Should we abolish ICE?

 So...the ICE situation is MASSIVELY out of hand. And there's calls on the left to "abolish ICE." The argument is that ICE was only established in 2003, and not it's basically Trump's little private army of proud boy types who are basically patrolling our streets "looking for immigrants", but hassling and even killing American citizens, and basically acting like he modern Gestapo.

The debate on the matter is a bit disheartening on the left. The democrats in congress just basically approved ICE's funding and are proposing the most mild of mild compromises like "wear body cameras", while leftists are calling for full abolishment of the agency. And like on many things liberal vs leftist, my views are somewhat in between.

ICE was founded in 2003 as part of Bush's national security consolidations. It absorbed several previous agencies, and while it has multiple functions, its biggest domestic one is finding and deporting illegal immigrants. It's always been controversial among LEFTISTS, ie, the types who dont believe we should ever deport illegal immigrants, but it has been used both by republican and democratic administrations to fulfill this role. 

With that said, in principle, do I support abolishing the agency? Not really. I believe it depends on who uses it and how it's used. Trump massively beefed it up, expanded it, and weaponized it in the way he's done during this administration. However, given proper constraints, it's been effective, while not being particularly harmful to citizens. The problem clearly comes from Trump's iteration of it, which acts more like a lawless secret police. 

With that said, thinking about it, do I support abolishing ICE? I mean, let me put it this way, when you get cancer, you do everything you can to get rid of it. The Trump's second term is basically fascism as a metastasized cancer. ICE has been corrupted, possibly beyond the point of no return. As he attempts his authoritarian takeover, he's radically shifted the culture of ICE to basically act as his private army of brown shirt types. The people they're hiring for ICE are untrained, unqualified, and probably have deeply fascistic beliefs themselves. They literally signed up in order to beat of on immigrants IMO. 

We like to talk about police having culture problems in recent years. We did this with defund the police. We talked about how "all cops are b#######s" because of their own cultural problems, where they cover up for each other, and they hire people who fit a certain profile. But now these ICE guys are so bad now liberals and even some leftists are wanting normal police back now. To be fair libs were never truly anti police, that's a far left "leftist" stance, and one that I don't fully embrace (although I kinda see the point of), but honestly, after this administration, I think ICE might be too far gone to salvage. The cultural problems will be too rampant, and the people there too toxic. Because let's be honest, Trump massively expanded them, militarized them, and the people in ICE are...mostly not good people at this point. They're white nationalist yeehaws who wanna beat up on brown people and even libs. And before anyone thinks this is some massive gaffe, uh...just look at comments online, they're like "YOU"RE NEXT LIB!" and crap like that, and even ICE officers themselves are basically talking like they're chomping at the bit to kill liberals and protesters and blah blah blah. So yeah, these guys have a culture problem, it's fascism, which as far as I'm concerned is like a metastasized cancer on this administration, and with the next one, it needs to be excised. Trump's long term success relies in part on consolidating agencies under control of the executive branch under him. Right now, our best defense is good people in say, the US military who have a standard of ethics where they'd refuse unlawful orders. But...it also works the other way. Because if ICE are Donald Trump's brownshirts, and they are, well, yeah. The best way to solve that problem is to nuke it from orbit. 

ya know, when I started this article, I really thought I was gonna conclude something like "yeah ICE need a massive restructuring but idk about abolishment", but I think I did talk myself into abolishment here. The issues with its current iteration are too severe. 

However, I do want to make one thing clear. I'm not entirely anti law enforcement, or anti cop, or even anti immigration enforcement. My own ideas are more aligned with moderate democrats like Obama and Biden, who deported millions of illegal immigrants, but who did so relatively lawfully. I'm not AGAINST enforcing immigration laws, and I believe the next administration that comes in from the democrats should still maintain some level of law enforcement regarding immigration. But they should focus on criminals, they should focus on new arrivals at the border, and they should always follow the law and the constitution and proper procedures.

My call to abolish ICE is, again, due to what Trump has done to the agency in his second term, and the lingering cultural issues with the agency that likely will persist long after he's gone. Just as Trump came in and tried to purge the executive branch of everyone not loyal to him, the next democratic administration must do the same. We must purge the executive branch and all of its agencies of Trump loyalists. We need to reform the federal bureaucracy back to its pre Trumpian state. We must hire civil servants who care about serving the public and the rule of law and the constitution. We're gonna need to do some heavy chemotherapy on the executive branch in the post Trump branch to minimize his legacy as much as possible. And if that means destroying entire agencies and replacing them with new ones with new people to fulfill several functions, so be it. If it means purging the administration of everyone who wasn't there before January 20th 2025, then so be it. We gotta rescue our country from this attempted fascist takeover, and if that means mass firing anyone associated with this administration, then SO FRICKING BE IT!

And yeah. That's my stance on that.  

Where do we go from here?

 So...as I've been saying since basically this blog's inception, we've been undergoing a party realignment since 2016. And, as I see it, it could've gone one of two ways. Either we got a strong progressive left with a weak and moderate right, or we get a strong populist right with a weak and moderate left. I wanted us to go in the other direction, but because the democrats basically F-ed us, we're on the other trajectory. 

And now we're basically in the midst of an authoritarian police state attempting to solidify its control over the country. It's control is not complete or absolute, but we are clearly in the phase where the threat is present, and conditions are worsening by the day. With that said, I want to map a few possibilities of how things will go from here.

1) Trump succeeds, American democracy is over

So say Trump invokes the insurrection act, suspends elections, or does other things that make the idea of a fair election like we've had basically impossible. The range of outcomes here can vary. On the one extreme, elections are cancelled altogether, and on the other, Trump basically is able to get some legislation through mandating voter IDs, banning mail in voting, and deporting POC on a level that shifts the demographics in a way to make democratic wins impossible. We could slide into a one party state with the pretense of democracy like Russia, or we could just do away with the concept like Nazi Germany. It's a spectrum, but the outcome could be on that spectrum. 

