The way the world economy is manipulated by world leaders is a little like a giant video game. The object of the game is to keep the world economy growing, without too many adverse consequences to particular members of the world economy. We represent this need for growth of the world economy as being similar to making a jet airplane fly at ever-higher altitudes.
Figure 1. Author’s view of the situation we are facing. World leaders look at their video screens and adjust their controllers to try to make the world economy fly at ever-higher levels.
World leaders look at their video game screens for indications regarding where the world economy is now. They also want to see whether there are specific parts of the economy that are doing badly.
The game controllers that the world leaders have are somewhat limited in the functions they can perform. Typical adjustments they can make include the following:
- Add or remove government programs aimed at providing jobs for would-be workers
- Add or remove government sponsored pension plans and payments to those without jobs
- Add or remove laws regulating efficiencies of new vehicles
- Change who or what is taxed, and the overall level of taxation
- Through the above mechanisms, change government debt levels
- Change interest rates
There are numerous problems with this approach. For one thing, the video game screen doesn’t give a very complete picture of what is happening. For another, the aspects of the economy that can be controlled are rather limited. Furthermore, the situation is very complex–there seem to be several “sides” of the economy that need to “win” at the same time, for the economy to continue to grow: (a) oil importers and oil exporters, (b) businesses and their would-be customers, (c) governments and their would-be taxpayers, and (d) asset holders and the would-be buyers of these assets, such as families needing new homes.
An even bigger problem is a physics problem that is hidden from the view of those operating the control mechanism. Jet airplanes in the real world cannot rise beyond a certain altitude (varying depending upon the plane), because the atmosphere becomes “too thin.” There is a parallel problem in the economic world. The atmosphere that allows an economy to grow is provided by a combination of (a) an increasing supply of cheap-to-produce energy, and (b) increased technology to put this growing energy supply to use. This atmosphere can become too thin for several reasons, including the higher cost of energy production, rising population, and growing wage disparity.
We know that in the real world, a jet airplane cannot rise ever-higher. Instead, at some point, the airplane hits what has been called its “coffin corner.”
Figure 2. Diagram of Coffin Corner by Aleks Udris of Boldmethod. On the chart, Vs is the velocity; MMO is the Maximum Mach Number.
According to Aleks Udris, “The region is deadly. Get too slow, and you’ll stall the jet at high altitude. Get too fast, and you’ll exceed your critical mach number. The air over your wings will go supersonic, you’ll pitch down, the aircraft will accelerate, and your wings will fall off. Also bad.”
What Happens As Coffin Corner Limits Are Reached in the Economic World?
What do world leaders do, as the world economy hits limits? One temptation is for the world leaders in Figure 1 to take their foot off the throttle that is operated by low interest rates and more debt, because they don’t seem to be providing very much benefit anymore. The leaders fear that if more debt is added at low interest rates, it risks creating “asset bubbles” that are easily disturbed if any little bump to the economy occurs. If a big bubble pops, there is a significant risk that the economy could fall down to a much lower level. This is like stalling the jet at high altitude.
World leaders can also use approaches that create situations more like “making the wings come off” the economy. These approaches involve favoring one group over another. For example, a government can give big tax breaks to businesses, but raise taxes on individual citizens. Businesses will ultimately be harmed by this approach, because they depend on individual citizens for their sales. The result is like tearing the wings off the airplane.
Another approach that would tear the wings off the economy involves actions by a different group of world leaders than those shown in Figure 1, namely the leaders from OPEC and Russia. These leaders have different video game screens and different game controllers. They can manipulate the world economy by reducing the supply of oil they provide. With this approach, they hope to increase the price of oil, and thus obtain a larger share of the world’s goods and services through higher tax revenue.
Raising the oil price would benefit oil exporters, but would make goods and services more expensive for oil importing countries. Ultimately, this approach would lead to recession in oil importing nations. The result would likely be worse than the 2008-2009 recession–another way to make the wings come off the economy.
Let’s look in a little more detail at what is happening, and what goes wrong:
[1] Energy plays a huge role in this game, because a growing supply of cheap-to-produce energy allows greater worker productivity.
It takes energy of various types to make the economy grow, because energy is needed whenever we move something, or heat something, or use electricity to operate something. We use energy products to leverage our human labor. For example, we use a truck to deliver a package, rather than walking and carrying the item in our hands. If fresh water is in short supply, we use energy to operate a desalination plant, and thus produce the fresh water we need.
It is generally workers who produce goods and services. If energy supply is inexpensive and readily available, it is easy for governments or businesses to create “tools” to make these workers more productive. These tools include such things as roads, vehicles, machines of all types, and even computers. If the quantity and capability of these tools are increasing, the labor of these workers is increasingly leveraged by the availability of these tools. This is what allows economic growth.
[2] The extent of world economic growth seems to depend primarily on how quickly total energy consumption is growing.
If we look at historical economic growth, we see that the rate of growth of energy consumption seems to play a major role.
Figure 3. World GDP growth compared to world energy consumption growth for selected time periods since 1820. World real GDP trends for 1975 to present are based on USDA real GDP data in 2010$ for 1975 and subsequent. (Estimated by author for 2015.) GDP estimates for prior to 1975 are based on Maddison project updates as of 2013. Growth in the use of energy products is based on a combination of data from Appendix A data from Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects together with BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015 for 1965 and subsequent.
The highest rates of world economic growth took place in the 1950-1965 period, and in the 1965-1975 period. These were both periods of very high growth in energy consumption. As we will see below, these were both periods when the price of oil was less than $20 per barrel, for almost the entire period.
If we look at economic growth over shorter periods, we also see a strong correlation between world economic growth and growth in energy consumption:
Figure 4. World growth in energy consumption vs. world GDP growth. Energy consumption from BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2017. World GDP is GDP in US 2010$, as compiled by World Bank.
[3] On Figure 4 (above), the widening gap between GDP growth and energy consumption since 2013 could either represent (a) Much greater efficiency in using energy or (b) A problem in measuring true economic growth.
We can see true efficiency improvements in the 1975-1985 and the 1985-1995 periods shown on Figure 3. These were the periods when the world was truly trying to “get away from oil,” after a spike of high prices in the 1970s. Governments around the world were encouraging new smaller cars; electricity generation was being changed from oil to nuclear; home heating was being changed from oil to natural gas or electricity. The new furnaces installed were much more efficient than the old ones. Thus, during this period, efficiency/technology improvements were aiding economic growth to a greater extent than usual.
Now, in the period since 2013, much of the “low hanging fruit” has already been picked. We may still be finding some technology gains, but it seems likely that at least part of the problem is an “economic growth counting problem.” GDP looks like it is growing, but it is really very hollow economic growth. Governments invest in projects of essentially no value, and their investment is counted as GDP. For example, they invest in unneeded roads, in apartments that citizens cannot really afford, in educational institutions that do not produce graduates with wages that are sufficiently high to pay for education’s high cost, and in high-priced medical cures that are unaffordable by 99% of the population. Are these things truly contributions to GDP?
We also find businesses that look like they are growing, but in fact are taking on increasing amounts of debt as they sell off assets. This is not a sustainable model! We encounter energy companies that claim to be doing “sort of” alright, but their profits are so low that they need to cut back on new investment, and they need to borrow in order to have funds to pay dividends to shareholders. There is something seriously wrong with this growth!
[4] The economic “atmosphere” becomes thinner and thinner, when oil prices rise above an inflation-adjusted price of $20 per barrel.
Back in the time period prior to 1973, oil prices were generally below $20 per barrel, in inflation adjusted terms. Since then, prices have tended to be above this level.
Figure 5. Historical oil prices are Brent oil prices in 2016$ from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2017; $20 per barrel is the maximum price level where oil is truly affordable; and $300 per barrel is the maximum price per barrel that the International Energy Agency seems to believe is possible for the world economy.
When oil (and other energy prices) were very low, companies could add tools to make workers more effective with little expenditure. As a result, the United States saw wages growing much more rapidly than inflation prior to 1968 (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Chart comparing income gains by the top 10% to income gains by the bottom 90% by economist Emmanuel Saez. Based on an analysis of IRS data, published in Forbes.
Once prices of oil started rising, prices of tools (broadly defined) rose. Governments and companies needed more debt to buy these tools. It became more of a burden to add capital goods of all kinds. Governments tried to raise GDP by adding debt, but to a significant extent they ended up with higher debt to GDP ratios rather than the rapid growth they were looking for (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Worldwide average inflation-adjusted annual growth rates in debt and GDP, for selected time periods. See post on debt for explanation of methodology.
The changes in the economy that allowed continued growth (more debt and more technology) tended to push the economy toward more wage disparity, in part because more technology required more training for some of the workers, but not for others. This allowed wages of the workers with special training to rise.
Furthermore, the need to repay debt with interest tended to funnel wealth toward the financial sector, and toward those within the economy who could afford to hold financial assets. These changes left less of the output of the economy for non-elite workers.
Economists never really understood what was happening. They had never thought through the important role that energy plays in the economy. Cheap energy is needed to create jobs. It is jobs, and the wages that those jobs pay, that tend to suffer when oil prices are too high (Figure 8). Thus, high-priced oil has a double impact on the economy:
- It makes goods of many kinds more expensive.
- It reduces job availability and wages.
Figure 8. Average wages in 2012$ compared to Brent oil price, also in 2012$. Average wages are total wages based on BEA data adjusted by the CPI-Urban, divided by total population. Thus, they reflect changes in the proportion of population employed as well as wage levels.
Logic would suggest that the economy cannot really operate on high-priced oil. Lower wages and higher prices do not peacefully coexist! We should expect high oil prices to be very unstable. Even if prices can reach a high level in response to a specific shortage or stimulus, we cannot expect these high prices to be maintained for a sustained period, without added stimulus. Unstable high prices are not likely to give rise to more oil production; they cannot be depended upon.
Economists have never understood this situation. Instead, they have made pronouncements that at some point in the future, they expect that oil would become scarce. Because of this scarcity, oil prices would rise. In their view, when oil prices rise, high-priced substitutes would suddenly become the best option available; somehow, the economy would become able to operate using these high-priced substitutes. (If energy products were not needed for labor productivity, this view might make some sense. In the real world, it does not.)
It never occurred to organizations such as the International Energy Association (IEA) that high oil prices might be a problem for the economy. The IEA has shown exhibits suggesting that oil prices could theoretically rise to $300 per barrel. Of course, at such an elevated price, there would be an almost unlimited amount of oil available to extract (Exhibit 9).
Figure 9. IEA Figure 1.4 from its World Energy Outlook 2015, showing how much oil can be produced at various price levels.
[5] The real enemies of continued economic growth are (a) diminishing returns with respect to oil and other energy production, (b) continued population growth, and (c) increasing wage and wealth disparity.
We seem to be playing a video game where the players don’t understand who the real enemies are.
Diminishing returns with respect to oil and other energy production have to do with the cost of energy extraction rising ever-higher, as more resources are extracted. There are a lot of resources that we can “see,” but that we cannot economically extract, unless prices rise to very high levels.
Figure 9. My version of the resource triangle for oil. Note that oil shale is not the same as tight oil, found in shale formations. Oil shale is kerogen that must be processed at very high temperatures in order to produce oil. This is rarely done, because of the high processing cost. Tight oil is not on this chart. Tight oil probably would be above “onshore heavy oil; oil sands.” It still would disappear, if oil prices permanently fell to $20 per barrel or less.
Continued population growth is a problem because it is really “energy per capita” that matters. Each individual needs food, transportation, and housing. All of these things take energy. Many years ago, when most of the workers were farmers, it was necessary to create ever-smaller farms, as population rose. This clearly would lead to lower food production per farmer, unless some sort of technological breakthrough was taking place at the same time. Today, we have a parallel issue.
Increasing wage disparity tends to be associated with the rising use of technology. When most labor is hand labor, workers truly do “pay each other’s wages.” All wages can be fairly equal. With increased technology, some workers have specialized training; others do not. Some workers are supervisors; others are laborers. Unless the overall output of the economy is rising very rapidly, non-elite workers find themselves increasingly unable to afford the output of the economy. It is this falling “demand” (really affordability) that tends to pull an economy downward.
[6] High oil prices can be temporarily tolerated by an economy, if interest rates are lowered to make this arrangement work.
Clearly, lower interest rates make capital goods of all kinds more affordable to both businesses and individual workers. If we look back at the period since 1981, we see a long period of falling interest rates, acting to stimulate the economy.
When oil prices exceeded $20 per barrel, the economy did not collapse immediately. In “normal” times, lowering interest rates was sufficient stimulus to keep the economy growing (Figure 4).
Figure 10. Ten-year treasuries through Nov. 17, 2017. Chart produced by FRED.
When there is a very big drop in oil prices (as in 2008, related to falling debt levels), then Quantitative Easing (QE) has been helpful (Figure 11). The US began its program of QE in late 2008, when oil prices were near their low point. There were three phases of the US’s QE. The US discontinued the third phase in late 2014, just as oil prices started to slide again.
Figure 11. Monthly Brent oil prices with dates of US beginning and ending QE.
[7] It is quite possible for a disconnect to occur between (a) the cost of oil extraction, and (b) the selling price of oil.
Oil that costs more than $20 per barrel is never very affordable by the economy. It really needs continual stimulus to keep prices at an elevated level. Once debt growth falls too low, the balance between the supply and demand for oil is settled in the direction of the amount of goods and services made with oil that non-elite workers can afford. Prices fall below the cost of production. This seems to be what has happened since 2014.
[8] In fact, since 2014, the selling prices of oil, natural gas, and coal have all fallen below the cost of extraction.
Figure 12. Price per ton of oil equivalent, based on comparative prices for oil, natural gas, and coal given in BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Not inflation adjusted.
It is popular to think that the reason why oil prices are too low is because of overproduction by the United States or Saudi Arabia. When a person stops to realize that essentially the same situation arises for all three fossil fuels, a person begins to understand that there likely is an affordability issue underlying the low prices for all three fuels. The affordability issue, of course, arises because energy supply is not rising quickly enough because (at over $20 per barrel), it is too expensive to be truly affordable. The “atmosphere is too thin” at today’s high cost of energy extraction.
9. Coal production seems to have “peaked” because at today’s low prices, few mines find the extraction of coal profitable.
It is popular in “Peak Oil” circles to believe as the economists do: oil and other energy prices can rise endlessly, because of growing “demand.” Economists have never stopped to think that at any given price, there is an affordability issue for customers. If prices drop too low, there is a profitability issue for those operating extraction facilities.
If we look at the situation with coal, we see a situation where peak production seems to have been reached because of low prices. China has closed down mines because falling prices have made mines that were previously profitable, unprofitable (Figure 13). Coal is the lowest-cost fuel; if it cannot be mined profitably, the world economy has a problem.
Figure 13. China’s energy production, based on data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2017.
In fact, it appears as though we have reached peak coal on a worldwide basis, as a result of low prices (Figure 14). It is hard to see any major production area that can grow substantially in the future, without much higher prices.
Figure 14. World coal production, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy Data. (For 1965-1980, consumption is substituted for production, because only consumption is given, and imports/exports are likely small.
[10] The world economy needs to be able to keep repaying debt with interest. If world economic growth slows too much, this will not be possible.
We may already be reaching a “too slow growth limit.” Below this growth limit, it becomes impossible to repay debt with interest, especially if interest rates rise. We may already be reaching this point, based on the lack of growth in energy consumption per capita shown in Figure 15. (Also, as noted in Item [3], it seems quite possible that recent GDP growth indications are overstated.)
Figure 15. Average energy prices (averaging oil, coal, and natural gas) versus the total quantity of energy products consumed per capita, based on BP energy consumption data and UN population data. (Prices have not been inflation adjusted.)
Figure 15 suggests that affordability and price go together. When the world economy is growing rapidly, energy prices tend to rise (as does energy consumption). When energy consumption per capita falls, it is a sign that the world economy is not doing well.
One of the things that confuses matters is the very different economic growth results for different parts of the world. If oil prices are low, this improves economic growth prospects from the point of oil importers, such as the United States and China. This is what our video game players are looking at, not the results for the world as a whole. It is oil exporters, such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, who are having problems.
If we look at world news, Venezuela may collapse because of low oil prices. Saudi Arabia has found it necessary to take on debt, and has undergone regime change, at least partly related to low oil prices. Norway is proposing that its oil and gas fund no longer invest in oil and gas companies, because it expects that there is a significant chance the oil price will not rise high enough to bring companies back to adequate profitability.
