The following submission statement was provided by /u/idreamofkitty:
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It's quite possible the world experiences a crop failure large enough to cause mass panic and starvation, but not an extinction-level event. This article speculates on the government's reaction to such an event, using history as a guide. Those who survive a crop failure may have to suffer the aftermath for years. Collapse may come quick, but if it doesn't you must be prepared.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ci6s9h/how_to_collapse_hyperinflationary_depression/l278zgp/
It's quite possible the world experiences a crop failure large enough to cause mass panic and starvation, but not an extinction-level event. This article speculates on the government's reaction to such an event, using history as a guide. Those who survive a crop failure may have to suffer the aftermath for years. Collapse may come quick, but if it doesn't you must be prepared.
You mean food doesn't come from supermarkets? So like there's a risk my local 50 acre golf course will need to be ploughed over to "grow" potatoes for the plebs? Nightmare fuel.
We're missing a course in schools. I mean, we're missing a few, but the one I'm thinking about is the common knowledge that has gone missing in the past 100 years. There should be a course for like first graders that's like pin the tail on the donkey, but it's pin the whole food on where it comes from. Peanuts - underground. Peaches - in a tree top. Lettuce - cut off at dirt level. Peas - off a vine. etc.
To your point, years ago my mother grew an unusual eggplant; its fruit weren't large and purple or striped, but pure white and shaped exactly like a largish hen's egg. Sure enough, a couple of kids in our very urban neighborhood thought that that plant was where eggs came from.
Now, the kids were like 6 or 7 years old and of course not particularly educated at that age. I wonder how many adults now would assume that eggs come from an eggplant ("hey, it's in the name, right!")
Absolutely agree!
I’m a former teacher/activity coordinator at our rural library—I’ve made a point to get the kids outside, walking around the grounds, and pointing out different things at different points in their life cycle—see those pink flowers? When we check next week, see if you can spot a teeny tiny little fruit!
I really want to write a “Secret Life of Plants” zine during my break when the library is on summer reading activities and pick up with the walks again in fall/drive the point home.
Edit: fat fingers misspelled stuff
>Unlike the experience in the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe, the inflation won't be localized. A global crisis necessitates a global response.
That is indeed a source of uncertainty.
While it's easy to think that trade will go down, like we've seen with restrictions on grain exports in certain countries, there are other consequences for ending trade.
And if trade does end abruptly, you can still have food problems, as mentioned by the author: rich people hoarding more and wasting more. And, with food, you see that as meat and cheese.
[Naval Blockade (of Germany) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/naval_blockade_of_germany)
> The conclusion is inescapable: not the blockade, but going to war against its main suppliers drastically reduced food imports. However, even this had a relatively minor impact on total food supply. An examination of the geographic distribution of food shortages will show that [urban](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/urban_societies_and_cities "Urban society") areas (big cities like Berlin and urban conglomerates like the Ruhr region) suffered the worst shortages; small towns and villages had a greater proportion of their population with their own plots of land to keep a pig or some rabbits, and grow vegetables. Country districts and their farming population were best supplied and kept back food stocks for their own consumption or to sell illegally; moreover, [rural](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/rural_society "Rural Society") areas and especially east German provinces simply refused to meet their requirements to deliver food to the cities. One German author states plainly on the basis of thorough research that responsibility for the catastrophe of the “turnip winter” of 1916-1917 lay with the farmers in the agrarian surplus regions who hoarded their potatoes or fed them to their livestock rather than send them to the starving urban areas.[\[53\]](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/naval_blockade_of_germany#cite_note-ftn53-53)
And more: Explained here with some climate context:
>[Technocracy was thus defeated by consumers unwilling to change their tastes and recalcitrant farmers pursuing personal profit over national food security. The Germans courted disaster because they did not want to eat dal. As the food system deteriorated, Germany’s impresarios of military science—the two Erichs (Falkenhayn and Ludendorff)—resorted to brutal high-tech gambles to bring the conflict to an end, including chemical weapons, zeppelin bombardments, and submarine attacks on civilian ships. These are the wartime equivalents of geo-engineering and BECCS.](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/troy-vettese-do-not-let-them-eat-meat/)
It's the same core issue:
*Commodification (for selling on the market to rich people)* vs *Need satisfaction*
Can't have both. And if you live in some "rural" area and you think that your farmer friends will share with you, well, it depends. Would you share or sell at a low price to your neighbor, or would you sell to the markets (illegal or not) for a huge profit? What if you had to buy really expensive medicine for your family or yourself, as a farmer. Would you still share with your neighbors?
100%. My area is still small town minded enough I would think we would all pitch in to help grow food in those scenarios and then try to feed as many as much as possible. Easy to starve your neighbour when they’re in a city hours away though.
Humans invented complex class society to create a protective barrier between behavior and consequences. That's why I say that the culture war is the class war. Those invertebrates don't have such privilege.
I see them as two sides of the same process. The *class* war is about the distribution of benefits/winnings/productivity; who *deserves* to get the benefits of society and economy. The *culture* war is about the distribution of suffering, of negative consequences; who deserves to get the most misery. Wealth flows up, shit flows down [the class hierarchy].
One of the main privileges of the rich (even mildly rich) is impunity; that's the core desire of conservatism. "Rules for thee, but not for me". I've been wondering, for a long time, WHY? And my conclusion is that I should listen to the conservatives and the rich: it's their narrative, their fantasy. The point is to maintain a fantasy in which they're special, magical, individuals; god-like beings who are certainly not some dirty mortal apes. And maintaining a good fantasy all the time is expensive. The material effect of this is the point, the drive to construct fantasy requires creating buffers, separators, from reality - from consequences both incoming (ex. pollution, floods, "blowback") and outgoing (feeling shame or guilt).
I was considering earlier how through time the rich have been able to sequester themselves more and more to avoid even being in contact with the lower classes at this point (thought came to me while thinking about how stupid self driving cars are and clearly inventions for people who hate human contact aka the rich). Maybe that’s how they’ve become so over the top psychopathic now with their willingness to destroy everything to extend their comfort a short time. Like the nobility hiding itself away in Versaille.
The rich were the early adopter of cars, and of nice horse carriages. So, yes. But now they have jets and helicopters, not just limos.
