Wealth – Page 10 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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?

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?

Get Woke, Go Broke: Disney Princess Edition

“I woke up on the floor of some Japanese family’s rec room, and they would not stop screaming.” – Anchorman

I knew that Disney® was broke when they wouldn’t give R2-D2™ a brother, only a transister.

As is probably obvious now, I like movies. I think that they can convey complex ideas, and can exemplify that which is best in all of us. When done properly, they provide a shared mythology that replaces the stories that we used to tell each other around the fire after a successful mastodon hunt. They would sometimes even sing songs, I mean most people who killed a mastodon are in the mood for some Hairy Elephante.

Movies can be subtle propaganda. Certainly, looking back there were large elements of mainly harmless propaganda added into the media that I watched growing up – trying to convince me to eat properly, brush my teeth, get enough sleep, and not start a criminal drug trafficking gang.

Data Point Number One is a Hollywood® movie that certainly has more wholesome values built-in, Top Gun: Maverick. Going as far back as the first Top Gun, the idea was fairly simple: America and Americans were trying to be the good guys. We were brash, we took Polaroid® pictures of Russian pilots, and we had shirtless, sweaty volleyball playing . . . dudes?

Well, at least Kenny can get spare parts if he has a footloose.

Okay, they did make some mistakes in the original. But it was nationalist. It focused on excellence. And the latest version has some of the same notes. Amazingly, people seem to like feeling good about their country and seeing excellence in action. Top Gun: Maverick will end up making over a billion dollars.

So, mainly wholesome. Sure there were some less wholesome parts built in there, but I’m still planning a post on propaganda. Some of the propaganda has been awful, and lately, it’s been worse. Hollywood® has recently been all-in on propaganda, and not the good kind.

That brings us to . . .

Data Point Number Two is Lightyear. Disney® movies used to be a bastion of wholesome values. Parents. Kids. There would be a conflict, but the end would almost always be resolved in a way that showed the importance of values. Disney©, however, has decided to showcase a family arrangement of two lesbian moms. This is a lifestyle that would have been:

Not legally enforceable across the country a decade ago,
Widely shunned two decades ago,
Subject to a visit from Child Protective Services thirty years ago,
Ruled out either of the lesbian moms to be able to work as a teacher forty years ago, and
Caused them to be burned as witches fifty years ago, though my timing might be off a bit on that one.

Jeff Epstein tried to give Hillary a high five, but she left him hanging.

Now? It’s a lifestyle being celebrated as normal in a Disney® film. To most parents (remember, it takes an actual woman and an actual man to make a baby, even in 2022) it’s not the propaganda that they want to have in the minds of their little kids. I did the math, and (to the best I can find) 0.14% of kids were being raised by lesbian moms.

Add in people who are hard Lefties who buy their kids Transition Flakes™? That’s your Lightyear audience.

Thus, it’s no surprise to me that the film failed. Lightyear has greatly disappointed the folks at Disney® due to its poor financial performance. People are simply declining to pay money to take their kids to become indoctrinated with the Latest Thing®.

Disney™ seemingly doesn’t care is actually blaming the audience, from some interviews I’ve seen.

I hear AOC met her boyfriend on Tinder®. That must have been awkward.

It’s not just Disney®, though they’re the absolute worst today. I’ve noticed that most movies made after, say, 2018, are awful. It’s not just Coronachan, either. It is the movie content. I don’t know if all the screenwriters suddenly became activists after Trump was elected, but the movies became awful.

How? They became drenched in Leftist propaganda. If it were just that, it might be interesting entertainment. But Leftism screws everything up. Character development doesn’t exist, because Strong Woman can never, ever be inferior to Man, even if Strong Woman just started piloting starships and Man has been piloting them for decades. Oh, and she’s stronger, too. And can beat anyone but another woman in a fight.

I wonder why they didn’t call her Mary Sue?

Yawn. It’s not even interesting, and combined with the bales of propaganda that gets thrown in, it just turns into a poorly written script that ends up making a movie that’s not very interesting. What are the stakes when the hero is perfect from the first moment of the movie?

It isn’t just movies. Books started to get infected with the same nonsense even before movies did. For a time, I stopped reading fiction because the books ceased being enjoyable. I thought it was me. I thought that I had grown up, and science fiction has lost its appeal because I’d grown out of it.

Then I picked up an older book, (Lucifer’s Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle) and was happy to find it wasn’t me – it was that science fiction books started sucking, and for exactly the same reason. Leftism kills everything that it touches.

I’ve noticed that most larger businesses don’t seem to care. Star Wars® (another Disney© product produced some of the weakest, worst content ever. Why? Retreaded stories and a protagonist that wasn’t interesting because she was already the Best Ever® at everything. Disney stock wasn’t impacted.

Until now.

If you pour root beer into a square glass does that just make it beer?

It has lost about half of its value since last year, with over $170 billion in market value lost. This started before the big market slide with the Biden Bust.

Looks like there’s a line. And looks like Disney© has found it.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

Joe Biden: Tasting Your Frustration Edition

“I can taste all the flavors from the past sixty years. I can taste the Korean War.” – Bob’s Burgers

I have the memory of an elephant. I recall seeing one at a zoo once.

