Renewable Energy Limits

 There's an interesting article in Nature that discusses the limits on wind and solar. (Here's a link.)

If future net-zero emissions energy systems rely heavily on solar and wind resources, spatial and temporal mismatches between resource availability and electricity demand may challenge system reliability. Using 39 years of hourly reanalysis data (1980–2018), we analyze the ability of solar and wind resources to meet electricity demand in 42 countries, varying the hypothetical scale and mix of renewable generation as well as energy storage capacity. Assuming perfect transmission and annual generation equal to annual demand, but no energy storage, we find the most reliable renewable electricity systems are wind-heavy and satisfy countries’ electricity demand in 72–91% of hours (83–94% by adding 12 h of storage). Yet even in systems which meet >90% of demand, hundreds of hours of unmet demand may occur annually. Our analysis helps quantify the power, energy, and utilization rates of additional energy storage, demand management, or curtailment, as well as the benefits of regional aggregation.

I live in an area (northeast ohio) with lots of cloudy days per year--200 according to this chart! Many of those days, especially in the winter months, will be very dark and solar panels won't produce much power. Plus in the winter, we can get heavy snows. In short, several days per year won't be conducive for solar power production.

If I wanted a reliable solar energy system for my house, I'd have to massively oversize the batteries and the panels. The cost gets prohibitive really quickly. Utility companies will have to do the same thing.

Anyway, it's going to be difficult and expensive to "transition" from fossil fuels to wind and solar if it's possible at all.

Ukraine War on Behalf of Monsanto

 Pretty interesting read: https://theecologist.org/2014/sep/11/ukraine-opens-monsanto-land-grabs-and-gmos

Bankruptcy of Westinghouse (and probably Toshiba)

There's a handful of companies that are in the nuclear power plant construction business. GE, for example, and Westinghouse. Westinghouse went bankrupt (2017) trying to build the last two new nuclear reactors at old plants in the US (Georgia and South Carolina). The South Carolina plant was cancelled. The story is pretty interesting. Here's just one article. Toshiba is the parent company of Westinghouse and it's probably toast too, or will be significantly restructured to try to shuffle the debt around.

I worked at a company that made some satellite hardware back in the early 1990s. I was a entry level employee (physics dude) and did some hands on work assembling and testing some of the components. Absolutely everything was documented. If I turned a screw, documented it. If I ran a test it was documented, which included a signature. At the end of that project, the company had a room full of three ring binders filled with paper. There was a manager who just kept track of the documentation. I assume nuclear power plant construction is similar. It must generate a ton of paperwork; although now I assume a lot of it is computer files.

Anyway, building a nuclear power plant is super expensive, but nobody wants to pay for anything. Contractors try to cut corners, inevitably, but then it fails and they need to rework things. There's no way to bring in cheap foreign labor, or make things overseas.

Americans don't want to pay other Americans to make anything. It's the same story in France and other western countries. If a company has to pay westerners western wages it means the management and shareholders can't get rich. That same story happened in ancient Greece and Rome, too.

The pipe dream of using robots and AI to do big projects like nuke plant construction is based on that. Nobody wants to pay. Nobody wants to be the dummy stuck doing the work, either.

Cricket Plant in Canuckistan

There's a cricket plant in Canada that will produce 9,000 metric tons of crickets, presumably dried crickets. It cost $90 million Canadian Pesos to build and the Canadian taxpayers provided about $10m in financing. Canada is the world's largest beef producer at 1.28 million metric tons per year. 

Supposedly the plant uses "AI", lol. I think "AI" is the mainstream term for computer control of any process. AI makes it sound futurey.

It's quite conceivable that crickets take more resources per pound to make than beef. In fact, it's almost certain because metabolic energy consumption increases proportional to the mass of an animal to the 3/4 power if I remember correctly. (it's definitely a number less than 1) Bigger animal = more efficient metabolism per pound. Here's a paper on the subject. The reason is simple--more surface area per mass = higher energy requirement, plus the network for delivering resources to cells is more efficient in a larger animal.

Anyway, it seems probable that a totally artificial environment is more expensive to operate than a field where cows graze in Western Canada. It's the place where buffalo lived.

We feed our ducks meal worms and they're actually quite expensive--on par with chicken--and poultry are the only market for them. There's probably no market for crickets but the psychotic government will try to force people to eat dried bugs.

Canada's political structure is really similar to the USA. They have a larger urban population that's in the globalist gay cult, and a rural population of standard issue white people. The urban population believes in stupid fantasies about the world, like eating bugs is a good idea for reasons. They would like to concentrate food production in their regions and outlaw food production that's not done in a factory.

