I’ve been thinking about this whole thing about the feminists and how they supposedly liberated women from the evil patriarchal society and stuff like that.

Then it’s the other thing, about how there’s not many women in the tech industry, especially at the top positions, and how that supposedly proves that women are discriminated against.

And I’m thinking: what a load of bullshit.

Let’s look at things in my favorite way: by following the flow of resources .

One of the main social things women do is trade sex for things – affection, security, money, power. In the “evil patriarchy”, the socially negotiated and established price of sex was taking care of the woman and her children for as long as she lives. This is more-less the absolute maximum one can negotiate.

In the modern, female-emancipated society, the socially negotiated price of sex is two drinks, or a dinner.

You’ve got to ask yourself, who is getting screwed here? Basically, when women were “oppressed”, the entire society was organized according to the principles of chivalry, which meant “women and children first”, they had the best social contract, tailored according to their best interests and desires, and they were the most protected part of society. Now somebody will say that they were not educated and were prohibited from doing male jobs, to which I will roll my eyes. Yeah, they were prohibited from working behind a plough in the field until they died, or being killed in some war. For the greatest part of our civilization’s history, not being allowed to do men’s jobs meant being protected from the harshest form of exploitation and murder. Male jobs were not emancipating men, they were the most gruesome, cruel shit you can imagine. However, there were as many queens as kings in the western civilization, and in the noble classes women were in most respects equal to men. Yes, the death penalty for women was being burned at the stake, but for the same crimes the punishment for men was being hanged, drawn and quartered. Essentially, the women’s right movement is and always was pure bullshit, because in the western civilization, women were always respected and treated better than men. Men routinely died to protect women and children, and it was a point of social pride. The only problem women had in our civilization came from too much protection, because when someone takes care of you, you aren’t pressured by survival imperatives to develop certain faculties, and so women really got more stupid and incompetent with time, at least relative to men, who were effectively selected against some traits, literally – if they failed, they simply died. If they were stupid, they died, if they were incompetent, they died. For a woman, all it took for her to survive was to cry and be distraught, and ask for a man’s protection, and a man would live and die for her. This is why women got to be good at expressing emotions and manipulating people, and why men got to be good at solving real problems, from watering crops and killing wolves to making nuclear reactors. All that was expected from a woman was to do what she would have done anyway – make meals and keep the house clean – and not have sex with other men in order for the husband not to have to feed other men’s bastards. The man was expected to provide food, protection, comfort and, basically, everything else you can think of. From where I’m standing, and I had grandparents who functioned in such a traditional way, this is either an egalitarian or a slightly matriarchal arrangement, but it is in no way patriarchal. Women always had enormous power in a society and basically everything was arranged to fit their preferences and desired lifestyle.

Which leads us to “why aren’t there more women leading the IT companies”. Let’s put it this way. There aren’t women leading the IT companies because in order to lead an IT company, you have to be its founder, you need to create your company from scratch. This usually means two guys quitting college, selling what little they have in order to buy computer parts, sleep on the garage floor, eat yesterday’s stale pizza and code all day, not bathing properly, not having a social life other than your geek friends, and have no guarantees anything you do will amount to anything. Basically, it’s what men do: they risk their lives and wellbeing doing things that are fucking hard, without any guarantees any of it will end up well for them. Sure, women would like to lead Microsoft, but if a woman saw the beginnings of Microsoft, she would wave scornfully at the Bill Gates sleeping on the floor after coding for several days and nights on end, surrounded by other geeks who were all into computers. But when this thing got successful, and the guys got rich, there was of course no place for women at the leading positions, because those positions were rightfully divided between those people who happened to risk their future and work their butts off when any payoff was questionable. While the guys did that, the women of their generation were into social studies, feminism studies, law and similar bullshit, trying to fuck good looking, non-geeky students, trying to get safe jobs and marry safe men, not some college dropout losers who spend nights writing code. That’s why women are not present at the ruling positions: they play it safe, and are therefore not present among the life’s biggest winners, or its biggest losers. Women prefer to inhabit the safe middle of the pack. Sure, they will complain about missing out on the perks enjoyed by the super-wealthy men, but if you ask them to actually take the risks those men took in order to get where they are, they will want no part of it. Sure they won’t, because taking risks means you can lose and end up dumpster diving.