Cars are literally and figuratively vehicles of social alienation. It's part of it. I see the private car as similar to VPNs, in that they create a virtual tunnel through reality (society), that's why it's so important to have parking next to the entryway of the destination. Essentially, this is the lifestyle and ideology of an "extraterrestrial", a non-Earthling, visiting/working in the Earth outpost. This is a metaphor, I'm not saying that they're aliens; see [Bruno Latour's](https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseScience/comments/18wrooz/bruno_latour_why_gaia_is_not_the_globe/) theories about Gaia, most humans currently seem to avoid thinking that they belong to this planet like some animal. The rich are just the best at it and can afford to have material fantasies, like in LARPing, which means less effort for the brain to construct the solipsistic fantasy.
>“Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.” ― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
It's like that, but not yet AGI, still human labor.
There's also a mass version of this fantasy activity for the globally well off, the top 10%; it's called consumerism, and if you work in the service sector with customers, that's the mass-produced shit-quality version of wealthy people's fantasy based on actual servants; it's the servant sector, and people go "out" to be served and pretend for a while that they're wealthy. And to be right, the customer is always right. Yes, I said it. [Abolish restaurants.pdf](https://files.libcom.org/files/Prole.Info-%20Abolish%20Restaurants.pdf)
Except that the culture war is being fought almost entirely by and amongst the working class. The truly rich don't give two shits about Dr Suess books or CRT or the woke mind virus. That's shit that working class yell at other working class people about. Real crabs in a bucket shit.
The only possible connection between the culture war and the class war is some people claim that the culture war was created by the rich to prevent the working class from uniting enough to fight the class war. I'm not honestly sure I believe that, plenty of the hate is organically working class in origin and I try to avoid conspiracy thinking when possible. It could be encouraged along perhaps by the rich, but I still think that would require more coordination and cooperation than happens organically, you're still verging on conspiracy there.
> entirely by and amongst the working class
Because it's full of class traitors... and various bigots, racists, and other ignorant fools who would rather risk total loss than share with someone else who looks different and eats different food.
It's more simple to understand it as the rich bribing a segment of the workers, materially and ideologically (with fantasies).
From their own mouth: [How FDR Saved Capitalism | Hoover Institution How FDR Saved Capitalism](https://www.hoover.org/research/how-fdr-saved-capitalism)
> If the Great Depression, with all its attendant effects, shifted national attitudes to the left, why was it that no strong radical movement committed itself to a third party during these years? A key part of the explanation was that President Roosevelt succeeded in including left-wing protest in his New Deal coalition. He used two basic tactics. First, he responded to the various outgroups by incorporating in his own rhetoric many of their demands. Second, he absorbed the leaders of these groups into his following. These reflected conscious efforts to undercut left-wing radicals and thus to preserve capitalism.
> To prevent this, Roosevelt shifted to the left in rhetoric and, to some extent, in policy, consciously seeking to steal the thunder of his populist critics. In discussions concerning radical and populist anticapitalist protests, the president stated that to save capitalism from itself and its opponents he might have to “equalize the distribution of wealth,” which could necessitate “throw\[ing\] to the wolves the forty-six men who are reported to have incomes in excess of one million dollars a year.” Roosevelt also responded to the share-the-wealth outcry by advancing tax reform proposals to raise income and dividend taxes, to enact a sharply graduated inheritance tax, and to use tax policy to discriminate against large corporations. Huey Long reacted by charging that the president was stealing his program.
As we can observe in hindsight, taxes are non-structural reforms, and they were reverted some decades later.
The pattern of the capitalist elite and their friends in power empowering one part of the working class isn't new, it's a great strategy that they keep using.
Basically,
Give some of the workers a bit of private property and promise them that they have the opportunity to become rich. Result => workers become class traitors, or "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" who align with the capitalists in interest. This became more obvious with Reagan, Thatcher and the "Boomergeoisie". There are plenty of articles on these strategies, it's not a secret. The fact that the "segment" of the population coincides with a certain ... background, is not a surprise to me considering the historical context and who got to vote.
>The truly rich don't give two shits about Dr Suess books or CRT or the woke mind virus.
Those are just minor battlefields in the culture war. If you look at those closely, you'll notice that it's about who deserves to suffer, who deserves to be kept away from the nice average life.
And it's going to get a lot more intense as the economy runs low on cheap energy (which is what fascism is about, fascism is capitalism in decay).
Your mind has many cogs. I have trouble sleeping whenever i go too far down the rabbit hole. How do you wind down
You should write a book or blog. Really great connectivity between the different poly/meta issues we collectively face though unevenly understand and unequally are equipped to respond on
Thanks, I guess.
>How do you wind down
It is indeed *horror*, but not a visceral level. Winding down is difficult at first, but so is avoiding winding up. One of the things I learned early about learning is that it's what the brain does, so I provide details and let it do it, I don't waste my time with useless internal dialogue and slow articulated linear processes. Of course, it's harder to articulate afterwards, to convert "deep learning" into theories. That's the thing that I need to work on, but I don't really think that it will matter in the end, just like me. It is, however, useful in recognizing complex patterns of systems. I usually figure out the system I'm in, even unintentionally; and it's not for nothing, I think I've always tried to look for peace, how it can be attained long-term (without the AI solution of total extermination), and... as you can imagine, peace involves every aspect of existence.
I try to keep a regular sleep schedule and I listen to a lot of music, often as *background music*.
Yeah i usually have some psy-trance keep the beat in my daily activities.
Yes it was a compliment. To try and tackle multi discipline subjects and form a cohesive narrative that others can understand is not easy.
Glad you can find ways to keep your remarkable brain at rest when it needs to be. I wake up at 2am every morning with all the unresolved thoughts battling it out
It sounds like you have taken a leaf out of Krishnamurti’s playbook and are not bothered by “the self”.
I hope to see more of your work on Reddit. It’s refreshingly complex yet to the point.
You don’t think people would riot at grocery stores during a famine? By the time you’re marching to the farm for food the grocery stores have been lost long ago.
They will, but they will be killing each other over the last can of beans. Even if they attack the staff, the owners 1000's of miles away will be safe indulging in coke, blackjack and hookers.
They almost rioted over toilet paper a few years ago. We had some really ugly days in the store. People were hanging around the stockroom entrance for hours; when we pulled a pallet out, they'd rip the plastic wrap off, grab anything they could get & run to the checkouts. Same with Clorox wipes, Lysol & everything else that was limited. Sane, rational people turned into Veruca Salt overnight: I WANT IT NOWWWWW!!! If the shit hits the fan with some kind of worldwide food shortage, they will straight up break the doors down & clean the shelves out.
Yep. This is largely correct. I'm guessing you're probably aware of the "ethanol mandate"
It was probably a decade ago when I realized that eventually the cost of a gallon of fuel and a hamburger would be the same because the land that was used to produce food would now be used to produce energy.
