Are you ready for a new authoritarian world order?
TakeSlap at TakeSlap.com offers spicy food for thought. We put words together in stream of consciousness articles that will slap you kindly into a spark of innovative thinking. Consume it raw at your own risk. Season it to taste. Always take it with a grain of salt as a free sample of our consulting service. Share it family style with friends and frenemies. We're all in this together. Enjoy.
The future is predictable
Don't fall for the mental trap of believing that "no one knows the future". It is not true, and makes you dumb. Culture makes all of us to believe that the future is unknown and unpredictable. Cancel that. Unsubscribe from that belief system. Erase that old program from your brain. Replace it with a new app. Realize that everything is predictable when you have sufficient data and computational capability.
The ability to predict "future" events is directly proportional to the amount of data, knowledge, and computational capacity within your reach. The future is unpredictable only when you lack sufficient data or when you try to be 100% accurate. If you have sufficient data, knowledge, and computational modeling capacity, you can work out reasonable probabilities of what will happen next.
Predicting the weather
Weather is a good example about predicting the future. Our ability to forecast the weather keeps improving as our data processing capabilities keeps improving. The accuracy of weather forecasts vary based on the amount of data known and modeled.
Forecasting the next minute is easier than forecasting the next hour. Forecasting the next day is easier than forecasting the next week. Forecasting next week is easier than forecasting next month. What is the difference? The next minute, hour, day, week, and month are all in the future. However, the closer the future is to the known past and present, the more we know about the variables affecting the mathematical function that we call the future.
Bad weather ahead in American politics and geopolitics
Prepare for bad weather and tumultuous times ahead in the United States and abroad. As a good patriot, hope for the best. As a good investor, diversity and prepare for the worst. The clouds of populism in the West (United States and Europe) and the winds of imperialism in "Chrussia" (China and Russia) are brewing a perfect storm that will change the current world order. You can bet on it. Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a symptom of all this. The disease is metastasizing and will continue spreading for the next ten to fifteen years.
Within the next twenty years, a second American civil war is possible. A third world war is probable. More authoritarianism is likely. A global recession is extremely likely. Yet, you can survive and thrive through it all. You can even profit and end up holding more power and money in a better world for everyone once the mental disease of war is managed and peaceful times return.
Authoritarianism will increase until everyone remembers that peace is better than war, which typically happens after a brutal war and not before.
Many Americans and Europeans are enjoying political polarization. We have enjoyed peace for so long that we do not know first hand the brutal pain of war. Peace has also brought massive boredom to fat and lonely masses. People find it fun and entertaining to immerse themselves in social media echo chambers of their liking. It gives them the pleasure (a dopamine high) of feeling that they belong to a pack. They enjoy belonging to a tribe where "everyone" thinks alike and everyone "knows" that all problems have the simple of hating thy enemy whoever that might be.
Polarization breeds dangerous populism at each end of the political spectrum. The lack of political compromise erodes the rule of law, and invites authoritarianism on the hands of whoever gets into power even if by the slightest margin.
Authoritarianism is not the end of the world.
As much as we hate and fear authoritarianism, we are more used to it than what we realize. For example, many of us fancy ourselves as capitalists and praised our corporations. Corporate governance is not too democratic. Shareholders may have votes, but the power is diluted by capital and the structure of securities.
American corporations can be as authoritarian as the Chinese communist party. Corporate managers and boards of directors make top-down decisions that everyone follows. If employees do not follow the top down directives, they are fired. There is very little democracy in corporate governance. Yet we love the system when it makes us money. The same goes on in China and Russia. Chinese and Russians like, or at least endure, their systems so long as it makes their lives better and more pleasurable.
Putin will bring pain to Russia and will thus be brought down, exiled, jailed, or killed.
It is not uncommon for failure to bring success, and for success to bring failure. The failure of the soviet union brought tremendous political success to Putin and his oligarchs. In two decades, they stole about $1 trillion out of the Russian economy. People endured it because it brought them a better and more pleasurable economy and social structure.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine failed. Yes, Ukraine is destroyed for now, but the costs to be born by Russia will eventually bring down Putin. The West is using Ukraine as the battleground to bring Putin's kleptocratic regime to an end. China will wait patiently on the sidelines. China will let the West burn money developing smart weapon systems that Chines engineers are reverse engineering as we type. China will let the West spend money and will let Putin fail.
Do your best and prepare for the worst
There are easy ways to profit from the new world order that is forming now. Think of nations as money-making corporations competing for market share. Some will win and some will lose. Diversify your bets accordingly.
Before Putin invaded Ukraine, his regime was like Bitcoin before regulatory constraints. After the invasion of Ukraine, Putin's regime is like crypto under heavy government sanctions and regulations. Unlike crypto, which still has a chance based on the many practical promises of blockchain technology, Putin's regime does not have a chance.
Putin will be sold in exchange of sanction relief
Putin's regime is coming down within less than five years. The most likely scenario is that Russia itself will save face by surrendering Putin in exchange for relief of economic sanctions. In any event, Putin is coming down soon.
How do we "know" that Putin is coming down? It's easy. What will happen to Putin if loses the war in Ukraine, which is highly likely? He will be brought down by an angry Russian mob led by oligarchs plotting for power. What will happen if Putin wins the war in Ukraine, which is highly unlikely? He would be emboldened to continue expanding the Russian "empire" until he is stopped by the West and China.
China's long game
China is not interested in stopping Putin for now, but would be interested in the future if Russia kept expanding. The Chinese are excellent strategic thinkers playing the long game for world domination. China has things well under control at home. China does not suffer the populist vices of free democracies, but benefits freely from the virtues of democracies by stealing their intellectual property. The greatest virtue of democracy is that it sparks innovation and creativity. China gets to steal democratic inventions and innovations without having to free its people.
China's best move for now is to stay on the sidelines. China will profit from reverse engineering the military technology developed by the West to help Ukraine beat Russia. Once Russia is defeated, China will profit from cheap fossil fuels from Russia and from trade routes through the Arctic. Note that Russian fossil fuels will continue warming the planet and melting the Arctic, which China sees as a cheap maritime trade highway.
There will be winners and there will be losers. Technology will prevail.
Some will succeed and some will fail. In the end, technology will prevail as it always does. The history of humanity is essentially the history of the technology (tools and methods) developed by humans. Stone age, bronze age, iron age, agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, information era, machine learning, are all the same examples. We are intelligent machines creating intelligent machines. Our only children used to be those coming from intercourse. Our new children are the AI machines that will take over and expand our universe.
Most human inventions, including the most important of all (the gods), were invented to win wars. The upcoming wars, from Ukraine, Taiwan, and the rest, will bring the next generation of technological advances leading to the AI power transition. The new arms race is the AI race. We are all running fast to professionally create (i.e. pro-create) the offspring that will save humanity by kindly pulling the plug on a vicious and virtuous primate for the books of history.
Enjoy the ride, live well, and prosper. History repeats itself. Observe the cycles. Pay attention to the ups and downs, and to the left and right swings. Let us know what you think and how TakeSlap Consulting can help you achieve your goals and dreams.
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