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I have said in recent posts that the world economy is hitting resource limits of many kinds. These limits include oil, coal, and other sources of energy, including uranium, used as a fuel for nuclear power generation. Because of these limits, the world economy is being forced to shrink back. In my opinion, the direction it is headed in is toward smaller, mostly less-advanced, more independent, economies. This change is also likely to lead to various types of financial collapse for many of today’s Advanced Economies.
Per-capita consumption of these early used energy sources has shrunk since peaking in 2007.
Most of us remember the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. With a declining supply of what used to be inexpensive energy resources, many economies have done poorly. Many of the wealthier countries have papered over their problems with an increasing amount of debt, but the limits to this added-debt approach are now being hit. It is the debt problem that leads to financial collapse.
In this post, I will elaborate on these ideas.
[1] Countries that are today’s Advanced Economies (members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)) are likely to fare poorly in this coming contraction.
The Advanced Economies include the US, most of Europe, Japan, Australia, and a few other countries. Their per-capita consumption of oil, coal and nuclear electricity resources has been shrinking significantly since about 2005. The year 2005 was approximately the peak of “conventional” oil supplies. More oil has become available since this date, but this oil is generally more expensive to extract.
[2] Energy consumption for the Other than Advanced Economies is hitting limits, too.
The Other than Advanced Economies were able to grow in their per-capita use of these three types of fuels between 2001 and about 2013, but since then, their per-capita quantity of these fuels has leveled off. The big impetus for growth was China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. World demand for inexpensive finished goods empowered China to start extracting coal and other minerals in quantity. But coal mines deplete, just as oil fields deplete, leading to the flat per-capita availability of energy supply for the Other than Advanced Economies since about 2013.
[3] With these changing patterns for the two groups, one potential problem is conflict.
The Other than Advanced Economies have figured out that they are creating a huge share of the world’s goods, but their per-capita use of energy is much lower than that of the Advanced Economies. Why should the Advanced Economies get so much of the finished products available from the world’s resources, when most of the work (and the pollution) has taken place in the Other than Advanced Economies? I would expect this type of thinking to take place in China, Russia, India, Iran and other countries in this group. These countries believe that they could get along perfectly well without the Advanced Economies and their high usage of energy.
[4] With these changing patterns, a second potential problem is financial collapse, especially for the Advanced Economies.
Each economy can be encouraged to grow in two different ways: (1) Through more debt, indirectly adding to more “demand” for finished goods, or (2) Through added supply of inexpensive energy products. Adding debt to pull the economy forward seems to work well if there is not a problem with hitting resource extraction limits. Once an economy starts hitting resource extraction limits, however, the added debt partly adds inflation, rather than finished goods and services, to the output mix. Thus, the debt approach no longer works well.
The world as a whole is now hitting resource extraction limits. Not only do individual citizens become unhappy with the higher inflation level, but investors demand higher interest rates for lending. This higher interest cost becomes a huge problem for the Advanced Economies that already have very high debt levels.
A recently issued report by the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows what is happening in the US.
In a sense, the reports that the CBO publishes are “Best Case” scenarios. The reports are optimistic in two different ways: (1) They assume that no more added-debt bail-out programs will be needed, as were used several times in recent years, and (2) They assume that inflation will quickly fall to 2%, so that interest rates can fall quickly and stay lower from now on.
Even with these assumptions, the results are disturbing. Note that on Figure 3 (in both charts shown), the especially significant increase in debt starts around 2008. This is when the US, and likely most of the other Advanced Economies, started to hide their energy problems by using more debt stimulus.
Even when the most optimistic possible estimate of the future “primary deficit” is made, and when the most optimistic possible forecast of future “net interest” outlays is made, there is still a huge build-up of debt. The implication is that very large tax increases will be needed to maintain current programs. Even with these huge tax increases, the problem will get worse and worse, year after year. There is a need to cut back on existing government programs to avoid adding the need to pay even more interest on debt in the future.
[5] If an economy is forced to shrink back, debts of all kinds become more difficult to repay with interest.
Any economy needs to grow, in order to repay debt with interest. A growing economy has a surplus with which to pay interest.
On the other hand, a shrinking economy tends to lead to major debt defaults. Leveraged debt is especially likely to cause problems.
The CBO is now forecasting that the US government could run into debt limit problems as soon as July 2025. Perhaps the US government will find ways around the current apparent shortfall, but the issue of the government not being able to meet its debt obligations without major tax increases or reductions in programs still looms in the background.
I expect that within the next three months, we will start to see loan defaults of some type, such as defaults by hedge funds. Governments will want to step in, but they will be limited by their own financial problems. Defaults on many other kinds of debts are likely to start taking place, as well. If inflation rates rise, and interest rates rise with them, defaults on many kinds of debt could start taking place.
[6] It seems likely that nearly all the Advanced Economies will have similar problems.
The Advanced Economies have tended to offer their citizens many benefits, including pensions for the elderly and some type of healthcare coverage. Many of them have financially supported what they are hoping will be energy types that will take the place of the energy types they seem to be losing.
If an economic system is not growing as fast as it has in the past (because of low energy consumption growth, and lack of debt stimulus), or is actually shrinking, these economies are likely to face a choice between either cutting back on promised programs or raising taxes. Governments will find themselves needing to cut back on programs that they have promised to their citizens, or, alternatively, they will need to default on their debt.
[7] Adding to the problems of the Advanced Economies will be the issue of goods and services needing to be made closer to home.
Without enough oil for all purposes, a logical way to cut back is to use less oil for international shipping. This would tend to reverse the trend toward globalization that started many years ago.
Figure 4 shows that the US started shifting heavy industry to other countries with better supplies of oil as early as 1974. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 gave another reason (or excuse?) for shifting heavy industry to countries with less expensive, more abundant, energy supplies.
I expect that in the next few years, the Advanced Economies are likely to need to move industrial production back closer to home, to save on limited world oil supplies. This will be difficult to do, especially in a timeframe of less than 20 to 30 years. New mines will be needed for minerals, but the lead times on these are very long, typically 13 years or more. New processing plants for these minerals will likely be needed as well, potentially adding to the lead time. Whole new, short supply chains will be required. Finally, goods and services manufactured closer to home will need to be transported to citizens, sometimes in new ways.
Many of today’s manufactured goods require imports of minerals from China or Russia. To the extent that specific minerals from these countries can no longer be imported, additional closer sources will be needed. This will further add to manufacturing difficulties.
[8] It will not be surprising if governments, or parts of governments, collapse.
History indicates that when civilizations reach resource limits, governments tend to fail. A recent example of this was the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991, after an extended period of low oil prices. The Soviet Union was a major exporter of oil, and the low oil prices (plus other internal problems) led to the inability to repay promised debt. The separate republics within the Soviet Union remained, so the people were not left completely without a government. I expect something similar may happen elsewhere in the future.
[9] History suggests that even in a financial collapse, the entire economy will not fall apart, all at once.
Incremental changes are likely to take place. Governments are likely to try to make cutbacks. Financial investments are likely to do especially poorly in the next several years, and high-paying jobs seem likely to disproportionately disappear. The economy will no longer be able support as many specialists as are working today, in many industries.
The electricity supply likely won’t fall off all at once; instead, electricity will become increasingly intermittent, with some areas having more outages than others. Diesel and gasoline will perhaps be available, at least part of the time.
New car sales in the Advanced Economies are likely to fall very soon, leaving citizens mostly dealing with used cars, and the difficulty of finding appropriate replacement parts for used cars. The problem of “empty shelves” in stores is likely to return and get worse.
There will likely be an increasing divide between the relative handful of citizens who are doing well, and the many others. In fact, we are already seeing a trend in this direction in the US. But many of today’s big spenders are likely to be knocked down in any coming economic contraction.
[10] Perhaps the good news in this contraction is that major international wars may not be a problem.
Instead, civil wars and local skirmishes may be the order of the day. There may not be resources available to fight long-distance wars, even if many citizens might favor this approach. Wars give an excuse for more debt and more income for soldiers, so they are always popular in troubled economic times. But a lack of materials for making military supplies (including insufficient sources of antimony) and the inability to raise debt financing may impede efforts.
[11] What should we expect in the future?
The US and many other Advanced Economies are likely heading into a worse and longer lasting financial crisis than the 2008 crisis, starting as soon as this summer. The problem will likely not start out as a full financial collapse. Instead, various leveraged borrowers will encounter difficulties. Gradually, the finances and very structures of many government organizations are likely to be threatened. Some government structures that we currently depend upon may disappear.
How the long term will unfold is unclear. We know that ecosystems often operate in wide cycles, and that economic systems are a kind of ecosystem. This relationship suggests the possibility of a later renewal.
Furthermore, Eric Chaisson, in Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, points out that there is a very long term trend in the universe toward more complex and more energy-dense structures. His analysis seems to suggest the possibility of evolution toward a different kind of more complex, energy-dense economy ahead.
In this ever-changing world, there may very well be opportunities for personal success. It will likely be a time of major readjustment, however. Perhaps quite a few people will be able to do well if they can keep their eyes open for opportunities to prosper, making the best possible use (or reuse) of resources that are available.
Appendix: Background on Oil, Coal and Electricity from Uranium
Oil Background
Oil was at one time a very inexpensive fuel, even when adjusted for inflation to 2023’s price level.
With the low prices that were available before 1970, oil could be used widely. It could be used to create electricity, and roads could be paved. Many people could afford cars who could not afford them previously.
In 1973, oil prices soared (Appendix: Exhibit 2). Appendix: Figure 3 shows that between 1981 and 2021, falling interest rates helped to make higher oil prices more tolerable. More debt could be added, and with lower interest rates, monthly payments could stay low.
Appendix: Exhibit 2 also shows that a big part of the problem since 2021 is that while debt levels are now high, interest rates will not stay down. This means that the cost of drilling new wells is now higher, and the general cost of investment in the economy is higher.
Appendix: Exhibit 1, indicates that, since 1991, the greatest per-capita quantity of oil that customers were able to afford occurred in the 2004 to 2007 period. This was a time in which home mortgage debt stimulus was used to keep the US economy growing; it was the time of Alan Greenspan and the NINJA (No Income, No Jobs, No Assets) home loans. The resulting sub-prime US housing bubble is reported to have lasted from 2003 to 2007. This sub-prime debt bubble is at least part of what led to the 2008 financial crisis.
The high US demand for oil as a result of the home mortgage debt bubble of 2003 to 2007 helped world oil prices to rise and consumption to rise. More recently, per-capita world oil consumption has been down, especially in 2020. Oil supply has not regained the 2004 to 2007 level, or even the 2018 level, in the most recent estimates.
Oil extraction has traditionally been a huge source of tax dollars, especially for oil exporters, even when oil was sold at relatively low prices. Anything that replaces oil needs to fill this role as well, because the economy needs energy (and taxes from energy) to operate. This tax revenue is a way to share what is sometimes called the “surplus energy” of the oil with the government of a country. At currently high extraction costs, this surplus energy benefit is largely disappearing.
Coal Background
Appendix: Figure 1 shows that the fuel in second largest supply has been coal. Its supply grew greatly after 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization. This growth in coal supply did not last long because coal that was cheapest-to-extract and closest-to-markets quickly depleted. Appendix: Figure 1 shows the peak in per capita coal supply was hit in 2011.
Coal helped start the industrial revolution. By 1700, it grew to be the dominant fuel in England. Coal gradually replaced firewood and was used in many new ways.
Appendix: Figure 5 shows the ways coal has recently been used. It is used directly in industry, besides being burned for electricity.
Nuclear Background
Appendix: Figure 1 shows that the peak in per-capita nuclear energy production occurred in 2001. But at one time there had been great hope for nuclear power.
It was known as early as the 1950s that fossil fuel supplies were likely to face depletion issues as soon as 2050. Physicist M. King Hubbert was of the belief that electricity from uranium would be too cheap to meter. He also believed that the quantity of electricity produced could be very high. Neither of these things has come to pass.
Early nuclear reactors were built to avoid problems that engineers could see needed to be avoided. This approach led to accidents: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). It became clear that design upgrades were needed, raising costs and lengthening timelines for building reactors.
In theory, there is quite a bit of uranium to be extracted, but getting the price up high enough, for long enough, has been a problem. The World Nuclear Association shows this chart of production through 2022. Production in recent years has been lower than consumption.
Fortunately, there has been a supply of nuclear warheads which could be down blended to provide uranium for nuclear reactors. This supply of nuclear warheads is now close to being exhausted. If nuclear power is to be expanded, more uranium will be needed.
Other details have proven problematic as well. In theory, the spent fuel can be reprocessed and used as fuel for reactors, but in practice, this process seems to be costly and time-consuming to set up.
Another issue is the high cost of building new nuclear reactors, and the need for debt to fund this cost. Clearly, the higher the interest rate, the higher the cost. Not many organizations can fund these high costs, in advance of actually getting electricity out and delivered to customers.
In general, to keep costs low for customers, the sale of electricity is priced at the margin. In many places, electricity from wind turbines and solar panels is given “priority.” As a result, wholesale electricity prices tend to be too low for electricity from nuclear power plants, driving them out of business. The price level is certainly not high enough to pay high taxes to governments. Such a margin would be needed if nuclear were to have a chance of truly replacing the benefits we have had in the past from inexpensive-to-produce oil.
Gail some clarifications and extensions of your posts by Patrick Raymond .
https://lachute.over-blog.com/2025/04/contextualisation-sur-une-intervention-de-gail-tverberg.html
This is pretty good, and quite long. This is one paragraph.
AI is an incredible multiplier. Optimus-3 could well be a game changer. Long lived devices have a major problem, for most goods and services things are probably as good as they can get. If no need for replacements, then there is no turnover in gdp.
Dennis L.
good to know that the laws of thermodynamics no longer apply Dennis
Russia and America talks in Istanbul — Iran and America talks in Muscat . Where is Europe ? Sidelined .
“Europe” talks but does anybody really listen?
okay one more, amazing AI.
I didn’t think it was right to use Our Finite World as a song title, so it’s Finite Planet.
more at my YouTube channel, I can’t be posting them all here.
It’s a finite planet
Made of rocks including granite,
Former islands such as Thanet,
Filled with girls with names like Janet,
And birds such as the gannet,
Paintings by modernists like Manet,
And bureaucrats who want to plan it.
AI should we ban it?
a ship to Mars, should we man it?
so many questions, few answers.
AI would readily accept your lyrics and put some music to them.
You did a great job on this! Thanks!
AI has “learned” what pop music is, probably most other styles too, but light pop music fits well with the serious themes of OFW.
Looking at shoe making machines they can be had from Eastern Europe and Indian.
There is no reason to believe a tariff on China will bring clothes and shoes making to US. It will move to Indian and Eastern Europe and other low cost countries.
That could be. I was thinking more of Croc’s and “flip flops” that could be made in the US.
Optimus-3 can knock them out. I think Musk is making 10,000 this year for Tesla use, increased production going forward, Optimus making Optimus.
Have no idea where all this goes except space, the final frontier for manufacturing.
Dennis L.
This evening, I went with my husband and two sons to a Korean restaurant that we go to occasionally. In the past, the place has been quite full, primarily with Korean guests. One time, we ended up sitting at the low tables preferred by some Korean guests because none of the regular tables were available. But tonight, the restaurant was practically empty. The price of the most popular meal (be-bim-bop) stayed at $13.95.
Are the tariffs affecting restaurant attendance significantly?
Margaret and I went to a restaurant in Woodstock, NY. It was lightly attended. The customers are a split between locals and NYC weekend tourists.
no doubt the volatility in US economics/finance/markets is influencing many people to reign in their discretionary spending for the time being.
it could be cyclical again, after the panndemic, people who had been somewhat forced to refrain from spending got back to prepanndemic spending mostly.
the 2nd half of this decade has begun on a bumpy path, no doubt it will get bumpier later this decade.
IC is wobbling and will continue to do so into the 2030s, this should be no surprise.
smaller weaker countries like the UK will struggle to remain in The Core, and spending there may plummet and never recover, time will tell.
I am betting that even conquering Greenland will not bring back pre-pandemic spending. Conquering Alberta though would be another matter.
I thought spending recovered from the panndemic.
ah yes Alberta would be a fine prize.
Canada as the 51st state would be amazing, though Trump can’t figure it out that it would be a huge Democrat state.
How about turning each province into a state, giving the Canadians 20 Senate and maybe 50 House seats, some of which would be picked up by the Republicans?
Non! The Québecois would never agree to that. Trump would have to liberate them and grant them independence in order to shut them up.
I think 2017 was top, then it started to decline. 2019 was already lower. Of course the usual suspects take 2019 as the baseline.
World per capita crude oil supply peaked in 2017. Total oil extracted was higher in 2018, but population rise was greater. The year 2019 was already on the way downhill, on a per capita oil supply basis.
