Sam's perspective matters, because it is the perspective of the oligarchy. It is the assumption that underlies the Great Reset and the NWO---that the useless eaters are the disposable part, that only the Epstein class and their service personnel need to be kept.
And you managed to quite succinctly expose the fundamental error underlying it.
The AI Takeover Has Arrived...but it looks completely different from what we imagined
The economy shrinks 10-15% to match the new supply-demand balance created by a lack of vital physical inputs on one side, and a lack of purchasing power on the other. Prices, trade flows and production volumes eventually stabilize, but at a permanently lower level. And while growth might eventually return, it will be wholly inadequate to raise economic activity back to its pre-war, pre-AI levels. Historians looking back on 2025 will say: that was the year when we passed peak global economic activity.
Brother John, you know that peak civilization is unsustainable; AI has shone a big light on the underlying rot & social disease causing disunification, imminent civil unrest & eventual collapse.
"Limits of growth" spurred globalists (as they became known) to plan for a future without "useless eaters" aka deplorables, so that the "important" members of humanity would transcend the correction from cheap resources to the "good" life, when in a more human-centric alt. reality compassionate planning to support regenerative communities should have been the goal.
AI is neither good nor bad, but the CULTure creating it are part of the globalist cult-sure, seeing the deplorables as having lived past their "planned" obsolescence, when in an alt. reality AI could be used to stretch resources for the many, more efficiently utilize & deploy critical resources, not suck all the economic/monetary "air" out of the room.
But TPTB are spiritually dead, see no greater vision to evolve from mankind's primitive status quo, failed to lead by example due to hubris, greed, fraud & corruption; The masses voted to allow those with no skin in the game to run the show, command & control the peak civilization lemmings right over the proverbial cliff.
Maybe there was no alt. potential/solution for the deluded "primitive hordes" to evolve into the future, maybe this is the best "we" can do, but I knew of many wise, loving, hard working men in my American experience that would have tried for a better future, without looting the country for "their family", without animus towards those of a different stripe than them or their community.
Too bad, sooo sad, these men never tried to become "public" servants beyond their communities, as it was clear Wee the Sheeple would only vote for the max lookers, talkers (liars) & partisan drones.
Of course, this was all before the rise of the internet & the mind control algorithms came online (now with AI) that have proven so adapt at herding morons into their sadist panopticon cells, representing the status quo.
Honestly, I don't even know why I bother entering text into the maelstrom, boredom perhaps, all it represents is waste my time & adds to the noise.
Well, this is a critical cusp in history unfolding, and I am doing what I can to take the better path. It is up to billions of us tochoose to be better humans.
Not only do I know from personal experience that there aren't "billions of us to choose to be better" in the pipeline, I would be very shocked if it was even in the millions.
"For many are called, but few are chosen (choose)." ~ Yeshua
A beautiful Gattaca where all our food is organic and Optimus robots do the food cooking and shopping. 'Look - stocks in AI and robot tech is soaring AND I get the good feelz of eating to save the planet'.
Thank you, Sam, for inspiring No1 to write this foundational essay - or perhaps I ought to call it the weaponised foundation to economics which can and should be used to slap round the head of any 'expert' who'd agree with Sam all the way down until those foundations crumble.
Just a footnote in regard to people needing food and clothes: clothes can be recycled, i.e. used 'intergenerational', a.k.a. 'hand-me-downs'. They also were used in exchange for food when times were really bad, e.g. in post-WWII Europe. A tiny contemporary indicator that things are getting a bit rough for those needing to use a much larger slice of their income for food: suddenly one can find on local networks many more ladies advertising clothes-alteration services than even a couple or so years ago. I wonder if cobblers will reappear as well.
Having started a career in mfg on the exact date the Romneyites started looting American mfg through leveraged buyouts, I got to watch the shrinkage happen to a number of coworker families during layoffs. First the replacement stuff like clothes, then the service subscriptions like cable, and then; Surprise! Consumer debt. They'll hang on to the mortgage by their teeth, but the credit cards stop getting paid pretty quickly. Sam will feel the building jerk.
