I am still processing current events, which have been shocking, but I think there is now a change occurring. The old era is crumbling and new will emerge – I see similarities between this change and the change from medieval to Renaissance in that the Renaissance was overhyped as Age of Reason (while in fact, superstitions flourished as did witch hunts and religious wars), just like the current age of atheism has led to a proliferation of cults, superstitions and die-hard fanaticism. Whether the emerging civilization will be more civilized than the dying one is debatable, considering the decreasing literacy rates and the fact that people no longer read much. Worse, critical thinking seems to have been discouraged to make people to conform the centrally managed ideologies, and this has been going on long enough to erode educational standards.
In Finland, which was supposed to have one of the best education systems in the world, some education official had recently stated that the schools should focus on learning processes and how to become good people rather than on concrete skills, which I interpreted as capitulation – children will not learn because they are not able to learn, so they must be taught to learn before they can learn. I did not go to the original news to find out exactly how would the educators grade learning of learning processes and what are the metrics for success but I suspect the standards to be lenient enough to process students out of the system regardless of their actual skills, especially the concrete ones.
Anyone who has discussed with a fundamentalist atheist will soon have realized that their faith is as unshakeable as their urge to convert everyone else, and any doubts about non-existence of God will be met with vehement proselytizing, while any vestige of deistic religious practice will incite their wrath. Ironically, as the old religion fades from mainstream culture, it does not lead to new atheistic world but a hodgepodge of cults, including some seemingly irrational ones.
Combined with decreasing literacy rates, apparent disfavor of critical thinking relative to obedience to centrally directed ideologies, the current system seems to be a perfect incubator for superstitions and cults among masses deprived of their traditional (or any other) culture and seeking meaning to their lives.
It has been written that none should present a problem without offering also a solution. My proposal would be to go medieval, that is reintroduce trivium: logic, grammar and rhetoric, that were the classical curriculum to the modern student body.
Logic, i.e., critical thinking wherein facts could be tested according to a system of formalized structures to detect fallacies, would be absolute minimum. Offshoots of logic, especially arithmetic and natural sciences in general, as well as traditional humanities from times before deconstructionism, would also be useful.
Grammar, especially its application in literacy, is crucial for the functioning of society and of individual within a society. Without ability to communicate clearly, in speaking, reading and writing, information transfer between individuals and generations becomes difficult, as does organizing the societies.
Rhetoric is an obvious application of logic and grammar, but the art of communication is difficult. I have read complaints that modern youth cannot communicate. I interpret those complaints as modern youth having been abandoned without teaching them rhetoric. Without an ability to convey one’s needs and wants, and to persuade others, a person is crippled in a society. Maybe the modern youth have their own society where they communicate amongst themselves, but even then, the intergenerational information transfer has been disrupted. Or, the young today no longer hear the teachings of their forefathers.
In any case, before I got distracted, I meant to post a video of a skipper butterfly in a flower, edited from one taken on October 5th, 2025.
October skipper. Skipper butterflies do not like cold weather, so the temperatures had been quite warm. Now, this winter, the fruit trees and magnolias seem to bloom early.
And I also added a jigsaw puzzle via Jigsaw Explorer.
Bubbles mosaic view of a skipper butterfly on plant. Clicking the above image will lead to 110-piece jigsaw puzzle, courtesy of Jigsaw Explorer.
This week has been very strange, even by 2020s standards.
Sap on a tree trunk, August 22nd, 2025, in evening sun light. Just something pretty.
I have been employed since September, a couple of temp extensions and I got another extension last week. Have been working hard to justify my continued paycheck, so posting has been sparse. It will probably continue to be so, until I get things stabilized.
The inflation is getting out of hand. On Thursday, the gold visited briefly at about 5600$ per troy ounce, silver tested 120+ range before settling below 120$. In the cafeteria, where I often go for lunch, the cheap meal of 2 pieces of chicken, a piece of corn bread and some side was 20$, a bigger meal 35$ and there was an 8-piece 70$ option, too. Then on Friday an incomprehensible double digit collapse of gold and silver prices, some say 8 – 10 sigma event. Also crypto went down, hard. The metal move was some times blamed on nomination of Warsh as the next Chairman of the Fed, but metals don’t move that much for nearly anything, at least they did not used to. People online grumble about market manipulation, but even that does not make sense, unless the economy is very, very fragile. A few years back, I could not imagine an event smaller than WWIII moving metal prices that fast. No, scratch that. A few years back, I could not imagine metal prices to move that fast. Period. However, I doubt the chicken will be cheaper next week.
