“When you subsidize something, you get more of it.
Ron Paul
I have a friend who once described Bitcoin to me as an organism which feeds on electricity subsidies. Bitcoin searches out the lowest cost of electricity available and consumes as much of it as it can to produce profit for the miners, since electricity costs are their biggest costs.
This is partly why China, for years, attracted the lion’s share of Bitcoin mining. Miners could co-locate next to hydroelectric power plants in China and suck up every extra available cheap and subsidized kilowatt-hour.
This is the essence of the free market. It finds inefficiencies and exploits them as capital flows to where it is treated best. It may be ‘predatory’ from the central planners’ point of view, but they opened themselves up to this effect the moment they intervened by subsidizing the market in the first place.
Bitcoin exposed a structural weakness in China’s electricity grid this summer which was under massive stress thanks to drought conditions there dimming the output of its hydroelectric generators. This is partly why Chairman Xi Jinping took the aggressive steps to kick the Bitcoin miners out of China this summer.
He could see the real costs of electricity rising as coal, oil and natural gas prices skyrocketed but, because of rate subsidies to end-users, revenue to power generating companies was flat. It served him in other strategic ways, like kicking out the flow of Bitcoin within the Chinese economy, cutting down would-be mining company financial oligarchs and ultimately lessening competition for the Digital Yuan.
The response from the Socialist is always the same, however. Today Russia is getting blamed for gas prices in Europe.
Price gouging in a crisis a moral failure, not the original wealth transfer (itself a theft) from one group of people to another, which is what an electrical subsidy is.
They see this as a market failure because to them the greater good is served by subsidizing certain aspects of the economy to achieve political and/or social goals. And, in some ways, they may be correct, but you’ll never know it because there can be no rational calculation of the costs versus the benefits, c.f. Mises’ critique of Socialism from 1921.
You see, the market is neutral. It doesn’t have a perspective other than expressing the very human response of seeing an arbitrage opportunity and exploiting it.
Rather than being a failure of the free market, Bitcoin miners seeking out and exposing the unsustainability of electricity subsidies is a massive success of market principles. It is firmly rooted in actual human behavior rather than some fantastical one created by a central committee and the force of the gun.
China kicking out the Bitcoin miners only forestalled the day of reckoning for its energy industry because their presence was a symptom of a deeper problem not the source of the problem itself. Today, four months later China is now rationing electricity to force demand down.
Rather than let market forces raise the prices, divert capital away from energy intensive (and possibly uneconomic) activity and give accurate signals to producers and consumers, China will do the authoritarian thing to blame the people and take away a basic function of a first world society.
This is a simple, yet dramatic, example of what’s fundamentally wrong with the world we live in today. China isn’t the only one guilty of this. Subsidies like these are everywhere and they do nothing except create pricing dislocations which attract massive amounts of capital creating economic bubbles in price.
If you’re wondering where this headline could come from:
Zerohedge answers it with the pullquote.
In fact, it is the Austrian School critique of these subsidies which is its core competency; to explain in real terms why government intervention in a market ultimately subsidizes overinvestment in one activity at the expense of another.
Capital at any given moment is finite. That means there is competition for it ceteris paribus. That competition means that if better profits can be made mining Bitcoin in China rather than building a new road or gas pipeline, then that’s what will happen.
We can create more capital but that requires time, ingenuity and labor. Capital compounds at a pretty linear rate and all we do with things like deficit spending is pull forward capital from the future to subsidize production in the present.
Today we produce far more electricity than we use. It’s estimated that as much as 30% of global electricity goes to ground. Bitcoin uses up less than 0.5% of that wasted electricity. It’s actually performing a major market function to blow apart these layers of bureaucratic insanity by preying on a fraction of this over-production.
Since prices are set at the margin, small demand or supply shocks can create massive spikes or drops in price if the market is operating at peak capacity.
If you really stop to think about it, it’s quite astounding that the world’s economic system is this vulnerable to this basic application of free market principles. Today Bitcoin mining is co-locating next to the cheapest electricity produced on the planet, next to volcanos and nuclear power plants. It’s coming to America in a big, big way where it will further expose rural electrical subsidies here in the U.S. just like it did in China.
But, for now, this organism is healthy, strong and in no danger of dying from the heavy hand of inept socialists.
French Fried Grid Lines
What prompted this article was my reading with a certain perverse glee that France is dealing with the same problem China has but in a different way. They are now suspending a planned tax hike in electricity tariffs because prices to the French consumer are spiking thanks to rising gas, oil and coal prices that its nuclear power infrastructure can’t overcome.
