Central bankers seem to think that adjusting interest rates is a nice little tool that they can easily handle. The problem is that higher interest rates affect the economy in many ways simultaneously. The lessons that seem to have been learned from past rate hikes may not be applicable today.
Furthermore, there can be quite a long time lag involved. Thus, by the time a central banker starts seeing an effect, it may be clear that the amount of the interest rate change is far too large.
A recent Zerohedge article seems to suggest that problems can arise with 10-year Treasury interest rates of less than 3%. We may be facing a period of declining acceptable interest rates.
Figure 1. Chart from The Scariest Chart in the Market.
Let’s look at a few of the issues involved:
[1] The standard reason for raising interest rates seems to be concern about inflationary impacts occurring as a result of rising food and energy prices. In practice, the impact of such an interest rate change can be quite severe and quite delayed.
Figure 2 is an illustration from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website showing one of today’s concerns: rising energy costs. Food prices are not yet rising. Normally, however, if oil prices rise, the cost of producing food will also rise. This happens because modern agricultural methods and transportation to markets both require the use of petroleum products.
Figure 2. Figure created by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showing percentage change in the Consumer Price Index between January 2017 and January 2018, for selected categories.
In fact, raising short-term interest rates seems to have been associated with trying to bring down rising food and energy costs, as early as the 1970s and early 1980s.
Figure 3. US three-month treasury interest rates. Chart prepared by St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The reason why an increase in short-term interest rates is helpful is because it reliably induces a recession. A person can see the close connection between short-term interest rate increases and recessions (gray bars) in Figure 3. Recessions in turn damp down food and energy prices.
The reason why this damping down effect occurs is because when there is a recession, many people are laid off from work. These people purchase fewer goods and services. With people out of work, “demand” for goods and services falls. (Demand is very closely related to “amount affordable.”) We might think of demand for goods and services as helping to maintain the “production” of new homes, new cars, upscale food products, toys, and even consulting services.
When demand falls, fewer goods of practically every type are made. This indirectly leads to less need for commodities of many types, including oil, natural gas, metals, and food. Commodities have very long production cycles, and only modest storage facilities. When lower demand for a commodity such as oil occurs, prices tend to adjust sharply downward, in order to signal the need for lower production. Figure 4 shows that interest rate spikes corresponded to the 1973-1974 oil price spike, the 1979 oil price spike, the 2004-2008 price run-up, and perhaps to other shorter oil price spikes.
Figure 4. Annual averages of Brent oil prices (in 2016$) and 3-month average interest rates, based on data similar to that shown in Figure 3 from “FRED.”
The annual data in Figure 4 loses the detail of month-to-month variations. Because of this, it makes the impact of the Great Recession look much less severe than it really was. Figure 5, using monthly data for recent periods, shows more clearly the severe fall in oil prices following the run-up in short-term interest rates in the 2004-2007 period.
Figure 5. Three-month US Treasury interest rates and Brent oil prices, both on a monthly average basis. Graph by FRED.
If a person looks at the indirect impacts on the economy as a whole, it becomes clear that the rise in short-term interest rates was one of the proximate causes of the Great Recession of 2008-2009. I talk about this in Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis. The minutes of the June 2004 Federal Reserve Open Market Committee indicate that the committee decided to start raising interest rates at a rate of 0.25% per quarter for the purpose of stopping the rise in energy and food prices.
The huge financial problems that indirectly resulted did not occur until four years later, in 2008. It is likely that most economists are unaware of the connection between the decision to raise rates back in 2004 and the Great Recession several years later.
[2] Higher energy prices squeeze a person’s “spendable income.” Higher interest rates have the same effect.
Economist James Hamilton showed that ten out of eleven recent recessions were associated with oil price shocks. We would argue that if an economy is subject to higher interest rates in addition to higher oil prices, the economy is doubly likely to go into recession. Figure 6 shows an illustration of the situation.
Figure 6. Image by author showing recessionary impact of rising energy costs and interest costs.
A wage earner’s pay does not normally increase as energy costs rise, or as interest costs rise. Even if energy and interest costs are well buried (in higher food costs, or in the higher cost of goods transported across the country, or in higher student loan payments) the amount of income that a person has available to spend on discretionary goods and services falls if energy and interest costs rise. Having both energy and interest costs take a bigger share of available income at the same time is especially a problem.
