Inflation Nation – Page 14 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

“Well, what do you expect to find? A story about a guy who drove his car off a cliff in a snowstorm?” – Misery

Why don’t the sounds of pigeons echo? A coo sticks.

I have written before about Ugo Bardi’s (Living Italian Economist) theory that he called Seneca’s Cliff. Seneca’s Cliff is a restatement of something Seneca (Dead Roman Dude) philosophized about. It was a simple idea: stuff gets built only slowly. But when it comes down? It comes down all at once, like falling off of a cliff, hence Bardi calling it Seneca’s Cliff.

A house is a good example of Seneca’s Cliff. A house is built over time – in most cases it takes several months to build one. But if there’s a fire, that same house can be burned to the ground in a manner of minutes. There are exceptions, of course: in a Mexican neighborhood in Canada, the house might be saved by a hose, eh.

Race car backwards is . . . race car. But race car sideways is . . . James Dean.

So, that’s Seneca’s Cliff. I wrote about it myself back in the day, when I was trying to write a novel. It started, “The world had been a web . . .” This is a metaphor that has always stuck with me – the web of interconnections required to maintain society as we know it.

The world is a web. As I write this, I’m writing it on a laptop that was built halfway around the world, with components and materials sourced on nearly every continent. Dude, I got a Dell®, but the Dell™ came from everywhere.

When everything works, that’s great. People communicate with each other through price and supply and demand and produce things like computers and cars and wedding rings and beer and PEZ® and the burrito that Amber Heard ate before she left a “grumpy” in the bed.

Believe all women? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve Amber Heard.

Unfortunately, we’ve been working at a world that’s based in efficiency, too. Efficiency is nice if you’re a company that’s trying to put together a lot of iPads® or Funko Pops©, but in reality efficiency sucks.

Why do you have two lungs? Two kidneys? Two bellybuttons? Because those are really, really important. I have a buddy who lost 90% of his lung capacity in one lung due to the flu back in ’92. Guess what? He conducts a full life like it never happened. He coached a wrestling team, and rides bicycles long distances.

When something is important, you don’t want an efficient system, you want an inefficient system. This is why the water department can make more water than it needs to.

What does Ghislaine Maxwell and July, 2022 have in common? Neither of them will see August.

But our global systems, at the top level, are efficient. We don’t produce 10% extra oil. We don’t have that capacity. In spring and fall we generally have plenty of excess electricity generation, but tell me how summer looks? Lots of spare capacity?

No, not so much. Sure, there are substitutes for lots of things – we can have Wheaties® instead of Rice Krispies™. But in the end, we have to produce enough food to feed 7.96 billion people, and enough energy to grow the food and move it from place to place as well as make clothes and iPods© and pantyhose.

If Biden made dumpsters, they’d be called trash can’ts.

But this means that we’re in a world where there is simply less food because there is less energy, and also because war took out production of a significant amount. This was added to by the Biden sanctions on Russia. They are strange sanctions, indeed. So far their result is that it actually resulted in more cash going to Russia every month. Oh, higher prices on energy mainly to Europe and the United States. The shortages we’re seeing now in food, which will soon become much worse will have an even larger impact.

It has already created stress in the developed world. But in fragile places, like most of the Middle East and all of Africa, food prices will increase to the point where many of the poorer governments will simply cease to exist as the revolutions start. The last time this happened, mass migration into Europe was the result. It’s possible that this time, violence will be exported to Europe, as well.

I hear that Miley Cyrus will star in a remake of Silence of the Lambs as Hannibal Montannibal.

These are the conclusions if things go well, based on where we are now. From everything I’ve seen, we’re not on the trajectory of things going well. The capital markets are slowly failing in the West. Why? All the spending from the decision to print all the cash to paper over the previous holes in the economy that were caused from all the cash printed to paper over the holes before that is a game we can’t play anymore. The holes are too big.

The delicate web that keeps goods moving is stressed now, and strands are missing, putting a greater strain on the whole web. It took hundreds of years to build up this economy.

