Well, while EU is of course in headlines with their energy crisis (launch the Nord Stream 2, silly people), Chinese have their own power and electricity problems now.

Where this gets interesting is the entire “renewable energy” industry is powered by Chinese coal (the only reason it got cheap and competitive), and Chinese coal is not longer cheap, so this feeds into things like silicon metal prices, and a whole range of other energy intensive industrial materials required by Green energy manufacturers.

https://twitter.com/solar_chase/status/1442764400771928067?s=20

And no, the only way you can power a silicon metal refinery with solar panels is if you build it on the surface of the Sun – those arc discharge reactors run at something like 2000 degrees Celsius and consume vast amounts of electricity.

Same applies for other industrial materials – those windmills are huge and batteries likewise require lots of energy intensive processing.

Basically, if Chinese can’t make it, the whole “energy transition” narrative becomes rather questionable. Exciting times.

Also goes to show that there are only three real countries in the world – Americans with fracking, French with nukes, and Russians with oil. Everybody else either doesn’t have the industrial base or energy supply, and can be ended with a flip of a switch.

So one has to re ask the question that was never answered [about Russia’s catastrophically lower natural gas deliveries]. Is Putin:

• Unreliable because he is unwilling

• Unreliable because he is unable

to sell in the SPOT market.

How about unwilling because he wants to put pressure on Western Europe to allow Nord Stream 2 to be put in operation, either ASAP or period? Note the western terminus is in Germany which just had an election and their Green Party wants to stop it from ever operating, along with the USA and I don’t know who else besides the Eastern European countries that currently provide transit for Russia.

Reminding everyone why natural gas is not optional at all if you don’t want to starve (provides hydrogen for the Haber process to fix nitrogen from the air, plus carbon dioxide is a byproduct and is much more heavily used in the food industry than I realized), suffer blackouts when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun isn’t helping much, or at all at night, especially if you turn off your nuclear plants and/or don’t replace them or build new ones (France managed to destroy its ability to do that economically, an interesting feat…), as well as freeze during the winter … well, I suspect doing this in advance of fall really hitting is concentrating some minds.

And was Russia previously considered to be a reliable source of natural gas? I seem to remember it having disputes with Eastern European countries Nord Stream 2 bypasses that resulted in Western Europe not getting the gas they needed. So Putin could make a case that Nord Stream 2 will allow for reliable supplies absent for example US sabotage (we did it during the Cold War).

Fred Reed waxes eloquent about the “digital yuan”, but why would anyone want to use a centralized stablecoin pegged to the yuan that’s controlled from the PBC given the variety of more discrete and already existing alternatives?

– Smart contracts would be able to handle and certify cash flows in a completist way
– A new kind of collateral would be born
– Transparency could be shared with business partners in a credible way

It makes me very unpopular to say this, but when you mix fiat with digital currency you get all these new superpowers that aren’t available to privately developed currencies.

I write about it here: https://medium.com/@will_99737/digidollar-the-dawn-of-the-transparent-economy-de8148a08d09

There is no compensation that could ever make up for the dying out of one’s people, one’s extended family.

China Isn’t Going to Make It

How’s Chinese obesity epidemic going?

To catch up with US, Chinese will need to overinflate their healthcare, finance, and government sectors. I know their government and finance are pretty strong, but Chinese may be too healthy to catch up to the US.

But if they get obese fast, they too can spend $10-$20 trillion on healthcare expenditures which will bring their economy in line with US.

Deindustrialization has benefits for the average citizens.

True, but that only works up until you realize that foreign countries shut down their production due to, say, a pandemic, and there is nothing you can do about it. Deindustrialization has benefits for the average citizens only as long as somebody else stays industrialized and makes products for them.

There are two parts to modern supply chains – one is globalization, and another is “just in time” inventory management where your product is made once ordered with minimal warehousing.

The inventory management is not going away as it has too many benefits, but supply chain we probably want regionalized, if we learned anything at all. Factories are heavily automated anyway, so cost of labor is not the driving factor anymore.

Even post pandemic, with trade tensions rising, you don’t want your critical components sourced from vulnerable Asia.

The benefit is similar to the internet itself–disintermediation.

Yeah, but internet is dominated by a few large government integrated corporate conglomerates and people love this, and can’t get enough of.

Just as with the internet, this is also unlikely to lead to the flourishing freedom that libertarians predict. If crypto is the real deal, then powerful forces will likely gain control over it.

Like I mentioned elsewhere, is Walmart Dollar a possibility? Maybe. I agree with underlying tech and doing away with commercial banks, they outlived their usefulness, but crypto is going to get centralized, if not by the government directly (through Central Bank), then by government linked corporate conglomerate. So if not US Digital Dollar, then it will be Facebook Libra or Walmart Dollar or whatever. My bet is still on Central Bank regulated digital currency though.

In evolution it is the environment that decides winners and losers. It is possible that your beautiful and smart designer children will be first to be exterminated by Martians for reason only Martians know and you have no way of anticipating.

Forced evolution can simulate environments conventional evolution couldn’t even dream of. Humans with tardigrade genetics will be able to nap outside of space stations or in hydrothermal vents. And how exactly being weak, ugly, stupid, and sick will help you fight off genocidal Martians? Not sure how that logic works. I’d think being beautiful and smart would be an advantage to fighting the Martians, not a hindrance.

Our beautiful and productive cows and pigs that we helped to evolve survive only because they are useful to us. The moment human race is finished all those cows and pigs will end up being losers when confronted with raw nature.

Feral pig infestation is pretty wild in US. So it’s not all clear cut. But overall, yes, we optimized pigs for meat production, not wilderness. But we can optimize for other traits, including survival, which will help us deal with raw nature, no problem.

Idiot. What does ‘your’ lineage really mean after five or more generations?

You recombined DNA will carry on, absorbing more and more information about its environment and developing more and more solutions on how to deal with it. Your lineage is an environmental computer that has been operational for billions of years. Something to be proud and be in awe of. Not quite immortality, but as close as you can get to it in the real world.

And what do you really mean? You are not even the same person you were when you were like 2 years old – the cells that made up the bulk of your body back then are long dead. You are a new pile of cells stacked together only to fall apart again in short order. The only thing that carries on is information contained in you. And that would be your lineage.

Performing medical experiments on strangers is generally considered to be a bad thing.

Who else would you perform medical experiments on? The only reason we even have such thing as medical science is because we perform medical experiments on strangers. You can’t really test things any other way – cell and animal studies will only take you so far. Human trials will always be the gold standard in medicine.

It doesn’t make it any better if those strangers are children. In fact, it makes it worse.

Children never get a choice, on the account of never being there when relevant choices are made. It’s just reality of the situation. But it is reasonable to assume that they would prefer to be prettier, taller, smarter, and healthier rather than the other way around.

None of those are gonna happen since the rationale of progress (“transhumanism”) is rejected wholescale. The tools themselves won’t be used much if at all, since everyone is moving the other way, back into organic social evolution. We are not going to be superhumans but people better adapted to demodernized, post-industrial realities.

