- Orlov: Placing The USA On A Collapse Continuum
Authored by Dmitry Orlov via The Unz Review,
The West is rotting!
Yes, maybe, but what a nice smell…Old Soviet joke
The word ‘catastrophe‘ has several meanings, but in its original meaning in Greek the word means a “sudden downturn” (in Greek katastrophē ‘overturning, sudden turn,’ from kata- ‘down’ + strophē ‘turning’). As for the word “superpower” it also has several possible definitions, but my preferred one is this one “Superpower is a term used to describe a state with a dominant position, which is characterized by its extensive ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined-means of economic, military, technological and cultural strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence. Traditionally, superpowers are preeminent among the great powers” this one, “an extremely powerful nation, especially one capable of influencing international events and the acts and policies of less powerful nations” or this one “an international governing body able to enforce its will upon the most powerful states“.
I have mentioned the very visible decline of the US and its associated Empire in many of my articles already, so I won’t repeat it here other than to say that the “ability to exert influence and impose its will” is probably the best criteria to measure the magnitude of the fall of the US since Trump came to power (the process was already started by Dubya and Obama, but it sure accelerated with The Donald). But I do want to use a metaphor to revisit the concept of catastrophe.
If you place an object in the middle of a table and then push it right to the edge, you will exert some amount of energy we can call “E1”. Then, if the edge of the table is smooth and you just push the object over the edge, you exercise a much smaller amount of energy we can call “E2”. And, in most cases (if the table is big enough), you will also find that E1 is much bigger than E2 yet E2, coming after E1 took place, triggered a much more dramatic event: instead of smoothly gliding over the table top, the object suddenly falls down and shatters. That sudden fall can also be called a “catastrophe”. This is also something which happens in history, take the example of the Soviet Union.
The fate of all empires…
Some readers might recall how Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly declared in the 1980s that he was sure that the Soviet regime would collapse and that he would return to Russia. He was, of course, vitriolically ridiculed by all the “specialists” and “experts”. After all, why would anybody want to listen to some weird Russian exile with politically suspicious ideas (there were rumors of “monarchism” and “anti-Semitism”) when the Soviet Union was an immense superpower, armed to the teeth with weapons, with an immense security service, with political allies and supporters worldwide? Not only that, but all the “respectable” specialists and experts were unanimous that, while the Soviet regime had various problems, it was very far from collapse. The notion that NATO would soon replace the Soviet military not only in eastern Europe, but even in part of the Soviet Union was absolutely unthinkable. And yet it all happened, very, very fast. I would argue that the Soviet union completely collapsed in the span of less than 4 short years: 1990-1993. How and why this happened is beyond the scope of this article, but what is undeniable is that in 1989 the Soviet Union was still an apparently powerful entity, while by the end of 1993, it was gone (smashed into pieces by the very nomenklatura which used to rule over it). How did almost everybody miss that?
Because ideologically-poisoned analysis leads to intellectual complacence, a failure of imagination and, generally, an almost total inability to even hypothetically look at possible outcomes. This is how almost all the “Soviet specialists” got it wrong (the KGB, by the way, had predicted this outcome and warned the Politburo, but the Soviet gerontocrats were ideologically paralyzed and were both unable, and often unwilling, to take any preventative action). The Kerensky masonic regime in 1917 Russia, the monarchy in Iran or the Apartheid regime in South Africa also collapsed very fast once the self-destruction mechanism was in place and launched.
You can think of that “regime self-destruction mechanism” as our E1 phase in our metaphor above. As for E2, you can think of it as whatever small-push like event which precipitates the quick and final collapse, apparently with great ease and minimum energy spent.
At this point it is important to explain what exactly a “final collapse” looks like. Some people are under the very mistaken assumption that a collapsed society or country looks like a Mad Max world. This is not so. The Ukraine has been a failed state for several years already, but it still exists on the map. People live there, work, most people still have electricity (albeit not 24/7), a government exists, and, at least officially, law and order is maintained. This kind of collapsed society can go on for years, maybe decades, but it is in a state of collapse nonetheless, as it has reached all the 5 Stages of Collapse as defined by Dmitry Orlov in his seminal book “The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit” where he mentions the following 5 stages of collapse:
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Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.
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Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.
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Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.
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Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.
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Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in “the goodness of humanity” is lost.
Having personally visited Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, and seen the Russia of the early 1990s, I can attest that a society can completely collapse while maintaining a lot of the external appearances of a normal still functioning society. Unlike the Titanic, most collapsed regimes don’t fully sink. They remain about half under water, and half above, possibly with an orchestra still playing joyful music. And in the most expensive top deck cabins, a pretty luxurious lifestyle can be maintained by the elites. But for most of the passengers such a collapse results in poverty, insecurity, political instability and a huge loss in welfare. Furthermore, in terms of motion, a half-sunk ship is no ship at all.
Here is the crucial thing: as long as the ship’s PA systems keep announcing great weather and buffet brunches, and as long as most of the passengers remain in their cabins and watch TV instead of looking out of the window, the illusion of normalcy can be maintained for a fairly long while, even after a collapse. During the E1 phase outlined above, most passengers will be kept in total ignorance (lest they riot or protest) and only when E2 strikes (totally unexpectedly for most passengers) does reality eventually destroy the ignorance and illusions of the brainwashed passengers.
