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Latest Issues of #AxisOfEasy

While the Herd Slumbers, Risk Is Rocketing Higher

By Charles Hugh Smith | August 4, 2021 | 0 Comments
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This wholesale transfer of risk from elites to the workers is finally becoming consequential as wealth / income / security inequality is reaching extremes that are destabilizing society and the economy. One of the most consequential financial trends of the past 50 years has been ignored to the point of invisibility.

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What’s Behind the Inflation Hall of Mirrors?

By Charles Hugh Smith | August 3, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The global economy may have finally run up against hard limits of “infinite substitution” and “infinite expansion” funded by central-bank free money. We are in an interesting, Hall of Mirrors moment: prices are rising, yet we’re assured by the Federal Reserve that this inflation is “transitory,” and other voices are insisting the primary forces of the economy (globalization, debt and automation) are all profoundly deflationary, meaning prices of everything will eventually plummet as supply will outstrip demand.

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Why Don’t Billionaires Pay the Same High Tax Rates the Rest of Us Pay?

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 30, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing. As with everything else in polarized America, billionaires proclaiming space tourism is the next for humanity neatly divides opinion into two camps: those who laud the initiative, hard work and innovations of the billionaires as examples of the American Can-Do Dream, and those who wished the billionaire space tourists had taken a one-way flight to a distant orbit of blissful silence.

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The Moment Wall Street Has Been Waiting For: Retail Is All In

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 28, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The ideal bagholder is one who adds more on every downturn (buy the dip) and who refuses to sell (diamond hands), holding on for the inevitable Fed-fueled rally to new highs. Old hands on Wall Street have been wary of being bearish for one reason, and no, it’s not the Federal Reserve: the old hands have been waiting for retail–the individual investor– to go all-in stocks.

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Taking power back from the algorithm

By Jesse Hirsh | July 28, 2021 | 0 Comments
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I was driving home from an errand run early this (Monday) morning when I saw two of my goats in the middle of the side road near our house. We had lent our two male goats to a neighbour, as we didn’t want them knocking up our young female goats (as yet). This neighbour had underestimated both the goats ability to escape containment, as well as their desire to reproduce.

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#AxisOfEasy 206: Stop What You’re Doing: Apple iOS Edition

By Mark E. Jeftovic | July 27, 2021 | 5 Comments
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Stop What You’re Doing: Apple iOS Edition,
Akamai DNS outage craters huge chunk of internet,
Researchers inject malware into artificial neurons … this and more in our weekly Axis of Easy #206

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WTF is the Metaverse?!

By Jesse Hirsh | July 26, 2021 | 1 Comment
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It may no longer be a cliché to argue that we live in different realities that themselves appear to be diverging. The obvious example being the expanding gap between those of us who have taken the science behind this pandemic seriously, and those who have indulged and succumbed to conspiracy.

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America Is a Moral Cesspool, and Student Loans Prove It

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 25, 2021 | 0 Comments
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If America somehow managed to educate millions of college students without burdening them with $2 trillion in debt in 1993, why is it now “impossible” to do so, even as America’s wealth and gross national product (GDP) have both rocketed higher over the past 27 years?

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America Has Lost the Trade War with China, and the Real Pain Has Yet to Begin

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 23, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Corporate America sacrificed national interests in service of greed, and so did the U.S. government. As we all know, the source of Corporate America’s unprecedented explosion in profits in the 21st century is the offshoring of manufacturing to China.

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The bot era has begun

By Jesse Hirsh | July 22, 2021 | 0 Comments
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It’s easy to recognize that automation has had a huge opportunity to advance as a result of the pandemic. However as a concept, automation is both broad and abstract. It manifests in a myriad of ways, depending upon the context and user.

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Have We Reached "Peak Self-Glorifying Billionaire"?

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 22, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Perhaps we should update Marie Antoinette’s famous quip of cluelessness to: “Let them eat space tourism.” As billionaires squander immense resources on self-glorifying space flights, the corporate media is nothing short of worshipful.

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#AxisOfEasy 205: US Gov Flags COVID Misinfo Stories For Facebook To Delete

By Mark E. Jeftovic | July 20, 2021 | 3 Comments
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Cloudflare CDN.js bug introduced critical vulnerability into 12% of websites online,
The US government flags COVID misinfo stories for Facebook to delete,
Trading Big Tech shares while regulating them has made Nancy Pelosi $ 70,000,000 USD… this and much more in Axis of Easy #205

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Big Tech: "Our Terms Have Changed"

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
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So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don’t be surprised if bad things start happening. I received another “Our Terms Have Changed” email from a Big Tech quasi-monopoly, and for a change I actually read this one. It was a revelation on multiple fronts.

