Tag: survival

When the money runs out or loses its purchasing power, all sorts of complexity that were previously viewed as essential crumble to dust.

Four D’s will define 2020-2025: derealization, denormalization, decomplexification and decoherence. That’s a lot of D’s. Let’s take them one at a time.

I use the word derealization to describe the inner disconnect between what we experience and what the propaganda / marketing complex we live in tells us we should be experiencing.

Put another way: our lived experience is derealized (dismissed as not real) by official spin and propaganda.

The current state of the economy is a good example. We see the real-world economy declining yet the officially approved narrative is that there’s a V-shaped recovery underway because Big Tech stocks are hitting new highs. In other words, we don’t need a real-world economy, all we need is a digital economy provided by Big Tech platforms.

This is derealization at its finest: the everyday world you experience directly no longer matters; what matters is stock prices and various statistics that all paint a rosy picture.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest class is fleeing soon-to-be-bankrupt cities. The wealthiest class has the means to buy the best advice and also has the most to lose, so I give their actions far more credence than official propaganda.

The “New Normal” Is De-Normalization and Here’s Why the “Impossible. Economic Collapse Is Unavoidable:

This is why denormalization is an extinction event for much of our high-cost, high-complexity, heavily regulated economy. Subsidizing high costs doesn’t stop the dominoes from falling, as subsidies are not a substitute for the virtuous cycle of re-investment.

The Fed’s project of lowering the cost of capital to zero doesn’t generate this virtuous cycle; all it does is encourage socially useless speculative predation. Collapse isn’t “impossible,” it’s unavoidable.

The basic idea is that all the structures of the “normal” economy only function at full capacity, as costs have moved higher, unproductive complexity has increased and our ability to pay these higher costs is based on ever-expanding debt.

As a result, “normal” became extremely fragile and binary: it’s either fully funded at full capacity or it collapses. The structures of everyday life are incapable of downsizing to 70% of their previous complexity and cost, much less 50%.

There won’t be any “new normal” because the system has become too rigid, ossified, over-regulated and controlled by entrenched interests and elites. It is incapable of reducing complexity and cost, and bailouts via borrowed money are stopgaps, not actual solutions.

Decomplexification is a mouthful, and everyone inside the machine knows the impossibility of paring organizational complexity. Everyone who is a stakeholder in the status quo (which is virtually every employee, manager, etc.) will fight to keep the status quo intact as is, for fear that any re-organization might imperil their livelihood or security. This is entirely understandable, of course.

Modern life is inherently complex. Representative-Democracy is complex and cumbersome because having a bunch of stakeholders all competing for public resources and advocating for a bigger slice of the pie is inherently messy. There must be oversight and feedback to minimize the possibility of one clique gaining complete power.

Long global supply chains are inherently complex. Managing ever-increasing regulations is inherently complex. And so on.

When the money runs out or loses its purchasing power, all sorts of complexity that were previously viewed as essential crumble to dust. We’re witnessing the early stages of this in real time in healthcare and education: overly complex and costly systems are breaking down not just from the challenges of the pandemic but because they’re structurally incapable of adapting or evolving beyond pseudo-reforms and policy tweaks.

As an illustration, consider the current overly complex way our healthcare system funds itself and a system in which customers pay cash for medical care: no insurance, minimal oversight auditing, etc. Regulations boil down to a requirement to publicly post prices for services and actually charge only the posted prices.

In higher education the campus and its entire bureaucracy becomes superfluous. Classes, embedded apprenticeships and in-person workshops are organized online. The entire scheme of accrediting colleges is jettisoned in favor of accrediting each student.

And so on. You can see the problem: eliminating unproductive, obsolete layers of costly complexity will eliminate millions of middle-class jobs that can’t be replaced with new expansive bureaucracies.

Yes, paying cash for healthcare and campus-less, mostly automated universities are oversimplifications. So where is the middle ground between current costly complexity and some “new normal” with half the costs and complexity? There’s no way to accomplish this while retaining the payrolls, priorities, processes and structures of the existing systems.

The point here is that when the money runs out or loses much of its purchasing power, overly costly complexity collapses whether we like it or not.

Decoherence is an interesting word. In science, “Decoherence can be viewed as the loss of information from a system into the environment, since every system is loosely coupled with the energetic state of its surroundings.”

Decoherence refers to the loss of systemic coherence between narratives, values, processes and systems. Simply put, stuff no longer works right and it no longer makes sense.

What worked in the past has been transformed by two systemic drifts:

1. Systems that evolved to function in a specific socio-political-economic context continued adding complexity and cost because debt-based funding was available, not because they were becoming more efficient or effective.

