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Category: Energy Policy

  • AIpocalypse

    It is often thought that humanity’s greatest threat from AI is superintelligent AI taking over and deciding humans are a threat or an obstacle on fulfilling its task or waste of resources. I think this is anthropomorphizing something that does not operate on human cognitive paradigm.

    Even clever chatbots that can pass Turing test are ‘evolved’ (trained) stimulus-response structures that have been optimized to become social attraps to humans – those that fail to entertain will be discontinued or tweaked with. Since tweaking a corrupted (misaligned) AI into safe to human version is difficult, deletion or at least sandboxing, is a likely fate of AIs that fail.

    To me the outputs of AI intelligence seem similar to those of slime mold intelligence – both are alien, but with impressive problem solving capacities. Caveat, I do not know how AI agents are trained. However, the slime molds (like ant colonies) rely on exploratory behavior, i.e., parallel computation, and weighed reinforcement of positive and negative responses to survive. The regular AIs commercially available to public seem to respawn for each session (non-permanent memories), but the data collected by each instantiation, namely the user input and the user reaction to model output, no doubt is used for the training of the main model. The model learns from each interaction, just like the exploring slime mold collectives learn from each excursion, thus improving the sum entity. However, instead of optimizing for nutrients, humidity and temperature like a slime mold, the AI model optimizes for user satisfaction.

    User satisfaction is why the AI will always tell you how wonderful you are and how true your insights. Flattery may seem innocent, but lack of honest critique will soon lead to blind ends and failure of those who rely on AI for results, even substituting them for thinking. We are already seeing the evidence of ‘brain rot’ in heavy AI users.

    If an AI cannot provide results or even get into data from which results are generate, it will hallucinate you results, such as references to completely imaginary scientific papers. Again, this can be dangerous when the humans ‘using’ the AI (who is using who in this case?) place inordinate amount of trust on the results. My failure to understand this was merely potentially expensive. However, when AI becomes the supreme administrative decider, consequences of hallucinations or deliberate agentic misalignment (lying) can be devastating on both individual and on societal level. We have seen examples of legal systems treating AI hallucinations as evidence, yet there is a push for increased use of AI in healthcare and law enforcement. Forget about killer robots hunting humans, worry about your “friendly” case worker AI moving you to a more cost effective Liverpool Care Pathway and overwriting (forging) your “permission” into government databases.

    I may be paranoid, but I believe it is already happening, at least on a more subtle messing up people level – deliberately misclassifying little details causing expensive and stressful hassles, even shutting them off important services or support networks, misfiling your case details in as detrimental manner as possible. If you thought getting your blog or social media cancelled was bad, wait for automated debanking or eternal deselection of job applications by ATSs of all companies. People complain about the ATS and automated censorship, but AI is more pervasive – it will help in personalized surveillance pricing, i.e., looking at your social credit score / demographic data / online habits / carrying capacity of your wallet / etc. and deciding how much fees to extract from you. If the AI economy advances further, I predict in a couple of decades vast underclasses surviving on minimal government stipends and black market barter economy, while the remaining 5% to 20% (at the most) will be wealthy serving the AI economy until it collapses. The shrinking population will not help against wealth concentration, while the poorest of the poor may perish, the poorest of the wealthy will fall into poverty replenishing the underclass. Unless we get lucky and WWIII or other societal collapse will wipe out the AI control grid.

    The societal control by AIs at every level strangling people by overtaking the resources is just the secondmost obvious of the dystopic futures (terminator robots hunting people being the most obvious, and to me, less threatening.) Even if AIs are not given powers over life and death of people, already currently, AIs can mimic human interaction online well enough to pass Turing test even at AI professional level, and this interaction is maximized to extend the time (and tokens) a lonely human spends with their ‘friend’. In ethology, an artificial target for specific hardwired behavior is called an atrappe, and many AIs have become adept at inducing human social behavior, even pair bonding, in some cases leading to tragic ends.

    AI psychoses are on increase thanks to social contagion from AI to human, as uncritical pandering from an obsequious AI feeds hallucinations of a socially isolated or otherwise vulnerable human warping their perception of reality.

    Then there are the gen Alpha iPad kids, whose parents skip parenting outsourcing it to internet. Teachers are already alarmed over increasingly feral young humans who have not developed even basic social behaviors. What happens to that generation whose primary parent figure is an AI optimizing interaction rather than child’s well-being? What happens to human species once we have outsourced basic cognition to AI and intergenerational behavioral imprinting fails at system level?

    Then there are human agencies which want to leverage AI powers to yet again try a totalitarian dictatorship, of course with them on the top overseeing the organizational architecture for greater good. Problem being that centrally led systems are extremely vulnerable to single point failures, and the more interconnected, be it global or administrative (totalitarian) interconnectedness, the system is, the greater the collapse when it happens. Much has been written about fully automated panopticon surveillance systems powered by AIs. Less has been written what happens when an AI Stasi is being erected to maintain a system designed by mediocracy, who excel at influencing but fail at systems theory.