Obama was truly the beginning of the end
I have lived in the US from 1986-1991 and from 2002 to today and there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the country has undergone a huge decline over the past decades. In fact, I would argue that the US has been living under E1 condition since at least Dubya and that this process dramatically accelerated under Obama and Trump. I believe that we reached the E2 “edge of the table” moment in 2018 and that from now on even a relatively minor incident can result in a sudden downturn (i.e. a “catastrophe”). Still, I decided to check with the undisputed specialist of this issue and so I emailed Dmitry Orlov and asked him the following question:
In your recent article “The Year the Planet Flipped Over” you paint a devastating picture of the state of the Empire:
It is already safe to declare Trump’s plan to Make America Great Again (MAGA) a failure. Beneath the rosy statistics of US economic growth hides the hideous fact that it is the result of a tax holiday granted to transnational corporations to entice them to repatriate their profits. While this hasn’t helped them (their stocks are currently cratering) it has been a disaster for the US government as well as for the economic system as whole. Tax receipts have shrunk. The budget deficit for 2018 exceeds $779 billion.
Meanwhile, the trade wars which Trump initiated have caused the trade deficit to increase by 17% from the year before. Plans to repatriate industrial production from low-cost countries remain vaporous because the three key elements which China had as it industrialized (cheap energy, cheap labor and low cost of doing business) are altogether missing. Government debt is already beyond reasonable and its expansion is still accelerating, with just the interest payments set to exceed half a trillion a year within a decade.
This trajectory does not bode well for the continued existence of the United States as a going concern. Nobody, either in the United States or beyond, has the power to significantly alter this trajectory. Trump’s thrashing about may have moved things along faster than they otherwise would have, at least in the sense of helping convince the entire world that the US is selfish, feckless, ultimately self-destructive and generally unreliable as a partner. In the end it won’t matter who was president of the US—it never has. Among those the US president has succeeded in hurting most are his European allies. His attacks on Russian energy exports to Europe, on European car manufacturers and on Europe’s trade with Iran have caused a fair amount of damage, both political and economic, without compensating for it with any perceived or actual benefits.
Meanwhile, as the globalist world order, which much of Europe’s population appears ready to declare a failure, begins to unravel, the European Union is rapidly becoming ungovernable, with established political parties unable to form coalitions with ever-more-numerous populist upstarts. It is too early to say that the EU has already failed altogether, but it already seems safe to predict that within a decade it will no longer remain as a serious international factor.
Although the disastrous quality and the ruinous mistakes of Europe’s own leadership deserve a lot of the blame, some of it should rest with the erratic, destructive behavior of their transoceanic Big Brother. The EU has already morphed into a strictly regional affair, unable to project power or entertain any global geopolitical ambitions. Same goes for Washington, which is going to either depart voluntarily (due to lack of funds) or get chased out from much of the world.
The departure from Syria is inevitable whether Trump, under relentless pressure from his bipartisan warmongers, backtracks on this commitment or not. Now that Syria has been armed with Russia’s up-to-date air defense weapons the US no longer maintains air superiority there, and without air superiority the US military is unable to do anything. Afghanistan is next; there, it seems outlandish to think that the Washingtonians will be able to achieve any sort of reasonable accommodation with the Taliban.
Their departure will spell the end of Kabul as a center of corruption where foreigners steal humanitarian aid and other resources. Somewhere along the way the remaining US troops will also be pulled out of Iraq, where the parliament, angered by Trump’s impromptu visit to a US base, recently voted to expel them. And that will put paid to the entire US adventure in the Middle East since 9/11: $4,704,439,588,308 has been squandered, to be precise, or $14,444 for every man, woman and child in the US.
The biggest winners in all of this are, obviously, the people of the entire region, because they will no longer be subjected to indiscriminate US harassment and bombardment, followed by Russia, China and Iran, with Russia solidifying its position as the ultimate arbiter of international security arrangements thanks to its unmatched military capabilities and demonstrated knowhow for coercion to peace. Syria’s fate will be decided by Russia, Iran and Turkey, with the US not even invited to the talks. Afghanistan will fall into the sphere of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. And the biggest losers will be former US regional allies, first and foremost Israel, followed by Saudi Arabia.
My question for you is this: where would you place the US (or the Empire) on your 5 stages of decline and do you believe that the US (or the Empire) can reverse that trend?
Here is Dmitry’s reply:
Collapse, at each stage, is a historical process that takes time to run its course as the system adapts to changing circumstances, compensates for its weaknesses and finds ways to continue functioning at some level. But what changes rather suddenly is faith or, to put it in more businesslike terms, sentiment. A large segment of the population or an entire political class within a country or the entire world can function based on a certain set of assumptions for much longer than the situation warrants but then over a very short period of time switch to a different set of assumptions. All that sustains the status quo beyond that point is institutional inertia. It imposes limits on how fast systems can change without collapsing entirely. Beyond that point, people will tolerate the older practices only until replacements for them can be found.
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.
Internationally, the major change in sentiment in the world has to do with the role of the US dollar (and, to a lesser extent, the Euro and the Yen—the other two reserve currencies of the three-legged globalist central banker stool). The world is transitioning to the use of local currencies, currency swaps and commodities markets backed by gold. The catalyst for this change of sentiment was provided by the US administration itself which sawed through its own perch by its use of unilateral sanctions. By using its control over dollar-based transactions to block international transactions it doesn’t happen to like it forced other countries to start looking for alternatives. Now a growing list of countries sees throwing off the shackles of the US dollar as a strategic goal. Russia and China use the ruble and the yuan for their expanding trade; Iran sells oil to India for rupees. Saudi Arabia has started to accept the yuan for its oil.
This change has many knock-on effects. If the dollar is no longer needed to conduct international trade, other nations no longer have hold large quantities of it in reserve. Consequently, there is no longer a need to buy up large quantities of US Treasury notes. Therefore, it becomes unnecessary to run large trade surpluses with the US, essentially conducting trade at a loss. Further, the attractiveness of the US as an export market drops and the cost of imports to the US rises, thereby driving up cost inflation. A vicious spiral ensues in which the ability of the US government to borrow internationally to finance the gaping chasm of its various deficits becomes impaired. Sovereign default of the US government and national bankruptcy then follow.