Greenland forgotten, our troops are amassing near Gulf of Persia. Government is currently under partial shutdown. On the top of the shutdown, the Federal administration is trying to stop disbursements to the states that refuse to investigate various forms of fraud on social services, health care, etc. There is a simmering tension that might flare at any provocation back to armed violence – the states are choosing their sides whether to support the Feds on immigration enforcement or not.
Meanwhile, there is the Moltbook issue. To me, it is unclear if this is a clever community make-believe or whether the AI agents are gaining autonomy or something between. Some in the Internet are screeching about Skynet, but it is the reality of our energy infrastructure that is a kicker. For example, there were over 180k households without electricity in Tennessee after a winter storm, tens of thousands still today, though the repairs are ongoing relatively fast. Even under the best of the weather conditions, many interconnects are under enormous strain between the Green New Leap that has destabilized the grid and the AI server farms which require power of millions of households. If I were a betting person, I would place money on the complexity collapse over the shiny AI future.
So, while charging my phone, I decided to use the time for making a no-context video of clips taken August 22nd, 2025, and then start writing a blog post as a place for that video.
Seed structures fluttering in wind, black ants on a tree (some sap)
I got as a suggestion from a YouTube, a video about moving to chase jobs. A part of the video made me rethink about the whole migration approach to avoid economic failure. Not that I am blaming individual people who choose to rip themselves from their home areas and finding greener pastures, being a migrant myself, that would be hypocritical.
However, people here in West have been relentlessly propagandized to move after better economic opportunities instead of improving their home environment. Specifically, the discussion which states would be the best options made me think about the migration between US states as a scam. People are encouraged to leave states with poor job prospects to chase the increasingly ephemeral employment across the continent. Similar phenomenon is seen within European Union that deliberately adopted the same approach as ‘free movement of labor’.
The free movement of labor proved disastrous in EU. In Eastern Europe, people mass migrated to Western Europe to do unpleasant jobs cheaper and with fewer options to object inhumane treatment than the local working classes. This emptied the poorer parts of EU cramming their peoples into wealthier parts of the EU. At some point, the second biggest Latvian urban population after Riga was London. Polish plumber became a meme. Meanwhile, the working classes of the Western EU began to lose their work to cheaper foreign competitors with fewer de facto rights. Those who remained employed saw their wages stagnate and working conditions worsen.
Eventually, the working and downwardly mobile middle classes of UK, which had been the end of the line for aspiring eastern EU citizens, voted for Brexit to reduce the pressure to their living standards. Aside from job markets, the immigrants increased housing pressure and needed public services. In short, the pie of gross national production may have gotten larger, but did it get large enough to accommodate all the new slices? And who actually benefited for the increase in GNP? Somebodies must have known or guessed the results but gone ahead with it anyway.
This was just the economic side of it. I wonder if much attention has been paid to the psycosocial and cultural costs to the immigrants themselves, when they leave their social support networks and familiar traditions and customs. The increasing atomization and hyperindividualization of the subjects, or objects of governance, of course benefits elites who do not really worry about lone ranters in the internet (those can be shadowbanned) but are sweating over mass movements not paid by and organized by themselves. Even though their biggest actual threat is mass passivism (NEETism, or as the Chinese say, lying flat), but that was not what I had been thinking this time.
The biggest problem after the exploitation of the migrants is that free movement allows exportation of the various regions socioeconomical problems, thus shielding their governments from the consequences of their policies. In United States, California, New York and Illinois are regularly trotted as examples of exporting refugees of liberal policies but as a Californian, I am rather tired of red staters sneering smugly at our homeless problem after having exported their drug addicts and mentally ill using what is here known as bus therapy: i.e., buying them a one way bus ticket hoping that the Californians will take care of their social issues.