[11] The whole “game” has been confused by a lot of not-quite-correct pronouncements from academic circles.
A lot of well-meaning people have tried to solve our energy problems, but haven’t gotten the story right.
Economists have gotten the story pretty much 100% wrong. Energy is very important for the economy. Furthermore, energy prices don’t rise endlessly.
Peak Oilers have confused matters by talking about oil, coal and natural gas being determined by the amount of technically recoverable resources in the ground. This might be true if energy prices could rise endlessly, but clearly they cannot. By following the wrong views of economists, Peak Oilers have led world leaders to believe that far more resources are available to be extracted than really is the case.
People who call themselves Biophysical Economists haven’t really gotten the story correct either. The Biophysical Economists realized that there was a need for a measure for diminishing returns. They put together a measure which they called Energy Returned on Energy Invested. The measure, unfortunately, only “sort of” works. It gives a lot of wrong answers. It does not suggest that oil prices above $20 per barrel are a problem. It also does not suggest that substitutes for oil that are priced above $20 per barrel are a problem. It tends to give a lot of “false positives” when it comes to the question of whether renewables can be substituted for fossil fuels. It seems to suggest that a particular ratio is important, when it is really the total quantity of an energy product available at a very low price that is important.
I should not pick on the Biophysical Economists. There are many others with academic credentials who produce metrics that really aren’t very helpful. Energy payback time is not a very helpful metric, especially from the point of view of deciding whether or not to use a particular device. It is not the energy that the economy must pay back; it is the full cost of manufacturing the device that needs to be recovered, including human labor costs and taxes. In some applications, the cost of mitigating intermittency may also need to be considered.
Even the standard Levelized Cost of Energy calculations can give misleading indications, if they are used on intermittent renewables without taking into account the cost of mitigating the intermittency.
Conclusion
With all of these issues, it is not surprising that world leaders have difficulty playing the energy and economy game. In fact, it is hard to see any winning strategy.
One of the issues that makes the game impossible to win is the fact that all sides must win. A solution that cuts out the oil exporters is a problem for an economy dependent on oil. Any solution that cuts out the workers is a problem, partly because businesses need workers as consumers, and partly because governments need workers as taxpayers.
The reason I have not included any discussion of renewables is because at this point in time, we do not have any renewables that are sufficiently inexpensive and sufficiently scalable to represent a solution.
Americans are drowning in debt. Here’s where they have it the worst
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/08/americans-are-drowning-in-debt-heres-where-they-have-it-the-worst/?utm_term=.a63162287ca1
The state of Minnesota looks like it is doing best. Lots of Scandinavian Americans there, including some of my relatives.
The areas doing badly (in terms of share of the population with debt in collection) look like they have a lot of Blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics in them. Also the coal miners in West Virginia.
Type in part of the name, to get article without paying the $1.
the south- where backwards economic policies and poor education funding keep citizens in a rut of poverty….
The counties doing worst seem to be the ones with poor citizen. If the citizens were well-off financially, it would be no problem funding good schools. When the parents are poor, they can’t afford funds for schools. Also, they can’t give their children the kind of support/example needed for them to succeed. Some of them cannot afford to feed their children a good breakfast before school. They don’t teach their children the importance of persistence at a task. They don’t read books to them. They probably never eat a meal together–lives are too fractured.
Wages disparity is greatest in the South.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Map_of_U.S._states_by_gini_coefficient.svg
The relatively few rich don’t care about trying to support the many poor people. The Republicans tend to be strong.
I don’t think that the rural South really produces much. Improvements in productivity pretty much passed it by. With low productivity, the total amount of Goods and Services produced is low. These have to be divided up among the residents. What happens in such cases is wage disparity. The poor cannot really afford education and health care, with such great wage disparity.
It’s time for Dunnce of the Week.
And the award this week goes to … Wolf Richter… come up here and collect your cap Wolf you f789ing MORE on…
MASTERMIND
Dec 10, 2017 at 1:01 am
The world’s largest oil trader Vitol says US oil production will peak in 2018
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-commodities-summit-vitol/u-s-oil-output-may-be-set-for-last-spike-in-2018-vitol-idUSKBN1CF1MZ?rpc=401&
MIT Technology Review: Shale Oil Will Boost U.S. Production, But It Won’t Bring Energy Independence
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507446/shale-oil-will-boost-us-production-but-it-wont-bring-energy-independence/
The US Shale Business is “not profitable” and can’t fund itself whether oil is at 100 or 50 dollars a barrel
https://imgur.com/a/t7ulB
Wolf Richter
Dec 10, 2017 at 9:24 am
You write: “The US Shale Business is “not profitable” and can’t fund itself…”
Correct, shale oil-and-gas has accumulated negative cash flow of about $250 billion since the shale boom started, and yet production has soared, and Wall Street keeps funding it to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year, in equity and debt funding. In 2016, shale oil drillers raised $40 billion in equity funding alone — and drilled this money into the ground. This year, they’ve been doing the same thing. As long as Wall Street keeps funding these negative-cash-flow operations, production will continue to surge and the price will stay low or drop further.
Watch the money that goes into the industry. There won’t be any kind of peak in production until the money dries up.
The money dried up very briefly during the oil bust, and production fell. But money started surging back into it in 2016, and production is rising again. See the first chart above.
So watch the money. That’s what matters in oil and gas. Not MIT theories. And production will continue to surge until the money dries up again.
DUH…. it apparently did not occur to Wolf to ask exactly why Wall St keeps funding this massive money losing machine …. how many years has it been now… nearly 10?
Clearly they are not funding it because they expect oil prices to rise to make them profitable — since they were NOT profitable when oil was over 100….
Could it be … naaaah… well maybe… that conventional oil peaked in 2005 or 6….. (acknowledged by the oil industry) …. and that shale is all that stands between us and…. total permanent collapse?
But nope – Wolf won’t go there — because Wolf is a MORE on.
Wolf the More on … woof woof woof. \
Fast Eddy is not permitted to post on Wolfy St… every since he DESTROYED Wolf by demonstrating using facts and logic that Wold was wrong on a couple of issues — Wolf doesn’t like it when he gets his face rubbed in the mud … he deletes…. then he bans…
Wolf the MORE on.
Big round of applause for Wolf in his Dunnce cap…
https://www.oddee.com/wp-content/uploads/_media/imgs/articles2/a98494_49674Dunce_Cap.png
I think this is the year that is make or brake for the shale industry. Based on several articles I have read recently. Investors are getting very impatient and want to see profits next year even if it means less drilling. And if they don’t deliver I think you could see an avalanche of investors leaving the industry.
Whiting Petroleum-
(USD) Sep 2017 Y/Y
Revenue 296.69M +2.6%
Net income -286.43M –
Diluted EPS -3.16 –
Net profit margin -96.54% –
Operating income -85.38M –
Net change in cash -12.07M -503.58%
Cash on hand 11.17M -39.05%
Cost of revenue 90.61M 2.99%
They’re going to need more cash. All but four institutions have added shares in the
last year (2.4 to 1)
VANGUARD GROUP INC 7,405,821
HOTCHKIS & WILEY CAPITAL MANAGEMENT LLC 7,063,884
FINE CAPITAL PARTNERS, L.P. 6,598,614
BALYASNY ASSET MANAGEMENT LLC 6,006,069
DIMENSIONAL FUND ADVISORS LP 5,797,279
BLACKROCK INC. 4,373,417
STATE STREET CORP 3,469,069
GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP INC 3,410,820
FMR LLC 3,102,906
LOOMIS SAYLES & CO L P 2,859,501
NUMERIC INVESTORS LLC 2,333,825
PAR CAPITAL MANAGEMENT INC 2,241,250
SCHNEIDER CAPITAL MANAGEMENT CORP 1,964,118
PANAGORA ASSET MANAGEMENT INC 1,858,315
KEY GROUP HOLDINGS (CAYMAN), LTD. 1,711,838
Someone needs to create a mutual fund that targets companies that lose the most money … this could be a huge opportunity!
I am sure that there are plenty of funds that target Tesla and its friends.
Hopium Funds.
I agree they are loosing money, the question is who is authorizing this? This is a geopolitical move not a business activity.
At this point, fiat dollars are meaningless. I think they will fund this till hell freezes over. They will just print another trillion if necessary.
I think the issue is getting money into the hands of potential buyers, so as to get the oil price up. The Middle East has not been making enough investments either. Neither has Venezuela. Even if funding is provided for US companies, it doesn’t fix the world situation. Exporters are worst off.
“I think the issue is getting money into the hands of potential buyers, so as to get the oil price up.”
Yes, but what we have seen is printed money ending up in the hands of banks, corporations and the super wealthy, not the average person trying in vein to remain above the waterline of expenses. So what will happen is the middle class will begin to fold en masse and in desperation printed money will somehow get funneled to them, but if done on a big enough scale will risk hyper inflation. It’s just an opinion, but I think all roads attempting to make this untenable dire situation work is devaluation of fiat. It hasn’t taken off too badly so far because all currencies are floating against one another and all are being undermined together. This one reason why many think crypto currencies are doing so well.
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Trillions have been put into the hands of the average person in the forms of:
– student loans
– car loans to bums
– mortgages to bums
– interest only loans to anyone
– CB support of the markets ensures pensions get paid
The list goes on and on … QE floats all boats…. never a truer statement has ever been made
Taking away QE sinks all boats.
I suspect this is the way it works….
The Fed indicates to Wall St that they have determined that shale is TBTF.
Wall St knows that you do not fight the Fed. It does not matter that shale is not economically viable – that it will always lose money no matter what.
You invest in it. Because the Fed is backstopping it. No doubt the Fed is feeding cash to these businesses — and Wall St is riding the coat tails.
All this talk of not being profitable — it has NEVER been profitable — Wall St knows that it will never be profitable – they have known this from the very beginning — for shale to be profitable the price of oil would need to be well beyond the price that the economy could pay.
They have piled in because it makes sense to pile in — there is no point in shorting the dung heap … the Fed will kill you.
Recall how China’s market tanked about a year and and a half ago — the big money was lining up against the PBOC —- and what happened? They got slaughtered — the PBOC handed cash to proxies and they bid the market back up — and anyone caught trying to fight them was threatened with jail.
This is the play book now — this is serious stuff…. you’d have a better chance of succeeding if you tried to stiff a mafia goon on a $5000 loan…. you do not mess with the POWER… you do not f789 with the el ders.
Everything is at stake — if shale is all that is between us and chaos — they will burn investment bankers’ children on a fire if that is what it takes to keep them on board ….and keep that oil coming out of the ground…
He did the same to me. 🙂
A lot of bloggers do it. They love to criticize but can’t take any criticism themselves
The internet is evolving into becoming something that is hostile to free speech.
Most of the people who are sour on free speech are liberal, representatives of large multinational corporations, basically TPTB. After the election of Trump, many liberal leaning websites and blogs, based in the U.S., disabled comments, on the grounds that too many (Trump supporters) people were posting hateful messages.
I would imagine that Wolf has a gigantic ego … that is stoked by sycophants who visit his site…. he no doubt believes that he has brilliant insights (he has NO insights — his only articles worth reading are those related to the problems in the auto industry, retail and restaurant industries… big deal – those are not insights — the numbers are out there for anyone interested — his only value is that he is willing to publish them — whereas the MSM glosses over them at best)
And when anyone exposes him as being wrong on an issue he loses it
My moment came when he claimed population growth was not necessary for economic growth — and he and his followers mocked me when I posted an opposing view…
I then posted a number of comprehensive studies that indicated population growth is responsible for roughly 1/3 of total GDP…..
He deleted my posts — then banned me permanently.
Wolf Richter is a wa…nker.
https://ilthedellecinque.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/wanker.jpg
Desperately trying to make up for conventional declines?
https://wolfstreet.com/2017/12/09/is-oil-about-to-collapse/
The Batlic states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) face wage increases and depopulation:
http://www.labsoflatvia.com/news/wages-rising-steeply-in-all-baltic-countries-estonians-still-earn-the-most
http://bnn-news.com/csb-average-wages-grow-rapidly-in-latvia-166325
http://gordonsander.com/2015/07/is-latvia-the-incredible-shrinking-country/
It is amazing they have been able to keep wages at 1/2-1/3 of what you get a short boat trip away for this long.
The future retirement age predictions for OECD countries:
https://twitter.com/OECD_Social/status/938076390481629184
http://www.oecd.org/publications/oecd-pensions-at-a-glance-19991363.htm
One step on the path to collapse will be
needs tried retirement. If you are needed in the work force – you don’t retire.
When the depopulation continues, you are forced to work till death…
At some point between, those who can’t offer the market anything won’t work, and those who can will be forced and/or incentivised to keep working.
A very good observation…
working until death used to be normality
I’m fine with working until death if it has me working until about 70.
Fiction.
Yes, fiction, the income from pensions is less and less satisfactory, so something like “retirement age” does not matter anymore…
Yes, most likely true. In my mother’s family the youngest boy stayed on the farm and in the later years essentially cared for his parents, one out of seven surviving children. A very healthy family if the two who died at birth or very early age are left out.
My dad served as “The head of the family.” from age 14 when his father was killed on the railroad while substituting for a friend so that man could have Thanksgiving with his family.
That grandmother was part of our household for all the years I lived at home and some thereafter. She was a very good babysitter and available on short notice who cleaned houses for pin money well into her seventies. He untimely death came just prior to her 101 birthday.
Dennis L.
This “AlphaZero” type of learning is probably going see a lot of applications.
From the Cornell University Library
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
The game of chess is the most widely-studied domain in the history of artificial intelligence. The strongest programs are based on a combination of sophisticated search techniques, domain-specific adaptations, and handcrafted evaluation functions that have been refined by human experts over several decades. In contrast, the AlphaGo Zero program recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.
A friend of mine was a fanatic player of Go…he was a Chess player also but needed more and made the remark he would be astonished if they developed a computer program for Go like there is for Chess, named Deep Blue. He was a computer data base developer.
This is indeed a major breakthrough in AI and came about very rapidly.
We may have underestimated human ingenuity and this coupled with genetic engineering,
will produce surprising results.
Can it learn how/when to predict this economic system of chaos will crash?
Yes, I have heard it can replace humans picking lettuce. At least while fuel is cheap enough.
I’m a celebrity get me out of here! Rob Lowe and Ellen Degeneres rush to evacuate the California wildfires as the massive inferno threatens 200,000 acres and bears down on Santa Barbara – forcing thousands of people to flee their homes
Celebs were among thousands forced to evacuate their homes amid Southern California’s largest and most destructive wildfire
New evacuations were ordered as the fire sent up an enormous plume near Montecito and Carpinteria
Rob Lowe said Sunday: ‘Praying for my town. Fires closing in. Firefighters making brave stands. Could go either way. Packing to evacuate now’
Ellen Degeneres tweeted: ‘We just had to evacuate our pets. I’m praying for everyone in our community’
Crews and fleet water-dropping planes and helicopters saved homes as gusts sent the blaze deeper into areas northwest of Los Angeles
Early on Sunday, actor Rob Lowe announced his plans to flee to safety as the flames continued the route.
‘Praying for my town. Fires closing in. Firefighters making brave stands. Could go either way. Packing to evacuate now,’ Lowe wrote to his Twitter page.
This afternoon, Comedian Ellen Degeneres also said her property was ‘under threat of being burned.’
Degeneres tweeted: ‘We just had to evacuate our pets. I’m praying for everyone in our community and thankful to all the incredible firefighters.
‘Everyone in the Montecito area is checking up on each other and helping to get people and animals to safety. I’m proud to be a part of this community,’ she added
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5165975/Celebrities-rush-evacuate-California-wildfires.html#ixzz50vLuHIrf
A lack of rain has officials on edge statewide because of parched conditions and no end in sight to the typical fire season.
‘This is the new normal,’ Gov. Jerry Brown warned Saturday after surveying damage from the deadly Ventura fire.
‘We’re about ready to have firefighting at Christmas. This is very odd and unusual
A lot of “praying” going on….I think it is “praying lite”.
If we go to war the Republicans will surely institute another draft..It would be a great way to get all those young people who are in dead end jobs or living with their parents into the labor force and could help increase our economic growth. And they could get rid of some of those useless eaters on welfare…Wall Street could be using that welfare money to invest… ( I bet someone is thinking this)
World War II was the way we really got away from the Depression of the 1930s. The huge amount of borrowing allowed us to pull out the fossil fuels needed to move the economy along. Total wages paid increased, as women were added to the workforce.
