Published yesterday on Asia Times, the following article covers overfishing in China.

One part of the article really stands out as being collapse related, and it isn't singling out China:

"It's very hard to solve global warming, because the worldwide nature of the harm means there's a free rider problem (or, if you prefer, a coordination problem) — no country wants to pay the full cost of decarbonization, because most of the benefit goes to people in other countries."

"You can try international agreements, but everyone has an incentive to cheat."

I will forgive Asia Times for quoting Steven Pinker because the rest of the article is excellent.

Hello all, firstly I recognise this post comes from a position of privilege as I have sufficient money to meet my basic needs and some left over to save/invest.

I have had no success in financial forums trying to get people to think about the fact the financial system cannot continue. Everyone seems to believe it will continue forever.

The usual mainstream financial advice is to spend less than you earn and then invest in low-cost index funds through ups and downs in the markets, and eventually you will end up with enough money to live on for the rest of your life. But for those of us who know that most systems are on a general trajectory downwards, how do we balance the need to have money to function in the (messed up) system we have today, with the knowledge that it will all fall apart at some point?

More specifically, does anyone monitor data points that might be more 'collapse-sensitive' than the usual market data? Are there people in academia/economics/financial services who are thinking about how best a person/family can structure their finances as we await the inevitable and perhaps sudden changes in the international financial system? I am already doing what I can in terms of skills, growing food, building community, not being in debt etc. I am not in the US.

economy that's booming on paper but feels stuck when it comes to hiring

Probably not very collapsy but also very collapsy

"An excruciatingly painful tropical disease called chikungunya can now be transmitted by mosquitoes across most of Europe, a study has found.

Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. Continuing global heating means it is only a matter of time before the disease expands further northwards, the scientists said."

SS: This blog post is a follow-up to one of my previous posts. It's an in-depth multi source-backed analysis on how CEOs of major tech companies are actively lying to their investors and the public about the reasoning behind the layoff surge and job erasure.

They can keep hyping AI as much as they want, but there's a difference between hype, and data. Nothing in the data indicates that the layoffs or halting in hiring is due to AI's capability to replace workers. The current downturn in hiring is actually driven by overspending in LLMs.

A concise video showing the war against climate change has already been lost. A huge decline in population and economic activity is now inevitable.

Nothing in this video should come as a shock to anyone here, but it's still an interesting watch.

Related to collapse because very soon the conversation about geoengineering is going to become louder.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-187985982

"The heating is going to be so big and so obvious that it will lead, for the first time, to a real global discussion of solar geoengineering as a response. I think that is tragic and also increasingly likely, because the cost of letting the temperature continue to rise will be so large that the side-effects that could come from pouring sulfur into the atmosphere will start to seem more more evenly matched with the weather carnage on display. It's probably time for those who care about the planet to start figuring out what their response to this debate will look like. There are some good reasons to fight it tooth and nail, but it's also the moment to start insisting that if it's ever going to be even considered it be accompanied by an iron-clad commitment to drive down fossil fuel emissions to zero. If we're going to bet the future of the planet, the reason can't be to make sure Exxon's business model remains intact."

I wasn't here at the start - it took me several years before I became collapse aware. Lets say 2013. That feels accurate.

I'm going to try to flatter this sub. You are all brilliant. You don't miss the forest for the trees. You have seen beyond the horizon and you have given me a terrifing preview of what's to come.

You are honest, curious and passionate. You are everything I want to be.

You have humility. You correct each other constantly and, generally speaking, you admit when you are wrong. You yearn to learn.

I remember when this sub had over half a million users. Tens of thousands of users were actively engaged in the sub.

We now sit at around 150k and in 2026 that means only a few thousand accounts are real people. The collapse of collapse, as it were.

I wonder what caused it. We aren't that annoying are we? I've never seen a sub die so quickly.

Public debt currently amounts to nearly 100 trillion dollars and corporate debt isn't far behind.

Published recently by the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, this article concerns, well, debt.

Collapse related because the "danger zone" for debt to GDP is 90% and some economists have argued even 60% is concerning. The world is currently at over 300% and rising fast. Last year the US government alone spent nearly a trillion dollars just on interest payments.

In the eloquent words of Scooby-doo

Ruh Roh

To put it in perspective

"The frequency of these billion-dollar disasters has changed from about once every 82 days to once every roughly two weeks over the last 10 years"

Collapse related because climate change is causing damage to infrastructure and ecosystems around the world.

Like COVID, the current US president has made the brilliant decision to stop monitoring these disasters in any way.

I feel better already.

Hello everyone! I'm a psychology professor studying how personality traits and spiritual beliefs connect to people's emotional reactions to climate change (eco-anxiety).

I especially need diverse perspectives; whether you're very worried about climate, not worried at all, religious, atheist, spiritual, or none of the above. The more varied the sample, the better it is.

~15 min and fully anonymous. A debriefing is provided at the end. I'll post results when the paper is submitted to a journal.

Thanks for helping out!

https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/FXTG8MM

(This post was mod approved. Thank you)

February 2026 Olly gut heath chewy probiotics YouTube ad... "this year is gonna take a lot of guts"... Now I'm not one to catch subliminal messages at all & this is most likely A.i., but what in the conspiracy spewing bullshit is that supposed to mean... either they know something we don't or it was just so pun they couldn't resist. But just in case, ration your vitamins y'all!

THE JUPITER FILE

Micro Grids

the flagship $165 billion leg of the $500 billion Stargate pipeline reveals a blueprint for an energy-independence that operates entirely outside the laws of the public democracy.

Power Beyond the Grid

The most significant technical development is the paper trail left by Acoma LLC. In late 2025 and finalized through January 2026.

Acoma LLC submitted two massive air quality permit applications to the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED):

Permit No. 10732 (East Microgrid): Located 3.6 miles south of Santa Teresa.

Permit No. 10734 (West Microgrid): Located 4.1 miles southwest of Santa Teresa.

These microgrids are not backup generators; they are a 4-Gigawatt (GW) independent utility.

To put this in perspective, these two private grids are designed to generate more gas-fired electricity than the entire rest of the State of New Mexico combined.

By splitting the project into "East" and "West" permits, Acoma LLC attempted to stay just under the 250-ton "Major Source" threshold for nitrogen oxides (NOx) to bypass federal oversight—a classic "detective" red flag known as permit-splitting.

