Is Religion a Species or Cultural IQ Test?

It struck me, this morning, that the USA has become a particularly gullible society. Even more than any other time in my 72 years and that is saying something. The Pew Research Foundation, in 2018, found that 53% of US citizens claimed “religion is very important in their lives.” If you look at the world map the Pew organization made, it’s difficult to find a country with a high degree of religious “commitment” that isn’t pretty much a sewer of stupid. We’re in the bag with great nations like Brazil (72%), Nigeria (88%), Egypt (72%), Ethiopia (98%), Greece (56%), Iran (78%), and the rest of the world’s degenerate nations. So, my conclusion is that the existence and persistence of religion in a society is a Gullibility Test. If a significant percentage of a population is willing to believe an incredible collection of sheepherder tales, that population will buy all sorts of incredibly stupid stories from whoever wants to rule that population. Hence, the current state of the United States of America.

There isn’t a single nation anyone would want to emulate with a superstitious population over 30%. Even Mexico (45%) and Israel (36%) are less superstitious than the USA. Canada, the country most US citizens would love to escape to if they would have us, has a 27% loony quotient. Most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and even Russia and China have managed to educate their populations so that under 20% fall into foolish magical thinking. Greece, Italy, and Poland are the only mostly-religious countries in Europe and . . . you can fill the blank with your own stereotype jokes of those countries. Among the world’s nations, the only countries (except the UK) with a total goober for a leader are religious nations. They are the ones who will believe anything; and the more incredible the better.

In the USA, we’re being overwhelmed with all sorts of stupid; from conspiracy delusions to radical left and right wing crazies to the usual variants of cults and splinter religions to alien invasion fairy tales. We are, also, obviously gullible as hell. Electing an internationally known con man to the highest office in the country has to be the pinnacle of gullibility and not only are US citizens that dumb but a substantial portion (typically >45%) approve of his miserable “performance.” That is also known as “doubling-down on stupid.” I’m sure we’re not the only nation that exemplifies Dunning-Kruger Effect, but we are working at perfecting it into a chaotic system of mismanaging government.

I recently read a note from a young friend who said, "Most younger Americans would kill for EU, Australian, New Zealand, or Canadian citizenship." They would absolutely marry for that reason. As of 2017, there were approximately 900,000 US-born Mexican residents, 800,000 in the EU, 750,000 in Canada, 700,000 in India, 600,000 in the Philippines, and the numbers drop radically among other US-citizen exported nations. There are only about 18,000 US citizens residing in New Zealand, mostly because (like every civilized nation in the world) NZ is only interested in educated citizens with useful skills. Of course, like every other country in the world, if you have a few hundred million to buy your way into NZ/EU/CA/AU or pretty much anywhere else citizenship it’s there for the buying. Money is still the universal language. Some things are dependable, I guess.

Is there a fix for our national foolishness? Apparently, the coronavirus is going to take a shot at it. The halfwits who believed President Fucknuts when he told them to guzzle bleach, to open up their guts to ultraviolet, to take a fist-full of unproven prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and to get out there and “open up the economy again,” are going to be the ones who continue to get clobbered the hardest by Covid-19; and reality. Maybe, instead of having to launch the boneheads toward the sun, Marching Morons style, they’ll just take care of themselves, evolution-style, and, probably, they’ll go down thinking it was part of the Intelligent Design. Who could argue with them? Who would want to?

Who Gets Replaced by A Robot

In manufacturing [Remember when we used to do that?] there is an old rule that says, “We automate the jobs that are mostly occupied by the biggest pain-in-the-ass employees.” In several of the companies where I worked in the 70s through the late 90s, the first people to be replaced by a computer or robot were technicians. For a time, moderately trained technicians were the “special children” on the manufacturing floor. They weren’t skilled enough to be engineers or even middle-management, but they were too skilled to easily be replaced by other company employees or easily recruited from the recently tech school-educated employment pool.

So, as soon as possible manufacturing engineers started searching for ways to put some kind of computer test equipment into the assembly processes to reduce the number of technicians needed. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a management decision. Few improvements in any process are driven by upper management; they are too busy stuffing their pockets with the company profits to bother with doing actual work. Actual decisions always get made by the people stuck being responsible for the work and that is almost always engineers and manufacturing technicians.

Thinking about that kind of problems in society, it is easy who and what engineers would automate in the rest of the country: police, prison guards, politicians and many bureaucrats, firefighters, tax collection, the justice system, bus and truck drivers, and restaurant workers. And, pretty much, in that order.

Police, obviously, are a societal pain-in-the-ass, a huge civic liability, more often than not more corrupt than the “criminals” they supposedly protect us from, and massively expensive. Police department costs range from as much as 64% of a city’s budget (Billings, MT, $247 per resident) to as “little” as 8% (New York, City, $624 per resident). Ridding taxpayers of out-of-control police department spending and erratic and violent policing would go a long ways toward making cities more livable, safer, less racist, less expensive, and sustainable. From a manufacturing engineering standpoint, a huge portion of what police do on a daily basis would clearly be easy and cheap to automate. At least 90% of what a traffic cop does could be done better with strategically placed sensors (cameras and microphones). Most traffic violations could be recorded, vehicles identified, and citations sent through computerized systems: no cop necessary unless an arrest for non-compliance is required. One of the most common vehicle violations that goes un-cited today is noise violations and practically every state’s current vehicle noise violations could be monitored and cited automatically with “fix-it tickets” and the revenue from those violations, alone, might pay for the system. For more aggressive traffic violations, the combination of those cameras and microphones and driver alerts could utilize the remaining human police and computerized dispatch systems to be used more effectively. The relatively few complicated police activities, typically assigned to “detectives,” would likely remain human-powered for a long time, but as the number of crimes solved by those humans continues to decline there will be plenty of incentive's for automated solutions to those underperforming employees.

Likewise, it’s pretty obvious that automation and robots could do at least as good a job as prison guards and their mismanagement for a tiny fraction of the cost. For example, California’s prison guard union is so grossly over-powerful that the annual cost of keeping a typical prisoner “guarded” is well over $100,000 per year. Even as the state’s prison population declines, the costs are rising rapidly as are the salaries and benefits of their underworked, unskilled union members. Since the guard’s union has a stranglehold on the state politicians (Democrat and Republican) the solution is clearly one place where California’s referendum system should be able to sold a problem that the politicians won’t dare touch.

The rest of my list (see above) will be more and less complicated to automate with some of the easiest going earlier simply because there will be fewer political obstacles to overcome (like truck and bus drivers who most everyone will be happy to see gone from the highways). So, now my “predictions” are in print and probably a while after I’m dead someone might find them and have a great time ridiculing how wrong I was. Have fun, whoever you are.