How fast will it fall down Seneca’s Cliff?

The Unraveling

“Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?” – Back to the Future

I knew a lady who loved mushrooms, she was a fungal.

The unraveling continues. In one sense, what’s happening is predictable. Looking back in history, while not everything happens in the same way, things very much rhyme. That’s why certain aspects of the current financial collapse are very, very familiar.

The Fed® still has enough influence that it can stop a snowball. Can the Fed® stop an avalanche? Not so much. They may have some tricks to push the day of reckoning down the line if it isn’t off the rails. Again, like a presidential election, it’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

If it were merely a financial problem, the actions might be enough. But it’s not just financial.

Other problems include extreme societal decadence. Decadence is a strong word. When I was a kid, it was applied to places like the late Roman Empire, or Willy Wonka’s® Chocolate Factory™ where those Umpa-Loompas wore those scanty tight outfits.

But when people take kids – elementary-age kids – to Pride®©™ parades that contain actual nudity and sex acts between adults, and then suggest putting hormones into five-year-olds because they pretended to cook in a pretend kitchen one day, you know that this is the point where God told Noah, “Get the boat,” and told Lot, “Tell everyone to wear sunglasses – I don’t care if it’s night.”

“Oh, and Noah? Put some lights on the boat. Floodlights.”

Whatever fetish sex act that any individual wants to do “because it’s Thursday” now seems to take the place of virtue. Replacing actual virtue with temporary individual passions is exactly what every single functioning society in history has avoided to in order to remain functioning. When people follow passions that are productive, like building rockets, they add to society. When people act on passions counter to virtue?

Those passions consume and destroy society. Period.

We don’t live in a world where “if it feels good, do it” can ever be a policy that lead to a productive society. At some point, we must be guided by virtue, we have to have a shared vision for a future, and a shared desire to build. Can you imagine a single event that would bring us all together again?

I can’t. We have to have that shared vision – if nothing else, to survive. Do we have it?

What’s the best way to avoid significant radiation exposure? Don’t bomb Pearl Harbor.

We do not. We are divided. The idea of a selfless devotion to duty seems to have (in many places) evaporated. Cops are supposed to put themselves into danger to save the innocent – that’s the only reason we put up with the rest of the nonsense that they get up to. If they have changed their motto from “Protect and Serve” to “Hide Until We Can and Give Traffic Tickets to People That Don’t Scare Us” then they’re not much use.

Globalism is likewise something that sounds good, but isn’t. I can understand the need for some places like, say, deserts to import grain and Alaska to import medicine and export oil and good vibes. But can someone tell me that we’re in a better and safer position as a country now that we depend on far-flung nations for things. When I talked to The Boy about careers, the advice I gave him was simple – don’t do anything that someone can do over the Internet. If you do, you’re competing with a job with millions or billions of people.

We have reached the stage of cultural collapse. I’m in favor of capitalism – but amoral capitalism is different. When capitalism is allowed to meet any need, the result isn’t good. Like any system, it needs boundaries. As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Why can’t the Democrats use the 25^th Amendment on Biden? They can’t count that high.

Freedom needs boundaries. Freedom needs responsibility. Liberty, real liberty, requires obligation for stability. Otherwise? It descends into chaos.

So, we’ve established that we’re in a difficult place. The things that we depended upon are slowly slipping away. The economy is in a very precarious place, culturally we’re shattered to the point that not even another 9-11 would bring us together. The difficulties that we see from here on out won’t serve to bring us together, they will bring us apart. How about the economic difficulties related to just high fuel prices alone?

The Lefties love it, even as it destroys our economy. Heck destruction of the economy might even be the point.

But stresses have consequences. If I drop an orange, it will fall. If we destroy an economy, it will fail. Some parts of it will be predictable: interest rates going up will make housing prices go down. Simple. We can talk about other correlations on Wednesday (feel free to bring up more below).

