[Newfie]

We have lost a large number of posters who were quite active and then quit rather suddenly.

Ruminating on the matter it seems people post here and get rather roiled up. Then they quit.

Perhaps it is the frustration of not being able to change minds?

I find the best use of the forum is as an excuse to type out my ideas. I find writing out my ideas helps me to develop them. It is the same with talking.

Anyway I because my need is met by the typing I am better able to resist the frustration of not changing minds. Not sure of this, just typing about the possibility.

[careinke]

We have lost a large number of posters who were quite active and then quit rather suddenly.

Ruminating on the matter it seems people post here and get rather roiled up. Then they quit.

Perhaps it is the frustration of not being able to change minds?

I find the best use of the forum is as an excuse to type out my ideas. I find writing out my ideas helps me to develop them. It is the same with talking.

Anyway I because my need is met by the typing I am better able to resist the frustration of not changing minds. Not sure of this, just typing about the possibility.

+1 Me too.

It also lets me go back and see what I was thinking in the past, plus my ancestors if they chose will be able to fully check out my life. I wish I could do the same with some of my ancestors.

I do take breaks sometimes, usually due to more immediate pressures from my real life, (like Grandkids!!!).

Oh, I also take personal attacks as a sign of victory.

Peace

[AgentR11]

I tend to quit posting from time to time; mostly as a matter of available time! Just variations in how much stuff I'm trying to do at once really.

[theluckycountry]

I find the best use of the forum is as an excuse to type out my ideas. I find writing out my ideas helps me to develop them. It is the same with talking.

+1 Me too.

Yes, #Me Too. It's helps to codify things in ya brain and of course to find new information. I think without this sort of interaction you cut yourself off from the real world and the influence of the BS media political world creeps back in. I was watching an episode of the "World at war" earlier tonight, the battle of Stalingrad, and it was fascinating to watch all those Germans marching across Russia only to get slaughtered in freezing trenches. Likewise the Russians marching in to get blown to pieces as well. If those German soldiers had not been seduced by the Nazi propaganda I doubt many would have signed up for the slaughter. But after 5 years or so of controlled media and suppression of thought it was all over for them.

This place isn't as much about espousing opinions as it is about dodging future bullets.

[Newfie]

A bit of interesting art work.

Read the description.

Art imitates life imitates art.

https://www.facebook.com/599283438/post ... tid=cr9u03

[theluckycountry]

A bit of interesting art work.

This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.

Never mind.
I probably couldn't have viewed it anyway as I'm not a member of facebook. I never joined any of the social media platforms actually. Just a personal choice based on my desire to limit screen time and not expose my personal life to data accumulators. This thread seems to have wandered a bit, it is hard to quantify degrowth in our modern world I guess, given that all of it, in the West at least, is based on massive debt creation and corporate growth in a market where valuations are really quite fictional.

I have tried to explain this latter in terms of the private pension money that floods into it every week from the wages of billions of working people across the globe. Just imagine a company like Tesla trying to grow in the 1970's when you actually had to make profits? Now all you have to do is create the illusion of value and no doubt have business associates in the pension industry who will redirect the funds under their control into your company. If every week there is a fixed demand for your shares coming from these funds then your share price automatically goes up doesn't it. Simple supply and demand.

Australia is a small nation, population of 26 million, a GDP of 1 Trillion and currently 3.4 Trillion in private pension ( superannuation ) assets under mismanagement. The pop stat is real! The GDP is a fictional value based on everything from wheat produced to CC debt. The pension figure too is a sort of fiction value because unlike the total debt, it can fluctuate wildly depending on the stock and property markets. With 50%, 1.7 trillion in stocks a 50% decline in the market wipes 50% of the value of people's retirement savings. Which is exactly what happened in 2008.

Trying therefore to quantify future growth is a bit like dropping a ball onto a roulette wheel. Around and round it goes, and where it stops nobody knows because growth is based on these fictional metrics that can change in a heartbeat. I'm talking about growth but really it's degrowth that will come from this fiction based economic system. We know that because debt always reaches a limit, eventually, and because over-inflated stock and property markets always revert, eventually. A lot of (most) modern economists would challenge those two truths, but that's understandable since they are being paid to promote the opposite.

[Pops]

If interested check out Peter Zeihan on the UTube.

I have for many years here said the old demographc curve will continue to bend toward degrowth as the birth rate continues falling to match the death rate. I debated people up one side and down the other arguing the population bomb will fizzle, pretty much as it is doing. Zeihan talks about this a lot, pointing out where this has already taken place and the reactions. Degrowth per se isn't his main schtick, he brings in many more observations and trends such as the US becoming more and more inward looking, China's collapsing economy, not to mention Germany's failing industrial sector behind the loss of RU gas imports and so on.

He's a bull on North American energy and its positioning to reshore manufacturing. He isn't a polyanna, if anything he is a investment bull. Many of his theses are simplistic, but he points out macro trends and situations I wasn't aware of. For example his take on Ukraine is that putin doesn't necessarily want it, he wants what is on the other side: the passes that are the route the EU would take to invade RU.

Another idea (not Zeihan's, more seeking alpha) I've argued is that we have been in actual degrowth since at least the '70s. Imagine being fired from your job and subsisting, in fact splurging, on your lifestyle by financing everything, including the interest payments. It is truly a ponzi scheme. Bitcoint, NFTs, home prices, stock values @ 25x earnings and earnings themselves at record levels on blatant price gouging, etc are just the most obvious signs.A quick look at the overall growth in debt vs growth in GDP shows the illusion of growth has been entirely financed.

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), All Sectors; Debt Securities and Loans; Liability, Level [TCMDO], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO, May 1, 2020.

Probably some double counting there but you get the gist. The point of Brenton Woods was to remove the benchmark (gold) so everything could be made up and the points don't matter. The US as post WWII guarantor of globalism (as long as you were against the USSR) is another of Zeihan's hobby horses. The increasing nationalism worldwide but in the US particularly is the death knell for that globalism because who else will be the cop that guards global trade routes? The post-war global order is coming to and end and that will result in the confiscation of our credit card. I think that will be the great dawning.

Degrowth won't ever be voluntary. But already all around us. Makes me think of how the prequel to Gilead might look.

[theluckycountry]

Love that debt chart. From one or two Trillion in 1970 to 80 odd Trillion today. Not Y=X^2, but certainly in the same family. When did growth start? In the 1700's, at the founding of Rome? It's always been there hasn't it, as long as there was a way to grow or steal more food than people could eat. And when it isn't growth, well then it's collapse, Not Degrowth.

Degrowth has a nice orderly ring to it. Like we will just slowly get poorer over time, slowly go back from smart phones to landlines with dials on them. 1970 was a good year, though I was very young then I still remember bits. I even remember using real silver coins a few years before. My father got involved in a pyramid scheme back then called SCOPE. It was to be a credit card like American Express but it never took off and he lost his $2000 buy in directors fee. Someone though made a lot of money.

That was the beginning of the "Get something for nothing mindset" and we have gone downhill ever since. I'm glad the moon landing by Armstrong and Aldrin was made in 1969. That was an honest decent endeavor and doesn't deserve to be associated with the 1970's.

[Newfie]

I don't agree with all of zeihan's positions but in general I think he has it about right. Be seems to have a harder time with short range predictions.

But for his larger global view, he has a lot to offer.

I find his explanation of the Japanese adaptations interesting and helpful.