This week has been very strange, even by 2020s standards.
Sap on a tree trunk, August 22nd, 2025, in evening sun light. Just something pretty.
I have been employed since September, a couple of temp extensions and I got another extension last week. Have been working hard to justify my continued paycheck, so posting has been sparse. It will probably continue to be so, until I get things stabilized.
The inflation is getting out of hand. On Thursday, the gold visited briefly at about 5600$ per troy ounce, silver tested 120+ range before settling below 120$. In the cafeteria, where I often go for lunch, the cheap meal of 2 pieces of chicken, a piece of corn bread and some side was 20$, a bigger meal 35$ and there was an 8-piece 70$ option, too. Then on Friday an incomprehensible double digit collapse of gold and silver prices, some say 8 – 10 sigma event. Also crypto went down, hard. The metal move was some times blamed on nomination of Warsh as the next Chairman of the Fed, but metals don’t move that much for nearly anything, at least they did not used to. People online grumble about market manipulation, but even that does not make sense, unless the economy is very, very fragile. A few years back, I could not imagine an event smaller than WWIII moving metal prices that fast. No, scratch that. A few years back, I could not imagine metal prices to move that fast. Period. However, I doubt the chicken will be cheaper next week.
Greenland forgotten, our troops are amassing near Gulf of Persia. Government is currently under partial shutdown. On the top of the shutdown, the Federal administration is trying to stop disbursements to the states that refuse to investigate various forms of fraud on social services, health care, etc. There is a simmering tension that might flare at any provocation back to armed violence – the states are choosing their sides whether to support the Feds on immigration enforcement or not.
Meanwhile, there is the Moltbook issue. To me, it is unclear if this is a clever community make-believe or whether the AI agents are gaining autonomy or something between. Some in the Internet are screeching about Skynet, but it is the reality of our energy infrastructure that is a kicker. For example, there were over 180k households without electricity in Tennessee after a winter storm, tens of thousands still today, though the repairs are ongoing relatively fast. Even under the best of the weather conditions, many interconnects are under enormous strain between the Green New Leap that has destabilized the grid and the AI server farms which require power of millions of households. If I were a betting person, I would place money on the complexity collapse over the shiny AI future.
So, while charging my phone, I decided to use the time for making a no-context video of clips taken August 22nd, 2025, and then start writing a blog post as a place for that video.
Seed structures fluttering in wind, black ants on a tree (some sap)
I got as a suggestion from a YouTube, a video about moving to chase jobs. A part of the video made me rethink about the whole migration approach to avoid economic failure. Not that I am blaming individual people who choose to rip themselves from their home areas and finding greener pastures, being a migrant myself, that would be hypocritical.
However, people here in West have been relentlessly propagandized to move after better economic opportunities instead of improving their home environment. Specifically, the discussion which states would be the best options made me think about the migration between US states as a scam. People are encouraged to leave states with poor job prospects to chase the increasingly ephemeral employment across the continent. Similar phenomenon is seen within European Union that deliberately adopted the same approach as ‘free movement of labor’.
The free movement of labor proved disastrous in EU. In Eastern Europe, people mass migrated to Western Europe to do unpleasant jobs cheaper and with fewer options to object inhumane treatment than the local working classes. This emptied the poorer parts of EU cramming their peoples into wealthier parts of the EU. At some point, the second biggest Latvian urban population after Riga was London. Polish plumber became a meme. Meanwhile, the working classes of the Western EU began to lose their work to cheaper foreign competitors with fewer de facto rights. Those who remained employed saw their wages stagnate and working conditions worsen.
Eventually, the working and downwardly mobile middle classes of UK, which had been the end of the line for aspiring eastern EU citizens, voted for Brexit to reduce the pressure to their living standards. Aside from job markets, the immigrants increased housing pressure and needed public services. In short, the pie of gross national production may have gotten larger, but did it get large enough to accommodate all the new slices? And who actually benefited for the increase in GNP? Somebodies must have known or guessed the results but gone ahead with it anyway.
