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@poastoak @PoalackJokes88 He's not quite that perfect, closer to 95% I'd say. He's by self-admission mentally ill, and for a very good reason, a father with a very bad case of PSTD.

As one albeit nasty so don't judge him too hard example, he believes his father was killed by Agent Orange microdoses (no, it's not that bad even in large-ish doses, or at least not the dioxin the usual suspects blamed it on back when the latter was a campaign of their's).

But A and B are spot on, and he's avoided a lot of the usual bad tropes that consume too much of the online Right. No doubt comes from being the sort of guy with a licence to command everything afloat except nuclear powered ships. Or see my favorite anecdote he's told, quoting:

"Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire

"Capitalists spend their time building

"Communists and Islamists spend their time destroying

"This asymmetry gives the latter a 10x advantage

"One side is passive while the other side is active"

He replied:

"John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad

"I learned this the first time I navigated a supertanker under a bridge.

"Captain said 'You want to create jobs for thousands of people? Turn right in that bridge column.'

"Destruction creates a LOT of jobs for dems and even more opportunities for fraud.

"Apr 7, 2026 · 8:47 PM UTC"

This is the broken window theory of economics BTW; for a full demolishing of it, see Economics In One Easy Lesson

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2041618828493296058

https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson-pdf.pdf

@sun @PoalackJokes88 @poastoak Destruction of the sort we're talking about is not net job creation.

The "lesson" in the book is five pages, the second chapter is a less than two page illustration of this using the traditional broken window example.

Politically created destruction ... LA's in the news due to the mayoral race and I just mentioned how fireboats would have helped ... if LA had really wanted to put out that fire (revealed preferences and all).

Or the California homeless situation will never be solved because it's all of the above, targeting class enemies as well as making a great deal of money for the ruling trash.

@poastoak @PoalackJokes88 Hmmm, it occurs to me that Konrad was lucky to connect closely with at least one jati (there are thirty thousand endogamous groups layered under castes) that by definition had to do the needful, else they wouldn't come back home from sea.

He spent a couple of years on a wildly successful gas field exploration job, including an unexpected intensity of a tsunami going under his ships that then wiped out a lot of the families of his men.

But plenty of us, especially in IT I can attest, know of or have heard stories from people we trust of Indians from presumably other jati who are lazy and thus "do the needful" is even a thing in their English dialect. For example there was a case where one firm arranged to (try to) deliver the same system to at least two different small states and get paid double or more for what they did. That was too clever by half of course. Or see my stories of one, probably, particularly incompetent boiler room shop trying to scam me as of late.

Hmmm, and he hasn't talked about working under Indians, which tends to be dire. May not have happened, he/the foreign firm he was working for was as is typical thrown out of the country once they found their big find. One reason India is poor is a lot of foreign firms have been burned in that sort of way, electrical power plants were a big example of that a while ago.

That said, trying to understand India from such a remove is frankly not something most of us want to do, and see his comments about never, ever going back. He too learned a set of lessons about how bad it and at least some Indians are.

>One reason India is poor is a lot of foreign firms have been burned in that sort of way, electrical power plants were a big example of that a while ago.
A common reason I've heard is that a company will set up and they'll be absolutely buried in red tape. The red tape is of course a shakedown, not just from one person but every single link along the chain, and most western companies are legally barred from paying bribes even if it's normal practice in the places they're working in.

@PoalackJokes88 @poastoak Yeah, that'll certainly do it, if not be the majority of problems. And you indeed don't want to run afoul of the 1977 US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, don't know about other Western countries.

But here I'm talking about active measures. Not even an "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further," but kicking Konrad and I don't know who else straight out of the country after he had discovered a huge gas field, and for the power plants, ruinously changing the economic deal once they were built and connected to the grid.

The first was envy, but both the poison the well for potential future deals and accomplishments with foreigners. Modulo P.T. Barnum, but eventually a country can get a reputation so bad not all that many are willing to take a chance. The PRC for example appears to be in a harsh transition to that.

Earlier, in 1977 India enacted harsh ownership controls and IP transfer demands after socialists ousted Indira Gandhi and her Congress party (and that was very much needed). Union Carbide was foolish enough to relinquish majority control of their Bhopal plant while allowing its name to stay on it. It only took seven years for what was likely a sabotage disaster, preceded by the plant switching from packaging etc. for the market to making dangerous stuff. IBM was wiser, had much more IP to protect, and just plain got out by 1978.

Overall, one general label for all this is "regime risk." Something we should keep in mind during these decline and fall of the American Republic days....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

I can't find the original article that was a play by play of the Bhopal disaster, but it immediately jumped out how many engineers were indians that seemed to have no idea what they were doing. Knowing how they hire, it was likely a lot of them were simply nepo hires from family connections. At least one seemed to be in an instrumental role who is currently running a very large company (I can't find his name though). "Sabotage" could simply be incompetence. I.e. someone was screwing up or stealing so their tank was low, and to avoid trouble they decided to fill it up with water instead. It's absolutely insane to blame Union Carbide for a disaster that was carried out at every level by Indians.

>Earlier, in 1977 India enacted harsh ownership controls and IP transfer demands
And that's the cherry on top. I didn't know about that part, but it's even more their fault because they *kicked out* the competent people then blamed them when things went wrong.

@PoalackJokes88 @poastoak Turns out the story of Konrad and finding "the largest natural gas field in world history" was a lot more complicated than I'd imagined, although this being India that's no surprise.

"When we arrived, most of the crew were good ol’ boys from Mississippi and Louisiana. But the Indian government had set an aggressive schedule to replace us with Indians.

"We had more problems than I can recount here. The most pressing involved three things: the caste system, honesty, and safety.

"I was chief mate, the first officer, so the crew was my responsibility."

He's explained elsewhere what that job entails, and how a lack of such people below the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO, highest-ranking US Naval officer) is ... bad.

So, he got a melange of Indians of all sorts, and lots of jati (maybe many families then moved close enough to get killed by the 2004 tsunami instead of being from the area???). This essay being about Henry Nowak and the Sikh family who killed him, he talks about them and for example how they lost their reputation for being the best bodyguards (Indira Gandai of course), and a lot about one particular Sikh without whom the operation would have failed.

All sorts of details, one standout is how a jati of sewage guys got exhausted, and Konrad started to suit up to continue the job and how the Sikh did the same after making sure no one else would know about Konrad actually going through with that. Because:

"It was explained to me later that the entire crew would have lost all respect for me if I had touched sewage, and the company would have had no choice but to fire me."

Worth reading until he gets to the multi-cultural blathering (a man of his time, for better or worse), but also how this Sikh murder family ... well, someone commented about that pajeet Texas "Rally Against Rednecks" (see a bit more about it in second link, also search for it), something to the effect that they were "speedrunning the path to the gas chambers."

Many of us has noted in the US a catastrophic recent collapse in the reputation of Indians. This is not going to help, although for us there's way too many Sikhs also sharing the same last name of his subordinate Singh (not the same as the family in the U.K.) who as illegal alien semi truck drivers have killed many Americans as of late....

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2062224299914571863

https://shitposter.world/notice/B6whQHqz8xyBCrCfTc