“That’s the Lone Ranger®? I thought he was here to fix the air conditioner.” – Predator 2
My friend’s wife asked him why he had Only Fans® on his phone. Apparently “to contribute to your sister’s college tuition” was not the right answer.
One thing I’ve noticed in life is that there is always a delay between action and reaction. If there weren’t a delay, we wouldn’t need watches to see why our spouses were still not ready even though we agreed we were leaving at 9am.
I digress. One famous example is a household thermostat. I think I’ve mentioned it before. In my house, the air conditioner has exactly two settings.
On.
Off.
That’s it. It doesn’t have a “make it colder faster” setting. Or a “don’t overshoot and make the water condensing on the windows freeze” setting. Nope. Just on or off.
That alone is something that many adults don’t even recognize. If it’s 80°F (3MPa) in the house, turning the thermostat down to 58°F (6km) won’t make it get any cooler any faster. It will, however, keep the AC going long after The Mrs. has gone to get a blanket.
I got fired from my job as a locomotive engineer. Boss asked me how many trains I’d derailed this year, and I told him, “I don’t know, boss, it’s hard to keep track.”
There are many other things like this as well. Infestation er, immigration is one. We go from “Well, that was a pleasant new Mexican restaurant,” to, “Can you speak a little more slowly and enunciate? Or, better yet, get me someone that speaks English,” to “No, let’s not go to that part of town anymore because we don’t speak hindi and they poop in the street,” in only 30 years or so of unrelenting legal and illegal immigration.
Somewhere between 30 years and 3 hours, though, there’s the space where our economy moves in its cause-and-effect loop.
Part of the economy is entirely made up, that being stock prices and cash. The dollar wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all agree it exists. Where did it come from? Well, we made it up. We first said we’ll print pieces of paper that entitled you to a bit of gold, and when the “bit of gold” part became inconvenient we decided to skip the entire gold part and keep the “we’ll print” part.
That’s fictional. And it always ends up the same through thousands of years of human history, but, yeah, sure. This time it will be different.
If we’re lucky, we’ll get food as good as the Soviets had it. Why, I hear it was so good that people would stand in line for days just for a single piece!
But there’s also a part of the economy that’s based in raw reality. Rather than trading bits of paper for other bits of paper, or electrons on one storage system for electrons on another storage system, at some point people need to move the actual stuff that all the fictional stuff is tracking.
And that’s real. I can’t eat a beef future that’s been cooked medium rare since it’s on a hard-drive in Pittsburgh or some place. I have to wait until I have an actual ribeye in front of me. Real things are those things that still exists when we stop believing in them. Anyone here want to buy some francs or deutschmarks? Thought not.
They don’t exist.
But they used to. So, by definition, they were only as real as our belief. What’s neat about imaginary things is you can make as many as you want as quickly as you want. I think that since politicians spend our dollars with exactly that mindset, they lose the concept that they can’t just print eggs out of thin air.
I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today. I’ll let you know.
No, we have a technology that turns insects into usable protein in the form of an egg, the product of thousands of years of human ingenuity. It’s called a chicken. And chickens are real, especially my neighbor’s rooster, who can’t seem to figure out that midnight isn’t dawn.
Real things, like the temperature in my house, are subject to actual physical laws. And the reaction to an action is sometimes something that may take months or longer. Let’s take the price of food. When the price of fuel goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, and the price of food goes up.
The typical reaction of a politician is to solve the problem by controlling the imaginary lever he controls: spending more than they have. Then the Federal Reserve™ uses the levers they control, namely cash supply and interest rates. Interest rates are an imaginary thing that shows how much extra cash the most recent administration just spent.
But throughout all of this, we can’t imagine a steak. We still need fertilizer to make the grass grow and diesel to harvest and move the hay, and a cow to eat the hay, and someone to kill and butcher the cow and then some way to get it to my house.
Why are pandas at home in San Francisco? They’re vegetarians that refuse to breed.
None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.
And, just like cooling my house, all of this operates on a delay. The oil is pumped from the ground. The oil is then pumped into a tank. It sits waiting for transport. Then it’s transported to a refinery where it sits in a tank until its turned into diesel or gasoline and put in a tank. And then it’s shipped to another tank where it sits until it’s put into a filling station tank. Then it hits the final tank: the fuel tank of the tractor or car where it will be transferred to the engine and, finally, burned to make useful energy.
At each of those steps there’s a buffer where the oil sits in a tank for some time. That buffer is the lag in the system, the time between when a shortage starts at any part in the process. As the buffer disappears, the shortage that cannot be papered over shows up at last. About 20% of the finished gasoline in the United States is stored . . . in car and truck tanks.
And in six months or a year, we’ll all wonder why steak costs $73.37 a pound and silver $290 an ounce because those can’t be created by changing a computer entry.
I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush. I did tell The Mrs. that there was no need to set the temperature so cold on our air conditioner. She told me?
“Not a fan.”
“None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.”
If only Hammurabi had known he only had to print out paper with $$$ on it so he could buy some A-10s to conquer the Hittites and Egyptians.
