Oh shit. Back in 2013 I was involved in a project that was trying to quantify the quality of life and the amount of energy available to someone to do "stuff." This isn't a new idea, back in the 1980's (at the very least, and probably even earlier) there was this idea that if you build power stations or extend power lines (and in this case, gas stations and gas lines as well) to an area with a lower quality of life, the mere presence of the new availability of energy will lead to quality of life increases. This idea was really popular in the 80's and 90's (again, probably earlier as well but that was the limit of my research) but started to stagnate in the 90's and really got debunked in the 2000's.
The impetus for the debunking was basically, the quality of life of Americans not really improving when they got even more energy access. On the other hand, Chinese quality of life was still improving a lot as they got energy access.
My 2013 project was to look specifically at energy for transport - the idea was that, as more accessible transport is available, the better the quality of life. We looked at distance, velocity, cost ect for predominant modes of travel in a region.
The funny thing was that several regions of China was beating some regions in the US - 2013 was just when China's HSR network was becoming mature.
The project never got published because of it. "It just didn't pass the sniff test", apparently. Because according to our own metric, some Chinese people would be living better lives than some Americans, and, without even looking into whether that was true or not, the people funding the project just assumed that was impossible and stopped funding.
Imagine you are in 1980s China, taking a shower at home with just a small portable heater for your hot water stream... Usually you can average say 5 minutes of warm shower before it gives out... When water starts getting cooler, you turn the knob increasingly to the Hot side to try and revert to maintaining a stable and comfortably warm shower temp... but then you have to keep turning the knob more and more to Hot side and faster and faster until soon you are at full deflection... So when the water starts going cold yet once again, thats it... game over for the warm shower experiment...
In just the last year or so America printed about 50% of all its US dollars in circulation since the entire history of the nation (some 245 years old)...
Money (be it physical paper or digital bits on a financial server an as electronic ledger entry etc) is just a human construct to symbolically represent or tally up claims on resources/energy...
At the end of the day its the raw resources and the energy that allows us to perform "work" that counts. Just printing more money (especially runaway printing like QE infinity) without discovering more oil or finding more resources does nothing to change the underlining physical and thermodynamic/entropy reality ... it doesnt increase real wealth...
Its just a bandaid cover up solution where the more you use the bandaid the bigger the hole gets...
A gallon of gas has the same energy as 6 weeks of human muscle labor. Even at minimum wage, the lowest paid member of US society can currently buy about 2 gallons of gas (12 weeks man muscle power) for about one hour of work. This is a huge energy/work multiplier effect afforded to us by the consumption of energy sources (in this case fossil fuels) that accumulated over billions of years on earth but which globally we have expended to near depletion within the comparitive blink of an eye (150 years since industrial revolution)
Much of our current purchasing power of money is inflated by this massive windfall of "multiplier effect of work/energy" from our consumption of nonrenewable hydrocarbons deposits.
Globally we are still a predominantly fossil fuel society, primary fuel is still that of the petroluem and its derivatives, we never left the oil age. It used to take 1 barrel of oil energy to discover, extract, refine and make useable 100 barrels of oil energy... long gone are the days of EROEI of 100, we now have fallen below the EROEI of 10 and still crashing.... all the low hanging fruits are gone... Global energy consumption (of all energy sources) peaked back in 2019... even before Covid.
As EROEI threshold continues to drop and thus the real purchasing power and "work multiplier" of our monies/curriencies continue to get diluted the central banks of governments have to increasingly print more and more dollars to temporarily bandaid the situation... But bankers and governments cannot cheat the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and unlike fractional reserve lending, you cannot borrow energy from nature as a loan with expectation/promise to pay it back later......
The labor shortage is a direct result of deminishing EROEI. Minimum wage has stayed the same $7.25 since 2009 but real inflation is now double digits annually... Companies wouldnt have trouble finding labor/workers if they paid a living wage or even what they paid decades ago when adjusted for inflation and rise in cost of living... but that would mean a true minimum wage of nearly $30/hr just to keep up with the $7.25 first implemented back in 2009.
But we know thats not going to happen (there is not even the politicial will to pass the $15 ) and even if it did happen it would simply pass on that cost price inflation to the rest of the consumers, businesses cannot afford to pay this sort of labor increase and never can middle class consumers eat the costs ... As the EROEI (and thus work multiplier effect) of energy continues to decrease and thus so does the purchasing power of money continue to erode, its basically hitting everything and everyone from both ends and all at the same time, so consumers wont be able to buy the things they need/want even if they have the money, and labor shortages will only exacerbate as no one wants to be a literal wage slave.
There comes a point where printing more money (which was always nothing more than reshuffling around of chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic) will no longer mask (no pun intended) the symptoms anymore and I would wager to reckon we have already crossed that point when America has to print 50% of all dollars in the entire history of its empire just to maintain the semblence of barely staying afloat on life support.
Via petrodollar hegemony and global reserve status of USD, the US extracts wealth from the rest of the world... but like all things on the top of the food pyramid chain it relies on the much larger lower bottom base to prop it up. Since the global energy resources have peaked, then mathematically it is all but certainty that global de-growth will be the reality going forward... No more global growth means the entire pyramid scheme and house of cards that America built its empire upon will come collapsing down...
As the US is the current global hegemon, the only way it can get out from under its own petrodollar hegemony FIRST without attracting the wrong kind of attention and alerting/setting off global panic of selling dollars is to invent a global distraction (CIA releases COVID) and then follow it up with global chaos (Afghan, Taiwan, HK, SCS, etc) to give the pretext justification for printing like there is no tomorrow, in order to get out from the dollar leaving the rest of the world holding the bag.... and furthermore by destabilizing the world through engineered chaos the US is inducing artificial global demand destruction to price most of the world out so that it can print to infinity with unlimited "quantitative-easings" to buy up everything with essentially free money.
Having seen the writing on the wall (see REPO mess) America's strategy is to exit the dollar and leave the rest of the world, including China to be holding the proverbial bag of excrement, and its intentional COVID failure, and Afghan failures are all part of its pre-planned exit strategy to create global chaos and induce artificial-demand-destruction on global scale in order to best position itself for the coming times and shore up and consolidate its own positions at the direct expense of harvesting the rest of the world by means of infinite quantitative easing through weaponization of its petrodollar hegemony and global reserve currency status
Releasing the CIA Biovirus and setting off a global pandemic (whilsts simultaneously planting it in Wuhan to both frame and blame CHYNA its greatest geopolitical rival in the process) with continued "variants" iteration releases serves to effectuate the goal of severely dampening global economic activity, and disproportionately targeting the developing third world (since they will get hit the hardest economically and also recover the slowest due to US vaccine shitplomacy hoarding...) thereby indirectly allowing America to put the squeeze on the rest of the world, asymmetrically targeting non-vassals and pricing out the poorer regions of the world so that they are much less able to compete for the remaining dwindling global resources/energy reserves
In geopolitics there are no Coincidences... COVID was THE single largest broadest categorical stroke of the proverbial brush so to speak that the US/West could have painted against China and the East (and rest of developing world) under the guise, pretense and shadow of plausible denialability whilsts effectuating the desired goal of reshaping a new world order with the West back on top and America consolidated and secured as preeminence above all.....