Decline of disposable income, coincident with decline of per capita oil production; you called it.
Dennis L.
Talking with a friend in China the tariffs are not even in the news. The strong winds with gusts of 93 miles per hour caused schools to close early on Friday.
The people in charge decide which information to give out.
I wish the thieves in DC would stop calling the Chinese peasants. Some of the Chinese I know have PhDs from Peking University a world class university. I have visited the library of a Chinese high school. Their periodical collection for science and engineering is better than most US universities.
Chinese engineers certainly have been successful in what they are doing.
I have had a little connection with the Chinese university system. I taught a short course on “Energy and the Economy” at Petroleum University of China at Beijing in 2015.
If you look at the list of Academic Articles I show on the sidebar, four of the six articles listed have Chinese co-authors. These were articles in which the research was originally started by Chinese authors. I helped them in various ways, including better American English, getting the papers together.
It looks like 50% of Chinese rural workers are classed as “peasants”…..
…by the Chinese Government.
Number of peasant workers in China (million) and the percentage of the rural population:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-peasant-workers-in-China-million-and-the-percentage-of-the-rural_fig5_366935842
Source: number of peasant workers is from the Peasant Worker Survey Report 2009–2018 issued by the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics; data on the Chinese rural population is from the World Bank database
“Change Our Minds, Change Our Lives?” by CHS
https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/change-our-minds-change-our-lives?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1692393&post_id=161203427&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=4cyn7j&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Excerpt: We’re also accustomed to permanent abundance. It’s been 52 years since gas stations ran out of gas due to geopolitical events (1973-74). The idea that gas stations could run out of gas and shelves could be stripped bare is incomprehensible to us now–just as it was then, until it happened. Yet the supply chains that deliver all this abundance are even more optimized / vulnerable to disruption than they were 52 years ago.
In the 16 years since the global financial system almost collapsed (2008-09), the vulnerabilities in the system have increased beneath the system’s apparent stability.
It’s been 44 years since the U.S. and global economies experienced a deep recession that couldn’t be reversed with a flood of central bank / fiscal stimulus. Now both the monetary stimulus and fiscal largesse are problems, not solutions.
People reading OurFiniteWorld.com have been more aware than most people of the energy issues facing the world.
We in Atlanta have had more recent gasoline outages than CHS talks about. I don’t remember the dates now, but it seems like we have had two hurricane-related outages and one broken pipeline outage. Atlanta is a long ways from Houston, so if there is not enough oil, Atlanta can feel the outage.
The big thing that caused the fuel unavailability problem was political leaders who said, “We will arrest (or fine) anyone who price gouges because of the fuel shortages.” If they had not said that, the market would have quickly used trucks to supply fuel that could not get from Houston to Atlanta. But once there was a price cap, no one would provide extra oil at extra cost. Some people ended up not being able to drive to work for a day or two, until the crisis was over.
Price fixing never works the way politicians think it does.
Trump slashes nasa funding
Guess he, who should be more informed, is not confidemt about space
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/trump-white-house-budget-proposal-eviscerates-science-funding-at-nasa/
Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA
“This would decimate American leadership in space.”
NASA has been a parasitic organization for a long time. He has been fairly erratic of late, but this is a perfectly defensible cut.
Yep, at the brink of global collapse, defunding luxury off-planet concerns and allocating more funds for the military sealing off of the southern border of the wealthiest country in the world which is bordered by some of the poorest countries, makes perfect sense if the desire is to avoid chaotic collapse.
As long as Dragonfly is funded I am happy. Arrival 2034.
oh no, humans are not going “to the stars”?
I’m guessing not even Mars.
david,
Mars would be a challenge, probably could get humans there but the damage from radiation might be more than the human body can endure and the return trip would not be helpful in that regard.
Optimus-x will go to space.
Dennis L.
You mean, the libtard paradise of Minnesota? Sorry, they will have 55 sexes, none of them geared toward repriduction.
It will go to space, realizes why the hell it is there, and explodes.
This is a forum about limits, I am/have facing/faced one with knowledge, I am out and vacuum tubes are so yesterday.
I asked Copilot if it could take a GitHub project, design a curriculum for me, tutor me and go from there. I then asked if it could help me mind-map my learning process; mind mapping is so today. Answer is yes.
Recently, it was very helpful with an Excel VBA project, much better at organizing modules. Copilot works so far for me. It is good with Multisim, answers work when measured.
I see education changing in the technical areas and I have recently been in the math and electronics courses at a CC; they are damn good, the textbooks are better, copilot is a hell of a tutor. The highschoolers(they can attend free in MN) are off the world smart, homeschooled for the most part.
I am going to try a project, last major one of my life, it appears one can have a MIT level education(assuming one has the requisite intelligence) on line for close to free.
What is missing is having a discussion group where learning is in part explaining what you think you know. Probably can find one online without the face-to-face.
Our world is changing rapidly, protesting seems a narrative of yesterday and socially it is very polarizing. Narratives have difficulty growing, building new ideas on the old. Don’t have a clue how all this works out, but technical education is very different today. Technical seems more incremental, Ohm’s law still works, add reactance and one has AC; it can often grow. Narratives have to discard too much which does not; that is unfortunate for our society, much friction, sometimes horrible wars.
A diatribe on Copilot, this stuff seems to work and it is very cheap.
Dennis L.
All the curriculum was there for years. No rocket science about that.
Education is one of the easier subjects to automate. In the old days it was basically the only job availanle for educated women, which is why it grew big.
Teachers anfmd admins are going out.
The thing I would point out is that you live in a fairly rich part of the US. Your state government has been able to provide essentially free technical education. The state government has high enough taxes that it can help subsidize the cost of this education.
At the state university where my husband teaches, there are fees that all students must pay, besides the per-semester tuition cost. One of these is indirectly to support the football stadium and associated costs. Another is a parking fee. Another is a requirement that each student (even part-time) buy a minimum number of meals at the school cafeteria. There is a wide range of food choices, but someone needs to pay for this. Georgia (where I live) has quite low state taxes, so costs ends up being borne by the student.
Another thing I would point out is that you, as a fairly successful retired individual, have your home, a vehicle and money for food available. Many (or perhaps most) young people have to worry about getting enough income to cover these basics, besides the cost of education. Students coming from foster care or from very poor homes have the most problems.
Kennesaw State University, where my husband teaches, has quite a lot of homeless students. These students don’t have money for the essentials. Some of these young people live in tents in the woods near campus. There is a program to provide at least some food for these young people. It is difficult to do homework, living in a tent.
Gail,
No argument; I suspect much of this is due to off shoring of “simple” jobs so the rich can make more money; much/some is women and men divorcing with no fault divorce laws and the kids suffering.
Kids are a “team” effort, two can double team a kid and simply wear him/her down.
We in the western world have lost our narratives to the “elites” who know it all. Bertrand Russell had all the answers in the sixties, at least many at Madison thought so, atheism was so with it. Purchased the book, never could complete it. Kids/youth need a narrative which works 20% of the time and sufficient thou shall not’s to avoid as many mistakes as possible. It needs to be simple, adolescents are very yes/no types. Yes, this from a data intensive.
From Copilot:
At Kennesaw State University, there are 2,091 teaching staff (instructional faculty) and 4,683 administrators and non-instructional staff. This means the ratio of administrators to teaching staff is approximately 2.24:1.
Ah, I could solve the homeless/hunger problem for the students, perhaps the non teaching staff could learn to code.
As for retirement, when I worked my quote always was, “I am running at 110% of my ability.” My baseball metaphor was if I stepped up to bat the stitches didn’t come off the ball, I was not hitting it hard enough. Probably still doing that, but capacity is not what it once was and naps are more frequent. Bummer.
Dennis L.
Nobody buys a car which will fail to start 80% of the time
No youth will take a mantra which will work 20% of tge time
Never conceived of homeless students. Collapse grinds on
It is sad. There has been a problem with students wanting to sleep in lounges.
I had been thinking re-industrialization was impossible due to lack of smart people. But now I see it will not be people from the slums of New York state rather the home schooled of the heart land designing running the factories. Thank you for the good news.
Capitulation .
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/trump-exempts-computers-handsets-chips-reciprocal-tariff-blitz
This is something essential for the US. We cannot make these ourselves in the US. Common sense wins!
” Common sense wins! ”
It went missing when DJT started the NONSENSE trade wars . Maybe ” Common sense is not that common ” after all .
Trade wars have been used historically. They can be understood by people as part of a salable narrative. They are a whole lot more acceptable than telling people about resource limits and the fact that population tends to outgrow available resources.
a weapon in the hands of the chinese, who can now restrict these.
Or they can make more of them and charge as much as they like.
MoA Copy/paste .
” This is a curious way to 1. undermining U.S. manufacturing and 2. to increase the trade imbalance.
High price, high technology products can now be imported from China with low tariffs applied to them while low tech intermediate goods from China, which U.S. producers need for their products, will have super high tariffs on them.
If this stands it will lead to more low tech production of intermediate goods within the U.S. while the high tech production will stay and expand in China.
China had retaliated to the U.S. tariffs by applying a 125% tariff on all U.S. products. It is unlikely to exempt specific categories from that. At rates above 100% trade between China and the U.S. will within a short timeframe come to a complete halt.
The U.S. has now exempted some 22% in value of its previous imports from China from tariffs while China keeps tariffs on all U.S. products high. The trade between the two countries will thereby become more unbalanced than ever before.
The U.S. will continue to import 22% of its previous imports from China while its exports to China will shrink to zero. The absolute trade imbalance will thereby be higher than it was before Trump started his tariff war.
All this is a curious way of acknowledging defeat in the war. The rolling of heads will start tomorrow. ”
Using this approach, the amount of oil that is used in transporting goods across the ocean will fall. This is critical. Also, the new factories built in the US will be very automated, perhaps using Chinese-made computers.
I don’t believe this:
“At rates above 100% trade between China and the U.S. will within a short timeframe come to a complete halt.”
An awfully lot of what China exports to the US is essential, especially minerals they mine. China’s share of the total cost of exported goods may be small, so trade will continue, even of minerals supposedly banned for export.
Some of the minerals may be cheap to mine, but the pollution secondary to mining is horrible for the land and the country.
They are however doing some interesting things to reclaim desert and mechanize agriculture.
Dennis L.
Chinese exporters dumping cargo into the sea to avoid Trump tariffs.
Hong Kong urges end to cargo dumping amid tariff tensions
Hong Kong exporters are warning against the practice of abandoning cargo at sea to evade tariffs, describing this action as “irrational,” according to reports from the “South China Morning Post.” Experts highlight that such practices can harm the reputation of both the companies involved and the country as a whole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/hong-kong-urges-end-to-cargo-dumping-amid-tariff-tensions/ar-AA1CKjmm
“Experts highlight that such practices can harm the reputation of both the companies involved and the country as a whole.”
Not to mention the environment. So much for ‘Saving the Planet’.
Wow! Real, immediate consequences to high tariffs. Less imported goods from China, quickly.
Maybe less imported goods is a feature, not a problem.
Optimus-3, robotaxi, AI are a whole. Musk has a goal to make one robotaxi every six seconds.
I will let someone else do the Copilot digging, but how many robotaxis are necessary to replace most of the auto fleet in the US? Per Musk personal autos are used about 10 hours per week. What is the saving in resources of utilizing a car “full time.”
What is the difference in oil usage in the “mileage” of a robotaxi compared to an auto?
Is it a change or a “convenience?” Maybe, but in gross time, which is faster, Amazon or going out to Walmart and wandering the aisles to find something?
Watching Optimus-3, this changes the entire import/export/ labor problem from the producer’s point. We can make it here and we can make it as cheap as it can be done using solar electricity. A $10K robot has a much different yearly cost schedule that a human; things are different. AI appears to be able to engineer it. Soon, we will do it in space, Otimus-X, Starship, mine the asteroids. Musk is has a goal of 10K Optimus-3 this year(fact check that one, close enough.)
We will cope. Life is getting better. Education will become very cheap and accessible, AI is an incredible tutor. Kids can start life without debt other than to the parents who love and raise them.
AI for education: going to upgrade my copilot so it can accept schematics; trying to learn a six inch pile of books in a semester. Could do that in my twenties and get top exam scores; bit older now. Wondering if I can input my goals, which are in the area of farming and have it design curriculums in say electronics and also be a side by side tutor? The electronics can be simulated on multisim, experiments on a bread board have their place, but multisim is real time. Wondering about a wave form in a design? Insert an oscilloscope and simulate the circuit with a few mouse clicks.
The world is different, it is here. The good news, we will burn less oil, we will pollute less, our finiteworld will get an emerging, new lease on life. Amazing, n’est pas?
Dennis L.
Musk has no shortage of Chinese factories and he would rather prefer to make some of his contraptions there, including the stuff you just mentioned.
It is amazing in its image since it will never exist. It only exists in your increasingly off-balanced world.
I am wondering if the goods that the US will focus on producing are
Food, including a lot more beans and less meat
Clothing
Shoes of some sort
Replacement parts for vehicles
A few basic medicines
We will still need computers. I expect we will need to purchase them from China.
Keeping the electric grid operating will be a major challenge. We may need to make replacement parts ourselves.
Intel still make computer chips in the US. What we don’t make are flat screens. They are made in Taiwan.
CM, explains why the Trump Admin locked in on tariffs. Included is the 1 hr interview between Scott Bessent and Tucker Carlson. It gives another side to the story.
https://peakprosperity.com/things-will-get-really-messy-unless/
I haven’t listened to the whole Bessent-Carlson interview, but many things are different in 2025 compared to 1981. For example:
1. Fossil fuel and uranium resources are very much more depleted. It will be much harder (or impossible) to restart industry now.
2. Interest rates were at nosebleed levels in 1981, something like 17%. These could be reduced to push the economy along.
3. World population is much higher.
4. The world is now used to supply lines extending around the world.
5. Debt, including leveraged debt, is up at nosebleed levels.
6. Banks look like they could be brought down by high interest rates, or by the end of the carry trade, or by falling home prices, or any number of other things.
7. The US has an awfully lot of retirees to support today.
to quote from that piece:
………/////Well folks, after years and years of waiting, it’s finally happening. The long experiment with attempting perpetual can-kicking has finally reached the end of the road.
Everybody who was paying any attention at all, and could perform basic math, knew that the US could not continue on its profligate path forever. The practice of spending beyond our means was not a forever deal. How could it be?////////………
Just like everyone else—-American workers want high paying jobs
And just like everyone else American workers want to spend their high wages on cheap goods.
but the peasants making cheap goods do it by taking away american jobs, because they start to make everything cheaper—–so American workers start to complain about having no jobs.
But the American nation (same as we Brits) like to go on pretending we are a ”major power”
The can has finally run out of road.
Mid 2020s anyone?
Hmm,
1. Well, Norm, we are both kicking the can down the road at this point, my road seems to have a visible end, yours?
2. Not sure about that one, economics seems to require infinite growth, biology does not have infinite growth, my thesis, economics sits on biology. Biology is not infinite, ask a dinosaur.
3. As for high paying jobs, perhaps much of that is secondary to marketing, make people unhappy with what they have, or grow the economy for useless stuff.
4. I think the peasants were enticed by 3.
5. There are some who seem to rise to the top and when they arrive they find they really are careerists only; so conquer the world, make it a better place. That one seems to be the same on both the left and right. Here we have people who cannot build.
6. Have we run out of road? Maybe, but Optimus-3 looks pretty good, probably can go to space, the final frontier.
7. If we can mine space, we can get rid of pollution in a major way, we can find our cubic mile of Pt, make terrestrial earth a H economy and with Optimus-3 on earth finally have personal maids.
Earth is finite, it is a very well constructed spacecraft, life seems to be self organizing. It is a period of reorganization, Optimus-3 looks to change things greatly, Tesla is making cheap, possibly pollution free transportation. Tesla is not a car company, it is a manufacturing methodology, Optimus changes everything.
Economics may well be changing, it follows biology which is self organizing. Economics as known is so yesterday.
Dennis L.
I agree:
“Economics may well be changing, it follows biology which is self organizing. Economics as known is so yesterday.”
I have to agree with norm here mid 2020s is what I thought also
i definetely think we will look book and think of 2025 as the point when the tipping point finally tipped.
doubtless though, the maganuts will be in denial for a bit longer
I can guarantee that people like Dennis L will continue to be in denial till their last moment.
he will have a platinum tombstone
Paranoiagett:
“i definetely think we will look book and think of 2025 as the point when the tipping point finally tipped.
doubtless though, the maganuts will be in denial for a bit longer”
a fair amount of upheaval in the world and you’re all giddy about your “mid 2020s” prediction?
this surplusenergynut says you still look totally wrong about “mid 2020s”, unless maybe it’s specifically about the UK.
