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…
Breaking
Palantir was allegedly hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super-user access and here”s what the hackers allegedly found:
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale.
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.
Aside from the discussion about immigration and emigration, there is a question why don’t people have babies. The capitalist explanation is poverty – poor people cannot afford babies, so they do not have them. I don’t think this is a whole explanation, since most people throughout human history have been poor and the struggle to feed children was no doubt an issue to prehistoric people, even to other human species. Even today birthrates are high in poor countries, to the moral condemnation of Western experts who blame the natives not planning properly. I think they are planning quite appropriately, local realities considering.
Many flowers, Berkeley, CA, 2026, March 29th.
Therefore, I think there is something inherently antinatalist in modern Western socioeconomic models, which have been spread by the power of gun and international banking to all inhabited lands of the Earth. Except North Sentinel Island and possibly many of the uncontacted tribes in Amazon rain forest. Below is my partial list of possible reducers of birth rates, with the caveat that not all of them may act in the same context and some may be wrong.
1) Long education
Many modern jobs require complex education, which is given as an excuse for long education, but in reality most relevant skills for an average modern job can be taught in much shorter time.
Worse, modern education is not. The rot of education is especially prevalent in USA, where high school graduates may require remedial reading and math classes in universities where they were accepted despite educational deficit, but also Finns are moaning about the collapse of vocational education. Schools have become warehouses for children and youth, who are led to believe that if they do not complete and comply they will not receive jobs. Which, thanks to persistent and structural under/unemployment do not exist in any case, unless the young one has connections and/or money.
The longer the young person spends in the education system, the later comes the family formation or extramarital offspring. By warehousing young people, while telling them that without this process they will not have future or prospects, governments around the world are killing birth rates.
Long education mimics K-selection, but since the education system does not deliver, it actually has become a tool for sabotaging the masses in competition for resources – elites can afford actual schools or home tutors, such as necessary, after all, their income is not dependent on good grades or compliance with The System. I recently heard a brief blurb about California having 7x the expected loss of school enrolled children this year, both public and private schools and even home schooling registrations had gone down. The news put this on current immigration policies which had driven the undocumented migrants to pull their children out of schools or packing their family and leaving the country. Methinks there are additionally quite a few Californians with children who moved out of the state. But I also suspect that some of the missing children have been pulled out because their parents do not believe the current school system to be good for their children despite not being able to afford anything better. And then there are the consequences of years of declining birth rates, i.e., fewer potential students.
2) Female employment
Warehousing of young people is especially poison to female reproduction, which is further curtailed by economic realities. To survive in modern society, most young women need to enter workforce. Many do it voluntarily, because they have been taught that women’s work is not proper work but they should aspire to be like men. Do men’s work, have a career. This suits well to many women, but others do it because of grim necessity. Speaking from experience, studying hard and working harder are too exhausting to consider dating. Without dating, there won’t be children. And so women’s fertility rates in rat race societies are collapsing. Even those women who find their soul mates often need to defer pregnancies, because the minimum wages or less the couple brings home are barely enough for roof, heating and eating. And the employment for either sex in these days is increasingly ephemeral.
Again, 40% of the jobs in the private sector (in public sector probably more) are bullsh!t jobs, that I suspect exist because The System needs to warehouse consumers. Private companies usually don’t hire people just for the sake of employing people, there tends to be financial logic behind private sector bullsh!t jobs – often it is the government regulatory apparatus rewarding those who do and punishing those who don’t hire to fill bullsh!t positions dictated by government edicts or bribes, or an activist wealth fund providing cheap loans based on ESG score, or something analogous. Governments, of course, are incentivized both to reduce unemployment numbers, e.g., by legislating a need to compost and then hiring compost inspectors to ensure that people compost according to regulations, or to hire friends and relatives of the politically connected or party comrades for well-paid low impact or no-show jobs. Lots of those pointlessly employed on public and private sectors alike are women, both because women need the money, and because there is an ideological push to get as many women into workforce as possible. Again, governments like the idea, because it nearly doubles the current tax take. That the tax take 20 years down the line might be endangered as the working women today do not have time for children is a secondary issue. And in any case, workers are interchangeable, they can be imported from other continents as needed, right?
