Precious Metals

Gold and silver prices are at all time highs and moving up almost every day. The "price" reflects a variety of factors and nobody knows which factor contributes what to the price. For example, the US dollar is being systematically devalued, which shows up in the price, but there's also a component of FOMO speculation from people who will move onto something else in a random period of time.

Gold is pretty useful for maintaining purchasing power of your savings. One big advantage is it's portable. Right now a pound of gold is closing in on $100,000. A cell phone weight of gold (200 grams) is about $30,000 of purchasing power. If you had to suddenly flee and wanted to take some purchasing power with you, you could easily do it with gold. Or if you wanted to make a major purchase, it would be easy to do it with gold... if we had a precious metals based system.

Silver is much less portable, so it's proportionately less useful for transactions. Silver is closing in on $70 per troy ounce. A cell phone weight of silver is about $450 right now. It would be useful for buying groceries or regular daily life transactions, which was its main use for centuries.

The price of silver in US $ was stagnant for many years. All through the early 2000s silver was $15-20/troy ounce. There are lots of people with many pounds of silver piled up in a safe or trunk or something because of the 2008 financial crisis or 2000 dot com implosion.

 

The main downside of precious metals is the US financial system is funny money based and there's a lot of waste associated with moving in and out of the funny money system. You pay a premium to convert your paper money to gold and pay a premium changing back from gold to funny money. The premium to buy gold is about 6% now, which is absurd. The premium to sell varies quite a lot but can be high.

The banking system is really hostile to gold and silver because it's competition. The banking system has a monopoly on numbers that it zealously guards through corruption and violence. The US government is in on it. At some point, the US government will charge a huge tax on gold and silver sales and throw know your customer rules at anyone who does gold/silver exchanges because the US government is trash and bankrupt. They'll probably do that before they rob people's 401(k) accounts but that's inevitable too.

A good way to look at the banking system, or the government is those people are all in competition to be the king of hell. That is, they're the Hades/Pluto/Sauron archetype. There's a lot of libertarian types who imagine gold and silver help them escape that sort of tyrant or the corrupt hell/death system, but a piece of metal is pretty firmly in the world of dead stuff. Metal took the place of stuff like seeds or slaves in the ancient world.

There's a lot of good reasons to rotate out of gold and silver if you have a hoard purchased at early 2000s USD valuation. Convert it to chickens or tools, or maybe long-term maintainable cars from the 90s up to the early 2010s.

Pockets of Competents

I'm in my 50s now and I've lived among a handful of different cohorts of people. The type of people I grew up with and now live around are weirdly, consistently "competent". The neighbors I have, for example, are high-end competent people in their work and hobbies. One of my neighbors is a blacksmith as a retirement hobby, plus he also designed and built his home and used to be a VP at a tool company. Another of my neighbors has a bunch of excavating equipment, but he's a high-end tech guy at a local tech company.

Most of the people I grew up with are like those dudes. They had a job, but also are good at hobby stuff or general life skills. They can fix anything in their house, their car, whatever. Even if they aren't super handy and hands-on they know enough to make decisions about paying a contractor.

As I lived with and interacted with different cohorts of people in my adult life, I came to realize that high functioning, high competence people are rare, and the high-competence generalist types are unicorn rare. A more common high competence type is a specialist who doesn't know about anything else. For example, a person might be a doctor, or a scientist with a PhD in some science field, but they don't understand or know anything about plumbing in a house. In fact, they have a lot of pride in their ignorance and imagine they're a "prince" or "princess" who can't be bothered to know about a septic tank or house wiring.

It's manifestly obvious to me now that those generalist competent people are the best to live near or work with. That habit of understanding all the things is associated with humility. An arrogant, status seeker type will imagine that it's "beneath them" to do manual labor, if you pile up a bunch of those people in the same place, you'll get major dysfunction and unchecked corruption and endless malinvestment.

If those generalist competent people understood "we're rare" they could all get together consciously. My neighborhood, though, happened through an "unconscious" sorting process. I got here through a few criteria. Low tax. Lots of land. Few neighbors. Low regulation. Relatively high property price. Remove any of those criterion, and it'd be a different mix of people. Like, remove high property price and maybe you get rednecks instead of gentleman farmer types, or add high regulation and you get the suburban housecat type of people who are more likely to be the specialist type.