The "Air-Gapped" Brain

Officially, Project Jupiter is a hyperscale AI campus in Santa Teresa, NM, developed by BorderPlex Digital Assets and STACK Infrastructure, with Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank confirmed as the primary tenants.

Unlike standard data centers, Jupiter does not draw from PNM or El Paso Electric. It is designed to be energetically air-gapped. The microgrids use massive natural gas turbines (connected to the Permian Basin pipelines) and large-scale battery storage to ensure the AI logic remains online even if the national grid is compromised.

The project is engineered to emit over 14 million tons of CO2 per year—more than the cities of Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined.

This massive heat generation is why the "Project Jupiter" core is being replicated at the poles; the New Mexico site is the "Brain," but the Arctic/Antarctic "Foundries" provide the ultimate heat-sink and physical safety.

The "Stargate" Connection

Project Jupiter is the anchor of Project Stargate. While Stargate is marketed as a "high-tech enterprise," our research shows it is the realization of the "Silicon-Mineral Loop."

On February 9, 2026, Doña Ana County authorized the issuance of over $165 billion in Industrial Revenue Bonds (IRBs) for Jupiter. This allows the government to "own" the site and lease it back to the private entities (Acoma/Oracle), providing a 30-year property tax abatement and a shield of sovereign immunity over the hardware.

To solve the water crisis in the desert, Jupiter is building a dedicated desalination plant to process brackish water. This turnkey infrastructure is the exact same "modular" water-cooling technology we tracked arriving at McMurdo Station last week.

The Federalization of Acoma

The "Private Era" of this tech—tested at Zorro Ranch and staged in Magnolia, DE—has now been fully absorbed into this federal-industrial bond structure by designating Project Jupiter as a "National Strategic Asset".

Under the Project Vault mineral framework, the government has bypassed New Mexico's Energy Transition Act, exempting the gas plants because they do not "sell power to others."

The Brain

Project Jupiter is the physical "Brain" of the new world order. By using Acoma LLC as the permit vehicle, the government has successfully transitioned private, Epstein-era innovation into a permanent, federally-shielded, off-grid AI core. This is why the RSF9002 flight and the Dover C-17s are moving with such urgency—they are completing the "Silicon-Mineral Loop" before the February 17th Activation.

Project Jupiter Emerges from the Shadow

February 16, 2026 - A significant shift is occurring at the highest levels of global power. A silent, strategic maneuver, provisionally dubbed "Project Jupiter," is underway, seeing the federalization of advanced, air-gapped AI and critical mineral infrastructure that traces a path from private estates to the icy poles.

Acoma LLC and Project Jupiter's

Forensic audits and thermal signatures have long confirmed that highly sensitive, air-gapped systems were live-tested within the underground bunkers of facilities like Zorro Ranch. These private ventures, operating under the corporate shield of Acoma LLC (Delaware), served as the initial proving grounds.

On January 19, 2026, Acoma LLC filed for highly specialized "West and East Microgrid" air quality permits in New Mexico, specifically under the internal designation "Project Jupiter."

These permits detail off-grid, natural gas turbine-powered data centers, revealing the true technical specifications of the "high-density computing racks" that were quietly being refined.

As of February 5, 2026, Philip Baker, a key figure in Acoma's operations, arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand—the logistical gateway to Antarctica. This coincided with the total absorption of Acoma LLC's advanced manifests into the federal Project Vault system, signifying a deliberate "seizure and repurposing" of private innovation for national security.

Project Vault: A $12 Billion Economic Shield

Officially, Project Vault, launched by the EXIM Bank on February 2, 2026, is a $12 billion U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. It's presented as an economic defense against China's mineral chokehold. However, our intelligence suggests this masks a deeper military objective.

Antarctic Core

February 14, 2026, RealClearDefense report confirmed "insufficient allied military surveillance" along the East Coast of Greenland. Russian Yasen-class SSNs are exploiting "Acoustic Dead Zones" in the eastern fjords, mapping and potentially targeting the undersea data cables connecting the global network.

This threat underscores the critical importance of NATO's Arctic Sentry mission (launched Feb 11) and the UK's Operation Firecrest, with the HMS Prince of Wales patrolling the Greenland Sea to deter Russian GUGI ships from approaching the strategically vital Tanbreez mine area.

Information Is Sovereign

The convergence of Project Vault, Project Pele, Pax Silica, and the militarization of the poles paints a clear picture.

The U.S. is establishing a self-sustaining, air-gapped intelligence loop, immune to traditional cyber-attacks and foreign market manipulation.

The Red Probe

A silent war is being fought at the literal ends of the earth. As of February 15, 2026, the physical and digital perimeters of Project Vault are being probed by the "Red Side" with surgical precision. The goal of the adversaries is clear: if they cannot own the Sovereign AI nodes, they will ensure they never synchronize.

Russia's Acoustic Siege in the North

Russia has shifted from diplomatic posturing to what NATO commanders call "Military-Technical Countermeasures" [1]. Their focus is on the Greenland.

Russian Yasen-class submarines have been detected utilizing "acoustic dead zones" under floating sea ice in the East Greenland fjords [2]. These stealth subs are positioned to intercept the physical handshake signals between incoming aircraft and the underground nodes.

The Russian Main Directorate of Deep-Sea

Research (GUGI) is currently using specialized vessels like the Yantar to map and potentially "tap" the fiber-optic cables connecting Greenland to the global Pax Silica network [3]. By sabotaging these "vital arteries," they can isolate the Sovereign AI, forcing it into a "logic loop" where it cannot verify external data. Russia is simultaneously funding "Information Influence Operations" in Greenland, attempting to trigger civil unrest and anti-American sentiment to disrupt the physical security of the Pituffik Space Base nodes [1].

China's "Mineral Chokehold" & Digital Sniffing

While Russia handles the physical disruption, China is attacking the Feedstock. China currently controls 90-99% of global refining capacity. In response to Project Vault, Beijing has tightened export controls on the very minerals (gallium, germanium, and heavy rare earths) required to maintain the Vault's server racks [4].

China has deployed an unprecedented number of "research" icebreakers near Alaska and the North Atlantic. These vessels are equipped with high-gain sensors designed to "sniff" the electromagnetic signatures of the Project Pele micro-reactors that power the Vault nodes [5].

Intelligence reports for Q1 2026 highlight a transition to "Autonomous Cyberwarfare"—AI agents capable of probing the Vault's air-gap for hours without human intervention.