European Christians like expensive heating bills?

Well, thanks to our Stunning and Brave Congresscritters, we are going to be sanctioning the Germans after all lol.

The measure authorizes new mandatory sanctions on entities and individuals involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including those that certify the project.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

This action is a rare victory for European Christians and a defeat for SJW “Open Borders” Globalism.

Of course the DNC passed it for the wrong reason. They are still locked into their Russia, Russia, Russia mythology. Defending traditional Christian values is anathema to DNC leaders, like Ilhan Omar & Rashid Tlaib.

PEACE 😇

Well, thanks to our Stunning and Brave Congresscritters, we are going to be sanctioning the Germans after all lol.

The measure authorizes new mandatory sanctions on entities and individuals involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including those that certify the project.

https://www.rferl.org/amp/nord-stream-us-congress-sanctions-russia/31474034.html?__twitter_impression=true

Rafal Smigrodzki, parent of the first polygenically selected child, has some very based views on the mainstream media and acknowledges the 13/50 issue.

Never understood opposition to genetic engineering and ‘designer babies’. Genetic engineering is a perfectly natural process that occurs all the time and will occur regardless of what we think or do. I mean, we all started out as single cell organisms and evolved into Chihuahuas or whatever.

Opposing directed evolution is like opposing showers because you don’t like water falling on your head. Sure, but it doesn’t matter how much you complain – it’s still going to rain. So instead of complaining, why don’t we make something useful out of the fact?

And as far as as winners and losers go, there are always winners and losers in genetic lottery. Directing the process allows us to level the playing field, like pretty much all technology does. So winners can still be winners but losers get a chance to improve their subsequent generations. It’s a wonderful thing.

And ultimately, you can drive evolution far beyond what is currently possible, producing traits such as enhanced radiation resistance and customized immune systems. Why deny humans such gifts?

Unfortunately, I see “bioethicists” locking up human progress on those matters and banning such research. As I mentioned elsewhere, this where deep space science research stations will certainly come in handy – impossible to find or intercept after launch, they can do experiments and genetic sequencing, transmit data back, and there’s nothing anybody will be able to do about it. At least not until it comes back on high elliptic orbit some 20 years down the road.

To add to that, these three-hour transfers take months of painstaking preparation to execute, partly because there are humans on board, partly because margin of error is very low, unlike in 2-day ISS transfers. For the Russian lunar program in its early phase the plan is to do a 4-launch orbital assembly on LEO, and they dread the possibility of things going wrong enough that many would rather wait for a super heavy booster that will do the job in 1-2 launches.

Because to refuel a single Starship will require like a dozen docking manuevers for the tankers carrying 100 tons each.

Right now, the fastest and best space dockers in the world are Russians with 3 hours from launch to the ISS. It takes SpaceX like 2 days to do the same thing. And thats just travel. Fuel transfer is on top of that.

There is only one spaceport right now for Starship sized ships, in Boca Chika. So at least initially, you will have to launch sequentially. Even if all goes well in all the launches all the time (it won’t), you are looking at best case scenario of two day turnaround between refueling lanches.

So realistically, three weeks or so to refuel a single Starship.

Russia is not fulfilling its delivery contracts.

Could you name at least one natural gas-related contract Russia broke? Did anyone got a right to demand penalty? If not, no contract was broken.

European commission advised everyone to switch from long-term contracts (which Gazprom preferred) to spot market. Europe is reaping what it sowed. Tough luck.

Writing from East Central Florida, it’s enough to keep one awake, but I take comfort in knowing that if it takes out NYC & D.C., (as such almost surely would) it would be worth dying for.

The last time I heard this concept was a number of years ago, the more mathematically robust scientific modelers pointed out two huge problems with the doomsday models. I did a brief look but my 1st pass did not find the articles from back then. If I can find them I will share them.

-1- When the wave steps up onto a continental shelf area it loses energy density rapidly as it spreads out.
-2- Inland areas protected by barrier land and an Inter Coastal waterways (where wide enough) will extract huge amounts of energy from a Tsunami even thugh the distance travelled is not particularly far. Something about the decline from above sea level back down into the inter coastal breaks the energy wave into multiple peaks and reflects some of the force back out to sea.

The map below shows the continental shelf area, and much of Atlantic coast has barrier island/peninsula and inter coastal formations. Inland areas of Florida & South Carolina are probably fairly secure. However, as you move north there are more large river entrances and less shelf. North Carolina & DC inland areas are much more vulnerable.

Even a 4-6 meter surge will wipe out pretty much everything on the inter coastal land formation. Some of the smaller islands may vanish entirely if they are scoured down a few feet. It would definitely be a bad day to be on the beach.
____________

The doomsday catastrophic scenarios I found most eyebrow raising are the ones for the San Joaquin Valley in California. Over pumping has:
— Sunk everything by 5-10 feet.
— Worst locations have subsided by ~40 feet.
— The aquifer water table has gone down 100-200 feet.
In the history of the human race nothing this large has been this artificially drained. All of the modelers are concerned about potential undiscovered unique impacts that could have unknowable consequences.

Due to lack of support, a major earthquake could cause massive sudden subsidence. Imagine the entire San Joaquin Valley filling with Sea Water as a marsh & sea area. A low % chance to be sure, but not impossible.

The higher % problem is “channeling”. Salt intrusion into the entire aquifer system if the Pacific “tops up” the water table via new underground connections. Everything that depends of pumping fresh water is rendered non-viable.

PEACE 😇

How many Fukushima deaths have there been due to actual radiation poisoning? Next to none.

Its like when Americans tested their hydrogen bomb and Japanese fishing boat got caught in the blast range.

Well, yes, the skipper on that boat died soon afterwards. He was a syphilitic alcoholic and US Navy, while trying to rescue him, messed up his blood type, and destroyed his liver and he died. The rest of his crew was fine and were making anti-nuclear speeches into their 90’s.

Same deal with Fukushima. There will be a lot of scary reports, but nothing long term will be linked to the reactor once long term comorbidities are accounted for.

In my experience, women like subhuman primates. I commute on a motorbike for a reason. Its not that it turns my wife on (she is used to it). But it turns local waitresses on etc. And that threat of competition turns the wife on. It’s fun.

Good post. Learned something new tonight.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes

This says a lot on how genetic and how social “identity-building” is.

Just use the Aristotelian causes schema to see it: genetics and environment are material causes, “social construction” is the efficient cause, identities becoming formal cause.

Dinh’s swan song on fat black whores in Capetown is quite an epic troll. It is not easy to try and build any lasting rapport with a population with high ratio autistics.

Philip K. Dick might have said it best. If you think this universe is bad you should see some of the others.

Yes. Your logic can be perfectly correct but if your assumptions that feed that logic are incorrect, then your output will be erroneous.

When your friend fears flying she is employing a perfectly good logic – indeed, should a plane experience a catastrophic malfunction, she will have a very unpleasant experience and will likely die in minutes. This logical sequence is obviously sound, and it is foolish to argue otherwise.