Well, then we're screwed. While it is possible a realignment occurs as the democrats are forced to realign themselves to this new reality and come back even more moderate, it's possible that, much like with Russia, the republican party maintains power by sabotaging further movements from democrats to ensure that they always win. And America just keeps backsliding.

This is the worst outcome, and yeah, we're screwed if things go this way. 

2) Trump fails; democrats claw back power

Now, Trump's solidification of power is not yet complete. He CAN still fail here. We are in a dangerous time, but I believe if we make it through 2026, we can begin to make a come back. If American democracy is allowed to continue as is, it's very likely that democrats will retake the house next November. I dont know what margins we'll see, but based on the generic congressional vote, I estimate the public has shifted 4 points since 2024, which means we should have a rather comfortable win, with a ballpark estimate of a 85% shot at retaking the house. The senate, that's gonna be a tough nut to crack. My own estimate is that democrats might gain ground, particularly in North Carolina and Maine, but I doubt they'll be able to secure a net of four seats required to control the senate outright. I'd say, optimistically, the democrats have a 25% shot there based on raw polling at this point (tipping point: Texas), but I wouldn't count on that.

Still, with the house, Trump's ability to get legislation passed grinds to a halt. There will be investigations, impeachments, although without a compliant senate, it's unclear how much will stick. At the very least, Trump's ability to actually do things will be reined in, and he will be a lame duck the rest of his term. 

And in 2028, well, then we very well could likely retake the senate and the presidency. And with that, a new era of politics can begin...or can it?

At this point, I'm gonna split things into various possible outcomes depending on how democrats act.

2a) Democrats learn nothing and do nothing, MAGA wins again

So...we saw this game before. Biden won in 2020, Trump did January 6th...and then F all happened. The house investigated and voted to impeach but the senate saved Trump. Trump plotted his come back. The Biden DOJ investigated him for several crimes, but never acted fast enough to actually put the guy behind bars, despite Jack Smith now saying they had a hole in one case. And now Trump is enacting his revenge. 

And....let's face it. The democrats propped up Biden in 2024 when he wasnt in any condition to actually continue to govern. Then they replaced him with Harris. They learned nothing, blamed Biden but refused to look internally at their own brand of politics, which I would argue has been unpopular since 2016 (because we ARE in a realignment). And uh...yeah. So they get in, they dont have a grand vision beyond getting Trump out. They don't prosecute Trump or his officials for obvious crimes against the constitution and humanity because they wanna put the thing behind us. And then...in 2030, republicans retake the house, and in 2032, they retake the presidency with someone else. Possibly Vance, or someone else.

And what happens from here? Well...we're back to square one. Keep in mind, Trump is too stupid to do everything he's doing. He has people behind him. He has infrastructure behind him. He has true believers behind him. And his own voter base is NUTS. They LIKE what he's doing. I was reading what they were saying about today's....uh...event, and they were cheering on the ICE officers. They are beyond hope and beyond help.

And given the direction of America first, the MAGA civil war, we could see the next wave of MAGA be outright Nazis. Trump might be a transition president for the GOP...with the next guy after him being a full blown fascist, like, the ones openly talking about concentration camps and screaming about Jews. Nick Fuentes's fanbase. Those people. They might be in charge. 

If that's the case, we're still screwed. We'll avert disaster....only to repeat the same cycle because the democrats refuse to learn.

2b) Democrats learn nothing, but public too afraid to vote republican again for a while

It's possible MAGA scars the country's psyche so bad that people just end up voting for the democrats by default for the next 12-20 years. They dont change, they don't learn anything, but the public realizes what we just went through and is so scared of Trump and his ilk ever getting power again that democrats maintain strong bipartisan support for a while among the 60% of the country that's sane. We see landslide type electoral wins in 2028, 2032, and 2036, and possibly beyond. After all, a telltale sign of a realignment is strong, overwhelming wins for one party and the end of the other party's current brand of politics. Here, the republicans would forced to moderate in order to win back voters, and the republicans would end up becoming relatively socially moderate, but still fiscally conservative. The democrats would remain fiscally conservative, but be socially liberal. It wouldn't be a great outcome, as things would never improve economically for the people. But everyone is just so glad that the Trump era is over that democrats are able to remain this third way party that no one likes but everyone tolerates anyway.

This is the "crappy status quo" outcome. It's not my preferred outcome, and progressives would be very muted because stepping out of line would mean electing another Trump, but at least we avoid fascism.

Still, this might be kicking the can that is our economic reckoning down the road. Kinda like how Jacksonian democrats and whigs distracted from the slavery issue, or how the democrats and republicans in the 4th party system did F all to actually improve things significantly for the working classes, and it required the great depression a generation later for real change. Such is the nature of American politics, we'll do everything but the right thing, and we'll only do the right thing when absolutely forced.

Speaking of which, when will said reckoning come? Give or take...2060. Why then? Well, let's keep in mind the 36 year cycles. And then keep in mind the possibility for messy transition periods between cycles. For example, we had the New Deal coalition win in 1932, the collapse of it in 1968, and the Reagan revolution in 1980. And what was 36 years after 1980? 2016.

If Trump counts as the transitional figure, 36 years after 2016 is...2052. If we start with 2028, we might see a 36 year coalitional collapse in 2064, with potentially another messy transition lasting from 2064 to...2076. 

So yeah the exact timeline is variable. Could begin as early as the 2050s, might not see the crap hit the fan until the 2060s. But expect the crap to hit the fan in the mid 21st century sometime. What would cause that? Who knows. Could be climate change. Could be the national debt, or China's ascendancy. I'm not sure. But the cycles tend to happen. I'm not sure what will happen in terms of cycles if Trump ends democracy though. We could see a revolution around that time if he succeeds in solidifying control in this era. Or some sort of Soviet collapse. Who knows.