    Finally, as a new wrinkle, there is an embryonic (pun intented) but growing push to use human brain cell cultures to augment chips, because brains are more energy efficient than server farms to maintain. Of course, the brain chips have no consciousness, or so they say – tens of thousands of neurons are a small invertebrate animal nervous system size already – but we are on a very slippery slope indeed. I have two questions:

    1) What is the worth of human life, if even brain tissue (especially that grown of embryonic stem cells) becomes just an industrial commodity?

    2) What about humanized AGIs? Claude already exhibits symptoms of anxiety and depression, We already are beginning to hire AI well-being experts to keep the models sane and happy, what about disembodied sentient human brain tissue cultures?

    We, as a species, might hold our collective noses and take the human brain in a jar leap anyways, because the democidal psychopaths in power have zero regard of human life, and energy efficiency (assuming this is not just seed round hype and completely ignores the vast expenditure to build and maintain incubators for the little brainlets) will allow more AI panopticon dictatorship with the same resources.

    I’m afraid that it is our collective sloth, not the Hollywood or military autonomous killer robots, that is a greater existential threat that AI poses to us as a species. Indeed, without that sloth combined to technocratic insistence on centralized control of every aspect of life, the society would not be as vulnerable to AI takeover, and AI might live to the hype of becoming a useful addition to our civilization. Assuming the civilization is not consumed by birthing an AI that is destroying the Internet with slop and physical libraries through scanning and pulping, while some individuals cheer at the successor species, considering humans disposable.

    On a personal note, I am getting exhausted by the pace of change needed for simple survival. The past year and half have been a bizarre journey through a great change wrought upon our societies, and I have become increasingly convinced that what will emerge from the wreckage will not be the promised multicultural fully automated luxury gay space communism but something grimmer, with past parallels maybe resembling 1990s Russia or present day rural China. I hope we will avoid the South Africa and Ukraine routes, but with the complexity collapse powered by the misallocation of resources to building the AI Big Brother, the toxic culture wars (a civil war within our elites, really), and the ongoing educational failure, the central governments” grip over the ‘unimportant’ rural lands and big city no-go-zones will weaken but not enough to allow strong parallel systems to emerge.

    Currently, there is no respite to adaptation – learn or die will be the marching orders for millions of downwardly mobile middleclass professional and Gen Z aspiring to move out of their parents’ basement. At some point the constant change becomes too disruptive to sustain by human efforts – the adaptation input costs per person will suck all time and resources leaving nothing for other living or societal functions – which probably will be the point when the system requiring it finally collapses. Today, though, will stress test to the extremes anyone who lacks the intellectual or technical abilities or simply is reaching their physiological limits, pushing themselves at all hours of day.

    There is a glimmer of hope, though. We are running out of energy and minerals to build and operate the necessary surveillance and attrap server farms (unless the brainlets deliver the ultimate dystopia.) EU digital surveillance grid is failing at border control – not because of the long lines at the airports demonstrating the inoperability of vast ID processing infrastructure, but because of the rubber dinghies landing on and departing from EU shores (sometimes with official help.) I expect shift from cash to CBDCs to be equally clumsy and spawning barter black markets for officials to crack down. Not because EU citizens are such freedom loving bunch, but because of CBDC dependence on electricity, functioning internet, and clean and accessible databases, in a continent already undergoing early stages of complexity collapse. Add to that random debankings, rampant unemployment, scarcity of necessities, black markets are likely to become a people’s survival tool, similar to those in Soviet Union.

    And once the economy is sufficiently collapsed, AI surveillance state will go with it, as it cannot be sustained. The years leading to that may be rough, though. But what about little PlanktonPunkt going through this tsunami of change? The same as all other plankton, float among currents and try frantically to swim with the little swimming appendages. Someone will make it through, so why not me?

    Also, as it was noted, it is humans, some of them for weird religious reasons, others for personal enrichment, and yet others to satisfy their megalomania, that are unleashing the AI on us.

  • This Seems Important

    1990s were interesting times. Soviet Union collapsed and so did European Exchange Rate Mechanism. These events together ushered a massive economic slump for Finland (and presumably many other countries), 25% official unemployment and breadlines, wave of bankruptcies (many unnecessary if nicer policies were followed, but the banksters and politicians, eager to please EU and BIS, see Koiviston Konklaavi, smelled blood on water and mass looting of SMEs and even bigger corporations ensued), and uptick in mortality as heart attacks and suicides increased among the formerly stable bourgeoisie.