[3] Reduced interest rates can be used to conceal the adverse impact of rising energy prices.
This is another version of what we saw in Figure 6. If interest rates can be reduced, they can offset most of the bad impacts of higher energy prices. For example, if oil prices are higher, it helps if auto loans and mortgage loans are lower in cost.
Figure 7. Image by author showing that artificially low interest rates can mostly offset the impact of rising energy costs.
Of course, central bankers don’t necessarily think this through. To what extent is today’s economy really dependent on very low interest rates?
[4] Falling interest rates have an almost magical impact on the economy. Rising interest rates reverse these magical impacts, and replace them with very negative impacts.
We saw in Figure 6 how falling interest rates could more or less conceal a rise in energy prices. The following are a few of the additional magical things that falling interest rates can do:
(a) Falling interest can raise asset prices of many kinds, including homes, stock prices, resale prices of bonds, and the price of land.
(b) Falling interest rates can raise commodity prices, making it possible to extract more fossil fuels and metals. Resources that previously did not look economic to extract, suddenly become economic to extract. This change occurs because with lower interest rates, more people can afford to purchase goods that use oil, such as cars and motorcycles. This tends to raise demand for oil products, and thus prices.
(c) Because higher-priced energy extraction becomes feasible at lower interest rates, more advanced technology, at higher prices, suddenly becomes feasible. Jobs open up in research areas that would not previously have made sense at lower energy prices.
(d) Falling interest rates can make the balance sheets of companies holding stocks and bonds as assets look better, because of their rising prices.
(e) Rising asset prices “feed back” into spendable income. People with homes that have risen in value can refinance, and use the proceeds to fix up their home (add an additional room or an updated kitchen, for example). Individual citizens and companies can sell shares of stock that have risen in value and use those proceeds to augment other income.
If interest rates rise rather than fall, the impacts can be expected to be extremely recessionary. The stock market may crash. Homes are likely to lose value because of a lack of buyers that can afford them. Energy resources that seemed to be available can suddenly seem not to be feasible because of low prices.
[5] The economy was able to reasonably tolerate the run-up in interest rates in the 1950 – 1980 period because the economy was growing very rapidly.
A person can see the pattern of short-term interest rates in Figure 3, above. Long-term (10-year) interest rates follow a somewhat similar, but smoother, pattern (Figure 8).
Figure 8. Monthly average 10-year Treasury interest rates, through January 2018, in chart by FRED.
World per capita energy consumption was rising very rapidly in the 1950 to 1970 period. Even in the troubled 1970 to 1980 period, per capita energy consumption continued to rise, although not as quickly (Figure 9).
Figure 9. World per capita energy consumption, with 1950-1980 period of rapid growth highlighted. World Energy Consumption by Source, based on Vaclav Smil estimates from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects (Appendix) together with BP Statistical Data for 1965 and subsequent, divided by population estimates by Angus Maddison.
When world per capita energy consumption is growing this rapidly, jobs tend to be plentiful and wages tend to rise faster than inflation. According to Figure 10, US wages rose more rapidly than inflation in the 1950 to 1970 period, without wage disparity becoming a problem. Even in the 1970 to 1980 period, when high oil prices were a problem, US wages were able to rise quickly enough to keep up with inflation. Rising wage disparity did not become a problem until after 1980.
Figure 10. Chart comparing income gains by the top 10% to income gains by the bottom 90% by economist Emmanuel Saez. Amounts are inflation adjusted. Based on an analysis of IRS data, published in Forbes.
The share of US citizens in the workforce also rose during the period up to 1980, as an increasing percentage of women joined the workforce (Figure 11).
Figure 11. Employment as a percentage of the population, aged 25-54. Chart from FRED, using OECD amounts.
The thing that made the 1950-1970 period unusual was the growing availability of inexpensive fossil fuels. With fossil fuels, it was possible to add expressways where they had never been before. This allowed more interstate trade and improved the productivity of truck drivers. Labor saving devices allowed women to join the workforce. Farming continued to become more productive, with all of its labor saving equipment. Even as energy prices rose in the 1970 to 1980 period, citizens were able to continue to buy energy products because their wages were rising enough to keep up with inflation.