So basically, women have to learn that they can’t have it both ways. They can’t be the most protected part of society and at the same time be the smartest and the most successful part of society. Those things don’t mix well. Being successful and smart is a result of merciless culling of the losers, and women dislike being mercilessly culled. They want to live, to be safe, and for their children to live and be safe. Men are most likely to take risks, which is why they make up the majority of all kinds of life’s losers, but they also make up the majority of all kinds of winners. So basically, the female emancipation movement did make women smarter. Their IQ actually rose noticeably in the last century. However, life is also much harder for women, because now they have to work, and sex is no longer a way for them to solve all of their financial problems, by trading it for lifelong protection. Basically, a life of a woman is now more like a life of a man – riskier, shittier, more dangerous, but also more rewarding. And when a ship goes down today, thanks to feminism, an equal number of places in lifeboats will be filled by women and men, which means most women will drown together with men. But that’s what female equality means: you also get an equal share of losing, not just winning.

I was just thinking about feminism and the concept of gender equality and social justice and how it differs from my views on the subject.

A feminist view of gender equality is that for every occupation you need to have an equal percentage of men and women.

My view of gender equality is that all doors should be open to all people regardless of gender, and if a person is the best qualified candidate, he or she should get the job, period. I don’t give a fuck whether someone is male, female, intersex or whatever. If you need a math teacher, what you should care about is how well a person teaches math. That’s the only thing that matters. If you need someone who operates a fork-lifter, you need a candidate who does it well. If you need a pilot, the most important consideration is how well that person flies a plane, not whether the person has testicles or ovaries. Gender quotas are total bullshit, because you can never really know who the best qualified candidate will be, for any given job. A man can be the most qualified babysitter, a woman can be the most qualified fighter pilot. Talent isn’t uniformly distributed in any given population.

Also, there is sexual dimorphism in humans which makes different things appealing to different genders, and it’s rarely a 50-50 distribution in anything. What matters to me is that you are allowed to do whatever you like, and if a woman likes to be a fighter pilot, or a man likes to be a babysitter, fine. But you can’t prescribe quotas. You can’t say that there must be an Einstein or a Beethoven in every generation. You can’t say that there will be women and men interested in occupations that are usually associated with the opposite gender. Sometimes there just aren’t any women who are interested in fixing cars, so you can’t make a gender-based quotas for car mechanics. I do, however, think that there should be no barriers other than one’s personal competence, because I’m a meritocrat, and fiercely so. All doors should be open to everyone, and may the best candidate win.

There are other issues, however – people are usually stereotyped in public perception, and according to this perception women should suck at driving, while men should suck at sewing. I did encounter some American men online who actually think women can’t drive a car with manual transmission and don’t seem to be aware that here in Europe almost all cars have manual transmission and all the women drive them daily. Also, women are usually considered to be less tech- and sci- savvy than men, which is also bullshit, especially since it’s a historical fact that when a man (Charles Babbage) invented a mechanical computer and wrote a program for it, it was a woman (Augusta Ada Byron) who found and corrected bugs in it. There are other silly stereotypes and prejudice, and feminists are justified in calling bullshit there. However, being stereotyped against isn’t a gender issue, it is a human issue. I’m being stereotyped against all the time and I couldn’t give two fucks about it. If people think you can’t do something, take it as a challenge instead of whining and calling for momma society to fight your battles. The important thing is, if you aren’t prohibited in doing something, that’s equality. Being approved of or lauded, is a whole different ballgame, in the order of magnitude of “being able to state your opinion” and “being taken seriously”. You have a right to state your opinion, but past that all bets are off.