Even if France fully passed on the input cost rises to the consumer, the tariffs the government charges for using electricity are another form of subsidy, not to the electricity generator, but to government itself. Why was France considering raising taxes on electricity during a global energy price spike?
Because its government spends too much money, doing what…?
…regulating its economy, which it has done an objectively miserable job of.
So, to subsidize its bloated and now openly tyrannical government France wanted to squeeze its citizens for more money to keep that arrangement in place: to fund The Davos Crowd’s mandates about COVID-9/11 vaccines, restrictions on travel, blasting protestors with water cannons… you know, protecting and serving the public.
But with massive protests around the country and the people’s falling confidence and patience with its government, France had to back off lest this latest tax hike enflame passions there even more six months out from a Presidential election.
In typical central planner Newspeak they called the simple act of not raising taxes, the ultimate form of government aggression, ‘price protection.’ It’s patently absurd for them to frame it this way when the last thing the French government actually does is protect its people, except those that work for it, from, well, anything.
He {French Prime Minister Jean Castex} said any new natgas tariffs following Friday’s scheduled 12.6% hike would be postponed until prices decrease in late March/April, adding that it will shield 5 million households who are on floating-rate contracts.
Castex said the French government would lower taxes on power prices, capping the scheduled increase in residential electricity tariffs at 4% in February.
In the midst of an energy price crisis the French government, in a blatant pander to voters for the 2022 election, not only scrapped raising taxes but also further subsidized lower income households, encouraging them to use even more electricity and worsening the government’s fiscal position.
Someone has to pay to move those electrons around just not those that might vote to re-elect Emmanuel Macron.
These are decisions not made with any long-term economic benefits in mind, but rather the most crass short-term political consequences trying to put a band-aid on a government-inflicted wound on the people themselves.
“The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.”
Harry Browne
Capital Gone Walkabout
Meanwhile, Germany is now running out of coal, as a major coal power plant there had to shut down because it ran out.
German utility Steag halted its coal-fired power plant Bergkamen-A after it ran out of hard coal supplies amid an energy crunch globally and logistics challenges domestically, the company told Bloomberg on Friday.
“We are short of hard coal,” Steag spokesman Daniel Muhlenfeld told Bloomberg via email.
Germany has been the poster child for Europe’s Quixotic quest for carbon-neutrality. What it’s wound up with is windmills not spinning (and the birds chirped in excitement), solar panels covered in snow when the cloud cover clears and gas prices never before seen in history, at over $1200 per thousand cubic meters.
Oil prices keep trying to fall and new conflicts and controls keep trying to push the price higher, be it from OPEC+ members trying to subsidize their national governments, or the U.S. actively pushing supply off the market to subsidize its LNG exports. But, none of the price rise is because we’re running out but because supply is being artificially restricted by central planners wanting to create a false reality.
How does anyone expect the mighty German industrial economy to absorb these costs without some kind of output slowdown? The answer is no one. In fact, if you think through the situation, it’s clear Davos is happy about this because this puts downward pressure on growth, starving out Germany’s powerful industrial and middle class, who stand confused as to the cause, if the results of the election there are any indication.
Because those people produce wealth. Growing wealth to those of limited understanding is problematic. If the world is finite, they argue, growth must be finite. That’s only true, however, at any single point on the timeline of our understanding of the universe.
Tomorrow we’ll figure out some new thing, some new efficiency, material or overcome some obstacle we didn’t have time for yesterday. We’ll take our surplus time we earned as profit today and deploy it to fix some other problem tomorrow, opening up new pathways for growth.
But this type of growth, where it isn’t directed by oligarchs and governments who stand in front of them, is somehow evil or unsustainable.
Yeah, for them.
For the past fifty years they’ve been telling us peak oil would end modern civilization and yet, absent their manipulations of energy markets through lockdowns, wars, currency manipulation and regulation, the real price of oil has risen just 12% over the past fifty years, when indexed for inflation, which they manipulate to the downside to sustain their power.
One could easily argue that today’s price shocks aren’t any more sustainable than any other commodity whose supply and demand fundamentals are driven by politics more than they are the markets themselves. Remove those obstacles and I bet we’ll see oil production subsidies driven out of the market the same way that bitcoin drove China and France to ‘protect consumers’ from electricity subsidies.
We had to invent a new word to describe the fight over energy, geopolitics, because of our adherence to the socialists’ maleducation on basic human behavior. We also had to invent a new definition of inflation in the age of money unmoored from the stored energy of gold and other hard assets, based on prices not the supply of money.