I hope we’re both still alive and kickin’ in a few years and we both can see if you’ve changed your tune.
(BAU tonight, baby!)
wasnt inferring anything immediate—and i have been known to be wrong
i said we might look back on this year and think that was when things started to go seriously wrong
you can all dance on my grave—and throw paint over my blue plaque if you like
Heavens forfend, Norman.
We reserve that kind of treatment for the likes of Jimmy Savile.
The family opted to dump his grandiose gravestone in a landfill somewhere, I believe.
>6. Have we run out of road? Maybe, but Optimus-3 looks pretty good, probably can go to space, the final frontier.
Looks pretty good in informercials. Reality would be different. You believe everything in informercials. I only believe it when I actually see it, the basic principle of science.
>7. If we can mine space, we can get rid of pollution in a major way, we can find our cubic mile of Pt, make terrestrial earth a H economy and with Optimus-3 on earth finally have personal maids.
First of all, why the ordinary chumps have to have personal maids with what energy? Second, you never spent a second thinking about shipping. Apparently you think you can teleport all these stuff with no energy expenditure, with the magic ton of platinum. You claim you ran businesses but none of them really involved shipping since I don’t think there are more shipping requirements on dental practices than shipping dentures and maybe some materials.
I can see two versions of reality chaos and reorganised order based on technology and innovation. Unfortunately it is too late to stop the massive snowball heading our way to its inevitable resting place.
You will have two choices , sink or swim in this ‘brave new world ‘
“If you need just 2 charts to understand just how disconnected from reality the Trump administration’s narrative and actions are, these are it. If you were to listen to them, you’d think that the “China shock” de-industrialized America and, in the words of Scott Bessent himself (in his interview yesterday with Tucker Carlson), that “China’s export level relative to their GDP” are so out of proportion that “we’ve never seen anything like this”. The only problem is that none of this is true. Which is a big problem because when you act upon a wrongful understanding of reality, your actions will at best be ineffective, at worst be self-harmful. The truth is that China is actually NOT anywhere near an “export economy”. They export a lot in absolute terms, that’s true, but as a percentage of their GDP China actually depends surprisingly little on exports. Have a look yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_trade-to-GDP_ratio… China is 159th out of 195 countries in the world when it comes to the importance of exports in relation to their GDP. Exports represent 19.74% of their GDP when the world average is 29.27%. Germany for instance can be said to be an “export economy”: exports represent 47.14% of their GDP. Or South Korea at 44%. But China? Definitely not. So the notion that tariffs on the whole world and a major disruption in global trade would be uniquely harmful to China is completely wrong. In fact China will be one of the countries out there that’s the least impacted by this. You should be much more worried about Germany or South Korea, for instance. Similarly, the notion that it is the “China shock” or the era of neoliberal free trade that “stole good-paying manufacturing jobs” in America is just as wrong. Check the chart: both NAFTA and China joining the WTO had virtually no impact on the manufacturing share of U.S. employment: it just continued on the same downward trend it had been in since the beginning of the 1950s. Which means that it makes no sense to solve a problem with trade policies when it has very little to do with trade in the first place. It’s like treating a patient’s broken leg with heart medication. The diagnosis is wrong, so the prescription can’t possibly work. Heck, in this case, the prescription will even probably be detrimental to the patient: by definition, to manufacture more stuff, you need the customers for it. And tariffs will lower disposable incomes at home (because they’re a tax on consumers and businesses) and reduce the market for U.S. products abroad. And not only will the tariffs reduce U.S. companies’ customer base, they’ll also dramatically increase their costs. Think of a company like Apple that has invested tens of billions developing intricate supplier networks spanning dozens of countries—networks that would take 5-10 years minimum and astronomical costs to replicate domestically. They can either absorb the massive tariff costs—severely impacting their profitability—or pass these costs to consumers through higher prices, making their products less competitive globally. So what should be done? First of all to solve a problem, you need to be clear on what the problem is. Is the problem that manufacturing jobs have disappeared? If that’s the case, I have bad news for you: they’re not coming back, ever. The real reason why they disappeared is automation and productivity gains so, unless you want an America populated by sweatshops and assembly lines early 20th century style, you probably don’t want this. If the problem however is that the U.S. is losing its competitive edge in advanced manufacturing and emerging industries – which is an actual thing – then the last thing the U.S. should do is its current policy of autarkic tariffs. No country that is currently on the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing – be it China, Germany or South Korea – did it through tariffs. They did it via patient decades-long investments in education, infrastructure, massive public R&D support, long-term industrial policy, etc. And, in most cases, they did it by opening themselves up to the world, with free trade. China’s EV and smartphones successes is a perfect example of that: did they succeed by shutting their door to Tesla and Apple? No, on the contrary: they did so by welcoming them with open arms because they understand that to beat the best, you actually need to compete with the best. At the end of the day, America’s greatest vulnerability doesn’t come from abroad but from within, specifically its growing inability to distinguish between its own simplistic propaganda and reality. Of course it’s much more comforting to tell yourself that China “stole” your manufacturing jobs and to believe in the silver bullet of tariffs. And it’s certainly more politically expedient to promise quick fixes than to explain that transforming industrial capacity requires decades of consistent investment in education, infrastructure, and R&D. Unfortunately, it’s not true. “?
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1908746457869692985
Italian TV lounge of the Democratic Party (left party), that is channel LA7 with programme “Otto e Mezzo”, was totally focus tonight on
Trump being a psychopathological criminal with narcissistic disorders
so dangerous that it was necessary to invite tonight at the programme a well-known psychoanalyst from the Italian Psychological Association.
But how is it possible that they cannot find a moment to try to understand that something substantial is changing on the world and that what is happening is not the fault of a madman?
They are painting Trump as a madman, but it is the same thing they did with Putin, unfortunately things went differently.
https://www.la7.it/otto-e-mezzo/rivedila7/otto-e-mezzo-11-04-2025-591250
What kind of psychobabble did he come up with to explain why Americans have chosen Trump? Psychopathological criminals with narcissistic disorders all of them? Ma che cazzo…
Choice and manufactured consent are two very different things, eh?
You get the tyrants you deserve.
Valid point reante, but why do so many that know they are being played, refuse to leave the game and willingly play along, with at least some parts of the obviously manufactured?
Can’t complain about being an inmate, when we are also willingly doing the jailers job.
https://youtu.be/132WkTTAp9M?feature=shared
Because they are not in a position to feed, clothe, and house themselves by themselves. Or raise their children by themselves. Because the State has guns pointing at their heads as necessary, and rooms with bars. And it’s been that way for a long time. And on top of that, every single one of us is directly descended from those in our bloodlines that chose to surrender to the Hegemon and not those in our bloodlines who instead chose to fight to the death for their freedom. Collectively we’ve had to bargain with reality for a long time now. The beauty of impending Collapse is that we now need to learn how to do the opposite. How far can we take that learning? Future generations are counting on us.
Thanks for your thoughts reante, but everything you wrote up to
“And it’s been that way for a long time.”
to my view, is just a cop out. Passing the buck.
We enjoy our bread and circuses far too much it would appear(even as we know it’s fate).
Other peoples have gone through more and we can observe some in real time.
Then you say
“And on top of that, every single one of us is directly descended from those in our bloodlines that chose to surrender to the Hegemon and not those in our bloodlines who instead chose to fight to the death for their freedom”
That’s just not true(bloodlines or will to fight), even if we were too believe the eugenics societies bs. The will to fight has nothing at all to do with bloodline and even if it did, what are the odds of getting every potential genetically related fighter within a population so similar, you can’t tell who’s mated with who..
Societal conditioning is your one and only hurdle. We have all been taught, not just that it’s an insurmountable hurdle, but that even attempting to live apart from it, would be a fate worse than death and so the prisoner becomes the willing guard fearing even to look at the bloody but easily surmountable reality of the hurdle(how sad).
The bloodline bs is one of the tools that keeps our thinking, just there, where it’s needed.
They proved it en masse a year before your entry into WWI. The US populace were almost unanimous in their objection to war. One year later, after a bombardment of social conditioning propaganda, they were almost unanimously for war. Did they all have a blood transfusion?
Can’t disagree with the collapse part and with future generations depending on us, although I see little to no sign of even basic awareness, let alone action, when the signs have been glaring for everyone, after the actions of 5 years ago(shocking how quickly that trigger can be pulled wouldn’t you say).
Hey Fitz, suit yourself regarding the alleged cop out but capture bonding is a real thing and it is the clinical condition that colloquially we call mental slavery. Easy going third generation cotton slaves enjoyed far too much that they could walk down to the lake to go fishing on Sundays because the shackles around their parents ankles were finally able to be removed at some point; according to you, easy going you enjoy your bread and circuses far too much. Me, not so much.
As to the other point on us all being directly descended from non-warriors, it should be self-evident to you that civilization’s rampage killed everyone who absolutely refused to be assimilated. The William Wallaces, all the Red Men. And that everyone in civilization is born of those that assimilated. That’s the greatest qualitative genetic bottleneck in human history that supercharged the neotony we see today.
Cheers
Will to fight has nothing to do with genetics and so can’t be bred in, or out.
Will can be encouraged, or discouraged with simple carrot/stick techniques.
No amount of eugenics theory, because that’s what it is, however “exceptional” it may appear, changes the evidence of history and as history has shown time and again, we’ll be turned into deathly demons when it suits. The ease with which that has happened surely defies the idea that breeding has stolen not just the spine, but now even the ability to grow one. I never had you as a “can’t do” kind of person and I doubt you will be when the time’s dictate.
I’m quite agreeable to a natural order of some kind, but wouldn’t that require a “can do” mindset and by expressing that, your own being and that itch to know, disproves all the eugenics flimflam(or maybe a bit of William Wallace slipped through after all)?
No one wants to mention that the world has a terrible energy problem. The only solution is to cut back on globalization. The tariffs are a way of doing this. The highest tariffs are on the most distant sources of imports. Also, a 25% tariff on cars will tend to reduce automobile usage. Autos use gasoline, which is a type of oil, leaving more for other uses.
We have well meaning people with narratives to which they have dedicated their lives and belief system. The narrative is changing and we really don’t know what will be an effective narrative going forward.
Dennis L.
The narrative is only changing in your copilot.
You are very condescending, what can you build? Have you ever organized a group to accomplish a goal?
Irritation off, have a nice day.
Dennis L.
I always do any project myself
And none of your increasingly unrealistic project came to life
kul, I believe you regarding your projects. Groups can be very efficient and effective. Thanks for the note.
Dennis L.
Thanks a lot for your work!
http://staatsstreich.at/energie-zoelle-die-daemonisierung-trumps-zitat-des-tages.html
https://www.deepl.com/de/translator
Thanks for the link to your blog!
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Exactly Gail.
That’s exactly what I was thinking too. I wonder how much of this Trump even has control over. And it appears fracking is coming close to peaking, so this gives them an excuse to pump the brakes.
And Trump gets low gas prices he prides himself on.
agreed…… doing all that is part of the answer to our energy problem, but the way you word it, makes it sound as if the don has some kind of altruistic intent in all this.
when in fact what he is trying to do is create a form of global economic domination, with himself as main benefactor, and dictator…. with no concern of its effect on anyone else.
That’s a hideous conspiracy theory, Norman.
I’m not saying it might not be true, mind you. Only that it displays the kind of thinking you usually warn other people against.
What would you think if somebody substituted “the Elders,” “the Masons,” “the Illuminati,” or “the Bankers” for “the Don” (“he/himself”) in that sentence?
“in fact what he is trying to do is create a form of global economic domination, with himself as main benefactor, and dictator…. with no concern of its effect on anyone else.”
“They are painting Trump as a madman, but it is the same thing they did with Putin, unfortunately things went differently.”
Putin is the greatest human of this century, his amazing achievement to go face to face and continue to WIN against the USevilEmpire which has the intent to chop up Russia for Western corporate profits.
this makes Putin one of the greatest leaders in world history.
Trump is no Putin.
Terrifying virus shuts European borders as PM says it may be ‘biological attack’
“A virus is sweeping through Europe forcing the closure of borders, with fears it could have been launched in a “biological attack”. Livestock are being slaughtered by the thousands after an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Hungary – the first in more than 50 years.
In response, neighboring Austria and Slovakia have closed dozens of their border crossings to the landlocked country, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health. A Hungarian spokesperson said the disease, which was first detected on a cattle farm near the northwest border, may have been “artificially engineered”.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/terrifying-virus-shuts-europe-borders-35037628
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/terrifying-virus-shuts-europe-borders-35037628
All we need is to start worrying about more “artificially engineered” illnesses!
In a move that stunned traders, analysts and policymakers alike, China has just announced a complete halt on all liquefied natural gas imports from the United States. A decision made abruptly with no prior indication, no phased reduction and no explanation beyond a terse statement from Beijing.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/9/2315581/-China-ban-on-LNG-imports-shows-they-have-studied-and-understand-US-vulnerabilities
This chart shows annual exports of LNG by country, according to the EIA.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_move_expc_s1_a.htm
LNG exports represent about 2.8% of the US’s natural gas exports. From the US point of view, losing these exports is not a big deal.
I am sure the LNG imports from the US don’t represent a large share of China’s natural gas use, either, since China has a lot of cheaper gas coming from Russia, by pipeline.
It is very expensive to transport natural gas to China as LNG. It is an inefficient, high-priced approach. It is something that should logically be eliminated.
>> LNG exports represent about 2.8% of the US’s natural gas exports.
To clarify Gail’s point here, exports **to China** represent 2.8% of US natural gas exports.
Slowdown confirmed .
” The sound of the global economy slowing down.
It’s better known as a Formula One team, but Hass is also one the world’s top-10 machine tools companies, crucial to build new factories. It’s now warning of a “dramatic decrease” in new orders from both US and foreign customers.”
https://x.com/JavierBlas/status/1909880226940666202/photo/1
This notice does sound ominous. New factories won’t be built without new machines being built. The current instability, by itself, reduces orders for new machines.
Neocons never care how the common people are affected.
“Energy Secretary Hints At Military Action Against Iran’s Global Oil Exports”
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/energy-secretary-hints-military-action-against-irans-global-oil-exports
Rephrasing, if I may:
“Energy Secretary Hints At Military Action Against China’s Oil Imports”
Because it amounts to the same thing.
Interesting point!
They will have to just keep dropping hints, because they can’t take any real action. Blockading Iranian exports to China would destroy our relations with the entire world.
Let’s make the best of it..it’s a good time to get rich
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/N7TF9Noa6K0
Yo. Bruh,
Non sarcastic question:
Would that train of thought imply the Pilgrims were neocons?
Dennis L.
Wherever you read opinions on tarrifs, the constant refrain from ‘expert’ economists is that “using tariffs to protect domestic industries, is stupid”
And they are correct.
But I think the folk around Trump, understand that the purpose of these *Trump-tariffs* are designed to reset (and reverse), a 60 year shift, from on-shore domestic activity, to off-shore global economics.
We all know,…Off-shoring economic activity, from the West to the East, only worked because of cheap, abundant, *surplus* fossil energy. We also know,.. that that *surplus* fossil energy, is in fast decline, and not cheap anymore. Surely it follows that as off-shoring goes into decline, that re-shoring is the key to future economic activity?
I believe that this ‘crazy grinding of economic gears’ using Trump-tariffs is not about protectionism. Instead it is a real-world recognition that off-shoring and globalisation is coming to an end.
For our part, we will have to re-calibrate our 1st world expectations. We might LIKE a pair of $500 (£440) Nike trainers, but do we NEED those trainers from the Philippines?
It might be wonderful to have exotic fruits on our Christmas/ Thanksgiving table, but do we need them flown in/ shipped in, out of (our) season?
A pack of three T shirts for $12 (£10) from Vietnam, is great, but they only last a summer season. Are they really worth it?
I think Trump’s tariffs, are NOT what economists think they are, and instead they are taking us into a (fossil scarce), world, that we were heading for anyway. If we all truly believe that surplus oil energy is in decline, we need to stop shopping for cheap clothes and shoes coming in a container ship from 6000 miles away, and start shopping for stout shoes and clothes that will last a decade, and made (a metaphorical), horse ride away.
David Butler 11/04/2025
I am afraid that you are right.
My take on it is this, FWIW. Those in charge are coming to realize that the global financial, monetary and banking systems they have been relying on for the past 50+ years are teetering on collapse. You can only create so much debt before the hose of cards, collapses. Those doing the borrowing had no intention of ever paying it back. Their idea was to keep borrowing and paying it back with cheaper currencies. Countries are now beginning to turn inward. Those who still are seeking to continue globalism are those with the weakest economies.