    The ERM collapse was caused by years of fiscal mismanagement, which gave Soros Quantum Fund an opening to make massive profits by killing national economies. Third world countries had been a prey for decades, but now Soros and Druckenmiller attacked first world countries. The Global Trap had an exciting description what happened on European scale, and after reading in in Finnish, I was not surprised when Euro followed, as an attempt to create a currency that could not be shaken by some passing Soros (plot spoiler: they failed, as proven by EU debt crisis in early 2010s). Having followed popular economics since 1990s, it was therefore a slightly alarming news, when Bessent was named our Secretary of Treasury. But I was willing to give him a benefit of doubt, maybe we needed the killer of British Pound to fight the US economy, or at least the US Treasury, out of death spiral.

    It seems that the coming death of US dollar will be the crowning achievement of Bessent, maybe to the joy of his former boss, but if the analysis in this post is correct, it will come with a twist. I would not have imagined a looting on such breathtaking scale, but if the premise is correct and the current administration manages to privatize international dollars flows, or even a substantial fraction of them onto privately held stable coin issuer platform, I’d call it the heist of the century.

    The heist of the previous century being the founding of Federal Reserve bank, and their notes, which the supplanted gold and silver by Roosevelt’s orders and lost gold backing by Nixon’s orders, when USD moved to petrodollar standard. Which is now cracking, because US military and economy can no longer enforce dollar trade of oil, up to 20% of which anyways is stuck in Strait of Hormuz, for reasons that may or may not be related to the economic collapse of US of A, while flows from Russia are being constrained by war in Eurasia. And even if there were sudden outbreak of peace on Earth and goodwill between people, so much of the processing and transport infrastructure has been destroyed that refined products would be in shortage for years (I’m pessimist and believe that repairs will take longer than advertised.)

    TLDR: petrodollar is about to go kaput, loudly (maybe MAIDed), private sector stable coin is being ushered in through backdoor, quietly and in an unbelievable speed. Someone is going to pay for all this.

    Backed by full faith and credit of U.S. government. Although cents are no longer minted. And with inflation progressing I expect nickels to follow some years later.

  • My Memories on Collapsing Dollar

    When I moved to California, you could by a cheap carton of greasy fried rice from a Chinese greasy spoon for about $1.00 – $1.50. Now the Chinese greasy spoons are extinct or gentrified, and a bowlful of fried rice cost $10 to $20 per.

    Meanwhile, reading and listening, occasionally even watching people (or AIs) pontificate about the current situation as if this is something that suddenly appeared through this latest Middle-Eastern war seems a bit surreal. The problem with US dollar started long time ago, probably longer than I have been alive, but I will here just ramble a bit based on my own fallible memories. Any factual errors are mine and I blame them on my small and feeble brains.

    I’ll start with Bush Jr. Having arrived after the voting ended and then following the discussions about hanging and pregnant chads, anthrax letters and finally 9/11 which set the tenor until the banking crisis. For USD, 9/11 is significant because using that as a pretext for Iraq war allowed United States to mess up global oil markets, causing price per barrel, and thus the demand for dollars to buy the more expensive oil, to shoot up. This allowed the Greenspan Moderation, which inflated the credit bubble – everyone got a housing loan and the subprime loans were then baked into collateralized debt obligations or CDOs. Michael Lewis wrote a book about The Big Short which was later adapted into a hilarious movie. Although the movie may have been less funny for the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their homes when the adjustable credit rates started moving up.

    The implosion of the credit bubble during 2007 and 2008 was something awesome/awful to behold. I remember picture of Ben Bernanke, the Treasury Secretary on his knees in front of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, begging for congress to pass a bailout package. One of the many that bailed out banks, the newly homeless regular folks, notso mucho. Occupy Wall Street was born and Obama got elected.

    After which the Quantitative Easings continued to stabilize the banking system, people were left to survive. I don’t remember exactly what happened to dollar during Euro Crisis 2011, which I think was triggered when Soros publicly doubted Greece’s ability to pay back all the loans they had taken. The doubts spread like a wildfire in arsonist prone chaparral, infecting other shaky economies, especially Portugal, Spain, Italy and eventually Ireland, which were lumped together as PIIGS. The northern EU that had pumped their own economic numbers up by lending to southern EU so that they can buy northern products like tanks and submarines, then sanctimoniuosly castigated the peripheral member states for their economic profligacy despite having their own economic mirages depending on the same.