That's happening in the Netherlands, Germany, and now Canuckistan. It's a harder sell in the US, because there's not as many progressive retards here as in those clown world capitals.

If the white liberals get their way, and all their stupid pipe dreams are put into practice billions of people will die. It's really that simple.

Failed Nuclear Project in MAGA Country

Plans to expand the V.C. Summers nuclear power plant failed in 2017 due to cost overruns. If there's any place a nuclear power should have succeeded it was South Carolina. Nuclear power is ded--it's too expensive.

German Government Nat Gas Nonsense

 There's a story in Germany that's really similar to the France nuclear power industry fiasco.

As natural gas prices spiked, regulation prevented one German company from passing along the cost to consumers, so one of the companies in that industry went bankrupt... Now it's being "bailed out", really initial stages of nationalization, by the German government. The government is also subsidizing the poor who can't afford natural gas.

It's a downward spiral of insanity.

Europe Getting Squeezed

The IEA is recommending Europe cut gas consumption by 20%... for now. I imagine that amount will keep going up because people in the west are being driven into poverty. 20% is like the "two weeks to flatten the curve" which ended up being two years.

It is true that resources are being depleted.

It's not true that global warming is going to kill us all, and the plans to reduce CO2 emissions are complete insanity--but they're actually being rolled out in places like California. At first, the plans will be set up to look beneficial to the masses, that is people will get paid bribes to think it's a good idea, then eventually we will all be tracked and taxed...

I think random violence is just going to start popping off everywhere as normal people begin to realize their governments are vile cesspits of corruption and incompetence, and the "leaders" of the western world sold us all out decades ago.

The French Government Bankrupted Its Nuclear Industry

I have been doing more reading on the bankruptcy of the French nuclear power industry; It's quite an interesting story that makes very little sense. I have to do more reading to understand the overall context, but at this point, for me, a handful of things are pretty clear.

For some currently unknown to me reason, the French government forced EDF to sell power at a massive loss. That ultimately bankrupted the company, and now it's nationalized.

Apparently the industry there has been a financial basket case for years; around 50% of the plants are offline due to maintenance (can't afford it) issues.

The bigger picture is that France did not want to allocate resources to its energy sector, at least while it was in private hands... which it hardly was, it was all but nationalized anyway. Now that it's owned by the government, they plan to waste more resources on nuke plants that will essentially operate "at a loss".

In theory the earnings of the power industry at least partially reflect a real world resource allocation. It takes X resources to produce nuclear power, but France only wants to spend 0.75X or whatever. There's no work around for that and government intervention really doesn't change that issue.

Chronic Debt in the Energy Industry

European energy companies have apparently racked up $1.7 trillion in debt in recent years. In the USA during the fracking boom, almost every company I followed was in chronic debt. The nuclear power industry in the US and France operates at a loss. The French nuclear industry is heavily in debt and is being nationalized.

Those industries require a lot of expensive equipment and infrastructure to operate. Apparently none of it really pays off. This is a novel situation that doesn't make a lot of sense. The debts are basically a type of subsidy.

Nuke Plants and Lia Thomas

I think the idea that nuclear power plants are the pinnacle infrastructure of our civilization makes sense. They're the biggest infrastructure project that advanced countries can (barely) pull off. They're our version of Egypt's pyramids or Rome's aqueducts. It takes civilization level resources that were accumulated over centuries to achieve that level of capability.

While that capability was built up, madness built up, apparently, at the same time, so when you get the pinnacle infrastructure, you also get pinnacle madness, like confusion over genders. There are probably always some people who believe they're the wrong gender without needing ideological training to think it. There are also people who think their left arm is trying to kill them, and that notion is similar to the idea that a person is the wrong gender--the body is "hostile" to the individuals concept of what they are.

When there's enough resources to build a nuclear power plant, there's also enough resources, apparently to build an industry based on gender confusion. I guess it basically expands the market for synthetic hormones, the same way sports doping expanded the market for steroids and other pharmaceuticals, like EPO and HGH. What's the market for gender drugs? I don't really know. If 0.1% of the population is gender confused, that's a small percentage, but still a lot (300,000+) of people. If each of them has to take hormones that cost $1000 a year to sort of achieve their goal (that's a total guess about the cost), that's quite a lot of money, especially if the market is a monopoly.

Anyway, I think it's no coincidence that public madness and peak infrastructure overlap. Peak infrastructure is also peak surplus by definition.