The growth in productivity was so great that wages plus government benefits (as measured by “Disposable Personal Income”) rose almost too fast. This added inflationary pressures to the economy. It is my opinion that these inflationary pressures contributed greatly to the oil price run-up in the 1973-1974 and the 1979-1981 periods.
Figure 12. Three-year average growth in Disposable Personal Income compared to inflation as measured by CPI-Urban. DPI from US Bureau of Economic Analysis; CPI from Bureau of Labor Statistics. Per Capita Disposable Personal Income is calculated by dividing DPI by US population, also from the BEA.
The run-up in oil prices also to some extent reflected a scarcity problem; note the two spikes in CPI-Urban in the 1970s in Figure 12, which are higher than would be expected, if the problem were simply a problem caused by the very high per capita Disposable Personal Income growth.
A major problem of the 1970s was a decline in US crude oil production for the area outside Alaska.
Figure 13. US crude oil production by type, based on EIA data.
This scarcity problem was significantly mitigated by the development of oil fields in Alaska, Mexico, and the North Sea in the next few years.
One of the things that substantially helped fix the oil problems of the 1970s was the fact that the US, as well as other developed countries, was able to make changes that substantially reduced their oil consumption. These changes included:
- Moving to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars
- Finding fuel substitutes when oil was being burned to create electricity
- Changing oil-based home heating to approaches that used other fuels
Figure 14. Oil consumption by part of the world. Data from BP Statistical Report of World Energy 2017.
The combination of these approaches brought supply and demand more into balance. There was a small dip in consumption in the 1973-1975 period, and a larger dip in the 1979 to 1984 period. In comparison, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 hardly made a dent.
An indirect impact of these changes was the fact that the US economy needed to become more integrated into the world market. The US started importing smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles from Japan, since Japan was already making these cars. Japan started making other kinds of goods as well to sell to the US and other markets. The US and other countries built nuclear electric generation to replace some of the oil-fired electricity generation. These plants were capital intensive and required growing debt.
Especially after 1981, changes started to take place in the US economy, reflecting its changed role in the world. US companies grew in size, as they began to add overseas markets to their local markets. Wage disparity became more of an issue, as high tech operations required more specialized high-wage workers and fewer of those with only a general education. Increased competition for jobs with workers from lower-wage countries also tended to hold down wages of those without advanced training.
[6] The situation is very different now, compared to the 1970s. It is doubtful that today’s economy could tolerate a spike in interest rates.
Today, we are not seeing rapid growth in per capita energy consumption, the way we were in the 1950 to 1980 period (Figure 9). In fact, world per capita energy consumption is almost flat (Figure 15), the way it was during the period of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the way it was at the time of the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s (Figure 9).
Figure 15. World energy per capita and world oil price in 2016 US$. Energy amounts from BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2017. Population estimates from UN 2017 Population data and Medium Estimates.
There are other similarities to the 1930s period. Short-term interest rates are back to the low level they were in the 1930s (Figure 3). Growth in Disposable Personal Income per capita is persistently low (Figure 12). Wage disparity is at the high level experienced back in the 1930s (Figure 16).
Figure 16. U. S. Income Shares of Top 1% and Top 0.1%, Wikipedia exhibit by Piketty and Saez.
It is probably because of this renewed wage disparity that we are having difficulty with oil gluts. Oil gluts were also experienced in the 1930s. People with inadequate wages cannot afford goods made with oil products. These gluts occur because of affordability problems–inadequate wages for part of the workforce.
Figure 17. US ending stock of crude oil, excluding the strategic petroleum reserve. Figure produced by EIA. Figure by EIA.
Despite the spike in oil prices that central bankers are concerned about, oil prices are currently too low for producers. Oil exporting countries, such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, depend on high oil prices so that they can collect high tax revenue. These countries are especially hurt by today’s low oil prices.
An increase in interest rates could very easily create a recession and drop oil prices even lower than they are today. Of course, that is precisely the intent of the central bankers. Our problem is that the economy cannot operate without energy products, particularly oil. The cost of producing oil is rising because of diminishing returns. It simply is not possible to drop its price as low as oil-importing countries would like it to be.
[7] Economists and central bankers think that they have good models of how the economy operates, but they really do not.
