Energy – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Energy: We Need Everything. Now.

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy: sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body. Anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

What do you do with a dead chemist? Barium.

I remember way back in high school gym class when I was a freshman. One day we showed up in the gym and saw a roughly six-foot diameter ball in the middle of the gym floor, as if a majestic bird the size of Alec Baldwin had left an egg for us.

That was new.

Coach said, “Welcome to Push Ball. Wilder and Jones, you two are captains. Pick your teams.” Jones and I were on the football team together, so we divvied up the rest of the boys. I think the girls were doing something like advanced couch-sitting that day.

Coach followed up: “Here are the rules. No rules. If your team pushes the ball into the opposing team’s bleacher, you get a point.” Technically, that was a rule, but I decided not to argue.

Pretty quickly I divined that part of the point of Push Ball was to burn up a lot of energy on a game that was very hard to win. Probably “something, something teamwork blah blah blah”.

But then I looked at the ball. It was filled with air, not Baldwin-DNA-soaked egg yolk, so it wasn’t all that heavy. But it was way too big for any one person to grab.

It wasn’t entirely smooth, though. There were laces.

These laces were like those on a football, except the gap between the laces was big – big enough to slip my fingers through. I developed a plan. I told my guys, “It’s gonna get easy – we’re gonna win. When I say go, get in front of me and block.”

Alternate meme text: “When the weather tells you to dress for the 100’s.”

As we played, I concentrated on rotating the laces towards me. When they were right there about shoulder height, I slipped my fingers in the gaps between the laces, and got a good hold.

“Now!” I yelled.

With the leverage of the handhold, I could easily use the opposing team’s force to pop the ball back towards me, and up. And with the ball gone, my guys got in front and blocked. I ran, holding the absurdly large ball over my head with one hand and slammed it into the retracted bleachers causing the wood to reverberate under the mighty force, scoring the first point.

“THIS. IS. SPARTA!” I yelled. Okay, no I didn’t, it sounds way cooler to pretend that I did. And I sure as hell felt like Thor (not the fake Marvel® one) slamming his hammer and making the lightning crash. Our team really did high five.

Coach blew his whistle.

“Okay, we now have a rule. You can’t do that.”

We had a really good weightlifting facility.

Weirdly, this post is the second one about energy. In one sense, our world is like that game of push ball. We work to innovate and create breakthroughs to better use the energy we have. The number of cars are up in the country, but the miles per gallon are way up, too.

Government would love to take credit for it, but it’s really not the case. Sure the CAFE standards have led to higher mileage, but a lot of that is due to innovation that occurred outside of those standards. When I read that the Trans Am® in Smokey and the Bandit only produced 200 horsepower, I realized that most of the cars I own have more power under the hood, and get better mileage. I always wanted a car with a T-top like the Trans Am™ in high school, so my dates could have had more legroom.

I was considerate that way.

We have become more efficient at using energy, and that’s great. But we find more uses for energy, too. If I lived in the same house today in 1977, right now there would be zero power usage outside of the fridge and the freezer. As it is, I’m watching a silly movie on a huge television while I type on a laptop with alarm clocks that don’t tick from springs winding down. I’m happy for that, because if the alarm clock would go tic-tic-tic all night, it would keep The Mrs. awake and she’d want to toc.

Is my house using a lot of energy? No, but there are a lot more devices in a home today using energy passively, like charging cell phones and security systems and “always on” televisions and computers and garage door openers on low power mode.

I drove up to my garage and saw someone had painted a “3” on it. I thought, “That’s odd.”

Even industry is more efficient, generally, at using energy. Modern manufacturing plants are expert at using what would have been waste heat in all sorts of ways to save energy, which in turn saves money. I mean, don’t be an engineer if you’re not so hot in thermodynamics.

But at the base of all modern industry, energy is crucial. It is the ultimate leverage. One analyst noted that $20 billion in Russian natural gas was used by Germany to create $2 trillion in economic output. That’s stuff made. It’s amazing leverage – $1 in natural gas was the basis for creating $100 worth of added value. Germany would like to start a war, but the rule is that it’s three Reichs, and you’re out.

Energy is that important. And energy usage isn’t a linear progression – it has been exponential. The problem is that energy usage is growing nearly exponentially. If you look at any short-term graphs, it doesn’t quite show it, but here’s one that puts it in perspective. I got it at Our World in Data (LINK) and it’s reused by CC (LINK).

If Ebola grew as fast as the world energy consumption, it would be called Hyperbola.

I think this one graph alone should be tattooed backward on the head of every Leftist who says BuT MUh ALtERnaTivE EneRgy. Eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas, and you have a world that, roughly, has as much energy as 1920.

The world population right now is 7.97 billion people. In 1920, the population was closer to 1.9 billion, which is roughly the number of people on a typical airplane nowadays. In 1920 electricity was only in 35% of homes. In the United States. Most people in the world in 1920 had no electrical power usage at all, heated their homes with firewood or coal, and only saw electrical lights at the picture show. Also, they were, sadly, almost sixty years too early to see Smokey and the Bandit.

