Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Mostly it's a mad dash for Federal Reserve printed money.

To answer this question, first, we know that the tech companies that are very clever like Google and Apple have a knack for siphoning the excess money that is in the economy off into their coffers. Apple has an enormous amount of accumulated cash.

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-fund ... s-want-it/

These numbers are from 2022. There are sources of more recent numbers, but Investor's Business Daily should have accurate numbers. The article shows some non-tech companies further down the list. Some of these are very capital intensive and will likely have as much long term debt (or more) than they do cash. The tech companies, on the other hand, normally have very little long term debt.

[Higgenbotham]

My grandfather was a farmer all his life. He was born in 1902. Farming as it was done in his era was an enormous amount of physical work. It got easier as time went on, though. He retired in 1968 and moved to town, but still worked well into his 70s. It took a toll on his body. When he was in his 80s he would tell me he hurt so bad he wished he was dead. He died at 88. He had an old green John Deere tractor. It beat the hell out of his body. Something like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=old+joh ... r&tbm=isch

The reason I mention this is lately I'm hearing more pie in the sky. It will typically go something like: I am so sick of all this. I want to get away and have a piece of land, grow my own food, and just live in peace. I've heard this twice in the past week. On the Archdruid's Q&A this month there was some reality. As I can best recall, there was one poster who talked about being in a remote area of Guatemala. He said his body could not keep up with the physical demands. Another poster echoed this, saying that most people cannot do the 6 hours per day of hard labor required. It's my guess that he means 6 hours of hard labor on average per day in addition to other labor.

I mentioned rebuilding houses full time for 8 years. I was 24 when I started. The physical demands sort of resemble farming or homesteading. There were several hours per day of hard physical labor and several hours per day of light labor, on average. Examples of hard physical labor might be sanding floors with a floor sander and light labor might be painting rooms. The idea while doing light labor was to move as quickly as possible. For example, when painting rooms, I would think in terms of how many hours to paint a room with my eye on the clock. Once the learning curve was over, after about 3 years, the schedule I settled into was about 12 hours per day of work for 8 days in a row, followed by 2 days of complete rest. That was an average. During the learning curve, I worked longer hours because there was more thinking involved and less doing.

I think as we roll on into the new dark age, the physical demand requirements will trip a lot of people up. It's a lot more than most think.

I was telling somebody just a little while ago that a little known consequence of braving the elements in the far north during the winter was needing to use my left hand to get my right hand into my pants pocket because it was too painful to stick my right hand directly into my pocket for 3 months out of the year because it was so cracked and bloody from working in the cold.

[Higgenbotham]

Old tractors aren’t all romance and fond recollections. It’s an old joke but I can remember my grandfather lighting a little fire under his Fordson to warm up the oil in the crankcase so the motor would turn over easier, hopefully to make the tractor start quicker. That’s fun to recall, but not any fun to have to do. Starting tractors could be a brutal affair. I was watching when my father was crank-starting our Massey Harris Challenger and the crank “kicked” and nearly broke his leg. Tractors increased the pace and intensity of farm work. Don’t let anyone tell you that the piston engine made farming easier than farming with horses. Tractors just meant you could get more field work done in a day. The wet year of 1947, we kept our tractor running day and night to get the crops in because we could. One afternoon Dad, completely exhausted, put me, a child, on it to “work ground” while he laid down under a tree at the field’s edge and fell asleep. He meant to nap only a little while. I knew how to stop the tractor by turning the key off but I did not know how to start it up again so if I stopped, Dad would have his sleep cut short. When it looked like the tractor was overheating, I just kept going round and round the field till it stopped of its own accord. Dangerous business. One of my cousins in the same desperate situation tied his little boy, age 6, in the tractor seat so he couldn’t fall out and had him “work ground” that way, guiding tractor and disk over the plowed ground while the father followed up with another tractor and the planter and kept a sharp eye on the son. Can you imagine what the labor laws would do to a farmer today who tried that?

In the days when we abandoned horse farming for factory farming, we abandoned biology for machinery and let the futile thought of getting rich override our common sense. After that farming became grueling slave work even if it was faster. We didn’t save time. Lights on the tractor just meant we could work longer. It wasn’t long after 24 hour work days that the Sunday day of rest went off the calendar too. Too bad. Even heathens like me need a Sunday day of rest.

https://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com ... never-die/

I said farming got easier as time went on. Another opinion. But the general idea is there. It wasn't easy.