I’ve used that example IRL, and people didn’t understand how it related to just printing money to create more stuff that money can buy. More money doesn’t create more of anything, it only redistributes existing supply to those who print the money. Often disincentivizing the creation of more things of real value.
wtfhappenedin1971.com
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“I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush.”
Cash is the worst thing to have if inflation is otw. Now more than ever a big garden will become important. For a few decades now Big Money has been investing on the assumption that food and water will become scarce and valuable, and if Big Money invests in something happening, they make that something happen.
More on this tomorrow.
The system is not just fake and ghey, it is also so massive and so full of fraud that it is only by an amazing effort of mass will that it keeps chugging along.
Once all the man-made parasitism and regulatory friction is removed by the dollar hyperinflation, the portion of the middle class with real jobs will realize it is almost independently wealthy and barely needs to work for a living. It is the job of government to prevent this from happening. Ancient Egypt was the first society that produced enough surplus to become rich, and the rulers destroyed the surplus building pyramids to prevent the middle class from saving and investing it.
The first “”Pyramid Scheme”?
Arthur, if it starts to fail they’ll just change the rules.
The commodities futures market used to be where you could take out insurance to protect yourself against price increases from the physical shortages that are moving at lightspeed towards us from the horizon. Now, just like we’ve untethered the gold from the dollar, we’ve untethered futures markets from physical commodities. The more we have replaced pulling everything from the ground with instead a focus on screen time, the further away from physical reality we are.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/14/prediction-markets-will-grow-to-1-trillion-by-2030-bernstein-says.html
You’ll love my tomorrow post.
By way of my 50 years of experience in the wholesale/retail petro biz, what we will see soon will make the 1973 & 1979 OPEC embargoes look like a picnic. Back then retail distribution was local. In a county of 100,000 or so, you’d have 7-8 jobbers that had bulk storage plants.
Some deilveries were direct from a large, regional storage facility (aka “Tank Town”) via an 8,800 gallon transport truck. But, mostly via a 2,000 gallon tankwagon from a local bulk plant to mom ‘n pop stores. As such, there was redundancy of supply from local owners.
That doesn’t exist anymore. We live in a coastal/resort orientated county of 200K people with ZERO bulk plants. The nearest is almost a 45 minute drive. Smaller commercial deliveries come from there or Charleston, which is a 90 minute drive.
Within 60 days Circle K, et al, will get an email with an attachment telling them that their contract allocation is being cut by 20-25%. Sign & confirm receipt. Gas lines ensue with an 8-10 gallon limit. Everyone will fill up on a half full tank – not at 1/4 or less. Semi trucks too but a 100 gallon limit.
50 years ago, lots of anger in a country that was 85% white. Little violence. Today? Sh** will HTF daily. Violently.
Actual shortages matter.
I know quite a few people that would dispute your logical explanation. Of course, they have nothing to counter your points, but their vocal chords are good, and their attention span allows long moments of loud nonsense. Some are relatives, and thankfully, they don’t have my phone number.
Jess-
Lived through Reaganites (yes, even them) dissing me as a “crooked profiteer” from 1979-81 all the time as a GM of an Esso Jobber. BTW, Nixon’s wage and price controls on retail petroleum were in place until Reagan dumped them. Regular went from 60¢/gal to $1.20 before they were eliminated. Several gas pumps were rammed, luckily no fires. People would purposely leave the gas hose in their fill pipe, tearing those from the pump. Notice the “breakers” on every gas hose these days.
As we were branded, could not source outside like unbranded C-stores could. Lost 40% of our retail gasoline business. Other branded or unbranded jobbers would give a larger allocation, and we lost those stores. Esso realized too late that their failure to accommodate was killing their jobber network. Took us 4 years to recover.
Every retail jobber these days are large branded jobbers or regional/nationwide unbrandeds like Circle K, Delta, QuikTrip or Sheetz. The average urban C-store costs from $8-10MM to build. It’s a big boys game.
I helped bid a convenience store project back in 1990. The price was well above a million, and over time, even with it being in a prime location, it closed. Competing against the foreigners that lived in the back of their store, had government handouts, and had supplemental income from families paying for their relatives to come to the U.S., was fruitless. Paying employees (with many apathetic) to run your store eats deep into profits, and when your competitor doesn’t even have a home mortgage, and drives an old beater, you really don’t have a chance.
Ha! You are a blessed man.
100% correct and the uniparty has NO clue on this reality. Hanging them will be amusing but It will not make for thunderdome, which is where we are headed.
The Lie is what they represent.
From a systems/controls engineering perspective, the two surefire ways to create instability is to have lag-time between input and output and excessive gain in correction. We have both in play.
Lag-time can be dealt with using the “Smith Predictor” model but that only works when the lag-times are predictable and the change is “crisp”. Excessive gain is a tougher problem, especially when it is on the “D” part of a P-I-D controller algorithm.
Changes in the future are likely to give us whip-lash. Just remember what your 3rd Grade basketball coach told you when guarding the guy dribbling the ball. “Don’t look at his eyes. Look at his belly-button.”
Smith and Wesson is my prediction
The market is looking at eyes.
Without fuel they were nothing. They’d built a house of straw.
I heard that in The Narrator’s voice. well done.