This is why I think the modern-day feminism is just full of shit. They make claims about gender disparity in wages and non-uniform distribution of genders in certain jobs and use it as an argument that women are discriminated against, and this is simply false. When I wanted to enter college, I had to solve the entrance exam. Nobody asked whether I was male or female, it was maths and phsyics, and I passed because I was good at that, not because I was male. I can honestly say that I never, ever had a situation where anything was easier for me because of gender, or that some doors were open for me and not for women. Also, when it comes to earning money, nobody ever tried to pay me more because I was male. They always wanted to pay me the least possible amount, and I had to fight and haggle. Gender equality is a total non-issue, and it was a non-issue for my parents, as well, and probably my grandparents. Feminism is a dead issue in the Western civilization, because there is total equality in rights for men and women, and has been for quite a while. In order to see what I’m talking about, go to Saudi Arabia and see how the opposite works. You want to drive a car – sorry, can’t, you have ovaries. You want to get a passport and go to Iceland and eat rotten shark – sorry, can’t, you have ovaries, need a male guardian. That’s what closed doors look like. That’s what it looks like when women aren’t allowed to do things, not because they aren’t qualified, but because they are women. That’s where feminism makes sense and should be introduced. Here, in the West, women can get a passport and go to Iceland to eat rotten shark until they vomit a bucketful. It’s just that most won’t feel like it, and that’s their damn right, too.

I wondered for years about why various charity organizations keep pouring enormous amounts of money into the undeveloped parts of the world, and there’s absolutely no result: the same areas remain undeveloped, people remain poor, conflicts rage and so on. On the other hand, there are places in the world which started as equally poor, and didn’t receive any aid, but on the contrary, they were exploited by the neo-colonial powers for cheap labor, and something very strange happened: there was a gradual improvement of the conditions to the level where they can no longer be considered developing countries.

And then it clicked: it’s because they made the poor people useful.

If you give the poor people money, they will spend it and then they are back on square one. They will remain forever dependent on welfare and this simply doesn’t work in the long term. However, if you find something they can do to contribute to the global economy, so that they are really useful, there is suddenly a demand for them, they are needed. And when they are needed, something wonderful happens.

You see, when you give charity money to poor people, what happens is that those poor people are completely useless. Nobody really cares whether they live or die. In fact, they are more useful dead, because they are merely a drain on local resources and don’t contribute anything of value. When you start pouring in aid, they become useful if they are alive but poor, because more aid is thus attracted to be stolen by the gangs and warlords and sold on the local markets. Since poor people are not a part of any kind of local economy, they are seen as worthless and useless, a mere object that serves to produce Western guilt and attract money and resources for thieves to steal.

But let’s say you don’t create an aid-distribution center, but a factory that will employ those poor people and pay them some wage that is miserable for the Western conditions, but is actually quite good money for the dirt-poor people. You are not exploiting them: you are making them useful. If they are not useful, they will starve: that’s how things work. If they are useful, they will work and be paid. When something useful is created, like a shoe factory, there is a need for security, because you don’t want gangs to rob and kill people randomly, and you usually employ one gang to protect you from all the others, and that’s how you get police. You want your workers to be able to follow instructions, so you build a school that will teach them to read and write. This provides employment for builders, teachers and book printers. You don’t want them to die of trivial disease, so you provide them with health care. This provides jobs for builders, doctors and nurses. You need water, electricity and sewers, so more investment is made into infrastructure. All this investment makes sense, because those workers are actually worth money to you: you manage to earn more money than you pour in.

The problem with helping the poor is that people who want to help them are motivated by wanting to feel good about themselves, and they will feel good if they unconditionally give money to the poor. However, when we look at what really happens, such unconditional help doesn’t really help the poor. On the other hand, if you try to exploit them, by finding something useful they can do for you, you will in fact help them more, but only if you don’t exploit them so mercilessly that you destroy them, which isn’t really in your best interest, because you can’t exploit them if you destroyed them, so ideally you make them thrive and do progressively more valuable work for you, and ideally you will raise their prosperity level to the point where they become the consumers of the goods and services that you yourself sell, so that they are both your workforce and consumers. And no, helping people is not about you feeling good about yourself because you handed some poor bastard a pittance. It’s about making them useful, about making them contribute to the economy. When you thus plug them into the system, you no longer have to provide them with aid. You just follow the logic of conventional economy.