However, it is based on an assumption that a catastrophic failure will occur despite many safety and redundancy features installed on a modern plane. This assumption is weak. Though obviously not entirely untrue – planes do crash from time to time.

So while your friends logic is strong, her assumptions are weak. Yes, catastrophic failure will kill you, and at the same time, no, it won’t happen because catastrophic failure is extremely unlikely, though not impossible.

So challenge your friends assumptions, not her logic 🙂

Same with me and Mikel. I agree with with his logic, but i disagree with his assumptions. If his assumptions were closer to reality, him and me would converge on the same understanding of reality. (Nothing beats Austrian economics when sources of power are external to the system such as microfinance and such).

That said, i believe my assumptions are close to reality in general, and so we have “irreconcilable differences” 🙂

That’s what salesmen want you to believe. I do chemical transfers for a living, here on Earth, and if somebody tells me “days”, i know for a fact it will take weeks on the real world.

That said, its not really a show stopper with 2 year period between launch windows.

Snobby and elitist isn’t the main problem. I don’t know about Utah, never been there, so can’t comment.

But the coasts are coming after your kids. A friend of mine from Detroit works in California now, his kids were fine in the Midwest, after moving to Cali his son is gay and daughter a lesbian. I knew those kids well in the Midwest, they were normal and happy.

Even my liberal wife was like “that’s strange, what are the odds of both kids turning out like that? And his daughter sounds really dark and depressed”.

When even liberal women are starting to do probability calculations, you know its problematic.

Its a bit of a dilemma as schools in the South suck relative to the coast, but at the same time, hopefully less brainwashing. I can deal with shootouts by the hood rats, but having your school brainwash your son into cutting off his dick is a bit too much. Stay away from the coasts.

And even if you don’t have kids, people in the coasts will cancel you the moment you say something out of current fashion. I’d rather hang out with deer hunting rednecks, they are nicer people.

But heat is harsh in the South, so I don’t even want to think about hauling and skinning a dead dear.

Hunting deer in the south is not like in the movies. The way it works for > 50% of successful hunters is this: you have a hunting stand which is a platform with a chair on a big oak tree (or similar species) branch and you have deer bait nearby on the ground (corn is common; there is some controversy in different jurisdictions over what is legal). When the deer comes for the bait you blast the poor sucker from 40-50 feet. After, you drive your pickup truck next to the carcass and lift the deer up onto the truck bed then you drive to the service that processes your kill for a fee.

The most strenuous parts are getting your ass up onto the tree stand and getting the carcass up onto the pickup truck bed. If it isn’t too hot you might not even break into a sweat.

Wasn’t Fukushima a very powerful tsunami? I mean, Fukushima reactions are retarded, everyone was focused on the nuclear power plant that didn’t really kill anybody, but the earthquake and the floods actually killed 20,000 people. But its like they are invisible.

And that’s in earthquake hardened Japan.

Now imagine Fukushima+, same earthquake and tsunami, but slightly more powerful.

So all those microchip factories, industrial materials factories, in East Asia are under water. How fast can we train the ocean squid to operate a printed circuit board factory? I mean, they are pretty intelligent, and will demand high wages. It can be a problem.

A few good quakes can put the planetary industrial centers under water. Problematic, unless you are an ocean squid.

For what it’s worth i told my grandmother in Kirov to vote for Butina, but she was in a different district. Still, grandmother voted United Russia, good.

I guess i could have voted in Russian elections as well, I have a valid internal passport and I’m a fully legal Russian citizen as of last year. Still, feels weird. Maybe next time.

True, but I meant that private companies might make solar electric for Earth-Moon missions, it could totally be feasible. Imagine ultra-light (say 0.1 kg per m^2) 5-10% efficiency square kilometer solar array with a plasma rocket engine – it could work as an Earth-Moon shuttle with week-long round trips at very high fuel efficiency, making Starship-like designs unnecessary. The trick is to bring the price of such arrays down to normal solar array levels + figure out how not to turn them into solar sails.

Solar sail slingshot around the sun would indeed be awesome, in fact at presently feasible technology level it’s probably the only way to get to a solar gravitational lens (to directly image surfaces of exoplanets with high resolution) within a human life time. Combining it with nuclear is a must, since you’d need a lot of power for such missions just to operate the telescope and provide communication.

VHS player, and played a porn video at full volume subjecting half the campus … beginning of the 90s

Really a golden age.

Lol, no.

In the Midwest, it’s mostly about rifles and deer heads (hunting season is in October), so you get a lot of that going on. Personally, I don’t hunt but I would love to learn how to properly skin a deer and asked to be educated on such matters, but no luck so far from my Midwest friends.

Deep South US is also all about guns, hunting, and woodworking. Deep South engineers make very good furniture. But heat is harsh in the South, so I don’t even want to think about hauling and skinning a dead dear.

Solar panels are cheap and can be made light, such that the performance is similar to nuclear electric for a fraction of a cost.

Solar panels don’t work well away from the Sun, so even by Jupiter performance will be meh.

That said, solar sails are definitely in the cards for future propulsion tech.

Imagine a nuclear electric tug launching a solar sail on a slingshot manuever around the Sun. Solar sails go wild near the Sun. Now that would be a ride of a lifetime.

I agree.

Private space companies can produce a hell of a result with chemical rockets (still to be seen with Blue Origin), but there are limits to what chemical rockets can do. And they can’t clear the regulatory hurdles for nuclear.

TL;DR – some criticism of starship + lots of discussion of nuclear propulsion that hasn’t feature systematically anywhere else to my knowledge

Starship is truly a game changer for low-Earth orbit operations (putting crude but cheap stuff into orbit to built large space stations, transport 100s of people, deploy 100s of satellites at the same time, etc.), but if you think about it, it’s rather extravagant as a transport vehicle for deep space.

Lunar flight will require anywhere between 4 and 16 refuelings per flight to delivery 50-100 tons of payload to Moon’s surface. The refueling operation will take between 8 and 32 weeks. During this time the ship in orbit will have to maintain its cryogenic methane storage for months, which is very difficult even on Earth . Flights to Mars and beyond will require similar amounts of fuel or more. That is, to make a 6 month journey to Mars you would have to park your spaceship in Earth orbit for 6 months to refuel. One round trip will take ~3 years total, not taking into account the “small problem” of producing fuel on Mars and 16 refuelings on low Mars orbit. Assuming 10 year realistic life span. Each “Starship” will be able to make 3 round trips to Mars max. Assuming 100 passengers per trip and a price tag of $500 million (very generous, in the long run assuming mass production $1 billion is more like it), you have 300 round trip passengers per starship, or $1.5-3 million per passenger, not even taking into account all other costs. In aviation the cost of the airframe itself is probably only 1/10 (maybe a bit more, I don’t remember) of the final flight ticket cost. That is, we easily get into >$50 million per passenger territory.

