There has been lots of talk lately about the need to embrace the gold standard for currency again because of America abusing the dollar. There are two issues that need to be separated, and the answers are not as simple as it might seem.

The reason why gold functioned as currency for the majority of history is that mankind had a solar powered economy. This means it was restricted by the amount of agricultural land that was used to convert solar energy into carbohydrates. Also, solar power was used for energy, in form of wood and coal. This made the total supply of energy available to mankind more-less constant. Also, technology was primitive and constant. This made the economy constrained, and its volume could be represented by another constrained resource, gold. Essentially, you could dig out just enough new gold to match the eventual growth of the economy. However, the problems started with the industrial revolution, where new inventions could multiply the size of the economy, and the monetary supply remained constricted. When petroleum use freed mankind from solar restrictions on energy by tapping into a huge energy buffer of oil reserves, invention of electricity broke all restrictions wide open, and Haber-Bosch method of synthesizing artificial fertilizers allowed for a huge increase in food supply, the economy and population started growing exponentially, and the monetary supply needed to be expanded far beyond the constraints of any single constrained resource. So, having in mind that the supply of gold couldn’t successfully cover the expanding economy even in the times of Tesla, Westinghouse and Rockefeller, and needed to be supplanted and eventually replaced by mechanisms based on mortgage loans and GDP calculations, suggesting an introduction of a currency backed by gold at this point reveals lack of understanding of the constrictive effect that would have on mankind. With gold, the totality of everybody’s wealth always equals the totality of gold in supply. With a gold standard, if you invent something that grows the economy by 30%, the supply of gold doesn’t grow by 30% to match, which causes a shortage of money in circulation and artificial appreciation of gold, favouring those who already hold the most gold, instead of giving power to the inventors and “new money”. Of course, if gold-backed paper money is used, the state will print more money in order to keep up with the economy, but then this money will lose convertibility into gold. This is the reason why gold standard was removed: it was a problem rather than a solution. When economy grew, for instance by the size of petroleum reserves, it was much better to use petroleum reserves as basis for currency than to try and dig out enough gold to represent the value of all the oil in the world, or to artificially inflate the value of gold to the comic proportions. Also, when someone came to the bank to request a loan, the bank could either say “sorry, but there’s not enough money in circulation to give you a loan, because we didn’t dig out enough gold this month”, or they could say “we can take the mortgage papers as backing for a low-interest loan we can get from the central bank, which will use this guarantee as backing and create new money which we will then sell you at increased interest”. Guess which turned out to be more acceptable for a growing economy.

However, when you allow someone to print papers saying “this paper represents a gold coin”, you will inevitably get more papers than gold coins, because the position where you can create money out of thin air is incredibly tempting. The first experiment with paper money in ancient China ended for exactly those reasons. But that is a separate matter: you can’t say that abuses of the fiat currency system justify returning to the gold standard, if the gold standard was not viable even in the 1930s, due to its restricting hold on economy. You can only make a currency that is required to be backed by actual physical resources, such as metals, petroleum, electric currency production, foreign currency reserves, and mortgages on physical assets. You can require solid backing for all newly printed money, but gold, there’s just not enough of it in existence to cover the value of our economy. It can’t even cover a minute fraction. And even if there were enough gold, it would work only if our economy remained constant. For a 5% growth in economy, you would need to have 5% of increase in total supply of gold, which is utterly unrealistic.

There is that other matter of dollar being an instrument of pressure and abuse, which warrants its removal from the position it presently holds. This would require the United States to relinquish a position where they can print new money out of thin air, and have the rest of the world pay for it; essentially, that’s what you get when everybody is forced to pay for petroleum in dollars. Instead of the normal inflatory effects you would get from increasing the supply of money in circulation, you get the situation where the rest of the world is artificially impoverished and American economy is artificially boosted. If you think America would relinquish this position without a very ugly world war, I have some real estate on the Moon to sell you.