Let’s go back to Germany (not the 1920 version) but today. Just $20 billion in natural gas costs $2 trillion in value added. Population is growing exponentially. Energy use is growing exponentially. We’re setting ridiculous ideas that we’ll be all-electric by 2030 by changing rules to limit innovation and declare winners. It’s like Coach not allowing innovation in Push Ball, but this time with real-world consequences.

But those electric cars. They’re powered by . . . what, exactly? Seriously, look at the chart. What? Nuclear we haven’t built? Solar which is so small it can’t be seen? Hydropower which is in decline because it can’t be built? Wind? I can’t see wind outside, and I also can barely see it on the chart.

Looks like the Green Energy Plan is free of charge.

Anyone, and I mean anyone who is not realizing that the Leftist energy pipe dream won’t lead to the greatest suffering that mankind has ever seen, even more than anything Global Warming® could ever cause, even more than both of the World Wars, combined, is deluded.

We need more innovation in energy, and we need it now, because the exponentials in energy use and population require investment to keep ahead of the game. Exponentials are funny that way, you have to be like Alice’s Red Queen and run faster and faster just to stay in place.

The Leftists that want to bring it all down? They deserve to be put into a Push Ball filled with Alec Baldwin’s DNA-soaked yolk.

The Biggest Shock: Energy

“Oil, Butt-Head. It’s oil. We’ve struck oil.” – Beavis and Butt-Head

I caught my bread moving to the music on the counter the other night. I guess it was a bun dance.

We’re 30 months past the start of the ‘Rona outbreak. Sure, it doesn’t seem like that long, but in many ways it seems so much longer, like being forced to watch Amy Schumer talk to Chuck Schumer about cheese. What happened, due to the reaction to the ‘Rona, was one of the biggest supply shocks that the world has ever seen.

When the ripples of that shock moved from country to country, things broke down. The world, at that point just before the pandemic was an amazingly efficient machine. It was wonderful at taking oil and turning it into important things, like Pringles®, hairspray, and cell phone cases.

But, I said that the economy was efficient – that means that all of the parts were needed – there were few wasted factories, and, few wasted workers. We lived in the greatest abundance that the world had ever seen. This abundance was so deep that world hunger was a solved problem. For the first time ever, there were more people in the world that were overweight than hungry.

This was a brief moment in history. In medieval France, for instance, the peasants would spend all winter in bed in a semi-hibernation to conserve food. I guess I just described me at 2:30pm on Thanksgiving, except I’m sleeping off food.

I guess the most popular Christmas song at mental hospitals is, Do You See What I See.

But back to Thanksgiving, what were they giving thanks for?

Having food. Even now as the events still unfold in slow-motion, the loss of abundance is looming. Shortages begin to stack up. A friend tried to buy a pickup, but was told it would be at least six months for it to arrive. He bought a different one.

The price increases we’ve seen are a symptom of that lack of abundance – we had shortages because we were finally paying the price for the efficiency of the system – we had shortages of everything except for cash. The powers that be decided to try to paper over the economic problems by flooding the world with that cash, which made people feel better, temporarily, but then led to the shortages we’re still seeing.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine? It’s an example of yet another stress to the systems of the world. Food. Fertilizer. Oil. And a big one as far as Europe is considered? Natural gas. The folks in Europe might need to re-learn how to huddle together for warmth during winter.

I’d tell you how to make an oil well, but it’s really boring.

Abundance came from that finely tuned system. What many don’t realize is that abundance comes mainly from abundant energy. That energy is used everywhere. It’s powering my computer and your computer (or phone) and the car that took me to work and the harvester that brought up the corn to feed the cow that became a steak on my plate last weekend.

Oddly, the Left thinks that by pretending that a new, renewable power will spring into existence, that it really will. That hasn’t happened, or if it did, the power grid certainly isn’t showing it. Widespread blackouts weren’t a feature of my youth – they’re an annual occurrence now, since the system is now overtaxed. It’s gone from resilient, with a capacity that is sufficient for nearly any situation, to one that is regularly broken.

There was a blackout in New York City. People were stuck on escalators for four hours.

Our history of abundance is dependent entirely on our mastery of energy. There are 7.97 billion people on Earth today. My estimate, based on history, is that without the current intensity of energy use, the Earth could support somewhere between 250 million and 500 million people, tops.

Energy is the key for all of that.

Oil is prone to, well, run out. Frakking has provided a very significant way to expand reserves, but conventional oil peaked back in 2016. The oil time, “drill it and pump it” is declining. Frakking can provide a respite, but even those resources are limited.

The choices that lead to a real future, though, are few. Of actual technology that exists and provides sufficient energy to power a civilization, nuclear energy is key. I’d love to suggest fusion power, but sadly, the only version of fusion that we have on Earth exists in very short duration, high-energy pulses, often designed for delivery by intercontinental missiles.

But fission does exist. It’s expensive to produce new fission power plants, but they last for decades. Are there downsides? Certainly. Nuclear waste isn’t great, but I hear it’s still better for your than corn syrup. And residents near Chernobyl can count on one hand the seven reasons why a nuclear meltdown is a bad idea.

But I never trust people from Chernobyl. They’re two-faced.

We actually may be struggling to return to abundance for decades, and I don’t think we’ve fallen nearly as far as we will. The supply disruptions started by the ‘VID and continuing through the Ukrainian War will continue, and will swing farther and farther out of control. This will put pressures on people and increase conflicts, both inside countries and between countries.