This was just the economic side of it. I wonder if much attention has been paid to the psycosocial and cultural costs to the immigrants themselves, when they leave their social support networks and familiar traditions and customs. The increasing atomization and hyperindividualization of the subjects, or objects of governance, of course benefits elites who do not really worry about lone ranters in the internet (those can be shadowbanned) but are sweating over mass movements not paid by and organized by themselves. Even though their biggest actual threat is mass passivism (NEETism, or as the Chinese say, lying flat), but that was not what I had been thinking this time.
The biggest problem after the exploitation of the migrants is that free movement allows exportation of the various regions socioeconomical problems, thus shielding their governments from the consequences of their policies. In United States, California, New York and Illinois are regularly trotted as examples of exporting refugees of liberal policies but as a Californian, I am rather tired of red staters sneering smugly at our homeless problem after having exported their drug addicts and mentally ill using what is here known as bus therapy: i.e., buying them a one way bus ticket hoping that the Californians will take care of their social issues.
Meanwhile, in California, UK, European Union, and other mismanaged territories, bad regulatory environment combined with excessive taxation and misallocation of government resources (encouraging further taxation) kills the economy, including employment. People with means (money, education, passport) and initiative will vote with their feet. And as the recent decade has shown, apparently the only thing you actually need for emigration is initiative, though money and passport will be huge advantages.
In the current narrative, as far as I understand it, emigration is supposed to punish the local administrations, they are losing tax base. Except that thanks to Federal or EU government and their funds transfers between the regions, the internal emigrants will still subsidize their original administrations with their taxes. While burdening the infrastructure from roads to social services somewhere else. Win-win for the local mismanagers. There are whole developing countries whose economies depend on remittances from their expatriate populations, which on surface seems more benign than the interstate welfare / subsidy parasitism, but which on one hand means at least a temporary loss of labor force that is building another country, while on the other hand creating distortions on the labor market of country they have emigrated into. And the psychosocial costs, again, were borne by the migrant labor and their families.
What happens if all regions export their economic problems and no region can handle the masses seeking better life any more? Or if one region exports the labor to be exploited in another region?
Well, the EU economy is collapsing, and though some blame the migrant crisis, I think the mass migration is a symptom of a deeper rot within the system that relies on imported people to exploit. Except that the current batch of immigrants did not arrive to be exploited but to figure out the greatest personal benefits. The massive immigration industrial complex that relies on government subsidies flowing to the ‘NGOs’ is definitely a drain on government budgets, but if it were not the immigrants, some other cause with swarms of ‘NGOs’ would take their place. EU has now two competing narratives, War in Ukraine and the Climate Change, which also demand lots of money, but the real reason why the elites are after all these years slowly beginning to turn off the money spigot on the immigration is that the economy (the big corporate, not just the little bourgeoisie or working classes) is dying. After the job market had already began to contract (in case you had not looked at the job search situation during the past couple of years), there was a brief attempt to use the immigrants to cook the government books by adding consumers to GDP, but this consumption was mainly driven by government handouts, and governments, as mentioned above, had also other places which needed the printed money.
The bigger issue that is destroying the economy is the all suffocating tangle of red tape and directives sprouting from Brussels, that has nearly destroyed all initiative within EU. As a child, I used to giggle at the Moscow lead Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Now large fraction of NATO is lead by equally insane Brussels. Among these directives are the dictates of the more cultishly fanatical supporters of various Veblen ideologies.
Veblen ideologies are impractical and costly to adhere, and mostly for virtue signaling among the peers, just like Veblen goods are mainly bought to show that the buyer can afford them and is sophisticated enough to know which expensive goods to buy. Anyway, the Veblen ideologies of the EU elites demanded destruction of nuclear power stations and building wing mills and solar panels instead, thus gutting their industrial base and small consumers’ electricity budgets.
Then there are the endless identity politics, which can only exist if divisions between peoples are carefully cultivated, and if necessary, invented. Problem being that increasing mistrust between people requires increasing regulatory layers to prevent them from doing unto the society before the society does it unto them. Thus, low trust societies are less efficient and require more top down enforcement (to replace the missing natural cohesion) but I suspect that is precisely the reason why many of the elites seem to promote identity politics – fracturing the masses into mutually hostile tribes prevents populist uprisings.