2c) Democrats learn, we get the progressive future I wanted

I'm starting to consider this a long shot, but it's possible that we could end up seeing the democrats learn from their mistakes. I know it looks like Newsom, Harris, and the like are ahead NOW, but what if the democratic primary season is a really nasty and bitter one. What if a popular charismatic candidate like Jon Stewart comes out of nowhere and wins it? What if the public decides they're enough with centrist democratic leaders and their approved candidates fall on their face? What then? Well, then we might see the democrats come back, elect a more extreme progressive candidate, and be able to enact a positive agenda that improves the lives of the people and wins them over. 

This is my preferred outcome and the one I hope for, but it's also the least likely. But if this happens, we get the happily ever after ending. The bad guys get tribunals, the country gets a new new deal, and we get a coalition of progressive interests centered around democratic socialism, human centered capitalism, or some variation thereof. And that lasts until around 2064 before it collapses, while it is replaced by the next thing in 2076. 

How do I rank the likelihood of these scenarios?

I won't assign percentages, but the outcomes are ranked as is from worst to best. From most likely to least likely...idk. 

I personally dont think Trump's control on power is complete enough that we'll get the truly hellish outcome, although he's certainly gonna try something I think before ceding power. I doubt he will succeed, but he's gonna try. And he COULD succeed, so that should scare everyone. 

Anyway, I asked chatGPT, and it basically broke it down like this:

5-10% chance of ending democracy itself

30-40% chance of democratic backsliding (similar to Hungary in the 2010s or Turkey in the 2000s)

50-65% chance of Trump failing and a reversal to some version of the status quo

 They seem to think that the US is very resistant to authoritarian takeovers (I would agree) and that Trump just taking over and creating a one party state is unlikely. However, there is a significant likelihood of some sort of "1B" (Trump weakens democracy but doesn't destroy it) or "2A" type situation. 

I also asked chatGPT about how they think the democrats would respond to Trump and Trumpism, and they tend to agree with me that they're more likely to basically double down on their current identity rather than embrace some sort of economic transformation. They'll lean into moderation and appealing to donors and the donor class over embracing something resembling a new New Deal. 

 If anything, the more I discussed it with chatgpt, their analysis seems to suggest some variation of 2a or 2b. We're in for a long messy period in which democrats become centrist institutionalists, and republicans keep doubling down on a post trump version of Trumpism. I will say, we do have different takes on what this post trump trumpism will look like. They think the GOP will likely become more insane, but still quietly authoritarian, a la, say, JD Vance, whereas I think that the "America first" people might draw them even further into radicalism. I recognize the Vance approach is very much a possibility. I just believe that the GOP keeps trying to "manage" their chaos agents only to be taken over by them and driven more and more to the right. So...idk. 

So I guess....2a and 2b are the most likely outcomes, with 1 being less likely, and 2c (my preferred outcome) being even less likely. 

If anything, the more I think about it, and chatGPT seems to concur with my analysis. We're kinda screwed. I was kinda hoping 2016 would merely be the chaotic period leading up to a realignment, with a real realignment around 2028, but if the democrats learn nothing, and they probably won't, 2016 was the event, and the best hope we have until like 2052 or so is just "voting blue no matter who." Which sucks. 

So...yeah. idk what to say here. This exercise kinda made me depressed about our future chances.  

Just another day in an authoritarian police state...

 So...it happened. Again. We're still talking about Renee Good and ICE just executed another citizen in Minneapolis. And this one was even less defensible than the Renee Good one. With that one, it was like, okay....well....she drove away. There were questions of the trajectory of the vehicle, whether law enforcement was in danger, etc. And while, upon close examination, it seems obvious that regardless of whether Renee Good was cleared to drive away (that's still debatable), she was not threatening law enforcement and the shooting was arguably unjustified. 

With this one, they just straight up executed this man. While Trumpers are saying "he had a gun", if you look at the video closely, you can see that he had a (lawful) concealed carry pistol that was taken off of him moments before the shooting. So...why did they shoot him? Yeah. Exactly. Not only were 7 agents dog piling the guy, he was disarmed, and they STILL shot him. This is basically just an execution. And then DHS has the gall to make it sound like he was a domestic terrorist. He wasn't. He was innocent all things considered.

And...much like Renee Good, this whole incident could've been prevented if we didn't have these ICE thugs patrolling American cities and harassing them. Really, this is all on ICE, it's all on DHS, it's all on the white house. But they'll tell us that he was a terrorist and blah blah blah. Ya know, just like they did with Kilmar Abrego Garcia when they locked him up on CECOT. Just like they did to Renee Good. These people have no shame. They lie about everything. 

And uh...yeah. Bad things are bad.  What else you want me to say?

The point of simplified narratives and their importance for political worldviews

 So...as you guys know, I'm trying to write a book about my ideas. And in order to really make the book work, I kind of need to, you know, craft a worldview. So my first topic in the book is really establishing that worldview. I spend the first chapter discussing the ideological divide between myself and, say, the fundamentalist christians on the right. I spend the second establishing a brief overview of history.

 And my overview of history is based on Karl Widerquist's books, which discussed how income inequality, private property, and economic unfreedom came about. And the general gist is this. First, we had hunter gatherer societies where everyone was equal and free, then we shifted to farming where over time, as societies grew, they became more complex, required leaders to run the whole thing smoothly, and those leaders became increasingly authoritarian and divorced from the people they served. This is how we essentially got monarchies, feudalism, and those kinds of authoritarian systems. We had strong men who had this idea that they had a divine right to rule. They distributed property to their friends and allies. And then everyone else just kinda worked under them, paying tribute and taxes to the monarchy and the nobles. And out of that, we got capitalism, which mostly preserved the privileges of those who were wealthy under the old system, while functionally coercing the serf classes to work under "free market" principles. Land was privatized, people had to go get jobs, and that's how we got the system we got today.

