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.

[aedens]

Fact will be when the Border ends so did you. Brandon is and always be what is truly was.
Transitive Law of numbers means the Police fail your already set to be
the next Law and Order Mayor.

The mayor of a violence-plagued city in Mexico was killed on a Sunday with his decapitated body left in a pickup truck
and his severed head placed atop the vehicle's roof. Americans are already BISH zone stupid is past any dicussion.

The name Laodicea is comprised of two Greek words, laos, which means "people" or "nation," and dike, a legal word referring to "custom," "punishment," or "judgment," based on context. The Laodiceans considered themselves law-abiding people. The last of the 7 as Time is here.

Timber Sales?

Yes, He was very old, and I was very young on a snowy day seeking game with my dog who is so dearly missed on to this day.
Property taxes on his average life with average pension unable to meet the average revenue demand was the root issue
to cover paper claims then still a gold standard.

The Model T Truck rig had a rip saw in tow with a flat belt off the back rim to slab his lumber to the mill for revenue payment.

He was very old.
I was very young and He smiled as we talked briefly that day on affairs that mattered to my young mind.
Lotus Corniculatus for these times to care for ours since yours are issue and in peril.

The numbers did not lie. They do.

[Higgenbotham]

July 15 was my best shot for guessing this top. It looks like it's in now.

Early 2026 at the latest but it's going to be hard for Trump to squeeze any more out of it:

The Telegraph

Republicans tell Trump to ‘grow up’ after he sacks data chief
Benedict Smith
Sat, August 2, 2025 at 11:11 AM CDT

President Trump’s sacking of Erika McEntarfer was described as ‘kind of impetuous’ by Cynthia Lummis, a Republican senator.

Republicans have told Donald Trump to “grow up” after he sacked the US government’s top statistician over underwhelming jobs numbers.

The president said on Friday he would remove Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) shortly after government figures indicated the economy was performing worse than expected.

The move has prompted a rare backlash against Mr Trump from members of his own party.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/rep ... 34024.html

Say, like Trump, you've been in the real estate business, and you recognize it's a bubble and has been for a long time. It's logical to say, well, it's been a bubble for a long time and the way to address it has been to buy the dip and then wait for some excesses, trim holdings, wait for the next dip, etc. The practical way to be successful in navigating the bubble has been to take on debt and assume the general trajectory is onward and upward to bigger and bigger bubbles with speed bumps along the road.

No worries, just a speed bump. The Boomers have been hitting speed bumps at full speed since, oh, about the time of Woodstock.

[Higgenbotham]

Early next week I can post that, then circle back to the general discussion about location and resilience to heat and extremes in rainfall.

My preference is to be in an area that is still amenable to growing vegetables, but also where the population density has thinned out considerably. That's approximately near the red line below as precipitation also thins out moving west. So these areas aren't "best" for growing but still generally "OK". Overall I don't think someone is going to get too much past that red line (approximately) moving west and have an easy time of it growing vegetables until it gets wetter near the west coast. And on the line it's not going to be real easy.

Condensed version.

A year or more ago, I discussed the theoretical balance between population and difficulty of growing conditions. Then over the past year, I've shown the difficulty of growing aspects in action. It's a tradeoff between population thinning out on the one hand and growing conditions being more difficult as population thins out on the other hand. The balance I've tried to strike for myself is within the red lines below, represented on different types of maps, but all amounting to approximately the same thing. The red line above should have been moved to the west in Texas.







It's possible to produce a lot on a small scale in a marginal area but the labor investment required to do so goes up. I've been digging pits 24 to 30 inches deep, then filling them with free soil and organic matter from the surrounding area. The preparation time might be somewhere on the order of 2-3 hours of hard labor per square foot. That's a one time investment, then there will be minimal maintenance after that. That's to make it somewhat resilient to heat, drought, and flooding, but at the present level of preparation there will be extreme conditions that reduce yields. More investment could increase resilience (digging deeper for example) but I think I'm striking the approximate right balance for now.