I saw many cases where the Western socialists try to “help” the “exploited” workforce in some Asian country by shutting down the factory that “exploits them”, and they feel very proud of what they did, except that later they find the “liberated” workers selling sexual services on the streets. No, assholes, you didn’t liberate them – the guys who gave them a job and “exploited them” liberated them. You ruined their lives, because you made their work useless so they had nothing to sell but sex. But don’t let that stop you feeling so fucking good about yourselves because you opposed capitalist exploitation.

I just love the leftists. They keep seeing themselves as a progressive force, yet everything they touch ends up fucked.

My understanding is that if one can’t simplify the basic principle into an understandable narrative, he either doesn’t possess good understanding of the subject, or is trying to bullshit you. In physics, the things that are really well understood can be made into a simple and straightforward narrative, while those that require head-spinning formulas and look more like c++ code than human language are the least well established and are most likely to evolve in the future.

The same goes with economy. Every time I’ve seen excessive complexity of the narrative, it was because someone had a vested interest in bullshitting everyone by adding layers of unnecessary complexity needed to hide some form of deception. For instance, the entire sup-prime mortgage crisis was essentially a scam, that was pulled off exactly because it was hidden in so much obscurity, unclear language, and, essentially, code. The complexity is not always there to hide foul play – mostly it is to create an illusion of great expertise, where simple concepts are intentionally related in overly complex terms in order to create an impression of user’s great knowledge and competence. I have the same issues with mathematics – some things are usually defined in such a complex way I usually feel very stupid for not understanding it, until I finally do, and then I can usually explain the concept in very simple, clear terms which completely dispel the “magic” of obscure terminology that actually made it almost impossible for me to understand the concept in the first place.

This is the reason why I explain things in a very simple, straightforward narrative. Of course, one can endlessly bitch about accuracy of this or that detail, but I find that unimportant. It’s essential for one to understand how the cogs and gears work, and then you can research the details as much as you like. I think that’s how all the good theories are made: by cutting through the pretense and irrelevant detail to the essence of what’s happening, and then you can model it mathematically to your liking. Essentially, Feynman and Nash formulated the basics of quantum electrodynamics and game theory in a canteen, one by playing with paper plates and watching the patterns of them falling, and the other by watching people interact and cutting through to the basic underlying motivations. It resulted in complex theories, but started by cutting through complexity in order to reach the simplicity of the basic principles which you could explain to a smart 10 year old.

The problem with economy is that when you don’t cut through bullshit, you lose money, and that can translate into losing a significant portion of your life. It is therefore essential that we really understand what is going on, how things work, why they work and why they fail. I am not alone in this belief – Warren Buffet, for instance, is a strong advocate of cutting through bullshit before you invest your money in something, because the quickest way to lose money is to invest in what you don’t understand, or to shift your money chaotically based on short-term events, instead of calmly implementing a long-term strategy. Essentially, great minds cut through bullshit, while small minds thrive in it.

So, as an example, I will break apart the 2008 crisis.

