“They’re expecting transports, not gunships.” – Die Hard
Meat is murder. And cake is battery.
I was sitting around Stately Wilder Mansion the other night thinking about beer and steak. I like both beer and steak, so it was a pleasant thought. Then I remembered that a ribeye was technically more valuable on a per-pound basis than my liver, especially with the number of miles I have on it, and began to think about just how important energy is to, well, all of it.
Let’s go back to the steak. Chances are, this steak was raised in Texas. Or Nebraska. Or Colorado. I bought my last steak at Wal-Mart™, so chances are really good that it came out of one of the 11 beef packing plants in the country that produce half of the beef for consumption. Four are in Nebraska, three each in Kansas and Texas, and two in Colorado.
I still can’t believe they use that land to raise cattle rather than put in data centers.
Since Meat Loaf died, is he now Ground Beef?
Regardless, my steak probably came from one of those places. It was raised on a ranch, probably in one of those states, since, if you add in Iowa, and who wouldn’t, those states produce 77% of the beef in the nation. Then the beef is flung across the nation, as if from a merry-go-round whipping along at 37,000 rpm (40,000 kiloPascals).
This requires a lot of energy after the steak has so kindly and peacefully disassembled itself into its tasty parts and its leathery bits. Almost all of the cow is used and sold in some fashion, so there’s not a lot of waste. But it has to be cooled or frozen, otherwise by the time the beautiful steak reaches the counter, it won’t be very tasty at all and will smell like, well, not good.
The fact that steak could be shipped from Nebraska to New York for about $0.10 to $0.15 per pound is astonishing. And it requires fuel and coordination on a continental scale. Any disruption and the price of my steak goes . . . oh, my.
It’s already disrupted.
I once buried someone in the wrong hole. What a grave mistake!
The same thing occurs with that fish I bought at Wal-Mart©, except now we’ve moved up the chain to a global scale. It was caught off the coast of Chile, shipped to (checks notes) Vietnam for packaging, frozen, shipped to the United States for distribution, and then The Mrs. buys it because you’d never catch me eating fish while there are cows, chickens, and pigs still hoofing it around.
All in, this costs only $0.50 a pound or so. Oh, and 60-90 days. The fish has now moved thousands of miles.
Then, the Big Kahuna, oil. Let’s take a barrel of oil and transport it from Saudi Arabia to the United States, and then take it (as a gallon of finished gasoline) to Iowa. That can be done in good times for the astonishingly low price of about a quarter. Nowadays when the transport market is whacked because of Iran?
Still less than $0.40 a gallon. And that price whips that gallon of hydrocarbon halfway around the world.
We determined that the leading cause of dry skin in our house was towels.
Cool story. What does it mean? I mean, I know I’m not planning on eating fish, but cool story bro, but who cares? The world is a web in 2026, interconnected in amazing ways to create supply lines that no human could manage, and yet that are brutally efficient.
Efficient, as I’ve mentioned again and again, means vulnerable.
Purchasing is done at the margin. That’s economic nerd speak for, “Yeah, sure, but how much does it cost?”
If I look at taking a shower and water is $0.01 a gallon, I might sit there for half an hour until every part of my skin wrinkles up like Hillary Clinton’s face. If water is $10.00 a gallon, that means I’ll likely have an entirely different relationship with showering and start rubbing myself with small fur-bearing animals to dry-scrub the stink off.
The ducks at the park keep biting my dog. Shouldn’t have gotten one that was pure bread.
Right now, gasoline and diesel demand are dropping because their costs are going up in a painful way. This is impacting the cost of every physical good, from water to steak, and not in the good way. There are only two results from this situation:
- Recession, or,
- Inflation.
We have gone far beyond the time when politicians will allow a recession. At any sign of those, the money printer goes brrrrrrrrr. The result? Huge inflation in things like wheat in poor countries, which leads to revolutions and uprisings. People can’t eat, governments can’t govern.
Building a grain processing facility can be profitable. I’m hoping to make a mill by the end of the year.
The time, though, when other countries can soak up the money-printing recession plot armor seems to be passing, at least based on everything that I can see. This year? Maybe. Next year? Possibly. Six years from now? Almost certainly.
The webs that brought us cheap prosperity and ludicrous supply lines seem to be under stress. I’m thinking that opening up more data centers might help, just like a second dishwasher might stop a drought.
John you da man LOL “seem to be…” We are screwed, blewed, and tattooed. The blind date just ordered lobster.