[Higgenbotham]

I don't have any final yield numbers except on one plant. That plant was suitable for Spring tomato harvest in Texas and it's done. Typical yields are supposed to be 10 to 15 pounds per plant. This one yielded 26 pounds. For the tomato plants that produce until frost, those have yielded about 10 pounds per plant so far and will probably get to 26 before frost. In a better year, they will get much more. The flooding has slowed them way down but they look set to pick up again in September. These plants require no more than 4 square feet, probably closer to 3, but let's say 4. Also, let's be conservative and say the plants produce 6 pounds per square foot and the one time labor investment is 3 hours per square foot. That amounts to 2 pounds per year per hour of initial labor investment. For lower yielding crops, it should be about proportionate because the preparation doesn't need to be as extensive.

[Higgenbotham]

"We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism...

Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination...

All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: “They are cursed and this is because of inequality.” Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more.

Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming.

Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”

Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.

“The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... l-collapse

Sometimes I've said I don't agree with everything I post. This I agree with. I've written things along these lines many times, mostly about corporate psychopaths and The 97th Percentile. Also that things on the periphery will improve when the giant sucking sound from the center is silenced forever.

viewtopic.php?p=78313#p78313

[Higgenbotham]

A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB'S MUST-READ BOOK • A radical retelling of human history through the cycle of societal collapse—"a Cassandra-like warning about the path today’s oligarchs have set [and] a sweeping and dire vision of a world on the brink.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“Deeply sobering and strangely inspiring. . . . Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins.” —Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus

“Anyone who doubts the importance of this conversation hasn’t been paying attention.” —Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun

12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves into hierarchies. The few dominated the many, seizing control through violence. What emerged were “Goliaths”: large societies built on a collection of hierarchies that are also terrifyingly fragile, collapsing time after time across the world. Today, we live in a single, global Goliath—one that is precariously interdependent—under threat from nuclear war, climate change, and the existential risks of AI. The next collapse may be our last.

In Goliath’s Curse, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy on our species, from the earliest cities to the collapse of modern states like Somalia. Drawing on historical databases and the latest discoveries in archaeology and anthropology, he uncovers groundbreaking revelations:

More democratic societies tend to be more resilient.
A modern collapse is likely to be global, long-lasting, and more dire than ever before
Collapse may be invisible until after it has occurred. It’s possible we’re living through one now.
Collapse has often had a more positive outcome for the general population than for the 1%.
All Goliaths contain the seeds of their own demise.

As useful for finding a way forward as it is for diagnosing our precarious present, Goliath’s Curse is a stark reminder that there are both bright and dark sides to societal collapse—that it is not necessarily a reversion to chaos or a dark age—and that making a more resilient world may well mean making a more just one.

https://www.amazon.com/Goliaths-Curse-H ... 0593321359

This looks like it has the potential to be one of the better books on collapse. It seems true that collapse may be invisible until after it has occurred. The reason is the various things that have been set in motion that probably can't be stopped and won't reverse until decades into the future. Nanoplastic concentrations and possible associated damage, for example.

[aedens]

Doubling Rate: Recent studies suggest that AI capabilities are doubling every 7 months,
significantly faster than traditional Moore's Law.

Input string suggested 5 month now is seen.
The log#3 map will be pivital as the Locust Phase increases.
We went past the rope burn maps now H.
When the useful idiots used the water pipes for fuselages
the dinoflagellate project was the last straw for me after the
last project was difficult enough.

You may remember some posts I made in early in this thread about how the low social standing of engineers in this country would eventually cripple the economy.

They have no clue H. Now they will learn again the hard way and it was already written.
51 pole dancers and the usual suspects.

I went back and parsed your view as they ponder Angels on a DEI pin on the Floor.
As you noted clearly in the past, " I've tried to get my head around what he's saying and really couldn't, but saved the article and the book summary in my notebook because so much of the rest of what he says makes sense. My thoughts have been that the personal computer circa 1979 was more like the railroad circa 1829.
Add the Internet to personal computers 20 years later and that would be like railroads in 1849 or so. And the Internet came along with the same 150 year lag time and to me that was more like the telegraph." Tue Nov 04, 2008 5:28 pm

It is approaching sooner than later and we do not need much more why to what window time.

They liked the Retards for Candy Program for way to long.
https://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=415941
The rot is way to deep. https://twitter.com/i/status/1950812890644226528