An autumn walk with the children. A deer in the headlights. Investment alternatives. The world my children will inherit 20211107

Sophia joined Eddie and Zoriana as we walked yesterday down through the construction site of the new highway/subway line/bridge under construction a half mile north of us. Since Eddie no longer attends the school up that way I don't go there very often.

There were small crews working even on this Sunday. One is assembling precast concrete sections of the subway tunnel that will be buried under the roadway. Another was spray painting the underside of the bridge.

I would like to hope that the subway construction implied that they were going to do the logical thing and prioritize the subway rather than build more roads for our already gridlocked city. But probably not – they have to put the subway tunnel in before they build a road in any case.

Our mayor had promised that he would drive across the completed bridge by Christmas. That clearly will not happen.

The kids did the things kids enjoy. Here is a shot of the three of them up in a tree. They also had a great deal of fun throwing rocks off the low bridge into the river. I had to warn them to be careful – there were scullers out getting their exercise. Good idea before the river freezes in December.

Eddie asked when we were going to build on the lot we bought last January. At this point my answer is that it will not be any time soon. I am a deer in the headlights. There is a great deal of chaos in the world, and chaos portends uncertainty and inaction.

Over the past couple of years everybody seems to have their own sources of statistics, often wildly at odds. However, one statistic everyone would accept points to declining births. Ukraine's fertility has been dropping precipitously, like that of just about the entire developed world. The additional uncertainty of Covid 19 has certainly increased reluctance to start families.

Add to that a wildcard. According to those of the wildly discrepant sources that I tend to favor, excess deaths in the developed world have risen by the high single digits over the past year. Most say it is not Covid 19 itself but something else. Some hint darkly that it can't be much else besides the injections. Several researchers indicate that first trimester miscarriages have increased significantly. It is too early to tell about birth defects – the first children to be born of injected mothers are showing up just now.

Any way you slice it, demand for new housing is not likely to rise anytime soon. Fears of coronavirus which drove people out of the cities a year ago have subsided somewhat. Real estate prices remain elevated, but have stopped going up. If people believe that the increased mortality is due to the shots, they will be more inclined to decline the shots even if it means unemployment. Of course, the authorities are always coy about their plans – nobody can tell for sure – but the uncertainty will probably dampen enthusiasm for both moving and having more children.

So, my answer to Eddie is that we're not going to do anything. In an extreme situation we may turn the new property into a vegetable garden.  We might even burn the structures to stay warm this winter.

Science Direct, a publication of the world's leading academic publishing house Elsevier, made a peer-reviewed paper by Peter McCullough and Jessica Rose on the correlation between injectable biological products and a 20-fold increase in the number of deaths and disabilities due to heart ailments in boys aged 5-30 "temporarily unavailable". Permanently.

Removing a peer-reviewed paper is a sufficiently unusual situation that Bret Weinstein had talked about it last month on his Darkhorse podcast. Finally finding a draft of the paper, after a month of sporadic searches, I can see why Fauci and Walensky would not want the father of a 10-year-old boy to read it. It would tend to make him hesitant.

I have been impressed at the establishment's ability to suppress the price of precious metals and prop up the stock market indices. All of the pundits say that they do it with derivatives. I think that answers too simple. Yes, the use derivatives, but I think they also take advantage of the government's license to perform open market operations. To buy and sell on the exchanges. Add to that the insight that they don't have to turn a profit. Therefore, if they are holding prices down by strategically selling at a loss, letting their good friends on Wall Street pocket the profits, who would be the wiser? I'm sure there is a wonderful book to come out on this in due time.

They have not been successful in corralling Bitcoin this way. All in due time – they have rushed to create a derivatives market in Bitcoin as well. But for the time being Bitcoin is looking pretty healthy. A couple of years ago I offered the opinion that Bitcoin may be John the Baptist to gold's Jesus. They will not be able to control Bitcoin, and they will eventually lose control of precious metals as they did several times in the past. Am I prophetic or pathetic? Time will tell.

The question hangs in the air whether we will experience inflation or deflation. My opinion is both. We cannot avoid inflation in fiat currencies, that is, in nominal terms. In real terms, relative to more stable benchmarks such as precious metals and real property, we will see deflation. The falling population means there will be fewer people competing to buy the existing housing stock. There will be fewer people vying to buy used cars. And eventually, at the end of a very long day, there will be fewer people competing for ownership of precious metals. But in the short term, as inflation destroys fiat currencies, there won't be much of any place to go except precious metals.