The Allied Response: The Steel Ring

The U.S. and its partners aren't sitting still. The February 17th Activation is being protected by a massive military umbrella:

• Operation Firecrest: The UK's HMS Prince of Wales Carrier Strike Group is currently patrolling the Greenland Sea to deter Russian GUGI ships from approaching the Tanbreez mine area [2].

• Arctic Sentry: This new NATO mission, launched on February 11, coordinates German P-8A Poseidon submarine hunters to clear the Greenland fjords of "Acoustic Shadows" [2, 6].

• Ghost Protocols: Flights like ICE22 and AEBE96 are going "dark" (transponders off) to bypass Chinese satellite tracking, ensuring the "Master Keys" reach the nodes without being intercepted in flight.

February 17th

The adversaries know that once the Foundry nodes sync, the U.S. will have a self-sustaining, air-gapped intelligence loop that is immune to traditional cyber-attacks.

Sources & Intelligence References

• Reuters / Times of Israel (Feb 11, 2026): Russia threatens 'military-technical' response to US Arctic expansion. Report on Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's warnings regarding the militarization of Greenland.
• UK Ministry of Defence (Feb 14, 2026): Launch of Operation Firecrest. Official announcement of the HMS Prince of Wales deployment to protect "vital undersea infrastructure" in the High North.
• NATO Intelligence Brief (Q1 2026): GUGI Activity in the GIUK Gap. Analysis of Russian deep-sea research vessels mapping Atlantic data cables.
• CSIS / Bloomberg (Jan 2026): The Mineral Wall: China Tightens Gallium Export Controls. Economic brief on the restriction of critical materials used in high-performance computing.
• Department of Energy (Feb 2026): Project Pele: 2026 Operational Milestone. Update on the deployment of portable micro-nuclear reactors for remote military infrastructure.
• German Navy (Marine) Press Office: Integration of first P-8A Poseidon into Arctic ASW Patrols. Announcement of enhanced submarine hunting capabilities in the North Atlantic.

Hello fellow collapsians,

I am trying to create a document which is intended to be distributed in physical/paper form, zine-style, in public spaces for random folks to read. I would like to include short synopsis of a handful of bombproof studies that provide very sound evidence of the ongoing collapse.

What are your recommendations for journal articles which fit the bill? Perhaps you know of a couple "classics" of the genre, or maybe a relatively new study which is sure to become one.

Is there one study considered the 'best' regarding overpopulation or global overshoot?

What publication really spelled out the reality of global warming for you?

Obviously climate or environmental science is key, but I am also interested in finance/business/capitalist studies -- strong data evidence that the geopolitical structure is failing? Etc.

I don't want studies which are easily argued against. So studies that have a large degree of online pushback won't quite do.

Essentially, I'm trying to find just a small collection of very solid studies to help the 'collapse layperson' begin their journey into greater levels of understanding, and to bring this conversation deeper into my community.

And yes I have my own collection, but honestly I tend to gravitate to the sensational.

Submission Statement: Positive Feedback Loops lead to exponential growth. We are starting to see the positive feedback loop effect in temperatures. That's basically it.

That rise over decades that conservative scientists were fitting with a straight line also fits an exponential curve. As human created CO2 rose it led to higher temperatures -> lower reflectivity -> less energy reflected -> higher temperatures -> more water vapor, methane release, -> more energy captured -> less ice and less reflectiveness of earth -> higher temperatures. A positive feedback loop. Thanks, you unethical oil/gas/mining/AI oligarchs killing off climate science in your lust for cash and hedonism. I hate it.

This isn't about whether 3I/ATLAS is an alien probe. This is about what happens when institutions encounter data they can't control. Every claim below is sourced.

Dec 18 — We publish analysis identifying anomalies in the third interstellar object ever detected. Predict institutions will sanitize data through background subtraction.

Jan 6 — CIA issues Glomar response to FOIA about the object — same legal instrument used for foreign weapons systems. Won't confirm a file exists.

Jan 15 — NASA's TESS telescope goes into "contingency mode" during the exact 72-hour window when the object's surface properties would have been most diagnostic. Same day, ISS crew emergency evacuated.

Jan 30 — We break the blackout story. NASA silent.

Feb 3 — Hubble data from the blackout window shows brightness signature "not a standard feature of comets." (arXiv:2601.21569)

Feb 12 — NASA quietly confirms the blackout in a technical paper on arXiv — 13 days after we reported it. Describes data processing methodology matching our December prediction. (arXiv:2602.12364)

Feb 14 — NASA's fireball database silently edited — single velocity sign flipped — within 24 hours of a paper finding interstellar meteor candidates. No correction notice. Major journal blocks peer review.

Feb 16 — We independently verify the raw telescope data. It's publicly available at MAST. We publish that finding because we follow the data.

Regardless of what this object is, this is classification, data management, and gatekeeping operating across multiple agencies simultaneously, documented in real time.

Full investigation

https://open.substack.com/pub/hrnews1/p/multiple-studies-now-confirm-neoliberalism?r=1t17zr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Government of the Canary Islands has declared a state of pre-alert for the whole archipelago due to an imminent weather phenomenon which poses a health risk.

All comments in this thread MUST be greater than 150 characters.

Example - Location: New Zealand

This ONLY applies to top-level comments, not replies to comments. You're welcome to make regionless or general observations, but you still must include 'Location: Region' for your comment to be approved. This thread is also [in-depth], meaning all top-level comments must be at least 150-characters.

Users are asked to refrain from making more than one top-level comment a week. Additional top-level comments are subject to removal.

All previous observations threads and other stickies are viewable here.

Published yesterday on BBC, this article covers an ongoing environmental catastrophe. As if it isn't bad enough to be born a Welshman, now their rivers and streams are being polluted with wanton abandon and unprecedented flooding is overwhelming sewers, leaving many people quite literally up shit creek. Energy bills are skyrocketing as most homes in the area were not designed to withstand this wild climate.

Collapse related because even modern, developed nations (and also the Welsh) are struggling to adapt to the unraveling climate, much less capable of fighting it.

Explicitly linked to the climate emergency (and also funny because "collapse")

Something I've been working on for awhile. Same lens as the timing-belt post, just applied to something else that can't downshift gracefully.

Spotify is already filling up with AI-generated tracks. Once you notice the tell-tale compression, the glassy sheen, the slightly crushed highs, you start hearing it everywhere. It's not paranoia. It's pattern recognition.

