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The economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment. There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing cor
by bearjaws 7mo ago
The economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment.
There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing corporate and ultra high wealth spend. The rest will be left with food and water.
We are destroying currently valuable jobs to allocate resources to electricity and silicon, concentrating wealth into 10 companies pockets.
I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression.
- bequanna 7mo ago> I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression. I follow your extrapolation in the first part, but this is where you lost me. Why is the Iran war guaranteed to have long-term net negative consequences? It seems far too early to predict the outcome with any kind of certainty.
- mjburgess 7mo agoIran's principle strategy is to impose severe economic consequences on the US and its allies, to tip the balance of resolve in their favour. This is easy for them to do, because closing vital shipping lanes and attacking energy infrastructure in the region is done at only the cost of a few drones -- whilst defending this is incredibly expensive. This asymmetry is the only one which is profoundly in Iran's favour, and their best strategy for forcing a diplomatic resolution. This is why they are attacking multiple US allies in the region.
- lumost 7mo agoThe Iran war is symptomatic of what's to come. If the US/other major powers feel unconstrained to wage semi-limited disruptive conflicts at will - then the world will be much less stable. Iran can close the straight of hormuz as retaliation, and there really isn't anything that can be done about it except for invasion. Other countries have similar capabilities or can acquire them readily. If Cuba wanted to close the gulf in retaliation for a US attack - they could, Denmark could lock the north sea to US shipping and naval traffic etc. etc.
- nradov 7mo agoCuba has effectively zero capability to project military power beyond their territorial waters. They can't close the Gulf of Mexico or even credibly threaten to do so. They are in no way comparable to Iran. As an island nation with limited natural mineral resources they're also very vulnerable to blockade.
- lumost 7mo agoShahed style drones are quite inexpensive, the straight between key west and cuba is only 90 miles. To my knowledge, it is practically impossible to destroy distributed shahed launchers from an air campaign alone.
- nradov 7mo agoTo my knowledge it is practically possible to carpet bomb Cuba and just kill everyone on the island. And they have almost zero domestic manufacturing capacity to build long-range drones (or anything else).
- jcranmer 7mo agoAbout 20% of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively closed right now. So far, the economy is coping by drawing down inventories elsewhere and praying that the strait reopens soon, but even then, crude oil futures are skyrocketing (up 50% in a week). If this lasts for a few months--and if a few oil tankers get blown up in the crossfire--this is going to be a repeat of the 1970's oil embargo. There is also the worry that the war is going to end up targeting and destroying a significant chunk of oil production facilities in the region, which will persist the energy crisis well beyond the end of active hostilities. Combine that with the fact that the war is being led by a senile idiot who is unable to articulate a strategic purpose for the war in the first place and being prosecuted by someone who thinks that war crimes are aspirational, and you begin to understand that there is actually little prospect of this being resolved anytime soon.
- toast0 7mo agoIgnoring concerns about the wisdom of the war; there's about three directions this can go: Fizzle out: Strait reopens cause Iran needs ocean shipping. Continue as now: oil trade disrupted, but using lots of missiles and drones and things; increased munitions demand leads to increased manufacturing jobs. Boots on the ground: oil trade reopened, long term quagmire, probably more munitions production.
- Ostrogoth 7mo agoOne potential knock-on impact of the strait being effectively closed, is that at some point the gulf states will be forced to shut-in production as local storage fills up and production can’t be exported. That combined with war damage to critical transport/export infrastructure will cause a lag where production can’t meet global demand even when the strait re-opens. Turning oil wells back on is not like flipping on a light switch.
- velik_m 7mo agoIt's already happening: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kuwait-cuts-oil-refining-output-155850782.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kuwait-cuts-oil-refining-outp...
- convolvatron 7mo agoturn it around. how is it possible that we interfere with a population, already inflamed with hatred because of past interference, and expect them to become moderate apolitical consumers. we kill more fathers, there will be more angry sons. that's been going on for more than 50 years. so no, it doesn't seem like there is any good outcome to be had by invading yet another country in the area and setting up another weak puppet government. what is the end game supposed to be here?
- nradov 7mo agoThere's no end game. In foreign policy circles they refer to this as "mowing the grass". Whenever an adversary starts to become a credible threat then bomb them enough to knock them down a few notches and delay the problem. From a purely amoral geopolitical perspective this can be effective, although at tremendous human cost.