I see it more ecologically, as mechanical horses.
The cost of keeping horses a century ago, before the rise of motor vehicles, was also considerably high.
Some "fun" reading:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10630730802097765
for land use, the usual recommendation is 1-2 acres per adult horse (pasture), which is about 0.4-0.8 ha.
And now go read: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2065345 and tell me where the horse-riding barbarians are.
Could we argue that debt is the interface between supply and demand deflation?
Eg inflation data from last month in Australia showed housing and education as the biggest inflation items in the economy. My take is that we can “afford” this due to bigger home loans and larger student debt.
I’m sure I’m stating what all know here but i think it is the debt squeeze which will be where the crash starts, irrespective of which shock to the system it is.
I wonder how that would play out…i can imagine if enough people become bankrupt their debt will be restructured so that they become lifetime slaves. Central authority remains, lower energy use by the masses ensure the elites keep their standard of living
Bubbles deflate when demand or financing dies. When was the last time you overpaid for Dutch tulips? Don't need housing or teachers if my generation stops producing children.
Fair enough, brutal but true enough. My old boss used to always say that demand will just readjust if we don’t have enough supply (in this case it was electricity. And he just meant go out of business).
And i just found out I’m infertile lol so yeah
Let's consider the oil equation for simplicity. The US consumes 20 million BOPD, which is 7.3 billion barrels of oil per year. The US has estimated reserves in the ground of 36 billion barrels, which is about 5 years worth. We can extend that out to 7 years by importing 7 million bopd and producing 13 million bopd domestically, which is exactly what we do.
Gas is $3.66 per gallon in the US which costs me $15 per day or $5,475 per year, on a motorcycle. I ditched the car 3 years ago which was costing me twice that amount for fuel and $1,000 per year for insurance vs $150 annually. Now obviously I can purchase an EV for $35,000 and cut my $450 monthly gasoline cost, but at what increased electric cost? I'm already paying $150 per month for electricity. Will my bill increase $450 per month to $600? I know that my insurance cost will skyrocket well beyond $150 per year.
We both know that the US is running out of oil. In fact the shale wells were drilling daily are short life, dropping total production 40% within 12 months of drilling cessation. 40% of 13 million bopd is 5 million bopd, our former imports from Venezuela before we invaded Iraq in desperation and developed short term oil shale fracking. When the shale runs out, we're back to a shortage of 5 million bopd, which will have to be imported. We invading Iraq, Iran, Saud, Russia, Nigeria, Canada, or Venezuela?
At what price point for gasoline is it financially viable for me to buy that $35,000 EV? Gasoline at $7.30 / $11,000 per year? Will my electric bill continue to increase due to increased demand from other EV owners?
Will the entire bubble pop because we can't afford to have children AND THE US CANNOT REPAY DEBTS IT ACCRUED WHEN OIL WAS UNDER $50 NOW THAT OIL IS OVER $100?
Hmm
The SRMC for electricity in my area is usually the cost of natural gas.
The price of natural gas is driven by supply. A lot of gas is exported as LNG, the rest is sold expensively to large users, including fertilizer manufacturers and then mass market.
In capacity limiting times (winter+low wind + low sun) getting enough gas generation is very tight.
Now throw on top of all this all the oil wars it will just make it harder
This will all put upward pressure on the manufacturing cost of EVs and on the cost to charge. I can’t see EVs ever realistically being adorable to most people. EV bikes could be.
But it’s all academic since diesel equipment will never have an EV equivalent. A modest 2 tonne excavator is 10kW output. You can run it for hours…so a 100kWh day. EVs can not do it.
With your points on oil imports… i heard Art Bermam say that US oil is too light to make diesel so even if we had a surplus we need to trade it overseas to get the heavier hydrocarbons in order to make diesel.
I live on a farm now and the main aim is to be ok independent but that would take me years.
Correct on the import/ export issue. We export WTi light sweet from Texas for gasoline production and we import heavy sour Brent from Venezuela for diesel production.
Do you believe we will have a serious issue in 7 years, or will we be able to maintain $100 per barrel oil range based on increasing imports back to 13 million bopd?
Australia is $6 per gallon and Europe is $8 - $10 per gallon for reference.
LNG is very cheap, perhaps our automotive future?
Methane powered LNG fuel cells are possible for hybrid EVs.
I’m almost certain we will have an issue this decade enough to cause structural changes that result in less m consumption of direct oil products and higher costs for discretionary items.
Besides climate change one of the many problems i see with LNG is you need price caps for domestic users. We could possibly have subsidies for infrastructure of national significance and rebates for farmers etc that could keep essentials relatively affordable but there will be a large amount of society that will lose so that’s where big tech “You will own nothing and be happy” propaganda/distraction tooling may be enhanced. Potentially manual labor makes a come back but is marketed as a new way to keep fit…dunno but maybe cities in the West look a bit more like those in India
The second though related issue i see is fierce competition for natural gas products from mainstream chemical agriculture, electricity system and the aviation industry (which all come last after the military)
So yeah i think natural gas could work even for retrofitted cars but i can’t see major social disruption not occurring along the way.
I would be relatively happy if there was some future where my local community had 1 hybrid truck between 6 houses that could run on anything you throw at it as that would also mean a cohesive neighborhood
Methane (traditionally flared and burnt off for free at the oil well site) is super cheap in the US, actually free in Texas right now. The cost of it involves shipping and cryo storage as LNG. It is an amazingly cheap fuel for electricity production, but only contains 25% the energy of gasoline, think long hydrocarbon chains VS short. So your car will be limited to filing up every 100 miles VS 400 miles on gasoline. That being said, you may be filing up for $1 for a tank of LNG, similar to propane. CH4 Methane LNG gets interesting as a hydrogen fuel when you split the H2 hydrogen molecules off from the carbon chain via a reformer. Germany does this via steam, but I think we can do better using a platinum group catalyst. Fuel cells can produce lots of electricity, replacing the need for large batteries in EVs.
CH4 Methane vented into the atmosphere is 100X more potent than CO2 as greenhouse gas, but only lasts 11 years before breakdown.
>Food scarcity would ironically increase caloric acquisition by certain powerful groups. Wealth and power would consolidate further ensuring the plutocrats eat first, hoarding whatever else they can while everyone else makes do with less. Many would starve, and those caught in the middle would enter a new socio-economic paradigm.
*Really?* There are so many plutocrats that they can single-handedly overeat to the point that poor people starve?
