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The Black Swan Just Had a Hundred Babies
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist – a saying that became reinterpreted to teach a different lesson after the first European encounter with them. The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb starting in 2001 to explain:
- The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
- The non-computability of the probability of consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
- The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.
Taleb’s “black swan theory” refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. [Source: Wikipedia]
Several red flags that an impending recession, following the inflation we are currently in, may be far more extreme than has been predicted, and quite possibly be something we haven’t seen in our lifetime. I’m not shouting conspiracy. I like to have a heads up so I can prepare within my abilities, and so offer the following observations that I’ve encountered:
– Our local (Florida) news station just aired a segment where a dozen new schools are in the pipeline and underway. The mass migration to Florida has overwhelmed the educational system, and the newest schools are already at 130% capacity. The segment was on construction. All the contractors say they have never encountered supply chain issues, and worker shortages, and accelerating costs all at once at this level — ever. Costs for ALL materials have doubled in one year — everything from lumber, electrical components, cement blocks, sheet rock, wiring, AC, and heating elements — basic construction materials and the backlog could be a year or so out.
– In the Florida Panhandle, a major lumber company just announced a 30-hour work week, from 60-70 hours per week. I’m not sure if the housing market is slowing, but the building industry is not.
– Anyone familiar with the World Economic Forum’s new “Build Back Better” criteria is now presenting something called ESG. This is the social credit score rating that has slipped into the newest standards for doing business in this “new world order.” It affects everyone including you, me, small and large businesses, and unless you can check off all the right social and environmental boxes, you may not get that bank loan for a mortgage or to keep your company afloat.
Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is an approach to evaluating the extent to which a corporation works on behalf of social goals that go beyond the role of a corporation to maximize profits on behalf of the corporation’s shareholders. Typically, the social goals advocated within an ESG perspective include working to achieve a certain set of environmental goals, as well as a set of goals having to do with supporting certain social movements, and a third set of goals having to do with whether the corporation is governed in a way that is consistent with the goals of the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement.A variety of governmental organizations and financial institutions have devised ways to measure the extent to which a specific corporation is aligned with ESG goals. The most prominent global movement in this regards is the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by United Nations in 2015. The term ESG was popularly used first in a 2004 report titled “Who Cares Wins”, which was a joint initiative of financial institutions at the invitation of UN. The report has been endorsed by 20 prominent institutions. [Source: Wikipedia]
Just last month, a major US company that supplies many products that we are all familiar with, wrote the following regarding the tampon shortage:
In its third-quarter fiscal year analysis for 2022, Procter & Gamble, maker of Tampax, noted it was having difficulty sourcing certain raw materials and experiencing rising shipping costs. In its “forward-looking statements” under “risks and uncertainties,” P&G included:
“(3) the ability to manage disruptions in credit markets or to our banking partners or changes to our credit rating;
(4) the ability to maintain key manufacturing and supply arrangements (including execution of supply chain optimizations and sole supplier and sole manufacturing plant arrangements) and to manage disruption of business due to various factors, including ones outside of our control, such as natural disasters, acts of war (including the Russia-Ukraine War) or terrorism or disease outbreaks;
(5) the ability to successfully manage cost fluctuations and pressures, including prices of commodities and raw materials, and costs of labor, transportation, energy, pension and healthcare …”
Edgewell Personal Care, maker of Playtex and o.b.™ tampons, has blamed its declining stocks on “extensive workforce shortages” caused by Omicron surges in late 2021 and early 2022. A question that remains unaddressed is whether farmers will actually be able to grow more, even if they want to, due to skyrocketing diesel and fertilizer costs, and uncooperative weather. Cotton-producing states such as Texas and Oklahoma are currently experiencing severe drought that has prevented planting of cotton this year.
Baby formula shortages, costs of food and fuel, no new gas, oil or diesel contracts, airlines in trouble, not only add up to a recession, but possibly another Great Depression. It’s not COVID, or the Russia-Ukraine conflict, or other manageable issues that seems to be fueling this looming Black Swan Of Unimaginable Proportions Event.
It seems to be the unfolding of The Great Reset’s goals — eliminating meat and replacing it as a source of nutrition with lab-based plant products, decimating the oil, gas, and diesel industries (whereby all supplies are delivered and most of the world population travels and heats their homes), placing unreasonable restrictions on the human population, whether by mandatory vaccines, ESG standards, accelerating costs of homes/rent while raising interest rates, and fueling political and social unrest by dividing people into groups through social media.
