A Contrarian's Take: AI's Electricity Problem and the Bull Case for Oil

Finance U Public Finance U
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I just listened to discussion in EU context how Ukraine war is this kind of money laundering both cover(media scapegoat) and way to launder hundreds of billions of euros of EU money.
Criminals do it like that, so it isnt that difficult for deepstate.

Arms deals, drugs, real estate… but Id put some money and secure bitcoin farming and “ecosystem” now that I see deepstate interested in that. Population sort of hates it, so AI/vague datacenter concept is excellent cover (although more and more people suspect that, they just dont have means to find out info nor influence these projects as decision power is far away).

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WAG here. What it the data center build out is cover for the chops to overwhelm bitcoin and other cryptos??

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Only other thing I can think of is deepstate is really provoking nuclear war and wants ultra hardened bunker within datacenter(+command center) closeby… that isnt pretty thought.

Trump administration doesnt trust bankers so that can be one reason. But I dont see how that fits, as via machinery they could handpick some favorite banks like Putin does and then give those FED cash and let others go bust who support democrats or are not willing to follow plans.

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I thought this video does a good job of succinctly laying out what a con-man Sam Altman is. No way do I believe any of the hype about AI. If there is advanced AI, I’m sure it’s not going to be used for the benefit of the plebs and certainly not be made available to them.

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@cmartenson ..a new thought on plasma scientist at MIT cause of what you just said…that guy was for free energy…he wanted to make life easier for us serfs…so Israel and the rest of the investors (
Israel came in through Trumps company) do NOT want this tech to be put on web for free…they had to kill him so they can control the new energy. He was STRONGLY AGAINST MONOPOLIZING THE PLASMA CONTROL…he had a big following…he had to go. Just like Charlie

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After some thought, I think I understand the Trump push for AI.

First, it is a financial bubble - which makes Wall Street types salivate. They love bubbles created by credit bubbles, which leads to bailouts and bonuses by the Federal Reserve. So, he gives them their bubble, creating room for his tarriffs and attack on mass migration policies as well as curtailment of South American drug and human smuggling. Those are HUGE foundational building blocks of the Globohomo world order. The AI bubble is Trump bribing these psychopaths in exchange for them letting go of slavery, drugs, Karl Popper’s dystopic wet dreams.

Second, AI gives crony networks lots of money - like “green energy” and “climate change” did for his opposition. So, the fix is in, and it is a Trump grifter army being raised.

Third, unlike the green and climate scams, what is the end point of AI build-outs? Think about it. Here are the end points:

  • move in ready industrial sites
  • huge industrial electrical capacity
  • inflated Federal Reserve USD (bubble pop bailouts) i.e. extremely low costs relative to other currencies

Yes, there will be destruction but we will end up with huge, electrified, wired buildings and generation based around natural gas and nuclear - which is domestically abundant and which locks in stable domestic demand.

This is will come with a grifter army to protect this industrial development - just as green and climate change nonsense has come armed for battle out of every hide hole and bat cave in academia. You can see the masturbating hordes of pHds around this technological utopianism already causing friction within the establish green and climate change hoaxer organizations.

This looks like a HUGE win, actually.

What to call this hypothesis? “AI as means, not the end”?

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As win? Despite those multiple problems you laid out? I cant argue general use infrastructure usability though. Bubble? Yes that’s it… grey line where creating bubble with FED money and money laundering/great taking are separating.
Also devaluing dollar to me seems solid argued how to compete with China and solve some of dollar issues.

My argument, in fashion of Iraqi freedom is, what is cost to those improvements… is it bubble with great taking to destroy whole economy and leave citizens with very poor purchase power. These weights of issues against each other is the key. Past decades it has been horrible.
Government spending is fine when it is producing useful things for most citizens. Pouring trillions to afghanistan wasnt(in modern west gov or corporation spending is very close: either rising costs for necessities in life or rising taxes due to monopolistic structure).

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I have been wondering about this inflation of the Federal Reserve USD - going back and forth with it.

Quantitative Easing (QE) is the regimen developed by economist Richard Werner to deal with fiat currency credit bubble collapses. Quantitative Easing (QE) being the following: printing money to keep banks afloat; restricting lending for financial products or instruments; lending only for productive purposes. The first part of that formula has been faithfully carried out with fiat currency by central banks the world over.

