty much peak at criminal money laundering. He’s not right about how it works or why these places are selected (because they have laws, basically: the kinds of laws this numskull would like to get rid of which would turn such countries into …. Ukraine). The irony of all this of course is the fact that the author himself appears to be embarrassingly rich; able to gallivant around the world as a “freelance author” attempting to interrogate corporate shell companies. If you look at his photo, he looks like someone Bertie Wooster throws buns at in the drone club. Of course it was perfectly legal for his ancestors to steal from peasants, Indians or deal opium to Chinamen or whatever his ancestors did to enable this lifestyle “journalism.” Just as most of what he describes is also perfectly legal, but apparently we’re supposed to think it immoral if the wrong sorts of people engage in it. If I were involved in “moneyland” I’d ensure this numskull gets as much press as possible: making him the daring investigator of AML shennanegins ensures nothing useful will ever be done about it. Peak insanity in this book; he interviews … Bill Browder. Browder is an actual looter of 2nd world shit-holes who was called on it as Russia got its shit together. Half the reason the west is mad at Russia is Browder didn’t think he had to pay taxes there. Because the author of this book is an incurious fucknut, he uses heroic Bill Browder as a victim of venue shopping for libel laws by Russian policemen: something that … Bill Browder is known to have done, even in the US, which has the first amendment. The sheer topsy turvy insanity of using the hilariously villainous Browder as a positive example here is something like picking Hermann Goering as an example of a heroic London real estate developer in the early 1940s. This pretty much sums up this book.
Dynamical Theories of Brownian Motion by Edward Nelson. This was suggested to me by frequent commenter chiral3 for a review of stochastic calculus, which I need for understanding things like Khrennikov’s theory and some new stochastic calculus stuff from Terry Lyons. This is a famous 120-page paper, freely available online, and I wanted to read it offline, so I bought the amazog book. Don’t do this. The amazog book is the first edition of the paper, which is written with hand-drawn 1967 era equations. You’d think this doesn’t matter compared to nicely formatted LaTeX, but it absolutely does: crabbed hand drawn/typewritten equations are difficult to read and the formatting is a trashfire. Beyond this it’s almost $40, which is outrageous. It even says on the product page that it is the second edition: it isn’t. I would have returned it, but realized all this after the return window expired. Pay $10 to print the second edition spiral bound at the print shop. Special thanks to Japanese autiste Jun Suzuki who agrees with me on formatting issues, and fixed a number of errors besides in the second edition, which is a real treasure, entirely attributable to him and his classmates. Otherwise this is an excellent paper which people interested in stochastic calculus should have a look at.
Real Analysis and Probability (first edition) Robert P Ash. This one, some youtube schizo recommended for learning real analysis applied to probability theory, which is directly relevant to book/paper mentioned above. There’s a later version of it extended with Catherine Doleans which covers the Ito Calculus, but I don’t give a shit about that, and can get it from other places. Key is this book has a solutions manual available so I can work out some of the problem sets and don’t have to rely on a LLM for solutions. I remember looking at somebody’s book on Real Analysis (probably Stephen Abbott’s book) as an undergraduate and thinking it was a lot of useless bullshit, at least for a physics major, but it turns out I actually need this crap. Nice, clear didactics, good notational explanations for retards like me who don’t inhale math formalism. I ain’t using this to do real analysis proofs; I don’t care about acquiring this skill, more a codex for following the more complicated proofs involving integrating over a bunch of noise. I am tool using ape, but it’s good to have some background for grug to use tool properly.