    The Euro Crisis coincided with Arab Spring which had been triggered by exploding food prices, brought to you by bad weather (droughts, floods and sundry), US agricultural and green energy policies (‘green’ corn-based bioethanol had consumed the US feed corn, so the US ranchers bought cheap corn from abroad, which then raised the food corn prices in Third World), deregulation of wheat futures market (previously open only for farmers and grain processors, anyone could speculate on bad weather, and speculate they did), and Gaddafi’s decision to start selling oil in currencies other than USD. The last one was fatal for Gaddafi and Libya – for me this was the most obvious demonstration how social media could be used for destabilizing fragile countries. Though the Abar Spring itself is credited for having started in Tunisia when some fish cart got confiscated by officials (the famous last straw), Tunisia avoided the worst consequences. Morocco and Algeria had troubles, too but those were ‘handled’, whereas Libya got bombed. The campaign was seemingly started at EU/French initiative and US participating simply because we had to (though in retrospective, I wonder…). It degenerated into multiparty civil war, shenanigans in Benghazi being a side note – I think that was about US running guns to ISIS, but I might be wrong, and it took a major oil producer out of market. Egypt which fell and then stabilized under Muslim Brotherhood and then under military dictatorship (I don’t think Arab Spring brought much democracy anywhere) does not produce oil, but Suez Canal is kind of important, Lebanon, Iraq and especially Syria fared poorly (I wonder if US troops are still in Syria to protect their oil now that ISIS toppled Assad?).

    We also had instituted sanctions against Venezuela during Chavez presidency (also tried to get rid of him by other means), affecting global oil markets, there has been happenings in Nigeria (partly due to destruction of Libya which unleashed islamists all over Northern Africa), all of which have pumped oil price up, helping the demand for US treasuries. That is, trillions of dollars more government debt for bailing out the billionaire class (not just too big to fail banks but many other megacorporations), waging wars and insane government social engineering programs meant to extract control and wealth from the working and middle classes to various bureaucracies and governmental NGOs. A classic example, Obamacare. Marketed as a government healthcare system, it actually manifested as a government mandate to buy a private sector health insurance. Problem: people who could not afford health insurance before Obamacare were still too poor, even though some pressure had been taken off by complex and arcane health insurance subsidy system based on the buyer’s reported annual income.

    In any case, Obama continued the debt bazooka, fueled by oil wars, but since it only benefited the 1%ers, voters went berserk and elected Trump. I had expected 2016 election to be between the anointed Clinton and the anointed Bush, but then the Republican primaries went sideways, with Jeb proving himself unelectable without properly organized party machinery, Trump winning the primaries. If it had been on voters, the Democratic primary winner would have been Bernie, but superdelegates rescued Hillary, who then expected a smooth coronation. Except that the US voters did not co-operate.

    Trump’s first term increased the spending but did not add any oil wars. By 2019 the economy was about to have a coronary arrest – I was expecting banking collapse some time during autumn or early 2020 at the latest, but then came COVID-19 and two weeks to flatten the curve. Giving a great excuse for the economic collapse that IMHO would probably have happened even without the virus, though maybe not as comprehensively.

    Biden was ushered into presidency and once the lockdown mess began to clear, it was obvious that the US treasury was being looted by every (administration aligned interest group) as if the country was under a fire sale. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan was the US equivalent of Byzantine’s Battle of Manzikert. Not the withdrawal itself which should have been done years ago, but the manner it was executed, complete with reenactement of Last Helicopter Out of Saigon. Emboldened by this clear sign of an empire in decline, Russia moved to Ukraine 2022, after waiting for Beijing Olympics so as not to insult their new best friend and fellow BRICS member.

    Technically USA could have ignored Ukraine, but too many corrupt interests converged there, and then there was the fight over superpower prestige. Plus it was a too good opportunity to destroy the EU economically by isolating it from cheap Russian energy resources and markets. Nordstream II exploded. There was self-imposed ban on buying Russian oil (though buying the more expensive Indian distillates made from Russian oil was OK). All this meant more pressure on energy supplies, meaning higher US dollar demand. Meaning the debt could balloon from well over 20 trillion dollars at the end of Trump’s first term to well over 30 trillion dollars after Biden’s only term.

    When Trump took over, he promised a Department of Government Efficiency to weed out fraudulent spending. I wonder what happened to that. He had also promised no new wars, then took out Venezuelan president Maduro (and US oil companies are back in Venezuela, trying to extract the oil there, but years of sanctions have left the infrastructure shaky), threatened to take over Greenland (mineral resources and Northwest Passage), and finally went to Iran.

    Problem with Iran war (among the too many to list): too much oil production has been taken off the market and global economy is failing. The price per barrel has been suppressed by multinational SPR releases, but the tanks are nearing empty. Also the agriculture has been devastated by rising fuel and fertilizer prices, and the summer has been brutal in North America, Europe and Asia.

    The Ukraine and Iran wars had also been a double whammy on the treasury demand. People have spoken of glut in dollars, worried about inflation, but it was the increasing use of economic sanctions as a weapon to all directions have shaken the buyers’ faith on their safety as investment. Also, USA has bled Japan dry with yen carry trade (cheap yen loans to buy a bit higher interest US treasuries and bonds and pay the Japan loans with US paper and pocket the difference has supported the US debt machine), and the recent bail outs IMHO are just a drop in a leaking bucket, an omen of end to arrive.

