Our ongoing review of my earliest and least accurate set of predictions about the future of industrial society, published twenty years ago in the first few months of my original blog The Archdruid Report, has touched on a few complete bellyflops and a fair number of near misses. When I wrote those posts, as I’ve mentioned more than once, I had an inadequate grasp of the economic side of the peak oil conundrum, and even less clarity concerning the murky realm where politics and economics get hot and sweaty under the covers.
That failure of understanding wasn’t accidental. During the century and a half or so since the science of political economy was surgically separated into the two pseudosciences of economics and political “science,” a vast amount of effort has gone into making sure that the general public has no clear grasp of how money and power twine around each other. It’s possible to get past those barriers, especially if you’re willing to read books by dead people and then think about what they have to say, but back in 2006 I hadn’t yet done enough of that.
Thus it’s all the more startling to me that, in the post we’re reviewing this week, I hit the ball straight out of the park. The post in question was titled “Economics: Hallucinated Wealth,” and it first appeared on October 4, 2006. You can read it here.
You have to understand the way the collective conversation in the peak oil scene, and society in general, was shaping up to realize just how far I’d managed to get outside the conventional wisdom of the time. In the autumn of 2006, two things were painfully clear to anyone who was paying attention. The first was that the price of oil, which spent the 1990s at all time lows when corrected for inflation, was rising relentlessly and putting increasing strains on every economic activity that depended on petroleum products: that is to say, every activity that generated any kind of real wealth. Plenty of people looked at that and came to the conclusion that a whopping economic crisis was on its way.
The second was that real estate had become the focus of an absolutely classic speculative bubble. Of course everyone who was busy taking out loans to invest in overpriced condominiums, in the serene conviction that they’d be able to sell in a few months for twice the price, insisted that it couldn’t possibly be a speculative bubble. That was one of the things that made it easy to identify the bubble as such. There are certain things that people always say and do when they’ve gone over their heads in a speculative binge, things as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise or death itself, and once you learn them you’ll have an infallible early warning system for speculative excess.
Do you want to learn them? Nothing could be easier. Run, don’t walk, to the nearest used book venue and snap up a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic The Great Crash 1929. I’ve noted here rather more than once that this is the funniest, liveliest, most hilarious work of serious economic history you’ll ever read, and it’s got value for that reason alone, but it also carries out a mordant dissection of the rhetoric and the mentality of people who buy into speculative bubbles. What’s more, not one detail has changed in the last century, nor is there any sign that it will change in the least any time before our species goes extinct and is replaced by the distant descendants of chipmunks.
I mean this quite literally. The self-same notions, as often as not repeated in the self-same words, that were used to sell worthless investment trust shares to idiots in 1929 were used just as enthusiastically to sell worthless structured real estate loans to idiots in 2006. What’s more, the idiots in question justified the transactions that would soon land them in bankruptcy proceedings using the identical arguments on both occasions. Read Galbraith’s account, review it regularly, burn its injunctions into your own backside with the business end of a branding iron if you have to, but learn the signs and you will be permanently immunized against flushing your money down the gurgling pipes of the next speculative bubble.
In 2006, every single one of the usual indications showed to any reasonable observer that the real estate boom then under way was going to lead to a crash and a ferocious economic crisis. The rising price of crude oil suggested the same thing. All across the alternative scene, that led a great many people to fall into the Y2K trap we explored two weeks ago: the belief, that is, that once a serious crisis arrived, industrial society would slide straight down into the abyss, with the usual accompaniments of burning cities, rampaging mobs, and the rest of it. The same indications led a much larger group of people to insist that while the impending crash wouldn’t bring everything down all at once, we were facing a Greater Depression (that phrase was in fact quite common) in which the world’s industrial societies would plunge into crushing poverty and misery.
That was the conventional wisdom in the peak oil scene, and that was what I rejected in the post we’re discussing. That stance got me mocked or shouted down in quite a few circles before the 2008 crash arrived. Afterwards, in the usual way, the people who’d predicted imminent doom simply pretended that they’d never said anything of the kind, and started ranting about some other supposed reason why the world really would end this time for sure. It’s a familiar story to me, and one that has been repeated regularly throughout my blogging career.
The point that matters here isn’t that I was right, though of course I was. The point I want to discuss is the reason why I called the crash and its consequences the way I did. It wasn’t simply a matter of recognizing the Y2K fallacy at work, though of course that was involved. I had started to notice a divide that became increasingly important in my writing in the years that followed: the separation between money and wealth, or more broadly between goods and services, on the one hand, and the systems of arbitrary tokens our society uses to control access to goods and services, on the other.
The distinction is important. Obviously, the difference between being wrecked on a desert island with $100,000 worth of food, shelter, and communications gear, and being wrecked on the same desert island with $100,000 in cash, is quite precisely the difference between life and death. Less obviously, the relationship between real wealth (goods and services) and the arbitrary tokens we use to get real wealth (including, but not limited to, money) can go spinning out of control in any number of ways.
The Great Depression is a great example. In 1932, the United States still had all the agricultural and industrial assets it needed to feed, house, and clothe its population amply, but bad policies pursued by the federal government in an attempt to preserve the position of the investment class at everyone else’s expense caused the money system to freeze up, leaving a third of the nation hungry and shivering. Whatever else can be said for or against him, Franklin Roosevelt broke the logjam and got money moving again. The investment class never forgave him; Roosevelt Derangement Syndrome was a significant political force in this country well into the 1960s.
Our situation in 2006 also involved a disruption of the relationship between money and real wealth, but it wasn’t the same kind of disruption. Instead, very large parts of the money economy had detached itself completely from the real economy of goods and services, becoming a realm of financial hallucinations completely untethered from the real world. That process of untethering began in 1973 when Nixon finished the job Roosevelt began and took the US dollar off the gold standard. It went into overdrive in the Reagan years, when Congress gutted laws passed in the wake of the Great Depression to keep the financial industry from repeating the mistakes that made 1929 famous, and thus unleashed a new era of wild financial impropriety.
As Galbraith pointed out decades earlier, words like “innovation” and “creativity” in finance always refer to the rediscovery of a specific set of bad ideas that provide huge short-term profits but guarantee disaster a little further down the road. The financial industry responded to the liberalization of the Reagan years in exactly the way you’d expect, embracing those same bad ideas anew and generating spectacular market crashes in 1987, 1998, 2000, and 2008. We would have had another one around 2020 but a different kind of crisis intervened; the fantastic overpricing of tech stocks these days suggests that still another crash may not be too far off.
It’s important to notice what didn’t happen in each of these financial crises, however. A lot of people who invested in each bubble were ruined―I knew people who lost everything in the 2000 and 2008 panics―but the crisis didn’t impact the broader economy the way it did in 1929. Part of that was simply the fact that government bureaucrats did in fact learn a few things from the disastrous mistakes their predecessors made in 1929, but another major factor was the separation of the money economy from the economy of real wealth mentioned above.
This is easy to understand if we look at a specific example. With that in mind, let’s talk about derivatives. Shorn of handwaving, a derivative is a bet. Let’s suppose, dear reader, that I bet you ten million dollars that by 2126, hippogriffs will have been discovered romping on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. You take the bet, insisting that this won’t happen, and we write up the bet as a contract. That’s a derivative. No, neither of us have to prove that we have ten million dollars, much less put that sum in escrow. Writing and signing the contract is all it takes. You and I are the counterparties of the derivative, and we can both sell the right to collect on our side of the bet for whatever the market will bear. Whoever buys either side of the derivative now has an asset that can be sold again, used to pad out a balance sheet, or manipulated in any other way known to today’s financial markets.
As far as I know, the market in hippogriff derivatives isn’t very lively just now, but plenty of other derivative markets are much more active. This is why the notional value of derivatives in world markets today is somewhere north of $1 quadrillion (that’s $1,000,000,000,000,000.00 for those who are keeping track). Nor are derivatives the only form of imaginative finance in circulation these days, far from it. I haven’t been able to find even a rough estimate of the total value of all investment vehicles in the world today, but I’d estimate that it’s at least an order of magnitude greater than the value of all actual goods and services on earth, even allowing for the insane inflation in the price of real estate and many other assets driven by this same process of metastatic financialization.
That process has distorted our economies and societies almost beyond recognition. Many of the asset classes that prop up the global economy these days, inflating balance sheets and providing collateral for loans, are what financial jargon calls “illiquid”―that is, it’s by no means certain that they could be sold at their notional price. Price discovery, the process by which we find out what something is actually worth by seeing how much somebody will pay for it, is about as welcome in many markets today as bright sunlight and holy water at a gathering of vampires. In effect, the only reason these assets have the value they’re assigned is that everyone involved agrees to pretend that they’re worth that much. The net worth of a great many of our current crop of multibillionaires is propped up by exactly this sort of make-believe.
All this explains neatly why the stock market crashes of the last few decades haven’t caused the catastrophic consequences of the 1929 crash. There’s no way for the money system to freeze up the way it did then, because gargantuan amounts of money can be conjured out of thin air by any player in the game who wants to keep the wheels of finance turning. You don’t have to read many pages of a good narrative history of the Great Depression―Studs Terkel’s Hard Times is particularly worth your while in this regard―to realize that in a very real sense, this is a change for the better. Still, just as every silver lining has a dark cloud around it, the widening gap between the economy of financial hallucinations and the economy of real, nonfinancial goods and services has its own harsh downside.
Here’s one money quote from the 2006 post: “To say that the economic empire of hallucinated wealth will continue to exist, though, does not imply that it will continue to produce the goods and services and provide the jobs that people need. Arguably, it doesn’t do that very well now. The ‘jobless recovery’ of recent years saw most economic statistics rise well into positive territory, while most people saw their expenses rise and their income shrink when their jobs didn’t simply fold out from under them. Things could go much further in the same direction. It requires no particular suspension of disbelief to imagine a situation where the stock market hits new heights daily and other measures of economic activity remain in positive territory, while most of the population is starving in the streets.”
We’re not quite into the territory set out in that last sentence, to be sure, but we’ve come much closer to it than we were twenty years ago. Get outside the bubble-neighborhoods where the privileged live their cosseted lives and it’s clear at a glance that for most Americans, those twenty years have witnessed a frightful economic decline. It’s not the money economy that’s declined, though. The money economy is doing fine; it’s the real economy, the economy of goods and nonfinancial services, that has cratered. The accelerating decay of our built environment, the declining quality of necessary services such as medical care, the inroads of shrinkflation and crapification into the products for sale―all of these have sliced away at the real economy while the money economy has been riding high. Another quote from the post we’re discussing summarizes it well:
“The economy of markets and statistics has aptly been compared to a circus, and like any other circus, it serves mostly to distract. While interest rates wow the crowd with their high-wire act and clowns pile into and out of various speculative vehicles, the real story of economic decline will be going on elsewhere, in the non-hallucinated economy of goods and services, jobs and personal income, all but invisible behind a veil of massaged numbers and discreetly unmentioned by the mainstream media.”
That’s the story of the last twenty years. It’s also the story of the decades ahead of us, despite all enthusiastic claims to the contrary, because these things aren’t happening because the wrong party is in power, or because the wrong policies have been adopted, or because some nefarious group or other is skulking in the shadows, making all these things happen out of sheer malice. It’s happening because like every other population of living things since that first cloudy shape at the bottom of an Archaean tidepool split in half and kept on growing, we responded to a sudden glut of resources by taking up extravagant habits. As the resource base that supported those habits trickles away, in turn, we are discovering that the habits have passed their pull date―and an entire human ecology based on those habits is going away.
There’s nothing new in that story. As Clive Ponting pointed out many years ago in his A Green History of the World, every civilization in history has made some version of that same mistake and passed through the same process we’re going through now. It’s very popular, and of course very comforting as well, to insist that what’s happening is the fault of our ideologies, or our economic systems, or our technologies, and that some new ideology or economic system or technology can turn things around and get the gravy train rolling again.
What too few people like to recognize is that ideologies, economic systems, and technologies rest on a foundation of resources, not the other way around. In a modern industrial society, every technology is simply one more way of using fossil fuels, every economic system is one more way of distributing the products of fossil fuels, and every ideology is either a justification for why some group of people gets an excessive share of the products, or an argument insisting that an excessive share of those products ought to go to some other group instead. Just as all the bells and whistles in electrical appliances depend on the flow of current from wall sockets, all the intricacies of our society depend on the flow of nonrenewable natural resources―primarily but by no means only fossil fuels―from wells and mines around the world.
As that humble but necessary foundation crumbles away from underneath our proud towers, a great many things we all grew up thinking of as normal and natural will go away forever. There are ways to deal with that, and some people are engaged in them right now. We’ll talk about that in the next post in this series.
*****
On an unrelated topic, a heads up may be timely to occultists who share my interest in old-fashioned astrological magic — my longtime friend Clifford Low, one of the pioneers of the modern revival of traditional astrological magic, has just launched a new website full of information on the subject at https://www.astrologicalmagic.com . (I have no idea why that URL hadn’t been claimed long ago, but there it is.) It’s still in development, but there’s already a lot of information, including plenty of essays aimed at the complete beginner. Soon there’ll be a shop where you can get consecrated talismans and supplies, though that’s not open yet. Give it a look if you’re interested in calling down eldritch powers from the stars. (No, really. Lovecraft parodied that, but he didn’t make it up…)
Have you ever seen Galbraith ‘s 1978 TV series “The Age of Uncertainty”. There is certainly a gravitas to his commentary that is not found in most present-day presenters I would say.
I’ve been reading your work for a long time now, including through much of the twenty-year period you’re looking back on in this series. I’ve also spent those two decades working in banking, with postings in different parts of the world, so I’ve had a rather different vantage point from which to watch some of the same developments. I even greatly enjoyed your novel Twilight’s Last Gleaming about the United States eventually breaking apart and the old thirteen colonies re-emerging. So this comes from a sympathetic reader rather than someone inclined to dismiss the broader argument.
I think the distinction you draw between money and wealth is both important and too easily forgotten. A financial claim is not the thing it ultimately claims. If a society has plenty of securities with impressive valuations but cannot reliably provide housing, electricity, transport, healthcare, food or other useful goods and services, pointing to the aggregate value of the securities doesn’t resolve the problem. Working in finance arguably makes this distinction more rather than less obvious. You become very familiar with the difference between a price on a screen or in a valuation model and what an asset will actually fetch when somebody needs to turn it into cash.
I’m less convinced, though, by the derivatives example. The trillion-dollar and quadrillion-dollar numbers sound astonishing, but notional derivative value isn’t really comparable to either financial wealth or world GDP. A $100 million interest-rate swap doesn’t normally represent $100 million of wealth created from nothing; the $100 million is primarily the reference amount against which two sets of cash flows are calculated. Dealers can also have enormous offsetting notionals while their net economic exposure is a small fraction of that amount. There are plenty of genuine excesses in derivatives markets, as 2008 demonstrated rather effectively, but I don’t think aggregate notional value demonstrates the existence of quadrillions of dollars of hallucinated wealth.
Where I think your argument becomes much more interesting is in the divergence between asset values and everyday material prosperity. Over my career I’ve watched the financial system become extraordinarily good at keeping itself functioning. A shock that might once have caused a catastrophic shortage of money and credit can now be met by central banks and governments creating liquidity on a scale that would have seemed fantastic to earlier generations.
That is probably a considerable improvement over 1929. But it has an odd consequence. We have become increasingly good at preventing the destruction of financial claims from bringing down the productive economy, while also becoming increasingly capable of reflating those claims. The owners of assets therefore recover surprisingly quickly. Whether the person who needs an affordable house, a decent job, functioning infrastructure or competent public services experiences a comparable recovery is a different question.
That seems to me the strongest version of your “hallucinated wealth” argument. I wouldn’t say the American real economy has cratered over the last twenty years. Real median incomes and quite a few measures of material consumption have risen, albeit unimpressively in some cases. Nor do I think economic statistics are simply fictitious. But I do think aggregate financial prosperity can increasingly tell us surprisingly little about how a median household experiences its economic environment.
My larger reservation concerns resources.
I completely agree with you that economics ultimately takes place in the physical world. Money cannot repeal thermodynamics. A civilization cannot consume energy, minerals and other resources that it does not possess or cannot obtain. Modern economics sometimes treats natural resources as though they were merely another input whose supply will obligingly expand when its price rises, and I think your work has provided a useful corrective to that assumption.
But the twenty years since the original post also seem to me to offer a warning against making the opposite assumption too confidently.
In 2006 it was quite reasonable to look at conventional oil production and conclude that increasingly difficult geology would impose a hard constraint fairly soon. What actually happened was more complicated. Hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling and other developments made enormous quantities of previously uneconomic hydrocarbons commercially recoverable, and the United States eventually became the world’s largest oil producer. That didn’t repeal geology. It changed the boundary between a geological resource and an economically usable one.
Something similar may or may not happen with the broader energy transition. Solar, wind, nuclear power, batteries, electrification and improvements in efficiency all have their own resource requirements and limitations. I certainly wouldn’t assume that they can reproduce indefinitely an industrial civilization built on extraordinarily cheap fossil energy. But neither am I sure we yet have enough evidence to conclude that they cannot.
Perhaps the disagreement therefore comes down to how much weight we put on substitution and technological change. I take your point that technology cannot abolish resource constraints. But technology can radically change which resource is the constraint. Britain once had an economy constrained by supplies of timber and land; coal altered that equation. Petroleum subsequently altered the economics of transport. The shale revolution altered what counted as economically recoverable petroleum. It seems possible that electrification and other technologies could change the equation again without ever making resources infinite.
This is also why I’m cautious about the analogy with earlier civilizations. Ponting’s broader observation—that civilizations repeatedly overshoot ecological limits—is worth taking seriously. But industrial civilization has one characteristic that makes historical analogy unusually difficult: it has developed an extraordinary ability to substitute one material, energy source and production technique for another. That doesn’t guarantee escape from overshoot. It does make the timing, depth and even direction of the adjustment much harder to predict.
So twenty years later, I think I’d give you considerable credit for the central insight of the original essay while remaining agnostic about its ultimate destination.
The financial superstructure really can become remarkably detached from the everyday experience of producing and consuming useful things. Asset prices can boom without producing anything resembling an equivalent improvement in ordinary life. And our ability to manufacture liquidity means that a financial crisis need no longer automatically liquidate the underlying productive economy—which is mostly a very good thing, but also allows some extraordinary financial valuations to persist.
Where I’m not yet persuaded is that this necessarily ends in a long descent driven by declining fossil resources. Resources set the boundaries of the game, certainly. But human beings have repeatedly changed the game by finding different ways of using them.
Perhaps the next twenty years will tell us which of those two forces turns out to be stronger.
In any event, thank you for revisiting these old essays rather than quietly forgetting the predictions that didn’t work out. Very few writers are willing to do that, and I’ve been enjoying the series enormously.
Great post, JMG. While I’ve adopted some of the measures of “Collapse Early and Avoid the Rush”, my discussions with friends and relatives who abide by the fake market-oriented measure of a “wealth” can never quite grasp how precarious their lifestyles might turn out to be. “What makes you think your 401K balance is accurate?” “What makes you believe your net worth has risen so dramatically by doing absolutely nothing?”
Most still buy into the distorted view of “investing in a company”, when common stock shares are the last in line to be honored when a company fails. These days it’s been a real head-shaker on how gullible (greedy) most people really are…..
So, Richard Nixon, despite the war on drugs, might have been taking LSD? : )
The idea of hallucinating wealth reminded me of these trading cards, though most of the politicians in them were from the 9/11 era:
https://www.johnallenwooden.com/psychedelicrepublicans
I got the CD audiobook for The Great Crash on order to listen to while I work. If it has my coworkers looking at me while I am laughing, that will be a good sign.
I’ve mentioned it before, but will add this book recommendation to the list: ‘Ten Lost Years 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression,’ by Barry Broadfoot.
The author travelled the country with a tape recorder in the 1970’s and simply asked people for their recollections. The entire book is made up of short verbatim anecdotes, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, about what people did (or didn’t do) to get by. The voices of the interviewees are vivid and their stories are full of local colour and detail.
There is a short chapter in which a few speakers speculate about what caused the Depression, but they agree that at the time the book was published (1973) very few people in Canada had any clear idea of the reasons behind the crash. It wasn’t talked about in schools or on the news in the decades following the recovery. It was as if the authorities just wanted to pretend the Depression never happened.
I read Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” a few months ago. It seemed to me he hoped his audience would include ladies with pin money enough to buy his book. The style was stately and charming in a way that today’s academese, with all its efficiency, lacks. Great reading list.
Decidedly peripheral to today’s post, but after going back and rereading the 2006 post, I have to say that “ad hoc distribution networks” is right up there with “minor-oriented sexuality” in the euphemism department!
Speaking of hallucinated wealth;
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2030/07/networth.png
He’s a Wealth Management guy talking his book.
My parents were children of the Great Depression. They didn’t talk much about it but their actions sure did. Serious garden, canning a lot of BC fruits, half a steer in the deep freeze, cooking and baking from scratch. Always helping out at the golf course, the Legion hall, swim club, my uncle’s cattle ranch. Tried to live their values when I was raising my four but sadly by the 1990s got hornswoggled into the greed of real estate. It was fun thinking I was actually rich, for a while, but got very uncomfortable when the 2008 meltdown happened. Tried to convince the wife to cash out and , you know, live within our means. She looked at me with astonishment, fear and then hatred and contempt. Got evicerated in divorce war several years later after I got the kids safely out of the nest. Adapted to living in a very modest lifestyle fairly well due to the lessons passed on from my folks. Relieved I don’t have that sword of debt hanging over my head or a BPD alcoholic to endure. Recommend Barry Broadfoot’s “Ten lost years” of the Canadian Depression. Not nuts and bolts of how the depression happened but stories gathered from the people who lived thru it. My country is about to get a real education on hard times.
This separation of real wealth from financial wealth also strikes me as another form of bifurcation. It seems that those who choose to go down the road of high technology might also be choosing that financial hallucination, while those who retrovate choose real wealth of goods, etc.
I will note that the post 2008 decline has hit large parts of the West pretty hard, not the USA alone. Europe didn’t have an easy time of it, with Greece being the poster child for many years.
Canada had a relatively easy time, due in substantial degree, I think, to selling real things rather than financial shenanigans. But we don’t seem to be doing as well with the 2020s crises as we were post-2008.
Of course, local and personal experience often diverges sharply. I was coping with newly arrived health issues that wrecked havok on my ability to work and hadn’t got disability status yet. I had a rough time that would have been worse if not for family. Whereas now I’ve been doing much better financially than in 2008 despite Canada as a whole having a harder time than in the earlier crises.
The UK seems to be doing pretty badly these days too. A lot of people blame Brexit, but many of the troubles were pre-existing. Brexit does not seem to have delivered on its promises, however.
If I am widening your point too much please discard this.
I am wondering about the larger question, just how much of our experience is hallucinatory? How much are we juggling symbols and labels that have nothing to do with, pardon the term, reality?
An example – in my neighborhood newsletter today the headline story is, Thousands of Invasive Carp removed from Silver Lake. A photo inside the paper shows a young person in hip wader boots proudly standing in a cocky, almost strutting pose behind massive tubs of large fish, which are presumably being allowed to die and rot – because they are an “invasive species”.
Meanwhile there is a story elsewhere in the paper about how local food shelves are being strained to keep up with demand, and high quality animal food is in short supply. The popular, in-demand items are real foods like mac and cheese dinner mix, “baby formula” (which is safe because it is “highly regulated”) and canned pasta sauce. Canned fish is also highly coveted – but that comes in a container that acts like a label saying, Food.
What if the carp were cleaned, cooked, canned and relabeled – would they stop being an Invasive Species and become Food?
Something is seriously wrong here. We have massive shortage juxtaposed with massive waste.
There is a hallucinated level of labels that stands like a dysfunctional filter between us and what is “behind” – bad word but it will do for now – behind our labels?
How much of waking up is about seeing through the hallucinatory layers?
Hi John, the divide between goods and services and *claims* on those goods and services is indeed widening. The same cow is being sold a dozen times, so to speak. As the resource base shrinks, there may be two other divides worth considering.
1) The economy that produces the physical goods and services and the economy that persuades us to purchase these goods and services. This latter economy is larger than advertising and includes much of the media and much of what passes for education.
This leads to 2) The divide between measured behavior and subjective experience. In the free market textbook by Alchian and Adrian, there is mention of prisoners trading chocolates for cigarettes, by way of illustrating the value of exchange of existing goods. Almost as an aside, the authors mention that the exchanges say nothing about how the goods are valued subjectively. One trader that trades away chocolate for cigarettes may barely tolerate either, and may take little pleasure in life. The other trader who trades away cigarettes for chocolate may love both goods, but loves chocolates even more. Here’s a slogan: INNER LIVES MATTER. Ignoring our subjective experiences as a sideshow is rather like medicine treating the placebo effect as a bothersome confounding factor rather than a major clue to inner healing.
Does the split of political economy into economics and political science have anything to do with Pluto becoming a planet in 1930?
Speaking of the economic gap between the tech brothers and mere mortals, Apple shipped their folding phone. Asking price from $2000 to $3200 depending on options. I wonder how many they will sell.
More down to earth a couple weeks ago we were discussing Washington’s dislike of hikers. It happened again.
“CHELAN COUNTY — A woman died Sunday while hiking through the Enchantments as a sudden early-season snowstorm swept across the Cascade high country, bringing significant snowfall and hazardous conditions to the popular alpine wilderness area.
The woman was hiking through the Enchantments with her husband when the incident occurred. Her husband survived but had to be rescued by crews from the wilderness.”
“The death came as an abrupt change in weather brought cold temperatures and heavy snow to higher elevations across the Cascades over the weekend.
Reports from hikers in the Enchantments indicated substantial accumulations in the Core Zone. One person camping near Tranquil Lake, at roughly 7,800 feet elevation, reported as much as three feet of snow accumulating on tents during the weekend. Other recent visitors reported fresh snow depths ranging from approximately one to three feet in portions of the Enchantments.”
The article is here but paywalled. New management took over the site and upgraded the coverage and charged for it. I am paying for it as there really isn’t any other local news source.
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/woman-dies-while-hiking-enchantments-near-leavenworth-amid-sudden-snowstorm/article_742448cb-db91-44aa-9db8-92ae4a9c95bb.html
My heat pump is back in heating mode after a cool but smoky summer. I used the cooling mode 12 days this year while my average is 22 days.
John,
“To say that the economic empire of hallucinated wealth will continue to exist, though, does not imply that it will continue to produce the goods and services and provide the jobs that people need.”
How far do you think things can go before the money economy outright collapses? Even with all the gimmicks and financial sorcery, surely it must be hit with reality eventually, right? Or perhaps it can sustain itself indefinitely as the real economy withers until political upheaval arises to destroy it?
When I was in college, I had a Latin professor, Dr Maurer. He was the platonic ideal of a Classics professor; tall, skeletally thin, never seen without a suit jacket even in the Dallas spring heat, a chain-smoker, and filled with an irrepressible loathing of English majors that was matched only by his passion for Vergil’s Georgics.
One class period, a student in the front row who had just come from Econ 101 made the mistake of placing their copy of Wealth of Nations on the desk while looking in their backpack for their pencil. The effrontery of being confronted with Adam Smith in his own private Roman demesne inspired Dr Maurer to spend half of the class period engaged in a furious lecture on how Adam Smith destroyed civilization.
When I was 18, I thought this was charmingly quirky. All these years later, I’ve come to suspect that Dr Maurer was on to something.
People like to say that politics is downstream from culture. And that’s true.
But culture is downstream from economics, which is downstream from ecology, which is downstream from physics. And so it goes.
While a lot of the more immediately apocalyptic predictions of the Peak Oil Sphere didn’t come to pass, it was crucial to my budding career as a failed member of the lanyard class. A lot of what I was learning in College, though valuable in its own right (especially symbolic logic), was completely steeped in the mythology of progress, and reading about Peak Oil and Jevon’s Paradox and other such things gave me a valuable mental toolkit to deconstruct the propaganda being fed to me through my own education.
Charlie Obert @ 12,
“What if the carp were cleaned, cooked, canned and relabeled – would they stop being an Invasive Species and become Food?”
Won’t happen till someone can make money on said carp. I doubt your local govt. can afford to subsidize someone else’s fishy profit.
Where I live, I keep seeing “for sell” and “rent” signs, and noticed it’s been getting harder to find roomates for for myself and friends, yet the rent in my city went up by 5 percent this year on average. Fortunately I am moving out into better pasture this year.
Greg Simay @ 13, I wholeheartedly agree that inner lives matter. What I cannot accept, which I grant you did not say, is the proposition I see underlying much commentary of the resentment and hurt feelingses variety that my inner life is someone else’s responsibility.
About the 2008 housing bubble: Some of the affected house buyers, liars loan perps, were taking a calculated risk that they could get themselves into a (relatively) safe neighborhood and good school system for at least long enough to get the kids graduated. When house payments went up, as of course they always do, there would always be cousin Joe who also had kids needing a better school, looking to share house and payments.
I was living in a small CA Central Valley town at the time. That summer was unusually arid, even for the CV. The city aggressively fined residents, owners and renters both, who allowed their yards to dry up. EXCEPT, banker owned houses in foreclosure seemed to be EXEMPT from the watering and mowing requirements being imposed on the rest of us. This is the kind of lived experience which leads some folks to give credence to wacky conspiracy theories.
@CharlieObert,
I’ve always thought the best solution to edible invasive animal species is to make it really easy and convenient to hunt and eat them. ‘Here, free fishing licence for x and y species only. If we catch you killing other species instead, we fine you with a really high fine.’ Or not need a licence at all for those species.
I’ve done invasive fish removal. We did eat some of those we killed (brook trout are excellent eating) but we killed far more than we ate, and most of the fish we caught were really too small to eat.
Reading Galbraith’s novel “The Triumph” will tell you all you ever need to know about Latin American politics, and a great deal that is still useful about US politics. If you believe that the US president is the one who decides to start wars, for instance, you need to read it.
Another book recommendation, this one about the Great Recession caused by the real estate bust of 2007-2008, is Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short”. The book is mainly about the few contrarians who saw the foolishness rampant in the real estate and financial sectors and bet against those players, thus making a lot of money when the bottom fell out of all the speculations. It’s a great example of the value of skepticism and having a contrarian nature.
