What this continuing saga illustrates is not that Mr. Musk isn't good at what he does. He is quite good in fact; perhaps to a fault and has an ego to show for it. But, as the saying goes, the Gods give us success precisely as a means to destroy us, for they know that our own vanities are often our worse vises. So even that, in this particular recitation of woe, though maybe related, is not what I think is the ultimate issue.

No, what is going on here is that the markets will always do what they are famous for doing, and that is be unpredictable. Irrational. And so influenced by turbulence. Which is, again, precisely why the three of these go together so well.

And then there is also the growing impatience with any investment that takes longer than an ever decreasing time frame of returns expectations. And why, you might ask, would that be, beyond ordinary greed as it already exists? That is so because money is now rendered down to be electrons themselves, moving at the speed of light, or should be if they were in the right investive system. Which is, again, precisely why stupid schemes like new bitcoins are so attractive, because you are literally paying for specialized processors to have ever increasingly difficult calculations give you more electrons than the processors used in making the calculations in the first place. A practice otherwise known as crunching numbers just to get more numbers, only in this case the numbers suddenly become actual increments of value. A different version of this is also carried out by other types of supercomputers to try and find whatever kind of market, and all other forms of information, correlations, so as to have some predictive capability on commodities prices; a practice, of course, that ultimately ends up putting its own unpredictable influence on prices as a whole, which is just more of the already mentioned turbulence.

The volatility of those various approaches, though, makes at least most of them pretty risky as well. But don't worry. Software of a different kind will soon leap to the fore (much more so than the games we get so far have done). This is so because the demand to create the perfect machine to human interface will be accomplished, to one extent or another, and when that happens, the route to pure addictive entertainment will be established. And from that point on electrons, and photons, being turned into gold, at ever more furious rates, will also be established. And all of that will be sustainable only as long as you can keep the electrons flowing, and the addicted on some form of treadmill of passive obedience, and ordered action. As well as to say as long as those in charge don't fall prey to that already mentioned recipe that the Gods use to destroy us. Understanding that they will also be plugged into a way to amplify vanity in ever more awesome destructiveness, and with ever greater imagination.

HEY... DO ANY OF THESE FOLKS WANT A SUB?

The Tesla Magic Is Gone

3 diggs theoutline.com

Almost a quarter of Tesla Model 3 orders may have been canceled, for a wide variety of reasons.

See Also:

Facebook shares plunge more than 20 percent on warnings for future

[Post Note: Of course universal income isn't a magic bullet. No more than Socialism itself is a magic form of social organization. And even if either were something close to being magic they wouldn't be able to overcome the insanity that markets have become now. And a big part of why they are insane is because they don't get "real" information anymore. How could they when everybody refuses to share information properly at all in the first place now (because you have to share it only when you can get more information back than you put out, because money is information too). And in any case, you still have to decide who's pocket you're going to get that money from, and then try to wage another information war on justifying why they should be the ones so encumbered, as opposed to anybody else who has large collections currently laying about. Which of course they wouldn't because they'd have already done whatever was needed to hide it.

Can you begin to see now just how crazy this whole mess has become?

I just hope to every God, and Higher Purpose, that this is so because all of our butts are on the line here folks.

CASHING OUT

Universal Basic Income Is Not A Magic Bullet

11 diggs Slate Magazine Money

The author of "Give People Money" on the pitfalls and promises of retooling the US safety net.

[Poste Note: One can only wonder what kind of money they'll be raking in once you can experience this sort of game thing as a full body, integrated whole. Haptic suits, and better VR to the eyes, may satisfy for a while, but it will only wet the appetite for the thing you plug directly into the nervous system with somehow. Hopefully not with a major projectile forced into your head from behind, while sitting in very shabby barber chairs.

The Na'vi from Avatar had it imagined better, but that was an organic approach, and we're quite unlikely to get that here. No. I think it will be some form of bio-electrical, printable grafting technique that will print actual tissue and circuitry onto the spinal cord. Something that will have its own, redefinable neural nets, with which to work translation codecs (which we could never program ourselves) to turn photons and electrons into the right neural signatures required to trigger whatever needs triggering. Or at least a matrix of experience that will seem to be that way in any case.

The interesting question for me, though, is: Will you be happy or sad that some game geek comes along to buy somebody like Musk out, just so he can have the production space for more servers? J.V.]