Every product now has an "extended warranty" admission of the collapse of quality and durability.

There’s a great uplifting hope swirling around the potential to fix what’s broken, and so here’s my question: how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability that we now take for granted? What do I mean by the collapse of quality and durability? Here are a few examples of many.
1. Appliances that were once built to last 70 years now fail in 7 years (or less). A reader recently shared the story of a GE chest freezer his parents bought 70 years ago–not a fancy freezer, or a top of the line unit, just the standard model everyone bought. That freezer is still running great, 70 years later.
Compare that to the anecdotal accounts we hear all the time of costly

By placing search/social media in the bucket of newspapers, radio and TV networks, perhaps we’ve obscured their true nature as "Digital Marketing Mechanisms."

Language is a funny thing. If we don’t have a word for something, in some way it doesn’t exist. When we find a word in another language that describes this something, we borrow the word, for example schadenfreude from German and tsunami from Japanese.
If we use an existing word to describe something novel, we may mis-categorize it, in effect obscuring its true nature. For example, calling a whale a "fish" makes a certain kind of sense (an animal that lives in the sea), but it doesn’t capture the fact that the whale is a mammal, not a fish.
Which brings us to social media, and the possibility that it

If you find my scribblings upsetting, there’s an easy solution: stop reading it. We’ll both benefit.

I’m never more than one inch away from converting my site from essays to photos of kittens and puppies as the only means to gain respite from being hammered for my many failings as a human being. But alas, were I to do so, some readers would detect an insufferable air of elitist superiority in my selection of kitten photos, others would trash me for my worthless posts, and should I post a photo of a sad puppy, I’d promptly be denounced as a bitter old man.
Welcome to the circular firing squad. As a culture, we seem to have reached a permanently high plateau of extreme touchiness, a sensitivity to slight coupled with an urgent need to lash out not just at

Or we can let the bubble implode under its own weight and have a plan ready to clean house when the dust settles.

Thanks to recency bias, we tend to think the world has always been more or less as it is today. Tectonic shifts beneath the veneer of everyday life escape us unless we make a concerted effort to peel back the veneer of normalcy.
For example, consider the rise of finance as the dominant force in our socio-economic / political status quo. Statistics give us a rough picture of the dominance:

In 2023, the finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing industry contributed 20.7% to the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP). This is higher than the long-term average of 7.29%.
In 1947, the finance industry made up only 10% of non-farm

The system has reached the limits of its adaptability. Everything else is entertainment.

A great many people have immense faith in political solutions to looming crises: if only we elect new leaders, if only we replace current policies with new policies, everything would be fixed and the crises will all dissipate.
There are powerful reasons for this faith and equally powerful reasons why political solutions fail in crisis.
Our faith in politics is nurtured by recency bias in eras of relatively low-level volatility: when the system is humming along, decade after decade, the incremental adaptations of politics are enough to resolve whatever spots of bother arise.
There are three key points here. One is that politics is by its nature incremental, and there are

The ‘novel, apocalyptic situation which has now arisen’ goes largely unrecognized.

A truly staggering quantity of content is aimed at predicting what happens next, a.k.a. the future, and justifies their prediction by referencing models that are presented as rock-solid predictive tools. The majority of these models are based on historical examples that have been distilled into models of "how the world works," i.e. claims that these were not one-offs or outliers but examples of dynamics that will play out tomorrow as they played out 10 years ago, 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago.
History is complex and thus open to interpretation. The victors / survivors write the histories to suit their interests (protecting their reputation, covering their errors, etc.) and

AI is for the peons, access to humans is reserved for the wealthy.
Judging by the near-infinite hype spewed about AI, its power is practically limitless: it’s going to do all our work better and cheaper than we can do, replacing us at work, to name one example making the rounds. It’s going to revolutionize everything from science to marketing, all the while reaping trillions of dollars in profits for those who own the AI tools, apps, etc.
All these extravagant claims make good clickbait, but let’s set a higher standard: if AI is so great, then prove it by eliminating all the surveillance, spam and robocalling that’s making daily life such a chore. If AI is so powerful and can do pretty much anything a human can do only faster, better, cheaper, then why doesn’t

Rather than attempt to evade Caesar’s reach, a better strategy might be to ‘go gray’: blend in, appear average.
Let’s start by stipulating that I don’t “like” this forecast. I’m not “talking my book” (for example, promoting nuclear power because I own shares in a uranium mine) or issuing this forecast because I favor it. I simply see it as the most likely trajectory of the global financial system, based on history and the dynamics of human systems. “Liking” it or not liking it has nothing to do with it: the opinions of Titanic passengers who didn’t “like” that the ship was sinking didn’t affect the outcome.
You already know the global financial system is untenable. In a nutshell, the expansion of production and consumption has been funded by the expansion of

We need to start thinking outside the current system, which has no solutions.