Doing Time Like a Spy by John Kiriakou. I’m a big fanboy of his youtube/rumble videos. He was the guy who blew the whistle on the CIA torture program. Because American dweeb state are a bunch of totalitarian numskulls he was the only one who went to prison over it. I know most of his stories from having listened to hours of his podcasts, so I picked this one at random, figuring he told fewer of these stories on podcasts. Anyway, some good stories in there, and good advice for operating in adverse social circumstances. It’s funny he’s recently had some good luck and signed with a big talent firm; hopefully it isn’t a spook-organized buy out. Spooks are chosen for mild sociopathic tendencies and charisma, and you can see it in the stories, and on occasion in his interviews; his recent interview with that chode Sean Hannity was pretty lol; can’t blame the dude, he’s trying to get a presidential pardon. Sometimes Kiriakou doesn’t come off well in the retellings which is kind of funny and indicates he’s being honest about what happened. Anyway good stories. Don’t go to jail, it sounds like hell. If you do go to jail, it helps to be a famous guy with CNN reporters visiting you. And now a word from our sponsors:
Seeing like a State by James C Scott. This is a book which I think I have been indirectly influenced by in a number of ways. As such, actually reading it is quite tiresome. It is a critique of High Modernism applied to societal construction, from architecture and city planning a la Le Corbusier/Brasilia to communism, collective farms, and villagization in Tanzania and so on. The guy who actually recommended it to me is a Palantir employee, which fits the theme. I find all this tedious because to me it is self-evidently true. High modernist projects like Soviet Communism have always failed because the people who dream this crap up have no idea how human beings actually work and interact with each other economically and otherwise. I’m pretty sure I knew that Le Corbusier made shit architecture, Brasilia is a shit hole, and communism is retarded before this dude wrote his book. Still, he did write the book, and wrap it all together in an overall critique of Modernism applied to human life. He also wrote a book on why Agriculture is a bad idea, “Against the Grain” -this has also been an indirect influence on me through people like REN and others. Yes, agriculture gives poor outcomes for human health compared to hunting and gathering, but it also enables people to develop technologies like penicillin, supersonic airplanes and vaccines. Mr. Scott is some kind of soft quasi-anarchist. This is an admirable point of view if you don’t take it too seriously. If you do take it too seriously you get an idiot like John Zerzan whose ideas would create mass death if implemented. I mean, if you want mass death, High Modernism is more humane, aesthetic and efficient. When Scott wrote this book in the 90s, High Modernism was well in the rear view mirror of most elites; at the time they were really into centrally planned “nudges” -that beigist nincompoop Cass Sunstein being a notable proponent, and strategic helplessness, like not having an industrial policy because it displeases people who make large campaign contributions. These represent the opposite and its midpoint for “High Modernism” antirespectively. As such, it would have been more socially useful for him to write a jeremiad against these things, rather than kicking the corpse of High Modernism which died 20 years previous with the Soviet Union. Certainly there are abundant examples of the failures of the Nudge and Strategic Helplessness, and already were when he started on his book on Modernism. Subsequent applications of these issues have done more harm since then than any subsequent High Modernist projects; to the point of wrecking entire civilizations, let alone merely making a kind of lousy city like Chandigarh. In short, humans are retarded and many of the plans of its elites come to naught, but sometimes we do cool things. I’m a non-fan of central planning in general, but sometimes it has to be done. For example, you’re almost certainly not going to invent microchips with central planning, but you’re sure as shit not going to manufacture microchips without a great deal of it. Sure, a lot of it is done in a distributed fashion, just like sending astronauts to the moon in 1969 used myriads of private contractors, but it is very obviously a good use case for High Modernism. Stuff like building a city out of giant rectangles: not so good for anybody. Anyway I skimmed after the first 300 pages, paying closer attention to the Tanzanian story as I was less familiar with it. Give it a pass unless you’re some kind of relic of the past who thinks central planning is the solution to all human problems.
The Odyssey translated by Peter Green. I think this is my lifetime third read of The Odyssey. As with the last time I read it, it starts slow; Odysseus doesn’t even appear until book 5 of the 24 total books. I’ve always preferred the Illiad for the action and gore; this is a much more sedate book. It’s also much more complicated as a story; a good part of the story is related by Odysseus telling a story about stuff that happened to him in the past in front of other people. This is a fairly sophisticated story telling technique, arguably the first such example in human literary history. It is also interesting for the various direct interventions of the gods, which were not so immediately present in the Iliad. I can understand how Julian Jaynes came up with his wacky Bicameral Mind idea after reading the Odyssey -it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him from the Iliad. It is also more psychologically rich, in that it deals with politics, running an estate, and family life rather than grimdark “only war.” I love Green’s translations; it varies in meter, allegedly sticking closely to the original Greek text. Fun lines I didn’t remember (I wasn’t in liftwaffe the last time I read it), Book 17, lines 283–286 where some rando goatherd suggests Odysseus could get swole thighs working on his farm and drinking goat whey. I also am going through the existent film adaptations; there’s an old Italian one with Kirk Douglass which isn’t awful. An Italian TV series which looks very complete, and a 1997 movie which looks cheesy but has its moments. The Christopher Nolan movie of course is already a disaster (it isn’t out yet); he used that numskull Emily Wilson’s translation and made half the characters black (I mean, Calypso could have been: the rest, nah). Stanley Lombardo would have been the correct translation to use.
Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA: A Confession from the Profession by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte. This is something I have awaited for years. A decade and a few years ago, I recognized that the Devil’s Wurlitzer was alive and well, particularly in well-colonized places like Germany. The mass media is controlled by government spooks and gangsters. The Fourth Estate is actually a puppet show from the First Estate. Seems trivially obvious now to all but the most thoroughly propagandized with various revelations from the Twitter Files, the nonsense around Snowden and Wikileaks revelations, and the work of Mike Benz. Back ~12 years ago, when I’d say stuff like “the national advertising council and USAID is a spooky government op” people would be fitting me for a tinfoil helmet. Ulfkotte wrote his book in 2014, and I had always wanted to read it, but didn’t realize the thing had been translated to English until recently. It’s pretty much what you’d expect, though obviously more directed to the situation in Germany. While people in the US knew all this from the Church Hearings in the 1970s, somehow it was forgotten or assumed that everything was fine after that. It’s kind of funny looking at this dude’s wiki entry. Doesn’t talk much about his career before he went off the spook reservation, and is all double-plus ungood words about his terrible, naughty, forbidden “you better not be like this guy” ideas, giving fairly short shrift to his assertions about the corruption of the mass media. Fairly not funny that he died of a heart attack at 56, like many others who say things like this.
Return of the Kettlebell by Pavel. I wasn’t even aware of this book’s existence until hearing of it in a Dan John podcast. It’s so obscure there’s only one copy of it on filesharing (buying Pavel’s old books is impossible; I think he had a falling out with his old business partner). Most of these books are basically repetition of stuff he’s talked about in other books. This one is a little more oriented to double kettlebell work and high volume stuff, which is more or less what I’ve been doing lately. For completists.
Beyond Quantum by Andrei Khrennikov. I’ve discussed this guy’s work, mostly in the comments in the Conditional Probability shitpoast. I discussed it at length in another post, probably to be followed by Ballentine’s book which mostly seems to be a conventional QM book, but with statistical picture firmly in mind. Ballentine is presently languishing in my library mostly unread (excepting for the excellent and crucial Chapter 9). If you are interested in quantum weirdness or are some kind of quantum mystic you should probably look at these two books. Ballentine is 100% correct in every way: every other interpretation of quantum mechanics is nihilism or unearned mysticism. This will always be true unless there are experimental proofs (which all inherently use Ballentine/Einstein statistical picture) to the contrary. Khrennikov might be right, and it’s close enough to right it should be taken as seriously as any other book on quantum mechanics. It’s essentially quantum mechanics as Brownian motion; hardly the first man to notice this (I had forgotten you need stochastic calculus tier tricks in the Feynman path integral picture), but one step closer to glorious truth.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham. Burnham’s more famous book is about “the managerialists” -this one is about political scientists, starting with Dante and Machiavelli. I dunno, it’s pretty weak on these thinkers in my opinion, consisting in long quotes from stuff I’ve already read. Mosca and Pareto are also featured; less familiar with Mosca, but I know something about Pareto, and I don’t think these thinkers have a lot in common other than the fact that they’re all Italian. I can’t recommend this book really, unless you happen to be interested in this group of thinkers, who I do not see as particularly related to each other. They are interesting in themselves, and there is a lot of good history in it, but it’s a flawed book which should be called something else, along the lines of “early shitalian political scientists I have known and loved.”
This is a sparse two quarters from me for reading: been bogged down in technical books (which take longer) and various work related treadmills.
Locklin on science 
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