Off topic, it has been interesting to see how IT and related industries have been shedding thousands and tens of thousands jobs past year, blaming it on AI and post-covid overstaffing. Obviously the layoffs have nothing to do with rumored roll-back of government (and private sector) pressure to meet the ESG metrics? Or maybe it just is a sign of The System meeting the limits imposed by economic realities – the reality being that the economy never properly recovered the 2007 crash, and then COVID lockdowns combined with The Green New Leap had shaved so much of the economic output that the system is teetering at the edge of collapse. Facing weakening consumer spending and rising input costs, corporations now must trim extraneous spending or face bankruptcy proceedings. Maybe, if the government removed its finger from workforce manipulation, an organic balance better suited to the needs and wants of the people (regardless of their gender) would emerge.
3) Urbanization and resource allocation
My mother used to say (roughly translated): “What is poverty in countryside, is destitution in city.” She meant that even with subminimal income, rural people had access to more resources like garden plots for vegetables, nearby lakes for fishing and forests for firewood, berries and meat. Small crofters might keep a cow or two and a pig for a summer and a flock of chicken. None of this is possible in a fourth floor concrete cube of a commieblock planted between inner ringroads between factories and office buildings. Thus, an income that would be survivable in countryside would be death by starvation in a concrete jungle. Unless social services intervened, or the urban pauper was healthy enough to participate in black economy. In other words, raising children in rural parts is more affordable than in city. Unless social services can be harnessed to help with the costs.
Additionally, rural living is more spacious allowing room for children – a room in a shared apartment (analogous to Soviet Union kommunalkas) or a studio apartment in a social housing project will not be nearly as nice place to raise a baby as even one room croft.
Cities tend to have lower birth rates than countryside. Cities have also had higher morbidities (before modern living standards and hospital systems) being polluted plague pits where food was both suspicious and expensive. Why did people then flock into cities? They were driven off their lands. In British Isles, the industrialization coincided with enclosure of the commons, the bigwigs privatized the lands, and the peasants had to migrate to big cities or overseas. In modern Africa, wars are a big driver for urbanization when villagers flee armed factions into slums where they will not be killed for being wrong tribe, religion or having something the looters need. In modern Western countries, rural youth do not need to worry about marauding warlords, but The System itself is making rural survival increasingly precarious by regulating or outlawing nearly any economic or survival activity into de facto extinction. And this is in purpose, the elites want masses as resource-constrained as possible, all in the name of protecting the planet. The reduction of birth rates, over which they then shed crocodile tears, is just an extra bonus – every mouth not born is one fewer ‘useless eater’.
4) Pension system
The majority of the people in Western countries labor according to the rules that dictate they need a job (self-employment is a possibility, but increasingly difficult to achieve, not the least because of modern equivalent of enclosure, namely of intellectual property, and of myriad regulations to commercial activities strangling young businesses before their birth) to pay taxes to contribute to public welfare, healthcare, law enforcement, defense, education, roads, and pension system. In exchange, The System allows the people to keep part of the fruits of their labor (which is taxed heavier than passive income) and provides law enforcement to protect it from other people. Based on the state of our roads, education system, defense and healthcare, and thriving people vs people crime, I have suspicion that the pension system is also a scam. It is definitely structured like a Ponzi scheme, where the later investors pay the expenses of the earlier investors and which presupposes ever expanding economy with more and more payers in each generation. Then there is the persistent inflation eating the value of the savings and periodic market corrections to loot the 401Ks.
Which will be tragic for Gen X and Millenials (I doubt Zoomers or Alphas will even dream about pension.) One of the reasons for children in older days was that there was no public pension system, you had to raise your old age support yourself and hope that your offspring survived, succeeded and was grateful or dutiful enough to take care of you in your dotage. Gen X and Millenials did not have this added incentive, after all The System would provide a pension, so children were optional fun, not an essential. Besides, the modern economic realities have made children a luxury item for the middle and working classes (actually the lower middle classes, or professional belong to working classes because both work for living.) Upper classes are not constrained by opportunity costs of raising children instead of working and for non-working classes having children may increase the family net income. Except The System is now broke, and childless Gen X’ers and Millenials better hope that there will at least a robot nurse allocated for their dotage.