The US may still look mighty, but its dire fiscal predicament coupled with its denial of the inevitability of bankruptcy, makes it into something of a Blanche DuBois from the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She was “always dependent on the kindness of strangers” but was tragically unable to tell the difference between kindness and desire. In this case, the desire is for national advantage and security, and to minimize risk by getting rid of an unreliable trading partner.
How quickly or slowly this comes to pass is difficult to guess at and impossible to calculate. It is possible to think of the financial system in terms of a physical analogue, with masses of funds traveling at some velocity having a certain inertia (p = mv) and with forces acting on that mass to accelerate it along a different trajectory (F = ma). It is also possible to think of it in terms of hordes of stampeding animals who can change course abruptly when panicked. The recent abrupt moves in the financial markets, where trillions of dollars of notional, purely speculative value have been wiped out within weeks, are more in line with the latter model.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.
Within the US there is really no other alternative than the market. There are a few rustic enclaves, mostly religious communities, that can feed themselves, but that’s a rarity. For everyone else there is no choice but to be a consumer. Consumers who are broke are called “bums,” but they are still consumers. To the extent that the US has a culture, it is a commercial culture in which the goodness of a person is based on the goodly sums of money in their possession. Such a culture can die by becoming irrelevant (when everyone is dead broke) but by then most of the carriers of this culture are likely to be dead too. Alternatively, it can be replaced by a more humane culture that isn’t entirely based on the cult of Mammon—perhaps, dare I think, through a return to a pre-Protestant, pre-Catholic Christian ethic that values people’s souls above objects of value?
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.
All is very murky at the moment, but I would venture to guess that most people in the US are too distracted, too stressed and too preoccupied with their own vices and obsessions to pay much attention to the political realm. Of the ones they do pay attention, a fair number of them seem clued in to the fact that the US is not a democracy at all but an elites-only sandbox in which transnational corporate and oligarchic interests build and knock down each others’ sandcastles.
The extreme political polarization, where two virtually identical pro-capitalist, pro-war parties pretend to wage battle by virtue-signaling may be a symptom of the extremely decrepit state of the entire political arrangement: people are made to watch the billowing smoke and to listen to the deafening noise in the hopes that they won’t notice that the wheels are no longer turning.
The fact that what amounts to palace intrigue—the fracas between the White House, the two houses of Congress and a ghoulish grand inquisitor named Mueller—has taken center stage is uncannily reminiscent of various earlier political collapses, such as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire or of the fall and the consequent beheading of Louis XVI. The fact that Trump, like the Ottoman worthies, stocks his harem with East European women, lends an eerie touch. That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilettes Jaunesmovement (just as an example) are definitely not.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.
I have been saying for some years now that within the US social collapse has largely run its course, although whether people actually believe that is an entire matter entirely. Defining “your people” is rather difficult. The symbols are still there—the flag, the Statue of Liberty and a predilection for iced drinks and heaping plates of greasy fried foods—but the melting pot seems to have suffered a meltdown and melted all the way to China. At present half the households within the US speak a language other than English at home, and a fair share of the rest speak dialects of English that are not mutually intelligible with the standard North American English dialect of broadcast television and university lecturers.
Throughout its history as a British colony and as a nation the US has been dominated by the Anglo ethnos. The designation “ethnos” is not an ethnic label. It is not strictly based on genealogy, language, culture, habitat, form of government or any other single factor or group of factors. These may all be important to one extent or another, but the viability of an ethnos is based solely on its cohesion and the mutual inclusivity and common purpose of its members. The Anglo ethnos reached its zenith in the wake of World War II, during which many social groups were intermixed in the military and their more intelligent members.
Fantastic potential was unleashed when privilege—the curse of the Anglo ethnos since its inception—was temporarily replaced with merit and the more talented demobilized men, of whatever extraction, were given a chance at education and social advancement by the GI Bill. Speaking a new sort of American English based on the Ohio dialect as a Lingua Franca, these Yanks—male, racist, sexist and chauvinistic and, at least in their own minds, victorious—were ready to remake the entire world in their own image.
They proceeded to flood the entire world with oil (US oil production was in full flush then) and with machines that burned it. Such passionate acts of ethnogenesis are rare but not unusual: the Romans who conquered the entire Mediterranean basin, the barbarians who then sacked Rome, the Mongols who later conquered most of Eurasia and the Germans who for a very brief moment possessed an outsized Lebensraum are other examples.
And now it is time to ask: what remains of this proud conquering Anglo ethnos today? We hear shrill feminist cries about “toxic masculinity” and minorities of every stripe railing against “whitesplaining” and in response we hear a few whimpers but mostly silence. Those proud, conquering, virile Yanks who met and fraternized with the Red Army at the River Elbe on April 25, 1945—where are they? Haven’t they devolved into a sad little subethnos of effeminate, porn-addicted overgrown boys who shave their pubic hair and need written permission to have sex without fear of being charged with rape?
Will the Anglo ethnos persist as a relict, similar to how the English have managed to hold onto their royals (who are technically no longer even aristocrats since they now practice exogamy with commoners)? Or will it get wiped out in a wave of depression, mental illness and opiate abuse, its glorious history of rapine, plunder and genocide erased and the statues of its war heros/criminals knocked down? Only time will tell.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in “the goodness of humanity” is lost.
The term “culture” means many things to many people, but it is more productive to observe cultures than to argue about them. Cultures are expressed through people’s stereotypical behaviors that are readily observable in public. These are not the negative stereotypes often used to identify and reject outsiders but the positive stereotypes—cultural standards of behavior, really—that serve as requirements for social adequacy and inclusion. We can readily assess the viability of a culture by observing the stereotypical behaviors of its members.
