Category Archives: society

Hype and tradition

Posted on by
Reply

Having nothing more useful to do at the moment, I did some research regarding the watch industry, since it’s the epitome of selling hype and illusions for inordinately overblown amounts of money.

They justify the prices by showing us the picture of an aging watchmaker patiently assembling the movement, and the idea combines low volume, skilled manual labor, and tradition.

So, let’s start with tradition. Which are the oldest watch companies currently in operation?

Blancpain, founded in 1735, is the oldest; however, it shows the typical pattern of being a dead brand revived with venture capital after the so called “quartz crisis” in the 1970s-1980s; currently owned by the Richemont group. The pattern consists of a venture capital finding and buying the dormant assets, and, sometimes, finding a grandson of the last owner and getting him to serve as a figurehead. In other cases, if the company was in a dire situation but alive, it is bought by either the Swatch group, or LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate, or the Richemont group.

Let’s see the others. Vacheron Constantin, founded in 1755, continuously operating since, owned by the Richemont group.

A. Lange & Söhne, founded in 1845, dead, resurrected in 1990 by venture capital, owned by the Richemont group.

Zenith, founded in 1865, survived the Quartz crisis, author of the famous El Primero movement that Rolex outsourced from them to power the famous Daytona. They are the traditional in-town competitor of Jaeger-LeCoultre. Purchased in 1999 by LVMH.

Jaeger-LeCoultre, founded in 1833, famous for making not just watches, but also the movements for other famous watchmakers, owned by the Richemont group since 2000.

IWC Schaffhausen, originally founded in 1868, went under in the quartz crisis, owned by the Richemont group since 2000.

To make it shorter: Blancpain, Breguet, Certina, ETA, Glashütte Original, Hamilton, Harry Winston, Longines, Mido, Omega, Rado, and Tissot, all owned by the Swatch group, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and made a fortune on mass-produced fashion watches powered by quartz movements; they invested the money by buying up the bankrupt watchmaking companies.

A. Lange & Söhne, Cartier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, MontBlanc, Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis, Vacheron Constantin, Van Cleef & Arpels belong to the Richemont group.

TAG Heuer, Hublot, Bulgari, Zenith, and Louis Vuitton are owned by LVMH.

One would be justified in asking if there are any actual watchmakers with continuous tradition that aren’t operated by the fashion brands and venture capital? They exist.

Patek Philippe, established in 1839, remains the last family-owned independent watch manufacturer in Geneva.

Rolex, founded in 1905 as a marketing brand that outsourced the actual watchmaking to others, invented some of the crucial mainstays of the watch industry, such as weather sealing and self-winding, not to forget the concept of wearing the watch on the wrist, on a stainless steel bracelet. They started as a marketing company and remained masters of hype, and regardless of that, they are actually one of the big innovators in the history of watchmaking, and the biggest, most recognizable name today.

Seiko, founded in 1881. Self owned, and the only vertically-integrated watchmaker in the world, alongside Rolex. They originally made mechanical watches, but produced the first commercial quartz watch in 1969.

Citizen, founded in 1918.

Casio, founded in 1946. as a calculator company, started making quartz watches since 1974.

So, wait a minute. If you want to wear a watch that has deep tradition of craftsmanship and innovation, your options are Seiko, Patek-Philippe and Rolex? Yup. Those three actually aren’t owned by hypemasters and have a serious tradition. One could argue that both Rolex and Patek are prime hypemasters themselves, and they wouldn’t be wrong.

But what about craftsmanship, assembling watches by hand, and so on? If you want that, your best choices would be A. Lange & Söhne, Patek-Philippe, and Grand Seiko. However, have in mind that most components today are produced by CNC grinders and similar technologies, and the manual part is usually only about the assembly. If someone makes millions of watches, of course it’s all mass produced, by definition.

So yes, the argument against the quartz movements, that they are mass-produced, is supremely silly, considering how Rolex, ETA, Sellita, Miyota and Seiko movements are all mass-produced, and almost nothing else is used anywhere. That’s fine, because a mechanical watch movement is a solved engineering problem, that doesn’t need to be solved again. As for quality, quartz movements are solid state, no moving parts other than what moves the indicators. They should outlive everything, and they usually don’t require servicing. They are also orders of magnitude more accurate. So, why are we being told that quartz is low-quality trash and mechanical is precious? Because of marketing. Billions of dollars depend on us believing that story, or nobody would buy a $10000 Rolex over a $200 Seiko. They convinced us that accuracy doesn’t matter, that accuracy is somehow a worthless feature since every quartz movement excels at it, and “we all know” quartz is crap. Well, pardon me, but in the 1970s and early 1980s I was taught to believe that accuracy is the central feature of a watch, and the expensive watches were expensive primarily because they were more accurate. That’s why the entire industry went nuts when quartz movements were more accurate. They thought it’s all over for them because there was no reason for the existence of mechanical watches any more. Even Rolex went nuts and started making quartz watches, and thought their mechanical watches were now trash. Everything else is just marketing hype that was slowly built since.

