Joe Rogan: "I Wasn't Afraid of AI Until I Learned This" (Video - 7mn)

  To finish the year with something interesting, here's a short video about AI but well worth listening to. 

  I have been involved with transformers for over 10 years (It is not as new as people say it is. It is only the way we use them which is new.) and I truly do not understand why they allow for the kind of emerging capabilities that the video discusses. In fact, nobody knows except for the fact that they are necessary steps to become more efficient at predicting the "next" word. That's it? That's what "intelligence" is? The ability to predict accurately, and therefore modelize the world to achieve this goal? 

 This in the end is what is truly frightening. I, and many other people, were expecting that we would have to build a model of the brain to get anywhere close to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). But in the end, it may not at all be the case... In which case we are much, much closer to AGI than we thought!

The Trusted News Initiative - Propaganda at its best by Russell Brand (Video - 25')

 It looks more and more like we are "there", in the post reality "Trusted News Initiative" propaganda world were all the news are controlled from.... Where exactly? 

 Wrong question I guess. At least we can still disagree for the time being without being de-platformed. Well, as long as you do not contradict the main stream narrative and do not have a following endangering the message like Russell Brand.

 Not yet North Korea or China but getting closer. I still remember 10 years ago when I was in China discussing political issues with Chinese people. Not that they would not engage in a discussion when alone but then again what could they do? 

 How long until the US and Europe start feeling eerily similar? Well, if you live there, don't worry, if the respective governments get it right and raise the temperature slowly enough, you will probably never see it coming.

 

The EV Graveyard Reckoning, Hardly Anyone Wants To Buy A Used One

  If the wind energy failure was not enough to convince you about the absurdity of our "green" policies, here's the EV failure. Even worse and less green if that is possible. In this field, China is leading and will consequently be the first to fall.

 Here too, EV were a good solution but limited to urban environments as a second car. We are now wasting huge sums of money producing million of cars which will have zero value in about 3 years. What an extraordinary recipe for failure as explained below! 

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

The market for used EVs is plummeting. What will car rental companies do with the used ones? Problems started in China but have spread to Europe and the US.

China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities

Bloomberg notes China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities

A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.

On the outskirts of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, a small dilapidated temple overlooks a graveyard of sorts: a series of fields where hundreds upon hundreds of electric cars have been abandoned among weeds and garbage.

Similar pools of unwanted battery-powered vehicles have sprouted up in at least half a dozen cities across China, though a few have been cleaned up. In Hangzhou, some cars have been left for so long that plants are sprouting from their trunks. Others were discarded in such a hurry that fluffy toys still sit on their dashboards.

The cars were likely deserted after the ride-hailing companies that owned them failed, or because they were about to become obsolete as automakers rolled out EV after EV with better features and longer driving ranges. They’re a striking representation of the excess and waste that can happen when capital floods into a burgeoning industry, and perhaps also an odd monument to the seismic progress in electric transportation over the last few years.

Shenzhen-based photographer Wu Guoyong was one of the first people in China to document the waste that results from frenetic development, taking striking drone shots of the piles of abandoned bicycles in 2018. In 2019, he filmed aerial footage of thousands of electric cars in empty lots around Hangzhou and Nanjing, the capital of China’s eastern Jiangsu province.

“The shared bikes and EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism,” Wu said. “The waste of resources, the damage to the environment, the vanishing wealth, it’s a natural consequence.”

Hoot of the Day

“EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism.”

Mercy!

The Chinese government literally forced people to buy the damn things. Biden is attempting the same in the US.

That article is from August. Let’s flash forward to December 21 to see how things are going in Europe.

No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too

What started in China is not limited to China. A second Bloomberg article reveals No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too

Because most new vehicles in Europe are sold via leases, automakers and dealers who finance these transactions are trying to recover losses from plummeting valuations by raising borrowing costs. That’s hitting demand in some European markets that were in the vanguard of the shift away from fossil fuel-powered propulsion. Some of the biggest buyers of new cars, including rental firms, are cutting back on EV adoption because they’re losing money on resales, with Sixt SE dropping Tesla models from its fleet.

The problems are expected to intensify next year, when many of the 1.2 million EVs sold in Europe in 2021 will come off their three-year leasing contracts and enter the secondhand market. How companies tackle this problem will be key for their bottom lines, consumer confidence and ultimately decarbonization — including the European Union’s plan to phase out sales of new fuel-burning cars by 2035.