However, there is a reason why America might actually find it preferable to have dollar crash and burn, despite all its obvious benefits. You see, all American debt is denominated in dollars. Also, American debt is so huge, it approaches the point of being unserviceable. There is a very easy and tempting solution for this: America can just print trillions of new dollars without any backing, and use them to cover their debts and thus reset their situation. Of course, that wouldn’t sit well with all the nations that hold American state bonds denominated in dollars, and would basically crash the world economy and monetary system in an instant, producing an avalanche of consequences, and that’s the reason why other great powers have been diversifying their assets, from US bonds to gold, rare earth minerals, etc.; because they see this coming. Either America will cause a world war to cover its naked butt, or remove any semblance of a fig leaf by simply resetting its debt to zero using the aforementioned method. Of course, having in mind that this would wipe out all retirement funds and personal savings of their citizens, this method would be hugely unpopular and would need to be covered up by some fabricated external factor. This is why I find a war to be much more likely. They will stir the pot so much, nobody will pay any attention to the little man behind a curtain pulling the levers and pressing the buttons. The plan seems to be to provoke Russia and China into a war, suffer a limited nuclear strike, introduce martial law, and then reset their debt and thus hide their plan behind some external villainous force, playing the poor victim of evil in the world. There is too much propaganda to that effect already in place for me to have any confidence in the possibility that I might be wrong.

In the previous article I explained what the Western “democratic governments” have in store for their population in case of a major disaster. The worldview behind their planning can best be described as “pragmatic materialism”, which BTW is how Satanists would describe themselves if asked. However, I can easily anticipate readers’ questions: if shit does indeed hit the fan that hard, what, if anything, can we do?

Well, I’ve been studying disasters and the answer doesn’t conform to this “pragmatic materialist” paradigm, to put it mildly.

The “conventional wisdom”, if you listen to the American “prepper” community, is that one needs to stock up on food, water purifying equipment, guns and ammo, and in case of a disaster, defend one’s property against intruders. Essentially, they sort people into three major groups: the hapless unprepared victims, the predatory criminals and the prepared homeowners. When I listen to their theories, I try to envision the world they are describing, and my conclusion is that there are unlikely to be any survivors.

Let’s say the supply of food, water and electricity is disrupted. There is no rule of law. Follow the Maslow hierarchy of needs combined with the game theory in order to figure out what’s going to happen. The most prized assets will be the off-grid farms that have private water sources and can grow food. Also, those places will have food and medicine caches. The most desirable assets will be taken over by the most powerful forces, those most likely to resort to murder and robbery. They will take over the farms, kill the owners, and allow everything to go to ruin because they don’t know shit about farming. So, the theory that the ones best prepared for a post-civilization life will survive is very implausible; a much more likely scenario is that they will be the prime targets of undisciplined, panic-driven violence, which will further disrupt the supply of resources. Once the predators run out of food, they will resort to predatory cannibalism, because humans will be the most abundant remaining source of protein. After that, everybody dies. The scenario is very similar to that of the extinction of the dinosaurs: in the initial chaos, the carnivores and the vultures wipe out the remaining herbivores, and then they die off as this short-term food buffer is exhausted.