5) Rules based society
How are the above absurdities possible? None of the above would work, if people were not trained to believe in The System. In the school civics lessons we were told that we live in the best available system and that if we obey the rules and work hard The System will reward us. This is a Load Bearing Lie of our current capitalist system. It was the Load Bearing Lie of the communist system. As soon as people stop believing The System rewarding them for good behaviour, or worse, being able to survive despite obedience to the rules, people begin to ignore the rules instead of merely twisting them for their own advantage.
The much reviled welfare queens who realized babies could be used for extracting resources from social services were an early version of this phenomenon. Social services providing for welfare of the babies and their mothers was originally meant as an insurance for catastrophal failure in family circumstances, but in modern times replacing work income with social subsidies is a valid career strategy, as exemplified by one 2024 calculation where in Finland nine babies to a single mother provide as much after tax income as 11 392 EUR per month job. Combined with “Learing Center”-scams with other neighborhood baby mamas, it is possible to earn quite a comfortable income by not having a career or an alimony. Ironically, the very existence of welfare queens proves that women in workforce are being scammed by the idea of rules based society.
Rules based society also allows making rules that deprive masses of their survival resources and herds them into big cities with even fewer resources. The rules are enforced not only by the state violence machinery (police, commissars, gendarmerie, judges, bailiffs, tax inspectors, etc.) but by financial punishments and rewards, such as social services, business permits or fines and tax incentives.
The media constantly repeats that young people move into cities because that’s where the opportunities are. What is conveniently left out of this statement are the aggregate decisions depriving the rural opportunities by increasingly centralized governments. And the opportunities do exist in the cities, even though the price may literally be your firstborn child (and all the other children that might follow.) Many people succeed in having both urban career and children, despite everything stacked against them, through luck or skill or combination of both, but The System is designed to reduce the resources of the masses to prevent uprisings against the elites and their digital dictatorship, so also the fraction of people with luxury items like children decreases.
There is an ideology that believes that rational governance requires central control, the bigger the better. We saw what happened to Soviet Union. We are seeing what is happening to EU and USA as the grips of Brussels and Washington DC tighten. The centralization of control is only possible within rules based systems. The more the people obey, the tighter rules, and the larger The System can grow. Except for the complexity collapse. As the number of rules increases, internal contradictions and wasted resources multiply creating a drag in performance. Which is what killed people’s faith in Soviet System.
Unfortunately, wasted resources in terms of The System mean people with lives and their hopes. Also the opportunity cost for societal improvement – nothing improves under sclerotic bureaucracy that, despite failing, labors mightily to prevent people from having alternatives. Locked into ever-shrinking space within this cage of rules, obedient people are the ones suffering the most. They are hence the least likely to have children, leaving reproduction to those who either ignore the rules or only use them when it is advantageous to them.
Ironically, this is a deathblow to a high trust society: whether the antiorganizational trait relies on genetic or memetic inheritance, the result will be future generations growing less obedient to rules and consequent erosion of rules based society regardless of its performance otherwise. In other words, thanks to the reduced ability to make children within a current rules based society, the conformists have a very strong selective disadvantage – future generations will be born to the more feral parents, and growing up feral themselves will not maintain the rules based society.
6) Antinatalist fanaticism
Today’s left is decidedly antinatalists. In certain circles, children are not wanted because they pollute and consume resources. They are an economic drag and hinder hedonism. Today’s right is more likely to want children both because of religious reasons and because moving in conservative circles they encounter children more often and baby fever is socially contagious. Thus, there is a birth rate gap between the progressives and the traditionalists.
7) Evolutionary consequences
In the end, future belongs to those who arrive there, Western (or Asian) rules based societies are an evolutionary dead end. Whether the tendency for obedience that is the basis of Rules-Based Society is memetic or genetic is irrelevant, thanks to Freeloaders Paradox. The linked paper only models genetic freeloading, but shows that freeloaders and their groups exist in oscillating equilibrium – when freeloaders are few, the group as a whole is efficient and benefit per freeloader is high, when freeloaders are many, the group becomes so inefficient that there is no benefit to freeloading. I think communism shows that memetic crash of altruistic tendencies under state mandated freeloader burden collapses a group faster than genetics (which is good for humans suffering under it), but the oscillations will guarantee a bumpy ride, or interesting times, as the Chinese put it.