- convolvatron 7mo agopersonally I think this is 'fair'. wave your stick around and threaten people and the community takes away your stick. But I don't really trust this administration to follow the wisdom of the elder Bush. it seems a situation primed to follow the course of the mideast wars of the last couple decades, where the US stayed purely for the reason of not wanting to own up to the obvious and attempt to force some kind of submission. I guess we can check in a couple weeks to see which way the wind the blowing.
- ericfr11 7mo agoWhen a country leader says "another country leader won't last without my approval", he becomes an imperialist driven by power and money
- darth_avocado 7mo ago> I don't know what comes after You start looking like South Africa, Brazil, India or other large economies with high concentration of wealth at the top.
- intrasight 7mo agoStart?
- dragon-hn 7mo agoIt can get so much worse than what we have in the West.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoLack of density in the US means we at least get the mexican version of this not the indian/bladerunner flavor.
- darth_avocado 7mo agoNeither South Africa nor Brazil are that dense, which is why I included them as examples.
- dmix 7mo agoAll of them famous for top heavy bureaucracies meddling in industry and highly political byzantine rules for business, which is the current drumbeat the west is following.
- piva00 7mo agoLumping "the West" as one thing in this argument is just wrong. The West is composed of so many different countries with their own legal systems, cultural baggage, bureaucratic and political processes which evolved differently over time that it makes your sentence meaningless. From my own experience moving from Brazil, having ran businesses there, and later in life moving to "the West" (Sweden) there's simply no comparison between the hurdles you have in Brazil vs Sweden. No, not even the drumbeat is pointing in that direction, it's almost a literal different world. You need to be more specific to make this kind of criticism, it is absurdly vague, and by that also quite unhelpful to any discussion.
- monero-xmr 7mo agoI heard this canard my entire life. It’s been said for centuries. If you want maximum employment pass a law that says all grass must be cut with scissors. Otherwise let productivity gains diffuse out - that’s the only way to increase true wealth
- jayd16 7mo agoWe can use technology to increase production and have a progressive tax. There is absolutely no reason we need to endure the extreme wealth divide.
- monero-xmr 7mo agoIf there is a need that people pay for, and it took 10 people, and technology comes and it can now be done by 1 person, that is a great thing. That’s not a bad thing at all. That’s exactly how the world progresses forwards. Everyone can get the need met, and at a cheaper cost, while freeing the other 9 people to do something else useful. That is why we have the standard of living we have today
- zahlman 7mo agoI genuinely cannot understand why this comment was killed. Even if you disagree with the position, there's nothing at all objectionable about how it's being presented.
- acdha 7mo agoI think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created. Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
- 0xy 7mo ago[flagged]
- behringer 7mo agoThose numbers are fraudulently underreported by the US government. Smart people have sold their US backed holdings. I'm making bank on gold and the international market.
- kamranjon 7mo agoCan you go into more detail about what you did with your investments? How did you invest in the international market?
- 0xy 7mo agoVTI (US equities ETF) was up 16% last year. No idea what you're talking about, but it's not grounded in reality.
- Hikikomori 7mo agoDollar lost more value.
- ece 7mo agoGold being a good investment is about as glaring a sign as there is for the third-worldifiction of the economy by dictators and the rich.
- 7mo ago
- marbro 7mo ago[dead]
- carefree-bob 7mo agoheh, I guess "bearjaws" is a good name. I don't see any doom or gloom, but what I do see is that tech companies massively ballooned headcount, and are now scrambling to return to sustainable levels, using anything as an excuse in order to avoid saying "we exercised poor judgment in 2020-2023". It must be AI! It's blockchain! It's tariffs! It's global warming! The list of excuses goes on and on, but just look at what the headcount was for these companies in 2020, and think about whether it makes sense for them to add that many new people. Management screwed up. I guess you can take this as a harbinger of Total Collapse, but I don't think that's warranted. Oracle added 30,000 people since 2020 and they are now realizing that this was foolish, given that Oracle's primary source of revenue growth is hiking license fees for legacy products. They don't need 30,000 new people. They don't even need the 130,000 people they had in 2020.
- palmotea 7mo ago> The rest will be left with food and water. Why? That's wasteful. The money for that should go to the shareholders, and the moocher problem will solve itself in a couple of weeks.
- matty22 7mo agoRead the history of just about any political revolution in history. Eventually, those oligarchs at the top find their heads in the guillotine.