Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

What's your thoughts on the religious and spiritual aspect of this transition time forthcoming? Will we see a renewal of faith in God and how will that affect the social structure and politics?

“New York City is finished,” he said. “They can’t keep order there, and you can’t have business without order. It’ll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again.”

“What do you hear of the U.S. government?” I said. “We don’t have electricity an hour a month anymore and there’s nothing on the air but the preachers anyway.”

“Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn’t met since twelve twenty-one,” Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. “We’re still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?”

“We believe in the future, sir. Only it’s not like the world we’ve left behind,” Joseph said.

“How’s that?”

“We’re building our own New Jerusalem up the river. It’s a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. Tell me something: do you know Jesus Christ.”

World Made by Hand by James Kunstler

[Higgenbotham]

I think the masses don't really give overpopulation much thought, and for most people alive today this is just how things have always been. None of them have had to seriously consider food scarcity.

There are also those who are more aware and just assume that we'll engineer our way out of our problems again when we start hitting the next production ceiling. Feels like wishful thinking to me, to just assume everything will work out without anything to base it on.

I'm in a field that is heavily involved with crop production, I've been to conferences and seen the latest advances and what's in the pipeline. All of the improvements that are being worked on are incredibly incremental, scraping very small efficiencies at great cost. Most of the industry is focused on leveraging AI and automation to get something on the order of 5-10% yield improvements, and the costs to implement these technologies in the real world are really prohibitive at this point for most crops.

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comme ... are_button

Based on my cursory understanding, he is correct as it applies to large scale farming.

One is that I believe AI, instead of dousing a field with a uniform coverage of pesticides, can "look" for insects and only use pesticides where it determines they are needed, avoiding waste. Same type of thing for other inputs.

[Higgenbotham]

“I have been asked a lot about how I feel about passing along Bridgewater after having started and built it over the last 50 years,” Dalio said in the LinkedIn post. “I am thrilled about it because I love seeing Bridgewater alive and well without me — even better than alive and well with me.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/ray-dal ... board.html

He rode it up for 50 years.

Stock market 25 year (plus or minus a few months) cycles

1907 (low) - 1932 (major low) - 1957 (low) - 1982 (major low) - 2007 (high)
1949 (low) - 1974 (major low) - 2000 (major high) - 2025 (Dalio makes final exit)



Chart isn't inflation adjusted but you can get the idea. It's hard to find an inflation adjusted chart going all the way back to 1907.



Probably the strongest cycle is the 34 year cycle 1932 to 1966 to 2000. Hard for me to imagine 2034 could be a high but it was hard for me to imagine 2025 could be a high either. So my inclination at the moment is to look for a 2025 high and a 2034 low or a 2032 low (1932 to 1982 to 2032). Maybe it'll be 2033.