Indeed, David. Welcome to the 5 year old Non-Public Degrowth Agenda: superficially stoopid, covertly intelligent. Or, Steve From Virginia would say, conservation by other means. Though he wouldn’t say that about this because he’s allergic to conspiracy theory.
An explanation of today’s market chaos (very low dollar, high 10-year interest rate (4.523%)), from behind a paywall:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/here-we-go-again-basis-trade-disintegrates-sending-gold-euro-yen-soaring-yields-trip
Here We Go Again: Basis Trade Disintegrates Sending Gold, Euro, Yen Soaring, Yields Trip Bessent’s “Redline” As Dollar Plummets
A related Zerohedge article, also behind a paywall:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/dollars-collapse-endgame
On The Dollar’s Collapse… & The Endgame
Revenue Shortfall
If the US were a publicly traded company, it would probably need to issue the equivalent of a profit warning — or more accurately a deficit warning.
Just as Congress is getting closer to agree on trillions of dollars in tax cuts pledged by President Donald Trump during his campaign, projections for some sources of government revenue over the coming years are coming in lower than expected.
The largest shortfall by far is how much the US can expect to generate from tariffs, which Trump and his advisers are counting on to help pay for the tax cuts.
Estimates keep changing with tariffs announcements rolling in on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But overall forecasters agree that tariffs will bring in a lot less than the yearly $600 billion figure that has been floated. That’s in part because tariffs will likely lead to a drop in imports. Lower consumer spending and business activity as a result of trade wars would also eventually reduce revenue from taxes.
A much smaller, but sizable, revenue shortfall may come from the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented workers. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that Internal Revenue Service could lose about $26 billion in 2026 in tax collections — $313 billion over the next decade — from a recent deal giving immigration officials access to IRS tax data in order to check the immigration status of taxpayers suspected to be in the US illegally.
The group said there’s some uncertainty around its estimate. But it reckons that unauthorized immigrants paid $66 billion in federal taxes in 2023, with the bulk coming from payroll taxes. Many of those migrants may now think twice before filing taxes — or move to jobs in the black market.
The US Treasury saw a modest pickup in customs duties last month when tariff hikes began to kick in — though not enough to make a dent in the widening fiscal deficit .
US gives ultimatum to Russia.
Ceasefire within April for Ukraine or (?).
Current latest developments have clarified US foreign strategy.
It was:
1) close Ukraine chapter in order to keep some raw materials for US, considering the incredible waste of money of the war.
2) having, as a consequence, time and military focus to let Israel attack Iran, in order to weaken Iran (the main interest here is not for US,b but for Israel, but Israel decides on this, not US).
3) start a trade war with China, in order to weaken China.
But Russia’ slow process on Ukraine has uncovered US cards, therefore now Russia, China and Iran, not only could forecast the possible move, but they have really seen it in full sun.
https://www.agi.it/estero/news/2025-04-11/ucraina-da-usa-ultimatum-a-putin-accordo-entro-aprile-30870135/
The main message of the link in Italian is this:
The three points that Student brings up regarding US strategy are not in the link.
Completely correct, Gail.
When I quote something it is always between inverted commas, when I say my opinion, it is normally written.
I would never give false information.
The US demanding Russia play by its rules reminds me of that famous Monty Python scene with the Black Knight. The US is incapable of hurting Russia as the country has moved inward rather than towards globalization. It is doing much better as a result and it has won the war with Ukraine. The longer the US tries to bully the Russians, the more the Russians will continue to advance towards Kiev.
Student . crap– pure speculation when I read the translation .
” AGI – Donald Trump’s administration is considering the end of April as the deadline for negotiations on Ukraine; by the end of this month, according to the American website Axios, Washington expects the Kremlin to make a decision on the ceasefire.
The ultimatum to Russia will be delivered by US special envoy Steve Witkoff, who arrived in St. Petersburg today. According to a source from Axios, if President Vladimir Putin does not accept the truce by the end of the month, the United States is ready to introduce new sanctions against Russia. These could be sanctions under Trump ‘s executive order or sanctions under legislation passed by Congress, an Axios source said. In the first case, the lifting of the restrictions will be possible with a simple decision by the president; in the second case, it will require a lengthy procedure, which in practice could drag on for decades.”
This is what is happening .
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/russia-ukraine-war/russia-us-talks-in-istanbul-conclude-after-more-than-5-hours/3534165
I am not going to go as to why Trump capitulated . There are more than enough posts on that . What caught my eye is this about Bessant , ignorance and arrogance = disaster and now add Vance calling the Chinese ‘ peasants ‘ is racist .
” Trump is not knowledgeable about China’s mighty economy. Vice-President Vance recently called China’s highly qualified work force ‘peasants’. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is likewise ignorant:
I advised Scott Bessent, now Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury who is leading the tariff war, in 2013 when he was still with Soros. An investment bank engaged me to advise Bessent on China’s economy and consumer trends and go over my book The End of Cheap China.
I took an instant disliking – Bessent was one of the most arrogant and ignorant on China people I had ever met. He was uber bearish on China and was largely ideologically driven in his analysis. Communist countries couldn’t succeed was basically the jist of his views.
Data and rational analysis did not reign supreme.
…
He thinks America has the upper hand with China right now. I worry for America. We have one of the most ignorant on China yet arrogant people I’ve ever met running a trade war against China.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/04/an-economic-advisors-weird-theory.html#comments
Context is not clear Ravi. Did you advise Bessent? The book seems to have been written by someone of Chinese ancestry. I could not find the quote on MoA.
Other than that I am not surprised. I met my fair share of Bessents in the course of my life. He is a technocrat, to misquote Kulm. Pure finance guy, when the real economy is manufacturing and mining and agriculture. When I was a grad, we used to define these guys as ” he can not tell an oscilloscope from an hammer”. Buy popcorn, and dedollarize.
” I could not find the quote on MoA. ”
It is not on MoA and it is not a quote but a conclusion reached by others who have studied the rise and fall of empires and civilization . Absolutely I m not a fan of AI but here what it says . Copy/paste from Google . I don’t have ChatGpt , Grock , Deep seek etc because I have never installed these apps knowingly .
The statement “empires decline and civilization endures” reflects the historical pattern of empires rising, reaching their apex, and then declining while the underlying civilization persists. Empires, characterized by vast territorial control and centralized power, are often susceptible to factors like economic hardship, internal corruption, and external pressures, ultimately leading to their demise. However, the cultural, technological, and social innovations that an empire fostered tend to endure, shaping the development of subsequent societies.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
The Rise and Fall of Empires:
Rise:
Empires often emerge through conquest, innovation, and strong leadership, expanding their influence and control over vast territories.
Apex:
At their peak, empires may exhibit impressive advancements in art, science, and governance, leaving a lasting legacy.
Decline:
Several factors can trigger an empire’s decline, including:
Economic Strain: Over-reliance on conquest and resource extraction can lead to financial instability.
Internal Corruption: Corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and social unrest can weaken an empire’s foundations.
External Pressures: Military threats from neighboring states or nomadic groups can destabilize an empire.
Natural Disasters: Climate change, epidemics, and other natural disasters can significantly impact an empire’s survival.
Fall:
Eventually, empires fragment, their control weakens, and they are replaced by new political entities.
The Enduring Nature of Civilization:
Cultural Legacy:
The cultural innovations, artistic achievements, and philosophical ideas of a civilization often persist even after the fall of its empire.
Technological Advancements:
Scientific discoveries, engineering feats, and technological innovations made by a civilization may be passed down and further developed by subsequent societies.
Social Structures:
The social structures, legal systems, and political ideologies of a civilization can continue to shape societies even after the empire’s demise.
Shared Knowledge:
The accumulated knowledge, skills, and practices of a civilization are often preserved and passed down through generations, contributing to the development of future societies.
Examples:
The Roman Empire:
While the Roman Empire eventually collapsed, its legal system, architectural styles, and the Latin language continue to influence the world.
The Byzantine Empire:
The Byzantine Empire preserved and transmitted classical knowledge, influencing Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Russian culture.
The Islamic Golden Age:
The scientific and philosophical advancements of the Islamic world were later adopted and expanded by European scholars.
In essence, empires are transient, but the civilizations that they embody often leave a lasting imprint on history, demonstrating the enduring power of human creativity and ingenuity.
Lessons from the Rise and Fall of Past Civilizations – Medium
06 Sept 2023 — One of the most salient lessons from past civilizations is the impermanence of power and dominance. Time and again, mi…
Medium ·
Safir Rifas
The Law of Civilization and Decay – Wikipedia
The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History is a book written by Brooks Adams in 1895. His intention was to prove that …
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The Inevitable Decline: Why All Great Empires Eventually Fall
22 Aug 2024 — The rise and collapse of great empires has been a consistent, nearly cyclical process throughout history. These enormou…
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Generative AI is experimental.
Trump didn’t capitulate. The tariff on China is 145%.
One of China’s problems is precisely that there are not enough peasants anymore. If there were, then China’s birth rate would not be so low.
In the West there is actually a dominant trope that the Chinese are somehow wilier, cannier than Westerners. The bonkers lockdowns should have put that one to bed. Sure, they are clever and industrious, but hamstrung by conformity and the need to save ‘face’. People love to exaggerate, and China has beeen overestimated.
People forget that China is a middle income country with a GDP/capita less than half of Britain’s, and that’s adjusted for PPP (purchasing power parity).
Now, just think how poor many British people are meanwhile.
” People love to exaggerate, and China has been overestimated. ”
Something to remember — ” Empires decline , civilizations endure ” .
Technology development and innovation doesn’t care about GDP metrics or per capita metrics. It cares about absolutes. Until the hydrocarbons run out, China has a bright future. 8x the engineers graduate annually of USA and 2x the work ethic and the manufacturing base. We got fat and lazy. The end.
There are a bunch of tariffs now. The 25% automobile tariff. China’s 145% tariff. The 10% “all other” tariff. Miscellaneous other tariffs that we don’t hear about, like the 34% tariff on lumber imported from Canada. This is a whole lot of tariffs, affecting major categories of imported goods.
This is a great deal of tariffs to try out. Waiting 90 days to add other tariffs makes perfectly good sense.
” Context is not clear Ravi. ”
drb , the context is to show the mentality of the Trump advisors . Bessant , Vance and now the post of Student we can add Witkoff . Threatening Russia with more sanctions . ROFL .
Gail we will find out . In the meanwhile Mr Kaplan on tariffs /
” George Kaplan on April 11, 2025 at 1:22 pm
This site shows drill pipe imports to the USA. From a quick look it seems at least half comes from China. With the dollar dropping in value and the oil price down a lot the light tight oil producers profits are going to be suffering , they might even be in difficulties in maintaining day to day operations. Note that even last year when things were much more propitious a couple of the largest independents still made slight losses and three got bought or merged.
https://www.volza.com/p/drill-pipe/import/import-in-united-states/
I agree that availability of inexpensive drill pipe is a big deal. Also, oil companies are not doing well now. WTI oil prices continue around $60, which is too low for drillers of shale.
If the system is already not working, could the theory be that adding tariffs simply puts an end to what does not, and cannot work, any longer?
Talking of paradox . Trump wants low prices but low prices means the shutdown of shale = trade deficit increases . Shale exports is 4mbpd = 4x$ 50 = $ 200 million per day = $ 6 billion per month = $ 72 billion per year . Trump is applying tariffs to lower the trade deficit . Caught between a rock and a hard place .
Assuming this is “trade” if the US collects $1.00 from an import and China collects $1.00 from a US export, isn’t it net zero?
Dennis L.
I do not believe your statement about China having a gdp/capital less than half of Britain’s….meaningless. britains gdp is skewed high due to the city of London financial whatever. My step children in Britain are economically struggling. Electricity is unaffordable, food unaffordable…Britain’s economy is in the toilet.
“The Gross Domestic Product per capita in the United Kingdom was last recorded at 47322.67 US dollars in 2023. The GDP per Capita in the United Kingdom is equivalent to 375 percent of the world’s average”
Adjusted for PPP – 52588.98 US dollars
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita
“The Gross Domestic Product per capita in China was last recorded at 22137.60 US dollars in 2023, when adjusted by purchasing power parity (PPP). The GDP per Capita, in China, when adjusted by Purchasing Power Parity is equivalent to 125 percent of the world’s average. ”
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-per-capita-ppp
Figures from December 2023.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gdp-per-capita
“britains gdp is skewed high due to the city of London financial whatever”
Sure, and China’s gdp is skewed higher by all the places that the media likes to show us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_inequality
China’s wealth is also more unequally distributed than in the UK.
Obviously with 1.4 billion people, there are many well-off individuals in absolute terms. Remember, the media laways shows you Shanghai, Shenzhen etc, not so often the inland provinces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_provincial-level_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita
Look at the huge differences between Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing on the one hand and everywhelse else on the other.
…and by the way the average Chinese worker is not just working 40 hours a week with several weeks holiday per year for that gdp for his capita.
I take your point about income snd wealth disparities in China being greater than in the UK.
And I am certain, the British enjoy longer tea breaks.
One other point is that official statistics from China are likely to misrepresent the actual situation due to cultural factors. By some accounts, the actually population of China may be only 50 to 60% of the official figure. Obviously, I can’t confirm what the actual population of China is; it would take considerably more fingers and toes than I have at my disposal.
ICE Pledges to Stop Illegal ‘Ideas’ Entering U.S. — Then Deletes the Post
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ice-pledges-stop-illegal-ideas-1235314913/
Screenshot
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/767ca9c8-6620-4a8f-b6c9-566f903f6b2c.png
Just because something is on the Internet with a screenshot doesn’t mean it’s true.
Doesn’t seem too far fetched.
“The two-page memo, which was obtained by The Associated Press, does not allege any criminal conduct by Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident and graduate student who served as spokesperson for campus activists last year during large demonstrations against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the war in Gaza.
Rather, Rubio wrote Khalil could be expelled for his beliefs”
https://news.yahoo.com/pressed-evidence-against-mahmoud-khalil-173708087.html
Beliefs, thoughts, ideas must all correspond to the official lies, no matter how obvious those lies are.
This is very short, so how many times do you think they fit antiyouknowwhat in?
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-to-begin-screening-aliens-social-media-activity-for-antisemitism
You should always ask yourself, who will they come for next.
Lessons from Tokyo: the world’s largest city is car free
“Tokyo’s transit system is massive, with more than 800 train stations serving some 40 million people daily. Trains are frequent, punctual and profitable. They’re so popular that transit operators employ a horde of professional people pushers , known locally as oshiya, to stuff passengers into trains during rush hour. In the unlikely event that a train is late, riders are given special notes explaining the delay to their bosses..”
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-04-08/lessons-from-tokyo-the-worlds-largest-city-is-car-free
its streets are not that good for driving and in Japan to own a car one has to have a private garage, not easy to do as housing is rather expensive and cramped.
When I visited Japan a few years’ ago, I discovered that major long-distance multi-lane roads were mostly car-free, also. There are tolls on these roads, making them expensive to drive.
Is olde Englande really as bad as this guy says, or is he merely fishing for clicks? Or perhaps both? He seems to have settled with his wife and children in Malaysia after just scraping by in London in the banking industry, and is now enjoying the warm climate and the much more polite culture and less aggressive, less aggravating ambience of the place. I left the UK over 40 years ago for the Orient and have never regretted that decision, so I tend to sympathize with his stance. But from his standpoint, the UK of the 80s was some sort of paradise, while I remember that decade as the period of the Six “De”s: Deprivation, Depression, Decadence, Decay, Despair, and Desperation, and an especially tough time for the young, after the golden age of the 60s and 70s.
Living in the UK freaked me out so much I left // The inevitable collapse of the UK
The UK is collapsing. When you live there you can see it in front of your eyes. There is no more community. There are no more jobs. Manufacturing has left. Pubs have closed. Nothing has taken their place. The UK hit a really important point. More than 50% of household income is now state handouts. Think about that. That is pure unsustainable death spiral cataclysmic stuff. These people will vote for anyone keeping them on the hand outs. So the economy is destined to fail because the UK population want to sit at home, watch tv, drink beer and get their handouts. They are now a wont work, dont want to work culture. The regulatory environment has killed the UK. It’s the silent killer of everything. Can’t hire, can’t fire, can’t evict, can’t do anything. It’s a real shame because the UK used to be great pre 2000. Post 2000 the death spiral has never been more evident. It freaked me out so much I had to leave.
no one told this guy oil peaked in 1999 in the uk. but he thinks someone bulldozed the constitution, or something.
North Sea oil gave the UK a few decades (1980-2010) respite from the full consequences of living with more expensive oil following the second oil shock of 1979, because it provided the nation with lots of well paid jobs and the government with a revenue stream. Without that cushion, perhaps Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four society would have arrived in the UK on schedule in 1984 instead of slowly taking form in the present century and finally materializing in 2024 under the leadership of Kier Starmer.