Those could be huge, massive wars. But as long as I don’t have to listen to Amy Schumer talk to Chuck Schumer, about cheese, it’ll be alright.

E, S, G: The Leftist War Against The Economy

“You dirty double-crossing limey fink! Those damn diamonds are phonies!” – Diamonds are Forever

Copernicus wondered where the Sun went at night. Then it dawned on him.

Let’s go on a thought experiment:

Pretend that, having conquered the colleges, having infiltrated the leadership of the military and being 95% of the members of most government agencies, and jetting from place to place on private planes, the Left wasn’t done. No, there was still one goal remaining, and it wasn’t finally getting a date or being able to benchpress more than the bar. Nope. The remaining group which they hadn’t managed to completely own was all of corporate America.

But how would they do that? I mean, the Left has a lot of money for taking over Portland, Oregon again and again, but that’s hardly a challenge nowadays. What if the Left decided that they wanted to only invest in companies that shared their political leanings, and create some sort of bogus reason to make other people do it, too.

Enter ESG.

What does ESG stand for, Entitled, Stupid, and Gutless? No, that’s Antifa®, silly. ESG stands for the three criteria that the Left wants to use to decide if a country or business is sufficiently Leftist: Environmental, Social, and Governance. That seems, at first blush, to be relatively safe. I mean, who wants a bad work environment? And social, well, maybe that means good customer service. And governance? Maybe that’s how efficiently the company is run?

Nah.

I got into Harvard®. You’d think they would have better security.

Not even close. So, ESG, does it really mean? I’ll quote from the fine folks at Harvard®:

The “E” captures energy efficiencies, carbon footprints, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity, climate change and pollution mitigation, waste management and water usage.
The “S” covers labor standards, wages and benefits, workplace and board diversity, racial justice, pay equity, human rights, talent management, community relations, privacy and data protection, health and safety, supply-chain management and other human capital and social justice issues.
The “G” covers the governing of the “E” and the “S” categories—corporate board composition and structure, strategic sustainability, oversight and compliance, executive compensation, political contributions and lobbying, and bribery and corruption.

Certainly, there is some Mom and Apple Pie-level stuff in there. There has to be otherwise they couldn’t sell it. It’s not like people look at a company and say, “Gosh, I wish Google® was even more corrupt with their search results” or “I wish Facebook™ had done more to dishonestly influence the election by censoring even more news unfavorable to the Left”.

In his spare time, Mark Zuckerberg likes to do normal human things, like drink water, consume calories, update circuitry.

Most of the ESG metric, however, is right out of the Left’s playbook. The parts in bold above are things that, mostly, don’t have anything at all to do with actual profitability or performance of a company. How can I tell this isn’t serious? The Left isn’t going after the NFL®. Even though I haven’t watched a game in years, they keep playing the games. So let’s pretend the NFL© wanted to maximize its ESG score:

For instance, to improve its ESG, the NFL could focus on climate change by eliminating stadiums and all the wasteful use of gasoline to get to the games. There’s more:

They could reduce their carbon footprint by using all natural, sustainable cotton fibers instead of wasteful nylon in their uniforms.
They could have opposing teams take electric cars to the games.
They could replace the plastic in their helmets with sustainably harvested weaved plant fiber.
They could replace the uniform types of grass on the field by using native plant species. Think of it – in Arizona you could have cactus and sand instead of lush lawns (that use far too much water!).

That takes care of the E! What about the S?

Workforce diversity? The players on the team could easily be selected so that they strictly follow the demographics of the United States, including half of them being women, and some being senior citizens. The handicapped would need to be represented as well, and not just as placekickers like they usually do.
Pay equity could be easily taken care of by having no member of the team or of the management staff make a time more than 20 times what the guy selling sodas in the stands makes each season, which would mean the CEO pay would be capped around $80,000. And if the starting QB got money from promotions, he’d have to split it equally with everyone in the organization. Equity, after all.

Maybe he can put that on a slogan for the endzone?

That takes part of most of the S, especially after the owner is forced to give up 90% of his team ownership to random citizens of the world, so a Sri Lankan goat farmer can understand the joy of owning an NFL™ franchise.

What about governance? Well, we could appoint people from every country in the world to the board of each NFL® team. And no more cozying up to local, state, and federal officials for more tax bux.

So why don’t people talk about applying the ESG metric to the NFL™? It’s simple.

People take football seriously.

All of the nonsense the Left loves to spout falls apart when it comes to one, simple business that everyone can understand and easily see the idiocy of the ESG metric.

Sri Lanka couldn’t believe it was riot season already! They still had their “I support Ukraine” banners up.

In real life, Sri Lanka was ranked by ESG score. They scored a 99 in Environmental, an 88 in Social, and a 47 in governance. Sri Lanka is facing its “worst economic collapse in its modern history” according to some economist somewhere that you can Google® search for if you’re bored. But its ESG was so good, right? They only used natural fertilizer, and lowered their carbon footprint! They also were starving and had to import lots of extra food.