“There isn’t used-car demand for EVs,” said Matt Harrison, Toyota Motor Corp.’s chief operating officer in Europe. “That’s really hurting the cost-of-ownership story.”

“One has to slash prices significantly just to get customers to look at EVs,” said Dirk Weddigen von Knapp, who heads a group representing VW and Audi dealers.

Biden Struggles to Convince People to Buy EVs, Only 12 Percent Seriously Considering

On April 18, I reported Biden Struggles to Convince People to Buy EVs, Only 12 Percent Seriously Considering

On July 13, I noted Despite Huge Incentives, Supply of EVs on Dealer Lots Soars to 92 Days

On August 20, I reported Clean Energy Exploitations and the Death Spiral of an Auto Industry

On October 16, I commented Wake Up Mr. President, Consumers Want Hybrids, Not EVs

More accurately, that should read Wake Up Mr. President, Consumers Don’t Want EVs.

GM Decreases EV Investment in Favor of Buybacks

And on December 2, I noted To Shore Up Share Price, GM Decreases EV Investment in Favor of Buybacks

Last month, GM said it would push back the opening of an electric-truck factory in suburban Detroit by a year. It also scrapped an earlier goal of producing 400,000 EVs over a roughly two-year stretch, through mid-2024.

Slam Dunk Ford Project Now Unclear

Ford’s EV plan is similarly distressed. Ford pauses and then scales back proposed Michigan facility backed by government funding.

Manchin Blasts Biden’s Definition of “Foreign Entity of Concern”

In the you can’t make this up department, Biden’s EV Subsidy Rules Leave Room for Chinese Suppliers

Depending on the definition of “foreign entity of concern” a number of things are floating in the wind including $7,500 tax credits.

Officials worked for months to define a foreign entity of concern but failed. It is not even clear if Ford buyers are eligible for tax credits. “Licensing technology, might be permissible under the rules,” officials said.

Who wants to buy a new EV on the basis a $7,500 credit “might” be allowed?

Q&A on What’s Delaying the Definition

Q: Why the struggle on the definition of “Foreign Entity of Concern”?
A: Ford wants to use Chinese technology but GM wants to block it.

For discussion, please see An Epic Battle: Ford to Use China’s Battery Technology, GM Wants it Blocked

My comment then was “Biden is guaranteed to upset someone. That’s what happens when you interfere in the free markets, taking sides.”

Biden is avoiding a firm definition hoping the problem will go away. But it won’t.

Green Fantasy

In the real world, The Green Fantasy Ends Because Consumers Don’t Want to Pay for It

EVs are not selling because despite massive subsidies to both the manufacturers and consumers, the latter via tax credits, consumers don’t want them.

But here we are, blaming this mess on capitalism. “It’s a natural consequence.“

What a hoot.

Britain's Net Zero Disaster & The Wind Power Scam

  Our modern society was built on oil. This is not by accident. Oil is the only energy source that is concentrated, easy to transport, use, and until recently cheap. Unfortunately oil is not forever. Our problem is not the lack of oil per se but that eventually it will take almost as much energy to pump it out of the ground than it contains at which stage the game is up. We're not there yet but getting closer every year, plus it takes decades to build the energy infrastructure which would allow us to switch smoothly to a new energy source knowing that the solution cannot be simple.

 New energies are therefore a good idea although unfortunately they are now approached with a religious fervor which is ignoring common sense and economic rationality. This is especially the case of wind power which should occupy a low rug in our energy equation due to all the drawbacks of the wind and has instead been elevated to the status of panacea. As explained below, this is a swindle. We are wasting money but far more ominously, we are wasting time.

 At this stage, the least of our problems is the Earth. The planet is fine. The mild warming we are experiencing currently is mostly natural and actually quite pleasant in most places. A warmer weather would probably increase somewhat humidity in the atmosphere which in itself is a good thing for life. Net zero simply doesn't make sense.

 

 What we need urgently is a drastic increase in less polluting gas production to replace oil and coal for the next 50 years and give us time to transition to more advanced energy sources such as fusion. Not doing that may cost us nothing less than our civilization.

Authored by Rupert Darwall via The Epoch Times,

“This is not about complicated issues of cryptocurrency,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos declared in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, after accusing the defendant of building FTX on a “pyramid of deceit.” Much the same can be said about the foundations of Britain’s net-zero experiment. Energy is complicated, and electricity is essential to modern society and our quality of life, but as with FTX, the underlying story is straightforward: Wind power and net zero are built on a pyramid of deceit.

Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: Wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net-zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.

The push for net zero began in 2019, when the UK’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80 percent to 100 percent by 2050—i.e., net zero—was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.

During the subsequent 88-minute debate in the House of Commons to write net zero into law, the clean-energy minister, Chris Skidmore, also asserted that net zero’s cost would be the same as the previous 80 percent target, which Parliament had approved in 2008. Challenged by a Labour MP on the absence of a regulatory-impact assessment, Mr. Skidmore misled Parliament, saying that there had been no regulatory-impact assessment in respect of raising the initial 60 percent target to 80 percent.

The regulatory-impact assessment that Mr. Skidmore says doesn’t exist gave a range of £324 billion (about $412 billion) to £404 billion when the target was raised to 80 percent—an estimate that excluded transitional costs—and cautioned that costs could exceed this range. Unlike today’s political pronouncements, the assessment was honest about the consequences of Britain acting if the rest of the world didn't. “The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak,” it warned.

The Climate Change Act was passed to show Britain’s climate leadership and inspire the rest of the world to follow its example. How did that work out? In the 11 years that transpired from passing the Act to legislating net zero in 2019, Britain’s fossil fuel emissions fell by 180 million metric tons—a 33 percent reduction. Over the same period, the rest of the world’s emissions increased by 5,177 million metric tons—a rise of 16 percent. Put another way, 11 years of British emissions reduction were wiped out in about 140 days by increased emissions from the rest of the world.

Someone who claims that he’s a leader but who has no followers is typically regarded as a fool. It’s different with climate. Politicians parade their green virtue—Mr. Skidmore is to quit the House of Commons, and he teaches net-zero studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School—while voters get mugged with higher energy bills. Analysis of Britain’s Big Six energy companies’ regulatory filings reveals that fuel-input costs for gas- and coal-fired power stations were flat from 2009 to 2020. Still, the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity paid by households rose 67 percent, driven by high environmental levies to subsidize renewable-energy investors. Yet, supposedly, the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.

During Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this year, Rishi Sunak claimed that the cost of offshore wind had fallen from £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) to £40 per MWh, numbers assiduously propagated by the wind lobby and the Climate Change Committee. His claim is flat-out false. The prime minister has been suckered by falling per MWh price bids made by wind investors in successive allocation-round bids for offshore wind subsidies.

The explanation for this is to be found not in falling costs but in a flawed bidding process that rewards opportunistic bidding by wind investors. The government was giving away valuable options that commit the government to honor the prices paid for winning bids but commit investors to nothing. Because investors don’t pay anything for these options, the only way they can get them is by cutting the price they offer—but aren't obliged to take—for their electricity unless they choose to exercise their options much later in the process.

Falling prices in successive allocation rounds are thus an artifact of moral hazard hardwired into the allocation mechanism; they reveal nothing about the trend in the costs of offshore wind. Analysis of audited financial data of wind farm companies undertaken by a handful of independent researchers comprehensively debunks the falling wind costs claim. The unavoidable move to deeper waters offset any cost reductions and operating costs per MWh of electricity for new offshore wind projects; the prices for the move are about double those assumed in the subsidy bids.

Preeminent among these researchers is Gordon Hughes, a former economics professor at the University of Edinburgh and adviser to the World Bank on power plant economics. Mr. Hughes’s analysis shows that by the 12th year of operation, rising per-MWh operating costs of deep-water wind turbines exceed their government-guaranteed prices, squeezing out their capacity to repay their capital and financing costs

The intermittency and variability of wind and solar led the government to create a capacity market to pay for standby generation. In any economic appraisal of renewables, the costs of running the capacity market should be allocated to wind and solar as their intermittency and variability create the need for it. Electricity procured from the capacity market isn't cheap. In 2020, German-owned Uniper’s thermal power stations obtained an average price of £224 per MWh, about four times the typical wholesale price.

Confirmation that offshore wind has huge, likely insuperable, cost and operating difficulties came in June, when Siemens Energy issued a shock profits warning and saw its shares plunge by 37 percent, in part because of higher-than-anticipated turbine failure rates. According to Mr. Hughes, the implication is that future wind operating costs will be higher, and output significantly lower, shortening the turbines’ economic lives. His conclusion is crushing:

“The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger wind turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified. ... It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe, and the United States are based on foundations of sand—naive optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.”

