Sunday, July 16, 2017
Elon Musk Unveils Apocalyptic Vision For The World
Elon Musk is no stranger to futurecasting a foreboding dystopia ahead for mankind, as we noted recently. But during a speech he gave today at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island, Musk turned up the future-fearmongery amplifier to '11'.
As a reminder, in the past, when he was asked about whether humans are living inside a computer simulation, Musk made headlines last year by saying he thinks the chances are one in billions that we aren’t.
Full interview below (Musk begins talking around 42 minutes in)...
Credit to Zero Hedge
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Here Musk is referring to the exponential growth of technology, the lynchpin of the Singularity theory. If in 40 years we’ve gone from the two-dimensional pong to the cusp of augmented and virtual reality, imagine where we’ll be in another forty, or a hundred, or 400. And that is where he began today...“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot,” Musk stated.“That’s where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.”
To Tesla's share price:"It's inevitable," Musk said, speaking of shift to sustainable energy. "But it matters if it happens sooner or later."As for those pushing some other type of fusion, Musk notes that the sun is a giant fusion reactor in the sky. "It's really reliable," he said. "It comes up every day. if it doesn't we've got (other) problems)."
Musk addressed government regulation and incentives:Musk said he has been on record several times as saying its stock price "is higher than we have any right to deserve" especially based on current and past performance."The stock price obviously reflects a lot of optimism on where we will be in the future," he said. "Those expectations sometimes get out of control. I hate disappointing people, I am trying really hard to meet those expectations."Musk added that he won't be selling any stock "unless I have to for taxes," and said "I'm going down with the ship... I'll be the last [to sell]."
And what drives him:"It sure is important to get the rules right," Musk said. "Regulations are immortal. They never die unless somebody actually goes and kills them. A lot of times regulations can be put in place for all the right reasons but nobody goes back and kills them because they no longer make sense."Musk also focused on the importance of incentives, saying whatever societies incentivize tends to be what happens. "It's economics 101," he said.
Within 20 years, he said driving a car will be like having a horse (i.e. rare and totally optional). "There will not be a steering wheel.""I want to be able to think about the future and feel good about that, to dream what we can to have the future be as good as possible. To be inspired by what is likely to happen and to look forward to the next day. How do we make sure things are great? That's the underlying principle behind Tesla and SpaceX."
But what started off as the latest sales pitch for electric cars quickly devolved into a bizarre rant that among other things, touched on Elon Musk's gloomy, apocalyptic vision of how the world could end... (via ReCode)“There will be people that will have non-autonomous cars, like people have horses,” he said.“It just would be unusual to use that as a mode of transport.”
Musk called on the government to proactively regulate artificial intelligence before things advance too far.
Musk has been concerned about AI for years, and he’s working on technology that would connect the human brain to the computer software meant to mimic it.“Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he said.“AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.”“Normally the way regulations are set up is a while bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” he continued.“It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
Full interview below (Musk begins talking around 42 minutes in)...
Credit to Zero Hedge
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Is This The Generation That Is Going To Financially Destroy America?
Did you know that the federal government is going to spend more than 4 trillion dollars this year? To put that into perspective, U.S. GDP for the entire year of 2017 is going to be somewhere between 18 and 19 trillion dollars. So when you are talking about 4 trillion dollars you are talking about a huge chunk of our economy. But of course the federal government doesn’t bring in 4 trillion dollars a year. At the beginning of Barack Obama’s first term, we were 10.6 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt. That means that we have been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt. When you break that down, that means that we have essentially been stealing more than a hundred million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day to pay for our debt-fueled lifestyle. Even Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is warning that this is not sustainable, and yet we just keep on doing it.
Nobody can pretend that what we have today is the kind of limited federal government that our founders intended. When federal spending accounts for more than 20 percent of GDP, it is hard to argue that we haven’t moved very far down the road toward socialism. As I mentioned above, total federal spending will surpass 4 trillion dollars for the first time ever in 2017…
Both the Congressional Budget Office and the White House Office of Management and Budget project that federal spending will top $4 trillion for the first time in fiscal 2017, which began on Oct. 1, 2016 and will end on Sept. 30.
In its “Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2017 to 2027” published last week, CBO projected that total federal spending in fiscal 2017 will hit $4,008,000,000,000.
I was recently asked how we are going to pay for a 4 trillion dollar government if we abolish the income tax like I am proposing.
Well, the truth is that we would have to dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Our founders always intended for the individual state governments to be much stronger than they are right now, and it is time for us to restore that constitutional balance.
Something desperately needs to be done, because we have a federal government that is completely and totally out of control. Even the Congressional Budget Officeagrees that we are headed toward absolute disaster if our leaders in Washington don’t start displaying some fiscal responsibility…
A large and continuously growing federal debt would increase the chance of a fiscal crisis in the United States. Specifically, investors might become less willing to finance federal borrowing unless they were compensated with high returns. If so, interest rates on federal debt would rise abruptly, dramatically increasing the cost of government borrowing. That increase would reduce the market value of outstanding government securities, and investors could lose money. The resulting losses for mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, banks, and other holders of government debt might be large enough to cause some financial institutions to fail, creating a fiscal crisis. An additional result would be a higher cost for private-sector borrowing because uncertainty about the government’s responses could reduce confidence in the viability of private-sector enterprises.
It is impossible for anyone to accurately predict whether or when such a fiscal crisis might occur in the United States. In particular, the debt-to-GDP ratio has no identifiable tipping point to indicate that a crisis is likely or imminent. All else being equal, however, the larger a government’s debt, the greater the risk of a fiscal crisis.