Hitler was the prime mover that ended the 30s depression.
that impetus ran until 1970—because 1969 was the peak year for oil discoveries. after 1970 the USA ceased to be swing producer so could no longer set the price of oil.
shortly after that the first oilwar started (though ww2 strictly speaking was also an oilwar)
since then the oil conflicts and unrest have been getting more frequent and intense.
there will be no end to oilwars until all the oil has gone.
I still contend that that it is growing debt that leads to the use of energy products and pulls the economy forward. This is a chart I made a while back:
Once there is some excuse to borrow, the borrowed funds can make their way back into “disposable personal income.” That disposable personal income is broader than wages. It includes money given to retirees, and money given to soldiers.
I think Hitler was a symptom of the times. Germany, like the rest of the world, was undergoing the depression. There were many unemployed, and great wage disparity. If the economy needed to shrink, the Jews were an out-group that could be marginalized. I was just looking at some testimony of M. King Hubbert of the period. He says:
When there is not enough goods and services to go around, you get symptoms like today. You get very low prices. According to BP, oil prices had hit a peak of $3.07 per barrel in 1920. There was a debt bubble in the “Roaring Twenties,” but even this did not get the price up. The oil price was only $1.27 per barrel in 1929. It dropped as low as $0.65 per barrel in 1931. World War II only got the price of oil up to $1.21 in 1944. (This was equivalent to $16.50 per barrel in today’s dollars.) In order to really keep the economy going, we really needed a further debt bubble after World War II, to pull the economy forward. After World War II, we discovered we needed to keep adding more and more debt, to pull the economy along. You may remember me article, https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/10/10/the-united-states-65-year-debt-bubble/
that works fne as long as there is increasing energy in the system
(which is why industrial economies grew at about 7%ps during the last century)
if you substitute debt for enegry—ie borrow money, then you are borrowing from your g’kids future
If we get in a major war-
Economic collapse on a big scale. The Iraq War is going to cost the US somewhere around US $7,000,000,000,000 (trillions) by the time it’s all paid for. And we have absolutely nothing to show for that disaster except the flattened twisted failed state of Iraq.
That U$D 7 Trillion represents nearly a whole year of US GDP if we figure in that about HALF of the US economy is just paperwork shenanigans and not producing anything of lasting value. Witness the 400 U$D Billion health insurance industry that does nothing but process insane levels of medical paperwork.
A war against a serious military state like NK is going to cost a whole lot more than any $7 Trillion. Maybe more like 10- 20 U$D Trillion. And it’s going to take massive resources and decades to clean up an irradiated Korean peninsula. A number of our Asian allies have basically indicated that the US is done in Asia if we launch a first-strike on NK- of course Asia is the economic center of the globe.
The psychotic thinking of our so-called “leaders” is that we can go around initiating major wars of choice against nuclear-armed nations when we are running U$D 750,000,000,000 yearly deficits. And this figure doesn’t include what has been described as dark budgets and backroom US Treasury adventures.
How do you get to $7 trillion? I will have to admit I have not looked at the subject at all.
Any excuse to incur debt, and use that money (paying soldiers, building airplanes, etc.) seems to be helpful to the economy. If it really did take $7 trillion, think of where the economy would have been without the $7 trillion. We would have gotten to the 2008-2009 recession a whole lot sooner.
OK Gail, 7 Trillion is probably a bit too far on this – especially as our economic gurus are now claiming somewhere around 18 Trillion as a valid GDP number. However, a number of foreign sources have been challenging these US claims of towering U.S. GDP for years – notably China and Russia.
Here is Charles Hughes Smith on US system inefficiency and paperwork and it’s excesses. I am seeing the same kind of mass inefficiency and paperwork madness in other areas of the economy-
How Much of the US Economy Is Friction?
11-01-2011
How much of the US economy is friction? It is a difficult question, as we’ve grown so accustomed to our way of doing things that we tend to assume that the present system is the most efficient one possible. If it is visibly inefficient, that we assume it serves a social need so vital that its maintenance overrides the high costs of maintaining the system.
Much of our faith is based on the belief that because we live in a market economy, the efficiencies intrinsic to a market economy — such as customers gravitating toward the goods and services that offer the lowest costs and highest benefits — are being effectively captured by the US economy.
Ten Doctors, Twelve Billing Clerks
Since some 18% of the US economy is devoted to health care (or what I call sick care, due to its perversity), let’s start with an example of massive friction in the US sick-care system. I recently received an email from a physician (one of many I get from doctors and nurses) who noted that his group has ten doctors and twelve billing clerks who do nothing but fill out forms and try to collect payments from various insurers and agencies.
Note that this does not include care-giving support staff such as nurses or assistants, or general-overhead staffing who handle bookkeeping, accounting, tax preparation, reception, scheduling, janitorial, legal services, etc. It also doesn’t include the cost of malpractice insurance coverage or the hidden costs of “defensive medicine” (that is, the practice of medicine aimed at minimizing lawsuits or thwarting a future claim of malpractice).
Regardless of your political ideology (if any), common sense requires us to ask what the billing-department costs would be in a single-payer or cash-only system. Common sense also requires us to ask whether the enormous cost of billing — which includes claims, counter-claims, adjustments, revisions, negotiations, disputed settlements, regulatory filings, lawsuits, and fraudulent claims, to name but a few facets of this friction — adds anything to the quality or quantity of patient care.
The Sapping Costs of Economic Friction
In industry after industry, we find that instead of market forces, the friction-costs of cronyism, regulation, and gaming the system dominate the cost structure. Thus the pharmaceutical industry spends much of its resources on marketing, not drug discovery (as it touts in its ubiquitous marketing campaigns and lobbying). The Pentagon-defense industry, cozy home to one of the world’s most infamous revolving doors (top Department of Defense employee one week, chief lobbyist for a “national defense” contractor the next week), manages to build fewer aircraft and ships for ever-greater sums of treasure. Where exactly are market forces at work in this incestuous relationship? Does the Pentagon ever get a bid from a South Korean ship maker, for example, or issue an RFP (request for proposal) that doesn’t weigh almost as much as the weapon being procured?
https://www.financialsense.com/contributors/charles-hugh-smith/2011/11/01/how-much-of-the-us-economy-is-friction
“Any excuse to incur debt, and use that money (paying soldiers, building airplanes, etc.) seems to be helpful to the economy.”
Killing millions of people and destroying smaller nations for decade after decade to give our economy a military keynesian boost is not sustainable or moral.
Also, this type of vicious international behavior eventually provokes a lethal military counter-response- the other nations get together and kill us. That has to be figured into the equation. Russia 1991 was barely capable of even defending it’s own domestic ICBM sites. And today-
2016 Report: Russia Defeats NATO in Baltic War Game
STUTTGART, Germany — A Russian offensive on NATO territory in the Baltics would overwhelm underarmed alliance forces in a matter of hours, leaving NATO with a harsh dilemma: Launch a long, bloody counteroffensive or concede defeat.
That is the conclusion of a new report by Rand Corp., which conducted a series of elaborate war games from summer 2014 to spring 2015 with the assistance of numerous American military commands and experts.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/02/05/report-russia-defeats-nato-in-baltic-war-game.html
Moral? Since when has than been a consideration….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE
If it were determined that we could buy another decade simply by blasting peripheral countries into the stone age and genociding entire populations — I have no doubt it would be done
Moral has a number of different meanings-
A practical morality might mean respecting other persons, tribes, or peoples so that these others trust you and are willing to work with you. This might mean keeping promises, peaceful negotiations, soft power operations ie building hospitals, ports, roads, dams, etc. Not acting in vicious and predatory ways.
This is what happens when persons, tribes or nations do not practice moral relations with their neighbors-
“…building hospitals, ports, roads, dams, etc.”
Increasing population and debt…as well as the environmental devastation you decry.
Or this-
I can see it now — Millennials sent to fight — and uploading selfies of themselves as the bullets zing past…. check me out!
Then suddenly …. WAP SLAT sounds… and nothing.
Just make you put the right pronoun on the grave
Well, Eddy, fantasize about being a dark and hansom fighter pilot who can sing and dance. It would be a way to your private jet and as long as you survived, your harem issue would not be an issue.
Those of us who are currently alive can trace our DNA back in an unbroken chain perhaps several hundreds of thousands of years. We might not be as easy to get rid of as you think.
Dennis L.
DNA ancestry tests branded ‘meaningless’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9912822/DNA-ancestry-tests-branded-meaningless.html
DNA Ancestry Tests Are ‘Meaningless’ for Your Historical Genealogy Search
http://www.medicaldaily.com/dna-ancestry-tests-are-meaningless-your-historical-genealogy-search-244586
Below is a quote from the first source. From memory something like 50% of all medical research cannot be duplicated and Gail has alluded to the publication issues and pressures. Mine test was consistent with genealogy work on my family going back to the Biederbeckers of Norway.
His colleague Prof Mark Thomas said: “These claims are usually planted by the companies that provide these so-called tests and are not backed up by published scientific research. This is business, and the business is genetic astrology.”
The DNA trail is remarkable as were it broken at any point in history, we(a given individual) would not exist. It argues well for the survival of the species.
Dennis L.
“You Grow Up Wanting to be Luke Skywalker, Then Realize You’ve Become a Stormtrooper for the Empire”
http://upriser.com/posts/you-grow-up-wanting-to-be-luke-skywalker-then-realize-you-ve-become-a-stormtrooper-for-the-empire
100% correct — never ever go to war —- unless the barbarians are at the gates… it’s not that it is not important to fight and kill and pillage resources …. it’s just that it’s better if you can convince others to do the fighting — and dying — and you still get your share…
I was watching the series ‘The Vietnam War’ Le Duan’s kids were shipped overseas to study during the war with America…. just as most kids of US leaders avoided the war
Who in their right mind volunteers for anything… when they know this?????
Anyone who does — well he/she deserves whatever happens to them…. id i ots.
Fortunately as we know most are total MORE ons … so there will always be plenty of them available to ensure we get our share….
Right on Fast, here in South Florida a soldier died and Trump called the widow to offer condolences. An uproar ensued over his remark. “Well, I suppose he knew what he signed up for….!!!!”
The fight between the president and Wilson began Tuesday when the Miami-area Democrat said Trump told Myeshia Johnson in a phone call that her husband “knew what he signed up for” and didn’t appear to know his name, a version later backed up by Johnson’s aunt. Wilson was riding with Johnson’s family to meet the body and heard the call on speakerphone. She was principal of a school Johnson’s father attended.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Democrat in Florida, is standing by her statement that President Donald Trump told Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, that her husband ‘knew what he signed up for.’ Trump says Wilson’s description of the call has been ‘fabricated.’ (Alan Diaz/Associated Press)
The 12-member team was reportedly in unarmored trucks when the ambush by the Islamic State in the Sahel — what officials believe was a relatively new offshoot of ISIS — occurred on a return route from the capital city of Niamey. About 10 Nigerian troops were also killed. It’s unclear whether the soldiers’ commando unit was carrying out its assigned mission at the time.
Additional remains of Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed when Islamic militants ambushed a military convoy in Niger, were recovered weeks after he was laid to rest, the Pentagon said Monday.
Johnson’s body was discovered two days after the attack, separated from the three other bodies. It’s still unclear why he was left at a different location. The Pentagon said earlier this month it informed the soldiers’ family members that the investigation into their deaths would not be complete until at least January
Suckers!
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f0/9c/ff/f09cffb7702af720e27d5c6e24b8e9b9–american-flag-american-pride.jpg
https://imgur.com/a/aBren
The ironical motto of the British Army: ‘Never volunteer!’ 🙂
Saw this tonight in the grocery store. My wife and I smiled and rolled our eyes:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51toG3Nf3BL._SX366_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
You can’t live on Mars because the cosmic rays will fry your brain and cause chronic dementia and paranoia. And the technology and logistics haven’t advanced far enough either. (Limoli, 2016) (Do, 2016)
https://news.uci.edu/2016/10/10/mars-bound-astronauts-face-chronic-dementia-risk-from-galactic-cosmic-ray-exposure/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576515004294
that “special edition” must be their take on science fiction.
or did Elon secretly buy Popular Science?
I guarantee you that within that article there will be a statement:
The research confirms that….
thank you FE and David for your replies.
Having two young kids makes knowing this stuff fairly difficult.
I will keep lurking and occasionally commenting.
Even if their future is uncertain, I find much pleasure in raising my children. Raising them to become respectful, well-mannered, strong, confident and pleasant human beings is what gives my life meaning. Learning them skills like fishing or skating, teaching them names of all the trees and birds.
Everybody will be gone some day, every object we possess will wither and vanish. But we can be happy and enjoy life today. That is a pretty unique ability many people lack because they are chasing carrots and dreaming about retirement in 2040.
What is done is done.
I wonder if anyone on FW would choose to have a child right now — knowing what the future looks like.
I guess less likely. But these things often just “happen” 🙂
I can imagine the children thing making it very difficult to acknowledge the situation.
I feel like this at times….
https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/08/24/bomb.jpg
Actually, what much of he Earth might look like in 2035. Without the shiny toys.
+++++++++
Or maybe those will be the vehicles that the El ders drive around in when they emerge from the bunkers — before they quickly return to the bunkers… and wait to starve.
a theme song for tonight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntLsElbW9Xo
enjoy!
Regarding the recent discussion about African Americans and their lack of success I will say this.
I just want to say the answer is probably complex but the fact that other “marginalized groups”, including Hispanics are doing better than African Americans point to social problems more than economic problems. I don’t think we can fix anything by throwing money like Bill Cosby threw money at women after he drugged them and did who knows what with them while unconscious.
The problem is not that they are “poor. ”
The documented problems with Native Americans are nearly identical to those of typical African American communities.
“Alcoholism is like the tip of an iceberg. It rides atop a submerged mass of other problems.
* Alcoholism often co-exists in Indian communities with certain specific other problems like depression, self-hate, cultural shame, and stress-related acting out. ”
https://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9221/indian.htm
Symbolic gestures such as politically correct terms, wefare, preferential treatment in the form of affirmative action, has not fixed self esteem and self-hatred among “marginalized groups” anywhere. These things seem to reinforce low self-esteem.
Some problems might be solvable: Fixing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict might be fixed by taking Israel away from the Israel. I doubt that there will be Jewish terrorism and Jewish crime and social dysfunction due to Jews losing the land they think God has promised them. Why do I think this? I don not believe cultures and ethnic groups are so similar that they will react in the same exact ways to environmental factors.
There is nothing to back up the belief that some people have on here that goes something like this:
“We are all the same. If we were given the same opportunities, we would all perform the same way”.
A Real Black Person said, “There is nothing to back up the belief that some people have on here that goes something like this:
“We are all the same. If we were given the same opportunities, we would all perform the same way”.”
I’ve often read that black people typically hate black people more than, or certainly as much as, the typical white person does. Your post confirms those reports. I have known a few (very few I confess) black people and I kinda liked them all. Guess its just me.
A Real Black Person thinks that if the Israelis were treated like the Palestinians that, “I doubt that there will be Jewish terrorism and Jewish crime and social dysfunction due to Jews losing the land they think God has promised them.”
So, A Real Black Person thinks that Jews are not capable of getting pi$$ed off. Or maybe he thinks that they are all cowards. Or maybe he thinks all Jews have no sense of outrage. If someone came to my home took it away, and then proceeded to treat me and mine like the Israelis treat the Palestinians they would see some f&**king social dysfunction I promise you. ‘Course, Im not Jewish – guess its just me.
Energy consumption per capita is a whole lot higher for Jews than Palestinians. I am sure water consumption is as well. I think a whole lot of the problem is inadequate resources for everyone.
it is THE problem in that region
If I were a Palestinian… and I could make my way to California… I know what I would be doing!
My mother told me not to play with matches.
Palestinian mothers teach kids to toss matches into dry forests….
The Jews, historically, have had a culture, or cultures that prevented social dysfunction. Whether they are being persecuted or not, the social relations between members of Jewish communities has not degraded very much.
I have heard about the theoretical “self-hating Jew” but that they don’t seem to dominate any Jewish groups. The Jews, in general, don’t seem to suffer from low self-esteem. They’ve done extraordinarily well, for a historically persecuted group. They have, in my opinion, no reason to feel bad about themselves. They are often hated because they do well.
The Palestinian/Isreali situation is another example of Jews doing well, it is extremely abnormal after larger numbers of a tribe are executed, that they are given the means to steal land from another one.