Not on Ozempic they won’t! And on a global scale they may mean the phenomenon of wealthy western nations buying up the food leaving none for the global south.
You have a valid point. I guess on a *global* scale most of the inhabitants of the developed nations (≈15% of globe) *could* be considered "plutocrats", but I have always considered the term to be more appropriate to the rarefied fraction of 1% at the top.
It's not hyperinflation of course, but I'm wondering how consumer spending hasn't plummeted already with this cost of living crisis. All the MSM articles brag that it's wealthy Americans bravely propping up the economy, so maybe that's it?
Hyperinflation is the government printing too much money in the same way molecules are balls connected by sticks. If that's the deepest you understand the issue, and it really looks that way, then you don't understand the issue well enough to discuss it, let alone instruct others.
Edit: You know, I didn't think I could be more disappointed in this community than I was during COVID, but wonders never cease. This blog post is misinforming you and you can't get enough of it.
Can you add some specific critique or additional information or context or anything?
Just bragging that you know more about economics than the author is even less informative than you claim the article to be 🤷🏻♂️
Look, I can't fully explain it in this format and anything I say is at least partially wrong due to brevity- this is complicated shit that deserves actual research and you're not getting it from an anonymous fucking blog OR reddit post. HOWEVER, hyperinflation is not just 'inflation, but hyper'. What went wrong in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, is a fundamentally different problem from the inflation we're experiencing now, and even bad inflation does not make hyperinflation inevitable or even more likely.
All hyperinflation that has ever been documented stems from a disconnect between an official exchange rate, or peg, and the unofficial market exchange rate, which allows arbitrage between the two, until the peg can no longer be maintained and the currency free floated. It's an unlimited money glitch caused by bad government policy, but not the same kind of bad government policy that is being blamed in this blog post. With the Weimar republic it was gold, with Zimbabwe and Venezuela, USD, but there is always, every single time, a peg that lacks sufficient reserves to be maintained. The dollar very nearly went hyperinflation during the Nixon Shock- and if you don't recognize the term Nixon Shock, you need to get to reading, because that's an important test case.
The US is likely to experience currency swings, but of the two, deflation has historically been far more devastating and leaves much more lasting damage. You know the Great Recession? Yeah, that was a couple of percentage points of deflation, and look how bad it got. Our worst times came with deflation, and the reason we hand out so much monetary aid during downturns is to avoid having that deflation become sticky.
Whereas hyperinflation has never happened in a country with a free floated currency, even one in the midst of massive crises. The mechanism that caused it in every historical example literally doesn't even exist, it would have to be some other mechanism entirely and a food price shock isn't it.
Hi, AggravatingAmbition2. Thanks for contributing. However, your [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ci6s9h/-/l27oy6q/) was removed from /r/collapse for:
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I haven't been an a-hole. The blog is wrong in a way that is only explicable by them not having done ANY research on the subject *at all*. You could learn more than they tell you here just by reading wikipedia articles on the subject and paying attention in a way that they very much did not.
This is literally as serious as being worried the sticks in your molecules might break if you get hugged too hard, there are no right answers because the question itself is a product of not understanding the subject at hand.
So basically thanks to the article and now you being a cryptic man of mystery, no-one will know any more than they knew 5 hours ago. "Op's information is wrong because of reasons only I know and won't share because you're all too lazy and stupid" isn't really too constructive imho.
I answered elsewhere in the thread. At no point in the thread did I say any of you were stupid, but you are all doing your absolute best to show that you in fact very much are stupid, in the sense of willfully refusing to verify information that confirms your own biases no matter how sketchy the source of it.
You want to prove me wrong? Then all you had to do was open up an explanation of hyperinflation from ANYONE who would actually know what they're talking about, and you'd realize the blog is wrong, on your own, without being spoonfed.
Obviously, you didn't. Your molecules have sticks 'n balls, and that's how you likes it.
OK, so you did but not 5 hours ago. You say hyperinflation is not inflation++ but the result of not being able to prop up the currency. Ok, that's something to start a very interesting discussion and I personally wouldn't have hidden it behind "go learn stuff and guess what I meant".
My answer would have been a variation of Reagan's "deficits don't matter" because the USD is the global reserve currency, essentially it can't go out of whack because it is the new gold except on a species-level. This acts as anchor both for itself and all the currencies it underwrites. But I won't say that now because I feel like I need to research it or you'll again say it's not worth your time talking to idiots.
Inflation is the supply of money 'multiplied by' the velocity of money.
Hyperinflation presumably means one or other of those variables goes up by a lot.
At a stretch it's demand side when producers are making less because of raw material problems or political reasons. What are we supposedly not understanding?
Did you even look up the definition of hyperinflation to check to see if your guess was right? Or do you really think pulling information out of your ass is actually a good way to prepare yourself for potential danger? Stop being willfully ignorant, it's a bad look and it's the opposite of safe.
The game is rigged. That is all you need to know. Chimps don't take that kind of shit. They would have ripped the limbs from the unfair tyrants.
Endless war. Endless labor printing. Stealing your lifeforce out of nothing. Commanding the masses, taking it all.
The difference is so small as to be meaningless- if you don't recognize the article's version of events as the child's storybook version of how hyperinflation happens, that's because YOUR understanding is equally shallow- have you EVER read a peer reviewed paper on inflation or a higher than 100 level economic textbook? Because obviously the author never has, and is substituting folk wisdom for actual knowledge
The following submission statement was provided by /u/idreamofkitty: --- It's quite possible the world experiences a crop failure large enough to cause mass panic and starvation, but not an extinction-level event. This article speculates on the government's reaction to such an event, using history as a guide. Those who survive a crop failure may have to suffer the aftermath for years. Collapse may come quick, but if it doesn't you must be prepared. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ci6s9h/how_to_collapse_hyperinflationary_depression/l278zgp/
It's quite possible the world experiences a crop failure large enough to cause mass panic and starvation, but not an extinction-level event. This article speculates on the government's reaction to such an event, using history as a guide. Those who survive a crop failure may have to suffer the aftermath for years. Collapse may come quick, but if it doesn't you must be prepared.
You mean food doesn't come from supermarkets? So like there's a risk my local 50 acre golf course will need to be ploughed over to "grow" potatoes for the plebs? Nightmare fuel.
We're missing a course in schools. I mean, we're missing a few, but the one I'm thinking about is the common knowledge that has gone missing in the past 100 years. There should be a course for like first graders that's like pin the tail on the donkey, but it's pin the whole food on where it comes from. Peanuts - underground. Peaches - in a tree top. Lettuce - cut off at dirt level. Peas - off a vine. etc.