Yesterday, thankfully, Resident Joe Biden indicated he was really in tune with modern Americans. During a press conference, Joe stated, “I understand the frustration. I can taste it.”

Taste it. Yes. Normally, I goof on Joe about being a bit addled, but here he’s nosing in on my gig. “I can taste it.”

I wonder, what exactly frustration tastes like? Is it like the dinner I made last month when Pugsley asked, “Was it supposed to taste like this?”

I wonder if, to Joe, our frustration tastes like something exceptionally expensive. A fine Bordeaux or, say, gasoline?

Thankfully, Joe is willing to devote all of his senses to solving our problems. I wonder if Biden smells our bank accounts? Probably not, though I heard that Joe took an interest that the supply chain issues have made stores run out of Pantene® – Joe said he’d personally sniff out the situation.

What’s the difference between The Mrs. and I? When she says “sniff this” it’s usually pleasant.

Thankfully, in the very same press conference, Biden also said, “. . . inflation is our strength . . .” Yes. He said that. Pretty quickly, Nina Jankowicz (the Jerry Springer of government officials, except Jerry would kill for her jawline) got up and echoed that thought: “Inflation is our strength, and war in Ukraine is peace.”

Okay, I’m making fun of these people, but in truth, they aren’t serious people. They’re an administration that might actually think that Robert Downey, Jr., is really Iron Man® and really might come and save them after he stops the Russians in Kiev. And that’s me being charitable in my assessment.

When it comes to government, one of the Leftist talking points was that, with Biden in the White House, we’d have the “adults back in charge”. In this case that’s an apt description, but only if the adults in question are a collection of diversity hires unable to get a job where an IQ greater than room temperature (Fahrenheit, not the meter thing). Oh, and they are in favor of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

Pictured: White House security badge.

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine dresses and calls xirself a woman. Xir also dresses like and calls xirself an Admiral.

As the assistant secretary for health, Levine told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera, about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.” It’s no wonder that Biden appointed a Supreme Court Justice that said she couldn’t define what a woman is. How ever did she decide what to put on her driver’s license?

So, that leads me to several options when it comes to the economy. The first idea is that we have left the equivalent of a group of dim-witted glue-eating children in a room filled with razorblades, poison ivy, cyanide, and whatever hellish creature that Australia might produce that I haven’t had a nightmare about yet. Carnivorous, poisonous koala bears that fly and have scorpion tails, perhaps?

Why did the koala drop out of the tree? It was dead.

Regardless, these idiots were saved from being Marxist perma-baristas by vote harvesting and have somehow gotten the keys to the economy. Of course, never having heard of debt, inflation, or Zimbabwe, the best idea that they had is “make everyone rich by printing more money”. Really. That’s it.

That’s the first option, actual idiocracy.

But what if this is the desired result?

Thus, the second option. The Cloward-Piven Strategy dates from the 1960s and was based around breaking the system through welfare. Cloward and Piven were two married professors that decided that since they were making money from the public for doing essentially nothing, that everyone else should be able to get a piece of that action, too. Economies aren’t based on people being productive, right?

The end idea of their strategy was bankrupting the country through increased pushing of social programs. Why do that, to help people? No, the aim was revolution in the United States. And this wouldn’t be a revolution like the French one (which was a head of its time) which proved that the French can win a war, if it’s against the French.

What’s a good way to start a revolution?

King George was only 11 inches tall – he was unfit to be a ruler.

Doing exactly what the current idiots are doing. It used to be just the commies like Cloward and Piven and their cousins Pol Pot and Stalin who wanted to change man, to make him perfectible. Now, the World Economic Forum (LINK) is on with the same old idea that’s caused so much grief over the past century and change. They have an agenda to make man a global economic cog in a machine where only one culture, one set of ideas is acceptable – in the world.

Strangely, the outcome of the “toddlers in charge” plan looks a lot like the outcome of the “Global Commie Power Grab” plan.

So, was Joe being stupid when he said “inflation is our strength” or was he just slipping and sharing the quiet part of the plan that he wasn’t supposed to say?

Biden’s Economic Case For Nuclear War

“Two hundred years have passed since the nuclear war raged to an end and the computers took over what was left of the world – sealed it off from the outside – and made it perfect. Now, in the Domed City in this year 2319, living is unending joy.” – Logan’s Run

After a nuclear war in the Middle East, there will only be one country and the Persian Gulf left. Just Kuwait and sea.

When we lived in Fairbanks, my hobby in the summer was getting firewood. I was the Bubba (from Forrest Gump) of firewood: “There’s lots of ways to have birch. There’s split birch, there’s dry birch, there’s stacked birch, there’s birch that the bark fell off of, there’s birch that still has bark, there’s wet birch, there’s birch logs . . .” you get the idea. Now imagine that James Spader was saying it. That will become important later.

