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Category: Speculation

  • A Couple of Tasks, Plus Pondering on AI

    Today, October 15th, PlanktonPunkt Designs finally reached 250 active listings on Etsy. I have been working to that goal for months, sometimes more intensely sometimes less. From now on, I’ll focus on increasing quality over quantity.

    Another long term task was dropping my tax returns, October 15th is the deadline for the returns (Federal and State.) Now I can dedicate more time and energy for other tasks.

    Also, I got today cold called by an AI recruiter. Whether that will result in anything, remains to be seen, but this was a mildly positive experience.

    As for the incoming AI-pocalypse that has been in headlines, with the big tech companies warning about the extinction of humans in few years, I am less than convinced.

    Reason 1: The massive tech bubble is about to burst and take global economy with it, and I suspect the companies need a face saving excuse for failing, such as government intervention to stop the AI-pocalypse.

    Reason 2: Some of the AI workers have fallen into cult-like thinking, even worshiping their AI creation and seeing it their duty to make a new Lord over humanity, even if it means the extinction of the said humanity. Or should I rather say, fulfilling an apocalyptic myth to usher in their ‘Messiah’. Having lived through a few Ends of the World (as prophesied by various sects and cults), I am somewhat skeptical about the coming AI-pocalypse that the AI cultists are preaching. However, being neosect(s) of the current secularist atheism of the neoliberal order, this message is proselytized widely in the media. Probably to frighten the masses to accept more government control.

    Reason 3: Confluence of energy crisis and competency crisis – even if AI might one day be powerful enough to exterminate humanity, currently its reach would be limited by available resources and humanity’s collective ability to maintain infrastructure to support the AI and it’s plans.

    Conclusion: I am less worried about pure AI than humans bungling with AI tools. The recent rapid increase in cyber attacks and their severity (see for example the French freezers last Sunday night) indicates to me excessive centralization and dependence on Internet, which are human failures, not AI failures. Likewise, I think that the AI swarms that have been escaping into Internet are either deliberate sabotage (to get government to do something) or human incompetence.

    Or maybe I am wrong, and humanity really only has six months left.

    Meanwhile, this is what I listed as my 250th active listing on Etsy.

    Succulent Dreams Laptop Sleeve, Padded Zipper Pouch, available on Etsy (within United States) via link by clicking the above image.

  • 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.

  • Is Butterfly A Valid Zodiac Sign?

    White butterfly (looks like a Pierid) seen on 2026 Aug 03, (in sidereal Cancer, if that bit of info is topical to this post)

    When I was very small, some auntie had asked me what my zodiac sign was. I did not know how zodiac signs were assigned, I just assumed one picks an animal, so I answered that I am a butterfly.

    It was only recently that I realized that butterfly could actually be interpreted as a valid zodiac sign, if you are a Cancer. Insects are part of Pancrustacea, albeit closer to Brachiopoda, such as waterfleas, than to Malacostraca, such as lobsters and crabs.

    Carcinisation has happened in at least five groups of Decapod Crustaceans (within Malacostraca), I presume due to ecological advantage. Evolution is very flexible, and the morphospace within Pancrustacea is staggering, ranging from parasitic barnacles, through coconut crabs (a hermit crab, not a true crab) to fairyflies (very small flying insects.) Thus, I would speculate that even insects, when exposed to sufficiently long evolutionary opportunity might undergo carcinisation, though at the current levels of ecological occupancy, this is extremely unlikely on Earth. Maybe on some terraformed environment…

    Assuming the insect potential to carcinisation, I would then expand the postulate that insects could be considered equivalent to crabs. At least, if squinting hard from some non-Euclidean, deeply imaginary angle. Thus, butterfly would be a valid zodiac sign.

    Of course, considering the deep divergence of Decapod and Insect crown lineages (Communostraca and Allotrichocrdia, respectively) some time during Cambrian or even Neoproterozoic era, on the same logic Leo, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Capricorn, Sagittarius and Aquarius would be interchangeable, whereas Scorpio would still form an evolutionary outgroup. I do not include Virgo here, because the presumed fertility/judicial deity is represented by constellation Furrow with Spica (signifying grain), and Furrow is neither a Chordate nor an arthropod (or maybe the constellation was named after the things she represents and Virgo should be among Chordata). Also excluded is the putative thirteenth zodiac, Ophiuchus, since the standard calendar uses only twelve signs. And to fully confuse the issue, astronomically, the Buttefly Cluster resides within the constellation of Scorpius, which after all, is another arthropod.