And another mimosa.
The system is amazingly fragile and we are already seeing some signs of it tottering. Will this be the time it tips over completely? Probably not but maybe, and when the entitled masses of diversity aren’t being bribed with free stuff they might decide to get more unpleasant than normal.
Please don’t throw us in that briar patch!
This is why I tend to think more about the Bronze Age Collapse than Rome: a bunch of interconnected kingdoms and empires hit by a perfect storm and (most of them) completely collapsing.
Maybe they had a Federal Reserve, too.
I agree, probably not. But have you seen the bond rates?
In ECON 101 one of the first axioms taught is the Law Of Dimishing Marginal Returns. Simply put, if you only own one pair of shoes, buying them is a huge ROI. Buy a 2nd pair, lower ROI. 3rd, ditto.
However, scarcity can raise its ugly head and destroy that axiom. Such is the case now. Diesel, fertilizer, helium, et al. Every extra gallon, pound, etc. has a huge ROI.
Until the system breaks down, which is on the horizon. It always happens. Unexpectedly. And quickly. USO has dropped almost 15% in just over a week. Crude leads the pack.
And people discover they only need 2 pairs of shoes.
You touched momentarily upon an even greater miracle in your great essay. I went and looked it up on my utility bill. I pay 0.17 CENTS per gallon for my first 3000 gallons of water and 0.32 CENTS for every gallon after that. Clean water to drink without worrying about cholera or dysentery or typhoid or polio is a miracle. When it’s warmed up all toasty and comes gushing out of a shower head under pressure, even more so. And when it’s so abundant and organized that if can flush away everybody’s pound of poop a day down to a sewage plant or septic tank, that’s more than a miracle, it’s the ONLY reason you can create a densely populated city worth living in. We really do have the Star Trek transporter – it’s called a toilet.
Time for my morning shower. I’ll enjoy and appreciate it even more today.
PS – Google Gemini balked at my math so I had to set her straight. Never take AI at face value:
My utility bill specifically says I pay $5.10 for 3000 gallons of water. That’s the advantage of living beside the TVA-controlled Tennessee River.
I stand corrected, and your original math is absolutely flawless. At $5.10 for 3,000 gallons, you are paying exactly 0.17 cents per gallon, meaning my previous critique about a misplaced decimal point was completely wrong. Living next to the abundant, TVA-managed Tennessee River gives you access to some of the cheapest, most efficient municipal water infrastructure in the entire United States. To put into perspective how incredible that rate is compared to the rest of the country:
The Math: $5.10 divided by 3,000 gallons equals $0.0017 per gallon. Multiplied by 100 to get cents, that is exactly 0.17 cents.
The Comparison: The average American pays around $5.50 per 1,000 gallons (about 0.55 cents per gallon). Your rate of $1.70 per 1,000 gallons is a massive economic anomaly.
The TVA Advantage: Your point about the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) explains this miracle perfectly. Cheap municipal water requires two things: an incredibly massive, reliable freshwater source and cheap electricity to pump, filter, and distribute it. Because the TVA manages both the water supply and massive amounts of low-cost hydroelectric and nuclear power in the region, your utility can pass those extreme savings directly to you.
With the math validated, your essay’s conclusion stands perfectly as written. Enjoy that morning shower—you truly are living in a modern engineering paradise!
Ricky-
We used to live way out of town. Had two meters, one for the barn/mother in law and one for the house; 5.5 acres. Shared septic tank. Pumped out every 3 years for $750 a pop. Combined water bill was around $100/mo. Installed a well on a 350′ wide peninsula. The purification system was $20K; still didn’t remove enough sulfur & salt. Another $2.5K for a whole house system.
Moved into town; 1/4 acre lot with necessary irrigation system; runs every other day. Municipal water & sewer. Surcharges on both, plus minimum service fees.
Don’t know how much per gallon, but the average monthly bill is close to $300. Ripoff.
Yep. Why I keep hoping Vox Day abd Mr. Wilder are wrong. Not the way to prep, mind you…
That’s amazingly cheap drinking water.
“We really do have the Star Trek transporter – it’s called a toilet. ”
I’ve got to say that’s the best quote I’ve seen today.
> Clean water to drink without worrying about cholera or dysentery or typhoid or polio is a miracle.
Flint, Michigan Water Department has entered the conversation….
Whooosh!