My father's father was raised breaking wild horses on the plains of Nebraska and farmed his whole life.

[aeden]

Germans are finished as Industry is abandoning the country more quickly than the green lunatics expected.
BASF said it would move production to China. Now one-in-six firms is relocating, at least partly.
The main cause is uncompetitive electricity prices — a direct result of Green policies,
above all the failure to build energy capacity to replace the closure of coal, oil-fired and nuclear plants.
Green leader and economics minister Robert Habeck has crushed them as it is grinding to halt to even survive to produce.
The reply's as you're only interested in power unable to code events already known since the red diaper cult.
The sprint to mud huts is quicker that Fritz can deceive themselves.
Retards in the States are not a hell of a lot smarter on inputs as they deny as the locusts loot what's not nailed down
since the tiny bubbles phase to eradicate its own base base.
No H is very difficult as we survive the disconnected-on farm and industrial base realities.
As explained to the Senator you are not paying attention and the acrimony has not a damned thing to do with survival
with these open border halfwits. The seventies was bad enough with the sticky wage arbiters.

[Higgenbotham]

State Farm’s California freeze: Looming insurance apocalypse or political ploy?

BY SAM DEAN
STAFF WRITER
JUNE 15, 2023 6 AM PT

Those lower prices haven’t exactly dealt a fatal blow to insurers’ bottom lines, however. Most companies in the U.S. lose money on the core business of homeowners insurance over time, paying out more in losses than they bring in in premiums, but they make profits by investing their capital in bonds, stocks and other financial instruments.

This isn’t the first time that State Farm and other major insurance companies have hit pause on writing new policies in the state, and the reasons for past stops and starts include major disasters, global financial markets, claims of over-regulation, and mysterious years of bad luck.

Many companies stopped writing new policies after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which prompted the creation of a distinct California Earthquake Authority to insure against seismic damage. But big insurers also have a history of more mundane business pauses. Allstate, which stopped writing new home policies in California in November 2022, did the same thing in 2007, only to reenter the market in 2016. State Farm also stopped writing new policies in 2003, only to reenter the market the next year.

Sullivan said that this time feels different. “Individual companies have made individual decisions before,” he said, but he thinks that both Allstate and State Farm hitting pause simultaneously points to a deeper problem.

Consumer advocates suspect that the political effect of the State Farm announcement is as significant as the business logic behind it.

“The idea that their decision is because they’re not getting the rate increases they want, that’s really not true,” said Amy Bach, executive director of consumer advocacy group United Policyholders.

“It’s a convenient excuse to blame the commissioner and blame Prop. 103 and blame the rate-making process,” Bach said. “But it’s really more complicated than that,” and could have as much to do with a bad year on the stock market hurting the company’s investment income as California’s tinderbox hillsides.

Even Frazier, the industry representative who thinks that California’s insurance regulation needs major reforms, admits that State Farm’s move cannot be entirely explained by mispriced wildfire risks. The mention of rising construction costs, to his eye, implies a different possible explanation for the pause.

The price of building materials and labor surged in the last three years, which has prompted California homeowners to raise their level of insurance coverage — where a homeowner might have been comfortable with a $250,000 policy to cover rebuilding costs in case of a fire, now they might want to up that to $350,000 or more, and willingly pay a higher premium for that more expansive protection.

As a whole, the homeowners insurance market in California has risen from $8.2 billion in premiums in 2018 to more than $12 billion today, with State Farm’s share rising from a little under $1.5 billion to more than $2.5 billion, largely on the back of these rising construction costs.

Frazier said that this jump might put State Farm in a financial bind. Insurance companies, like banks, are required to keep a certain amount of cash on hand to make good on claims in case of disaster.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/ ... california

[Higgenbotham]

All this can be summed up quite simply. During the long era of expansion made possible by the exploitation of fossil fuels, the world’s industrial nations had positive-sum economies: that is to say, the total amount of wealth in those nations increased on average from year to year, and it increased faster than the total amount of illth. Since the arrival of the first energy crisis in 1973, the world’s industrial nations have effectively had zero-sum economies: that is, the total amount of wealth—not of money, but of nonfinancial goods and services—remained largely static on average, while the total amount of illth rose to equal it. We are now moving into an age of negative-sum economies, in which the total amount of wealth decreases on average from year to year, while the total amount of illth rises steadily for a while.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-negative-sum-economy/

It's because we've been in the maintenance phase of a declining civilization since the 1970s.