Ford $19B EV "Writedown"

Ford recently announced it's EV project is a failure. They're planning to "pivot" to AI datacenter energy storage in hopes of riding that hype wave after then "netzero" EV hype wave ran out of gas a couple of years ago. As part of that they are taking a "writedown" of $19B, whatever that means.

A few years ago the narrative was "EV's are inevitable" for various handwaving reasons. Many reality based observers understood there are huge problems associated with trying to switch the entire transportation fleet to battery power. Many executives at car manufacturers didn't. Are they stupid? Yes. They're stupid, delusional people who were insulated from consequences usually since birth.

"AI" suffers from the same problems. "Bitcoin" and "blockchain" suffer from similar problems. We really don't live in a world of endless plenty. There's endless ideas and endless funny money, but pretty harsh limits on the system. Burning resources to run a bureaucratic system is really foolish.

The economy has some inherent physical limit on energy production. In the US per-capita energy consumption has been constant for many years. There's no new source of energy. People get more efficient with energy use (like better insulation, LED lighting, etc...) instead of building new, very expensive infrastructure. The idea the overall economy can be re-allocated to build out a new grid with additional capacity is probably a crack-pipe dream. Here's an old post: "The 20 Kilowatt Lifestyle"

The current system runs flat out to support the 10-13 kilowatt lifestyle. Trying to reallocate resources to achieve the 20 kilowatt lifestyle is probably impossible barring some major new, portable energy source.

I think the "pockets of competents" future is the next big thing.

"Costs" are Mostly Fake

A few years ago, I noticed that Amish neighborhoods are loaded with small businesses. There are woodworking shops, lumber yards, engine repair, welding shops, greenhouses, jam and jelly producers, plus retail shops in the Amish community that's about 20 miles from my house. Many Amish can apparently afford to have a business that only intermittently brings in revenue because they aren't operating on credit for the most part.

Reportedly, Amish tend to pay off debts like a mortgage as quickly as possible. Back around 2010 I decided to follow that model. We paid off our mortgage on our current property and now have no debt and there is a corresponding drop in cost of living, and my "need" for an income is greatly reduced.

Now marginally productive, revenue generating projects are purely positive. For example, we have chickens and ducks and sell eggs through our neighbor's egg stand. In recent years I sold garlic and pumpkins from the garden. Those activities are absurdly easy. I put a table by the road with a money box. People take the stuff and leave wads of cash or quarters.

There's not really any need to calculate an "ROI" or see if there's a net gain or net loss with those activities because we don't have any outside obligations. We don't need to squeeze productivity out of the chickens or ducks either so they get to live a royal life. It would be difficult for us to generate much revenue from the roadside stand though and that market would saturate quickly. I know the market is surprisingly large: many people exclusively buy eggs from farmstands because it's a much more sensible option than buying from the grocery store so all the egg stands along my road sell out 100% of the time. However, I don't know the full extent, but it might only be like $2000 a year. Also past a certain point, more infrastructure would be required.

"Costs", really debts are what keep people running on the hamster wheel of life. "The System" is a bunch of people running on hamster wheels on behalf of bankers and other parasites who in turn are heavily indebted to others to support their life.

Gameified Reality and Bizarre Ideology

When people are acting "naturally", that is mostly unconsciously by following long standing customs, or according to manifest common sense, they're acting "freely", that is unencumbered by the need to adhere to "rules". That scenario might not be utopian, nor result in relationships that are fair and stress free, by the way. The strong can dominate the weak. Cheaters can prosper, etc... However, there's not a lot of overhead cost associated with that scenario. There's minimal officialdom, bureaucrats, etc... because there's no regulation. The "frontier" in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries was like that

By contrast, authoritarians often force people to "believe" various weird, anti-nature, nonsense ideas and religions. This is often associated with very heavy bureaucracy or rule by force. During the Reformation period, for example, some regions or cities in Europe came to be dominated by cults where, it seemed, the main goal of whatever government apparatus came to be was intent on making citizens take part in particular christian sectarian beliefs and practices.

The "leftist" ideology in the US is like that today. It's at war with nature and easy going, laissez-faire life. Several states in the US institutionalized leftist ideology in law and corporate catechisms of the HR department. It's mysterious to me how that continues and actually expands every year. In the early 90s the concept was basically "be nice to women at work" and today it's "make sure you know the pronouns of the 0.1% of the population who cares about such nonsense or you'll get fired".