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Do people exist as a single continuous, inclusive sovereign realm or as a set of exclusive, potentially warring enclaves segregated by income, ethnicity, education level, political affiliation and so on? Do you see a lot of walls, gates, checkpoints, security cameras and “no trespassing” signs? Is the law of the land enforced uniformly or are there good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods and no-go zones where even the police fear to tread?
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Do random people thrown together in public spontaneously enter into conversation with each other and are comfortable with being crowded together, or are they aloof and fearful, and prefer to hide their face in the little glowing rectangle of their smartphone, jealously guarding their personal space and ready to regard any encroachment on it as an assault?
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Do people remain good-natured and tolerant toward each other even when hard-pressed or do they hide behind a façade of tense, superficial politeness and fly into a rage at the slightest provocation? Is conversation soft in tone, gracious and respectful or is it loud, shrill, rude and polluted with foul language? Do people dress well out of respect for each other, or to show off, or are they all just déclassé slobs—even the ones with money?
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Observe how their children behave: are they fearful of strangers and trapped in a tiny world of their own or are they open to the world and ready to treat any stranger as a surrogate brother or sister, aunt or uncle, grandmother or grandfather without requiring any special introduction? Do the adults studiously ignore each others’ children or do they spontaneously act as a single family?
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If there is a wreck on the road, do they spontaneously rush to each others’ rescue and pull people out before the wreck explodes, or do they, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, “get on the phone and call up some flakes” who “rush on over and wreck it some more”?
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If there is a flood or a fire, do the neighbors take in the people who are rendered homeless, or do they allow them to wait for the authorities to show up and bus them to some makeshift government shelter?
It is possible to quote statistics or to provide anecdotal evidence to assess the state and the viability of a culture, but your own eyes and other senses can provide all the evidence you need to make that determination for yourself and to decide how much faith to put in “the goodness of humanity” that is evident in the people around you.
Dmity concluded his reply by summarizing his view like this:
Cultural and social collapse are very far along. Financial collapse is waiting for a trigger. Commercial collapse will happen in stages some of which—food deserts, for instance—have already happened in many places. Political collapse will only become visible once the political class gives up. It’s not as simple as saying which stage we are at. They are all happening in parallel, to one extent or another.
My own (totally subjective) opinion is that the US has already reached stages 1 through 4, and that there are signs that stage 5 has begun; mainly in big cities as US small towns and rural areas (Trump’s power base, by the way) are still struggling to maintain the norms and behaviors one could observe in the US of the 1980s. When I have visitors from Europe they always comment how friendly and welcoming US Americans are (true, I live in small-town in East-Central Florida, not in Miami…). These are the communities which voted for Trump because they said “we want our country back”. Alas, instead of giving them their country back, Trump gifted it to the Neocons…
Conclusion: connecting the dots; or not
Frankly, the dots are all over the place; it is really hard to miss them. However, for the doubleplusgoodthinking“ideological drone” they remain largely invisible, and this is not due to any eyesight problem, but due to that drone’s total inability to connect the dots. These are the kind of folks who danced on the deck of the Titanic while it was sinking. For them, when the inevitable catastrophe comes, it will be a total, mind-blowing, surprise. But, until that moment, they will keep on denying the obvious, no matter how obvious that obvious has become.
Don’t expect these two losers to fix anything, they will only make things worse…
In the meantime, the US ruling elites are locked into an ugly internal struggle which only further weakens the US. What is so telling is that the Democrats are still stuck with their same clueless, incompetent and infinitely arrogant leadership, in spite of the fact that everybody knows that the Democratic Party is in deep crisis and that new faces are desperately needed. But no, they are still completely stuck in their old ways and the same gang of gerontocrats continues to rule the party apparatus.
That is another surefire sign of degeneracy: when a regime can only produce incompetent, often old, leaders who are completely out of touch with reality and who blame their own failures on internal (“deplorables”) and external (“the Russians”) factors. Again, think of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, the Apartheid regime in South Africa under F. W. de Klerk, or the Kerensky regime in 1917 Russia.
As for the Republicans, they are basically a subsidiary of the Israeli Likud Party. Just take a look at the long list of losers the Likud produced at home, and you will get a sense of what they can do in its US colony.
Eventually the US will rebound; I have no doubts about that at all. This is a big country with millions of immensely talented people, immense natural resources and no credible threat to it’s territory. But that can only happen after a real regime change (as opposed to a change in Presidential Administration) which, itself, is only going to happen after an “E2 catastrophe” collapse.
Until then, we will all be waiting for Godot.
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- AT&T Stops Selling Location Data Of Americans To Bounty Hunters
After Motherboard gave a bounty hunter a phone number and a few hundred bucks, their contact responded with a screenshot of Google Maps, containing a highlighted circle indicating the phone’s exact location.
Motherboard then released a report on Tuesday, showing how T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling their customers’ location data, and some of that data was ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and unauthorized people, letting them track virtually any phone in the US.
In a swift response to the report, several senators requested the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to investigate, and demanded greater oversight and regulation of the telecommunications industry.
On Thursday, AT&T released a statement indicating that it is halting the sale of all location data to so-called location aggregators, firms that sit in the supply chain between the telcos and clients.
“In light of recent reports about the misuse of location services, we have decided to eliminate all location aggregation services – even those with clear consumer benefits,” AT&T said in a statement. “We are immediately eliminating the remaining services and will be done in March.”
Some companies use the location data service for legitimate purposes, such as roadside assistance to find stranded customers, or financial companies to detect fraud. But, according to AT&T’s statement Thursday, “all location aggregation services” will be cut off.
In Motherboard’s report, the smartphone they located was using the T-Mobile network. For Motherboard’s staff to receive the location, the data traveled through a complex system of companies, starting with T-Mobile, before going to a location aggregator called Zumigo. Zumigo then sold it to a firm called Microbilt, which provides access to a variety of industries, including bounty hunters. The bounty hunter then sold it to a source, and that source finally sold it to Motherboard.