Our convictions about money are quasi-religious: heretics are burned at the stake. I’m not sure which stake I’ll be tied to, because all the conventional choices–fiat currency, sound money (gold, Bitcoin) or debt-free currency (a.k.a. MMT)–are all fatally flawed.
To understand why, consider the wild cards in any monetary system: global trade and credit. Let’s start with credit, which as David Graeber explained in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has been an integral component of monetary arrangements since the dawn of civilization.
Taxes must be paid and seed purchased for the next crop, and so credit in some form–notched sticks, bills of sale, purchase orders, loans–is the

The few winners of global recession will use the decline as a means to break the chokehold of unproductive BAU elites.

That the global economy is slipping into recession is self-evident. What’s not yet known is the eventual depth and length of the recession. Given that the extreme policies needed to avoid recession over the past 15 years have reached extremes that are now the problem, not the solution, there won’t be any more fiscal-monetary "saves" this time around.
What’s also not yet known is how far the few winners will advance and how far the losers will fall. Recall that when it comes to wealth and power, what matters is not absolute gains or losses, but relative gains or losses: how well we do in relation to our peers and competitors.
For example, among

Policy errors have consequences, and we’re only in the first inning of those consequences.
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If we ask, “what’s changed?,” two under-appreciated dynamics pop out: risk and consequences: risks are rising globally in a multi-dimensional self-reinforcing way, and the consequences of the Federal Reserve’s 14-year policy error known as ZIRP–zero interest rate policy–are finally manifesting in unwelcome ways.
The Great Moderation is a term often invoked to describe the multi-decade

What changed in the economy is now nobody can afford to get by on working-class wages because there’s no longer any bargains.
The economy has changed in many ways, and it’s difficult to track the glacial movements over decades.
One change that few seem to recognize or discuss is the disappearance of bargains: cheap rent, cheap meals at hole-in-the-wall restaurants, cheap transport, cheap travel, cheap services–all gone.
Back in the day, even stupidly expensive cities like San Francisco had working-class districts with cheap rent and cheap eats. One reason the hippie movement arose in San Francisco was the availability of cheap places to rent in what many would dismiss as rundown slums or ghettos. There were plenty of working-class hole-in-the-wall restaurants and

One wonders what we’re paying for via taxes, products and services, when we end up having to do so much of the work ourselves for nothing.
Let’s look at a day-to-day reality that is so ubiquitous it doesn’t attract the attention it deserves:
Digital services–the foundation of the digital economy–are dumpster fires we’re supposed to put out ourselves. The services are broken, dysfunctional rubbish, and yet somehow the agencies or corporations that are responsible for the endless dumpster fires of their digital interfaces have shifted the burdens of this incompetence onto the consumer / customer, who is supposed to put the fire out ourselves and make do with the smoldering sludge at the bottom of the dumpster.
Digital services are everything relating to customer

The mainstream holds the Fed is busy planning a return to the glory days of zero interest rates, but ZIRP is on the downside of the S-Curve; it’s done, gone, history.
Let’s summarize what the Federal Reserve accomplished since embarking on its massive interventions to control volatility, risk, bond yields, interest rates, the mortgage market, bank subsidies and liquidity, all of which can be summed up as the cost of credit-capital, that is, capital that is borrowed into existence based on some form of collateral or income stream.
By artificially suppressing the cost of capital to less than inflation, the Fed succeeded in:
1. Fatally distorting the economy.
2. Greatly enriching the already-rich at the expense of the bottom 90%.
3. Crushing the middle class and

As in the Gulag it replicates, the innocent are swept up with the guilty in a disconcertingly unjust ratio.
The human mind is not particularly well-adapted to polycrisis: we struggle to adapt to the drought, then the earthquake knocks down the village walls, then the tsunami pounds what was left, followed by the epic flooding, then the hurricane batters the survivors, who witness the volcano erupting and wonder what they did to anger the gods and goddesses so mightily.
Now put yourself in the shoes of those tasked with governing / leading the traumatized, overwhelmed masses. If you call a public meeting to hear what the masses reckon are causes and solutions, you find a near-riot of vociferous wrangling over the equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head

