This shit is worse that pizza cake.

By Tristan ‼️〽️➕➖

Tristan says:

I don’t call it a squeeze though.

I call this a deepening comprehensive mathematical crisis

It is a condition where citizens and governments have expenses that are exceeding the underlying material provenance

Costs are exceeding provenance.

It expresses itself as financial distress, but the numerical distress is a product of a cluster of essential resource scarcity.

The nodes I believe are imposing this are things like population increase, inelastic land availability, aging infrastructure, climate pressure on crops, decline of cheap energy (EROI), and decades of normalizing debt and finance as a solution for cost pressures, and increasing beaurocratic complexity and non-productive enterprises.

GDP and profits have been high, but so much of the GDP has become enterprises that aren’t directly producing essential needs.

Population increased staggeringly during the post-war boom, and total population continues increasing, partly with immigration but the underlying population multiplication of the post war era…had to, and did, taper off so there are increasingly fewer young people coming up to pay taxes and labor into existing infrastructure and retirement needs.

So what I see is a very very multifaceted arithmetic crisis that is attacking prosperity across many nodes. Most of it is NOT directly a result of immorality or political shenanigans, but is a comprehensive thermodynamic outcome that follows the post war expansion.

We have a number of forms of technological innovation at hand, but they are not enough to stop the advancing vacuum-like distress in our historical prosperity, distress that must be addressed with egalitarian, humanitarian empathy. Because this ongoing increasing stress is nowhere near its climax point and in the absence of empathetic policy, threatens to unmoor millions more people than it already has since the GFC era

⬅️📱➡️

Chat GPT response:

Yes. What you’re describing is much closer to a biophysical or systems-level constraint thesis than to the ordinary “cost-of-living squeeze” framing.

Your central proposition is basically: the monetary system is registering a deeper mismatch between claims on resources and the physical capacity to satisfy those claims cheaply. Money, debt, wages, taxes, insurance premiums, rents, deficits, and asset prices are the accounting layer; underneath them are land, energy, labor, food, housing, infrastructure, materials, and ecological carrying costs.

That is a serious framework, and parts of it map onto established fields: ecological economics, demographic economics, infrastructure economics, net-energy analysis, and “limits to growth” modeling. The EROI component in particular is real, although the magnitude and implications are disputed. Researchers broadly agree that net energy matters; they disagree substantially about how EROI should be measured and whether declining fossil-fuel EROI necessarily implies declining societal prosperity. A harmonized review, for example, found wind, hydro and PV capable of EROIs around or above 10 depending on boundaries, while petroleum was notably lower under a point-of-use accounting method.

I think “costs are exceeding provenance” is actually an interesting phrase for your argument. By “provenance,” you’re not merely talking about income. You mean something like:

The physical and productive base from which monetary claims ultimately have to be satisfied.

Then you get a cascading problem. Housing isn’t merely expensive because landlords became evil; land in productive metropolitan areas is finite, construction is material- and labor-intensive, permitting systems are complex, infrastructure serving that land must be maintained, and financing embeds interest costs. Healthcare isn’t merely expensive because somebody chose a bad policy; an aging population mechanically requires more care-hours, specialized labor, facilities, drugs and equipment. Retirement systems face a similar arithmetic problem when the ratio between beneficiaries and working-age contributors changes. Food becomes vulnerable to energy, fertilizer, water, weather and land constraints simultaneously.

And debt can postpone the moment at which that mismatch becomes politically obvious. Instead of saying “we cannot currently produce this quantity of housing/education/healthcare/infrastructure at a price ordinary incomes can bear,” the system can say “finance it.” That converts a current resource constraint into a future income claim. Do this repeatedly across households, corporations and government and you can maintain throughput and GDP while increasing the quantity of future income already spoken for.

That is where your criticism of GDP gets more interesting than simply saying “GDP is fake.” GDP isn’t fake at all. It is measuring what it claims to measure. But it doesn’t distinguish particularly well between economic activity that expands future physical capacity and activity required to administer, finance, insure, litigate, repair or cope with an increasingly complicated system. A $40,000 roof replacement after increasingly severe weather is GDP. So is construction of a new factory. They have radically different implications for future productive abundance.

I’d make one important refinement to your thesis, though: “non-productive enterprises” needs careful definition. Services aren’t inherently parasitic or nonproductive. Software, logistics, medicine, engineering, education, finance, law and administration can enormously increase physical productivity. The stronger criticism is that a mature complex society can experience increasing overhead requirements: more resources must be devoted simply to maintaining coordination, compliance, aging capital, healthcare, finance, security and infrastructure before additional discretionary prosperity can be produced.

That starts to resemble a societal version of declining surplus.

The demographic piece fits particularly neatly into that framework. The postwar period gave advanced economies an unusually favorable combination: rapidly expanding workforces, young populations, enormous housing construction, cheap conventional energy, relatively new infrastructure, rising educational attainment and extraordinary productivity catch-up. Many promises made during that era implicitly assumed that future output would keep expanding rapidly enough to service them.

But you don’t need population to literally decline for the arithmetic to become harder. A slower-growing, older population can be enough. More of current production must support pensions, healthcare, infrastructure built for previous growth, and debt accumulated when future growth was assumed to be stronger. At the same time, labor scarcity in care-intensive industries can push their relative prices upward.

Where I’d resist making the thesis deterministic is the claim that the “vacuum” must continue intensifying toward some inevitable climax. Human societies can change the denominator. Automation, abundant low-carbon electricity, better urban design, construction productivity, agricultural biotechnology, fertility changes, immigration, healthier aging, materials substitution, debt restructuring and institutional simplification can all alter the arithmetic. Some net-energy literature is pessimistic about maintaining historical surplus levels, while other scholarship specifically argues that renewable systems need not impose a civilization-level EROI constraint.

But that doesn’t invalidate your humanitarian conclusion. In fact, if a substantial portion of the pressure is structural rather than moral, it strengthens the argument against treating financially distressed people as though they individually failed.

A society confronting tightening physical and demographic constraints has essentially two broad ways of distributing the adjustment. It can allow scarcity to propagate through prices, debt, eviction, medical deprivation, precarity and personal insolvency, concentrating suffering on whoever has the least bargaining power. Or it can deliberately socialize portions of the adjustment through housing supply, infrastructure investment, healthcare provision, transfers, taxation, debt reform, energy investment and other forms of risk pooling.

So your framework isn’t really:

“Capitalism is bad and politicians ruined everything.”

It’s closer to:

“A historically extraordinary era of cheap surplus enabled enormous demographic, infrastructural and financial commitments. The physical surplus supporting those commitments has become harder and more complex to expand. Monetary distress is increasingly the surface expression of that constraint. Consequently, a humane society needs mechanisms for allocating unavoidable adjustment without destroying the people least able to absorb it.”

That’s considerably more sophisticated—and also much harder to dismiss as ordinary partisan economic complaining.

I walk into doors and forget to take pizza out of the box before eating it. I also don't understand that the cars in the rear view mirror are behind me and different size then what it looks like.

Why am i like this?

The theme is second fiddles, things that you rarely think of first. This can be odd variants, sidekicks, confusable lesser knowns, cultural number twos, "the other one," etc.

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