Instead of basing our money on our past work, tokenized by gold, they gave us a money based on what we will produce for them, debt. What I didn’t show in the above graph is the stability of oil in real terms before we entered this era.
All Malthusian arguments about the end of cheap energy are themselves indefensible and unsustainable and yet that is all we are ever told is coming. They deny the Marginal Revolution (1871-74) in economics, which negated all of Marx’s complaints about capitalism before his death (1883), and yet his idiotic ideas fuel the unquenchable thirst for power of midwit oligarchs and the envy of their socialist useful idiots.
When someone is lying to you, you really owe it to yourself to ask why.
Davos has broken the world supply chain for energy for the sole purpose of proving a point that history itself has already debunked, Facebook be damned.
They do this, nominally, in the name of sustainability, arguing the wastefulness of capitalism is the end state of it.
But, as I’ve already shown with bitcoin and electricity, oil and money printing, it is the over-production of something through subsidization that creates unsustainable waste and malinvestment which eventually has to be liquidated in a rational system.
But instead of bowing to the rational, ending that system of privilege for them, they make the monetary system ever more irrational to the point of absurdity.
Last year, Paul Krugman was calling the $1 trillion coin “an accounting gimmick” that “wouldn’t even fool anyone”, now he’s all in on the illegal power grab with a New York Times column headlined, “Biden Should Ignore the Debt Limit and Mint a $1 Trillion Coin”.
That only took a little over a year.
The End of Socialism
This brings me to the final point of this essay. They are losing. They are losing not because they aren’t powerful or aren’t making our lives miserable but because their system of subsidy, which produces unearned wealth (or rent) for them is failing rapidly.
They embarked on this Great Reset solely for the purpose of defaulting on their socialist promises made by buying off present generations with the labor of future generations. We call this in modern parlance debt.
Now that the debt is unpayable and the future liabilities of their governments overwhelming everything they have unleashed a torrent of policies around the world to starve, freeze and kill off entire generations of taxpayers who they can’t afford to bribe anymore.
COVID-9/11, no matter how you look at it, as a political operation has shortened lifespans in the U.S. by 18 months in 2020, according to the CDC. What will those numbers look like in 2021? This is a radical contraction which lifted trillions of unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare payments from future U.S. governments.
And they call libertarians heartless?
Draw your own conclusions from this but I think you know what it means.
Davos is purposefully shrinking the division of labor in order to prove the Marxist critique of capitalism correct when it has done nothing but lift billions out of poverty which the Malthusian central planners told us a century ago then was unsustainable.
Central planners aren’t rational. They are simply tyrants who prey on the fear and weakness of people grown soft through abundance. Because in their mind sustainability is only measured by the continuity of their power over society not the actual economics of that society. The instability, chaos and conflict come from their inability to accept that someone else may have a better solution to society’s problems than they do.
And what truly keeps them up at night is the gnawing feeling that the best system is the one where no one person or group of people could ever manage a system as complex and dynamic as seven-plus billion people acting in their own self-interest creating a spontaneous and self-correcting order which doesn’t need their help.
When I look out today and see bills in the U.S. Congress to deny unvaccinated people from flying or children from getting an education all I see is a failing system of energy distribution and subsidy trying to protect itself from the ravages of its own stupidity.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here, power doesn’t prove you’re smart, it simply makes you stupid.
Bitcoin, among other technologies, is slowing eating away at these unsustainable markets while the socialists in China, France and yes, Washington D.C. scramble to keep the central planners’ dream alive of a world where they control access to everything you need to live your most productive life.
They are scared to death of a private banking system that doesn’t need them or a division of labor that coordinates production where their toll booths can’t collect. To them we are just livestock to be farmed, batteries to be discharged and liabilities on their balance sheets to be written down.
Energy isn’t scarce, it is abundant. Human energy, that is. Oil is finite. So is gas. So is coal. But until we properly price its costs, we’ll never figure out what’s the best replacement for them and at what point in time that change should occur.
Between now and then it will be a long, cold winter.
“I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you.”.
