> I do wish I had your elequency

Ha! Thank you. I must admit that it's way easier for me to write "in conversation" (i.e. here rather than a blog), but when I get on a rant/roll and hit submit and the screen refreshes with a wall of text, I'm always a little embarrassed.

> couple of curve balls I would like to throw at you

That's what I mean. That is what helps me think. As it turns out, though, running late again today. But I will take a swing at those curve balls when I have a moment.

About 20% of all cyber truck sales were to Space X in the last quarter with data

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-16/tesla-leans-on-elon-musk-s-spacex-to-buoy-sagging-cybertruck-sales


I suspect we'll see more nuggets as Space X files to go public

FF: Works great, even on scanned (image) pdfs.  UI is clunky -particularly when resizing text to fit a spot on the form- but this is really useful for filling out forms.

Gem: Allows you to add text, draw (freehand), add signatures, and highlight documents directly in the browser. You can fill out forms, add comments, and save or print the edited PDF. It is designed for basic annotations rather than advanced structural editing of existing text or images.

Key PDF Editing Features in Firefox:
    Add Text: Click the text tool (often a "T" icon) to add text anywhere.
    Draw & Sign: Use the draw tool to create signatures or handwrite notes.
 
To use it, open a PDF file in Firefox, and you will see the editing toolbar in the top right corner.

I think broadly we agree on this, but there are a couple of curve balls I would like to throw at you, as you are so eloquent in putting this into sense

The first is that while there are stupid rich people, there are also stupid poor people. And some intelligence is bound to float to the top.

Also, as there are, I believe, according to some, 7 or even 9 types of intelligence, the question of which one is needed now and in the future springs to mind.

It has to be money(or let's call it currency) , as we are stuck with the capitalist system.

Are we headed toward a Brave New World now? Where Soma, might be alcohol, or screens, or other drugs?

I would argue that most in the UK certainly have homes, and emergency funds. Even if they rent. Homelessness is fortunately the plight of mental illness more than poverty.

I do wish I had your elequency  

 

I feel like this is particularly relevant in light of the recent attacks on Sam Altman, which recalls the Luddite attacks of the early 1800s

>> not to self, ask for shorter answers

Uh oh...

QuoteAnd I do see it as part of society's job to give everybody the opportunity to make those "good" choices.

Yes indeed. That was sort of the part that got me going. I think that, at least in the US, we are failing at that completely. I just don't understand why young people aren't rioting in the streets, voting my generation and older out of office, rolling back the entitlement state for wealthy old people (why does someone with millions of dollars in the bank and a healthy pension get Social Security?).

My point was that I think of the "biological divergence" and other things mentioned as consequences of long-term trends that are quite independent of and upstream of the three factors mentioned (AI dementia, poor diet, passivity/loss of social capital).

QuoteBut that doesn't necessarily change what is happening and doesn't change the fact that the class divide is only being made wider by this.

Agreed. Those things are important, but to me they are important as symptoms, not causes. That's where I think the Gemini analysis goes off the rails. It gets the causal direction wrong.


Tech bros and meritocracy

QuoteThis isn't about how much money you have in the bank, but the quality of your inputs

This is basically a "blame the victim" narrative that essentially pretends that those of us who are AI "pilots" and who go the "gym" of the mind, will (and should) rule the world.

The tech bro vibe is no surprise. An LLM is just a prediction machine. It is not going to offer new insight. It is ultimately going to offer the most probable take given the training data it has available.

So I think it has absorbed perspective from those who write (and thus provide training data). And that perspective is a defense of the current state of things, propped up by a misplaced belief that we live in some sort meritocracy where people have the nice things because they deserve them. As Will Munny says in Unforgiven, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it Little Bill."

The language of pilots vs passenger, active vs passive rings of the denigration of NPCs in tech bro speak while they, the technorati (aka pilots), sit astride the world making things happen and enjoying the just fruits of their superior decisions and intelligence.

I just don't buy it.

Biological Divergence

Biological divergence always accompanies great disparities in wealth.  It is as old as civilization. In fact, it almost defines the beginning of "civilization."

And, of course, the observation isn't new either. It is core to HG Wells' division of society into the Morlocks and the Eloi. There was a concern about the biological divergence then too as factory work and unhealthy conditions in cities and poor nutrition were stunting growth amount the working class in particular. Perhaps pollution too.

One measure of human flourishing is average height over time. Height among individuals has a genetic ceiling, but whether or not people reach their genetic ceiling is primarily a function of childhood nutrition. So when heights change within a population, that is mostly economics.

** The birth of agriculture/civilization.

When humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures, average human height decreased by 2-4 inches and other health markers decreased based on skeletal remains. This is because those who *paid* tribute shrank dramatically, while those who *demanded* tribute grew rich and fat and presumably tall.