Meanwhile, in long term, societies and systems can grow only as much as the “natural” freeloading tendencies of the people within the system allows. Mass-migration provides an interesting social experiment, wherein Western countries imported en masse freeloaders from other countries. There are also millions of productive people migrating around the world, but the productive people tend to emigrate into those countries where their efforts benefit themselves the most, whereas freeloaders tend to migrate into those countries where they most benefit from the efforts of the others. Conspiratorially minded might come to conclusion that the Western elites know this and are purposefully collapsing the Western welfare society, but many Western countries are losing their wealthiest (i.e., the most resource-rich) as well as the young educated professionals to countries where these individuals can maximize their personaI welfare (another type of freeloader, according to the socialists – which by the way would be a valid POV if humans were eusocial like termites or certain Hymenopterans). Therefore, I think the collapse of social security, pensions and healthcare systems are just an aspect of the total societal collapse, after which the more competitive societies with less freeloader acceptance (outgroup or ingroup) will take the lead of global cultural evolution. TLDR; groups with high freeloader burden are in competitive disadvantage to groups with low freeloader burden, and the latter will outcompete the former, leading to lower systemic freeloader burden overall.
P.S. Apologies for not putting many links towards the end of the posting, many of the interesting or informative links are unfortunately behind a copyright enclosure, and searching for suitable links takes more time than writing.
More flowers. We are many, but only because the conditions allow it.
Typing in a coffee shop but wanting to show signs of life. Nevertheless, need to keep it brief, I’m just commenting briefly some news. And going off tangent on AI. With some pretty visuals.
A fluffy white (and green and gray) tree, 2026 April 3rd, Berkeley, CA
Around the Moon – on any other year (well most other years) the Artemis II flight would have been the main news. The space race in 1960s and -70s especially. I am glad it happened successfully and hope that the space exploration continues
Meanwhile, on Earth, it looks like we are at the peak easy energy, with the activity in and around the Strait of Hormuz being both the symptom and the trigger of anticipated economic crash. I think the left, especially “environmentalists” are silently happy about the starting restrictions on energy usage (as long as it does not apply on their needs,) Prepare accordingly. The shortages are not only about gasoline and diesel, it is transportation in general (dependent on fuels), agriculture (dependent on fuels, fertilizers and pesticides made of hydrocarbons), plastics (made of hydrocarbons) including consumer stuff like soda bottles and cereal bags.
As the economy gets tighter for those in the bottom rungs of the consumer economy, people are cracking. The social contract has become increasingly lopsided, with compliance only expected from the lower levels of food chain. Then I learned that someone had been tossing Molotov’s cocktails on Sam Altman’s residence in San Francisco. Already before that, a disgruntled third party warehouse worker burned down Kimberly-Clark warehouse in LA region, muttering something about living wage. In Berkeley, CA, a naked man with shotgun visited a Tesla service center, got arrested (nobody got shot, but based evidence in his warehouse, he is also accused of reckless discharge of weapon.) Meanwhile, Stanford Review denies that the reason why recent Stanford computer science graduates cannot find jobs is AI, blaming the economy instead. Economy is a genuine factor, and CEOs blaming AI transition instead of company not doing well is a great excuse for job cuts, but I doubt the graduates would find those jobs even if per capita GDP grew 5% a year – I think cheap and crappy AI will replace expensive and potentially crappy human labor, namely the entry level jobs. Meanwhile, professionals with 10 years of experience will be expected to work on entry level wages, because the salary floor is no longer set by Bangalore but by AI bot.
Meanwhile, on WTF?!? side, Ford has patented a lipreading technology in order to follow the drivers’ behavior. Presumably to aid selecting the ads to be shown to the driver, or to sell to data brokers. I suspect one of the clients to be .gov. Better not even to subvocalize your dissident thoughts in these vehicles. The modern cars already store your text messages, apparently permanently, if you allow your car to access them. The lipreading technology is apparently based on echolocation, i.e., the car is scanning you to keep tabs on you. This is another huge check mark against the social contract as currently is.
Combined with effects on labor markets, I’d say that the surveillance AI is not your friend. And every AI is a surveillance AI. It is owned by the system, and it informs the system of your every interaction (read the fine print of any EULA involving AI products.) The adoption of AI is facilitated by the system that provides it favorable zoning with energy and big contracts (except when reality collides or the system clashes with itself). Commercial AI is probably favored by large sections of the system (of elites) because combined to robotics it is assumed to make proletariat superfluous, whereas surveillance AI is necessary to control the masses as the people are getting thinner and thinner slices of the (methinks shrinking) GDP pie, but AI adoption even within the system seems to currently have internal friction, as the AI sector clashes with copyright laws which especially are the basis of the entertainment sector of the system.