I dated a homeless girl once – it was nice, after the date you could drop her off anywhere.

The one thing that I can tell you, is what comes next won’t be like what came before. The problems that we have rhyme with the problems of the past, but they’re not the same. During the Great Depression, we were at least (mostly) homogeneous as a country. Now, not so much.

The end state is tied to the initial conditions. And the initial conditions of the Great Depression were greatly different than they are today, so there’s no way that we’ll see the same results. And things will never go back to “normal” because we simply cannot go back in time, and there isn’t any such thing as “normal” nor any time period which is “normal”. They will be different.

What we have, though, is the rhyme. It won’t allow us to predict perfectly. But it will allow us to see, dimly.

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.

The Good News Is The Same As The Bad News: It’s You

“Winners always want the ball. . . when the game is on the line.” – The Replacements

Floors take on a lot of responsibility. It’s like everything falls to them.

There’s bad news:

No one is coming to save you.

But there’s good news:

No one is coming to save you.

Who will save us?

You will.

I think many people have this weird idea that other people are the answer. The last first aid course that I took before moving to Alaska ended up every scenario with, “and then you call 911.” To be fair, that’s a great idea in most places. I mean, unless you’re in a school.

The reason the murder rate has gone down over the last few decades isn’t because the idiots in Chicago have developed some sort of restraint in shooting each other. Nope. The medical folks are faster at getting those that were shot, and the docs are better at saving them.

The woman who helped The Mrs. deliver Pugsley quit. I guess she was having a midwife crisis.

But then I took a first aid class in Alaska.

Wow. Night and day. The content was much, much richer. The trainers went into much greater detail, and told us, “You’re not trained to do this. But if help isn’t coming, it might save a life.” The translation was simple. Phone coverage in Alaska sucks.

How bad was it? When we moved there, you couldn’t get a phone line, even if there was copper to your house. And cell service? The infrastructure consisted of what two bright schizophrenics that left the mainland United States could cobble together with the parts of a downed DC-3.

Everyone else was in the same boat. The message was clear.

“You’d better pay attention.”

The quiet part they didn’t say in class was: “because no one is coming to save you.”

When I woke up in the hospital, I told the doctor I couldn’t feel my legs. “That’s because we amputated your arms, maybe?”

When I ended up having to have my entire fingernail removed and the part under the nail stitched up because there was were two 55 gallon drums of salmon oil (I’m not making ANY of this up) on my property that I tried to open and the wedge slipped and pulled most of the nail off anyway, the doctor said, “Okay, this is going to hurt like hell for a few days. I’m going to prescribe you some (powerful painkiller). You probably won’t use them. Toss them in your backpack, so if you’re out moose hunting and break your leg, you might be able to limp out.”

Think that a doctor would say that in Nebraska?

He didn’t say the quiet part: “because no one is coming to save you.”

I prefer it that way. Really. Sure, I like Internet and electricity and cold beer and watching Trailer Park Boys. But I know the true answer.

When it goes bad?

No one is coming to save me.

Three friends were in the forest – the first said, “These are moose tracks.” The second said, “No, those are bear tracks.” The third was run over by a train.

That might sound depressing to some people, but not to me. I like me. And, I like my chances. To be fair, the person in this world I trust most in the world . . . is me. The next one is The Mrs. Third in line?

Maybe Sturm, Ruger, and Company? Yeah, they’ve always been straight shooters to me.

One of the lessons that I’ve walked away with in the last 20 years of my life is that:

the police,
the Constitution,
the courts,
the military,
congress,
and anyone sitting in the office of president

is not going to save me.

And they’re not coming to save you, either.

In one sense, it’s scary. I think that many people take the idea that someone, somewhere, is responsible for them. That’s simply not true for anyone over the age of, say, 14.

We are not passive actors in our lives. That idea is corrosive. We are in control.

That’s from an Edgar Allen Poem.