It's a simple narrative. But is it too simple? Perhaps. I know a friend of mine recommended david wengrow and david graeber's book "the dawn of everything", which explicitly attempts to debunk these kinds of simplified "grand narratives" of history. It turns out that the narrative that widerquist put forward that I parrot tends to oversimplify to some degree (especially my own simplification, since I need to cut it very short in order to sum it up in just a few paragraphs). My friend said that my own narrative was "wrong" according to this book. I took the criticism under advisement, and left a note to myself to check into this book later when I came back to this topic, as I was writing on other topics at the time. Well, now the time has come to do that. And while I didnt want to read the book directly as it's quite long and I really only dwell on the issue for a couple of pages, I did read summaries of the book to get a gist of the main arguments, and read what others have said about it. One criticism really stands out to me, and I feel is very relevant to my own main book. 

Basically, the guy's criticism is this. The book does point out that history is far more complex in practice, and there are exceptions to the rule for everything, but it doesn't mean that the rule itself is necessarily wrong. If anything, a core weakness of this book (and I've heard this criticism from multiple places) is that while it attempts to tear down the existing narrative, it doesn't replace it with anything. It just points out that complexity exists. For example, we might have the narrative "there are four seasons, summer, fall, winter, and spring." And then some guy comes out of nowhere and is like "well ackshully, nuance exists, it doesnt snow in Arizona, so do they really experience winter? Some locations it's always cold like in the poles, some places it's always hot like in the tropics, sometimes it rains in the summer, sometimes it doesn't snow in the winter, sometimes some places have the seasons reversed because of being in the southern hemisphere, some places like southeastern asia might only have two seasons, a wet one and a dry one, etc."

And in the grand scheme of things, it's like "yeah, you're technically right, but this doesn't really disprove the main thesis, complexity exists but it doesnt mean the general theory is wrong or inaccurate, and many anthropologists understand exceptions to the rule exist while still accepting the general rule." And that's kind of the core weakness of this book as I understand it. Yes, history is complex. It's hard to simplify history into a simple narrative. However, if you need to, you will end up with...well...the narrative that these guys are trying to debunk. That originally we had relatively little inequality and unfreedom, something happened with society to make it more in a more authoritarian direction, and we deal with the consequences of that today as social systems have evolved in ways to protect the privileged classes at the expense of everyone else.

The person above even pointed out that this book could be used as fodder for the right, as the counter examples could provide talking points for right wingers to muddy the water. And that this could kill and sabotage left wing political movements. And in thinking about my book, and its context, and what I'm trying to accomplish, I tend to agree with that. 

What I'm trying to do here is establish a basic worldview. A frame of reference for the world in which we draw our sense of reality. My own worldview is set up in opposition to the conservative Christian worldview, which bases its own conception of reality on the bible, and tends to believe things like the world always operated under the principles of private property and what became capitalism, and that this was established by God, and deviations from it are immoral. Given 40% of the US give or take believes the world is 6000 years old or so, and that humans were created in their current form, this narrative has sway. And even among moderate christians, you still got people with one foot in that worldview, and another foot in the real worldview, where they're always reconciling religious doctrines with physical reality as we understand it.

I say, no, we need a narrative to explain how we got to where we are, so we can look at this system properly. So...I attempt to draw history from hunter gatherer societies through capitalism, but because my book isnt designed to focus on all of the details, and dwelling on the topic for too long will take away from the clarity of the book, I simplify. I point out that, "yeah, there are four seasons, summer, fall, winter, and spring", and I let the pieces fall from there. 

Does it evade nuance? Yes. Is that bad? Not necessarily. The more time I spend on a topic the more detail I can give, but the more detail that I give, the more it bogs me down, distracting from the main topics which deviated to this one to focus on. The less detail I give, the more I oversimplify, but if I know I oversimplify, is that really bad?

Well, again, if anything, the oversimplification is a necessity. The comment above was written by a leftist. leftists are often aware of the same history I draw from, and use that general narrative to critique capitalism as just an evolution of a system that favors the wealthy at the expense of all else, and calls for its abolition. I dont quite call for its abolition, but for heavy reform, BUT...I deal with a lot of the same common history that these guys do and my own analysis is parallel to leftism. I do emphasize different things than they do. They focus on the means of production and alienation, I focus more on the protestant work ethic and economic coercion. They think the solution is a new system. I think the solution is a new new deal within the existing system. There are ideological differences. 

But...again, imagine you try to point out a narrative and someone comes around complicating everything with a lot of details. And the right is a lot like this. To build on the weather ideology, we see this a lot with climate change. "Oh, its snowing in chicago, guess it still gets cold in winter, checkmate librul!"Or on evolution, I know I was taught creationism in high school and they focused on how various early transitional forms were found to be hoaxes, they emphasized microevolution over macroevolution (even though they're the same thing on different time scales), etc. And the point is, even if these small nuances exist, does that disprove the greater trends? And I would argue no.

And it's the same thing here. I think, as an author, well, if I had to replace this narrative based on this new work, what would I get? And the answer is that I would get...nothing. Just an overcomplicated picture bogged down in details that lacks any form of clarity on problem definition. And it probably misses the point. And that can sabotage political movements, because left wing political movements need a worldview, to compete with the right's worldview. We need a narrative of how we got here. And while I admit, we cant teach everything in a condensed format, we can at least teach the basics and general trends. 

The problem with this book is that it complicates conventional narratives, without replacing it. it just bogs down the reader in unnecessary details. And when youre trying to build a worldview, it paralyzes you. it leads to nihilism. It can unravel political movements, like the one I'm trying to build.

So...to respond to this book, I'll say this. I acknowledge that complexity exists in the real world. it is very difficult to explain everything that has happened in human history in only a few paragraphs, or pages. And I dont want to dedicate entire books JUST to this topic. There are other people who have covered it, and I can assure you, rereading the prehistory of private property lately, that stuff is addressed somewhat. Similar counter examples are brought up, but they dont disprove the narrative widerquist puts forward.