JMG
It’s funny that the day you post about hallucinated wealth the Fed makes the decision to hike rates to curb inflation. But because inflation is currently being driven by the price of oil and not spending, all this does is hurt the average person with no real effect on inflation. The Fed is basically saying that people are too wealthy while everything is falling apart around them. I don’t think that you can get more detached from reality than that.
thx for the essay. I read the 2006 essay and was like “this could have been written today”, which for some reason, was profoundly depressing. I guess that does prove the truth of the “long and bumpy descent”.
ps — I thought the official date of the dollar off the gold standard was 1971, not 1973?
thx again
Jerry
Pardon me while I will carp for just a moment about carp. Yeah, it’s tangential to this week’s topic. Growing up near a river, I grew to despise these loathsome fish. They wallow in shallow water and make easy targets: My neighbors would spear them in substantial numbers, using bow & arrow, for garden fertilizer. (They grew huge strawberries in that garden.) My uncle (who grew up during the depression) served carp to my brother once without telling him it was carp until afterward. Not too bad, my brother told me. I have noticed that carp are on the “do not eat” list for Great Lakes fish. They are bottom feeders and contain more than their share of heavy metal contamination. But I suppose eating carp, heavy metals and all, beats starving. It might keep you going long enough to breed the next generation.
Hello, JMG and commentariat:
Here we go again with John’s review of his own predictions in the past. Well, everything related with economy science seems to be affected by usual orthodoxal economists claims about their science being near as exact as “hard sciences”(cough), and not politized (ha-ha-ha).
“snap up a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic The Great Crash 1929”
Oh, I read it some years ago and it’s really worth to read it again, methink.
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“the fantastic overpricing of tech stocks these days suggests that still another crash may not be too far off.”
Yes, data center and LLMs current frenzy doesn’t announce anything good in the short or medium term. Oh, and there’s also a “slight” overpricing in housing (at least here) and gold, don’t forget these another likely bubbles.
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“In effect, the only reason these assets have the value they’re assigned is that everyone involved agrees to pretend that they’re worth that much.”
It seems a very irrational attitude (and behavior) by those economical actors, which is counterfactual with usual mainstream economists claims about economics being driven by “rationally selfish” human beings…
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“As Clive Ponting pointed out many years ago in his A Green History of the World, every civilization in history has made some version of that same mistake and passed through the same process we’re going through now”
I’m taking note of it, because I haven’t read it yet…There must be somewhere a Spanish translation of it.
Gunstone, nope. I’ve just read his books.
Nitin, thanks for this. You’re certainly correct that the instant reflation of asset values is a good case study in hallucinatory value, but I didn’t make up the $1 quadrillion figure for derivatives — that was reported in the financial press. I used it as a stand-in for a whole class of dubiously liquid assets that are being used to manufacture the illusion of growth. As for the state of the economy, one of the issues few people are willing to deal with these days is that decline is not evenly distributed; I wonder whether you’ve spent any significant part of the last twenty years in the poorer parts of flyover country, as I have, and whether your comments about my take on our ongoing decline would be different if you had. Down the road a bit we’ll also be talking about the economic and resource costs of substitution of energy resources, which have played a considerable role in driving the ongoing decline in quality of life across the developed world; we’ll also talk about the way that dumping costs on the general population, the built environment, or the ecosphere as a whole — where they are not recorded by economists — has played merry hob with our collective ability to gauge whether we are in expansion or decline. More on this as we proceed!
Drhooves, I know. It seems to take a remarkably sustained effort to get out of money-mindedness and notice the real world of goods and services — and that’s an effort most people aren’t willing to put in.
Justin, I somehow managed not to hear about Psychedelic Republicans until now. Would they be paired with Dead Drunk Democrats?
Dylan, thanks for this! I’ll make time to read that.
Joann, I suspect he did! Smith was writing just before the English Regency, at a time when women of the privileged classes were highly literate, and many of them were interested in public affairs. As for academese, it’s the sort of thing you always get in a self-policing caste: it’s made deliberately difficult so that people outside the caste won’t be able to make sense of it.
Roldy, I didn’t mean it as a euphemism. I meant that systems of distribution would be cobbled together in a hurry as existing institutional arrangements froze up or fell apart.
Siliconguy, the inflation of the money economy continues apace.
Longsword, my parents were a little younger than that — my father was born in 1938, my mother in 1941 — but a little later on I got to know quite a few people who remembered the Depression years, and since I spent quite a few years being very poor, I got plenty of opportunities to learn about frugality. It’s an education worth having.
Justin, hmm! Yes, that makes sense.
Pygmycory, true enough. Thanks for the international perspective.
Charlie, excellent. Yes, exactly — what makes hallucinatory wealth so easy, and so problematic, is that we’re in the normal state of a late civilization, where reason loses touch with reality and abstractions pile up to the point that nobody can see what’s right in front of them. The Barbarism of Reflection was Vico’s term for it, and it ends in madness.
Greg, these are excellent points. Of course you’re doubtless well aware that the medical industry does in fact treat the placebo effect as a bothersome confounding factor…
Anon, no, it took place before then.
Siliconguy, that’s Washington State for you. As for the Apple folding phone, yeah. Yawn.
Nephite, the money economy can outlast nearly all of the real economy. It’s quite possible that the stock market will hit all time highs on the day that the power goes out in Manhattan forever and armed raiders cross the George Washington Bridge in search of loot and slaughter.
Calliope, funny. I don’t think it’s fair to say that Smith destroyed civilization; he simply gave voice to the attitudes and the class that was responsible for that.
Allie, I like to point out that culture is also downstream from imagination. So, for that matter, is economics!
Circle, yep. I’m not exactly sure how the real estate market is being so efficiently gimmicked, but gimmicked it certainly is.
Tom, it’s a wonderful novel! All Galbraith’s fiction is worth reading.
Eric, also worth a read.
Anon, well, there’s that.
Jerry, thanks for catching the typo; yes, it was 1971. As for the depressing realization that nothing has changed except that we’ve slid further down the slope, trust me, I know.
“That stance got me mocked or shouted down in quite a few circles before the 2008 crash arrived. ”
I would shout back up then. The ape creatures in 2001: A Space Odyssey understand that. I would have thought that in the millions of years since, our species would devise innovations against this weapon of mass destruction!
LBJ is certainly dead, and he was certainly a drunk. So were many others… No arguments from me. They are all FLOCKING politicians, after all and swarm together in the same fetid cesspools, flip flopping as needed, scratching each others backs when they aren’t lubricating each others shale holes for new sources of oil…
But no, they probably didn’t get paired.
Yet, I found some of the artists more recent work pretty cool. He has a satirical children’s book out called The Liking Tree:
“In this modern parody spin on Shel Silverstein’s beloved classic The Giving Tree, two children befriend a strange tree, and quickly become enchanted by its flattery and dazzling distractions. But time goes by, and as the tree’s selfish, exploitative nature is revealed, the children must decide whether to live by its lonely rules, or walk away and rediscover the joys of real life and true friendship.”
He followed this up with FOMO the Screen Zombie Gets a Snack.
Gunstone # 1:
“Have you ever seen Galbraith ‘s 1978 TV series “The Age of Uncertainty”.”
No, I haven’t seen it. Maybe it never arrived to my country, but I can search it on youtube (thanks for your suggestion).
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Nitin # 2:
“It seems possible that electrification and other technologies could change the equation again without ever making resources infinite.”
Electrification is the favorite “silver bullet” to dodge the Long Descent from usual conventional “wisdom”, but full electrification of everything in our technological civilization seems impossible. For example, heavy machines electrification is a “hard” task, to say it softly…And full electrification also means much more nuclear plants (because “green energy” can’t produce enough powere without ups and downs). Electrifying all light vehicles could relieve fossil fuels depletion in the future, but relieving isn’t healing…
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Pygmycory # 11:
“Europe didn’t have an easy time of it, with Greece being the poster child for many years.”
I remember well those years. On the short form, Greece was the whip boy for EU (and Berlin) leaders, due to its small size and economy. Yes, Greeks governments were usually corrupts, but it’s interesting Brussels never noticed this “small” problem before the 2008 crisis (ahem). Another countries members (to their regret), of the infamous groups of PIIGS, like Spain, suffered some nasty austerity punishement, but lesser than poor Greeks, because we’re bigger in population, and nobody wanted to end our famous touristic economy, methink.
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Charlie # 12:
“What if the carp were cleaned, cooked, canned and relabeled – would they stop being an Invasive Species and become Food?”
Indeed, carps can be eaten alike another fishes, thoug they’ve got plenty of bones inside their body, and carp tastes a bit like mud, according some people who had eaten it (for example, it’s eaten in China and Poland). Some “gourmets” say you can avoid its muddy taste putting under fresh clean water at least for 3 hours before cooking it…
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Calliope # 17:
“The effrontery of being confronted with Adam Smith in his own private Roman demesne inspired Dr Maurer to spend half of the class period engaged in a furious lecture on how Adam Smith destroyed civilization.”
I bet it had to be a more interesting class than usual Latin lessons…Am I right? I wonder which were his arguments against this economy “sacred cow” (so many times quoted, but I’m afraid much less times read taking care of his ideas).
I’d say one of the central fallacies of economics is a variant of Goodhart’s Law, the popular version of which states “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
In ordinary circumstances money is a proxy for wealth, because it measures how much wealth you could get reasonably quickly if you wanted or needed it. But once making money becomes a goal in and of itself — that is, once speculation becomes a significant part of economic activity — Goodhart’s Law kicks in and the measure detaches itself from the thing it’s measuring. (The fact that money still works reasonably well as a measure of wealth for people outside the financial class highlights the fact that there are really multiple economies, not just one “the economy.”)
I will say this for money, though: at least it exists. Unfortunately a good deal of economics is formulated around a more abstract proxy — utility — that doesn’t exist at all in any meaningful sense. Trying to interpret utility in real-world terms is almost exactly on par with trying to figure out how badly hurt a D&D character is based on how many hit points they’ve lost: in both cases the proxy measure is so abstract it doesn’t actually relate to anything in any concrete way. (Turns out some measures don’t measure anything in particular!)
I think that it was in 2006 that I started reading your essays; never disappointed.
As for collapse, history shows that it is always a long process marked by a ratcheting down. The religious fantasy of sudden apocalypse is a part of our historical inheritance from Christianity so is unlikely to go away any time soon.
Thanks again
pygmycory @ 22, I read somewhere that Australian authorities put a bounty on rabbits. Enterprising farmers started raising and releasing rabbits so they and neighbors could collect the bounty.
Tom Welsh @ 23, there is also O Henry’s interlocking set of stories, called Cabbages and Kings, on the same theme. I think it Henry’s best work. Conrad also wrote a novel, Nostromo, about politics in SA. I suspect, cannot prove, that the character, Nostromo, might have been loosely based on the S. American career of Garibaldi.
Anonymous @ 25 I doubt the poohbahs of the Fed are altogether immune to popular anger. I wonder if the Fed might be telling wealthy RE investors, OK, you had your fun, but folks have to have somewhere to live, you know. No more buying up properties for pennies and holding them off the market, or raising rents to the stratosphere. Big Finance was able to call on govts. to shut down Occupy, but when the police themselves can’t afford a decent place to live…
JMG @ 29, re your response to Roldy. Such “systems of distribution” are called the Black Market, and it is alive and thriving.
If you look at the velocity of money, it delined steadily starting in the mid 90’s, cratered during 2020, and now seems to be bouncing along at a post-war II low. This has a lot to do with why people are feeling poorer; Money is being spent at 1/3 the rate it was 30 years ago!
Charlie (#12),
I have another example of this disconnect at work that I find wild. I work in a restaurant where the management is constantly complaining about food costs. The wild part from my perspective is that we make soups and sauces using packaged vegetable stock. We also throw out several pounds of vegetable scraps a day.
Yet somehow none of the management has noticed that we could use the vegetable scraps for broth, and look at me like I’ve grown a second head whenever I suggest it….
After I hit post on my last comment, it occurred to me that the utter inability to grasp that we could use vegetable scraps to make vegetable broth is an absolutely perfect example of the barbarism of reflection at work: no one is able to get past the reflection of “vegetable broth” that the packaged goods provide and notice what vegetable broth really is. The result is madness, of course: spending huge sums of money on a product that we could make in house for essentially nothing: The labor costs for it would be negligible; the extra gas to run a burner to boil water is barely noticeable to a restaurant as busy as ours; and everything that goes into it except the water we are quite literally throwing out every day.
JMG, sorry, my bad – I figured “ad hoc distribution systems” was the nice way of saying “black markets.”
I for one am not going down without a fight. If the descendants of chipmunks think they can take over, I’ll stand my ground. I’ve been training my dog along with a local militia to do the best we can against the chipmunk onslaught! We’ve got a lot in this area, but no Chip nor Dale is going to be moving into our birthright any time soon!
SiliconGuy #8: Re: rising net worth: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $100 in Jan 2019 would be worth $133 in August, 2026, so we can knock 33% off of those growth figures at once. However, my top-of-mind inflation gauge is based only on the price of bulk organic rolled oats, which has gone from $0.99 to $1.99 in a local store: 100% inflation. Only the bottom 50% saw that much increase in net worth. I wonder how much of that is based on unavailable credit? If you can’t buy a house, you can’t take on a mortgage which immediately puts one under several hundred thousand dollars debt.
Suppose we say everything is true and there is no oil in Iran, Alaska, Siberia, Sudan, Ireland, Brazil, Cuba, or several other places untried. That’s fine, take it as written.
What strikes me most is we can have a 100x prosperous living compared to 1920, on like 1/4 of the amount of oil we use right now. Because almost all of it is wasted on nonsense.
I just want everyone to internalize that fully and truly. Go place yourself in 1920, watch every movie and video of life then, just out of horses, almost no oil usage, and say we could 5x that per-capital oil usage, live 5x better than even they did, and STILL cut oil usage so radically we’d either have enough oil for 75 years, or enough exports to pay thousands in dividends per household per year.
It takes almost nothing to do so, to make this change. What did they have for instance? Smaller schools? More trolleys? I think we can hack it.
So the point is IT IS ALL VOLUNTARY. You can make the change in minutes. Or rather, You can’t, because this requires collective change in values, in priorities. WE can make this change in minutes. No one needs to lead, order, pay, or make us. You just do it. We just do it.
So someone want to explain? Or explain why I’m supposed to be sad if the nation acts like a complete idiot from coast to coast and loses their minds for no reason to have a LESS glorious existence than we had in 1909? Enlighten me.
@Roldy: I’m gonna make myself a sign for the Department of Ad Hoc Distribution.
Seriously though, folks – Milder forms of ad hoc distribution are a robust market here in the Rust Belt. It looks much like the favor cycles and gift cycles described in the “backward” parts of the US by late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers. Now – if I could just put on my trickster hat and get a big research grant to study this “new and improved” work-around. (tee-hee)
And – A bit off topic but, thank you for the link to academia.edu and the Hooper article on this week’s Magic Monday.
Regarding the split between economics and political science, this occurred in a series of stages. Probably the first was Alfred Marshall’s text Economics (c 1900) which effectively initiated the physics/maths approach in economics. At the time there was still a lot of pushback from the German Historical School of Economics, which as per its name was very focused on the importance of history and institutions to economics (ie against an ahistorical approach). Then in the 1930’s Wesley Mitchell (head of the NBER) in the US pushed today’s standard economic statistics (GDP etc) which pushed economics further towards quantitative approaches. Then after WWII Paul Samuelson was influential in pushing the ‘phsyics’ approach to economics (positing ‘laws’ equivalent to the laws of thermodynamics etc) which further divorced it from qualitative approaches. That and the war pretty much put an end to the influence of the German Historical School of Economics, which was effectively subsumed into sociology – what was once political economy has in fact split into more than two disciplines: economics, political science, economic history (generally completely divorced from economics these days), sociology (which in itself is increasingly split between economic sociology and political sociology), and business administration, to name a few. Galbraith was part of the last generation to be significantly influenced by the German Historical School.
I’m curious, what happened in 1932, that has you pinpointing it relative to 1929?
It’s interesting to read Denninger who shouts “it’s all gonna crash” with consistent fervor. And of course he backs it up with all the ways the economy is built on lies. He’s accurate, but somehow the debt-machine keeps cranking it out, and everyone still gets up in the morning and goes to work for weaker paychecks.
And then there’s Tim Morgan, whose very careful analysis of a lot of data has him recognizing that an economy (and he too differentiates between financial and real-products, energy-based economies) predicated on growth will certainly run into trouble now that growth has ended.
One looking at the financial economy and the other the energy-based – and coming to the same conclusions about likely next phases.
And for the longest time, I was continually surprised that the rickety contraption of our global “economy” is still rattle-banging along with a patch here and a bailout there, a bubble here, and some massaged statistics there. I assumed it’d go kablooey at any point. I probably could’ve earned something somewhat substantial in monetary terms had I a stronger constitution for dancing with kablooey-that-hasn’t happened.
At some point, does that dance end, or are monetary shenanigans truly going to keep notional wealth propped up until, as you say, “the power goes out in Manhattan”?
Perhaps mine is an error of timing and not of substance? As you say, “As that humble but necessary foundation crumbles away from underneath our proud towers, a great many things we all grew up thinking of as normal and natural will go away forever.” Which sounds a bit collaps-ish until you factor in that pesky detail: timing.
Then, again, perhaps mine is an error of using the money economy as some sort of benchmark (because, truthfully, I use money and was trained to think that it’s a particular indicator) without recognizing just the lengths many someones would go to ensure that money would just keep pipping right along: “It’s not the money economy that’s declined, though. The money economy is doing fine; it’s the real economy, the economy of goods and nonfinancial services, that has cratered.”
So, as anyone with their wits about them ought to be doing, I’m still straddling the mindsets of “use money while I can get it and it’s useful” and “create money-alternatives to access needed goods and services.” It’ll be “interesting times” indeed when I can trade the produce of my labor and land for irrigation supplies (or what have you). Those times aren’t here yet, though.
I think it was Galbraith who invented the neologism “economeretricians.” Combining “econometricians” with “meretricious” was a punning stroke of pure genius. Unfortunately, I can’t remember which of his books included this, and my search engine is not being very helpful either.
@Kan #44,
Thank you for this overview. I think the story you’ve told reaches its climax with Milton Friedman, who advocated an “instrumentalist” approach to economics that became increasingly influential. In this approach, the assumptions on which an economic model rest are considered essentially irrelevant — they can be blatantly false, and you certainly don’t have to check if they are correct — and only the predictive success of the model matters.
(This might not be so bad if there were any economic models with signficant predictive successes.)
This has been one of the key criticisms of several of the heterodox schools of economics, such as the Austrian school (which tends to go to the other extreme) and the empirically-focused post-Keynesian “real world economics” school that grew out of Steve Keen’s work in Debunking Economics.
@JMG
It occurs to me that there is a fairly simple argument for why economics and politics cannot be separated: have you ever noticed that if you know which school of economics an economist subscribes to, you can fairly reliably predict their political views down to the smallest details?
You can pretend they are separate but the repressed shall return.
So, Mr. Greer …. Ansari Allah enter the chat! POW! – BLAM!! … watch that hallucinated .. um, western “‘wealth”‘ evaporate, like spit on an Arizonan desert rock .. whenith that liquid equity gets blown to smithereens – again, and again, and again! I’ve read/reread both cautionary books which you’ve highlighted within this post… I’ll wager a trilllllllllion quatloos, that only about say, 5% of the cogent public … have endeaveored to read, let alone grok .. the meaning of said words within. I’m transferring what “equity” I hold in retirement ‘investments’ into an account to which I can withdraw at a moment’s notice … assuming my financial ‘institution’ doesn’t brick me first in my attempt to run with it!
Regarding the glorious electric future…. It is an unfortunate fact of thermodynamics that electricity is a method of moving energy around, not a source of energy. Like all methods of moving energy around, some must always be lost in the process.
Primary energy sources are few: fossil fuels, hydropower, wind, nuclear plants that are expensive equipment for boiling water and producing electricity with steam turbines, and sunshine reborn as biomass or animal power. There are a few niche sources such as tidal bores.
Solar photovoltaic panels look like primary energy sources until the inconvenient question of the amount of primary energy used in their manufacture and transport is asked. Solar panels are good at putting the embedded energy up front. They do not return enough energy to run an industrial civilization.
Users may not care, any more than someone stranded in a broken vehicle cares that their flashlight runs on embedded, and quite lossy, energy. Solar panels are great for situations and locations where building transmission infrastructure is not cost effective.
Alas, I have done the math many times and it is ugly. By way of example, I recently had a contract to design a solar system on a one story light industrial building. This is the ideal situation for solar power, because taller buildings have more stuff inside that needs to be powered but the same size roof. It was a good sized building, able to support almost 500 kW of panels. That is just under a utility sized system. The solar system was able to power the lights and computers and some random doo-dads. It was not able to power the light industrial activities that were the reason for the building.
This always happens. Every time I look at motor loads, things that rotate and move and have to store electric and magnetic fields, solar power comes up short for replicating normal grid-tied operation. There are only a few cases, such as a small pump in a remote location, where it can be made to work with batteries and enough panels.
Raphanus
Rhydlyd @ 43, would you please just keep quiet about ad hoc distribution? Once word gets out that folks are bartering without official permission, the parasites will descend. They are as inevitable as mosquitoes in summer. One set of poverty pimps will create a special Department of Neighborhood Distribution, with regulations and set asides for favored groups. Another batch of folks who like to live on other people’s work will be asking themselves, how can I monetize this and turn it into profit? The latter group will petition for a city sponsored flea market, to be operated by their private company empowered to collect fees from all. Either batch, or both, might even manage to get ordinary sharing declared illegal.
Gunstone, no, shouting back doesn’t accomplish anything — look at the internet squabble of your choice for the evidence. It’s always seemed more useful to me to ignore those who won’t listen, and direct my efforts instead toward those who might.
Justin, based on your description, The Liking Tree could be very good or very, very bad. I personally found the Silverstein piece it mocks one of the most loathsome things I’ve ever read — one long glorification of submission to abuse and exploitation.
Slithy, that’s valid! I probably need to cycle back to some of the themes of The Wealth of Nature, and talk about the role of intermediation in economic life.
Raymond, exactly. It doesn’t work so well in religious terms, either!
Arodrigo, do you happen to know if there are measures that determine the velocity of money held by the different classes in society? I’ve suspected more than once that money held by the very rich tends to move much more slowly than money held further down the ladder, and so the extreme imbalance in the distribution of wealth we have now might be an important factor driving down the velocity of money.
William (if I may), that’s a great example! You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I keep a freezer container for vegetable scraps, and make stock from them regularly…
Roldy, nah, we have those all the time already.
WatchFlinger, the chipmunks are cold and patient. They will watch humanity with their beady little eyes until the last of us goes extinct, and then dance on our graves.
Dzanni, people say that quite often, but the numbers simply don’t work. I’m not suggesting that anybody be sad, by the way. I’m suggesting that we make concrete changes in our own lives — but we’ll get to that in detail in the next post in this sequence.
KAN, the mere fact that economics has no connection these days with economic history is, to me, the best proof that economics is a pseudoscience. If your theories aren’t based on past experience, what claim can they possibly have to validity?
Temporaryreality, the 1929 crash didn’t have to turn into the total debacle it did. It took several years of really bad policy to reach the point that the 1931 collapse of the Credit Anstalt bank in Austria could set off a chain reaction in the world banking system. That chain reaction went critical in 1932, and led to a situation where many people in the industrial world who had paychecks couldn’t cash them, because the banks had shut down. As for collapse, one of the main functions of the money economy at this point is to smooth out the curve of decline, so that everything just gets a little worse each day. I expect that to continue, despite temporary crashes and crises, for most if not all of this century.
Phutatorius, ha! I don’t think I’ve encountered that, but it sounds like Galbraith. It was edgier than you suggest, though, because he had a classical education and so knew that meretrix is Latin for “whore.”
Slithy, an excellent point!
Polecat, I’ll take your wager. Let’s sign a contract, and then we’ll have a derivative with which we can start gaming the quatloo market!
Raphanus, thank you for this dose of cold reality.
@Nitin #2 https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/ is a good source to understand that a renewable transition will not be able to sustain anything like what we now know as “normal” in the USA.
@Nitin #2 The qualifications of “The Honest Sorcerer”
“I’m an industrial product engineer by training, working for a large engineering company in the field of electrification and automation of road transport for many years now. Before that, I worked more than a decade for an American corporation in various roles, ranging from maintenance engineering to project management and process expert positions, as well as spending 2 years on a post-graduate leadership program in the supply chain and logistics areas. I’ve seen how investment and sourcing decisions are made in these great conglomerates, how our much cherished consumer products are produced and how they get to the end customer. I saw how ‘sausage’ is made.”
Perhaps there is a contrary expert who has the understanding of the underlying nuts and bolts of our current system who can argue the opposite – that a technological transition is possible, not relying on a some new future new tech being manifested
Hi John Michael,
Mr Galbraith certainly had a dry sense of humour, and I second your recommendation of his book: The Great Crash, 1929. Almost a century on, and the music remains the same.
We’re also agreed in relation to the purpose of derivatives, for that’s what they look like to me.
I dunno man, this subject used to bother me deeply, but having read as much as needful on the subject so as to peer at what is otherwise occluded, a sort of resigned to the inevitable state of mind took over – and from there I learned good grace. Guess it’s a journey, huh? Oh, and a focus on the more practical aspects of life began. I look forward to hearing what you have to say about the next stage. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Kind Sir,
bubbles are easy to spot but hard to time.
As Confucius pointed out many millennia ago:
Man who keep looking out for top and bottom get in trouble with Missus.
Possibly apocryphal.
I think Keynes put it like this: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Also true although irrational is a rather weak word to describe the current situation.
Here in Australia we started a housing bubble in the mid 90s. It was blindingly obvious by 2002. Still going on a quarter of a century later. Showing a few signs of weakness lately, but since we successfully transitioned from a diverse productive economy to a delirious fairy-dust economy in the last decades, it can easily go on for another generation. We will all be billionaires by then. Just like my great-grandparents in Germany in the 1920s.
What’s not to like about that?
What if a country is a huge economic bubble with a bit of society attached to it?
I seem to recall capital gains taxes, and other similar regulatory methods being required for bartering, etc.. I’m guessing it can’t properly be enforced so you don’t hear about it much, but this was a live topic in 2001 and I doubt if these rules have been removed (they never are). Just as there is a quite complex tax scheme involving capital gains on precious metals. You can try to leave the “system” but the system isn’t going to leave you alone. Just sayin’.
Another related topic, yes, financial systems may continue without interruption until the end of time, but what we cannot count on is continuity of our natural systems. Ecological tipping points, unplanned-for physical disasters (long predicted, just not capitalized) and so forth. Those don’t fit financial models, and break international trading models in our globalized world. Some feel that the current round of US-initiated wars and war zones are or are going to have such an effect. Of external full safe-havens, there are precious few, which I imagine at least a few of our technological overlords may chance to discover.
William #37 – Bingo! Thank you for that example.
I wrote a vegetarian cookbook years ago, and it still drives me nuts when I see so many cooking sites online have recipes that start with a premade packaged stock or boullion, vegetable or otherwise. And you are right, that stuff is expensive.
You certainly have a point about the Silverstein book. It’s been a long time since I looked at it, but I do recall an ick factor. It’s not one of the kids books I’ve kept around. The kids had no limits to what they took, and the tree had no boundaries. The Codependent Tree, maybe from a standpoint of interpersonal analysis.
—
I am starting to think there might be other areas to look for the bifurcation process.
Mary Bennet has a point, you are supposed to pay income taxes on your barter, and probably sales taxes as well. So keep in on the QT.
When money gets sufficiently decoupled from actual value you get hyperinflation, or at least really high inflation. Diesel in WA state is over $7 a gallon.
And a public service announcement; if you are planning a 16 mile hike in the Enchantments expect bad weather and be prepared to camp overnight. The lady who died froze to death 8 miles from the trailhead. Eight miles in the mountains is not the same as eight miles in Oklahoma. Her husband barely survived. The mountain did not permit the rescue helicopter to approach until the next day.
When you speak of financial hallucinations, I think of how the number 0 introduced ideas with no form to the human race. In antiquity, an idea implied something tied to geometry. Kind of like of money used to be tied to material goods and services and the gold standard.
@ JMG: Well, I was understating it. You really don’t need to have a classical education to know the meaning(s) of “meretricious.” I have for years been reminded of Odette in “Swan’s Way” when encountering the word. It suggests a faked virtue. I must admit I find it attractive — as did Swan.
It’s only within the last five years that I’ve learned that Ronald “Ketchup is a Vegetable” Reagan legalized stock buybacks thus divorcing the stock market from assessing the actual sales of goods and services. I’ll keep an eye out for the Galbraith book you mentioned.
Something just clicked for me, so forgive me if my thinking is still a sloppy here: I forget where, but a long time ago you mentioned in response to someone’s comment that most people in the investment class are pensioners on a fixed income. Despite not being what we’d think of as the traditional robber baron investment royalty, nevertheless, their interests are tied to the “proper” investment class.
These days I associate “fixed income” with Social Security, but that wasn’t always the case. When FDR sold the investment class down the river, he largely replaced pension system with Social Security, and thereby evicted quite a number of people from the investment class, casting them down to the welfare class. (Social Security is often thought of as an investment, but considering it started paying out from day one, it is in fact welfare program transferring wealth from young workers to old retirees, and this was well-understand at the time.)
No wonder so many people were so angry at him!
I will be getting a copy of The Great Crash 1929. Thank you for the recommendation.
Can I just say that the timing on these essays is impeccable. Considering all the recent multipolar issues involving energy, things are getting very interesting again. Best to keep ones eye on the bigger picture.
“When Adam Smith wrote this, political economy was still an intact science. This may explain why he could point out that a publicly traded corporation is the worst possible way to run a business.”
A few months back there was an ‘Ask Reddit’ post which asked “What products or services haven’t become rubbish.” After a while it was noted that all the products that were still high quality were not publicly traded companies. When you don’t have to appease the share holders, you can focus on pleasing the customers.
Also I always liked the analogy Alan Watts used for the Great Crash. It is like turning up to a construction site and the manager saying “We cannot build today as we have run out of inches.”
@JMG
Re: Reply to Nephite
I infer that the technological bifurcation you discussed recently will eventually include money. First, the rural areas that lose electricity and reliable transportation networks and get abandoned by the government might revert to bartering or an unofficial currency, perhaps U.S. coins. More and more people will stop using money and the government will tax concerte goods from them instead of money. But people in the gated communities will all be heavily invested in the speculative economy, have very high net worths on paper, and pay massively inflated prices for everything.
Dear Mr. Greer, et all; A couple of new books, that might prove interesting.
“Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History.” (Kurt Andersen, 2020.) How politics and economics became the political economy.
Also of note, “Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America.” (Robert B. Reich, 2025). Besides one insider’s view of politics and economics, over the last 60 years, it’s a bit autobiographical. Also, Reich and Galbraith were quit good friends, and often chatted and debated, back and forth. They also made quit a striking visual. Galbraith at 6.9 feet tall, and Reich topping out at less than 5 feet. 🙂 Lew
Chris, oh, granted — there’s no more point in getting upset about it, any more than there is about getting upset because summer’s over and autumn storms are on their way. The disconnection between wealth and standard ways of managing wealth is a constant feature of the old age of civilization — in effect, their economies get senile, and spend all their time muttering the word “Rosebud” or something.
