America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)
salon.com
salon.com
>and most importantly, it has the strongest military by far.
"America" (The U.S.) will likely collapse from internal conflict, possibly precipitated or accompanied by external provocation (cyber warfare, infrastructure attacks, propaganda), that will divide the country and the military. Imagine the U.S. during the Civil War/War between the States. This time there won't be borders between the sides. How is a country facing such internal strife going to be able to control, let alone worry, about global affairs beyond it's borders?
Against what, and by what means?
(Perhaps naively) I'd always assumed the markets decide the exchange rates of (most) Western currencies against each other.
Obviously with a dollop of central bank intervention here and there(!)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=KT86
but overnight, rather than over several years?
I think it would represent a fairly strong change in global power structures, but like you I don’t think the sky would fall.
It's quite a long read, but I can tell you it doesn't come from a libertarian perspective. It does touch on Bitcoin, but near the end in one of a few theoretical "where things could go" perspective.
>"I think it would represent a fairly strong change in global power structures, but like you I don’t think the sky would fall."
Agreed, it would be shocking but life would go on. We would just have to live with a new international monetary paradigm.
But as she says, such a change could take place in different ways, with different implications. If it were to happen suddenly it would be a shock, but that isn’t necessarily the case.
Most signs point to a multipolar world order isn’t he future, and outside a complete internal political collapse, the US would in all likelihood be one of those poles.
Broadly speaking, the US has to run trade deficits in order for the rest of the world to have the dollars they must use to buy oil. This severely handicaps our ability to manufacture and produce things domestically. During the past century the US Government took on lots of debt with the understanding that our economy would naturally grow to cover the obligations. But given this international monetary system, I struggle to see how the US can manage to grow it's way out of all the debt we've made for ourselves. I would like to go on, but Lyn is a far better writer than I.
Also, the notion that domestic knowledge on how to build things like chips has been gutted is just flat out false. Intel is still close to the cutting edge in chip fabrication, they just aren’t #1 anymore.
We have opened a direct line for all of our enemies to be able to attack us without any regard to geography whatsoever. Critical infrastructure is all online and barely protected by even the most basic security. We’ve already seen multiple utilities go down due to hacks, and those were probably accidents where the attackers were overzealous. It’s not unreasonable to assume that we’re already completely pwned, with foreign interests just sitting back and waiting for the right time to flip a switch.
Military and geographical advantages are irrelevant in this scenario.
Oh, it has the largest too -- the US Air Force.
It's just the second largest air force in the world belongs to the US Navy.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-a...
Unfair share? Based on what? The spending is directly correlated to USA's interests, there is no nanny-ing or "good will" going on, it's a matter of purely international interests. Looking at this with the patronising "unfair share" is a bit preposterous.
I'd say it's pretty unfair to a lot of countries being forced under the sphere of influence of the US to be continuously subjugated, through foreign policy or direct meddling in internal affairs, like the whole of Latin America. That is really fucking unfair.
Do you really believe the US has been doing that selflessly?
I mean, it's OK to no longer want to be an imperialistic nation. The feeling I get from people with that kind of message, though, is that they usually don't want to lose the benefits of being hegemonic. They just don't want to pay the upkeep for it.
A loss of military hegemony will most likely reduce the US's global political and economic role as other countries move to fill that void or take advantage of the absence (China, Russia, at present). The net effect will likely be a shrinking of the US economy in the end, and not growth or even sustainment.
With respect to the substance of your comment, sure, Trump talked a good game about stopping the stupid wars. He just never got around to actually doing that.
The same things that are happening now have happened before -- just not in our lifetimes. The history and his analysis is quite instructive.
The book was refreshing in its objectivity, lack of political bias, and clarity of writing. I've given copies to several friends.
It's pretty clear from his analysis and the data that the U.S. is in a decline of global influence.
https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/...
Why should I put much stock in historical analysis done by a "American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager" [1]? My gut feel that someone like that probably has so much other stuff on his plate that the analysis would be in many ways superficial, and such a person likely has enough status that large numbers of people would indulge his pretensions at being a polymath even if it's not actually true.
No, I didn't say he was wrong because of who he was. I have suspicions that he might be over-hyped, and I was asking questions about that.
And if that's wrong, I have literally a million self-published books that you really ought to carefully consider, lest you be guilty of "Ad hominem."
It's funny and interesting that the military budget is such a common punching bag. The defense budget is a pretty small percentage of the overall outlays. Yet people continue to act like it's the single line item that is holding America back.
Here's where the American federal government spent money in 2020.
* $1T on unemployment compensation and paycheck protection program
* $1.1T on social security
* $1.2T on medicare and medicaid
* $1T on "other" which includes federal employee retirements and welfare programs
* $900B on non-defense discretionary spending on thing such as housing assistance, transportation, and education.
