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The Other Life community is also known as the Imperceptible Country. Think of it as a Web2.5 community.
10,000% Bullish North America
This guy Peter Zeihan is blowing up. Everyone is recommending him to me lately. He’s written a few books about geopolitics and his content seems to be rising due to interest in Russia-Ukraine.
At the Other Life meetup in Austin last weekend, ~nopbud-hosdes outlined a few of his big ideas, which he later published in the Imperceptible City:
North America is freaky. If you think of the planet as a series of video game / RTS spawn zones, North America is super-super easy mode. Most places have impossibly high transport costs, and North America has a series of insanely navigable rivers, dropping commodity transport to near-zero.
It also has an insane abundance of energy resources AND the biggest, most fertile agricultural zone in the world. AND highly defensible natural borders. AND the bulk of the land is in nice temperate, easily habitable climates.
North America has been coupled to the old world because our elites idealize europe, and Wilson made some dumb decisions about integrating into european defense arrangements. We’ve been subsidizing europe since WWII, on the condition that they serve as cannon fodder if there’s a WWIII.
Now, US is in an isolationist phase, AND Europe is kicking off a series of brutal regional wars, AND Asian countries will have to go to war to protect energy routes from the Middle East, WHILE Iran and Saudi Arabia duke it out.
Net net, everything in the US will drastically improve, economy will drastically improve, quality of life will drastically improve, and we’ll go for mercantilist policies that let us profit off chaos, while ensaring south america in economically extractive deals
He’s 10,000% bullish on North America, basically
Join the discussion at ~hatryx-lastud/other-life.
Should your blog have a comments section?
There was a good discussion in town, started by Fanny Vassilatos.
I gave a long reply with all my thoughts, here’s a snippet:
I have a pet theory that there is a major generational divide when it comes to comments sections. It seems to me that blogs/newsletters with thriving comments sections tend to be Gen X writers or older. If your audience is sophisticated and nerdy Gen X or older, I feel like you’re much more likely to have a thriving comments section. If you’re audience is Millennial and younger, I feel like you’re less likely to have a thriving comments section. Millennials and younger never really developed this pattern/habit, they are much more accustomed to a private Discord or a private DM group.
As you can see, I prefer to give the Other Life community its own real estate, rather than force comments underneath any particular post.
Join the discussion in town.
Catalytic Converter Theft
A catalytic converter is an automobile part composed of platinum, palladium, and rhodium—precious metals.
We’re seeing reports of catalytic converter theft up ~10x.
Why is this interesting? From ~dibryl-sartev in the city:
As commodity prices rise, so do returns to theft of materials for parts. This is one of the dynamical couplings that cause dark ages to get dark quickly: metals and oils get cannibalized for relatively extractive low-tech-high-security uses rather than their relatively productive high-tech-low-security uses whenever the high tech populations are not able to protect themselves and the shared materials are scarce, but then the high-tech-low-sec demand still exists and this drives up the cost of materials and reinforces the cycle until the high-tech-low-sec gives up.
It’s one of the core loops of “catabolic collapse,” the tendency of complex social systems to begin burning their stored capital after they begin to hit sustainability limits, until reaching a new lower-capital equilibrium (possibly much lower).
For that reason, in a civilizational autumn it can be especially interesting to keep an eye on returns to petty theft and signs that the theft is becoming more organized, and here is an interesting example.
Join the discussion at ~hatryx-lastud/other-life.
On the limits of instrumental rationality in warfare
Edward Brown elaborated an interesting thesis in town:
The next revolution in military affairs will not come from new weaponry, but that weaponry will in the long run be its undoing…
The cognitive rigor mortis of optimization thinking in warfare will always lose to an opponent whose scope of warfare is wider than your own…