** The age of industrialization
Here again, the average British male shrank by about two inches during the period of rapid industrialization. This is a good analogy to the present - the Luddites begged Parliament to enforce the laws on the books and protect workers, but Parliament responded by repealing those laws and giving the burgeoning industrialists total free reign. So the Luddites attacked the factories.

Anyway, during this period, it's not just that British males got smaller on average, the gap increased between the size of males at the elite Sandhurst military academy and the lower class boys at the Marine Society.

Again, biological divergence driven precisely by the size of the bank account, not "the inputs."

** Portuguese in Switzerland

This is just anecdote. When I lived in Geneva, there were a lot of Portuguese immigrant families in my neighborhood and my building. It was striking to see that the parents, raised under the dictatorship, were almost all tiny manual laborers, and their children, raised in wealthy Switzerland, towered above them while going to university.

Here, the biological divergence righted itself in less than a generation. You could argue that "the inputs" changed, but I would argue that it was the bank account and, to your point about opportunities, moving from a society that didn't offer opportunities to one that did. But the main "opportunity" that Switzerland offered was very high wages even for immigrant labor.

In other words, I just don't buy the framing that the bank account doesn't matter.

Are people poor because they make bad decisions?

Quotehow can somebody make a choice when they don't know what the choices are

I think it is even a bit more fundamental than that.

This question has gotten a lot of research in the past couple decades.

One famous study concerns Indian farmers who get paid once a year at rice harvest. Researchers give them cognitive tests before harvest, when they are "poor," and after harvest, when they are "rich." There are large differences. They are "smarter" when they have a cushion. There is a big cognitive load to being poor.

Similarly, the famous marshmallow test has been looked at more carefully. In lore, the kids with better self control (who could wait), had better outcomes. But what this was actually testing and revealing was socio-economic background. It turns out that if you are a wealthy kid and someone tells you, "If you sit here until I come back, you will get two marshmallows," you can wait because:

1. You aren't that desperate for a marshmallow because you get treats often anyway
2. Adults commonly keep their promises to you and you believe that you actually will get a second marshmallow.

The poor kids, it turns out, don't believe either of those things so they make other choices.

Anyway, lots of research on this.

So I see almost all of the negative behaviors associated with the passenger/passive/NPC class as downstream of economic security and opportunity.

Participation in sports, eating habits, screen time for children and so on all track with income for very clear reasons.

Fixing the income/security problem is not magic. There are plenty of rich people who don't read and don't exercise too. But there would be a reversion to the mean.

Quotelearning how to read to lift themselves out of poverty,

I have mentioned this too many times, so the short version this time. The house my father bought for 2.5X salary as a first year teacher is now 13.5X salary for the same house for a teacher at the same school with the same job.

Why don't you start training right now to try to make the British team for the 400m and 800m in the next Olympics? Simple: because you have no chance of success. It would be wasted effort. If the odds seem impossible, none of us puts in the work unless we just have an absolute love of something.

My father was raised quite poor - 8 kids in a single-parent working-class household during the Depression. But he saw a path. He went in the army, then to college, got a job as a teacher and had a house, a car, a wife and two kids before he turned 27.

That trajectory is completely and utterly unattainable now except for members of the inheritocracy (thank you for that word).

So that once again  brings up your point about the duty of a society to provide opportunities. If the path out of the "biological underclass" seemed attainable, I think you would see a lot more people burning the midnight oil to get there.

In other words, I don't think the poor have changed so much as poverty has changed. Modern poverty offers a lot of small luxuries (iPhones and Netflix) while depriving people of a path to obtain fundamentals (homes, retirement savings, emergency funds).

At least the US, we are failing the younger generation. And we are failing them with or without AI, with or without doomscrolling, with or without bad nutrition... though all of those things are leading them down bad roads.

>> Overall, the costs run $10kish per season.

At one point we had three sons playing league hockey. That number is all too true!

Intriguing. as I'm getting older I'm looking to get closer to the local community I was expecting that in America too but apparently not.

 My reasoning is that as a get older I want to be able to walk to the doctors to the pub to the coffee shop and to the grocery store oh and the Butcher.

Of course having seen so many lonely old folk being in the community seems quite important to me too.

Or use Bing I'm guessing it will still be on there other search engines

For me it would have to be retrospective as well

My mom got hacked because the gas station threw the carbon sheet in the trash and someone went through the trash, found her number and made some major order over the phone. Fortunately the amount triggered an alert and investigation showed the purchase was from a phone booth next to an isolated rural gas station.

This scam is now impossible because there are no more phone booths.