They spent 50 years and billions of dollars convincing us that the superior technology, that literally erased Swiss watchmaking, was cheap trash. If for some reason quartz watches weren’t that easy to mass-produce, the industry might have gone the other way and quartz would now be known as super expensive space tech, while mechanical watches were for the plebs.

To add insult to injury, most “traditional” brands that make mechanical watches today have almost no claim to a horological tradition if compared to someone like Seiko, who are generally assumed to be a newcomer to the industry, while in fact they are a seriously old brand with incredible legacy in watchmaking. Honestly, if you want a watch with a claim to tradition, craftsmanship and innovation, buy a Seiko. It’s not going to be a status symbol in a sense that it’s very expensive and few can afford it, but status symbols are a tricky thing anyway. People think Rolex is a status symbol, but sometimes it’s merely part of the uniform, something people think they need to have in order to be “taken seriously”, like a suit and a tie. Also, I’ve seen that the reaction to people who have a Rolex is usually negative – yes, a Rolex is recognized, but it’s usually recognized as something wannabes, snobs and people without taste wear to show how much money they have. On the other hand, I never saw a negative reaction to a Seiko, or, for that matter, IWC or Zenith. If they are perceived, and they seldom are, they are perceived as “a nice watch”. If a Rolex is perceived, it marks you as an asshole with a Rolex. So yes, it’s a status symbol alright, but not of the kind I find worth acquiring.

Dystopian prophecy

Posted on by
Reply

There are a few movies that started as light comedy, but they unfortunately turned out to be prophetic.

I read a tweet by Trump today and I remembered “Idiocracy”. Unfortunately, we’re living that.

If there was a movie playing in the theatres called “Ass”, with nothing but ass on the screen, people would come to watch it. Only, the movie screen would need to be made vertical, to resemble a phone, because they got so used to looking at phones their brains probably no longer recognize the concept of horizontal.

Also, “The Demolition Man” was supposed to be light comedy and turned out to be a dystopian prophecy about a totalitarian dictatorship of the clean, gay, polite and politically correct, and if you want to be normal you’d need to live in the sewers and eat rat-burgers because the gay totalitarians have taken over the civilization and you need to have electric self-driving cars that drown you in foam for safety in case of a crash.

I commented something along those lines to Biljana and she said “don’t forget Wall-E”, and I thought – sure. We’ll drown in trash while AI grows us to be docile, overweight, completely ignorant and incompetent consumers, while the shopping chain “Buy n Large” ends up being the government, for all intents and purposes.

There were other dystopian sci-fi movies of that kind before: The Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green and so on, but somehow, they don’t strike as hard because they are trying to be a serious warning. When light comedy ends up hitting as hard as “1984”, it’s somehow more real.

Decreasing benefits

Posted on by
1

My wife and I were taking one of our usual photographic walks in the town of Hvar yesterday evening, after the rain.

The tourist season is starting, so it’s more crowded than we’d like, but there were some quite nice sunset scenes and we came back with quite a nice catch on the memory cards.

As a curiosity, Rimac brought quite a show of Nevera cars.

This, combined with the fact that quite a lot of superyachts were parked there, made me think – I’m probably surrounded by the greatest density of people with order of magnitude more money than me, and it’s incredible how little they can actually show for it. In the real world, if you encounter a God who’s an order of magnitude more powerful than you, they are actually scary powerful – they can snap a finger and cancel some event out of existence by modifying its origin in time, or they can assemble a particle cloud back into the destroyed object, or they can create/modify universes. Here, they can buy a bigger boat or a faster car you can’t actually legally drive faster.