It’s that same environmental rating that countries like the Netherlands and Canada are chasing when they are preparing to mandate that their farmers have fewer cows and use less fertilizer. Both of those things, you see, hurt the carbon footprint and thus make the environmental score of the country go down. If it causes people to go bankrupt to buy Cheetos® or starve, I guess ESG is a way to make sure that everyone in the world has the same chance to be hungry, poor, or exposed to social unrest as the least developed nation. It could happen here. Oops. Forgot about Chicago.

It is happening here, at least with the ‘S’ part of ESG. Looks like we’ll have Equity soon with countries that riot over it being (rolls dice) Tuesday soon enough.

When he fires an employee, he fires an employee.

Because of this fantastic success at the national level, Wall Street™ is pushing ESG at the corporate level. The aptly-named Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock™ which currently controls over eight trillion dollars in investments is a big fan. Eight trillion dollars? That’s almost enough to buy two full tanks of gas in Biden’s America. Think a man who controls eight trillion worth of cash has some pull?

The aptly-named Larry Fink certainly does. Individual shareholders don’t vote, so the aptly-named Larry Fink’s eight trillion in stock probably controls two or three times that level of shareholder votes. Alone. The actual ESG rating process is so murky and subject to manipulation that the ESG for a company can be as fraudulent as Joe Biden’s hair plugs.

So, yeah, the Left has constantly used corporate America for funding, and now they’ve figured out a way to make business support whatever crazy policy that the Left wants to use to turn the United States into the next version of Sri Lanka.

Thankfully, he planted a tree to offset his carbon emissions.

The aptly-named Larry Fink has a private jet, and houses everywhere, and burns more carbon in a week than most people will burn in a lifetime. Won’t you please reduce your carbon footprint so he can continue to do this? I mean, it would up your personal ESG score . . . .

Economics In 2022, A Picture Book

“Stay classy, San Diego!” – Anchorman

I think the Chairman of the Federal Reserve® is required by law to drive a Fiat®.

Recently, part of the revolution has been televised . . . the Dutch government has decided that farming is evil because it keeps people from eating bugs and living in the pods:

Of course, the Dutch have commies there, too:

But who thinks hunger is good, besides the commies at Antifa? Oh, the United Nations:

Well, we know the UN never comes up with their own ideas, they’re too busy with waste and corruption. So where did this idea come from?

Oh, yeah, the World Economic Forum.

Thankfully, they’re not at all evil, right?

Karl nods approvingly:

But the World Economic Forum® has plans to help, right? How it started for Sri Lanka:

How it’s going, I mean they’ve had four years to implement The Plan:

But they’ll help Europe, right?

How it might end:

But the United States is not immune from economic illiteracy:

I’m sure this won’t put 40 million people on edge:

But Joe Biden is coming to the aid of the American people:

And Kamala is planning on how to leave Kabul Washington.

While all of this goes on, there are differing views on the economy:

At least Amazon® will help us:

But in the end, maybe we will come to an ethical conclusion:

Stay classy, America!

Copper, Bikini Economics, And An Early Warning

“My hemoglobin is based on copper, not iron.” – Star Trek, TOS

Why didn’t they let the clown make iron? He smelt funny.

The current economic mess we’re in has often been discussed by economists. Let’s look at the word economist so we can understand what that word really means. Eco comes from the Greek “echo” meaning repeating sound and the Serbo-Croatian word “myst” meaning where gorillas hang out, therefore it means a bunch of gorillas repeating the same thing back and forth to each other on PBS® until it’s time for bacon-wrapped shrimp and cocktails at the faculty lounge.

Likewise, the economy has been hit by what the “economists” call an exogenous shock.

Okay, what’s exogenous? I could give another silly definition involving the X-Men® and confused gender identity, but exogenous really means coming from outside. In this case, it’s the current mess in Ukraine, and, most particularly, the sanctions that were put in place.

Typically, I’ve noticed that when people want to punish someone, the idea would be to pick something that would be negative for that person. But, once again, Biden has managed to play Brer Fox to and thrown Brer Rabbit straight into the briar patch – Russian income is up compared to previously. Normally when you punish someone, bad things happen to them.

Oops.

I could probably round up a group of drunken fraternity juniors at any college that still taught stuff (sorry Harvard®, sit down) what could over a round of beer pong come up with better sanctions than Biden and his staff threw together. And at the worst case, they’d come up with sanctions that were silly yet didn’t hurt the United States. I mean, Putin doesn’t really have hair, so we’ll have to table Chet’s idea to give him a swirlie. Besides, Chet is passed out now and Brad has a Sharpie® out.

What do you call someone kicked out of a frat? A has-bro.

It started predictably enough – the energy sanctions have already caused a fill-up event to cost so much that it gives the Lefties goosebumps. This is wonderful in their eyes. Why? It causes less use of pesky gasoline and electricity. Their ultimate goal is to create an economy that produces no carbon dioxide at all, being run entirely by $80,000 electric vehicles to take Leftists from the Starbucks® to their Pilates lessons.

How far are they willing to go? The Dutch have implemented a plan that requires their farmers to reduce their number of cattle by 30% by 2030. So, less of whatever the Dutch make out of milk. I wonder if they’ll take the same stance with gasoline? If so, how will Vincent’s Van Gogh?

Vincent’s Van won’t Gogh. And since the economy can’t work on good climate intentions something will have to break.

