Home

Unexpected things tend to happen when the real source of problems are papered over and then suddenly reality intrudes.

Isn’t AI just a shoddy facsimile of authentic expertise that “serves the state and the media” in a new theater of Spectacle?

After all, “they can always print more money.” That’s always the solution until it becomes the problem.

No nation clinging to the current “waste is growth / landfill economy” will survive the emergent global polycrisis.

Let’s dispense with human presidential candidates and conventions, and replace both the candidates and their supporters with idealized AI fabrications.

Economists and pundits steer well clear of the eventual social and political consequences of America’s entrenched neofeudal wealth-income inequality.

History suggests such a stratified society cannot endure as a democracy.
When we say “The Wealthy Are Not Like You and Me,” most people will assume we’re talking about
ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) with $30 million or more in assets or even the hyper-rich worth hundreds of millions or billionaires.

Everything is boring, even the aliens. Sometimes truth is best revealed tongue-in-cheek, that is, in semi-serious banter rather than supposedly serious analysis.

The fragmentation, simplification and localization of the post-Imperial era offers us lessons we ignore at our peril.
There is an entire industry devoted to “why the Roman Empire collapsed,” but the post-collapse era may be offer us higher value lessons.

The problem with bubbles of received wisdom and herd-euphoria is conditions change but the risk of something untoward happening is still perceived as inconsequentially low.

We can pretend an insanely over-leveraged, fragile status quo is rock-solid and will deliver the goodies regardless of anything short of an alien invasion or meteor-strike, but pretending will only take us so far.

The ideal ‘sound money system’ is one in which many currencies, both state-issued and privately issued, compete in a transparent global marketplace.

Now that America has been transformed from a high-trust social order into a low-trust social order, there’s no going back.

The risks of gambling in speculative frenzies and depending on serial asset bubbles continuing forever are easily observable, yet few act to reduce these risks.

But the status quo has much to unlearn, and it seems the only pathway to a new understanding is a Great Depression.

Those who got out early (i.e. now) will be glad they acted promptly and those caught in the decline will regret their faith in a high-cost system that was no longer affordable or sustainable.

Eventually policy-makers turn the dials to 11 and nothing happens.
Many others have explained why inflation is part-and-parcel of the status quo. In the simplest terms, where’s why inflation is essential:

So what happens if AI destroys both profits (due to it being “free” and a freely distributed commodity) and jobs?

Now that debt is rising faster than “growth,” and “growth” is dependent on speculative credit-asset bubbles, the collapse of the Keynesian dream looms large. Unbeknownst to economists, the Keynesian bedrock of modern economics–using financial repression and government spending funded by debt to manage the business cycle of growth and recession–is an artifact of a century of expansive cheap energy and virtuous demographics.