DropBear, I like to point out that Isaac Newton tried to time the South Sea Bubble and lost everything he’d invested. I am not as smart as Isaac Newton, and neither are any of the people who think they can time a market. As for the bubble with a last scrap of society dangling from it, that’s the universal state of complex societies in their twilight years. Think of Rome — isn’t that what guys are supposed to do? 😉 — in its last years: the vast abstraction of the Roman Empire hovering over a collapsing, depopulated society with one of history’s more incompetent elites at the helm.
Clarke, (1) of course! The current system survives only by trying to force all economic activity within its ambit. That’s standard in a failing society, and plays a large role in the collapse of market economies and their replacement with economies dominated by gift and customary exchange. (2) Yes, and any number of other factors can also have the same effect. The global economy is fragmenting into regional economies, despite all the frantic squawking of globalists, because the cost to the rest of the world of supporting the US economy now exceeds the costs of regionalism.
Justin, the thing to keep in mind is that bifurcation is a very rough model. It will more likely be a polyfurcation.
Siliconguy, anybody who leaves a trailhead anywhere in the Cascades or Olympics without overnight gear, foul-weather clothing, and a way to make hot food and beverages in a hurry, is gambling with death. It really is that simple.
Luke, excellent! Yes, and that leads into very deep places. The pseudonumber 0 and the equally fake realm of negative numbers were both introduced into Western mathematics to make it easier to calculate debt, but they’ve had destructive consequences radiating outward through a very wide range of contexts.
Phutatorius, yes, Odette fills that role very well. Perhaps we should speak of ecodetteonomists. 😉
Moonwolf8, yep. He presided over a wholesale gutting of financial regulations put into place, for good reason, in the wake of the 1929 crash.
Slithy, that was only one part of what fueled Roosevelt Derangement Syndrome, but it was an important part.
Michael, I don’t think I’d encountered that Alan Watts analogy before — it’s spot on. Yeah, I think things are going to get very interesting indeed.
Patrick, excellent. Yes, very much so — and we’ll get to that.
Lew, interesting. Thanks for these.
@JMG re: Political Economy Books
Would you happen to have a short list of true political economy books worth reading, besides Smith (I might guess at Pareto, Mises, and Schummacher)? If the answer is “check out the bibliography to The Wealth of Nature, then fair enough!
Cheers,
Jeff
Apologies if this is a repost, my browser threw an error the first two times I hit submit. If so, kindly delete this duplicate.
Mr. Greer, please note that I’m sending my personal thrall with a CONtract wafer, ready to mind sign. Also note: He carries a neck bridge … So, No Cheating! or you’ll be sitting on a rock on some shiny speck in the sky, pondering the where’s and why’s of a mentat’s fated attempt at fraud.
Wall Street hallucinates like an LLM on LSD.
JMG: what do you think of the Baby Bust? Now global except for a few central African nations, and even there the fertility rate is falling. Governments worldwide are throwing money at it, to little avail. Why? Economics? Ecology? Mother Earth saying she’s had quite enough of us? If we depopulate that way instead of by massive increase in death rates, then I’ll be grateful. Is it possible to increase the size of our sustainable niche?
Kind Sir,
I am pleased to hear that we are on track for the great plan here down under. I am also convinced that our politicians and leaders would be proud to hear that they fulfill the role history assigned to them.
@Drhooves RE “discussions with friends and relatives who abide by the fake market-oriented measure of a “wealth” can never quite grasp how precarious their lifestyles might turn out to be. “What makes you think your 401K balance is accurate?””
I do believe that the 401K balance is accurate, it is just that by the time you get it, it will not be worth anywhere near as much as one was expecting. Sure you will still get $500K but that will get you the cheapest car available if you are lucky.
@ Justin “It seems that those who choose to go down the road of high technology might also be choosing that financial hallucination”
Most high tech folks saw the 2008 crash and it frightened them as they had a glimpse of the future in which the doors of progress and the dreams of the middle class where closing rapidly. They are desperately trying to cash out before the last opportunity to do so vanishes. This is also why we see so many folks getting deep into gambling. They think the only path to the promised comfortable life is to make a hail mary shot just to get the chance of maybe making it.
I think the smart people now live ‘Beyond success’ as it is defined by others. I will get Melvina Reynolds to sing my position on this.
I don’t mind failing – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9WqILHPZyM
@ Charlie RE : Carp
There was a TV show here in Australia called ‘Eat the invaders’, it was promoting the idea of turning invasive species into meals. The six they focused on was Rabbits, Carp, Cane Toads, Camel, Cats and Deer. Only Cane toads were an issue due to toxins but everyone was fairly receptive of the other things.
@ Siliconguy RE : Folding phone
It is always interesting to see if Apple can do something vaguely interesting. But they show off their new phone and I’m thinking “Yep… that is an Apple phone that folds.” Just completely think nothing of it, I suspect the usual crowd will rush in to buy it but I also suspect that crowd is shrinking every year.
@ Anon Re : Interest rates
At least some economists here seem to vaguely get this.
There are three main reasons inflation is rising. Higher rates won’t fix them – https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-15/rba-inflation-economy-interest-rates/107151344
@JMG “I’ve suspected more than once that money held by the very rich tends to move much more slowly than money held further down the ladder”
This is why the $5,000 Trump cheque isn’t a terrible idea. Yes, it is being used as a political tool, but if you are going to give out $1 trillion, it is much better to give it to the people at the bottom rather than another hand out at the top.
@JMG “meretrix is Latin for “whore.”
And here I am thinking it is a character out of Asterix and Obelix. 😉
I read Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” in the 1980s, as part of some course, likely English, because he was a wonderful writer.
That book “Hard Times” changed my life. I felt bad that I gave my mudder Harriet such a hard time about her touting what it was truly like in the 1930s. Harriet, her father Isaiah, and little sister Emma had a very difficult time, partly because Isaiah was “too proud” to get him and his two young daughters into a bread-line or soup-line; people in bread-lines and soup-lines were beggars and paupers or heading to the poorhouse,— and he would rather starve before behave like a beggar or pauper. He felt those people were beneath him. And the family came close to starving. This was upstate New York, Albany area.
Nothing prepared Isaiah, he from a long lineage of skilled and hard workers, for the 1930s Depression,— it nearly broke his spirit. As a 0-8 year old, I couldn’t tell the his-before-and-after-humilition. As I mentioned, Isaiah made a big impact on me, and I think of him fondly, and miss him still.
——
Cosseted, AND closeted. (I had to look up the word ‘cosset’).
——
shrinkflation
Man, I see shrinkflation up close and personal when I go to the yogurt section. Cockamamie, itty-bitty containers. What are they thinking, that we/I wouldn’t notice that for the same price, there is half what there used to be? (I am waiting for a thimble-size container.)
——
“The economy of markets and statistics has aptly been compared to a circus, and like any other circus, it serves mostly to distract.” …
I seem to recall reading this section. I distinctly remember talking to Jethro about this issue, or akin to this issue. He would not hear of it,— in fact, I remember how he pooh-poohed the idea. Him: No way, not a chance. I knew how to deal with him when he got so pig-headed: just shut up.
——
I love the way environmentalists say that electric/electrification is our savior. As JGM has written many times (and glad he did), electricity exists because of petroleum.
——
“The Age of Uncertainty” by John Kenneth Galbraith. 1978 TV.
No streaming services found.
Bummer. 1978 was one of the worst years of my life.
——
Dylan 5
“It was as if the authorities just wanted to pretend the Depression never happened.”
World War II (WWII) happened.
By the time WWII ended in 1945, families that had survived the 1930s, during WWII, had been blown up and blown apart.
I remember my mudder (1926-2005) sayin’ that no-one in 1946-and-later wanted to hear a thing about the 1930s. They wanted to marry and birth children. After WWII, those who lived through the 1930s wanted to “fuggettaboddit.”
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
William #37 – you gave me another piece of the puzzle.
About your restaurant, I suspect there are a couple of Labels running things.
There is a Label called a Recipe, which is kind of like a statute in a law book. You Follow the Recipe – I suspect restaurant chefs are trained not to improvise as you want the food to taste Consistent. Deviating from the Recipe is risky. Also, improvising is not for Cooks, it is for Chefs, and you need to be Certified and Recognized to be a Chef. Everyone else, follow the Rules.
There is likely another label that says Food Scraps are Garbage, and you don’t cook with Garbage.
So a possible wake-up exercise is to do what I just did here – take situations, and examine what Labels are in effect, and how they constrain perception and behavior. You can’t get out of the box of a Label until you can see it, or rather see through it.
I just recently read the paper on Catabolic Collapse. It’s clear and straightforward.
I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trying to be cute here, but I wondered what exactly was the paper’s original contribution to this topic. Being young as I am, I came to these ideas “fully formed” so to speak, and I don’t have a complete picture of the chronology of which researcher contributed which piece of the puzzle. Was it the name (“catabolic collapse”) or the equations ? The neat synthesis, maybe 😉
Closer to this post : the role of fictitious capital as a cushion to maintain a semblance of normality. The idealist in me would rather have let it go bankrupt in ’08, clear the excesses and restart on a healthier basis (but of course!). Now as I get older and read more history… Well there’s simply no telling how bad it could have gotten. Does the shale revolution happens had we let it crash then ? Without this burst of new fuel, we could have had big wars and nasty leaders all around.
Ultimately, knowing human nature, it was inevitable that the can would be kicked, I manage to accept that now. It surely bought us time. Though it seems that nowadays the resource wars are gaining intensity.
Re: bifurcation…Right, as with any binary model, there is a spectrum of variation between.
An excellent post, and one which demonstrates your remarkarkable capacity for economkc divination – you did quite a bit better than the mainstream, which predicted endless growth forever, or the y2k style doomsayers. Truly, fiat money is a powerful form of magic, changing the consciousness of entire societies to believe there is wealth where there was none before. While many claim its a false illuaion and we ahould go back to gold, as you pointed out this creates unneccessary lack. Not having enough tokens to denote wealth is a bit like being unable to get someone into an empty train seat due to lack of tickets. Yet, when this magic is abused, we get… all sorts of absurdities. Still, it can keep a society and economy afloat long past the point the bottom dropped off, like willie e coyote running off a cliff and staying in the air until he realizes it…
I have to say, I’m very excited for the astrological magic website. I’ve already shown a natural talent and inclination for crafting talismans, and having this guidance is excellent. Thank you for the link.
Speaking of astrology, I heard you say on a podcast you are working on a book about using astrological transits to time life events. After recently making some great life decisions by timing them around the eclipse based on your advice, ai am very interested! When is that coming out?
Hi Siliconguy and John Michael,
The Tasmanian wilderness has also snagged quite a number of formerly warm bodies in the past year, and the Victorian high country is likewise hungry. Two women found dead at Nelse, near Falls Creek in Victorian alpine region
You know, I’ve hiked in both places and met people who were oblivious to the risks. A day begins warm with blue skies, then turns. The thing with hypothermia is that people’s minds stop functioning properly, and the same is equally true of heat exhaustion – and that happens in the MacDonnell Ranges up in the Northern Territory.
I recall encountering a young couple in shorts and t-shirt in the Tasmanian wilderness when the weather had turned ugly. My advice fell on deaf ears – go back to your car immediately. Instead being goal focused they wanted to reach a mountain hut which was much further along the track. They must have gotten lucky because I didn’t read about the incident in the newspapers, but still, extreme conditions requires absolute focus to survive with a solid dash of luck. A lot of ifs there…
Cheers
Chris
Re: solar panels – Even on the household scale, the rooftop solar system that we installed ten years ago pretty much covered our annual consumption, with the meter running forward during the hottest and coldest months, but running backward during the bright and comfortable spring and fall. Then we got a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, and we’re back to paying monthly electric bills again (and buying some fuel, but getting 60 miles of travel for each gallon of gasoline, and driving about 230 miles a week). So, yes: solar panels keep the lights and computers on, but not the motors that go “roundy-round” (in the language of YouTube contributor CursedControls).
“As for collapse, one of the main functions of the money economy at this point is to smooth out the curve of decline, so that everything just gets a little worse each day.”
Em… the money economy is sticking around so as to “flatten the curve”, you say?
Well, that should only take around two weeks or so, I hear…
😉
@JMG
In response to the chipmunk menace, I am pleased to announce the successful negotiation of a mutual defense and friendship treaty with the squirrels Details follow:
The humans agree to:
1.Place a moratorium on cutting oak, hickory and walnut trees for 2 years.
2.Follow a non-intervention policy regarding squirrel raids on birdfeeders. The humans agree that this is a domestic matter between the blue jays and the squirrels, and the human’s policy will be official tolerance but clandestine support (through resupply of said birdfeeders).
3. The humans agree to drive the speed limit or 5 miles below on country roads until such time, should hostilities begin, it become necessary to repeal this provision.
The squirrels agree to:
1. Stay off of country roads during daylight hours, using culverts or jumping limbs across the road should they need to cross a road.
2. A relocation policy of urban squirrels away from garbage cans back to the country. The humans recognize the squirrels’ claim to all chipmunk bedding and nut stores.
3. The squirrels have agreed to a policy of “mafia-like” treatment of chipmunks; chasing them from trees, exacting acorn protection money and public shaming of the chipmunks’ pathetic tails.
We hope this treaty will last a thousand years and cement the friendship between squirrels and humans and create a lasting front against our common enemy. There were no comments from the rabbits, but they seem to be aligning with the chipmunks.
What is interesting is that hallucinated wealth didn’t in any way result in beautiful architecture like in the early 20th century. As if there is a correlation that shows up regardless.
In previous eras. Real wealth resulted in gold, silver and marbled cities. Fine clothes and so on.
@ Michael Gray #66
“Also I always liked the analogy Alan Watts used for the Great Crash. It is like turning up to a construction site and the manager saying “We cannot build today as we have run out of inches.””
You know the aftermath of the 2008 crash here in Donegal, Ireland, was a very real, and rather sudden, decline in the availability of money. The banks more or less put a stop to lending for a wee while (months? a year?), while calling in as many debts as possible.
This was when I realised that in order for money to circulate, and be spent on goods and services, it first has to be borrowed, by somebody – not necessarily me, but, somebody has to have borrowed it. If banks stop lending it out, it stops existing. Mathematically this showed me that the reason for “growth” to be so inexorably built into our economic concepts is because at any given moment in time, every $1 that is currently in circulation is an IOU to someone, but crucially, it is not an “evens” money IOU, but an IOU that bears interest. And since the interest does not yet exist (the interest is NOT lent into existence) it has to either be generated by an economy that “grows” or else it has to be nicked off the next guy in a game of musical chairs.
However, the second realisation I had at that time, when I noticed that all of the companies closing down around me because they had run out of money to pay wages, or suppliers, or creditors, could still count on a great deal of “real” capital – experienced staff, working machinery, a working business model, potential customers wanting/needing their products, and etc. And yet, the sudden cutting off of the money spigot had turned all of that “real” capital into liabilities that, for some, were simply too large to bear. It was exactly like noticing that a building site full of workers and machinery and building supplies and etc had somehow run out of “inches” and therefore had to close down. Very surreal!
PLEASE NOTE: I have removed a large number of out of date prayers from the list. If this affected your prayer, I invite you to update it. The full list of removed prayers can be found here.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 9/17). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May NebulousRealms be protected from hostile spiritual entities and curses at this time, so that he may be grounded, in accordance with the will of his Higher Self.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May Open Space’s oldest friend’s mother Judith recover her strength and health completely.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Trubujahs’s mother-in-law, Helen, who is currently hospitalized after side effects from chemotherapy for her pancreatic cancer became a liver infection, be filled with vitality and be healed of all serious ailments; may Helen’s mind and spirit remain strong in the face of these ordeals.
May Brother Kornhoer’s daughter Katharine have strength in acknowledging her situation, total honesty with others as she works her way out of it, fortitude so that she can put in the work necessary to get out of her situation, and divine guidance on how to proceed. May she face her problems squarely and not hide from them, and may her anxiety be dissolved through trust and acceptance of divine assistance.
May Matthew Jussaume be granted healing and relief from his Multiple Sclerosis. May the Divine guide him to health, as well as grant him guidance for dealing with the condition.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin continue to make progress in her healing toward full mobility, and prayers for strength and support for her family.
May Atmospheric River’s gall bladder full of gallstones heal and be filled with such vitality that her current stones diminish, her comfort increases, and her gall bladder remains free of new stones.
May Northwind Grandma’s husband Jeff, who passed away unexpectedly on July 22, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination; may he be healed of the “wound in his heart” that he held in life.
May Jeff’s cat Henry accept, twice a day, Northwind’s giving him his Flovent inhaler dose and pill, and let her take him to the veterinarian once a month for an injection.
May Anonymuz get the strength and resolve he needs in his endeavors for justice, and may truth and justice be served.
May Lukeszy’s father’s post-surgery swelling be healed.
May Helen in Oz be free of inflammation in her biceps and shoulder, and may she be successful in the slow process of regaining pain-free range of movement and increased muscle mass and strength therein.
May JC of Geauga County, Ohio, who is fighting cancer, be blessed and uplifted so that he may receive the healing he needs and recover as best as possible.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, who is still undergoing chemotherapy in preparation for a surgery, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment; may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, who still has some lingering issues in his ongoing recovery from a heart condition, be healed and strengthened.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s reconstructive surgery on his left ureter go well; may his right kidney heal; and may his empty nose syndrome abate.
May Brother Kornhoer be able to afford his son’s international surgery.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG # 29:
“I’m not exactly sure how the real estate market is being so efficiently gimmicked, but gimmicked it certainly is.”
I don’t know how that market was being gimmicked before LLMs era, but I bet current “progress” in this “marvelous” technology makes a lot more easy to gimmick some markets to go on the usual financial bubbles. It’s my work hypothesis: usual suspects give LLMs wrong and/or biased cooked data, and those markets will be “always” growing in hallucinatory wealth terms…
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Justin P. # 31:
“But time goes by, and as the tree’s selfish, exploitative nature is revealed, the children must decide whether to live by its lonely rules, or walk away and rediscover the joys of real life and true friendship.””
Oops! That paragraph seems to be depicting current madness in “social” media, to say an easy example of selfist and reckless source of mainstream “amusement”. I bet that book was written a few years before than present day…
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Mary B. # 35:
“I suspect, cannot prove, that the character, Nostromo, might have been loosely based on the S. American career of Garibaldi.”
Oh, Garibaldi in South America, to say it softly, was a pirate and a bandit (at least as a part-time “job”), according some Uruguayian and Brazilian people I’ve met in person and online. Of course, they may have their own national biases against Garibaldi, but I bet he wasn’t always a “clean” Italian hero outside his own country (ahem). Maybe Conrad played with these nasty historical events to some extent in “Nostromo”.
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KAN # 44:
“Then after WWII Paul Samuelson was influential in pushing the ‘phsyics’ approach to economics (positing ‘laws’ equivalent to the laws of thermodynamics etc) which further divorced it from qualitative approaches.”
Samulson scientificist approach to economics has partly helped current arrogant and biased view usually made by neoliberal economist, when they’ve been pointing (since the `90s) that global economy and runaway especulative economics are “natural” and can be explained (or maybe justified) with “scientifical laws”. So, everybody who has made criticisms against these two sacred cows of neoliberalism, are “anti-science”, and they behave like people who would deny gravity law (cough). Neoliberal guys never are able to grasp their “laws” are nearer to fake science than “hard sciences” laws.
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Phutatorius # 46:
“I think it was Galbraith who invented the neologism “economeretricians.” Combining “econometricians” with “meretricious” was a punning stroke of pure genius.”
A very sharp and hilarious alike neologism, methink. There´s only one problem, IMHO: maybe it could ofend prostitutes who earn their money in real economy (“meretricious”=related with prostitution), when they’re blended with econometricians…Well, if they would know what the heck is an “econometrician”…
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Sñithy T. # 48:
“have you ever noticed that if you know which school of economics an economist subscribes to, you can fairly reliably predict their political views down to the smallest details?”
Yes, indeed you can make on the short form, a rough but realistic classification: Neoliberal-Milton Friedman guys (Conservative-right wing) and Keynesianists and Post-Keynesianists economists (Liberal in the USA sense and European Socialdemocrats). Oh, and the “Vienna boys”, of course, usually are “libertarians” in the US sense (so they tend to far right wing).
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Raphanus # 50:
“It is an unfortunate fact of thermodynamics that electricity is a method of moving energy around, not a source of energy. Like all methods of moving energy around, some must always be lost in the process”
Oh, it’s a “small dirty secret” which could prevent to achieve in the future the full electrification dream…I think some vehicles and industries are going to be electrified during the Long Descent, but it only will be a relief to save some fossil fuels, not all of them in the long term.
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JMG # 52:
“KAN, the mere fact that economics has no connection these days with economic history is, to me, the best proof that economics is a pseudoscience. If your theories aren’t based on past experience, what claim can they possibly have to validity?”
Wow! I think you’ve shot a “silver bullet” against the heart of that fake science in which economics has become in present day…Thank you for your reasoning.
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(To be continued)
BeardTree # 53:
Thank you for your link. Well, there’s a fake narrative (even within mainstream ecologism) that it’s trying to fool everybody pretending there’s happening now a “transition” into the “green energy” and blah blah blah…Not only in the USA, but around the world. I’m not a technology/energy expert, but I see for example, the electric car business claims about legendary cars full electrification has failed…
Even if renewables sources were”helped” by a lot of new nuclear plants, they wouldn’t achieve the full electrification utopia (indeed, there’s another peak like the oil one, in uranium, which will happen soon or later).
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Patrick H. # 67:
“First, the rural areas that lose electricity and reliable transportation networks and get abandoned by the government might revert to bartering or an unofficial currency, perhaps U.S. coins. More and more people will stop using money and the government will tax concerte goods from them instead of money.”
Another half-forgotten tradition (at least in some parts of Europe), before “falling” into the barter economics, is “local money”; an idea which sometimes is remembered in some fringe leftist contexts. It’s been tried during the past century in economic crisis times. On the short form, small towns halls and another local powers coin their own money to ease wealth circulation and avoid inflation…Here, a halfway decent explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency
A good idea but there’s a “small” problem. Only national governments have the legal power for coining money, so police and tresaure authorities can end soon those “pocket money” ideas. Of course, if govt power dwindles so it can’t be able to show its power in some small towns, this idea could work to some extent, at least before barting would be the king in the long term…
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JMG # 69:
“the thing to keep in mind is that bifurcation is a very rough model. It will more likely be a polyfurcation”
OK, a new word I’ve learned today, thanks John!
“Perhaps we should speak of ecodetteonomists.”
Well, to be more exact, two new words…”Ecodetteonomist”. Wow!
“It’s quite possible that the stock market will hit all time highs on the day that the power goes out in Manhattan forever and armed raiders cross the George Washington Bridge in search of loot and slaughter.”
What an image!
Also, I have definitely seen the truth in your “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush” mantra. Among the well-to-do of my area, going to thrift stores and buying thrifted clothing used to make one a target for insults. Now the wealthy have created the grift of “thrifting,” where they find thrifted clothes and resell them at a higher value, and among the wealthy, wearing thrifted clothes is now seen as cool. Now prices at thrift stores are rising, unfortunately.
In this scenario, it literally was a rush. It seems the overpriced clothes of mainstream brands are starting to become a burden even on the upper middle classes, leading them to buy from stores that used to be for only the destitute. The trick is to always be on the cutting edge of collapse to avoid the giant crowd of wealthy gentrifiers that are coming in behind you.
Hi,
Yes, I am back. My husband retired suddenly and became seriously ill at the same time. We are adjusting, and he is better.
About 1929. I was pondering that and 9/11. I was in D.C. and witnessed/affected the attack on the Pentagon. The Conservative media kept drumming up how this day changed America. The regular media did as well. I personally did not see any change, that had not been building since the late 1990s.
However, October 29, 1929, did change everything. The whole financial system was changed overnight. People who depended on the stock market were suddenly broke. It was illusionary wealth, with a few like Jessie Livermore who took advantage of the existing system. Livermore couldn’t make money under the post-1929 system and killed himself. The wealth was based on “air and hopes.” There was nothing real except in people’s minds.
I keep coming back to that with the dot come and the tech bubble, as well as the 2008 debacle. Wealth was all based on the imaginary and not real things. As for me, we never got out of the 2008 debacle and are still bumping along flaying our arms.
—
two after thoughts – I was a part of the Nixon going off the Gold Standard. I remember when the French decided to change how they valued their gold holdings, and then all hell broke loose as to how to value gold.
Chipmunks – they are financial predictors for me. I know what I have money problems by counting how many pop up from under cars.
John, your August 12th eclipse predictions are coming true. I know lots of people die all the time, but your chart interpretation said eclipses in fixed fire signs will mean influential people will die. Just learned that Annie Dillard also died. So we have Wendell Berry, Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and her…
…now we know Mitch McConnel hasn’t died, but I sure do wish some of these folks would retire and give other people a chance to have a go in office.
But speaking of KY, there is a lot of wealth in the state. Plenty of poverty too, to be sure. But some of the wealth seems to be embedded in the realm of physical goods, property and things more-so than other areas. It’s just a limited observation, but I guess you can’t go wrong with tobacco, whisky, horses, and the unofficial cash crop, weed.
JMG,
A good example of the ratcheting up of coping mechanisms in the financial economy is to compare the S&L Crisis under Bush 1, to the subprime collapse of 2008 under Obama. In the S&L debacle over 2000 bank managers and financial executives were punished in the criminal justice system with many going to jail.
In the 2008 financial crisis nearly nobody outside of Bernie Madoff ( who’s crimes were not really related to that financial event, just cheating rich people) was brought to justice under Obama and his cardboard cutout attorney general Eric Holder. They wanted to keep the system together so badly they just skipped the step of punishing the criminals to prevent the same mistakes in the future, thus ensuring the ” racket” would continue unabated in its ability to keep the financial economy propped up.
Jeff, I’d encourage you to check out the bibliography of The Wealth of Nature. 😉
Polecat, so noted! I’ll look forward to Mr. Shatner’s arrival.
Paradoctor, I’ve written about declining population fairly extensively. Here’s a post from 2007 predicting the population bust:
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-depopulation-explosion.html
And here’s one from two years ago, when it was already under way:
https://ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
As for LLMs on LSD, maybe you should found an LLC in the LCD industry to project the resulting DTs on TV!
DropBear, they may not be so happy when they find out how that role fares in the final scenes.
Michael, exactly. If you want to stimulate the economy, put money in the hands of ordinary people — they’ll spend it, and get the wheels of the economy moving. If you give it to the rich they’ll just hoard it. As for Meretrix, Goscinny and Uderzo made their comic family-friendly, so they didn’t mention her; the Gauls of that little nameless village are old-fashioned, but the world’s oldest profession doubtless has a foothold there!
Thibault, most previous explanations for the collapse of civilizations either focused on extraneous factors, such as invasions or environmental crises; political-organizational factors, such as excessive complexity or elite overproduction; or sheer handwaving, such as moral decay or innate life cycles of societies. My theory of catabolic collapse argues for an economic cause that’s hardwired into the nature of complex societies as such, and interacts in predictable ways with their resource bases and cultural imperatives. That approach has become fairly common these days, but it wasn’t anything like so frequently discussed in 2005 — one of many ways in which those of us on the fringes quietly influence discussions further in.
Justin, yep. One of the things I want to do with the Technonomicon is encourage diversity of approach.
Paedrig, thank you. These I tend to think of the gold bugs and the fiat-money promoters as a great example of my rule that the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea; the issue, of course, is that when it comes to media of exchange, there may be no good option. I don’t have a publication date yet for my book on natal chart transits, but it should be out sometime next year.
Chris, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve been told that there are odd geological and ecological similarities between the eastern edge of Australia and the northwestern edge of North America.
Scotlyn, in a certain bleak sense, yes!
WatchFlinger, beware. If the chipmunks cut deals with the dogs, we’re all in deep trouble.
Info, ah, but the wealth in those previous periods wasn’t hallucinated. Renaissance Italy, for example, was genuinely rich, as a result of trade flows through Italy connecting Europe with the Middle East and points eastward, so they came by their gold, silver, and marble honestly. Hallucinated wealth doesn’t make up for material impoverishment…
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Nephite, that’s also a sign of the extreme downward mobility hitting the cubicle class as their jobs go away. Yeah, it’s going to be annoying, but it’ll pass.
Neptunesdolphins, welcome back! Sorry to hear about your husband — I hope he makes a full recovery.
Justin, I hadn’t yet heard of Annie Dillard — ouch. Another to add to your list is Peter Max — yeah, nobody remembers him now, but I recall his art from back in the day, when he was the most iconic imagist of the time:
As for Kentucky, it’s been on my radar screen for a long time. Much depends on the religious climate, though.
Clay, a good example indeed. There’s also a difference between competing factions of the elite — the people most heavily involved in the 2008 bubble and bust were on Obama’s side of things, and so got handled with kid gloves; a different faction was in power in 2000, and the bankers didn’t do so well.
Some years back, while working on a master’s in journalism, I had reason to do a deep dive into the movie palaces of the 1920s, Art Deco design being an interest of mine. A quote has stuck with me. “A quarter bought entrance into an afternoon of fantasy. A shopgirl with a few shares of stock could sit on a gilded throne in the lobby of the local movie house and imagine the princess that she would become when her investment paid out.” Every economic bubble inflating the fortunes of those with skin in the game has an undertow pulling the working class along behind it, lulling them into complacency. The Power Ball lottery comes to mind as a modern equivalent, among others. Those with the least to lose will always suffer the most.
Watchflinger thanks for the chuckle;
The Sciurini [tree squirrels] and Marmotini [chipmunks and their perfidious allies the ground squirrels] wars have been quite vexing in this area.
Washington State is quite racist where squirrels are concerned. Red squirrels are a protected species while the Eastern Tree squirrel and the Fox squirrel are designated as immigrant invaders and may be killed on sight by anyone with a small game license.
Speaking of states, they may not coin money but they can accept gold and silver as payment for debts. (Article 1, Section 10). In practice though Roosevelt confiscated the gold in 1933 at the old price so he could devalue it in 1934.
Although I don’t eat fish myself, I’d be remiss not to post this in response to the discussion of carp:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/introducing-the-greatest-childrens-book-ever-written-about-gefilte-fish
JMG
I have a real world example that might of interest. My dad (a baby boomer) bought his house for roughly $250,000 in 2011. Now on average houses on average appreciate 3%-4% year over year. So in 2026 the realistic value of his house should be in the range of $389,491-$450,235. However because of how the price of housing played out during Covid. He is convinced that his house is $600,000 and initially planned to put it on the market for $700,000 and be haggled down to $650-600,000.
