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Category: Speculation

  • 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.

  • Summer Solstice

    Also a Father’s Day in United States. Congratulations to all the fathers, it is, unironically, an important task.

    Since today is a celestial event, this is a good place to mention an update on K2-18b, this potentially hycean exoplanet, that may or may not harbor life (it resides in a habitable zone of a red dwarf but the spectral signs of biosignature molecules are not very reliable and the molecules may also have been formed by abiotic means.) Now, SETI had included this solar system to their radioastronomical survey for alien radio signals. They did not find any, but got plenty of data for future negative controls.

    IMHO, microbial life on exoplanets and larger moons is likely (how common is another matter), but assumption that alien civilizations would communicate via strong radio transmissions seems oddly specific. I expect that if we ever find proof of advanced material civilizations, it would be something like Dyson structures or remnants of extraterrestrial advanced materials not formed by natural processes.

    I thought to get some photos of the sunset of the longest day of the year, but gray clouds had crept over and obscured the sky. It often happens in Berkeley, days are sunny but as the evening sets, the cloud cover spreads from sea to hills. I did not get up there, but in many nights, the blanket of water which is cloud cover over the flats is fog or mist in the hillside. So, instead, here is a picture of jasmine flowers, size reduced from the original taken earlier today.

    These are either from South Berkeley or from North Oakland, the city border crosses the block where the plant grows.

  • 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.