Big Brained Genius Lia Thomas

 I don't know if any of this is true, but I won't be surprised if it is.

"Lia" Thomas is a man. He has balls and a penis. He dates women.

He claimed he is a woman, and that's apparently all you have to do to compete against women in sports, and change in a locker room with the women even when you have a penis. He might be taking hormone therapy... but if he wasn't how would anybody know?

Anyway, in liberal world, all that makes sense. It makes enough sense that the NCAA can nominate a dude like that to be "woman of the year".

"Model" = Facts

 Apparently the Dutch government mandates that will put farmers out of business are based on computer models, so were:

• Climate change policies;
• Covaids policies.

Outside experts who examined the covid disease model found that the code was trash and amateurish. They could not reproduce the results the governments were promoting.

I've worked on a handful of computer models of physical systems over the years. In some fields, like say nuclear science, you can get a model that's as accurate as your inputs. If you perfectly describe some system, the model and experimental data will align quite well. In other fields, the model is a vague qualitative approximation because simplifications and assumptions are necessary and some characteristics of a system are difficult to precisely quantify. For example, in an optical system, it's time consuming to really measure the precise characteristics of a reflective surface at some specific wavelength of light, and if that much experimental characterization of something is required, building the model is a waste of time, anyway. Some things are impossible to measure, for example, what's the reflectivity of a surface when viewed from the inside of a crystal?

Climate models include simplifications of atmospheric behavior, because there's insufficient computer power to include them. Some things that massively affect climate can't even be included, like volcanic eruptions, because they're random events. There are most likely aspects of climate that are entirely missing from the models because they're not known.

Anyway, it's pretty interesting that model outputs are now regarded as gospel truth.

Rank Corruption in DC

Nancy Pelosi recently purchased millions of dollars of NVIDIA stock... then pushed hard for a bill that will directly benefit the company, and herself obviously.

People complain about the blatant corruption, but the trash continues it day in and day out... I think that's going to come to a screeching halt any day now... It's sort of happening around the world. Average people are sick and tired of leftist governments and their stupid plans. Currently there's major unrest in Sri Lanka. The Netherlands and other EU countries are getting ready to shred their governments. It will be an interesting summer.

Zero real people give two shits about global warming or other lefty rhetoric. When push comes to shove, all that nonsense will be chucked into the fuck-it bucket.

Nuclear Powerplant is Peak Infrastructure

 I've been delving into the problems with nuclear power for the past couple of weeks. It's been pretty interesting. I think a person can draw some fairly useful conclusions.

Nuclear power isn't feasible because it's too expensive. It's expensive because the reactor environment is so hostile, and the plants are potentially dangerous if they're not carefully assembled. There are only a handful of competent people who can build them, so it takes a long time and is very expensive. Since they're expensive to build, they're expensive to maintain and repair. They need constant maintenance because the reactor environment is so harsh.

Fission plants show that there will never be fusion plants, for the same reasons. Fusion is apparently much harder to do, and the environment is potentially harsher, so building plants will be even more expensive, and maintaining and repairing them will be proportionally more expensive. Fission power plants basically failed to be economical. Fusion will be much worse, unless there's some gift from god breakthrough in that field.

MLB Players Refuse to Play in Canaderp

 About half of the Kansas City Royals baseball team is refusing to play in Canaduh because of that dumb country's vaccine mandates. Here's an article: link

I think that's a really good approach to white liberal insanity--refuse to participate in it. Every white liberal scheme revolves around participation of a mass of people to "validate" the stupid claims. It's a daily emperor's new clothes exercise with those people.

Nuclear Power is an Economic Disaster

 The nuclear power industry is positioning itself as "green" because it doesn't emit as many CO2s as the fossil fuel power plants. A new generation of shills is marketing nuclear power to young people and some of them are falling for the sales pitch.

The nuclear power industry is a basket case all around the world. If you delve into the history and economics of nuclear power, once you get past the paper thin sales pitch you see a bankrupt, subsidized disaster everywhere you look.

In the heyday of the industry, half the planned reactors in the USA were cancelled because they are too expensive to build and operate. Perry nuclear plant in northeast Ohio is one example; It was originally going to have two reactors but only one was built. It took 13 years to build the plant.

The plants are massively complicated and require expertise in all sorts of fields that apparently doesn't exist anymore, and it did not even exist at the time of the construction of most of the US nuclear power plants.