However, aside from being bad for the economy by the added bureaucratic drag, the conflict between ethnic or ideological tribes can be used for driving the opponents of the regime away. Every conservative chased away is a reward for the progressive administrative state of California. Even if reducing the dissidents diminishes the likelihood for corrective action instead of economic collapse due to runaway Veblen ideology cults.
But why do Brussels and Washington DC allow epic failures like Germany or California? Without resorting to conspiracy theories about shapeshifting lizard people, I hypothesize that firstly, both California and Germany are too big to fail, and secondly, when they do fail this presents the central governance an opportunity to gain bigger grip on regions (thus, ironically, further entrenching the collapse of the whole rather than just some of its parts.)
Both California and Germany used to be the industrial backbones of their respective organizations, and enormously wealthy and powerful, so it will be easier to pretend nothing is amiss than to actually try to do something about them. Because of their sizes and their remnant wealth, and their heritage of numerous bureaucratic positions within the System, California and Germany still wield great power in Washington DC and Brussels, respectively, thus preventing anything done to them without their permission.
Meanwhile, as both regions do their best to dictate the policies of the larger collective, or in case of California, at least ignoring / defying the edicts from the capital, the factions aiming for more centralized control are waiting for a useful crisis to exploit for further power consolidation.
And what does this have to do with the locust economies? As the systemic polycrisis deepens, individual people and families will frantically try to find a place to survive. Survival is no longer just a problem of the Third World. Thanks to reductions in food and energy production (not to mention the oligopolistic squeeze on healthcare resources, especially in United States), the struggle for survival is returning to the First World.
California being pretty much the last shore of the West, I do not know what shape or form the mass migration within the First World will take, but I believe it will not be many years from now when the powers that be finally begin to slam the borders shut, not to keep immigrants out but to keep emigrants in, just like East Germany used to do and North Korea (and to a lesser degree People’s Republic of China) still do.
Prepare for the Fall. The season is nearly gone, but the civilization will take a bit longer to finish.
This May in Finland I was lucky enough to spot this beetle on a tree stump. The stump was also hosting a fungus, recycling nutrients. Life goes on.
Now I am in California. The job situation is bad. The official US unemployment percentage for July 2025 was 4.2%. Functionally unemployed in July 2025 were estimated by Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to be 24.7% of US labor force. With AI, especially white collar unemployment is estimated to soar further. I think AI is an excuse for job cuts resulting from austerity enforced elimination of Bullshit Jobs.
David Graeber estimated in his 2014 book Bullshit Jobs – A Theory that about 40% of the jobs are unnecessary and people are being paid, often well, to do nothing useful.
Meanwhile, we have printed money, that is accumulated debt, faster than productivity has grown since the previous century, but now the buy-now-pay-later Ponzi scheme is unraveling. Most of the printed money seems to have been soaked into stock market and complex derivatives, benefiting governments and their servants and ‘NGOs’ and the 0.1%, which have sucked the money (plus interest) away from real world investment. While also saddling the people with unpayable public debt loads, the consequences of which manifest as increased taxation, reduced services, and proliferating licensing requirements and fines, which both are additional taxes in disguise to government coffers.
Now the production is no more, despite the inshoring attempts of the current administration of US and the 99.9% are doing price discovery. The economy is shedding jobs. Optimally the lost positions should have been the 40% Bullshit Jobs, but it seems that many useful positions are eliminated, too, further damaging the economy.
Part of this is the loss of consuming power driven by the mass functional unemployment. While the people with Bullshit Jobs may not have produced anything, they used their salaries to keep up the consumption demand, being vital for the survival of many small real businesses like pizzerias, lawn care companies, cosmetologists and car dealerships.
Another part of it is the pathologies of the system itself. After years of promoting incompetents into leadership positions, be it by nepotism, political clientilism (including DEI) or slack allowed by easy (freshly printed) money, the managerial class no longer recognizes which workers are necessary for operating a business. A case example: Boeing.