However, regardless of what the Americans might believe in their satanic worldview, my study of limited disasters shows a different pattern. You see, when shit hits the fan, the course of action that is most likely to result in survival is not self-centered predation, but cooperation. You don’t try to hog resources, because you understand that you are always going to lack something someone else has. Eventually, the resources are going to run out. The sociopaths do exist, but they are immediately treated as a foreign entity and killed off. The non-sociopathic armed gangs will trade protection for food, essentially becoming the paramilitary force that will guard the farms against attackers. The farmers will accept this as preferable to being killed, and will become the new serfs. The armed forces will become the new lords of the realm, and will form a hierarchy among themselves, resulting in new feudalism. How do I know this? Because that is what happens every time there is a major civilization-ending crisis. The armed thugs divide the food-production resources (farmland with serfs) among themselves. The serfs get to survive, the armed “knights” and “lords” survive. The sophisticated intellectual part of the civilization is wiped out. Nothing unrelated to food production and fighting has great chances for survival. In essence, civilization is reduced to a territory under control of a mafia gang: people get to mind their own business and have some semblance of normal life, but the price of this is paying for protection by the well armed militia. The territory is divided into areas controlled by different militias, which wage turf wars, until at some point they decide to merge, and then you get a state with “police forces”, and you even get “democracy” where you are periodically asked to choose which gang gets its turn in exploiting you for resources. As the baseline of violence is reduced and commerce is established between territories, there is need for high-level products and technology, which gives birth to sophisticated trades, and later to science and technology. The more connected the world, the more abstract structures it can support, until you get the global civilization that veers so far into the abstract it ends up destroying itself, and you get a reset into barbarism, feudalism etc., ad nauseam. That’s history of civilization for you.

Of course, we are talking about a civilization-ending event, not a species-ending one, but the irony is, in a species-ending event, the best you can do is try to preserve your spiritual integrity by cooperating with others from the position of kindness, trading for resources, offering services in exchange for resources, being helpful and protective, and simply continuing to do the best you can until everybody eventually dies. This would be very hard for the materialists, who believe this life to be all there is, but for the religious and spiritually inclined people it would be quite easy: in fact, it would be just another day in life, where you’re supposed to do the best you can in the available circumstances, and thus show God that you’re a worthy person who will remain faithful even in the darkest of times. You see, for the best people life isn’t about surviving, or having your family survive. It’s about being faithful to God by doing the best you can until the very end. And that is what you should do when shit hits the fan. Be the best version of yourself you can be, and you will leave this world as a winner. Choose to desperately fight for scraps, trying to survive at all cost, and you will lose everything, and still die.

Every time I have to purchase equipment I think about recycling, and I’ll share some of my thoughts on the subject.

There are several kinds of recycling:

• Upgrading or servicing the existing equipment in order to extend its usefulness in its current function (example: upgrading the existing computer’s RAM and replacing HDD with an SSD in order to increase its performance, and keeping it as your current device).

• Re-purposing obsolete equipment after its replacement had been purchased, and relegating it to some secondary yet necessary role (using an old computer as a HTPC for playing movies, or to replace a family member’s even older and weaker device).

• Selling equipment on the used market in order to extract the remaining value in form of money, and leaving it to others, who might find the performance satisfactory, to get the remaining use from the device. Donating old equipment can be seen as a combination of that, and giving the money to charity.

• Disassembling the device and re-using it for parts.

• Recycling the device for raw materials which can then be re-used for manufacturing a new, modern device.

You basically have the same issue with cars; when you have an old car, how long does it make sense to invest in repairing it and keeping it in function, and when is it more sensible to buy a new or newer vehicle and relegate the old one to a secondary role, give it to a family member who might find it useful even in its present state, sell it to reclaim the remaining value, sell it for parts or have it recycled for the raw materials?

I recently watched a YouTube channel about a married couple that left the city to live on a parcel of land in some rural part of America, I think Idaho or something similar in the mountains, and they basically decided to do it on the cheap, living in a trailer while they gradually build their infrastructure from scratch, using mostly reclaimed materials. When they managed to do something by using essentially their own labor and almost no other resources, they were very proud of their achievement. The whole thing struck me as an example of bad economic thinking, and I’ll explain why.