The British government has been conned into placing a massive bet on offshore wind and is forcing electricity consumers to spend billions of pounds on a dead-end technology.

The falling cost of wind deception contaminates official assessments of the macroeconomic consequences of net zero. The Office for Budget Responsibility claims that the cost of low-carbon generation has fallen so fast that it's now cheaper than fossil fuel generation. Similarly, the Treasury erroneously took falling prices in wind subsidy allocation rounds as an indication of falling wind costs. Both see the economy riddled with multiple layers of market failures, while not recognizing the real danger of government policy being captured by vested interests, as, indeed, it has been. Taken to its logical conclusion, theirs is an argument for switching to central planning and a command-and-control economy.

The Treasury argues that “other things being equal,” the added investment required by renewable energy “will translate into additional GDP growth.” Other things, of course, aren't equal. As recent history shows, there’s a world of difference between investors and politicians making capital-allocation decisions. The centrally planned economies of the former communist bloc squandered colossal amounts of capital, immiserating their populations. Few now believe that investment in those economies boosted growth.

We don’t need to hypothesize. Government data disprove the Treasury’s contention and demonstrate that increasing deployment of renewable capacity reduces the productivity of Britain’s grid. In 2009, 87.3 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, including only 5.1 percent of wind and solar, generated 376.8 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6 percent of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.

Those numbers are damning for renewables and demonstrate why they make electricity more expensive and people poorer. Before mass deployment of renewables, 1 MW of capacity in 2009 produced 4,312 MWh of electricity. In 2020, 1 MW of capacity generated 3,094 MWh, a decline of 28.3 percent. It’s as clear as can be: Investment in renewables shrinks the economy’s productive potential. This is confirmed by the International Energy Agency’s net-zero modeling. Its net-zero pathway sees the global energy sector in 2030 employing nearly 25 million more people, using $16.5 trillion more capital, and taking an additional land area the combined size of California and Texas for wind and solar farms and the combined size of Mexico and France for bioenergy—all to produce 7 percent less energy.

Britain’s energy-policy disaster has lessons for the United States. The physics and economics of wind power aren't magically transformed when they cross the Atlantic. Whenever a politician or wind lobbyist touts wind as low-cost or says net zero will boost growth, they become accessories to the wind power scam. The data lead ineluctably to a decisive conclusion: Net zero is anti-growth. It's a formula for prolonged economic stagnation. Anyone who wants the truth about renewables should look at Britain and the sorry state of its economy. For the past decade and a half, it has been going through its worst period of growth since 1780.

Unlike in business and finance, there are no criminal or civil penalties for those who promote policies based on fraud and misrepresentation. Rather, net zero is similar to communism. Like net zero, communism was based on a lie: that it would outproduce capitalism. But it failed to produce, and belief in communism evaporated. When the collapse came, it was sudden and rapid. The truth couldn't be hidden. A similar fate awaits net zero.

China's Spy Agencies Now Targeting The Country's Economic Pessimists

  The old joke in the Soviet Union was: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work!" We know how this charade ended in 1992 with the explosion of the Union. 

  Move forward to 2023 and we have indeed become more sophisticated... in our understanding of manipulation of the masses. And here once again China is outperforming the US, sort of.

Frustrated Biden Demands Media To Start Reporting Good Economic News

China's Spy Agencies Now Targeting The Country's Economic Pessimists

  Different methods, exactly the same purpose! Just a little more persuasive on the Chinese side.

  That much we have learned over the years: Recessions are social phenomenons more than economic ones. This doesn't mean you can delay a recession forever, but pushing it back by a year or two has its advantages, especially in a democracy where your successors will have to deal with the consequences. Not a detail!

  And here we are in 2023, adding flesh to the dream of Ten Xiaoping of uniting capitalism and communism almost 20 years earlier than expected. Talk about a visionary. Talk about a dystopia. But make no mistake, we'll get our social credit score right on time if we go down this road. We may even have to eat ze bug!

In a move that we wouldn't be surprised to see take hold in the U.S., China is now reportedly cracking down on its citizens who have a negative opinion regarding the country's economy. 

A new Nikkei article detailed how the country's spy agencies have turned their focus to the country's financial naysayers. 

"Various cliches that denigrate the Chinese economy have emerged. False theories about 'China's deterioration' are being circulated to attack China's unique socialist system," the country's Ministry of State Security said at China's recent annual conference to set economic policy. 