On a long enough scale it does count though. But I agree with you that the final only real thing No1 skips is a meal.
Most demand comes from: food, clothes & shelter. We didn't outgrew those basic needs in all our history.
One could also make the argument that the world is awash in shelter. As the birthrate is trending downwards, there'll be more than enough shelter for everyone. Same principle as your "awash in clothes" argument. But here the timeframe is in centuries, not decades.
Hmmm: ""food consumption is counted in days, clothes in decades and shelter in centuries"". I'm going to sit on that one for a while, has the inklings of a good quote 😀
I get the point, retard, but a huge percentage of spend on apparel is very discretionary and under the category of “fashion” not basic clothing. Where I live there are thrift shops stuffed to the brim with extra clothing available for free or a pittance
While I understand the point that everything leads to consumption and use by end users, and that demand adapts as economies grow and develop, isn't there still the matter of what that spending and growth occurs in?
Asset price inflation and increase in rent directly benefits a small section of society, who further invest in assets rather than consumption and development. As such, money gets locked up in financial markets and betting, even if theoretically it depends on a buyer at the end. While this is not exactly what Sam claims, it still seems to hold somewhat true to my understanding.
Thanks - this is actually a better version of what Sam was reaching for.
I don't think that money just sit trapped in markets. Because for every buyer there is a seller who walks off and spends or reinvests it somewhere else.
Asset inflation is just a higher price on the same claim, and that claim is deferred consumption all the way down (and yes for real estate that demand is counted in decades).
So let's say you have a share, you sell it for a hundred. Now the seller has the cash. He can spend it on whatever he wants (likely another share).
The velocity *inside* the financial markets of this circulation is HIGH, and *out into goods* is LOW. It's not really trapped. Anyone can step out at any moment. But as long as they keep choosing to recycle it among themselves, it bids up the price of existing claims and almost none of it reaches a final buyer with a grocery list.
Buying Apple shares on the secondary market gives Apple nothing - you've just repriced a claim that already existed. Only primary issuance (new shares, new bonds) actually channels savings into "development".
The overwhelming bulk of asset-market activity is secondary. So the money isn't locked up and it isn't funding development either. It's idle from the real economy's point of view: neither consuming nor building, just inflating the price tag on claims that already exist.
Rent is the cleanest case for this... A rent increase is a straight transfer from tenants (high propensity to consume) to landlords (low). It doesn't conjure new housing. It directly drains consumption out of the chain and parks it. Pure distribution, pure drag.
To get back to my analogy: If this (re)distribution of money which is inflating the share price is the same distribution starving consumer demand whose future sales depends on it, then the valuation is eating its own foundation. The tower gets taller on recycled money at the exact moment the floor it rests on gets thinner. Not "money escapes the consumer" - it can't - but the rate at which income converts back into final demand collapses, while the paper claims on that demand keep climbing.
The penthouse just gets bigger whilst the foundation cracks.
Or one simply helps create a bubble, so that, when it fails and the general population are forced to bail it out (401/k in this instance) one is already positioned to scoop the proceeds up.
Of course, Sam herself will not be scooping but that being scooped.
But yes, there is a systems fail point where No1 wins, because it comes back down to food, poor-fitting clothing, and small 40-people-communes living in multi-million dollar houses.
I agree whole hearted with your point, but would like to illustrate that ‘every buyer needs a seller’ intuition is right for the secondary market, but a core tenet of ETFs is the creation/redemption mechanism—APs can go straight to the fund and create or redeem shares rather than only trading what already exists.
Indeed, that share count isn't fixed, and you're right that an AP can create rather than trade.
But the create leg doesn't conjure anything: to mint new shares the AP delivers the underlying basket, which is again sourced on the secondary market (within a limited amount of time that is).
So there still needs to be a seller... From the ETF share down to its constituents. Apple still sees nothing unless what's going into that basket is a primary issue, which it almost never is.
Astute reasoning. SBI on its way. Since I already grow most of our food, I will be buying more nails; maybe some more insulation for the attic; assuredly more silver. If Trump and Bessent weren't such fools, we would already have a stimulus check to buy the midterm election. Then another check in October.
