23 sats \ 3 replies \ @soggycakes 3 Jun 2022 \ on: Peter Zeihan: "Over the next few years, we're probably going to lose a billion people from famine." bitcoin
good context from the latest Vaclav Smil book review from Tom Morgan:
Four Pillars of Civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia
Smil’s assessment of the importance of ammonia is staggering.
“In 2020, nearly 4 billion people would not have been alive without synthetic ammonia…. the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia [is] perhaps the most momentous technical advance in history.”
https://thekcpgroup.com/insights/insights-from-how-the-world-really-works
Fritz Haber of the "Haber-Bosch synthesis" won the Nobel Prize for this discovery and is also the father of chemical warfare. His work led to the development of Zyklon B used in the gas chambers during WWII.
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Governments will therefore need to rebuild domestic industries, militaries, energy grids, and general infrastructure. This makes understanding the reality of the hard stuff about hard stuff as important as it’s ever been.
With commodity money (e.g., gold-backed ruble, bitcoin), governments will lose their ability to print to pay for militaries and infrastucture. Nobody has any idea how things will play out.
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Seems that governments around the world, even the ones who are in theory opposed to each other are in lockstep about pivoting from COVID to world war. I read a theory that these things all serve to slow down the velocity of money so people don't see how f'ed they are too quickly and start bringing out pitchforks... do people even own pitchforks anymore?
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