When the Ministry opened its WeChat account in summer of this past year, its first post on August 1 simply read: "We need to mobilize the entire Chinese society to crack down on and prevent espionage."

The revelation that the spy agency has been so openly active on WeChat was unexpected, the report says. While its main functions include targeting spies and engaging in counterintelligence operations, protecting China's economy is not typically within its scope.

However, the agency's recent posts following the Central Economic Work Conference on December 11-12, along with similar communications after a significant economic policy meeting in late October, suggest that the ministry is broadening its range of responsibilities.

"How strange that China's economic policies for next year, ones that have just been adopted, were first explained by the Ministry of State Security," one Chinese economist told Nikkei. 

The spy agency's recent social media activity, coinciding with growing online skepticism about the government's optimistic economic narrative, implies a crackdown on those providing objective yet critical analyses of China's faltering economy.

Experts highlighting issues like the exodus of foreign companies and declining consumer confidence, often with detailed economic data, are particularly at risk. These analyses typically avoid directly contradicting the government's assertion of achieving a 5% growth target, reflecting caution under China's strict speech regulations.

The Ministry of State Security, traditionally focused on counterintelligence, is now venturing into economic discourse - a shift that suggests the Chinese government views overly realistic or negative economic assessments, which it considers influenced by foreign narratives of decline, as threats to national security. This indicates potential repercussions for those with pessimistic viewpoints, the report noted. 

Read the full report here.

Dave Collum's 2023 Year In Review: Down Some Dark Rabbit Holes, Part 2

  This is the second part of the year in review by Dave Collum. All in all it seemed that 2023 was an eventful year. But that may just be because we knew nothing yet about 2024!

  Before the 2008 crisis, we had all the warnings of the impending crash thanks to the derivative market. In 2019 if was the Repo market which preceded the Covid virus by a couple of months. Now, the omens are here but the feel is different.  

  Between the fentanil streets of Philadelphia, the closed stores of San Francisco. the human tsunami at the Mexican border and in the Mediterranean Sea, the Ukrainian tragedy, the Gaza genocide and the endless other crisis, the problems have become pervasive and the markets are levitating above reality. 

 How long this can go on is anybody's guess but the time scale must be in months, not years. So enjoy the Dave Collum's wit. In 2024 it will probably take a more sinister turn.

Dave Collum's 2023 Year In Review: Down Some Dark Rabbit Holes, Part 2

 

Dave Collum's 2023 Year In Review: Down Some Dark Rabbit Holes, Part 1

  This is the Dave Collum Year in review newsletter. Powerful and often witty comments about the world and the economy in 2023. It is a must read but unfortunately over the years it has become too long so I won't repost it here and just give a link to the full letter on Zero Hedge.  

 If you want a very short version: Here it is. Cynical but true!

We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy.

~ Chris Hedges

Dave Collum's 2023 Year In Review: Down Some Dark Rabbit Holes, Part 1

The "Control System" Is Collapsing - 'The Great Taking' Looms As Globalism's Last Gasp

  In retrospect this sounds obvious, but if you can issue as much money as you want without any (short term) consequences, what will stop you from buying the world? 

  What indeed? And this is unfortunately what we have been witnessing for over 50 years now. Since 1971 exactly, when the dollar (the world money) was dissociated from gold "temporarily" by Richard Nixon.

  The theory says that issuing too much money will create inflation and destroys the economy. This is true if you are Zimbabwe but it doesn't work that way if you are the US because the money doesn't flow to the economy, it flows to assets creating bubbles enriching cronies and well connected people who have access to low interest loans. This is what we have witnessed over the last decades, slowly at first and then in an accelerated manner recently. The rich gets richer and the poor (almost everybody else) gets poorer. The last parameter of the equation is to control tightly the numbers and massively under-represent inflation. This started happening in the 1990s when governments realized they could "adjust" inflation with "hedonist" parameters and absorb the 1.5% of yearly technological progress as well as "convenience" factors to massively subtract to actual inflation. The result? Americans and Europeans are about half as rich today as they were in 1980. Good job!

 The problem with all great ideas like this one is that sooner or later you hit a wall. We had a hint of this in 2008 when the virtual economy needed re-floating urgently. Then again in 2020 but this time the money needed was 10 times larger. And so we had a pandemic to justify the trillions. You won't start counting the beans for your own health, will you? Now for the final takeover, they will need a few hundred trillions. Basically ALL the money in the world. The CBDC! Think how convenient this will be!

