all technology brothers should have a birthright trip to paris to see how good certain things can get and all the axes of civilization they don’t think about. they should also get one to singapore to witness the hollow Disneyland feigned joy of technocratic perfection
if AI starts handling a lot of the "simpler" parts of jobs, a lot of jobs are going to basically be tasks that require high cognition constantly and making a lot of high weight decisions
this is a different muscle that people who "knock out tasks" are not used to - and honestly is very mentally taxing
Nice middle class Asian family but that ain't winning.
Winning is the patriarch running borderline illegal business in a primary industry in Indonesia, Philippines or Cambodia or misappropriating state assets from a China SOE before moving to Singapore under the Global Investor Programme and hard pivoting into real estate bc it’s the one thing your overseas enemies can never seize.
If patriarch is Singaporean to start with, wealth is from a questionable “trading” / “consulting” business involving members or alleged members of the Malaysian or Thai royal family. A guy who knows people in East Timor might be involved somewhere. Money is invested into cash flow businesses or real estate because it’s the easiest way to launder the money.
Oldest son is groomed to take over the real estate empire / cash flow business but gets sent overseas to university for “exposure” and either turns out gay and decides to pursue art / music or becomes a lawyer / accountant that wants nothing to do with the skeletons in the family closet. Either way they are a disgrace.
Younger son is left to his own devices. Either ends up in Ivy League if naturally high IQ and then goes to New York / California or fucks it all up and is sent to study business management in Australia to save the family face.
The former shows up every 3 CNYs, the months before the patriarchs death and the will reading.
The latter discovers drugs and hookers and will be recalled by the patriarch to permanently occupy a seat as “director” in the family office and various portcos where he can do literally no damage to the family’s reputation or wealth.
The daughter(s) grow up spoiled. The patriarch likely optimized for a hot wife so depending on the dice roll, the daughters either end up hot as fuck like mummy or somewhat resembling a bloated toad like daddy.
The hot ones will at some point attempt an influencer career, possibly venturing into money-losing business ventures like skincare, spas or bars which daddy will write a blank cheque for. Depending on repression level, she might bring home an Indian man at some point just to give dad a heart attack. The 4D chess move here is for the patriarch to throw a minor fit before accepting her choice - they will break up within 6 months in that case. If the patriarch objects, she will marry him and the family will have to cope by constantly exclaiming how cute Chindian babies are.
The ugly ones will go overseas to study something completely worthless and promptly identify as a they/them, likely also finding their way into body positivity movements. Likely dead to the family until she comes crawling back in her 40s to look after the aging parents after realizing she spent 15 years hanging out with retards with nothing to show for it. Christianity might be discovered along the way.
The success in this family is that none of this shit fucking matters because daddy's gains have compounded so hard that he can sit in his GCB with four Ferraris, five mistresses and an entourage of hanger-ons knowing that none of the generation's fuckups matter (except maybe deep down, the Chindian babies if any) because he never had expectations of greatness to begin with.
He will die knowing he can never be overshadowed and that the family's legacy is his and his alone.
And that is what winning as a family looks like.
The reason stuff like this is so important (and very funny) is it exposes that Marxists will defend everything Marx ever said. They don’t treat him like an academic, they treat him like a prophet. Could Marx have come up with some good ideas despite being too dumb to understand calculus? Sure! But Marxists will defend 0/0 anyway, because to them, he’s Jesus. Once you accept that he had a flawed understanding of math, you might accept that his “labor theory of value” was also wrong, which means he had a flawed understanding of economics. Then you might start looking at things like the Mongol invasions and think “hmm maybe there’s more to history than class struggle after all?” And if the guy didn’t understand math, or economics, or history, well then maybe this whole communist revolution isn’t going to happen the way he thought. And anyway didn’t he think it was going to happen 200 years ago? Am I following some millenarian cult leader who keeps pushing back the end of the world? Can’t let those thoughts in. So dx/dy = 0/0.
I happen to be the person who translated Marx's Mathematical Manuscripts into English, published by New Park in 1983.
Marx was aware of, but chose to ignore, A.-L. Cauchy's mathematically correct foundation for the operations of calculus, published more than half a century before Marx's own work.
Marx gave a philosophical critique to a discipline which needed foundational improvement back in the 1780s, prior to the work of Lagrange and its completion by Cauchy.
THE YOOKAY AS ART
A short collection of recent photographs of Modern Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’ which have artistic merit and which capture a changing Britain 🧵
I’ve said this before, Japan doesn’t beg for admiration. It doesn’t need to. It exists certain of its heritage and is alluring BECAUSE it couldn’t care less if you notice.
China can’t stop with its obsessive need to tell you about its greatness (ancient, powerful, independent) while desperately craving the West’s validation. You can see the inferiority complex in every LED display.
singapore is the highest iq country that has never shipped anything that matters.
this is my essay on why there are no great singaporean companies. we are a nation of compradors; middlemen too domesticated to do anything but serve.
leaving out the years that he worked at AMD and LSI is a great eg of how a lionizing narrative works. it creates the impression of superhuman genius, which confers a valuable aura that has material impact on morale, negotiations, etc. Similar to “Singapore was a fishing village”