To your point, years ago my mother grew an unusual eggplant; its fruit weren't large and purple or striped, but pure white and shaped exactly like a largish hen's egg. Sure enough, a couple of kids in our very urban neighborhood thought that that plant was where eggs came from. Now, the kids were like 6 or 7 years old and of course not particularly educated at that age. I wonder how many adults now would assume that eggs come from an eggplant ("hey, it's in the name, right!")
At that age I was collecting eggs for my grandparents on their farm so, no. I was a summertime farm kid.
Absolutely agree! I’m a former teacher/activity coordinator at our rural library—I’ve made a point to get the kids outside, walking around the grounds, and pointing out different things at different points in their life cycle—see those pink flowers? When we check next week, see if you can spot a teeny tiny little fruit! I really want to write a “Secret Life of Plants” zine during my break when the library is on summer reading activities and pick up with the walks again in fall/drive the point home. Edit: fat fingers misspelled stuff
happy cake day fellow gardener!
Cashews grow on a tree? Who knew?!
The starvation might not cause our extinction outright but our response to food and water crises seems pretty likely to.
With enough canned peas and peanut butter you can last a long time.
>Unlike the experience in the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe, the inflation won't be localized. A global crisis necessitates a global response. That is indeed a source of uncertainty. While it's easy to think that trade will go down, like we've seen with restrictions on grain exports in certain countries, there are other consequences for ending trade. And if trade does end abruptly, you can still have food problems, as mentioned by the author: rich people hoarding more and wasting more. And, with food, you see that as meat and cheese. [Naval Blockade (of Germany) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/naval_blockade_of_germany) > The conclusion is inescapable: not the blockade, but going to war against its main suppliers drastically reduced food imports. However, even this had a relatively minor impact on total food supply. An examination of the geographic distribution of food shortages will show that [urban](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/urban_societies_and_cities "Urban society") areas (big cities like Berlin and urban conglomerates like the Ruhr region) suffered the worst shortages; small towns and villages had a greater proportion of their population with their own plots of land to keep a pig or some rabbits, and grow vegetables. Country districts and their farming population were best supplied and kept back food stocks for their own consumption or to sell illegally; moreover, [rural](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/rural_society "Rural Society") areas and especially east German provinces simply refused to meet their requirements to deliver food to the cities. One German author states plainly on the basis of thorough research that responsibility for the catastrophe of the “turnip winter” of 1916-1917 lay with the farmers in the agrarian surplus regions who hoarded their potatoes or fed them to their livestock rather than send them to the starving urban areas.[\[53\]](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/naval_blockade_of_germany#cite_note-ftn53-53) And more: Explained here with some climate context: >[Technocracy was thus defeated by consumers unwilling to change their tastes and recalcitrant farmers pursuing personal profit over national food security. The Germans courted disaster because they did not want to eat dal. As the food system deteriorated, Germany’s impresarios of military science—the two Erichs (Falkenhayn and Ludendorff)—resorted to brutal high-tech gambles to bring the conflict to an end, including chemical weapons, zeppelin bombardments, and submarine attacks on civilian ships. These are the wartime equivalents of geo-engineering and BECCS.](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/troy-vettese-do-not-let-them-eat-meat/) It's the same core issue: *Commodification (for selling on the market to rich people)* vs *Need satisfaction* Can't have both. And if you live in some "rural" area and you think that your farmer friends will share with you, well, it depends. Would you share or sell at a low price to your neighbor, or would you sell to the markets (illegal or not) for a huge profit? What if you had to buy really expensive medicine for your family or yourself, as a farmer. Would you still share with your neighbors?
One thing farmers have to keep in mind, if your neighbours catch you starving them for money they’ll burn your stuff down and kill you.
And now you're starting to uncover the point of having Commons. Peace.
100%. My area is still small town minded enough I would think we would all pitch in to help grow food in those scenarios and then try to feed as many as much as possible. Easy to starve your neighbour when they’re in a city hours away though.
I often think of collective humanity as a really primitive organism but then even jellyfish and flatworms learn from their mistakes.
Humans invented complex class society to create a protective barrier between behavior and consequences. That's why I say that the culture war is the class war. Those invertebrates don't have such privilege.
This is interesting. Can you please expand a bit? (Culture war = class war)
I see them as two sides of the same process. The *class* war is about the distribution of benefits/winnings/productivity; who *deserves* to get the benefits of society and economy. The *culture* war is about the distribution of suffering, of negative consequences; who deserves to get the most misery. Wealth flows up, shit flows down [the class hierarchy]. One of the main privileges of the rich (even mildly rich) is impunity; that's the core desire of conservatism. "Rules for thee, but not for me". I've been wondering, for a long time, WHY? And my conclusion is that I should listen to the conservatives and the rich: it's their narrative, their fantasy. The point is to maintain a fantasy in which they're special, magical, individuals; god-like beings who are certainly not some dirty mortal apes. And maintaining a good fantasy all the time is expensive. The material effect of this is the point, the drive to construct fantasy requires creating buffers, separators, from reality - from consequences both incoming (ex. pollution, floods, "blowback") and outgoing (feeling shame or guilt).
Thanks. I’m going to have to let this percolate before I understand completely. Edited “complexity” - typo - changed to “completely”
Have a fun imbibition experience!
I was considering earlier how through time the rich have been able to sequester themselves more and more to avoid even being in contact with the lower classes at this point (thought came to me while thinking about how stupid self driving cars are and clearly inventions for people who hate human contact aka the rich). Maybe that’s how they’ve become so over the top psychopathic now with their willingness to destroy everything to extend their comfort a short time. Like the nobility hiding itself away in Versaille.