Back in the 1980s, some experts looked at France's nuclear program as a success compared to the US. France used two reactor designs and "mass produced" them to control costs. Guess what, though, 50% of France's nuclear plants are currently offline and the industry is bankrupt. The corporation that runs the power plants is heavily subsidized, but is still bankrupt and is being nationalized right now.

I don't think there's any chance to revive the industry. Its track record of failure is too obvious. Its like a violent drunk that's been kicked out of the bar, but keeps hanging around outside. Back in the early 2000s during the "W" administration, the industry attempted a revival, but that didn't get anywhere. Now it's trying again... Ironically there might be enough dumb white liberal "environmentalists" to get at least one or two white elephant retro plants built, but the severe difficulties with construction of the plants--mega expense, chronic cost and schedule overruns and the like--will crop up again, and that'll be that.

Here's a really detailed article from Forbes on the failure of the industry in the US. At the time it was written (1985) it looked like the Japanese nuclear power industry and the French nuclear power industries were "success" stories... that conclusion obviously did not hold up over time.

Solar Panels Cost $20-40 to Recycle, yield $2-4 in Materials

 Solar panels include toxic heavy metals. It will be a disaster to put them in landfills. Unfortunately, they're difficult to recycle. By some accounts it costs $20-40 to recycle a panel and there's only about $2-4 worth of materials recovered from the panels. They're not built for recycling, and the process does not have economies of scale. So it costs $20 for one panel, or $2000 for 100 panels, etc...

Millions of solar panels will go defunct every year in the not so distant future. Of course, there's no project in place to recycle them. Why? Because the green energy industry is every bit as greedy and "bad" as the petroleum industry. Cost to recycle solar panels will probably be foisted off onto tax payers, or maybe onto consumers of the panels, which makes sense. It effectively increases the lifetime cost of a panel by 25%+. Huge solar farms will be 25% more expensive, etc...

EV batteries are worse than solar panels from this perspective. The latest Tesla batteries are an integrated assembly. The batteries are embedded in a polymer foam adhesive matrix, apparently. They can't even be repaired. Consequently recycling them will be a nightmare. It will be a lot worse than solar panels. There will be a hefty "recycling" fee attached to EVs in the not so distant future.

It's likely that the recyclers will cheat, just like plastic recycling facilities do today. EV batteries and dead solar panels will just pile up in poor countries just like e-waste does today.

Live in a Based State

Florida seems to be the poster boy "based" state right now. There have been a couple incidents of homeowners defending their property with guns and the sheriffs in each case praised the homeowner and encouraged blowing criminal scumbags away.

Florida, of course, was one of the first states to drop the covid insanity and actually "follow the science". Right now, leftist retard areas of the country are ramping up the covid bullshit again. Apparently those fools have no memory or capacity to think in abstract terms. For them the masks and vaccines are like magic spells. They've been assured by their priests that masks "work", though anyone who can observe and draw his own conclusion understands they weren't effective at all for obvious reasons.

As a consequence Florida is attracting net migration from blue states. "Based" = masculine, really. By contrast, states like California, New York, and various other coastal states are governed by insane, retard progressives. They've managed to infiltrate and now control places like Denver, too. Those places are effeminate, gay, and seem completely unhinged. Places like New York City, San Francisco and Portland have devolved to complete dysfunction; the most basic benefits of civilization like control of broad daylight crime are gone in favor of rank virtue signaling. There are numerous videos of stores being looted in broad daylight in places like San Francisco. Cities like Portland are large open air homeless camps and drug dens.

Florida is going to be the template for lots of other states. It seems like Ohio is going the based route too. It works, because competent people tend to be pretty based. 

Regionalism not Globalism

 The people on the top of the societal pyramid see complexity as a solution to challenges of the immediate future. Cars and trucks keep getting more complicated, for example, supposedly for safety reasons, but road deaths have actually increased in recent years, probably because of smartphones. The Biden administration put new regulations in place for drunk driving detection systems--I doubt that's going to work. It will be buggy, POS software. Self driving cars seem like a pipe dream--a couple was recently decapitated when their Tesla self drove under a semi. Apple's self driving cars are apparently total garbage after spending billions in R&D.

Anyway, the technological solutions are really scams to make money. Industry groups push their tech via government so they can reap financial rewards. They don't even really have to deliver any working or useful thing anymore, either. They just collect the prize first.