But plenty of other countries have done relatively better than the UK without the benefit of significant domestic oil production. Blame creeping socialism, bureaucracy, over-regulation, the class system, bloodymindedness, or even that catch-all, the British Disease, but it is clear that a lot more has declined than just domestic oil production.
It is possible that large oil consumption gives countries and cultures some sort of dependence. They crash a lot harder than those that had to develop under resource constraints. Exhibits A and B are the USSR and UK. Watch out below when it happens to the US and Saudi. Russia, I should add, is doing something to diversify, having strong manufacturing now.
That’s why patetic King Charles came to Italy 3 days to visit the Italian President (still his role is head of military) to boost military links between the two Countries, hoping going on fighting Russia.
They are ridicolous.
We could make money trading with Russia happily and peacefully and saying goodbye to UK.
Incredibily, Russians still love our food, wine and fashion, we should ‘leccarci i baffi’ and say ‘thank you’.
We have already given, Charles. Abbiamo gia’ dato. In 1915 we entered a war we had no business fighting, after we got groomed with a handful of coal for 50 years, and sacrificed a generation to please your great granpa overlords in the City. this time we are going to go Silk Road, like we have done for nearly 2000 years.
Alexander Mercouris is not optimistic about the UK as well. During thewinter months I noticed he would wear warm clothing while doing his daily London programs from home. I got the impression that his heating was limited.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bQg9Zq9TsvM&pp=ygUJdGhlIGR1cmFu
This is a recent Duran video. Near the beginning of the video, the question is raised, “How are businesses going to plan? There is no stability in the system.” Policymaking seems too chaotic.
And in that video, which is rather short. He mentions that Keir Starmer instead of focusing on the potholes in London streets where he resides, decided to ignore the internal financial, fiscal problems of the UK and instead he decided to focus all his attention on Ukraine. Ukraine is far more important to Keir Starmer than the UK. He is a reflection of the entire global leadership today.
As Gerald Celente likes to say: “Trade wars, currency wars, world wars. When all else fails, they take you to war”.
How deep are your roots now, Tim? When the time comes, will you be buried in Japan?
I expect I’ll be cremated, Jarle. In Japan, we are allowed to bury dogs and cats, but humans have to go in the fire. I think that law came in during the 1960s.
I’ve always considered myself British and I’ve never felt the urge to obtain Japanese citizenship. However, since the plandemic, and especially since the Starmer regime came to power, I’ve been feeling very uneasy about the UK and wondering whether it would be safer to switch—not to gain any rights or privileges in Japan, but to avoid who knows what from an increasingly erratic and authoritarian UK government. The way things are going, I may even get my call up papers to serve on the Eastern Front.
As it is, the Japanese government treats me with a lot more respect than the British one has ever done, and I don’t think they are about to go back to testing their swords on resident barbarians any times soon. And if there is going to be a worldwide economic collapse, I would rather experience it in a place where the people are likely to accept the situation stoically and without panicking or degenerating into waring tribes or street gangs.
All the brave British who were eager to kill other Europeans without impunity or regret are too afraid of the Asians and flee to their land
Even the late Dr Firth preferred to live in Malta in his last days despite of praising the screwups who messed up Western Civilization
If Asia is promoted we get more of Asia.
That’s a fair point….. up to a point.
But Asia is a very big and very diverse place.
I hope Dr. Firth finally managed to get a decent funeral.
And that’s another reason why I distrust the UK Government. They couldn’t even repatriate the body of a dead citizen who was on a plane bound for Blighty.
I’ve posted this song before. It may have been a bit over the top when it was written a quarter of a century ago, but today it is understated. And I think it should be the UK’s national anthem.
Bertrand Russell talking about why he was not a Christian.
Interviewer: “Do you think there’s a practical reason for having a religious belief for many people?”
Russell: “Well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true. That’s quite… (I expect Bertie was going to say “ridiculous” there.) At least, I rule it out as impossible. Either the thing is true or it isn’t. If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t you shouldn’t. And if you can’t find out whether it’s true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgement.”
(this clip is a little over 3 minutes long.)
He is incredibly superficial. There is no ‘moral truth’ either. It is a ridiculous naivity to equate ‘truth’ with ‘utility’. Likely some of us can live without moralistic lies but I doubt that it would look anything like the pacifist, anti-imperialist universalism that he had in mind.
He had nowhere near an ‘objective’ mindset and he was just striking a ridiculous posture that he had no right to. Ironically the whole thing is a lie. Not that that is a ‘crime’. If he wanted to attack Christianity in the name of ‘truth=utility’ then clearly he was free to do that.
The historical British philosophical tradition – Hume, Hobbes, Bentham – has got nothing to do with the nonsense that he was spouting. It is incredible how Britain intellectually collapased in that period. Britain did once contribute to modern philosophy but Russel is just massively embarrassing.
On the contrary, Mirror. Truth is only ever had through the accurate patterning process we call (true) Reason, and true reason is the only intelligent activity that biology ever engages in. The accurate patterning of cause and effect, in order to ascertain what are constructive decisions and what are unconstructive decisions, is the very definition of utilitarianism. The mind is fundamentally a utilitarian tool. Evolution is utilitarian.
Politics/religion/faith is, OTOH, is not a constructive utilitarian submission to evolution — to natural law — but an unconstructive one to the Hegemon, and that is a moral truth. If one doesn’t like the phrase “moral truth” then you can just substitute the word “ethics” for it. If one doesn’t like the word ethics, then one has no business talking philosophically in the first place because ethics is just a function of Reason and, again, reasoning is ultimately all that we ever do.
“to natural law”
jus naturale comes down to us from the Romans. They considered conquest and slavery to be a part of that law.
They also found those practices to be jus gentium, as they were a part of the law of all nations that they ruled, as well as of their own jus civile.
They found conquest and slavery to be most ‘constructive’ as did the other nations. Indeed the Roman Empire was built on conquest and slavery.
I supposed that makes conquest and slavery ‘ethical’.
Rome was very much the ‘hegemon’.
In other words what is construed as ‘constructive’ is liable to vary by time, place, customs, dispositions and manners.
No one these days seriously argues for an ‘absolute’ ‘natural law’ that is deduced by ‘reason’.
‘Natural law’ is now basically just a throwback to medieval scholastic theology, the stuff that you denounce as ‘hegemonic’, and ultimately to the Roman slave empire.
Mirror you just created a strawman argument. I explicitly contextualized natural law as an ecological/evolutionary/nonpolitical understanding and you recontextualized it (changed the definition) as a Roman political/nonecological understanding in order to supposedly rebut my argument (as if they weren’t into the cooperation of ideas for political purposes).
What’s wrong with that picture?
Would you care to actually rebut my argument on its own (de)merits?
cooptation not cooperation
Of course nature does have normative ‘laws’ that dictate behaviour. Evolution takes any number of paths and it always ends in failure. You get ‘means and ends’ but you do not get ‘descriptive and normative’. Besides evolution works fundamentally through competion and cooperation is only a facet of competition. Evolution works through the eradication of the less adapted. It is not about everyone surviving and it works though selection. Cooperation can help but it cannot elimate the fundamentally competive nature of evolution. No one is saying that they are opposites. Lefy posers do tend to contrast them but they tend not to compete very well anyway. If someone shoots you before you breed then that is ‘evolution’. Call it ‘law’ if you want. It is all about competive survival at the end of the day. It does not ‘mean’ anything and it has no ‘purpose or value’. Those things are perspectival and not a matter of universal ‘law’. A lot of people do not ‘get it’ but that is humans for you. They evolved to assert themselves rather than to understand how meaningless they really are. Nothing really matters unless people think that it does. It would not really matter if the entire cosmos suddently blinked out of existence. Btw. it was not a ‘straw man’ and I did address ‘constructive=ethics’; conquest and slavery and very constructive, certainly for the masters. If they got to survive then evolution worked for them. They cooperated to enslave others. It is all perspectival. There is no ‘ideal pattern’ that applies to everyone. And Nature does not give a sh/t about whether you survive; it has no ‘laws’. The surivival of the fittest is actually a mechanism rather than a ‘law’ which is just a metaphor, a projection of a human concept. The concept of ‘natural law’ is basically mad.
For those of us less familiar with the ins and outs of natural law that Mirror seems to be, I asked an AI to teach me about it:
===
“Natural law” is a philosophical concept that refers to a system of law or moral principles that are considered to be inherent in human nature and can be understood through reason. The idea posits that certain rights and moral values are universal and can be discerned from nature itself, rather than being solely determined by human conventions or societal laws. Here’s a breakdown of the key elements of natural law:
Key Characteristics of Natural Law
Universal Principles: Natural law is believed to represent universal moral principles that apply to all humans, regardless of culture, religion, or time period. These principles are seen as rooted in human nature.
Reason and Rationality: Proponents argue that human beings can use reason to discover natural laws. This rational understanding leads to the identification of what is morally right and just.
Human Nature and Ethics: Natural law is grounded in the idea that there are intrinsic characteristics and purposes of human beings. It posits that ethical behavior corresponds to fulfilling these natural purposes.
Foundation for Human Rights: Many concepts of human rights are derived from natural law, asserting that individuals possess certain rights simply by virtue of being human. These rights are seen as inalienable and not granted by any authority.
Contrast with Positivism: Natural law is often contrasted with legal positivism, which asserts that laws are rules created by human beings and that there is no inherent connection between law and morality. Legal positivists argue that law is valid if it is enacted according to the rules established by a governing body, regardless of ethical considerations.
Historical Context
Natural law has a rich history and has been discussed by various philosophers throughout the ages:
Ancient Philosophies: Philosophers like Aristotle, who discussed the “natural justice,” laid some groundwork for later natural law theories.
Roman Law: The Stoics contributed to the development of natural law by emphasizing the idea of a rational order in the universe that human beings should align with.
Medieval Thinkers: St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the most influential proponents of natural law. He integrated Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, arguing that natural law is part of divine law and can be discerned through reason.
Enlightenment: Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, expanded on natural law, linking it to ideas of personal liberty and property rights. Locke’s views influenced modern democratic and legal frameworks.
Modern Interpretations: In contemporary discussions, natural law continues to be relevant in debates about human rights, ethics, bioethics, and the relationship between law and morality.
Applications
Natural law has been used as a theoretical foundation for various legal and ethical systems, influencing areas such as:
Human Rights: The notion that every individual has inherent rights based on their humanity.
Moral Philosophy: Discussions surrounding ethical behavior and moral responsibilities often draw on natural law principles.
Legal Systems: Some legal theories incorporate natural law concepts, arguing for laws that should reflect moral reasoning rooted in human nature.
Conclusion
In summary, natural law is a complex and influential concept that posits the existence of inherent moral and ethical principles discernible through human reason. Its historical roots and ongoing relevance make it an important topic in philosophy, ethics, and law.
====
Mirror, next time somebody asks, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”, I shall certainly weigh in with”Well they did give us natural law! …. Along with lead plumbing, straight roads, the toga, Latin, Roman law, the Roman alphabet, and those nifty Roman numerals. If it wasn’t for the Romans, we’d all be writing in Ancient Greek and counting on our fingers.”
Now ask the AI about the critiques of ‘natural law’.
Btw. Aristotle included conquest and slavery as a part of ‘nature’ and so did the Romans. The Christians just dressed up their own religion in those terms. God acts in nature and thus whatever the religion says is ‘natural law’ and ‘rational’ only on a definitional basis. You cannot always believe the stuff that people come out with. Shocker.
I just happen to be reading a book at the moment that covers the medieval conception of jus naturale and its basis in Roman law. “The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages” (2015, Routledge).
My main interest is the laws of warfare in various periods and that is the go to text for that period. The Law of Arms was the thing in chivalry rather then the Voluntary Law of the modern period or the ‘International Law’ of today.
Jurisprudence has always had a close relationship with philosophy and the history of ideas and various texts are go to for various periods.
‘Natural law’ theory has been reworked or just discarded in different periods of jurisprudence.
So eg. Hobbes was dominant in practice in the 17-19th centuries and the only ‘natural rights’ for him were to do whatever you judged that you had to secure your survival and also to keep promises. The former took priority in practice and treaties came and went. He constructed a developed political philosophy of society on that basis.
Modern international law owes more to Locke, although Kant is more often cited, and its ‘natural rights’ are more about ‘democratic self-determination’, ‘diversity’ and modern liberal concepts. It basically harks back to the Revolutionary period in France and USA in opposition to the patrimonialism of the Age of Absolutism.
For the Romans ‘natural law’ was about conquest and slavery and Aristotle opens his Politics with a discussion of those and the book takes it from there. The Greek talked about those who are ‘slaves by nature’ but they did not use the ‘natural law’ terminology that owes more to the Stoics.
Beyond that, any Tom, Dick and Harry can dress up his own politics as ‘natural law’ but obviously no one is obliged to take them with any solemnity just because they recycle that verbiage.
Mirror now you’re shooting the messenger while simultaneously committing the fallacy of composition, as Nietschze did above. It’s based in negative emotion:
“Beyond that, any Tom, Dick and Harry can dress up his own politics as ‘natural law’ but obviously no one is obliged to take them with any solemnity just because they recycle that verbiage.”
Just because others inadmissable dress up their politics in natural law doesn’t mean that natural law itself is inadmissable such that I am also playing dress-up. Is the ecology itself playing dress-up? Is the planet Earth itself just a grotesque pantomime of a home?
If there is no polarity (competition-cooperation in this case), and all of the combinatorial values in between, there can be no life at all. Life, the universe itself, is just myriad creative tension. And understand that outside of civilization the competition under natural law is largely indirect while you clearly think of all competition as direct conflict. It’s a huge ontological distinction and I suggest you think on it. It’s no wonder that you look through the glass so darkly.
I get your point about Russell being an incorrigible and, some would say, an intolerable poseur.
Apparently, he had an IQ of 180. And he was very well educated. But he strikes me as more a performer, a commentator and a gossip, than an original thinker. Was he promoted by the system and marketed as a public intellectual in a similar way to those modern “thinkers” whose works appear in airport bookstores? I think there may have been a bit of that sort of promotion, even back in Russell’s day.
But at the same time, he was a real intellectual, not a pseudo one, despite the pretensions. It was said he couldn’t boil an egg, nor brew a pot of tea, although he could wax poetic about hypothetical teapots in space. And he was about 87 years old at the time of that interview, which is nearly as old as our Norman.
Encyclopaedia Britannica gives him a good writeup: “Russell’s contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics established him as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century.”
What else can I say in his defense? He was a man of his time and of his class. Almost anyone from the same era would appear ridiculous to young people these days. After all, young people these days tend to laugh at the hippies of the sixties and the disco dancers of the seventies, or at anyone who can’t use a smartphone to pay for their Cinnamon Dolce Latte. They must think Victorians in general were a real scream.
On Russell’s contention about believing things that are true; first of all, I would ask how can we judge whether a thing is true or not? And then again, if we know a thing to be true, then we have no need to believe it (belief meaning acceptance that something exists or is true, especially without proof).
One point I’d like to comment on. You said, “It is a ridiculous naivety to equate ‘truth’ with ‘utility’,” which I take as an implication that Russell did that.
What he actually says in the clip is:
“It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because it’s true.”
As far as I can see, there is no equating of ‘truth’ and ‘utility’ there, but rather a contrasting between the two qualities. But then again, my IQ is well below 180, and I get easily lost in philosophical talk.
Ken Gemes is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.
> Nietzsche claims that with the rejection of religious underpinning of the value of truth (e.g. truth as God’s word and as something absolute), we can now raise the question of why and to what extent we should value truth. He argues that our need for meaning conflicts with our will to truth because such a will tends to destroy all mythologies including the mythology of value – our will to truth reveals that values are not objectively ‘out there’ in the world, but are merely our own projections onto the world. This knowledge eviscerates the world of meaning. This does not mean that Nietzsche rejects the value of truth. He instead rejects the notion, inherited from the Judeo-Christian worldview, that truth is an unconditional value. Such a notion of truth, destructive of all myth and meaning, is unliveable. The very claim that the truth is valuable, even if not unconditionally valuable, is itself one of those myths that help give life meaning.
Logical mistake on Nietzsche’s part. Just because mythologies of value exist doesn’t mean that true value doesn’t exist. A worm navigates the soil for food based on temperature gradients because the worm has (instinctively/unconsciously/evolutionarily) reasoned that some gradients correspond with more food (metabolic heat). That’s a true, accurate evaluation of soil evolution, of natural law. There’s no mythology there. Humans do the same. Mythologies are metaphorical regardless of whether or not some people choose to take them literally for simplicity’s sake.