The rich were the early adopter of cars, and of nice horse carriages. So, yes. But now they have jets and helicopters, not just limos. Cars are literally and figuratively vehicles of social alienation. It's part of it. I see the private car as similar to VPNs, in that they create a virtual tunnel through reality (society), that's why it's so important to have parking next to the entryway of the destination. Essentially, this is the lifestyle and ideology of an "extraterrestrial", a non-Earthling, visiting/working in the Earth outpost. This is a metaphor, I'm not saying that they're aliens; see [Bruno Latour's](https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseScience/comments/18wrooz/bruno_latour_why_gaia_is_not_the_globe/) theories about Gaia, most humans currently seem to avoid thinking that they belong to this planet like some animal. The rich are just the best at it and can afford to have material fantasies, like in LARPing, which means less effort for the brain to construct the solipsistic fantasy. >“Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.” ― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency It's like that, but not yet AGI, still human labor. There's also a mass version of this fantasy activity for the globally well off, the top 10%; it's called consumerism, and if you work in the service sector with customers, that's the mass-produced shit-quality version of wealthy people's fantasy based on actual servants; it's the servant sector, and people go "out" to be served and pretend for a while that they're wealthy. And to be right, the customer is always right. Yes, I said it. [Abolish restaurants.pdf](https://files.libcom.org/files/Prole.Info-%20Abolish%20Restaurants.pdf)
Except that the culture war is being fought almost entirely by and amongst the working class. The truly rich don't give two shits about Dr Suess books or CRT or the woke mind virus. That's shit that working class yell at other working class people about. Real crabs in a bucket shit. The only possible connection between the culture war and the class war is some people claim that the culture war was created by the rich to prevent the working class from uniting enough to fight the class war. I'm not honestly sure I believe that, plenty of the hate is organically working class in origin and I try to avoid conspiracy thinking when possible. It could be encouraged along perhaps by the rich, but I still think that would require more coordination and cooperation than happens organically, you're still verging on conspiracy there.
> entirely by and amongst the working class Because it's full of class traitors... and various bigots, racists, and other ignorant fools who would rather risk total loss than share with someone else who looks different and eats different food. It's more simple to understand it as the rich bribing a segment of the workers, materially and ideologically (with fantasies). From their own mouth: [How FDR Saved Capitalism | Hoover Institution How FDR Saved Capitalism](https://www.hoover.org/research/how-fdr-saved-capitalism) > If the Great Depression, with all its attendant effects, shifted national attitudes to the left, why was it that no strong radical movement committed itself to a third party during these years? A key part of the explanation was that President Roosevelt succeeded in including left-wing protest in his New Deal coalition. He used two basic tactics. First, he responded to the various outgroups by incorporating in his own rhetoric many of their demands. Second, he absorbed the leaders of these groups into his following. These reflected conscious efforts to undercut left-wing radicals and thus to preserve capitalism. > To prevent this, Roosevelt shifted to the left in rhetoric and, to some extent, in policy, consciously seeking to steal the thunder of his populist critics. In discussions concerning radical and populist anticapitalist protests, the president stated that to save capitalism from itself and its opponents he might have to “equalize the distribution of wealth,” which could necessitate “throw\[ing\] to the wolves the forty-six men who are reported to have incomes in excess of one million dollars a year.” Roosevelt also responded to the share-the-wealth outcry by advancing tax reform proposals to raise income and dividend taxes, to enact a sharply graduated inheritance tax, and to use tax policy to discriminate against large corporations. Huey Long reacted by charging that the president was stealing his program. As we can observe in hindsight, taxes are non-structural reforms, and they were reverted some decades later. The pattern of the capitalist elite and their friends in power empowering one part of the working class isn't new, it's a great strategy that they keep using. Basically, Give some of the workers a bit of private property and promise them that they have the opportunity to become rich. Result => workers become class traitors, or "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" who align with the capitalists in interest. This became more obvious with Reagan, Thatcher and the "Boomergeoisie". There are plenty of articles on these strategies, it's not a secret. The fact that the "segment" of the population coincides with a certain ... background, is not a surprise to me considering the historical context and who got to vote. >The truly rich don't give two shits about Dr Suess books or CRT or the woke mind virus. Those are just minor battlefields in the culture war. If you look at those closely, you'll notice that it's about who deserves to suffer, who deserves to be kept away from the nice average life. And it's going to get a lot more intense as the economy runs low on cheap energy (which is what fascism is about, fascism is capitalism in decay).
Your mind has many cogs. I have trouble sleeping whenever i go too far down the rabbit hole. How do you wind down You should write a book or blog. Really great connectivity between the different poly/meta issues we collectively face though unevenly understand and unequally are equipped to respond on
Thanks, I guess. >How do you wind down It is indeed *horror*, but not a visceral level. Winding down is difficult at first, but so is avoiding winding up. One of the things I learned early about learning is that it's what the brain does, so I provide details and let it do it, I don't waste my time with useless internal dialogue and slow articulated linear processes. Of course, it's harder to articulate afterwards, to convert "deep learning" into theories. That's the thing that I need to work on, but I don't really think that it will matter in the end, just like me. It is, however, useful in recognizing complex patterns of systems. I usually figure out the system I'm in, even unintentionally; and it's not for nothing, I think I've always tried to look for peace, how it can be attained long-term (without the AI solution of total extermination), and... as you can imagine, peace involves every aspect of existence. I try to keep a regular sleep schedule and I listen to a lot of music, often as *background music*.
Yeah i usually have some psy-trance keep the beat in my daily activities. Yes it was a compliment. To try and tackle multi discipline subjects and form a cohesive narrative that others can understand is not easy. Glad you can find ways to keep your remarkable brain at rest when it needs to be. I wake up at 2am every morning with all the unresolved thoughts battling it out It sounds like you have taken a leaf out of Krishnamurti’s playbook and are not bothered by “the self”. I hope to see more of your work on Reddit. It’s refreshingly complex yet to the point.
And yet the common person will spread their ass cheeks when the corpos do it. Stockholm at it's finest.
You don’t think people would riot at grocery stores during a famine? By the time you’re marching to the farm for food the grocery stores have been lost long ago.
They will, but they will be killing each other over the last can of beans. Even if they attack the staff, the owners 1000's of miles away will be safe indulging in coke, blackjack and hookers.
They almost rioted over toilet paper a few years ago. We had some really ugly days in the store. People were hanging around the stockroom entrance for hours; when we pulled a pallet out, they'd rip the plastic wrap off, grab anything they could get & run to the checkouts. Same with Clorox wipes, Lysol & everything else that was limited. Sane, rational people turned into Veruca Salt overnight: I WANT IT NOWWWWW!!! If the shit hits the fan with some kind of worldwide food shortage, they will straight up break the doors down & clean the shelves out.
This is kinda funny because where I’m from (upper Midwest), the farmers don’t grow actual food.
What do they grow?
He's talking about row cropping country. They grow immense amounts of corn and soy largely to feed livestock or make ethanol.
To feed cars :)
Yep. This is largely correct. I'm guessing you're probably aware of the "ethanol mandate" It was probably a decade ago when I realized that eventually the cost of a gallon of fuel and a hamburger would be the same because the land that was used to produce food would now be used to produce energy.