First of all, the closer you are to processing the raw materials, the cheaper your labor. Essentially, whatever else you do, it will be cheaper to do it, get the money, and use part of that money to pay for the cheaper labor of the lower-qualified workers. If my work-hour costs ten work-hours of a backhoe operator, if I learn to operate a backhoe and use it to do work, I didn’t save n backhoe operator hours, I wasted 9n of my hours worth of money. Essentially, every hour I spend doing someone else’s work, is a loss of money, because I’m no longer earning the money to finance the spending, I’m using up my reserves and reducing my earning potential, because I’m learning how to do work that’s 10x less valuable on the market, and forgetting how to do work that’s 10x more valuable. The only reason why one should abandon his work and learn how to operate a backhoe or mill tree trunks into planks is if it’s more valuable on the market than what he’s already doing. Essentially, the efficient way of doing things is to do your job and let others to theirs’. That way, you get paid for what you do, and you pay others for what they do, and the net result is a wealthy society. If you neglect your job in order to “save money” by doing the others’ job, you are basically abandoning your career and starting anew, from scratch. If that’s what you want to do, fine; also, if that makes economical sense to you, it means that your career is either not bringing you the income it is supposed to, or you didn’t do the math.

So, basically, there appears to be some kind of a mathematical equation that shows if investing work and suffering poor functionality of equipment is worth more than the money-value of investing in either new equipment or in others’ labor. At some point, it’s more economical to get rid of something and either sell it or scrap it, than to keep owning it. On the other hand, at some part of the function it makes more sense to fix something and prolong its useful life than to invest money in a replacement. The most important variable seems to be the value of your labor, and the importance of some piece of equipment for your work. To me, it makes more sense to invest in the newest computers, than to invest in a new car, because I don’t use a car for work. Even if a car breaks down, it doesn’t significantly alter my ability to earn money. It simply becomes less convenient to get groceries. However, if my computer breaks down or even if it becomes too slow, it is a disaster and I need to replace it as soon as I can pay for the replacement, because if my computers die I’m basically fucked, because I use them for both work and information-gathering in order to be up-to date with things, not to mention keeping others up to date. Essentially, I can do without a car for a month, and I can do without a computer for a day. My absolutely essential equipment consists of a desktop machine, a laptop machine that is a fully-capable stand-in replacement for the desktop machine, and a smartphone that makes it possible for me to leave my home office and stay completely up to date with work and to react immediately when necessary. With those three devices, I can basically be completely mobile, go somewhere for a day or ten days and keep working. Without a smartphone, I couldn’t leave the office during work hours, in case I’m needed; since my work hours are 9 to 22, I would get out of shape and degrade quickly. Without a laptop, I couldn’t leave town for more than a day; hence no vacation, and I couldn’t recover from the accumulated strain, and would therefore degrade. Without a desktop computer, it’s game over. So, essentially, I could do quite nicely without most of my clothes, or without a car, or without my walls being freshly painted, and I can easily skimp on those and use the time when I get the car fixed as an excuse to take a walk. If my computer, laptop or a smartphone dies, the only walk I’m talking is to the computer store to get a replacement, because the moment I stop working is the moment I start the process of functional degradation. A taxi driver will have different priorities – for him it’s car first, everything else third.

And this equation of priorities, of things you can sacrifice if necessary, things you can live without if necessary, and things that are your yellow, orange and red lines – of gradual degradation, inability to recover the lost capability, and irreversible loss of capability and eventual destruction, are universal, and that’s why I used this example. It’s a matter of life and death to the entire Western civilization, because they are fucking with the Russians in a way that can be mathematically expressed. You can slander them, sanction them and reduce the price of the goods they export so that you harm their economy. That’s their yellow line – they can take it for years, knowing it will harm them, but the alternative is a nuclear holocaust that is an even greater harm, so they will take the loss for the time and maneuver to change the strategic situation. You can build up weapons at their borders, depose governments in their neighborhood in order to destabilize them, surround them with military bases, and try to draw them into a conventional war. That’s the orange line, something they can take to a degree, but will very quickly maneuver in order to avoid anything that would either imminently cause a direct war, or irreversibly degrade their position. When you cross their red line, you and everybody you know, love, hate or have ever heard of reaches the temperature of the Sun within 30 minutes.

That’s how it works. If you can’t help it, you live with it. If you can’t live with it, very bad shit starts happening very quickly. It’s all game theory, nothing new here. Use common sense to see where their red line is. Cross it in order to die.