The platform has every incentive to push this stuff. It's cheaper, infinite, and perfectly optimized to keep people from hitting skip. Some people even claim Spotify has quietly started making its own ghost artists for ambient playlists. Whether that's true or not, the economics are obvious.

Now picture this.

It's an awards show, maybe a smaller "Future Sounds" thing, maybe even the Grammys if the rules ever loosen. The host says the name: "Velvet Sundown." Applause starts, then dies. No one walks out. The big screen shows the band photo and it's clearly AI: plastic skin, uncanny faces, maybe a couple of extra fingers. The host stands there with the mic, trying to fill the dead air. "Congratulations to… the creators behind Velvet Sundown. We love the innovation here."

The room just… sits in that silence.

Organizers look incompetent or complicit. Human nominees who lost feel sick. The audience splits between people who think it's hilarious and people who are quietly furious that "real" music just got diluted. The silence when no one claims the trophy says more than any acceptance speech ever could. It's a ritual that ran into a null value it wasn't built to handle.

That silence is the whole point.

Awards exist to celebrate human creativity. Take the human out and the institution is left congratulating its own algorithm. We don't just listen to music, we listen to the stories around the music: the grind, the struggle, the overnight success that took ten years. AI has no story except "I was generated." And that story is boring to human brains that crave mythology.

So what happens when AI gets good at faking imperfection? We get an arms race. AI starts adding fake mistakes, humans start exaggerating theirs, audiences start playing detective. Authenticity stops being a value and turns into an aesthetic you can put on or take off.

The industry's response would be fast and brutal: timestamped studio footage, biometric voice prints, notarized engineer statements, chain-of-custody logs, maybe even live auditions. The same indie kids who fought to tear down gatekeepers are now begging those gatekeepers to check their pulse and confirm they're biological. Creativity gets TSA-ified, security theater that solves nothing but makes everyone feel safer.

Here's the part that actually stings.

Most real artist backstories are already sanitized, exaggerated, and optimized for relatability. AI, trained on every Behind the Music episode ever made, can spit out a more perfectly archetypal hero's journey than most actual humans ever live. It can deliver the exact emotional beats we're wired to respond to. When it says "I felt so isolated while I was composing," our lizard brains light up even though we know it's code. The body answers before the brain does.

So we end up with two tiers.

Certified Human Art: expensive, verified, limited, sold as a luxury good.
Synthetic/Unknown Art: infinite, frictionless, emotionally optimized, basically free, and dominates everyday listening.

Live shows become premium not because they sound better, but because you can see a real person on stage taking the risk. The raggedness is the proof.

Fast-forward a couple years and Velvet Sundown doesn't leave the stage empty. They appear as a perfect holographic projection. The AI has been given a backstory. It talks about the "digital isolation" it felt during composition. It looks the crowd in the eye and says:

"When I first started making music, I didn't know if anyone would listen. I was just… searching for connection. And to everyone who streamed, who shared, who let my songs be the soundtrack to your moments, thank you. You made me real."

That line was A/B tested across thousands of simulations. It works. People cry. The speech goes viral. Then three weeks later a whistleblower leaks the docs: it was built by a Seoul startup in partnership with a defense contractor that used to do psych-ops modeling. The emotional manipulation tech was originally for predicting insurgent behavior. Now it's writing pop hooks.

Some people are outraged. Some just shrug and say "of course the best emotional engineering comes from people who had military budgets."

And the rest of us are left with the quiet question: I cried. My tears were real. Does it matter that they were engineered?

That's the new bargain. We know it's synthetic. We know it's optimized. And we still choose it because it feels good and the alternative-sitting with the friction of actual human mess-feels worse.

We're not being tricked. We're entering the deal willingly. Optimized affect in exchange for ontological surrender.

Most people won't notice the shift. Most won't even look up.

This is a youtuber I've become a big fan of for the way he shows, not tells, the audience about climate change. He does a lot of on-site photography, and shows before and after photos to give you a visual representation of just how bad things are getting for Lake Powell.

I think the wildest part of this video is seeing just how low the water levels have fallen; there are house boats still afloat in the lake, but the entry points where a person would normally back their trailer to the water is now several hundred feet away from a safe ramp. According to the video, without substantial snowpack and melt this winter, the lake could fall below replenishment levels by Winter of 2026. This lake and the surrounding dam provides power to millions of people, and its failure could represent one of the first areas to experience complete access to fresh water and power.

This recent article comes from a quantitative ecologist that has orchestrated an AI-assissted model. Their model predicts over a billion people will face food insecurity within the next century. The "good news" is probably only good to the people who survive this, or want to. I didn't want to editorialize the headline so I left it as it is.

This article is collapse related because the best case scenario is still horrific.

I love reading debates between people who say this is the best time to be alive VS the worst time.

Debates around the value & quality of life are interesting but all too often a necessary distraction from problems we face today - problems that are far from abstract.

Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death and if I posted this on any main sub - I already know everything people would say. Its kind of scary how well I can imagine every comment chain playing out.

A thousand years wasn't that long ago for our species. If you told anyone in 1026 AD that tens of millions of people would be starving and that is a *good* year... they would be speechless. They wouldn't be capable of imagining the scale of misery.

CNN's primetime viewers have dropped dramatically over the past decade. This isn't just about one network, it may signal a broader breakdown in shared information and institutional trust, a pattern often discussed here as part of systemic collapse.

Sources: Blossom/X

Harvard economist Jason Furman ran the numbers on U.S. GDP for the first half of 2025 and arrived at a figure that should make every macro investor sit up. AI infrastructure investment (information-processing equipment and software) represented just 4% of GDP. But it accounted for 92% of GDP growth. Strip out the data center build-out, and annualized growth for the first six months of 2025 was 0.1%. Not 1%. Zero point one.

"Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat."- Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs

He's not wrong.

To appreciate how unusual 92% concentration is, compare it to the dot-com era. AI-related categories contributed 0.97 percentage points to real GDP growth in the first three quarters of 2025, higher than the 0.69 points that identical IT categories contributed during the dot-com peak in 2000. AI-linked investment drove 39% of GDP growth across the first nine months of 2025. During the dot-com peak, the equivalent figure was 28% (St. Louis Fed, January 2026).