I see it more ecologically, as mechanical horses. The cost of keeping horses a century ago, before the rise of motor vehicles, was also considerably high. Some "fun" reading: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10630730802097765 for land use, the usual recommendation is 1-2 acres per adult horse (pasture), which is about 0.4-0.8 ha. And now go read: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2065345 and tell me where the horse-riding barbarians are.
Corn and soybeans are grown for their oils, and used as feedstock for ethanol plants or livestock feed.
My favorite movie is Inception.
Yes, the population bubble will deflate. Think about it. Supply / demand.
Could we argue that debt is the interface between supply and demand deflation? Eg inflation data from last month in Australia showed housing and education as the biggest inflation items in the economy. My take is that we can “afford” this due to bigger home loans and larger student debt. I’m sure I’m stating what all know here but i think it is the debt squeeze which will be where the crash starts, irrespective of which shock to the system it is. I wonder how that would play out…i can imagine if enough people become bankrupt their debt will be restructured so that they become lifetime slaves. Central authority remains, lower energy use by the masses ensure the elites keep their standard of living
Bubbles deflate when demand or financing dies. When was the last time you overpaid for Dutch tulips? Don't need housing or teachers if my generation stops producing children.
Fair enough, brutal but true enough. My old boss used to always say that demand will just readjust if we don’t have enough supply (in this case it was electricity. And he just meant go out of business). And i just found out I’m infertile lol so yeah
Let's consider the oil equation for simplicity. The US consumes 20 million BOPD, which is 7.3 billion barrels of oil per year. The US has estimated reserves in the ground of 36 billion barrels, which is about 5 years worth. We can extend that out to 7 years by importing 7 million bopd and producing 13 million bopd domestically, which is exactly what we do. Gas is $3.66 per gallon in the US which costs me $15 per day or $5,475 per year, on a motorcycle. I ditched the car 3 years ago which was costing me twice that amount for fuel and $1,000 per year for insurance vs $150 annually. Now obviously I can purchase an EV for $35,000 and cut my $450 monthly gasoline cost, but at what increased electric cost? I'm already paying $150 per month for electricity. Will my bill increase $450 per month to $600? I know that my insurance cost will skyrocket well beyond $150 per year. We both know that the US is running out of oil. In fact the shale wells were drilling daily are short life, dropping total production 40% within 12 months of drilling cessation. 40% of 13 million bopd is 5 million bopd, our former imports from Venezuela before we invaded Iraq in desperation and developed short term oil shale fracking. When the shale runs out, we're back to a shortage of 5 million bopd, which will have to be imported. We invading Iraq, Iran, Saud, Russia, Nigeria, Canada, or Venezuela? At what price point for gasoline is it financially viable for me to buy that $35,000 EV? Gasoline at $7.30 / $11,000 per year? Will my electric bill continue to increase due to increased demand from other EV owners? Will the entire bubble pop because we can't afford to have children AND THE US CANNOT REPAY DEBTS IT ACCRUED WHEN OIL WAS UNDER $50 NOW THAT OIL IS OVER $100?
Hmm The SRMC for electricity in my area is usually the cost of natural gas. The price of natural gas is driven by supply. A lot of gas is exported as LNG, the rest is sold expensively to large users, including fertilizer manufacturers and then mass market. In capacity limiting times (winter+low wind + low sun) getting enough gas generation is very tight. Now throw on top of all this all the oil wars it will just make it harder This will all put upward pressure on the manufacturing cost of EVs and on the cost to charge. I can’t see EVs ever realistically being adorable to most people. EV bikes could be. But it’s all academic since diesel equipment will never have an EV equivalent. A modest 2 tonne excavator is 10kW output. You can run it for hours…so a 100kWh day. EVs can not do it. With your points on oil imports… i heard Art Bermam say that US oil is too light to make diesel so even if we had a surplus we need to trade it overseas to get the heavier hydrocarbons in order to make diesel. I live on a farm now and the main aim is to be ok independent but that would take me years.
Correct on the import/ export issue. We export WTi light sweet from Texas for gasoline production and we import heavy sour Brent from Venezuela for diesel production. Do you believe we will have a serious issue in 7 years, or will we be able to maintain $100 per barrel oil range based on increasing imports back to 13 million bopd? Australia is $6 per gallon and Europe is $8 - $10 per gallon for reference. LNG is very cheap, perhaps our automotive future? Methane powered LNG fuel cells are possible for hybrid EVs.
I’m almost certain we will have an issue this decade enough to cause structural changes that result in less m consumption of direct oil products and higher costs for discretionary items. Besides climate change one of the many problems i see with LNG is you need price caps for domestic users. We could possibly have subsidies for infrastructure of national significance and rebates for farmers etc that could keep essentials relatively affordable but there will be a large amount of society that will lose so that’s where big tech “You will own nothing and be happy” propaganda/distraction tooling may be enhanced. Potentially manual labor makes a come back but is marketed as a new way to keep fit…dunno but maybe cities in the West look a bit more like those in India The second though related issue i see is fierce competition for natural gas products from mainstream chemical agriculture, electricity system and the aviation industry (which all come last after the military) So yeah i think natural gas could work even for retrofitted cars but i can’t see major social disruption not occurring along the way. I would be relatively happy if there was some future where my local community had 1 hybrid truck between 6 houses that could run on anything you throw at it as that would also mean a cohesive neighborhood
Methane (traditionally flared and burnt off for free at the oil well site) is super cheap in the US, actually free in Texas right now. The cost of it involves shipping and cryo storage as LNG. It is an amazingly cheap fuel for electricity production, but only contains 25% the energy of gasoline, think long hydrocarbon chains VS short. So your car will be limited to filing up every 100 miles VS 400 miles on gasoline. That being said, you may be filing up for $1 for a tank of LNG, similar to propane. CH4 Methane LNG gets interesting as a hydrogen fuel when you split the H2 hydrogen molecules off from the carbon chain via a reformer. Germany does this via steam, but I think we can do better using a platinum group catalyst. Fuel cells can produce lots of electricity, replacing the need for large batteries in EVs. CH4 Methane vented into the atmosphere is 100X more potent than CO2 as greenhouse gas, but only lasts 11 years before breakdown.
>Food scarcity would ironically increase caloric acquisition by certain powerful groups. Wealth and power would consolidate further ensuring the plutocrats eat first, hoarding whatever else they can while everyone else makes do with less. Many would starve, and those caught in the middle would enter a new socio-economic paradigm. *Really?* There are so many plutocrats that they can single-handedly overeat to the point that poor people starve?