Neo – The Matrix
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Thanks
I am absolutely blown away. I love hearing Tom’s thoughts on anything that is important in the world today. But this masterpiece, needs to be not just read, but re-read until it is completely understood and absorbed by anyone and everyone interested in how we can in our own modest ways, make the world a better place. Spread the word until everyone understands that the way to peace, prosperity, and abundance is voluntary free-markets, minimization or destruction of nation-states and central planning, and the magic of Bitcoin for the whole world to make it all possible. #BitcoinFixesEverything
He is BEYOND mind-blowing smart! I always encourage people to follow Tom because he has a way of taking millions of words and putting it into a sentence that every single person can understand. His macro abilities are off the chart!
love your podcast you did with the two other guys, especially at minute 21:04 to 28:05, those 7 minutes is the most critique of our evolving monetary system. Always enjoy reading your work and watching your youtube videos.
Michael Grove and Peer Quinones? Yes, that was a good time, certainly… glad you enjoyed it.
Who is losing? Where? Maybe pure socialism as a wishful utopia but not authoritarian wealth redistribution. As you said “starving out Germany’s industrial and middle class” is the goal. Such a move is neither altruistic nor philosophical. It is about control. Is Xi losing? Are the Central Banks losing? Is the WHO losing? Who is afraid of whom in your forecast? Certainly the progressive left in CA who runs the state fears nothing. Starving out CA’s middle class is their goal and remember they drove out dirty industry like semiconductors years ago. Energy as a metaphor for winning or losing? I do believe this essay shows the leaps and bounds of your deep knowledge but we may not live to see who wins.
Xi is losing. He has to kill the golden goose (capitalists like jack ma) that brought prosperity and relevance in order to maintain CCP control. China will become poor again or CCP will lose power. The demographic problem won’t wait that long. And the exploding debt problem may not wait at all.
Central banks aren’t losing. They already lost. 14 years of extraordinary monetary policy (0% rates, debt monetization, etc) have failed to produce anything but debt… debt that can not be paid. When a teenager maxes out their parents credit card, that is not winning.
CA is bankrupt. It takes some serious gaslighting BS to claim CA is even viable without ongoing subsidies. Arguing about Sacramento is arguing about who the captain of the titanic is after they hit the iceberg… fine, you are in charge of a sinking ship.
Unless you watch TV (fka the idiot box), WHO and CDC are no longer trusted. Restaurants in NYC have seen traffic collapse by 50-60% since covid passports were implemented. Not down 50% versus 2019 like much of the country. Down 50% versus august 2021. If there are so many people in NYC who support covid passports, why aren’t they patronizing NYC? Because hypochondriacs and politicians are an extreme minority.
Media outlets are getting desperate to depict the Marxist revolution and the ice cream tyrant as winning.
They wouldn’t be so desperate to put on airs if they were actually winning.
Outstanding Mr Luongo. Simply outstanding.
What do you think about this guy:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSCvK3ElVZG
https://www.instagram.com/p/CT96blFAKUa
https://www.instagram.com/p/CREnAp2NSVB
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQv9QGBNYEi
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQGzqdbtjOj
https://thehempnurse.com/category/organic-cbd/cbd-oil-benefits/
Yes it’s excellent analysis as always, but starting from the wrong jumping off point.
Yes, socialism is failing everywhere. It always does.
And yes central planning are doing great damage. It always does.
You think Davosians have failed to learn this, and I think they learned it long ago and like the Borg, have adapted. They are using these failings to conduct controlled demolitions of the existing order in favor of their new one.
Which is why they have spent decades marching through our institutions, dividing us along the lines of race, gender, sexuality and faith. It’s why they created multiculturalism, uncontrolled immigration, and the welfare state.
Cloward-Piven. Coudenhove-Kalergi. These are plans well-known to social engineers, and yet you never refer to them.
It’s why they have installed imbeciles as our national leaders. Patsies for the chaos they are unleashing. National leaders who can be blamed and brushed aside as global governance emerges. The indoctrinated will demand it. Indeed will celebrate their impending doom.
I’m sorry, any analysis that looks only at the weaknesses of its author’s enemies is doomed to be imbalanced – we MUST look at their actual playbook. Look at their strengths too, and how they react to setbacks, adversity and opposition.
The Great Reset is not something they are forlornly hoping to squeeze into existence with the old failed strategies of the past.
It is the rescue plan they intend to offer us once their manufactured chaos has sufficiently panicked their indoctrinated victims.
With cryptocurrency (their revolution, not ours) and digital IDs (coming on-line with COVID as the pretext) standing ready as our saviors they have built a technogulag for us, and have painted FIRE EXIT over the door.
Now they just need to light a fire.
I think you are the saddest man I have ever met, Ivor. Because you think these people are omnipotent when they are clearly clueless.
Therapy, sir. Seriously.