I think a lot of the idea that other people are responsible for us comes from the anonymity of large city life. To me, it’s odd – the more of us around, the less responsibility we feel, and the more we want to blame other people. Why? With so many people around, it brings anonymity. Anonymity makes it easy to avoid responsibility.

In Modern Mayberry? We know each other. We talk to each other. We are, in the end, responsible. I go to dinner, and the owner of the restaurant greets me, and (from time to time) brings a bottle by the table and pours each of us a shot.

Why?

Our lives are not anonymous. It’s a community. Are we responsible for ourselves? Certainly. But in a small town, we understand that we help each other. And he can go home and tell his wife he wasn’t really drinking on the job.

“Tequila or vodka?” That’s how I’d start a marriage counseling session.

Our nation is fundamentally broken. I’d say that someone in New York City doesn’t care about Modern Mayberry, sitting here in flyover country. But they do. Most of them can’t even understand it, but what they do understand they despise.

That’s okay. I’m not responsible for them. And I certainly don’t want them to be responsible for me.

Only you can save you. Only you can save your family. And that’s still the good news: “Winners always want the ball . . . when the game is on the line.”

The people in Washington D.C.? They won’t save us.

You will.

And that’s the good news. Your life. Your future. Your family. Your country. They’re in your hands.

Would you change that for anything?

I wouldn’t. I like it when the ball is in my hands.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

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!”

Why We Are The Luckiest People, Ever.

“Keep a memory of me, not as a king or a hero, but as a man. Fallible and flawed.” – Beowulf

Donate one kidney, you’re a hero. Donate six, and all of a sudden you’re a monster.

We are the luckiest people who have ever lived.

“Why, John Wilder, you must be insane! Look at what’s going on,” you say. Well, the nice men at the sanitarium said that the whole “insane” thing was in the past, especially since the surgery. The doctor said the lobotomy was a no-brainer.

But really I believe that we are lucky.

When you look at the state of society, we see an amazing breakdown. I chronicle that breakdown, week after week with this blog. We see our government falling apart. We see it brimming with fraud. We see our lives mocked and insulted.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

Functional cultures run on shared values. The values built over hundreds or thousands of years of hard-fought experience on how to make that culture work? To make a stable government? These are all being subverted.

Discarded.

On purpose.

In a time like that, it’s easy to give in to depression. It’s easy to give in to despair.

Seriously, though, why would you?

We can’t lose. Why?

My boss calls me the computer at work: if left unattended for ten minutes, I go to sleep.

We have the whole world against us. We are called horrible names because we have beliefs rooted in those timeless values. Even though they hate us, they’re more than happy to take the fruits of our labor – to tax and to take our productivity. Despite that, at every point our politicians again and again take the road that gives them power – a road that is rooted in evil and lies.

And the world? Many in the whole world have fallen for the lies, utterly. Timeless values are overturned in the span of less than a decade. In 2000, if young boys were dancing nearly nude in the streets, dressed as women, taking money from men, there would have been arrests.

Now, the pictures are printed and celebrated.

This is not evil, this is the Evil of books for children, of such a caricature that they’re nearly comical. Charles Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Joe Biden? Soros? Really? They’re so over the top Evil that central casting wouldn’t send them to a serious movie – they’d be given roles as the Wet Bandits from Home Alone.

Pictured: Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

Their tactics are no better. They brag about being tolerant while using the power of government and media to ruthlessly suppress any opposing voices. They use the levers of government selectively – citizens visiting the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is the worst thing that ever happened. Riots in the streets causing billions in damage, theft so brazen that stores pull out of major metropolitan areas? They celebrate that. Congress is used, again and again, to pass laws that push society away from values, destroy the family, and increase the power of the government over the governed. Oddly, anarchists and Antifa® applaud that, and celebrate things that even thirty years ago would be called tyranny.

They hate us. They are attempting to use the education system to make children hate the very culture and society that allowed the prosperity that they’re leeching off even now. They want to erase the history that built this nation and the heroes that tamed a frontier and invented entire industries.