I mean, it’s nice, but I can’t but feel it as damning with faint praise. Once you solve all your actual problems that are caused by the lack of money, there’s precious little you can actually do with money. Buy a faster car with more expensive upholstery. Buy a bigger boat. Buy a bigger house. Buy more houses in many different places. Hire people to maintain it all. Have a space programme, or a charity fund, or something to give you the impression that it makes sense and is worth while. But basically, you do the same things you always did, just with no financial constraints. You still drive a car, only better. If you liked boats, you can get a better one. If you were into computers, you can get the best one. If you were into photography, you can buy the best cameras and lenses. You can get the house you actually like, instead of the one you could afford. But you still have all the human limitations, constraints and issues. There’s very little one of those billionaires can do, that a middle class person can’t. I mean, actually do, not just take a ride on a boat or have ten houses that require staff and staff managers. It’s like HiFi – you get to 90% of what’s possible with a few thousand euros. After that, ten times the money will give you the next 9%. After that, you can pay infinite amounts of money for utterly insignificant or even fictitious progress; essentially, you get to delude yourself for a hundred thousand dollars.

Money is absolutely crucial up to a point, and the difference between what your life is as a broke student or a homeless person, and someone in the middle class, can feel like magic. You can just pull out the wallet and solve things that would seem insurmountable to the other person. You can cash out a piece of real estate. You can go to a car salon and buy a new fancy car, cash. If you need a medical intervention, you can just deal with it because money is no object. However, after this miraculous ascent in functionality you can purchase, you get a weird situation where people can have exponentially more money than you, and they have to literally invent bullshit that does barely anything more, but costs insane money, just so that they could show that they can actually get something for that difference in wealth.

But that’s not how things work “up there”, in the real world. There, wealth/power is real, and it’s measured in soul-stuff. There, orders of magnitude do much more than buy stuff that’s invented so that you could pretend to be able to do more. The power differential is real, the way a power differential between a fire cracker, a 1 ton bomb and a thermonuclear device is real. Here, if you’re more powerful you can smoke an expensive cigar on your superyacht while you wait for the delivery of your new Rimac Nevera to complement your fleet of Bugattis. Among the Gods, if you’re more powerful you can correct the timeline, selectively freeze time, spend twenty years doing something and then go back twenty years in time to use the results instantly, you can create a universe to test a hypothesis, and you are actually spiritually capable of functioning on the same level with the fellow Gods. Here, it’s a silly game of pretence, where you act as if your power actually matters. There, it actually matters.

And the thing is, the effort it takes to earn a billion dollars, if we disregard luck which is actually hugely important, is actually comparable to the effort one would have to make in order to attain actual spiritual advancement that would produce actual, non-bullshit power differential in the real world, and this world so successfully hides those results, that barely anyone bothers with it.

About matters and seriousness

Posted on by
Reply

When I mostly wrote about politics for a few years, some people understood it as me “not being interested in spirituality any more”. When I started writing about spirituality again, shocked Pikachu face, I guess. So, what’s the deal?

Well, it’s kind of obvious. When I saw Western propaganda accompanying the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I understood that such propaganda is something that would happen only if they had a long-term plan for a war with Russia. As I analysed the events from this perspective, it gave me such a good match that I started a political blog as a place where I can unload my thought processes as a form of a warning, because there’s no way for a war between West and Russia not to eventually go nuclear, and people should know about that well in advance in order to be able to prepare, and by prepare I mean be ready to absorb lesser impacts before the major one, and when the major one comes, be on good terms with God.

What do I mean by lesser impacts? Well, if you’re in Ukraine, you got to find out already. Likewise if you’re in Israel, or the region around Iran. It’s not particularly great in some parts of the West either; London, Paris etc. have turned into terrible shitholes that resemble Africa. America is also not a great place to be, and it’s getting worse.

I expected that, because the nuclear ultimate escalation isn’t something that just happens out of nowhere. You don’t attack Russia and China because you’re doing well. You’re doing it because your civilisation is at an impasse, and you’re looking for a desperate way out. Others react to your desperate measures in progressively more desperate ways, and it ends in mushroom clouds.

People have a silly idea about nuclear war – basically, both sides push a button and twenty minutes later there’s no world. I wanted to explain why this isn’t so, and why they will try everything else first, and why most people in the world won’t even know there was a nuclear war until much later. You need to understand the logic of those things.

So yeah, that was a priority. Also, the reason why I didn’t write about “spirituality” – God, I hate that word – is because I was thinking and meditating and figuring things out, and I don’t like talking just to hear myself talk. I basically needed a decade or two of processing to do, in order to get to the next level of understanding, and it’s not something you can copy-paste from somewhere, because, simply put, nobody has ever done it before. I did write bits and pieces as I was sure, and eventually “The Light Beyond” happened, as a culmination of all this. One of the more important reasons why I didn’t write much is because people who read it generate their own ideas that feed back into my perception, and then it makes it harder for me to figure things out and get a clear signal through all the interference. Then, as I got the pieces together, I could write it all down, since feedback loops no longer matter once I get it.