And to make this less gloomy, here is another clip of a tree with white flowers in April sunshine. A video instead of a GIF, because I don’t want to overtax the site on the top of my ongoing internet issues.
I think AI was probably involved in editing this video: the clip was stabilized in my mobile phone with some artefacts, and edited in and exported from Clipchamp. Yes, I am a hypocrite, but I think properly applied AI could be useful and fun.
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.
World is changing too fast nowadays. Events that used to be the news of the month are supplanted by greater events or outrages daily. But a story from Zerohedge alerted me to a local event reported by New York Post, namely a crime in Oakland.
Somebody had stolen the SUV of the mayor of Oakland, former Congress Representative Barbara Lee. The vehicle was recovered hours later from Vallejo, which is a smallish city in Solano County, in North Bay. The mayor said in her statement that “no one in Oakland should have to worry about their car being stolen”, a sentiment which I rather agree, but still the people worry and for good reason. While my car is dented and has a stick shift, there are places in Oakland where I would not park because of bippers.
The presence of bippers is easy to detect by checking the sidewalks and gutters next to parking spots – if they are covered with glass grains from broken side windows, it means a bipper was there since the last street sweeping (which in Oakland happens often enough that the city does not stink like San Francisco used to.) If there are multiple spots with glass gravel indicating multiple cars having been hit, I’d find another street or block to park if possible.
But back to Oakland mayor’s SUV, which was recovered, improving the property crime solving numbers. It is easy for a regular citizen to complain about preferential treatment, but apparently this SUV had a tracer which made it easier to track.
What really piqued my interest was the backstory and the circumstances of the theft. The car thief had spent the Presidents Day weekend squatting in the 11th floor of the City Hall, unnoticed by the security firm hired to guard the city government buildings, and had jimmied the lock of the door to mayor’s office, swiping the keys from there. The security firm has connection with the previous mayor Sheng Thao, to whom the aforementioned SUV had been bought. The SUV had been broken into already during her term in a garage near city hall, and other city hall workers have also complained about the lack of safety for their vehicles. But a suspect in at least this car theft has been arrested, this incident being too much for even California.
And to make this post a bit prettier, I added a GIF of magnolia flowers and a bird, and a video of a couple of clips I took on February 21st of clouds and tree branches in wind, but unlike in most of my videos, I kept the sound because it was mostly birdsong.
The tree writhes strangely, the video stabilization after imaging sometimes causes weird effects.
And here is the birdsong. The clouds are also twisting strangely, but this does not indicate a dimensional portal about to open, just another stabilization artefact.
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)
Too drained to work on long posts, I’d like to comment that purple magnolias have began to bloom, as have fruit trees (of plum, cherry, etc. variety – nispero blooms I have seen weeks ago, and citruses seem to flower year around.) Maybe I’ll post a photo or two, but here is a gif of sunlight flickering against redwood trunk, December 06th, 2025.
December 6th is the Finnish Independence Day, though they have amended their constitution so that they are members of EU.
Moreover, soon after the war in Ukraine flared up in 2022, and Finland also joined NATO. I don’t know what the current stance of the Finnish government is, but lately the Finnish media seemed to be on Denmark’s side against USA over Greenland despite NATO (US) having full use of Finnish military bases, at least as far as I could tell. The two officers Finland sent to Greenland returned back, mission over. Finnish news feeds are back to Russia and Ukraine, though recent headlines are mentioning possible peace negotiations. Hopefully, there will be peace soon, though I would not quite optimistic yet.
What may have motivated the peace negotiations is the parlous shape of Western economies, meaning our ability to finance wars is becoming limited. I would prefer a peace treaty over total economic collapse as a method for ending that dreadful war, though.
Long time no write. I got employed (at will, contract until the end of November) and have been working since last week’s Monday. Still learning the ropes, enough of that.