Also, I think that once the numbers of births start to decline, that is the point at which the rate of physical expansion of the civilization also starts to slow down and, therefore, traditional male activities like building infrastructure begin to decline and the civilization enters into a maintenance phase before the inevitable decline. The mix of jobs begins to change and women are able to better do many of the jobs that become prominent during the maintenance and decline phase (like health care and education, which really just serve to milk out the surplus of the civilization before it collapses). This shift in the job mix has the effect of accelerating the decline (further reducing births and the effects that result from the further reduction in births).

Since consolidating some of these ideas in this Dark Age Hovel, I've been better able to connect some of the posts.

In addition to the energy crisis, the early 1970s coincided with:
The entry of women into the work force in large numbers
Roe v Wade
End of Bretton Woods

Gail shows another aspect of what I'm calling the maintenance phase. Her graph basically shows a maintenance phase since 1973 or 2004 if one prefers the line to be completely horizontal.


https://ourfiniteworld.com/

[Higgenbotham]

In the story 2 posts above about State Farm and Allstate no longer writing home insurance policies in California, there is a mention of a bad year in the stock market. What may not have seeped into the consciousness of the journalists or the people they interviewed yet is that these companies are probably more concerned about the bond market than the stock market. The stock and bond markets are probably not their only concerns though.

Also, I read somewhere else that State Farm has stopped writing new policies on everything except auto in California.

[aeden]

Rickards says the retards will be left behind in the August business meeting.
They cannot hide the money In Monaco anymore unlike the paradise and pandora files
with dozens of shell companies in over 14 jurisdictions avoiding the swamp looters which is there very own.
We even linked the the other absconder from the root kit time segment. The big lie is crypto with us we are the future.
Retards and FTX caption retards caption not needed here. Avarice the spur of greed once again as Hume explained.
Comments unconfirmed are building cranes are up everywhere as the west cannot even define
anatomy by the educated west medical mouth breathers as the looted of used and abused village idiots linger with
burn loot murder. Bad as the SPLS that offshored money when they went rogue.
The DEI with ESG smothered in stakeholder pony hoof in the shit pile will be the end of them.

To be over the target now joined with the geniuses at the dodgers as it just writes itself, we are listening to the Consumer
is just comedy gold.

My Son quit State Farm. The Consumer base was retard grifters fraud on steroid's.
The lunatics with gas cans and cutting power poles to snap in the wind gusts did not help matters for utility power lines.
I have yet to sweep footage of the recent eastern fires and reports are clear more mischief than facts at play.
We are distilling three marker's into 2024 in this cycle ramping up. We are talking CME cycles that the smarter people are aware.
Our primary concern is positions into September in this Hurst cycle discussion. Crops are stressed in a few areas of concern also.

Members of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Atlantic Council, World Economic Forum, etc. can collectively fvck off.
I didn't vote for any of this.

[Higgenbotham]

News update down at the bottom.

The 6 excerpts from Marc Widdowson's book The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age, in the order posted, discuss these topics:

Characteristics of Economic Descent
World Economic Order and Whether the Dark Age will be Global
Neo-Barbarian Invaders will Destroy the West
Fragmented Spirituality of the Descent will Leave People Wanting
Giant Firms will Fail and there will be an Informal Economy
When the Descent Culminates in Collapse, Every Remaining Nuclear Warhead may be Exploded

Before discussing these excerpts individually, the crux of the matter in my opinion is how severe the financial crisis will be and whether the financial crisis by itself will either cause governments to fail or a large number of deaths. Historically speaking, that's not the case. Let's summarize what is different this time, looking at what may be most important immediately after the worldwide financial system seizes up:

1. Critical components are only manufactured in a small number of often vulnerable locations in the world.
2. Manufacturing of components requires as many as thousands of inputs sourced from all over the world.
3. Farms are typically thousands of acres and use hard to repair equipment that requires high tech electronic components.
4. Populations are dependent on high tech water and wastewater treatment.
5. Big box and large virtual stores dominate retail.
6. Populations are higher and more concentrated in urban areas.
7. Populations are dependent on transfer payments.

We've had 2 minor test runs - the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 covid panic. Both were partial financial seizures.