Classic straw man – nowhere have I said they are omnipotent. I just disagree that are the feeble ancien regime you pretend. Are there no other alternatives?
I believe they are sophisticated and well-connected social engineers with a deep and malevolent understanding of human nature and how to manipulate it. Whereas you seem to think that because the average patsy politician is an imbecile, the Davosians that run them must be too.
Newsflash – narcissistic and demonic organ grinders are rarely as dumb as their monkeys.
You keep saying that their Great Reset cannot be forced upon us, despite me saying many times that THEY NEED NOT TRY.
They have very obviously focused all their efforts on indoctrinating the masses – one day soon the chaos in our societies (that the Davosians have wrought) will be demonstrably beyond the patsies installed as our national leaders and global governance will be presented as the obvious answer.
And 80% of the people you know will weep tears of relief, and will dance in the streets. Any that oppose them will then be treated with deep suspicion.
Prepare for that day, because it cometh, and that right soon.
P.S – You are still refusing to comment on whether “How To Make A Mint” is genuine – evidence that the NSA created cryptocurrency would strike at the foundation of your analyses of course, and reveal that you have hauled their Trojan horse into your stronghold.
Ivor,
I have commented extensively on the NSA and crypto. Nothin I say will persuade you, so WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT?
I honestly, would be so much happier if you just went somewhere else to play out your neuroses in public.
But, I’ve told you this and yet you keep coming back, thinking somehow, someway I will bow to your superior wisdom and accept your nihilism as mine.
That won’t happen. So, please, keep wasting your time.
I’m literally done with you….
I’m under no illusions Tom – I realise that you probably won’t be convinced. You’ve been bamboozled.
I actually suspect that even after I’m proven correct, you will find a way to convince yourself that events have borne out your analyses and not mine. That’s ok.
But as iron sharpens iron, I hope that by seeing two different visions of the future contend with each other your readers might be provoked to greater thought. And that’s the goal here, right?
And forgive me – I’ve not been reading your stuff that long and so may have missed previous comments you’d made about “How To Make A Mint” – can you link me to your views on the subject?
I don´t want to upset Tom but I want to state that I have a lot of agreement with Mr. Ivor. Tom´s articles fill me with enthusiasm, so great, creative, original, intelligent, knowledgeable, encouraging, I find them. I´m thus a bit surprised that a view that I share finds such strong opposition by Tom. It´s very encouraging to me to hear from Tom about the weaknesses of the cabale… plausible enough. Yet… whenever I
ponder the stuff myself, I can´t stop thinking: what a marvellous scheme have they put together, these cabale people. Man do they have everything in place, everything covered. I agree: I would like to discuss their strenghts. Again, it´s very encouraging to hear about weaknesses in their plan but it needs to be pointed out how incredibly cutting-edge they are… it´s not an accident that they are winning, or, that they have won so incredibly much so far (just think e.g how they stole literally trillions upon trillions of money and now use that money to brainwash the sheeple and fight / kill off any opposition… that is easy to beat no… or look at Soros, how he leverages every stolen dollar by creating all these NGOs, these forums, how he corrupts all the right key people etc… it´s expertly efficient). If we understand their game plan and their strenghts, that can only increase our chance in… not beating them but saving more for us.
They have indeed done a good job of deceiving us into thinking they have all the angles covered but they don’t. I see the cracks and the folly of it all.
I am not saying they aren’t fucking shit up it destroying countless lives. But their goals are flawed as are their methods. What they have is seemingly unlimited capital and opportunities but that too is an illusion
If they were truly winning the long game they wouldn’t be outing themselves now. They would continue to play in the shadows but they aren’t Because of this they go from strategic error to strategic error while winning tactical battles which look important but are ultimately irrelevant.
I don’t underestimate them, but I dont fear them. Simply put these people are not that bright but they are powerful
Ivor has sussed out all of these aspects of their power but he refuses to see how easy it is to bring the whole thing down when competing agendas raise the costs beyond their ability to pay
You can knuckle under or you can be sugar in their gas tanks. Despair is easy.
Tom, while I totally agree that our enemies are anything but omniscient, they are still very dangerous. Their pawns have in fact infiltrated and subverted most of our institutions over the last 50 to 60 years. That, coupled with their control of the various nation state governments makes them dangerous.
Does that mean their various plots and plans can’t fail? Of course not. Look at Ivor’s thought experiment of the crowded movie theater as an example. My first thought was that’s unrealistic. Why? Because in reality, they aren’t the only ones setting fires, nor are they only ones with a flashlight. Human reality is FAR too complex to be properly modeled. In a vary real sense its much like quantum mechanics.