It is ‘valuable’ only as a means to an end. The end itself is not ‘valuable’. You want to survive because you evolved with that basic instinct but that does not mean that your existence is itself ‘valuable’ or its means inherently ‘valuable’. It could just as well be ‘valuable’ for someone to do you in and to take whatever you have. It is all perspectival and it is not governed by any ‘ethical natural laws’. The sheep is food to the eagle. To the man. The man is food to the lion. Nothing ‘means’ anything or has inherent ‘value’. It has value only according to a particular perspective. In reality it has no inherent ‘value’; that is not what ‘value’ means. It is valuable to a subject and not in itself. That is basically what Nietzsche was saying. So it is fine accordig to Nature to conquer and to enslave you or just to kill you for the kicks. Nature does not give a sh/t about what happens to you. In fact nature is about as violent as it could possibly be and it ‘works’ through competitive survival. Harsh, but Nature is what it is and I am not going to lie about it just so that you can pose as ‘wise’ and as ‘superior’ to other people. The idea of ‘natural law’ is basically childish.
If you would just listen for a moment, what I am trying to tell you is that accurate moral values (evaluation) are simply a second-order emergent, metaconscious phenomenon of physics: biology emerged from elemental physics and our metaconscious minds that can conceive of language-based values emerged from first-order emergent instinctual PHYSICal biology. Which is why I talked about the worm’s values being based on subsistence-level physics so as to say that our ethical values should be based on nothing more than subsistence-level physics twice removed, because that is the dynamic by which worms and humans came to exist in the first place. That’s what the truth of natural law is. Going with the wild flow. If you can’t listen then just try to love yourself a little first, brother, and then go out and earn yourself some more love. But building is hard, so if you ain’t up for it then the least you can do is not go around living in the past and telling everyone else that country loving hard work doesn’t exist. At least you’re not cussing me out this time round, so there’s that. Peace.
Thank you Reante for patiently trying to communicate your view.
Let me try to paraphrase your point to see if have grasped it correctly. And apologies if I’ve grasped any of it incorrectly.
Accurate moral values, or ethical evaluations, can be understood as a complex and higher-level [second-order] phenomenon that arises from the fundamental principles of physics.
Just as biological life developed from basic physical elements, human “metaconscious” minds, capable of understanding and expressing values through language, have emerged in the course of the evolution from earlier creatures lacking such minds driven by instinctual physical [first-order] biological processes.
This connection is why you mentioned that the values of a simple organism, like a worm, are rooted in basic survival-driven physical needs.
Consequently, you are saying that human ethical values should also be grounded in these fundamental principles of survival, which are indirectly related to the basic physics underlying our existence. This perspective reflects “natural law”—which in essence is an acknowledgment of the underlying forces that shape life and existence, urging us to align our lives and our ethics with the natural flow of life.
If I could add to that, “natural law” is an ethical concept developed by humans, obviously. Since, somewhat ironically, “natural law” isn’t a “law of nature”, it could be argued that the term “natural law” is a misnomer, or at least potentially confusing. But at the same time, it isn’t something that somebody just “pulled out of a hat” in order to justify their own convenient ethical system. It emerged over a long period based the recognition that human beings have the capacity for reason and on reflections on and inquiries into human nature.
Tim thanks very much, you say it so much more elegantly than I do, and understand it intimately. And you’re a model of equanimity.
“If I could add to that, “natural law” is an ethical concept developed by humans, obviously. Since, somewhat ironically, “natural law” isn’t a “law of nature”, it could be argued that the term “natural law” is a misnomer, or at least potentially confusing.”
“Natural law,” as a phrase, is just a third-order emergent phenomenon of self-organizing physics (evolution) isn’t it? Biology is first-order, animal kingdom metaconsciousness (which humans optimized) is second-order, and accordant language is third-order, or at least quasi-third-order; therefore the phrase itself shares the same fractal. Seamless. Most hunter-gatherer cultures’ languages eschewed the numbers 4 and above in order to keep their languages accordant, and, by extension, their actions. Of course they could count well beyond 3, for practical purposes, voicing them invited acquisitiveness.
Natural law as the spoken word of physics: what do you think about that?
Political law as the spoken word of psychoapathologizing physics.
Tim I should have also asked why you don’t think natural law is a law of nature? Admittedly it would be more precise to say natural law is in accordance *the* law(s) of nature, but I think that’s implied/covered by the normal use of law in the singular.
law implies intent
there is no intent.
humankind expands beyond the limit of available resources, then dies back……just like any other species.
except that humans have been foolish enough to create gods in order to confirm that they are not subject to the forces of nature and natural constraints.
Thanks Norm. I gather then that you irrationally believe the universe can come from nothing, and without intent. Reason makes self-evident that the origins of the universe must be the result of an intention, and that its dynamics can be patterned well enough to coalesce into trustworthy/stable body of living law/rules. If that wasn’t the case we humans wouldn’t be here. I agree with what you said about the god function. I don’t believe in god, just Creator.
To me, the Creator is still active. Somehow, the self-organizing system has kept the economy from completely crashing so far. I have been writing about this issue for almost 20 full years now.
Somehow, I see the self-organizing system still at work, every day. The people commenting on this blog keep changing. They have an amazing variety of backgrounds.
Somehow, the self-organizing system has helped me along, too. Nearly every other energy writer is trying to maximize his financial collections; I haven’t felt like I needed to. This has allowed free comments for everyone.
My background has been unusually good for being able to investigate what is going on. I met many other researches early on, which helped as well.
the universe just ”is”
the fact that we dont know how it came about, does not grant us licence to manufacture a convenient ”truth” to fill that gap.
some physical function is in force, but in ways we just dont understand at all
Mirror, personally, I haven’t read such a heated philosophical discussion since Wittgenstein thrust that red-hot poker in Popper’s direction during a debate in Cambridge attended by Russell in 1945.
Words, phrases, concepts, and idioms have meanings that people have invested them with. Playing with them and putting them together in interesting ways can be as much fun for some people as playing with Lego bricks is for others.
Producing philosophy can be considered as an activity similar to building huge models of Saturn V rockets or medieval castles using Lego bricks—with the added advantage of being able to remold some of”bricks” at will in order to make them fit the structure one is building, which is something that is not allowed with Lego.
Take the word or the concept “value”.
It’s a noun and a verb, and its adjectives valuable and invaluable come from the same stable. If we look at the noun “value” and think about how it is used, see that it is used in a huge variety of different ways, depending on the field and the context in which people are using it.
IMHO, you would be correct in stating “It is ‘valuable’ only as a means to an end. The end itself is not ‘valuable’.” That should be a trivial observation. The end may be valuable to someone, or to a worm diffing in the earth, and not valuable to someone else, but it is not valuable to itself. To this I would add, an end (goal, purpose, target) can also be a means to something else. A life of action and activity can be considered (rather depressingly in my view) as a long series of means and ends.
What I think all these uses have in common is that “value” is in the eye of the evaluator, be it an individual, an authority, a market, a society, or a worm. The natural world may have no intrinsic “value,” nor any need for it, but its denizens, including worms and humans, whether consciously or not, would appear to need “value” if they are to bother to get up or dig down in the morning.
If I were to attempt to define “value” as an abstract noun, I would say that “value” was a concept that almost everyone is sure they understand by almost no one would be able to define exhaustively, but which embodies ideas of worth, importance, and significance across various contexts, serving as a fundamental concept that influences ethical frameworks, economic transactions, personal beliefs, and cultural practice; and also that understanding “value” as an abstract noun necessitates recognition of its fluidity and variability, as it’s meaning can differ dramatically according to individual, cultural, or situational perspectives. Yeah!?
Would have been interesting to watch Russel debate with Jung.
How did such a complex system as the Universe spring out of nothing, and then keep going and going? It would seem to me that this would, by itself, argue for a Creator of the Universe.
What rules are needed for people to live together in a particular time and place vary, just as religions vary. Different religions/historical customs give interpretations of what is needed. Religions also help bind groups of people together, so that young people can marry people other than close relatives.
With all of the fossil fuel burning, cultures have been rapidly changing. And, as we reach the end of the fossil fuel age, cultures can be expected to change even more. It stands to reason that rules for getting along with each other and the natural environment might need to change as well. Religions need to keep changing to match the times.
In recent years, a popular belief has been that the world economy can keep growing, indefinitely. We don’t need a god because the government/stock market/pension plans will provide everything we need. All we need to do is to vote in the correct political leaders. But this doesn’t really work, as we are discovering now.
“How did such a complex system as the Universe spring out of nothing, and then keep going and going? It would seem to me that this would, by itself, argue for a Creator of the Universe. ”
You then have to argue where the “Creator of the Universe” came reom.
No you don’t.
According to the obvious laws of our universe, something (the universe) cannot come from nothing; therefore, a Creator external to the universe must exist (or have existed) in order for the universe to emerge.
Anything outside of this universe is entirely unknowable to us who exist within it, obviously. Any attempt to explain the nature or origins of a known unknown has no basis in true Reason and, therefore, no reasonable arguments are possible let alone necessary, but people are still free to make up irrational religious mythologies about Creator if they choose, but that choice was only ever exercised by humans once humans started agriculturally enslaving their local ecologies and thereby fundamentally skewing their perceptions of ecological dynamics to that of destructive master-slave dynamics instead of constructive self-organizing dynamics. Agricultural religious mythologies became the cultural vehicles for justifying the structurally selfish new dynamic. Surprise surprise.
Thanks, Christopher. Jung vs. Russell on God, life and everything, refereed by perhaps Aldous Huxley or Eric Fromm.
On the other hand, perhaps AI agents representing the views and perspectives of these two unique very smart thinkers will engage in some simulated debates soon? It’s either that, or we are going to have to sit through Jordan Peterson vs. Yuval Noah Harari, which would be the intellectual equivalent of being waterboarded.
He adopted Catholicism on his death bed if I remember correctly
It appears CHS is no fan of globalization: “Last Gasp of the Landfill Economy”
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr25/last-gasp-landfill4-25.html
An excerpt:
My experience has been that the appliance manufacturers are looking too much for efficiency. They cut corners. The product fails, very early. A couple of years ago, we had an LG refrigerator fail after we had had it about a year. Fortunately, LG gave us money for it after the company decided it was unrepairable. We bought a Whirlpool Refrigerator instead, and it has held up for a while. So perhaps they don’t all fail right away.
I liked CHS’s more blunt description from his earlier posts about this topic. “The crapification of the US economy.”
https://wallstreetwindow.com/2022/02/the-crapification-of-the-u-s-economy-is-now-complete-charles-hugh-smith/
He has nailed it.
And it applies to services and software. Tax year 2022 Vanguard failed in its fiduciary duty to take my scheduled RMD (in the US , a Required Minimum Distibution from a tax deferred IRA (Individual Retirement Account) to a taxable account and paying taxes on the amount of that transfer as income). Vanguard advertises this service and had done it the previous two years. (about the life of a refrigerator). After an appeals to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service , or the “tax man” ) and a letter from Vanguard admitting fault, I avoided a 20% tax penalty.
So I got on the phone with my Flagship representitive in 2023 to be sure this did not happen again. Like an idiot I didn’t follow up, but got nervous towards the end of 2023 and said to myself I’d better double check. Sure enough, they hadn’t taken it out for 2023 either! I immediately took the RMD on line December 29, 2023 but then found out that Vanguard had not warned investors that even though the IRS deadline to take an RMD was December 31, 2023, a transfer, even within its own funds, had to have been done by December 28, 2023. Therefore, my transaction would not be recorded until January 2, 2024, thus triggering a “gotcha” failure to take a timely RMD.
On September 2, 2024 I got my first notice from the IRS that they were charging me a 10% penalty plus interest. At least the penalty had been lowered to 10% of the RMD. This time, my appeal was rejected and I am still waiting to see if my abatement will be considered.
So this year I took my 2024 RMD early , even before my tax returns. I tried to contact a Flagship representitive, and they never returned my scheduled call. I tried several times to take this RMD on line but it was so confusing I could not do it with any confidence. So yesterday, 4-09-2025 my follow up e-mail “confirmed” that I had made “a fund exchange” but only named the account numbers. Presumably, I would have been informed that I had taken the RMD from my IRA account, paid the tax on it, and deposited the balance into their taxable account to satisfy the requirment for my RMD for 2024.
So today 4-10-25 at the time of this post, when I checked my online account, you guessed it, my Vanguard account still shows that I have not taken the RMD!
These bankers, lawyers, hedgefund managers, money changers are F-ing useless! The lawyers especially are held to no standards of competence. They represent the crapification of the services industries. And AI is going to improve this? Microsoft , Google, Apple, Palantir etc are quite busy as the Deep State’s surrogates trying to get all your information. Switching to Linux which has been a hassle as well but it is better to make my stand now I figure.
And people wonder why I am pissed.
>> Switching to Linux which has been a hassle
I recommend this to anyone. With Microsoft Windows openly becoming spyware in recent versions and exfiltrating all your information, it is time to abandon them for good.
I really like their dev-tools, but you can’t be on a hostile system.
Ubuntu is my go to platform.
I believe people are flexible. I want to see no Chinese products landed in the US and see no US products landed in China. What to do about trans-shipments?
About ten years ago, I bought a set of three yoga videos. One of them was entitled “Yoga for Inflexible People.”
I see there is also a book of the same title:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50387422-yoga-for-inflexible
Donald Trump is just a symbol of the fight between the working population and the retirees. The pensions are completely unsustainable and what is ahead is much more worse than this current “tariff war”. Anyway, this “tariff war” in fact represents the war between the younger populations of the producing countries and the ageing populations of the consumers countries.
The actual horrible stagflation is something that can not be beaten, as the returns are diminishing fast. Very fast.
The situation is completely out of control: AI destructs the last easy jobs, i.e. the jobs with low energy consumption in the services sector.
The system completely dismantles: energy gets more expensive and the transport becomes unsustainable.
The green agenda requirements can not be met, if you do not have cheap resources.
Food is out of reach, plagued by droughts and pests, which means horrible prices.
Horror, horror…
When the number of living retirees (boomers) drops below a certain threshold number, they will be outvoted by the Xers ,Millenials, and Zers. Estate taxes will suddenly rocket up to confiscate as much easily accessible boomer wealth as possible. Currently, I think it is 14 million! Do you think they are really going to let that much pass through their nets? The IRS will know who the boomers are, where their money is, and that they are too wimpy to do anything about it, re: armed revolt. They will let themselves be outvoted and go whining to their graves. The number of young people who get no inheritance will greatly outnumber those who are counting on a big inheritance.
It therefore may be better to give up to $18,000 (that was the max amount for 2024 tax year) per person per year tax-free now to your sons, daughters, and granchildren and avoid getting blindsided by a sudden future increase in inheritance tax when the government is making a mad scramble to find cash. All those boomer retirement accounts, pensions and savings will be too irresistible for the government not to get their hands on.
Taxing is one way of cannibalism: the system collapses, as there will be no means for maintenance. You can grab something, but the bigger problem is who will do the maintenance, if there are no cheap and skilled immigrants?
18,000*30 = 540,000. Nowhere close to the estate tax threshold.
“Not entirely, but Quakers played a significant role in the development of iron production in England. For example, Abraham Darby I, a Quaker, revolutionized the iron industry in the early 18th century by using coke instead of charcoal in blast furnaces. This innovation made iron production more efficient and cost-effective, contributing to the Industrial Revolution.
Quakers were prominent in various industries during this period due to their strong networks, reputation for fair dealings, and innovative approaches to business. However, they were not the only group involved in iron production; others also contributed to advancements in the field.”
Note the reputation for fair dealings; this traces back to their religion I should think. Groups of humans need rules and while I am not familiar with Quaker religion, Judeo-Christian religion has the Ten Commandments which are a set of simple rules. Modern Law seems to be all about winning at any cost; it does not build trust. If a deal needs five pages of fine print, it is probably not a very good deal.
Dennis L.
There is always a tension between making money at any cost and treating the trading partner fairly.
It seems like you need a lot more than the ten commandments to work out what is fair and what is not. I suppose that working out what is fair is the reason that many religions and religious groups around the world have arisen. As the amount of resources available changes, and the population changes, each person’s fair share can change dramatically. Somehow, religious writings can be reinterpreted in the current situation.
Agree regarding Ten Commandments, but is a good place to start.
The world is not deterministic, it is approx 80/20. The trick is to cast aside the 80 which does not work quickly; longer the 80 is tried, the stronger the narrative to try a little harder.
If forgiveness has a strength, it is for the sinned against to move on as soon as possible.
I do not believe in making money at any cost, it does not build good will and can build lasting animosity.
Dennis L.
The world is determined by available energy and materials, not delusions
NASDAQ down 6+% right now and S&P down 5% right now. Interesting. Boomers are probably freaking out, all that’s important to them is that the numbers go up.
The amounts keep bouncing around. The 10 year Treasury rate is at 4.400%. That gives pretty high mortgage rates. WTI is about $60, which is too low for producers.