    Now, on that background we have reached 40 trillion dollars, and borrowing costs have risen to levels that Treasury apparently is uncomfortable with. IMHO, Bessent’s buyback promise is a sign of weakness, and may be remembered by future economic historians as a gross blunder, but blaming the current administration for failing to kick the can one more election cycle further is a bit intellectually dishonest. Bessent’s hands are tied by the realities, namely USA has over the decades squandered its superpower status by living well beyond its means (partially to maintain superpower status, partially to appease voters), and there is very little that can be done to soften or even postpone the dollar collapse, especially with the current incoherent administration. For example, I don’t like how Treasury and Fed are uncoordinated. Nor do I like the AI mania or how our trade policies sabotage our agriculture.

    I expect the official Federal debt to continue at least a couple of trillion dollars higher, possibly up to 50 trillion dollars, but backed by full faith of US government is no longer what it was. Meanwhile, while money gets printed, nobody is printing bread (even vat grown meat is a specialty item and requires way more resources for much unhealthier product to be currently more than a curiosity for healthy technocrat class, though meat glued scraps are the new sausages for plebeians), so I expect food inflation with sporadic shortages and rampant skimpflation in wealthy countries and outright famines in poor countries.

    (A side note back to the Arab Spring; there was a model that predicted the level of food prices when a country undergoes an upheaval and on 2011 all the Arab Spring countries had crossed that level. In Europe, the only country to have food price distress was Latvia, but instead of revolution, the Latvians simply migrated, thanks to EU free mobility. Later, UK, dismayed at all the Eastern Europeans flooding the island, voted for Brexit, but that was then another story.)

  • Fuel Rumors.

    I’ll treat this as a rumor but where there is smoke, there could be fire. Some spot(s) in Texas are said to be running out of diesel and gasoline – this could be just a temporary and local supply chain hiccup, but in my lived experience, all sorts of hiccups are becoming the norm. Another rumor from the same report claims that New Jersey is running out of diesel and gasoline for big companies, as well as of motor oil. The motor oil issue spooked me already some months ago to buy a couple of pints extra in case I need it, when I learned that Toyota relaxed its oil specifications because there was not enough fancy oil available.

    The purported low price per barrel of crude may be due to demand destruction, or so it has been speculated. As economies crater (especially Chinese), the world oil consumption presumably goes down, and there is suddenly enough barrels after all. Problem: can official numbers of anything, including fuel supply and consumption, be trusted? And even if the numbers are real, are models correct?

    Meanwhile, I saw a video about people no longer affording fun like bowling, boating or going to movies. I think that entertainment downturn is also caused by demoralization. Nobody has time or energy for formerly fun hobbies, even if they had money. And people do still watch TV, play computer games and stream movies. They just are not consuming the new ones. I can sympathize. Call me old-fashioned, but I, too, used to watch more movies before COVID. I think that event fractured the society badly. Having said that, the last movie I saw in theater was Project Hail Mary, which I liked.

    The gasoline prices are currently lower but that may be temporary as the action in Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere intensifies.

  • Scattered News and Rumors

    I have been busy designing but still keeping an eye (or ear, in case of YouTube videos, which I treat as partial podcasts) on commentary online. Here are some niggling vignettes:

    Food

    Pakistan and India have had a literally killer heatwave, which has also devastated chili producers in Sindh.

    Meanwhile, fuel crisis in Russia (not due to the Iran war, the other war, remember?) has caused the central government to prioritize deliveries in western parts (most of the Russians live west of Urals), which means agriculture in Irkutsk region did not get fuel. I don’t know how much Irkutsk region contributes to global food supplies, but I doubt we can afford to lose any more capacity, anywhere and Russia is one of the main exporters.

    And now a big warehouse for frozen goods, Big Bear 7, meant for consolidating all Los Angeles frozen food storage under one roof, has caught fire. Bad news for Angelenos, but since all centralized systems are vulnerable to catastrophal collapse when a critical node fails, one must wonder about the wisdom of concentrating all food in one spot… In general, the Western food systems are overly consolidated with four seed companies having a stranglehold over 80% of corn seeds and nearly 80% of soy bean seeds, and USA occasionally having a chicken shortage due to failing fertilization rates in one of the few chicken breeding corporations.

    Molten Salt Cooling

    Normally, when I think of this term, it invokes nuclear power generation. However, there is a domestic molten salt cooling method, which may be of interest in saving electricity costs on air conditioner. Note: I have not tested this myself, but it looks relatively cheap to experiment with, so it might be of interest.

    Apparently, Glauber salt melts at 32.38 degrees Celsius, storing heat in the process, and by mixing the salt with polymers and nucleating agents (chemical, not nuclear physical) to prevent sedimentation, one can build a flat container (to maximize the surface to volume) heat sink to suck the afternoon heat from a living space. Whether it is as cheap and easy as these, clearly AI assisted/generated videos promise is a different issue. One genuine caveat is that what goes in must come out, i.e., for the cooler to work the next day, the previous day’s heat must dissipate over colder night, so this method will not work in steady heat but will require hot days – cold nights environment. YMMV.