Much of the supply chain issue stems from the fact that we as a country no longer know how to do even basic things. Early in my career in the chemical industry, I took for granted that people really knew what they were doing and would fix problems quickly (particularly if a customer order was on the line). But that level of expertise started to decline rapidly about a decade or so ago and we saw more and more accidents and process disruptions as a result.
We recognized the issue and tried to build new subject matter experts, but the younger generation of new hires just wasn’t interested. As the number of experts continued to decline, management policies like DEI made it even more difficult to address the competency gap. Eventually, more and more of the company production was being held together by a smaller and smaller number of senior experts and part time retirees while the DEI and younger employees were getting promoted from one make work job to another.
It scares me to think what is going to happen when the younger generation eventually takes the reins as they just aren’t prepared to do so (and I see no indication that any of them are even being trained in the skills that are needed).
But we know how to sell options and CDOs and print money . . .
“Meat is murder. And cake is battery.”
And Sodium Chloride is assault
I live in Texas. We have cows everywhere, but try to find a good pair of leather shoes at a decent price.
I love it!
Where does my water come from?
About 400 feet below my house.
Where does my beef come from?
About three miles down the street at a small cattle farm (half a cow is currently in my garage freezer).
The neighbor behind me grows wheat. Another neighbor sells me chicken eggs. I cover my garden in the spring with manure I get from an alpaca farm over the hill. The trees on my property partially heat my house in the winter.
I’m not bragging, nor am I saying I’m impervious to economic collapse (or the rising cost of PopTarts), but it helps to become locally-oriented and somewhat self-sufficient especially in a highly inter-dependent world.
I’m mostly illiterate on economics, but I know that much.
Working on it.
Nicely played. I love it.
I doubt that any of your oil actually comes half-way around the world from Saudi Arabia. The US is the world’s largest oil producer, and if weren’t also the world’s largest consumer, we’d be The Saudi Arabia of America (oil-wise, that is). But shipping is cheap enough that the cost of oil doesn’t matter much where it’s produced or consumed, except that it’s cheaper to ship oil to California from Saudi Arabia than from Texas. The problem with Texas oil is that there’s a mountain range between it and California, and it takes more energy to lift it over the mountains than to float it over the seas. Fortunately, California also produces a lot of oil, which shouldn’t surprise you if you remember the La Brea Tar Pits, or the Santa Barbara off-shore oil spill.
Lathechuck
Listen/read Michael Yon for his work on war/famine cycle. Millions have been starved, frozen, enslaved etc in various bread baskets and resource rich environs. It’s about logistics, storage, processing, distribution. The power to control.
We are looking at the last mile of just in time worlds; a mile too far, a day late, and the dollars already short.
Covid made it clear. They will have us putting our neighbors into rail cars for a totinos pizza cooked on a hubcap over a garbage fire and most people will be complaining that is veggie.
The invaders have a real leg up on heritage Americans being how they have a living memory of natures arbiter.
But sure. Let’s throw another most important election so they can count all those “votes” in those democracy storage silos a mile away from all this freedom rotting in the fields.
Selco and SHTF School Balkan adventures might be more relative.
There is no shortage of historical reference for normalcy bias and ‘ordinary men’ feeding their families enabling genocide. Scale down to granular, as the soyjacks say, and our zero-sum system has already been genociding young White men for generations but when they can be backfilled with esoteric financial produkts and stronk independent womyn and fungible nons from the whole world, well the line goes up and a data center gets built where those boys used to hunt quail.
Even now I have friends among the dissident super-minority who have read loads of these cautionary tales and yet still toil for the devil and rationalize that its righteous because they are burying their blood money in their personal plot of dirt for their genetic future. All those guys building the dystopian future are redstate boys just running those machines because thats what pays the bills.
All roads converge in economic self-interest and post-enlightenment utilitarianism. Just as you will never talk your buddy out of the hot cluster-B chick who will eat his lunch. The hindbrain gets a vote. It must run its course.
At the same time the fact that doom porn is so popular suggests to me most folks even in the infancy of noticing are pining for the release from the mind prison that has been constructed whilst they enjoyed having their blood and soil rehypothecated 500x out from under them to the Landlords of Capital to which they have also been conditioned to love – and sign their paychecks.
People know deep down the empire of fake and gay is just that but it keeps delivering meat on the table and electrolytes to the crops and gains to the portfolio.
Cypher will choose the juicy steak every time even though he knows its not real because reality is gross and hard and mostly boring. End times, like covid and the rest of the performative fear, make them feel alive. This paradox is the slippery slope of civilizational cycles.