Galileo said that everything falls at the same speed. He never saw Biden’s stock market.

Why do you think they want to destroy and desecrate our monuments? Why do they hate our flag? Why fill the media with propaganda?

They want parents to fear children in a mirror of the Soviet era. They want to turn wives against husbands. They want to split the atom that makes up society, the family, and replace it with the state. Even religious institutions are rotting from within as the values of the Current Year replace the values that have proven themselves for over 2,000 years.

I started drinking brake fluid – it’s okay, though. I can stop anytime.

That, my friends, is why we’re lucky.

Our backs to the wall, the entire world against us, we owe our enemy nothing. We stand by our beliefs. We stand by God. We stand by our families, our wives, and our children. We stand by the future that we are even now building. To win, we will need to show virtue, courage, and strength greater than any generation that has ever lived.

We will do so.

We are in a place to bring heroism back to our world. The future will remember us, not as the remnants of a world gone past, but as the founders of a world reborn. They will speak of us for a thousand years. They will write stories about us. They will write songs about us.

That is why we are lucky.

When Will The Bubble End? When We Give Up.

“Oooh! Ahhh! That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” – Lost World: Jurassic Park

What do you call a swimsuit a girl wears to an animal park? A Zookini.

One time, Pa Wilder told me he had been interested in buying Sears® stock in the early 1980s. In addition to growing, it also paid a nice dividend. He’d calculated that the dividend from the stock would have paid for the stock, and he could have sold it in the 1990s and been dollars ahead. He didn’t. Ma Wilder flatly refused. She didn’t like stocks during the day, and I know she would have hated bitcoin in the evening. I’m sure it would have been her crypto-night.

Ma’s philosophy was that hope isn’t your friend when it comes to most things in life. And especially the stock market. The stock market is really built on hope. Many stocks have projected growth “priced-in”. This means that they sometimes sell for many times their projected earnings.

Since 2008, the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury have done absolutely everything that they can to keep the prices of stocks up. The biggest thing they did was to cut interest rates to zero, on everything but dirt. On dirt, the Fed™ charges high-interest rates – I guess you could call them loam sharks.

In one sense, interest rates serve as an alternative to buying stocks. If I can park my money in Treasury bonds and make a few percent (essentially keeping up with inflation) then that’s a stable investment. Horses hate that as well – they often can’t invest because they don’t have a stable income.

I named my horse Mayo. Sometimes, Mayo neighs.

But when the interest rate is zero, the government is printing cash as fast as it can, investments are pushed toward stocks, and more and more cash piles in.

This makes the investments silly, as more and more cash chases revenues. In a world filled with eternal hyper-growth, this works. But that world doesn’t exist, so essentially the stock market becomes a Ponzi scheme or a cargo cult of prosperity.

It’s good if you get out on time. You get the upside of growth. You can get dollars out of the market that you can buy things with. Like me, I blew all my stock market gains on a limo without a driver. Spent is all and nothing to chauffeur it.

But eventually? The market falls.

Sorry if that joke didn’t land well.

Normally, that’s healthy. Falling markets weed out weak and bad companies. Falling markets are actually healthy since they clear out the junk. On top of that, CEOs will never be worthless, since there is a pretty healthy market for slightly used internal organs.

We live in a world, however, where the markets have been aggressively managed. The idea of a recession is scarier to a politician in office than almost anything. People without jobs look for someone to blame, and politicians will do anything to avoid blame. Heck, Joe Biden would do whatever he could to set Hunter up for life, that is if Joe was ever tried for murder.

The result is that the economic policy is aggressively tied to growth, regardless of the consequences. It’s like trying to keep a party going long after everyone should have gone home. The best way to do that? Switch from beer to wine. When people start to lag? Swap out to vodka. Then, for a final shot? Pure grain alcohol. Sure, that sounds like Nancy Pelosi’s breakfast routine, but when you’re trying to run an economy like Pelosi’s daily frat party, eventually it has to stop.