The resulting erosion of collateral will collapse the global credit bubble, a repricing/reset that will bankrupt the global economy and financial system.
Scrape away the complexity and every economic crisis and crash boils down to the precarious asymmetry between collateral and the debt secured by that collateral collapsing. It’s really that simple.
In eras of easy credit, both creditworthy and marginal borrowers are suddenly able to borrow more. This flood of new cash seeking a return fuels red-hot demand for conventional assets considered “safe investments” (real estate, blue-chip stocks and bonds), demand which given the limited supply of “safe” assets, pushes valuations of these assets to the moon.
In the euphoric atmosphere generated by easy credit and a

We can also predict that the next round of instability will be more severe than the previous bout of instability.
Everyone is in favor of “doing whatever it takes” to “restore financial stability” when the house of cards starts swaying, but funny things happen on the way to “Restoring Financial Stability.” Whatever “emergency measures” are rushed into service to “stabilize” an inherently unstable system resolve the immediate problem but opens unseen doors to new sources of instability that eventually trigger another round of systemic instability that must be addressed with more “emergency measures.”
These unintended consequences proliferate as policy extremes are pushed to new extremes, and “emergency measures” become permanent sources of the very instability

If AI isn’t self-aware of the fact it is nothing but an exploitive tool of the powerful, then it’s worthless.
The latest wave of AI tools is generating predictably giddy exaltations. These range from gooey, gloppy technocratic worship of the new gods (“AI will soon walk on water!”) to the sloppy wet kisses of manic fandom (“AI cleaned up my code, wrote my paper on quantum physics and cured my sensitive bowel!”)
The hype obscures the fundamental reality that all these AI tools are nothing but labor-saving mechanisms that cut costs and boost profits, the same goal the self-serving corporate-dominated system has pursued obsessively since “shareholder value” (“an entity’s greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of the shareholders”) gained supremacy over the

The unencumbered realist concludes that there are no solutions within a status quo structure that is itself the problem.
Realists who question received wisdom and conclude the status quo is untenable are quickly labeled pessimistsbecause the zeitgeist expects a solution is always at hand–preferably a technocratic one that requires zero sacrifice and doesn’t upset the status quo apple cart.
Realists ask “what if” without selecting the “solution” first. The conventional approach is to select the “answer/solution” first and then design the question and cherry-pick the evidence to support the pre-selected “solution.”
What if all the status quo “solutions” don’t actually address the real problems? This line of inquiry is strictly verboten, for there must be a solution

Our time is better invested in actually learning about trends that impact us directly.
Imagine making this simple change in your life: whatever you don’t control, you stop paying attention to it.This includes a vast array of “news” and “crises” that we have zero control over: the wretched flooding in Timbukthree, geopolitics, distant wars, macro-economic trends, politics above the micro-local level, and so on.
Once we stop paying attention to everything we don’t control, what’s left to focus on? The simple answer is “whatever we do control,” which tends to be in our household or individual sphere of influence: the duties, habits and rituals of everyday life. In other words, we control our responses to whatever forces we don’t control.
But wait a minute. Aren’t we

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn’t about central bank bailouts, it’s about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems.
The vapid discussions about “soft” or “hard” landings for the economy are akin to asking if the Titanic’sencounter with the iceberg was “soft” or “hard:” either way, the ship was doomed, just as the global economy is doomed by The New Normal of Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies.
Death Spirals are the inevitable result of entrenched interests clinging on to the status quo and thwarting any adaptation or evolution that might threaten or diminish their share of the swag–and that includes any real change because any consequential modification has the potential to upset the gravey train.
The status quo

Our reliance on the endless expansion of credit, leverage and credit-asset bubbles will have its own high cost.
The Great Moderation of low inflation and soaring assets has ended. Welcome to the death by a thousand cuts of stagflation. It was all so easy in the good old days of the past 25 years: just keep pushing interest rates lower to reduce the cost of borrowing and juice credit expansion ((financialization) and offshore industrial production to low-cost nations with few environmental standards and beggar-thy-neighbor currency policies (globalization).