The United States founding is much different than other nations. It consciously enshrines the tension of "positive laws" (or gamified reality or rules) and "nature's laws". The Declaration of Independence is the real founding document of the US and is a brief statement of the nature of things, then the constitution is nested inside of that and represents a mere paper agreement.

The gamifiers, authoritarians, religious schemers throughout history attempt to capture the natural man and put him to work for them. Generally the natural man gets tired of it after a while, which can be a very long time.

Pragmatism versus Death Cults

One of the movie and fiction tropes I absorbed as a kid is "the system" is a corrupt pile of garbage and it only persists because of the hypnotized masses. Conan the Barbarian (1982) is basically all about that. The masses are either literally enslaved through violence, or enslaved to a cult run by the magician/warlord Thulsa Doom who's ultimately defeated by Conan's ascent in consciousness. The Matrix is another movie with similar themes. There were numerous TV shows with that same set of themes all through the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, like "24", or even MacGuyver, or a ridiculous show like "The A-Team".

I think that trope failed to hold up over time for me and some of my high school friends. It is true the system is a corrupt pile of garbage. It's worse now than ever and in fact has been on consistent downhill trajectory my entire adult life. However, the "model" implied in those TV shows and movies is "the individual" can triumph over the system in a physical way, that is the heroes can actually physically defeat the thing, like in the movie They Live the hero character (who has no name) actually defeats the alien invaders by blowing up their mind control device. The general public snaps out of their slumber and presumably ousts the aliens from their midst. In "The Matrix" Neo attains super human powers through a rise in consciousness and training. Conan destroys Thulsa Doom and disbands his lotus eater death cult.

The trope fails because "the system" is really synonymous with the vast ocean of people out there in the world. One of the Roman emperors Caligula famously "declared war on the sea". The "hero" trope is a little like that. I think the Neo character is a great example of that sort of madness; Neo's line "there is no spoon" is a good summary of that insanity. Nope, it's all spoons. Or in the Conan world, you chop the head off one Thulsa Doom there's dozens popping up in his stead on a daily basis, and endless fodder for cults.

Let's take a modern day example and try to figure out who's the Thulsa Doom. In recent years some oligarch NGO and probably some college professors somehow convinced the public that 20 somethings can have different "pronouns" and to use their "wrong pronouns" is an act of violence that in some states is "illegal" in certain settings. In 1990s TV shows trannies were a punchline and comedic trope because they are ridiculous and suffer from a classic, age old problem: nature doesn't care about you, but you think you're "important" and whine and cry like a baby about your plight as if that bitching will "change" factual reality--like having testicles and a penis. Somehow, their insanity became everyone else's problem. Who's the Thulsa Doom to decapitate and "defeat" that cult of 1,000,000 Karens?

A historical "solution" to societal depravity is for groups of skilled people to bail on the delusional masses as they spiral down and down to destruction. When the masses go crazy, people start to shuffle around. For example, California net migration has been over 100,000+ people per year since 2018 due to high costs and an insane ideology heavy, corrupt government and a generalized departure from reality. There's a similar story in Illinois and New York for the same reasons. The Reformation period in Europe also drove waves of migration as the masses descended into violence and madness about crackers and wine and religious cults took over entire cities and led to starvation and mass violence.

I think one of the sorting mechanisms that will come into play in the US will be pragmatism and skill versus ideological retards and fools. What's the point, for example, of skilled people propping up corrupt, incompetent corporate/financial America? The "skilled middle" will pop out of the incompetent upper and lower class and power structure.

I'm Not a Believer

Many cults and religions put heavy emphasis on "belief" or "faith" which is really the same thing. There are secular formulations of that concept too. "Believe in" this or that political party or candidate.

I strive to get my mental model of reality to line up with the natural order of things as much as possible. Since our verbal and symbolic consciousness exists in another dimension (the information dimension), "we", that is our verbal and symbolic conscious doesn't really have access to the natural order of things, especially in verbal and symbolic terms. Therefore, it's not an easy task to come up with a high fidelity model of reality.

Beliefs are worthless and it's generally a bad sign when someone sells a concept or cajoles people into "believing" in products, people, or plans. The Titanic for example was deemed "unsinkable" by White Star Line company. It was sinkable. It didn't matter if you believed it could sink or not.