How many clerks do you see at Walmart or Lowes at the checkout aisles? Everything has become self-checkout, and while you are on camera, a voice thanks you for using the automated system. You will own nothing, including having a job, and be happy. The tech industry (where the WEF claims all those checkout clerks will be retrained for new jobs in the new world order) are having large layoffs. That doesn’t make sense?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSMQgELP53M
So how will people buy food, pay for healthcare, or heat their homes this winter in this Great Reset? Governments across the world seem to be on auto-pilot, like they are taking their cues to do nothing from bigger entities that no one voted for.
We’ve had wars, shortages, labor disputes, and other challenges before, but not all at once without any solid leadership to make sensible preparations, like opening pipelines, creating jobs, assisting farmers and ranchers to provide food, etc. What are you seeing in your area / job ? What are you doing to prepare?
Published in General
Praying. It’s all I’ve got at the moment.
And it’s still the best plan.
Somewhere someone knows what to do that involves economic systems and computers and politics. All I got is the old tried-and-true stuff: Be good, study the Scriptures, and pray without ceasing.
Here in NJ the Governor (multimillionaire Phil Murphy) is fighting inflation by handing out 10’s of millions of unspent Covid relief funds to illegal aliens. And he’s helping combat the baby formula shortage by making NJ a sanctuary for baby-killing.
Maybe this is true, but is it really that different than what we’ve seen in the past? In the pre-Reagan days, the left used to claim that the country was about to be squeezed by corporations who would create a synthetic fuels industry (to “get us off oil”), allocate more of the nation’s wealth to investors (“the rich got richer”), and automate basic industry.
Some of it was accurate, some was accurate for a while. We didn’t rush into synfuels. The ethanol boondoggle was about as far as it got. Instead we raised the rewards for finding oil. We sure did increase the share of American wealth going to the rich, that much they got right. We automated some of basic manufacturing, but mostly we outsourced it instead. We didn’t automate RCA’s TV assembly plants to cut payrolls, for example; we just stopped making TVs here.
When things are interconnected into wider and more all-encompassing patterns, there are often benefits from so doing…but extensive interconnection is also a powerful generator of Black Swans. See my post Coupling.
You present a compelling case that we are all screwed and evil has won.
Not counting the eucatastrophic divine intervention we aren’t even looking for yet, yes.
That’s a Tolkein word, eucatastrophe. Better to Google it than to ask me. Or at least to ask me later when I can type.
The story of Earandil reaching Valinor, or Gollum slipping up on Mount Doom while Sauron is looking in the other direction, is the sorta thing I’m talking about here. Salvation is nigh, but we don’t even know where to look for it yet. Meanwhile, we have to tend to our own duties, and, after good wins over evil, those who survive, or anyone who finds they can look back on earth from heaven and see more clearly, will see how being good in our own little lives helped to win the day.
We are either experiencing the coordinated, ingenious reordering of the world by a supremely capable elite, or the result of stresses put on brittle systems and incompetent elites who are mouthing modern institutional cant in the hopes that the trendy cant buys them time. I’m a Hanlon’s Razor guy, myself. If they were really good at this we’d be hearing about the marvelous successes of Sri Lanka.
If self-checkout wasn’t popular, people wouldn’t use it. Target and Home Depot – my local equivalents of Walmart and Lowes – have staffed aisles, but the line at self check-out is always longer. I like it. It’s faster and more efficient and I can bag things according to my preferences. Having some bored worker beep items over the scanner is redundant. That said, my local grocery store has no self check-out, and everyone’s happy; we all know the cash register clerks, a few of whom are long-termers. The baggers are all local kids. Same goes for the local hardware store.
Do you bank online, or go to the branch and talk to a teller? I do both.
No one wants that. I mean, sure, the line comes from WEF blather about some techno-utopian future where everything’s a seamless micro transaction, but it all grates against human nature.
Good points
Love the concept of the Black Swan but not entirely sure it fits here. I think you give a bit too much credit to there being a plan for the Great Reset that’s being executed.
It would seem that although the Biden administration is heavily pushing their own agendas which runs counter to all that you learn in Econ 101. The efforts create uncertainty and drive inefficiencies in the business and labor market. (It’s far easier to pay a robot or install a self-checkout counter than deal with maintaining employees during a labor shortage.)
The biggest issue however, is that with Trillons of COVID relief dollars given directly to consumers at a time when services were not available. This demand shock broke the Just-In-Time supply chains with non-elastic shipping capacity. This demand and lack of being able to deliver goods started to cause sustained inflation which the Fed had to address.
To address inflation the Fed increases interest rates. The speed at which they increased the interest rates is a direct response to the amount of inflation they determined. With the rate at 0% there were a host of companies and investment which used this “free” money to fund various boondoggles. Those companies which are not turning a profit and lived on these investments need to fail.