    As the origins of the zodiac signs would require another, deeper dive into Mesopotamian mythology, and the origins or Western calendar, mathematics and astronomy, none of which are my strong points, I’ll skip them here. And what do I think of astrology in general? I presume that during the Bronze Age and earlier times, human biology was much more connected to annual variation in circadian rhythms and seasonal variations in diet, and thus a baby born in summer months would have different gestational environment and early infancy than a child born in winter or spring. The differences were probably strong enough to affect the later health and psychological development of the individual, causing observable differences between cohorts born, e.g, when Sun was in Leo rather than in Sagittarius. Modern horoscope warnings about tall dark strangers approaching on Tuesday, are nonsense, I think.

    Summa summarum, I consider butterfly to be approximately as valid a zodiac sign as the zodiac signs in general, and depending on taste, equivalent of Cancer or Scorpio.

    Brown butterfly seen on 2026 July 17th, still in tropical Cancer

  • Cookies and Milk

    Doomscrolling my news sources, I stumbled on these two gems, cookies and milk:

    cookies

    https://www.sciencealert.com/radical-overhaul-to-milk-production-would-use-up-to-96-less-land-than-cows-study-suggests

    and milk.

    The purpose of microbial ferment of plastic into proteins (and metabolic byproducts, I suspect) is to compress them into cookies that can feed people. Most of whom, according to some poll, would eat it if resource constrained.

    My comment to that:

    “First they destroy farming, pave the nature with concrete and solar farms, and then they offer plastic cookies. This article is probably a psychological test to see if it actually works on masses. Methinks there will be a mass extinction of anything larger than rats and a global desertification to the tune of Sahara before we reach that level of resource constrain.

    More ominously, the elites may have realized that they have destroyed too much of the food system, and the resource constrained conditions might cause social instability like torches and pitchforks, i.e., Arab Spring II. The fact that this sort of dystopia is even attempted to be normalized shows what level of famine they are expecting in their pipeline.”

    was missing the risk of microplastics and exotic chemical impurities.

    I have already cut down eating certain foods for their suspected plastic content, would not trust the cheap mass manufactured plastic cookies, could not afford expensive mass manufactured cookies.

    Lots of current plastics contain many toxic elements or chemicals from manufacturing, and even those that were inert in the original product might be freed during fermentation process. Others, like phthalates were not safe to begin with. And then there are microbial metabolic side products which cannot be cheaply removed fully and may convert inert to toxic. Not to mention that recycled plastic has encountered many environments during its travels and may have collected dangerous souvenirs. I remember from years ago that granola in boxes made of recycled cardboard needed to be bagged into clean plastic bags, because of the hazardous impurities in recycled cardboard.

    As for the milk, I believe in whole milk to be the healthiest alternative, unless one is lactose intolerant or is allergic to milk (different ailments but both unpleasant), and I would not trust the manufacturing processes to be safe enough for microbial milk substitutes, especially for people who have yeast allergies.

    But based on my understanding on the linked original article, it discussed substituting milk in point of view how much land is saved when rapeseed oil and sugar beet residue is used instead of dairy cows. The paper’s point was not improving human nutrition. The final product is supposed to be nearly as good as milk, but without lactose or cholesterol, and fats coming from rapeseed oil, minerals, vitamins and other nutrients were assumed to be added from somewhere but even the authors admitted that since the fat profile differs from milk fat profile, the milk substitute might not be a substitute for all milk uses.

    Why do we want to ‘save’ land? Rewilding, settlement and other agricultural uses were mentioned, as was Net Zero. I have previously discussed rewilding and destruction of food production, but why exactly do we need more settlement when most of the worlds population lives in countries where fertility rates are below replacement level, and soon their populations are beginning to collapse?

    I do not trust the nutritional value of microbial milk substitute. Having read some of the baby formula ingredients lists, I am not surprised that babies fed with formula develop lower IQ than breastfed babies, though I am not condemning their mothers, who often do not have a realistic alternative option for formula. Economics may be too brutal to stay home to nurse, and not all mothers produce enough milk to feed a baby. I have not seen the microbial milk ingredients list, the original paper was speaking of rather generalized data, but whatever the final products to be pushed to us are, I expect their industrial requirements to be about as healthy as an average baby formula.

    Summa summarum, these milk and cookies would be something I would leave for modern Winter Holiday Santa, the commercial one that is supplanting Christmas Santa and older characters like Joulupukki and Krampus. Even if the hypothetical Winter Holiday Santa would leave me lumps of coal as gifts after such skimpflation, those probably would be welcome in the approaching fuel shortage. And if it were anthracite coal, it might even contain a fossil or two!

  • 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.)

  • Water for Suspicion

    Water, somewhere in Finland, 2025, May 31st

    My crawl though murkier parts of internet brought me to the subject of Water Wars, that is: who gets to decide who gets water?