The Palestinians often resort to violence because it seems like economic opportunities are scarce in the Middle East in general, and it doesn’t help that Israel conveniently took all the good land,resources, and economic opportunity. Unlike many black peoples, a good percentage Arabs when given the opportunity will perform like other groups. The Palestinians may fit that mold or be so full of social dysfunction and despair that that isn’t possible.
There are black peoples who do very well, but they tend to come from places with more of an intact traditional culture. African Americans never had a culture. It’s a huge problem.
“I’ve often read that black people typically hate black people ” Black people think collectively without having a culture in America. Success outside of the “typical” areas is considered “acting white”. There is not one group with so much bickering and in-fighting and it has gotten much worse over time. To some degree, this is happened to ALL groups in industrialized and wealthy societies, but for black people, it seems to be worse.
As for FF’s examples of humiliation below, I was always under the impression that most ethnic groups interact with some level of hostility.(And people will humiliate other people if they get positive reinforcement for it) (Some) Asian people not liking black people is nothing new. That is not because of white supremacy, it is because
a)people prefer to be with their own kind. Self-segregation is part of how people bond. Most parents don’t want their children to marry someone outside their culture, which is the problem with interracial couples. Genes may mix but cultures often don’t. That’s why many conflicts have a cultural and ideological component.
b)black people, specifically African Americans, are not really known for making contributions to society outside of crime and sports. I would add entertainment, but the mediocrity in entertainment these days, doesn’t favor any talented performers
They have a bad reputation . PR campaigns and affirmative action can’t change what people see in real life.
Since the 1960s, African Americans have generally pursued a path of grievance–and haven’t done much with it. Just because guilt worked for Zionists, that doesn’t mean it will work for African Americans. The Jews, were recognized for making many positive contributions to human societies so much that that many non-Jews buy into the notion that Jews are the “Chosen People”.
Dmitry Orlov has written a book about sustainability, and about how sustainability groups persevere. He has also given talks, which I have heard. In his view, common religious beliefs and some persecution are very helpful for keeping these group together. He does not have much hope for groups of people with varying beliefs being able to form sustainability groups, and stick together under hardship. They will not give sufficient authority to a single leader, and follow him.
The Jews even today have very strong beliefs about taking care of their kin. One of my husband’s nephews died suddenly at age 40, a year ago, leaving a widow with three small children. The widow is Jewish, and her family lives close by. Her family have been very helpful in helping her through this difficult time. Even before this happened, the grandparents were very much involved in the lives of their grandchildren, as was the widow’s unmarried sister. I suppose this would be the case with many other kinds of relatives of other religious backgrounds, but their relationship was striking, even before the son-in-law died. I had met all of these people, when we visited various times in the past.
I have a buddy – who lived in Asia for 10+ years… and he was not attracted by Asian women no matter how hot …
I’d play this infantile game of searching for samples on the internet — and email them to him … and ask him if he’d make an exception …
Stuff like this….
And he’s always say NOPE. Not interested.
I still can’t work out if he is racist — or perhaps gay….. something is not right.
Some people are so WEIRD!
I’d cut off 3 toes and both little fingers…. for a date….
http://www.razorfine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/jessica-gomes-sports-illustrated-2013-02.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/d6/51/8f/d6518f45cf9d2360f37061fee1239d61–jessica-gomes-funny-sexy.jpg
http://www.razorfine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/jessica-gomes-sports-illustrated-2013-02.jpg
Good points … it is a very complex issue.
Another problem is that blacks have been treated as animals … it is not long ago that they were whipped and yoked just like other animals…
They were and remain despised by many in America. They are told they are stuuuupiid. That they are not human. That they are no better than pack animals…
Flip the channel to any zero hedge stories involving inner city violence then read the comments if you want to know what many Americans really think of blacks.
No other ethnic group has to carry this baggage.
“We are all the same. If we were given the same opportunities, we would all perform the same way”.
Very true — we have no idea what it is like to be black – the shi t that people have to deal with on a daily basis.
I have a friend — black American – he’s a trader at a big US bank working in Asia — he had a long term Asian girlfriend — she invited him to travel to her home country to meet the parents … for whatever reason she did not tell the parents he was black — they arrived — the father saw him — and started screaming at her to get him out of the house.
I cannot even begin to imagine the humiliation he must have felt.
I have an Indian friend — we were both working in Hong Kong and planning a trek in Nepal — we went to a shop to buy some gear including clothes and shoes — they told him that he was not allowed to try on the clothes — but I being white was exempted from this…. I was incensed and told the shop keeper to f789 himself and we walked out…
These are the sorts of things that some people have to deal with — black people would get the worst of it…
They are no smarter or stuuuupider than the average human …. (most humans are very sttuuuppid no matter what their colour) — but their self esteem is constantly taking hits …. and that is not a recipe for success in life. Tell someone they are a stuuuupppiddd black dog over and over … and guess what…. all but the strongest most confident start to believe it.
Give me a baby and I’ll create any kind of man…
-James Watson (Father of Behaviorism)
“I doubt that there will be Jewish terrorism and Jewish crime and social dysfunction due to Jews losing the land they think God has promised them”
You clearly have no idea how the Jews got hold of Palestine. They did it by bribing British politicians like Balfour and Churchill and by using terror against both the British occupation forces and the Palestinian original inhabitants. BTW, the Palestinians were there long before Moses. The Levant was never empty.
The Jewish terror gang “Irgun” killed heaps of Palestinians and British soldiers. They blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem and killed 91 – mostly British officers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
One day, the Jews of Europe will be compelled to return to Europe because they refuse to live in peace with their neighbours – and you will then see for yourselves what they are capable of.
alfredmelbourne:
Some good books about the history of Israel have been written by Shlomo Sand, an Israeli history professor. The first, “The Invention of the Jewish People” was published in 2009. The second, “The Invention of the Land of Israel” in 2011. Then he wrote “How I Stopped Being a Jew”. His books have been very controversial in Israel, but he still has his job, so that’s good.
He provides evidence to support the view that Palestinians are the Jews who refused to give up their land when Muslims overran the region, but that they converted to Islam and live there to this day. Even DNA studies support this notion. Palestinians are more closely related to Israelis than anyone else on earth.
I will never forget the article I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education back in the early 2000’s in which they interviewed some professor (not Sand) who said that Palestinians were “not human” but “animals”. “We will build walls and they will continue to climb over them, and we will kill them.”
In a book called “The Secret History of the War on Cancer” by Devra Davis, she recounts interviewing an elderly Jewish relative of hers who survived a German concentration camp. Her relative asks, “Why didn’t Hitler recruit Jews into his cause? We would have made such good little Nazis.” This book is a must read for all health professions for all the documented history of cancer and cancer research.
A Real Black Person
I live in Canada in the city of Halifax. Historically we treated black people bad but we almost have none of the problems that the US has.
Some people say that part of the problem in the US is throwing them money food stamps and cheep competition for jobs.
The average wage in Halifax is 47k and can be made as a cooks helper. Construction easy 100k
The Great Depression Economic Growth 1% GDP
2006-2017 Economic Growth 1.5% GDP
And what happened back in 2006? Conventional oil peaked…..
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7382/full/481433a.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression…
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual
You have to stand in awe of the media for convincing the majority of Americans the economy is doing great. They just keep pointing to the stock market and the fake employment data. And fake news does the rest…
In many ways…humans really are very simple duuuummmb beasts….
To be honest though I am glad the media is misleading everyone because if they were honest about how bad our situation has become. Consumer confidence would go into the gutter and our economy might have collapsed by now..What is crazy is that all the media news networks are all totally lying about our situation on their own. There is no grand conspiracy here or puppet master controlling them all. Even my local news cherry picked last quarters GDP to claim the economy is doing good.
And this is just one mid sized town’s news network out several thousands nationwide. And they used the same exact argument that CNN did.. Its like they are all in total denial and are just grasping at straws to make believe everything is okay…I posted this comment about our GDP on my facebook today and here was an article someone posted in reply…
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/28/final-reading-on-q2-2017-gross-domestic-product.html
And I read a business insider article and a yahoo article last week that did the exact same thing. They cherry picked quarters and then said the economy was in good shape. And never said what the yearly average was annually…This is like cherry picking one month of your teams football schedule instead of talking about their overall seasons record.
Think the MS is not centrally controlled?
Watch this:
This is quite the video.
A person can imagine what is happening inside China, where Internet access is strictly controlled.
By the way, way back when, when my father was a General Practitioner Physician, he smoked Camels, just like all of the other doctors did. A doctor does what he needs to do to fit in.
But we are free.
And it is important to watch the news to ensure we are informed, responsible citizens.
We got rid of our television years ago. I turned off NPR after I realized the nonsense it was passing on. It doesn’t matter what you watch, it has an agenda.
2006-2017 = No Collapse…
2018-2029 = well, extrapolating from the past 12 years, the answer would be No Collapse.
Study: Limits to Growth was Right. Research Shows We’re Nearing Global Collapse (Turner, 2014)
http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
Collapse is always two years away.
that’s crazy talk!
I would be happy if it would stay two years away. People in Venezuela don’t think collapse is two years away. People in Syria and Greece and Iraq probably don’t think Collapse is two years away. I think we have creeping collapse, which will encompass an increasing number of countries–eventually all of them.
Don’t forget Detroit either…
Detroit is a good talking point…
we certainly see those weak peripheral countries “collapsing”…
that could be the first stage of “creeping collapse”…
one of the next stages could be the collapsing of bigger poorer cities…
of course, there may be no numerical order and these things even now seem to be happening in unison.
Collapse always feels like it is a long way off… until it comes.
Recall how people were living massive from 2002 till about 2007…. the party looked to be endless..
Then … rather suddenly … someone flung buckets of cold p iss onto the crowd…
Puerto Rico is collapsing.
Baltimore is also in the process. If we consider the pruning of unrealistic pension obligations that can never be paid, then we could state that Dallas of all places, has started the collapse process. Look around….the process is in motion.
Don’t forget Illinois and its pension crisis.
If the truth were known, there would be pension crises everywhere.
Isnt a creeping collapse a slow “collapse”?
I guess creeping collapse is less of an oxymoron…
those peoples are convinced that their particular ”collapse” is a political problem—or maybe a religious one
Collapse is part of the way the Universe is made; it is an outcome of the laws of physics.
You may not think that this is a religious issue, but I think a good case can be made that it really is. This is the way the Universe and the World were “created.”
I agree that it is not a political problem. The same laws of physics allow leaders to rise up in ways that push to flows of energy in ways so that part of the population will survive, even if there are not enough energy supplies for everyone to survive. This is the way ecosystems in general work; when times get tough, part of the population is wiped out, not all of it. Equal sharing of resources would have allowed slightly more people or animals to survive longer; in terms of keeping whole species alive, unequal sharing allows “survival of the best adapted,” and a better long-term result for individual species.
If you neighbor loses his job its a recession.
If you lose your job it’s a depression.
If you neighbor gets cancer its a tragedy..
If you get cancer it’s the end of the world…
Time and space are relative. ..
I am an LTG believer, but we are still only tracking the upwards trajectory.
We will see if services peak, and especially if food peaks or death rate bottoms.
The forecasts after peak are nonsense in my opinion. The do not consider the financial system, among other thing. The authors have even said they are wrong. The model only Tess approximately when, not how the collapse plays out.
I agree with you. Relationships on the way up may be invalid on the way down because of changes in variables unknown to the model.
But until one of the maxes are reached we can’t empirically say it was correct.
We sure arent tracking the stabilized model.
I thought their ideas about how to stabilize the system were absurd. This was Dennis Meadows’ first job out of grad school. The authors were very idealistic, in my opinion.
How would you have stabilized the system, if sent back 45 years and being empress of the world?
(Don’t say it was always impossible because of human nature ;))
No, it is impossible because of the way the system is constructed. The system needs to grow, because humans (with our use of supplementary energy) tend to have growing population. We overpower other species on the planet. The problem is evolution, and the fact that humans evolved to use burned biomass to cook part of our food, back in hunter-gatherer days. It is all the fault of evolution, and the way the system is put together.
If someone had … 50,000 or whatever years ago …. bashed in the brains of anyone with an IQ of over say 40…. and continued to do that until all higher intelligence was removed from the gene pool… I am confident that we would not be facing this problem…
‘The most intelligent non-human animals, such as some crows, chimpanzees, bonobos, parrots, and dolphins, are in this range. Bonobo or chimpanzee I.Q. scores are sometimes even quoted as high as 80 or 90, but those are childhood age-peer scores that correspond to adult I.Q.’s of only just over 40.’
We needed to ensure this
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CMv0V9LqLRo/hqdefault.jpg
was hooked up with this
https://i.skyrock.net/7260/3947260/pics/136687248.jpg
This did not happen and therefore we are f789ed now
Thank you Gail, are we sure Meadows even believed in their own solutions.
I think you could allow IQ up to 100 or possible way above. I think it is reasonably safe to assume an intelligent person with IQ 120 wouldnt have invented IC or the green religion, or built the electric grid or internet.
I am sure that the Meadows believed in their solutions. I have talked to Dennis Meadows at length about this issue. I have been part of a small group when Dennis Meadows showed videos of what happened in 1972, and explained what he and Donella felt and said at that time. The two of them lived in a commune, with a number of other young people. Like many young people of the period, they had very idealistic views. (I have never met Donella; she died quite a few years ago.) He still tends to be quite idealistic; he is (or was recently) a regular reader of Resilience.org.
I bet Dennis has a drum …. and goes to those gatherings where everyone thumps their drum … and stinks of BO. I suspect he also has tattooed the word Koombaya on his left buttock check
Using that reasoning, I see that I will live for 1 million years.
me too!
I accept my faulty logic…
IC most likely can only collapse once, so yeah, reasoning that it has never happened before is no assurance of anything.
Hey David,
just wondering if I good be so bold to ask your approximate age (and any other commenters who care to disclose). It would help with clarifying various perspectives on here. I myself am a 46 year old guy in Australia with a young family.
thanks for all the fine comments.
Niko B (apparently there’s another Niko)
52 going on 14
I am far to young to die!
hi Niko…
I am late 50s…
and yes, a person’s age certainly affects their perspective, especially about something like The Collapse.
Baby Doomer here is 30ish?? (dare I think that?) so at about that age, a person would have much more of an issue with The Collapse if it happened in the next 1 to 10 years say.
I’ve lived enough… if The Collapse happens really soon, well, that’s just one of many ways to go to the nothingness of eternal death.
young family of yours?
when it gets that personal, then there’s a real sadness to the situation.
when I see a baby or a pregnant woman, I just hope for the world to stay mostly together for their sake, but I see it less and less as realistic hope.
and I think it’s best to shield youngsters from this possible doom, and hope that “we” are wrong and the world keeps rolling for a few more decades anyway.
go in peace.
What I hope for is to go down with as little suffering as possible….
I would not be surprised if the North Korea thing turned out to be Plan B….
World leaders and their masters would know that the overshoot will lead to famine violence disease and radiation … which guarantee extinction … but not before horrific suffering.
So when they get the signal that whatever it takes is no longer working — and the BEAST has finally busted through the main gate… and is approaching at full canter ….
Why not just unleash every last nuclear weapon and take out the BEAST … and pre-empt our suffering.
http://www.troll.me/images/crazy-eyes/makes-sense-to-me.jpg
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/fairytailfanon/images/5/5c/Evil-monster-fantasy-skeleton-giant-tube-with-220203.jpg
32 which is way too young to die in the short term. But at least I got to live through my 20’s….
It’s better to burn out. Than it is to rust -Neil Young
49, but nice-looking women in their 20’s keep hitting on me, so not feeling too bad! Still have hair, and it’s brown. 🙂
wealth is the ultimate aphrodisiac
which is why 80yr old billionaires are seen with 20 yr old bimbos
Hi Niko,
I generally don’t comment much. But in case you do come across a comment of mine.
I’m 32. Also with a young family.
33 from Norway here, couple of young kids.
46, never went for the family thing (even before knowing all the s.h it which is about to hit us) Hope I can get another summer of golf in, planning on hitting 100 rounds (one of the many advantages of not having a family…)
David
A Doomer only has to be right once….. 🙂
true…
maybe in some distant year, you will finally be right for once 😉
(ps: I’m often wrong)
We have been in a depression statistically the last 11 years. And once those permanent peak oil shortages hit in a few years and the price spikes sky high …The global economy will collapse..And Limits to Growth will be vindicated…And there isn’t a damn thing anyone or any country can do about it…..Soon you will wish you were never even born…
“… permanent peak oil shortages hit in a few years…”
sounds good to me!