Vincent did some karaoke – he liked to sing blues. One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Ear.

Something to break? Let’s talk about the price of copper.

Copper is a very good conductor of electricity. It’s also a metal that is in demand when an economy is growing. Why? Copper goes in wire for houses – 43% of copper is used in building and construction. Copper goes in computers – 20% is used in electronics. Add in another 20% for cars and such – and that takes us over 80%. I’d bore you with more facts about copper, but it makes me break out in hives – I guess I have a metallurgy.

I went to Steve Jobs’ funeral, just to ask this: “Who is thinking outside the box now, Steve?”

Regardless, let’s look at what happens to the price of copper when the economy is overheating – in 2006, you can see the price of copper (from Macrotrends, LINK) shot up. Interest rates were low, and houses were being built on every flat piece of ground from San Diego to Orlando.

That was the result of an economy that was overheated. Copper popped up in price, and then collapsed.

Copper does that – and it leads. When interest rates were low and anyone who could fog a mirror could get a loan, then copper prices shot up back in 2006. As long as the boom held out, copper held out. When the market for houses finally collapsed, so did the price of copper.

So, that’s the history.

What about 2022?

It started with a spike. Why? Low interest rates and easy money made it so the housing market, even in sleepy little Modern Mayberry was hot. When I bought my house, there were houses that had been on the market for over 300 days. Three months ago, a house hit the market on Friday and was gone by Monday.

Now, I’m thinking it won’t be nearly so easy to sell in a small market. And copper indicates that it’s likely that construction demand is dropping. Not only that, but China, typically a big market for copper, cut its demand for scrap copper in the past week by 47% (according to the one source in broken English I could find). So, it’s no big surprise that copper prices are down over 20% since March.

So, I’m not sure Biden can sanction Russia any harder unless he comes to our houses individually, breaks our windows, impregnates our dogs, and sticks his thumb in the butter in the fridge.

Oh, crap. You don’t think I gave him ideas, do you?

Wherein I Use Greek Mythology To Show How Screwed We Are

“Would Homer cut away from Odysseus’s journey just as he was being enticed by the siren’s song?” – BoJack Horseman

My lack of knowledge of Greek mythology is often my Achilles’ Elbow.

We’ve reached the Scylla and Charybdis stage of our economy.

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a six-headed monster that was probably less scary than the average half-dozen Congresscritters, and certainly less dangerous.

Charybdis was a whirlpool that sucked inside everything that got close to it three times a day, so it was pretty much exactly like Kamala Harris.

The idea is that if you’re between Scylla and Charybdis, life is on the edge because there are dangers on either side. When Odysseus tried to sneak between the two, he lost six crewmembers, one to each head of Scylla. Thankfully they didn’t go too close to Charybdis, since Kamala has a mean-looking canker sore, and some gifts last forever.

Trying to thread the fine line between Scylla and Charybdis: that’s where our economy is now.

Could it be that the Odyssey is just a made-up excuse by a husband as to why he’s ten years late?

As inflation rages through the system, every minute that we have an interest rate well below the rate of inflation, inflation is being fed. To quote Joe Biden from January 24, 2022, “It’s a great asset – more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch.” You can tell he’s excited to Build Back Better!

Oddly, it’s not inflation in everything. Some items are starting to deflate now. Houses, for instance. The price of a house is tied to the interest rate – the more interest wrapped into a monthly payment, the fewer the number of buyers that can afford or qualify for a loan. And in Biden’s America® people have to qualify for more important things, like a Quarter Pounder™ or a tank of gas.

But back to home loans: fewer people qualify? Less demand. Less demand? Lower home prices.

When we moved to Modern Mayberry in the middle of the Great Recession, some houses had been on the market for longer than 350 days. These were decent houses, but there just wasn’t any demand. Recently, as people began to take my advice and flee the cities, houses disappeared off the market in days here in Modern Mayberry. With all the city folk moving in, at least I know what a hipster weighs: an Instagram®.

One hipster I knew poured water from an ice tray into his beverage. He liked ice before it was cool.

Now? Interest rates for mortgages are going up, so demand for houses will be going down. Eventually, the market for houses will go back to where it was when I got here. That’s okay, I never expected to walk away from Stately Wilder Mansion with a single dime of profit. For me, a house is where I live, not an investment.

So, interest rates up, housing prices down. Simple.

Also, interest rates up, stock prices down. For the last decade, stocks have been just about the only game for people who were trying to keep up with inflation. This was a continual pressure upwards on stocks. Now as interest rates go up, there are other options.

Traditionally, there was (this was something I read in an article a long time ago) a formula showing the value of a stock in relation to the interest rate: Maximum P/E=20-Prime Rate. That meant, with an interest rate of 0%, a stock was at fair value with a Price to Earnings ratio of 20. Likewise, if the interest rate was 10%, the fair market P/E would be about 10.

Obviously, it’s such a one-dimensional analysis that it was made back when “digital computing” meant counting on your fingers. There’s no way I’d suggest anyone use it to pick stocks (nor would I suggest taking the advice of an Internet humorist on any investment advice no matter how witty, charming, and handsome he might be), but it does show how the relationship between interest rates and stock prices and earnings was thought about once upon a time. But it summarizes the same idea – interest rates up, stocks down.