All of this foolishness is possible because of cheap energy... but cheap energy is rapidly depleting. In the 1940s, the EROI of a barrel of oil in the US was 100:1. Today it's 15:1. It seems pretty obvious to me that  solar and wind power are energy consumers, rather than energy producers. Without massive subsidies and public resources, wind and solar projects aren't profitable, for example. It's impossible to build out the large energy storage infrastructure for example, without government resources, which is a really good hint that renewable projects are not viable at a large scale.

Ironically, though, it probably is viable for homeowners to install solar, which is really pretty interesting. That provides a hint about the direction everything is going... Total disintegration of countries like the USA maybe down to the county or state level. The reason for it is simplicity trumps complexity.

The federal government is loaded with insane, retarded bureaucrats right now. They are not sure what a man or a woman is. There are people who invested hundreds of hours of their life in studying dumb gender ideology making policy. The feds need more and more resources for their dumb projects so they'll demand more taxes, or more dollar dilution every day from now on. What's going to happen?

People will stop paying attention, and will stop playing in the system. It will start at the margins of society, then work its way into corporations and other official institutions. I think we'll see this happen in our lifetime--probably in a handful of years rather than 100.

As the top levels of government disintegrate, people will focus on their local community to keep order and make life livable.

Are the Masses Dumb Enough to Fall for the Covid Scam Again?

 The trash in the government, like Fauci and the jewish lady at the CDC, seem to be setting the stage for another round of covid scams because of variant 99 2A three delta charlie--hut hut hike.

Are people dumb enough to get herded into various scams again like forced vaccinations because of employer demands, or whatever? I'm skeptical that people will fall for it all again. I don't see many masks at the grocery store, now, for example. The people who are wearing them now, I assume are either legitimately sick AIDS patients, cancer patients, or whatever, or are completely insane liberal retards. I think there aren't that many liberal retards, frankly anymore.

Too many people have experienced "covid", aka a cold, personally to care. Too many people who were vaccinated got sick, then saw unvaxxed people get the exact same results as them to care anymore.

So can some loser like Fauci get up on stage and scare people again? I am betting no. I don't think any amount of propaganda can scam people into believing their lies this time around. 

Organic Farming and Sri Lanka

 There's an Ohio farmer David Brandt who has used organic, no-till farming methods for decades. He's been successful at it, but it took a long time for him to figure out a working system. No-till regenerative agriculture is really a good thing, if people can make it work. Some farmers might not be able to make it work in a reliable way.

I've been trying to grow cover crops for the past 5 years in my garden. It worked 2 out of 5 years according to plan. 3 out of those 5 years, including this past year, the cover crops failed over the winter. The cover crops can add nitrogen and beneficial soil structure when they grow in the off-season months. They failed, I think, because there are rodents in the garden and they ate the roots and plants over the winter.

I realized, in the spring, that if my family truly depended on my garden to live, we'd be forced to scramble for other soil amendments. In fact, other methods of saving and improving the soil quality are much more reliable, for example, adding composted manure or large quantities of fall leaves.

Sri Lanka forced farmers to use organic methods--something that takes a smart person years to figure out--and quite predictably it was a disaster. European countries are attempting the same thing right now.

The thing that's actually happening is some white liberal armchair "experts" looked at a really simple sales brochure style explanation of organic farming methods and then enacted laws based on what's essentially a TV commercial. They're people who are entitled, but also stupid and lazy. They're good at glad handing, going to conferences and the like, but they're actually total losers. Those loser people are going to kill off tens of millions unless the hard nosed, competent and practical people kick their asses.

Los Angeles Loserfest

 Apparently Los Angeles is back with the "mask mandates".

The masks don't work.

The vaccines don't work.

But white liberals and media people insist it all works. In their insane, retardosphere it's very important to trust the nonsense non-science.

Covid is a fucking cold. Who fucking cares? If covid is going to kill you, you didn't have long to live anyway. I can't imagine many intelligent, capable people are going to stay in shitholes like LA, or the state of California in general.

People who are sane and capable of making their own choices are going to leave the retarded mass of humanity behind.

Salt Dust Cured my Cough

 I had covid-19 a few weeks ago. It was a flu or cold or whatever you want to call it. I was in bed for two days, then tired one day, then I had a nagging cough and congestion for several days. The cough was really annoying. Maybe I had a minor upper respiratory infection.

I had a similar cough years ago when I was in college after a cold/flu thing. I coughed for a month or so after otherwise fully recovering. It was very annoying too. I was not eager to repeat that, so I looked around for a solution to this problem. I thought maybe some type of vaporizer might help so I started to look around online.