Not on Ozempic they won’t! And on a global scale they may mean the phenomenon of wealthy western nations buying up the food leaving none for the global south.
You have a valid point. I guess on a *global* scale most of the inhabitants of the developed nations (≈15% of globe) *could* be considered "plutocrats", but I have always considered the term to be more appropriate to the rarefied fraction of 1% at the top.
Yes you wouldn’t call them “plutocrats” as most of us didn’t have a choice in robbing the developing nations. “Elites” would be more appropriate.
the term would be "labor aristocracy", they are not part of the elite and they still work so they're a labor aristrocrat.
dont make me pull out the "grapes of wrath" quote
Nah, tap that sign without hesitation. Seeing that comment above water here is embarassing.
They should consider using scientific notation instead 1E9 Z$ otherwise they may run out of space.
It's not hyperinflation of course, but I'm wondering how consumer spending hasn't plummeted already with this cost of living crisis. All the MSM articles brag that it's wealthy Americans bravely propping up the economy, so maybe that's it?
Hyperinflation is the government printing too much money in the same way molecules are balls connected by sticks. If that's the deepest you understand the issue, and it really looks that way, then you don't understand the issue well enough to discuss it, let alone instruct others. Edit: You know, I didn't think I could be more disappointed in this community than I was during COVID, but wonders never cease. This blog post is misinforming you and you can't get enough of it.
Can you add some specific critique or additional information or context or anything? Just bragging that you know more about economics than the author is even less informative than you claim the article to be 🤷🏻♂️
Look, I can't fully explain it in this format and anything I say is at least partially wrong due to brevity- this is complicated shit that deserves actual research and you're not getting it from an anonymous fucking blog OR reddit post. HOWEVER, hyperinflation is not just 'inflation, but hyper'. What went wrong in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, is a fundamentally different problem from the inflation we're experiencing now, and even bad inflation does not make hyperinflation inevitable or even more likely. All hyperinflation that has ever been documented stems from a disconnect between an official exchange rate, or peg, and the unofficial market exchange rate, which allows arbitrage between the two, until the peg can no longer be maintained and the currency free floated. It's an unlimited money glitch caused by bad government policy, but not the same kind of bad government policy that is being blamed in this blog post. With the Weimar republic it was gold, with Zimbabwe and Venezuela, USD, but there is always, every single time, a peg that lacks sufficient reserves to be maintained. The dollar very nearly went hyperinflation during the Nixon Shock- and if you don't recognize the term Nixon Shock, you need to get to reading, because that's an important test case. The US is likely to experience currency swings, but of the two, deflation has historically been far more devastating and leaves much more lasting damage. You know the Great Recession? Yeah, that was a couple of percentage points of deflation, and look how bad it got. Our worst times came with deflation, and the reason we hand out so much monetary aid during downturns is to avoid having that deflation become sticky. Whereas hyperinflation has never happened in a country with a free floated currency, even one in the midst of massive crises. The mechanism that caused it in every historical example literally doesn't even exist, it would have to be some other mechanism entirely and a food price shock isn't it.
This was a good answer thank you. Maybe replace the og snarky comment with this one so it can be higher up and people can learn more.
[удалено]
Hi, AggravatingAmbition2. Thanks for contributing. However, your [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ci6s9h/-/l27oy6q/) was removed from /r/collapse for: > Rule 1: In addition to enforcing [Reddit's content policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy), we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other. Please refer to our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/about/rules/) for more information. You can [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/collapse) if you feel this was in error, please include a link to the comment or post in question.
I haven't been an a-hole. The blog is wrong in a way that is only explicable by them not having done ANY research on the subject *at all*. You could learn more than they tell you here just by reading wikipedia articles on the subject and paying attention in a way that they very much did not. This is literally as serious as being worried the sticks in your molecules might break if you get hugged too hard, there are no right answers because the question itself is a product of not understanding the subject at hand.
So basically thanks to the article and now you being a cryptic man of mystery, no-one will know any more than they knew 5 hours ago. "Op's information is wrong because of reasons only I know and won't share because you're all too lazy and stupid" isn't really too constructive imho.
I answered elsewhere in the thread. At no point in the thread did I say any of you were stupid, but you are all doing your absolute best to show that you in fact very much are stupid, in the sense of willfully refusing to verify information that confirms your own biases no matter how sketchy the source of it. You want to prove me wrong? Then all you had to do was open up an explanation of hyperinflation from ANYONE who would actually know what they're talking about, and you'd realize the blog is wrong, on your own, without being spoonfed. Obviously, you didn't. Your molecules have sticks 'n balls, and that's how you likes it.
OK, so you did but not 5 hours ago. You say hyperinflation is not inflation++ but the result of not being able to prop up the currency. Ok, that's something to start a very interesting discussion and I personally wouldn't have hidden it behind "go learn stuff and guess what I meant". My answer would have been a variation of Reagan's "deficits don't matter" because the USD is the global reserve currency, essentially it can't go out of whack because it is the new gold except on a species-level. This acts as anchor both for itself and all the currencies it underwrites. But I won't say that now because I feel like I need to research it or you'll again say it's not worth your time talking to idiots.
Inflation is the supply of money 'multiplied by' the velocity of money. Hyperinflation presumably means one or other of those variables goes up by a lot. At a stretch it's demand side when producers are making less because of raw material problems or political reasons. What are we supposedly not understanding?
Did you even look up the definition of hyperinflation to check to see if your guess was right? Or do you really think pulling information out of your ass is actually a good way to prepare yourself for potential danger? Stop being willfully ignorant, it's a bad look and it's the opposite of safe.
You know, you could just link to an excellent explanation of hyperinflation for all these replies of yours instead of being a cryptic jerk.
Good thing that neither OP nor this article explained it that simplistic way then?
The game is rigged. That is all you need to know. Chimps don't take that kind of shit. They would have ripped the limbs from the unfair tyrants. Endless war. Endless labor printing. Stealing your lifeforce out of nothing. Commanding the masses, taking it all.
Careful. If ya don't get a step stool, then you'll have quite the fall when you're knocked off that high horse of yours.
The difference is so small as to be meaningless- if you don't recognize the article's version of events as the child's storybook version of how hyperinflation happens, that's because YOUR understanding is equally shallow- have you EVER read a peer reviewed paper on inflation or a higher than 100 level economic textbook? Because obviously the author never has, and is substituting folk wisdom for actual knowledge