Meanwhile, in California, UK, European Union, and other mismanaged territories, bad regulatory environment combined with excessive taxation and misallocation of government resources (encouraging further taxation) kills the economy, including employment. People with means (money, education, passport) and initiative will vote with their feet. And as the recent decade has shown, apparently the only thing you actually need for emigration is initiative, though money and passport will be huge advantages.
In the current narrative, as far as I understand it, emigration is supposed to punish the local administrations, they are losing tax base. Except that thanks to Federal or EU government and their funds transfers between the regions, the internal emigrants will still subsidize their original administrations with their taxes. While burdening the infrastructure from roads to social services somewhere else. Win-win for the local mismanagers. There are whole developing countries whose economies depend on remittances from their expatriate populations, which on surface seems more benign than the interstate welfare / subsidy parasitism, but which on one hand means at least a temporary loss of labor force that is building another country, while on the other hand creating distortions on the labor market of country they have emigrated into. And the psychosocial costs, again, were borne by the migrant labor and their families.
What happens if all regions export their economic problems and no region can handle the masses seeking better life any more? Or if one region exports the labor to be exploited in another region?
Well, the EU economy is collapsing, and though some blame the migrant crisis, I think the mass migration is a symptom of a deeper rot within the system that relies on imported people to exploit. Except that the current batch of immigrants did not arrive to be exploited but to figure out the greatest personal benefits. The massive immigration industrial complex that relies on government subsidies flowing to the ‘NGOs’ is definitely a drain on government budgets, but if it were not the immigrants, some other cause with swarms of ‘NGOs’ would take their place. EU has now two competing narratives, War in Ukraine and the Climate Change, which also demand lots of money, but the real reason why the elites are after all these years slowly beginning to turn off the money spigot on the immigration is that the economy (the big corporate, not just the little bourgeoisie or working classes) is dying. After the job market had already began to contract (in case you had not looked at the job search situation during the past couple of years), there was a brief attempt to use the immigrants to cook the government books by adding consumers to GDP, but this consumption was mainly driven by government handouts, and governments, as mentioned above, had also other places which needed the printed money.
The bigger issue that is destroying the economy is the all suffocating tangle of red tape and directives sprouting from Brussels, that has nearly destroyed all initiative within EU. As a child, I used to giggle at the Moscow lead Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Now large fraction of NATO is lead by equally insane Brussels. Among these directives are the dictates of the more cultishly fanatical supporters of various Veblen ideologies.
Veblen ideologies are impractical and costly to adhere, and mostly for virtue signaling among the peers, just like Veblen goods are mainly bought to show that the buyer can afford them and is sophisticated enough to know which expensive goods to buy. Anyway, the Veblen ideologies of the EU elites demanded destruction of nuclear power stations and building wing mills and solar panels instead, thus gutting their industrial base and small consumers’ electricity budgets.
Then there are the endless identity politics, which can only exist if divisions between peoples are carefully cultivated, and if necessary, invented. Problem being that increasing mistrust between people requires increasing regulatory layers to prevent them from doing unto the society before the society does it unto them. Thus, low trust societies are less efficient and require more top down enforcement (to replace the missing natural cohesion) but I suspect that is precisely the reason why many of the elites seem to promote identity politics – fracturing the masses into mutually hostile tribes prevents populist uprisings.
However, aside from being bad for the economy by the added bureaucratic drag, the conflict between ethnic or ideological tribes can be used for driving the opponents of the regime away. Every conservative chased away is a reward for the progressive administrative state of California. Even if reducing the dissidents diminishes the likelihood for corrective action instead of economic collapse due to runaway Veblen ideology cults.
But why do Brussels and Washington DC allow epic failures like Germany or California? Without resorting to conspiracy theories about shapeshifting lizard people, I hypothesize that firstly, both California and Germany are too big to fail, and secondly, when they do fail this presents the central governance an opportunity to gain bigger grip on regions (thus, ironically, further entrenching the collapse of the whole rather than just some of its parts.)
