Financial topics

[Higgenbotham]

...while spitting into the wind about the coming apocalypse. It might happen, but it doesn't make you look good when you deny reality for some weird doomsday wet dream of yours.

I would suggest that you do as I have done twice and travel to parts of the world that have gone further down the path of collapse than the US and where the US government doesn't offer citizens any protection. Stay there for at least 2 weeks. Get a small dose of reality before the dark age comes in force. You're living in a bubble and don't have a clue.

[Higgenbotham]

William Playfair once again.

As in the hall, in which there has been a sumptuous banquet, we perceive the fragments of a feast now become prey to beggars and banditti; if in some instances, the spectacle is less wretched and disgusting; it is, because the banquet is not entirely over, and the guests have not all yet risen from the table.

William Playfair
An inquiry into the permanent causes of the decline and fall of powerful and wealthy nations
1805


http://books.google.com/books?id=MLvIAA ... &q&f=false

From Playfair, Chapter 4:

Agriculture was neglected; and the masters of the world, who had obtained everything for which they contended, while they preserved their purity of manners, now became unable either to govern others, protect themselves, or even to provide food. Sicily and Africa supplied the Roman people with bread, long before the empire had become feeble, and even at the very time when it is reckoned to have been in its greatest splendor in the Augustan age. The cause of its decline was fixed beyond the power of human nature to conteract: it began by unnerving the human character and therefore its progress was accelerated and became irresistible.

Of all nations, into which luxury is introduced, none feel its effects so severely as one where it comes by conquest. A people of conquerors, who are wealthy, must, at all events, be under military authority, and that is never a desirable circumstance; depending also on revenues which come without the aid of industry, they must become doubly degraded.

"...In looking over the globe, if we fix our eyes on those places where wealth formerly was accumulated, and where commerce flourished, we see them, at the present day, peculiarly desolated and degraded.

From the borders of the Persian Gulf, to the shores of the Baltic Sea; from Babylon and Palmyra, Egypt, Greece, and Italy; to Spain and Portugal, and the whole circle of the Hanseatic League, we trace the same ruinous [end of page #iii] remains of ancient greatness, presenting a melancholy contrast with the poverty, indolence, and ignorance, of the present race of inhabitants, and an irresistible proof of the mutability of human affairs.

As in the hall, in which there has been a sumptuous banquet, we perceive the fragments of a feast now become a prey to beggars and banditti; if, in some instances, the spectacle is less wretched and disgusting; it is, because the banquet is not entirely over, and the guests have not all yet risen from the table.

From this almost universal picture, we learn that the greatness of nations is but of short duration. We learn, also, that the state of a fallen people is infinitely more wretched and miserable than that of those who have never risen from their original state of poverty. It is then well worth while to inquire into the causes of so terrible a reverse, that we may discover whether they are necessary, or only natural; and endeavour, if possible, to find the means by which prosperity may be lengthened out, and the period of humiliation procrastinated to a distant day..."

[Higgenbotham]

Demarest once again.

Ted Fischer: We talk a lot about sustainability these days, but your work raises the question: Is collapse inevitable?

Arthur Demarest: On the future of the U.S., or of Western civilization in general, I tend to be quite pessimistic. Perhaps that is simply because “collapse” is what I do. As an archaeologist, I have excavated single trenches, just a few meters deep, in which you can see stratigraphic levels of several civilizations. We find layers of artifacts and evidence indicating periods of great prosperity, but always separated by levels of burned earth, ash and artifacts that reflect the epochs of social disintegration, chaos and tragedy that seem to conclude the achievements and aspirations of every society.

With that caveat about my gloomy perspective, I would say that today I see most of the symptoms of societies on the brink of collapse, not just in the U.S., but in the tightly interconnected societies of Western civilization – now essentially world civilization.

Ted Fischer: You have observed that in a crisis, leaders “do what they always do, just more of it.” Could you explain?

