Survival is More Than Canned Food and Matches… Click Here!

Category: Futurology
Despotism or Tyranny?
Written by Rob
Sunday, 29 April 2012 13:39
No Comments

Much of the developed world will descend into despotism. The failure of mainstream policies will fatally weaken mainstream politicians, parties and institutions. People will turn to the extreme left or the extreme right to restore their declining living standards. Vested interests benefiting from the status quo and those opposed to these extremes will fight to retain what they have, democracy be damned. Advocates of the left, right and status quo will all believe they are acting “for the good of the people” as they destroy our democracy and trash our way of life.

It matters little to the millions of dead whether they died in a NAZI concentration camp, Soviet Gulag or Cambodian killing field. They are just as dead. Treated as dispensable slabs of meat, to be used and abused so someone could create their version of a better tomorrow. Falling for the left to stop the right or for the right to stop the left is simply succumbing to the rhetoric of potential despotic tyrants. Psychopathic ideologues will deprive you of your life, liberty and property as readily as they always have. We denizens of the West have not escaped histories bloody embrace.

But the descent into tyranny is not inevitable. It is just the most likely outcome given how much the worldview of the spineless curs in positions of power diverges from reality. Churchill could have accepted the inevitability of a German victory in World War II. He did not do so. Instead he rallied the people, not by telling them to go shopping, not by claiming things were going well when they were not. But by telling the people what a hard time they had before them:

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.

We too have dark days ahead. At this stage it is economic rather than military Armageddon we face. The latter may well come, but in the near term it is a lower probability outcome than one of debts being defaulted on and expectations not being met. For many the economic adjustment will be a disaster. People led their lives and made their plans according to a false set of societal operating assumptions. Our leaders need to explain this fact to prepare us for the hard times ahead. The money diverted to financial vested interests is money needed to feed, clothe and provide warmth to the poor. Our experiment in crony capitalism must end.

Churchill in telling people of the hard times ahead, knew just how bad they would be:

For the first time, the people had hope but Churchill commented to General Ismay: “Poor people, poor people. They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.”

The march of the extremes into the mainstream is  but the first step in the unraveling of  our politically correct Joseph Goebbels like big lie:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”.

Politically correct Western states are losing the ability to shield their people from the effects of the big lie. The shock of the adjustment will be large. We need to prepare people for it. Otherwise the shock may shatter our societies, enabling extremists or existing vested interests to seize control. But the mainstream media’s reiteration of politically correct perspectives amplifies the big lie. It befuddles much of our richer, better educated and empowered population segments. This has created a leadership class unaware of the need to prepare for the tough times ahead. Their ignorance and denial is effectively paving the way for the extremes and existing vested interests to seize the State.

Denizens of the developed world may think they have stepped out of history. Wars, famines, pestilence and mass poverty do not happen to us. They exist in history books or happen to other peoples. It’s natural for those in poor countries to slave away making trinkets and material items for our amusement. It’s natural for the majority of our “children” to spend the first quarter of their life studying and the last quarter in retirement. The half of our lives spent  working is punctuated by frequent holidays. The working day is not too long or onerous.

Well history has started again. States can not make good on their promises to their people. Governments are trying not to admit this. In so doing they are putting off the inevitable, at the cost of making it worse. Their policies can not work:

My Speech Delivered at the New York Federal Reserve Bank:  The noose is tightening on your organization, vast amounts of money printing are now required to keep your manipulated economy afloat. It will ultimately result in huge price inflation, or, if you stop printing, another massive economic crash will occur. There is no other way out.

Again, thank you for inviting me. You have prepared food, so I will not be rude, I will stay and eat.

Let’s have one good meal here. Let’s make it a feast. Then I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you all, walk out of here with me, never to come back. It’s the moral and ethical thing to do. Nothing good goes on in this place. Let’s lock the doors and leave the building to the spiders, moths and four-legged rats. – Read the whole speech.

The failure of mainstream policies will undermine the standing of all institutions associated with them. The appearance of corruption and rampant fraud will destroy the trust on which our society is built. Once gone it will be sorely missed. Without trust we will soon be poor. It is more than the value of the dollar in our pocket that is dependent on it. It is the foundation of civil society. Without it there will not be much innovation or affluence. Recreating widespread trust once lost could be a task of decades or generations. Its loss is worth resisting.

It may not be too late to avoid a period of persecution, anarchy and mass impoverishment.  But the only hope of doing so it to restore integrity. Integrity to our institutions, our budgets, our leaders and our laws. Without this, all roads lead to misery and tyranny.

Graphic courtesy of Zerohedge – read the post.

 
A more mercantile world
Written by Rob
Friday, 10 February 2012 13:45
2 Comments

What will be the overriding international framework of the “new normal”? The new normal being the state of the world after the current debt and global imbalances are but a distant memory. Replaced by other new and more pressing concerns. There are grounds for believing it will probably be more mercantile.

When thinking about the future it is worth remembering that there are infinite potential futures. Although in retrospect from our perspective only one will ever have eventuated. At any moment in time it is impossible to know all possible futures, let alone describe them. Any attempt to do so will be wrong. Anyone who claims to know the future is wrong, although they may be right in some instances about specific aspects of it.  David Deutsch’s many worlds interpretation of reality may or may not be right. But it does highlight the number of branches. A simple reflection on the universality of unexpected consequences reveals how unknowable the future is.