The likelihood of such a crisis also depends on conditions in the economy. If investors expect continued growth, they are generally less concerned about the government’s debt burden. Conversely, substantial debt can reinforce more generalized concern about an economy. Thus, fiscal crises around the world often have begun during recessions and, in turn, have exacerbated them.
I get so frustrated with Republicans in Congress, because they are supposed to be watching out for us.
During the 2010 elections, one of the biggest mid-term landslides of all time gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives and they have had it ever since. One of the pillars of the “Tea Party revolution” was fiscal responsibility, but the national debt has just continued to explode.
When the Republicans took control of the House in early 2011, we were about 14 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt.
We have been betrayed, and those that have done this to us need to be held accountable.
Of course the big reason why our politicians never want to control spending is because they know what it will do to our economy.
During the Obama years, we spent more than 9 trillion dollars that we didn’t have. If we could somehow go back and take 9 trillion dollars out of the economy over those 8 years, we would be in the worst depression in U.S. history right now.
Nobody in Washington wants to be responsible for plunging us into an economic depression, and so they just keep stealing from the future in order to prop things up in the short-term.
And a similar thing could be said about central bank intervention. If the Federal Reserve and other global central banks had not pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into the financial system over the past 8 years, we would be in the midst of a horrific economic nightmare right now.
But now all of that “hot money” has created epic financial bubbles all over the planet, and when they finally burst the ensuing crisis will be far, far worse than if they had never intervened in the first place.
Global central banks now have more than 20 trillion dollars in assets on their balance sheets and the world is more than 217 trillion dollars in debt. The desperate measures that national governments and central banks have been taking have delayed the coming crisis, but they have also guaranteed that it will be far worse than it could have otherwise been.
The stage is set for the worst financial crisis in world history, and the only way that it can continue to be delayed is for our leaders to continue to inflate the bubbles larger and larger and larger.
But of course no bubble can last forever, and the bigger they become the harder they burst.
Credit to economic collapse
Nobody can pretend that what we have today is the kind of limited federal government that our founders intended. When federal spending accounts for more than 20 percent of GDP, it is hard to argue that we haven’t moved very far down the road toward socialism. As I mentioned above, total federal spending will surpass 4 trillion dollars for the first time ever in 2017…
Both the Congressional Budget Office and the White House Office of Management and Budget project that federal spending will top $4 trillion for the first time in fiscal 2017, which began on Oct. 1, 2016 and will end on Sept. 30.
In its “Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2017 to 2027” published last week, CBO projected that total federal spending in fiscal 2017 will hit $4,008,000,000,000.
I was recently asked how we are going to pay for a 4 trillion dollar government if we abolish the income tax like I am proposing.
Well, the truth is that we would have to dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Our founders always intended for the individual state governments to be much stronger than they are right now, and it is time for us to restore that constitutional balance.
Something desperately needs to be done, because we have a federal government that is completely and totally out of control. Even the Congressional Budget Officeagrees that we are headed toward absolute disaster if our leaders in Washington don’t start displaying some fiscal responsibility…
A large and continuously growing federal debt would increase the chance of a fiscal crisis in the United States. Specifically, investors might become less willing to finance federal borrowing unless they were compensated with high returns. If so, interest rates on federal debt would rise abruptly, dramatically increasing the cost of government borrowing. That increase would reduce the market value of outstanding government securities, and investors could lose money. The resulting losses for mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, banks, and other holders of government debt might be large enough to cause some financial institutions to fail, creating a fiscal crisis. An additional result would be a higher cost for private-sector borrowing because uncertainty about the government’s responses could reduce confidence in the viability of private-sector enterprises.
It is impossible for anyone to accurately predict whether or when such a fiscal crisis might occur in the United States. In particular, the debt-to-GDP ratio has no identifiable tipping point to indicate that a crisis is likely or imminent. All else being equal, however, the larger a government’s debt, the greater the risk of a fiscal crisis.
The likelihood of such a crisis also depends on conditions in the economy. If investors expect continued growth, they are generally less concerned about the government’s debt burden. Conversely, substantial debt can reinforce more generalized concern about an economy. Thus, fiscal crises around the world often have begun during recessions and, in turn, have exacerbated them.
I get so frustrated with Republicans in Congress, because they are supposed to be watching out for us.
During the 2010 elections, one of the biggest mid-term landslides of all time gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives and they have had it ever since. One of the pillars of the “Tea Party revolution” was fiscal responsibility, but the national debt has just continued to explode.
When the Republicans took control of the House in early 2011, we were about 14 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt.
We have been betrayed, and those that have done this to us need to be held accountable.
Of course the big reason why our politicians never want to control spending is because they know what it will do to our economy.
During the Obama years, we spent more than 9 trillion dollars that we didn’t have. If we could somehow go back and take 9 trillion dollars out of the economy over those 8 years, we would be in the worst depression in U.S. history right now.
Nobody in Washington wants to be responsible for plunging us into an economic depression, and so they just keep stealing from the future in order to prop things up in the short-term.
And a similar thing could be said about central bank intervention. If the Federal Reserve and other global central banks had not pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into the financial system over the past 8 years, we would be in the midst of a horrific economic nightmare right now.
But now all of that “hot money” has created epic financial bubbles all over the planet, and when they finally burst the ensuing crisis will be far, far worse than if they had never intervened in the first place.
Global central banks now have more than 20 trillion dollars in assets on their balance sheets and the world is more than 217 trillion dollars in debt. The desperate measures that national governments and central banks have been taking have delayed the coming crisis, but they have also guaranteed that it will be far worse than it could have otherwise been.
The stage is set for the worst financial crisis in world history, and the only way that it can continue to be delayed is for our leaders to continue to inflate the bubbles larger and larger and larger.
But of course no bubble can last forever, and the bigger they become the harder they burst.
Credit to economic collapse
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