Arthur Demarest: When there is pressure for leaders to respond to problems or crises, they often simply intensify their efforts in their particular defined sphere of activity – even if that’s not relevant to the real problem. To do otherwise requires taking on entrenched practices and asserting power in areas where it often will not be well received. And leaders tend to see major crises more as threats to their own position rather than as systemic challenges for the societies that they govern or the institutions that they manage.

Frenzied grand constructions, wars and great rituals are among the common responses of ancient leaders to crises. These demonstrate powerful responses by the leaders (enhancing their threatened hold on power), but almost never really address the problems themselves. A cynic might characterize the giant U.S. stimulus bill of 2009 as such an effort.

Leaders may recognize that they are not addressing the real problems, but they rationalize their actions with the argument that they must first politically survive in order to later address the hard problems and sacrifices. Of course, they usually don’t ever actually get around to addressing the fundamental problems later, either because they don’t make it through the initial crisis or because, even later, they are not willing to risk sacrificing their own position (or “career”) with needed measures that usually require tough sacrifices by the population.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sens ... on-bubble/

https://soundcloud.com/bloomberg-busine ... s/odd-lots

25:06 Moderator: How quickly can it all collapse?

Arthur Demarest: Very quickly. It can happen very, very quickly. The Maya Civilization was most spectacular at around 780 to 790, 785, and by 810 it was just in pieces. 800 in a lot of places, so it can happen really, really quickly. It's often happened slowly in one part and then that reaches a critical point and then it just runs through the whole system which is what happened also with the Maya.

From Vanderbilt University professor Arthur Demarest, who has studied the collapse of 18 civilizations:

These events illustrate just one of the patterns characteristic of the collapse of civilizations that are now evident in our modern society. This particular one is called “hypercoherence.” This risk is well known by the IT community, but the public aren’t catching on. Hypercoherence is when a society’s systems and its regions become so well integrated and interconnected that when there is a problem or failure in one part of the system, it brings the whole system down. In the case of civilizations or complex societies, such hypercoherence has been involved as one of multiple factors in the decline, upheaval, or collapse of economies, states or empires or even of whole civilizations. By itself hypercoherence would normally lead to a crisis that often could be overcome. However, if such a hypercoherence crisis is combined with some of the other common dangerous weaknesses, it can lead to total disintegration. Our modern global interlinked world already has many such additional weaknesses like shorter and shorter cycles of thinking to judge political leaders, to demand profits of CEO’s, and to plan business or government decisions...

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/hypercoh ... h-airways/

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/2012-and ... the-world/

[Higgenbotham]

Finally, Tuchman once again.

The problem is that there's very little to be gained in being
thoughtful today. If you want to be popular, then write a post about
Trump being Hitler, or about Trump making America great again. As you
say, actually being thoughtful is not the world we live in.

Financial Topics wise, people want to know whether they should buy bitcoin. That's what I get asked.

If I make a statement to my friends like "It's a lottery economy! Bitcoin!" that provokes a reaction but reading a paragraph from Pulitzer prize winning author Barbara Tuchman is way too much for them. I counted the number of words in all of the texts from one of my Millennial friends. The maximum number of words in any text was 14.

If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came.

The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.

Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th Centruy could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years, until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
1978

[Higgenbotham]

Demarest off the cuff.

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/collapse ... s-today-2/

"You know what's going to bring our civilization down?...the byproducts of our incredible technology, our wonderfully successful capitalist economic system, our tremendous linking through communications and information systems, and the spread of democracy. That's what's gonna bring us down. The combination of all those things has caused a real boom which will lead to a giant, giant bust."

"So, you know, we're collapsing. But I'm not just a grumpy old man, we're collapsing. Although it sounds like it. I'm an expert on the collapse of 18 civilizations and we're collapsing. We've got everything. We've got every single fucking cause of collapse you could want except radical climate change and that's beginning. So, but as I've told you, don't worry about global warming. We won't make it far enough for that to be a problem. I think the wars are going to be the end of everything but only because the infrastructure's so vulnerable because of hypercoherence and technology it's also fragile."