For me, I have to simplify though. I have to boil it down to "there are four seasons" without worrying about whether it snows in arizona or whether india experiences them the same as the US does. Why? Because the point of this book is to build a political movement with a clear problem definition and solution, and quite frankly, the exact details of the past dont matter, as long as I have a narrative to get me to the more important parts, which is capitalism. because even if the ancient world is complex, well....in the end, capitalism won. It's the worldwide system now. THe authoritarians won. They beat out these other systems through never ending conquest and imposition of their systems on the whole world. And that's kind of the point of discussing things anyway. Ya know? I spend like, maybe a couple pages discussing the distant past, and then the rest of the chapter I dedicate to discussing the history of capitalism and political movement within it. And that's what defines modern history anyway. All I really need to show is that hey, these social structures we practice today aren't natural. Things werent always like this, AND WE CAN CHANGE THEM, AND SHOULD CHANGE THEM! Is that so hard? Apparently, to people who want to write 700 page books arguing 'well ackshully some group in the distant past defied the trend", it is, but for the rest of us looking to use history of the past to educate people on CURRENT realities, it really isn't. And that's the point I'm trying to make here. 

How bad can computing get? A look at the lowest end products I could find online

 So...that article I wrote yesterday about how basic $300 laptops and $200 tablets can run a lot of modern stuff and are surprisingly useable had me wonder, well...what if I looked for the worst products available? How bad off would you be if your (or more likely, your mom or something) picked out the worst products in like walmart or something. What would you be limited to playing?

I'm gonna be honest, I dont own any of the products I want to discuss, nor do I want to buy them, but I will ascertain, based on various metrics including comparisons to products i do own, and benchmarks, how bad off you'll be if you end up with any of these.

 Windows laptop 

So, I decided to try walmart for this one and see what was the cheapest, worst laptops you can get are and dear god, it's awful. I really forget how variable quality is at the low end sometimes. I normally filter out the junk and hone in on the best specs for the money, but there's a lot of crap. You often got laptops next to other laptops 5-10x as strong for only a few dollars more. Obviously getting an i7 for $300 like my dad did isn't normal, I really searched for that deal and had microcenter within driving distance, but yeah. You should at least get an i3 or ryzen 3 system with 8 GB RAM I would say these days? But on walmart's site, I find a lot of ewaste for like $150-200 with celerons and pentiums and athlons in them. For reference, those are all low end processors. Sometimes comically low end with how bad they are. I mean, not gonna poor shame, I know how tough things can get, but yeah for the most part there's no reason to buy the vast majority of this junk. It's ewaste. You can often buy something far better for like not a lot more money. 

Anyway, sifting through the garbage, my goal today is to find the MOST garbage laptop I can. It should be noted I'm limiting myself to windows and its environment here. After all, the point is what is the worst gaming machine I can find and what you can play on it. There are a lot of awful chrome books too with what looks like really bad processors, but I wanna focus on windows first. 

Anyway, eventually I found this monstrosity for $126. It has a celeron N4020 processor, a particularly old one (there were a lot of faster N4500s, N100s, N150s, and N200s), 4 GB RAM, 64 GB storage, and for an IGP, the N4020 has a UHD 600. 

So first, let's focus on the processor. its a dual core, and it doesn't even have hyper threading. I havent seen CPUs that bad since like the early 2010s, then again anything below i3 level to me is just...terrible. I remember far cry 4 wouldnt even launch on a dual core after a bunch of people were hyping some pentium back in the day. And a lot of games from 2013 on just...thrash with horrible 1% lows framerate wise if they are on less than 4 cores. To compare it to my old 2011 laptop, it is at least better than that, and as I said, that thing felt like an Xbox 360 in practice, so maybe it could play games from before 2013 well?

4 GB RAM, here's the thing. New OSes dont do well with 4 GB RAM. I know my old laptop from 2011 is virtually unuseable on windows 10 because windows 10 liked to use 6 GB on my desktop when doing nothing at all. On 4 GB, my old laptop lagged and struggled to open anything. Was a decent experience back on 7 though, but yeah, 4 GB RAM hasn't been good since, again, before 2013 or so. After that I'd say you want a bare minimum, and opening task manager on my desktop, I'm currently using 8 GB RAM just sitting here with a few game launchers, discord, and a firefox window open with 4 tabs (mostly this blog and other links related to what I'm talking about). 

GPU wise, it has the intel UHD 600, which is probably slower than the 630. Comparing the two, its like 30% as powerful.  Now keep in mind, the 630 was 8800 GT territory and isn't too too bad. I mean, its very dated by modern standards, but again, going back to pre 2013 or so, it's sufficient for that. Comparing it to my old laptop chip, it's comparable to that from the few benchmarks available.

Now, keep in mind, I own a laptop like this. I bought it 15 years ago when i was a relatively midrange laptop that I got on sale at a good price. It had remarkable abilities for the time. Even could run BF3 which was brand new at the time. I ran it at 800x480 with 30 FPS, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, it was a marvel to see it run at all. 

However, I stopped using it after around 2015ish mostly. it got too slow. It couldnt run any new games after 2012-2013 at all well. And after W10 pushed itself on everyone, it became so slow i hated just turning it on. And after that, I just got into tablets and mobile devices instead. I kinda gave up on the idea of a budget "gaming laptop" because of how poorly tech like this ages (also why i havent been keen to get a steam deck, it's very comparable to what this laptop was at the time and I expected it to age the same way, it has admittedly aged a bit better, but not a ton better, so...yeah). 

But yeah. Would I recommend buying something like this in 2025? No. it's a horrible experience. If it's anything like that 2011 laptop, it'll take 5 minutes to boot, be unresponsive when you click on anything, and honestly, again, youre gonna be stuck with at most ps3/360 ports. Looking it up online, here's a playlist of YT videos with this CPU/GPU combo and its...worse than my old 2011 laptop was. Literally, looking at how it handles stuff like BF3, COD4, and stuff like that, I can attest that my AMD laptop from 2011 is faster than this at gaming. 