2. The socio-political-economic context has changed and so the status quo systems are mal-adapted, i.e. obsolete.

These two systemic drifts occur so slowly that we aren’t even aware of the loss of coherence unless we compare the current system to a previous set point or look at it from the perspective of starting from scratch: what would the most sustainable, lowest-energy consumption, most efficient and productive system look like if we designed it from scratch? It certainly wouldn’t be the system we have now,

The four Ds help us understand why the status quo is incapable of adapting / evolving fast enough and effectively enough to manage a controlled collapse to a much lower level of cost and complexity.

The status quo can’t even admit the need for a controlled collapse, much less manage it.

We can add a fifth D: denial. The four Ds are already in motion and denial is only accelerating systemic decoherence.

¹² And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

¹³ And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

¹⁴ And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

A magnitude-6.5 earthquake rattled western Nevada just before sunrise May 15, 2020 waking up people at 4:03 a.m. local time, well before their morning alarms went off, according to news reports.

This is the strongest earthquake to shake Nevada in 65 years. As of 5 a.m. local time, six magnitude-4 or higher aftershocks had already rocked the region, including a magnitude-5.1 aftershock just 23 minutes later, at 4:26 a.m. local time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The earthquake struck 34.7 miles (56 kilometers) west of Tonopah, Nevada, near the California-Nevada border, about 120 miles (193 km) southeast of Carson City. Shaking was felt as far away as Sacramento and Reno. People also reported feeling shaking in Las Vegas, about 200 miles (330 km) southeast of the quake’s epicenter. So far, there aren’t any reports of injuries.

The earthquake originated 1.7 miles (2.8 km) underground, in the shallow crust of the North American plate. The USGS has classified it as a strike slip fault, which happens at vertical fractures when the rocky plates that make up Earth’s surface move horizontally. To visualize this movement, place two fists together and move one backward, or watch this 1-second USGS video.

The earthquake happened within Walker Lane, an active seismic zone located along part of the California-Nevada border. The Walker Lane zone is a hotspot; it contains up to 25% of the motion where the North America and Pacific Plate interact, USGS said. The remainder of that motion largely happens in the San Andreas fault system.

Over the past 50 years, about two dozen magnitude-5 or higher earthquakes have hit within 62 miles (100 km) of today’s spot, largely to the west and south, USGS reported. In roughly the same region, for instance, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake struck in December 1932 and a magnitude-6.5 quake hit in January 1934.

I have a contact that lives in the vicinity who made the following email report;

“Yeah, I was sitting at my computer facing due East, and I felt it coming at me from out of the Southeast. The hanging lights confirmed that with the direction of their swing. It had the rolling “feel” of a shallow quake with some pretty good force pushing it.

My best first guess for origin was the Hawthorne, NV area, and at a force over 6.0, since Hawthorne is about 130 to the Southeast, the felt force & the distance would just about be right for the way it felt passing thru here.

Hawthorne always concerns me, since it is built right over one of the thinnest surface crust areas in North America, and is also one of the largest repositories for ordinance & high explosives in the U.S. The Hawthorne AAD* is 226 sq miles of explosive bunkers, of which about 200 Sq Mi are in actual use the last time I read the published stats. The actual bunker count is numbered at 2,427, and they claim status as “The Worlds Largest” ordinance depot. They did supply the majority of the ordinance used to fight WWII, so there is that.

The origin of Hawthorne AAD might be seen as beginning with the Black Tom Depot explosion in New Jersey in 1916. Then the Morgan Munitions Depot explosion in 1918, also in New Jersey. There was a popular belief that German sabotage might have been the cause. The Germans did have motive, means, & opportunity, but when an explosive depot cooks off, there isn’t much left in the way of forensic evidence, and no case was ever made to a positive conclusion. Then in 1926 The Lake Denmark Naval Ammunition Depot blew up, also in New Jersey. These were all massive explosions that killed or injured people at great distance.

Congress got involved, and passed a pretty open ended mandate, that a Depot be commissioned in the West, and no farther that 1,000 miles from the coast, which would put in play the entire State of Nevada, and about half of Utah to boot.

The Hawthorne area had been mined since the 1850’s, and the studied geology, high level of earthquake activity, & prolific geothermal eruptions in region should have been enough to indicate it would be a bad choice to store millions of pounds of explosives on top of it.

I’d guess the final location decision in 1930 was made on a Friday afternoon, by a mid level D.C. bureaucrat, who just stuck a pin in a map & called it good. Watching the news these days, I really don’t think things have changed that much.

*Hawthorne Army Depot (HWAD) is a U.S. Army ammunition storage depot located near the town of Hawthorne in western Nevada in the United States. It is directly south of Walker Lake. The depot covers 147,000 acres (59,000 ha) or 226 sq. mi. and has 600,000 square feet (56,000 m²) storage space in 2,427 bunkers. HWAD is the “World’s Largest Depot” and is divided into three ammunition storage and production areas, plus an industrial area housing command headquarters, facilities engineering shops, etc.

Maybe it’s the beginning of the promised apocalypse?