Author Archives: danijel

Thoughts

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I’ve been reluctant to write anything lately, mostly because I feel like I have nothing more to say at this point. Well, nothing that would be relevant to the present situation, at least. Both economy and politics are in a phase where the explosive mixture has been established and we are waiting for the right kind of spark.

As for the disaster preparedness, I would keep this a priority – and I don’t mean just having a bug-out backpack ready. I mean saving money, primarily in form of precious metals, but also cash, and having it ready in various forms, in case you need to react to the worsening of the situation in your immediate environment. By this I mean primarily the good people who live in America or some other potentially explosive parts of the world, who might find themselves in a situation that quickly escalates into riots, barricades and war of some kind. Keep yourself mobile enough to be able to get away from the X if excrement starts hitting the impeller, to put it politely. You know what I mean by mobility – have enough cash at hand to react quickly, and a car full of gas. Also, everything you need to stay online and keep working (laptop, smartphone, chargers), because the moment you stop being able to make money is the beginning of a serious personal crisis for you and your family. I don’t know what to tell you to expect – from what we’ve seen so far, the situation has a tendency to vary wildly between parts of the world, and the undertones of the beginnings of a global crisis are mixed with local disasters; for instance, if you live in Donbass, having mobility means being able to evacuate into Russia where your level of acute danger will drop exponentially, but you will still be in danger of an American nuclear attack, which, to be sure, is very much on the table now that Trump, who got in the way of Armageddon plans, is out of the picture and the old team is back in power. If you’re in America, you might be in the most dangerous place on the planet at the moment, because you live in a country that is simultaneously provoking a nuclear power (China) and a nuclear and space tech superpower (Russia), and if things escalate, they might escalate very quickly, in a way where significant parts of America reach temperature hotter than the surface of the Sun. To be sure, America doesn’t seem to need this kind of foreign assistance and is working on destroying itself quite thoroughly on its own accord, but I simply don’t see America going quietly into the night. As they degrade, they will try to pull others with them, and will eventually and inevitably cross some red line which will make the creation of “The day after: a documentary” an inevitability.

As for the economy, the ideal opportunity to earn lots of money quickly will soon turn into an ideal opportunity to lose it all if you didn’t convert it into gold and silver in time. Basically, when the collapse starts, it will happen very quickly, because of all the computer trading and fast digital connections, and you won’t be able to react in time and pull it out unless you’ve been acting proactively. Basically, if you don’t hold the Krugerrands, you hold the bag.

As for the spiritual preparations, that’s been going on quite intensively for basically everyone I’ve been talking to lately, so I don’t even have to mention it. The “guys up there” have that part handled and people have been going through an accelerated regimen of learning important lessons dealing with their personal karmic makeup, and also a process of detachment from the world. I don’t know in which phase the process is at the moment, but I personally have been ready to go for quite some time, and my personal nightmare isn’t related to all of this ending – it’s related to it going on endlessly. Whenever my ride away from here comes, it will be later than I desire and hope. In the meantime, I’m making plans to endure whatever disaster happens first.

To let you know how seriously I’m taking the preparations, let me just say that the condo I’m renting at the moment has a leak in the roof just above my bed, and all sorts of cracks in the walls, as a consequence of all those earthquakes in Croatia in the past year, and I still didn’t move because I don’t want to expend significant resources before I know where the lightning will actually strike; but I’m sitting on enough money to be able to move immediately and without hesitation if I feel that the right kind of opening was formed. Basically, I prioritize having potential energy to having a good static situation, because we are at a point where good static situations can turn into hellholes on very little notice.

Update

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I’m having persistent health issues that look increasingly like spring allergy, and the fact that all kinds of plants are blossoming at the moment, and I’m literally drowning in allergens, is making this diagnosis very likely. This doesn’t exclude the possibility that I’m also having a low-level viral infection that’s messing with my immune system: it happened last year and the symptoms were similar, but this year, so far so good – the symptoms are mild. Regardless, I’m not feeling well, and the combination of factors also resulted in sudden weight gain in the last month, coinciding precisely with the health issues, namely high level of cortisol in my system.

Due to all this, I decided to take a spring vacations and go to Hvar, where such issues usually either improve or disappear completely after a while.

Why gold prices are falling

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Long version:

There’s somewhere around 200x more “paper gold” in circulation than there is actual metal in the vaults supposedly backing it up. This is politely called “rehypotecation“, and less politely it’s called “fraud”. Basically, they are selling the same gold bar 200 times and counting on the fact that almost nobody demands physical delivery. Now, the BIS apparently demands that the holders of gold as a tier 1 security under Basel III demonstrate that they actually hold physical gold in the quantities they are reporting on paper, and the deadline for that appears to be 28.6.2021. This means that some of the major players, who previously used to defraud people massively by playing with paper, are in a situation where the music will stop playing, in a game of musical chairs, so they are now dumping all that paper gold (read: fraudulent garbage that is about to be exposed) in order not to get caught, and since the market treats those forgeries as if they are physical metal, the price of both is connected, so selling off immense amounts of paper lowers the price of both. At the same time, the demand for physical metal is enormous and everything that appears on the market is immediately lapped up. When the paper positions unwind, and all the thieves manage to cover their naked butts, the price of gold, now fully physical, will likely explode to cover the same volume of money that was previously the valuation of all the “paper gold” forgeries in circulation, basically expanding to 200x or so compared to where it is today, because the “paper gold” was artificially introduced to satiate demand without allowing the price of metal to rise accordingly.