The regular people (including many of the 40%ers) are now suffering from another effect of money printing, inflation, including food inflation. Although food (and other) inflation is not driven by money printing alone but by money supply growing faster than food (or other) supply. The demand is semielastic, if that is a word. The former middle class downgrades consumption and the poor skip meals, but the number of mouths to feed depends on immigration plus births minus emigration plus mortality.
Unfortunately, thanks to the globalization, also problems are global. I think food inflation in the West is not only due to reduction of food production per capita or collapsing Western economies but also due to increasing wealth in poor and middle income countries, that now can better compete for the global resources.
I also believe that the global food production has not kept apace with the global money printing, and though the poorest in the West have traditionally outspent the poor and even the middle classes in poorer countries, now even in West we now have food inflation because other countries can pay for the food on global export markets. For example, China has during recent years bought massive amounts of grain, pulses, oils, meats, fruits increasing price pressures.
Meanwhile, people with money to travel are leaving global south for global north increasing pressure in the Western countries. Traditionally, if food supplies or economy grow tighter people emigrate. However, it is not the poorest of the poor who can apply for visas or pay for human smugglers if they are not eligible for a visa. Nowadays the situation in the departure country does not does not need to be catastrophal to induce emigration. Just the perceived better economic opportunities in other (including Western) countries – thanks to mass media and ubiquitous internet -, and the comparative ease of traveling are now major drivers of mass migration from poorer countries to wealthier, and if the situation in the country receiving the immigrants changes, the flow of people will head some other place.
Thus, I think that fewer people are starving to death but the price of the global affluence paradoxically is that more people in West go hungry.
Some time ago I was in a grocery market here in California, not a hugely expensive one. They advertised for two avocados for seven dollars. The economy may be toast but it won’t be an avocado toast.
Florida is constructing an ‘Alligator Alcatraz‘, a deportation facility in the m Everglades. An abandoned airport project will be (government) quickly converted into a 5000 bed facility with an idea that the surrounding swamp area with its alligators and pythons would be part of the security. Federal government will use FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program money for the center. Presumed Federal costs will be 450 million dollars annually. Assuming processing speed of two weeks per deportee and full occupancy, that housing alone will cost 3750$ per person though I doubt government will be that efficient. But Alligator Alcatraz is a catchy name, good marketing!
The immigration industry seems to still provide good income for some – left loves to import immigrants with government paying the housing, whereas right loves to deport immigrants with government paying the housing.
Nigerian Oil Production Woes
Alleged 7.2 billion US dollar fraud in Nigeria has led to the arrest of two officials in Nigeria’s state owned oil corporation and three other officials are being investigated. Annual allocations of money meant for revamping and rehabilitation of old oil refineries had not been efficient, as Kaduna, Warri and Port Harcourt refineries “haven’t been producing fuel in recent years” as Oilprice.com reports. Nigeria is struggling to meet (as in has not met) its OPEC quota of oil production due to crime and “struggles to launch new projects”(ibid.)
Sweden has illiteracy problem
Regardless of the possible reasons for the Swedish education crisis described in this Zerohedge article (originally from Epoch Times but they require registration), about 800000 of 10 million inhabitants of Sweden are categorized as illiterate. While he definitions of literacy may have changed over the centuries, this is according to the author “the highest number since at least the mid-19th century, possibly since the early 18th century.”
During 18th century Finland was part of the Sweden, and literacy was then enforced by strong state church that demanded that everybody had to pass confirmation (which was prerequisite for get married – premarital relationships were strongly disapproved those days) and to pass confirmation had to know how to read (the material promoted by the state church , other literacy was a bonus.) Perhaps, if literacy would again be a basis for full civil rights (e.g., one would need to be able to read a contract for their signature to be legally binding), the literacy rates would begin to climb again. Without motivation to learn, there will be a segment of population that will not make an effort.
Also, what was alluded in the article but I think should be emphasized is that many of the modern students do not even speak Swedish, and before they learn the language they won’t be able to read or write it, either. Also the Finnish literacy levels which used to be among the highest in the world are declining, at least according to PISA statistics.
A picture from Finland, February 2025, not directly related to Alligator Alcatraz, Nigerian oil production or Swedish literacy.
PlanktonPunkt 