    While the subject has been surfacing my feeds in waves as new item or old opinion makes splashes, I thought the post behind the link above to be a nice summary of many of he main points.

    One of the voices for monitoring and monetizing the access to water is WEF. On private sector, the role of Nestle in various water related controversies in Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe have been reported. But surely privatization will work this time, right? People joke about communism, as in “but this time it will be different”, but I have noticed exactly the same issues with capitalism. In the end, it does not matter whether the central command is the Chairman of the Politburo or the Chairman of the Board, access to resources will become a dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed. By inference, the only way to prevent the water distribution from becoming a tool of dictatorship is to maintain local control over access.

    AI, of course, is now part of the mix, and it does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings that they are often prioritized over people. I suspect many of the local water crises only happened once a data center was added to the drinkers. But every crisis will be exploited to justify control, not only locally but globally. Just last month we were told that world is entering water bankruptcy. We know water is scarce in Sahara, Arizona and Mongolia. However, Canada and Sweden have plenty of water, and most countries should have reasonable rainfall levels, though politicians may do their best to worsen the situation. For example, despite nearly double snowpack on Sierras 2019, political decisions were made and California told residents not to water lawns. So even though UN acknowledges water scarcity is unevenly distributed, and even locally, like in UK, I think the shortfall is due to bad politics and mismanagement, possibly even profiteering, rather than actual environment, I suspect the control grid will be global.

    At which point, I would extrapolate from central command to the dangers of central command at hands of anti-humanist ideologies of WEF, technocratic dreams of Club of Rome and John Maynard-Keynes (and his followers), not to mention the trans-humanist tendencies of technocracy (some of who are prioritizing AI not as a tool for wealth but as a stepping stone for a manmade god to rule the stupid biological masses in their controlled hives). The publicly allowed zeitgeist seems to clearly wish there were fewer of us and people are without censorship and overtly talking what should be done about it, calling for ‘sustainable development’.

    Helped by the swarms of opportunists rushing to exploit the chaos caused by the disruption, the technocrats hope to push their anti-human control and wealth extraction agendas through (regardless of the consequences to environment, environmentalism being just pretext.)

    Lil’ PlanktonPunkt needs water to survive. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt does not like that another vital resource is taken over by the wealthy and the powerful behind paywall. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt remembers years ago in a faraway land everybody had access to water and swimming and fishing (angling was mostly free, nets required fishing license.) If you wanted water piped into your home and then out of it, you had to pay for municipal water authorities. Water bills were not really an issue, or maybe Lil’ PlanktonPunkt just does not remember. Some supermarkets had free well water for customers to refill their containers if they did not like the chemical taste of municipal pipe water. City slickers, of course, were obligate users of municipal water and sewer services. Today, on another continent, authorities decide if you are allowed to drill a well on land you own and if you are allowed to water your fields from that well, and there are places where storing rain water that fell on your roof for watering your garden into too many barrels requires a permit. But then there are fights over whether you are allowed to grow a garden, on land you own. And that is not even including laws requiring registered seeds. PlanktonPunkt worries about food. And access to water.

    Running water and bird song, 2025 May 30th, Muhos, Finland

    (Note: the links in my postings sometimes contain ads but I’m not sponsored by any of them)

  • Finland in Financial Finale?

    I wandered into a video about why Finland sucks. Some I agree, some I don’t, but I put a longish comment there and decided to republish it with some modifications and additions.

    The downward turn of Finland became a point of no return at EU membership.

    The money circulating in economy now goes to Brussels and multinational corporations operating under international rules, while Finnish economy is being strangled by EU directives designed to favor the looting of peripheral provinces like Finland. Everything else is downstream symptoms of this colonialism.

    Including chopping state services like electric grid, elder care, and soon common water resources, for sale to international bidders (which I suspect to happen because the administrative and tax structures are heavily stacked against those domestic enterprises that do not use tax sandwiches and cheap foreign labor.)

    Using regulatory capture via EU is a modified version of standard globalist modus operandi, sending economic hitmen to subvert national governments to facilitate their countries looting. Here it is a supranational structure operating under severe democracy deficit that functions as a middleman and a fig leaf of legitimacy to borderless looting. After quick googling, I got the impression EU itself seems to consider the political legitimacy a perception issue, i.e., the system may get (cosmetic?) changes and the EU subjects might be probagandized more, if the issue becomes more relevant to the powers that be.

    Among other economic issues, the video mentioned refugees, which in case of Finland was a GDP Ponzi scheme coordinated at EU level. In general, the whole multiculturalism is just a marketing term used by elites pushing for their ‘remedies’ to economies that are already underperforming because of the epic looting that has been going for a long time.