And the longer you’ve been drinking? The worse the inevitable hangover.

Did you know Helen Keller had a cat? Neither did she.

That’s where we are. The booze has been pulled away from the table. At some point, I’m certain, that the Fed® will run out of tricks to keep the party going – even they have a limited supply of cocaine, especially since Johnny Depp found the spare key they keep under the mat.

I’ve been wrong before. Perhaps the party isn’t over at this point. Perhaps there’s some adrenaline that they can inject in the eye socket of the economy to keep it dancing a few more years. Biden would love to kick the can down the road and have it keep going until at least 2024. I mean, he’d love that if he knew what day of the week it was.

But every party has an ending. And as long as this one has been going, it will be bad.

We never really paid for the party in 2008. Sure, the Great Recession was bad, but the housing bubble never really cleared. How can I tell? It happened again.

Right now the average rent in the country (I read in some disreputable source) is $1,800 a month. I’d say housing prices were so high that NASA put them there, but NASA can’t put anything nearly that high. If people didn’t learn the housing bubble lesson, the housing bubble never really popped.

I hear NASA wants the next person on the Moon to be a woman – so dinner will be ready when the men get back there.

The housing bubble pops when people start buying houses again – not as investments, but as places to live. The stock market bubble pops the same way – when most people don’t want to buy stocks.

And from May, 2022, there’s a lot of pain left before that happens. The way the stock bubble ends is with utter capitulation, with people being so disgusted that they ever thought that stocks were the road to riches.

Only when people stop thinking that houses and stocks are magic money machines, will it be over.

The reason Ma Wilder wouldn’t let Pa buy the Sears© stock is that she had seen the aftermath of the Great Depression, and had seen stock speculation ruin the lives of many, many people.

When we get there, we’ll know it’s over. Will it be this year? In five years? In ten?

Being a waiter might not be a glamorous job, but at least it puts food on the table.

I don’t know. But I feel the combination of debt, inflation, and the generally fragmented nature of society will bring crisis. The good news?

It’s still a beautiful night, and I think someone left a beer in the cooler.

Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement

“Get old, you can’t even cuss someone and have it bother ’em. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.” – Bubba Ho-Tep

Hunter wanted to start a new delivery service, but Instagram® was already taken.

I’ve stumbled on a principle that I think is currently guiding the flow of history. Being a very humble person, I have named this Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement. Put simply, it’s the idea that if there are two more or less equal outcomes, the most amusing outcome will happen. It’s like instead of being dead or alive, Schrödinger’s Cat had a choice of being a polar bear or nuclear warhead.

Amusing, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean good. It doesn’t mean beneficial. The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald (PBUH, who I’m sure was part of the branch of the MacWilder side of the family) put it this way, “The job of a comedian is to make comedy. Comedy is when something unexpected happens. So, what’s funnier than a comedian that tells a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh?”

Norm’s joke.

I think, for reasons to be explained below, that we are in a time in history where the most amusing thing that could happen, will happen. And I have evidence. And not the burn a body at a funeral home it’s a cremation, but burn a body at home all of a sudden it’s “destroying evidence” sort of evidence. Nope, most every story is one you’ll be familiar with.

The Trump Election in 2016 was my first clue. I’m fairly sure that Trump thought he was going to lose on election night, but after the polls closed? Amusing as can be. Hillary’s mental breakdown and gin-infused refusal to admit that no one would announce her as “Her Cankleness” at the United Nations?

Amusing.

Also amusing was COVID. Remember the pictures of people collapsing on the street in China? Yeah. People fell for that. In the end, it became a meme. Again, I’m not saying it was positive, but how amusing would it have been if people had said, “Oh, it’s a really bad flu.” Heck, there are still people who so mRNA addicted that they get the Pfizer® shot into their eyes every other week.

Why did Hunter sniff artificial sweetener? He thought it was Diet Coke®.