The economy is a self-organized system that is able to create goods and services using energy products. In fact, it cannot continue its existence, without continued very substantial energy consumption. The economy gradually builds itself up, with new businesses, new consumers, newly invented products, and with transportation and financial systems. I envision the economy as looking something like a child’s toy that is built from many pieces. If one or more pieces are removed, the system could collapse.
Figure 18. Dome constructed using Leonardo Sticks
The economy has been built based on the laws of physics. It requires sufficient energy. It is in many ways like a hurricane that loses power if it is forced to go over land for any distance. A hurricane gets extra strength if it is able to pass over very warm water, which provides the energy it needs. Right now, the world economy is showing signs that it does not have sufficient energy; the standard of living of young people around the world is falling. The return on energy investment is far too low.
While it may be true that the US economy looks like it is at full employment, based on the number of people looking for jobs, the percentage of people aged 25-54 with jobs tells a different story (Figure 11). This percentage has fallen since 2000, at least partly because of globalization.
Unfortunately, the approach that economists are taking to model the economy cannot provide a good representation of how the economy really works. A self-organized system has many feedback loops that are difficult to understand and model. One change leads to other changes that are hard to see in advance. The problem with current models is that they are likely to produce misleading indications.
[8] Conclusion
We have heard the saying, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger.” The theory behind raising interest rates seems to follow a similar line of reasoning. If central bankers can raise interest rates, economies will be stronger.
The catch is that we are too close to the “edge” to be testing an increase in interest rates. Economies, below a certain “stall speed,” cannot repay debt with interest, and cannot hope to provide entrepreneurs with an adequate return on investment. Our low rate of growth is already close to this stall speed.
Given where we are today, it would be quite possible to accidentally “kill” the economy with rising interest rates. This would be especially the case if short-term and longer-term interest rates rise at the same time. A budget with large deficits could cause longer-term interest rates to rise. So could selling large amounts of QE debt.
Also, feedbacks don’t come quickly enough to make necessary course corrections. This makes raising interest rates way too much like playing with physics reactions we don’t fully understand. Interest rate increases (like fission reactions) start chain reactions. In an open environment such as the world economy, we have limited understanding of the outcome of these chain reactions.
Venezuelan Inmates Eating Rats and Pigeons to Avoid Starvation
http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/venezuela-es/article201968749.html
The secret to good tasting rat or pigeon is fire roasted, hot and spicy! Wash it down with stout beer.
unlike you, JH, I have never eaten rat or pigeon…
do they taste like chicken?
It was a jab at some humor. I haven’t eaten that stuff either. There was only one time I was hungry and could only afford one meal a day for a weekend, and that was right in between going from one job to another. Missed getting to the bank by 5 (before they had atms and have 10 bucks for food for the weekend. That was in 86. Anyway, life has been great and just love these 450 acres in Jackson Hole. Giddy up!
long live BAU!
in the article, the big mistake was eating a rat that was found already dead…
see?
meat needs to be fresh!
anyway…
in The Collapse, or probably even before, the supply of rats and pigeons will be found to be inadequate for feeding a city full of people for even a short time…
yee haw!
‘Meat needs to be fresh’
That’s why if I am a bad guy …. and the hordes have killed and eaten all the animals… I am keeping a herd of humans locked in a cage…. and I’m stewing them … keeping the choice cuts for me and my band of KILLERS…. and the scraps go back to the herd…
Sustainable living … you know what I’m talkin about?
Whatever it takes — will mean whatever it takes — when Mr DNA is threatened with extinction — he will not hesitate to issue the command….
He’s done it before … many times.
Hmm. Boiled rat washed down by a $6.00 bottle of Guiness Stout?
Before this is over …. they will be eating each other … I guarantee it…. and I have no doubt that so will many of us here on FW…..
You might want to start making notes on neighbours who have young children…. you may say that I am being silly…. but when hunger is gnawing at your guts… Mr DNA will be in charge…. and he’ll be commanding that you kill kill kill…..
The communist cannibals: Shocking images reveal the depravation suffered by peasants forced to eat HUMANS during the 1920s Russian famine
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4076244/Distressing-photos-1920s-Russian-famine-turned-hopeless-peasants-cannibals-five-million-people-starved-death.html
another trump stupid idea-send more troops to graveyard of empires called Afghanistan
trump thinks by send more troops us army can defeat Taliban which is joke
nobody in the history has full control over Afghanistan
whether Alexander the great or British empire
or soviet union which got biggest humiliation by Taliban
why afghans are so good fighters is they anything in there genetic
The population is pretty disbursed, and they know the territory. It is hard for someone else to come in and figure out where they are hiding.
