Prediction

Overground

Chill Politics, Prediction

Might be right, might be wrong — but we have heard this before. Read documents and commentary from the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was chaos. There were riots, the Weather Underground bombed the US Capitol building and people believed society was about to dissolve into anarchy and mass death.

But it didn’t. And that’s mostly forgotten now, even in some cases by people who lived through it.

My personal guess is that we experience a pretty bad WWIII against China, Russia and North Korea, the US pulls together and we and Europe emerge stronger with China diminished and reclusive once again.

But Trump is doing the US much damage that will not be easy to repair. I agree that it is not looking good.

The III

Chill Prediction, War

WWIII has already started. I mean, obviously. Well, if you have a brain attached.

Future historians will mark the date of its commencement as of February 20, 2014, the first Russian invasion of Ukraine. I’m guessing it’ll end somewhere around 2040, unless we nuke ourselves all to hell. Then it could be sooner.

Prone

Chill Political Economy, Prediction

I like Ed, but this is a clueless take. He’s not thinking predatorily enough, like an MBA would. The point of GenAI is to eventually replace workers, not to be these little toys we have now. The MBAs simply DO NOT CARE if AI does not do work that is as of the quality that a human can do. If a GenAI costs 1/20 the price and does work that’s only 1/4 as good — that is still a net win. In MBA thinking, anyway.

Ed is wrong, wrong, wrong. “Mediocre and error prone” at a low price is just fine in capitalism. Preferred, even, if it never talks back, never demands higher wages and has no actual human needs.

Understand this or you understand nothing.

Done Dirty

Chill Evil, Prediction, War

We’ve really done Ukraine dirty. And by “we,” I mean the US, NATO and the EU. We allowed them to absorb all the Russian aggression and revanchism while providing just barely enough support to survive.

And we’ll pay for that. More specifically, the Baltics, Poland and Germany will. At least they’ll get it the worst.

Wait and see.

The Problem Is Not Cost

Chill Political Economy, Prediction

Yup. And it’d only cost around $100 billion to fill the desert1 with enough solar panels and batteries to power the entire United States year-round forever.

The problem is not cost. Nor even what is possible. The problem is will. We could do so much more than we have done. And we should. The future does not belong to faint-hearted, anemic degrowthers cowering before the god of lost causes and reveling in their prostrate servility. The degrowthers claim that tech will not allow us to survive what is coming. But that is completely wrong. In fact, it is the only thing that will.

We undertake insanely ambitious projects or we die. It’s as simple as that.

As I’ve said before, we must become the gods that we pretend to be.

  1. Or somewhere, if the desert is gone.

Runover

Chill Prediction

It looks like the future of Europe is to be a stagnant backwater where the standard of living slowly declines. It’s likely to be overrun both by Russia and by mobs of economic migrants with Enlightenment-hostile values and cultures.

My guess is that the region will deteriorate for 200-300 years and then as those mobs aforementioned and their terrible cultures cool out, it’ll flourish once again — after some brutal wars and genocides.

Good times, good times.

Poland

Chill Prediction, War

The Price of Russian Victory: Why Letting Putin Win Would Cost America More Than Supporting Ukraine.

Allowing Russia to defeat Ukraine would cost the United States about seven times more than preventing a Russian victory.

Far more than that. Because if we let Russia win, we’ll be fighting Russia in Poland in 2028 or a bit later. I’d estimate the financial cost of that war at $5 trillion or so. And that’s only the monetary burden; hundreds of thousands to millions will be killed and lives will be disrupted forever.

We should not let that happen. But we probably will.

We Are There

Chill Clowns, Prediction, WTF

This is correct; we are already in WWIII’s beginning phases and we should act like it. There is a certain inevitability to these things. We are making it worse, not better, by not helping Ukraine enough. I don’t completely agree with Kyle but we’re on a path globally that leads to a world-devastating conflict, with very few realistic ways to avoid it.

Our goal now should be to make it the least bad and shortest war possible. Which we in the US are not doing at all, and neither is Europe.

What We Do

Chill Prediction, War

This is not the direct setup for the Taiwan invasion. That’ll occur in 2026-2027 while Trump is at his weakest. This is a test to see how the US and Europe respond to provocations. This is a common Chinese tactic that produces extremely valuable real-world data on likelihood of aggressive retaliation, determination of actual effects of communications being severed, and movement of forces in the area in which the sabotage was conducted and in other areas as well.

This is a dry run for a future, much larger operation and not the operation itself.

Bad Boom

Chill Prediction, War

If Russia nuclear strikes Ukraine, would the West really follow up with nuclear counter strikes?

No, that’s not what would occur. NATO and the US would utterly destroy Russia’s military capabilities using conventional means, though. And perhaps even occupy Moscow temporarily.

However, what China would do is another matter. That I don’t have a lot of insight on but I can guarantee it would not be nothing. Most likely it would occupy significant parts of eastern Russia and Siberia, I’d guess. But that I’m less clear on.