Both California and Germany used to be the industrial backbones of their respective organizations, and enormously wealthy and powerful, so it will be easier to pretend nothing is amiss than to actually try to do something about them. Because of their sizes and their remnant wealth, and their heritage of numerous bureaucratic positions within the System, California and Germany still wield great power in Washington DC and Brussels, respectively, thus preventing anything done to them without their permission.
Meanwhile, as both regions do their best to dictate the policies of the larger collective, or in case of California, at least ignoring / defying the edicts from the capital, the factions aiming for more centralized control are waiting for a useful crisis to exploit for further power consolidation.
And what does this have to do with the locust economies? As the systemic polycrisis deepens, individual people and families will frantically try to find a place to survive. Survival is no longer just a problem of the Third World. Thanks to reductions in food and energy production (not to mention the oligopolistic squeeze on healthcare resources, especially in United States), the struggle for survival is returning to the First World.
California being pretty much the last shore of the West, I do not know what shape or form the mass migration within the First World will take, but I believe it will not be many years from now when the powers that be finally begin to slam the borders shut, not to keep immigrants out but to keep emigrants in, just like East Germany used to do and North Korea (and to a lesser degree People’s Republic of China) still do.
Prepare for the Fall. The season is nearly gone, but the civilization will take a bit longer to finish.
As mentioned in the previous Restless Times posting, France just changed their prime minister.
But so did Nepal. Their parliament burned, and the prime minister fled on helicopter. People were teed off by the government decision to shut down all social media because the companies refused to censor content that Nepalese government did not like (no, I don’t have any details) and then the pro-social media demonstrators were met with a hail of bullets, and then it turned out that the number of teed off citizens exceeded the government firepower and willingness to use it. Some people are suspicious about the social media companies’ unwillingness to censor in Nepal, after all, the social media have been over the years been weaponized for color revolutions and some interests may have wanted the Nepalese government out. However, the people of Nepal have probably been thoroughly disgusted by their leaders and corruption so I think the uprising was organically powered, with social media companies merely allowing the people to egg each other on.
In Qatar, Israeli airstrike is claimed to have taken out Hamas leadership. There are dissenting reports. The news have within the last decade become a fun-house mirror maze, where people hear what they are supposed to think and then are left to figure out if anything happened let alone in the manner the news present the events.
Gold prices are shooting up. I am waiting to get some money to buy gold and silver. The physical metals, not the futures. Currently, as I type, I read that each silver ounce in the COMEX vaults has been overbooked by 36 times, i.e., there are 36 paper contract ounces to each physical ounce, which means that in case of a panic, the first / strongest to assert their claim will get the nuggets. Whether the rest will get even the cash value of their paper metals will depend on whether the vault on which you have claims has money to cover the debts. In other words, the same logic as in Resolution Weekend.
Europeans are busy with military exercises. There were at least six simultaneous ones within Finnish territory, including joint force exercises and urban warfare exercises, and Finland also participated in the CBNR exercise in Sweden. Poland had massive exercises, and aside from Quadriga exercise, Germany has moved a panzer brigade to Baltics. The French and UK orders regarding hospital readiness in case of mass casualty event I may have already mentioned earlier. I had so hoped that the United States 2024 election results would have brought peace, but depressingly it looks like this will not happen.
Also Belarus says they shot down stray drones (either Ukrainian or Russian) and warned Poland about the arriving drones. However, there are too many reports for me to follow but it sure looks bad.
In Vilnius, there were LNG rail car explosions. In the report I read, they were attributed to OHSA violations, but the cause is still being investigated.
Secretary of War Hegseth gave a speech to military in Puerto Rico telling the soldiers that this was not training but to end poisoning of the American people.
Economy will not improve, either. Layoffs are increasing, but the hirings (at least in the USA) keep getting revised down. On Tuesday, I saw in LinkedIn feed a discussion about even recruiters finding new careers (sorry no link or screenshot.) I have been actively looking for a job since last year, and based on my job listing feeds the job market has been getting crazier by month.
Needless to say, I am doubtful about the idea of getting a job. At least a job matching my skills and work experience. Why I get advertisements for ‘CDL-A drivers needed’ is anyone’s guess, I don’t have a commercial trucking license, but based on recent news, maybe that is not a hard barrier in California.