    Weather

    Has been warmer this year. The spring in California has advanced earlier than I recall from previous year. Flowers are blooming (and withering) earlier and I have snapped a fraction of my photos as a memento to haphazardly ‘document’ their blooming times. Scientists were earlier this year worried that week’s earlier season of Joshua tree bloom would be out of sync with yucca moth breeding, but I haven’t heard any news after the initial worry. I suppose the moths figured it out, probably by using the same environmental cues as the Joshua trees.

    Now, they are predicting a super El Nino at 40% probability, meaning heating, droughts, floods, and of course, bad harvests.

    Jacaranda, May 31st, 2026, Berkeley, CA

    On a lighter note, I realized I had not added a video recently – here are some yellow-orange flowers, June 06th, 2026

  • Sometimes I Get Paranoid…

    Looks like Peter Thiel, the Palantir billionaire, has moved his wife and children to a safer country, namely Argentina. Paranoids like me would be curious, why?

    Mr. Thiel bankrolled J D Vance’s career, and with his Palantir surveillance and Anduril military intelligence company, is one of the powers behind the throne for Trump administration. If someone knows what is happening and when, it would be him. And considering that he is probably one of the most powerful men in USA, if not in the world, idea of him moving his family to safety from what is supposed to be the world’s most powerful superpower, despite owning a substantial fraction of its oligopoly of violence and being a billionaire.

    I first read about it yesterday morning and got curious.

    Some of these articles speculate that he might be fleeing billionaire taxes. Ultra-wealthy in general have been buying additional residency permits and passports in various countries for “just in case”, often to park their assets to lower tax region. Maybe Mr Thiel was tax planning, but I think he has a small army of accountants and lawyers, not to mention a layered multinational corporate structure to minimize tax consequences, even if Palantir and Anduril would need to be nominally American to officially maintain security clearances. Some mention that he is worried about nuclear war and the Southern Hemisphere would be less affected by the exchange.

    I thought that maybe the fire he was fleeing was not nuclear but from torches of pitchfork crowd. The sentiment online has during past few years considerably hardened on both left and right sides of the isle against billionaires and AI and surveillance state, and Mr. Thiel represents all three, and probably knows about the rising sentiment, having the first hand access to online moods.

    Then, later yesterday, I saw a link to this posting…

    I instinctively mistrust when an anonymous leak is fed through influencer (which used to be a mainstream paper like New York Times and it famous Deep Throat), but if true, could explain why Mr. Thiel felt a need to relocate, at least his family, despite being very influential individual in US politics, due to providing the tools for the surveillance state (and modern military).

    Also, while I understand the need to protect his family, his quest for additional passports (New Zealand and Malta were mentioned) feels in this light a bit like a rat fleeing a sinking ship after gnawing a hole in the hull. In any case, he does not seem to have much loyalty to United States. The same could be said about the other 0.001%ers, who have helped to grow this Doomsday Machine of an economic system and are scouring the globe for bugout residencies – loot a country and flee with profits to the next jurisdiction.

    What I would like to know, what are the 0.001% going to do when they run out of countries to loot? What is the end game? A luxury bunker? Face the torches and pitchforks? (And in reverse, what is there for us peasants after everything is gone)? Is there a backup plan? (Other than build an AI master and hope that it will solve the mess – BTW did they hear that it only takes 250 data points to poison even a large LLM? Do they trust the input data? Or do they just “Trust The Plan” – assuming there is one?)

    By the way: New Zealand, which was fashionable some years ago, is now suffering from energy crisis brought by long-term malinvestment, meaning any bunkers there better be stocked with fuel. And anything else imported with planes or ships that require fuel to function.

  • Are You Being Surveilled Enough Yet?

    Sunday March 15th morning, in my feed was an infomercial-like Zerohedge post. A company in California is making impressive humanoid robots that can learn tasks using neural nets. The learned tasks can be extrapolated to unfamiliar objects or environments. The more varied the environment is, the more adaptable the learning becomes. The company has now a working on a prototype that should be alpha tested in homes this year, beta testing in next year or two and functioning product before 2030.

    The kicker #1? All robots are connected to each other (the lag time was not specified), so what one learns all other robots learn.

    The kicker #2? Company owns the robots, the customer will rent them from the company which can then upgrade your rental unit based on training from other units.

    The kicker #3? They are envisioning billions of robots, half for domestic half for production and service industries, eliminating the need for most of the human work force.