Which leads us down a very deep and twisty rabbit hole. :)
This makes predicting and planning for out comes, orders of magnitude more difficult, than simply creating chaos.
Like you, I have faith in the market. But keep in mind that the market is a very human activity (just as science is) and can be perverted by various incentives and power.
That has the consequences we see all around us.
While I seriously doubt that the eventual out come of all of this will be the Great Reset, if we aren’t very lucky and keep up the pressure on their pawns, it could very well be a nightmare that might take decades to recover from.
I am of the view that several decades are necessary. First decade destruction, second is the beginning digging out and beginning the rebuild. I think I’m optimistic about only 2 needed, but I have kids and the thought of most of their lives in chaos is beyond me. I’m resigned to the rest of my life being so. Whether it’s totalitarian psyber polygon whatever it’s called or chaotic collapse, trajectory is clearly accelerating towards something unpleasant.
Yes that’s my view too – the plans of the Davosians are too far-advanced to prevent now, and we will be forced to watch in horror as they come to fruition.
At which point our principled and disciplined resistance must begin, fearlessly pointing out the horrors of global governance despite the persecution that will be the price.
Whereas Tom is still hopeful that the Davosian plan can be prevented.
I hope he’s right.
That’s the malevolent elegance of their scheme.
They actually encourage others to light fires, because although there are a few others (like Tom) with flashlights, the connecting door to their technogulag is the only one that says FIRE EXIT over it.
We can all argue whether the prohibitionists in the 1930s were well intentioned or just power hungry megalomaniacs, but the majority of the populace was found in speak easies while the pompous politicians went on tv declaring victory over alcohol.
While some doctors and nurses are getting fired for refusing covid shots — attorneys are already salivating over the mother of all wrongful termination lawsuits — many health professionals are taking covid needles, shooting the crap into a sink, then filling out their passport card with the date. Technically the shot was administered (into the sink). Fauci lied, WHO lied, CDC lied. Follow their lead and lie some more.
Victory over alcohol, I mean Fauci-wuhan disease, is ours!
test
So Tom, are these widespread outages…….
a) The fake cyber attack I’ve been predicting?
b) A final live test before the big one?
c) A big fat nothing?
And who do you think they’ll blame?
No one doubted they would do something like this Ivor… note also that this is targeting a bunch of companies hostile to China/Russia who could just as easily be behind this… or it could be the Ungovernables….
Or it could be Davos.
There are more than one possible solutions to the present problem. Everyone has a stake in this…. why take out Facebook (esp. this way) if Diem was going to be the bankers’ crypto.
Dig in a little and see that Facebook got its DNS master record erased and given its stupid security protocol nearly lost the entire company… the ENTIRE company.
You are thinking way too small with your analysis of their vandalism.
This, if anything, was an attack on Wall St. not us. You really don’t get it, do you.
|We’re well past your 100 days, I should have taken your bet.
Yes I guess summer has ended – if it all rolls over at Halloween and I have to admit it was 150 days instead of 100 I’ll still consider that close enough, When it comes to the New World Order it’s better to be a year early than a day late.
When I look at the Facebook “whistleblower” I just see a leftie demanding that governments insist that social media do more of what they are all dying to do – censor all but progressive views.
To that extent, the headline could be “Davosian dupe demands that Davosian tentacle becomes Davosian mouthpiece”
P.S – This wasn’t just DNS, it was routing. But DNS is affected by routing as is all other IP traffic so what people saw was DNS failures. Someone trying to “tidy up” some routing setup “screwed up”.
Facebook runs its own DNS server which was hacked and deleted and that caused brown outs all across the internet yesterday because of their exploitable security model. Make of that what you will. All it takes is one person with the right access to screw it up.
This was a FB security protocol issue more than anything
Noteworthy tech tidbits….
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748203
An interesting discussion of the energy market and bitcoin. You point out problems with the supply of gas, oil, and coal, the big three that account for about 85% of total human energy usage. But then you say “Tomorrow we’ll figure out some new thing, some new efficiency, material or overcome some obstacle we didn’t have time for yesterday”.
Perhaps. But there is a difference between free markets and science. Just because the market wants something, like, say, energy that doesn’t take too much energy in order to extract it, doesn’t mean that it’s physically possible. The market might prefer that the Maxwell equations for electromagnetic waves were different. But some things are not negotiable.
