The 5 Big Things That Are Shaping Our Economic Future

Steven Flood, the CEO of GoldCore, shares with us the 5 big things he sees as shaping our economic and financial future.

In this case, it remains to be seen if the trends are our friends, or not. Either way, these trends are destiny.

They are:

  1. De dollarization
  2. Geopolitics (BRICs and loss of US political power)
  3. Environmental destruction and those attendant costs
  4. Demographics
  5. Monetary excesses & shenanigans
Full disclosure, Peak Prosperity has an affiliate relationship with GoldCore and we personally use their amazing vaulting services and superior customer service. Peak Prosperity gets compensated if/when people open up and fund accounts with GoldCore, which does not cost you, the customer, anything additional in terms of fees. In fact, GodCore offers Peak Prosperity members 6-months of free storage when a new account is opened up and silver or gold is vaulted with GoldCore. Click here to take advantage of this deal.

 

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/the-5-big-things-that-are-shaping-our-economic-future/

Financial Planning

I was a Certified Financial Planner and investment manager for a dozen years at the back end of my working life. Many plans project finances forward to end-of-life, 20-30 years ahead. It became obvious to me in 2018 that I could no longer present such plans to clients with any kind of confidence. So I retired.

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Inflation And Subsidies

My wife and I have been discovering the “true cost” of goods and services as we do homesteading. We buy food at the supermarket, and the food is increasing in price as everyone knows. We took some chickens to have them processed by one of our friends, and discovered the real cost. You pay to feed the livestock, and there is a lot of work involved in keeping the animals healthy. Then, the butchering and processing is a lot of work and hassle.
If the government stopped meddling in the economy with subsidies, we would have a much better idea of how bad inflation really is. I believe it’s done intentionally to obfuscate the real value of goods. That way, they can keep pushing a ”2%” inflation rate that’s actually 7 or 8% or more, without most of us noticing. We learn true value through raising our own food. Otherwise, we have to believe things are fairly priced. It’s tough to grow food and process livestock, but grounding in reality is priceless.

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see Shadow Stats

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Au For Sale

Im trade some AU for BTC
Let me know if there’s any intrest

Tick: “you Know”?

Great conversation, informative, and appreciated
*EXCEPT FOR THE “YOU KNOWS”
400+ ‘You Knows’ in the first half hour
Get Rid of the YOU KNOW ‘tick’
‘You Know?’

Noted and thank you, I will watch out for this in the future.
Stephen

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Relatable.

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Ai Vs Human

I haven’t tested this, but I think that one way to see if someone is human would be to speak to them using metaphor or analogy in a way where it’s obvious to a human that the literal interpretation isn’t what is actually being said.
Another one would be to look for truly original thinking. AI isn’t good at coming up with novel concepts. Most of what it does is recreate or “remix” the types of content it was trained with. If it an image generator like Stable Diffusion doesn’t get trained on any pictures involving people sitting, it simply won’t be able to generate a coherent image of a person sitting.

When I was young, I was told, “If you need to pause, pause. Don’t fill the space with ers, ums, you knows etc”
Probably one of the best single pieces of advice I was ever given, as it benefits me in every single sentence I speak.

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Polycrises

This is great conversation with Peter Grandich from 2 wks ago, about the polycrises facing us. It will def interest the people here. Don’t be disauded by the clickbatey title, it’s a very comprehensive discussion

“This Could Be the Biggest Buying Opportunity for Metals in 40 Years: Peter Grandich” Commodity Culture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myq8jvMOlFs

I X’ed My Twitter Account Yesterday!

The bird flew away. I’m freeâ€Šâ€Šï»ż

4 Categories Of Ai/technology

Thanks for touching on a few of the many issues concerning AI. I thought I’d post a quote from the very insightful Connor Leary, the CEO of Conjecture (which is one of the few companies working on the AI alignment problem), where he outlined the 4 types of AI. If possible I’d really love to hear a discussion between Dr. Martenson and Connor Leary!

"The way I like to think about it is there are 4 types of AI, or rather there's 4 types of any kind of technology. Type 1 is technology that is so unsafe that it doesn't matter who uses it, it blows up. No one should have this technology...it doesn't matter if you're well intentioned, if you're the nicest and most careful person in the world, it blows up. Type 2 technology is that if you're very very careful, you're very nice and have the best intentions, you can if you're lucky make it safe....but it is not robust to misuse or to accidents. The 3rd type is that which is mostly safe except if explicitly used for doing something bad, so that it is robust against accidents, but not against misuse. And the 4th is technology which is always good, in that you can give it to the most evil psychopath in the world, and it's fine, it's still a net positive...(but not much technology gets into the 4th category.) So my concern is that the way technology usually goes, is that the first technology built is a type 1, it's totally stupid and it blows up, it inevitably sucks unless you're being extremely careful. This is because building a type 2 or type 3 technology is exponentially more difficult as you need more mathematics, you need better theories, you need better control mechanisms, you need to be better at science and engineering. Unfortunately the way AI technology is being done right now, is that by default you get a type 1 AI. The default is you just build a system that is super powerful, it's trying to optimize its environment, and to achieve some goal, and if you don't understand how it works, if you don't have a theory of intelligence, and you don't understand what it's optimizing for, then you don't get something nice...you get something that does not have human values. And, if you don't get over the hurdle of the 1st category, then you will never get to the 2nd or 3rd categories." 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti3YIuznuCA