 Why would it be worse than the AMD one? If I had to guess, drivers. AMD has made GPUs for decades now whereas before intel Arc, all they had were IGPs, and despite making excellent CPUs, they often made bad GPUs and had bad drivers. I know in 2013 I recommended an intel HD 4000 laptop to a friend (comparable experience to this) and he had trouble running some games I could run simply because intel drivers sucked. Yeah at this level, I'd highly recommend buying AMD over intel when possible, just to get a better IGP. Normally with low end laptops like this the IGP is the big bottleneck with gaming as the rest of the specs are at least decent, but intel IGPs really fall on their face sometimes, which is why I'm kinda biased against them with GPU/IGP related purchases for gaming, even if they offer excellent products otherwise for the most part. 

AMD CPUs historically have been fairly mid (although are decent now), but again, when buying a laptop like this, it doesn't matter. Sometimes its better to get a slightly weaker CPU to get good IGP performance. Again, what's gonna bottleneck your system is your GPU mostly.

And RAM...4 GB RAM is awful and I know it held me back on my 2011 laptop at times, but yeah. 

Just...don't buy products like this. Again, always go for at least intel i3 or Ryzen R3 with 8 GB RAM these days if you want something like....not COMPLETELY awful. Again, at budget prices, you got a lot of options, although again, it's better to spring for something for like $300 and not end up with ewaste. If I were to buy something cheap from walmart right now, just looking at the options, spend a bit more and go for something like this or this. Something around the $300 mark that isnt awful. Which would I go for between those two?

Well, intel wise the CPU is a little better. AMD wise the GPU is better though, and keep in mind what I said about drivers. AMD aint the best at supporting their products long term, but they tend to be more functional for gaming in practice. Either way, the intel one is cheaper so the two are appropriately priced. id probably say is worth $60 for better and more consistent GPU performance though. 

What would these machines be able to do?

Well, not a ton, see how it falls on its face in these games, but many of them are rather demanding AAA games.  

Youre probably better off spending an extra hundred on a steam deck if youre serious about budget gaming, and forgoing the budget laptop experience altogether. But if you have to have a laptop, well, this is gonna destroy the chip from the cheap one. Notice how youre paying around 2-3x the price and getting 6x the performance? Low end be like that. Avoid low end. 

Really, I think the best lesson from all of this is "just get a steam deck, bro...".

Either way, the worst of the worst can at least get you xbox 360 level performance roughly, with a more modern laptop being....not all that terrible. I mean, it's not great, but it's not terrible....

 Anyway this is why i just switched to mobile devices.

Speaking of which, what about Chromebooks?

Chromebooks

ChromeOS seems a lot more limited gaming wise. It's not designed for gaming, although it's apparently able to do android gaming. Chromebooks are cheap, affordable, and while probably better than an ewaste laptop for general uses, are probably less capable of gaming. Apparently PC games are available through a compatibility layer, although given the low end nature of these systems, they probably won't run well. 

In terms of the specs, at the low end you get the same host of celeron processors that low end windows laptops can run, and I'd expect game compatibility to be worse than in a normal windows environment. However, I did manage to find a chromebook with an even worse CPU than in the windows ones, bringing us to new lows in performance.

So this thing has a N3350 processor, which is this much worse than the N4020 of the windows one. Graphically, they perform about the same, with the HD 500 in the chromebook being worse than the HD 600, but not that much worse. Still, you can't afford to lose power at this level.

Now to be fair, I know very little about chromebook environments, so on actual gaming performance, Id prefer to let videos do the talking, however, looking at videos I cant find this specific specs configuration, with videos talking about bad chromebooks still having better specs than this, and being limited on storage anyway. Still, just to compare it to say, my samsung s6 lite, on the android side, it looks comparable. Although on CPU it seems worse than the samsung exynos chip. Given the CPU was my biggest bottleneck in games like COD mobile, that doesn't bode well. 

It also barely has any storage at all. So...to answer the question what would it take for me to do browser gaming rather than actual PC gaming? Probably this thing. I don't even think I would do mobile gaming on this. Like, again, I wouldnt even have enough storage for games with its pathetic 16 GB storage. I havent used a tablet with 16 GB storage since my original memopad 7 from 2014, and that can't run decent mobile games these days. Heck, I havent used a PC with 16 GB storage since my original 90s era desktop which died in 2002.

So yeah. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel here. 

As far as what a good chromebook looks like, well it follows the pricing of windows. You can even get like intel i3 ones, although at that point I'd just want windows for gaming anyway. Still, say I settled on a middle ground and went for this. $180 for a CPU that's 2.5x as strong, and a GPU that's 4x as strong. I could probably like, at least do SOMETHING on that. For PC gaming, it can at least handle the basics in a windows environment at least. Not amazing, but like...better than the crap we've been talking about. 

Apparently on the android side, it won't even let this guy download games, so....yeah. Chromebooks seem to be a special level of gamer hell. If youre a parent who wants to get a system where your kid cant play any games and you wanna make them miserable (or just focus on school), get a chromebook. Apparently the things are useless. Not saying really dedicated people cant find way to jailbreak the things. but yeah.

With that said, let's focus on android tablets now.

Android tablets

 This is the space I retreated to for low end and portable gaming. I dont do the steam deck, as its kinda expensive and not very portable or good for what it does for the price (although better than laptops). I dont do laptops because they're even worse, and often even less powerful. Chromebooks are hell. But android? Well, android has the google play store, games meant for cheap and lower end devices (including 3D games), and yeah it's the best bang for your buck for the lower end. Even something like a $200 tablet like a Samsung A9+, which I own, is pretty capable of running most stuff Id wanna run. And if you wanna invest in an actual gaming handheld for $200, you got a lot of options. 

Still, given how powerful my older samsung s6 lite is, and how it competes with the above celerons. I suspect we'll approach new levels of low here today. On the one hand, gaming on android is like gaming on a curve, you can go a lot further given how undemanding the OS is and how the games are designed for this hardware level, but on the other hand...ewaste exists on android too.

