But for most people, cause and effect ends when they close their eyes.

I’m mortified by the percent of the adult population that doesn’t really understand cause and effect in any meaningful or functional way. It took me way too long to realize its something ,that was assumed implicit to me when internally modeling other people’s mental models, actually doesn’t even apply to like 60% of the population. it explains a lot of my confusion for my life about peoples behavior.

its weird how the brilliance of Jay W. Forrester and the whole systems dynamics thing had a succession problem or something . Nobody took up the reigns afaik . just sort of faded out . donella meadows… As school of thought or discipline it really just got left abandoned and rudderless. ive been hoping some genius would revive it and bring it back to the public sphere in a meaningful way. at best we got some good stuff like permaculture out of it that got traction but still not the holistic tier that should exist . maybe its too abstract

if the manufacture and supply chain of materials of a windmill is substantially fossil fuel based its just a symbolic version of that.

while i think a lot of the “renewables are made of fossil fuels” arguments are overly reductionist in a pragmatic sense its still true. i do think many of those people think unless the entire supply chain of renewables is renewables its impure or not useful. Its still very useful and steps on a continuum to full renewable self reproduction , even if it does take some nuclear peaker plants or something .

the ore grade getting shittier and more contaminated with heavy metals and those metals accumulating in the soils everywhere those fertilizers are used will fuck humanity sooner and already is in many places.

I think hes making a supremely bad call trying to get those people to sell a real asset homestead in a good location just because of debt. in the current situation the only path that can be taken is papering over any crash with money printer. This will end up rapidly devaluing their debt to the point they will basically be getting dirt cheap primo property so long as they can float through the fixed payments long enough. People in weimar era germany that bought tons of assets on debt made out like bandits. Maximizing Debt is a good strategy if you dont hit ruin between now and the blow off of inflation. If they have savings to cover a few years of payments they should be good once the next crash hits

Venezuela then iran then cuba.

if you dont believe me i dont care. this is for people who know me and know im not full of shit. if you want proof go hangout on the firing range of Ft Hood when they drop the test run bunker busters for all i care.

During the US civil war a bioluminescent fungus that kind worked like penicillin randomly spread after a battle saving a bunch of lives:

cool!

Before the antibiotic era there was a dude that survived cholera or other epidemic in trench warfare WWI they found a particular strain of ecoli he harbored and preserved it and there is a company that still sells it .

i thought we needed to be closer to 800- 1000 pom

600ppm is the place where it start affecting human cognition from what i recall. there was a dude in the reddit back in the day called MrVisible that was obsessed with this and had a whole sub about it . i thing it was called r/doomsdaycult or something like that.

EDIT: i just went to find that old sub and reddit banned it of course . maybe a reddit archive will have it.

"First, there is no natural brake. AI capabilities improve, companies need fewer workers, displaced workers spend less, weakened companies invest more in AI to protect margins, and AI capabilities improve further. Each company’s individual response is rational. The collective result is a negative feedback loop that feeds on itself.

Second, the spending damage is wildly disproportionate to the job losses. The top 20% of earners drive roughly 65% of all US consumer spending. These are the white-collar workers most exposed to AI displacement. A modest percentage decline in white-collar employment translates into a much larger hit to discretionary consumer spending, devastating the businesses that depend on it and triggering further layoffs.

Third, AI agents will dismantle the vast intermediation layer of the US economy. Over fifty years, we have built trillions of dollars of enterprise value on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, and most people accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Agentic AI eliminates this friction. Software, consulting, financial services, insurance, travel, real estate and payments are all built on monetizing complexity that agents find trivial. As these sectors suffer steep revenue losses, they will shed jobs aggressively and compound the bleeding.

Fourth, the financial system is one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth. Over $2.5 trillion of private credit has been deployed into leveraged buyouts underwritten against revenue assumptions that no longer hold. The $13 trillion mortgage market is built on the assumption that borrowers will remain employed at roughly their current income for thirty years. These aren’t subprime borrowers–they’re 780 FICO scores who put 20% down. The loans were good on day one. The world just changed after they were written.

Fifth, the government’s fiscal position inverts at the worst possible time. Federal revenue is essentially a tax on human work. As white-collar incomes decline and payrolls shrink, tax receipts dry up just as the need for transfer payments surges. The government will need to send more money to households at precisely the moment it is collecting less from them."

Wildy higher losses and worse than i would have suspected.

Maize Under a high-emissions scenario, our projected end-of-century maize yield losses are severe (about −40%) in the grain belt of the USA, Eastern China, Central Asia, Southern Africa and the Middle East (Fig. 2a, Extended Data Fig. 7a and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11). Losses in South America and Central Africa are more moderate (about −15%), mitigated in part by high levels of precipitation and increasing long-run precipitation (Extended Data Fig. 3b). Impacts in Europe vary with latitude, from +10% gains in the north to −40% losses along the Mediterranean. Gains in theoretical yield potentials occur in many northern regions in which maize is not widely grown (Supplementary Fig. 7).

Soybean The spatial distribution of soybean yield impacts is similar in structure to maize, although magnitudes are accentuated (Fig. 2b, Extended Data Fig. 7b and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11); for example, about −50% in the USA and about +20% in wet regions of Brazil under a high-emissions scenario.

