One Closed Strait, Three Crises: How the World Became a Chain of Dependencies

This broadly covers something I've been musing writing a post about. The real bad things that happen, much like the good things, happen slowly and don't have the salience necessary for people to pay attention in the current age.

We're always looking for catastrophes or victories that happen in a matter of days, something that can be summarized in a Chyron. But in general the systems that really count work more slowly and with more complexity than that.

Things don't have to be apocalyptic to be bad. We have been on a rollercoaster of sea freight costs (SCFI) since COVID and the knock on impact on prices only seems to go in one direction. It adds to demographic and housing crises and government debt crises. Add in an energy crisis following on from the same crisis barely weathered at the start of the full invasion of Ukraine, add in a fertilizer crisis, add in a once-in-a-thousand year El Nino and things fall apart.

Humanity has always faced crises, many thought the world would end in nuclear fallout roughly half a century ago, but things don't have to have the salience of a nuclear bomb going off in the neighborhood to make everything worse. And it is a slow and gradual disaster.

The current strain of populism works the same way. Screwworm eradication efforts aren't sexy, they don't have high salience and they play into people's view that the government spends money and time doing nothing. And you remove the system and it doesn't fall apart immediately, and the effects are mud […]

I feel like this is overdramatized a bit.

For instance: it's mentioned that EU gas storage is at 67% and Germany's at 56%.

What is not mentioned though is that Poland's storage is at 97% because the previous administration, for better or worse, was paranoid enough to invest in a sizeable marine gas terminal and the current one stocked up early.

Regarding real estate: adjusted for inflation prices peaked 2.5 years ago, interest rates are also much lower than back then. Nobody is buying because all the Ukrainian refugees who were moving to Poland are here already and that's the last bump in population this country will see for the foreseeable future.

Also there's the threat of war on Polish soil, which affects investor sentiment.

> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.

Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.

Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.

As a European, there is only one answer to this: more Europe. Alas, with far right winning everywhere, we are only going to get more war, more inflation, more poverty, more climate change etc...

Is there any country that has good prospects? asking for a friend...

This is one of the most cogent summarizations of the status quo that I've seen.

It leads nicely into a conclusion that, even without the preface, seems reasonable: build personal buffers of water, electricity, and cash.

Blame too much connectedness. Humans are not designed to be affected by things that happen 100's of miles away. They shouldn't even know the names or those far away places or people. They shouldn't have dependency on things that are produced far away.

Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places.

Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people.

You are not designed for this.

Fellow Pole here :)

The author writes: "This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. (...) And the Polish loan is the worse product."

I wrote a piece comparing what Poles and Americans say about the housing crisis in social media, you might find it interesting, especially that I tried to compare affordability as well [0].

In short, it seems that:

- Warsaw is even slightly less affordable for its residents than Manhattan

- but the Americans seem to be more pissed off by the situation.

That was very surprising to me.

[0] https://rudolf.observer/en/posts/who-complains-more-on-housi...

I normally just lurk, but this is one of the cooler and actually functional website designs I have seen in a while. Sceptical at first, but it's innovative, and serves to elevate the content, truly chef's kiss.

> A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps

It's almost s if economic theories actually describe reality! Given that it's economy 101 predicting that this would happen.

Still, people do it again and again. Rent control proponents for housing should take notice.