Anyway, we can expect that any Wall Street bubble has QE waiting in the wings. In fact, it is an inevitability that the USD will continue to be inflated away. That is bad news … for the Federal Reserve IF the United States can develop its industrial base to self-support industrial civilization without a dire need for imported goods and services.

If the Federal Reserve destroys its US Dollars, and the system the Federal Reserve is a part of, is starved of the wages of slavery, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and a stranglehold on all commerce and credit … what is to stop a sovereign currency backed by a basket of commodities and sold via the U.S. Treasury from taking the place of the US Dollar as a currency for international trade - or flip it, and use the new U.S. Treasury money for domestic production and denominate the massive discounts for foreign export in the worthless US Dollar.

After all, who holds the most US Dollars? Of course, the Federal Reserve prints at will - but who else? Alex Krainer has estimated that more US Dollars collectively sit in the bank accounts of the Globohomo off-shore banking system than circulate annually, and more than the US government has access to.

I think the AI bubble is a perfect weapon to have our “Fourth Turning” - but that the turn is towards the American System of nationalist economics. At least, that is the thesis I am working with at the moment. This is, of course, mostly Copium and podcasts mixed with my sporadic selective reading of books like:

  • “The Creature from Jekyll Island” by G.W. Griffin
  • “Great Red Dragon, or London Money Power” by L.B. Woolfolk (1890)
  • “The Modern Anglo-Dutch Empire” by Robert Ingraham (2018)
  • “The Empire of ‘The City’” by E.C. Knuth (1944)
  • “Princes of the Yen” by Richard Werner (2003)

Something about the sky-is-falling where-the USD goes-so-go-I narrative doesn’t feel right to me, so I have been working on this perspective for months. Happy to be wrong; in fact, I typically am quite wrong.

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I have been reading whitney web so see the dark side to my startup plan and culture, even if in exotic isolated neutral remote dr noah islands. My bioelectric morphogenesis project seems like the only sane one these days. Yes we are f**ked but you gotta find the crack in the darkness to let the light in - then everything can be flipped. I think you are underestimating current silver breakthrough - that AI youtuber i shared has some valid points and why plundering resources and picking winner banks might be so critical (cant figure out whose backing him) eg https://youtube.com/@financial_revelations1?si=dfJPSxa72p9wtFXj but why he got dozens more channels.

On a more positive note I have just found an excellent field guide to resistance series in netflicks called Future Man that seems to make sense of this madness - full of practical tips.

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I find reading Whitney Webb, like listening to her speak, creates a dissociative effect and leads to negative ideation. As a result of this effect, which I have uniformly felt every time I touch her writing or her interviews, my opinion of her is quite negative.

Noam Chomsky created/creates the same negative ideation in my mind.

At some point in my life, I learned to listen to the little defensive voice in my head and I simply stop listening to these sorts of people. Something is not right, their communication is only darkening my psychological state, time to back away and find the analytical views that stay away from that abyss.

Her books are on my shelf, untouched once I made this emotional realization. Now, just like Chomsky, whenever I hear her voice I stop listening and walk away. There are already many competent people explaining the same phenomena that she does.

My positive examples: Mike Benz; Roxane Towner-Watkins; the ladies at Promethean Action Network; Alex Krainer; and, of course, our own Chris Martenson.

Honorable mention to old interviews with “The Archdruid” John Michael Greer (especially the last interviews he did with the Extraenvironmentalist Podcast guys).

Same concepts, same factual basis for analysis - but better on my mental state overall.

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OK as I engage with middle men in next few weeks (generals, princes, cyber/risk/regtech, asian and middle east investors, chinese models etc) that may be on any “side”, I will shift metaphor and perspective to see the overlapping shades of grey and the subtle harmless shadows that perception has been trained to filter as noise since young, rather than seeing it as totalising darkness with cracks of light. Nuanced shifts and inversions in light and dark of Krainer, Benz et al rather than all or nothing revelations of light and dark demonisation of whitney. Raw right perception and recognising blindness are important to navigate the mess beyond relying on narrative spin. Plus seeing the humanity. As in the first principles learning and nuanced character shifts and awakenings we see emerging in the field guide, Future Man, as they transcend and integrate modern culture conditioning. If only I could cook like wolf or sing better kareoke, I’d be a general myself by now.