A recent credit card outage in France was blamed on botched payments system update. The reason for ATM failure in Scotland was not clear from the same post.
Considering the banks are claiming it was just a botched update, my paranoia instinct would tend to cyber attack (private or foreign public sector) or frenzied preparations for Central Bank Digital Currencies supposedly becoming to EU this October.
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It is speculated that French government will collapse in this budget crisis. Belt tightening proposals include removal of two holidays: Easter Monday and May 8th (celebrating victory of WWII) to ‘increase the productivity’ by making people work more for the good of the country (who decides how the extra profits are used?). Aside from reducing the well-being of working people, I think this to be an arrogant display of cultural insensitivity, especially the claim that Easter Monday does not have any religious significance.
There is also chatter that France is going to need IMF bailout next week.
This May in Finland I was lucky enough to spot this beetle on a tree stump. The stump was also hosting a fungus, recycling nutrients. Life goes on.
Now I am in California. The job situation is bad. The official US unemployment percentage for July 2025 was 4.2%. Functionally unemployed in July 2025 were estimated by Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to be 24.7% of US labor force. With AI, especially white collar unemployment is estimated to soar further. I think AI is an excuse for job cuts resulting from austerity enforced elimination of Bullshit Jobs.
David Graeber estimated in his 2014 book Bullshit Jobs – A Theory that about 40% of the jobs are unnecessary and people are being paid, often well, to do nothing useful.
Meanwhile, we have printed money, that is accumulated debt, faster than productivity has grown since the previous century, but now the buy-now-pay-later Ponzi scheme is unraveling. Most of the printed money seems to have been soaked into stock market and complex derivatives, benefiting governments and their servants and ‘NGOs’ and the 0.1%, which have sucked the money (plus interest) away from real world investment. While also saddling the people with unpayable public debt loads, the consequences of which manifest as increased taxation, reduced services, and proliferating licensing requirements and fines, which both are additional taxes in disguise to government coffers.
Now the production is no more, despite the inshoring attempts of the current administration of US and the 99.9% are doing price discovery. The economy is shedding jobs. Optimally the lost positions should have been the 40% Bullshit Jobs, but it seems that many useful positions are eliminated, too, further damaging the economy.
Part of this is the loss of consuming power driven by the mass functional unemployment. While the people with Bullshit Jobs may not have produced anything, they used their salaries to keep up the consumption demand, being vital for the survival of many small real businesses like pizzerias, lawn care companies, cosmetologists and car dealerships.
Another part of it is the pathologies of the system itself. After years of promoting incompetents into leadership positions, be it by nepotism, political clientilism (including DEI) or slack allowed by easy (freshly printed) money, the managerial class no longer recognizes which workers are necessary for operating a business. A case example: Boeing.
The regular people (including many of the 40%ers) are now suffering from another effect of money printing, inflation, including food inflation. Although food (and other) inflation is not driven by money printing alone but by money supply growing faster than food (or other) supply. The demand is semielastic, if that is a word. The former middle class downgrades consumption and the poor skip meals, but the number of mouths to feed depends on immigration plus births minus emigration plus mortality.
Unfortunately, thanks to the globalization, also problems are global. I think food inflation in the West is not only due to reduction of food production per capita or collapsing Western economies but also due to increasing wealth in poor and middle income countries, that now can better compete for the global resources.
I also believe that the global food production has not kept apace with the global money printing, and though the poorest in the West have traditionally outspent the poor and even the middle classes in poorer countries, now even in West we now have food inflation because other countries can pay for the food on global export markets. For example, China has during recent years bought massive amounts of grain, pulses, oils, meats, fruits increasing price pressures.
Meanwhile, people with money to travel are leaving global south for global north increasing pressure in the Western countries. Traditionally, if food supplies or economy grow tighter people emigrate. However, it is not the poorest of the poor who can apply for visas or pay for human smugglers if they are not eligible for a visa. Nowadays the situation in the departure country does not does not need to be catastrophal to induce emigration. Just the perceived better economic opportunities in other (including Western) countries – thanks to mass media and ubiquitous internet -, and the comparative ease of traveling are now major drivers of mass migration from poorer countries to wealthier, and if the situation in the country receiving the immigrants changes, the flow of people will head some other place.
