Krystal Ball

Now, there is one for the empire's perspective.

There is an offsetting sort of dynamic here, which is that while you're getting screwed at the pump, you know, the oil producers are making money hand over fist.

And since you have, you know, the Middle Eastern sources of oil greatly reduced.

Right.

People are coming to, you know, to buy American oil in droves, like the amount of exports of American oil are skyrocketing.

So that doesn't help you.

But in terms of those oil executives and shareholders and in a certain sense, in terms of the interests of the empire, where then we have control over a larger share of the pie, the overall pie has been reduced.

But what remains, we have larger control over that share of the pie.

There is somewhat of an empire benefit here.

The problem is, though, that if you go beyond that energy control, I mean, there's a bunch of problems.

Number one, what the bet, if you're thinking in that direction, the bet is basically that the rest of the world will suffer more than us.

That doesn't mean we don't suffer, right?

That means we still suffer a lot, just less than the rest of the world.

So maybe that helps us hold on to our hegemony.

But I think that is a really flawed way of thinking about things when you consider how vulnerable we are because of how little we make here, how few of like critical supply lines we've been able to take control over.

Energy is just one resource of many.

that are required even just to, you know, requip ourselves from a defensive or war footing perspective.

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