I mean hopefully it can be delayed by a year or two until I can get SRS and move to Seattle and integrate into some leftist networks. But we're all just stuck in this limbo of waiting for the evil empire to implode and it's still tottering along, smashing thousands of lives daily. I'm not romanticizing the Cool Zone, I'm just tired of being kept on the edge - waiting, waiting. Let's just get it the fuck over with
"Everything was forever, until it was no more". Hell, this happened twice with Russia+ in the 20th century. No one, especially Lenin, expected state collapse in the 19teens until it suddenly happened. It was obviously on the edge but the actual moment it was ready was a surprise to all. Ditto for the collapse of the USSR. The cracks are obvious but no one can really predict ahead of time when the whole structure just crumbles. The US has attributes that render it incredibly resilient, but its facing a series of cascading failures that will inevitably fall into a complete systems collapse. Predicting its exact date is like trying to accurately predict the next Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake or, perhaps more accurately, the next ground zero for a pandemic. We can make a lot of very educated and intelligent guesses. But the timing will only become obvious in hindsight.
I mean, so much of it is simply that its an enormous open liberalized market system. So while you can point to Ohio going into economic decline or Mississippi and West Virginia just kinda existing as these banana republics since their inception, the rest of the country can keep growing in a manner that dwarfs their under-performance.
But then a downturn hits Wall Street or Silicon Valley, and nothing good happening in the Gulf Coast or the Midwest really matters, because several hundred billion dollars getting flushed all at once can't be ignored.
The resiliency is largely just in these heavily fortified economic bastions that the national population gathers around, like refugees around a burning barrel. The Fed comes around and dumps more fuel in the barrel and everyone says "This is fine". But then some dipshit like Rand Paul or Donald Trump starts taking stabs at the Federal Reserve because of all the contradictions in the "We live in a palace while you huddle around a barrel" economic system. And that presents an existential threat to the country.
We can see the stress points. But they're well insulated and fortified and deliberately made opaque from the outside. So its difficult to determine what their state actually is, until the cladding finally gets pierced or the interior begins to give way.
But we can also see a pattern of history. The Volker shock preceded the '83 collapse. The rate hikes in '06 ultimately triggered the '08 collapse. The minor rate-hikes starting in '16 combined with COVID ran us into a big '20 downturn. And now we're trying to raise rates again specifically to suppress wage growth. Everyone with an ounce of memory regarding economic trends knows where that's headed.
And you might say "We know how to fix this, we just lower rates and give out a bunch of free money again". But that's hard to do when we're losing dollar hegemony and our Congress is full of people who hate domestic spending.
You can see the tower trembling. I agree you can't say when its going to collapse, but you can see all the pressures building. Something is going to give in the next few years. This isn't '92. This isn't '03. This isn't even '14. We're way too unstable and way too hard up for real economic utility. There isn't some tech boom coming to save us. There isn't a glut of cheap energy coming to save us. :ron-paul-its-happening:
The Empire is/was indeed incredibly strong and could take a number of body blows that would have collapsed weaker nations. And you're right, despite its historic resilience, even the US can only stagger around punch-drunk for so long before it falls over. The cheap energy of the aughts and the tech boom of the aughts/teens provided a temporary boost in profits. But aside from AI, there's really nowhere else for investor money in Silicon Valley to go. The energy sources we've shackled ourselves to won't be able to compete with the renewables boom. People aren't interested in working for shit pay while wrecking their bodies with American health coverage in the trades, so that will continue to dry up. The nation will literally crumble before our eyes; it already is. Education metrics will continue to fall, with fewer and fewer people able to perform at a high school level, much less engineer the innovations of the future. More and more of the citizenry will become ever more isolated, insecure, afraid, and alienated. And the cost of everything from health to education to food will continue to rise and at some point soon the stone will simply have no more blood to give. Except literal.
It’s really been wild to watch the fed deliberately pressing the “crash the economy” button while everyone screams “No don’t do that!”