I stumbled into the "salt" treatment. It sounded like total bullshit. Companies sell small ceramic pots that hold chunky salt crystals. They have holes on the bottom where the salt chamber is, and a larger outlet on top. You can inhale salt dust using the contraption. They're cheap, so I thought I'd give it a try. A couple of doctors promote them.

Amazingly the thing worked. I inhaled some salt dust. It made me cough a little bit for any hour, but that was it. It seems like the salt really does something, like kill bacteria or whatever.

I wonder if people who live in coastal towns with a dry climate have few respiratory problems. Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

Gray Man Rebellion?

I don't know if there's any real "connection" among these events:

• Georgia Guidestones Destroyed;
• Dutch (really EU) farmers Protests;
• Shinzo Abe assassinated with home made gun.

But they're various facets of what a gray man, rando vigilante uprising might look like. Some rando person just decides to take out the trash and does it. There's no central coordination and no apparent connection between these events, except for the shared inclination. People are fed up? There's no stopping such action, really.

I am often amazed that there's not more violence against scumbag politicians, and eventually against their partners in the financial and corporate world. It's probably a lot easier than anybody could imagine to wreak havoc on such people. The assassination of Shinzo Abe shows that in spades.

Somebody Blew Up the Georgia Guidestones

 The Georgia Guidestones is was a monument to "globalist" central planning ideology, and somebody blew it up today at 4AM. One of the stones was completely smashed and the rest of the monument was damaged. Here's footage of the scene: https://www.wyff4.com/article/georgia-guidestones-possible-explosion/40525569

I think it was possibly a "real" event. That is, some person who is sick of the globalists blew up "their" monument. I think that's possible because: no suspect was immediately identified, and the bomb didn't work perfectly, and no fraudulent person or group claimed credit. I think that's what real action against the powers that be would look like. Some rando will just get sick of it and take out the trash... that's probably going to start happening pretty soon, and it's long overdue frankly.

The town actually destroyed what was left.

Enjoy the Show pic.twitter.com/7wctwtYC4U

— EXOCET17™ 🇫🇷 🇷🇺 ⵣ (@excocet17) July 6, 2022

Canadians Need to Obliterate Their Government

 I had covid a few weeks ago.

It's a cold.

I was sick for three days, then I a cough for a couple of weeks.

The spastic response of governments and corporations to this cold is beyond absurd.

Canada is going to try to coerce their citizens to take a covid "booster" every 9 months, I guess because their entire government are employee hacks for pharma companies. Canadians need to obliterate their government--that is remove those people from power and permanently disenfranchise them and their families.

It's absurd things have gotten this far in the western world. I can't understand what's wrong with western people--when did they turn into such spineless, feckless trash?

Good Summary of the Current Scenario

Pure fire 🔥👇 pic.twitter.com/2rH8amzpeV

— VeBee🇺🇸✝️ (@VeBo1991) July 3, 2022

Dutch Farmers Say Fuck the EU

 Some faggots in the EU and in the government of the Netherlands think they can put farmers out of business because of this or that form of "pollution". Some shithead bureaucrat thinks their little theory is superior to a person's ability to support his family. Apparently, the farmers are completely done with them.

It'll be interesting to see what happens as a result. I think we're at peak government parasitic bureaucracy right now. Nobody really cares about CO2s or nitrogen or global warming bullshit. It's just a power play. Men are sick and tired of being ordered around by fags and women.

Burning the Middle Class for Fuel: Failing Empire Strategy

The current "first principles" theory of the collapse of "complex societies" like large Empires is that their system hits a point of diminishing returns, then inexorably collapses. The Roman Empire expanded because conquests 1 through N-1 were profitable and allowed it to expand further for a time, but the Nth conquest was too costly. The explanation makes sense. The "collapse" is really like a going out of business sale. All the infrastructure and organizations that built the society get liquidated or fall into disrepair because they eventually become too costly to sustain.

The Western Empire expanded from the 1400s through the 20th century. It extracted wealth from around the world and piled it up in national capitals like London and New York. It built up industry and infrastructure internally until recently. Then in the 1980s, it started to burn the working class and the middle class by shipping manufacturing overseas.

It offered ostensible benefits to society at large with these economic changes, such as increased productivity and more efficient use of resources, but really it was just an attempt to concentrate wealth in fewer hands. That process continued through the present day and new strategies for wealth extraction that incorporated government to form cartels, like the covid vaccination campaign, Obamacare, and many others.

The top of the pyramid is consuming the rest of the society like a giant parasite. I'd say that's well past the point of diminishing returns.