 Can they pull it off? I don't know. I think not but who knows.        

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombTh.com,

The Great Taking: The Latest “Anti-Mainstream” Conspiracy

A new book has exploded on the alternative / conspiracy / fringe landscape over the past few weeks – I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. Zerohedge, Bombthrower Media, et al, we all occupy this space. Let’s call it, “anti-mainstream”.

The book is called “The Great Taking” and there is now a YouTube video documentary of it here. You can’t actually find it on Amazon (deliberate choice by author, I presume); I bought my copy via Lulu, but you can download the PDF for free here.

At the risk of oversimplifying it: The Great Taking puts forth a warning that a virtually unknown entity called “The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation” (DTCC) is effectively the “owner” of all the publicly traded companies in the world, and in fact all debt-based assets of any kind:

“It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass.

Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt.”

Over the course of the book, the author describes a 50-year process by which ownership of shares in public companies, and all debt collateral has been “dematerialized”.

In the olden days, you invested in a company – they gave you physical share certificates – and you were now part owner of the company. This is still how many value investors including me think of stock ownership.

We’re not invested in all of these companies in The Bitcoin Capitalist Portfolio simply because we’re trying to time the oscillations in the price movements. We think of ourselves as partial owners of these businesses.

Michael Saylor, Brian Armstrong, Mike Novogratz, Frank Holmes, Jamie Leverton et al, aren’t just celebrity CEOs in this space (Bitcoin)… they’re our partners. Granted, we’re the minority partners, silent ones, betting the jockeys and just along for the ride; but we don’t think of these positions as just stock charts and price gyrations – we think of them as businesses in which we are part owners.

At least I do.

According to The Great Taking, author David Rogers Webb, this is not true. We don’t own small pieces of these companies, we own claims on those pieces, because – over the course of decades, through the exigencies of ever-increasing trading volumes, combined with the machinations behind the scenes of diabolical manipulators – stock ownership has been supplanted by “security entitlements”.

Webb posits that when the debt super-cycle culminates in its ultimate blow up; the trap will be sprung, and actual ownership over all these companies and assets will be subsumed by the clearing houses. An infinitesimal cadre of elites will effectively own everything, and the masses of the world will be reduced to serfdom.

Which sounds familiar; it seems to be the common theme from The Great Taking to the WEF’s Great Reset (or Stakeholder Capitalism, or whatever they’re calling it these days).

It’s the mother of all wealth transfers, one that makes the ongoing wealth transfer of inflation and the Cantillon Effect – or the sharp shock heists that occur during every crisis from the dot-com bust through the GFC to the Covid Panic (the last of which saw an overt war on small business as those deemed “non-essential” were shut down while the megacorps were propped up by the central banks) – seem tame.

Here’s my thoughts on The Great Taking:

Modernity could be described as humanity’s accelerating pace of technological advancement. Part of that advancement is the ever increasing level of intellectual abstraction.

If you’ve been a member or following my writings long enough, you’ll have heard me talk about the W R Clement book, Quantum Jump; written in 1998, it ascribed the entire scientific revolution from the Enlightenment onwards, to the discovery of perspective (then called “God’s space”), in art:

Brunelleschi and the re-discovery of Linear Perspective circa 1400’s

That “quantum leap” began the process of rewiring all our brains for ever higher levels of intellectual abstraction. It enabled us to go from ownership of a coal mine, for example, being ascribed to whomever physically occupied the space – including militarily – to people, and even corporatized entities like pension funds or investment clubs, owning fractional pieces of that mine, from far off places, even other countries.

Initially we did this using physical pieces of paper to represent that ownership. There is a scene in an Agatha Christie “Miss Marple” mystery, “The Moving Finger”, where a man of leisure (played by William D’Arcy) takes to convalesce in a small cottage in a country town, and he visits the local barrister to register his securities with him, reaching into the inside pocket of his sport jacket and handing him the physical share certificates.

Today, he’d just handle everything from a smart phone he carries around in his jeans.

That’s increasing abstraction.

What The Great Taking is warning us about, is that this increasing level of abstraction comes with a price – that we’re no longer really fractional owners of these businesses, we’re owners of claims on these businesses.

And he may be right.

