Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

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We were getting close to a fairly positive future.

There are three basic constraints to material and non-material goods:

- capital - labour - energy

There are other raw materials, but they aren't limiting factors. For example, processed Lithium is in short supply right now, but it's not raw Lithium that's the constraint. We don't have enough Lithium mines and processing facilities. capital/labour/energy, in other words.

We had a glorious period in the post-WW2 era where the price of energy & capital was dropping dramatically so the world was labour constrained. Wages skyrocketed, and the middle class emerged and prospered.

Then the 70s halted cheap energy and the 80s halted cheap capital and the world has stagnated since.

In 2019, things were looking up again. Capital was cheap, and green energy prices were dropping in their own version of Moore's law so it became crystal clear that energy would be very cheap soon.

But we can't have the proles regain the power they had in the 60's. Low unemployment, cheap energy and cheap capital means that power will shift from the rich to the middle class. So a crisis was invented. Let's pretend that the inflation caused by a supply crisis and a war in Ukraine is actually caused by cheap capital. That way we can get rid of cheap capital and throw a ton of people out of work so the rich and powerful can maintain control. While we're at it, we'll use the war as an excuse to stay on the petro-economy.

Luckily, it's not too late. I expect inflation to quickly turn negative as bottlenecks free up and high interest rates throw the economy into a recession forcing the fed to reverse the interest rate hikes.

>But we can't have the proles regain the power they had in the 60's. Low unemployment, cheap energy and cheap capital means that power will shift from the rich to the middle class. So a crisis was invented. Let's pretend that the inflation caused by a supply crisis and a war in Ukraine is actually caused by cheap capital. That way we can get rid of cheap capital and throw a ton of people out of work so the rich and powerful can maintain control. While we're at it, we'll use the war as an excuse to stay on the petro-economy.

That's basically Keynes general theory of employment, interest and money. The moment the marginal efficiency of capital falls below interest paid on money(=capital is cheap), capital is abandoned in favor of money. My entire stance is based around the concept of lowering the interest rate all the way down to the marginal efficiency of capital.

For example, during the great depression people couldn't afford food due to a lack of jobs, at the same time farmers did not harvest their crops because it was unprofitable, they let them rot on the field: http://exhibits.lib.usu.edu/exhibits/show/foodwaste/timeline...

A lot of military spending is simply motivated in using that cheap capital for _something_. After all, the military will give you a job and make your country "great" again. At worst you get to plunder a country which is highly profitable because you didn't have to create all that value yourself.

What boggles my mind however, is the fact that we have this climate change thing. If you want to keep this farce up, just invest in green tech. It's just a matter of changing the tax code. Excess energy/capital can be used for capturing CO2.

I like your framework, but I do question your dismissal of raw materials.

The 'green revolution' broke a barrier in our ability to grow food (amount per acre), but it isn't clear if that increase can be sustained for the next 100 years-- the massive amounts of chemicals we put on the land are killing the soil.

That's before we get to climate-change threats to food production.

Or species diversity threats to food production.

Or the elimination of 80% of insect biomass in developed countries, with concordant impact on food production.

We could easily grow a lot more food in less space if we had to. To give an extreme example: greenhouses grow about 1000x as much food per acre as conventional farming does, but the resulting food costs about 10x as much.

We use all our land to grow food not because we have to, but because that's the cheapest way of doing so. We could grow food more intensively, but then the price of food would go up.

There is this agrotech thing called no till farming and combined with proper crop rotation and carefully selected cover crops and soil management your soil will improve every single year instead of degrading.

I have seen a lot of hackernews comments that think they can just chemically or genetically engineer their way out of this. Just spray compound X and Y on crop Z and you are ready to go. It may look technologically impressive but that is actually the lazy solution.

You're totally right, no-till farming is the best way to preserve the soil. The problem is that no-till farming uses a lot of chemicals, and consumers think that organic farming is the solution. But organic farming uses tillage for weed control, so it destroys the soil.

> So a crisis was invented.

Are you saying that the millions upon millions who died (not to mention the untold millions who are suffering long-term health problems), didn't actually die? Or that what they died from (a highly contagious and infectious novel virus) was engineered?

The crisis that was invented is the perception that it was government stimulus that caused the inflation. The pretension that millions of deaths didn't cause the economic problems, it was the stimulus that caused the economic problems.

A piddling price to pay to regain control of the proles.

It's a proven fact that COVID was bio-engineered, is it not?

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