2018 and 2019 might just rock out to 730 days of BAU…
for now, let’s discount the 2020’s to zero.
The collapse will be the worst catastrophe in the history of mankind. Nothing will ever come close..
as long as it’s not 2018 or 2019…
humans discount the future…
my calendar still says 2017.
Keep in mind that in 2005 people were saying 2013 collapse would have to occur by, then in 2013 it was collapse would have to occur by 2017, and now the years get pushed out even further. I’m not saying collapse won’t happen, but I do know from experience on peak oil websites the timing of events is very difficult and people’s predictions so far have been way too early. Now as we get ready for 2018, which by previous accounts should be a post collapse year, BAU is set to keep on going.
Maybe it’s like watching the glaciers in Antarctica that are suppose to cause so much sea level rise. Sure, as were going it will probably occur, but when? Imagine you’ve got an outpost next to one of those glaciers and every day you walk out and watch it. After a while you’ll probably say, “I have no idea when that behemoth is going to start dramatically sliding into the ocean, so I’m going back to the civilization.”
“… the timing of events is very difficult and people’s predictions so far have been way too early. Now as we get ready for 2018, which by previous accounts should be a post collapse year, BAU is set to keep on going.”
yes yes yes yes… a million times yes…
there is a Way-Too-Early syndrome…
it seems to be getting bigger…
perhaps it’s contagious…
sure, the 2020’s are coming, and that’s a big landing zone where The Collapse could hit.
but the next 380 days?
I would bet that they will be a lot like the past 350 days.
so, here’s a good place for…
BAU tonight, baby!
Yes but before we never had two trillion in future capex slashed like we do now. And before we didn’t have the IEA and Saudi’s and many other banks warning like we do now…..
IEA Chief warns of world oil shortages by 2020 as discoveries fall to record lows
https://www.wsj.com/articles/iea-says-global-oil-discoveries-at-record-low-in-2016-1493244000
Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Warns of World Oil Shortages Ahead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-minister-sees-end-of-oil-price-slump-1476870790
Saudi Aramco CEO believes oil shortage coming despite U.S. shale boom
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/07/10/saudi-aramco-ceo-believes-oil-shortage-coming-despite-u-s-shale-boom.html
CitiBank CEO warns of oil shortages coming as soon as 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/citi-says-get-ready-for-an-oil-squeeze-than-an-opec-supply-surge
People are almost completely ignoring a looming crisis for oil
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-oil-supply-and-demand-2016-9
World Oil Shortages To Lead To Oil Price Spike By 2020s, warns Goldman Sachs
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Supply-Crunch-To-Lead-To-Oil-Price-Spike-By-2020s-Expert-Says.html
The End of Peak Oil? Why this topic is still relevant despite recent denials (Chapman, 2014)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151300342X
Projection of World Fossil Fuels by Country (Mohr, 2015)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016236114010254
Chevron CEO warns US shale oil alone cannot meet the world’s growing demand for crude
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/01/us-shale-cannot-meet-the-worlds-growing-oil-demand-chevron-ceo-warns.html
German Military (leaked) Peak Oil study concludes: oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 90% of all manufactured products, so a shortage of oil would collapse the world economy & world governments
https://www.permaculture.org.au/files/Peak%20Oil_Study%20EN.pdf
“World Oil Shortages To Lead To Oil Price Spike By 2020s, warns Goldman Sachs”
yes… these are real possibilities…
I might be more worried when it’s December 10th, 2019…
and that is VERY SOON…
but really, like most humans, I discount the future, and that discount grows as the timeline extends…
I’m trying to get through the winter of 17/18…
predictions about the 2020s can be very interesting…
but nowadays, I’m not (yet) losing any sleep over the 2020s.
They got it wrong….oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 100% of all manufactured products
Surprisingly, none of these reports say, “Without an adequate supply of oil, we cannot have enough jobs that pay well. We will have financial problems that lead the world economy to collapse.” Everyone assumes that the crisis will look like a shortage. This is possible (especially for short periods), but I think it is just as likely that the symptoms will look like debt defaults, falling asset prices, and bankrupt banks. In 2007 and early 2008, we had high oil prices. But this soon resolved to very low oil prices and recession. I expect any high oil prices will again resolve to very low prices. In fact, prices are already quite low, compared to what oil (and other commodity pricers) need.
The German study says that the stock market will crash post peak oil and people will lose all faith in their government institutions. (Lucky me I never had any to begin with) 🙂
” I expect any high oil prices will again resolve to very low prices.”
this is one of the best things about this blog…
there are testable near-term predictions…
I see WTI oil is about $57. It was mini-spiking from high 40s low 50s and now seems to have stalled.
the next significant swing will be telling… into the 60s or back near $50.
I think deflation is winning, but it’s a long slow game.
A very rational assessment, Gail.
A great problem is that the electorates will be looking for scapegoats, and many false ‘solutions’ will be on offer…..
We have some big financial institutions and others calling for a bottle neck in oil supply possibly by the end of 2018…. hopefully they are wrong – it is not possible to time this because we have incomplete info
Yes, there is so much we don’t know. And we can’t know which data is real and what’s fake. We can only speculate and continously asess real life events and compare this to our theories of collapse mechanisms.
It seems like money is printed at will to keep select businesses alive. You don’t have to show a profit, just be an important cog in the machinery, e.g. energy, food, technology.
If the “real economy”, i.e. the economic power of the masses of non-elites, are sinking hand-in-hand with conventional oil production, it might take a while before “shortages” become a big issue in the first world.
If China cut back in its demand, or has debt problems, we could see falling world demand and prices.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Ican warns nuclear war ‘a tantrum away’
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42298453
The $10 Trillion Investment Plan To Integrate The Eurasian Supercontinent
The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), by lending out money using an alternative currency to the dollar, opens up huge spaces for investment and the strategic transformation of the region.
The overland integration of the BRI, led by China and Russia, aims to create different transit routes for goods as well as different areas of economic development along the new Chinese Silk Road. A great opportunity is thereby opened up for Chinese banks and for private investors interested in creating infrastructure or developing potential industrial poles in the countries involved in this grand Chinese initiative.
Hong Qi, president of China Minsheng Bank, recently said during an economic forum held in Beijing regarding investments in the BRI that there is potentially about $10 trillion worth of investments in infrastructure in the countries that make up the BRI, such as in railways, urban development, logistics and cross-border e-commerce.
At this point, more than $10 billion has already been committed in investments, thanks to companies already present in over thirty countries and regions along the BRI, with the ongoing intention of financing these loans through China’s public and private sectors. According to data from the China Banking Regulatory Commission, a total of nine Chinese banks are involved in the financing of projects, with 62 branches having been opened in 26 countries. A further $10 billion could come from European countries as a result of investments stemming from the China-CEEC forum.
The effort is mainly focused on the development of railway networks, hospitals, and power plants. Such basic infrastructure will lay the groundwork for further development in countries involved in the BRI that otherwise have little capacity to invest in such projects themselves. According to Zhang Zansheng, an accredited researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, the first marker is set for 2020, the year that “further tangible progress” should be made in the development of the BRI, mainly referring to railway links between different Asian regions and the Mediterranean. Reflecting how things are already changing, dozens of trains leave monthly from European countries to reach China, the latest being one from Italy, leaving from the province of Pavia, a few kilometers from Milan.
Robin Xing, Chief China Economist for Morgan Stanley, echoed many analysts in predicting that 2018 and 2019 will be the two key years where tangible implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative will start to become apparent. These projects and investments will increase global trade with the countries involved in the BRI, which could see a 10% increase in their exports to China over the next 10 years, the practical results of the investments in ports, railways and industrial centers.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-08/10-trillion-investment-plan-integrate-eurasian-supercontinent
The “10 Billion USD has already been committed” is a nice start.
If we look worldwide, the 10 Billion USD in BRI investments doesn’t look like much when we consider that the US Congress adds this much to the US Deficit every 3 days.
Chinese local governments accused of faking economic data
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2123614/chinese-local-governments-accused-faking-economic-data?utm_content=buffer746b7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
In 2014, Elon Musk said Teslas will be 90% autonomous by 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJmhpgW0Dmc
Then in 2015, he said that cars will be fully autonomous by 2017
http://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview/
look at his acting skills
I’m not super impressed with his acting when it comes to the “hard question”: “How’s that going to happen?”
Looking side to side there for a bit, and then laying on the bullshit.
Lol, could you imagine autonomous cars in the hood? Or even in the burbs?
Elon is starting to lose it…
Says Tesla is building AI chips And god-like machines will take over within a decade
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/08/elon_musk_finally_admits_tesla_is_building_its_own_custom_ai_chips/
I’ve read somewhere that Tesla is now burning cash at close to $500k per hour. If this is indeed the case, the implications are hardly positive…….
They are spending around 1 billion a quarter according to Bloomberg. And that is the same amount GM spends. And Tesla sells one percent of the total volume of GM and only sells three vehicles.
Notice how there is generally nowhere to comment on any of these sites that post this rubbish.
More evidence of the fact that the MSM does not exist to inform — or to encourage discussion.
It exists to tell the masses what to think.
Self-driving cars are right around the corner. We are on the precipice of a solar and wind powered world.
And most people believe. Few question that.
I saw that figure too. I can understand why some are recommending shorting the stock.
I suspect Tesla — because it is a crucial ingredient in hopium — has been identified as TBTF…. if that is true … then shorting could result in big losses.
Entropy is always the winner. There is no point to this madness.
Perhaps what is of interest is what we do along the way, and not the end point.
We humans were given one chance to see what we could do in this beautiful world. The end point has always been known.
This world does not belong to any one particular species of animal. I’m sure the life of a squirrel is interesting to the squirrel, too.
“There is no point to this madness.”
true…
but it’s a fascinating madness…
and we get a virtual front row seat via the internet…
if IC and BAU are madness, please give me more madness in 2018.
Took in a PBS Nova program about Extreme Animal Weapons…very surprising findings and for a Domesday Prepper may help in planning…
Here is one link, hope it connects
http://www.pbs.org/video/extreme-animal-weapons-6piqlw/
Surprising evolution at play, nature is less concerned regarding survival of the individual, rather reproduction to perpetrate. The most “peaceful” appears to be the most menacing weaponry.
It is very entertaining to watch the strategy to keep life in the mix.
But humans don’t have any particular need to reproduce, even if it’s not crystal clear whether or how more people in a given context helps or hurts.
Artleads, we are unusual in one regard…we mature human adults are hot wired ready to mate 24/7 in child bearing years…we are obvious real good at doing it…judging from the headlines coming out of the media nowadays.
In my younger days, was a Tropical Fish Hobbyist and set up numerous breeding tanks for various species of egg laying fish. Generally speaking, a vast number of brood was produced and culling was required to prevent overcrowding. Rather heartless task, but necessary, the fastest growing, robust were picked naturally. Glad I live that we humans have largely bypassed that check and balance…for the time being.
I was watching my local news tonight and they said “The economy grew at 3 percent last quarter and that was the highest level since 2014″…They cherry picked one quarter of GDP instead of giving the yearly average. And I was watching CNN the other morning before work and they did the exact same thing. There CNN MONEY pundit said “The economy grew at 3 percent quarterly, so that is good.”..How pathetic the MSM is grasping at straws now…
The Great Depression Economic Growth 1% GDP
2006-2017 Economic Growth 1.5% GDP
The EU is boasting about growth, too. Tell that to the young in Italy, Spain, Greece, even France.
It reminds me of the death of the sister of a friend from a remorseless neurological illness.
They would say ‘She looks better, don’t you think?’ when there was a temporary remission. but as I only saw her every few months,I could see that she was much worse.
The MSM is not merely seeing what it wants to see, as they were, but lying.
Seattle’s homeless population grows more than 40-percent in two years
http://www.king5.com/article/news/local/homeless/seattles-homeless-population-grows-more-than-40-percent-in-two-years/281-497511264
Warning: Keep your hands on the wheels of driverless cars
Series of surveys this year by institutions ranging from MIT to the AAA show that most motorists don’t want to drive, ride in or be on the road anywhere near an autonomous vehicle.
https://www.salon.com/2017/12/09/warning-keep-your-hands-on-the-wheel-of-driverless-cars_partner/
I find it hard to believe these cars will go much beyond shuttles within a warehouse complex in the next ten years. There is too much that can go wrong.
Gail,
A TriStar jet could land itself in the seventies, robotics is growing at an unbelievable pace; it is an area of interest. Last month I attended a medical manufacturing show in the Twin Cities, the advances from IMTS in 2014 were incredible. Machine learning is the basis of Amazon, Mars rovers are autonomous to a fair extent and ancient technology. Technology is somewhat questioned on this sight, but it is pretty incredible to watch it develop.
Betting against technology to date has not been a very good bet.
Thanks for all the effort, thanks for no advertising and thus an unbiased site.
Dennis L.
The problem with technology is that it creates too much was disparity. Some people have no jobs at all. Others have very low paid jobs, while managers and those with higher education tend to be much more highly paid. So while technology is helpful in some ways it still creates a problem for society. I would bet against technology because robots cannot buy finished products. Thus, using an army of robots leads to an economy that make a lot of goods, but has no one to buy them.
Machines do NOT think. They do NOT learn.
I have two decades of experience working with computer programmers – one of the things I do is I tell them what I want the machine to do — and they write the code — and the machine does exactly what I tell it to do.
It is a STUUUPID slave. The machine does not provide feedback. It does not improve on any instructions. It does not run away. It does not even think that it should run away. It does not talk back. It is never lazy. It does not require the whip. It has ZERO IQ. It would not exist without my input. In fact it doesn’t even have a brain – that is how STUUUUPid it is.
AI is an oxymoron.
I will help you with this concept – think of a hammer — if you don’t swing the hammer it is useless. Same with a computer.
If the machine could figure out what to do without me or the programmers — I could slash quite a few jobs and save the money to buy more wine — and I could drink the wine every day because the machines would have no need for me.
To make that happen you would need to reproduce the human brain.
Not gonna happen. NEVER. Not in a billion years.
I guarantee you – we will never see self-driving cars on the road.
The cost to create a vehicle that could react to a wide range of situations would be off the charts. And even then — I guarantee you — these cars would still be less safe than driving with the Little Old Lady from Pasadena in the driver’s seat.
Here’s the master telling the slave what to do….
https://labintsis.com/wp-content/woo_uploads/103-robot_mehanicar.jpg
I’ve seen a battery powered golf cart make it through 18 holes…
https://imgur.com/a/B83VP
If we had a chart of “feet drilled”, I wonder what that would do. I know that there has been a switch from vertical to horizontal drilling rigs and laterals are getting longer. I imagine that is part of the change taking place.
They are probably abandoning less profitable wells and maxing out the profitable ones. I wonder how long this will work.
About as long as selling off assets to produce cash flow works as a strategy.
Hi Gail,
So many of us have said how much we’d like to see your message spread further in the mainstream world. I’m reposting something here that needs to be thought out more. If we decide on a course of destroying nothing, physical or psychological, we’d be stuck with all manner of abominations. How does this figure or not figure in a hopeless world? I don’t have an energy analysis that either supports or refutes the following. I’m looking for a paragraph or two from you that is simplified to the point that is truth is obvious to the fiercest denier. Any thoughts?
DESTROY NOTHING
I’ll have to return to the drawing board to figure this out. I was trying to bring intuition, religion, the sacred and analysis into relationship, but it’s still elusive. The part of it I’ll stick with–it’s the intuitive part that I was trying to combine with energy–has to do with land use planning.
– Any given scene in a built environment supports a social system.
– If you disrupt the scene, you disrupt the social system, in physical and emotional terms.
– The social system reflects energy flow of a certain type, along with its emotional corollaries.
– That energy flow is too complex and subtle to grasp intellectually.
– But the sense of the sacred, based on “aesthetic intuition,” can make physical disruption jarring and offensive. It realizes that subtle flows of energy are being disorganized and subjected to entropy.
– Ergo, it concludes that the purely intellectual calculation based on arbitrary rules of development are grossly destructive, and can only lead to deteriorated energy and social situation.
– But since aesthetic excellence tells you how to add new things without disturbing the old (to a significant extent anyhow), you can have a lot of new development as long as it is nuanced and camouflaged.