Flying to other planets on a “Starship” become downright silly. Going to outer planets is actually easier than going to Mars, since good departure windows occur nearly once a year, but the distances are so great that chemical rockets would take many years to get where they need. The difficulty with parking around Jupiter or Saturn is that you need extra fuel for maneuvers around different satellites, landing, etc, which “Starship” will never have – all methane will evaporate over 5-7 year journeys. The only feasible way for it to break upon arrival is by flying through planetary atmospheres to enter capture orbit.

Nuclear rockets though are total game changers in many domains, though maybe not in commercial space for now. Nuclear power in low earth orbit is extremely useful on low orbits for military applications. The current Russian plan is to have a 200 kW – 1MW radar system (or several of them) to radiate the entire planet, something ground based radar systems can’t do effectively (over-the-horizon ground radars can scan much of the planet but are limited to shortwave radio frequency, which makes it ineffective for precise targeting). Such radars make stealth aircraft pretty much useless + allow for advance targeting of incoming aircraft and missiles. In the future multi-MW space nuclear reactors will be able to fire short laser pulses over vast distances that pack as much energy as artillery shells, with no dissipation. Such laser canons are being developed by Russian scientists for military purposes and for laser-ablative nuclear propulsion (using the nuclear reactors to power lasers that would burn a polymer fuel pellet, thereby multiplying thrust by a factor of 5-10 relative to electric plasma propulsion. More Russian plans using radars – using sounding radars. Most powerful space sounding radars to date are in tens of Watts range, they are able to crudely probe surfaces of planets to depths of hundreds of meters. Nuclear power 500kW class sounding radar will be able to map the crust of the Moon, solar system planets and planetary moons more precisely to depths of many kilometers – unprecedented leap in geology. More will be learned about planetary sciences using these radars than in the past 1000 years.

Deep space flights only make sense using nuclear electric propulsion. American plans for nuclear thermal propulsion (heating hydrogen using nuclear rods or solar collectors) only make sense for Earth-Moon travel (2-4 week roundtrip max vs 5-7 months for nuclear electric), going anywhere beyond that only makes sense using nuclear electric. The “Zeus” spacecraft will be a 500 kWe nuclear rocket that will take 5 years to go from Earth to Moon to Venus to Jupiter to Callisto/Ganymede. I’ve heard in a presentation by Keldysh Center senior engineer that the plan is to develop 100 MWe nuclear rocket by 2050. It will have delta-V of ~200 km/s and enough thrust to go to Mars in 39 days, to Jupiter in 6 months, and to outer solar system in 2-3 years with a cargo of ~100 tons (comparable to Starship). That’s 10 round trips to Jupiter, 5 to Uranus and 3 to Neptune in 10 years. Mars will still be hard because of inconvenient launch windows, but better than Starship. The cost of construction will be modest. 100 MWe nuclear powerplants are routinely used in ocean vessels (though different designs). Liquid droplet radiators are 10-20x lighter than metal ones , so the mass of 100 MW rocket will be ~400-500 tons including 100 ton payload (lighter than fueled Starship, can be built in Earth orbit using 4-5 Starship launches). It has enough fuel for a round trip (unlike Starship) and can perform maneuvers in planetary systems to hop from one moon to the next. The projected cost of 500 kWe “Zeus” is 5 billion rubles, or ~$200 mil. PPP. Cost is not gonna rise linearly – probably as a square root, i.e. 100 mW will cost about as much as a nuclear ice breaker or an aircraft carrier, especially if large “gas torch” rockets are available and deployment is cheap + mass production will make all the difference. The price is, however, high enough that deep space mission will remain great power domain.

The limit of nuclear power in space is likely ~100 MWe, maybe you can push to 1GWe, but even droplet radiators increase such that the 1GW ship becomes so massive that there are no efficiency gains from increased electric power. The distant future of electric propulsion in space is still Fusion power. Fusion in space can theoretically be designed such that only 5% or less of fusion energy converts to thermal heating that needs to be removed using radiators. This allows scaling to many GWs or even TeraWatts in the future, allowing 1-2 week flight times to Jupiter and Brachistochrone trajectories (shortest time trajectory vs. currently used smallest fuel burn). Nothing is in the works in Russia r.n., but I know that this is a pet project of irrc chief plasma physicist in Kurchatov institute + Novosibirsk Academy of Science Physics institute converted their experimental magnetic mirror rig in a highly efficient plasma rocket engine. Who knows, maybe they will learn how to turn it into a fusion rocket.

Right now two institutes are working on nuclear rocket design in Russia – KB Arsenal and Keldysh Center. Literally the entire country is designing or testing parts for this device, almost 100% of the spacecraft is new. There has been a lot of lab work in the US on some components of nuclear rockets (VASIMR engine, radiators, less on reactors), but only this year the defense department realized the potential of nuclear reactors in space, so I’d say the US is currently 15-20 years behind, at best 10 years behind, at worst 30 (no major experience operating nuclear reactors in space, overall degradation of nuclear competence). China is more active. By my estimation based on papers that I’ve read at least 3 teams are working on each nuclear tug component (reactor, engine, radiators). The Chinese design is basically the same as the Russian design, though funnily their work is more transparent than Russian, they publish their research in major journals in English, Russian breakthrough work has no citations and is located in backwater Russia-language journals, often affiliated with parent Institutes. Very little published work since 2012, a lot of it is top secret.

This was better:

Video Link

I want to work in environment which allows you to be that eccentric and disorganized. His crazy disorganized desk at 13:00

Lol you would love my office then. Same mess of paperwork, but I work with chemicals , so I sometimes stick resins to shelves in my office so I can watch them flow down, makes cool stalactites. Strictly speaking, it’s not allowed, but nobody wants to blow up a chemical plant because chemical engineer didn’t understand rheology of the process so watching polymers drooping is something I get to do for fun.

I’m obsessed about cleanliness on the production floor though. Factory floor is a different story.

The droplets are made as you pass diffusion pump oil through an atomizer basically.

The one thing that bugged me about this is Russians used heavy oil as their transfer medium. I personally ran a diffusion pump for like 3 years, as in, operated, took it apart, cleaned it, and I used phenyl silicone diffusion pump oil.

Phenyl silicone has higher refractive index (its shinier) relative to heavy oil, so if you want to maximize your quantum yield (how much heat you convert into light), you probably want to have shinier stuff.

Ironically, I used that same pump oil as refractive index tuner for data storage technology materials I was cooking at the same time.

Anyway, I understand why Russians use diffusion pump oil for this technology. I know how those pumps work, and yes, cooling something like a nuclear reactor in space is a perfect application of the technology.

But if Putler reads this blog, phenyl is the answer for quantum yield optimization in the organic liquids world. If you can handle solids, titanium is the answer, but this may not be feasible in space. But heavy oil is meh.

Hydrogen tech costs more than methane tech. But it also delivers more (hydrogen is the best chemical fuel reasonably possible), so for national security and technical development reasons, I would recommend keeping SLS around.

Yes, RL-10’s are from 1970’s. And they are expensive. But they push up to 470 seconds ISP. While Musks’s Raptors are good, they only go to 380 seconds.