I suspect that green energy will soon be yesterday's news. Last winter and this have demonstrated that Europe was premature and certainly unwise in shutting down their fossil fuel and nuclear generation capacity. If demand falls with falling population, and as higher energy prices throttle the urge to signal one's virtue, these will make a comeback.

Internet shills are touting uranium as the investment of the hour. I am not so sure. Bringing inactive nuclear generators back online will create some demand. But even that is a long-drawn-out process. Building new reactors takes several years.

Uranium is scarce, but it has long been noted that the current levels of technology use only a small fraction of the energy potential in fuel rods. My bet is that if and when nuclear makes its comeback, good minds will go to work on the problem of putting spent nuclear fuel back to work. My bottom line would be that the world will soon forget Greta Thunberg and that fossil fuels will be the better bet in the short term.

The balance between the values of labor and capital have shifted significantly over the past few decades. Automation is a major factor which has lessened the value of labor. Another has been labor's abundance due to widespread immigration. The result has been a widening gulf between the incomes of people who have relatively difficult to develop skills and average workers.

The pool of talented workers is going to take a pounding. The more intelligent strata of society have had decreasing numbers of children since the Industrial Revolution. This trend has been greatly accelerated in the last half-century. Those people are retiring.  The universities in the United States and Europe, in their pursuit of numerous perverse dogmas, have decreased the number of students and the quality of education in technical fields. This is before taking into account potential depopulation attributable to the Covid injections.

I am homeschooling Edward and expect I will be doing the same for his sisters. Even here in Ukraine, which is not beset by the issues that are causing such a fuss in Loudoun County, Virginia and the elite private schools in New York City, there is a general consensus that the quality of education has been sinking. Local schools here are back into Zoom meetings. It makes me all the more content with my decision to do it myself. The powers that be behind these decisions seem to have agendas other than giving the rising generation proper preparation. While I can only conjecture about their motives, I am in a position to do something to avoid their impacting my kids.

We may find ourselves reverting to the system of tutors and homeschooling that produced several generations of geniuses in the 18th and 19th centuries. I may be in the vanguard. I certainly have my eyes open for others who see things similarly.

Going back to the theme of deflation, I anticipate that the value of tangible assets will continue to deflate as there are fewer people bidding for more of the stuff that already exists, but the value of skilled labor will once again inflate simply due to a lack of supply. That should bode well for my children.

Cryptocurrencies are a wildcard. Like precious metals, their value comes from their scarcity. There is total transparency with regard to the transaction history of each of them. They are vastly easier to negotiate than physical metals. Though it takes computer trickery rather than burglary tools, they can just as easily be stolen. Ever since their inception there has been talk of the possibility that quantum computing will be able to simultaneously try every conceivable private key to swipe them. I am not in a position to assess this argument, but I assume that the big boys would not be wading in as they are if this were anything likely to happen soon.

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. I tell Eddie this is the season to lay low and keep your eyes wide open.

There is discussion of the elites of the world eliminating the hoi polloi so that they and their progeny can enjoy the world in unspoiled splendor. But what about their progeny? The second generation rarely inherits the abilities that brought the first to the pinnacle. Regression to the mean is real. See my video to this effect.

The next generation's supreme intellects will not for the most part spring from the loins of this generation's elites, but from the far more numerous legions of above average people.  In rough numbers, per Stephen Hsu and Richard Flynn, two parents with IQs of 160 – one in 30,000 – on the average have kids at 136 – one in 120.  But the converse is also true. The parents of people at 160 average 136 as well. The take-home point is that unless they get really ingenious at making designer babies, the elites cannot afford to do without the rest of us.

A strategy to eliminate all but the most successful of this generation in the interest of the future of the world would be misguided. Not only will the next generation be less talented, through regression to the mean, but as is evident in most instances it will be corrupted by the very success of its progenitors. Simply reflect on the talents and accomplishments of George W. Bush, Chelsea Clinton and Hunter Biden and others like them. Ask yourself if the children of prodigies such as Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others sparkle anywhere near as brightly as their parents. No!

That's the sweetness and light from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking, and the kids may, perversely enough, have above average prospects. Should they survive.