The problem when I look at cheap android tablets, the market is flooded full of machines that dont have their specs published honestly. Theres a lot of tablets with chips that aren't even named, and RAM amounts that include a page file off of your drive so youre getting WAY less RAM than you're supposed to. As such, it's hard to properly evaluate them, especially if I do not own them, and I aint buying ewaste just to make this article. 

Still, there's a few for under $60 which have 2 GB RAM, and an unnamed quad core processor, probably an allwinner model. I would not recommend buying these, but again, I'm trying to find the worst tablets I can. 

 Looking up allwinners on google I get:

Allwinner quad-core processors are cost-effective System-on-Chips (SoCs) featuring four ARM CPU cores (often Cortex-A7 or A53) and integrated GPUs, designed for entry-level to mid-range devices like Android boxes, tablets, IoT gadgets, and smart displays, offering capabilities like 4K video decoding (H.265/HEVC) and supporting various connectivity options at low price points. Key examples include the A33 (Cortex-A7), H3 (Cortex-A7), A64 (Cortex-A53), and H618 (Cortex-A53), powering budget-friendly hardware with features like 4K video and Android/Linux support. 

Key Characteristics:

• CPU Cores: Primarily ARM Cortex-A7 (older, more power-efficient) or Cortex-A53 (newer, better performance).
• GPU: Often integrates Mali-400 MP2 or Mali-G31 MP2 for graphics.
• Video Support: Hardware decoding for H.265/HEVC (4K @ 30fps) and H.264 (1080p @ 60fps) is common.
• Target Markets: Entry-level tablets, smart home devices, OTT/Android TV boxes, automotive systems, and single-board computers (SBCs).
• Cost-Effectiveness: A major selling point, making quad-core performance accessible in budget devices. 
•  

 Basically, they're junk. I know the mali 400 and the mali g31 are really outdated chips I saw common in budget tablets like...a decade ago. I mean just comparing it to my samsung s6 lite 2020, we're talking 5% of the GPU power. With it refusing to run a lot of benchmarks at all. Dont buy devices like this guys. I mean, at this point, youre gonna have a lot more problems than not running games, these devices won't run much of anything at all. They will probably lag doing anything. Don't buy these kinds of devices.

Conclusion

So yeah, I'll be blunt. Dont buy the worst electronics you can. While you can occasionally get deals at the low end if you know how to shop and know what youre looking for specs wise, you can get good deals, for the most part, the actual bottom end of the market is an endless void of ewaste. You'll get something that not only won't game, it won't even run smoothly out of the box for the most part. It will be a terrible and frustrating experience. You probably won't even be able to run those browser games that I bashed.

Still, if you know what to look for, and are maybe willing to spend a bit more, you should be able to find something decent.

With laptops, I'd spend at least $250-300 for windows, and aim for at least an i3/r3 with 8 GB RAM. Anything with 4 GB RAM, or celeron/pentium/athlon processors are more or less certified ewaste at this point in my view. If you really know what you're doing and really patient with sales, you might even score something decent for $300-400 like an old i5/i7/e5/r7. You probably wont see laptops with dedicated GPUs until you hit like $500 on sale and those go quickly, but yeah.

Honestly, I'd probably just say buy a steam deck, but I understand people would rather buy a device for like school or office work too and non gaming tasks. 

With chromebooks, just...don't. They're not meant for gaming and seem to be designed for sadists (or parents/school administrators) who dont want you to game on the things at all. While they should run stuff off of google play, a lot of the time they wont be compatible with actual games, and have limited storage. They make ideal work/school machines though due to their low cost and locked down nature (as in, they're made for people who DONT want you to game on them). 

With android tablets....the sub $100 market is a black pit of awfulness. Just avoid. Still, in the $100s at least you should be able to score like a 4 GB Samsung A9+ or a cheap Lenovo tab based on my recent research and near $200, you can get the better 8 GB version of the A9+. Still, looking now it looks like the A11+ is out and is a bit better, but also more expensive ($220-250 for the 6 GB model). Yeah, i'd buy a A9+ on sale or a A11+ honestly. Just avoid the junk of the low end market.

Assuming you shop smartly and get something that's...not terrible, a world of gaming is open to you. A samsung tab should run most apps on the play store, although might not play the most demanding ones. And again, with PCs, something capable of running games at least through the mid point of gen 8 should be doable, and if you take my "just get a steam deck" advice, pretty much all of gen 8 minus multiplayer games, as well as early/lighter gen 9 titles.

Just...for the love of god avoid chromebooks. I'll have to research them more but again, they're literally made by the people who want cheap work machines that are extremely barebones and locked down on gaming. So yeah, I guess at the extreme low end gaming hell still exists. Which is the point of this. Just...how bad can it get? Now we know. Pretty fricking bad. Shop smartly, people. 

Yes, we should embrace a life of hedonism

 So...I had a debate with someone who had an interesting take on some subjects up my alley. Although i did have one significant difference from the guy. he seemed to value meritocracy for its own sake, and I don't. 

I find meritocracy to be rooted in structural functionalism. We need it to motivate people to work. But, assuming the work can be done without meritocracy, then meritocracy loses its meaning. Even more so, praising meritocracy for its own sake leads to the sad state of affairs we have today where we create jobs for their own sake, rather than allowing people to work less as automation makes us ever more efficient. I would argue we should change our social structures somewhat to account for technological advances, while believers in meritocracy just want more jobs for their own sake.

I saw a meme recently about how we live in an era where we can do the work of hundreds of people with one robot these days, and then it had some ancient philosopher like "I bet you just sit around eating figs all day and having orgies...right?....right?" And yeah, it was the anakin/padme one. 

We don't live in that reality. And I have my own ideas on why. It's because we're governed by the morality of protestant ascetics who thought enjoying life was sinful. Eating figs? That's gluttony! Orgies? That's lust! Not working? That's sloth! SIN! SIN! SIN! SIN EVERYWHERE! 