Marty, The point is the Malthusians don’t believe we will ever figure that out, or come up with good, safe nuclear or anything else to replace it with.
IN fact, they have explicitly said humanity can’t be trusted with cheap nuclear power because, i don’t know, we’ll be peaceful and not need them anymore.
That was my point… and, we are nowhere near the limits of Maxwell’s equations, Chris Martenson be damned.
Capital may be finite but the accounting measure, that is, fiat currency, is not. MMT, the Fed going “brrr”, $3.5 trillion “stimulus”, what have you, it is all the ongoing destruction of the fiat accounting measure of capital.
I am curious to see how the Davos crowd contends with the destruction of such an accounting measure, one that they depend on as much as we do, even if they don’t live so close to the edge as to consequences.
It’s as if they are not just threatening to burn down our houses, but the entire town, in which they also live. I hope I live long enough to see how it all plays out, I am curious.
Tom,
Does China keep flying fighters and bombers further into Taiwan airspace until the Taiwanese “snap”, or does Xi just skip the pretense and invade?
I refuse to entertain the notion that the ice cream tyrant and the woke SecDef represent even the slightest deterent. The Chinese have home court advantage, and the US has a dementia patient and a social justice warrior. And Joint Chief Milley will probably warn the Chinese of any counter-strike.
China diverts attention away from their energy crisis. The CCP takes / retakes Taiwan and brings it into the fold. TSMC either becomes Chinese or gets destroyed — its no longer available to the USA in ether case. At least some TSMC employees will likely survive an invasion and will face “re-education” camp — many will eventually work for China.
Few Americans want to deal with yet another long war — even if we had halfway competent leadership, which we do not. Taiwan isn’t US territory. Any promises made by dead presidents decades ago don’t matter.
If Pentagon war gaming is to be believed, the US would not win a war with China over Taiwan. The Pentagon doesn’t say if their simulation outcome was due to weapons or public support or leadership — but with the incompetent leadership currently in Washington, another Afghan withdrawal style loss seems really likely.
I read the article below about the topic of Taiwan. Appears US would lose according to the gamers. But, why would a country announce to a potential enemy that he would lose in a conflict?
Is the US trying to make the potential enemy over confident or is there a message to the potential enemy in this report? Was the report leaked purposely? Is there more here than meets the eye?
https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2021/10/04/a-new-way-to-defend-taiwan/
Washington bureaucrats leak reports all the time for the most infantile of reasons. Does it matter which DMV mini-tyrant is pulling a power play on the other DMV mini-tyrant? Which one soiled their diapers first?
There is a leadership vacuum at the White House and Pentagon, regardless if the soap opera drama in the royal court.
Taiwan is about 90 miles away from mainland China, close enough to invade with fishing boats. They don’t need a billion dollar amphibious assault ship — that is Pentagon think
Hi Hugh,
I can’t say much about your thesis one way or the other, but as you mentioned the CCP, you might find this interesting:
The Rise of the Xi Gang: Factional politics in the Chinese Communist Party
As the global debate on the Chinese model, and especially its domestic political system intensifies, there is a tendency to regard the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a monolith. This paper corrects such a view and argues that any attempt to comprehend elite politics in China requires an understanding of the factional dynamics within the party.
https://www.orfonline.org/research/the-rise-of-the-xi-gang/
I just thought it mirror’s some of the stuff that Tom always brings up: “don’t see everything monolithically and look for the divisions and the factions.”
Before I read that, I had thought the CCP was monolithic, but Xi’s rise appears to be due to a loss of control of the country by the CCP (because of corruption) and Xi is seen as bringing the country back under control. (so the author posits).
And if the infighting is still on going, it could explain some odd tings, like is just a faction of the CCP that was supporting Biden over Trump? etc. It appears that the CCP has an equivalent Deep State that might mirror our own???
Anyway, just thought it was interesting…
Babylon Bee has a “story” (it is satire just in case recent public school indoctrinees don’t grasp this).
Bad news: public school teachers are pushing critical race theory
Good news: they are teaching it as well as they teach basic math
It’s funny because it’s true!!
Do you see the BTC ETF being as exploitable as the futures metals markets?
Wouldn’t this make the manipulation/suppression of BTC prices possible for anyone that had (for example) a printing press and an inexhaustible supply of proxies?
No. because 95% of all the gold in the world is controlled by central banks. BTC on the other hand, isn’t. Why do you think they haven’t approved an ETF yet?
The difference between how the CFTC and SEC have treated BTC ETF’s and when SPDR got the Gold ETF is completely different. The Gold one was fast-tracked and the whole process took less than 12 months.