I bought some speakers. At least that was a sound investment.

Heck, it even led me to a never-fail way to manipulate individual stocks: if I buy a stock, it goes down.

There are other impacts, too. For instance, it makes debt harder to pay back for people around the planet. If Egypt owes money to ChaseAmericanFargo™ Bank and the interest rate is variable, that means that Egypt will have to start selling items to pay back New York, or London, or Beijing. Heck, the British would already have the Pyramids, but they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum

More money to the banking centers? Less money for chow for the Egyptians. We saw this exact scenario play out in the Arab Spring in 2012. Expensive stuff caused people to go hungry and then hungry people with no hope do what they always do when they can’t watch Netflix™ and buy Twinkies©.

They swap out the government. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss in Egypt, and it’s exactly the same boss as it was in Syria. Some things don’t change. If it’s bad enough, it also craters the economies in South America and, even Canada might have its assets frozen. Or, more frozen.

How did Kamala get her cold sores? She dated Herpules.

But when the interest rates go up, it’s not just the government in Egypt that gets squeezed. The current debt in the United States is $30.5 trillion. The total US debt, including personal debt, student loans, credit cards, and I.O.U.s to me from that one guy that owes me $20 is about $91 trillion. (All numbers from usdebtclock.org)

When the interest rates go up, the payments on interest go up. That means less money available for everything else. When last I looked, the mandatory payments the Federal government were as much as or more than the amount of money that they took in. That means that printing more money is now the only way the system can work. It’s like having a tobacco cessation class with a two-cigar minimum.

That leads to the difficult bit – the hall of mirrors. If we don’t raise interest rates, and raise them quickly and raise them high enough, inflation will devastate the economy. If we do raise them, interest payments will freeze the economy and dry up all the PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides the government buys daily. We are in a classic trap, but it is a trap entirely devised by the Fed® and the politicians working long-term problems on short-term incentives.

By attempting to push back the moment of financial reckoning by any means possible, we’ve created a failure that is much, much larger. If we would have let financial companies fail in 2000 and 2008, and fixed the structural problems with Medicare, perhaps, just perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.

But we are.

How bad are things?

Again, people have been trying to gauge when things in the stock market are out of whack – Gregory Mannarino came up with a market risk index that he called the Mannarino Market Risk Index, which was modified by Nobody Special Finance into the Modified Mannarino Market Risk Index. You can watch the video on what makes it up here (LINK). It’s only twelve minutes, and it’s pretty simple. The MMMRI is simple, but it’s still quite a bit more sophisticated than the 20=P/E-Interest rate formula from back in the Stone Age. The summary is of selected past MMMRIs is:

Black Monday (1987), MMMRI 234
Dotcom Bubble Pop (2000), MMMRI 208
Great Recession (2008), MMMRI 169

Right now?

You can find tracking information on MMMRI here (LINK) on Mannarino’s website.

Yup. MMMRI is screaming loudly that the stock market is really, really messed up. But you knew that. Things are broken, and they’re breaking faster as things go downhill. So, whatever you do, don’t buy canned goods and storage food and precious metals and PEZ® and ammo. Nope.

I’m sure that the team of Biden and Harris along with Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, (who had no idea that inflation was even a problem) or Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary, (who said that high gas prices are “a very compelling case” to buy an electric car) will be here to help us charter a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh, wait, Biden and Harris are Scylla and Charybdis.

Our Economy: At The Jagged Edge

“Because of the metric system?” – Pulp Fiction

I saw a mountain covered in cows. “Huh, that must be Mt. Heiferest.”

Systems work within certain limits. Let’s take . . . the Earth. The Earth is absolutely filled with life. It’s nearly everywhere, and in abundance, unless a particular bit of life has secrets about the Clintons. Let’s just look at a single variable of the system that supports life: temperature.

All things being equal, if the Earth was as hot as Venus is, the zone where life could exist (if it was based on the need for water, of course) would be pretty small. Likewise, Mars would have a smaller envelope – it’s too cold – and water would be frozen most of the time. Sure, life is technically possible in both locations, but it will never thrive like it has for a huge chunk of the Earth’s history.

And that’s just one variable impacting a complex system.

There are many ways to configure an economy. Most of the ones that work really well are decentralized for most things. No one tells a farmer in Nebraska what or when to plant. The farmer chooses, based on what he thinks he can sell. No one tells PEZ® to make a Yosemite Sam™ PEZ© dispenser. But why wouldn’t they make a Yosemite Sam® PEZ® dispenser? Duh.

A day on Venus lasts 5,832.6 hours, so it’s just like a Monday on Earth with Biden in the White House.

Most of the time, this system is pretty closely coupled. The world doesn’t have years of surplus of, say, food just sitting around – with billions of people, I know someone would eat the Ding Dongs® and Pop Tarts™ first and then there wouldn’t be any for me. I mean, it certainly looks like Nic Cage could make an infinite amount of movies since the word, “no” isn’t in his vocabulary, but even he has limits to his Nic Cage-ness.