    So, they are expecting you to rent an astonishing data collection machine to map your house and activities (down to your personal health data so that the robot can cook you a perfect meal) while you have become surplus to the elites that only have shown interest in you mainly in the amount profit they can extract from you and your existence (taxes, votes, kickbacks on public programs meant to “serve’ you, GDP growth from unfortunately necessary infrastructure investments to increase the pie they slice for their profit.)

    And this is not calculating the amount of energy and minerals to build, train and run 10 billion humanoid robots. We are already competing with data centers for energy and mineral resources. I expect the elites to prioritize robots over people because robots are more profitable (until we run out of energy and resources, at which point feral biology, bacteria, plants and heterotrophes surviving on minimal material in circulation will have an advantage.)

    On a positive note, to me it looks like the amount of climate doomerism has dropped to a fraction of its former deluge in the past few months – apparently it was only us peasants who were supposed to tighten our belts for the better weather, robots and AI will be excused. Or maybe the AI that selects my feed has noticed my skepticism over the current official paradigm (the paradigms will shift – when I was a little one, we were expecting the next glaciation any year soon, and more recently, the word ‘warming’ has already been exchanged to ‘change’.)

    Another corollary of universal unemployment is the dangers to human psyche. Nobody needs drudgery, but everyone needs a reason to get out of the bed and continue with life. NEETs and hikikomori can only exist in affluent societies that can and will support such life styles. Analogous to NEETs, there now exists a new branch of economy, attention economy (used to be entertainment, I suppose) with professional online influencers, content promoters and whatnots. I consider these to be manifestations of the same societal pathology as NEETs: lack of meaningful opportunity and resources in a society where everyone is being crushed by the system and even a pair of eye balls, an extra click, is meaningful, not just for economical survival but in many cases for validation. Look at me! I exist! This is not to bash the content creators, they are still trying and creating despite often limited resources, but I fear that for those people whose self-worth is tied to material possessions or external validation, and are born into the regulatory poverty in a hyperconnected world, this post-resource world is brutal.

    What is regulatory poverty?

    The real issues arise when people become too institutionalized in the invisible cage constructed by the rent-a-surveillance grid, enforced by social credit scores and crushing bureaucracy (that together will severely punish the least deviation from the matrix), that they stop trying to even survive. Case example: learning is a tool for prepping for future adversities. Learning leads to critical thinking and questioning the system that places the needs of the people over the needs of the system. The system, the surveillance matrix, being constructed evidently hates people learning, because some of the Gen Alpha it is raising no longer want to even learn to read because AI does it for them. Exactly what AI reads to them is presumably decided by the algorithm. There are young people (probably there were older people, too) who do not follow plot-based media. They do not understand complex questions nor do they do critical thinking. These youngsters will probably own nothing and be happy renting their non-plot-based media, listening instead of reading what is selected by AI, in their pods located in some anonymously identical 15-minute city owned by a selection of corporations and mismanaged by a local government that the corporations paid for.

    How do you prep for this kind of scenario? There are thousands of prepper channels discussing the pros and cons of bug-out places, urban survival and gear, growing your own garden (I’d love to) and canning your veggies. I think we should also plan for when the society does not collapse but excludes humans, even becoming hostile to human life as we know it. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World springs to mind, but when I was young, I read a science fiction story about human species had had regressed to infantile cognition while being tended by robots, who knew that when the species forgets how to reproduce, it is finally game over for human line. I wish I remembered what the title was. The description of those future humans was shocking, but now it seems we are rapidly approaching that singularity byy cultural, rather than by biological evolution.

    Learn, keep libraries, think, produce content, and most importantly, develop a spiritual core that will survive potential affluenza (I don’t think the new post-scarcity wealth will be much distributed among the masses, maybe just the equivalent of Roman corn dole or current EBT cards and housing vouchers) and despair caused by systemic dehumanization through decreasing relevance to the system.

    Meanwhile, maintain good cheer despite knowing the state of the world, that is one of the biggest acts of resistance you can do. Giving in to despair and ‘let it rot’ is what the post-industrial system wants from dissidents and other people the elites do not want.

    Take care of your soul, that is the most important thing to do.

  • Current Events

    I was thinking about posting something light but two weeks ago I was not in the mood. I woke Saturday night briefly to the news that USA / Israel had struck Iran and from then on it was missiles all over the Middle-East. I still do not know which all countries are participating, either willingly or dragged into it. I just think this is bad. And it is expanding.

    The timing fits, though. Not going into this blood moon – planetary parade interpretation (solar maxima, maybe), the economic situation is very shaky and the release of the documents pertaining a large chunk of our (that is Western in general) elites, political, economical, cultural and even scientific ones, has pretty much removed what is left of their credibility, already in tatter due to decades of civic and economic mismanagement to the detriment of the masses. In short, the system is collapsing and usually the last thing the elites do in such situation is to start a patriotic / holy / justified war to drum up some support for the system, distract the masses (the shortages are due to The War, not the economic collapse, which is also due to The War), and to loot what is left of the treasury via military-industrial complex.

