We know this is true because the curve remains inverted, with short-term debt remaining around the FFR, but long-term is below it, when really it should be a bit above and on a slope upward toward the 30 year. Maybe it will eventually sink in. The FOMC started even talking about hiking rates again recently, since inflation failed to cool in recent months.
Observing American health care firsthand thanks to ill relatives, I can say that it still functions but it is probably a few years at most to collapse. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services budget is about 15% funded and getting worse each year. Wait times for specialty appointments are months, surgery a half-year at least (unless urgent/life-threatening), care impossible to access – many people have to go to the ED just for diagnosis. Life expectancy down significantly in the last 10 years. We won’t escape Canada’s fate.
The homeless population increasing in a geometric ratio is something I have also seen in the USA. Luckily it has been a very mild winter or we would likely have large numbers of people freezing to death here as well.
I used to live in MN and there was a while there when the insect population had dropped critically low. Certain species like the native ladybirds appeared to disappear completely, replaced by the Eurasian invasive ones. And the monarch butterflies almost disappeared as well, but the practice of leaving prairie buffers on the edges of farms in the western part of the state seems to have helped their numbers recover. By the time I left, you would see monarchs in the summertime again. I still have grave concerns about biota in America though, as I suspect there will be major abuse of wild habitat as energy descent takes hold.
In the Upper Midwestern USA, we have had an unprecedented warm spell this winter, with almost no snow in December, and the mildest winter on record thus far. The only blip was a minor cold snap of below-zero wind chills for just over a week, and that just ended in the past couple of days. Now we are in a January thaw that looks to cause an entire melting off of the snow cover, which I don’t recall ever happening before during January in my life. This pattern is the result of a combination of overall warming and a “Super El Nino” pattern in the Pacific this year.
That’s fine as long as people can admit to themselves that energy throughput with renewables is going to be a fraction of what it was in the age of abundant fossil fuels. And the problem I see is that most people touting green energy are either unrealistic or mendacious about this. We still haven’t got past the phase of people thinking they will keep their consumer and commuter friendly lifestyles in the coming decades.
IIRC, there was a time period when tropical forests were found as far north as North Dakota in the Americas, and there was deciduous forest within the Arctic Circle. That gives some idea of what the biota would be like in a warmed world, about 1 million years from now that is. A big bottleneck awaits us though and I’m thinking that also includes enough scarcity to mean famine will be thing on the far end of declining net energy, maybe as soon as later this century (though earlier for low income nations).
The corporate price gouging and death by 1000 cuts fees have gotten out of control since the COVID era. Not just for Amazon either, though they are a very strong case in point. I am trying to do as little business as possible with these globocorps anymore.
It’s not just nazis on substack. There were plenty of other people who joined it thanks to the willy-nilly censorship that was happening on the large platforms in the past few years. The problem is that it’s hard to avoid some parasitic free-riders like the nazis if you want to have a genuine free speech platform, which none of the major platforms are any longer.
Personally I think it’s a good trend that more people are blogging and not all of the money is getting funneled away from creators to platforms owned by billionaire sociopaths like Musk and Zuck.
Sorry to practice thread necromancy to respond, but what the internet is really good for at this point is aggregating the previous output of culture. Social media has gotten way past the point of “too much noise” but sites like archive dot org are gems, and there are a bunch of private curated libraries like that as well. So in other words, the internet is good for learning if you are a self-directed person. But that’s about it, and so that’s what I use it for at this point.
It’s also an interesting question to ask what will happen to the web in a declining net energy world, over the next 1-2 decades. Probably a slower, text-only internet could be preserved well into the future. But the question is will it be? The corporate stewardship of the internet has been very poor.
But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
I’m not surprised. An instance of this would be the monarch butterfly which was abundant when I was a child. Then there were years where no one saw them and they even were presumed extinct in our area. Finally in 2016 I saw them again in a different part of the same state I was living at the time, and slowly they returned. But the overall volume of insect life in general is down. I would guess a large part of it is owing to both destruction of habitat and excessive use of pesticides. Suburbanization in my region has accelerated this process.
I actually think that Android has gone downhill in a big way, but I still won’t go to Apple’s closed ecosystem, and I don’t care what teenagers think.
Yes, that makes sense. There used to be this place called Tower Records in London, which I visited the one time I actually stayed in London (I’m from the USA). And this was, at the time, probably the biggest and best-stocked record store I had seen, so I bought a bunch of stuff. Hawkwind albums were among them. In those days there was an “old rock revival” ongoing and also that was the heyday of the first wave stoner rock/metal as well. Very interesting to reminisce on those days which seem like a lifetime ago.
I vaguely remember Hawkwind: wasn’t that a project that Lemmy Kilminster was in before Motorhead? I listened to them back in my stoner daze. But I left all of that behind, so I haven’t listened to as much psychedelia ever since.
I think it represents people being fed up with both institutions in the real world and the decline of the quality of the internet since the last couple of decades. As for them tuning in to something else, I have seen much more interest in DIY, hard skills, personal projects and such of late, but nothing societal beyond that which would really bring people together. I think that’s the best we can hope for at this time – at least people learning useful skills or not sacrificing their whole lives to corporate ambition is a plus.
I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I’m thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.
Yeah, they should have the resources to hire pretty much the best devs, it’s not like they are a startup or in some kind of backwater situation. They’re an old company with a big name and a lot of money.
Proprietary software has basically just turned into a giant grift and it makes me not want to use any of it anymore.
Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going – FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren’t for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it’s probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.
Yep, plus they are talking about INCREASING short term debt issuance versus going back to QE. They have to because of the deficits. But this can create feedback and we’ll have the situation of both government spending and bondholder cash contributing to the inflationary dynamic. So for some time to come, the trend will be inflationary, even as the Fed balance sheet winds down. Though, if you look at their balance sheet, it can only go down so far, since Treasury’s bank account is at the Fed and I don’t see that decreasing soon either.