Webb is a former high level financier and an expert in the legislation and regulatory framework that governs the space. The book looks to be meticulously documented and the legalities well researched.

This is no different, I might add, from our mantra: “Not your keys, not your coins”.

In fact as I read through The Great Taking, I found myself marvelling at how closely everything Webb was describing resembled what happened during the crypto carnage of 2022-23, when hapless users who had deposited their crypto with exchanges found their assets rehypothecated, collaterized – even appropriated from under them.

It drove home the lesson, hard.

Holding shares of Amazon in your E*Trade account may, when the chips are down, be no different from keeping your stack of BTC on an exchange (please don’t).

The businesses to survive an event like The Great Taking, may end up being privately held ones. The assets you keep may be the ones with no counter-party risk – sound familiar? It’s only a core tenet of the entire Bitcoin philosophy.

It is possible that in the event of an even larger financial crisis than we’ve seen prior (and in case you haven’t noticed, each one is typically an order of magnitude larger than the previous), everybody holding publicly traded stocks on platforms gets rug-pulled – and some mysterious and shadowy entity winds up with all the marbles.

Should that occur, I would expect it to signify the end of the global financial system as we know it, and not in a way wherein the society simply continues as a world of penniless serfs, subservient to about 0.001% of the elites.

It would be more of a “last gasp of Globalism” than a final takeover of the world.

Some closing thoughts from the book’s author seems to concur:

I will make a startling assertion. This is not because the power to control is increasing. It is because this power is indeed collapsing. The “control system” has entered collapse.

Their power has been based on deception. Their two great powers of deception, money and media, have been extremely energy-efficient means of control. But these powers are now in rampant collapse.

This is why they have moved urgently to institute physical control measures. However, physical control is difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive. And so, they are risking all. They are risking being seen. Is this not a sign of desperation?

This has also been my read on it from fairy early in the pandemic, and more so since – especially after the #FreedomConvoy. Official narrative aside, that event sounded the death knell for not only Covid Tyranny, but for WEF-inspired globalism itself.

Within a year of that happening, all Covid emergency measures had ended worldwide, vaccination uptake rates went into secular decline, and the mainstream media entered into a full-on death spiral.

Webb continues:

“We have entered a time in which their nature is being recognized. Knowledge of their existence has become unavoidable. Their grasping will come to an end, because all of humanity cannot allow it to continue.

Once it is recognized, humans will bond against a common existential threat.

People from all walks of life will join in common cause. We have witnessed this already.”

It follows a theme I’ve been developing for a few years now, one that I didn’t originally conceive but came across and feel is accurate:

That theme is that the next, worldwide conflict (“World War III”, in essence) will not be a geo-political struggle of the US vs China, or West vs East, or NATO vs China/Russia: it will be populations against their own governments.

When you think about it, it almost fits the historical definition of the Marxist “class struggle”, only we – hopefully – don’t get a Communist “utopia” at the end of it.

In fact, I think that’s what everybody will be rebelling against: the imposition of a technocratic socialism that attempts to hoover up the property rights of the rest of humanity.

Those attempting to capitalize on this, the elites and the technocrats, have only really had one superpower with which to build their position over time:

“They promote the belief that they are all-powerful. They are not. 

All they have had is the power to print money. 

The rest, they have usurped from humanity.”

Of course, Bitcoin is the kryptonite to this superpower, the one thing elites had which enabled them to rig the entire system in their favour is basically finished, and they know it.

At the risk of going on too long about it here, but wanting to do the topic some justice, The Great Taking scenario isn’t incompatible with what we’ve been calling The Great Bifurcation since the onset of the pandemic, encapsulated by my glib, cynical quip:

“In the future, there will only be one occupation: managing one’s wealth. And most people, are gonna be unemployed.”

We see The Great Bifurcation happening all around us already: tent cities from Burnaby to Toronto, fentanyl zombies roving San Francisco, increasing masses behaving like savages; this isn’t because of race, politics, religion or even a far-reaching global conspiracy to impoverish humanity or depopulate the earth (although there are almost certainly cells of elites who would wish that) – it’s because we’re using debt for money, we can’t stop, and the level of intellectual abstraction that is required to operate, let alone thrive, within a hyper-financialized world, is leaving larger and larger chunks of the population behind.

Anytown of the future.

It’s Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” (tl;dr: the rate of technological change will accelerate and compound) released in 1971, combined with Clement’ “Quantum Jump” (intellectual abstraction will become increasingly more complex) from 1998, writ large.