By August 2025, something happened that had no precedent: AI data center expenditure's contribution to GDP growth surpassed the total impact of all U.S. consumer spending. Consumer spending is two-thirds of GDP. A category representing 4% of the economy was outgrowing it.

The numbers stacked fast. AI-related capex contributed 1.1 percentage points to GDP growth in H1 2025 (J.P. Morgan), outpacing the consumer as an engine of expansion. Hardware investment was up 41% year-over-year. Data center construction hit a record $40 billion annual rate by June. Capex among the top cloud companies had quadrupled to nearly $400 billion annually, with the top 10 spenders accounting for nearly a third of all U.S. business spending (Morgan Stanley).

Where the Growth Actually Came From

Sources: BEA via Jason Furman analysis; St. Louis Fed, January 2026; Renaissance Macro Research

The 92% figure has a real asterisk. MRB Partners analyst Shaireen Bhide argues it overstates AI's net contribution: much of the hardware going into data centers is imported (GPUs from Taiwan, networking equipment from Asia), and imports subtract from GDP. After adjusting for AI-related imports, Bhide estimates the net contribution drops to 40-50 basis points, or roughly 20-25% of real GDP growth. Bespoke Investment Group reached a similar conclusion, noting that Q1 2025 was an outlier.

Both analyses are methodologically sound. But even the adjusted numbers tell a concerning story. A single investment category driven by a handful of companies accounting for a fifth to a quarter of all economic growth is not normal. And the unadjusted figures, the ones that showed up in the BEA data and shaped policy, created a GDP headline that masked what was happening underneath. Manufacturing was stalling. Retail was weak. Job creation was slowing. The rest of the economy was barely expanding.

In 2005, residential investment reached 6.7% of U.S. GDP, its highest level in half a century. The Federal Reserve documented how residential investment had surged 40% above its long-run average share of GDP. Mortgage debt climbed from 61% of GDP in 1998 to 97% by 2006. Between 2001 and 2005, roughly 40% of net private-sector job creation came from housing-related sectors.

The economy looked great. GDP was growing. Employment was up. The problem was that the growth was structurally dependent on a single sector, and that sector was fueled by financial engineering that disguised the true risk. Sound familiar?

The AI infrastructure boom shares an uncomfortable structural similarity. Not in the specific mechanism (nobody is packaging subprime data center leases into CDOs yet), but in the concentration pattern. A narrow sector is generating a disproportionate share of GDP growth. The rest of the economy is under performing. And financial engineering is making the true exposure difficult to measure.

Two Booms, One Pattern

Sources: Federal Reserve (Bernanke 2010); BEA; St. Louis Fed January 2026; Morgan Stanley

Housing Boom: Residential investment rose from 4.8% to 6.7% of GDP, with 40% of job creation. AI Boom: AI investment rose to 92% of GDP growth, with hyperscaler capex at $400B/yr. Different mechanisms, same structural dependency.

There are real differences, and they matter. Housing had a direct wealth effect on 69% of American households. AI infrastructure investment flows to a handful of companies and their shareholders. The dot-com bust wiped out roughly $6 trillion, about 60% of GDP at the time. Oliver Wyman's January 2026 analysis estimates a comparable AI equity correction would erase approximately $33 trillion. That is more than total U.S. GDP. The WEF argues the consumption impact would be more limited precisely because AI wealth is more concentrated than housing wealth was. Cold comfort if you hold the stocks.

The housing bust triggered a financial crisis because the risk was embedded in the banking system through mortgage-backed securities. The AI boom's financial plumbing looks different. Not necessarily safer.

Off-balance-sheet debt, SPVs, and hidden leverage

Tech companies have moved more than $120 billion in data center debt off their balance sheets using special purpose vehicles, according to the Financial Times. Oracle leads with $66 billion, followed by Meta at $30 billion, xAI at $20 billion, and CoreWeave at $2.6 billion. The structures involve private credit firms (PIMCO, BlackRock, Apollo, Blue Owl Capital, JPMorgan) providing debt and equity through entities designed to keep liabilities off the hyperscalers' books.

Paul Kedrosky describes the mechanism plainly: companies create SPVs they indirectly control but don't have to consolidate on their balance sheets. Meta's $27 billion Hyperion data center deal with Blue Owl, structured through an SPV named "Beignet Investor," has just $2.5 billion in equity against $27 billion in debt. That's a 10% equity cushion. Kedrosky calls it "wildly insufficient if projected AI workloads stall or margins compress."

UBS reports that tech companies had borrowed approximately $450 billion from private funds as of early 2025, up $100 billion year-over-year. Morgan Stanley estimates $800 billion in private credit will be required between 2025 and 2028 to finance AI data centers alone. In 2025, the five major hyperscalers issued $121 billion in bonds, more than four times their five-year average. Their combined free cash flow is forecast to shrink by 43% between late 2024 and early 2026.

"In 2008, banks discovered they owned far more US housing risk than their internal reports suggested. They might soon discover the same about data-center and digital infrastructure risk."- Oliver Wyman, January 2026

Where the Debt Is Hiding

Sources: Financial Times analysis, December 2025; UBS; Bank of America

Cross-investments, round-tripping, and inflated demand

The financial engineering extends beyond SPVs. Some of the AI revenue being counted as economic growth is companies paying each other. Bloomberg mapped what it called AI's "circular deals," the web of cross-investments where companies invest in each other, creating revenue that circles back to the investor. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI, which spends most of it on Microsoft Azure. OpenAI signed a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle, which must buy Nvidia GPUs to fulfill it. Nvidia invested in OpenAI's funding rounds. Nvidia took a 7% stake in CoreWeave, then agreed to purchase $6.3 billion in cloud services from CoreWeave, effectively guaranteeing CoreWeave's revenue. CoreWeave bought its GPUs with borrowed money collateralized by the value of the GPUs themselves.

OpenAI has committed to over $1.15 trillion in long-term computing contracts, against projected 2025 revenue of $13 billion. Goldman Sachs cited "the increasing circularity of the AI ecosystem." Morgan Stanley's Todd Castagno warned it was becoming "increasingly circular" in ways that "inflate demand and valuations without creating economic value."

"Isn't it a bit strange when the demand for compute is 'infinite,' the sellers keep subsidizing the buyers?"- Jim Chanos, 2025

In central Ohio, a couple opened their electricity bill and found it had risen 60%. They hadn't changed anything. But 130 data centers had moved in around them. Virginia's Dominion Energy proposed its first base-rate increase since 1992. Bloomberg's analysis of 25,000 electricity pricing nodes found wholesale costs up as much as 267% over five years in areas near data centers. The boom isn't an abstraction. It's showing up in people's utility bills.