I think the U.S. has learned that we can’t just keep spending money without driving inflation, putting the Modern Monetary Theory (government prints money to increase wages and pay for services) into the trash heap of bad ideas. It’ll be a transition from the free money but dealing with reality is always the best long term plan.
I think it’s different than the past, i.e. pre-Reagan days because of the extremely fast pace of social media, AI – automating everything and the global system connected in ways we did not see in the past. There was a separation and barriers in place so a large event could be somewhat controlled and not spread so fast. The European countries were not connected under one currency or economic structure, for example.
Germany triggers ‘alert level’ of emergency gas plan, sees high risk of long-term supply shortages (cnbc.com)
I don’t think evil wins – but there are so many who think this is just normal, or Russia’s fault and have their heads buried. We can vote differently, push back on the education and information process, etc.
I’ve read The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (published in 2016). In six years, many of his descriptions have unfolded and it is worth reading. This is new territory.
Why not both, sort of? A ruling class that schemes to impose a tyrannical system of global corporatism, but that is not nearly as wise and competent as it thinks it is. Hence various failures. But then, they are unlikely to be troubled by failures that leave the ruling class largely untouched, as the impoverishment and disempowerment of ordinary people are features, not bugs.
See also this variation on Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”
The WEF types want that. It appeals to their human nature. With every passing day we see more evidence that “You will eat bugs, live in a pod, and you will be happy” is indeed the future they desire. Corporations and politicians and leftists all have their own reasons to love such schemes. I could go on, but, in short, Bladerunner, anybody?
Everyone is cheering Elon Musk for buying Twitter (that may not go thru) and supporting right wing candidates – at the same time he has that Mind company that is developing chips for the brain. He just had more kids with one of the upper management employees – he’s a brilliant person and a very strange duck. Yes – Bladerunner meets The Matrix…
Self-checkout systems vary greatly in quality/usability. The ones at Whole Foods and Target are pretty decent, also Walmart IIRC. Safeway and Giant systems feel like a science fair project built by a kid who didn’t have time to finish it properly.
For any significant number of items, I’d prefer a human checker….it’s a learning-curve thing, he can do it faster than I can.
Amazon has a no-check-out system which has been deployed in a few Whole Foods & possibly other stores…has anyone tried it?
Would someone identify one of these alleged “black swan” events in my lifetime — say in the past 50 years — that led to some catastrophe?
I don’t think that the US has had a major catastrophe in my lifetime. There have been a few recessions, generally mild ones. There was one notable epidemic, which turns out to have been a pretty minor thing.
What I have seen is a great deal of overreaction to minor bumps in the road, usually leading to the adoption of some foolish policy or other.
We do have long-term problems, and we should be focused on those. Immigration is a problem. Family breakdown is a problem. Crime is a problem. The decline of the Christian faith is a problem. None of these is a “black swan” event. All can be improved with wise policy, I think, though not overnight.
For me, none of the other catastrophic Black Swan Events affect my household as much as the “non-existent” totally made up “conspiracy theory” or black op activity known as Weather Modification.
Due to the unprecedented numbers of volcanic activities that have been unleashing their furies on the globe, The US West Coast should have been the recipient of major life-giving, drought ending rain storms from 09-2017 to now..
Back in late September 2017, I turned on the Weather Channel to note that a scroll feed at the bottom of the TV screen was in effect for most of three days: the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of that week was spent warning us, explaining how by that Thursday, a one hundred year storm event would be unleashing high winds and a most unusual amount of rain for the 9th month of the year.
The public was urged to complete any errands requiring travel on major roads and highways by late in the day on Wednesday.
However even as this alert was on going, so too was the major activity in the skies above our heads. What should have been radiantly sunny skies soon became herringboned bands of sky-painted horizons.
Thursday came and went, and although overcast, nothing occurred but a few hours of mist.
Less than 3 weeks later, on Sunday Oct 8th, 2017, a catastrophic wildfire took out major portions of Santa Rosa Calif, parts of Napa County and also Sulphur Bank here in Lake County. (The Lake County fire was a separate small fire from the major one.)
Of course this horrendous fire storm was used by proponents of the Global Catastrophic Climate Crisis Theory to portend that we all must immediately switch to electric cars, & stop blow drying our hair. Also our households must accept hot temps in the summer and freezing temps in the winter, rather than using our AC/heating systems.
“1PacificRedwood” has devoted a great deal of time to demonstrating exactly how chem trail spraying combined with microwave activities from satellites, as well as Nexrad stations, dry up, stall and or divert the many rainstorms California should be receiving. He can be followed on youtube. His presentations involve satellite weather maps, atmospheric rivers of moisture images, and other scientific data.