You can overlay Engel’s law on a K‑shaped economy (which we are in) by using “Engel-style” spending patterns (food vs non‑essentials) to trace and explain the divergence between the upper and lower arms of the K across income groups and over time.
Engel’s law is about what happens as income rises, not about what happens for people whose incomes stagnate or fall.
So “the slice of the pie gets smaller” is only true for households moving up the income ladder on the upper arm of the K, not for households stuck on, or sliding down, the lower arm.
Sam's perspective matters, because it is the perspective of the oligarchy. It is the assumption that underlies the Great Reset and the NWO---that the useless eaters are the disposable part, that only the Epstein class and their service personnel need to be kept.
And you managed to quite succinctly expose the fundamental error underlying it.
The Honest Sorcerer on AI eliminating paid-jobs:
The AI Takeover Has Arrived...but it looks completely different from what we imagined
The economy shrinks 10-15% to match the new supply-demand balance created by a lack of vital physical inputs on one side, and a lack of purchasing power on the other. Prices, trade flows and production volumes eventually stabilize, but at a permanently lower level. And while growth might eventually return, it will be wholly inadequate to raise economic activity back to its pre-war, pre-AI levels. Historians looking back on 2025 will say: that was the year when we passed peak global economic activity.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-ai-takeover-has-arrived
Brother John, you know that peak civilization is unsustainable; AI has shone a big light on the underlying rot & social disease causing disunification, imminent civil unrest & eventual collapse.
"Limits of growth" spurred globalists (as they became known) to plan for a future without "useless eaters" aka deplorables, so that the "important" members of humanity would transcend the correction from cheap resources to the "good" life, when in a more human-centric alt. reality compassionate planning to support regenerative communities should have been the goal.
AI is neither good nor bad, but the CULTure creating it are part of the globalist cult-sure, seeing the deplorables as having lived past their "planned" obsolescence, when in an alt. reality AI could be used to stretch resources for the many, more efficiently utilize & deploy critical resources, not suck all the economic/monetary "air" out of the room.
But TPTB are spiritually dead, see no greater vision to evolve from mankind's primitive status quo, failed to lead by example due to hubris, greed, fraud & corruption; The masses voted to allow those with no skin in the game to run the show, command & control the peak civilization lemmings right over the proverbial cliff.
Maybe there was no alt. potential/solution for the deluded "primitive hordes" to evolve into the future, maybe this is the best "we" can do, but I knew of many wise, loving, hard working men in my American experience that would have tried for a better future, without looting the country for "their family", without animus towards those of a different stripe than them or their community.
Too bad, sooo sad, these men never tried to become "public" servants beyond their communities, as it was clear Wee the Sheeple would only vote for the max lookers, talkers (liars) & partisan drones.
Of course, this was all before the rise of the internet & the mind control algorithms came online (now with AI) that have proven so adapt at herding morons into their sadist panopticon cells, representing the status quo.
Honestly, I don't even know why I bother entering text into the maelstrom, boredom perhaps, all it represents is waste my time & adds to the noise.
*As always, Words fail; Love is a Verb*
""I don't even know why I bother entering text into the maelstrom""
-> Thanks for your contribution to the Aether.
Well, this is a critical cusp in history unfolding, and I am doing what I can to take the better path. It is up to billions of us tochoose to be better humans.
Always the optimist John 😉
Not only do I know from personal experience that there aren't "billions of us to choose to be better" in the pipeline, I would be very shocked if it was even in the millions.
"For many are called, but few are chosen (choose)." ~ Yeshua
You choose for one person. I choose for one person.
💯 🎯
🙏
Hear, hear!👏👏
Superbly written. Picasso's art using words.
I mean there is always killing people though.
Then we will have Utopia.
A beautiful Gattaca where all our food is organic and Optimus robots do the food cooking and shopping. 'Look - stocks in AI and robot tech is soaring AND I get the good feelz of eating to save the planet'.
Sam is upbeat and No1 is black pilling us!
😁
Thank you, Sam, for inspiring No1 to write this foundational essay - or perhaps I ought to call it the weaponised foundation to economics which can and should be used to slap round the head of any 'expert' who'd agree with Sam all the way down until those foundations crumble.