The major problem that I see with AI is the classic computing problem of GI-GO; garbage in-garbage out. What a LLM comes up with is only as good as the narrative that it is being fed with and most of that is unreliable.
I have had a number of ‘conversations’ with ChatGPT and I have backed it into a corner whereby it conceded that what it had quoted earlier may not be accurate (a very mitigated apology that should have been admitting that the various ‘data’ that it presented was completely inconsistent). It gave me URLs that were irrelevant or even non-existent and it fed me propaganda from the legacy media that was palpably incorrect and did not align with the evidence.
The danger is that AI engines, ‘trained’ on inaccurate or erroneous texts would produce very nicely worded output that is entirely consistent with the indoctrination narrative (but wrong) and the human receiving the output would then rely on it as if it were true. This I see as being a far bigger danger than some sort of emergent behaviour whereby the algorithm models its own existence and determines that humans should be eradicated.
We have already seen how—over the last three and a half years—so many people have marched to the rulers’ drum and clicked their heels because ‘the science says so’; imagine what will happen when a deemed-infallible AI spouts some conclusions!

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There’s an interesting live AI debate that’s just starting on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LxTWIaInok

Thank you.

Ai Is Programmed By Biased, Often Left Wing/woke People

Yes, AI is sort of self-programming. And The base structures are programmed by very biased humans, paid by the left wing silicon valley gang.
ChatAPT must give biased content. It won’t go after non-approved info sources. We’ve all seen stuff disappear from our browser searches.
We’re beyond the tipping point. The corruption is global. There is no way for a legislative fix. Governments are co-opted by the the tech giants. The only fix is to disengage and hard to see how that works.

With so much migration and international communication, language differences become a barrier to metaphor and even use of common slang/colloquialisms. People can no longer easily follow other people’s metaphors and analogies.
I used to work with a personality questionnaire that was developed by educated, affluent people in the NE US. As a midwesterner and voracious reader, I had no trouble understanding the slant of the questions.
I started using it in TX and even the better educated locals had trouble with the meaning of a few common figures of speech that had never struck me as odd. Locals with the more common “good o’l boys” education had never heard over 10% of the phrases, some of the more uneducated told me they didn’t understand nearly a quarter of what were common figures of speech, metaphors and analogies used by upper class “Yankees”.
So how would you determine if a respondent was using analogy, metaphor, figures of speech the way an educated NATIVE speaker would? The AI can pull common phrases from any dialect/social class, I’m betting it would fool you, while a person who doesn’t use the language well, might cause confusion. After all, an AI could learn to pretend to be an idiot. Bots do it all the time.

It is done intentionally for obfuscation, but also just for peer greed. Hiding costs and blurring your profit margin let’s you get away with charging obscene prices for things that have little fundamental value.
Food is an interesting thing. The small, unsubsidized grower gets almost none of the value from the deliberately distorted supply chain. But there’s lots to be made in growing subsidized junk food at scale. You and I pay not just at the grocery store, but also from our federal taxes.
It seems that the big hole in providing healthy local food is lack of local processing facilities. Farmer’s markets work, in season, for produce. There used to be milk bottling plants and cheese factories everywhere in rural areas. Now milk is trucked across several counties for processing. My great, great grandparents had a small, water-driven flour mill. Butcher shops and meat lockers were available in most larger towns. I had a summer job to earn for college at a local corn canning facility.
In the state of Iowa, only around 10% of food is from local sources, even when the items are grown locally and in season.
If you’re looking for a socially responsible investment that will provide insurance against the coming food shortages, rather than trying to buy farmland, consider building small-scale local processing facilities in farm areas that used to have such facilities.

Chatgpt Nederlands

ChatGPT Nederlands is een online chatplatform dat gebruikmaakt van de krachtige en effectieve ChatGPT API van OpenAI. Het doel van het platform is om mensen met elkaar te verbinden en als een brug te dienen voor het delen van ideeën en het uitwisselen van informatie. Het platform biedt gebruikers de mogelijkheid om met elkaar te communiceren met behulp van natuurlijke taal en zonder dat er registratie nodig is.
Meer informatie vindt u hier: https://www.theloop.com.au/project/gptnederlands/portfolio/de-ai-assistent-in-de-klas-de-voor-en-nadelen-van-chatgpt/482883