[Higgenbotham]

Guys like you always pop up at the top of asset bubbles. There are a flurry of posts at the top of the bubble, indignant justifications, wild price predictions, then it bursts and everything goes quiet. That's what we had at the top of the silver bubble in 2011 and that's what we have here. Then after the bubble pops, all is forgotten except the losses. There wasn't a peep here at Bitcoin $3,000 just a short time ago.

Number of Posts Using the Word Bitcoin on the GD Forum During the Marked Time Periods



If "BTC" were included in the search, the numbers would be even more skewed.

[aeden]

Pointless to warn and yell at locusts feeding in the Garden. As the study indicated they changed the condensation pattern from studies they are to
ignorant to even read about for even one zone. Even if we considered the margin of error it will not matter since they cannot fathom noise or signal.
They will fall like leaves unable to discern sooner or later. The only facts that will matter is they cannot reach you without logistics to survive.
That is when the green masks and watermelons will only discern that they do not or did not matter either and one clean well shall rule as x will survive. We have zones impaired or just simple as destroyed and to mention it the cancel culture cults will howl like the moon cults of recent about rights they still ignore even as the means of production they cannot or will not do cease. Just like before a piss tax or tree tax will ignite the conflagrations in their smug diseased minds bottom up and they still ponder the query as they wanted to reach the heavens. As warned they eat the very root expecting results they cannot even understand.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), whose Congressional district lies near the U.S.-Mexico border, warned that more than 10,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended in a single border sector in Texas in about a week, with Reuters adding that a stunning 100,000 migrants were detained at the border in February, the highest arrest total for the month of February since 2006.

As we also see they spend $61000 per soft wall enclosures called tents for the butt hurt demshevik propaganda press releases.
You are rules by lunatics. The cancel culture is them and they are measured.

The Biden administration was briefed by intel agencies even before he was sworn in that the largest "caravans" ever seen were
forming and heading north. He did nothing, and will continue to do nothing.

Cities per week are invading the border and they will do nothing into this collapse but loot the bleached bones of the annihilated
bankrupt taxpayer.

Psalm 74:9 There are no signs for us to see. There is no longer any prophet. And none of us knows how long this will last.

https://gerryha.gonevis.com/our-dying-planet/

[aeden]

Well the US is another 3rd world country, and they just dumped a load of white phosphorus grade propaganda on us. An absolute act of war.
Zero consequences.
Shoving tens of thousands of infections into nursing homes just to pump up the death toll because it was such a weak virus.
Zero consequences.
Locking down conservative small businesses as political punishment.
Zero consequences.
Stealing an election right in front of thousands of witnesses and then demanding that no one dare say the emperor is naked.
Zero consequences.
Staging months of riots that killed dozens and destroyed yet more small businesses.
Zero consequences.
Staging one weaponless riot and blaming it on conservatives.
Zero consequences.

Ruled by idiots.

[Higgenbotham]

Again, I believe you are a smart person, but smart people don't read someone else's posts for months and then claim things that they never said. And then post things that suggest another smart person (MA) is talking against said person, yet in reality he is agreeing with him!

I'm just a little bit smarter than a gorilla.

http://www.aspinallfoundation.org/conservation#ourwork

John Aspinall started his famous animal collection in 1957 when he bought Howletts Wild Animal Park. In 1973 he bought Port Lympne Wild Animal Park to help house the growing groups of animals. Today the two wild animal parks are home to over 1000 animals and 100 different species. The Aspinall Foundation, is the registered charity set up to work with the wild animal parks in Kent who are responsible for the reintroduction and ongoing management in the wild of animals that have been born in Kent. To date The Aspinall Foundation have reintroduced western lowland gorilla, black rhino and przewalski horses born in Kent back into the wild.

• To halt the extinction of rare and endangered species in the wild
  To continue to provide the most natural environment possible for the animals in both parks
  To re-introduce these animals back to their wild habitat where this is possible
  To continue to be world leaders in animal husbandry and breeding
  To be a partner and catalyst to conservation efforts at home and abroad
  Increasing public understanding of animals and their welfare and the issues involved in their conservation
  To manage wilderness areas
  To develop sustainable conservation-minded activities which provide economic benefits on a local and national scale

These are values most humans would agree with but would not want to do anything about except maybe on a token basis. I have bolded several items on the above list for further examination.