His plan was shattered when his neighbors. Tried selling their houses and they were left sitting on the market despite price drops down to the $500,000s. As of now there are five houses for sale on his street and dozens throughout the neighborhood that have sat on the market for over a year.
I have been watching their Zillow prices for the past year and here are my observations. It seems to me that the average house is valued at roughly 2x what its actual value should be in most markets. Boomers generally tack on an additional $100,000 for haggling purposes, what I call the “boomer tax”.
Because most boomers have most of their wealth in housing and the average house’s fair value is around $300-$400,000, I estimate that the average baby boomer overestimates their net worth by $400-$500,000.
Michael Gray @ 75, about that $5,000 check. Here is a true story to illustrate the principle involved. Which I shall retell, even though the incident is already known to this literate commentariat.
Around the time of the Battle of Marathon, or shortly thereafter, the Athenians found a large vein of silver in their mines at Larium (tip of Attica). The assembly of all male citizens would have to decide what to do with this windfall. Many wanted a one time distribution to all citizens. Themistocles knew the defeated Persians would be back. He proposed using the silver to build a navy. Imagine that you are a middling sort of Athenian citizen. Sure, a once in a lifetime handout would be welcome. But, once you paid your debts, bought your wife a new chiton, yourself a warm cloak, set up little brother in his own workshop and provided your niece a dowry, the money would be gone and you would be about where you had started. A building program is a jobs program for working people. Don’t forget that triremes only lasted about 2-3 years, so would have to be rebuilt. All sorts of jobs and opportunities for suppliers of sails, cordage, timber, bronze for the rams and so on. The thetes, the very poorest Athenians, were the rowers. They didn’t get to vote, IIRC, but that doesn’t mean they were without influence. (There were no galley slaves used in the ancient world, except possibly by Carthage in later centuries. I asked the experts over at the ACOUP blog.)
I look at what people in high position, and so-called pundits as well, don’t say. What IS NOT being proposed, by either party, is refurbishment of our bridges, and existing housing stock for just one example. What we need is a new WPA.
Since the $5000 check proposal has been mentioned, I would like to ask if anyone else picked up on the proposed *requirement* that it be spent in the USA?
And if so, did anyone else read this as a dogwhistle for the techbros and social engineers who dream of implementing programmable digital currency? aka CBDC?
The reason I ask is that over 6 years ago, when I still worked in an office, my boss got a random and weird prospectus trying to interest him in a pilot scheme for testing programmable digital wages. Somewhere in the sales pitch was the suggestion that he would have the power to “pre-programme” his employees’ wages so that (say) it would not be spendable in a bar any day except Saturday – apparently to achieve every Irish employer’s dream of preventing employees coming into work with a hangover… 😉
At the time I found the whole notion both horrific and also thoroughly lacking in popular appeal… but there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and well, here we are. Governments everywhere are already busy implementing various kinds of controls on who may spend their own money and where and on what (prominent real life examples to date include Jacques Baud, Francesca Albanese, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber), and would absolutely love to be able to automate the whole process of deciding whether, where and on what, any one of us may spend our money. (Which they see as “our” money).
Giving everyone a $5000 programmable digital coin which has been pre-programmed to work only on purchases of American goods sounds (at least to me) like it could be part of a pitch to make programmable digital currency popular.
On a scale ranging from Carefully Cautious to Edgily Gun-Shy, be honest… how paranoid am I?
Peter Max, I’ve definitely seen his art. The word Love, in that shape and those letters is rather iconic. Sad to hear it.
Louisville might be okay, and other parts of Northern Kentucky as far as the religious aspect of things. I’ve heard Paducah is making a bid at enticing artists with their cheap former warehouse spaces. A cousin of mine who is an artist just moved from California, where he’d finally lost a teaching position in the graphic design world, and is now teaching in Murray, KY. I hope to catch up with him next time he visits here to see his mom, my great aunt. Murray is about an hour and half from Nashville… I’m not sure if that area will go the way of JHK’s Foxfire Republic, but there is a lot of financial wealth down there tied up in the music industry. I’ll be curious about his impressions of Murray, though he is looking for work elsewhere. It’s only a 1 year gig.
@Paradoctor #73
“Is it possible to increase the size of our sustainable niche?”
What the size of that sustainable niche for humans would be is a good question. What is possible with best practices, regenerative agriculture, ecosystem restoration, a circular economy based on repairable simpler technology designed to be recycled, the practices JMG calls green wizardry, judicious use of electricity and machinery, a bit of biofuels production, well managed forests, movement based on walking, biking, some mass transit, canals, wind powered shipping and so forth, a phase out of noxious plastics and other chemicals and so on. It may be more than the one billion humans as back in 1800. Unfortunately an opportunity to gracefully and wisely transition to a “green” economy over the decades starting in the 1970’s was missed. I was young man back then and saw the vision.
Odd battles:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-bruce-power-climate-change-gizzard-shad-fish-event-lake-huron-9.7337290?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-ca
Fish 1: Nuclear Reactor 0, though fish casualties were heavy.
Apparently nuclear power plants aren’t designed to deal with millions of warm-ish water fish trying to all get into their warm wastewater during a cold snap. Messes up their cooling and leads to shutdown being needed. Also to dead fish having to be removed by crane.
Siliconguy #96
You’re welcome. There was something I read recently in Britain, the American gray squirrels had become an invasive species. They had pushed the native red squirrels out of their habitat and brought diseases to the red squirrels, but lately, the red squirrels in Britain had started to make a comeback, pushing the gray squirrels out and reclaiming their territory.
Here in Appalachia, grey squirrels and fox squirrels are in their native habitat. I’ve seen a much greater number of both in recent years. Probably due to the decline in popularity of hunting them, shorter winters and increased habitat as forests cut for timber years ago have regrown. They used to be a common food source among old timers here and may start being so again.
Re. Peter Max .. I grew up seeing those trippy TV adverts hawking Levis and 7UP. Also, I’m just now re-reading Simon Winchester’s book ‘Krakatoa’. He notes that the Dutch VOC was essentially the percursor to how all modern capital markets came to be organized and function … although, after having lived through the last several decades of financial shenanigans, the $hark$ appear to rule with seeming impunity. Perhaps some enterprising oligarch with a soul could do a solid, setting up and positioning the appropriate HAARP apparatus .. towards New York, London, and Brussels .. dialing things up past 11 – just to be sure!
@JMG
Indeed Hallucinated wealth shows its fraud not only in subpar architecture but also in a lot of modern art too that is highly priced but poor quality.
No matter how much they launder their numbers the falseness inevitably does show up in the artistry somehow.
On the topic of astology – have you done a libra ingress for London? Because… well, I don’t know if you heard this, but recently the parliaments of Scotland, northern Ireland, and Wales are all ruled by independemce larties, came together, and signed a Memorandum of understanding to the effect that they all intend to break away from the UK, which shall be united no more. They even declared that the current prime iminister shall be the last of a United Kingdom! And Trump seems to be supporting them, so these claims have weight…
Was there any indicication of this in the stars? I know you claimed Emgland would have foreign policy problems in the eclipse prediction, but I dont know if this counts as foreign or domestic issues! In any case, wild developments, and the Chamger marches on, upending the world…
Nit directly related to your post, but my Gods, what could this do to the financial hallucination markets, most of which are centered in London? This is a tectinic shift in European and global politics! Of course, they arent suggesting armed rebellion, so much as proper legal petitions amd such, but still! And a day after the ingress! May be worth doing a chart for London soon.
Hi John,
I think in a recent post you pointed out that schizophrenics aren’t babbling incoherently, but are instead speaking in a private language about predicaments they aren’t permitted to speak about plainly. Sometimes a patient and insightful therapist can decode the language.
I wonder if some of the perceived craziness of our society at large is in fact a kind of private language. Take the recent phenomena of gender dysphoria occurring at 10X or more of the historical rate. It’s easy to declaim the arbitrariness of someone declaring they’re of the opposite gender merely because they so declare it. But what about the far more numerous people who imagine themselves to be the movers and shakers of society because they have a piece of paper from a university? People dress themselves up with all these credentials, and nowadays that doesn’t guarantee an ounce of competence or leadership ability. (The Wizard of Oz film made fun of this notion; in the end, all the Wizard could do was confer credentials. At least in the army, you have sergeants trying to whip the second looies into shape.) And a big reason why is the same reason behind hallucinated wealth–an “education” lost in abstraction and never coming into contact with the ground of reality. So when a boy claims to be a girl or vice versa, is that young person reacting to the cosplay going on at all levels of society?
“Arodrigo, do you happen to know if there are measures that determine the velocity of money held by the different classes in society? I’ve suspected more than once that money held by the very rich tends to move much more slowly than money held further down the ladder, and so the extreme imbalance in the distribution of wealth we have now might be an important factor driving down the velocity of money.”
If I remember correctly, precisely this was the core of Keynes’s understanding of the Great Depression and how to solve it.
JMG,
“It’s quite possible that the stock market will hit all time highs on the day that the power goes out in Manhattan forever and armed raiders cross the George Washington Bridge in search of loot and slaughter.”
-> So it might be an okay idea to play the stock market if you can afford to lose some dough?
@JMG
“The pseudonumber 0 and the equally fake realm of negative numbers were both introduced into Western mathematics to make it easier to calculate debt, but they’ve had destructive consequences radiating outward through a very wide range of contexts.”
This relates to some things I’ve been reading and thinking about for a few years now, and since you mentioned on the other blog that you’re writing some books on mathematics, I hope you don’t mind if I brain-dump just a bit.
Officially, at the foundations of modern mathematics is Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, which takes first-order logic and adds several* axioms that in theory the rest of mathematics rests on top of. ZF was heavily-criticized at the time, and still has its critics. One of the criticisms is that it was formulated with the goal of justifying modern mathematics, including some results that were themselves controversial at the time (this is especially true of the Axiom of Choice, the one that leads to really weird things like Banach-Tarski). As a result It sidestepped the question of if those results were really valid.
(* Actually, ZF set theory has infinitely-many axioms because an axiom that should really be stated in second-order logic is hammered into first-order logic by assuming every possible instance of it as a separate axiom.)
For myself, I can’t shake the feeling that, to paraphrase Leopold Kroenecker, the gods made the counting numbers, and all else is the work of a bunch of monkeys who think we’re smarter than we really are. That is, the counting numbers are pre-theoretical in a way that the integers, rationals, and especially the reals are not. You can try to define/construct the naturals but for me there will always be the question of whether you defined it correctly.
(Mathematician Edward Nelson liked to point out that almost all mathematicians assume that the formal notion of the naturals — our definitions — is the same as the genetic notion of the naturals we arrive at through the practice of counting, but we don’t actually know this. If they are not, then among other things the use of mathematical induction beyond numbers we can actually count to becomes dubious.)
And once you get beyond the naturals, the constructions of the integers, rationals, and especially the reals share an awkward property: they tend to turn a question into its own answer. For example, assume you have the naturals — however you define them. Then the most common construction of the integers is as an ordered pair of naturals** (m, n) where m is the “positive” part of the number and n is the “negative” part. In other words, the pair (m, n) stands in for the difference m – n, a difference that might not exist in the naturals (ex: (1, 3) = 1 – 3 = -2). The rationals are then a pair (n, d) of integers standing for the quotient n/d, which again might not be an integer. The reals are an even bigger can of worms.
(** Actually an “equivalence class” of every such pair with the same difference but that detail can be worked around by instead defining equality more loosely than simple identity.)
The case for these constructions is that quite simply they work. The integers and rationals in particular are simple and can be shown to have all the properties we would want them have. But I’ve seen it suggested that they are better thought of as a “pending operation” — an operation that can’t be completed in the current unit but could perhaps be completed in a different one — rather than numbers in their own right.
Anyway, sorry for the brain-dump.
Grey squirrels in the United Kingdom are being preyed upon by pine martens, reducing the population of grey squirrels
https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/our-research/research-explore/feature/significance-of-native-predators-to-naturally-restore-ecosystems/
Of course, this just shows how nature quite easily adapts to “invasive” species without any human intervention at all, meaning the efforts of conservationists to destroy invasive species in order to protect native species is quite unnecessary.
@Watchflinger #104
That’s good to hear about the red squirrels. However, when I looked it up what I read was that it wasn’t red squirrels that were pushing out the grey squirrels, it was a combination of human intervention and the reintroduction of pine martens.
The latter is interesting because the reason the pine martens were driven out is because they’re a blight to farmers. One can kill an entire hen house in a single night and leave the bodies to rot — they just enjoy killing. But that murderous efficiency has made them effective “protectors” of red squirrels because grey squirrels are easier prey for them. (Though what will happen when the grey squirrels are gone is suppose another matter.)
> Peter Max
Oh, I remember Peter Max, sure ’nough. His paintings/drawings were out-of-this-world.
I had forgotten about him. Now that you mention him, I miss his 1965–1975 artwork. I see any art of his from that time, and automatically think, “hippie.” My kinda guy.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
JMG
“What too few people like to recognize is that ideologies, economic systems, and technologies rest on a foundation of resources, not the other way around.”
You know the easiest way to find extra/slack in your household budget is to ask, “Can you actually afford the ideologies, economic systems, and technologies you personally have?” It only takes a few negative responses to that question before you end up with more resources than you thought you had.
Oh yeah, and the heat predicted by the eclipse as well. Major heatwaves in the Ohio valley. It seems like we had August weather most of September, with highs in the upper 80s and low 90s.
NephiteNeophyte @90: I don’t think it’s the price of clothing that’s the issue; I think the well-to-do have finally cottoned on to the steep decline in quality over the last 20-30 years. It’s nearly impossible to find clothing that is a) all natural fibers without an admixture of plastic, b) with fabric thicker than a Kleenex, and c) constructed with actual seams (not even French seams, just seams) instead of being serged together–even if you go to expensive designers these days, you may not get decent fabric and/or construction. If you shop carefully you can find pre-2000s pieces in thrift stores that were made properly. Actually, the upper echelons call it “collecting vintage designer wear” and talk about building a wardrobe around classic pieces, but that’s what it boils down to. Fast fashion was originally aimed at teens, but when they saw how much profit it made, most clothing manufacturers followed suit and shaleified their lines from bottom to top.
@watchfinger
The grey squirrel was introduced into Britain in the 19th century and quickly replaced the grey, partly by competition, but mostly via diseases introduced via the introduction of grey squirrels themselves.
What is turning the tide for the for the red squirrels is another animal, the Pine Marten, a predator of the mink family. The Pine Marten is a native of Britain, but by the end of the nineteen had been reduced to remnant populations in north Wales and western Scotland. They had been systematically exterminated by game keepers to protect ground nesting birds:- pheasants, partridge and quail, which it was fashionable then to shoot in large numbers by rich folk at shooting parties on their country estates. Time moves on and most of the rich have found other things to do at the weekend. In the last decades of the 20th century ecologists twigged (pun intended) that where you found pine martens you found red squirrels. After a lot of watching they found this was not a coincidence. Pine Martens can catch grey squirrels, but not red squirrels. The difference is twiggs. Red squirrels are roughly half the weight of grey squirrels allowing them evade Pine Martens by going further out on twiggs than a Pine Marten is willing to risk a fall from. With legal protection and the great reduction in game keeper numbers the Pine Marten is spreading slowly from its hide aways, plus introductions are being made into suitable habitat (i.e lots of grey squirrels!). It’s hoped the red squirrel will follow the Pine Marten, but I suspect that the grey squirrels will be in the UK for a long time yet. Predation from Pine Martens will give an evolutionary push for grey squirrels to become lighter, and they still have the disease edge over reds for the present.
Hi John Michael,
Thought it might be worth mentioning – given that we’re discussing economics – that a litre of diesel was priced at AU$3.01 in a nearby petrol station. Far out! Converting to your currency and units of measurement is AU$3.01 x 3.8 x 0.7 = US$8.00 / Gallon.
Glad my small Suzuki doesn’t require much petrol in order to go a long way.
I’m not entirely certain that those sorts of prices won’t have serious economic consequences given how much of the heavy fuel gets used in all manner of activities in Australia. It is a fair thing to suggest that high energy prices are an additional tax across the entire economy, and will most certainly reduce expenditure in other activities.
You know what though, I’d predicted that we’d have fuel rationing after Easter, but was wrong. What we seem to be doing is rationing by price instead. Interestingly, I’m starting to read articles denouncing big vehicles. These things don’t happen in a vacuum, and presumably those large machines will become either harder to physically get, economically out of reach to purchase, or way too expensive to maintain and use. It’ll be a long slow return to small, then eventually none. Dunno.
Cheers
Chris
OT: Poking around Tablet Magazine, I found this. If anyone posted it earlier I didn’t see it, apologies!
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/druids-are-back
JMG,
In a way a lot of the modern consumer goods market in the us is a kind of financial hologram representing not the application of resources and labor but mostly of finance and wealth extraction. As an example, If someone in 1972 went to the shoe store to buy some Bass shoes they came from an American factory, the leather from an American tannery, most of the price they would pay would go to real things, including the salesman with the Brannock Device to measure you feet.
Today someone might go to a store in the mall and pull a box of Nike’s off a big shelf to try on themselves. Maybe only a kid at the cash register. The actual labor and material content by value of those shoes might only be 5% or so, which was provided in another county. The rest of the purchase price is profit, license fees, pay for endorsements by star athletes, overhead not spent on building more factories and manufacturing capital but on a glittering world headquarters with lakes and basketball courts and big berms around it like Disneyland. Most of your dollar went to the same place as your health insurance payment or the interest paid on your credit card. Off in the in to the matrix of financial middlemen, oligarchs, political wheeler dealers and economic pimps.
Disclaimer, many of my Neighbors work at Nike. Non of them make shoes, design shoes, or make materials for shoes. All of them work in IT, logistics, marketing, HR, etc. The 300 Vice Presidents live up in the hills in a fancier part of town. Nike is no-different than most American products companies today, and in some ways is better than the ones run by private equity.
One thing I think a lot of people miss when talking about financial markets is how many of them are no longer run by humans, but have been given over to the machines. Somewhere north of 95% of all trades on stock markets are done by machines (algorithmic trading). So there’s another further disconnect between (human) estimates of how much something is worth and the major markets. I actually heard from a former banker back around 2010 that figuring out what humans would estimate something was worth was no longer useful: the machines had taken over the financial markets.
I’ve long wondered just how much of the weird investment decisions of the last few decades is being driven by the way that machines now run essentially all major financial markets, and they are obviously not wise, no matter how clever they might be.
This is certainly on topic, investments that sounded like a good idea but were not.
“Buzz ≠ an investment case. Trust the machine ≠ the road to riches.”
From
https://mutualfundobserver.com/2026/09/ishares-closed-etfs-graveyard/
JMG # 69:
“The pseudonumber 0 and the equally fake realm of negative numbers were both introduced into Western mathematics to make it easier to calculate debt, but they’ve had destructive consequences radiating outward through a very wide range of contexts.”
Ironically, new (pseudo)number 0 as we write now since medieval times (copied to Arabs who copied to some extent to Indian mathematicians), when it was known for the first time by Middle Ages scholars and feudal bookkeepers (thanks Fibonacci, during XIIth century, methink), had some problems to be accepted by everybody. In spite of its evident advantages over the old school Roman numbers system (ahem), I rad somewhere that number 0 was suspicious for Catholic Church authorities, maybe due to its meaning as “nothing”. Well, maybe they thought number 1 was “good” because Christians believe in only 1 God (monotheism, in spite of the Trinity?). I’m wandering off now, I’m sorry…
Another hypothesis to explain this mistrust in modern 0 by Rome could be another reason, less metaphysical than I’ve guessed before: maybe number 0 made easier to write debt, so it was easier to commit usury practices (like John has written, calculating debt was easier using modern 0). And Catholicism always has claimed usury is a sin…though since some centuries ago, the Popes have been softening tough medieval meaning of usury…
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Michael G. # 75:
“There was a TV show here in Australia called ‘Eat the invaders’, it was promoting the idea of turning invasive species into meals. The six they focused on was Rabbits, Carp, Cane Toads, Camel, Cats and Deer.”
I like rabbit and deer meat. Indeed, I remember my grandpa raised some rabbits in the back garden, and sometimes we ate one of them when my family went to his small town house. Carp, Cane Toads and Camel; I don’t know, I’ve never eaten them. Cats…oh no, I love cats!
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Chris # 81:
“The Tasmanian wilderness has also snagged quite a number of formerly warm bodies in the past year, and the Victorian high country is likewise hungry. Two women found dead at Nelse, near Falls Creek in Victorian alpine region”
Well, I’ve read your comment and your link first, a bit puzzled, because I know Australia (and Tasmania too) has mountains, of course, but they aren’t very high even by European standards (not even over 3,000 m. peaks in Australian territory). However, then I’ve thought mountains are always mountains, so everybody who goes to them must respect them, unless they want to play with death…By the way, I remember there’ve been some deaths in near 2,000 m mountains here in my country (with peaks suitable to reach them walking, not climbing!), due mainly to unwary tourists falls. And sometimes some unwary walkers have needed to be rescued, after being missed in a thick fog, in those “small” mountains heights, without winter technical clothes, so with some hypothermia symptoms (even in April!).
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Clay D. # 93:
Your comment about Obama political decision, avoiding any legal punishment against anybody with real power in American financial/economics world (not even against some convenient scapegoat), has made me to think in relationship between economics and politics, which has been denied since the “happy” globalization times since ’90s, by usual neoliberal economists (ahem). Speaking of political economy, or economics politics, I remember now that some years ago I read a book titled “La gran mentira de la economía” (The Big Lie of Economy), written by Gonzalo Bernardos. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Spanish. On the short form, this writer explained how (thanks to the neoliberal economists and globalist illusions) politicians here (and everywhere) left economics world without any political control. So acts have consequences: 2008 crisis (this book was written in 2014). Economics should be a means for some different social and political purposes, never a final purpose in itself. I agree.
However, this essayist was too naïve to think that, after 2008 crisis, governments, economists and bankers would be more cautious and responsible in near future. Nowadays reality contradicts this wishful thinking (I laugh at this claim, with some bitterness…). For example, citizens here are suffering since a time ago, an evident inflation in goods (including food), and current government (apparently “progressive”, ahem), has been passive until today to control prices growth, going on a non written neoliberal economics “law”(economics aren’t politics, so politicians mustn’t try to control it: mortal sin!).
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JMG # 94:
“Goscinny and Uderzo made their comic family-friendly, so they didn’t mention her; the Gauls of that little nameless village are old-fashioned, but the world’s oldest profession doubtless has a foothold there!”
You’re right when you wrote that comic is a family-friendly one, but I bet some men in that legendary very small town in Gaul, which fought bravely alone against Roman invaders, had near it some bigger towns, in which I bet there would be some women with that old job you popinted, even in some brothel…During ancient Romans time, it’s well known there were a lot of women (and maybe men) in prostitution business, “free” and slave alike. By the way, I read some years ago in a comic magazine only for adults, a pornographic parody about Obelix having sex with a hot woman who apparently was a w***e (ahem). Asterix was slightly upset during that apocryphal story (why?) about the two famous Gauls…
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Mary B. # 99:
A very interesting story from the past. History is a neverending source of knowledge for the present time, because “history never repeats itself but it rhymes”.
However, I’ve scratched my head after reading this phrase:
“Don’t forget that triremes only lasted about 2-3 years, so would have to be rebuilt.”
I’m a bit puzzled, because I didn’t know this fact. It seems those warships lasted much less time than last sailing ships during more recent times of old school sailing, before steamers era…I guess they had to be rebuilt due to some technical limits their shipbuidings had in those times, but I can’t think which limits they had…Can you depict briefly which causes led ancient Athenians to need rebuilding those warships so often? Thanks on advance.
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Scotlyn # 100:
Programmable digital coin seems IMHO a creepy idea, because I think it’s too similar to a totalitarian and moralistic dictatorship utopia, in which private life of everybody would be controlled, to some extent…I wish it’ll never replace old coins, but I’ve got my doubts, too.
I have a book club going over at my Dreamwidth blog as well as my Substack about The Mandibles, a novel by Lionel Shriver that follows the tribulations of one family that falls upon hard times during a second Great Depression in 2029. The book speculates a famine that sets in around 2032 or so and lasts until 2039. Nearly entire salary class is upended and ends up scrounging for food and shelter. They become the new lower class, and since they are not used to living at the bottom of the totem pole, they are vicious to each other and completely miserable. Like any dystopian novel, the Mandibles is full of hyperbole and overreach, but there are some uncanny resemblances to what we are living through right now. Instead of forced vaccination, the people in the Mandible’s world end up going through the government taking 90% of everyone’s paycheck and citizens being force-microchipped with what essentially acts as a credit card.
I think it’s fascinating how the Mandibles reveals the anxieties of the wealthy and puts a fine point on what they’re always imagining in their subconscious minds. I think we can surmise from the Mandibles that the upper middle class wealthy (especially those who play the stock market and finance their lives on unearned wealth) are tormented by visions of poverty and starvation while enjoying some of the greatest excess ever possessed by human beings.
Also, thanks for explaining derivatives, I never understood the concept before now. I also appreciate that someone else hates Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree as much as I do.
JMG,
Do you think the financial response to the pandemic was one of these methods of coping that the financial elites did to keep things propped up. To be clear I am not intending we talk about the disease itself, or any of the medical or pharmaceutical issues surrounding it., Just once it became a thing, for whatever reason, was it used an excuse to do what many Keynesians had always dreamed of, pumping money straight in to the consumer and business economy. Was there any particular group that this financial response was aimed to help more than others?
Bruce, very true, and the difference between those who stay stuck in the precariat and those who rise out of it is precisely the difference between those who let themselves fall for the evil magic we’re discussing — for that’s what it is, of course — and those who break the spell.
Sister Crow, ha! Thanks for this.
Anon, exactly — a fantastic amount of real estate is much more illiquid than its owners think. Most middle class Boomers, as a result, are going to find out the hard way that the real estate they thought would be their cash cow in retirement has already been sent to the glue factory.
Scotlyn, I don’t think you’re being paranoid at all.
Justin, so noted and thank you.
Pygmycory, Mother Nature’s really getting edgy about those…
Polecat, “oligarch with a soul” is right up there with “vegetarian carnivore” and “celibate harlot” as an oxymoron.
Info, the vast majority of modern “art” is simply a collection of tokens for use in money laundering schemes. I did some reading on art crime for one of my Ariel Moravec novels, and the art business seems to exist for the purpose of making drug dealers look honest. Organized crime uses art as a major vehicle for money laundering, so do sanctioned regimes, and so do a lot of the ordinarily crooked rich. That’s why so much modern art is so bad — nobody bothers to make it look good, as it’s not there for artistic purposes. It’s just mass produced for the sake of crime.
Paedrig, I’m delineating it right now, and it’s a doozy: Sun at nadir, Neptune dead conjunct midheaven, a badly afflicted Moon ruling the ascendant and the Moon herself in the 8th house of death. The next three months are going to be dramatic, and not in a good way — and yes, I’ve been watching the building political crisis closely.
Greg, excellent. Yes, and that’s an essential insight. I think there are a lot of factors driving gender dysphoria, not least a medical industry scenting lifelong profits off anyone they can lure into that status, but the sheer absurdist cosplay of society is also a major factor.
Jessica, yep. I think that all things considered, he was right.
Luke, as long as it’s just play, it’s no more harmful than any other kind of entertainment. I have a few shares, though that’s mostly because I’m experimenting with using astrology on the stock market.
Slithy, I agree that the natural numbers are the only ones that are given, and then only because our nervous systems are set up the way they are. The rest “work” because they are part of a self-referential system in which every part is designed to fit into the shared structure. It so happens that some of the relationships among elements of that structure make workable models for relationships among things in the world of sensory experience, and that gives mathematics its practical usefulness — but ultimately it’s a very refined and erudite game, chess or go to the Nth power.
Northwind, yeah, I have much the same reaction — a gentler and brighter time.
GlassHammer, sure, but most people will not, under any circumstances, ask themselves that question!
Justin, yep. TSW!
Chris, it’s not that high here but it’s gone way up. Yeah, the energy tax will have an impact, a huge one, for the next few years; what happens after that depends on the outcome of the mess in the Middle East.
Sister C, thanks for this.
Clay, that’s an excellent point. At what point does the cost of supporting all those layers of financial gamesmanship become so great that it’s more economically efficient to make real goods with real materials and sell them locally?
William, that’s an excellent point, too.
Siliconguy, ha! Thanks for this.
Kimberly, thank you. Like you, I take great comfort in hearing from someone else who can’t stand that loathsome book. I haven’t read The Mandibles, but you’ve certainly hit an important point. A lot of people in the comfortable classes are terrified by the thought of falling from their current position into poverty and misery; I wonder just how large a role that plays in the soaring unreason of that class over the last decade or so.
Clay, well, most of it seems to have been pumped directly into the criminal economy — specifically the economy of political corruption whereby legislators and bureaucrats allow public funds to be slurped up by well-connected frauds in exchange for a hefty cut of the take. I suspect that was quite deliberate.
You deserve a Nobel Prize in Political Economics for this post. Most excellent!
2 thoughts…
Motorcycles and scooters are still inexpensive and high quality, while car and truck quality/price has been a disaster for about 10 years. Seems the obvious decision is to go third world and ditch the car/ truck for a motorcycle/ scooter. I’ve been riding for about 50 years and my latest is a Honda Shadow Phantom motorcycle. Cheap to own, good gas mileage, and cheap insurance.
Also, I’ve recently started using dowsing rods to locate underground water pipes. Seems there’s a big rabbit hole to explore here, as people are using them to find all manner of things, as well as answering questions in a yes/no manner.
Greg Simay @ 108. I think the young people nowadays, in the USA, are trying to figure out strategies by which they can make decent livings, preferably at something for which they have aptitude, and support families.
Neophrite @ 90, linen shirts have disappeared from thrift stores recently. I did find one cotton/linen blend and one silk camp shirt. Another trend I am seeing is 2nd hand outlets being taken over by various groups and factions and quite openly being operated for the benefit of those factions.
“Northwind, yeah, I have much the same reaction — a gentler and brighter time.”
I was just wondering today if you could time travel someone from the 1960s ad 1970s to now would they experience the texture of ordinary life as very different. It would be hard for them to see through the surface differences but when they could see through the computerization and ubiquitous cell phones, would the vibe of now be perceptibly different? Just a thought experiment.