I think we’re close to the limits of the system that’s given us prosperity as we know it. Yup, that’s a sobering thought. Here are a few data points:

This one hit me fairly hard (from Vox Day’s place – there’s more at the LINK):

I own a small trucking company, and this is what the fuel crisis is doing to our country… Today I filled up my truck to deliver products that help keep our country fed. When I filled up my truck, it cost me $1,149.50. This is ONE truck, for ONE day of fuel. I own three. So for one day of operation, it’s costing me $3,448.50. (Yes, we use a full tank of fuel every single day, sometimes more than 1 tank per day).

My trucks generally run 5-6 days a week, so we’ll just estimate on the low side and say five. That’s $17,242.50. Last week was over $20k for ONE week, that I have to pay out of my pocket to try and keep not only my children fed, but those of my employees, and our country.

Mark my words, we are on a downhill slide to the worst recession our country has ever seen. Trucking companies are going under left and right. (Literally hundreds weekly.) If you’re not aware, what you’re wearing, what you’re eating, what you’re living in, what you’re driving, what you’re reading this on, was delivered by a truck.

That’s sobering. All the beer comes on trucks, so it could be literally sobering.

We might need USB if the USA fails.

What else have we seen?

Baby Formula Shortages
Rising Violence, Well, Everywhere
Short Tempers
Shortages of Basic Repair Parts For Vehicles

These have some consequences. Big ones.

People are pulling back on frills, in a hurry. A very good restaurant in Modern Mayberry just shut down. Forever. The owners threw in the towel. Rising prices led to fewer customers . . . customers feeling pinched can always cook their own food at home as a quick way to save a few bucks. I opened my browser (which thinks I live hundreds of miles away from Modern Mayberry) and saw the same exact story a few hundred miles away on the same day our local hangout closed – another, distant, beloved local restaurant shutting down in a town I’ve never been to.

The Mrs. has a phobia so she stacks the plates in the cabinet by the year we bought them. It’s a very rare dish order.

Why are dining customers feeling the pinch? Let’s just talk a single variable: fuel. By my calculations, the rising cost of fuel is draining $2.3 billion dollars a day, every day from the economy. That’s not quite a trillion dollars a year, but fuel is priced into everything. Divide the rough annual cost of just the increase and I came up with almost $2,800. Per person. Multiplied by a family of four, and that’s about $11,000 a year per family. If the average family makes $69,000 a year, just the increase in fuel prices is about 16% of their annual income. Sure, lots of that isn’t direct to the family, but it gets priced into every single thing they buy.

That’s stark, especially because it’s only a single variable. Increased interest rates will be hitting soon, along with all of the financial pressures that will bring. And, of course, there will be more things as this crisis cascades.

I took a college elective on pollen creation. I got a B.

Here’s another data point. I pulled into McDonald’s® and asked for a McSausage McMuffin with McEgg®. Don’t judge me! They’re tasty!

“Sorry, we’re all out. We do have sausage biscuits left.”

“Okay. I’ll take one.” Not my favorite, but, whatever.

“Okay, that’ll be $6.50.” It was just as they put up their lunch menu, so I hadn’t seen the price.

Six fifty? For a sausage patty, some not great scrambled eggs, a slice of cheese, and a biscuit? And it wasn’t what I wanted in the first place?

I noped out of that. First time I’ve canceled a drive-through order that I can recall, but I didn’t need the sandwich $6.50 worth. I drove out of the line and off on my way. Good thing it wasn’t an Amish McDonald’s® – I hear they don’t have outlets.

I hate to think about what happens when Joe runs out of his “good” ideas.

Our economic systems are certainly out of balance. Badly. We’re at the edge of a cliff, and I have the feeling that things will soon be changing, and quickly. Be prepared for a change in temperature.

Wherein I Discuss Home Mechanical Systems, The Economy, Otters Running A Nuclear Plant, and Pelosi Alcohol Consumption

“Iced tea. . . air conditioning . . . water.” – Stargate SG-1

I went to an air conditioning conference once. It was pretty cool.

Let’s begin our tour of the economics world with the lowly thermostat. When The Mrs. and I were first married, The Mrs. would turn the thermostat on our air conditioner way down in the summer, say, to 62°F (45km). This led to the house gradually beginning to cool down, but the air conditioner would labor on like a Billy Barty attempting to oil a “modern” Sports Illustrated, um, model with a stepladder and a 55 gallon bucket.

This electrical effort by our air conditioner would continue until the outside of the house would resemble Joe Biden after he’s seen his latest approval ratings: a cold sweat on the exterior of the house as the moisture outside condensed on the meat-locker temperature windows.

I asked The Mrs., “Why do you turn it down so low?”

“So it gets colder, faster.”

The Mrs. says I’m an absolute 10 – on the Kelvin scale.

Now, on the surface, that sort of logic makes sense. If I spin the dial on the stove farther, it heats up my Dinty Moore Beef Stew® and Orange Jell-O© mix faster (goes great with corn and doughnuts). Twisting the dial puts more energy onto the stovetop. But (at least in every house I’ve lived at) the air conditioning doesn’t work like that – at all.

The air conditioner at our house is either on or it’s off. There is no “kinda on” or “working as hard as a Supreme Court Clerk deleting his phone texts” setting. Nope.

On.

Off.