Short versions: hold and buy now while it’s cheap, and if it drops more, buy more. Think of it as Bitcoin at $300, a few years ago.

On central planning

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(from the forum)

I want to add a comment, on the topic of free market vs. central planning.

America will criticise China’s “communist central planning” as if it were a universally bad thing, but having in mind what they recently had in Texas, where they had a free market approach to generating electricity which resulted in:

  • major power losses
  • infrastructure breakdown due to lack of cold weather proofing of the equipment
  • people being charged extreme amounts per kWh because much less electricity was produced and so the “free market” raised the price of the now scarce resource.

Also, we had a similar example in Zagreb, where the communist urbanistic planning ended with national independence, and after that the “free market” determined what will be built, and the result is an urbanistic disaster. Lots of new buildings were made, in areas with poor infrastructure, and then this developed multiple chokepoints – sewage system overloads, road capacity overloads, telecom infrastructure overload, and everything looks more like a concrete favela, than the “elite urban villas” that were advertised for inflated prices. Basically, free market created a clusterfuck.

There are places where you want a free market, but then again, there are places where you want the state to handle things. For instance, producing essential medications should absolutely be state-controlled, because free market will not create cures for diseases, because that’s not profitable. It will create addictive “treatments” that will force you to keep buying medications. This is why I have zero confidence in Western medicine – it’s been creating “treatments” instead of cures as a matter of principle for the last who knows how many decades, to the point where it’s so much a matter of strategy now, they don’t even know how to think in other terms.

Also, the military industry. The Russian way of designing weapons is absolutely superior to the American one, because the state dictates everything and controls the main parts of the process, which is inventing the new technologies and manufacturing, and the design bureaus basically offer competing designs and can’t dictate the prices. As a result, Russia can produce better weapons for a fraction of the cost, because the state dictates the terms and the goals, which are to produce the best weapons for the least amount of money, unlike America, where the huge corporations dictate the price, and the state is reduced to defining the desired performance and inspecting quality, and the goal of the entire process is for the companies to milk the state for as much money as possible while still delivering the minimum design spec. Also, the American military tech is intentionally designed to have enormous cost of maintenance, because that’s how the corporations keep milking the state, while the Russian tech is designed to be robust and cheap to maintain, because the government designs it that way, because it knows it’s going to have to pay for it in the long run.

I know I usually sound like a free market fundamentalist, but that’s usually because I’m arguing with positions that don’t understand the principles and advantages of the free market, which are very real, but the free market is not something that will produce an optimal result. It’s like biological evolution – it can produce many things, but it’s limited to iterating within the constraints of natural selection. It will not produce anything near what an intelligent consciousness can produce, in terms of technology. For instance, biology can’t use nuclear energy for power, enter orbit, or make a rotating joint necessary for making motors, wheels or propellers. If free market is a good approximation of biological evolution, strategic central planning is human consciousness applied to a problem, and it’s capable of both fucking up immensely because it doesn’t have the punishing feedback of free market economy, and also of anticipating and solving problems far ahead into the future, which the free market can’t do. For instance, from the position of free market it’s profitable to keep people hooked on some drug and leech them for money. That’s why dealing drugs is such a profitable business model. It’s only because of the state’s central planning that it is decided that it is a very bad thing for the population to be hooked on drugs, and the laws are introduced to prohibit the practice, regardless of the short-term profitability. An example of what happens when entire countries are hooked on drugs is the opium crisis of China and the problem Russia traditionally has with alcohol. But of course, from the free market perspective, selling drugs is profitable as fuck.

And let’s not kid ourselves – the Western market is also controlled and regulated. It’s profitable to just dump toxic waste somewhere, so there’s a law against that, that performs the function of central control and planning. It’s profitable to deceive people and steal their money, so there are laws that punish such behaviour, because someone decided it’s better for the society as a whole. It’s profitable to create a monopoly or a cartel and exploit everybody, so there are laws that punish that, because this isn’t beneficial for the society as a whole. So it’s just a matter of degree and method, not of principle.

Useless technologies

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Maybe I’m getting old, but as someone who’s been living on the bleeding edge of technology since 1984 or so, and early-adopting all kinds of gadgets, there are increasingly more things that leave me indifferent, or I actually find them annoying. Let me cite some examples.