Both financialization and globalization are deflationary forces, as they reduce costs. They are also deflationary to the wages of bottom 90%, as wages are pushed down by cheap global labor and stripmined by

Should the wealth effect reverse as assets fall, capital gains evaporate and investment income declines, the top 10% will no longer have the means or appetite to spend so freely.
Soaring wealth-income inequality has all sorts of consequences. As many (including me) have noted, the concentration of wealth and income in the top 0.1% has enabled the few to buy political influence to protect their interests at the expense of the many and the common good.
In other words, extreme wealth-income inequality dismantles democracy. There is no way to sugarcoat this reality.
But the concentration of wealth and income isn’t limited to the top 0.1% or top 1%. The top 5% and top 10% have increased their share of household wealth and income, too, and this has far-reaching

The second essential step is to recognize how the spectacles of “news” and entertainment distract our attention from this erosion of basic rights.
Hierarchical power structures like city-states arose as problem-solving solutions, not just for the elites who benefited from the concentration of wealth and power but for the citizenry. This dynamic underpins the analysis presented in my recent book Global Crisis, National Renewal: when nation-states and global hierarchies no longer solve the key problems of their populaces, they dissolve and are replaced by some new arrangement.
It’s easy to see how hierarchies benefit the leaders / elites at the top, but there’s always a trade-off to the populace ceding power/control to elites: we will cede control over our lives in

If the Fed succeeding is a “Black Swan,” bring it on.
What if the “Black Swan” of 2023 is the Federal Reserve succeeds? Two stipulations here:
1. “Black Swan” is in quotes because the common usage has widened to include events that don’t match Nassim Taleb’s original criteria / definition of black swan; the term now includes events considered unlikely or that are off the radar screens of both the media and the alt-media.
2. The definition of “Fed success” is not as simple as the media and the alt-media present it.
In the conventional telling, the Fed made a policy mistake in keeping interest rates and quantitative easing (QE) in place for too long, and now it’s made a policy mistake in reversing those policies. Huh? So ZIRP/QE was a policy mistake, OK, we get

This dynamic–making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era–receives little attention or understanding.
Eras may last decades, and only those who’ve lived long enough to recall previous eras have experienced the transition from one era to the next. The era of financialization, globalization and low-cost, abundant oil/natural gas began over 40 years ago in 1981.
The era of digital / Internet technologies took off about 30 years ago. All of these dynamics accelerated in the early 2000s, roughly 20 years ago.
Only those 60 and older experienced working in a previous era (pre-1981).
All of these dynamics are entering a phase of nonlinear turbulence as the changes are outpacing these

If the consensus of experts misunderstand money, credit and prosperity, how are we going to advance?
Describing all the ways experts got it wrong is a thriving cottage industry. Expertise is itself contentious, as conventional expertise legitimized by credentials, prestigious institutional positions, scholarship, prizes, etc. can be wielded to promote the interests of the expert or whomever is funding the expert.
Another segment of experts are self-proclaimed, essentially substituting an air of confidence in their own projections for actual expertise.
Yet another segment of experts are lightweights with a misleading veneer of legitimacy to cloak their real identity as paid shills for corporations or other self-interested parties. PhD, anyone? Just put that PhD

The gag reflex kicks in at some point and we walk away because it is no longer worth the price.
Everyone has a line in the sand when it comes to inflated prices they refuse to pay. For one Walmart shopper I observed, it was a carton of eggs for close to $10. She announced her line in the sand verbally, with great force and sincerity.
What’s your line in the sand, the point at which you simply refuse to pay the asking price? Is it the $25 burger? Or is it the $50 for two burritos and two beverages?
Each person’s line in the sand reflects their income, wealth, budget, social status and value system–what’s important to them. For some higher income folks, it might be the ridiculous “resort fee” that’s tacked onto the already overpriced resort room, hotel tax, excise

Those who see the madness for what it is have only one escape: go to ground, fade from public view, become self-reliant and weather the coming storm in the nooks and crannies.
A great madness sweeps the land. There are no limits on extremes in greed, credulity, convictions, inequality, bombast, recklessness, fraud, corruption, arrogance, hubris, pride, over-reach, self-righteousness and confidence in the rightness of one’s opinions. Extremes only become more extreme even as the folly of previous extremes wearies rationality.
Imaginary sins are conjured out of thin air to convict the innocent while those guilty of the most egregious fraud and corruption are lauded as saviors.
The national mood is aggrieved and bitter. The luxuries of self-righteousness,

What’s unfettered in America is “Communism for the Rich” and the normalization of corruption that results from the auctioning of political power to protect monopolies and cartels.
The irony of constantly being accused of being a communist is rather rich. When I point out that “free market capitalism” in America is neither a real market nor real capitalism, those who equate any criticism of “capitalism” as proof of communist leanings are triggered.
Noting that Marx got monopoly capitalism and alienation right triggers another group who equate any favorable mention of Marx as proof of communist leanings.
There are two ironies in these accusations of being a communist. One is that I’ve spent 17 years tirelessly critiquing centralized wealth and power–the acme of