Pretty self-explanitory. We have the advantage of knowing the end station for our dear, beloved economic system is very near. Like, probably before 2030, the economy will totally collapse, primarily due to AI-automation. The US alone has $18.8 TRILLION dollars (thats $18,800,000,000,000 dollars) in personal debt, which is entirely reliant on people working. I wonder how our wonderful banking system will operate when it has almost $20 trillion dollars worth of debt that can never be paid back, as millions of white-collar workers are made redundant, and equally as many service-oriented, blue-collar jobs fall like a domino! Bye-bye economy!

At that point, if you have not converted the majority of your resources into real, tangible assets (such as food, water, tools, medicine, seeds, etc.), then you will have no chance of survival, frankly. Granted, it probably does not matter as Dario Amodei or Sam Altman will probably send autonomous drones to "clean up" the rabble once shit hits the fan, but you should still prepare because it is your only exit, even if the chances are admittedly slim.

I have liquidated all my savings and am currently slowly converting it into primarily food and tools. Saving for retirement? lol. I pay my rent, the rest is going into supplies. Aiming for about 2-4 years worth of supplies. You should do the same, even though it is scary. But evil is scary.

Its time to start preparing accordingly.

Beginner beekeeper (less than a month's experience) . Southern Sweden.

A few days ago I made this post about possible EFB in one of my hives. Yesterday an inspector came by and agreed something was wrong, though he couldn't confirm what exactly. He suspects EFB but also raised the possibility of a failing or old queen. The queen is marked 2025 but there's a real chance the seller only marked her recently before selling. Apparently the guy I bought from has a very bad reputation among other local beekeepers, something I did not know before purchasing from him. The inspector advised leaving the hives alone while he sends a comb sample for lab analysis, which will probably take 1-2 weeks.

While waiting for results, I'm now dealing with two related concerns. First, the colony seems to be getting close to swarming. It's looking quite full inside, though activity at the entrance is still quite low, even compared to a few weeks ago when the weather was atrocious. Also, we're probably talking about 1-2 frames of capped brood total, maybe 3 if we are being very generous. Second, the hive doesn't have much food. For a single brood box, stores are minimal despite good weather and me feeding them 1.5L of 1:1 sugar water about 2 weeks ago. Now that temperatures are good (22-25°C daily) I expected foraging to pick up, but the frames look more or less the same as they did a few weeks ago.

So I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to add a second brood box and new frames only to discard everything if EFB is confirmed, but I'm also worried that letting them swarm will leave an already weak colony in an even worse state. And feeding in June seems frankly insane, though if the hive is sick I suppose that changes things.

Appreciate any advice from people who've dealt with EFB or similar situations.

Summary at the bottom.

Preamble rant

For a while now, the concept of AI creating a demand constrained economy as people lose purchasing power due to layoffs, has been a "mainstream" talking point. I have lurked discussions surrounding AI and its economical implications without creating my own account to contribute, and I can say that as late as the beginning of this year the concept was simply not talked about. For those unfamiliar, the concept is essentially:

AI layoffs --> people are without jobs --> people spend less (consumption drops) --> companies generate less revenue --> companies are forced to save more money --> more layoffs --> people are without jobs --> etc.

Basically, its a death spiral that will completely torch the economy. Super dumb counter-arguments to this point frequently bring up dumb shit like "post scarcity" and "abundance", completely forgetting that people dont give a fuck that they can get bespoke software for pennies if they are simultaneously starving to death. They (conveniently) forget that scarce resources, such as arable land, is physically limited; there is no super-promt to have claude produce infinite farmland (sorry r/accelerate!)

The point of the post

I realized the other day that the above scenario is just part of the problem. I dont see anyone talking about the issue of debt and white-collar layoffs. We (as in the developed world) are insanely indebted. Mortgages, cars, student loans, credit cards: the list of our personal debt runs wild. In fact, our entire global banking system is predicated on debt, and people paying their debt. Without people paying their debt, the banking system, and in turn the economy, collapses. We have seen it before (shoutout 2008). I was not old enough to meaningfully remember the economical implications of 2008, but I do know that it brought our global economy to its knees. And the worst part: THAT WAS ONLY MORTGAGES. Can you imagine what happens when hundreds of millions of well-paid, white collar workers lose their jobs to AI? We are talking about TRILLIONS in debt that stands ZERO chance at being paid.

To me, this is probably even scarier that the demand death-spiral that I talked about in the beginning. Theoretically, you could somewhat mitigate a catastrophic collapse in demand by a number of actions. And in emergency situations, the state could just hand out resources directly to the people, sort of circumventing the requirement for demand. But if people can not pay their debt then the banks collapse, and if the banks collapse then we are talking about basically the economy of every single developed country in the world collapsing. If the demand drop is apocalyptic, then the issue of unpayable debt is it's mother.

TL;DR

While a drop in demand due to AI layoffs is a systemic risk to our economic system, the subsequent inability of the middle class to ever pay back their debt, for the same reason, is a guaranteed collapse waiting to happen. Such a collapse will not only collapse the economy, but it will bring basically all developed nations to the brink of, if not to, collapse due to insanely heavy reliance on debt to finance the state's operation.

PS: I cant help but feel immensely sad we, as a species, are letting a handful of satanic soon-to-be trillionaires collapse the entire economy because they want to be techno-feudal gods. Billions of people will die in the next 10-15 years as a result of starvation as the economy collapses and supply lines disappear. If you are not religious, now would be the time to find some sort of spirituality to make peace with the fact that you will likely not live to see 2040. What a disgraceful, evil end.

Hello! 2 hives, southern Sweden, zone 2.

this is my first year beekeeping and I have just started to dig into varroa. The problem that I run into is that I can not find one consensus opinion regarding how often you should check for varroa, and how you should treat for it while bees are still producing honey.

Right now, my plan is to put down a varroa tray once a month, let sit for 3-4 days, and analyze how many mites have fallen down. From my understanding, this gives a rough estimate fairly easily at the cost of accuracy. If that control yields a high mite count, my plan is to sugar roll test to determine if treatment is needed.

The problem that I run into is when and what treatment are doable during the season. I find plenty of resources for treatment after last harvest, but I can not find anything about treatment during season. The resources that I have found say that treatment while you have honey supers on should be avoided as it can cause the honey to degrade or possibly turn mildly poisonous. Obviously, the problem then becomes: why even check for varroa during season if you cant treat for it? Is it just to check how dire the situation is?

This varroa business I've found particularily confusing as a new beekeeper. I also dont have any of the specialty equipment that people often talk about or recommend off-handedly, such as drone frames, meaning that a lot of advice is just not applicable.

Any help in shedding some light on how to approach this is much appriciated!