The market is no longer stable enough to just leave money there and let it grow.
Gold is up 3% on the day. People are losing trust in financial products as stores of value.
Re: earlier comments on start of industrial age. So it seems like the crucial component was the steam engine.
By 1078 CE, the implementation of coke as a replacement to charcoal in the production of iron in China dramatically increased the industry to 125,000 tons per year.
Why didn’t China figure it out?
It’s an interesting what if history if they did.
They would have covered the world for fuel.
Maybe they could’ve been so dominate that there would have been no other nation of significance ever. No world wars.
Would Ancient Greek philosophy just be a footnote?
Everyone else just novelties for the amusement of one of those eastern dynasties.
There is an upside to China not scaling up coal use. China would have used up its easily accessible coal, early on, if it had figured out how to scale up its use. Today, the world economy would be in much worse state, if China had depleted its coal supply early.
China’s heavy industry grew up in the north of China, just like it grew in the north of the US and Europe. There seemed to be a connection with needing the coal for heating, and then that interest spreading to other uses.
They would need tons of other stuff in their civilizational toolkit for that to happen.
You see, Europe had at the time a scientific revolution going on, with people discovering physics and its mathematics, and this allowed engines to be built.
They were discovering and colonizing the world since 1492, with the most advanced naval and navigational technologies. They had a useful printing press industry, a strong commerce forged by centuries of Hanseatic practices. Pre-industrial industries with the Guild system.
European nations were also passing through a philosophical transformation, since Spinoza and had a political transformation with the Enlightenment, with its ideas of freedom, which led also to free trade. There was a whole pan-national european community of learned men, each advancing all of the stepping stones needed for the industrial revolution to happen, little by little, individually, and then sharing their discoveries.
China had nothing. For all that matters, they were still some medieval society with an asiatic production model and a God-Emperor.
They would treat coke as just another common thing, use it to exhaustion and then collapse.
“Oh! But they had the printing press as well! They had gunpowder! They had a huge navy, biggest ships ever!”
None of this matter. They had a lot of good toys, yes, but these were just toys to them. They didn’t have a matured civilization to treat these as more than toys.
Just like you giving Oil and Ferraris to Arab of African dictators.
you can also pin it down to religion
the industrial revolution was started by quakers—dissenters—they were excluded for the church, the law, universities and the military
so they went off and did their own thing—ie production of cheap iron.
and changed the world.
You bring up important points. The Chinese made musical bells of iron long ago, but the Chinese never figured out making more useful things in quantity with iron. Perhaps the issue is not having enough of the precursor elements for society.
Nitpicking maybe, but the Europeans haven’t discovered and colonised the world since 1492, but since 1415, when the Portuguese conquered Ceuta and began exploring the west coast of Africa, discovered the Azores islands in 1427 and by 1488 had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and already discovered, arguably, the new American world (as in Brazil).
Sick of this ignorant BS that the Spanish “discovered America”.
Not only did they not discover it, but all the hard work was already done by the badass mother-f*ck*rs portuguese.
If there were any justice in this lawless and godless world, Portugal would charge Spain, England, Holland and France a billion dollars a year in royalties for inventing modern colonisation!
I see that the italian press talks about insider trading orchestrated by the administration. It is not impossible, the last week has been an insider trader dream. Surely someone made a lot of money shorting things.
i’d come to that conclusion
a few of the don’s chums must have made billions
Then again, all of them are reporting it at the same time. While a reasonable hypothesis (we are not so far removed from the days of Hunter Biden), we have seen these types of media storms before.
Are you suggesting that the Don’s casino is not a legit business? That’s a shocking assertion.
Some folks lost a lot of money, too. By laws of chance, it will go both ways. But insiders, or people who understand the back and forth nature of negotiations, may have an advantage.
The internet enables trades involving hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars in milliseconds. The FED /fractional reserve banking system enables the creation of trillions of unbacked fiat dollars with the press of a keyboard button, essentially legalized counterfeiting. Bribing of politicians to write laws favorable to banks, financiers, and hedge fundsleads to even crazier “financial instruments” like derivatives. And the ultimate outrage is that when these hedge funds and banks screw up or get too greedy, the big ones get bailed out with even more fiat money.
Derivatives were once an insurance policy for farmers so they could afford the next year’s planting. This depended on getting some kind of guaranteed price for their crops from the fall harvest. This had become a perversion on Wall Street.
I understand the theory that shorting stocks keeps an eye on acompany’s performance, but in my opinion, the insider trading, the dark funds, the manipulation of IPOs, government subsidies for industries like Amazon, SpaceX, Palantir, the FED printing, the bailouts, the on-again off off-again tariffs, the favorable tax treatment of capital gains over earned income has tipped the scales to the extent that true Capitalism has been totally corrupted.
The current favorable tax rates for capital gains from passive finance activity should be taxed at the highest rates possible, since many of these gains are derived from fraudulent government funding. Taxes on earned income, especially in a degrowth economy, should be reduced drastically or even eliminated. This would cut back on the financier/ rentier parasite class and focus on the true cost of making things and providing useful services. You certainly want to encourage investment, as true capitalism, despite its faults, is still the best system we have to benefit the people, but today we reward malinvestment.
So eliminate these monsters of shorting, especially naked shorting, on Wall Street. You can buy stocks in the expectation that the company will grow, or sell them in the belief that they are overpriced, but no more shorting them and beyond like with volatility indexes, and secondary bets on abstracts. Restrict the amount of leverage, which would probably be a self-correcting problem if bailouts ended. The current system injects too much chaos and no longer functions. Tax short-term capital gains at 90%.
But all of this is just wishful thinking. The cold reality is that it would take an all-out civil war, a total war, to change this. This isn’t going to happen. Not unless the trucks stop running, the grocery stores are bare, and dollars become worthless.
Maybe the Italian press, should show some paperwork to confirm their accusations? If they have evidence of insider trading and do not provide it, they are complicit are they not?
The italian press responds only to its masters, so they will do what they are told. If the going get tough, they will be ordered to switch the subject. Look, a femminicidio! or a squirrel, or something.
They hate Trump because he promotes national values.
Italian press is leftist and ?ewish, so they strongly believe that nationalism represent a risk for their lobby, because inside a nation they could be stigmatized, but inside a pot-pourri like Europe, they can easily rule above the mess and above the melting pot.
So, every occasion is good to try to create Trump’s evilness or psychological problems.
They have not understood the real changes that are happing.
The fantastic mortal double jump is that the same Italian leftist and ?ewish press completely support Israeli nationalism 😀
the don promotes only the values of ”self”
you can check history to confirm that
he cares nothing for anyone or anything outside that parameter
No matter how much some people want to deny it, the bad days for the lower classes have arrived and their fate will be rather harsh.
Those who believe some contraption which we don’t have will be enough to provide good living for the rednecks, etc, are extremely delusional. Why those who own such contraptions have to provide good living so people who can’t spell can drive the latest electric vehicle? Simply delusional.
The technocratic society is a winner take all society, leaving nothing to the rest.
The world will be very cruel, without mercy, without any leniency to about 90-99% of all population and all good things will be enjoyed only by the top, with an uncrossable barrier to separate that from the rest, if the world does not collapse within ten years.
A good example of the technocratic society is the USA military industrial complex. Its leaders are on the production side MBAs, so technocrats all right, and generals who have never seen the battlefield on the procurement side (presumably also technocrats). It can be beat, apparently by primitive societies like the Houthis, due to the technocrats being incompetent.
It is easy for MBAs to think that models will work, but I cannot believe that they will work any better for the military than for anyone else.
I’m not following drb753. Is he saying the military industrial complex is being managed and led by people who very little military experience but have MBAs and lots of models or theories about how to prevail in various military conflicts?
We still speak about the coming collapse, and yet few are willing to accept that we are actually *in the collapse* right now. Yes, poor people are going to suffer, but frankly, everyone is going to suffer.
Suffering is subjective. I might have to migrate my diet to seasonal fruit and vegetables, wash my clothes by hand, and walk everywhere, and fix things instead of buying new.
A rich person who thought he would be imune the the economic descent, might find that his grounded Lear Jet needs a replacement chip, which is not made anymore. A rich and a poor person might share a fate, because some drug or regular life sustaining medical intervention is not available in your time zone anymore.
Are we not all facing an ( oil depleting ), future which we will have to adapt to in ways that we have not yet anticipated?
we can predict everything except the future
You are right; we are already in the collapse, with some of us more in the collapse than others. For a while, wealth was rising from generation to generation. Now we find that young people are less well off than their parents. Getting higher education wasn’t as helpful as hoped. Buying a home seems out of reach, indefinitely.
“The technocratic society is a winner take all society, leaving nothing to the rest.”
That’s not a technocratic society, that’s barbarism.
That’s the way the Mexican drug cartels operate.
That is not the wheel, metal tools, or written language.
That is not civilization.
I hope that’s what you meant.
I hope you meant that there will be no civilization in the future, just gangs.
our technocratic society cannot exist without the ‘underclass’ of unwashed workers
https://youtu.be/BjiZUkayyCY?si=fTgCcbGcNKINE3zS
Alex Krainer’s take on the current geopolitical situation.
I listened to at least part of this video.
Alex Krainer thinks that Trump’s attack on Yemen is indirectly an attack on Europe’s trade through the straight. This attack tends to cut off Europe’s trade with the Far East. It is another way of reducing world trade (and indirectly using oil use). Thus, while attacking a very poor country makes little sense, looked at this way, it is a way to rebalance the system in a way that favors the US.
Thank you.
Dennis L.
The guy regularly talks about FED policy and has derived it from basic economic theories. Although he reports mainly on the USA, it is still interesting for me as a non-American.
He calls it “Credible Threat Theroy” and he wasn’t really surprised that the tariffs have now been canceled again (except for China).
You could say Trump and Powell are working in tandem.
I like the guy and maybe it’s worth listening to his theses, especially for Americans.
Tariffs should be looked at as a way to increase inflation expectations. This is a benefit to the Federal Reserve. It is not really a way to move US manufacturing higher.
Administration needs fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the economy. Affects stock market. Administration gets their power back.
The neutral interest rate is important. If inflation is high, high interest rates can be justified. Administration has leverage by lowering interest rates to zero, if neutral rate is high.
The US put a 34% tariff put on Canadian lumber over the weekend, but it doesn’t show up in the US public media. But this was hidden. Media blackout; being publicized in Canada.
This is first part of video.
I have followed this guy and he is way behind the curve he just now understands that we are heading into deflation….. we are already in a recession. He doesn’t understand energy. If you really want to hear a good explanation https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/eurodollar-university/id1506469669?i=1000702997692
This is much better than a home depot guy.
Gail maybe help edit this guy’s message so he’s not posting his email to get spammed? Seems to have switched the username vs email fields.
I don’t think that there is an edit I can make, other than to delete the comment. He uses the same string as his email. For now, I will leave it alone. What he says makes sense. I have my email address many places, and it is not a huge problem.
I can believe that a dollar shortage is part of the problem. I agree that that seems to be a better explanation than is being given by the Uneducated Economist. High interest rates are a real problem for the economy today. Increasing inflation expectations sounds iffy as a desired outcome.
Hazard is governed by the laws of physics. I remember this picture of my friend, who is a matematician:
https://www.cernova.sk/foto/aktualne1/176/1422134586_20150122_100710.jpg
https://www.cernova.sk/aktualne/?a=9-roc-hazard-v-deviatke-nastastie-pod-kontrolou-odbornika&id=176
Gravity is the most important force here.
Everything put together sooner or later falls apart… Paul Simon sang in the 70s.
https://youtu.be/E1dMPwSfHmg?si=FmBscwc5_7707pSO
Main distractions in the west over the last five years:
“The gruesome pandemic”
followed by
“Poor Okraina/Russofobia part n”
followed by
“The Donald says”.
Distractions are a good way of describing what has filled US media:
1. The gruesome pandemic
2. Poor Ukraine and terrible Russia narrative
3. Donald Trump’s sayings, which keep changing
The Great Reset is happening. The Great Reset is not happening exactly the way described in the book by the same name but it is happening apace.
The distractions just give rationalizations for what the elite have decided needs to be done.
Right before the pandemic, this book came out
10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less Hardcover – February 4, 2020
by Garett Jones
The rule of law is now the rule of the elite.
The masses are the sheep and the elite are the shepherd.
TINA.
(there is no alternative).
Round one complete
——————
I am reading an awful lot of interpretative narratives about how ‘the world’ bigged up and Trump ‘backed down’. The actual facts are more salient. You have to remember that humans are basically pushy groupish primates who make up stories the whole time.
So what are the facts thus far?
> additional levies on the world’s second-largest economy [have increased] to 125 per cent, deepening his trade stand-off with [China]. A 10 per cent blanket levy on most imports from around the world also remains in force [plus the specific tariffs on sectors.]
…. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said the “world is ready” to work with Trump to “fix global trade” but dismissed China as having “chosen the opposite direction”.
[It] ushers in a phase of what are expected to be multiple, parallel trade negotiations between the US and its top trading partners [bar China] over the coming weeks to try to resolve commercial tensions. (FT)
——————-
Let round two begin
Most of the world wants to negotiate. China stood up to USA and USA stood up back; that looks set for confrontation. EU also retaliated with targeted sanctions to targeted USA sanctions on EU; it did not respond to the 20% general tariffs and it now finds itself on the general 10%; however it did retaliate in a targeted way and quite possibly Trump will respond to that. It was fascinating to see how Europeans were suddenly all for China and against USA.
My general view would be that nothing ‘means’ anything unless there is some ‘goal’ in mind. For Europeans, it is generally about states and economies and they quite like the world ‘the way that it is’. They see Trump as disrupting their status quo. But the world is a flux and all things in it and their ability to ‘control’ that is limited. And they are free to interpret ‘meaning’ as they like but it is only an interpretation and there are others that are at least as interesting.
USA is its own case. Its view of ‘meaning’ is similar to the Europeans: states and economies. Whether it can compete on the global stage in the future remains to be seen. It is trying to strengthen itself economically and to thus increase its security potential. It has lost its hegemony and it faces emergent peer competitors in China and Russia. Europe basically depends geopolitically on a strong USA but it not willing to be weakened that USA might be stronger.
I suppose that we will have to see how that all works out for them. I will not lie and pretend that I am ‘rooting’ for any of them. Pushy groupish primates are going to do what they are going to do. One can take them only so seriously. They find their stories ‘convincing’ and that is up to them. ‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances.’ ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question.’
At what point driving from San Diego to Tijuana and returning with a trunk load of laptops becomes a viable business?
If Mexico can import the laptops without a tariff, and if smuggling into the US can avoid the tariff, I suppose this approach becomes a viable business quite quickly.
with 100% tariffs you could return with a single laptop, not violate any law, and make a livable profit on Ebay.
JJ Couey was the main scientific advisor for RFK Jr’s book The Wuhan Cover Up, and afterward he worked as a staff scientist for Children’s Health Defense until they fired him for not staying “on message” in December 2023.
JJ has is sympathetic to RFK Jr. but thinks he’s lived his life a bit like Truman Burbank of “The Truman Show” fame, surrounded by people who have been actively managing his reality since way back when. I’m sharing this for people who might be trying to gain some insight into why Bobby is behaving “inconsistently,” even going as far as to approve of things that Norman approves of, such as MMR vaccines for kiddies.
This is an interview JJ did with Kim Iversen last month. He also touches on the origins of the pandemic, the non-existence of SARS CoV-2, the virus/no-virus debate, etc., and speculates as to why the pandemic’s planners might want to kill off a substantial fraction of the population.
The interesting stuff starts at about 15 minutes in.
https://rumble.com/v6qy83g-the-ultimate-covid-hoax-why-rfk-jrs-researcher-says-the-virus-never-existed.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
This still seems like a hard sell.
We know, or think we know, too much about the virus and its many mutations.
there was a plan to exterminate the world’s population but it failed so now the elders are trying an older approach World War 3 between America and China
/////////there was a plan to exterminate the world’s population but it failed so now the elders are trying an older approach World War 3 between America and China//////
when any kind of ‘plan’ is made, it has to be with a purpose in mind.
tell me—what possible purpose could there be in exterminating the world’s population??
and just who were the planners?
i have a masochistic need to know about such things.
But Norman, suppose you weren’t paying attention to Fast Eddie posts about the CEP… be provided as much detail as possible and afraid you are not allowed to know more. It’s a club and we ain’t in it, BRUH.
Much like the movie The Big Short when the two Brown Investor Group applied to get access to the WS circle and had to call Brad Pitt to make their trades to make billions in the 2008 financial crisis.
Much like what has just happened now..