Orlov used the Taliban as an example of a coherent group that has specific cultural and traditional practices that bind them together as well as their territorial advantages. I think it was in his five stages of collapse book that he went into detail on them.
It’s the same sort of situation that occurred in Vietnam. The Vietcong would take a few bags of rice and run through the jungle, rain or not, while the US soldiers were packed down with heavy gear and equipment. The Afghans move out quicker because they carry less. They also still have that old world ability to be patient, sit and wait in circumstances our guys would be yelling and playing games alerting people for miles around to their location. It’s a completely different culture.
Charlie didn’t get much USO, he was dug in too deep and running too fast.
https://s-usih.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/fall-of-saigon1.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2Tg1ZF3blgM/VTaiXjh-PAI/AAAAAAABc4Q/3dAqnbsVj5A/s1600/The%2BFall%2Bof%2BSaigon%2C%2B1975%2B(1).jpg
Mountains, blood feuds and invasions for thousands of years – selects for fighters. Like Albanians, Basques, Kurds.
The west fears losing it’s resource foothold in Eurasia so they are prolonging the whole mess forever and ever.
As to how the Afghan war is going……………
Today after 17 years of fighting and a trillion USD spent, the Taliban is able to infilitrate the capital city Kabul at will and set off jumbo car bombs within a stones throw of the US Embassy.
Usually, in these types of wars, the capital city is the safest place in the warzone.
The US does not want to defeat them. The Allies had no problem in WW2 with fire-bombing the German people almost out of existence bcs whatever happened, the Germans were not going to be allowed to slip the leash of the international bankers.The war against the Germans was thus a total war.
There are no such issues at stake in Afghanistan.There is poppies and there is MIC profits in war materiels, there is propaganda, and there is keeping out the Russkies.No need to genocide the Afghanis.
There is no desire to “win” this war. Same as in Vietnam. The idea that the US could not clear the country of people if it wished is silly.
What if I were to tell you … that everyone’s reality …. is based on a gigantic conspiracy…. that you are being run around a maze looking for the cheese…. that you are no better than rats….
Would that upset you? Would you vehemently disagree?
Perhaps there is another part of the situation as well: connections with other people, and working together with these people, to try to make things work as well as possible. These connections with other people are a big part of what makes life worthwhile. If we focus only on the worst aspects, it doesn’t help us at all.
I would have liked to visit Afghanistan…
QE to infinity and beyond!
“Eurozone inflation is still dependent on quantitative easing, the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, told the EU parliament on Monday. His statement suggested that the ECB’s bond buying programme could extend beyond expectations of a September deadline.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/02/26/inflation-subdued-ecb-chief-says-suggesting-bond-buying-could/
I am glad that someone understand the situation.
If I understand your hypothesis correctly, debt is a way to pull future resources into the present; will it end when there no longer are real future resources to pull in? E. g. tight oil. Tight oil has been pulled into the present to offset mature fields, if they deplete faster than tight oil is added then all the debt in the world will not add additional oil. Tight oil in exchange for paper or digital bits has been a good deal. When this happens, what gains and what loses value?
It will end when a major part of the system breaks. I expect that this will happen when world energy per capita stays flat too long or starts to fall. This may ot may not have anything to do with oil supply. Falling coal supply is just as much of a problem. Adding more intermittent renewables tends to make the situation worse as well, because they are mis-priced and tend to drive other electricity producers out of business.
Sure, we have the flexibility to (remain desperate) and do some more bond buying (to keep BAU afloat a bit longer). No problem, (a deadline was just set to make it seem like we had this all under control).
Everything is fine. They’ve got this.
Is it possible even though what is happening defies all logic and can only end in ever increasing debt that people just don’t care. If everybody just closes their eyes will it really matter? Does it matter? How far out can we steal from the future – when does it break?
What is that one piece that brings the whole pile down?
