iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

I invite you to sign up for my Substack: The Choice Engine. Here's my latest article: The Trade Deficit is Made in America The Greatest Trick Capital Every Played: Convincing America the Trade Deficit Was China's Fault Please share! thechoiceengine.substack.com/p/the-trade-...

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

🚨Must Read!🚨: The US lost a 'war' with China 20+ years ago when we abandoned production for financialization. The most dangerous quality of the current moment is the “temptation…to attempt to overcome the consequences of its economic decline by… military means.” thetricontinental.org/studies-on-c...

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

The evidence supporting therapeutic benefits of entactogens and psychedelics vastly exceeds any evidence of negative effects. Remember Alan Watts: “You’ve got to go out of your mind to come to your senses.”

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

The banality of an educational objective is revealed by whether AI can deliver A+ work with naive prompting. The goal of education in the present moment should be to teach students how to employ AI creatively to amplify the breadth & depth of their work product.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Finally figured out DSPy and now realizing I need to spend the rest of my life on data curation. Or I can just use Gemini-2.5-Pro with silly prompts and let it figure it out.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Circling back to bsky after a few months and find Travis building cool software with AI. Someone else who gets it. Awesome.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

China is crafting a multipolar economy rooted in sovereign development, technological self-reliance, and coordinated diplomacy—backed by real productive capacity, not nostalgia. Without structural change, tariffs are just noise on the way down.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Tariffs are a nationalist reflex in a system still ruled by Wall Street. Meanwhile, China isn’t trying to revive the old order—it’s building a new one.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

American workers aren’t “too expensive” because of wages or tariffs—they’re crushed by debt, rent, insurance premiums, and financial extraction. The real drag isn’t a trade imbalance—it’s the US financial sector bleeding the real economy dry.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

China doesn’t redirect finance toward industry. They don’t insulate key sectors from speculation. And they do nothing to make U.S. labor uncompetitive.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

But the material base for that dominance—productive industry, global goodwill, internal unity—is gone. Without changing the parasitic structure of the US financial sector, tariffs are just symptoms of decay.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

6/6 Tariffs Alone Won’t Build a New Order—They’re Clinging to the Old One What the U.S. seeks with tariffs is not a new system—it’s a restoration of lost dominance.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

China plans in decades, not quarters. It integrates trade, infrastructure, education, and labor development under a unified vision—driven by statecraft, not market speculation.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The U.S. has none of this. It operates on quarterly earnings and election cycles, not national development horizons. Tariffs without structural change are just nationalist theater performed for a decaying electorate.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

5/6 No Strategic Depth A tariff is a tactic, not a strategy. Real development requires control over finance, coordinated public investment, long-term technological goals, and the insulation of key sectors from external shocks.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

China offers what the empire never did: infrastructure without subjugation. It doesn’t ask for loyalty—it offers co-development under shifting global terms. While Washington is building walls and bombs, Beijing is building roads.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

U.S. tariffs serve as a catalyst—forcing nations to confront the costs of dependency. You can’t sanction the world and expect loyalty in return.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

4/6 Tariffs Accelerate Revolt in the Periphery Global South countries now face a choice: remain subordinate to an extractive system in decline, or align with emerging centers of capital and sovereignty.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

While the U.S. imposes sanctions, China builds supply chains—promoting yuan-based trade, launching competing platforms, and embedding itself into Eurasian, African, and Latin American trade corridors that bypass Western chokepoints.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Each new tariff drives targeted nations to reduce their dependence on the dollar, build alternative institutions, and deepen regional alliances. Tariffs fuel the very breakup of U.S. financial empire they’re meant to defend.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

3/6 Trump's Tariffs Undermine U.S. Financial Hegemony In weaponizing trade, the U.S. is hastening the decline of its own global position.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Firms are expected to serve national development goals, not extract maximum short-term profit. Capital is subordinate to the strategic needs of the state, not the other way around.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The American elite seeks to contain economic fallout without altering the structures of class domination that caused it. Tariffs that protect monopolies without discipline simply create new rentier fiefdoms. By contrast, China disciplines capital.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

2/6 Preservation of Class Power, Not National Industry These tariffs aren’t about rebuilding the economy. They’re about protecting the profit margins of bloated monopolies that hollowed it out in the first place.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

While America played empire, China played industry. Now one prints sanctions, the other prints steel.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Meanwhile, China played the long game: investing in productive forces, building industrial ecosystems, and shielding its economy from Western financial capture—ensuring that sovereignty over industry remains a matter of state strategy not market whim.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

After decades of outsourcing and gutting public infrastructure, the U.S. is now trying to patch up a decaying economy with trade barriers. It’s not reindustrialization—it’s damage control. You don’t regrow a burned down forest by fencing off the ashes.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

1/6 Protectionism Without Production Tariffs signal the end of a unipolar economic model that enriched a domestic rentier elite while hollowing out productive capacity.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

You can’t rebuild an economy with tariffs when the factory’s gone, the workers are broke, and Wall Street owns the land. China knows this. That’s why it’s winning. Trump’s tariffs won’t rebuild the U.S. It’s imperial decline wrapped in red, white, and blue. 🧵

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Posting this thread over here because it articulates the current economic dissonance so well. Here is the source (couldn’t find him on bsky) Full thread text below 🧵👇 x.com/upholdrealit...

x.com

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

What we need are policies that distribute and invest the fruits of automation and productivity equitably, providing a sufficient security/lifestyle floor to allow individuals to manifest their intrinsic creative gifts. This is what abundance is about.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Remember the experiments where kids were paid to do math? The extrinsic incentives destroyed the intrinsic worth of the activity.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

I’d argue the creative spark is omnipresent, but most humans are stranded at rung 2 or 3 of Maslow’s HoN and lack the security, time and energy to manifest it. True creative flow is emergent and intrinsic. In many ways, external factors corrupt it rather than incentivizing it.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

When speculation pays off at multiples of productive enterprise - as it has for the past 15 years - it destroys the codes, norms and contracts that hold societies together. Amplified by social media, this explains most of the reasons why we’re coming apart at the seams.

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Maybe not ‘best minds’ but definitely a preponderance of ‘great minds’ are wasting life on this zero-sum garbo

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Reposted by Adam Butler

Cormac McCarthy @cormacmccarthy0.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Just successfully ran complete unit tests on a full-stack API so I'm officially full-stack dev now, right?

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

The global ‘reserve’ asset is whatever the world’s engine of production is accumulating most aggressively at the margin.

Map of the world’s industrial production

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Really excited about this episode with Dr. Robert Frank on Perverse Incentives, Positional Goods, Darwin’s Wedge and How Competition Fails Don’t forget to share and subscribe! youtu.be/jb_Jg7OTA64?...

youtu.be

Dr. Robert Frank on ‘Smart for One But Dumb for All’

YouTube video by ReSolve Asset Management

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

A great thread worthy of consideration. “The counter-reaction to expert elites was a consequence of the internet…and unrestricted information flow.” But: “Isolating the knowledge generating components of society from the decision-making components of society is unlikely to be a good idea.”

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

I definitely wouldn't characterize the current role of markets as facilitating 'well being'. It's worth contemplating what sort of world is crafted by those who respond to these perverse incentives? "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." – Jiddu Krishnamurti

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Adam Butler @gestaltu.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Modern markets reward: * Risk seeking * Nihilism * Cognitive dissonance * Moral relativism Knowledge, prudence and contact with reality are **maladaptive**. Markets no longer serve any economic purpose via capital allocation or price signaling. Policy and the social contract should reflect this.

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