About the possible breakup of the UK, Craig Murray, who is a strong supporter of an independent Scotland, contends that the independence party in Scotland (SNP) is basically just another neoliberal party that role plays as being for independence but will never actually try to make it happen. In particular, he sees anything involving asking the English government for permission is a method designed to fail. Northern Ireland also has the complication that roughly half the country is intensely attached to the union with England (more than the English themselves). Some kind of Celtic federation might be a way to reconcile that part of the Northern Irish population to the end of Union.
My paternal grandfather fought in combat for Irish independence and I would wish all the Celtic parts of Britain well. England going back to being England might well be good for many English too. Other than the ones in finance.
JMG,
I may have been coy with that question. What about buying and holding with a significant chunk that you can afford to lose? I’m being pressured by those close to me to get in the market but I’ve been resisting mainly because I take the ideas presented on this blog seriously. I suspect this isn’t a good idea but I need to fortify my position on this matter so I’ll ask. Apologies if this is an out of pocket question.
Chuaqin#124, Chris
I have seen some YT about hikers dead in Tasmania and my opinión is that the spanish mountains are a specie of garden compared with the Tasmanian enviroment because is tropical forest in wich is very easy to lost for the unexperimented hikers who abandon or miss the trail.
https://youtu.be/31kwfaYuhDA?is=y4O4QLAHVRw33pe0
This talk of chipmunks reminds me of the 1939 film “Peace on Earth”, which gave me nightmares as a child. In that film, the chipmunks have inherited the Earth through the very effective strategy of “Do Nothing. Win.” while mankind wipes itself out in endless warfare. The scene where the last two humans shoot one another is permanently ingrained on my memories. I don’t blame it on the chipmunks, though. They were just there.
Oh, yes, and let me join the chorus of congratulations in agreeing that you nailed it with that essay, John.
JMG,
Another fantastic article. A comparison between hallucinated wealth and material wealth is necessary and important in these times. I’d like to add another lens to this conversation. Young people in the United States have taken to harassment of older generations in recent years, as evidenced by the derisive term “Boomer” to describe the beliefs of older generations who often give tone-deaf advice to younger generations about finding stability and success in our declining national economy.
I suspect the generational disconnect has materialized because of the expansion of hallucinated wealth. My hypothesis goes like this: older generations grew up in an economy that was closely tied to material goods and services. As these generations aged, they transferred their wealth into assets which are subject to disconnect from material wealth, i.e. the stock market. What they did not realize was that the stock market itself was slowly being decoupled from material wealth through government policies, i.e. neoliberal economics, the offshoring of both the production and manufacture of material wealth outside the borders of the United States. This political-economic manouver saved the hallucinated wealth of older generations, but eroded the system by which wealth was generated in the USA for future generations.
Currently, we have arrived at the moment in history when younger generations have arrived in the labor market and have found the system by which older generations created wealth entirely corroded, and therefore the advice of older generations does not ring true to younger generations. Let’s take the contemporary University experience in the United States as an example of our national political economy, and the smaller subsections of hallucinated wealth’s political economy and material wealth’s political economy.
Generally, the outcomes of a University education are bifurcated these days. Graduates who exit university directly into the political economic system of hallucinated wealth (i.e. Finance, Tech) are considered well-off and generally do not have concerns about the broken system of material wealth because their assets are wrapped up in nonmaterial instruments like joint-stock-purchase programs. The other group, the group which graduated University (or did not go to University at all) and did not reach the political economic system of hallucinated wealth like their compatriots, are stuck in soft-skill jobs that provide little for pay or secure future. This is best exemplified by the large number of college graduates holding jobs that are supposedly “below their education” as retail workers or coffee-shop baristas.
The insult of “Boomer” is directly tied to this experience of younger generations going to college and missing the boat on the political economy of hallucinated wealth. Younger generations have received advice that told them to invest in higher education as the surefire path to a stable life, and dutifully invested their time and assets in an education. When they arrived on the other side, they found that the political economy of material wealth had eroded, and thus there were fewer paths in general to a good life beyond the political economy of hallucinated wealth. Those paths to material wealth were abandoned decades ago, and now an entire generation has been mis-guided into a path to a stable life.
JMG,
My grandfather had Roosevelt Derangement Syndrome, most likely up until the day he died in 2012.
He was a railroad engineer and his daily routine involved putting Roosevelt dimes on the railroad tracks so he could run over and destroy them.
Imagine what modern day TDS people would do to Trump coins!
JMG,
One comment about derivative trading. I used to run data science for a family office (a private hedge fund) and all we did was trade one type of derivative, options. Took me a few months to learn what options are, but here’s a way for everyone to understand.
Put options are insurance on stocks. If a stock falls to a certain price by a certain date, you have a right to sell that stock to the buyer of the put at that price, no matter how much further it falls. So if you buy a 100 dollar put option on Tesla stock for December 31st, you can sell Tesla stock for 100 dollars per share no matter how far it falls.
Call options are hedged bets. You buy the right to buy a stock if it hits and stays at a certain price by a certain date, no matter how much higher it goes. So if you buy a 3-dollar call option of Gamestop and it shoots up to 90 dollars, you can buy Gamestop stock for a measly 3 bucks. Furthermore, if you sold a 3-dollar call option and you don’t actually own the stock, you have to borrow the money to buy the stock at 90 dollars so you can sell it back to people at 3 bucks. That’s how some hedge funds went out of business.
From May 16, 2022 onward, the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) turned options into a complete casino, and the SP500 now has options that expire every single day. These zero days to expiration options (0DTE) now make up the majority of what people trade for SP500 options and other options where everyday 0DTE options are available.
Essentially, people are betting on where a stock price will end by the end of the day.
@JMG re: mathematics
Given what you’ve written, I definitely think you would appreciate some of Edward Nelson’s papers on the issues with the current mathematical foundations. Nearly everything he published is available through his web page: https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/
A few of them are pretty heavy-going, especially “Hilbert’s Mistake” and his books, but “Confessions of an apostate mathematician” is maybe his clearest, least technical exposition of his views, while “Warning signs of a possible collapse of contemporary mathematics” gets somewhat technical but is gentle in how it approaches it.
The summary is: he is fully convinced that mathematics is created as we go (a quote: “What would the world be like if God had not created numbers? Just what it is like now. There is not a shred of evidence that the numbers have been created.”) and tries very hard to take this idea as seriously as possible, with the result that he questions whether expressions like 2^2^2^2^2, which cannot be concretely computed, actually stands for a natural number.
It’s odd stuff if you’re used to normal mathematics, and it took me a while to get into his headspace and understand what he was saying.
Mr. Greer … oxymoron$ indeed. OK, welp …. maybe we – as in ‘we’ realistic enslaved humons – can enlist the Houthis, or some such .. to help work out the kinks in said tech “projection” … I’d be all good with it…
Regional Averages for Diesel in Washington
Seattle-Bellevue-Everett: $7.48 per gallon
Spokane: $7.33 per gallon
Bellingham: $6.99 per gallon
Bellingham is right next to the refinery.
As for math I think everyone was surprised when imaginary numbers turned out to be just the thing to describe how voltage and current behave in AC circuits. My college roommate was an electrical engineer. The math in that field is indeed interesting.
JMG
I have a crazy update. My dad’s neighbor dropped her listing price by $100,000 today. It was listed for $638,000 at the start of the year and is now down to $494,900. From what she told my dad, she can’t afford it anymore and is bleeding out. She may end up having to move in with her kids. But I don’t think its going to sell at that price though.
I have a feeling its about to get really bad isn’t it?
@JMG
That makes me think if a lot of bad architecture serves the exact same function as money laundering but justified by the same type of art critics. I believe the same or similar rationale of how bad architecture is somehow good is applied to bad architecture.
Chauquin @ 124, The detail about longevity (not) of triremes comes from a recent book about the Athenian navy. I believe the title is Lords of the Sea, publ in English; I doubt there would be a Spanish translation. Some folks built a trireme a few years back, which duly disintegrated within a few years of launch.
My point was that neither of our major parties is offering any kind of jobs program.
Hi Chuaquin,
It’s not the size of the mountain, but the vastness of the wilderness. A person can get lost… The state of Victoria, where I reside has the same landmass as the entire UK, but with one tenth of the population (7.1 million). You live in a highly populated part of the world, and would be astounded by the quiet I enjoy.
Hi Michael Gray,
For the record, I can confirm that as a mostly vegetarian, camel tastes pretty good. I had a pie or burger (I now forget) up around Alice Springs near on 30 years ago. And croc burgers were fine too – tasted like chicken, probably cause the farmed ones up north are fed a lot of chickens. If you’re curious about rabbit, I’d most certainly recommend a rabbit pie from the Tooborac hotel and attached pie shop.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Anselmo,
Agreed, to fully appreciate how easy it is to get lost in a wilderness, one must first experience astoundingly dense vegetation. There was a young lady from Europe who perished in the Tasmanian wilderness, and the effort just to find her body was phenomenal and look at the scale of the map, it’s not a massive area. Coroner rules Belgian tourist Celine Cremer’s bushwalking death caused by multiple errors.
Even up in the mountain range I reside in, there are radio black spots, lot’s of situations for the unwary to become unstuck – and places where nobody will ever walk, for decades, if not longer.
Not a place to muck around in.
Cheers
Chris
Bob, motorcycles are certainly an option. Me, I prefer to live in walkable areas and use public transit, but everybody has their own needs and wants. As for dowsing, that’s great stuff — it can’t work, but of course it does!
Jessica, I think they’d be horrified by the decay of the built environment since their time. You have to look at color photos from those days to realize just how ugly and crumbling things have become.
Luke, when everyone you know is pleading for you to get in the market, you know the top is near and they’re going to lose their shirts soon. In your place I’d wait to buy the dip. (Or the crash.)
TylerA, that film always gives me the cold horrors. It’s an absolute classic:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7vqdce
The battle flags of the Vegetarians and Meat Eaters are especially choice.
Mrdobner, that’s an important part of it, surely. Another part is the simple fact that the Boomers refuse to step aside and let younger generations rise to positions of influence. Look at our Congress — the most geriatric in history, full of Boomers who should long since have gone into retirement homes but are clinging to power.
Dennis, the president who serves as figurehead for an elite replacement cycle always becomes the center of a cult backed by the new elite and a derangement syndrome from those whose loyalties remain with the old elite. Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt are the three previous examples; what will happen with the fourth is utterly predictable. Thanks for the good clear explanation of options!
Slithy, I’ve bookmarked it — thank you!
Siliconguy, thanks for this.
Anon, as usual, she’s following the market down, and doing it slowly enough that it’ll never sell. If she cut it to $294,000 she’d probably get that now; in a year that’s probably too much. Whee!
Info, well, architecture has to at least pretend to be a place for people to live or work. My take is that modern architecture is so dreadful because it’s motivated by class hatred. Those office buildings with their blank faces and ugly shapes are telling passersby, “You serfs don’t matter, and you don’t deserve anything but ugliness.” Those McMansions with their cluttered bad taste are telling passersby, “Look at how important and rich I am, you peon.”
another data point in the uneven recoveries and also “the purpose of a thing is what it does”
The city by me ( not the towns) is having an absolutely HUGE building boom, which I may have mentioned, if I have, forgive me. I saw yet another ad today for yet another one in progress, how one should apply for one of the limited low income units. Then the price, a low income apartment being $3800/month. This is not going to house low income. To qualify, you can make 80% of median income or less. There are actually alot of low income, way below that income, 80% of median is a large income, that is who is getting helped, and that is only for a couple units in the building, the rest are at “market rate” so more than 4,000 a month. Which goes to the “purpose of a thing is what it does” . They can SAY that all the housing is to help the lack of housing for people living here who are having trouble. But, what does it DO ? It provides apartments, sometimes second homes, for people with high incomes who want to have an apartment in this location/climate. In most cases, people who do not live here at the moment are moving here to rent them.
So the purpose seems to be to provide high end apartments for out of area people with high incomes to be able to live or vacation here while providing ALOT of yearly property tax revenues to the local government, and increased sales tax revenues to the local government, and large profits to a couple connected construction ( not the guys with the hard hats, the company financing the ventures, what are they callled ? ) entities.
The added benefit being that these people are not likely to COST the local government departments and areas much, what family lives in these ? Not many, and at that income, if they do, they wont be a drain. So less spent on social services and schools.
@Slithy #111 and @JMG #127 re: The Reality of Numbers & Math
Paul Lockhart (author of The Mathematician’s Lament) in Arithmetic argues that math is a creative art, like music or dancing, that just so happens to use interally-self-consistent abstractions as its medium instead of soundwaves or body movements (I wonder if he’s haunted by Pythagoras’s ghost?). In the same book, he also argues that zero isn’t such a big deal, it’s basically a placeholder that was invented to make the on-paper abacus approach to doing arithmetic that we all learned in elementary school more straightforward and harder to mess up, rather than some monumental conceptual breakthrough.
For what it’s worth, as someone who’s been turned off by math ever since those elementary school lessons, I found the book genuinely interesting and worthwhile, so if anyone is struck by the feeling “I keep hearing about the beauty and interestingness of math, but I just don’t see it,” consider giving it a look.
Cheers,
Jeff
@Mary Bennet #138
For decades the Federal government has been running an unintelligent jobs creation program called deficit spending. Last year 5.8 percent of the economy was that borrowed money. A suddenly balanced budget would create an immediate recession and job loss. This year for every man, woman, child, infant in the USA around 5,800 borrowed dollars will be injected into the economy minus whatever is spent over seas.
65 percent of the budget goes to social security, veteran benefits, Medicare, disability, food stamps, unemployment, Medicaid. 13 percent to defense, 15 percent to debt interest, leaving 7 percent to everything else. Essentially the Federal government is a debt ridden welfare department with a military that funnels 3.2 percent of the GDP to those who own that debt.
The current federal deficit is close to 29% of spending and millions and millions of people are dependent on federal spending for health care and daily expenditures, the deficit is built in.
Hi John Michael,
It’s an interesting situation we are in, and well, if I may suggest, a lot of diesel fuel is required to cause serious mischief in other parts of the world – far removed from the middle east dust up. It may be that this is all a form of cutting the Gordian Knot and covering up serious resource and energy decline, plus retreating from US global commitments, whilst setting hard limits on mischief. But then, that’s when we get to learn why the mischief was being conducted in the first place, and Warren Buffets famous quote about tides and lack of clothing comes to mind. Interestingly, that bloke has gone full cash and t-bills I believe. Anyhoo, a hard way to learn don’t you reckon? You made an impression upon me long ago when you mentioned that the Roman Empire conducted massive campaigns against the German barbarian tribes at extraordinary cost, and didn’t turn a profit. The economics was what got that Empire, and it collapsed under the weight of costs and diminishing ability to project force – as well as 99 other cogent reasons.
It’s an interesting point you made about the political class disconnecting from the economic question as to who wins and loses from their pet policies. I’m going to cogitate upon that subject. I’d not realised that the field of knowledge was originally described as ‘political economy’. Makes a lot of sense though.
Cheers
Chris
Dennis Michael Sawyers @ 135: “Roosevelt derangement syndrome.” I can relate. Back a few years, when I was attending Quaker meetings, I met an “old-school Quaker” there (who was in a traditional marriage to an honest-to-god female of the species.) But anyway, he told me that his father, also a Quaker, had never forgiven FDR for getting us into WWII. The Quakers nowadays seem to have abandoned that sentiment, and turned into Unitarians without a program — which is the biggest reason why I abandoned the Quakers.
@Kimberly Steele #125 and @JMG #127 re: The Giving Tree
I never read it as a child, and when I did read through it at some point when I was older, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but got a bad “vibe” from it. Which led me to laugh when on the show 30 Rock Alec Baldwin’s “over the top” Republican character (who looks positively tame these days) recorded himself reading the book for his future child(ren) and summed up “Shel Silverstein was a communist.”
Cheers,
Jeff
Hi John Michael,
And everyone laughed when the Greenland idea was first mooted. I thought it was a brilliant strategy and said as much, and here we now are. People forget, land can only be held, by those strong enough to do so. Barbarians know this…
Cheers
Chris
I also think they we are overbuilding apartments, at least around here, that they are not going to find people for the shear quantity of units being built at the prices they propose. I did read something a few weeks ago that a newish apartment building over in San Jose, downtown, has empty units, a reason given is the lack of parking. Developers ( I remembered the word finally) are told that they dont have to build in enough parking, and they only have to have certain square feet, windows, etc… and the costs for these units are high. The article said that some residents got tired of the added price of parking garages a few blocks away, parking tickets, etc…..
Down the street from me, one or both of the adult offspring of that neighbor have moved home with kids in tow. There is some illegal plywood building up not far from the house to provide more room, discreetly painted brown with no windows on the street side to be camouflaged there under the trees. This has replaced the activites that used to be in that area, no more chickens or veg garden. Maybe some small veg garden in another location. No more chicken coop for sure. Next door to them, the adult child, spouse and kids, gave it up and moved out to …. I think somewhere great lake-ish area where they can make it on their own, they were in a legal ADU, so the parents have rented it out and will join them once they retire. We all know how hard it is for this generation !
JMG #69:
I appreciate your clear-eyed rejection of both catastrophism and technotranscendence; a slow decline does more fit the patterns of history than do absolute rise or collapse.
But sometimes you let me down badly. For instance, zero is a ‘pseudonumber’? Nonsense. Let me do some counting to zero. How many penguins are native to the Sahara? Zero. How many palm trees grow on Antarctica? Zero. How many elephants are standing right behind me? ( I look around…) Zero. How many accountants use Roman numeration? Zero.
I grant that movie credits count years, and football counts Super Bowls, in Roman numerals. But that’s just ‘antiquing’; using obsolete language for a bogus look of ancient respectability.
Tobias Dantzig told of a letter from a medieval tutor to a merchant; in it he said that if you want your son to add and subtract, we can teach it here in Germany; but if you want him to multiply or divide, then he must go to Rome for study that advanced. But nowadays children and silicon chips can do all those operations, thanks to positional numeration. Speaking of silicon chips, they use binary, which has only the digits one and zero. I mentioned your ‘pseudonumber 0’ comment to my cyber-savvy daughter; she rolled her eyes.
As for negative numbers, sure they were inspired by debt banking, but they have other uses. Minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Minus twelve miles east is twelve miles west. Positive and negative electric charge.
Then there are rational numbers. You and I share one cookie; so we get 1/2 cookie each. Here we transition from numbers for counting to numbers for measuring.
Now for real numbers. How long is the diagonal of a square? What is the area of a circle of radius one?
Complex numbers drastically simplify deriving trigonometric identities. Quaternions are better at doing 3D graphics than are 3 by 3 matrices; no gimbal lock. So if you’ve ever played 3D video games, quaternions were in the programming.
I grant that octonions and sedonions have no known use. Yet. But the Greeks, who discovered conic sections, knew no use for them. Now we see them as gravitational trajectories.
There is a place for contrarianism, up to a point; but past that point it just sounds foolish.
Atmospheric, and it also provides plenty of newly manufactured debt to add to the casino we laughably call an economy, which is another very important gain to the system.
Jeff, this makes perfect sense to me. I see mathematics as being like dance — a creative art form to which I’m the equivalent of tone-deaf.
Chris, cash and T-bills sounds like a good idea just now, though I’m not entirely sure about the T-bills!
Phutatorius (if I may), “Unitarians without a program” is perhaps the most savage description I’ve seen so far this year. Accurate, but savage. Mind you, I know far too many Unitarians who are Unitarians without a program…
Jeff, nah, under Communism, at least in theory, everyone gets an equal share (though of course some are inevitably more equal than others). Under Silverstein, some get everything, some get nothing, and the ones who get nothing are expected to glow with feelings of love and generosity as they’re mugged.
Chris,
“…and to hear duh lamentations of duh EU!”
Yes, that is best.
Atmospheric, of course. If the generation of debt is the goal, the mere utility of the buildings is irrelevant…
Paradoctor, the concept of “none” is not a number. It’s the endpoint of an asymptote, like infinity. The real number line centers on 1, not zero; it goes …1/4., 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4… I’ll discuss that in some future post, and then you can have fun with it.
You know, Paradoctor, I think I’ll change my mind and address this in more detail now. Take the number line I’ve just sketched out: 1 in the center, going asymptotically to zero on one direction and infinity in the other, and let’s apply that. Take the elephant you don’t think is behind you. Are you sure no least fraction of an elephant is there? No bit of dust that was shed from the skin of a circus elephant who passed through your town, no water molecule that was part of an elephant’s body? There may be very little elephant there, but arguably — just as every glass of water you drink contains some of Julius Caesar’s urine — there’s some. As for temperatures, the zero point in Fahrenheit and Celsius is set arbitrarily. The only temperature system that has a real zero is the Kelvin scale, and in that, absolute zero can never be reached and there are no negative numbers.
@ Paradoctor, binary 1s and 0s
Your daughter is young. We use the digit “0” and “1” but of course what is realy is is “on” or “off” a voltage or not, even in a larger sequence, 01110011 or whatever, this is not numbers as such, this is just symbols we are using It is symbols not math. So it has no relevance to the mathmatical implications of ‘0″ wether it is a pseudo number, a placeholder or a number.
if you tell me 01110011 I would need more information, this is a representation in what system ?
Anyways, alot/most engineers are not bothered by what zero is considered. Let the mathmeticians and philosophers go hash it our
IJMG, I just read what you wrote about zero, and infinity, good explanation, you can never get there, just keep getting closer and closer, reminds me of calculus. In practical applications, we eventually get to close enough, round off and do enough math to make that thing,
Paedrig 107
> recently the parliaments of Scotland, northern Ireland, and Wales are all ruled by independemce larties, came together, and signed a Memorandum of understanding to the effect that they all intend to break away from the UK, which shall be united no more.
Thank you for this note❣️It hit me squarely in the heart.
Off-topic, but topical.
I have been looking forward,— waiting not-so-patiently,— for this announcement (or plural) for a long, long, long time (multiply that a thousand times).
Heritage-wise (approximately) I am over half Irish, an eighth Scottish, and one-thirty-second Welsh,— I identify with these three peoples in my bones. (I feel sorry for the Cornish cuz I think they would never actually separate.) I am also roughly three-eighths English, ironically the line of my grandfather Isaiah of whom I often speak. Isaiah’s English lineage’s family, in the 1840s (County Norfolk; Lincolnshire; some Suffolk) had been left to starve at the behest of the English aristocracy; the family was forced to split up and depart their dear English soil. So really, except for being a smidgen Belgian, French, and a big hunk of German, I do not sympathize with the UNITED moniker of “Britain.” (And I bet the Belgians, French, and Germans don’t give a hoot if Britain splits up, although maybe the French will party.)
Guess why half of Isaiah’s grandfather’s descendants are not found in England, but rather in Australia; not to mention my one branch in the USA which flourished (five generations’ => hundreds of people)? I was able to trace this line because of the family’s relatively rare surname, corroborated by DNA. It took decades of research, and had I not been an amateur genealogist and did the work myself, finding them would have cost half-a-million dollars, but man, was I motivated. There is no doubt I found the correct family.
I was able to piece together that line’s 1800-to-1850 livings in England, which was a holy h*ll. Before 1800, I can surmise from the history of skilled workers in the region, including the fate of weavers.
You know, Isaiah’s family’s bitterness😤towards the English aristocracy (and counterparts in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) (“elites”) was genetically handed down to me. (Sorry JMG, I had to say it. On this issue, I am not Miss Nice Gal.)
The Scottish are a proud people. JMG, your Clan MacGregor (and other lines) are here too.
The Irish are a proud people.
The Welsh are a proud people.
And every one of those ethnicities had to grovel before the English, more than once, over the last thousand years, and survive by grit alone. “Brit” occurred only by force.
So, I am glad that it is IN THE AIR where these “proud peoples” finally say it out loud, publicly. Even the last few weeks, I have wondered if these “divorces” would happen in my lifetime (age 74). Could be. Here is hopin’😔. Go for it.
Thanks again, Paedrig.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Grey Simay 108
> I wonder if some of the perceived craziness of our society at large is in fact a kind of private language.
You may be onto something. Over the last couple months, I have been dealing with Jethro’s inner life, how much he lived among “the digitals.” He being a software engineer from beginning to end of his career, I am discovering the world “HE” lived in and the world “I” lived in (and current), were not even close. We had a glue between us but not a whole lot in common. I am DE-constructing Jethro’s life; I am switching from digital finances to paper finances, because I have to.
I see now that Jethro read different websites. He had joined online organizations where each day, cumulatively, he was on emailing lists of about thirty per day. Per day.
Jethro’s political websites were way different than mine. We were so far apart, we couldn’t talk about certain things without risking divorce. Not kidding.
In other words, Jethro and I spoke different enough languages, having diverged over years, to make it hard to live with. We dealt with lots of interpersonal friction. Friction, now that I think about it, wasn’t our fault.
The upshot: Stop surfing the Internut.
The Internut is a source of suffering. Internut surfers are evolving into a society of one1️⃣.
Internut-surfing sufferin’-succotash.*
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
* Sylvester the Cat; Daffy the Duck; Looney Tunes characters; cartoons.
JMG,
A question about the end destination of the covid money. Is it better or worse that it went to criminals than if it went to the finance class? Yes, it would be best if it went to actual ordinary working class Americans. But if the choice is between Armenian fraudsters in the San Fernando Valley vs the Walton family or Ken Griffith I am not sure which one is better. The first will buy gaudy houses and G wagons employing contractors and Mercedes mechanics but the second will stick it in a private equity fund where it will buy up mom and pop hvac companies and ruin them.
I’d like to thank everyone for the update and information on grey and red squirrels in the UK. Predation is a part of nature that keeps balance. E.g. I recently removed an armadillo that was digging up my yard and now I have ground wasps!
Regardless, we, for the time being, have contained any potential chipmunk uprising. The dogs have declared loyalty to humans as they always have for 10,000 years. The bond between humans and dogs is essentially unbreakable and they will never make deals with the chipmunks and will be with us to the end.
Chris#144, Chuaquin.
I’ll add these three items to the security list recomended by the Tasmanian Police:
– A lighter.
– A whistle
– a compass
Atmospheric, all mathematics is a way of rounding things off to a “close enough” approximation. Are two apples plus two apples equal to four apples? In the real world, as distinct from the abstract world of mathematics, it depends on the size and quality of the apples, doesn’t it?
Northwind, I know. There’s a reason why so many immigrants from the various nations of Britain dropped every trace of their traditional culture as soon as they got here: for them, Britain was a nightmare from which they’d finally awakened, and finding themselves in a place where they didn’t have to cringe and grovel before every idiot whose great-grandfather let some king or other debauch his wife — you probably know, but many people don’t, how many aristocratic lineages got their titles that way — made them feel like Dorothy stepping out of the black and white house into the living color of Oz. Except, of course, the last thing they wanted was to click their heels and go back to what used to be home.
Clay, oh, if it was all going to ordinarily enterprising crooks, that would be fine. The problem is that so much of it sticks to the fingers of politicians and bureaucrats.
WatchFlinger, the dogs may have their own ideas about that…
JMG,
But… if you ever investigate the root cause of a resource issue (issue with manpower, equipment, time, material) that has persisted for months on end you will identify an ideology (usually a management ideology) causing the issue. Sure, there will be a great deal of denial (usually by management) but… you (and everyone else) can’t avoid seeing it.
Same holds for your personal life when you investigate a root cause for an issue there, just…. no one is going to pay/incentiveize you to do this and you know going in that culpability is coming back to you.
@Scotlyn #100,
In theory, Yanks already have a mechanism for this in the form of the EBT Card– that’s a government-provided debit card that can only purchase foodstuffs that is part of their welfare system. It replaced food stamps and the famous government cheese, though Americans will often still refer to “food stamps”. Perhaps trump could hand out cards (doubtlessly gold in colour) with similar restrictions on them. I’m not sure how the electronic part works, though– I think it’s built in to the Point of Sale (PoS) machines. If you’ve ever worked retail you’ll know the PoS is a PoS in the more colloquial sense, so if they want this rolled out after the midterms they should have started… last year?
I also must say that I find the existence of food stamps bleakly hilarious as a Canadian– here we’re supposed to be so much more caring and socialist, but we’ve nothing equivalent. If you’re poor in ruthless, capitalist America, the government keeps you from starving. If you’re poor in caring, socialist Canada? Good luck, bucko– hope the food bank isn’t empty, eh?
Paedrig # 107:
“recently the parliaments of Scotland, northern Ireland, and Wales are all ruled by independemce larties, came together, and signed a Memorandum of understanding to the effect that they all intend to break away from the UK, which shall be united no more. They even declared that the current prime iminister shall be the last of a United Kingdom! And Trump seems to be supporting them, so these claims have weight…”
Yes, I’ve known that shocking Memorandum thanks to online spanish news. On the short form, I can tell you (in my “realpolitik” mood, not a moralist one) they can have Trump apparent support, but playing with a country national sovereignity can be very dangerous for secessionists everywhere…Do you know that Catalonia independentist parties tried to achieve their own country without asking any permission to Spain central government in 2017? Oh, of course, demonstrators were beaten massively by Spanish police, and Catalonia by now goes on being part of Spain. They failed. You don’t walk free after mocking and defying national sovereignity…literally (eventually, prison included for leaders).
I bet any London govt would let easily those “countries” break away from the UK without sending a massive police preventive action against those secessionist parties before the secession. If Spain govt did it, why not British govt too, in near future?
If things worsened (ahem), I guess London would send directly its Army without any doubt, and then…well, let’s draw a veil.
The only one reasonable and practical way to become a new independent country is dealing an agreement with your central govt, if/when it’s possible to do it (good luck in this). It’s the case of Slovakia when Czechoslovakia ended as a one country…Unless you’re ready to repeat the bloody times of Yugoslavia disintegration. Is it worth to try it? I tend to think British secessionist parties are bluffing, if they’re clever enough.
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Anonymous # 112:
“Of course, this just shows how nature quite easily adapts to “invasive” species without any human intervention at all, meaning the efforts of conservationists to destroy invasive species in order to protect native species is quite unnecessary.”
In addition to your comment, I think the term “invasive species” is troublesome in itself, because how can we define where begins a species to invade our ecosystems? On the other hand, a lot of agriculture plants aren’t local, but they’ve managed to “naturalize” here and there after having “escaped” outside farms. For example, olive trees in Spain came from somewhere in ME, some millenials ago, according some scientific searchs. So after this time, they aren’t no longer “invasive”, but a “naturalized” tree here.
A French dissenter ecologist named Gilles Clément said “invasive species” term is absurd, because in the long term they’ll be as natural as native plants or animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Cl%C3%A9ment
In addition to this, it’s a contradiction when most ecologists (like the rest of the current left) praise human migrations against “xenophobia”, but they show a kind of “biological xenophobia” against non human “invaders”.
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William # 122:
“Somewhere north of 95% of all trades on stock markets are done by machines (algorithmic trading).”