Physical bottle neck on oil?
e.g. Ghawar production does a North Sea … or a Mexico…
We are seeing a big surge in shale production — one has to wonder if that is a desperate move to offset production falls from other suppliers…
HSBC: Brace for the oil, food and financial crash of 2018
80% of the world’s oil has peaked, and the resulting oil crunch will flatten the economy
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/brace-for-the-financial-crash-of-2018-b2f81f85686b#.z9uwvj2gd
Raising interest rates is one way to bring the whole system down. That is why I wrote this article. Rising interest rates seem to have caused the Great Recession of 2008-2009. It is a good guess that they will cause the next even more major crash.
Report: No progress for African-Americans on homeownership, unemployment and incarceration in 50 years
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-no-progress-african-americans-20180226-story.html
Its no coincidence around fifty years ago is when they started the war on drugs…
Ex-DEA agent: Opioid crisis fueled by drug industry and Congress
Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi says drug distributors pumped opioids into U.S. communities — knowing that people were dying — and says industry lobbyists and Congress derailed the DEA’s efforts to stop . In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed — that according to Joe Rannazzisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes. Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread — aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/
Classic of Michael Ruppert exposing the CIA dealing in hard drugs!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UT5MY3C86bk
Did the CIA help invent crack cocaine?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/crack-and-the-contras-how-the-cia-mainstream-media-propaganda-and-the-contras-fueled-the-crack-cocaine-epidemic/5629132
That’s an interesting story, because I kept wondering how all those drugs from a pharmaceutical company made it in such big numbers on to the streets. “aided by Congress, lobbyists” it states in that article. So now it’s not even enough to allow lobbying in DC, but it is now part of the US landscape. Just how far can this type of corruption go, we no longer need to ask.
Someone got the bright idea to ask every patient frequently to rate their pain on a level of one to ten. If anyone gave an even moderately high rating, they received pain meds. Facilities were anxious to get high ratings from patients, so they encouraged doctors to make patients happy by giving out lots of pain prescriptions. It soon became obvious to patients that they could get all the refills they might want by saying that they had a high pain level.
That “someone” is the giant pharm companies lobbying all who will play ball. Follow the money. That NY mag article omitted that part.
No surprise here…. this is how Obama got the employment rate down…
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/A6VUFv2YHrE/maxresdefault.jpg
Americans Invented Modern Life. Now Were Using Opioids to Escape It.
https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/americas-opioid-epidemic.html
It’s a MUST read!
Americans Invented Modern Life. Now The Government is Making Sure we are Supplied with Opioids to Escape It.
Fixed it…
Shall we?
http://nuclearstreet.com/images/img/world_map.png
Considering spent fuel pond fires are likely to be deadly up to a 10 mile radius, and contaminate an area of ‘hundreds of square miles’ according to the nuclear scientific literature (all depending upon wind direction), then having the nearest one about 6,000 miles away is OK by me.
Not so lucky for those living in the US, Europe or the East Asia seaboard.
All those spent fuel ponds will not destroy the planet, but will make large parts have some very interesting evolutionary changes in the next few million years.
Of course if we do survive the collapse in this neck of the woods, (none of FE’s hordes here), then a sudden change in Cli.mate might actually get us anyway.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-27/arctic-warming-creates-beast-from-the-east/9488130
http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/9488292-3×2-940×627.jpg
Its very often the punch you don’t see coming that delivers the knockout blow.
Now if it were me … and I was looking at that map…. and I saw a cluster of those radiation symbols nearby…. and I was a prepper…..and I’d dump my life into a doomsday domicile…
I’d be buying bulk Xanax about now….. because sometimes … Mr Cognitive Dissonance… needs … a little…. helper…..
We have had the Triassic, the Cambrian, the Permian etc etc. In future this epoch may be named the ‘Uranu-brian due to the sudden evolutionary change? Who will name it? Maybe a evolved jellyfish!
Maybe we will find that some humans have a gene that makes them immune to the effects of eating breathing and drinking radioactive elements…. they may actually thrive when they ingest this stuff….
Kinda like Popeye and his spinach….
Not Bloody Likely. Google “Radiothor”. I think the guy’s neck fell off.