A derivative is, essentially, a paper that derives its value from an underlying real asset. For instance, paper money started as a derivative of gold, like today’s gold bonds. A mortgage loan contains a “security”, essentially a document which allows you to sell someone’s house if he doesn’t pay the installments regularly. These securities can be traded in their own right, and when you’re a big mortgage company, you can play very strange games, such as bundling many mortgage securities in a single package, in which bad mortgages (the ones where the loan shouldn’t have even been approved in the first place because he doesn’t earn enough money to be likely to repay the loan), euphemistically called “sub-prime”, are bundled together with the good ones in order to dilute the risk. This is very similar to the dangerous practice of some blood banks that pooled all the blood together before testing it for HIV. The resulting pool diluted the HIV positive blood below the threshold where the tests could reliably detect presence of the virus, but it was still infectious. That’s how the mortgage companies played the system: they understood the rules according to which risk-assessment was to be assigned to the entire bundle of securities by the rating agencies, and sold quite a large number of bad (“sub-prime”) mortgages to non-paying customers, and insured the entire package as a bundle to get a good insurance price and rating. However, this coincided with the point when the outsourcing policy backfired at the American economy, and a lot of people lost jobs. Having lost their jobs, they could no longer repay the loans. Combined with the already substantial number of the sub-prime mortgages on the market, this resulted in a huge number of defaults on mortgage loans. No problem, you’ll say, just repossess the houses and sell them, real estate is a good investment. But that’s the case only when the market as a whole is healthy and you sell individual houses. When you already exhausted the number of people who can afford to buy real-estate, to the point where you sold sub-prime mortgages for years, and now even the good ones defaulted, this means that the demand is zero and you just had a huge surge on the supply side, flooding the market with houses nobody can really afford. And then the banks said “no problem, the loans are insured”, and then the insurance companies defaulted because they played the system and lost. And then, when the loans themselves proved to be worthless, all the derivatives on those loans, including the emission of a significant portion of US currency, proved to be worthless. The American government had to choose between seeing the entire economy fold, and raising the stakes, and it chose the latter, printing trillions of new dollars in order to prop-up the corrupt and broken system. Since foreign currency is heavily based on US currency ever since Breton Woods and later the petrodollar, all hell broke loose, because America essentially transferred the cost of their crisis and of the rescue of their economy to the rest of the world, which had to buy those essentially worthless new dollars, unbacked by neither gold nor real assets, in order to buy crude oil on the market. This essentially pumped assets from the rest of the world into America, and created a chain of events which made the other countries reconsider their reliance on American currency as the basis of international trade, and as they attempted to save themselves from this vampire-transfusion event which created a never-ending global depression that threatens to pull everyone under, America intervened even more aggressively to bring the disobedient countries in line, mostly by instigating “color revolutions” and “springs” of all kinds, collapsing governments and fomenting civil wars in or near the “disobedient countries”, relying more and more on hard instead of soft power.

And the cautionary tale is that the reality of the situation was lost in the complexity of the narrative that has been told to the public. When you cut through the bullshit, you get to understand that the entire show of American prosperity is not due to their superior political or economic system, and that they don’t really practice either democracy or the free market. If they practiced democracy, the citizens would never vote for saving the greedy financial industry and the state by transferring the debt to taxpayers and foreign countries (in fact, Iceland showed what a real democracy would do). If they really practiced free market economy, nobody would be “too big to fail” and the state wouldn’t intervene to save failed bankers. This was such an enormous abuse of trust vested into America by its allies and friendly countries, that it essentially ended the petrodollar era and catapulted the world into very dangerous times that lie ahead. I wonder if the other countries think that America, like its banks, is too big to fail.

I recently ran into some weird theories about currency, from theory that only gold and silver are proper currency to the theory that one can simply create an imaginary currency out of thin air, as long as it remains scarce enough, and by the pure power of make-believe there goes the Bitcoin.

What I found out is that almost everyone is completely and utterly ignorant of what money is and how it works, so I’ll try to make things a bit clearer.

The concept of money became interesting when people initially began to trade. Since it was always a problem to decide how many chickens you need to give for a goat, and how many beaver furs are worth one bear fur, sooner or later people came up with some universally desirable item that can be readily traded for anything else. Before you think of gold, some other things were thought of first. Animal furs were apparently among the first forms of money, which is why Croatian money is called “marten” (kuna in Croatian). Of course, since carrying furs around and trading them for things isn’t always practical, the role of universally acceptable goods was soon taken by precious metals, as soon as their universal desirability and acceptability was established. Their main advantage was durability, in a sense that they could change hands many times without becoming much worse for the wear.

