It’s fitting that we are entering Q2 of the 21st century with a crisis big enough to match anything from Q1

Every empire dies, the US is no exception

One of the fundamental fuckups of western capital is the constant drive to eliminating slack and overcapacity in systems. It turns out, having lots of extra capacity has been one of China’s huge competitive advantages. Being able to spin up production on a lot of extra unexpected demand puts them in the position to benefit from black swan events in a way that catches western capital flat-footed.

lol yeah

dude betewen this and that graph of daily temperatures at various points in the year (it’s like +5C in the american southwest over like anything ever recorded in march and I can confirm the weather is fucking crazy here (it was in the 30s, then 80s, back to 30s-40s, tomorrow is a low of 36 and a high of 87) and the fact that brussel sprouts are already 2x in price due to weather events in california and apparently squash is up in price due to weather in florida and apparently the price for the very basic pellets used as feedstock to make like literally all heavy and light plastics doubled after already rising from idfk what to 15 cents a pound (so at the time I read it was 30 cents a pound)

i think we are really truly and tremendously fucked and that is even if they don’t start dropping nukes over the strait which doesn’t even matter anymore in preventing this because all the damage is baked in by the destroyed infrastructure and interrupted supply

and not a single person I work with seems concerned at all and I feel so frustrated I want to scream. I think they all just assume they’re insulated from famine because we serve food but what if there’s no food to fucking serve