Thank you for this data. Indeed, I suggested in one of my previous comments that it was very likely that current unending and unstoppable financial growth (aka financial bubbles) was fueled to some extent by LLMs and another technological tricks, beyond direct human intervention.
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Kimberly S. # 125:
“Instead of forced vaccination, the people in the Mandible’s world end up going through the government taking 90% of everyone’s paycheck and citizens being force-microchipped with what essentially acts as a credit card.”
The microchip thing in that novel is a good part of that full dystopian world, but governments don’t need to go toward that extreme measure to control people in real world. For example, when you pay everything with your card, or even better for control, with your smartphone (oh, we’re so modern…), your money can be fully mapped by the govt and banks. By the way, in China (that happy democratic country) nobody uses coins nor paper money anymore. Of course, its govt is very glad to have promoted this “progress”, guess why…
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JMG # 127:
“Organized crime uses art as a major vehicle for money laundering, so do sanctioned regimes, and so do a lot of the ordinarily crooked rich. That’s why so much modern art is so bad — nobody bothers to make it look good, as it’s not there for artistic purposes.”
A painful truth, methink. I bet we can point as “art”, to some extent, the awful modern buildings designed by some god-like architects nowadays, as “palaces” for the rich people and some politicians (I bet not all of them have earned their money by legal ways). Indeed, they’re very expensive so they’re suitable to launder “dirty” money…
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Anselmo # 132:
Well, of course Tasmania has another climatic zones than Spain, so their “little” mountains can be more dangerous than ours; but beyond local differences, mountains are mountains, even “small” ones, everywhere (especially after summer). For example, you can be lost esily with a sudden thick fog and get hypothermia soon. And my comment about people rescued or dead in those 2,000 m mountains here, is based in true news form the recent past. So Spanish (and Mediterranean in general) “medium” mountains aren’t a joke, neither.
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Mrdobner # 134:
“we have arrived at the moment in history when younger generations have arrived in the labor market and have found the system by which older generations created wealth entirely corroded, and therefore the advice of older generations does not ring true to younger generations.”
With regards to likely different culture and economics, to some extent, you’re depicting social situation here, too. I’ve read recently an Eurostat report by the EU about economical data in Europe. According it, there’s more poverty within young adults in age for working than in people older than 65 (retirees), in Spain and some another EU countries. So, young people seems poorer than their parents. Why? Of course, transformation of a lot of workers into precariat explains partly this data, but I also bet most retirees have finished paying their mortgages or they’ll finish to do it soon, so they haven’t this heavy spending anymore over their budget. On the other hand, all Spaniards in work age who can do it, sign a mortgage to buy their “own” home, but I think this tendency is in a trains crash with crappification of real jobs incomes here. So do the math: they’re usually in true problems to reach the end of every month.
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(To be continued)
Info # 141:
Oops, maybe I’ve “read” your thought, because in my last comment, I’ve written the same idea about this topic, before having read your comment…
Suspicions about bad architecture for money laundering are very likely. At least here, you can see sometimes this or that “new rich” big houses, even in small towns, who unluckily show wealth (always legal?) and bad taste alike, ruining towns landscapes.
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Mary B. # 142:
Thanks for your answer. So triremes seem a short life technology, according that book. I don’t know exactly how much time lasted a wooden sail ship, but I bet wood degraded faster in salted seas than in less salted and colder seas like the Baltic, and of course, fresh waters wood boats maybe have a longer life than “salty” ships.
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Chris # 143:
“It’s not the size of the mountain, but the vastness of the wilderness.”
thanks, I understand this data. So you mean it’s a true “human desert”. Europe mountains and landscapes have an advantage for easier and faster rescues, due to its high industrialization and big population density, but some areas are scarcely populated, though in a much lesser size than Australia.
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JMG # 156:
“Paradoctor, the concept of “none” is not a number. It’s the endpoint of an asymptote, like infinity. The real number line centers on 1, not zero; it goes …1/4., 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4… I’ll discuss that in some future post, and then you can have fun with it.”
Indeed, I’ve remembered thanks to your answer to Paradoctor, that there isn’t a “0 year”, but a “year 1” in all the chronologies/calendars used around the world and history, according this or that important chosen event.
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Anselmo # 164:
Those three items you’ve written are indeed useful in Tasmania and the rest of the world wilderness…
“An interconnected ecosystem of $3.6tn of disclosed commitments” with tn being trillions.
For AI of course. They did a radial network chart of who is doing who. (Should one of those whos be a whom? I was always fuzzy on that.)
https://www.ft.com/content/8475dc9b-b2d4-4e10-a6b6-12796b11758a?segmentID=0bb4f69a-72d2-5619-4945-365b9d6d2888&syn-25a6b1a6=0
@Chuaquin (#168) replying to JMG (#156) about there is no “year 0”:
Historians and chronologists agree with you: the year 1 BC [or BCE] was immediately followed by the year 1 AD [or CE]. To the best of my understanding, however, more scientific approaches to the material artifacts of history (e.g. as in archeology) have rechristened 1 BC as the year “0” and all the preceding years are “minus” plus a number that is 1 less than its BC number: the year “2 BC” is now the year “-1” in their systems.
Note: I already see working class / working poor / hustling poor riding ebikes in Cincy as a main mode of getting around. My workplace is a warehouse with offices (sitting on the site of old Crosley Field for you baseball nuts) that is in what I call the industrial wasteland sector of the city. Its on a major street between several if the lower income neighborhoods. I see guys on ebikes everyday.
@Luke Z, #131
— I haven’t the foggiest idea where you are, but here in Canada we have Guaranteed Investment Certificates, which are a place to lock-in your money with federally-backed savings insurance on the principal. Like bonds, you can buy them to mature at different rates, and like bonds those rates usually aren’t the best… but I have recently learned of a “market linked GIC”. You are contractually certain to get your money back, while you also get any gains the market shows, less the fee kept by the banks/brokers/etc. Some people frown on them because they don’t yield as well as plain stocks, and aren’t as sure a thing as a pure GIC. It’s also totally liquid for the term; IIRC you can’t just sell it like you can a bond.
OTH, if you know you aren’t going to touch that money for a year or five, and you know you’re in a bubble and know you can’t time the dip, letting the bank take the loss if it pops during the term of your investment might look pretty appealing. No idea if the USA or anywhere else in the Anglosphere has the same thing, and I’m not advising you what to do with money; just pointing out an option that might possibly fit your desire to get everyone off your back about stocks and not lose your shirt. I understand that completely.
John Michael wrote, “Take the elephant you don’t think is behind you. Are you sure no least fraction of an elephant is there? No bit of dust that was shed from the skin of a circus elephant who passed through your town, no water molecule that was part of an elephant’s body?”
Wow, now I can see another aspect of how druids relate to the world differently from the standard perspectives that get so ruthlessly reinforced by Western educational models. Like the druid technique of breaking false binaries into ternaries to reintroduce mental flexibility to our overly rigid mental restraints, the habit of relating to reality as not particularly discrete, overlapping concentrations of more or less of any measure you would like to apply to that reality is exceptionally useful. It certainly makes understanding how everything is actually already connected much easier than trying to suss out that mystical insight by using the all-or-nothing thinking imposed by the zero-versus-one binary.
And how very useful for magical practitioners to better understand the constantly churning and flowing energies of the subtle plains: Are you enlightened yet, yes or no, fully or not at all (or possibly fully negative), those being your only permissible responses? Well, actually, I think I might still be in the wee fractional end of the number spectrum with regards to enlightenment. Perhaps some dust of enlightenment has passed by me or settled on my skin or even gotten breathed in. Or perhaps different parts of me are at different fractional points on the enlightenment scale. My astral self could be much more enlightened than my etheric self, or they could both be weighting down my mental self like oversized anchors.
Are you cursed, yes or no, fully or not at all (or maybe blessed as a full negative)? Well, I got born as a human this time, so from a sea slug’s perspective I’m rather blessed, while from a god’s perspective I’m excessively cursed. From my perspective, a lot of curses have already been cleared, others have slowly begun resolving, and still others remain completely unknown to me. Best of all, some curses will resolve not be being banished but by my finally waking up to the fact that they’re also blessings and gifts, whose cursed downside I’m quite happy to cope with, given their massive upside.
Are you some simple forced binary to which you can only respond yes or no, fully or not at all (or perhaps minus one to spice things up)? Quick, yes or no! What a tedious way to go through life, and we were all programmed to think like that and then regurgitate those proscribed responses. With all the various ways we could relate to and interpret the reality around us and within us, that pathetically hamfisted and shoehorned way was the only one our mentors would tolerate. Sorry, that’s just a ridiculously stifling and tedious way to go through an entire lifetime.
I think I would rather begin practicing being a fraction or a myriad, or a fraction of a fraction or a myriad of a myriad. What depths of interiority or exteriority might be waiting in plain view for me to begin exploring them, should I ever succeed in waking up from the impoverished nightmare of the all-or-nothing quantifying I was trained in (a clear case of a curse and blessing rolled up in one)? What fraction of that numerical straightjacket is curse and what fraction is blessing? How many myriad curses and blessings does that numerical straightjacket bestow? Ok, let’s face it, druids just have more fun!
@Chuaquin, #168, (If I may butt in)
“most ecologists (like the rest of the current left) praise human migrations against “xenophobia”, but they show a kind of “biological xenophobia” against non human “invaders”.”
— except when they get on the topic of European-descended migrants. Then they go full Blood-and-Soil nationalist for whatever Indigenous group last conquered the region– even if, like the Iroquois in parts of Canada, their conquest post-dates the beginning of European settlement! Everyone pouring in now has to be welcomed, of course. The established “whites” are, on the other hand, absolutely an invasive species. I’ve heard more than one person– most of them “white” themselves, whatever that means– call for treating their fellow humans like Asian carp or purple loostrife. One hopes that it wasn’t meant literally, but what sort of metaphorical “just kill them all” was meant in that case? The mind boggles.
From a European perspective it probably seems absolutely schitzoid; it looks that way from close up, too, but I’ve been assured by highly-paid consultants to my government that every good citizen has to do their part to Eradicate Whiteness! (Whatever that means. Cultural Genocide at the very least, near as I can figure out.)
I’ve been watching a Youtube channel made by Minnesota Implement. They’re a small business that makes snow plows and other metal implements for tractors and whatnot. the owner shares updates on how business is going and it doesn’t sound good. He just shared that his steel and shipping costs together have increased by 40% in the past few days. It’s a great snapshot, I think, of how smaller businesses that provide real goods and services are feeling the pinch right now.
Here in Canada, where I forge ironwork of all sorts, our business is down about 30% compared to this time last year. We’re getting by but it’s getting harder every week! I suspect the supply shock from the reduced output from the Middle East is making its way through the real economy now.
Brace yourselves!
If we anticipate troubled times ahead (and of course we do, the conditional was rhetorical), then this story might be relevant. I recently visited a Cold War Nike anti-aircraft missile base near Baltimore. Our guide pointed out one of the buildings, which had housed the base’s power plant. It wasn’t a very big base, and the power plant building could have been a garage, and he said that the “farm boy” who knew how to keep the generator running reliably also kept himself from being shipped out to fight in Vietnam. He had a critical skill, transfered from civilian to military application, that kept him physically safe, while those who just needed to be trained to carry a gun got sent to places where that skill was needed. Choose your skills wisely.
By the way, this base was proof that the US Army was planning to use nuclear weapons against Soviet aircraft over US soil, if they had ever gotten as close as Harrisburg, PA.
“The ARMY?” you might ask. It turned out that if a guided missile was “more like” artillery than aircraft, it was an Army project; otherwise, it was an Air Force project. Ballistic = Army; cruise = Air Force.
“Northwind, I know. There’s a reason why so many immigrants from the various nations of Britain dropped every trace of their traditional culture as soon as they got here: for them, Britain was a nightmare from which they’d finally awakened, and finding themselves in a place where they didn’t have to cringe and grovel before every idiot whose great-grandfather let some king or other debauch his wife — you probably know, but many people don’t, how many aristocratic lineages got their titles that way — made them feel like Dorothy stepping out of the black and white house into the living color of Oz. Except, of course, the last thing they wanted was to click their heels and go back to what used to be home.”
The British Isles (especially the main island) had perhaps the roughest Dark Ages in Europe/Mediterranean but perhaps the most stable Modern Period (not including the “Early Modern Period “).
Part of the reason why I think that island has produced so much dystopian fiction (1984, Facial Justice, various books of H. G. Wells, A Clockwork Orange, V for Vendetta, Children of Men, etc) is a sense that although it is a relative location of stability, history shows it could fall into bad luck and become unrecognizable.
I was wondering if I could have your thoughts on this.
By the way, I imagine that Northwind being from historically highly German and (to a lesser degree) Scandinavian Wisconsin is surrounded by a lot of other people who historically weren’t sympathetic to London!
Chauquin
> fresh waters wood boats maybe have a longer life than “salty” ships
Here begineth cogitatin’…
On the other hand, salt is a preservative.
It would be fascinating to find someone (expert; book; expert’s book) who has studied wooden hulls; how well do hulls fare over time in various water environments? I suspect fresh waters themselves have different characteristics, like Black Sea vs Caspian Sea vs Lake Huron. Also, (for example) I suspect the salty ocean around Indonesia is markedly different from the salty ocean around Cuba.
Here endeth cogitation…
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Dennis Michael Sawyers @135, we shan’t have to wonder for long what the TDS sufferers will do with Trump coins: https://www.usmint.gov/semiquincentennial-president-donald-j-trump-2026-1-coin-rolls-bags-MASTER_SEMIQDJT.html
JMG, I’m trying to understand your reply to Paradoctor fully. So would a good summary be zero equals the Unmanifest or Sunyata? Even if there is no elephant behind you, there is still the potential for an elephant or a fraction of an elephant?
TylerA, thank you. Will have to do some searching on that topic at some point.
JPM, yeah, I see a lot of obviously working class guys on e-bikes every day, and see a bit of a hot rod culture around them… government is taking notice, unfortunately, while doing nothing about the guys driving around pickup trucks with hoods so high they can’t see a grown man in front of them.
On the discussion around zero – fascinating – it reminds me of a joke:
At a high school dance, the girls and boys start on opposite sides of the gymnasium. Every 30 seconds, they close half the distance to one another. How long until they meet? The philosophers say forever, while the engineers say they’ll be close enough for all practical purposes soon enough.
It makes my head hurt, but I’ll say that I think of zero as “unrelatedness”, and kind of a necessary counterpart to unity (1). For instance, I might be drinking a glass of (dilute) giraffe urine right now, and no matter how much dilute giraffe urine I drink, the number of intact, whole giraffes capable of making urine in my apartment won’t change.
@paradoctor #155
If I may share my perspective here: I’m not at all sure that I agree with JMG that zero is a pseudonumber, mostly because I don’t know what exactly means by the claim. He’s clearly not making that claim that it’s illegitimate to use zero in any context, though I would strongly disagree with him if that’s what he meant — 0 is a perfectly cromulent value of type int in most programming languages, for instance.
Especially when it comes to mathematics, I’ve learned not to judge differing viewpoints too quickly. For example, rejecting the Law of the Excluded Middle (the law that says that every proposition is either true or false) can’t possibly be reasonable, can it? Except there is a 100+ long history of some very good math being built on a system in which that law does not hold, and much of computer science finds a better mathematical footing in that tradition.
Consider a claim I find much more unreasonable than zero being a pseudonumber (again, whatever that means): that there is a largest natural number, the successor of which is zero — in other words, naturals are fixed-width integers with the overflow property, like on a computer. Or that there is a smallest positive rational number that all rational numbers are multiples of it — a “mesh size” for the rationals, and again like floating-point numbers on a computer. These are clearly wacky ideas, and yet they’re explicitly the beliefs of Dr. Doron Zeilberger, an otherwise-respected mathematician with many published papers containing good mathematics.
No question, there are some math cranks out there. There is an entire subreddit — r/infinitenines — devoted to one person’s attempt to prove that 0.999… repeating equals something other than 1. The math on there is quite bad. But even here the problem is not really the claim (which is actually true in some algebraic structures) but the bad math and the person’s unwillingness to accept correction.
Wooden ships are a favorite food of shipworms as if all the other problems with seawater immersion weren’t already enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipworm
Oddly, they are actually clams.
That description of Puts and Calls was most interesting. I thought they were basically gambling and apparently I was right. Between the financial gambling, sports betting, lotteries, and now “prediction markets” the US is into a real gambling problem.
JMG,
I appreciate that my explanation was understood! If you wanted to regulate options, it’d actually be easy.
Each underlying (each stock, commodity, ETF, index, etc.) can have a maximum of one expiration per month. If you pass that law, you turn options from the casino they’ve become to what they’re actually supposed to do as explained in the prior post.
I think one reason derivatives are called derivatives is because you see that word and you immediately think calculus and your brain turns off, so very few people put in the effort to understand them.
Jeff and JMG, you know what is crazy? I first heard The Giving Tree recited in my church. The pastor read it to us children. I think I was all of 8 or 9. It made me cry. The pastor said it was supposed to be about God’s love. This was in the 1980s, and I can think of no better reason for The Giving Tree being popular in that era than the wanton desire to rape/vampirize the Earth and suck her completely dry and to be conveniently forgiven at the end of the blood orgy. No wonder I was an atheist by the time I was 20! I am emphatically not an atheist now as most of the readers here know. Anyway, being a slow learner, I was confirmed in that same church at age 14. By 16, I had parted ways with churchgoing. We begin to see why Christianity did not stick for me and why it took a long time for me to return to any form of worship!
@Dzanni #42 – the numbers are the easy part of the Predicament of Decline when it comes to addressing mitigation. I often think of my grandparents who got married in 1919, and then homesteaded on a farm in North Dakota, raising 11 kids. Their farm, 12 miles from “town” of 250 people, started out with no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no stable income, and survived the Great Depression with a little help from .Gov.
So bringing back a lifestyle with a 1920 energy footprint is certainly possible, but the process of getting there – well, that’s where the insanity of the masses comes in. Humans are herd animals, creatures of habit and mostly – extremely self-centered. Navigating the pathway ahead will require advanced knowledge of human psychology and sociology to avoid widespread misery. So far, from what I can tell, that knowledge is in short supply. History provides numerous examples of what comes next, and adapting mentally, physically and emotionally to the “New Normal” is going to a challenge.
@Michael Gray # 75 – I should have stated something more like “Does your 401K account accurately reflect the equivalent value you think it does?” It’s easy to see where hyperinflation, confiscation, or economic collapse could easily reduce that number to near zero.
@squirrel topic – not sure where that came from, but yesterday a co-worker mentioned to me that her and her husband plink .22 rifles to reduce the squirrel population on their rural property, and feed the carcasses to their pigs. Saves the step of dressing the squirrel which is a bit more troublesome than slaughtering a pig. A sign of the times as obtaining adequate protein for our diets is threatened.
Tim PW, Out of curiosity, can you melt down and reuse existing ironwork? I don’t suggest that as a business strategy, of course, knowing less than nothing about the iron work trade. I do wonder if it can be done, and what would be the quality of a recycled iron product?
Tyle#173, Luke
I think that your confidence in a goverment, in this case the Canadian goverment, is absolutely unfounded..
@TimPW, I am sure the falling availability of energy (long term and maybe also because of war) has something to do with your and with Minnesota Implement’ plight. But wouldn’t Trump’s 50% import tax on Canadian goods affect a Minnesotan company, too? And wouldn’t the trade war affect you, too?
Tim PW @ 176, anyone who dares to suggest that what you described about the implement company might be an intended consequence of current policies will immediately be denounced as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and worse.
Here is another one for the list:
Ohio punk progenitor Eugene Richard O’Connor a/k/a “Cheetah Chrome” (Feb 18, 1955 – Sept 13, 2026) (Rocket From The Tombs, Dead Boys).
Got to see them play with the Circle Jerks back in the mid 90s.
https://youtu.be/-3YbedLa5I0?is=2pvjIrM6OE6gRV8G
They were first wave punk from Cleveland and definitely left a mark.
RIP Cheetah…
Northwind G. # 160:
“I do not sympathize with the UNITED moniker of “Britain.” (And I bet the Belgians, French, and Germans don’t give a hoot if Britain splits up, although maybe the French will party.)”
Oops, I near missed your comment about the “united” Kingdom thing…I can tell you I don’t represent all the Spaniards opinions about the secessionist Memorandum against British government, but I know well that a lot of people here, -it doesn’t matter leftists or righters-, don’t like very much UK power (OK, or rather its today power remnant). Well, Spain was an empire some centuries ago, and it declined partly by its own mistakes, partly thanks to the new world power (then, the British Empire). For example, sir Francis Drake is a hero in UK even today, but in Spain we think he was a bloody pirate (according we’re told at school), ha ha…These different stories about that historic guy are a remnant of our old times as mutual enemies, centuries ago.
So I think no pity for UK govt if secessionism, if it would happen there…
I’m not a Spanish Nationalist, but I don’t have much pity for current Brit govt, due to another motive: London govts have been without exception, reckless warmongers for pushing another NATO European members towards a true direct battle against Russia to “help poor Ukraine”, and provoking Putin toward it. What could be wrong? . So it would be a wry irony 10 Downing Street in a near future had to send British troops against parts of its own country, in the worst case…However, I wish a simillar scenario like Yugoslavia civil war during ’90s, doesn’t happen in the future. It’s cool to admire Scottish people and another non English people who want to have their own country, but it wouldn’t be cool to see part of your family and friends killed in a blood bath, if I were for example a Scottish guy…So I’d tell the secessionists in UK to think better before upsetting too much London govt; and I think it’s always better make a deal than starting an open fighting: “realpolitik” first, please.
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Tyler A. # 167:
“the EBT Card– that’s a government-provided debit card that can only purchase foodstuffs that is part of their welfare system.”
Thank you for this information, a fact I didn’t know, as an ignorant and arrogant European…
Well, I understand it’s better to use that money card for purchasing food, instead to spend it in prostitution, boozing and gambling…On the other hand, it’s a limit in personal choice which I find a bit difficult to fit in current democratic narrative (we live in a free country and blah blah blah).
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More about wooden ships span before rotting and disintegrating:
Maybe you know the bizarre case of a Swedish wood sailing warship, the “Vasa”. It shipwrecked near Stockholm some centuries ago, but water wasn’t very salted there (Sweden lakes and rivers, and Baltic Sea), so it was rescued near undamaged…Today, you can see it in a Swedish museum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
(It’s a very bad luck it shipwrecked in its first voyage, but according some “gossip”, Sweden designers and builders, during the XVIIth Century, made some technical mistakes which made that warship unstable, so…).
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Robert M. # 171:
Yes, there’s a “year 1”, but not a “year 0”, in civilian time count and historic time. And there’s a “year -1”, too, before current era. I didn’t know the “year 0” within sciences…(thanks). Well, I remember a new age magazine here, which lasted a heck of years, was titled “Año 0″(so, “year 0”), which it’s funny if you think it well.
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Christophe # 174:
“Well, I got born as a human this time, so from a sea slug’s perspective I’m rather blessed, while from a god’s perspective I’m excessively cursed.”
I agree, because I also think like you, that blessings and cursings are relative situations, depending of your perspective…or another beings perspectives, up and down your current situation in this world.
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Tyler A. # 175:
“except when they get on the topic of European-descended migrants. Then they go full Blood-and-Soil nationalist for whatever Indigenous group last conquered the region– even if, like the Iroquois in parts of Canada, their conquest post-dates the beginning of European settlement! Everyone pouring in now has to be welcomed, of course. The established “whites” are, on the other hand, absolutely an invasive species.”
Well, that attitude and behavior is very usual in the Left in the Western Diaspora countries (in which ecologism has been included in a Procrustes bed way, like in the own Europe today), because the known (and partly fake) myth of the Noble Savage has been very succesful until today. This romantic idealization of non white people, had been clarified and demythified by some scientists during the past century, but since the “French Theory” (aka Postmodernism) began to infiltrate the Academia and the political Left everywhere, there’s been an unending atatack against the Age of Enlightement and everything which smells like Western or European. Current woke frenzy has worsened even more the hatred against white people, especially against the “origin of all the evilness in the word”: Of course, evily evil straight white men…
So xenophobia from non white natives, or people from Third World countries, against European “white” people and their culture, is a “good” xenophobia, according current woke doctrine. I think wokism is the last offspring of Postmodernism, in a demented mood.
I tend to think people is always people, and we must be together in everything is common for us, not in which divide us like human beings. Human Rights, common mankind and so on, which ironically are an European invention…
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Finally, another comment more about dangerous mountains:
Here there’s near my town (some km) a mountain whose height is 2,300 m. You can reach its top walking for some hours, not climbing. Indeed, I’ve walked to its peak several times, always during the summer. It’s interesting to see some planes in past times have crashed against this “low” mountain, due to suddden and thick fogs in every season, except “full” summer (I saw some rusty steel pieces from those crashed planes, when I walked by a not very known path towards the peak). Since the ’80s, near 20 people died in that “innocent” mountain. Main cause of death was falls. There’s no big rough cliffs in that mount, but slopes are sometimes quite hard and long, so if you slide you may fall rolling down…until your head or neck smashes eventually against a rock. Things worsens when fog, snow, rain and/or hard wind start, which usually appear suddenly (lack of visibility), even during late Spring and early Fall. Too many tourists are fooled by the apparent easy paths towards its top.
Mr. Greer and commentariat, I’m sure that many of you have heard the quote “No matter who you vote for for president – you get John McCain..” Well, using my bestest Vulcan TV logic, I’ve come up with an even better statement .. one that conceivably mind-melds the generations: No matter who you listen to in D.C and it’s surrounds, indeed verily, within the halls of power across the Planet .. You get .. wait for it – HARRY F. MUDD!
In a point for the real economy, I was talking today to the young woman doing the checkout at Trader Joe’s, She is doing a 3 semester welding course at the local community college. This will give her a good selection of well paying jobs, and no or very limited debt. I am happy to see that community colleges are starting to offer more trade courses and that young people are following this path.. some good news.
Stephen
News;
“Sept 18 (Reuters) – About $18 billion in loans tied to an Oracle-leased (ORCL.N) data center in New Mexico has come under pressure, with loans quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar by syndicate banks including Santander and Jefferies (JEF.N), the Financial Times reported on Friday..”
“Efforts to sell the debt to a broader pool of investors have stalled amid concerns over Oracle’s rising borrowing and weakening creditworthiness,”
Oh boy, The banks that issued the loans can’t resell them. The “broader pool of investors” wants an effective 10% more interest than the original rate as issued to make up for the higher risk.
Furthermore; “Project Jupiter was initially set to be powered by 2.2 gigawatts of gas turbines, but the state land office blocked a request to run a natural gas pipeline to the data center, the report said.”
AI sort of ended the climate emergency or at least the yelling and screaming about it. I know, I know, the gas turbines are only a bridge until the fusion plants come on line. 🙄
I’ve got copies of both Galbraith’s book and Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of Great Powers coming for future reading.
Lathechuck 177
> the power plant building could have been a garage, and he said that the “farm boy” who knew how to keep the generator running reliably also kept himself from being shipped out to fight in Vietnam. He had a critical skill, transfered from civilian to military application, that kept him physically safe, while those who just needed to be trained to carry a gun got sent to places where that skill was needed. Choose your skills wisely.
Ay-yep. My grandfather Isaiah (born early 1890s), of the multi-skilled, multi-generational line whose parents (and siblings and uncles) taught their males how to fix just about everything (I won’t repeat my musings) had only an 8th grade education, but from age eight years onward (I am guessing), his family taught him to fix and do just about everything (including farming), where he focused on electricity. By the time the World War I draft came around, he was the perfect age to get blown to bits in WWI; but no, the govmint plopped him in the Signal Corp, plus, of all weird places, in Panama. I have seen his military records. I had to look up what was going on in the Panama Canal zone during WWI (I still don’t understand). (Maybe he was one of five guys, tents, campfires, and Dutch ovens, like the 1960s’ TV show “Wagon Train”). Plus, not only was he doing electrical stuff in Panama, his family had had experience with CANALS. He was a shoe-in. And I sure he wasn’t digging ditches — too valuable for that. From 1890 to WWI, he himself had lived on his family’s various canal boats plying the waters between Montreal and New York Harbor. After WWI, canaling was gone.
I am relatively sure Isaiah hated the humidity of Central America’s, being a northern-heritage type, but except for diseases like malaria, Panama was a pretty-plumb-place-to-park for those years. 8th-grade edjakashin. It was “what” he knew (electricity) that saved his life, not “who” he knew.
Isaiah was a harsh guy to my mudder, but a sweetie to me. And a one heck of a hunk (probably the handsome-est of any of my male forbears of whom I have seen photos). He had movie star looks, up there with Clark Gable. Grandpa, the looker. When he walked by, women must have swooned. I never did unearth why he married his first wife Josie (my grandmother; died 1940; I hear-tell she was a mean-cuss).
Any-who. Thanks for listenin’.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
@gunstone, Britain had dark Dark Ages, but the isle as a whole did not lose writing, which it had enjoyed for less than 400 years when the Empire moved out. Places like Olympia, Sparta and Delphi lost writing in 600 AD after about 1300 years of written history, and so did the whole Balkans peninsula outside Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Athens, Corinth and the small fortress of Monembasia.
Gunstone 178
> I was wondering if I could have your thoughts on this.
I don’t think I have read even one book on the subject of dystopian fiction so I have no educated opinion on this. I read Sherlock Holmes. Yeah I know, how odd. But Sherlock Holmes short-story pastiches comfort me, like comfort food. Good thing there are pastiches because I had read each of the canon stories at least six times, starting in the 1970s. The Sherlock Holmes canon got me through the latter part of college. I have no insight into the psychology of it.
As for Wisconsin, in my late 60s, I realized I had lived a fish-out-of-water existence my whole life, and ended up hankering to be among Nordics. I grew up in a largely Italian ethnic city of upstate New York, living among swarthy dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned children. I was, like, the only “white white.”
Then, due to a fault of my own doing, I lived in California for 35 years, among yet another peoples where I would and could never fit in (Mexicans). By my 50s, I was whirling uncontrollably getting dizzier by the week. It was meditation that helped figure out what was amiss: I was nowhere-(wo)man. It was a physical feeling that grew. The only solution was to get to a region where I looked like everyone else. I had never lived (long) in a place where I looked like everyone else.
So when choosing where back-East to move, New York State not only had sky-high taxes, but every place I might want to move to was still too-Italian: Italians had taken over.
Wisconsin was about right when it comes to looking like others. Basically, Anglos and Saxons are my people.
The physical feeling phenomenon is hard to explain. I had been too far and too long from people whom I resembled, and over decades, it very seriously negatively affected my mental health; I mean “VERY”. I could tell only after “living without” for fifty years.
It came down to that I didn’t feel safe among Italians, and didn’t feel safe among Mexicans.