Paper money became interesting as a way of carrying more value with you than could be done practically and securely with precious metals. In Europe, the first to issue paper money were the Knights Templar. Since people were traveling frequently between Jerusalem and Europe, and often carried substantial amounts of money with them, being robbed was a genuine concern, so basically the Templars offered a service in which they would exchange your money for a paper, which you could exchange back for gold coins on the other end, minus a fee, of course. This became so popular, and they so powerful, that the Pope decided to get rid of them, but the principle served as a basis for the current methods of debt clearing. The banks started issuing promises to pay cashable by the bearer, that could be exchanged for metal coins, and soon those banknotes were traded among the people as proper money, because it was understood that they could be converted into “proper money” at any given moment. Soon, national banks started issuing such banknotes, exchangeable for gold on demand, and guaranteed for by the nation’s gold reserves.

But this is where the trouble started. You see, when people understood that paper money was as good as metal money, they stopped being in any hurry to exchange the banknotes for gold and were content to simply use them indefinitely. This means that the state came to the “brilliant” idea of printing much more banknotes than it had the gold reserves, which was actually necessary because of the immense industrial growth in the 19^th century, which would otherwise be constrained by the insufficient amount of money in circulation.

This is an aspect of money that few really understand: that there must be enough money in circulation, that it can cover all needs of trade. Basically, if object a is traded for object b, and both are worth a certain amount of money, and both are independently traded for money, this mandates that the total amount of money in circulation necessary for unrestricted trade must essentially be equal to the value of all goods and services in circulation, basically that the amount of money in circulation must be some function of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the state. Since it’s unlikely that the state will manage to mine enough gold to exactly match its GDP, tying the exploding GDP of the industrial revolution to a finite resource was an immensely bad idea, because scarcity of money in circulation would artificially raise its value and therefore constrict commerce. Essentially, when one horse was commonly traded for x gold coins, if the GDP rose by the factor of two, the scarcity of money would mandate that the twice as large GDP would still be traded for the same amount of gold, basically artificially raising the value of gold and the horse would now be traded for x/2 gold coins. This kind of static monetary practice doesn’t acknowledge the fact that new value can be introduced to the market, and it therefore had to be reformed. This was done by acknowledging the fact that the state guarantees for its money not only with its gold, but with all of its assets, and the direct convertibility of banknotes to gold was first disabled (with laws that prohibited “gold hoarding”) and later completely ended.

This means that a state guarantees for its currency not only with its precious metal reserves, but also with its entire asset sheet, which includes foreign currency reserves, loans by the central bank to the commercial banks etc. This works basically like this: you want to buy a house. You deposit guarantees to a commercial bank, including mortgage to your house. The commercial bank then requests a low-interest loan from the central bank, and forwards your guarantees. The central bank creates new money, guaranteed for by the mortgage to your house, the commercial bank then insures the loan with an insurance company, adds cost of insurance, adds its own interest, and you pay for the entire package. The basis of the entire thing, of course, is the fact that you have a job, which allows you to pay installments monthly, so basically the true backing of this emission of money is GDP, which includes your job.

It’s not just printed out of thin air, or pulled out of one’s ass. It’s not “worthless” because it’s not backed by gold; no, gold is merely one of the metals traded on the free market, and its value relative to printed money is determined dynamically. It’s also not “bullshit”, so that it could be readily supplanted by other bullshit items such as Bitcoin. First of all, nobody’s mortgage guarantees for the emission of Bitcoin. Its quantity in circulation cannot be increased when the GDP increases, which means it is a finite resource which would restrict commerce and its value would artificially rise due to scarcity, and is therefore completely unsuitable for the role as currency. Something like Bitcoin could work, but only if it can be created based on guarantees by some real asset. Since it is unbacked by any assets, it is essentially worthless, and is accepted only because people are stupid idiots who don’t know shit about how money actually works. You can’t base currency on make-believe.

However, if you separate the currency from a single tangible asset, you make it more volatile and prone to fluctuations and abuses, which is a topic for the next article.