My more specific predictions would be:

• There will be a major global financial panic and crisis. Supply chains will break, resulting in unavailability of critical raw materials and components. Global trade will begin to shut down. As it begins to become apparent that the supply chain linkages are permanently broken, the global interlinked financial markets will shut down and cease to exist. This will all happen very quickly. It will not take years from the initial panic.
• The focus of governments will turn to controlling their panicked and hungry populations. Due to lack of availability of imported goods and adequate storage "sufficient to reconstitute" a system consistent with nation state government, this will prove to be too little too late and most government will devolve to the local level as populations lose faith in their national governments and the national governments lose the resources and ability to control their populations.
• There will be no large scale nuclear war. Instead, the population will be culled through starvation, local strife (including settling of long-standing scores) and disease. Wave after wave of pandemics will sweep the world.
• Similar to national economies and governments, centralized utilities will fail or become so decrepit as to be unsafe and unusable. All centralized utilities including the power grid will shut down permanently.
• The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.
• Life during the coming dark age will be similar to the last dark age but worse due to environmental damage and pollution.

Updating the piece of the discussion regarding semiconductors and the changes that have occurred since 2018

Semiconductors are the most critical "critical component" that the US has been relying on vulnerable parts of the supply chain for. Getting that fixed was a problem because the cost structure in the US was too high for the foreign semiconductor manufacturers to consider moving any plants onto US soil. In 2021 or so work was done to give these foreign semiconductor manufacturers enough incentives to build some facilities in the US at huge cost. Of course, these incentives will rob from Peter to pay Paul so to speak, resulting in more debt and an even higher cost structure in the US for everybody else. These facilities are expected to become operational in 2024.

Conclusion: Assuming these facilities become operational in 2024 and there are no serious disruptions to the supply chain before 2024, the very worst impacts of the coming financial crisis forecast by me in 2018 can be avoided.

In my view, this makes forecasting muddier because we don't know how China will respond prior to these facilities becoming operational and, if they do become operational, whether that will mitigate the impacts of the coming financial crisis enough to prevent nation state governments from collapsing.

I now want to switch to another piece of this post by Warren Dew because it ties in with the above comments; therefore, only the underlined part has been changed.

This is all good stuff but I want to focus in on the underlined portion, which makes the point discussed in another thread recently. The author states his IQ is 156-163 and based on reading this post and scanning through his other posts, that is likely accurate in my opinion. Like I've stated, it seems to be only in the range of IQ at 150+ that people can consistently understand and apply these concepts. People in power at the government or even the corporate level cannot by definition because they have to be in the IQ range to be able to effectively communicate with and lead their subordinates.

Warren Dew
MIT graduate; IQ only 156-163 but know 3 people with IQ 170+
Author has 6.3K answers and 1.9M answer views 5y

There are several reasons why governments aren’t just paying highly intelligent people to solve the world’s problems.

First, governments are run by people who don’t generally care much about solving the world’s problems. What they usually care about is staying in power, and increasing that power. Any solving of the world’s problems is at best secondary, and if staying in power means making the world’s problems worse, they’ll do that too.

Second, cooperation between governmental leaders and the very high intelligence advisors might not be all that easy. In democratic governments, most elected leaders are probably within the 30 IQ point Hollingworth communication range of the average voters, so likely not much higher than 130 IQ at best. People above 160 IQ will be outside the Hollingworth range of the leaders, so it won’t be easy to communicate their recommendations to the leaders to implement. And even where the communication problems are solved, there may be differences in goals between leaders and experts. When government leaders hire someone really smart like Edward Snowden to help them spy on their citizens, and Snowden ends up sabotaging those efforts because he sympathizes with the citizens more than with the government, government leaders may think twice before again hiring people smarter than they are.

Third, top down techniques are economically inefficient: a small number of IQ 150+ people are not as “smart” as hundreds of millions of average individuals all making their own optimizations. That’s why free market systems are so much more productive than centrally planned economies. At best the think tank folks will need to figure out how to work with the free market effectively, which likely means giving the free market a lot of free rein. Indeed, there are already private think tanks that provide advice like that in the US, and the government sometimes wisely takes that advice.

But perhaps you’re not asking about a theoretical group of IQ 150+ people; perhaps you’re specifically asking about IQ 150+ people on Quora. In that case, the answer is that they provide the answers for free already, so why pay them?

https://www.quora.com/If-we-have-a-grou ... s-problems

It seems to me that the US elite realized at some point since the covid outbreak that getting semiconductor plants moved onto US soil will help them stay in power (and without them they might not). Of course, they will say, "We did it all for you."