...and then, finally, we get to defense spending at $700B.
The budget deficit for FY2020 was $3.1T. Maybe the military budget is so high it is causing a ripple in the multiverse that makes arithmetic different in this universe. Maybe if we cut $300B from the military budget in our universe it will even out to $3T because magic.
In typical years the Defense spending is equal to each of the discretionary non-defense spending and "other" mandatory spending which excludes Medicare + Medicaid and Social Security. Medicare + Medicaid and Social Security spending have certainly increased the most and that seems to be inline with the increased spending on health care over the last few decades.
It's also worth noting that the non-defense categories still include defense related spending like veterans' income security, benefits, and services.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55343 - 2018
just a small reminder that $700B is less than the bank bailout of 2008/2009 which straddled both a Republican and Democrat president. That's in the top 5 most outrageous things in my lifetime (so far).
Yes, it does. It just says that military appropriations for the Army have to be approved by Congress every two years. Congress controls the purse strings, the President has command.
Article I, Section 8:
"The Congress shall have power...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy..."
Note that the Navy is not even subject to the two year limit on funding.
Navy was a different consideration at the time since it protects trade, which is required for commerce afaik.
In this hypothetical scenario where America can't borrow money or easily run a deficit, it won't matter at all whether a line item is discretionary or non-discretionary. Cutting the military budget won't magically help anything.
You really shouldn't tho.
>The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this
None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels.
Actually, not even any developments that might be created in the next 5-10 years, in the level that they can be applied within the next 15 years would solve such an issue.
May I suggest the combination of hydraulic fracturing with centimeter-precise horizontal drilling allowing oil producers (many of whom are badly run, granted) to access massive crude and natural gas resources previously unreachable?
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
Almost immediately after the article was written, US oil production hockey-sticked up to the point we were a net exporter of oil starting in 2020. The Salon analysis is actually hilarious against what actually happened.
> Two aspects of shale production make it radically different from conventional production. First, it takes a lot more energy (including many miles of steel tubing per well, for example) to extract energy out of these wells. Traditional wells have a ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) of 10- or 20-to-one, or an energy cost factor of 5 to 10%. The EROEI with fracking is in the range of 5- or 10-to-one, or a cost factor of 10 to 20%
The oil from fracking also runs out very quickly. From the same article:
> A conventional well’s production declines at about 5-8% per year, and it can remain productive for decades. By contrast, the first-year decline in shale wells is over 60%, and about 90% of a well’s production occurs in the first five years. That creates a "drilling treadmill," as new wells are needed simply to replace production from wells drilled a few years before.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-07/is-fracking-a-...
In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date.
Your response is to say that it may not be true by Z date. Which is all fine and good but not the point. It didn't help that you offered as proof a link to a web site that states it is "focused on the environment, social justice, indigenous rights and travel" that has an obvious bias against the thing that it is criticizing.
Similar remarks have also been made by people in the oil and gas industry, it's not just an environmentalist meme:
> the technology that enables unconventional oil and gas production resulted in a 4-fold increase in oil and gas drilling costs from 2003 to 2014
https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurberman/2017/07/05/shale-g...
Or, you know, person A predicted something, and person B managed to avoid it by a kludgy short-lived workaround (that makes things worse, e.g. raises the price of gas to $3+ from it's 2014 price to now), and now people act as A's prediction is not a problem anymore because they want to believe...
And yet the gas price is higher it's been since 2014 or so.
And "moving to EVs", with 280 million conventional cars in the USA atm, ain't gonna happen in any large degree for the next 10-15 years. EVs (including hybrids) are less than 4% of current annual sales, and all-electric are half that. That's even assuming there was the production capacity, battery materials availability, network, etc for this to happen - which includes several breakthroughs or handwaving micacles.
if there is one takeaway from all this it is there are very few oil producers that are profitab;e above $50/bbl and US ain't one of them.
who cares about wildly fluctuating oil prices if your country is no longer dependent on oil.
I beg to differ. Two years ago the Saudis and the Russians got in a bad spat where the Russians decided they wanted to bankrupt US natural gas producers and the Saudis decided to bankrupt the Russians
An interesting thing here is the central role played by energy in this analysis; this article was before the fracking boom (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:US_Crude_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_..., which shows the US fracking boom, though not the recent decline) and before the last factor of 8 or so decrease in the cost of solar panels made them cheaper than fossil fuels in much of the world. So it predicts Iran and Russia will be "energy kingpins" in 02025, which doesn't really seem to be in the cards.