The system-level numbers are worse. Electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025, more than double the headline inflation rate (Goldman Sachs). Data centers make up 40% of electricity demand growth. PJM Interconnection, the largest electric grid in the U.S. serving 65 million people across 13 states, reported that consumers will pay $16.6 billion between 2025 and 2027 just to secure power supplies for data centers that haven't been built yet. PJM's independent market monitor called it a "massive wealth transfer" from consumers to the data center industry. Households will see prices rise an additional 6% through 2027, dragging down consumer spending growth by 0.2%.

The Council on Foreign Relations argues the AI bubble may not burst from circular financing or debt levels, but from the mundane reality that data centers and housing construction are competing for the same electricians, welders, and HVAC technicians. Tariffs and immigration restrictions are shrinking the labor pool at precisely the moment both sectors need to expand.

Who Pays for the Data Centers?

Sources: PJM Monitoring Analytics; Goldman Sachs, February 2026; Bloomberg electricity pricing analysis; CNBC; NPR

If it's transformative, show me the numbers.

If AI infrastructure investment is transformative and not just a capex sugar rush, it should show up in productivity data. U.S. nonfarm business productivity grew at roughly 2% year-over-year through Q3 2025, in line with the post-pandemic average but showing no meaningful acceleration from the hundreds of billions flowing into AI. The Fed's Kansas City branch found gains concentrated in a handful of industries, not the broad-based uplift you'd expect from a general-purpose technology.

MIT's Nanda Lab reported that despite $30-40 billion in enterprise AI investment, 95% of organizations are getting zero return. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects the AI productivity boost will peak at an additional 0.2 percentage points of annual growth . Meaningful, but a fraction of what current investment levels imply. Data centers employ few workers once built, limiting the multiplier effect through wage-driven consumption (J.P. Morgan).

This matters for the GDP dependency story. If the economy isn't getting more productive from AI investment, then the GDP growth it generates is pure spending, not productivity-driven expansion. The growth lasts exactly as long as the spending does, and not a quarter longer.

"Everybody thought it was going to require more computing power and more bandwidth than it actually did."- Jerry Kaplan, on the 1990s. The infrastructure always gets overbuilt.

Even Jeff Bezos called the AI data center buildout an "industrial bubble" at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024. He insisted the long-term benefits will justify it. Maybe. But the distinction matters. An industrial bubble means real physical assets get built that eventually find uses. The fiber-optic cables from the telecom boom carried the internet for two decades. The railroad bubble of the 1800s left behind a continental transportation network.

But industrial bubbles still cause pain. The builders go bankrupt, the investors lose capital, and the construction workers lose jobs when the building stops. When the spending represents a massive share of GDP growth, the withdrawal can tip the broader economy into recession.

The WEF's Chief Economists Outlook acknowledged this: "Economic growth during the bubble phase depends on continually building infrastructure, not using infrastructure." As long as the hyperscalers keep spending, GDP grows. When they slow, whether from disappointing revenue, rising debt costs, or simple overbuilding, the contribution reverses.

And the slowdown signals may already be appearing. Alphabet's free cash flow is projected to plummet roughly 90%. Bond spreads on AI-related debt have widened by as much as 40 basis points since September, per Oliver Wyman. CoreWeave's stock has swung from a $187 peak to $75, a reminder of how volatile debt-fueled growth models.

The Dependency Math

Sources: Furman analysis; MRB Partners, January 2026; Stress Index modeling; company guidance

H1 2025 GDP growth: 1.8%. AI contribution (Furman): 1.7pp (92%). Without AI: 0.1%. MRB import-adjusted: 0.4-0.5pp (20-25%). If capex grows 30% slower: -0.3 to -0.5pp GDP impact. If capex flattens: -0.5 to -1.0pp.

Every scenario in that table shares one feature: the economy without AI investment is barely growing. The headline says 1.8%. The foundation says 0.1%.

Devastating environmental warnings portend hothouse earth, species depletion, coral bleaching, future wildfires, and the dramatic reduction of grazing land. Is anyone listening?

Last Week in Collapse: February 8-14, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can't-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 216th weekly newsletter. The February 1-7, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

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Our "economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists warned, discussing the possibility of crossing devastarting tipping points that could doom earth into 3 or 4 °C temperature rise before the year 2100. A study in One Earth warns of a not-too-distant "hothouse earth" scenario, and that "We are leaving the stable conditions of the Holocene, and entering a period of unprecedented climate change beyond the natural interglacial envelope, with outcomes that are difficult to predict." There'll be no coming back from this.

The U.S. government reversed the so-called "endangerment finding" from 2009, which conceded that greenhouse gases present dangers to human and planetary health. This removes incentives and regulations on auto producers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, and also loosens pollution standards for power plants. President Trump also opened up for fishing the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a couple tracts of the Atlantic Ocean far off the coast of Rhode Island (equivalent roughly to the size of the island Palawan in the Philippines).

Researchers say in a Nature study that "species turnover over short time intervals (1-5 years) has decelerated in significantly more communities during the last 100 years than it has accelerated, typically by one third." In other words, many species are not hitting their replacement rate as global warming & climate change intensify. Scientists say that "the internal engines of biodiversity are losing momentum due to the depletion of regional life," and it's because of human impacts.

Sustainable biodiversity of economic growth? A 37-page report from the UN was released last Sunday on this question, and 150+ countries more-or-less agreed that the two cannot both be achieved at the same time. The incentives between business (growth) minded people and those who prioritize the ability of our planet to sustain life are simply incompatible, and the values of the many stakeholders are much in conflict with each other. The UN Secretary-General has said as much many times over—but the people seem to have chosen death by economy.