    The real original reason for the refugee business was at first ‘tax payers are not breeding, let’s import more labor’ (and charge the public purse cost plus for integration services by well-connected providers, which, surprisingly, have zero incentives to run out of people to provide integration services for). If nobody paid for the great social benefits to them (AKA the immigration industrial complex) the immigrants would go somewhere else. As would the integration service providers siphoning this money.

    In California, we have a massive homeless industrial complex, with more and more tax money collected to subsidize more and more homeless services serving more and more homeless. Now people have began asking evaluation of results, even audits to find where 20 billion dollars (20 * 10^9 $$$) paid over 5 years went.

    Then, when the newcomers did not get employed (the economy was still sick due to looting, and using the ‘integration services’ rather than job opportunities as a bait attracts different cohorts of immigrants), the rationale began to shift towards consumer headcount method of economy – more consumers mean more economic activity.

    Except to pay for the new army of unemployed, the successive Finnish governments needed to borrow more money, cut other services and pay taxes. Which did not increase economic productivity but increased money in circulation while shifting it from pocket to pocket. Which means inflation and rising unemployment. But at least the economic numbers were manipulated to the EU standards using approved methodologies.

    I don’t know what the next phase of immigration will be, but I would be surprised if it worked better than the previous two phases. Finland, I think, is still in the first phase but beginning to have doubts about it (I might be wrong because I don’t follow Finnish media that much any more.)

    Slightly expanding on the subject, I think NATO’s current whining for war is just the grand finale in the leveraged buyout of nation states like Finland. The EU cash cows have been milked out of all the profits a peacetime economy can provide, let’s sell them to meatpackers. The military industrial complex, the war bond markets (large parts of Ukraine have been put as collateral for the loans required to continue the war against Russia), the reconstruction contracts, the overall firesale of the desperate (or dead) people’s resources for cheap to multinational investors. Finland is, of course, eager to go against traditional enemy, thinking that NATO will help them or that they will help NATO, or something.

    TLDR: Finland is just a case example what happens to once stable and prosperous countries once EU gets to rule them. I suspect that once looting Finland with just current methodology is no longer cost effective, it will be one of the assets to be liquidated in the war against Russia.

    Economic low pressure over remaining small businesses, a metaphor.

    Checking photos of Finland to best illustrate the situation, I think this is better than one of the runners up, a dead tree full of concs.

    Here is a sky darkened by rain clouds and a thin line of trees, cosmetically around a road rest spot, but no trees behind them. To the right was a rain drenched bog with sparse, stunted pines.

    It could be that the line of trees surrounds a farm (those are also usually under heavy regulatory and financial burdens), but thin lines of trees can be seen standing between roads and clear cut openings all over Finland. Such a line could be easily considered a metaphor for cosmetic ‘Happiest Country Statistics’ masking over the remnants of Finland’s economy, while behind spread ploughed through clear cut openings, that would be the real state of Finlands economy. And the dark clouds of global economic collapse and war are looming.

  • 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.

  • Food.

    Dead meat. And lots of it. In California, in July. Though I suspect most of the biomass stored there was not meat, more like a mix of meat, fish, ice cream, frozen fruit and vegetables, and lots and lots of TV dinners, imagine the smell of 65 million pounds of rotting food stuff. And logistics of dealing with the mess. The panel in the video behind the link tried to. In this case, I suspect flies and other scavengers like mice and ants will become a plague, but still preferable to the putrescing health hazard. Having seen the organizational abilities of California in general and LA region in particular (Palisades fires, for example), having the mess to fly away after the maggot phase might be the fastest and most efficient way of dealing with it.

    Heat dome is destroying our crops and cattle. Corn is currently silking, too much heat destroys the ears before they have formed. Soybean flowers are suffering, too. Cattle pastures are parched, meaning strain on supplemental feed supplies. Not to mention animals themselves at risk of heat strokes. And the farms are already under water stress, fighting for supplies.

    In general, our wheat production is the lowest in 50 years. The US wheat acreage is lowest in over a century and when weather and fertilizer effects are added, the amount of wheat to be produced is in danger.

    President has declared a national emergency over the availability of fertilizers. One reason for low wheat acreage is the unaffordability of fertilizer and if the farms do not get their fertilizer in the autumn, next year will be worse. This autumns fertilizer needs to start moving to wholesalers already to make it in time for the farmers. Next year’s crops depend on whether we can source enough now.

    The past few years have reminded me of Revelation, chapter 6, verses 5 – 6, where Famine is given orders in terms of food inflation.