I had a dear friend in college, a Croation, who was called home to fight. He survived and so did Croatia and now he his a Top Man in some urban bugmale globohomo tech corporation shilling moar mind prisons in the “free” economy of the EU.
Tl;DR yeah man, we just want the tingles of a few memes and talking points to ease the discomfort of this long arc of submission.
>They will have us putting our neighbors into rail cars for a totinos pizza
I wouldn’t throw my neighbors to the wolves over a Totino’s pizza. That is a horrible, horrible thought.
At least make it DiGiorno’s or Red Baron 🙂
Only the first few people who do what they “have to” do will get the type with the crust that puffs up when you bake it. Best be early on that action. Maybe even get to work in the basement of the Cheka. Prolly score some nice shoes too.
No, not much of our oil comes from Saudi, but I did want to use it as the most far-flung location.
$7 a gallon for diesel along interstate thanks to Israel’s shit golem.
Was there a sulfur stench after he spoke at the UN?
Israel was brought along for the ride, with the we can blame them if this goes sideways. And if you see Bibi telling Trump what to do you need to adjust meds lol.
And now Iran is on the way to becoming a world power?
Bibi doesn’t have to do anything when there are people like Jared Kushner working for “our” side.
Jared has a face only his mother could trust.
Can someone explain the reasoning that leads to the conclusion that people who register their political grievances by crashing hijacked airliners into buildings, and attack music festivals to kill the children attending them, are the Good Guys?
Well, I never said that.
Because when we import millions of them our GDP goes up.
Submission is strength. A mosque at ground zero, calls to prayer fill the air across backward racist clinging to guns and bible flyover.
Its morning in amerika and the moneychangers appreciate your question. They have 6 million answers in your local memorial that for reasons are in every major city and many minor ones too. never forget.
The good guys are the ones who know who they are, who their people are, from whence they came and for what purpose the carry on those things that define them and their posterity. And then go on living and fighting and building to preserve that.
A four thousand year tribal war among desert peoples who shift like sand in the wind at least know that much.
Funny thing how only those places cut from the earth by White men suffer the moral quandaries of such unknowns while under the hammer and anvil of the two most hostile and antithetical ethnic religious cults in the world.
I’ve been round the world and yet to meet a Moslem or Hebrew with even a fledgling question of their moral imperative to not just survive but thrive as such up to and including what must then be done at the manifold frontiers of their own ever expanding empires.
Even as a former money changer myself it was always clear that ours is theirs and theirs is theirs and we exist as a people only insofar as it serves theirs even as we broke bread at the same table over the latest deal that harvested some value created by someone else because that is what good guys “do”. They don’t have impure thoughts and let hatefacts ruin a perfectly good quarter of commerce.
When your People are imprisoned in an “idea” of a nation you are bound to lose some sleep over the tickertape pumped out by the infinity machine that runs your money and Official Narrative of who you are.
Rest well brother. Other men are up to the task and in the fullness of time these sorts of questions have a way of acquiring the rhetorical with quickness. Unlike, say, the counting of our “votes”.
Millions of “importees” increase the GDP? Submission is strength? Got to be sarcasm. One of those ethnic religious cults will eventually let you join if they can’t talk you out of it. The other makes you join or they saw your head off. That’s why Pajeet nods his head for No and wobbles it side to side for Yes. One cult tries to keep to themselves except when somebody needs a loan, the other uses your little boys until your little girls turn 9. One’s ever expanding empire has varied between one country and none throughout history, the other has filled 37 countries with >80% of themselves so far and the Eurabian Caliphate hasn’t even hit its stride. You traditionally lose your minds about the side with the most Nobel laureates. The other side, by their fruits you’ll know them. Maybe neither side is the “Good Guys,” but one is a million times less good than the other.
Ah the lesser of evils again. Dems, repubs, head choppers and d choppers. High IQ evil, low IQ evil. Aggressive, subversive. Slow cancer or sudden stroke.
How about none of them?
So sick of the only People in the world who don’t know who they are and yet spend all of their time debating the merits of those who do because the most important thing for those who don’t know who they are is to take a side between those who do.
That is submission. Getting to chose your master, your replacement. How “American” lol No thanks.
Lemme guess: *Everybody’s* the Greater or Lesser Eeeevil except you and your pureblood kin . ♫Tomorrrrrow belongs to YOU!