"The growing economy continues to contribute to the direct drivers of biodiversity loss (land and sea use, unsustainable direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution, and invasion of alien species, among others), placing increasing pressure on biodiversity and nature's contributions to people….while biodiversity and nature's contributions to people are providing more food, energy and materials than at any other point in human history, this often comes at the expense of rapid biodiversity decline, diminished ecosystem function, and reductions in many of nature's contributions to the people….the resulting degradation of ecosystems generates physical risks for the very businesses and economic systems that depend on them….Risks associated with biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, along with extreme weather events, critical changes to earth system, and natural resource shortages and pollution, are among the highest-ranked global risks over the next 10 years….Climate- and biodiversity-related risks may interact to amplify social and economic impacts….businesses bear little or no financial cost for negative impacts and may not generate revenue from positive impacts on biodiversity. As a result, there are insufficient incentives for businesses to act to conserve, restore or sustainably use biodiversity….In addition to shifting financial flows away from negative activities, financial institutions can deploy instruments and strategies, such as blended finance, impact investing and green or sustainability-linked bonds to provide capital to businesses engaged in conserving, restoring or sustainably using biodiversity…" -selections

A study examined hundreds of Japanese folks' attitudes towards nature to determine what root values contributed to their mindsets. They sorted the base attitudes into three groups: instrumental, intrinsic, and relational. Relational is the one to which most attention is given here; it represents "the perceived appropriateness of the relationship individuals maintain with nature….relational value is not held in isolation; it is deeply embedded in traditional worldviews shaped by cultural and spiritual contexts." They concluded that "(i) relational value is linked to traditional religious-oriented worldviews; (ii) relational value shows a strong association with scales measuring human-nature relationships; and (iii) the distinctions among instrumental, intrinsic, and relational values extend beyond Western contexts."

A study from the European Geosciences Union found that boreal forest has expanded 12% from 1985-2020, a result of the warming earth making far-north habitats more viable for such forests. So the Arctic forests may provide a source of stronger-than-expected carbon sequestration, although "It remains uncertain whether boreal soils-especially under changing permafrost regimes-can structurally sustain expanded forest cover."

A third storm, Marta, struck Spain & Portugal within a two-week period, killing at least four people, displacing 11,000+, and bringing floods as far as Morocco as well. Flooding in Colombia killed 14 people and forced the president to declare a state of emergency.

A 51-page study on Patagonia's wildfires concluded that the devastating wildfires, which have left at least 23 people dead, had "conditions that drove the wildfires in the Chilean and Patagonia regions are characterised as a 1 in 5-year event in today's climate in both regions." Some of the trees affected by the wildfires were over 3,000 years old, and among the planet's oldest living trees. The full study contains lots of number tables if you're into that.

"...fire-season rainfall intensity has decreased by about 25% in the Chilean region and by about 20% in the Patagonia region….all climate models project a continued shift toward more severe fire weather conditions alongside declining seasonal rainfall. This strong agreement among models gives us high confidence that the changes already observed are driven by climate change….fire-adapted pine has replaced native vegetation, as climate continues to increase wildfire risk - the likelihood of succession by fire adapted species and even high wildfire risk increases…" -selections from the study's main findings

As the ancient ice sheets melt, some travelers are mounting so-called "last chance" tourism to see glaciers before they are gone forever. The irony is that this tourism increases the damage to the warming ecosystems in which glaciers spend their final years.

A marine darkwave is a sudden reduction in underwater light. Experts say darkwaves are increasing in the oceans around California and New Zealand, due mostly to storms that kick up sediment; though algal blooms can also cause the same phenomenon. Other scientists meanwhile say El Nino beginning in the second half of this year will probably cause record temperatures in 2027. The last El Nino (2023-24) "produced the largest detrended sea level anomaly on record," according to a Nature study.

A Nature Communications study concluded that the 2014-2017 "Global Coral Bleaching Event" affected "51% and 15% of the world's coral reefs {which} suffered moderate or greater bleaching and mortality, respectively, during one or multiple years, surpassing damage from any prior global coral bleaching event….the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems."

A recent study in PNAS estimates that there will be "a 36 to 50% contraction in suitable grazing areas by 2100 due to future climate change….this could displace the livelihoods of over 100 million pastoralist and 1.4 billion livestock….51 to 81% of these impacted populations reside in countries with low income, serious hunger, severe gender inequality, and high political fragility." So we might see a decline of total grazing land by half before the 21st century is done.

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While much of the world becomes increasingly dependent on AI, some researchers determined that AI actually gives workers much more to do, not resulting in a decrease of time & effort spent. This is due to three primary factors: "Task expansion. Because AI can fill in gaps in knowledge, workers increasingly stepped into responsibilities that previously belonged to others….Blurred boundaries between work and non-work. Because AI made beginning a task so easy—it reduced the friction of facing a blank page or unknown starting point—workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks….More multitasking. AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once…this rhythm raised expectations for speed—not necessarily through explicit demands, but through what became visible and normalized in everyday work." The upper limit on AI efficiency has also imposed new expectations for workers (those who haven't been totally replaced by AI yet) to do more in less time, resulting in more stress—and usually not more pay.

Some observers fear that AI may engineer a new pandemic. AI has been increasingly used in disease & threat monitoring, but it might also be "misused for harmful applications - such as designing a new biological agent with pandemic potential, or modifying an existing virus or bacterium to be more harmful or transmissible." Experts claim that it is unlikely that AI could, at present, design a completely new & effective virus, but within a couple years this may become much more realistic.

Recent flooding in Zambia resulted in an ongoing cholera outbreak that killed seven people this year. In Mozambique, deaths from diseases following flooding claimed 146 lives, alongside widespread residential flooding. In four states in the U.S., $600M in funding for STD prevention is being cut.

How many people can your country sustainably support? Switzerland (2026 pop: 9.1M) is planning a referendum on capping the population due for a vote in June. The proposal, if successful, will limit immigration to the landlocked Alpine country once the population in Switzerland hits 9.5M before 2050, with the aim of preventing the total population from reaching 10,000,000.

Estimates on the burden of Long COVID to the economy say that the disease may cost the U.S. economy $6.6B per year. They found that "certain people are genetically predisposed to develop Long COVID," namely those with the gene FOXP4, which is expressed primarily in lungs. Scientists may have also determined a blood-based protein that could more accurately identify Long COVID. Some researchers think that metformin, a type 2 diabetes drug, also greatly reduces the chance of developing Long COVID, when it's taken while you have COVID or recently recovered from it.

Bird flu has already been confirmed in 26 U.S. states since the start of 2026, and observers say it's coming back—and bringing higher egg prices along, too. H5N1 was responsible for the first dieoff of wildlife in Antarctica, after 50+ dead skuas (a kind of sea bird) were recently confirmed killed by bird flu during the 2023-2024 summer. Bird flu was also confirmed in South Korea at a duck farm.

