Gidday Jay. I don't have much disagreement with your list. But there are vital ingredients missing. Such as the force equivalent to the gravity which is that which propels living things, including people, to avoid this: believe we are operating at the edge of the event horizon of the black singularity of finance-ability, close to the point of no (risk-free) return, gravity-sliding towards TeoTwawki;
I believe the Process of Collapse is just getting started, on the financial markets, in the real economies, on the geopolitical landscape;
I believe the realization of Collapse have not yet coalesced within the psyche of the democratic, mania happy, but ignorant street mob, as they are merely sugar-doped experimental mice happily ensconced within a burlap bag, always the last to know and the first to suffer. >
The sheep in the paddocks, whose very lives depend, unknowingly, on the continued desire for lamb shanks and kebabs, are unaware of the proximity of the financial black hole event horizon. Similarly, not all of We, The Sheeple need to know how close we are to a financial Reynold's Number.
It's sufficient for those, like you and me, who spend their days clicking around in cyberspace, reordering and gerrymandering the financial landscape, values, prices, ownership and orders of importance and battle, to look after the situation. The sheep, sheeple, J6P, W3C, S2B, H4P etc, can graze happily in their pastures, confident that we will fix things up in exchange for the small income we derive from the effort.
There are hordes of people, namely 6 billion, all trying to maintain their little piece of Shangri-La. Even though most just run in the rat race, the combined energy is increasingly powerful. There are twice as many people as just a few decades ago. They are all trying to improve their situation. Even the suicidal ones.
6 billion people are increasingly armed with CDMA2000 phragmented photon cyberphone light sabres, whereas three decades ago they were armed with slide rules and not long before that with horse-shoes and muskets. We can do a lot more with light sabres than muskets.
While there are vicissitudes, cycles of fear and irrational exuberance, weather failure and acts of malevolence, the overpowering drive of 6 billion CDMA2000-armed people far outweighs the glitches. There has never, as far as any human knows, other than by guesswork, been such an immensely powerful army. It hasn't even been fully armed yet.
Each individual will fight for survival and improvement. It's built into their DNA and was done eons before the Aztecs melted the first gold nugget into a bauble representing their inbuilt desires for survival and purchasing power.
So while I find your list essentially true. It's not complete, either in the forces driving us into collapse mode, or, more importantly, in the force keeping our universe in expansionary mode [which has lasted since the original Big Bang].
But, you are right that it is not a linear expansion. It's an infinitely variable up and down trek akin to climing Everest, with a LOT more people sure to perish before we reach the summit and Nirvana. We now have 6 billion sherpas lending a hand. That's enough to cover the whole mountain, from top to bottom. Many hands make light work.
Your worries fell into two categories - the fear of mismanaged money leading to financial implosion and the fear of the eon's-old alpha male fight for conquest, territory, girls and the mayhem that results from such madness.
While it's true that Uncle Al has let rip with an astonishing fusillade of overwhelming force doctrine pixelation of megamillions of new $s to fight back the forces of darkness, this has not led to inflation. That's because he has got the luxury of running the money supply for many billions of people with increasing wealth and increasing productivity, such that one software nerd can provide a valuable service to 6 billion people indirectly and 1 billion directly at a unit cost near zero and marginal cost of production even closer to zero - "Click Here" is a very cheap production cost compared with making another copy of a Lexus which requires actual factories, people and materials.
He can write a cheque for King George II to finance a vast military enterprise and it's lost somewhere in the 5th significant figure. He doesn't need to tax people [other than by this stealth tax dilution method]. In the good old days, such dilution would send prices soaring. Not these days, thanks to 6 billion sherpas and sheeple needing feeding with $$.
We are now past 3 years into the biggest-ever market clearing process and even with the Twin Towers malevolence and a few other glitches thrown in, the world is very steady.
My 1999 fears of event horizon penetration and cascading collapse when the hot air went out of the Nasdaq are now long gone. Yes, there are some major stacks of derivatives, dodgy loans in Japan, USA housing and elsewhere [JP Morgan's Newmont Mining deal for example] which will continue to load the market clearing process for years to come. But they seem manageable to me.
The Millennial Madness, Y2K Bug, Twin Towers, Irrational Exuberance and so on are fading memories. People are back to the daily grind. The rat race is our normal way of life again.
The US$ is now cheap enough that Americans have to get a real job and earn a living, with companies producing bottom lines instead of promises and stock options. That process is well underway. The world does not owe the USA a living. Another 50% would see the US$ at NZ$0.80 - the whining from NZ producers would be louder than the combined whining of all Korean CDMA producers whining about QUALCOMM royalties.
Unfortunately, I'm long enough in the tooth that I'm not totally sanguine when reading your list. With substantial effort, people really could make things as bad as you fear.
For example, we have got an electricity crisis here, when all that was required was to double or quadruple the price, which would result in people not wasting it or using it when they don't really need to. But as suggest, what's sensible and what governments do are two different things.
Mqurice
PS: Americans whining louder than a fleet of Koreans and a herd of Kiwi farmers combined: siliconinvestor.com They think I should hire them for exorbitant pay when I can hire Indians or Chinese for a fraction of the price demanded by Americans. India doesn't threaten me or my country and allows Kiwis to sell stuff there [unlike the USA which 'protects' their farmers].
QUALCOMM is an American registered company, but it's not American owned [though plenty of Americans do own some shares]. I'm not an international charity designed to benefit already overpaid Americans. |