Thus, I think that fewer people are starving to death but the price of the global affluence paradoxically is that more people in West go hungry.
Some time ago I was in a grocery market here in California, not a hugely expensive one. They advertised for two avocados for seven dollars. The economy may be toast but it won’t be an avocado toast.
Crude claims that USA just wants Venezuelan oil again, just like in the past 20+ years of regime change attempts, seem somewhat plausible.
It might be the Venezuelan threats against Guyanan oil fields in Essequibo that are currently exploited ExxonMobil that triggered the latest action.
An infographic shown by X user placed Canada among the high oil resource countries – most of which were either destabilized, contested, under hybrid warfare / influence campaigns, or Western sock puppets. Kazakhstan may have been the only exception in the list, but that may be just US being more remote than Russia and China. Bouts of sanity, like recognizing the limits of former ‘hyperpower’ are extremely rare, rarer than pacifism, in Washington DC.
But a grim fact is that the Western technocivilization is running out of energy, among other resources. Whether for AI powered surveillance dystopia or utopistic popst-scarcity dream, reality is reasserting itself crushing them all with resource scarcity.
Looks like the oil wars (including hybrid warfare), this time north and south, are back on menu. With War on Drugs joining hands with War on Terror as casus belli.
I saw an interesting video from YanasaTV. He was discussing about blue pigs and their causes in California. I think this is a symptom of even bigger problem than he described, so I thought to expand a bit.
The starting point was boar meat that had turned blue in some parts of California, because of liberal use of rat poison, which dyes the meat.
According to the video, farmers have been fighting against a figurative tidal wave of rodents, whose populations had exploded in four counties due to farm and orchard closures leaving them tens of thousands of acres of prime breeding areas in almond country.
The official explanation of the laws was the environment and need to save water. However, an important underlying cause influencing the passing of water laws was consolidation of water rights under the big players. (get reference)
Any case, according to Yanasa TV, last year California lost 8000 farms, to multifactorial causes, but lack of water is a big one. Oddly enough, Texas lost even more farms, 18000, also often due to lack of water. In Texas, the irrigation competes against AI server farms. And is losing.
That caught my attention. The news have been buzzing for a couple of years about how the Silicon Valley firms have been moving to Texas because of their nicer regulatory environment. The discussion online had given me the impression that this was due to the taxes and insane regulatory policies of California. I had not thought about the water regulation, but in hindsight, it should be obvious. The firms are moving to what is greener pastures (more resources) for them, never mind the parched pastures of the ranchers. Which are blamed on climate change.
The final point I got from this YanasaTV video was the question, how do we feed the billions of people if we reallocate agricultural resources to feed AI? The regulations hindering the agriculture are passed under the pretense of ‘conserving the resources’, but to me it seems that most if not all conservation regulations are nowadays just to preserve the ‘protected’ resources for the powerful, whereas the little people like me get to enjoy the Green New Leap as increased energy and food prices. And as shortages of critical resources.
The California water rationing for urban dwellers and destruction of small farms is not about conserving resources, since water is very much available for the Big Almond, golf courses, and such. It is about extirpating the competition for scarce resources the big players want for themselves. If the side effect is the ballooning fruit, vegetable and meat prices for the small people, someone is making money of that, too. At some point the breakeven point when increasing prices will not bring more profits because the consumers cannot afford to buy will be reached but the availability of food (and energy or other resources) relative to the need will determine whether that happens before or after a mass uprising.
Speaking of AI and energy, I wrote the other day about rolling blackout warnings in Maryland and New Jersey. I think the AI industry will have to begin to address its effects on the energy grid soon, maybe already next winter. Once people will begin to experience survival threatening acute shortages, backlash is guaranteed. The incoming collapse of the power grid, by the way, is the main reason why I chose coastal California as my bugin place. If the grid fails, I will not freeze to death.
But my realization about all of the above: there is no such thing as a conservation law. There are only resource reallocation from the poor to the wealthy laws.