Just a footnote in regard to people needing food and clothes: clothes can be recycled, i.e. used 'intergenerational', a.k.a. 'hand-me-downs'. They also were used in exchange for food when times were really bad, e.g. in post-WWII Europe. A tiny contemporary indicator that things are getting a bit rough for those needing to use a much larger slice of their income for food: suddenly one can find on local networks many more ladies advertising clothes-alteration services than even a couple or so years ago. I wonder if cobblers will reappear as well.
Thanks again for this vital economic lecture!
I found RalfB's comment the best: https://no01.substack.com/p/a-rounding-error-with-a-grocery-list/comment/267379833
""Sam's perspective matters, because it is the perspective of the oligarchy.""
I didn't think of it that way, but it does make a LOT of sense when seen through that lens.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Yep, something like that. Although his was a bit of a posh version.
Maslow had self-actualisation up top. ""Becoming who you were meant to be.""
I'd argue that discretionary money and attention are translated into clicks, views, and chips on the table instead.
Same shape though.
Lose (or is that loose 😉) the income and the casino empties first.
My cynical version:
* physiological stays -- No1 wants to be hungry
* safety -> subscription ["you own nothing"]
* social -> follower count
* self-esteem -> likes
* self-actualisation -> margin, leverage, dopamine hits from getting a like?
*self-actualization -> hookers & blow (the real dopamine hits)
FIFY
I'm sure the yacht owners really give a hoot about "likes" /s
Some of what you say is so obvious...I wish I could think of it
Medicine, food, clothes, in this order. I'd rather skip lunch than not buy medicine for my mother.
♥
Having started a career in mfg on the exact date the Romneyites started looting American mfg through leveraged buyouts, I got to watch the shrinkage happen to a number of coworker families during layoffs. First the replacement stuff like clothes, then the service subscriptions like cable, and then; Surprise! Consumer debt. They'll hang on to the mortgage by their teeth, but the credit cards stop getting paid pretty quickly. Sam will feel the building jerk.
I don’t think clothes count. The world is awash in used clothes that could be worn in a pinch
On a long enough scale it does count though. But I agree with you that the final only real thing No1 skips is a meal.
Most demand comes from: food, clothes & shelter. We didn't outgrew those basic needs in all our history.
One could also make the argument that the world is awash in shelter. As the birthrate is trending downwards, there'll be more than enough shelter for everyone. Same principle as your "awash in clothes" argument. But here the timeframe is in centuries, not decades.
Hmmm: ""food consumption is counted in days, clothes in decades and shelter in centuries"". I'm going to sit on that one for a while, has the inklings of a good quote 😀
Water in days, food in weeks....
"The rule of 3":
- air : 3 minutes
- water : 3 days
- food : 3 weeks
- clothes : 3 years?
- shelter : 3 centuries?
The last 2 I just cooked up 😉
I have never seen a point so thoroughly missed. Amazing.
I get the point, retard, but a huge percentage of spend on apparel is very discretionary and under the category of “fashion” not basic clothing. Where I live there are thrift shops stuffed to the brim with extra clothing available for free or a pittance
The end of the world is doomed to wear pants that are tight, too short, and an ill fitting t-shirt🤣
When did we pivot to Marvel movies??
While I understand the point that everything leads to consumption and use by end users, and that demand adapts as economies grow and develop, isn't there still the matter of what that spending and growth occurs in?
Asset price inflation and increase in rent directly benefits a small section of society, who further invest in assets rather than consumption and development. As such, money gets locked up in financial markets and betting, even if theoretically it depends on a buyer at the end. While this is not exactly what Sam claims, it still seems to hold somewhat true to my understanding.
Thanks - this is actually a better version of what Sam was reaching for.
I don't think that money just sit trapped in markets. Because for every buyer there is a seller who walks off and spends or reinvests it somewhere else.
Asset inflation is just a higher price on the same claim, and that claim is deferred consumption all the way down (and yes for real estate that demand is counted in decades).