You really don’t want to lose the technology and know how for much higher performance engines. Some day there will be a mission for US that will require those extra 90 seconds, and it will be good to have that on tap.

Will the real Charles de Gaulle please stand up, please stand up?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/french-ambassador-to-the-us-recalled/index.html

So Ohio engineers introduced the first regulated (variable wattage – 2010) and temperature control (2014) chips.

Never bet against Midwest American engineers. A century ago, Soviet industrial power was created by guys from Gary, Indiana (it wasn’t a hood rat shithole back then), and now Chinese vaping prowess comes from Ohio.

China, even if it annihilated all corruption, raised and met standards that are literally impossible, and had god-level production quality, would still be universally hated, and as a matter of fact, if their products became so high quality, the west would only hate them more, because that’s ultra-insubordination. They’re already in a genocidal mood.

Although surprisingly the most important chips, and software, for vaping is designed and made in America.

When I lived in the U.S.A I worked with a dude whose son was involved in founding or something of a vape company, the son was a physics PhD and was looking to go to work at Google where a a friend of his already worked but said that Google was having problems with gender.

Anyways it brings me to Karlin’s and other’s point about Wallstreet and silicon Valley being brains drains that stunt the growth and innovation.

I agree. I will present a simple 3 stage model of modernization. Shit country –> moderately prosperous country –> rat race country.

A shit hole country is where talented people and untalented people have to flee to survive.
A moderately prosperous country is one where the talented have financial security and can dedicate their talents to what they want to do.
A rat race country is a country where the talented have to pursue money because financial stability is precarious and difficult to attain.

What the eleventh Jinping of China has done is veered the course from moderately prosperous country to socialism. By restricting schooling he reduces the rat race aspect of life, by redistributing wealth and limiting company valuations and monopolies he is creating competition for workers, instead of workers competing for a few spots in big companies.

What I have heard of Bell Labs is that it was heavily controlled by the government is that true?
I want to echo Michael Hudson and point out that there is tons of money dedicated to rent extraction, not creating wealth. The difference is between buying more slaves/plantations and creating the cotton gin.

Also lmao at India for going straight from shit hole country straight to rat race country.

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“Arrgh”

I’m assuming you wanted to make 50 rods of course.

Of course, using the to rods to catch fish is naive. The most important thing is using the rods to make red pebbles. “Pebble Rods” are a financial leverage multiplier.

;<P

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Many people seem very excited about the potential of the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage of the Vulcan to use Moon fuel and refill that way. But I really don’t know enough about it to say whether it hype or not.

From my perspective, the main potentiality of the moon is as a weapons base and all this other stuff is mainly about getting lesbo black women to the moon.

It’s not so much the economics that I’m concerned about, but rather various permitting limitations for resource extraction and heavy industry.

Things can make economic sense, but if Scary Child Greta says you can’t build a mine, then you can’t build a mine.

I’m not concerned about Peak Oil, or peak cobalt, or peak copper or whatever. There is almost infinite amount stuff out there, but if suburban housewives build a school over it, you ain’t getting it. As world grows richer, number of suburban housewives will increase in places like China, Africa, etc. Places where we usually mine things and process things. And to be fair, the housewives do have a point. Then again, maybe pollution abatement technology will advance fast enough for us to co-exist peacefully.

From my personal experience in US chemical industry, we did have a boom, but please look where – South where permits are easier to get, so fracking could get developed. So we got polyethylene production boom basically, thanks to cheap petrochemical feedstock and energy. But there is more to industrial civilization than polyethylene, as important as it is. And even with fracking and polyethylene, New York Times was complaining about it non stop. So I don’t know if fracking boom can be replicated in the US as easy going pro-business Southern attitudes are replaced by more complaining from NYT elite opinion makers.

If New York Times thinking spreads to China and Africa, we may run into problems on Earth.

Me and Mikel are coming from two different perspectives.

He thinks of money as a medium of exchange between free independent agents operating under conditions of scarcity.

If you frame it this way, he is absolutely right. If his assumptions are correct, then his logic is sound too.

However, I think of money as a tool of social engineering mostly used for status gain and power between highly unequal agents operating under conditions of abundance. We live in infinite universe with unlimited energy so on.

I think my assumptions are closer to reality. We live in an abundant world, but our actions are limited, by ourselves and others around us. Including warlords demanding red pebbles to gain status, else they shoot you in the head.

So in the real world, you have laws, and taxes, and yes, credit allocation, that is based purely on power and not rational economic interests. I think this is closer to reality compared to Austrian economic theory.

I am reminded of what Alan Watts once said about the Great Depression –

So, you remember the great depression. I expect a number of you around are old enough to remember the great depression when one day everybody was doing business and things were going along pretty well and the next day there were bread lines.

It was like someone came to work and they said to him “sorry chum but you can’t build today, no building can go on, we don’t have enough inches.” He’d say, “what do you mean we don’t have enough inches, we’ve got wood haven’t we? We’ve got metal, we’ve even got tape measures.” He’d say, “yeah, but you don’t understand the business world, we just haven’t got enough inches. We’ve used too much of ‘em.”

And that’s exactly what happened when we had the depression. Because money is something of the same order of reality as inches, grams, meters, pounds or lines of latitude and longitude. It is an abstraction. It is a method of book keeping to obviate the cumbersome procedures of barter. But our culture, our civilization is entirely hung up on the notion that money has an independent reality of its own.”

It’s in an essay about confusing abstractions with concrete reality – link here. https://www.google.com/amp/s/sebasbuchner.com/2013/05/03/sorry-guys-we-havent-got-enough-inches/amp/

If I go the liquor store and buy beer with cash, it cannot be reported to a government healthcare service. Anyone who thinks the government run CBDC’s would be anonymous is staggeringly naive.

I get what you are saying, and i agree. It’s a problem. Personally, i don’t care what people spend money on. From monetary planning perspective, i would only care about aggregates. If people wanted to buy hookers and cocaine, its fine because then hookers and cocaine dealers will buy breakfast cereal. So its all good.

But others may not see it the same. That said, credit card purchases are tracked, and credit cards are quite popular. So i think its just a matter of time and building trust.

You may still be forced to pay your taxes in a devalued currency but, once it loses its value for day-to-day transactions, governments cannot do anything practical to avoid people switching to more useful means of exchange.

Large corporations will not give up USD for some “Uncle Bills’ Coupon”. So if you want to shop Amazon or WalMart, and vast numbers of people do, you will need government approved and regulated currency.

Theoretically, Walmart dollar is indeed a possibility as i mentioned before. But that would be rather drastic.

“Arrgh”

I’m assuming you wanted to make 50 rods of course.

I’m sure it will work. Starship is a combination of Soviet N1 rocket with Soviet RD-270 full flow staged combustion engine, with vastly improved electronics and controls, and optimized for methane.

Its actually a very good, robust design. Kinda surprised Russians didn’t go for it first.

But i wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket. SLS is a very powerful rocket with a very good upper stage (those RL-10’s are pretty awesome). And its already almost done. So i would keep some missions for it, just in case.