If that makes me racist, so be it. It’s like,— whatever. I am too old to question the biology of it. Somebody else can figure it out. My simplistic view is, people need to be “in the midst of their own kind,” literally, “to feel safe.” Humans are clannish. Humans can never NOT be clannish; they can TRY to deny clannishness, but clans are in our DNA. Look at all the clans around.
Frankly, it is long past time northern whites admit and re-embrace their own clannishness. Diaspora-Nords need to reclaim clannishess, bring it back home; re-hearth (to hearth again) our clan, for our own physical and mental health.
Re-hearth a clan. Diaspora-Northern Europeans have been de-hearthed by others (abusively); heck, we have de-hearthed ourselves, without our knowing it was happening.
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New subject
⌛️🍁The hour that autumn arrived here, is right now, this hour. A northwind is kicking in, and is airing everything out. The clouds are moving fairly fast. I am weary of winds arriving from the south,— “from the south” often seems so ‘laden,’ where it feels like it is bringing ill.
I gotta stand out on the porch, and take in the good vibes.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Siliconguy @ 184 Ancient Greeks, and likely others as well, coated their ships with pitch, to discourage the teredos. The pitch turned black, which is why one reads of black ships in Homer. According to the same book I referred to above, the ships were beached at night, and the hull inspected for the dread mollusks.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries at least the British navy, and I suppose anyone else who could afford it, cladded their hulls with copper to guard against worms, barnacles and seaweed.
Mary Bennet #188,
Scrap iron and steel is melted and recycled all the time on an industrial level. I don’t think it’s feasible on a small backyard level, but reusing old steel for new purposes is valid. All it takes is a little experimentation with the scrap and a bit of knowledge of metallurgy to identify how scrap can be best used for new items. I do this as often as I can, in fact, turning car parts into gardening tools!
Economically speaking, using reclaimed materials rarely competes with using new. That being said, I feel that over the next few decades there’ll be an inflection point where reclaimed can be used on a small, local scale and out compete new materials. In particular, I think about the immense costs in energy and infrastructure to create new/recycled steel and to ship it all over the place. If you can make use of all the steel that’s in your area, well, all the better.
Aldarion #190,
Yes, the trade war between the US and Canada is having a devastating effect on small businesses. I didn’t mean to gloss over its effects in my post.
The single biggest change for my business was the US removal of the “de minimis” exemption for imports below USD$800. When that was struck down, I was suddenly impacted by all the tariff rules. It’s been a wild ride, to say the least, and it has my wife and I considering how to change direction so that we’re not relying so much on business from the US.
I refuse to ship any further than the US because it’s silly to me to ship ironwork all over the world when there are smiths in other parts of the world.
Mary Bennet #191,
The fellow in the youtube video doesn’t go so far as to say that what he’s experiencing is being done intentionally, but he does say that the current administration is to blame for the large cost increases.
I’m not sure what to think about all this, honestly. Maybe some destruction could be good, to help clear away the calcified systems that have been in place for so long. If we look at this from the Long Descent perspective, maybe what’s happening is a lurch downward to a simpler arrangement (i.e. reduced complexity) that could allow for some marginal recovery. I think remaining agile is key to getting through this.
@chaquin # 193
USA, EBT cards(food stamps) having these is very much in line with what our overall culture in this country has traditionally been. We care, we dont want people to starve. Also, we want people to be self sufficient and take care of themselves, we dont want to dis-incentivize working. We are not telling anyone what they can or cannot do with their money, as it is not their money, it is not money at all. It is just a specific gift of food. They are being given food, not money, so no-one is limiting their use of money or telling them how to spend or prioritize it. Currently, there is of course some discussions and disagreements about this, some think it should become more clear this is a gift of food and that actual boxes of set types of food should be given, not a card to pick out their own food. This is a minority viewpoint. Some think that we should not have separate programs with help, ie., food with this card, reduced rent thru this program, help with winter heating bills with this other and should just give a set bit of money. This is also a minority viewpoint. ( many opposing arguments, one being so they buy drugs and now have no apartment, heat or food …? And another being, look how well that is going in the UK, where they went to one basic payment and it is not enough to cover the needs, whereas when they were separate, the household had more heat and food…)SO likely this will all stay much like it is.
GlassHammer, I freely grant that. Other people can always see it. Getting the people in question to see it themselves, though, is a Herculean task.
Silicon, thanks for this. And all of it’s balanced unsteadily on a lot of hype and a few moderate successes. We may be in for quite an ecoomic crunch.
Justin, so do I. Here in the DC area, delivery drivers use e-bikes rather than cars because they can get where they’re going much faster and with less hassle than car traffic will permit.
Christophe, excellent! Yes, and it’s not just Druids. The recognition that there are no perfectly discrete objects, that everything blends at the edges into everything else and there’s a little bit of elephant everywhere, is something you’ll find in mystical traditions around the world, and for good reason: discrete numbers are very blunt instruments for making sense of the real world. (And yes, we do have more fun.)
Tim PW, it seems increasingly likely to me that we’re approaching the tipping point of a serious economic discontinuity. Hang on tight!
LatheChuck, thanks for this. The last of the three elementary schools I attended in childhood was built on a former Nike missile site south of Seattle, so I recall a fair amount about the program.
Gunstone, stability very often benefits the ruling classes at the expense of everyone else. By the time mass emigration began, Britain was a bitterly class-ridden society in which the lower 50% or so could count on nothing but grinding poverty and constant humiliation from their supposed betters. It’s indicative that well into the 19th century the Royal Navy was largely staffed by slaves — they weren’t called that, but theNavy literally kidnapped people by the tens of thousands (look up “press gangs” sometime) and locked them aboard ships for the duration of each war, and the pay the victims received was nominal and often stolen. (Then the Admiralty wondered why American ships, manned by volunteers, sailed and fought rings around them in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812; morale really does count for something in battle.) Britain is one of the great centers of dystopian writing because some aspects of British society have been pretty dystopian all along.
Luke, you’re being much more philosophical than I intended. It’s simply not true that absolute nothing exists anywhere. Deep space is full of dust, electromagnetic radiation, and much more; a total vacuum is as impossible to reach as absolute zero; and, as I pointed out, somewhere in the room behind you is at least one bit of dust or one molecule of vapor that was once part of an elephant. We do not live in a universe of discrete, separate, bounded objects that correspond to abstract numbers; the real world consists of overlapping, intermingling fields of presence, and numbers are very blunt instruments to describe them.
Justin, sure, you’re dealing with very small fractions of giraffe in your apartment. Any attempt to add those up to equal one whole giraffe also has to contend with the equally small but significant fractions of wildebeest, crocodile, skyscraper, hurricane, and the like that also jostle for room in the same space, not to mention the approximations to unity occupied by such things as beds, televisions, and wall art. It’s a very crowded apartment…
Dennis, and of course it will be a dry day in R’lyeh before that law gets passed!
Kimberly, that doesn’t surprise me at all. Teaching children to think of accepting abuse as generous and loving is a convenient way of grooming them.
Justin, sorry to hear this.
Polecat, I usually balk at Star Dreck metaphors, but that one works.
Stephen, good for her. Thank for the good news.
Silicon, hoo boy. Not sure when the dam is going to break, but it’s going to break.
John Michael Greer 206
Would you call the British Isles more dystopian than Continental Europe on average historically?
Northwind Grandma 199
Well, there is a distinction between in-group attachment and out-group hatred. Even the infamous Critical Race Theorists note that.
Derrick Bell, considered the founder of CRT, explicitly distinguished “racial nepotism” from “racial animus” among whites . He of course cynically went on to describe the latter as the source of much of the discrimination faced by blacks like himself. Yet he still made the distinction.
My husband is a fan of betting on four-footed “derivatives”. Since he only plays with money he can spare, and never with our necessities, I’ve no problem with this. I often tell people he’s gone into the bookies to check on his “investments” and when they look askance, I might add, well, the bookies are very honest about the fact that you may lose your shirt on their premises (“past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance”), and that you enter at your peril.
OTOH, a pension, which is money you entrust to [stock market] gamblers for a locked-in term during which you cannot take it back, is supposed to be a prudent thing. Lol!
In the context of wokesters “wise” idea of pointing there’s a “good” racism/xenophobia (coming from non white people), and a bad racism/xenophobia (always the usual suspects: Europeans-white people), I can tell you that some months ago, I enjoyed a lot of “Schadenfreude” when I was reading a Spanish comic I won’t bother to link nor tell its title (secondhand embarrassment). It was a self-biographic story drawn by a Spanish young woman, from Chinese ancestors (this data counts in usual woke “victimism Olympics”, methink…). After starting reading her touristic adventures around the world, I saw she was very woke biased, so I thought giving up this lecture (life is too short to waste it reading bullshale). Of course, cartoonist like other artists in the West tend to be nowadays more or less wokesters (what a surprise!). However, my patience was worth it…When she was visiting Canada (I think she was in Toronto) with some European and Canucks friends (all of them “white”), she saw a drunk middle age man, with a Native aspect, in front of a pub, who began to insult her and her friends with very rude words, because they were “damned white invaders”. This poor girl was ashamed, sad and upset all at once. (what a pity…). Evidently, that native guy was so drunk that they didn’t realize she wasn’t a white European woman, but an Asiatic girl in her appearance, so she was insulted as her “white” woke friends, too…I smiled with a wry grin at the expense of this woke cartoonist hard time with that noble savage, ha ha…She got a taste of her own medicine, to say it softly.
Dear Druid,
Your explanation of the number zero just blow up my mind. Negative numbers are not real? Oh my God, no doubt our society is so messed up.
Agnes
#Christophe, if I may: Thomas Fuchs, a German professor of psychiatry (not a mystic at all, as far as I can glean from his academic publications) has pointed out that when you hold an object (like a pen or a walking cane) in your hand and touch a surface with the tip of that object, you feel the touch happening not in your hand, but at the tip of the object, several centimetres or maybe even a metre outside of your body.
He proposed that during an action like writing with a pen, the actual entity doing the writing is composed of the entire loop: brain -> motor neurons -> hand muscles -> pen on surface -> eyes -> brain. In his view, the brain is not some special substance endowed with conscience, but a “mediating organ”. If there is such a thing as consciousness (of course this needs to be stated hypothetically in an academic publication), it is present just as much in the motor neurons and muscle cells as it is in the brain. I did brain research for almost two decades and found it very liberating to consider brain cells (neuron and glia) just humble cells, like other cells in our body. In fact, the logical conclusion (I think he doesn’t go as far as stating it) would be that during the act of writing, the conscious act of writing is executed just as much by the pen as by the hand.
On a more basic, atomic physical level, how do you define a pen, a table and a human? They are all composed of proton, neutrons and electrons, and we know that an electron can be present anywhere, it is just less and less probable to find it far from a certain nucleus. In other words, the electrons of the pen, the table and the body all interpenetrate to some (extremely small) degree. The only viable definition I can think of is that a table can be usefully defined as a single object because all parts of the table move together when you push the table (unless you break it!), while all parts of the pen move together when you lift the pen. That is, synchronous movement is what defines an objects on the atomic physical level, and synchronous movement also makes several objects temporarily become one during conscious acts.
This plays into your argument that objects are not as clearly separated from each other as might appear at first glance.
Lathechuck # 177:
“the “farm boy” who knew how to keep the generator running reliably also kept himself from being shipped out to fight in Vietnam. He had a critical skill, transfered from civilian to military application, that kept him physically safe, while those who just needed to be trained to carry a gun got sent to places where that skill was needed.”
A clever guy, who chose his right skills during his right time…
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Northwind G. 179:
“On the other hand, salt is a preservative.”
Yes, salt is a good preservative…for food; but not for wood and iron/steel ships (corrosive). Indeed, Baltic Sea is known among underwater archeologists for its high quality preservation wrecks, due to its lower level of salt in its waters (also cold waters, another factor to help wood and steel preservation: less aggressive marine life than hot seas).
https://www.boote-magazin.de/en/travel-and-charter/territories/the-baltic-sea-ship-graveyard-fascinating-images-of-ghostly-wrecks/
In addition of this, I watched some time ago a documentary about sailing today in the Great Lakes. Some sailors in those ships said these steel ships lasted more or less double and even triple times as average than sea ships…because those Lakes are made of freshwater. Well, I’m not an expert in this topic, but it seems a true fact.
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Siliconguy # 184:
I can tell you Spanish name for shipworm is “broma”, a name which ironically, it’s the same word to depict a prank in my mothers tongue. Well, if shipworms managed to hole a wooden ship enough to sink it, it’s a very bad joke for its poor sailors…A “funny” little animal, who lives even in cold and not much salty seas like the Baltic Sea. I think in the old times of wooden warships (for example, during Trafalgar battle time), some of them were coated with copper plates under their waterline, more for trying to protect their hull against shipworms than for armouring them…
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In a previous comment I’ve written Francis Drake is usually a hero for British people, and a pirate for Spaniards. I tend to think personally he wasn’t a pirate, but a corsair, who is like a pirate, but not a pirate in a strict sense (Pirate: freelance sea criminal). Indeed, he was under the English Crown protection to attack Spanish sheeps full of gold…so he was a corsair, in a technical sense.
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Siliconguy # 196:
“I know, I know, the gas turbines are only a bridge until the fusion plants come on line.”
I’ve heard that narrative towards our “shiny” energetic future, too…I remember there’s another variant of that rosy prediction, which claims current fission nuclear plants are another bridge until the fusion plants come and so on…
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Northwind G. # 199:
“I grew up in a largely Italian ethnic city of upstate New York, living among swarthy dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned children. I was, like, the only “white white.””
Well, most Italians are dark haired and share another common Mediterranean aspects with Spaniard and Portuguese people too, but a few of them are fair-haired. Indeed, I met an Italian blond hair (natural) some years ago, and I was a fair-haired boy during my childhood…though my hair began to darken since my teen years (toward brown hair),so nowadays I seem a dark-haired guy…I’ve met more people here who had gone more dark haired as soon they became adults.
By the way, I tend to think judging a person honesty or dangerousness according its “ethnical” appearance is a bad system to know it.
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Mary B # 200:
Thanks for your information, I didn’t know why ancient Greek ships were black, so I was puzzled by this data until now…
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Stephen # 201:
Yes, during Trafalgar battle time, not only British warships, but some Spanish and French warships used copper for trying to protect their hulls agains some “funny” animals and seaweed, too.
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Atmospheric # 205:
Thank you for your view about American system to feed poor people there. Well, here we’ve got another approach to this social problem, I think it isn’t better nor worse than yours (context count, methink). I think there’s some food who comes from the EU remaining funds (a social fund), which is distributed especially by social services in town halls here, to everybody who can prove they’re poor enough to need that food (papers, please). I don’t know exactly how do you prove you’re poor to need that food, and indeed I hope I never must to know it for using that service…
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JMG # 206:
“The last of the three elementary schools I attended in childhood was built on a former Nike missile site south of Seattle, so I recall a fair amount about the program.”
A very bizarre building to recycle it into a school, methink (ha ha!). I thought the most bizarre building recycling was a WWII German bunker which became a Catholic church, maybe in France, some decades ago…John, your former school seems an even more bizarre use. It’s a fun and creepy story alike…
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“theNavy literally kidnapped people by the tens of thousands (look up “press gangs” sometime) and locked them aboard ships for the duration of each war, and the pay the victims received was nominal and often stolen.”
Oh, poor people…However, British Navy wasn’t the only one which did that dirty trick to get “forced voluntaries” for becoming sailors. Before Trafalgar battle, Spanish Navy kidnapped a lot of unwary men in Cadiz and neighbor town, in brothels, taverns and even the streets, as cannon fodder to the incoming battle, after they emptied Spanish prisons. It’s a known historical fact, which appears in history books and novels about that event. Part of the spanish Navy defeat in Trafalgar can be explained due to these poorly trained forced sailors (in addition to the coward and stupid behavior shown by the French-Spanish navies Admiral Villeneuve, against Nelson wisdom). imagine you’re drunk in a tavern and two soldiers take you at bayonet point toward a warship, ready for an impending battle: What a nasty hangover!
JMG asked, “Arodrigo, do you happen to know if there are measures that determine the velocity of money held by the different classes in society?”
In economics they call this the Marginal Propensity to Consume; of each $1 you get, how much do you spend this year. The welfare/working class it’s 0..85-0.95 or higher, middle class 0.50-0.80, and upper class 0.05 to 0.10. There’s a nice article backing up what you say here,
https://emeraldbook.org/news/aug-3026/
The counterargument by the “trickle down” people is that while the wealthy don’t spend as large a fraction of their wealth, it’s a higher absolute amount, and their spending contributes to the wealth of the bottom two. Which… no.
@Anselmo,
Look at it this way– if the banks go under, AND the government crashes out to the point where deposit insurance isn’t available, there’s literally no safe place to park money. This may in fact be true– in the long run, it’s absolutely going to be true– but are you betting everything on this crisis being the one to bring down the monetary system? We can always try and hedge for that, but I’ve heard “this will be the end of capitalism!” enough times that I’m betting we’ll have a few more bubbles in us and am not ready to go full beans-and-bullets prepper or to bury a bag of denarii in the back yard. Those are basically your options if you give up on the banking system, after all.
“This plays into your argument that objects are not as clearly separated from each other as might appear at first glance.”
Johansson gauge blocks come immediately to mind. They stick together no adhesive needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block#/media/File:Gauge_block_adhesion.jpg
Metals are metals because the electrons wander freely throughout the mass. This makes for occasional weirdness. The same meandering electrons give beta carotene its ability to have different colors (green bean, carrots, pumpkin, etc)
“Scrap iron and steel is melted and recycled all the time on an industrial level. I don’t think it’s feasible on a small backyard level, but reusing old steel for new purposes is valid. ”
China’s Great Leap Forward proved small scale iron working wasn’t a viable economic activity.
The next step up is viable. There is a local foundry using scrap to produce various things including manhole covers.
https://dlfoundry.com/
The bad news is they are dependent on natural gas and that comes from California or Alberta. Could they retool for an arc furnace using the local hydropower? A very good question.
Shortly after this post on Hallucinatory Wealth was published, I saw a TV meeting of Saudi Prince MBS and President Trump in the White House. Trump said something like “Prince MBS has promised to invest $800 Billion Dollars in the United States.” (Prince MBS nods and smirks as they shake hands).
Talk about hallucinatory wealth!
The Saudis have traded their real wealth (oil) for digital IOU’s whose value may evaporate at any time.
No wonder they want to unload dollars for real stuff in the US!
I am currently writing a doozy of an essay about home equity loans, and how that particular form of unearned wealth is ruining lives and futures on the individual and collective scale. There is no shortage of predators who see homemaking as a means to a profitable end, and that end does not benefit the homemaker or the people within the home. Home equity loans are just another way in which we become completely materialistic and stop seeing home as a sacred place to foster humility and inner development. Instead, the home is perverted into yet another material asset to gain hallucinatory wealth in the form of poisonous debt.
“Are you sure no least fraction of an elephant is there? No bit of dust that was shed from the skin of a circus elephant who passed through your town, no water molecule that was part of an elephant’s body? There may be very little elephant there, but arguably — just as every glass of water you drink contains some of Julius Caesar’s urine — there’s some.”
it may interest some here to know that this theory was given a humourous treatment in “The Third Policeman” by an Irish writer of many pseudonyms, in this case “Flan O’Brien.
The following passages appear in which a character is describing why a policeman and his bicycle may come to be made of each other in some way. 🙂
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles…when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
@JMG, from last Wednesday’s Gainesville Sun:
Digital Detox; “In 2025, GenZers visited bookstore and public libraries more than they did in 2022. According to our data, 66% of Gen Z identify as readers…a longing for digital detox is a part of why print books are their top preferred reading format…nearly 1/3rd bought a physical book in a bookstore…The American Time Use survey doesn’t capture platform-based reading, reading or writing fan fiction online BookTok and Bookstagram…Gen Zers are more likely to experience reading as a social activity…growing popularity of silent reading parties, where groups of people come together suggests that they’re finding community in books. They also participate in literary cosplay and gather at conventions and themed events…the 2025 Portland Book Festival sold out for the first time ever.”
Evidently I’ve caused some dispute about the pseudo-ness of the number zero. Much ado about nothing?
Let’s start with the elephant not in the room. I look behind me… still no elephant. JMG asks if there isn’t a molecule of water or CO2 that used to be in an elephant. How materialistic of him to identify a water molecule as elephantine. An elephant is an holistic organism; a molecule is not an elephant, or even 10^-30 of one. Ditto with Julius Caesar or a T. Rex or an opabinia. Right now, how many opabinia are swimming in front of JMG?
As for 0 being the limit of a sequence 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, … ; that is treating 0 as a real number, when it is usually introduced much earlier as the start of the “natural number” sequence 0, 1, 2, 3,… You could just as easily call 1 the limit of 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, …; or of 2, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, … or of the alternating sequence 1/2, 4/3, 5/6, 8/7, … On the basis of this argument, how many people would be convinced that 1 is a pseudonumber? Zero!
You are correct that 0 Kelvin is a natural limit. But I suspect that you use Fahrenheit, or Celsius, far more often than Kelvin. Let’s take longitude. 0 degrees longitude goes through Greenwich, England. Clearly 0 degrees longitude could be anywhere, but that’s what’s on the maps nowadays. Negative 3 degrees west of Greenwich is 3 degrees east.
The lack of a year 0 A.D. is an historical effect; the number hadn’t been invented/discovered yet. This messes up year calculations. How many years from 17 BC and 23 AD? Not 40 but 39! It’s a calendrical error caused by a mathematical error: excluding zero.
Atmospheric River; My daughter’s age has no bearing on this question. Say the same thing again to her in 30 years and she’ll still roll her eyes. 1’s and 0’s in a computer indicate on and off; and what’s the voltage when the gate is off? Zero!
@ Chuaquin #212
USA, food for needy
Oh, we also give out tons, literally tons and tons of food to people in the USA, lots of overlapping programs, the largest of which is Federal Government sponsored commodity foods, contracts with USA farmers and some processors, they buy and distribute fresh fruits and vegetables, canned and frozen meats and fish, canned and frozen fruits and vegetables, fruit juice, dried fruits, rice and pastas, beans, milk, cheese some eggs. The Federal programs are based on income in addition to special ones for seniors, children and Tribal areas, and someone getting the food cards (EBT, food stamps) they use at the stores to pick out what they prefer can also get this stuff in addition, for free. The Federal commodity foods are made in such quantities that additional foodstuffs are “bought” at very low prices by the various States who also distribute more as they want, their own criteria. This is a large country, the various states have their own programs also, depends on the state. ALot of places also have a meals on wheels program that brings one premade cooked meal a day to senior citizens who ask for it. Around here, they bring it once a week, 5 frozen meals to reheat plus fruit, bread and milk, and a bag of fresh produce if you ask for it. There is no income requirement.
California, where I live, loves to have controlled, government programs, so California state and a large statewide non-profit distributer, buys alot of commodity foods and gives it out. This is in addition to the Federal income based giveaways. Sometimes the distribution sites are in cooperation with various churches or community centers. Here, these have no criteria, no income limits, no one is turned away. This may not happen everywhere in the state if there is no local coordination, but it is very very common. In this state, you would have to try real hard to not have enough to eat. So, drug addicts or if someone falls thru the cracks where they cant get out and no one checks on them, but again, in alot of areas, maybe most, there is effort to get the meals delivered to the home bound, etc… We have “soup kitchens” where desperate can just walk in and get a free hot lunch. There are a few people who have made their own small non-profit in my specific area that make lunches and go tent to tent to the main drug camp sites and deliver food and water.
Because even the Federal government has 2 overlapping food programs, sometimes some people might have been picking up commodity free food weekly and going to the store with the card and buying…. snacks, soda, more expensive foods, or living off commodity free food and buying drinks and foods to use in their under the table business or food cart. Which is why some people paying for the program would see this ( which is not everyone of course, just a minority) buying cases of soda with the card and not real food. They were reselling the soda and living off the free commodity foods So then we get what you read in the news that in some states the cards now cannot be used for soda, chips or candy ( which a few were only buying and reselling) . In my offsprings part of Oregon, they have a deposit on bottled drinks, so some enterprising desperate drug users will take their card and buy bottled water, and in the grocery parking lot, are seen opening and dumping out the water, and then back to the store to turn the bottles in for .10 each ! This is a true thing that is seen. Addiction is a terrible thing.
Alastair Crooke once again has posted an article that dovetails brilliantly with your insights this week into how our zero and negative thinking model has run roughshod over older ways of interpreting and understanding reality.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/09/21/a-world-turned-upside-down/
https://www.unz.com/acrooke/a-world-turned-upside-down/
The West prefers imposing consistent, discrete, definable, and measurable myths onto reality, in lieu of relating to whatever blurry, bustling confusion may actually exist. We Westerners seem to be unfortunately addicted to only searching for our lost keys in the illumination of our man-made Enlightenment, though we clearly lost them far away from that reassuring glow. As Alastair writes, “A recovery of older ways of thinking – the ‘all-at-once, all together’ way of thinking (thinking through image) and other sources of cognition – can open a path to mediation between the seemingly oppositional polarities of the subjective and the objective which mechanical rationality so often leaves hardened into unresolvable impedimenta…. These modes of thought possess logic of their own that stands apart from the Enlightenment rigidities.”
The fact that currently in Britain hundreds if not thousands of British citizens are being legally punished for what would be in the USA ordinary free speech shows that oppressive upper elite pattern still is there in the marrow.
Dear Mary Bennett, Siliconguy and Chuaquin
On shipworns, ‘broma’ and the lifespan of wooden ships
‘Don’t forget that triremes only lasted about 2-3 years, so would have to be rebuilt.’
I had no idea that the word ‘trireme’ meant ancient Greek warship. Thanks for that.
That doesn’t mean that any wooden ship in the Mediterranean will last as little.
A Llaüt, small wooden ship used for fishing or just enjoyment is a minority but still can be found on Spanish beaches. Some are more than 20 years old. They need lots of maintenance but well kept will last long years.
Chuaquin
The most common name for people like Drake was a privateer: basically a pirate with a letter from the crown.
The British navy would seldom , if ever,have a crew of primarily pressed sailors. They would be used to make up the losses from casualties or disease.. There were far too many skills required to have an entirely inexperienced crew.
stephen
Speaking of hallucinations, one way magicians and pickpockets work is with distraction. Don’t look at the man behind the curtain! Here’s something I haven’t seen commented on: google has removed the ability to search for news articles from before the last twelve months. Some may come incidentally in a general search, but it prefers more recent articles. Duckduckgo still allows it, I haven’t looked at other search engines.
Consider why the world’s largest search engine wouldn’t want us to be able to easily find news articles from before the last year.
FYI
I see diesel today on the central CA coast at $9.09 per gallon. Amazing it hasn’t affected prices of everything more yet, but I suppose it takes awhile to work its way through the system.
Northwind Grandma – “Thanks for listening” Thanks for telling the tales!
Gunstone, it varies from place to place in Europe, of course. The European subcontinent is very diverse in its histories and its dystopian dimensions.
Scotlyn, your husband is smart in his choice of investments. In a horse race, one horse is certain to win and the others won’t. In most speculative markets, everyone wins for a while, and then everyone loses at least as much as they won.
Agnes, they’re purely a convenience for calculating debt. Yeah, it’s a mess.
Warburton, thanks for this! The jargon-term and the source are both very welcome.
Silicon, yep. Plenty of weirdness there!
Emmanuel, yep. It’s a devil’s bargain on both sides.
Kimberly, no argument there. That’s especially deadly now that global population is peaking and real estate prices have nowhere to go but down…
Scotlyn, funny but true!
Patricia M, thank you for this! I’m delighted to hear it, and not just for career reasons.
Paradoctor, the only one who’s treating this as a dispute is you. Everyone else is saying some variation on “Wow, what an interesting way to look at numbers” — you’re the one who came charging in here trumpeting like a bull elephant (or perhaps a significant fraction of one!) because I wasn’t thinking about numbers your way. I freely admit that yours is one way to think about numbers; it’s the way that’s given us many of the more toxic features of the modern world, and if you’re satisfied with its consequences, hey, by all means keep thinking about numbers that way. There are other options, though, and treating zero as a pseudonumber equivalent to infinity, but on the other end of the number like, is one of them. I’ll be discussing it in more detail later on; consider your fussing on the subject already addressed.
Christophe, thank you for this! I’ve bookmarked it to give it a close read later.
BeardTree, yep — but then civil liberties in Britain are privileges temporarily granted by goverment, not rights hardwired into the foundations of the nation.
Warburton, that’s an excellent point.
Stephen, thanks for the data point.
Three math thoughts before bed, if you’ll permit them:
The number line you’ve described is essentially the positive rationals, or possibly the positive reals depending on how you feel about those (on the one hand, pi is an essential quantity but is not rational; on the other hand almost all reals are uncomputable — worse, almost all are utterly undefinable — though these can be banished by rejecting the Law of the Excluded Middle and working constructively). In either case, what you have is a commutative semifield: a field lacking an additive inverse or negatives.
I tend to think of negative numbers not as a quantity but a quantity adjoined to a direction in one dimension. A classic example is velocity in one dimension: a positive velocity indicates movement one way a negative velocity movement in the opposite direction. The (m, n) construction of the integers from the makes each integer essentially the place you get if you take m steps in one direction followed by n steps in the opposite direction.
In probability theory, Pr(X) = 0 does not necessarily mean the event X cannot happen. We say instead that X almost never happens. This is because there are multiple ways that a probability of 0 can come up as a limit for events that nevertheless can in principle happen (ex: flipping a coin forever and always getting heads).
@ Scotlyn 219; “The Third Policeman.” A favorite of mine! Thank you for bringing it up, and for noticing how apt it is for the current discussion.
@ Beardtree # 224
Are you referring to the UK’s designation of supporters for “Palestine Action” as terrorists? Because, if so, you should know that on 26 August 2026, the US Treasury department joined the UK in its efforts, by designating Palestine Action a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”, leading to the kinds of economic sanctions on individuals, intended to punish them for their speech, that can bite from afar and from across borders through the “hallucinated wealth distribution system” (aka banks) we are discussing here.
In addition of my previous comment about an embarrassing meeting between an Asian-Spanish woke woman and a drunk and angry (and racist-xenophobic) Native man, somewhere in Canada, I’d like to tell you she tried to forgive him in her comic, using the usual commonplaces against evil European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, but she sounded unconvincing (ahem). I think everybody are individual people, beyond our ethnic and national conditions, so we’re responsible for our acts.