With those caveats in mind it is likely people will remain people. Our wetware (brains) will suffer the same cognitive failings in the future as they do now. We will be driven by the same fundamental desires and emotions. An understanding of people going about the ordinary business of life will remain relevant. Those components of economics that soundly reflect the individual human condition and our collective behavior will remain applicable. Economic “laws” which reflect deeper truths rather than transient circumstances will hold. They will continue to aid our understanding of human economic reality, even in the new normal.

What is less certain is if the primary economic actors will remain human in any sense generally accepted today. I am not just talking about algorithmic trading or robots,  but us. Ray Kurzweil has a great predictive track record. Even if he is overly optimistic in his predictions for the singularity, the implications of exponential rates of improvement for only a short while longer are profound. Trends continue until they don’t.

Ray Kurzweil’s Transcendent man which can be rented here for US$4.99 provides an overview of the singularity. Technology is important. Technological improvements may provide the productivity increases necessary for Westerns to maintain their standard of living. Technology provides the grounds for hope, as long as we keep the Neo-luddites at bay. But this post will concentrate on that which is more knowable. The consequences of humans individually and collectively interacting with each other.

There is no point re-inventing the wheel. People far cleverer than I have put pen to paper on the nature of the new normal. Mckinsey’s for instance had this to say:

The new normal (requires free registration)

These two forces—less leverage and more government—arise directly from the financial crisis, but there are others that were already at work and that have been strengthened by recent events. For example, it was clear before the crisis began that US consumption could not continue to be the engine for global growth. Consumption depends on income growth, and US income growth since 1985 had been boosted by a series of one-time factors—such as the entry of women into the workforce, an increase in the number of college graduates—that have now played themselves out. Moreover, although the peak spending years of the baby boom generation helped boost consumption in the ’80s and ’90s, as boomers age and begin to live off of retirement savings that were too small even before housing and stock market wealth evaporated, consumption levels will fall.

and

The big unknown is whether the temptation to blame Western-style capitalism for current troubles will lead to backlash and self-destructive policies. If this can be avoided, the world’s economic center of gravity will continue to shift eastward.

Through it all, technological innovation will continue, and the value of increasing human knowledge will remain undiminished…. This much is certain: when we finally enter into the post-crisis period, the business and economic context will not have returned to its pre-crisis state. Executives preparing their organizations to succeed in the new normal must focus on what has changed and what remains basically the same for their customers, companies, and industries.

The McKinsey analysis seems reasonable. But what will be the global contextual framework in which organizations operate? People will remain people. As such some aspects of reality will remain constant:

Understanding Reality

A collapse of the system will not and cannot be pleasant. The current crop of Western empowered vested interests will be every bit as determined to hold onto power as those in China. People are people. Power hungry narcissists  are power hungry narcissists the word over. There will always be some of them in positions of power. This should to be part of our understanding of reality. We can not change it.

Power hungry people are likely to be interested in increasing their power. If they control a state then they are likely to try and increase its power. Just as Tito supposedly kept a lid on ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia, so the USA currently keeps a lid on the ambitions of state leaders. The US effectively sets and enforces the global rules.  A relative decline in the US will weaken this control. States are likely to start vying for more power in ways they currently cannot.

At least that’s my current explanation for the conclusions reached by Adam Posen, a Bank of England official in What the return of 19th century economics means for 21st century geopolitics. The speech mentions that the multi-polar world of the 19th Century was more mercantile than ours. If our future multi-polar world rhymes with this past then we are entering a more mercantile period.

This report of the creation of a German commodity alliance suggests a more mercantile world may be upon us sooner rather than later:

12 companies join German commodity alliance

Twelve German companies have joined the new German alliance aimed at securing raw materials supplies in the face of growing competition for key commodities, the Federation of German industry BDI said on Monday.

In October 2010, Germany’s government approved a new commodities strategy aimed at helping German industry secure supplies in the face of intense competition from China and other newly-industrialized countries

Posen’s article also mentions that intellectual property (IP) was not very well protected in the 19th Century. It also suggests global supply chains will be further split up, in part to make it harder for suppliers to steal valuable IP.

Another factor worth considering is the longer term effect of all the money printing going on at the moment. Paper currencies will deteriorate and lose their purchasing power (possibly after a period of deflation). Eventually this is likely to result in people refusing to accept them in payment for transactions, particularly international ones. If so, something will take its place. The world could shift to gold or some bimetallic standard or perhaps to a re-weighted IMF special drawing rights type currency. Whatever replaces fiat currency is likely to gave a profound psychological effect.

I suspect the mercantile mindset of there being only a set amount of wealth in the world reflected the widespread use of the gold standard. For all intents and purposes there was only a limited amount of “gold wealth” in the world. Gold wealth was a zero sum game, there is only so much gold that can be split amongst the countries of the world. What changes is the amount the gold can buy. A world without paper money could be a much more mercantile one, simply because of the set amount of money in the world. Manipulation of the price of money then enters a whole new ball game. But that is the subject of another post. It was also the subject of much debate in former times.

There are multiple reasons for suspecting the world will become more mercantile. There are historical precedents and sound theoretical grounds to expect it. A mercantile world will be quite different, for both countries and corporations. But that’s the subject for another post.

 
Woman gets 3D printed jaw
Written by Rob
Sunday, 05 February 2012 11:37
No Comments

Boingboing highlighted this example of technological change:

Woman’s infected jaw removed, 3D printed replacement implanted

An 83-year-old woman with a badly infected lower jaw had the entire thing replaced with a 3D printed titanium/bioceramic replica….One day later the lady could start talking and swallowing.