Two choices. So, if you want it to be 68°F, and you put it to 68°F it will get to 68°F exactly as fast as if you put it down to 40°F. But not everything works that way, and The Mrs. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that when we met. Plus, in our case, the air conditioner dries the air, so when I woke up in our 40°F house in the summertime, the air was making fun of Hillary Clinton since it was as dry as Norm Macdonald’s wit.

I hear that when Norm got to Heaven, St. Peter told him, “Norm, you have to have an eye test. Cover one eye.” Norm covers one eye and reads the chart: “E-I-E-I . . . Oh, come on! I wasn’t that old!”

The economy is certainly more complicated than a household HVAC unit, but I’m not sure the incompetent participation trophy award winners at the White House have any sort of clue. At all. They’re like putting playful river otters in charge of running a nuclear reactor. Sure, it’s all fun and games watching them be all nimbly-pimbly with the control rods. But sooner or later (mainly sooner) the control rods will be pulled and the uranium will eventually melt into a radioactive mess that’s slightly more destructive than the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial after the core melts down.

I believe this is actually from the trial – Lawyer: “Did you see what happened after you left?” Depp: “I wasn’t there after I left.”

The point is that our economy is complicated, and we’re dealing with a current Resident of the Oval Office that would find running a YouTube® video complicated. “What do you mean, I press the button and the sheep start to talk? How does that happen? Who puts them in there?”

It would be hilarious if we weren’t actually living through this, like when Caligula named his horse a Senator of Rome. My sides are still in stitches about that one! But when it’s us, it’s scary. I mean, Kamala’s not exactly a horse, but, still, the analogy holds, even in this case if it rhymes.

The air conditioner analogy (as a very simple one) actually does have some meaning in this case. When an economy is stalled, there is a case (not the best one, but at least a case) for using money to restart it. Sure, it’s dangerous. And I can make the argument that we’ve done it so many times that it’s really messed up the entire system.

I hear she’s auditioned to be a Batman® villain – The Giggler™.

But after the system is going, by continually forcing more money into the system, well, as Joe said, “I did that.”

If that were the only issue, it might be solvable. It’s just one variable. Have Kamala and AOC eat all the spare money and then it might be as okay as Buddy Holly in a parachute. Might.

Joe, however, has other ideas. When you put sanctions on a nation, the idea is to hurt that nation. Really, that was their plan. But the sanctions against Russia (along with the war, which I also blame Biden for – he could have stopped it with ONE PHONE CALL) have resulted in soaring fertilizer and food prices. That’s bad enough, but it has also popped fuel prices to record highs – The Mrs. wanted to give me something rare and valuable for Father’s Day, so I just asked for five gallons of gasoline.

Fuel impacts everything.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Janet Yellen doesn’t care about you.

The combination of these sanctions and war have effects that haven’t been felt yet – not remotely. An example: a farmer normally fertilizes his alfalfa to increase yield. Not this year – the cost increase for fertilizer far outstrips what he expects to make in revenue. So, he deals with the “natural” yields. Due to high diesel costs, he also gets less money after the cost for harvesting is deducted.

What eats alfalfa?

Well, for one, cattle. So, less alfalfa, more expensive food for cattle. More expensive food for cattle? Well, if the rancher can’t make a profit, he’ll sell the herd. Those aren’t magic, and cattle don’t regenerate immediately like Wolverine®, so if you think we have high beef prices now . . . . just wait.

That’s the second idea: every action has a reaction. Some are immediate, like lower amounts of oil leading to higher prices. Others are longer-term. There’s a delay between taking the action and the result.

Going back to houses, this is like water hammer. That’s what happens when a valve closes too fast in a poorly designed plumbing system. The closing of the valve sends a pressure wave back and forth through the system, rattling the pipes as the pressure goes (at the speed of sound!) through the piping system. If you’ve ever lived in a house with water hammer, you know the sound. It’s loud.

But a simple act, closing a valve, can send waves of pressure moving back and forth through the system.

If you find a bomb that explodes when it’s stepped on, let me know. It’s mine.

We haven’t seen the end of those pressure waves from the magical sanctions that were supposed to have weakened the Russians but have instead raised the value of the ruble and thrown the food and fuel systems of the world into turmoil. Again, my analogy of otters running a nuclear reactor doesn’t appear to be far off as these secondary impacts reverberate through the system.

Eventually, these systems come back into equilibrium. However, unlike the consequences of a 40°F house, in this case we end up with the possibility of an economy more wrecked than the Pelosi family after about 11 AM.

As Nancy would say, “Cheers!”

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless: it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something: that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate. Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal. This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense. If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer. To make it clear: The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource. Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs: “Cocaine use? I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™. That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line. As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons. You might want to soap up when you get out. Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example: back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive. The CPU was the pivot point. In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast. Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too. But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap. There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up. I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized. Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers. If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month. Unless you’re in a Boeing®. Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff. What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!” Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup. And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend. What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity. It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies. It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small. It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive. But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances. I think it was Baltimore. Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved. We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup. Totally solved. More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©. Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares. Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry. But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes. Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food. But that world hunger thing? Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh? I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon? Well, no. Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008. The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did. And now interest rates are higher. But who needs money? The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy. The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup. Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up. And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance. Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

A decadent people
Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
Because they live in abundance
Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.