Meanwhile in 2018, The Weather Channel had a panel of weather experts on one show who detailed that anytime a major weather event is indicated as about to occur – especially if predicted 72 to 96 hours prior to the event, there is a firm 90% chance of that event occurring.
By my own tally, our weather events involving rain now occur only 12 to 35% of the time, even when foretold 96 hours prior.
Over the last six weeks, we here in Northern California should have had at least 9 of ten predicted rainstorms but instead received only one lovely 15 hours of intense drizzle. (But hey – at least it wasn’t 15 hours of “mist.”)
NWO meeting Agenda 2030.
Yes, maybe you’ve read this comment of mine elsewhere but I’m sure James hasn’t. It’s context is that a lot world leaders are wrongly and very vaguely and unsupportedly being claimed by Klaus Schwab as WEF acolytes.
***
Yes, there’s a scam involved. But there are many “Young Global Leaders” who actively support and speak at WEF conferences, too. These should not be dismissed as incidental. But what I keep coming back to is that when you’ve got a manual, you use it, it has a proven record, you trust it, and you use it to help with things that aren’t mentioned in it. Klaus Schwab has a manual too. It’s relatively recent compared to, say, a manual dealing with NBC hazards, but its directions are being pursued and followed and the things that should happen if this manual is followed are in fact happening.
I wouldn’t put it all up to tinfoilery or deride it as Dr. Evil’s “secret plans” but rather look at what they say they intend and see if it’s happening. If it’s not, then forget it. But if the world is going the way Schwab says he wants it to go, then maybe warnings about it should be given some credence.
After all, the Davos crowd really is a thing, and has been for decades, and they really are some of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Even if they are incompetent and ignorant, they are still malignant.
Why do you call black swan events catastrophes? They’re not necessarily catastrophes. They are completely novel and unexpected events and therefore at least moderately paradigm changing.
But overrunning the southern broader, and the government encouraging it, is a catastrophe, and it is as far as I know a unique thing in history.
Now, Jerry, that seems like a dangerous question for you to ask. The answer is obvious.
You referring to the Beiden Ascendancy?
@arizonapatriot
Here in California, we have the rolling blackouts.
We have a governor whose water restriction policies are coming about even though corporations waste more water than ever, and a great deal of water received by snow melt off ends up flowing out to the Pacific.
We have photos of herds of cattle who were being raised in the Great Plains states being struck down. (Though I haven’t vetted the photos and stories.) Not a natural, 102 degree weather event.
There is the “investor opportunity” to buy in right now to the gas stations slated to be transformed overnight from gas providing to E-vehicle charging.
We had the Summer of 2020 Rampages Occurring While We Of Color Grieve. These rampages cost 40 billion dollars, decimated 38 neighborhoods in the USA and lead to at least 200 deaths.
Amazingly they were not mentioned in the media, except as wide spread looting events.
Even the Aug 2020 weekend of looting in Chicago, which at one point involved a gang of thugs of the BLM type descending on a crowd of African Americans out for a stroll on a weekend afternoon, had the media focus bnly on the boutiques that had shoplifters. The thugs wielded pipes and maimed and killed this crowd of innocents.
N-o-t C-o-v-e-r-e-d in t-h-e M-e-d-i-a!!
Anyway, for those who only watch Mainstream media, the narrow focus that is offered will be The Great Insurrection of Jan 6th, and the fabulous upswing in the job numbers posted by the Biden Admin for June 2022.
No, Jerry’s birth. 😜 It led to disaster, I tell ya!
You know, The Beiden Ascendency would make a good Ludlum-style novel. You up for it? Or would it be too unbelievable?
Like the evil reenvisioning of Being There.
Yes, it would be.
On the other hand, you may have something. Instead of “I like to watch,” the character would say, “I like to sniff.”
There was one near my hotel in NYC. It was always empty. There’s something about it that seems wrong, as if the moment you get inside the store the doors lock and the windows become opaque for a second, and then turn transparent again to show a store that is once again deserted.
It was just off, the sort of room in which Keir Dullea would drop some cutlery.
https://zeihan.com/end-of-the-world/
Peter Zeihan’s new book is a scary look at what he says is irreversible worldwide decline, due to globalization and demographics. We peaked a few years ago, and the supply chain issues and shortages will never be fixed. Expertise and manpower that will never be replaced.The Wuhan Virus restrictions hastened everything. It’s back to the 1800s from here.
Is he right or partly right?
The 1800s?
Please.