REALLY LONG–READ ONLY IF RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF ENERGY GRAB YOU.
(JMG blog)
JC says:
December 7, 2017 at 11:56 am
Mr. Greer, I will attempt to do the atheist route for you, starting from the science angle and arriving at nature spirits of a sort.
The gaining insight where things just click is an application of pattern recognition. It’s what artificial intelligence researchers have been playing with for a few decades now, with some partial success. When you practice on an instrument, the patterns are being embedded in your brain until you don’t think about it anymore but just do it. When at that state, you start to assemble patterns of the patterns you leaned. Once those larger patters establish themselves, things just connect and seem obvious. You don’t seen separate things anymore, you see patterns of patterns of things. You feel it and see it in a whole different way.
The same applies for feeling the vibes. You don’t see it, or hear it, or smell it. But somehow your brain recognizes a pattern in a combination of a lot of little subtle things from all senses that you don’t consciously perceive but is there nonetheless. You recognize it as ‘a vibe’ but will almost never be able to say what exactly makes up the vibe. It doesn’t make it any less real of course.
Now I’ll tell you that religion has a function that nature has put into humans for a reason besides just being religious. Humans are terrible in long term view, especially multi-generation. But there are some things that the next generations should understand, like not cutting down too many trees or you have soil erosion and people die. It’s pretty hard to do a long term study and convince people, certainly several years BC. An approach that works, is by coding long term behavior into rituals, and link rituals to religion. You don’t stop soil erosion consciously, but you have sacred groves of Demeter that have the same result.
I’m not trying to talk down on religion. In fact, you could see religions it as a living entities living in symbiosis with humans. They live in our minds and writing, multiply, mutate, cross-fertilize and can die. Bad religions with bad rituals let their host do things that destroy the support structures. The host will eventually die, and so does the religion. Good religions makes the host thrive and will outlast the other religions.
In the same way you can wonder if a storm system is alive. It maintains a certain structure, in a dynamic balance using energy and material from its environment. Just like most living things. You can wonder if species and ecosystems are alive, mutating, adapting, reproducing. They are not alive as we are, but still they form a pattern recognizable as a living thing. Even evolution seems to be alive, to have a spirit, and even works as a system that leans, collects knowledge, builds in fail-safes and backups (the more we learn, the more we see those nifty things). It just thinks on geological timescales.
The world is full of self-organized systems. Religions of various types seem to be some of these religions. I believe there is a god behind all of the self-organization. It is a miracle that humans have been able to be on earth as long as they have been.
The concept of god or some sort of universal orderliness is irrelevant to the explanation of cause and effect, since that concept itself assumes causality or ‘self-organising systems’ as you put it.
God seems to me to be a god of endless coincidences. The fact that the Universe can exist, with all the rules of physics, seems to me to be a miracle. Energy plays an amazing role.
Religious writings include stories to illustrate beliefs that seemed to be helpful at the time. People today will want to decide whether these beliefs still make sense. In a sense, we have to believe something. Do we believe, “Technology will save us,” or “He who dies with the most toys wins,” or “A beautiful body is what success is all about”? Or do we balance those views with some older views?
When humans are born and start growing up in the world, they will develop emotionally and psychologically all by themselves. Even if they are raised by wolves as is sometimes the case, they develop as humans because the human brain nervous system has evolved to develop that way. But without the aid and support of an already well-developed and function human social environment, they will not develop the social and linguistic skills they need in order to function smoothly in society or to indulge in deeply abstract and intellectual pursuits.
Human society molds its members in various ways. The kids have to be filled up with something and the adults have to be kept cooperative or society won’t continue. “Religious” beliefs, ideologies and rituals have long been part of the mix. And for adults, the beliefs don’t even have to be believed. As long as the orthodox doctrines are publicly acknowledged as true, individuals can believe anything they like in perfect freedom. But it takes a certain degree of intellectual and emotional maturity for an individual to accomplish this feat. It isn’t something one can pick up while being raised by wolves.
I’m ready to chuck out the word “religious” as being “not very useful”. I think it sheds more darkness than light these days on the things it attempts to describe. The ancient Romans coined the word, according to one theory, to describe duties and rituals that formed ties between people and those things that were above them, which were in those days personified as gods. Thus spake WIkipedia: ” According to the philologist Max Müller in the 19th century, the root of the English word religion, the Latin religio, was originally used to mean only “reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety” (which Cicero further derived to mean diligence).”
Fortunately for readers, I’ve been called to elevenses — the morning tea ritual my people practice, and I have a religious duty to accept a cup of Orange Pekoe and a chocochip cookie — so you are spared any more of my half-baked sermonizing this Sunday morning.
I am not sure I am giving you the answer you are looking for.
It is not us humans who destroy things; it is primarily the laws of the universe that destroy everything that we think we have made. We create an antibiotic; micro organisms quickly adapt so the antibiotic no longer works. We learn to build plows to help in farming. We quickly discover that their use leads to soil loss. Also, they quickly break. If nothing else, the fuel used to power the tractors that pull the plow quickly gets used up and needs to be replaced with new fuel. The oil well from whence the oil comes quickly depletes, and needs to be replaced with a different oil well in a different location. Even we humans need to have a new supply of food and water to keep our bodies going. With these supplies, we still age and eventually die.
The world is made with many replaceable parts. We err in thinking that anything is really permanent.
“Nothing endures but change.”
– Heraclitus
“Impermanent, subject to change, are component things. Strive on with heedfulness!” This was the final admonition of the Buddha Gotama to his disciples.
And when the Buddha had passed away, Sakka, the chief of the deities, uttered the following:
Impermanent are all component things,
They arise and cease, that is their nature:
They come into being and pass away,
Release from them is bliss supreme.
Aniccaa vata sa”nkhaaraa — uppaada vaya dhammino
Uppajjitvaa nirujjhanti — tesa.m vuupasamo sukho.
— Mahaa-Parinibbaana Sutta (DN 16)[1]
“Release” implies something permanent (like a soul) is being released to go into Nirvana realm which by the way is permanent per Buddha’s teaching!
Dear Manor H. Kahn;
“Impermanent are all component things,”
Nuff said,
Pintada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Sermon
I think I’m trying to say the same thing in a different way: There is nothing we can do to make things better. You have a carbuncle of a high rise in a historic neighborhood. There’s an L overpass that divides the neighborhood and blocks access to the water. You removed old rail lines and widened the road for auto traffic. Just to briefly touch on the limitless list of “improvements” to our lives. So now there are those who want to tear down the L, put back rails, blow up the carbuncle and the dams…to make things better. Thanks to you and others here, I’m seeing that you can’t make things better. There is some justification for the old axiom: “when in doubt, don’t.” What I’m saying is don’t. I’m perfectly capable of following this philosophy. There is no overriding principle forcing me not to follow it, regardless of what others do. Would you disagree with this view?
If people see a way that they think they can make money, they will aim for whatever improvement that they can profit from. This is what drives improvements. When there is no money for them, they will stop, and the neighborhood will just go downhill.
You once recommended a new housing paradigm: Instead of building new structures, people would share existing buildings, move into basements that already existed, etc. That is what Mexican (undocumented) immigrants do. Might my intuitive judgment about how things should look–if I had stuck to them against all odds–have led to this being more commonly practiced? For decades, it’s been clear to me that building anything on virgin land was less good than leaving the land alone. Has I stuck to the point and gotten help in the process, might your housing scenario have had a better chance of success?
Was my not trying hard enough (not believing in myself enough) and others not supporting me an indication of how the universe destroys everything, or was it indicative on a social failure?
Part of the problem here, though, is a chain of events where the original decision acted as a domino to hit down all the others. One huge problem is the (unconscious?) discarding of the rural, as the world increasingly urbanizes and population increases. But you’ve stressed that people living together in the same place lowers reproduction. So, preventing building, leading to living together would equal fewer people?
Where I live, a Flying J truck stop is being proposed, and local residents are up in arms. Mostly those that live in a large suburban development at the county line. I had railed against that development from the moment I saw it 6.5 years ago. There was something vile about it in my mind. It was destructive of the area’s rural character. Then we come back to the domino effect: The county has previously allowed the city to annex half the rural land and build up to the present county border. That helped to put pressure on remaining county land. Dwindling agriculture dwindled further. Plans and thoughts about things rural vanishes. No one could distinguish the difference between urban, suburban and rural anymore. The county plan does nothing much to protect rural values. Since local agriculture has given way to distant industrial agriculture which requires trucking we find ourselves down the chain of fallen dominoes… Nobody is alarmed at the monster new interchange at the county border, which most likely had the Flying J truck stop in mind without disclosing that to residents. And the result of all that unconsciousness is that the suburban newcomers are fighting tooth and nail to stop the development…even though they are part of the domino chain that brought it on. You have to shake your head.
It’s that good old friend NIMBY you are talking about.
In my town there were a similar development, they built a big suburb in a rural area with single family homes. After a few years a developer was allowed to build big apartement complexes deep in the suburbs, so the local inhabitants started protesting and said this would result in too much car traffic and that “this area should be for single family homes only”…
The answer to this kind of Nimby-ism is, clearly, for red-blooded Real Men to create a harem in their ‘single-family’ property, thus increasing density of occupation, and making more than one woman very happy indeed (women like nothing better than bitching about other women, haven’t we all noticed? Harem life is perfect for that!) Children can be packed in like sardines, keep them warm and teaching them to fight for survival – an important Darwinian lesson. 🙂
I think the rise of fundamentalist Islam has that covered.
There’s a theory that the reason why third-wave feminists are reluctant to critique Islam or Arab cultures is that they have a subconscious desire for red-blooded Real Men to “take control”.
That theory is absurd.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/14/opinion/muslim-convert-irpt/index.html
There is a lack of males with energy surpluses. Everywhere.
Well, Artleads, we have a ‘County Plan’ here too – they are I suspect the same everywhere.
In this case, the central government in London threatens that if a plan for dumb, ugly
and poorly-built developments isn’t produced by local authorities, in a hurry, they will simply remove all restraints and let the developers do just what they like! And of course all the usual lies about the properties being ‘affordable’ and ‘answering social need.’
It’s like saying ‘One bullet in your body, in a vital organ, or a whole magazine unloaded: you choose?’
I do sometimes find myself longing for this civilisation to end – but it will, soon enough. To destroy through concrete is the only logic it knows, and it will destroy itself.
If I was over 70… and in declining health…. I’d wake up every day hoping it was the last for every single one of us.
Meanwhile… I prefer that BAU staggers on … so that I can continue to enjoy raping and pillaging Mother… this is one thing I have in common with Green Groopies … although they would never admit that.
Rape the Mother. Steal from Mother’s Purse. Live Large!
You are Freud ‘s dream come true. Lol
‘Change is the only constant thing’.
We just have to learn to accept that.
In many ancient mythologies, even the gods change and die.
The economy’s biggest mystery — paychecks just aren’t growing
“Economists believed heading into 2017 that the low unemployment rate would push wages higher, but they still haven’t broken out.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/08/lack-of-wage-growth-remains-the-economys-greatest-mystery.html
It’s obvious the US government unemployment numbers are fake.
Maybe because percentage not working is astronomical?
There are hardly any unemployed here in Britain -if we discount the incapacitated, etc – and yet an ever larger % of the fully-employed are receiving wholly inadequate wages: and an astonishing number need welfare supplements to pay all their bills. No need at all to put up wages to aid retention and recruitment, very easy for employers.
Self organizing systems are in general a mystery.
At this point, the world economy is not producing a very rapidly rising supply of goods and services. Everything gets squeezed: inflation rates, interest rates, profits of companies, amounts paid to fuel producers of all kinds, from food to uranium to fossil fuels. It is logical that wages of workers get squeezed as well.
So you’re saying deflation has taken hold. Is there an underlying cause?
Debt deflation will be a large factor, along with speculative bubbles being the only way to profit driving additional capital into the FIRE economy over the goods & services economy.
Instead of high prices limiting supply, low wages are limiting supply. We have assumed that shortages can appear only one way, but they really can appear in multiple ways. Deflation is a sign of shortages; it is the sign of a system trying to get smaller. Quite a while I wrote a post about what a cook does, when the cook has too little of a necessary ingredient. The answer is, make a smaller batch. Deflation is what hits when the economy needs to make a smaller batch.
Why is everything I purchase going up? Health care costs go up, education goes up, eating out goes up, groceries I am not sure of, gasoline appears to be mostly up, RE taxes are up, dental care is up, housing costs are up, mortgage rates are up, stocks are up, bonds are up, auto’s appear to be up and last of all, bit coin is up.
Dennis L.
>Health care costs go up
Government backed monopoly/oligopoly (artificial scarcity), in addition to paying customers subsidizing those who can’t afford to pay
> education goes up
Student loans flood the education market, causing isolated inflation since the loans are specifically tied to education
>eating out goes up
Demand has been going down, businesses need to raise prices to remain open
>housing costs are up, mortgage rates are up, stocks are up, bonds are up, auto’s appear to be up and last of all, bit coin is up.
The FIRE segment of the economy has inflation due to QE, and the bubbles induce more capital flow into FIRE causing more inflation in FIRE economy and deflation in the economy of goods and services.
Reply to comment below:
We eat at a restaurant periodically, basically the same items. In the last 15 years the cost has increased 100% or 6% per year non compounding. Autos are not down in cost, the cost of servicing an auto, e.g. an oil change, is not down, dentistry which is not affected by various insurance programs is definitely not down. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, HVAC service technicians? Farm land is not down overall, the ten year trend seems to be up. It seems to me that internet service is up, I don’ t watch TV so I am not sure of cable, but I suspect it is up, utilities are up. In 1991 the cost of a gallon of gas was $1.14 according to energy trends insider, now let us say twice that or 100% increase, about 4% per year I believe non compounding.
Minimum wage is up not down, wages are up not down, but prices are up faster from what I can see.
Are smart phones up or down? I don’t have one, don’t know. Is FE’s Gulfstream up or down? Is the cost of maintaining it up or down? Anyone priced a new F35 lately? Say with all the options.
What specifically is down? E. g. a specific service or commonly purchased item. .
Dennis L.
Not because of “inflation,” at least the way it is counted. This doesn’t show much increase recently. I found this chart that can be used to show how the inflation rate has varied over the last 20 years, for various categories. https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm
You click on a line, at it shows the inflation rate over time for the particular category, at least the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts things.
I am empirical, for me my Quicken accounts tell me things are increasing in cost. Talking on the phone at one time cost me about $25/month, now maybe double. There is nothing I need to say on a cell phone that didn’t happen perfectly well on a land line. My last oil change was in excess of $50, not that long ago it was less than $30. My last dental cleaning/exam was $200 which is up from $100 not that long ago. Electrical rates in Germany are off the map. My last Camry hybrid was maybe $26K, a new one is maybe $33K over ten years, same car for all practical purposes. Accounting rates are up, legal fees are up, eating, drinking, driving, housing, education, healthcare are all up. I am eagerly awaiting FE to chime in on the cost of Gulfstream ownership over the last ten years. He could easily answer if landing fees are down over the globe.
No sarcasm intended neither explicit nor implicit. It would be nice to know where the deflation is occuring.
Dennis L.
I have not reached the point where I am checking on landing fees….
My understanding is that deflation is dangerous when it involves resources… consumer prices continue to rise — because extraction costs have increased — but resource prices deflate — because consumers cannot afford the higher prices required to allow resource companies to remain solvent.
What percentage of our gasoline comes from natural gas distillates?
The one thing I know is that the percentage is higher in the winter than during the summer. Short chain hydrocarbons tend to evaporate easily. For this reason, they are skimmed off and stored for use when the weather is cool. This is why gasoline is lower priced in the winter than the summer.
Ford moving new self-driving vehicle, EV production from Michigan to Mexico
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/06/ford-makes-room-for-new-self-driving-vehicle-moving-ev-production-to-mexico.html
Sorry I have been offline. We were without power for several hours yesterday, because of a snow storm. My Internet is still down. Fortunately, I can get some access through phone lines.
Sounds like quite a storm!
“A massive storm system that started in the Deep South is moving into the mid-Atlantic, the Northeast and New England. More than a quarter of a million people from Louisiana to Georgia are without electricity and there has been one weather-related death so far. Almost 2,000 airline flights were cancelled Friday due to the weather.