Then where’s the hype over 100 ton Mars bulldozer or whatever? Where’s Martian payload development?

I mean, NASA has Perseverance rover on Mars. Its an amazing human achievement. It cost a ton of money, and mission was known years in advance, and launch windows established, and you could track them building and testing it.

And what’s that thing weigh? 2 tons? Now can you imagine 100 ton payload? It would be monumental human achievement. So where is the hype? Where is the mission development?

I don’t see it. I do see an obvious interest from US military though, and i know for a fact they have ready payload – Rods from God orbital bombs, and probably killer robots/drones too. So i make a rational conclusion that Starship is a military orbital freighter/bomber.

Maybe. We’ll see i guess.

Amur is a nice little rocket, Soyuz replacement i believe, it will be used for some specialized orbits but it’s no heavy lift.

Russia is trying to avoid heavy lift route due to costs, it seems like. Angara 5V will do 37 tons which may or may not be sufficient. Keep in mind that ultimately, with nuclear tug, it becomes 37 tons to almost anywhere in the solar system direct which is insane.

Imagine a three stage orbital assembly – 37 tons for nuclear tug, 37 tons fuel, 37 tons payload.

With those 7,000 second ISP ion engines, your delta v budget will be like 28 km/s. By contrast, Starship, even fully fueled will be gimped by those 380 seconds ISP Raptors. 1320 tons full, 120 tons hull mass, and 100 ton payload only gives you 7 km/s delta v. You will be waiting forever for gravity assist launch window.

28 km/s is a lot better than 7 km/s. Even if Russian ISP will be lower than 7,000, say 4,000, you are still looking at 16 km/s. Plasma accelerators are the future. Starship Raptors are nice engines but they are outclassed.

Another curious thing about Starship. I see a lot of development of the freighter, but not a lot about payload. Maybe I missed something, but i haven’t heard anyone saying “Yay! We made a 100 ton Mars Bulldozer! Let’s test it!”.

There is no satellite or other space vehicle currently in development that can fill a Starship. Those vehicles take many years to develop and build, and yet no announcements have been made. They are rather expensive too.

So there is only one agency right now with money and secret payload development capability – Pentagon. So likely of Starship being a military bomber/killer robot delivery vehicle is high.

Can the same be said of deep space? Asteroid belt mining has been often speculated about. But most resources are very cheap – and have been becoming much cheaper relative to the size of the world economy.

Currently, i don’t see commercial projects in deep space being viable. BUT – it won’t always be this way.

First, i want those Zeuses/Nuklons going to the Jupiter moons and such. Russian nukes will melt the ice and drill deep down. With half a megawatt of electricity on tap the amount of science can be done is massive. It can revolutionize our knowledge of the Solar System.

Second, I’m not saying aliens, but… lol. Things like Oumuamua demonstrated that we can’t see a damn thing in space. We seriously need to consider planetary defense against various suspicious flying rocks. Even if they don’t hit Earth directly, we need to know they are coming and sample them whenever possible. Science gains are huge, and it may even save the planet. And again, those half MW units can power some insane observation capabilities.

Third, as weird as it sounds, but future of space is in biotech. There are some very interesting things happening tissue engineering and 3D printing cells already. Russians are planning to send their new space station to less protected polar orbit to study radiation resistance of living critters. I think its a correct move and we will be pleasantly surprised. Also, on Earth there are various ignorant calls to ban important biotech research. Automated deep space orbital science stations can be used to successfully run away from Earth based “bioethicists”. That research will be worth $trillions.

And finally, while resources are cheap now, this may change. As world GDP grows, Africans etc will richer. Once they get rich, they will start banning resource extraction on their lands. Nobody wants to live next to a cobalt mine. Environmental movements will flourish and extraction industries will get banned on Earth.

Jeff Bezos is correct – heavy industry will be forced off planet by the environmental movement. Asteroid mining will become viable then.

You just shift some of the same limited resources from uses that is feasible under a stable pebble-mining regime to ones that are short-term in outlook.

Societies and economies always operate below potential. If you restrict production to only pebble based activity, it is obvious that production would increase with the amount of pebbles increasing.

If your theoretical fishing rod production was 100 rods, but you were restricted by law to only make 25 rods because you only had 25 pebbles, then doubling your pebbles would allow you to make 50 rods. Again, rather obvious scenario.

Do they get shot by reverting of the old ways of bartering, albeit more discreetly? (grey economy) And even if that’s the case, it’s rule by intimidation.

How do you barter haircuts for cancer surgery? 80% of the economy is services. And LOL, yes, it is rule by intimidation, that’s kinda how it works. Try not paying taxes some time, see how it will work out.

In the example island economy, they can barter, but they need to give pebbles to local lord as tribute, so they need pebbles ultimately. If they don’t, they get shot in the head.

True, whether the state is local or national or global. Libertarians and anarchists want to abolish all those entirely. Which is why decentralizing money is one of their strategies.

Good luck with that. But I think you will simply end up with warlords in the end. And then its back to pebbles and getting shot.

Good luck convincing anyone in Florida those FedCoin CBDCs are good ole’ fiat dollar. Not even A123 is impressed. (You might have better luck in Japan only because of more Confucian, conformist ethics)

People don’t have a problem with Federal Reserve notes now, right? I think they will get used to FedCoin too.

It’s true in modern society, and only in modern society is this exaggerated. If the entire world goes Taoist or Mad-Max, BAM! Status signaling comes by forms other than money.

Agree but then we will have bigger problems than monetary policy.

What he means is particularly human ways of waging war, i.e. by statecraft.

Statecraft is just nicely dressed warlord. Or an Ant Queen.

Any economic theory without a moral or spiritual foundation eventually leads to impoverishment.

Agree. Economy is just a tool to achieve goals. But those goals will need to come from elsewhere.

And to people who think Chile and the US are not enough, here is England of Margaret Thatcher.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QGBPAM770A

As you can see, its always the same story. I can do this for Japan too, and other countries.

Bottom line – credit matters. Credit markets matter. Its the only thing that matters. Credit to private sector is neoliberalism, credit to the state is socialism. Neoliberalism has been dead since 2008. We are following the only path possible.

To people interested in how real world works, here’s something to chew on:

US private debt to GDP ratio.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/private-debt-to-gdp

This explains why neoliberalism was thought as winning formula. This debt was the major reason for GDP growth until 2008.

But neoliberalism died.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-to-gdp

The state took over. The state is the only one that can get low interest rates. The future belongs to those who can get low interest rates. The future belongs to the state. Its inevitable.

I repent and apologize.

As penance [∆] I offer up the mildly NSFW gifs below [MORE]

PEACE 😇
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[∆] In the quickest ecclesiastical judgement & savage condemnation in the history of Christianity, I have been informed that mildly NSFW gifs are “fun” and therefore ineligible as “penance”.

Apparently my new motto is — Digging The Hole Deeper

Great video. Fiat currency is a lot easier to create than leaves (leaves are actually amazingly complex biochemical factories) which is why we always use fiat.