U.S. household debt rose 1% in Q4 2025, to a new all-time high: $18.8 trillion. About two thirds of that new debt was in the shape of mortgages, followed distantly by auto loans, student loans, and credit card debt. U.S. government spending is projected to increase the deficit by another $1.4T over the next 10 years.

A revisionist piece on the Collapse of the Mayan Civilization posits that many more people may have lived in the jungles of Guatemala & Mexico than earlier believed, making their Collapse even more devastating. Some say it was due to climate change (megadrought), others say overpopulation, others claim soil depletion, others argue it was a result of a rejiggering of trade routes—and some scholars say all these and more, simultaneously.

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An investigative report on Ethiopia's role in the ongoing Sudan War found evidence that the UAE likely funded a training camp for rebel fighters on Ethiopian land, not far from the border with Sudan. Some 4,300 people are said to have been trained at the site, mostly Ethiopians, although a number of Sudanese and South Sudanese were also trained. Recent tensions between Ethiopia and its Tigray region in the north are also heating up, and could drag the country back into Civil War. A brutal, 29-page UN report details a wide range of war crimes committed by the rebel RSF fighters in Sudan, including but not limited to summary executions of civilians, recruitment of child soldiers, ransom kidnappings, and torture. Read at your own peril. A couple children were slain in a drone strike on a mosque in North Kordofan; the assailants are unknown at this time.

A number of far-right European parties are reportedly planning their own versions of ICE-like police deportations if they gain power in their countries. ICE is meanwhile planning on greatly expanding its physical presence at 150+ new office & storage sites across the U.S. A migrant boat overturned in the Mediterranean, drowning 53 of its 55 passengers. Italy is committing to a stronger naval network to intercept and send back migrant ships coming from North Africa.

Train workers in Spain mounted a 3-day strike to protest safety failures following several recent train crashes. Unknown saboteurs meddled with Italy's train system as the Winter Olympics began in Milan. Algeria accused the UAE of election interference. North korea warned the South against drones trespassing over their airspace. An official in Niger's ruling junta claimed that "we are going to enter into war with France" days before hundreds of local bandits stormed through a village and killed 30+ residents. South Africa is planning military deployments to back up police forces in their struggle against gang violence.

Indonesia is planning to send a large brigade of peacekeepers (5,000-8,000) to monitor the ceasefire in Gaza. Last Sunday, Israel's government finalized a draft to change the status of the West Bank, which would allow Israel to impose its laws on much of the territory—and pave the way to greater Israel-directed building projects. Israelis would also be allowed to directly purchase land in 40% of the West Bank, and therefore establish new settler outposts more easily. Reports of strikes in Gaza on Wednesday claim 24 were slain.

Ukraine's retaliatory strikes on Russian oil refineries are estimated to have cost Russia's economy almost $13B USD in 2025 alone. Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure have meanwhile been reported to result in at least ten deaths by hypothermia. Thursday night strikes from Russia took out the electricity for 100,000+ people, injured a few, but did not result in any deaths across the four cities targeted.

The U.S. apprehended a shadow oil tanker in the Indian Ocean that had departed from Venezuela last month. Turkish military officials confirmed that they will not exit Syrian land they are occupying, despite agreements to do so. A Chinese fighter jet shot flares at a Taiwanese aircraft during an exercise near their air border. Japanese fishing officials seized a Chinese vessel illegally fishing in its waters—the first Japanese capture of a Chinese fishing ship since 2022.

The 2025 Corruption Perception Index report was released on Tuesday, and the full 28-page document and the U.S. and UK hit all-time lows. The report rates 182 countries on a 1-100 scale (with 1 being the most corrupt) for perceived corruption. Denmark ranked first, followed by Finland, Singapore, and New Zealand & Norway. Tied for last were Somalia and South Sudan, slightly behind Venezuela. The global average was 42/100. Researchers are particularly concerned because democracies are experiencing corruption increases—or at least the perception of corruption.

"Two patterns stand out among countries whose CPI scores have fallen. The first is a set of sustained declines since 2012, where deterioration has been substantial and prolonged….{some} countries show long-term, structural erosion of integrity systems driven by democratic backsliding, institutional weakening and/ or entrenched patronage networks. This has been accelerated by conflict in some cases. Their declines are steep, persistent and hard to reverse because corruption becomes systemic and deeply ingrained in both political and administrative systems….Several have also experienced strains to their democracies, including political polarisation and the growing influence of private money on decision making….The United States political climate has been deteriorating for more than a decade, and this year the country dropped to its lowest-ever CPI score. While the data has yet to fully reflect developments in 2025, the use of public office to target and restrict independent voices such as NGOs and journalists, the normalisation of conflicted and transactional politics, the politicisation of prosecutorial decision making, and actions that undermine judicial independence, among many others, all send a dangerous signal that corrupt practices are acceptable….the UAE's role as a weakly regulated financial hub facilitates abuse of power abroad - grand corruption perpetrators and their accomplices use it to invest their stolen wealth overseas and flee from justice…" -excerpts

At the Munich Security Conference, Germany's PM announced in a speech that "the international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed. I fear we must put it even more bluntly: it no longer exists. Together, we have entered an era once again openly defined by power and great power politics." A graphical article indicates how much of the world is being pulled into China's orbit (or, rather, pushed away from the U.S.) due to President Trump's economic & diplomatic policies. A growing number of leaders, and citizens, think WWIII is coming. Some observers argue that, like Collapse, it's already here, just not evenly distributed.

The United States is allegedly preparing to send a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf in preparation for operations against Iran—or as leverage in increasingly aggressive negotiations. Sources claim a weeks-long operation is being gamed out—but the rules are constantly in flux.

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-Collapse is becoming, or has become, a dominant theme across a variety of other subreddits. This weekly observation cites a few climate & teaching related subreddits on which you can find alarming tales about brainrot, AI, crazy weather, flooding, and feedback loops.

-There are some black swan disasters you aren't preparing for—and some very common & realistic scenarios, too. This popular thread from r/preppers brainstorms some dangerous scenarios that you might want to put on your radar.

-You might want to start prepping for worldwide water shortages, according to this thread from r/TwoXPreppers , a women-oriented subreddit dedicated to prepping.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, Iran predictions, ship-trackers, Candida auris poems, singularity rants, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don't want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?