Captain Zero Fun

BREAKING - Tadej Pogačar is set to return to cyclocross in the 2026/27 off-season. His goal is to win the World Championships in this discipline as well.

Gravel “racing” is not racing It’s a sportive with a timing chip. There, I said it. I love gravel. I own a Parlee Taos. I’m racing the MGR in Kenya. But let’s stop pretending that 300 people riding a dirt road in a spread out line with a feed station every 30k is racing. That’s an event. A great event. But it’s not racing. Racing is elbows in a bunch at 45kph through a crosswind. Racing is knowing that the lad two wheels ahead is going to attack on the left hander because he did the same thing last week in the A3s. Racing is reading a peloton like a chess board, sitting fourth wheel, waiting, waiting, then going so hard into the last corner that the sprinter on your hip can’t come around you. Road racing in the UK is dying. Ireland’s calendar is half what it was ten years ago. US crits are disappearing. Meanwhile gravel sells out in minutes. I get it. Gravel is accessible. No licence needed. Nobody’s getting dropped and sitting on the side of the road in the rain waiting for the broom wagon. Nobody’s getting shouted at for overlapping a wheel. But that’s exactly what made road racing brilliant. Categories. Real categories. Where a third cat could pin on a number knowing they’d race other third cats. Where you could get promoted, get relegated, have a season that meant something beyond a finisher’s medal and a burrito at the end. Where a club rider from Bray or Brixton or Brooklyn could say they won an actual race and it mattered because a hundred other lads tried to stop them. We didn’t lose road racing because people stopped wanting to race. We lost it because we stopped making it easy to race. Rising entry fees, pre registration. We lost it because gravel figured out something road racing never bothered to learn. Marketing. Name five gravel races. You can picture the logos, the colours, the Instagram grid. Unbound. Belgian Waffle Ride. Migration Gravel Race. SBT GRVL. They built brands. They brought influencers. They made showing up feel like joining something. They understood that the race starts on social media six months before anyone pins a number on. Now name five local road races. You can’t picture the logo because there isn’t one. The entry was a bank transfer to a club secretary. The results went up on a spreadsheet three days later. Nobody posted about it because there was nothing to post. Road racing didn’t get beaten by gravel. It got outmarketed by it. The racing itself was always better. The tactics, the categories, the raw chaos of a bunch sprint on a wet dual carriageway. That magic never left.

it hasn't sunk in for most people. we already live in a post-scarcity society. UBI is already here. basic package: disability, medicaid, food stamps etc bonus package: literally getting paid for staying at home and hanging out with your relatives extra bonus: if you are willing to commit fraud, pretend your kids are autistic and get paid for that. get paid for watching your neighbor's kid. pretend you are taking care of your grandma. fake hospice clinic. fake rehab clinic. fake therapy clinic. giga bonus: during a time of crisis take advantage of PPP or CARES and open a fake business and get paid for existing people are shocked when they learn that defense is the FIFTH largest line item in the budget. ahead of defense: social security ($1.6T), interest on debt ($1.1T) medicare ($1T), medicaid + ACA ($1T), AND THEN defense ($0.9T) complain about defense all you like, but healthcare fraud is a way bigger factor. hundreds of billions per year. this is only going to get worse, because the fraud is a structural part of the system – payouts to client groups in exchange for votes (normally D). in the US, only 47% of the population actually works (fully 14% of the population is working age and does not work). retirees are 18% and children 22%. the system I described above subsidizes 50m non-working people absolute minimum, but really it's far more because people that are paid to stay home and take care of their relatives are considered "workers" of that 47% of "actual workers" maybe one third does real work, the rest are shuffling papers around or doing fake email jobs. so you have, rough math, 50 million actual workers supporting 300 million dependents. that's the nature of the economy today. it will only accelerate. eventually you will have 10 million using AI tools to do all the work and 340 million dependents. the reason no one roots out the fraud is because it's the system that keeps our extremely fragile polity intact. the fraud is the UBI. the purpose of the system is what it does. of course, it's a deeply unfair system, because you are allowed to commit fraud if you are a politically protected client group of the democrats. DOGE was killed faster than any government program ever, because it attempted to root out the fraud. if you are honest and unwilling to commit fraud, you are a huge loser in this system. your neighbor will have their mortgage subsidized by some government program. they will get favorable SBA loans due to DEI. they will open a fake hospice or autism clinic. they will get paid for taking care of their neighbor's kid and vice versa. the primary skill in the labor market is learning how to extract money from state and federal government programs, not gaining skills or making yourself employable. if you are just trying to work an ordinary wagie job you are a huge sucker. you are paying 40-50% effective all in taxes to everyone else who is a net taker. the sad part is because AI is such a substantial productivity boost, it will actually keep this system going for a while longer, and maybe in perpetuity. AI boosts the 15% of the population that is actually productive so much that the remaining 85% can coast by. no one in charge will change this because they can't think of anything else. the political costs of a real UBI program are too great and we don't have the money for it anyway. so we will keep this covert fraud-based UBI program running indefinitely. unfortunately, if you are an honest wagie, you lose.

BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI CEO agent to help him do his job Employees are also adopting AI agents and AI tools internally, namely My Claw and Second Brain, in a bid to speed up work, as they get graded on AI use

Never forget how Israel murdered Palestinian First Responders on a literal live stream. Repost this. Please I beg you