Like i said, we could use Beany Babies but US dollar is easier.

If our money had to be as complex and amazing as leaves, we would be in real trouble.

Luckily, people just like digits on a computer screen, much simpler technology (and yes, computer is much simpler than a leaf).

Fiat is easy, shiny, and people like it. Which is why it’s here to stay.

I was hoping that you would introduce some more relevant assumptions, such as a central authority on the island distributing the red pebbles or something like that.

That’s what “getting shot in the head” is referring to. Monopoly on violence. I have demonstrated how increase in pebble supply will indeed result in increase in material conditions.

This exchange, however, shows a very real fact: people get mystified with the subject of money.

There’s nothing mysterious about money – fundamentally, its just a tool of social organization, or social engineering, if you will. Nothing more, nothing less. We live in a vast universe that doesn’t care about US dollar, or Euro, or Yen, only humans do.

The amount of goods produced on that island would be determined by the needs, wishes and industriousness of its inhabitants, constrained by their technology and availability of materials and tools

If you think that government regulation, including taxation and credit, has no impact on the production of goods, you may not be as smart as i thought.

They would all instinctively understand that this is not physically possible.

If pebble was the mechanism of exchange, and they got shot for not using it, they would understand quickly why pebble was important.

This is exactly how good standard came about in prehistoric times. Do you think starving cavemen cared about gold? No lol. They were trying to survive. But warlords and priests liked shiny things, and they could murder the starving peasants and take what they wanted. This is why gold, useless metal in those times, became so valuable. You could give it to a warlord or a priest and they would murder your rivals because they liked shiny things.

Economic history shows that people would start using substitutes for reb pebbles in their transactions out of necessity

Not if they risked getting shot in the head. States can lose monopoly on violence, but this typically happens after they lose a war (in Venezuela’s case, its sanctions/trade war), and as soon as state regains its power, those substitutes once again become subordinate to the state. Germans lost gold due to reparations and lost war, hyperinflated and rolled out renten mark. Hitler tried something and went to prison lol. It wasn’t the end of the world.

Japanese printed more than just about anybody, but they don’t need to be told that state is the main power, so Yen is doing nice indeed. And good luck switching away from USD lol. So no, nobody is switching to anything, at least domestically. Americans will continue to use dollars just like Japanese will continue to use Yen.

And this shows another important lesson: money needs to be relatively scarce and somewhat fungible in order to properly accomplish the goal it was invented for.

I got good news for you: money is still relatively scarce and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Aren’t you the one pushing “unlimited wants” thing? You should know better.

Money, as a tool of social engineering, is used to confer status, and status is relative, so desire for status is indeed infinite. So is money demand. We can do this with Beany Babies, but US dollar is easier to make, so we convince people it has status power. People get it to look good. Easy peasy. There will always be demand for money as long as money = status.

But no need to make ordinary people suffer needlessly because of this. Hence basic income and credit.

when people had forgotten what money had been invented for, when the idea of increasing production by increasing the money supply, usually to finance wars, came to the minds of ancient rulers.

Do you seriously believe money predates war? LOL, even ants and chimps have wars, and they have no use for money. War predates humanity itself. The whole point of money was to attract attention of a warlord and sway him. And warlord comes from war.

Do you realize that what you are saying is that if they only managed to collect many more red pebbles they would be able to materially produce many more goods and services?

Yes, you are absolutely right. If you are only allowed to manufacture fishing rods when you have red pebbles, then more red pebbles would allow for more fishing rod production which would get them more fish and improve their material condition.

Here are your option chains.

1. Have more red pebbles -> make more rods -> enjoy more fish.

2. Don’t have red pebbles -> make more rods -> get shot in the head.

Obviously, option chain 1 improves your material condition and, option chain 2 doesn’t.

So yes, having more red pebbles would absolutely improve your ability to produce more goods and services. Not only that, pebble inflation is a requirement for growth, and has been baked into their economy from the start.

And of course “Muh Non Aggression Principle!!”. Well, that’s an aspirational goal, but this assumption has never been true in all of history.

And this is why libertarians don’t do well in politics. Libertarian logic is excellent, but assumptions are garbage. This is also why Communists do better in politics. Communists have terrible logic, but their assumptions are correct. Communists simply say “make rods, or get shot in the head”. And people get this.

People will put up with terrible logic (because most people are bad at logic), but they will not put up with bad assumptions – its like the Uncanny Valley of reasoning. If it doesn’t jive with people’s observed reality, they are not going to bite. Getting shot in the head for not having pebbles is the observed reality for most people, and has been throughout history. Non Aggression Principle is not. So Communist reality is closer to the real world for most people, despite bad logic and all.

So, Mr. Libertarian Textbook, you may be very clever and logical, but your assumptions keep you off track. 🙂

If it comes down to a fight between a Mexican cartel and Walmart Corporation, my money is on Walmart Corporation.

It boils down to ability to organize logistics and supply chains, and don’t get me wrong, cartels are no slouches, but they can not match WalMart .

Now, can hypothetical WalMart Dollar replace US Dollar as currency of choice? Yes, maybe. And maybe that’s the possibility Facebook was considering with their Libra currency attempt. But i don’t see it as likely.

WalMarts and Facebooks and Amazons will still need the service of US Military and that service transacts in US dollars. Things would have to get unimaginably bad before US military transitioned to WalMart dollars or Libras or whatever.

Then WalMart Corporate Treasury would replace Federal Reserve as central bank. Possible, yes. But it would literally be Mad Max world, it would be crazy out there for this to happen. So i think very unlikely.

You don’t understand. MMT uses fiscal policy to control inflation, not to promote it.

Ironically, that’s one of the few areas where I’m sceptical of MMT. At least in the US. I’m not an expert on tax policy in Europe. But in US, tax take is always 18% GDP. Doesn’t matter what rate is. So MMT won’t be able to take money out of the economy with taxes because tax take is always the same. I guess they could crash the economy and that would be deflationary, that would work, but they don’t quite put it in those terms.

Chile was never meant to be an experiment in Austrian economics

I never said Austrian, i said Neoliberal.

The financial sector in Chile is certainly much more developed than in Argentina and Chileans make extensive use of credit, although their figures are quite average compared to developed countries: https://stats.bis.org/statx/srs/table/f2.1

Chile is not a developed country. What a polite way of saying “Chileans are drowning in debt up to their eyeballs”.

Argentinians, on the other hand, don’t trust their banks (with good reason) and buy dollars, durable goods like cars or properties to protect their savings as much as they can. No wonder there is little credit available in the Argentinean economy.

What a polite way of saying “Argentinians are not in debt up to their eyeballs which is why they are poor”. I’m now going to flip your game back to you and say ” Argentinian state has debt that is quite average compared to developed countries, it is certainly less than USA”.

Argentina needs banking reform similar to what Nabiullina did in Russia, and cartelize the sector. And then Argentinians need to go shopping mindlessly on credit, just like Chileans did.

I understand that you are very enamored of your pet theories but why is it so difficult to accept that sometimes the conventional wisdom is right about simple things?