“The pre-winter storm made its way through Atlanta during the busy Friday evening commute and some parts of Alabama saw a record 10 inches of snowfall, reports CBS News’ Mark Strassmann…”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/winter-storm-system-brings-record-snowfall-to-the-south-heads-north/
Our internet is still down. I am using cell phone access with limited bandwidth right now. Yesterday we lost power from late afternoon until bedtime. Local roads are a problem because there are a lot of trees down.
Sorry to hear about that ggg coooling thing hitting your region ….
ikr, Climbdate change starts to get strong around this time of year
in the Northern hemisphere.
haha…
And down here in the south the GGG wwwwww is kicking in as the summer season starts… we had a rather balmy 29 degrees C day … a month without any rain … and just last summer we had enormous amounts of rain … and it was much cooler…
Well that’s weather for ya!
I’ll report back when the area has changed and is a desert — or a rain forest…
We learned several things:
1. Weather forecasts aren’t very good. No one warned people about the possibility of a major storm. I sent my son off to work downtown on the 7:00am express bus, without thinking about the possibility that there would be a big storm and a major lack of public transportation to get back in the middle of the day. (The express bus only runs in morning and evening rush hours.) Schools in our area started to send children back home in the middle of the morning, when it became clear that we were in the middle of a major storm.
2. Falling trees are a big issue in the South. They are very often too big for a person to move without cutting them into pieces with a power saw. Some fall and hit houses; some fall across streets blocking them. Some take down electric power lines, which are generally above ground. We were without electricity for several hours on Friday afternoon/evening, probably related to falling trees.
3. When the electricity is out, there are many side effects. Gas heating in homes does not work, so homes get quite cool. Stop lights don’t work. In fact, quite a few stop lights were out on Saturday, after the storm on Friday. Gas pumps don’t work.
4. On Saturday morning, the major issue was trying to figure a way out of the neighborhood, around all of the downed trees. Once a person got out the neighborhood, someone had taken care of clearing the snow and trees from major streets. But most stores were not really open, probably because employees couldn’t get out of their neighborhoods, with all of the downed trees. My daughter who was visiting New Orleans said downed trees were are problem there as well.
5. Internet access was out longer than other services (except through telephone “cellular data.”) Fortunately, cell phones continued to work. We got internet service back on Sunday afternoon (today), after the storm on Friday.
1,000 persons own 40% of all Bitcoins, and they may be manipulating the Bitcoin market:
https://themarketmogul.com/1000-people-40-bitcoin/
manipulation?
say it ain’t so!
The largest single day drop in the price of silver occurred on “Silver Thursday.” In February 1985 the Hunt brothers were charged “with manipulating and attempting to manipulate the prices of silver futures contracts and silver bullion during 1979 and 1980” by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
If memory serves, the Hunt bros. owned at one time 45% of all silver holdings. Now that’s some leverage to manipulate.
It’s time consuming and boring to wait for something to go up in value. Much easier to orchestrate it’s rise, to force it, to manipulate it like a toy in your hands.
‘The Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection said on Monday in an urgent letter to 28 cities in the north that residents now could continue burning coal’
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Gas-Shortage-Has-China-Backtracking-On-Coal-Ban.html
BURN MORE COAL! (thanks for paying attention)
Shades of 1928
https://www.economic-undertow.com/2017/12/07/shades-of-1928/
Much much much much worse than 1928…. this is like 1928 … but the CBs keep pushing the markets even further out of kilter with gargantuan amounts of free money….
Even if the end of cheap oil were not the reason…. these actions would on their own eventually lead to the collapse of civilization …
If you look very closely … you will see Humpty teetering on the edge…
http://webecoist.momtastic.com/assets/uploads/2009/10/Amazing_Cliffs_1b.jpg
the long-term aftermath of 1928 was a 7 decade run of prosperity…
of course, there was a 7 decade supply of cheap oil back then, too….
perhaps there will be an anniversary-crash of the markets in 2029…
I think I’ll go out on a limb and predict that.
That’s just crazy talk!
thanks!
I am a self-proclaimed expert at crazy talk!
come to think of it, the “8 years” have been a problem in recent history:
1918: WWI, Spanish Flu pandemic
1928: prelude to Great Depression
1938: prelude to WWII
1948: prelude to Korean War, H-bomb development
1958: Edsel, recession, US advisors go to Vietnam
1968: Nixon, Vietnam War
1978: Carter, prelude to Iranian Revolution
1988: Bush I, prelude to Gulf Wars
1998: prelude to “Dot Com” financial crash
2008: Great Financial Crash, almost went down
2018: ???
GDP is loving this sh it! Feed the beast …. replace those houses … run cars off the assembly lines as fast as the insurance companies can pay for them!
Beeee utiful!!!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-08/it-was-war-zone-heavy-winds-push-wildfires-toward-san-diego-bel-air-burns
is the economy running too “hot”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
once again, overpopulation is a major part of this CA wildfire “crisis”, but goes unmentioned.
The fact that insurance is available, so that the individual homeowner is not very much affected in the case of fire, makes a difference as well.
The climate is changing in California. People are still catching up to that fact and so are insurance companies. Don’t be surprised if rates go much higher.
“The only thing that Is constant Is change, noted the philosopher Heraclitus about 2,500 years ago. And California’s climates (and yes, there are several of ’em) are no exception to this time-tested rule.
It’s well established that in California the 20th century was one of wettest centuries of the past 1300 years and that the region has suffered numerous droughts including century-long “mega-droughts” during that time. And yet still the state develops and its population expands as if the present relatively benign conditions were going to last indefinitely.
I think it’s one of the results of the normality bias that rules human behavior and explains why big disasters and sudden changes for the worse tend to catch us with our pants down.
By the way, Heraclitus was also the dude he said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.”
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MtLbQpBWkLA/hqdefault.jpg
Fire officials said Thursday brought a historic fire danger score and prompted them to upgrade their color-coding system to include purple for the first time. The scale used to measure the potency of the Santa Ana winds typically runs from gray, for little or no danger, to red, for high danger
Though it is not rare for Santa Ana winds to blow this time of year, weather experts say it’s unusual for them to be combined with such dry conditions.
With relative humidity in the single digits along the coastal mountains, the air is the driest it’s been here in recorded history, said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain.
“The [relative] humidities right now along the coast are much drier than what you’d normally see in the interior desert in the summertime,” Swain said. “Once you get down to 1% or 2%, you’re down almost as low as is physically possible
California has two distinct fire seasons: the summer season, when hot temperatures dry out vegetation providing fuel for wildfires; and the fall fire season, when hot, dry Santa Ana winds blow in over the mountains from the desert. Research shows that global warming is making both of them worse.
A 2015 study found that, over a 50-year period, fires in both seasons have become more frequent and more severe—though Santa Ana-fueled fires, which burn along the state’s coast, tend to be more economically destructive. A 2014 study found that, between 1984 and 2011, the area burned by large fires increased by roughly 90,000 acres a year. While both studies looked at the effects of large-scale changes in climate on wildfires, neither directly implicated human-caused climate change. However, a 2016 study found that anthropogenic warming doubled the amount of area burned by forest fires between 1984 and 2015.
On top of the recent heat waves, the Western United States has been gradually getting warmer for some time. Average temperatures in California have risen roughly 1.5 degrees Celsius since 1895. And every degree counts: “For more than three decades, wildfire researchers have known that fire and aridity, which is controlled by heat, exist in an exponential relationship,” Robinson Meyer explained in The Atlantic. “Every degree of warming does more to promote fire than the previous degree of warming, [Park Williams, co-author of the 2016 study] said.”
A number of studies have already shown that the long-term temperature trend associated with global warming has increased the likelihood and severity of drought in California—even in the absence of significant changes in precipitation. Our new work demonstrates that the increasing frequency of atmospheric patterns conducive to extremely low precipitation and extremely high temperatures California is likely causing a further increase in drought risk on top of that contributed by more gradual long-term warming
http://weatherwest.com/arch…
“California has two distinct fire seasons: the summer season, when hot temperatures dry out vegetation providing fuel for wildfires; and the fall fire season, when hot, dry Santa Ana winds blow in over the mountains from the desert. Research shows that global warming is making both of them worse.”
Research shows that ever-expanding population and development is making both of them worse.
I friend of mine in college in the 70’s was from CA. Even then he worked a summer job clearing brush to limit fires. The fact that GW is trotted out to explain this is not surprising, even amusing. Kind of like saying a big hurricane that is no larger or intense than previous hurricanes that struck the same area, and causing great damage to the east coast is due to GW, when the hurricane is no different than before, but rather the infrastructure and population has greatly increased, thereby logically increasing the economic damage and loss of life.
Any change in temps are due to weather cycles, and the fact that our sun is changing as we speak…we are heading to a mini ice age.
That works for me Jesse….because we people ain’t going to do anything about it anyway…Yes, I climate is ALWAYS CHANGING….it didn’t matter why it is! BAU baby!
LA has really only four distinct seasons:
FLOODS, FIRES, EARTHQUAKES, AND RIOTS
Nice one. Lol.
‘Research shows that…’
Research shows that renewable energy is ….
Research shows that EVs are….
Research shows that the Tesla semi-truck will….
Seriously, **** academia. The amount of rigorous research seems like it’s small compared to the politically motivated falsifiable research that is being conducted.
The latest excuse for the lack of adoption of renewables I’ve been told in person is “politics”, when,in actuality, it is politics that is forcing the adaptation of an unreliable and expensive source of electricity generation.
Academia has replaced the medieval Catholic Church and is selling indulgences as we speak…
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Academia has replaced the Catholic Church and is selling indulgences.
The Catholic Church used the money from indulgences to fund its building program. I suppose the building program was a make work program for those who would otherwise be unemployed. Church and state were closely affiliated back then. Indulgences operated like an additional tax on the people.
Now universities are often closely affiliated with governments. Governments are a major source of funding, both through the funds they provide for research grants and more general funds. Governments can also mandate renewables. The big attraction of renewables is the installation jobs they can provide, also the funds for leasing land for wind turbines. They can be used to provide a story of salvation that is just as phony as the original indulgence story. And since it is the new religion, it can’t be attacked. People will even voluntarily give funds to support the cause.
Spot on! Yes, the new indulgences. And if you believe, you are one of the saved……
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New article by Ugo Bardi https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-to-lose-the-climate-war-bd75c8e44c88
Looks like another prisoner of limited mental models
I didn’t get past the headline…..
Superb article, Sven!
From that article: “How did we arrive at this point? There was no lack of warning, nor of models showing what was happening. But our leaders made the same mistakes that the Japanese leaders made: they ignored the results of the models.”
Great analogy to the battle of Midway and just like the Japanese model suggested a miracle was needed to win the battle, and so will a miracle be needed to avoid cataclysmic consequences to ignoring what the models indicate is and will continue to happen and that miracle won’t happen just like it didn’t for the Japanese navy.
I can easily see the point in time occurring when panic does ensue and people say, ok, there is a real problem here, so let’s do whatever we can to stop it. But that’s when it’s too late, because the momentum is like a mega runaway train with no brakes, no simple switch to turn it off. There already is geo-engineering; chem-trails to reduce sunlight as a dimming method but it only has so much effect that is overcome by more emissions.
May I interrupt your Koombaya drum pounding … and just say …
BURN MORE COAL TONIGHT BABY!
http://oneclicksmile.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Screen-Shot-2017-02-22-at-11.40.50-768×419.png
BMC tonight, baby!
BMCTB
OU812
In our little corner of the space-time continuum, two simple equations spell out the essentials.
BMC = BAU
BLC = SHF
https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/csz/news/800/2015/alberteinste.jpg
Ugo has not thought deeply about the so-called alternative energy sources. He obviously does not read Gail’s blog or understand her presentations.
He’s what we call a “math moron”, they get stuff wrong to a high degree of precision. This syndrome is prevalent in academia, where silo thinking is the main operational code.
Once something has been “proved,” others can make use of the (often false) finding. Or they can simply misunderstand the finding (under what circumstances is it not true; is a model sufficiently complete to be helpful?), and create a new paper, which is even less correct than the previous paper.
By the way, one thing I can see that most readers cannot see: your email ends .edu. You understand how the system works.
i speak from experience.
Ugo Bardi is quite clever enough: he is just afraid to face the full truth, which is very human, hence the truly absurd ‘hopefu’l articles he publishes.
Utah man fearing doomsday spent 30 years building bunkers
said the man, fearing “end times” or some kind of collapse of society or the government, slowly constructed four cabins and underground bunkers in the forest outside the ski town of Brian Head, hiking up materials in a piecemeal fashion.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/utah-man-fearing-doomsday-spent-30-years-building-bunkers/2017/12/01/71aec094-d6e3-11e7-9ad9-ca0619edfa05_story.html?utm_term=.8bd4cd862121
Doomsday preppers cant even survive a fire.
must have been a nice hobby for him…
but, this is a fine example of how most Doomers are way-too-early…
speaking of early…
there are still 23 more days before 2018 and…
BAU tonight, baby!
He was too lazy to dig underground.
and decades too early…
typical Doomer…
He just wanted a shed, like any normal man, and it went a little too far…….
He should hook up and compare stories with Jan!
Fast, you are his successor…
Matt Lauer May Lose His $9.2-Million New Zealand Farm
New Zealand regulators are reviewing whether the former Today show anchor violated the country’s “good character” requirement
Last week New Zealand’s overseas investment regulator said it was reviewing the agreement for the farm on South Island, since Lauer’s alleged misconduct may violate New Zealand’s behavior clause
While this real-estate scenario plays out in on the other side of the globe, Lauer has reportedly been hiding out at his $33.5-million home in the Hamptons since his termination from the morning show
Ahh, that’s too bad…seems the NZ authorities will put the squeeze on old Matt like in Bali…LOL
CIA TOLD TRUMP NORTH KOREA CAN HIT WASHINGTON WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN THREE MONTHS, REPORT SAYS
http://www.newsweek.com/cia-north-korea-trump-three-months-735229?amp=1
This is like one of those TV ads that says “Call within the next thirty minutes because supplies are limited.”
Nostradamus predicted the 3rd anti-Christ would be one of the first to die in a war he started. Whether Trump is the 3rd (Napoleon 1st, Hitler 2nd) or not and whether that prediction comes true or not, it’s interesting considering the situation with NK.
Hitler was responding to the stab in the back…. therefore one should look to identify who did the stabbing if one wants to find the ‘anti-Christ’
Don’t Stalin or Pol Pot count as an anti-Christ?
There are plenty of anti-Christs throughout history.
Christopher Hitchens was the genuine Third Antichrist—the first two being Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. And Hitch, as you may remember, died in a war he insisted on fighting to prove that booze and fags were health foods.
Gee you could get in trouble talking about fags Obama is big on them.
On the upside I get to go to anger management for 3 days and the food is great.
yes…
I predict an all-out nuclear war between NK and the USA in 2018…
I’m sure other countries will join in…
oh, wait…
that’s not the rational model for new year’s predictions, which is to predict situations similar to this year…
so…
I predict many nuke and/or missile tests by NK in 2018…
I predict no war, as it’s senseless to fight a ground war against the world’s 4th largest army = NK…
I predict continued behind-the-scenes “battles” against NK, probably espionage that is most likely ongoing right now…
and though a “regime change” in NK hasn’t happened yet, maybe in 2018…
I feel like making that a prediction, but recent history suggests not.
Have you given up hope on BAU 2019? What has changed?
hi Paul…
top few lines are sarcastic…
2019 is too far away…
but 2018?
365 days of BAU, baby!
He soiled his diaper I guess. The BAU-or-bust clique on OFW sound like high-functioning nonagenerian invalids anyway.
And after Iraq WMDs, we all know to believe everything the CIA tells us! Yea!
John Bolton is totally insane
Why Isn’t Wall St. Backing The Next Shale Boom?
Even Saudi Arabia cannot survive Brent under $70 for more than a few more years. 2/3s of the OPEC nations are already bankrupt.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Isnt-Wall-St-Backing-The-Next-Shale-Boom.html
Oil Investors Are Growing Impatient
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Investors-Are-Growing-Impatient.html
“Russia has opened a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in the country’s northern region of Yamal. The first tanker with LNG was launched on Friday by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The ice-breaking tanker is named after the former CEO of Total Christophe de Margerie who died in a plane crash in Russia. The tanker can carry up to 173,000 cubic meters of LNG. Russia plans to build 15 tankers as big as the ‘Christophe de Margerie‘.”
Icebreaking LNG tankers? 15 of them… and then also building not one but three of the largest nuclear powered icebreakers ever built. Dam, some of the GW zealots here need to send Putin the articles stating that the Arctic is trending to be ice-free. Dang, those Ruskies are stupid! Wasting their money and resources like that.