Norman Pagett says:
April 10, 2025 at 7:09 am
i’d come to that conclusion
a few of the don’s chums must have made billions
It’s soooo obvious….why so serious? BRUH
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ktGarjZC8E8&pp=ygU1VGhlIGJpZyBzaG9ydCBhcHBseWluZyB0byBpbnZlc3RtZW50IGJyb3duIGludmVzdGluZyDSBwkJfgkBhyohjO8%3D
This is my favorite cash and burn fluck, I mean flick along with Margin Call…you really need to pay attention better, Norman or life will pass you bye..just kidding…not…I mean yes…I’m so 😕 confused
as far as the dear departed FE was concerned, his posts were so full of the need to regale everyone with his own inadequacies and …er… shortcomings, i was forced to ignore all of it.
i find that’s the best way to deal with obsessives, though he was by far the worst in that respect.
i’m sure there’s a financial club we of the great unwashed are excluded from
life passed me by years ago—i am still trying to catch up with it
JJ wouldn’t go that far, Adonis. He conjectures or suggests that, with US Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid set to go bankrupt in years to come due to demographics ‘n’ stuff, the planners took the opportunity to bump off some of the oldsters early in order to trim the amount that these systems was paying out.
One problem with that is, as Elon’s team has discovered, there is an awful lot of Social Security fraud that could be addressed without bumping off anybody.
With the above in mind, have you heard the joke about the two gravestones in the cemetery?
One gravestone says to the other, “They are taking away our social security.”
The other gravestone replies, “That’s too bad! Can we still vote?”
“What Are The Pros and Cons for Each Vaccine?”?
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/determining-the-risks-and-benefits
Pros and cons? Easy – don’t take any of the poisons aka ‘vaccines’.
Live as clean as you can, avoid Big Pharma’s multifarious poisons.
Enjoy life doomers.
yup
enjoy polio while you can
as long as its not you paralysed
Would this be the polio that had almost disappeared(95%+) before the introduction of vaccines?
The same polio that doubled not long after mass vaccines were introduced?
All major vacancies were introduced just as the diseases were disappearing.
Scarlet Fever, which has never had a vaccine, followed the same path. How could that be so, if we were to believe poison sellers?
Norman, it’s important to recognize that even before the introduction of the polio vaccines, most people didn’t develop polio.
And when I say most people, I mean well over 99.9% of people.
In 1952, the peak year for polio in the United States, there were over 21,000 cases of paralytic poliomyelitis reported. This represented a high point in the disease’s impact on the US, leading to widespread fear and increased efforts to find a vaccine. There were also about 3,000 deaths from polio that year in the US.
The US population in 1952 was estimated to be 155,548,000 (there was no comprehensive census that year).
21,000 cases out of 155,548,000 people works out to about one case of polio for every 7,000 people, meaning that 6,999 people out of every 7,000 didn’t develop polio that year.
I don’t want to understate the seriousness of polio. For anyone coming down with it and their families, it is a tragic life-changing event.
But being vaccinated can also be a tragic life-changing event.
According to the National Institutes of Health, “at least 220 000 people were infected with live polio virus in Cutter’s vaccine (including 100 000 contacts of immunised children), 70, 000 developed muscle weakness, 164 were severely paralysed, and 10 died.”
Whether Cutter’s vaccine helped more people than it harmed is debatable. It is assumed that it was given to over 400,000 people, half of whom received live polio virus in the shot.
With odds like that, all I can say is thank heavens Cutter’s vaccine wasn’t rolled out to 80% of the entire population of the US, or there could have been 100 million infected with polio, 30 million developing muscle weakness, 500,000 severely paralyzed, and 5,000 dead.
If Trump can’t take the heat from the economic damage of his tariffs, how will he possibly be able to go to war with Iran? The damage the Iranians could do to middle east oil production if we bomb them would do worse economic damage than the tariffs. This shows Iran that Trump is horribly weak.
Maybe the back and forth we are seeing are just the way the system works. It is not a sign of weakness.
Just like the stock market doesn’t go straight up or straight down, ideas like the tariffs get thrown out, then then taken back and changed somewhat, and perhaps paused. There is always back and forth.
I’m not sure but I think things were freezing up. The world economy is incredibly interconnected you can’t just cut things off. Trump is realizing this.
The US has cut off Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, N.Korea. Does it matter? Do we have any tools to analyze the situation? Who will be voted off the island next?
Venezuela should be added to your current list.
I expect all of the countries on the list (except perhaps Iran) are doing pretty poorly right now, without huge additions of debt to try to hide their problems.
https://www.azorobotics.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=352
Robots take over mining.
That is an interesting article.
The problem with mining coal is that it historically been cheap and easy to produce, without a lot of front-end cost and complexity. It has been the inexpensiveness that has been particularly valued. Investments could be small and pay back quickly.
There are now a lot of robotic devices that can make mining safer. They can also do many of the things that workers would do. But this adds front end costs which need to be financed, generally using debt. But even if shares of stock are issued, the problem is similar. There needs to be a pretty good payback, quickly, to cover the interest payment, and to amortize the cost of the equipment.
The article refers to these issues. Everywhere in the world, coal and many minerals are extracted by very low-paid workers. Unless the cost of the mining equipment (and all of the development costs, and interest expense) can be held way down, the robotic devices tend to make the cost higher than the price the market will pay for the extracted materials.
Thank you for the reference at azo.
Dennis L.
China calls on world to unite against Trump tyranny.
“China has said they will bring in an extra 84% tariffs on the US after Donald Trump put a 104% tariff on some Chinese imports to the US which the president later increased to 125%.
This is a 50% increase on top of China’s previous tariff. This comes after an editorial in the state-run newspaper China Daily declared: “Global unity can triumph over trade tyranny.”
https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/china-tariff-usa-response-trump-1081554
Even apart from what actions Trump is taking, there is evidence that China is doing poorly. The Daily Shot provides information (mostly charts) that subscribers are not supposed to forward further.
It says:
“• China’s labor market indicators remain broadly weak, reflecting over three years of slack even before the latest trade shock. New urban job creation and employment PMIs continue to trend below average, while unemployment benefits remain elevated. (chart shown)
Another chart is headed:
China’s fiscal stimulus in 2025 will be the largest outside the pandemic
Complete government budget balance, ratio to GDP, by type of account
It then shows that the fiscal stimulus ratio to GDP for 2025 is expected to be 10.9% of GDP, based on the research of Gavekal Dragonomics/Macrobond.
This is in the “Wow” category! It is similar to 2020. It seems to be in the works, even without Trump’s actions.
It is just one country saying what can come into the ports of that one country. Hardly global tyranny.
China was going down but now they have a fall guy Trump I think that they will dig in. The U.S just betrayed the whole world. No one trust the U.S anymore. The reserve currency only works when there is a certain amount of trust
A Zerohedge article that is behind a paywall:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/absolutely-spectacular-meltdown-basis-trade-blowing-sparking-multi-trillion-liquidation
“Absolutely Spectacular Meltdown”: The Basis Trade Is Blowing Up, Sparking Multi-Trillion Liquidation Panic
We have all heard that derivatives are likely to be the first thing to get into trouble. This article says we are rapidly approach that day.
Later the article summarizes:
To summarize:
1. Multi-trillion basis trade is blowing up and countless funds and banks are unwinding positions, but…
2. There is not nearly enough liquidity in the system
3. The lack of liquidity shockwave is rampaging across all markets, sending stocks plunging (liquidation panic), bonds crashing (yields up 50bps in 2 days), and a flight to safety in FX (yen soaring… but at some point the inflection point will get hit and there will be an acute shortage of dollars as the global synthetic dollar short at around $6 trillion is even bigger than the basis trade).
4. We have critical liquidity drainage events as soon as tomorrow (the 10Y auction followed by the 30Y auction on Thursday), and if there is not enough liquidity in the system, we may have an unofficially failed auction – yes Dealers would in theory take down the whole thing, but if we get a 40 or 50% dealer award, it’s the same as a failed auction.
Meanwhile, if this were happening at any other time, the Fed would be rushing to bail out the system. After all Powell cut a jumbo 50bps in September 2024 when there was zero stress in the market plumbing… But he can’t do anything now because he would be seen as aiding Trump, especially since the narrative now is that yields are surging because of stagflation fears. Only, that’s not the case at all – indeed, yields were tumbling until Friday, when the basis trade started to get unwound, at which point they shot straight up.
And the biggest paradox is that the more liquidity is drained, the higher yields will rise, the more the Fed will misinterpret the signal sent from yields as one of stagflation (“let Trump fix that, he just needs to undo tariffs”) instead of what it really is: imploding liquidity and an imminent market crisis.
The 10-year Treasury interest rate is now up to 4.410%. This is terrible for the housing market, because mortgage rates will be high. This rate was down below 4% on Friday. All of this whipsawing hits the debt market even harder/faster than the energy market.
It appears Trump had good intentions and why he wanted to bring mfg back to the US. The problem is that the USA has stage 4 cancer. It is too far gone economically and financially to bring it back to its glory days. The foundation has been weakened and hollowed out by politicians who used those glory days to benefit and enrich themselves at the expense of the US.
Everyone who has enriched themselves are now crying that the spiked punch bowl has been taken away. This is how Empires collapse, from corruption, bribery, malfeasance and decay.
Trump thinks he’s taken a trip back to the mid-fifties where hotdogs, Chevy’s, drive-in diners and rock and roll were all the rage.
Nostalgia is not a feature of MAGA . Nostalgia is a feature of the broader society. Many poll and studies show that people do not want a change from what they like or are accustomed.
It is easy to mock the boomers for being “nostalgic” but the younger generations are just as bad.
AI is power limited. Jensen Huang give a fun talk and even gets in the more you buy the more you save.
Revenues are power-limited in the AI industry, just like in many other industries.
Energy = revenue, today.
Power efficiency is terribly important.
Scale up to the maximum. The larger the system is, the more money you make.
“the more you buy the more you save.”
That guy gets it!
You get out what you put in.
“Trump Tariffs Live: Trump announces 90-day pause excluding China”
As I thought they have been obliged to make a correction.
That shows something, actually the idea tha one champion can simply beat in the world all the others in a bad way, is not feasible.
One cannot treat badly at the same time friends and enemies, waiting for everybody (also friends) to come by own house and make them kiss own @$$, as Trum himself said.
Another thing that this move shows is that besides trying to build back US industry, the objective is to weak Russia and China.
Against Russia with a low Oil price, something that Trump himself had already threaten to do to Russia, asking help to Saudi Arabia, before negotiations with US started.
Against China to force it in a sudden corner of economic and social collapse.
In my view, the result of all this will be to see in the next months and years Russia and China more friends than ever.
But the final objective of all these geopolitical movements will probably be what we are trying to discuss and to forecast here in this blog about awareness of ‘finite’ global resource, that is a general reduction of globalization, but I think that Trump’s administration is not doing with the purpose and with the idea that we have in mind in this blog.
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-tariffs-live-markets-selloff-us-reciprocal-tariffs-kick-2025-04-09/
Mish calls it capitulation .
https://mishtalk.com/economics/trump-capitulates-with-a-90-day-pause-on-tariffs-dow-jumps-2200-points/
apparently base rate 10% remains
Trump’s administration is basically now punishing only China.
But I think that Russia will come to help China in a way that I don’t know, but it will surely do it, thanking back China for all the support received for the war in Ukraine.
‘Divide et impera’ worked well for Caesar in Gallia around 55 B.C. where Gauls’ tribes were less clever than Romans, but I’m not sure that tribe-Russia and tribe-China are so now.
Trump can be unpredictible in his actions, but imprevidability works well when one is Annibale.
If you are unpredictible but not powerful like Annibale was (in the first period of his fight against Romans), one runs the risk to lose credibility and make no fear.
In my view, Trump’s admimistration may have good ideas (..maybe and as final objective..), but these ideas are applied in a childish way.
Or, even better for both Countries, China could help Russia to finalize the work in Ukraine and so liberate Russia of the need of a negotiation in steps with US to close this chapter.
Then, with Ukraine solved, EU will slowly and inevitably buy again energy from Russia and increase exchange with China.
The world will be in any case heavily transformed and I think that we have entered a period of global recession.
READ MY LIPS!
TRUMP:90-DAY PAUSE EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY
https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1910020294837780701
I notice this in the thread. History shows 5 or 6 bear market rallies, after a downturn begins.
https://x.com/GlobalMktObserv/status/1910020420373303511
Yes , 75 countries are in touch . South Korea , Japan ( vassals), India ( Modi is retiring in September ) Vietnam . Who else ? Lesotho, Cambodia, Mali , the Penguins . The two major players China and EU are what matters . Panic .
the don is complaining that the chinese are not showing him respect
that—without exaggeration—is straight out of the Godfather
and reveals his narcissistic weakness
You are right he has no plan, no moral base. He is just a thug.
Thug seems to be a popular interpretation and it’s only going to get dirtier, but soon enough the US, as with it’s offshoots, Ukraine & Isnotrael will have no ability to sustain their barbaric ways. China know this and will fight if needed to reach this point.
“Americans, White people generally, are, to recall, a people who came from no roots in any sophisticated culture and civilization. One sees a photo line up of that 洋人 / yangren, baboon variation in every Trump Cabinet meeting (see Yang Jiechi 杨洁篪 in this). Hence, bundled in the same room, the differences in emphasis and tastes show: Miran is an economist, so his theoretical morality is in apolitical economics; Rubio is a Cuban street hireling who can do little else to be effective but kick groins; Trump is a New York hustler who lives a life trading favors, issuing threats in between, which he calls Deals.
The Trump Cabinet line up is a snap shot into the American Way, past and present — actually the 洋人 / yangren White Man’s Way once piracy became statehood.
Like Trump wielding a baseball bat to close deals, Miran uses the Dollar which he sees as having a global coercive power.”
Scathingly funny article, but also interesting about how the dollar might be used(suicide).
https://cloudwoods1.substack.com/p/han-xiongnu-usa-war-of-the-century
This is hilarious. He is whipsawing markets so hard.
The end result (or one of the end results) will be a lasting mistrust of the stock market in the population and investors like Saudi sovereign fund. no bad thing.
Good point.
Demographic interactions between the last hunter-gatherers and the first farmers
“Abstract
Demographic interaction processes play a pivotal role during episodes of cultural diffusion between different populations, particularly when these episodes can lead to competition for the same resources and geographic space. The diffusion of farming is one prototypical case within this broader scenario, where groups of incumbent hunter-gatherers occupied a space which would later be claimed by expanding farmers. In this work, we tackle such processes through a two-population mathematical model, where farmers and foragers compete and interact in the same geographic space. We present this work as a conceptual approach where, first, we assess the implications of our theoretical model and its general applicability and, second, we empirically test it on three case studies: Denmark, Eastern Iberia, and the island of Kyushu (Japan). While these regional case studies do not encompass the full range of processes observed in the interaction between migrant farmers and incumbent hunter-gatherers they provide reasonable variation to illustrate how our model can be fitted to a diverse range of empirical data and provide insights into these demographic processes. In particular, our theoretical model and case studies illustrate how endogenous interaction processes alone can explain the demographic fluctuations observed in the archaeological record during this transition, highlighting how these should be accounted for before invoking external forces as primary drivers.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2416221122
MG. Could you give a summary of that? It seems like word salad at its best.
Dennis L.
It sounds to me as if the author is saying that there is a whole lot of natural variation in populations of both farmers and hunter-gatherers. If farmers win out, external factors (such as climate change) should not assumed to be the primary drivers.
Of course, if farming produces more food per unit of land, with less variability, I would think it would win out.
yes, that is all there is to it: agriculture, at least initially, before soil depletion ensues, provides more resources than gathering. Basically, normally a few percent of the plants provide edible food. With agriculture, 100% of the plants do.
The agriculturalists will then be smaller, with bad teeth, bad eyesight and shorter life expectancy, but more numerous, and superior militarily due to long lasting provisions and being able to support a fraction of the population solely for war purposes.
Gail said it: if farming is more efficient than hunting and gathering, provides more food, then hunting and gathering is abandoned.
If you can collect material for your fields in your vicinity, bring it there and protect it, why should you chase food that animals eat anytime they need?
The idea of the Garden of Eden is the idea of a protected and maintained food space. Animals living in the Garden of Eden together with the first humans implies that they are not wild, they are subordinated to the needs of the humans, i. e. the humans do not let them eat what the humans need. As animals do not have a self-control.
David Graber in his book The Dawn Of Everything posits that hunter gathers “played” at farming for a thousand years before seriously taking it on. So this is in opposition to the theory that they were separate groups competing.
If by farming graeber was talking about pastoralism then I’ll give him a pass though the “playing” characterization is foolish. If he was talking about arable farming then he was just plain wrong, as he was in general. He wasn’t a real anthropologist. He was the ‘anthropologist’ whose covert job it was to subvert anthropology.