After the release of Motherboard’s investigation, T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted that his company is also going to cut off all location aggregators. Verizon said in a statement Thursday that it, too, will eliminate the service. Sprint has so far not released any comments on the issue.
The announcement from major telcos reflects a significant victory for privacy advocates who have sounded the alarm that corporate America has mishandled consumers’ data, often to sell it off for an economic gain.
“Carriers are always responsible for who ends up with their customers’ data – it’s not enough to lay the blame for misuse on downstream companies,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) in a statement. “The time for taking these companies at their word is long past. Congress needs to pass strong legislation to protect Americans’ privacy and finally hold corporations accountable when they put your safety at risk by letting stalkers and criminals track your phone on the dark web.”
Other critics said consumers have an “absolute right” to the privacy of their data.
“I’m extraordinarily troubled by reports of this system of repackaging and reselling location data to unregulated third-party services for potentially nefarious purposes,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) said in a statement. “If true, this practice represents a legitimate threat to our personal and national security.”
Harris demanded that the FCC immediately open an investigation.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel tweeted Thursday, “The FCC needs to immediately investigate reports of this system of repackaging and reselling location data to unregulated third party services and take the necessary steps to protect Americans’ privacy.”
In another tweet, Rosenworcel added: “It shouldn’t be that you pay a few hundred dollars to a bounty hunter and then they can tell you in real time where a phone is within a few hundred meters. That’s not right. This entire ecosystem needs oversight.”
- The Internet Of Things Data Explosion
A decade ago, it likely seemed unthinkable that our refrigerators could tell us when we were running low on milk, our doorbells could record our visitors, and our audio speaker system could also “accidentally” order toys online. And yet, here we are in the era of the “Internet of Things”, sometimes abbreviated as IoT, where these sorts of devices have exploded in popularity and are literally everywhere.
The Internet of Things typically refers to adding network connectivity to everyday objects or devices that previously were not internet-enabled. As Tony Fadell, founder IoT trailblazing company Nest commented, a hallmark of the Internet of Things space is to work on “unloved” and sometimes “utilitarian” devices (think smoke detectors, doorbells, and other sensors) and add never-before-possible functionality via network connectivity.
And while consumer IoT has received a lot of attention with the prevalence of smart speakers, televisions, and household appliances, the Internet of Things has also arrived at the enterprise as companies are using the internet to track expensive assets and optimize logistics and manufacturing.
The growth of Internet of Things in terms of number of devices, revenue generated, and data produced has been stunning, but most predictions expect that growth to accelerate. The number of connected devices is expected to grow to 50 billion in 2020 (from 8.7 billion in 2012) and the annual revenue from IoT sales is forecast to hit $1.6 trillion by 2025 (from just $200 billion today).
But perhaps most notable of all, the amount of data produced by Internet of Things is expected to reach 4.4 zettabytes by 2020, from just 0.1 zettabytes in 2013.
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Before diving into the data, it’s worth spending a moment clarifying what we consider to be an Internet of Things device, and what isn’t. In this report, we adopt the definition that IoT devices are ones that were traditionally not connected to the internet (“dumb” devices), but are now network connected, enabling a new set of applications.
For example, even though smartphone phones and computers are Internet-enabled, we don’t consider them as IoT devices because they “traditionally” have been so. At the other end of the extreme, an internet-enabled toaster oven would be considered an Internet of Things device in this report because that appliance hasn’t typically been connected to a network.
With that definition in mind, just how fast is the IoT market growing? With any market forecast, there are a number of competing statistics and predictions, but all of them indicate the growth has been blazing fast and may even accelerate.
According to the NCTA, the trade association for broadband and television providers, the installed base of connected devices is expected to grow to over 50 billion by 2020, an increase of almost 500% from 2012.
Nearly every market forecast shows the industry growing to a trillion dollar plus industry in the next decade. One of the more conservative estimates from market research firm IoT Analytics pegs it growing to a $1.6 trillion industry by 2025.
If $1.6 trillion in revenue by 2025 seems like an aggressive estimate, keep in mind that by that year, McKinsey estimates the market to reach $6.1 trillion, IDC estimates $7.1 trillion and Cisco estimates $14.4 trillion.
How can a market grow from relatively small to a multi-trillion dollar industry within a decade? Given that the ambition of Internet of Things is to replace every asset in the economy with a networked-replacement, the industry is targeting a very large market.
Consumer Vs. Enterprise Landscape
Not only is IoT a very large market, but it targets both consumer and enterprise devices and applications. While consumer IoT devices often get most of the attention in the popular press, enterprise IoT has the potential to transform the operations of nearly every industry in the economy.
On the consumer side, what are the most popular IoT devices? A report by market research firm Walker Sands shows the ownership rate of various connected devices among U.S. households in 2017. While not strictly part of the “Internet of Things,” smartphones and tablets are included in the chart below for reference.
Though no nowhere near as popular as smartphones and tablets, the most popular IoT devices of streaming device, home automation, and smart speaker are found in over 20% of homes in the United States.
Part of what makes predicting the size of the IoT market difficult is that some of the categories are growing at tremendous rates. Take smart speakers, for example, a category that barely existed a few years ago may sell 56 million units in 2018, eight times more than their 2016 sales, as tech giants Amazon, Google and Apple have jumped into what has become a huge category.
Smart speakers may stand out as an exceptionally fast growing category, but it’s not alone. Televisions for example, have gone from “dumb” screen monitors to ones that can play internet video via direct capability or through a streaming device in less than a decade. There is strong reason to believe that in the future, nearly all consumer devices that could be connected to the internet, will.