There’s another silly thing I found out recently; you see, I sensed that people ask Chat GPT and other LLM AI models about me. I asked Romana to try asking the questions I felt people are asking, and indeed, the answers came immediately, which means the system already had everything cached from recent inquiries. She copy-pasted some of it to me, and I found it incredibly silly. For instance, when you ask AI how competent I am, basically asking it to evaluate me because you trust a statistical evaluator of other people’s opinions more than you trust your own judgment, it tells you, essentially, that I’m quite competent at photography and programming, and less so at politics and religious philosophy – essentially, evaluating my deviation from the data pool that defines its primary neural networks as “being wrong”, while matches with consensus opinion are interpreted as “being right”. People who don’t know how that shitbox “thinks” will mistake it for actually having thought processes, which it doesn’t. The true interpretation of what it said is that my IT knowledge is generic enough that every competent IT person shares it, my photography knowledge is essentially what every competent photographer shares, and my pictures are composed along the lines of what is generally found aesthetically pleasing. My political opinions, however, are completely out of, what its western and leftist data pool of generally accepted propaganda defined by the CIA, defines as “normal”, so it’s “wrong” and “not substantiated by facts”, where facts are what the CIA tells the “journalists” to publish. Also, my opinions about spirituality are not the generally found copy-pasta; it’s actually the real thing, because I have my own independent access to the facts, which is orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s. In fact, some of the facts I have are my own memories from long ago, which are accessible only to me, and nobody else (with the exception of a few who also happened to be there); in simple terms, nobody else knows what actually happened because they weren’t there as it happened. I was. If someone didn’t learn it from me, they don’t know. So, Chat GPT thinks I’m taking myself too seriously, because it can’t verify my sources, so it thinks they are questionable. They are not.

Let me put it this way. Only a few people have been on the Moon. A few more have been in orbit around it. They have a unique perspective on it, and others are not really in a position where they can verify it independently. If they tell Neil Armstrong that he shouldn’t take himself too seriously with his stories about walking on the Moon, my answer is that they, in fact, are the ones who are taking themselves too seriously and they shouldn’t, while he’s taking himself exactly as seriously as he should, as he has an independent source of experience that they can’t access, duplicate or independently verify, so they should shut the fuck up.

Puzzle

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and writing only some of it down, while the rest of it remains work in progress.

I also made some interesting pictures:

It’s just that I’m having trouble figuring out what’s going on. The wars seem to be escalating, but contained within a pattern – none of the actors wants to disturb the world that holds the foundations of their power, and yet as the predictable certainties slip away, they seem to be forced into actions that they don’t actually want to make, with consequences they don’t want to accept. America wants to remain in power, but its economy is inherently broken, their soft power is all but gone, and their military is a one trick pony. Europe would want to act based on principles, and yet this sounds so ridiculous when it comes out of the mouths of atheists whose principles are something they themselves made up and is worth less than the paper it’s written on. Based on those principles they act in ways that subvert the foundational architecture that defined them.

Russia and China would want to be powerful and prosperous, and yet they don’t want to pay the price of that, which is to fight America and win. America abuses everybody and says “so, what are you going to do about it?” So far, nobody came up with an answer.

People seem to have found another source of religion. First they followed prophets and revelations of God. Then they followed science. Then they invented social media to receive validation from other humans. Now, they seem to chat with LLM AI, trying to get it to clear their confusion, answer their questions, and be their God. Considering how LLM is merely re-hashing the ideas of their own making and giving them what it sees as normalised results, this newest exercise in navel gazing is as pathetic as it is desperate, and reminds me very much of coprophagy.

But people, stupid as they are, will sooner ask Chat GPT about me, than ask me about Chat GPT. The Great Oracle will tell them what to think. That can’t go wrong.

It’s already very hard to find sources that are not contaminated by AI. With enough iterations, it will become completely impossible, unless you already know what you’re looking for, which makes it moot because searching implies finding new stuff, beyond what you already know. Younger people are destined to ingest the excrement of AI, thinking it’s information. It’s not. It is to information what a turd is to a hamburger that someone else ate.

I’m not saying AI is completely useless. I use it to remove noise from my images, and also for large-object generative cloning. Also, my camera uses it to detect people, birds and insects, and to focus on the eyes. I just don’t ask it for opinions, especially considering how often it fails to identify insects.