  • Smart watches. I saw how they work, said “meh”, never got one. Instead, I use a very classic mechanical watch. It is a very elegant piece of technology that is powered by hand motions, is easily serviceable and lasts for a very, very long time. Also, it isn’t landfill fodder.
  • Social media. Strictly speaking not a gadget or a tech artifact, but I see the entire phenomenon as extremely worrisome, and it does kind of function as the spirit behind lots of gadgets. My main problems with social media are that they are corporate-owned, and as such have a chokepoint of censorship, where a political group can take control of the company, which is relatively easy, and then basically control behavior of billions. Also, they promote groupthink and mobbing, and, by definition, reduce people to very simplified patterns of thought and emotion. Absolutely none of that is a good thing. I certainly don’t object to people communicating online, and it is definitely possible to create very constructive forums, but the general trend is that Facebook, Google, Twitter and others are implementing political censorship and reducing the level of human mental diversity and complexity.
  • Virtual/hybrid reality devices. The only place where I can see use for them are driving/flight simulators. For everything else, they are just a great way of getting motion sickness.
  • Mobile apps that are essentially just single-website browsers. Just use the web browser to go to that site and there’s your “app”. Pointless. Also, dedicated media library apps. A better version of this is called a file system and a media player.
  • Appliances with Li-ion batteries built in, with no apparent thought given to servicing or replacement of the battery, which shows that the device’s useful life is obviously limited by that of the battery. It’s an obvious example of wastefulness and planned obsolescence. I’m talking about electric shavers, vacuum cleaners, toothbrushes, smartwatches, digital styluses, earphones/headphones, phones, tablets, laptops etc. It’s not that I object to things not being tethered to a wall with a power cord, but just make batteries that are standard, modular and easy to replace and recycle, thank you.
  • Electric cars, but shortage of electricity. It’s not that we don’t have designs for safe and efficient nuclear power plants. Thorium-molten-salt technology that uses liquid nuclear fuel not only is safe (it’s trivially easy to make it fail in a safe manner without causing meltdowns), it also uses radioactive waste from our solid-fuel plants as fuel, basically transmuting everything into either fissile or inert form. The technology is absolutely awesome, but you don’t hear the “eco” leftists talking about it, because all they care for is stupid and toxic shit such as the windmills and solar panels. It’s all weak, inefficient and unreliable garbage. The only things that are actually great are geothermal and nuclear plants, and you can define geothermal plants as nuclear plants using unconcentrated nuclear fuel in-situ, because the Earth heat is nuclear in origin. Electric cars are not “clean”, they are toxic garbage, and they don’t use a “clean” or “abundant” resource, because electricity can be both dirty and scarce, and, thanks to the leftists, it is increasingly more so. Power the entire civilization with liquid fuel fission reactors, and power the cars with modern isotope sources instead of those huge, heavy and fragile Li-ion batteries, and then we can talk about electric cars. Safety-wise, I would rather have a nuclear reactor than a Li-ion battery in my car, and as for the solar panels and windmills, has anyone given any thought to their lifespan, recycling requirements and ecological impact? Thought so.
  • Hipster tech. Here I’m thinking about film cameras that intentionally produce inferior pictures because it’s “retro”, or using vinyl records mastered from digital sources because it’s “analog”. That’s just affectation.
  • Podcasts and video. I don’t object to those as such, but when a guy online makes a video in which he basically shows stock footage and reads from a script, it might as well be an article in textual form. Reading is a thing.
  • Nuclear fusion. Stop trying to make that work, it works only when gravity provides containment for free, i.e. in the stars, but when you have to create containment yourself, it’s extremely expensive which makes the whole idea ineffective, dirty, cumbersome and fragile. It’s also not “clean”, it produces as much radiation as nuclear fission, it’s just that the nuclear fuel is gaseous, and not solid or liquid. Liquid nuclear fuel used for fission solves all the problems of solid-fuel fission reactors, and remove all the complexity, difficulty and cost associated with fusion.

Basically, I find it annoying when people who discard a technology that consumes nuclear waste to produce clean electricity, in favor of technology that consumes rare elements to produce chemical waste and dirty electricity, have some incredible urge to lecture everybody about environmental impact. Also, I find it annoying when people who can’t write a web application to save their lives think they are tech savvy because they have all the social media apps on their phones. Also, I find it annoying when people who virtue signal online about the evils of “capitalism” and “consumerism” prefer to buy a locked-in unserviceable device because it’s “more elegant”, and they also bully people who still use an older device because they are “poor”. Also, they use hipster tech, but ridicule “boomers”, without actually knowing what a “boomer” is, only that it’s someone older than they are, with an assumption that they are the smartest generation because they have smartphones and stuff. But the old guys who made them their fucking smartphones, they are stupid and “out of touch with the modern things”.

It is also my impression that we are witnessing a historically unique phenomenon where the younger generations are significantly less tech-savvy than the ones before them. Basically, the WW2 generation went to the Moon, the baby-boomers invented IT, my generation invented all the IT infrastructure that runs on top of that, and the younger generations basically just use it all to exchange memes online. Basically, the level of intellectual degradation is visible from the prevalence of conspiracy theories that cast doubt on the existence of all kinds of things that were obvious to the generations before. I’ve seen all kinds of nonsense – Moon landings aren’t real, space tech isn’t real, Earth is flat, nuclear weapons aren’t real.

All I can say to this is, idiocracy is real.