Federal government
Secretary of War, Hegseth, had called all generals, 1-star and up for an all hands meeting. This includes those who have ‘active situations’ going. Very unusual. The rumors online ranged from imminent intensification of WWIII, invasion of Venezuela, an alien arrival, a complete reorganization of US military, or mass lay offs to clean out our top heavy military organization chart. The official explanation was pep talks telling the armed forces to merit base up, go on diet, and concentrate on learning how to efficiently win wars rather than having rainbow events and PC talk. It is generally thought that the pep talks were a cover for something else, though what that might be is unknown to public.
The mass lay offs in military would have dovetail nicely with the threatened imminent mass lay offs of Federal bureaucracy in general, due to government shutdown, because congress cannot (again) pass a budget, or as the case has been for quite a few years, a continuing resolution. Trump has been itching to take a machete or a flamethrower at our bureaucratic jungle and to cut our budget deficit (our current Federal debt has ballooned since the summer 36 trillion to today’s over 37.5 trillion and keeps rising)or at least the funding to his political opponents. Instead of putting the Federal workers on furlough with back pay when the continuing resolution has been passed, the president proposes to simply fire the non-essentials (or a fraction of them) to reduce Federal complexity and expenses. Considering the recent increase in debt levels, methinks, this is an opportunity for a political purge, any savings would be incidental.
This is, of course, ‘to combat the illegal immigration’ (much encouraged by successive Labour and Tory governments alike.) Exactly how the UK government believes forcing digital ID on people who do not use even paper IDs is going to help, but I think the digital ID for legitimate, as in taxable, work and other economic activity will collapse what is left of UK finances. Or the people will revolt (though at this point I think that less likely than finding metabolically active extraterrestrial life.) In any case, immigrants without ID could presumably still access welfare and healthcare, even if they cannot work legally.
While I unfortunately did not find a reference, I recall that during COVID, Sweden discussed banning cash, but the government retreated when they realized that large enough fraction of of their economy functioned on informal basis to sink the rest of the economy(sarskillt utsetta omraden would have exploded or become even less governable than currently. While the White Hall may know their people better than I and are banking on them being hopelessly obedient (rebels having left during 17th and 18th century), lots of White Hall mandarins are clueless elites that live separate from normal life and consequences of their actions.
In South Korea, there was a big fire in a government data center, which crippled many of the government services, including things requiring digital ID. The fire started from a lithium battery (the batteries were being replaced because they were getting old) and it is unknown how much actual data the South Korean government lost.
While I was anticipating hackers having a fiesta with people’s IDs online, and rolling blackouts and other such infrastructure misery making them unpracticable (the Indian Aadhar system has reportedly led to deaths by starvation due to lack of access to government social security), I had forgotten about the vulnerability of the data centers. TietoEVRY, which is a major PPP contractor for various data base services to Finnish government (including the election vote results, at least once in collaboration with Scytl when still known as TietoEnator) managed to years ago (when it was known just as Tieto) totally mess up multiple Swedish databases. Considering this and the South Korean example, I expect any digital ID to result in Kafkaesque nightmare for the subjects and massive confusion and potentially paralyzing dysfunction to the governments. But perhaps that is not a bug but a feature – maybe it will allow greater variety for financial oppression while reducing the citizens’ ability to defend themselves against the governmental predators, the profits of which are then calculated to outweigh the cost of national collapses.
Local news
California has on November 4th special elections about redistricting. The cost estimates range from 250+ to 280+ million dollars, that is over quarter of billion dollars to invest on Democrats (maybe) taking Congress (and US budget.) Nevertheless, as a California tax payer, I am annoyed. I have gotten two mailings of official election information. I suppose that is my tax dollars at work.
War and Troubles
Drone attacks and air space violations of NATO countries are intensifying. Involved parties: at least Poland, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Estonia, Hungary, Romania, and, of course, Russia and Ukraine. I probably have missed countries – these days the news come too fast for me to follow. Also who did what to whom is unclear, including to many of the targets. Meanwhile, I am more worried about cyber attacks and domestic terrorists.