In the enterprise, the promise of greater efficiency gains from IoT, is part of what is underlying the predictions of why IoT could be a multi-trillion dollar industry in the next decade. Thirty years ago, understanding where your assets where, what they were doing, and what was wrong was them would have been cost prohibitive. Today, given the proliferation of low cost sensors and internet connectivity, this kind of knowledge is commonplace.
There are three main use cases for the Internet of Things in the enterprise:
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Monitoring and Diagnostics: Improved machine availability with real-time monitoring and diagnostics.
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Predictive Maintenance: Get notifications and diagnose alarms and anomalies in real-time to accelerate issue response without affecting production.
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Industrial Security: Find the source of security problems before equipment fails and avoid the costly downtime associated with breaches.
Beyond individual companies embracing the Internet of Things, we’re also seeing large scale industrial projects with IoT at their core. Research firm IoT Analytics, compiled a list of 1,600 known industrial IoT projects and categorized them according to these segments:
The largest category of industrial IoT is Smart City, which often involves projects involving traffic monitoring, parking management, and other applications that give governments analytics into the workings of their cities. Rounding out the top three industrial IoT use cases are Connect Industry (IoT devices in non-factory environments like a mining operation) and Connect Buildings (typically using monitoring to make building energy use more efficient).
The Data Cometh
Whether it’s for the consumer, enterprise or industrial, IoT devices by their very nature produce an enormous amount of data. As would be expected given the steep expected growth of the IoT market, the amount of data that will be generated by the Internet of Things will be truly enormous.
According to IDC, the data generated from IoT devices is currently growing from 0.1 zettabytes in 2013 to 4.4 zettabytes in 2020:
By this estimate, data generated by IoT devices in increasing nearly 50 times in just seven years, posing some spectacular challenges for the companies tasked with being stewards for this data.
IoT executive Steve Wilkes highlights the three main problems companies face in light of this IoT data explosion:
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Data Integration: Using this newly created IoT data in concert with other enterprise data sources like log files, message cues, and transactional data.
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Managing Data: Currently, there isn’t enough storage in the entire world to meet the future expected data storage needs from IoT devices. Creating a data management process to decide what data to store and how to access it for analysis will pose major decisions for these companies.
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Data Security: IoT devices captures highly personal data from consumers and highly proprietary data from enterprises. As the last decade of high profile hacks has demonstrated–where there is data, there is bound to be people trying to steal that data.
Conclusion
By all accounts, the growth of IoT has been exponential. The market is expected to grow from a couple of hundred billion dollars to over a trillion dollars in under a decade. A category like smart speakers, which was a small niche a few years ago, is now a ubiquitous presence in homes across the world. And as companies invest in capital improvements, those assets are increasingly equipped with internet capability to monitoring, maintenance and optimization purposes.
The Internet of Things revolution is here and it’s only getting bigger. And that means one enormous by-product from all these connected devices: data. The companies that create and deploy IoT devices will increasingly find themselves pondering not just how to use IoT devices but what to do with the data and how to secure it from threats.
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- Viva La Revolution! Fidel Castro's Grandson Flaunts Wealth On Instagram
Tony Castro Ulloa, the grandson of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, recently posted photos of his private life on a private Instagram account showing frequent trips around the world, driving luxury cars, sailing on superyachts, and dining at expensive restaurants.
The photos, posted several months ago, have sparked outrage on social media after Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald published them.
The decadent lifestyle of Tony Castro is not sitting well with many Cubans on the island or exiled in South Florida, who say most Cubans live on an average salary of $30 a month and rationed food.
“All the animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” Pedro Pérez wrote on his Facebook page, the Miami Herald reported. The quote is from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” which is banned in Cuba.
Castro family members barely show their faces in public, except Antonio Castro and now his son Tony.
Antonio is an orthopedic surgeon, and his son is a model, which has led some people on social media to think the lavish pictures are from photo shoots.
In 2015, Antonio was photographed near a Greek resort island of Mykonos, aboard a superyacht in Bodrum, Turkey, where he rented five luxury suites in one of the most expensive hotels, according to media reports.
The Miami Herald said Tony is a big traveler. His photos on Instagram show him in Mexico, Spain, Panama, and various places in Cuba. His girlfriend accompanied him on the trips.
The first public displays of Tony was in 2016 as Chanel was preparing for a fashion show along Havana’s famous Prado Boulevard.
The 1959 Cuban Revolution was led by Tony’ grandfather dictator Fidel Castro who went on to rule the country for five decades until his death in 2016.
By 1962, Fidel implemented a ration food system that most Cuban families still rely on today for their food intake.
Last month, Cuba’s second-in-command, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, said “the impact of the embargo, which has strengthened under the Trump administration,” has triggered a nationwide shortage of bread, eggs, and other essential goods.
While many Cubans are experiencing a food shortage across the communist country, it sure seems that Tony’s lavish lifestyle, exposed by American media outlets, might not settle well in the empty stomachs of Cubans.
- As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, The Party's Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic And Pro-War Than Republicans
Via Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S December 18 announcement that he intends to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria produced some isolated support in the anti-war wings of both parties, but largely provoked bipartisan outrage among in Washington’s reflexively pro-war establishment.
Both GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the country’s most reliable war supporters, and Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient hawkishness, condemned Trump’s decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror jargon.
But while official Washington united in opposition, new polling data from Morning Consult/Politico shows that a large plurality of Americans support Trump’s Syria withdrawal announcement: 49 percent support to 33 percent opposition.
That’s not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the proposition that “the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm’s way” far more than they agree with the pro-war view that “the U.S. needs to keep troops in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to help support our allies fight terrorism and maintain our foreign policy interests in the region.”
But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent.
A similar gap is seen among those who voted Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections (28 percent support withdrawal while 54 percent oppose it), as opposed to the widespread support for withdrawal among 2018 GOP voters: 74 percent to 18 percent.
