The West Approaches the Event Horizon

Everyone thought the technological singularity would usher in a kind of nirvana or tech utopia. Increasignly, it looks like cross the event horizon could bring about the rapid collapse of the West.

Locklin on Science: Technology winter continues

I’m also supposed to be impressed with the mRNA vaccines. They may be a useful new capability for humanity. One, mind you, which existed fully formed about 12 years ago when I wrote about stall in technological progress for Taki. Moderna existed for a whole year by the time Cowen got around to writing about it two years after I did, and had essentially the same vaccine available for MERS shortly afterwords. It may very well be the loosening of regulatory overhead on mRNA vaccines because cat ladies are afraid of the Wuhan coof unleashed a great new capability which will make us all better off. It may also be that these vaccines are ineffective or dangerous. We don’t actually know yet, and only a fool or a Moderna executive speaks with certainty on the subject. Preliminary results out of Israel are not terribly encouraging; I’d have to guess at best, 95% was an extremely optimistic effectiveness overestimate. At worst, mRNA vaccine is both useless (could be) and harmful (also could be; immune system problems can show up years later).

The idea Chinese photonic quantum computing is some breakthrough is laughably insane: big hint: optical QC is O(n^2) in number of optical elements; just like it was in the 90s when they first tried it. Their setup, of course, isn’t even a QC element, and the real news is a Chinese team beat Google’s QC results using GPUs. Which isn’t a sign of progress; it’s a sign that “quantum computing” is a fake subject filled with gibbering imbeciles. Similarly, Chinese nuclear fusion breakthroughs are about as likely as Chinese quantum computing breakthroughs or Chinese mathematicians proving the Poincare conjecture. China hasn’t innovated much of anything in about 1000 years. If it starts to, it will be a surprise to everyone, including the Chinese. China is undoubtedly a civilization on the rise; particularly apparent because the US is declining: that doesn’t make them actually technologically innovative.

...Meanwhile, back in America: dated aircraft designs dropping out of the skies due to preposterous engineering incompetence, Texas and California can’t keep the lights on due to a lack of rudimentary common sense, government by hysterical twitter mobs, our latest fighter plane has been declared a failure, tech companies imposing mass censorship and East German style surveillance dystopia, mass obesity and heart disease, favelas of broken and crazy people …. along with normal people bankrupted by a corrupt medical system, three quarters of Western civilization living in medical fascism hell. Yeah, bro, we’re just about to pull out of it. Maybe if we have a giant war and kill off some of the human chum running the place it could happen. It’s definitely not happening right now!

Speaking of the mRNA vaccines: Why the CDC is worried

Now there is a very real possibility we are going to see some percentage of the vaccinated who will need heart transplants in the next ten to thirty years. It could be a hundredth percent, it could be two percent, it could be twenty or more percent after thirty years, if the inflammation doesn’t go away (and nobody knows if it will). But when 70% of the population has gotten the jab, whatever way, it could be a fuckload of people needing new hearts, and there would not be enough hearts out there, so many of them would die. CDC is wondering whether they just gave a chunk of the population heart failure, and if so, how many.

I don't know if that is accurate, but this looks like it may be:

Already the not-vaxx has killed 77 percent of the total covid-19 deaths in Iceland. So, it may not take very long for the "cure" to amass a bigger body count than the "disease".

Officially, 30 people have died from SARS2 in Iceland. I found 12 reported deaths in media reports, some from January and some very recent, already 40 percent of the total. The number looks credible to me.