Nah, my pet theories predict macroeconomic outcomes far better than conventional wisdom, Mr. Texbook. 🙂 and the funny thing is, i don’t think you are wrong – you just apply sound logic and the wrong place at the wrong time and get off track. But in general, your thinking is proper.

Somebody, for a change in Latin America, managed to apply some reasonable economic policies and the result was quite favorable.

I agree. They probably cartelized their financial system, used copper as currency backstop, and then printed a large amount of private sector debt via commercial banking system. Pure neoliberalism, and successful application at that. But this approach is limited. Neoliberalism is not sustainable.

It looks like you lost the plot here. I was just saying that if you claim deficit=>growth and I show you several examples of surplus=>growth and deficit=>decline, your theory quite obviously has some holes in it that you can’t simply hand wave at.

My apologies if i didn’t explain it clearly. It is quite possible for small places to have surpluses as long as overall larger system runs a deficit to support demand. However, if larger system stops running deficits, those smaller places will be forced into deficit. This is universal. If US stops printing, it will go into depression. This will cause commodity price drop (oil at -$40/barrel was fun last year) and normally surplus countries (Saudi for example) will go into deficit.

No, not at all. One of the few certainties we can reasonably have in economics is that private actors are more efficient than the government.

Not always. When your private sector debt to GDP is like 300%, the only thing your private actors are doing is flipping same fake derivative financial asset back and forth to each other. They are useless and worthless. Government can do a lot more and a lot better with the funds.

Interesting idea. Perhaps those capital-starved countries in the 3rd World are just wasting their time and all they could do to get lots of factories, housing and infrastructure is print some money.

Chileans did. And it worked for them. Argentinians did not, and they are poorer for it. So yes, mathematically, printing some money is absolutely a requirement to having some money. You are getting it. 🙂

Only because the debt economy is so thoroly broken and the calculation of interest rates – differences in time preference – is impossible?

I wouldn’t say its broken, just reflects current reality of just in time economy. There is no future anymore in any meaningful sense. You either place an order right now, or you don’t. Factory either executes your order or idles and closes down. There’s no “stock” or savings to speak of, everything is made to order. So there is no need for savings, or capital, or interest rates anymore.

I am really hopeful for the glorious posthumanist era. But instead of gay automated genetic cyborg utopia, that will be a stillborn system, the system disintegrating or eating its own elites. Then Nature will reclaim what humanity has seized from her in excess during all these Industrial Revolutions…

Maybe. But unlikely any time soon.

Nominal GDP means NOTHING, and it can even be of negative value if it is used to hide the rot.

Nominal GDP means absolutely everything because if you don’t have that it means you are dead. Only the dead in the cemetery have no economic activity at all. Even Venezuelans are better off.

Nominal GDP is like temperature – if your body is at room temperature, all your other problems are irrelevant.

If you set up an usurious system, you need regular debt write-offs or jubilees to counteract debt build-up, otherwise it will be definite ruin whether the state or moneylenders/banks do it.

You do realize that we run some of the lowest real negative interest rates in world history, with more negative rates to come?

What you say is already happening lol. When interest rate on a loan is 0% or negative, there’s no usury anymore. Banks literally pay you to borrow. We are living the jubilee as we speak. Commercial banks are finished, dead, even if they don’t know it yet. New era is upon us, and it will be spearheaded by the government and central banks.

People can adopt whatever crypto they like, they are irrelevant. But if you think that IRS, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Walmart family will refuse US dollars, you are deluding yourself.

People are irrelevant. Your entire life, your civilization, is created for you by major corporations and they are not going to give up the US dollar because US dollar has aircraft carriers and Bitcoin doesn’t. Dollar is power.

How many Army divisions does crypto have?

That doesn’t mean dollar won’t evolve or course, central bank digital currency will be the way of of future once we eliminate commercial banking.

But central bank digital tokens will still be backed by military power, and corporations will follow that power in order to control it. People will fall in line. That is our future.

And barter in 80% service economy? LOL! What, lawyers will go on strike and refuse to sue? Singers won’t sing in bars? Oh the horror!

LOL there won’t be any barter. Or a revolution. Most people are irrelevant to modern production processes. They will get their basic incomes and they will be happy. There is no alternative.

US is not the same as Venezuela or Zimbabwe, so US has different priorities. There won’t be a similar run on currency – IRS and US Navy will make certain of that.

I get the historical enmities. However, at some point the more powerful & potent side should try to build some sort of bridge.

The consequences of intentionally provoking each other is illustrated by this Dune Mini Series clip. [MORE]

PEACE 😇

LOL as much as i like Polish people individually, Polish and Russian politics never worked as harmoniusly throughout the centuries. Germans and Russians though, when we are not trying to genocide each other, the trade and political relationships are very powerful. Germans and Russians are like that ying and yang thing.

BTW, Hong-Kong is another excellent example of a country refusing to accept Mal’s and MMT’s predictions

Sure it is.

Hong Kong: Private sector debt to GDP – 330%. Real estate bubble much?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QHKPAM770A

I mean, you realize that past some point, probably 100% private debt to GDP ratio, state can achieve much better results much more efficiently, right?

Neoliberalism does have efficiency advantages at lower debt to GDP ratios, but once you are talking 400-500% debt to GDP ratios, neoliberalism is dead. Flipping same asset a million times a second is pointless. State is far more efficient at resource allocation at this stage.

The intentionally offensive choice by Russian Elites to land NordStream 2 in Germany will materially worsen Polish-Russian relations.

????? WTF!?

You need an entire package – resources, institutions, human capital, and most importatly culture.

You need all of that stuff for national power and other important things. But not nominal GDP. Nominal GDP is simply the sum total of monetized human activity, it doesn’t have to be useful or meaningful.

Which is why its more of a meme number these days. BUT: nominal GDP drives investment decisions and investment is very real and very critical. Which is why nominal GDP is important and must never be allowed to drop.

Why bother building a factory if there are no customers buying stuff? Higher nominal GDP means there are still customers out there and building factories is worth it. It doesn’t matter if this is achieved via inflation or real growth.

??

Nominal GDP will skyrocket during inflationary period. Venezuelan nominal GDP increased dramatically measured in Bolivars and Zimbabwe nominal GDP increased dramatically in Zimbabwe dollars or whatever during their hyperinflationary events. Real GDP is a different story but we are not Venezuela or Zimbabwe so nominal GDP is the main focus here.

No, we can be certain that that is not the reason because Chile had been exporting large amounts of copper all throughout the 20th century but it only began overtaking its neighbors in GDP growth in the 80s, after it started applying a strict policy of fiscal and monetary discipline. Incidentally, the importance of copper exports as a percentage of GDP went down at the same time.

Chile is a poster child of neoliberalism. The term was invented for that country. Copper backdrops this but you are right, its not the whole story.

Let’s compare Chile and Argentina because everybody likes to hate on Argentina.

GDP per capita.
Chile: $15k
Argentina: $10k

Government debt to GDP 2020
Chile: 33%
Argentina: 102%