It’s interesting another Spanish tourists have had different experiences with Canadian natives. For example, some years ago, a guy wrote an article in my town main newspaper about his trip to Canada. He was in a Canuck town (unfortunately, I can’t remember which one), and he knew near it there was a town/neighborhood populated by Natives. He wanted to go there to meet Canadian “indians”, but some Canadian friends tried to discourage him, “because Natives often are dangerous and even bad people”. However, he got on the bus who led him to the Native town. When he arrived, he saw “normal” houses, well, some of then seemed a bit poor, and of course, there were some Native people in the streets. He never felt threatened nor scared by them. Even he managed to have a talk with some of them, who were to some extent puzzled to see a foreign tourist in their town, and they seemed nice people.
Another experience (fair worse than previous one I’ve told you) was lived by the writer Javier Reverte, during one of his Artic travels (2007). He wrote about it in his book “En mares salvajes”(no English translation available, I’m sorry). During his trip, he arrived to a Canadian small town on the shore of the Artic Sea, during the summer. He saw most people was Inuit or half-Inuit. When he was walking there, he looked at an old man sitting outside a house, so he waved him, hoping to have a talk with him in English. The old man began to shout rude insults against him, as a “damned White Canadian”. Reverte tried to explain him he was an European tourist, not a “White Canadian”, but he had to flee fastly, because the Inuit man speech was more and more agressive.
Then, this writer tried to excuse that racist attitude by the old Inuit, remembering the humiliating actulturation suffered by Native “Indians” and Artic Inuits during English colonization…I think it’s true, but it’s also true that angry Inuit was racist and unfair against Reverte, because of course Spaniards never conquered Inuit people.
In another paragraph of that travel book, this writer said briefly that Canadian “Indians” and Inuits have avoided to mix each others, even they often doesn’t like to get along each other. According some of the first European explorers of North Canada, they even saw wars between “Indians” and Inuits, in which even women and children were killed. Oh the noble savage….It seems xenophobia is unfortunately an universal tendency.
A little bit more of this:
“Are you sure no least fraction of an elephant is there? No bit of dust that was shed from the skin of a circus elephant who passed through your town, no water molecule that was part of an elephant’s body? There may be very little elephant there, but arguably — just as every glass of water you drink contains some of Julius Caesar’s urine — there’s some.”
And again: this from “Hamlet” scene V: “To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till ‘a find it stopping a bunghole?…. Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?”
@siliconguy: I had never heard of the gauge blocks, what a great example of the electrons from supposedly separate objects interacting strongly! The area I know better is protein-protein binding, which is based (partially) on van der Waals interactions, but there it is of course invisible to the eyes.
@paradoctor: As far as I know, at least in telecommunications, “off” doesn’t mean zero volts, it means a lower voltage than “on”. The definition of the set of natural numbers that I learned in school begins with 1, not with 0. In many languages, it is more idiomatic to say “I don’t see elephants”, or “I don’t see any elephants” (that is, constructions that don’t depend on a number zero) instead of “I see no elephants”. But more generally, I do agree that JMG’s argument is stronger when he argues that all numbers are simplifying models imposed on the world we observe.
@Silicon Guy,
Awesome link about the foundry near you. But you might note that they do use electric arc melt furnaces. A melt furnace fired with natural gas can not generate the temperatures needed to Melt cast iron or steel. Gas can only be used to melt aluminum and brass. We sadly lost all the foundries near us long ago, I used to use one with an old fashioned coke ( refined coal) type furnace.
One more comment, although it is getting late in the week.
I feel that a comment thread on the topic of hallucinated wealth is remiss without any mention being made of Frederick Soddy, a physicist who, in 1933, turned his attention to critiquing “orthodox” economic theory in a book called “Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt”. A copy of which may be downloaded at this link – https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140873
CHAPTER IV, which is titled “THE FALLACIES OF ORTHODOX ECONOMISTS: Wealth and Debt,” opens, appropriately enough to this post, as follows:
“Wealth is a positive physical quantity, but debt is a negative quantity. It has no concrete existence, and is to the physicist an imaginary quantity. If we deal with numbers, then we may with great appropriateness give them either sign; but in physics, which deals with real quantities, we can only do so with caution. The positive physical quantity, two pigs, is something anyone may see with their own eyes. It is impossible to see minus two pigs. The least number of pigs that can be physically dealt with is zero. Plus two pigs at least must be taken for granted before we can, even for reckoning, make use of the imaginary quantity, minus two pigs. Though we may, with the utmost mathematical purism, deduct two from one and have left minus one, we cannot deduct two pigs from one pig and have left minus one pig. Indeed, in pure mathematics, negative quantities were first recognised and justified by the Hindu mathematicians by their analogy to debt.
“The economist would probably deny that pigs were necessarily wealth in his sense of the term, for example, if they were running wild and unappropriated. Assuredly a buyer is not going to give anything to a seller for pigs which the seller has not get to sell, and the point seems a meaningless quibble. If the pigs were running wild on a private estate they would be wealth to the owner of the estate, so that we reach the conclusion that it is all a question of private ownership. What is wealth after it is appropriated was not wealth before.”
I first became aware of Mr Soddy’s work following the 2008 bank crisis when we were all trying to figure out how the wildly positive numbers being thrown around during the “Celtic Tiger” years had flipped to become the wildly negative numbers of the Banking Crisis which was apparently going to require that Ireland pony up over 60 billion euros to bail out foreign banks who had made some terrible bets.
At that time, and in that context, reading what a physicist had to say about the hallucinations that were the stock-in-trade of the economists, was like a cold refreshing drink on a thirsty hot day.
Further to my last, I should say that Frederick Soddy was, in fact, a chemist, not a physicist. He was a winner of the 1922 Nobel prize for chemistry.
This link is to a transcript to:
“FREDERICK SODDY – and – THE DOCTRINE OF ‘VIRTUAL WEALTH’
– – – – –
A PAPER PRESENTED TO THE 14TH ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE EASTERN ECONOMICS ASSOCIATION, BOSTON, MASS. MARCH 1988
– by –
J. MARTIN HATTERSLEY, Q.C., M.A., LL.B., FORMER PRESIDENT ECONOMICS SOCIETY OF NORTHERN ALBERTA
https://web.archive.org/web/20081120224637/http://www.nesara.org/articles/soddy88.htm
To many of his readers, Soddy’s major contribution to economics would have been his understanding of the essential role of energy in the creation and preservation of all wealth.
Gunstone # 207:
“Well, there is a distinction between in-group attachment and out-group hatred. Even the infamous Critical Race Theorists note that.”
Yes, it’s infamous: I think CRT is a fake science, but from time to time, indeed they need to see real world facts…
Of course, these two tendencies are common for every human beings, and they explain how some minoritarian ethnic/cultural groups go on being distinguishable today, like Jews and Romani. Indeed, these two human groups share their proud to be one ot the “tribe”, and distrust to people outside their group: “goyim” or “payos”(a Spanish Romani term to depict non-Romani people here).
An anthropologists said a lot of time ago (maybe Claude Levi Strauss?), that ironically, ethnic minorities have managed to keep united as an human group, not only due to their shared ethnical-cultural pride inside their groups, and xenophobia/racism against them commited by outside majorities…but also because they’re more or less, xenophobical/racists against those ethnic or cultural majorities which surround them; so they’ve never been assimilated by aculturation nor genetic mixing with the others…
Of course, groups tendences can be sometimes ignored by individuals from different origins and groups. For example, I’ve had some friends here who are South American and Caribbean people, even I met a time ago a Jewish woman. Nevertheless, I’ve witnessed you and the other person need to “break the ice” beyond evident ethnic and national differences, having some empathy and respect to the other, to find fastly common hobbies and interests (a common ground); then, friendship (or even love) can really begin. Some people can do it, others can’t…
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Aldarion # 211:
“If there is such a thing as consciousness (of course this needs to be stated hypothetically in an academic publication), it is present just as much in the motor neurons and muscle cells as it is in the brain.”
This idea has made me to remember another similar one which I read some years ago in a novel (“The Cave”, in its English translation), written by the Portuguese writer J. Saramago. In addition of his usual (leftists) social concerns, he wrote in a paragraph of his novel that sometimes, you can see in an fine artist and a good craftman or worker, how their hands seem to have their own life and smartness, beyond their “owner” will and freedom (aka central brain/mind), to make their works. It seems IMHO an interesting feeling.
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In a previous comment I wrote (#212), I told you how a lot of new sailors for the Spanish Navy who fought in Trafalgar battle, were kidnapped…er..recruited as “forced voluntaries” even a few days before sail off toward open sea. Of course, I know a heck of British Navy sailors who fought that legendary battle were also near slaves, but unfortunately for mixed alliance between Spain and France Navies, Nelson had had time enough to train fair better his seamanship to make them become hard and old seadogs. So when the battle began, it’s said that when a Spanish Navy gun had managed to shot a cannon shot against a British warship…the Brits had had time enough to shoot two or even three shoot against Spanish and French warships. So do the math: British sailors were faster than their enemies, so it partly explains Nelson posthumous victory (in addition of his brave and risky first maneuver). French Navy sailors were slightly better trained than most of fresh Spaniards, but in spite of it, they weren’t as fast as British gunners…and some of their captains were quite coward and incompetent. Another interesting historical fact: Spanish Navy officers were usually paid in Trafalgar battle times with delay (ahem). This problem and being forced to be eventually under a French Admiral supreme command (a Napoleon puppet), didn’t helped anything for their morale, methink.
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Tyler A.# 214:
“if the banks go under, AND the government crashes out to the point where deposit insurance isn’t available, there’s literally no safe place to park money.”
Of course, I also think this hypothetical situation isn’t happening today and it’s likely won’t happen in near future. However, taking it as work hypothesis for a more long term future, you’re right. I’ve always thought the last and best safe haven is physical gold, even when nowadays it seems there are a gold price bubble, beyond its evident value in geopolitical and domestic crisis like nowadays. Another bubble more, in addition of LLMs one and so on.
Oh wait…if you save gold ingots or coins, you’ll need a good safe and being cautious. However, in very bad times, everybody can guess easily who was rich enough to purchase and pile up gold, so bad luck: Robberies happens, because “good” thieves tend to be clever people. So not even gold is a sure bet, if true bad times would happen…
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Scotlyn # 219:
“you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles…”
I see it’s an ironical writing, but I can tell you, being myself a hardened urban cyclist, that sometimes when I ride my bike, I feel myself and my machine like a kind of mechanical centaur. I’m not kidding! It’s a strange feeling of being one with my machine. I’ve heard sometimes a lot of motorbikers feel the same, well, maybe we share the two wheels magic…
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Patricia # 220:
I’m glad to read good news about young people liking more reading true books…
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Atmospheric # 222:
Thank you again for explaining me in a wider sense American food programs for the needy.
“ALot of places also have a meals on wheels program that brings one premade cooked meal a day to senior citizens who ask for it. Around here, they bring it once a week, 5 frozen meals to reheat plus fruit, bread and milk, and a bag of fresh produce if you ask for it. There is no income requirement.”
That measure is available here too for the elderly who aren’t able to cook by themselves or they don’t want to do it. Meals are cooked and shipped to the users homes by secular and Christian charities, under some control and subsidizing by our government. They seem to work well nowadays.
“They were reselling the soda and living off the free commodity foods So then we get what you read in the news that in some states the cards now cannot be used for soda, chips or candy ( which a few were only buying and reselling).”
Oh, what a dirty and nasty trick…I understand why cards use has been limited in some states, due to that dishonest behavior. I think EU food programs are quite well controlled, first by EU governments which distribute directly food or indirectly control social services within town halls bureaucracy and NGOs) and second by EU which control national govts food delivering program for poor people.
So I tend to think fraud is very low within this food European program. However, it isn’t very strange to find sometimes in some low level neighborhoods, some boxes with food, labelled with the Spanish and EU flags (sure signs of the food program). It seems some poor people didn’t like some part of the food they got by social services, so they dropped it next to garbage containers (some sybarites weren’t hungry enough to eat food they don’t like)…It’s a pity, because that food usually isn’t expired. Well, at least some another people who maybe is really starving can get it in the streets…
Here, a link to EU food aid politics:
https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies-and-activities/funding/fund-european-aid-most-deprived-fead_en
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Agnes # 225:
“I had no idea that the word ‘trireme’ meant ancient Greek warship. Thanks for that.”
Indeed, I think “thireme” means (in Latin and/or ancient Greek), a ship with paddles organized in three levels or rows. So their rowers were sitting in three different benches in each side of their warships.
“A Llaüt, small wooden ship used for fishing or just enjoyment is a minority but still can be found on Spanish beaches. Some are more than 20 years old.”
Llaut boats were also sailing on the Ebro River lower course for some centuries, until big dams eventually finished off their old fashioned work, some years after last Spanish civil war. I think river llauts were partly similar, partly different of sea llauts, but I’m not an expert in boats…
On the other hand, it’s true, wooden ships/boats with a good maintenance, can last that time or even more. According what I’ve read online about usual nowadays ships lifetime, for example a steel container ship for sea voyages crossing oceans, last from 25 to 30 years before be scrapped, more due to technical and economical problems (repairing it becomes too expensive for shipping companies), than because it’s really “rusty to the death”. So I think every modern merchant ship lasts a similar average time…maybe oil and gas tanker are scrapped sooner (I’m thinking in their stricter safety measures).
So, if freshwater metal ships last two times sea ships average lifespan (according what I saw in a documentary about the Great Lakes), I think an American ship which always travel across the famous five Lakes could last easily 50 years on service.
Wooden ships usually seem to last less time than steel ships, but…I´ve read in novels and history books that some old wooden warships which fought in Trafalgar battle, had been sailing in service for 30 or 40 years before (they usually were very slow, ahem). For example, the “Santísima Trinidad” (Spanish Navy flagship, because it was the biggest one) was in 1805 near 40 years old (oops). However, the warship Rayo was even older: it had been working for the Navy for 55 years (!!) when it went under in Trafalgar due to British cannon fire. Well, I’m sorry if I bore you with my Trafalgar-mania, but I love to read everything about Napoleonic wars History, ground war and naval war alike…Have you noticed it?
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Stephen P. # 226:
“The most common name for people like Drake was a privateer: basically a pirate with a letter from the crown.”
Thank you, I din’t know that word. I think your short depiction of Mr. Drake job is the same depicted by the French word “Corsair” and the Spanish one “Corsario”. Indeed, “our” privateers/corsaires had a letter from the King too; its name was “patente de corso”. That usually was meaning they were allowed to attack foreign enemy ships, in exchange for national protection (which true pirates never hadn’t: so they could be eventually hanged, because they weren’t “war prisoners”) and giving a part of their plunders to their King. Clever pirates tried to become privateers, guess why…
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Warburton # 227:
“Consider why the world’s largest search engine wouldn’t want us to be able to easily find news articles from before the last year.”
A good question…I bet there are some dirty reasons to do it:
1-Modern companies and their Faustian minds hate the past, so they usually can think knowing History is an useless hobby. So let’s erase the past…
2-Politicians, bad journalists, CEOs and advertisers are stronger in their power if/when manage to make people forget past events, who could be painful for their current goals. They like people with the “memory of a gold fish” to fool them better.
3-(…) Do you have any more idea about this decision?
And one more, extremely topical quote from Frederick Soddy’s “Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt”, 1933
“Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and compound interest. The former applies when the interest is periodically paid, the latter when it is not paid. For sufficient reason, the process of compound interest is physically impossible, though the process of compound decrement is physically common enough. Because the former leads with passage of time ever more and more rapidly to infinity, which, like minus one, is not a physical but a mathematical quantity, whereas the latter leads always more slowly towards zero, which is, as we have seen, the lower limit of physical quantities.”
Lathechuck 229
Thank you.
In so many words, without using these specific words, JMG taught me/guided me to tell stories on subjects I personally experienced (“first person accounts”). Not only that, if one is the ONLY person who can tell the story, so much the better. There is no better testament than a person telling a story that only (s)he knows.
I keep out of trouble, mostly, by telling first person stories, to my recollection, that no-one else can tell. I got the idea from the magazine, “The Sun,” which requires this of writers:
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/
Occasionally here, I touch on a subject where I get booed off the stage. [Meh, with a slight flick of the hand.] At that, I pass from sight, mingling with shadows.
💨🫥➫💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Here’s a jaw-dropping indicator of the hallucinated economy going poof for regular folks who are now scrabbling for the real resources: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1wjydiy/what_warning_signs_of_a_worsening_economy_are_you/
Clay Dennis 237
> We sadly lost all the foundries near us long ago
Triple bummer.
Where are you? In the USA, at least we still have Lodge Cast Iron cookware🍳 in Tennessee:
https://www.lodgecastiron.com/
I am a collector of Lodge cast iron cookware (non-enamel). I LUV-UV Lodge’s wares; they are so high quality. I will buy a piece from other cast iron manufacturers only if Lodge doesn’t have the size pot/pan I want, which is roughly every five years.
💨🫥🍳💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Chuaquin#245
I think that you’ll enjoy reading Trafalgar ( Pérez Galdós)
Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós | Project Gutenberg https://share.google/FC81YBGrjmzfR8UHY
Agnes @ 225, Triremes were a kind of ancient warship which had three banks of oars. They were fairly new in Themistocles’ day and replaced the earlier penticoster, which had 25 rowers on each side. Historians still can’t agree about where triremes were first developed and deployed; Corinth and Carthage are the chief contenders. BTW, to whomever mentioned ‘paddles’ above, any boat enthusiast will indignantly tell you that oars and paddles are NOT the same thing. I am not sure what is the difference.
“the process of compound interest is physically impossible”
I dispute that. In a chemical plant it’s called thermal runaway. In a nuclear reactor it’s called supercriticality. Then there is the fruit flies in a jar experiment.
Now if you want to argue that unlimited compound interest in a physical system always ends badly I won’t argue at all.
Tyler #214
I think that you’ll interest these two links:
The first is a video about the fading of Middle Class because the inability of capitalis for to expoil New gegraphical zones
https://youtu.be/uHdFVBbOSEI?is=IdvWwcaau_Yxkv9
The second is of our admired archdruid warning us about the madness of investing in assets in an economy in terminal contration.
https://youtu.be/uHdFVBbOSEI?is=IdvWwcaau_Yxkv9E
https://share.google/e0oheicPemWlu1cxT
I would remember you the blocking of bank acounts wich dew years ago was decreted by the Canadian Goverment against the truck drivers who were oposed against COVID vaccines
Northwind, I am glad you like the Lodge cast iron, now that the older Wagner and Griswold have become impossible to find outside the overpriced resale venues. I bought the older cast iron for years, to use and then pass on to the girls and grands. I do like Lodge’s wok shaped pan, bought three, for me and each girl.
A heads up, vintage Revere ware is currently out of fashion among collectors. I have seen piles of it in thrift venues at quite reasonable prices. If you need some decent sauce pans, sans the nasty coatings, now is a good time to find some Reveres.
PS – and I am now at risk of “hammering on a point”, I know, but JMG, in view of comments you have made in the past about the difficulties in setting up communes and such, and attributed to people’s lust for leisure and aversion to work, you may be especially interested in the brief section entitled “The interest-bearing Theory of Wealth”, closely followed by the section entitled “The conflict between Leisure and Wealth” which begin at the bottom of page 90 of the pdf version of “Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt” by Frederick Soddy. https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140873
“The better educated and leisured classes, indeed, now usually regard the physical conception of wealth—i.e. actual goods, food, fuel and the like—as a crude and rude idea that civilisation has grown out of. To them civilisation means a much more advanced stage of society, and of “progress” in which wealthy people derive leisure without any effort in perpetuity as an interest payment on some form of communal debt.
“The debt may be a simple debt like Consols, War Loan, etc., in which case they derive their livelihood without assisting in production of wealth from the communal revenue of wealth, as a payment of an annual sum in return for not being repaid their principal. Or it may be derived as a hire-payment for the use of some agent or accessory essential to the production of wealth which they lend to the community. So used are they to living on the interest of debt that they do not realise sufficiently the absurdity of everyone trying to do so.”
This “leisure [living off investment income] class” was obviously the elite class which did get effectively replaced by WWII and the arrangements that came after. However its echoes are still with us. 🙂
@ JMG and all Druids here: Blessed Alban Elued. For everyone else, Happy Fall Equinox and a rich harvest.
About the state of the world today: a retro gem from Tom Lehrer.
“They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain, there’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain. The whole world is festering in unhappy souls: the French hate the Germans (insert long list here), and I don’t like anybody very much! …..There’s strife in Iran….what nature doesn’t do to us, will be done by our fellow man.”
Now for your regularly scheduled B-Movie Marathon, with horror host Jonathan Cahn! The creature feature flick this Tuesday evening, sparkling with the first chill weather since the dog days blasted their bellicose heat into the late summers fiery furnace, is none other than the Altar of Pergamon. It lives! It breathes! It belches with the ferocity of a man who has just shotgunned three cold cans of Schlitz lager. It beats on the brow like a bit of Blatz! And in these moments that are about to terrify and tantalize with a voice so visionary and venal, there is such a furor of prophetic frenzy it will make even the laziest and tamest canines turn into rabid Cujo’s of the soul. Prepare yourselves!
” IS IT POSSIBLE… That there exists an ancient mystery that lies behind the events of the modern world? An ancient object created over 2000 years ago and yet is altering the course of world history? The secret behind the events of our age, the past, present, and the future? Could it lie behind the greatest calamities of the modern world . . . · The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich · World War I · The Holocaust · World War II · The spread of Marxism · The rise of the Soviet Union · Nuclear war · The near end of the world · What is yet to come, even a new world order · And much, much more . . . And where is it bringing the world? Who is the dark angel? And what are the unseen forces at work and moving behind the events of the modern world? In what may be his most stunning and monumental book yet, The Altar of Pergamon: The Mystery of the Dark Angel and the Future of the World, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Jonathan Cahn opens up the ancient mystery that has affected and is affecting everyone on earth . . . even you! For the first time in years, Cahn reveals the mystery through a story, the spellbinding account of Ariel Herzog, a skeptic known for dismantling the claims of the supernatural, but who receives a cryptic page of a secret book. The page opens up an ancient mystery. The mystery will lead Herzog and an unlikely ally, Lara Winter, to undertake a journey that will span the globe to unlock the mystery, page by page, revelation by revelation. The journey will take them from New York City to Istanbul, to Berlin, to Eastern Europe, to Moscow, New Mexico, Havana, Jerusalem, and beyond. In each place, they will encounter a mysterious agent connected to the mystery holding the keys to unlock the next secret and piece of the puzzle. But they are not alone. They will find themselves watched, tracked, and pursued by the members of a dark organization who have guarded the mystery from ancient times. And those who draw too close to unlocking its secret do so at the risk or cost of their lives. The Altar of Pergamon will reveal the Visitor, the Man in the Bazaar, the Dark Kingdom, the Monster’s Birth, the Guardians of the Throne, the Wizard, the Hall of Mirrors, the Stranger on the Train, the Dark Priesthood, the Ancient Matrix, the Black Gate, the Winged Creature, the Unholy of Holies, the Lightning of the Gods, the Woman and the Beast, What Was and Is to Come, the End of All Things, and much, much more. It may sound like a thriller… a fantasy… something out of an Indiana Jones adventure… Lord of the Rings… or the DaVinci Code . . . But The Altar of Pergamon is different from all of these … Because the mystery it reveals is not fiction It’s real… It will change the way you see the world. It has already altered the course of world history… and maybe even your life. It is the mystery on which the future of the world hangs in the balance. And your future may depend on it. The Altar of Pergamon – The Mystery of the Dark Angel and the Future of the World – the book you can’t afford not to read!”– Provided by publisher.
The Altar of Pergamon by Jonathan Cahn
Tune in again next week when Kolchak the Night Stalker hires an exorcist to do a banishing ritual over the New York Times bestseller list and over the demons of daytime television.
This PSA has been brought to you by a generous donation from the Situationist Intergalactical, Jamcon ’26 division.
TemporaryReality
As a poster on the chans I am obligated not to use Reddit. So I’ll post my example here. I work with shipping supplies to big retailers. The average cost of shipping has more than doubled in this year alone. The most recent price increase happened yesterday, all the big companies FedEx, UPS, etc. updated their pricing overnight. So expect groceries to increase over the coming weeks.
There’s also something else interesting going on with big shipping companies, but I’ll save that for the next open post.
Interesting about Tom Lehrer, Patricia… does anyone remember Tom Clay?
What the World Needs Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPABesa7wcE
A cringeworthy LP from yesteryear and a favorite to play on the radio (at least every so rarely).
@Patricia Mathews (#252):
Thanks for calling up wonderful old memories by reminding me of that song.
TemporaryReality 243 (16 Sept 2026 of last week)
> on Calgarianexplorer
Each man to himself attitude.
Companies not promoting family culture (or culture) any more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1wjydiy/what_warning_signs_of_a_worsening_economy_are_you/
me: I asked, what is “family culture”? I never heard of it. I have heard of family ‘values,’ like “Addams Family Values.”
Then I went to a link of an organization I recognize:
https://www.focusonthefamily.com/planned-giving-legacy-post/what-is-family-culture/
them: “So what is family culture? It’s when we have a specific set of articulated values, a vision for a way of life and a mission of living that out daily. Taking off what [blankety-blank] says, family is one of the first places we find meaning in the world.“
me: Ahh, I got it: ‘family values.’
Since World War II (1945 onwards), Americans (of all income levels) have given zero attention to family values: junk food is what Americans most value. Americans are in BIG trouble if they are unable to forge values pretty darn quick. (I am not optimistic.) Or else my crystal ball says Americans will resort to thievery, thuggery, and other dastardly deeds, as value-substitutes, on a regular basis. They won’t/don’t care who they hurt, as long as they “get theirs.” They will either partake of crime, or war.
Or, as a third choice, Americans defaulting to “Mean Cuss Borderline Personality Disorder.”
Heaven forbid Americans ponder formal training in a trade school (for a year or two; no matter age or gender). Why not learn a skill like welder, cook, or, for sitters, bookkeeping? (aka skilled trades) Heaven forbid they learn to “pinch pennies,” which by now is “pinch 50¢’s.” Heaven forbid, they learn about humility or repentance.
Being so late on a Tuesday, I fancy that tomorrow will be open-post, so maybe I shall re-post this entry tomorrow. I have seen others occasionally post twice.
💨🫥🥷🏼💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Mary Bennet 249
> Revere ware
Yes, I do like Revere ware. Are you referring to the brand, or generically to pots and pans?
I can’t imagine steel pots and pans being given away. Except for cast iron, what else would one use to cook on one’s stovetop? I value steel pots and pans that have rubber/insulated handles; lids made of glass and have rubber/insulated top-knot handles. These specifications are hard to find.
Speaking of cookware, I am “unable to stomach” (pun intended) non-stick coatings. I feel non-stick coatings are poison. I refuse to have the stuff in my house. Cast iron is great as non-stick, as long as one takes time to rub cooking oil into the pores periodically. I wig out at rubbing oil cast iron; it is a meditation. Steel pots and pans, I don’t have problems with those,— they just need to be honored for what they are: the workhorses of the kitchen. If one is worried about sticking, merely add a pat of butter early in the cooking. I don’t mind sticking, as when encouraging browning and crusting.
Now one thing does come to mind. I have no idea from where I picked this up. If I remember correctly, China had/has a glut of steel. They just had/have TOO MUCH STEEL. Perhaps pots and pans in thrift stores reflects this glut. Anyone know details about China+steel?
💨🫥🥘💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Mary, if I may, an oar requires an oarlock. A paddle is hand held.
Mary Bennet – As far as I know, “paddles” are held in the hands, while oars are attached to the boat in oar-locks which pivot as the rower pulls on the oar. Canoes and kayaks use paddles. Dories, dingies, skiffs, and sculls are row-boats.
Incidentally, paddlers face the bow; rowers face the stern.
I read this on Reddit in reply to “What warning signs of a worsening economy…”, but I am maximally befuddled. The writer evidently works in a library, and wrote this:
“Library is very busy with more and more people needing help and services that we aren’t equipped to handle. But we do our best to help as much as we can as we are one of the last free institutions.”
[The writer did not elaborate, and I cannot ask him/her.]
What COULD the writer be talking about: “services that we aren’t equipped to handle”? (I could be facetious but shall refrain.) For those working in a library (or knowing a librarian), do you have insight into what could be going on when a member of the public asks a librarian for help, but it is not in a librarian’s job description to assist in such a matter? I can’t begin to ask an intelligent question other than “what?” I would appreciate assistance in unraveling this mystery,— I am missing a piece of the puzzle. Give me a clue.
💨🫥🕵🏼♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Mary Bennet, Clarence and Lathechuck – re paddles/oars.
Generally you “paddle your own canoe” – meaning you hold your propelling implement in your own hands and you can dip it into the water on either side of your craft., and as far forward and/or backward as you can reach.
Oars are set into oarlocks which keep them fixed to one side of the boat, and although two of them can be operated by a single rower, oars open up the prospect of a larger, communal, organised, team effort – and, presuming a co-ordinated rhythm can be initiated – oars can be effectively operated by very large numbers of rowers, each sitting at their station beside a fixed oarlock.
Paddles do not lend themselves to communal propulsion. Oars do.
(maybe too late, but I’m going to try comnenting my last comment here)
JMG # 230:
“In most speculative markets, everyone wins for a while, and then everyone loses at least as much as they won.”
It seems like self-deception within gambling addicts. They look only good times when they are lucky to win, but soon they begin to loose a lot of money, but they don’t want to notice it. They are lucky again, but they don’t want to think that good times will end soon or later.
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“civil liberties in Britain are privileges temporarily granted by goverment, not rights hardwired into the foundations of the nation.”
I think you’re right. Indeed, UK has never had a written Constitution which everybody can read to know what the heck are their rights…
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Scotlyn # 241:
“Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and compound interest.”
I think debt and creditors are ruthless and near eternal, until debtor pays them.
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Anselmo # 245:
Well, I’ve read “Trafalgar”, the most famous “Episodio Nacional” written by Pérez Galdós. Indeed, it’s within my bookshelf…I’ve got “Cabo Trafalgar”, by Pérez Reverte, too, but let’s draw a veil…I think it’s worse than old novel by Galdos, though being a modern novel, it shows more accureate technical data, to say something in favor of Perez Reverte.
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Mary B. # 246:
“any boat enthusiast will indignantly tell you that oars and paddles are NOT the same thing.”
I take note of it, though I can also tell you English isn’t my mother tongue, and I’m an “earthling” guy who lives far from the sea…
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Clarence # 259 and Lathechuck # 260:
Thanks for clarifying the difference. By the way, an “oarlock” in spanish is called “tolete”, a word which always makes me laugh, I think it sounds funnyto my “inland” eyes and ears. I’m a freswater sailor!
@ Chuaquin #263
“I think debt and creditors are ruthless and near eternal, until debtor pays them.”
May I ask if you see this as an objective truth? …as a moral imperative? Both? Neither? Something else?