The robots have not fared well trying to deal with the reactors at Fukushima…
The ponds are a far more dangerous beast…
Maybe Hollywood should release a movie where Matt Damon. Brad Pitt and George Clooney are born to parents who were in the helicopters that dropped cement on Chernobyl… the mothers gave birth to them before dying from The Sickness…
And now the three of them have super human powers but only if they huddle around a spend fuel pond to recharge every morning…
In the words of Don Draper ‘If you don’t like what’s being said – change the conversation’
Citing a little-noticed study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Academies said that if an accident or an act of terrorism at a densely-filled pool caused a leak that drains the water away from the rods, a cataclysmic release of long-lasting radiation could force the extended evacuation of nearly 3.5 million people from territory larger than the state of New Jersey.
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/05/20/19712/scientists-say-nuclear-fuel-pools-around-country-pose-safety-and-health-risks
countries with measles right?
Nuclear reactors, doh.
wow… there are lots of giant red dots in my area…
though I’ve never seen one…
they must be well hidden…
but, anyway…
I ain’t afraid of no giant red dots!
Thanks to whoever on here referenced ‘The Tyee’ website. Have come across this old bit of wisdom/prediction; Technique in this refers to Technology.
Jacques Ellul seems to have understood the need to believe and how Technology would step up as an escape from reflection.
‘Technique has become the new and specific milieu in which
man is required to exist,one which has supplanted the old milieu,viz., that of nature.
This new technical milieu has the following characteristics:
a. It is artificial;
b. It is autonomous with respect to values,ideas,and the state;
c. It is self-determining in a closed circle. Like nature,it is a
closed organization which permits it to be self-determinative
independentlyof all human intervention;
d. It grows according to a process which is causal but not
directed to ends;
e. It is formed by an accumulation of means which have established primacy over ends;
Further on;
‘Modern man’s state of mind is completely dominated by technical values, and his goals are represented only by such progress and happiness as is to be achieved through techniques’
The catches with trying to achieve technical solutions:
(1) It really takes energy, not just technology.
(2) As complexity growth (through increased technology, larger enterprises, more education for some workers), wage disparity increases. Ultimately, the wage disparity can
bring down an economy. One of the problems is inability of governments to collect enough taxes.
1) even supposing there is a magic wand energy solution, there is enough wrong with the remaining systems that this doesn’t guarantee an ability to manage a finite planet.
2) Complexity is all about nodes, linkages and transitions to higher or lower stable states, typically when one node is added or removed from the network. The transitions tend to be rapid, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that contraction (for example) will take less than many decades to complete.
I agree. Cheap energy alone is not enough to solve our problems. And we really don’t know how long the transition will take.
This is what happens when belief overrides logic…what a circus, but try arguing with a tech-apost.le.
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/12/08/Illusion-Of-Progress-Chinas-Electric-Cargo-Ship-To-Carry-Coal/
‘Without a hint of irony, China Daily explained that the ship will mainly haul “coal for the generation of electric power.”
About 75 per cent of China’s electricity comes from the burning of coal, meaning that electric vehicles are in fact running on coal.
Chinese researchers recently calculated that when all factors are included — from manufacturing electric batteries to charging them with coal-fired electricity — electric vehicles create 50 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions than internal combustion engine cars in China.’
The purpose of building these devices is two-fold:
(1) To have devices to export to a world market.
(2) To keep smog out of China’s cities, and more concentrated in rural areas.
I don’t think saving CO2 emissions is very high on the list of things they are concerned about.
I’d imagine China would prefer using coal over oil as well, given their relative access to the two. Plus they can shift electricity generation to natural gas from Central Asia and/or Russia as needed, while cars are stuck on oil distillates.
I agree.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-26/taleb-slams-journalists-my-new-book-designed-be-hated-bullshitters
Skip to the bottom and see the screen shot of Taleb’s response to Barry Ritzknob….
Excellent!
Ritzknob is the ultimate bull shi tter — and an arrogant fat pri ck
Waiting for Taleb to launch that book on Audible…
SITG – Skin in the game – according to Taleb, is about balancing incentives and disincentives. It’s a way of looking at things and seeing things that others do not see.
I doubt that the idiot journalist understands the completeness of his humiliation, or obviously the wouldn’t have made the comments in the way that he did.
Most MSM ‘Journalists’ likely believe their own BS…
Skip to the one minute mark
CNN is clown news. There is no Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and its the Ukraine that’s breaching the truce with daily shelling, sniping & mortar attacks of the Donbass. If Russia were really there we would have witnessed footage of L’vov going up in flames, instead of Donetsk or Lugansk.