These two accelerating dynamics conspire to create a veritable “Breakaway society” where those who are positioned and have the cognitive ability to front run the technology live in the future, and the rest, who can’t, fall behind into the past.

The main difference that I see is Webb’s Great Taking is a deliberate conspiracy driven by successive generations of insular elites, whereas my concept of The Great Bifurcation is, as I always say, more the result of perverse incentives and dynamics than outright conspiracy.

The reality is probably elements of both.

Having said all that, we should be clear in our motivations and strategies for what we are holding in our equities portfolios:

We hold Bitcoin, in proper self-custody, so nobody can take it from us in the event of a catastrophic collapse of the financial system.

We may hold some physical gold, silver, junk silver for the same reasons, and we may have property somewhere, farmland, anything that we can lay physical claim to – although we may find ourselves in a situation where we have to somehow enforce those claims.

Stocks, ETFs, even Bitcoin stocks or weird crypto moonshots, we don’t hold these to survive the collapse of the system. We hold these to try and garner out-sized investment returns within the system so long as it continues to function.

I don’t know about you, but I actually don’t want the financial system to collapse. I don’t want society to go off the rails, I am not an accelerationist.

I’m not hoping for a hyper-inflationary flameout of the entire global economy. That would suck, and I’d prefer to be wrong about that.

In other words, were The Great Taking scenario to play out and come true, it would be a permutation of a catastrophic collapse we’ve been positioning for anyway – and we never really considered our equities portfolio (at least we shouldn’t) as part of our toolkit for navigating the collapse of the financial system.

One way or another, should the entire system collapse, I expect our stocks to be among the first casualties, via bail-ins, capital controls, forced conversions into government debt, recapitalizing zombie banks or after all those – if we’re unfortunate enough to have been wildly correct about our positions – “windfall taxes” taking much of what’s left. (I am not alone in thinking this; any of you who also read Mark Faber’s Gloom Boom Doom report know he expects to have upwards of 25% of his wealth confiscated by technocrats during some future, exigent crisis).

That’s why I said in the November letter, on this cycle (or the next) we will have to individually make our exits from the equities based on our own financial goals. While we keep our Bitcoin stack forever and make plans for inter-generational succession – and we may do that with some of our stocks (I could see *** and *** being legacy, dynastic holdings) – for the most part we’re in these to strategically profit within the existing system and cash out to meet our financial objectives.

Everybody knows I want my lake-house in the Muskokas, and you should know what it is that you want.

CIA Officer's Shocking Confession: "UFOs Are NOT What You Think!"

  This is a clickbait video so the tittle is irrelevant and it's full of junk. And still there is enough information to keep it as the core of this subject. 

  Lately, we have been bombarded with UFO information, mostly that the (US) government actually knows far more than is told. But is this true? I am open to the suggestion although I do not believe any of it.

 Here, what we have is Edward Snowden telling us that among all the secret documents he has had access to, he never saw anything related to UFO, even less about a conspiracy on the subject so that if there is anything at all related to UFO, it must be deeply buried where most people have no access to. 

 The absence of proof is not the proof of absence. This said, I would tend to concur. There must be here and there interesting reports and documents which have not been divulged. That much is certain. But the rabbit hole probably stops there. 

 No alien craft, bodies and artifacts buried under a storehouse in Area 51 in Nevada. No nothing in fact. The government knows little more than we do. The subject is just used to flood the headlines when something of interest, or a scandal is about to erupt. Whistleblowers will come and go. UFOs will continue haunting our skies and we won't learn more about the subject. It is simply beyond our grasp.     

 Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon do not "discover" us. They know we exist. They can see our planes up in the sky and sometimes hear about gold diggers far away in the forest. But mostly their knowledge of "us" is static. As for UFOs, we are the tribes.

ALERT: A HACKERS WARNING "ITS WORSE THAN PEOPLE CAN IMAGINE" Nationwide CYBERATTACK

 Will cyber-security become THE subject of 2024? (Among others!)

 While we are playing and having fun with ChatGPT, less well intentioned people are putting it to good use and making quite a lot of money out of it. This may indeed explode although the time frame will probably be more than a single year.

  On this subject, non State actors are less dangerous since their main motivation is "money". On the other hand, the chance that the current economic war morph into a cyber war seems quite high. Then all bets are off. The electric grid may indeed be a prime target. We've been warned.