So let's say you have a share, you sell it for a hundred. Now the seller has the cash. He can spend it on whatever he wants (likely another share).
The velocity *inside* the financial markets of this circulation is HIGH, and *out into goods* is LOW. It's not really trapped. Anyone can step out at any moment. But as long as they keep choosing to recycle it among themselves, it bids up the price of existing claims and almost none of it reaches a final buyer with a grocery list.
Buying Apple shares on the secondary market gives Apple nothing - you've just repriced a claim that already existed. Only primary issuance (new shares, new bonds) actually channels savings into "development".
The overwhelming bulk of asset-market activity is secondary. So the money isn't locked up and it isn't funding development either. It's idle from the real economy's point of view: neither consuming nor building, just inflating the price tag on claims that already exist.
Rent is the cleanest case for this... A rent increase is a straight transfer from tenants (high propensity to consume) to landlords (low). It doesn't conjure new housing. It directly drains consumption out of the chain and parks it. Pure distribution, pure drag.
To get back to my analogy: If this (re)distribution of money which is inflating the share price is the same distribution starving consumer demand whose future sales depends on it, then the valuation is eating its own foundation. The tower gets taller on recycled money at the exact moment the floor it rests on gets thinner. Not "money escapes the consumer" - it can't - but the rate at which income converts back into final demand collapses, while the paper claims on that demand keep climbing.
The penthouse just gets bigger whilst the foundation cracks.
Or one simply helps create a bubble, so that, when it fails and the general population are forced to bail it out (401/k in this instance) one is already positioned to scoop the proceeds up.
Of course, Sam herself will not be scooping but that being scooped.
But yes, there is a systems fail point where No1 wins, because it comes back down to food, poor-fitting clothing, and small 40-people-communes living in multi-million dollar houses.
That makes sense, thanks for replying!
I agree whole hearted with your point, but would like to illustrate that ‘every buyer needs a seller’ intuition is right for the secondary market, but a core tenet of ETFs is the creation/redemption mechanism—APs can go straight to the fund and create or redeem shares rather than only trading what already exists.
Indeed, that share count isn't fixed, and you're right that an AP can create rather than trade.
But the create leg doesn't conjure anything: to mint new shares the AP delivers the underlying basket, which is again sourced on the secondary market (within a limited amount of time that is).
So there still needs to be a seller... From the ETF share down to its constituents. Apple still sees nothing unless what's going into that basket is a primary issue, which it almost never is.
I think we average people are going to see howe big a slice will be soon.
Astute reasoning. SBI on its way. Since I already grow most of our food, I will be buying more nails; maybe some more insulation for the attic; assuredly more silver. If Trump and Bessent weren't such fools, we would already have a stimulus check to buy the midterm election. Then another check in October.
Heh. Remember that Trump wanted to give everyone a 2k dividend check? (Nov 10 '25: https://no01.substack.com/p/trump-wants-to-hand-out-2000-tariff)
"Those are rookie numbers" - Pres better pump it up some more, cuz we are gonna need it, for food, clothes, petrol, etc.. .
“For only 7Trillon in printing, I can give you a $2k Check. I sent it yesterday.” 🤡
This Sam... she blonde by any chance?
Not last I checked 🤣
You can overlay Engel’s law on a K‑shaped economy (which we are in) by using “Engel-style” spending patterns (food vs non‑essentials) to trace and explain the divergence between the upper and lower arms of the K across income groups and over time.
Engel’s law is about what happens as income rises, not about what happens for people whose incomes stagnate or fall.
So “the slice of the pie gets smaller” is only true for households moving up the income ladder on the upper arm of the K, not for households stuck on, or sliding down, the lower arm.
Wall Street vs Main Street…
My take is that Engel's law always applies. When things move downhill, it's just Engel's law pointed downwards.
It's a ratio after all, so it runs both ways.
Income up, food share down.
Income down, food share back up.
Which is the K, really. Upper arm is Engel forwards, lower arm is Engel backwards.
Same law, different directions.
I agree with your take. Sam’s was rather short sighted.
I think so too, but I can't say that else I get my nose bitten off 😂
We all have our moments!🤷🏻♂️🤣