Note added in proof:
Nova Scotia in Canada banned people from going into woods, either Crown lands or privately owned lands belonging to someone else. Traditionally people had enjoyed access to Crown lands, but now they had been told that this privilege had been taken away to prevent forest fires. 25000$ fine for people trespassing their country’s forests. Would you feel like hemmed in?
Then I read that the Nova Scotia woods (over 3500 acres of them) are getting sprayed with defoliant that is being used to kill unwanted (less economically useful) tree species. Imagine large swathes of dying and drying trees in the middle of a drought. Controlled burns to free land for more profitable tree species were speculated. The cost to the ecosystem is hideous, so is the loss of immaterial (and material) value to the people.
Not that immaterial value even matters to the powerful. My uncle back in Finland told that they are planning a data center next to a big hydropower plant in the town he lives in, and the land being developed has stone age sites on it. I don’t know how valuable these sites are archeologically, but I suspect they have not been properly studied, either.
Midwest Chick posted recently that Lava Ridge Wind Project in Idaho was cancelled.
This project was opposed by the residents but the previous administration gave it go ahead in December 2024 anyways. Now the approval was canceled by the Department of Interior due to legal deficiencies, including proximity to a Minidoka National Historic Site (WWII Internment of Japanese-Americans) and local opposition including lawmakers and local 0fficials
Meanwhile, Maryland is threatened by rolling blackouts. Rolling blackouts may have lots of proximal reasons, but my gut feeling is that the main causes in some order are: fragility of green power sources, deferred maintenance of the grid, and increasing power demands of everything is computerized AI society. In the end of the article was a warning for people with refrigerated medication or medical devises needing electricity to have an action plan in case of outage. The power prices in Maryland and New Jersey are moving up and the consumers are livid.
As a Californian, I am not in a position to point fingers on energy grids, but ours should have been a warning example, not something to emulate.
I just saw a video on YouTube by a gentleman who seems to be into Bitcoin. Aside from the Bitcoin part, there were interesting little news.
Bank of England has published a bail-in guide. The term of note is ‘resolution weekend’. That’s when the peoples’ bank accounts will be converted into bank stocks at some fraction of value.
I had already become aware that millionaires and billionaires are fleeing the UK by their thousands, an exodus greater than that afflicting PCR, despite PRC having vastly larger population. I was surprised at the claim that the departing assets are equal to 4% of UK GDP. Dividing the 91.8B$ cumulative wealth of the departees by 3640B$ estimated GB GDP gives only about 2.5% in mu calculator. It will be interesting to see if the UK government will go full DDR and slam the exit doors shut at this hemorrhage. They already have the hate crime reporting lines and speech crimes police (in case someone could post something UK government does not approve) so why not go for the full experience, complete with empty shops?
Meanwhile, EU has made a deal of the decade (this century is too young to claim that something even weirder would not be coming through the pipes) agreeing to: 15% export and 0% import tariffs with US, 750 billion euros worth of US fossil fuels while banning all the Russian fossil fuel imports (which had continued despite the war, including quite a lot of natural gas transiting in pipelines through Ukraine), and 600 billion euros of private direct investment to US.
Exactly what this private investment is and how EU Commission can agree to seems unclear. According to the document description page on EU side, the agreement is not legally binding. I suspect that the tariff and energy deals were a bribe to US to let EU still continue their war – I further suspect large amounts of US military gear to be included in that 0% import tariff. Also, I suspect that EU will rather soon have a resolution weekend for bank accounts as they are already talking about mobilizing funds laying in peoples’ bank accounts to fund plans that are excessive for the public purse. Pension funds are joining the arms bonanza. Bonus points if these ‘privately funded’ imports/investments will count towards the 5% of GDP funding target for non-US NATO members.
Joker in the game: EU CBDCs, denied by European Central Bank to be programmable with expiration dates (not to mention blocking or sin fees for non-approved uses, which would similarly depend on programmability.) (There are also privacy questions.) I wonder what the actual utility of EU CBDCs for the small people would be, and how CBDCs (programmable or non) would affect application of a Resolution Weekend?
PlanktonPunkt 