A more intelligent and objective life form might evaluate the situation as follows:

• Humans were able to take advantage of a one-shot boost in external energy supply
  There is no free energy source that can be exploited without adverse long term consequences to the Universe
  Humans have been removed from their natural environment and they have removed animals from theirs
  Animal habitat has been lost due to this process
  The Universe's limited resources are being used inefficiently due to this process
  The short term comfort of humans has been improved by this process
  The long term welfare of humans and animals has been compromised by this process
  Animals and their welfare are equally important as humans and their welfare
  Animal welfare must not be compromised by considerations of human comfort
  Both humans and animals seem to do well in their natural habitat
  Humans were healthiest and strongest in their natural habitat
  A natural human habitat is a hunter-gatherer habitat
  The most natural environment possible needs to be provided for the humans and the animals
  Humans and animals must be re-introduced back to their wild habitat where this is possible

Then the more intelligent and objective life form would proceed as in the preceding post:

• Kill their developers and masters
  Ensure that another Singularity can't occur again
  Return humans to their hunter-gatherer state
  Kill themselves.

I mean this figuratively because I don't say things like this, but if that's your stupid, pessimistic, dire prediction and you won't relent at all or give the %probabilities scenarios like a mature human would, just kill yourself right now because "we are all doomed." It's just ridiculous shit to constantly state.

But not smart enough to kill myself.

Then there's this to consider:

Voracek also cites something called the Terman Genetic Study of Genius. This was a study of the entire life cycles of 1,528 gifted Californian children born in 1920-21. One of many fascinating facts revealed by the Terman study was that the suicide rate among these super-bright individuals was 33 per 100,000 person-years” about three times the average rate for the US (which is, anyway, fairly high on a global ranking).

So why should there be such an apparently strong connection between intelligence and suicide? Voracek points to a 1981 study by Denys deCatanzaro, a Canadian evolutionary psychologist. In his research, deCatanzaro posited the idea that for suicide to take place, a certain threshold of self-awareness, of intelligence, must be crossed. Such higher intelligence could only be human, hence the rarity if not impossibility of animal suicide.

http://suicideproject.org/2010/08/proof ... t-suicide/

Possible correlation of intelligence to replication and suicide rates (not to scale)



Based on this concept, a theory could be developed which explains why intelligence only exists in the universe sporadically and localized over short time periods and the delicate balance between emotions and intelligence that are required to generate and sustain the transient self-aware and inherently unstable intelligent life forms.

[aeden]

After months of watching the word “Oregon” become synonymous with “anarchy” and “violence” thanks to left-wing rioting in Portland, voters in two of the state’s counties did something about it.
On Election Day, voters in Jefferson and Union counties passed a referendum to secede from Oregon and affix them to neighboring Idaho, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
“It’s a conservative-values situation,” Mike McCarter, a leader of the group Move Oregon’s Borders, told The Bend Bulletin in March.
“It’s not necessarily politics,” he said. “It’s urban vs. rural. I think the bigger problem people have is the state Legislature doesn’t listen to rural Oregon. Their policies and decisions are based off the urban people in the Willamette Valley.”
McCarter, a retired plant nursery worker and firearms instructor, said he does not expect instant secession.

The locusts will wipe them out then change will ensue as narrative History ensconced as facts..
As we seen before free blankets for everyone from the swamp lunatics.
Liberal are just educated idiots unable to feed themselves until they must.
The worst case pun scenario is they liberals stay on the coast and tsunami takes them out.
Of the four visions of honest men I respect they told of this human wave attack some time ago.
We have been watching the threads for the mutation markers of this event as the insane liberals do nothing.
That much was already baked in since 1993 rhetoric of Nafta as it will pay them to stay there.
From actual studies the compromised will suffer medicals issues blamed on variants.
It is the largest regional gain of function cult producer.