Rice High-emissions rice yield impacts are mixed in India and Southeast Asia, which lead global rice production, with small gains and losses throughout these regions. This regional result is broadly consistent with earlier work1. In the remaining rice-growing regions, central estimates are generally negative, with magnitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Central Asia exceeding −50% (Fig. 2c, Extended Data Fig. 7c and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11).

Wheat Wheat losses are notably consistent across the main wheat-growing regions, with high-emissions yield losses of −15% to −25% in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa and South America and −30% to −40% in China, Russia, the USA and Canada (Fig. 2d, Extended Data Fig. 7d and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11). There are notable exceptions to these global patterns: wheat-growing regions of Western China exhibit both gains and losses, whereas wheat-growing regions of Northern India exhibit some of the most severe projected losses across the globe.

Cassava Cassava is projected to have uniformly negative projected impacts in nearly all regions in which it is grown at present, with the largest losses in Sub-Saharan Africa (−40% on average under a high-emissions scenario). Although cassava does not make up a large portion of global agricultural revenues, it is an important subsistence crop in low-income and middle-income countries. Thus, these yield losses may be a substantial future threat to the nutritional intake of the global poor (Fig. 2e, Extended Data Fig. 7e and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11).

Sorghum Sorghum losses are widespread in almost all of the main regions in which it is grown at present: North America (−40%), South Asia (including India) (−10%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (−25%). Projected gains emerge in Western Europe (+28%) and Northern China (+3%) (Fig. 2f, Extended Data Fig. 7f and Supplementary Figs. 10 and 11).

still funds some coherent stuff.

Nice . I was waiting for someone to quantify this type of thing. I wonder what the maximum possible density is.

What YIELD is, is production per area figure. So like, if you jettison all these marginal failing fields, your “average” climbs. Because you’re making the denominator smaller FASTER than you’re making the numerator smaller. But production is falling!

yeah reminds me of how they claim less and less people are in poverty because some arbitrary $2.50 a day threshold while simultaneously the number of people with permanent malnutrition based stunting is increasing by hundreds of millions.

to be expected as higher latitudes get bulk of the warming compared to tropics.

I just don’t know how small farms survive in a financial sense

they dont , we’ve been in a “get big or get out” regime for decades already . Most small farms are subsidized by outside working family members , this is well documented in the usda statistics. what going to have to happen is farmers are going to have to start charging more to compensate for year to year risk but its difficult to do because competition between commodity producers is high so further farm consolidation will continue until there are so few players oligopoly like margins and coordination to higher prices becomes viable.

its mind blowing the mental/bureaucratic gymnastics humans will engage in to delude themselves . there has never been a moment we were off the rcp8.5 path but the narrative was so ubiquitous .

rates of soil carbon accumulation, though that lies outside of the scope of this article. The Kernza domestication program was launched in 2002 and has reached about 1/3 the yield of wheat in comparative trials (DeHaan et al., 2018; Cassman and Connor, 2022

1/3 the yield of current modern wheat is already at the level of preindustrial wheat yields so as a post apocalyptic crop this creates a beneficial artifact from the modern era.

people started working on this in the 1960s though most failed there were major lessons to be learned about it. It is very much the time to start building parallel institutions. the transition towns movement the FEC and FIC federation of communes people have been haphazardly lurching towards these things . worker owned and co-ops of the past and even lodge societies like the oddfellows have built humanistic social instituions that have been mostly ignored by mainstream society.

Im working on things with some other people right now. what country are you in ? how old and do you have any skills?

Money is more than banknotes and coins. If you have a bank account, you can use what’s in it to buy things, typically with a debit card. Because you can buy things with your bank account, we think of this as money even though it’s not cash. Therefore, if you borrow £100 from the bank, and it credits your account with the amount, ‘new money’ has been created. It didn’t exist until it was credited to your account. This also means as you pay off the loan, the electronic money your bank created is ‘deleted’ — it no longer exists. You haven’t got richer or poorer. You might have less money in your bank account but your debts have gone down too. So essentially, banks create money, not wealth. Banks create around 80% of money in the economy as electronic deposits in this way. In comparison, banknotes and coins only make up 3%.”

this is missing the much bigger more important macro picture right now which is we entered a fiscal dominance. Now regardless of monetary credit expansion from banks poofing money into existence, government outlays are being printed and its in a runaway . This source of inflation would run even if interest rates were 20%. in fact high interest rates are paying bond holders from printed money which is inflationary. A lot of people havent noticed this phase change. its one of the reasons golds going crazy right now, along with the dying of the dollar as reserve currency .

USA is backed itself into corner . austerity is politically unacceptable and the only path forward is inflating away nominal debt.

Im glad i planned for this because i would be epically more fucked if i hadnt.

Land prices are out of control too, used to be major regional differences but thats mostly been arbitraged out and now even places in oklahoma and arkansas are overpriced. People listing good farmland has slowed so much, they just hold it now.

https://www.lynalden.com/full-steam-ahead-all-aboard-fiscal-dominance/