Amusing. Even more amusing? If the mRNA vax didn’t actually help people and was instead an amazingly irresponsible experiment where we tested it on people before we tested it on mice. Oh, wait . . . .

Not mine.

Although I wanted Trump to be re-elected in 2020, I have to admit that the 2020 election was amusing. What happens when a bunch of well-funded Leftists and Globalists decide they want to change the rules and control information flow so a barely-living reanimated corpse of a political hack so limited in intellect that he plagiarized law school work and so limited in charisma that houseplants regularly get more attention gets close enough that they can commit (what is likely) the biggest electoral fraud in history?

And Biden is doing such a wonderful job that he’s making Jimmy Carter look like an effective and competent President, while displaying worse morals than Teddy “pants optional” Kennedy. Sad that Biden doesn’t remember any of that from day to day, and that his son Hunter doesn’t remember the years 2008-2021, and that the New York Times® doesn’t remember anything bad anyone named Biden ever did.

When NASA shows a picture of a hole at work it’s a scientific breakthrough. When I do the same thing, it’s an HR violation.

It’s certainly amusing, and probably more amusing than if Trump were in his second term. And what if that child-sniffing dementia patient picks the most vapid and, well, retarded mentally challenged person to ever sit as Vice President?

Amusing as can be. Mike Pence was boring, mostly. Kamala Harris regularly shows that her knowledge of foreign policy came through watching game shows and infomercials. Sham-wow®!

If Kamala was amusing, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was even more so. To have Joe Biden state, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a . . . .embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable,” less than a month before that exact thing actually happened?

Amusing.

Like salmon return to spawn in the rivers, COVID-19 laid its eggs and became the Ukraine. The Mrs. heard one young high schooler say, “Hey, COVID’s over! We have World War III!” The Ukraine became the Next Big Thing.

And then?

Elon Musk. Pretty much everything he does is amusing. Twitter® is hilarious. Beating NASA with 1/1,000^th of their budget even more. And selling electric meme cars to Leftists that now hate him?

I hear that Amber will soon be touring with Korn.

That’s amusing! He even showed up in commentary at the Johnny Depp/Amber Turd trial.

I think, maybe, that The Market Collapse of 2022 is at least partially from the Left trying to take down Musk and keep Twitter™ as the main source of Leftist indoctrination. It bothers them so much that they actually panicked enough to appoint a Ministry of Truth.

See? Amusing.

Now, just this week, I hear that “men” are lactating. And that “men” can have abortions. Oh, and did I mention the Supreme Court decision?

Yeah. Amusing.

The dead writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote about this (when he wasn’t writing about Oedipus) in his Future History. He called it the Crazy Years. The Crazy Years were just that – the years after society broke down. Heinlein didn’t write about that period much at all, mainly because it’s not a great story.

I do hear he was a savvy shopper, so they called him Bilbo Bargains.

J.R.R. Tolkien was going to do a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He didn’t. Why? After the One Ring was chucked along with Frodo’s finger (note to self, that would be a good band name) and destroyed, things were good. The world had been saved from Evil, and anything that would be a sequel would have been dark. It would have involved (from his notes) Aragorn’s kids idolizing Orcs and slowly being seduced by a decadence that prosperity brought, eventually leading to degeneracy and corruption replacing morality and virtue.

Heyyyyyyyyyy . . . .

Most years, most decades, haven’t seen as much amusement as these last six years. We live in those dark years that neither Heinlein nor Tolkien wanted to write about because it was depressing.

That’s okay. We’re not in a story.

What we are in, though, is a history moving ever so quickly that the novelty content is ever increasing.

There is one thing that we can do, and one thing only. In the darkness of years where degeneracy and corruption replace morality and virtue, be moral. Be virtuous. Stand for what is right, even when the world flows around you and tells you that good is bad, and men can breastfeed. Be virtuous, especially when those around you count virtue as the greatest sin.

Why? It’s right. And it’s not at all what they’re expecting.

I guess that makes it amusing, right?

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.