Maybe China will be an "energy kingpin"—it could cover the Gobi with PV panels and run HVDC, which might be outside the state capacity of countries like Perú, Saudi, and Libya which control vast desert territories on paper. But, so far, despite installing more PV capacity than the entire rest of the world, China's PV capacity factor is a disappointing 13%, compared to 29% in California, so it's apparently making terrible choices about where to site its solar farms. (Still better than the 10% you get in Germany or the Netherlands.)
For the last 2500 years the "world's reserve currency" has been gold, except for the last 77 or so. That could easily happen again. Bitcoin was kind of gunning for that position, but China's thoroughgoing rejection of it forecloses that possibility for at least a generation, and Bitcoin could easily cease to exist in that time.
Although the knowledge of this article's author about computer security seems to come from Hollywood, the computer security situation is indeed extremely grave, and as more and more things become digital, any state that doesn't take it seriously and take effective measures to improve the situation is likely to be destroyed. Presently, that means every state in the world.
It's true that when financial and military collapse comes, they are likely to come very quickly.
At the end of 2022, GOP will win the mid-term elections and have the majority in the house and the senate.
They already have state legislatures effectively under control, and the supreme court is full of conservative judges.
In 2024 Ron De Santos, or another authoritarian candidate, will win the GOP nomination and easily win the election because Mr. Biden is a total loser.
With the supermajority, the GOP will establish an autocracy for decades.
Because in 2026, Dem will win back both congress and senate, it's just a normal pattern. Voters never liked any party owns it all.
Two parties keep playing this along the way, except each game are so close these days, it's tiring and boring and hard to advance any agenda when either one is in control.
The system is getting close to deadlock when both sides no longer honor the game rule: "debate before the election, work together after it and just wait for your next turn". Instead it's now about fighting every day, it does not matter who won the election anymore. The end result?
"Nothing Got Done(tm)"
In that sense, it's not because China is doing better, it's because US's internal problem stops itself, and may bring it down.
The parent's prediction is that there won't be a (free) election in 2026.
Hope that helps.
That's why the voting rights bill is Biden's main 2022 agenda item.
do you just mean win elections for decades? That i can sort of believe (or at least comprehend), but wholesale destruction of Democracy? To me, that means canceling elections and the president declaring themself absolute power for life which i just don't see happening. I would expect a military coup before that since the military swears allegiance to the constitution first and then civilian leadership next.
- shredding off what remains of voting rights
- packing courts all over the country, including the SCOTUS with conservative or right-wing judges
- appointing right-wing figures to top positions in DoJ, DoD, and FBI
- cementing the state legislatures authorities to determine the outcome of elections
They can’t seem to find a single thing to unify on.
The Democratic party has a harder time "unifying" because it's more accepting of change, but there is a wide spectrum of tolerance around how much and when people adapt to rapidly changing social and fiscal policies. Ultimately I think there is unification, but there's lag time for everyone to catch up and be on the same wavelength; a lag time of years, sometimes decades. This gives the perception of a disorganized party, but realistically it's more complicated than that.
American democracy collapsed in 1788, when the wealthy forced through a "constitution" that overruled democratic regulation of debt.
I actually think it's more likely that a third party like Andrew Yangs Forward Party emerges and wins an election. A lot of people are sick of two options, and feel alienated in by their own party (both sides)
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/589450-quinnipia...
https://www.axios.com/desantis-florida-civilian-military-for...
Also, MSNBC & CNN are not different from Fox News. These are all propaganda networks. I despise them all equally.
The inverse is not true.
The best and brightest Americans (regardless of race) can never effectively defect to China. Maybe if you're ethnically Han Chinese your children will have a chance to be fully integrated and accepted, but definitely not if you're any other race.
The gravity of best and brightest migration is still one way into the American singularity.
[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...
Yeah. Also, generalizations can be true but misleading in a particular instance. I think a lot of people make that mistake with China, assuming because in general democracies have been more successful than autocracies [1], they can be complacent because China will fail. There's no reason autocracy with a talented leader (or one who's lucky) can outperform a democracy.
[1] People also often say that free markets are "more successful" than less free markets, and it's probably true to an extent, but there's also a lot of problems/disagreement defining what "success is." For instance, the US has traded away a lot of its general manufacturing capacity leading to more "success" by some financial metrics but failure by many others.
This has literally been the key point of contention from just about day one.
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
What was I thinking, of course that's absolutely unthinkable...
At some point, there were indeed wolves, so dismissing the chance of them because of fradulent/failed prior warnings turned out to be a mistake.
Plus, in 2022 it's more accurate than ever. Though of course, Rome didn't decline in a day, either...
Greed, gluttony, spread of cancerous culture, lack of social justice and many more