Weird how people are letting their guard down. My guard level is steadily trending higher. Risk seems to be increasing steadily rather than decreasing to me.

Map people: “things must be getting better because they’re easing restrictions, so I can let down my guard”

Territory people: “err basically nothing has changed, so easing restrictions means we’re just accepting higher shared risk which means I must mitigate personal risk more”

Developments: we now know several things don’t work, but haven’t found anything that does. Food security plummeting by the day. Infrastructure accidents in the developing world already. Famine beginning to loom in Africa. Fiscal support already at limit.

War zones trying to return to “normal” war with no pandemic proofing.

Throw in your locusts and murder hornets for some color.

Basically, no good news. We bought time, achieved almost nothing with it beyond a bit of curve flattening.

And the curve flattening is partly just spike shifting in most overloaded parts of the world.

Tldr: if you’re letting your guard down you’re an idiot. Unless you have a mansion in Idaho, or better still on the moon, staffed by robots, your risk has gone up not down. Probably 3x.

https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1259270527631257600?s=21

My hard landing asymptote is: design your survival-level lifestyle within a 20-mile radius plus Amazon. Assume that nothing except money can travel longer distances easily. And assume that money will be worth less and less.

Right now the poorest under-the-API types are being thrown under the bus. Expect the shit level line to slowly rise and that you will be thrown under the bus too when it rises to your class level. Maybe not via higher Covid risk, but other risks like hunger or destitution

Never thought I’d live through this level of breakdown, but I’m now making post-money plans, as in when money is not the primary form of risk insurance needed. There’s going to be a pretty bad rice shock within the year I think, which will make the meat crisis look like a joke.

We just hit Great Depression levels of unemployment... except this is way worse because that was *merely* a financial crisis. There wasn’t a pandemic doing the rounds and half the civilizational machine in a dangerous unplanned shutdown mode it wasn’t actually designed for.

I suspect a lot of the people who are optimistic right now believe the laissez faire part of the economy is much bigger than it is, and don’t realize how much bigger the planned part is. By which I mean both state capacity and the innards of large corporations.

This planned part is not some sort of magical self-healing, self-regulating emergent stochastic magic show orchestrated by money. It is more like a precisely engineered machine that runs in somewhat deterministic ways via explicit coordination.

And it is MUCH bigger.... “laissez faire was planned, planning was not” — Polyani.

We’re about to see the biggest natural experiment in actually free markets. A sample of the world free marketers want, as regulatory reins fail.

Find your generalized green zone now. Not as in virus-free, but as in resilient

— high local basic sustainability
— global logistics connectivity
— varied, digitalized local economy
— good healthcare
— good law and order
— medium density
— communitarian spirit
— blue >> red

Explaining my strong blue >> red bias https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1259282761564606464?s=21 https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1259282761564606464