Identical trends can be seen on the question of Trump’s announced intention to withdraw half of the U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, where Democrats are far more supportive of keeping troops there than Republicans and independents.
This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan:
With Trump rather than Obama now advocating troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of this has changed. The new polling data shows far more support for troop withdrawal among Republicans and independents, while Democrats are now split or even opposed. Among 2016 Trump voters, there is massive support for withdrawal: 81 percent to 11 percent; Clinton voters, however, oppose the removal of troops from Afghanistan by a margin of 37 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed.
This latest poll is far from aberrational. As the Huffington Post’s Ariel Edwards-Levy documented early this week, separate polling shows a similar reversal by Democrats on questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.
While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining. “Those who voted for Democrat Clinton now said by a 42-point margin that the U.S. had a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria involving ISIS,” Edwards-Levy wrote, “while Trump voters said by a 16-point margin that the nation had no such responsibility.” (Similar trends can be seen among GOP voters, whose support for intervention in Syria has steadily declined as Trump has moved away from his posture of the last two years — escalating bombings in both Syria and Iraq and killing far more civilians, as he repeatedly vowed to do during the campaign — to his return to his other campaign pledge to remove troops from the region.)
This is, of course, not the first time that Democratic voters have wildly shifted their “beliefs” based on the party affiliation of the person occupying the Oval Office. The party’s base spent the Bush-Cheney years denouncing war on terror policies, such as assassinations, drones, and Guantánamo as moral atrocities and war crimes, only to suddenly support those policies once they became hallmarks of the Obama presidency.
But what’s happening here is far more insidious. A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he’s willing to allow the Bad Countries to take over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.
At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives, even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Instituteand has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. By far the most influential liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents, while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a “national security liberal” who was “all about counterterrorism”).
All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It’s inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation — which will endure long after Trump is gone — is well under way.
- California's Monarch Butterfly Population Collapses By 86% In One Year
In 1981 the Xerces Society, a non-profit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates, counted more than 1 million Western Monarchs wintering throughout California.
The group’s most recent count, over Thanksgiving weekend, estimated 20,500 Western Monarchs in 2018, an 86% decline from the nearly 148,000 spotted the previous year, according to an annual census conducted by the Xerces Society, SFGate reported last Sunday.
Researchers with the conservation group called the number “disturbingly low” and potentially “catastrophic,” in a statement.
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus plexippus) are the most well-known butterflies species in North America. The Western Monarch typically migrates to California each winter, and researchers for the conservation group count its population in the state each November.
“A ubiquitous sight in gardens, prairies, and natural areas from coast to coast, their arrival in northern states and Canadian provinces is viewed by many as a welcome sign of the change in seasons from spring to summer.
Renowned for their long-distance seasonal migration and spectacular winter gatherings in Mexico and California, the Monarch butterfly population has recently declined to dangerously low levels,” Xerces Society said on their website.
Biologist Emma Pelton, who oversees the November count, told The New York Times that the 2018 count is “potentially catastrophic” when combined with the 97% collapse in the overall Monarch population since the 1980s.
“We think this is a huge wake-up call,” Pelton said, adding that ecological changes impact the butterflies and serve as a forward leading indicator for the overall health of an ecosystem.
The volatile climate in California in the last decade has threatened the butterflies, the Times reported. The state also experienced the deadliest wildfire season on record, causing widespread smoke damage and poor air quality.
“The major stressors affecting Western Monarch include habitat loss (overwintering and breeding), pesticides (herbicides and insecticides), and climate change including increased drought severity and frequency,” Xerces said in a statement.
If nothing is done to correct the trend, the Monarch butterflies could face extinction, Pelton warned.
“We don’t think it is too late to act,” she said. “But everyone needs to step up their effort.”
However, California’s monarch butterfly population is not the only insect in collapse; there are reports that the North American Honey Bee has experienced widespread Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen.
While the exact cause of these die-offs is not entirely understood, a recent report has linked Monsanto’s Glyphosates to the global decline in honey bees.
Monarchs and honey bees are critical components of the food chain, and if massive die-offs continue, well, it could disrupt the food supply for humans.
- The Age Of Trump Clearly Shows That Narrative Is Everything
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:
“Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!”
The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump’s supporters, despite the fact that it says essentially nothing since “eventually” could mean anything.
Indeed, it’s looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president’s stated agenda to withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political aisle, just like they always do:
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Trump supporters are acting like he’s a swamp-draining, war-ending peacenik…
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…his enemies are acting like he’s feeding a bunch of Kurds on conveyor belts into Turkish meat grinders to be made into sausages for Vladimir Putin’s breakfast, when in reality nothing has changed and may not change at all.
How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.
Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
This has consistently been the story throughout Trump’s presidency: a heavy emphasis on words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he’s interacting entirely with perceptions and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often claims he’s “never said” things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don’t matter in this media environment, only narrative does.
Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled “A Look Back at Clapper’s Jan. 2017 ‘Assessment’ on Russia-gate” reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he’s said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior.
That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it’s completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar, from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It’s pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the “collusion” story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there’s no evidence that it did.
So now you’ve got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump’s opposition to attack him on his insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earthif any little thing goes wrong, but they don’t. Because this is all about narrative and not facts, Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which existed in secretive US government agencies long before the 2016 election.
And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump’s presidency. Not any of the things people tell me I’m supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been highlighting in a very clear way how we’re all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all the time.
Humanity lives in a world of mental narrative. We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what’s going on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn’t shaped by human mental narrative.
This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell themselves about what’s going on in the world using mass media control and financial political influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more efficiently than any dictatorship.