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How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 18, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice. The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common:

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Welcome to the 21st Century Sequel of the Catastrophic 1600s

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 16, 2021 | 0 Comments
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As the chart below on ‘how systems collapse’ illustrates, the loss of stabilizing buffers goes unnoticed until the entire structure collapses under its own weight. Disruptive extremes of weather: check Rising geopolitical tensions with no diplomatic resolution: check Multiplying scarcities in essential commodities: check Domestic disorder accelerates as extreme positions harden into irreconcilable conflicts: check

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Here’s Why America’s Labor-Shortage Will Drive Inflation Higher

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 14, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Great swaths of the American workforce are already on strike or slipping away from the dead-end treadmill. America’s labor shortage is complex and doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic expectations favored by media talking heads. The Wall Street cheerleaders extol the virtues of “getting America back to work” which is Wall-Street-speak for getting back to exploiting workers to maximize corporate profits.

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#AxisOfEasy 204: New “Hate Speech” Bill Provides For Pre-Crime, House Arrest And Ankle Tracking Bracelets

By Mark E. Jeftovic | July 13, 2021 | 3 Comments
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Canada’s C-36 “hate speech” bill provides for pre-crime, house arrest and ankle tracking bracelets,
Cuba shuts down Internet as mass protests erupt in the streets,
White House wants social media and SMS carriers to police “misinformation” in text messages…this and much more in Axis of Easy # 204

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The $50 Trillion Plundered from Workers by America’s Aristocracy Is Trickling Back

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 12, 2021 | 0 Comments
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As I often note here, when you push the pendulum to an extreme of wealth and income inequality, it will swing to the opposite extreme minus a tiny bit of friction. The depth of America’s indoctrination can be measured by the unquestioned assumption that Capital should earn 15% every year, rain or shine, while workers are fated to lose ground every year, rain or shine.

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Housing Bubble #2: Ready to Pop?

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 8, 2021 | 0 Comments
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All debt-fueled speculative bubbles pop, even as cheerleaders claim otherwise. The expansion of Housing Bubble #2 is clearly visible in these two charts of house valuations, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve database (FRED). The first is the Case-Shiller Index, which as you recall tracks the price of homes on an “apples to apples” basis, i.e. it tracks price movements for the same house over time.

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The right to repair is not the ability to repair

By Jesse Hirsh | July 8, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Living out in the country, the repair ethos flourishes. I suspect it is partly a consequence of extra space. Seemingly everyone has a project vehicle or two, in addition to some broken heavy equipment, and extra machines kept on hand for spare parts.

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#AxisOfEasy 203: Another Supply Chain Attack Infects Thousands Of Businesses With Ransomware

By Mark E. Jeftovic | July 6, 2021 | 5 Comments
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Canada’s new “Guiding Principles” for Internet are “Creepily Totalitarian,”
Another SolarWinds type supply chain hack as Kaseya discloses breach,
Microsoft researchers find Netgear router vulnerability… this and more in this week’s Axis of Easy #203

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For Canada Day 2021: new Guiding Principles for the Internet, all of it

By AxisOfEasy | July 6, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The new Broadcasting Act, Bill C10, may be stymied in the Senate of Canada, but the actual content of its policy objectives has just been released. Heritage Canada has published “Guiding Principles on Diversity of Content online.”

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A Few Things About Reinforced Concrete High-Rise Condos

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 6, 2021 | 0 Comments
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There is a downside to steel reinforcing bars: they rust. The second most remarkable thing about the sudden collapse of the Florida condo building was the rush to assure everyone that this was a one-off catastrophe: all the factors fingered as causes were unique to this building, the implication being all other high-rise reinforced concrete condos without the exact same mix of causal factors were not in danger.

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July 4th: Sorry, America, You Lost Me

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 4, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Star Wars 24 plus the novelized version, amusement park ride, podcast, action figure and OnlyFans pages, anyone? I happened to be in a Big Box Emporium, buying two bags of whole wheat flour, when a strange revelation struck me: almost nothing in this giant emporium was made in the USA.

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Virus Z: A Thought Experiment

By Charles Hugh Smith | July 1, 2021 | 0 Comments
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What’s striking about our thought experiment is how little reliable data we have about the transmissibility of our hypothetical and the long-term consequences of its mutations. Let’s run a thought experiment on a hypothetical virus we’ll call Virus Z, a run-of-the-mill respiratory variety not much different from other viruses which are 1) very small; 2) mutate rapidly and 3) infect human cells and modify the cellular machinery to produce more viral particles.

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Contributors

Mark E. Jeftovic

Mark E. Jeftovic

Mark is the co-founder of easyDNS and the editor-in-chief of #AxisOfEasy. He is the author of Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS (Packt UK, 2018) and Unassailable: Protect Yourself from Deplatform Attacks & Cancel Culture. 

The Canadian Bitcoiners

The Canadian Bitcoiners

Joey Tweets and Len the Lengend are the hosts of The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast, and you may recognize them as the voices (and faces) behing the AxisOfEasy Podcast. CanadianBitcoiners.com

Charles Hugh Smith

Charles Hugh Smith

Charles Hugh Smith is the author of numerous books and writes from OfTwoMinds.com.