Update:

Xi Jinping Has Set Annexation Timeline For Taiwan, Warns China Expert
Story by Benzinga Newsbot • 1h ago

China’s President Xi Jinping is reportedly setting a timeline for the annexation of Taiwan, a move that could potentially escalate tensions in the region, according to a Fox News report.

The report cites a warning from China expert Gordon Chang, who suggests that Xi’s time frame could be as soon as early 2024, coinciding with the end of his current term. This development comes amid a series of aggressive actions by China towards Taiwan, including repeated incursions into Taiwan’s airspace.

What Happened: Chang, in an interview with Fox News on Saturday, warned that Xi is “dropping hints” about his intentions towards Taiwan and that the Chinese leader’s recent actions suggest he is preparing for a possible conflict.

“Xi Jinping is serious,” Chang warned. “He talks about how China was the next Taiwan in the quote-unquote ‘new era.' ‘New era' is Xi Jinping’s code word for the time in which he rules China.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/xi ... 734fa&ei=9

It seems to me that China really has to move on this in the next few months.

[Higgenbotham]

Now that there is something concrete in the news about China possibly moving on Taiwan "as soon as" early 2024, along with the ongoing bear market in bonds, stocks and real estate starting in early 2022 followed by the reemergence of a banking crisis in 2023, and the ongoing possibility of pandemics, it seems like the right time to repeat the idea of "multiple converging events" first discussed in the forum in 2011 and put it into the Dark Age Hovel. The discussion began with the idea that by pushing off the financial crisis back in 2008, Ben Bernanke was setting things up for the crisis to hit on all cylinders, all at once, instead of being spread out over several decades as it was in the early 20th Century, which could cause the world to go into a new dark age instead of a typical crisis.

** 14-Apr-2020 World View: Simultaneous cataclysmic crises

In the last century, the following three cataclysmic crises took place
ten years apart:

• 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic
• 1929 Stock market panic and crash
• 1940-45 World War II

Today, all three of these cataclysmic crises are occurring
simultaneously. In addition, the WW I and WW II fault lines and
timelines have been combined.

So the economic crisis will be much worse than the Great Depression,
and the war will be much worse than WW II.

I still don't agree that the world is headed for a new dark age, as
you claim, but I do agree that this is the best evidence so far that
supports your view.

I would agree with that assessment. This is a quote from last year, referring back to 2011 where we discussed the possibility of "multiple converging events".

I think there is something majorly different now versus the last crisis era, and that is the idea of multiple converging events mentioned 8 years ago when Lily was on the board. Some say this is like 1929, and I think they are right. Some say this is like 1937, and I think they are right. I think this crisis is going to hit with full force on all cylinders, all at once - economic, political, and social.

2011. I think this is just a fancy way of saying that kicking the can down the road until you run out of road is not necessarily a good idea.

In doing so, my fear, which I think is well founded, is that by trying to stave off the collapse of a part of the structure where in 1932 everything did eventually survive pretty much intact, these actions will 3 or 5 or 10 years down the road collapse a much larger part of the financial system. On the other hand, that may be inevitable, or it may be a good thing in the long run - better than losing just part of the system now as occurred in 1932/3. I suspect, though, that's not the case, and that taking the banks into receivership in 2008 and going through the process of investors taking haircuts which is the basis upon which Western Civilization was founded and has prospered for many centuries would have been the correct path to take. The incorrect path I feel Bernanke et al have taken is the path that I believe will lead to a scale of collapse that is on the order of 50 or 100 years.

One reason for thinking that is the convergence of many cyclical factors as we are discussing. So while I don't think what you mentioned is the "main event" we are dealing with, it is part of the mix of things that are converging on the same or similar timelines. By trying to spread out the effects of the real estate bust, Fed and Treasury will be dealing with multiple problems all at once instead of cleaning up one problem at a time. It becomes possible that they will lose control of the multiple problems at a critical time.

Updated link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/20 ... o-collapse

Summary of Demarest's Interview

There are counterproductive patterns leaders almost always try as society nears collapse.

Leaders do more of and intensify what they do; leaders do short term thinking, fast reactions and fast solutions trying to hold onto power.