So now America has a president who is escalating a dangerous cold war against Russia, who is working to prosecute Julian Assange and shut down WikiLeaks, who is expanding the same war on whistleblowers and Orwellian surveillance network that was expanded by Bush and Obama before him, who has expanded existing wars and made no tangible move as yet to scale them back, who is advancing the longstanding neocon agenda of regime change in Iran with starvation sanctions and CIA covert ops, and yet the two prevailing narratives about him are that he’s either (A) a swamp-draining, establishment-fighting hero of peace or that he’s (B) a treasonous Putin lackey who isn’t nearly hawkish enough toward Russia.
See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be more different from what’s actually going on, and the only reason they’re the dominant narratives is because an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over the stories that are told by the political/media class.
The narrative matrix of America’s political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It’s psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they’re at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.
Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.
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- Costco Can't Keep Its 27lb "Emergency" Mac-And-Cheese Bucket In Stock
If the demand is there, the supply will show up.
This is likely going to be the business school case study conclusion years from now when someone first asks the question of why Costco was selling a 27 pound bucket of macaroni and cheese to begin with. And it will likely also be the answer when the discussion turns to how quickly the product has been selling out.
Just when you thought the country couldn’t get any more gluttonous, Costco has “blessed” its customers, according to the NY Post, with the massive “storage bucket” of macaroni and cheese. It contains 180 servings and six gallons worth of separate pouches of elbow pasta and cheddar cheese sauce. It sells for $89.99.
But don’t get this confused with any old grocery purchase – it’s listed on the company’s website under the category of “Emergency Kits and Supplies”. The reason? You can amortize your $89.99 purchase over the course of two decades, as the product has an astonishing listed shelf life of 20 years. This is sure to make it a mainstay in
millennial’s parents’ basementsbomb shelters and underground bunkers nationwide.People Magazine also noted you can even fit “100 baseballs, half a bale of hay or your average 3-year-old child” in the bucket when you’re done with it. That’s the gift that could keep on giving well after 20 years has passed.
And of course, people are not waiting until Armageddon to crack open their bucket of mac & cheese. Consumer reviews have poured in on the item, and they’re almost all positive.
“Good stuff! We bought this for our grandson. He was here the day it arrived. We opened it and made it. Very pleasantly surprised. I have made it a couple of different ways. You can’t mess it up. Have purchased it again, and will continue to use it,” one review says.
“Honestly, I was expecting something that tasted horrible. I was surprised to find out that it was very good,” another says.
Don’t want to make the trip to the store to pick up your trough of mac and cheese? Costco.com will deliver it, too. But for right now, the product’s popularity has it temporarily out of stock.
As financial Twitter veteran Barbarian Capital (@BarbarianCap) often says, “The American eater wins again.”
- Where Will You Be Seated At The Banquet Of Consequences?
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
To get a good seat at the banquet of consequences, the owner of capital has to shift his/her capital into scarce forms for which there is demand.
The Banquet of Consequences is being laid out, and so the question is: where will you be seated? The answer depends on two dynamics I’ve mentioned many times: what types of capital you own and the asymmetries of our economy.
One set of asymmetries is the result of the system isn’t broken, it’s fixed, i.e. rigged to favor the few at the expense of the many. There are many manifestations of neofeudal asymmetry that divides neatly into two classes and two systems, the nobility and the serfs.
A rich kid caught with drugs gets a wrist-slap, a poor kid gets a tenner in the Drug Gulag.
Upper-middle class households are tax-donkeys, paying high taxes and getting few deductions, while mega-wealthy corporations and financiers enjoy offshore tax shelters of the kind exposed by the Panama Papers.
The stock market operators use high-frequency trading to front-run the market and generate profits that are inaccessible to serfs with retail trading accounts.
And so on. Given that the nobility control the machinery of governance (so-called democracy), there’s no way for commoners to influence the neofeudal cartel-state asymmetries short of shutting down the entire system.
Which leaves the asymmetries created by the dynamics of the 4th Industrial Revolution in which new technologies and business models are destabilizing every sector of the old economy.
The core dynamic here is value flows to what’s scarce and in demand. The asymmetric returns on capital and labor are the direct result of what’s scarce and what’s not scarce and what’s in demand and what’s not in demand.
Ordinary labor and college diplomas are not scarce and therefore command very little premium. Ordinary capital is also not scarce, and hence the low yield on ordinary capital.
This is why your place at the banquet of consequences will depend on what kinds of capital you own, where you own it and when you own it, the size of your debt burden and the flexibility of your cost basis/structure.
Take a house as an example. A house is arguably a limited form of capital as it doesn’t generate an income unless you rent part of it out or conduct a business from home. It’s also very illiquid (costly to sell and the process takes months) and highly sensitive to conditions outside the owners’ control–interest rates, real estate bubbles and downturns, etc.
Let’s say the owner encloses the garage and rehabs the space into a rental studio. Now the house is a different form of capital as it has the potential to generate income.
Let’s say there are identical houses, one in a white-hot market with high demand for housing and the other in a depressed region losing population and enterprises.
In the high-demand region, the studio fetches $1600. In the low demand region, it fetches $400, if the homeowner can find a tenant at all.
Let’s say the owner of the house in the high-demand market decides to sell and take the capital gains that result from owning real estate in a high-demand market. Her neighbor hangs on and a year later valuations have declined 25% and buyers are scarce/nonexistent.
Where each owner gets seated depends on what kind of capital you own, where you own it and when you own it.
As I explain in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, skills, experience and collaborative networks are also forms of capital. But like a house, the skills, experiences and networks can only generate high returns if there is a relative scarcity of these specific forms of capital and there is demand for them.
To get a good seat at the banquet of consequences, the owner of capital has to shift his/her capital into scarce forms for which there is demand. This is much easier to manage if the owner of capital has very little debt (and what debt they do have is fixed-rate and long-term), a very low fixed-cost basis/structure, willingness to learn, an appetite for risk and the flexibility to make radical changes to avoid declines in income, capital and control.
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