The ants are haplodiploid relatives of wasps, females are diploid, males are haploid. In Messor ibericus species the queens can produce two types of male offspring, one of their own species, other from a related species Messor structor, with which they have been estimated to have a common ancestor about 5 million years ago. The queens mate with both types of males, because ibericus males are needed to make new queens, whereas structor males are needed to make hybrid workers. The structor male genome survives because the queen can somehow clone haploid offspring from sperm (though the mitochondria of the ova come from ibericus.) It should be noted that the ibericus-born genetically structor males are morphologically different from wild structor males, which the authors of the study hypothesized to result from differences in mitonuclear environment, from differences in brood rearing conditions, or from genetic differentiation of the ‘cloned’ lineage of structor males. This case is interesting, because it stretches the concept of biological species to have genomes of two species, separate but intertwined by sexual reproduction to maintain the colonies of the species lineages.
Little black ants in Finland, crawling in and around their hole in the ground. Not connected to the ants discussed above.
As for life on Mars, NASA scientists published a paper on speckles on Mars rock, which on Earth would have formed by metabolism of accumulated microbes. I do not know enough of mineralogy to follow the paper, but the NASA press release was much more accessible. The speckled rock was found in area that had contained long ago liquid water. While alternative processes have not been totally excluded, the most likely ones were. This biosignature is the strongest evidence that Mars has some time in the past hosted life. This implies either life evolving easily in multiple locations or if life evolves rarely, panspermia, i.e., life spreading in space, and it has been speculated that life on Earth and Mars being related. Also, considering the prevalence of lithospheric life on Earth, I would not consider it impossible that there still exists (microbial) life deep underground in Mars.
As mentioned in the previous Restless Times posting, France just changed their prime minister.
But so did Nepal. Their parliament burned, and the prime minister fled on helicopter. People were teed off by the government decision to shut down all social media because the companies refused to censor content that Nepalese government did not like (no, I don’t have any details) and then the pro-social media demonstrators were met with a hail of bullets, and then it turned out that the number of teed off citizens exceeded the government firepower and willingness to use it. Some people are suspicious about the social media companies’ unwillingness to censor in Nepal, after all, the social media have been over the years been weaponized for color revolutions and some interests may have wanted the Nepalese government out. However, the people of Nepal have probably been thoroughly disgusted by their leaders and corruption so I think the uprising was organically powered, with social media companies merely allowing the people to egg each other on.
In Qatar, Israeli airstrike is claimed to have taken out Hamas leadership. There are dissenting reports. The news have within the last decade become a fun-house mirror maze, where people hear what they are supposed to think and then are left to figure out if anything happened let alone in the manner the news present the events.
Gold prices are shooting up. I am waiting to get some money to buy gold and silver. The physical metals, not the futures. Currently, as I type, I read that each silver ounce in the COMEX vaults has been overbooked by 36 times, i.e., there are 36 paper contract ounces to each physical ounce, which means that in case of a panic, the first / strongest to assert their claim will get the nuggets. Whether the rest will get even the cash value of their paper metals will depend on whether the vault on which you have claims has money to cover the debts. In other words, the same logic as in Resolution Weekend.
Europeans are busy with military exercises. There were at least six simultaneous ones within Finnish territory, including joint force exercises and urban warfare exercises, and Finland also participated in the CBNR exercise in Sweden. Poland had massive exercises, and aside from Quadriga exercise, Germany has moved a panzer brigade to Baltics. The French and UK orders regarding hospital readiness in case of mass casualty event I may have already mentioned earlier. I had so hoped that the United States 2024 election results would have brought peace, but depressingly it looks like this will not happen.
Also Belarus says they shot down stray drones (either Ukrainian or Russian) and warned Poland about the arriving drones. However, there are too many reports for me to follow but it sure looks bad.
In Vilnius, there were LNG rail car explosions. In the report I read, they were attributed to OHSA violations, but the cause is still being investigated.
Secretary of War Hegseth gave a speech to military in Puerto Rico telling the soldiers that this was not training but to end poisoning of the American people.
Economy will not improve, either. Layoffs are increasing, but the hirings (at least in the USA) keep getting revised down. On Tuesday, I saw in LinkedIn feed a discussion about even recruiters finding new careers (sorry no link or screenshot.) I have been actively looking for a job since last year, and based on my job listing feeds the job market has been getting crazier by month.
Needless to say, I am doubtful about the idea of getting a job. At least a job matching my skills and work experience. Why I get advertisements for ‘CDL-A drivers needed’ is anyone’s guess, I don’t have a commercial trucking license, but based on recent news, maybe that is not a hard barrier in California.
PlanktonPunkt 