BTC? 5 years now and they are still dragging their feet. They thought futures would break BTC in 2017.
I’ve covered this multiple times, Ivor. Multiple times.
I’m afraid it’s the curse of most article writers isn’t it? That readers that come late won’t have read your entire back catalog. But if you’d like to post a link to one of your articles on that (and on the NSA-origination story) I’d happily read them.
And I’m not sure I understand your central point – central banks (and/or the BIS) were desperate to keep a lid on the price of gold lest it blow the whistle on their insane debauchment of their currencies, so they started fiddling about in the paper markets to suppress the price.
Now central banks want a cryptocurrency of their own and DON’T want private crypto competing with their version (surely you admit that this is their desire?), it makes sense that they might try the same trick again?
They just didn’t need to do it before now – private crypto was still too niche, and they weren’t ready to launch their own. Now private crypto is starting to look dangerous (to them) and they ARE ready.
I know you don’t expect them to succeed, but surely this is an obvious tactic for them to attempt again, as it has worked so well against gold?
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/bis-outlines-policy-responses-to-facebook-diem/
Interesting that it’s the BIS – is there any banking organisation more Davosian?
Physics trumps economics every time.
Our current situation has been known was coming for a long time. Growing populations meets diminishing resources which, has been covered over by decades worth of ‘printed’ currency. Consequences await.
Nothing regarding the loss of liberties, supply chain disruptions and political turmoil has surprised me. This Covid thingy did though. I didn’t see that one coming. We have been blindsided by a brilliantly executed misinformation campaign that will shift the blame and the consequences onto those who deserve them the least.
To consume limited energy resources for no other reason than to create an intangible assets such as cryptos is foolish. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that you are a chemist.
I posted the following link for you once before. If you haven’t seen it and have the time, please humor me. It was produced mid 70’s. (A great decade to be a teenager.) 1 hour.
Dr Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_VpyoAXpA8
And another. Produced by Australia’s ABC. 10 min.
Computer predicts the end of civilisation (1973) | RetroFocus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCxPOqwCr1I
Cheers.
H.
Malthus lives!
Malthusian? Absolutely! With feet firmly embedded.
Here is a 5 min read that I authored and had a few hundred comments. I replied to many.
https://theaimn.com/depopulate-or-perish/
Avagoodwun.
H.
When I tell people that private crypto will be banned, they tell me that’s impossible, and refer me to how the US government failed in their War on Drugs.
And that’s a great example.
They knew they couldn’t stop people snorting coke, so they took over the drug trade.
*lightbulb*
There is no evidence that gas, oil or coal are finite resources.
True enough… at any one point in time there is, however, an upper and lower limit to how much can be produced based on supply and demand.
To adapt a common phrase, the cure for low prices is low prices, right?
More demand for (relatively) cheap energy would raise prices and more deposits would thus become reserves (i.e. extractable at a profit)
Those claiming we have “limited reserves” don’t seem to understand the classification – “reserves” is an economic term and so when prices rise, more deposits become “reserves”.
And every generation is always running out of “reserves”, because once we have identified enough to be going on with, we stop looking and start drilling – looking for new deposits is more costly than extracting the “reserves” already identified.
Of course the search for new energy sources is one that will only really begin in earnest once things get serious, and once every scientist in the world is looking for alternate energy sources instead of mithering about climate change bollocks or other causes de jour, I would confidently expect cold fusion or some other exciting quantum leap to come along toot sweet.
After all, at some theoretical price, their silver content would make a pair of old discarded sports socks worth rooting for amongst a thousand tons of trash.
The energy crisis isn’t being caused by supply or global availability.
It is being caused by incompetent politicians, marxist, and a clueless 14yr old Swedish bimbo who thinks she knows everything.
Just because there is oil / NG in the ground does not mean the politicians won’t make your life impossibly expensive.
Vote for the twitter freak next time instead of the ice cream tyrant. Sure, his tweets are mostly moronic — but you can always turn twitter off (and you should anyway). The left wingers want everyone else to freeze to death (the White house will still be heated even when your children stop breathing).
You will also learn that western politicians war against refineries will screw up more than the gasoline market. Refineries also make CO2 (aka dry ice) which is used to refrigerate food during shipment. Refineries produce the chemicals that go into fertilizer that gets used to grow food in the first place. And refineries make the ethylene that becomes all sorts of plastic — for wrapping your food to your car to your home to the pointless masks you wear to glorify Fauci.