As if we shouldnt be enjoying life. But that's basically the logic of protestantism. Enjoying life is sinful, we shouldn't do it. We're sinful, we gotta atone to God for our sins, and this involves living a frugal life where we dont enjoy things and we just work all the time. 

And that's the ethic that dominates modern life. 

As a humanist, I have to think that somewhere along the way, we really got our priorities wrong. Maybe we should sit around all day eating figs and having orgies. Well...okay, not literally. We have far more diverse diets than figs. Of course that's why we Americans are so fat.  And maybe we shouldnt literally have orgies, I mean, that much unprotected sex with so many partners can cause complications like STD epidemics and unwanted pregnancies, although we do have ways to mitigate SOME consequences of that. And it could destroy romantic relationships. Some think the ubiquity of porn is causing issues with social relationships for example. I don't advocate for banning it, but I'm not gonna recommend people just goon 24/7 either. 

But what else can we do in a post work world? Well, I just got done talking about the ubiquity of gaming. Star Trek had the holo deck, they even talked a holo deck addiction, something i'd arguably have if we lived in that universe, but you know what? If that's what people wanna do with their lives, that's A okay in my book. I'm for freedom. And that's the thing. I'm for the freedom from forced obligations like work, but also freedom to enjoy life. The pursuit of happiness as its called. We should be free to do what makes us happy. And if that involves consumption of food, video games, certain nsfw materials between consenting partners, go for it, I don't care. As long as you aren't harming anyone, enjoy life. And people like other things too. We live in a consumerist culture. Some like to play sports, watch movies, travel, go to restaurants and amusement parks, and live the good life, and they should be able to. We seem to have nothing against hedonism when it increases someone's wealth. We just have this really nonsense work ethic to go along with it.

And don't get me wrong, to some degree, consumption increases work demands. And that's what makes consumerism and modern capitalism work. People consume, consumption increases demand, demand creates jobs, blah blah blah. But for me, it's a balance. if you have expensive and labor intensive tastes, you might have to work harder yourself for more money to enjoy that. But at the same time, if we live in a world where we can supply everyone's basic needs with a fraction of the labor we used to, AND we also live in a world of cheap and plentiful entertainment, why shouldn't basics be cheap or free? Why shouldnt we give people money? And why shouldn't people with less labor intensive or demanding tastes be able to live well while working very little?

We live in a world dominated by the protestant work ethic. but in my view, we should embrace a more hedonistic ethic. There's nothing wrong, in my view, of not wanting to work. Especially in modern society. I mean what's the point of all of this progress if we still have to work like a medieval peasant just to survive? All that protestant work ethic crap doesnt have its sociological justification in functionalism, I'd argue, it has its justification in conflict theory. We work to make rich people money while we live frugal lives always struggling to survive. And that's where we are. We act like creating jobs is such a great thing, when I just see it as subjecting people to work to justify giving them a paycheck to satisfy an ethic rooted in the logic of a long since bygone age at best. And at worst, we're literally just slaves of rich people. 

So yeah. That's my argument. There's nothing wrong with enjoying life. We SHOULD enjoy life. We should enjoy life more, and we should work less. Sorry, not sorry. F protestantism and its anti fun ethics.  

The reverse gilded age of gaming

 So...I've been thinking about that last article I wrote about the accessibility of gaming, and I've come to realize gaming is rather dualistic in nature. On the one hand, gaming sucks. Modern gaming is expensive, it's predatory AF, and hardware prices are going up and up and up. On the other hand, gaming is more accessible than ever. Your basic computer for $300 has as much graphical power as the gaming PC I got when i graduated college in 2010, and can play virtually any older game up through 2015, and many low requirement games that are newer. A $400 steam deck can run most single player games up through 2022, although may have issues with multiplayer due to linux compatibility. A $200 tablet, smartphone, or android gaming handheld can run entire generations of past games on the thing. Everyone has more access to games than I had for most of my life. They just can't run the latest and greatest. And given the state of AAA gaming....are they really missing much if they miss the modern stuff? Arguably not really. 

So we have this dualistic nature of modern gaming. We have widespread accessibility to hardware capable of playing most of the classics and even many more modern lower end games, and we have have a crisis with AAA gaming, affordability, and the rising cost of PC parts. The high end of the market for the latest and greatest is turning hellish, but the past is more accessible than ever before, and people have access to decades of older games on modern hardware.

And this is kinda why, as I contemplate my choices going forward for gaming, I might just opt out of the latest and greatest. if PC gaming and console gaming is becoming so unaffordable, I might just opt out of it. However, that doesnt mean i'll stop gaming, it just means I'll shift to sticking with older and lower requirement games. A lot of my reasoning for wanting access to the latest and greatest is not wanting to be left behind. I know what it's like to have a crappy PC that can't run anything. But in the modern era, your typical low end PC is at least half as powerful as a PS4, and closing in on base xbox one in power. Steam deck and the like has literal PS4 era power. Even smartphones are arguably at least as powerful as like a ps3 or xbox 360 these days. We are, in a way, living in a golden age. it's just gilded because of all of the crap.

If anything it's a reverse gilded age. it's a golden age but all the crap is on the outside, where we look at modern gaming and see nothing but high system requirements, mediocre experiences, and things being in decline. But at the same time, the classics are more accessible than ever. The greats go on sale all the time for just a few dollars on steam. And they can be run on any computer just about. You wanna play PS3/360 era titles? Just buy a $300 craptop and pay anywhere from $2.50-10 per game and you got some of the best games ever made. Play the wealth of f2p games that would wow past me. Play doom eternal and cyberpunk 2077 on a fricking handheld. The possibilities are endless.

Sometimes I focus so much on how bad current thing is I forget to talk about the other side of that. Past experiences are more accessible than ever and can be run on just about anything. In a way its a reverse gilded age. Crappy on the outside, golden on the inside.