As such, we spent a lot of time in the (mostly Gump-free) forest. The Mrs. would generally keep an eye on the (then four-year-old) The Boy. Outside of moose and grizzly bear, the forest was safe. Oh, did I mention the wasps? Yeah. Fairbanks was infested with them. So, one day while I was knocking down trees and sawing them up, The Boy was playing near a tree.

What’s Gump’s password? 1FORREST1. (meme as found)

Then The Boy started screaming. If you noticed the clear foreshadowing, it certainly wasn’t a bear or a moose, but rather The Boy had been jumping up and down (unknowingly) on a subterranean wasp nest.

Wasps have a sense of humor. Oh, no, they don’t. They’re hatred wrapped up in spite with a side order of malice and animosity. So, they did the only thing their stupid malignant minds can comprehend: they stung The Boy. Repeatedly.

Fast forward a few months. We had abandoned all of that sweet, sweet birch that we were going to combust in order to liberate the carbon back into the atmosphere and move from Fairbanks to Houston. Ugh. In the backyard, though, a beautiful butterfly came fluttering by bouncing from flower to flower.

I could see the wonder and amazement in The Boy’s eyes as he tracked it across the backyard. He moved close.

“Be careful,” I said, “they bite!”

He ran screaming into the house, and now I had a four-year-old son that was deathly afraid of butterflies and also the problem of explaining to The Mrs. how I was really just kidding and not intentionally emotionally scarring our child.

Good times.

I sleep on a cushion made of butterfly larva. It’s a caterpillow.

“What,” you might ask, “does that story have to do with nuclear war? I can read the title, John Wilder, and I didn’t come here for twisted tales of how you made a child cry by telling him that butterflies sting.”

Well, bear with me.

What if . . . nuclear war is not so bad? What if nuclear war is Joe Biden’s cunning plan to revive our economy?

I mean, giving trillions of dollars just seemed to work for a while, and now everyone’s tired of having all that free money. Giving billions to the vaxx companies so that they could, um, prevent oops, lessen the likelihood the vaxxed got COVID oops, lessen the impact of COVID oops, make billions of dollars in profits.

The Mrs. says that Jack Daniels® keeps her healthy. She calls it Liver Cross-Fit®.

The next best idea that Biden had, besides eating crayons and attempting to have sex with his desk was just more of the “print trillions of dollars” idea. That didn’t go as well once people figured out they weren’t the ones getting the money, and they had to trade internal organs for a tank of gasoline.

Giving billions of dollars to Ukraine seemed safe, but outside of asking for more money, Zelinsky’s prime impact on the war effort in Ukraine appears to be walking around sweaty in an olive drab t-shirt while looking for escorts with Hunter Biden.

Huh. That doesn’t seem to be working.

So, how about provoking a nuclear war? I can just imagine the conversation with the cabinet . . . .

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (SECDEF): “Are you sure, Mr. President? Don’t you think that giving Ukraine, and I quote, ‘a whole bejeebus load of guns and stuff’ might provoke the Russians?”

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP): (unintelligible giggling, possibly drunk)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken (STATE): “I’d like to remind you, Mr. President, there are a lot of Ukrainians that we’ve got left. I mean, the Russians have to run out of artillery shells at some point.”

Joseph R. Biden (BRANDON): “But, hey, man, have you thought this through? If we bomb the Russians, and they bomb us, we can (long pause) you know the thing. Build better boobies.” (waves hands while looking uncomprehendingly at imaginary people behind him)

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP): (giggling) “You said boobies! Check out this rack!” (lifts blouse)

Monica Lewinsky is 48! It seems just like yesterday that she was crawling all over the White House.

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (TREAS): (ignoring VP) “He has a point. Think of all the industrial activity we would get if a nuclear war hit the United States. Look at (checks notes) Japan. We nuked them twice, and look how their economy skyrocketed!”

Joseph R. Biden (BRANDON): “Yeah, man, he has a good point. Is it a good point? Who has the good point?”

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (TREAS): “You, sir.”

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP): (giggling) “So, it’s settled! Margaritas for everyone! This has been a long, hard day, if you know what I mean.” (winking at Yellen)

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (SECDEF): “Sounds great! I’m in. Just one more thing to do before I call it a day!” (picks up phone to call NORAD) “Brandon has authorized Operation McChicken™, repeat, Brandon has authorized Operation McChicken©, authorization code “PEZ BRAVO JOHNNY DEPP.” (hangs up phone) “Now where’s that margarita?”

So, if it appears that that the Biden Administration is being run by people who have all of the competence of Bulgarian mall lawyers attempting to fix a seventeen-year-old copier by poking and prodding it with whatever pens and paperclips their greasy fingers can find hoping against hope that their random actions will fix whatever “ERROR 031” is?

No. The Bulgarian mall lawyers, though only dimly aware that their random actions are little more effective than hitting the machine with a hammer while chanting Sheryl Crow songs in the nude, at least were bright enough to not vote for Biden.

So, perhaps like that butterfly, nuclear war won’t be so bad? Despite how good Biden makes it sound, I’ll take my chances without having a nuclear war, thank you.

As found.

I’d love to write more, but I’m watching a movie with James Spader and it requires all of my attention because he might be Jack the Ripper.