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The most William Gibson cyberpunk comment I have ever read. Thank you!

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Some particular mathematical insight here. There’s one equation P != NP which soberingly will limit AI. See Fundamental Computational Limits and the Trajectory of Technological Development

Technology in its present form has a limited lifespan, not because we lack cleverness, but because we’re building on the wrong foundation. We’re optimizing within a paradigm that’s fundamentally misaligned with reality.

Nature will outlast our brute-force phase. The question is whether we figure out elegant, coherence-aligned approaches before we exhaust ourselves bashing against reality’s actual structure.

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Thanks for that. I know - the meglamania of recency is a bit embarrassing to the field and world, is it not?

Reconceptualising technological development from first principles does not require the new paradigms and approaches, that work with physical limits rather than against them, to emerge entirely in a vacuum. If we look more closely at nature and attune to be fitted to nature from microscopic level to cognitive to civilisational, then nature might reveal her principled secrets that informs the new paradigms and approaches.

Some have innate knowledge of this by also working within. Progress might be beyond materialism.

Others in cogsci like vervaeke relevance realisation or clark predictive processing see the function of consciousness as directly handling computational complexity - to ensure relevance or predictive fittedness to reality of overwhelming outer sensory data and our inner expectation models. So we might need foundational research on conciousness and role in computational complexity to nurture its emergence to replace current blind hope of god like omniscient conciousness arising from our meglamaniac scaling of one partial mechanistic success.

So thank you for building more of a case for studying emergent intelligence and conciousness in Tuffs prof michael levin style new biology research in bioelectric morphogenesis - as i said this component of my agenda applying levin to filamentous fungi for tangible near term microscopic result in oud resin production, seems my most sane project in my cyberpunk agenda. Wisdom often looks crazy in our low-life humanity, hi-tech cyberpunk dystopia or in our wisdomless forced control approaches to exponential tech in our planetary challenges. My silver vaults and golden visas and venture capital in sovereign AI platforms are just a “means to an ends for me” to create context for my pet project seeking empirical natural morphogenic breakthroughs.

It is not that agentic AI roots in AI planning in computer science started ignorant of complexity science P != NP etc - I spent half the 90s integrating teams of operations research phds well versed in optimisation and NP hard problems with AI teams and object oriented teams, such as in building planning tools at ryder logistics to route toyota us parts network (classic travelling salesman problems with NP-complete routing decisions and NP hard optimisation).

More interesting to me is similar well known formal results in description logics where we already formally understand similar physical limits on expressiveness, decideability and completeness in logical concept language description itself (with equivalent results in modal logics) plus equivalent complexity science in qantum computing.This could inform levin’s exploration of multidimensional teleological spaces of emergent cellular intelligence.

Of course prior to covid, I workshopped applications of both quantum computing and description logic views of the gene ontology, with our oz leaders in proteomics, systems biologists led by the guy who coined the term proteome, who went on to build our next gen sequencing platforms for oz biotech researchers, that are now used by the rna industry. But this has become perhaps an even more embarrassing field of science. This underpins my interest in biological computational modelling as one input to my pet levin project in bioelectric morphogenesis.

Litle miss muffet ate the cat to eat the bird that ate the spider etc. It all leads to biolectric morphogenic foundations for me at the moment. Even my christmas is dining with biolectric healer from ancient asian indigenous lineage - an electric pokemon girl who wears rubber gloves all the time to avoid dangerous discharges if we get too intimate. Hmm - maybe I am just a cyberpunk cartoon character. Merry christmas all.

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I have noticed this in W. NC and the SC upstates areas.

I think a few things are driving it. One is as you say people are getting out of cash. Secondly, as the dollars purchasing power decreases, the advantage of off shore factories decreases. We will be seeing more industry return to the USA.

When manufactured return to US soil they will rebuild in non union areas. The SpouthEast will see a lot of investment.

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I agree. The trend to move manufacturing to the Southeast has been going for a while. I think of the south as America’s last cheap place to go for land and labor. The internet is causing a boom in investment, especially land, in the south. By that, I mean real estate can be shopped online from anywhere. I see buyers coming here from all over to buy up rural land and farmland. AI data centers are booming here as well.

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I think data centers go where the power is cheap. I actually got a refund from my Rural Coop this year, the data centers will ruin that for us.

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