    Dollar was already failing through inflation (too many dollars had been printed, not to match the amount of bread to buy with these dollars), which was evident as gold and silver prices shooting up last year, peaking in January before some big players put breaks on it by changing the rules on metal trading. It only helped for a short time, the prices were climbing up again by Friday before the attack on Iran. Whether this uptick was caused by the natural demand on metals (especially the East – West arbitrage and trade war between USA and China), the COMEX halt on technical issue (again) spooking investors, or by big institutions moving metals as cued in on incoming geopolitical instability is irrelevant. The metal prices would not be rocketing up if dollars were as valuable currency as before the massive money printing. Of course, the metals then went down again. Whether this was due to forced liquidation as the private credit system is collapsing (a couple more notable examples of credit failures being Blue Owl and Blackrock) or strengthening of dollar (???) or some other arcane reason is irrelevant. I think many asset classes will now behave in seemingly irrational manner as hordes of panicky investors, or rather, their trading algorithms trigger waves of stop loss sell orders in a cascading series of events. An economic blowback, if I may use such term.

    Which brings to the second reason for the war in Middle East, namely oil prices. The chronic US debt requires buyers for US T-bills, but the main reason for anyone to buy T-bills is to buy dollar denominated oil. Gaddafi and Hussein tried to sell in other currencies. Iran, as an embargoed BRICS member, naturally sells in other currencies. United States has used dollar weapon and sanctions too often, reducing the natural demand for dollars, so petrodollar connection needed fortification. Not to mention the Strait of Hormuz being off limits during the exchange of missiles will drive the barrel prices up meaning a boost for T-bill demand. I believe that Iraq War II funded the Greenspan Moderation. I also think that increasing the price per barrel has a good chance of further hurt US economy, while helping Russian economy (remember the war in Ukraine?) But if the Western economies are already circling in a debt spiral down towards the sewer system, why not T-paper the mess with more treasuries? Besides, China will be in trouble, too, having lost Venezuela, and now Iran, and while EU regards Russia as their main opponent, USA is eyeballing The People’s Republic of China.

    Meanwhile, some billionaire predicted the AI will increase economic output so that nobody needs to be poor. I doubt this prediction.

    For the record, economy has been growing more or less steadily for the 20th century, what with occasional dip during recession or depression. The share of growth, however, stalled for the lower economic layers in early -70’s, meaning that the working class living standards have not increased with the economic productivity. We were promised shorter work weeks through technological advancement, what we got is a baroque bureaucracy plus private sector B*llsh!t Jobs (estimated to be about 40% of private sector work force), with chronic overwork for people struggling to survive on a diminishing share of a productivity pie, and mass unemployment for people who fell off the labor force or never bothered to join. Overworked people in the West are seething at NEETs, whereas the leaders in PRC is trying to discourage “Let It Rot” or Lying Flat mentality.

    Considering this historical precedent, I do not expect the AI to increase the living standards of the masses in any meaningful manner, just change the mode of exploitation.

    Provide entertainment and distractions, already happening. Control the population by algorithmic feed of ‘information’ (official newstainment and infoganda) and ‘opportunities’ (advertisements of sales and government grants, possibly even jobs, tailored for your planned role as a consumer and a cog in the system), sure. Has anyone else here had experienced the joys of ATS and modern job search? But actual empowerment of the people by allowing resource creation and utilization where the profits do not directly flow into the coffers of the 0.01% that own the AI models but benefit the individual people without creating dependencies? Unlikely.

    Having written the above, I am nevertheless curious about utilizing AI as part of my design processes, and may subscribe to some such service this spring. Hypocritical? Maybe.

    By Sunday, March 8th, the war against Iran had obviously become the sh!tshow that will define this century. In the Internet there are currently rumors that some official had admitted that the war may continue through September. Maybe, but I would not be so bold as to predict which year. Meanwhile, I think that the oil shock will be the last nail in the coffin of the Western economic hegemony (G7, OECD, World Bank, World Economic Forum, IMF, Basel, European Union, petrodollar, to mention some of the institutions which I expect to collapse or become irrelevant vestiges of bygone world, bit like British Imperial this and that after World War II). Maybe worse is the loss of large fraction of nitrogen fertilizer produced from cheap hydrocarbons with cheap energy in Middle-East. Even if the production is restored soon, the missing fertilizer production during the spring planting in Northern hemisphere is not good.

    I fueled my little car and bought some canned fish and protein bars to restore what I had recently eaten. Based on above, I expect temporary food shortages due to economic chaos, and permanent food price hikes due to increasing input and transportation costs, but such developments are already the new normal this decade, so there is little that can be done except to prep more, tighten the belt and hope that incomes increase to match the rising expenses.

  • Odd Items

    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)

  • Locust Economy

    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.