Funny, but in the pictures I see sea ice!
“The ceremony was also attended by a member of Saudi Aramco’s board of directors. The kingdom is considering taking part in Novatek’s new project, Arctic LNG 2, according to Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak.”
The Saudi guests reportedly had to change their trousers at the end of the event.
https://www.rt.com/business/412468-russia-arctic-lng-plant-putin/
Duh, maybe it is possible to break through 1 meter thick ice, but not when 10 meters thick.
It snowed, so AGW doesn’t exist.
Its funny, pics of starving people do not bother me at all. Seeing this … is different. Maybe its because all polar bears are intelligent and decent, people not so much.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/08/starving-polar-bear-arctic-climate-change-video
“Its funny, pics of starving people do not bother me at all. Seeing this … is different.”
I agree.
Well, you wildlife-sympathizing misanthropes can go north and offer your plump carcasses as food for the starving polar bears, Basically, you walk up to one of them on an ice flow, gesticulate wildly, and scream, “Eat us, you wonderful natural creature, as your plight is all our fault!!
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/clip_image002_thumb5.jpg?w=623&h=476
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Polar-Bears-Stable-or-Growing-in-12-of-13-Arctic-Districts-York-2016.jpg
Just like people, polar bears are fruitful and multiply when given the opportunity. And the balance of recent scientific research indicates that this is exactly what they are doing at present.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.2030/full
You can drop cluster bombs of facts and logic on DelusiSTANIS… you can fill a flame thrower with facts and logic and try to incinerate them… you can hurl atomic fact and logic missiles at them… you can stab them with sharpened facts and logic.
And all will bounce off harmlessly … because they are protected by thick shields made of stooopidity.
Fortunately these shields also render them harmless…
By the way, proper scientist and polar bear researcher Susan Crockford has produced a critique of the starving bear linked to CC agony porn and tear-jerker photo op and I think it’s an enlightening read—as in you can actually learn something worth knowing from it, as opposed to just having your emotional bell ropes pulled by the guttersnipe press folks at the Guardian.
We finally have this year’s example of the new fad of claiming every polar bear that died of starvation (or on its way to starving to death) — and caught on film — is a victim of climate change: a young bear on Somerset Island near Baffin Island, Nunavut filmed in August during its last angonizing hours by members of an activist conservation organization called SeaLegacy.
https://polarbearscience.com/2017/12/09/one-starving-bear-is-not-evidence-of-climate-change-despite-gruesome-photos/
Oh boo hoo … booo hooooo hoooo…. (Don Draper Playbooks Ch 7 – section c – subsection iiiiiv – use fake photos or photos without proper context to elicit strong emotions from Stuuuupiiid Human MORE ons)
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/09/02/13/syrian-migrant-boy-turkey.jpg
If you really want to up the ante — do this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmfVs3WaE9Y
Of course that was all a act — a lie – she made all of that up
That kid was in a safe place but his dad wanted to take him to the land of free stuff Canada.
Here is the co-founder of SeaLegacy (CBC Radio) saying why they filmed the incident and released the video (my bold):
“Conservation group SeaLegacy has released video of an emaciated polar bear near the Baffin Islands. They say climate change has led the animal to starvation. (SeaLegacy/Caters News)
“We hear from scientists that in the next 100 to 150 years, we’re going to lose polar bears,” Mittermeier [SeaLegacy co-founder Cristina Mittermeier ] said.
“We wanted the world to see what starvation of a majestic animal like this looks like.”
This may be how you get gullible people to donate money to a cause but it isn’t science: there is no evidence that this starving bear was a “victim” of sea ice loss caused by global warming.
SeaLegacy co-founder Cristina Mittermeier admitted as much later in the interview quoted above and said the reason the bear died was “irrelevent” — essentially admitting that she was using this poor individual as a serendipitous photo op to illustrate the future fate she imagines for all bears.
“It is impossible to tell why he was in this state. Maybe it could’ve been because of an injury or disease,” Mittermeier said.
…
While Mittermeier said the bear had no obvious injuries and she believes it was too young to die of old age, she contends that’s irrelevant.
“The point is that it was starving, and … as we lose sea ice in the Arctic, polar bears will starve.”
In August, this bear would have been only recently off the sea ice: since most bears are at their fattest at this time of year, something unusual had to have affected his ability to hunt or feed on the kills he made when other bears around him did not starve and die. It could have been something as simple as being out-competed for food in the spring by older animals.
But if sea ice loss due to man-made global warming had been the culprit, this bear would not have been the only one starving: the landscape would have been littered with carcasses.
This was one bear dying a gruesome death as happens in the wild all the time (there is no suggestion that a necropsy was done to determine cause of death, just like Stirling’s bear that supposedly died of climate change.)
Comment captured…. when it is released this will make sense:
Humans are dummmb f789s…. tell them anything … add a photo … and they will believe it
They are STEWpid.
I think the big question is whether the purchase price for LNG can rise high enough to cover the cost of extraction and shipping. I know that the US can’t really make a profit sending LNG to Europe because the European price is only $5 or $6 per Mcf, and shipping costs from the US are about $4 per Mcf. This means that extraction must be done for less than $1 to $2 per Mcf. In fact, natural gas companies have been selling natural gas at $3 per Mcf, even though they are losing money at this price. Russia is likely to run into the same low price problem.
WORLD ECONOMIES IN TROUBLE: Middle East Oil Exports Lower Than 40 Years Ago
https://srsroccoreport.com/world-economies-in-trouble-middle-east-oil-exports-lower-than-40-years-ago/
I think this article from last year can help explain some of the idiocy going on in Saudi Barbaria
Jeff Brown predicted this many years ago using his Export Land Model.
it was only a matter of time until oil exporters increased their internal usage because they became wealthier by selling oil.
KSA is burning more oil than ever before.
this will not end well when their biggest oil fields collapse.
“it was only a matter of time until oil exporters increased their internal usage because they became wealthier by selling oil.”
There’s some interesting irony there as the more oil they sell, the wealthier the country becomes, the more oil domestically they consume, but in the long run means less oil to export, leading to less wealth, less oil consumed domestically until it no longer makes economic sense to extract.
yes…
Reality is ironic.
Another good reason why WE must TAKE the oil from THEM — using extreme FORCE if necessary. They MUST be left with only enough energy to stay alive.
Bomb the bast ards into the stone age if they dare to insist on participating in our ORGY.
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/33400000/Spock-star-trek-the-original-series-33456825-500-175.png
That is an illogical assertion, firstly because ‘WE’ is not defined, and secondly because the act of ‘WE’ taking ‘THEIR’ oil will inevitably be performed from many different perspectives simultaneously, thereby defeating the point of same.
Turns out cynical optimism is more an indicator of inner desperation than of logic.
No need to get so pedantic… better to be any one of us … than a Yemeni …
The Stone Age would be an advance for them: women then probably had more rights than in the Kingdom today 🙂
Saudi Arabia may be out of oil to export by 2030 – Citibank
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/9523903/Saudis-may-run-out-of-oil-to-export-by-2030.html
Saudi Arabian oil reserves are overstated by 40% – Wikileaks
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks
Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Warns of World Oil Shortages Ahead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-minister-sees-end-of-oil-price-slump-1476870790
Saudi Aramco CEO believes oil shortage coming despite U.S. shale boom
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/07/10/saudi-aramco-ceo-believes-oil-shortage-coming-despite-u-s-shale-boom.html
German Military (leaked) Peak Oil study concludes: oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 90% of all manufactured products, so a shortage of oil would collapse the world economy & world governments
https://www.permaculture.org.au/files/Peak%20Oil_Study%20EN.pdf
Unaffordable would have the same effect.
The more oil they sell, the wealthier the country becomes, the more oil domestically they consume, but in the long run means less oil to export, leading to less wealth, less oil consumed domestically until it no longer makes economic sense to extract…
Mind = Blown
Happened upon this article while reading about flying squirrels, which are really interesting animals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/magazine/how-a-joke-about-flying-squirrels-led-to-an-ailing-womans-cure.html
Kind of reminded me of my 92 yr. old house-bound mother who mysteriously got a tick-borne disease (anaplasmosis) 2 yrs ago.
These infectious disease from strange contacts with nature cases are more common than you might think.
When Boom is Bust: the Shale Oil Bonanza as a Symptom of Economic Crisis
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-12-05/when-boom-is-bust/
Americans say they are worse off today than 50 years ago
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/people-are-better-off-in-20-countries-versus-50-years-ago-the-us-is-not-one-of-them-2017-12-05
It would be interesting to look at how energy consumption per capita has changed between 1967 and 2017 in the countries listed. I imagine that Viet Nam, India, and So. Korea are at the top of the “winners” in energy consumption per capita list. Viet Nam also had a war problem in 1967.
“Large parts of Malawi have been plunged into darkness as water levels at the country’s main hydro power plant fell to critical levels due to a severe drought, according to its electricity company.
“The impoverished southern African country which relies on hydroelectricity has been hit by intermittent blackouts since last year, but the outages have recently worsened, lasting up to 25 hours…”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/08/malawi-blackouts-drought-hydro-power
This problem seems to occur relatively frequently when countries (except in a few very cold or wet areas) depend on hydro-electric. I expect that this is part of the reason that IEA treats hydroelectric as if it is only a replacement for fuel, rather than a stand-alone electricity source. Of course, the IEA treats wind and solar this way. BP and EIA give about 2.6 times as much credit for hydroelectric, wind, and solar, compared to IEA (assuming that these sources completely replace the finished electricity product).
Wishful thinking meets reality:
“China’s government has allowed some northern cities to burn coal in a temporary policy U-turn, as the country faces a heating crisis.
“Beijing had banned the use of coal for heating this winter in an ambitious plan to reduce pollution.
Recent winters had seen heavy smog blanket China’s northern region.
“But millions are reportedly now left without proper heating, after failing to switch from coal to other fuels in time for winter.
“The coal ban has also reportedly led to a gas shortage as people rushed to switch to the alternative source, which has compounded the problem…”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42266768
It seems like the government could have thought this through better. The government should have figured out that there was not enough current supply, and that storage would be inadequate. Natural gas is hard to use because it is so hard to store. People and businesses cannot afford high prices for natural gas.
Jack Bogle of Vanguard Worried About US Pensions
Jack Bogle isn’t optimistic about the state of U.S. pensions over the next decade.
The founder of Vanguard Group thinks a conservative portfolio of bonds will only return about 3 percent a year over the next decade, and stocks won’t do much better, with a 4 percent annual gain over a similar period. This is “totally defeating” for pensions, which “are not going to be able to meet their 7.5 percent or 8 percent obligations,” Bogle said in a Bloomberg Radio interview that aired Thursday.
“The only return you get on a bond is from the interest coupon,” with fluctuations in prices eventually evening out and becoming relatively negligible over the longer term, he said. Given a portfolio of about half corporate bonds and half U.S. Treasuries, the blended yield is about 3 percent today.
“So that’s what you get over the next decade,” he said.
This is a huge problem for pensions, which rely on bonds to provide steady, reliable income needed to cover benefit payments to plan participants. For example, the largest U.S. pension, California Public Employees’ Retirement System, is considering more than doubling its bond allocation to reduce risk and volatility as the bull market in stocks approaches nine years.
Pensions have generally lowered their returns targets over the past few years, but they’re still aiming for annual gains of more than 7 percent on average. To Bogle, that’s an unlikely scenario.
Bogle, 88, also has a self-professed knack for making accurate market calls. His prognostications on stocks have had about an 81 percent correlation to what actually happens, while his bond predictions have been accurate 95 percent of the time, he said.
Jack Bogle is absolutely right, this will end badly as there is no way US public pension funds will attain a 7 or 8 percent annualized rate of return over the next ten years without taking huge risks — risks that can place them in an even worse predicament than they already are.
Let me repeat this, even if US pension funds aggressively allocate more to alternative investments — hedge funds, private equity, real estate, infrastructure, etc. — there is still little chance of attaining a 7 or 8 percent annualized rate of return over the next ten years.
And if my worst fears of deflation headed to the US materialize, even 4% annualized rate of return over the next ten years will be difficult to attain.
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2017/12/mr-index-worried-about-us-pensions.html
I am guessing that a 6-7% depletion rate in legacy oilfields will not help this situation?
I agree. The legacy oilfields are really the beast of burden that carry the big loads. We are approaching (if not passing) the point where all attempts to replace losses from legacy oilfields are failing.
https://imgur.com/a/yJvge
YEA 6.5 percent is optimistic. I did see one doing 8 tho it had some Vancouver and Toronto properties in the mix.
The back of the envelope math did not work until I discovered all the non vested cash was stolen aka given to the lifers…It was well over 100 percent funded
https://www.economic-undertow.com/2017/12/07/shades-of-1928/
New article on Economic undertow blog. It would be a tragedy for mankind if this guy died without writing a book. Or Gail for that matter!
This blogger is worth reading!
Mining and using bitcoin should be considered a criminal activity. I bet, this will happen sooner or later… The collapse of the bitcoin comes…
Bitcoin si practically mining itself out…
Steve Ludlum is one of the greatest minds and writers of our time. His work incorporates a deep understanding of history, art, economics, psychology, and philosophy. Similar to poetry, you must read and re-read his posts to get even a modicum of understanding of what he is attempting to convey. Like Gail, and perhaps even more so, his presence is intentionally understated. He promotes nothing on his site except a measured, thoughtful wake up call to those that will listen, that the system is headed into oblivion.
Over the years, I have studied everything he has written online and came to the conclusion that anyone commentating on the economy, politics, finance etc., that failed to mention energy and economy in the same sentence is a MORON.
Energy is to civilization what oxygen is to humanity. INSEPARABLE!
If I remember correctly, Steve Ludlum’s career has been in orchid growing. He learned about economics as a hobby, by reading about it. I am not sure if he is retired now. At one point, he lived outside Washington DC. Hence the name, “Steve from Virginia.” I met him at an ASPO-USA meeting.
He is on Twitter as “Steve from Virginia”
I am “Gail the Actuary” on twitter. Those were our pen names on TheOilDrum.com.
I know that, as an editor, I sponsored several articles written by Steve from Virginia. I don’t remember any other editor sponsoring his articles. They were more interested in “How much oil is there from which country?”
I’ve only read a few of his past posts, but definitely plan to read his entire output from beginning to end someday. Perhaps I’ll be motivated in the near future by some major collapse event. It would be a shame to lose his thoughts about collapse to the collapse before I’ve read them.
When energy is cheap…..
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-06/man-who-threw-away-bitcoin-now-has-over-100-million-reasons-dig-landfill-site
European coal plants in death spiral.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/08/death-spiral-half-of-europes-coal-plants-are-losing-money
“Ricketts said government subsidies for clean energy now dominate the market: “Traditional economics, based on supply, demand and market equilibrium, has all but disappeared.”
The European greens will slit the throat of Europe’s industry slowly but surely.
This is sad. People do not properly value the various types of energy available. Fossil fuels are made to subsidize the intermittency of wind and solar, but not given credit for the service. The overall electricity rate level ends up way too low, the way rates are calculated. There is no possible way wind and solar can be scaled up to replace the fossil fuels. The economy cannot run with a renewables-based economy.
I should probably be writing an academic article on this issue. This is an academic article from 2013 talking about the issue. https://www.neon-energie.de/Hirth-2013-Market-Value-Renewables-Solar-Wind-Power-Variability-Price.pdf This is one graphic from the article:
I agree. The more you build out wind and solar the more you need to subsidize it. It simply does not scale. And it certainly does not replace fossil fuels.
Wow, if coal is loosing money that is pretty bad.
This is the second ‘advertorial’ that I have seen on this subject
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2123330/does-hong-kong-want-be-clean-green-city-cutting-electric
Koombaya fighting back against logic:
Electric vehicles in Hong Kong could be adding “20 per cent more” carbon to the atmosphere than regular petrol ones over the same distance after factoring in the city’s coal-dominated energy mix and battery manufacture, a new research report found.
Investment research firm Bernstein also claimed that by subsidising electric vehicle purchases, the government was effectively “harming rather than helping the environment” at the expense of the taxpayer.
“The policy is to encourage drivers to be green, but they are actually subsidising vehicles that create more emissions of CO2 and particulates from power plants,” said Bernstein senior analyst Neil Beveridge.
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/1935817/electric-shock-tesla-cars-hong-kong-more-polluting