I reckon Christine Ama-wh ore…. was a man at one point…. he cut his dongle off and siliconed up… a started on a daily regime of female hormones….
I await the day when she stands up and proclaims that she is a Zee…
Afterall…. no shame… it’s cool to be transgender.
Its all coming together like pieces of a Jigsaw. Most don’t have any idea of the picture that all these isolated articles are part of. OFW and our own thinking has given us here an inkling of where each piece fits, but we all still can vary greatly in the picture we assemble along the way. I am actively avoiding collecting too many pieces/reading/listening to too much commentary now.
Its because these events affect us all differently, and we can interpret what it means individually, we can have quite different responses. Me, I carry on with some work, some new toys, and bit more distance from what passes for polite conversation these days. Its a free circus, and it has many ringmasters. Find some bread, enjoy some wine, and don’t sweat the small stuff methinks!
I hope we are all wrong on this site, and that the Aliens will come and take our spent fuel-rods, and any technology newer than steam-punk. Now that would be interesting.
It is hard to make a strong case for telling everyone about our problem, if there is essentially no way to fix it. People just get upset.
Wouldn’t too many people knowing about the problem accelerate the collapse anyway?
You are right. If people did knew that the debts taken out today would likely not be repaid, it would have an impact on the availability of new loans. If people knew that companies had a maximum life expectancy of, say, five years, they wouldn’t invest much in equipment that was expected to last 25 years. They might not have more children. This would reduce the demand for bigger homes and bigger cars.
We have to keep up demand somehow, even if that means thinking up more and more semi-useless needs for energy products. Luxuries favored by the wealthy are especially helpful. Medical treatments for 90 year olds are favored, for example.
If we instead divide us earnings/wealth evenly, the (formerly) poor will quickly spend it. The energy products we had will be quickly gone, and the story will be over.
I didn’t quite get that reasoning, Gail. If the point is to keep up demand, then spending from the not so wealty would have a greater effect, due to their numbers, or not?
Or is the point, that since there is not enough energy to go around, the spending get concentratet on the top, and the poor get «kicked out of the boat». Is the increasing inequality a way the self-organising system adapts to scarcity and saves energy?
Right. The point is that if there isn’t enough energy to go around, the spending gets concentrated at the top, and the poor get kicked out of the boat. That is the way a self-organized system adapts to an inadequate amount of energy supplies. Physicist Francois Rodier calls the situation, “the poor get frozen out.” What wealth is available rises to the top (wealthy), like steam.
The self-organized system tries to keep going as long as possible, by getting rid of some of the less useful members.
“Medical treatments for 90 year olds are favored, for example.” I surely agree. Keeping more people around longer will be highly appreciated by such people. It also ought to reduce drag for all kinds of care dispensed by the young for the old. It ought to cut down on contagion too. I could see a whole lot more telemedicine as well. We’re pretty much wasting the available technology. And I agree also that military spending ought to grow…mightily!
What about spending on the Internet? Ability to share information globally could be useful to a self organizing system. I would agree that the poor do not need housing or education expenditure. (A functioning Internet could be a major means of education.) .Neither the rich, IMO. There are a lot of old buildings left to rot. The rich could buy these and fix them up.
To a large extent, the poor never asked and don’t need to be in the boat. They can get by with nothing, providing obstacles aren’t put in their way. What people think the poor are and need is misguided. It might come from never having lived among them. A lot of who are called poor were doing OK on their own till greedy bas tards insisted on selling them things they never wanted or needed.
If they didn’t want or need the stuff — why did they buy it?
And if they didn’t buy the stuff …. there would be no jobs…. and we’d end up in a cyclonic disaster
http://snbchf.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DeflationarySpiral.png
Thanks heaven for greedy ba st ards… and human nature…. and little girls…..
Check out Soros Greenspan Adelson …. they look like talking corpses… how are these men still alive?
If they were run over by a car the birds wouldn’t bother to try to pick the bones clean … there’s nothing but mummified skin and brittle bones there….
Could it be that the wealthy are spending trillions on treatments that allow them to live to 150?
Or is there some sort of pact with the devil going on here…..
Intuition comes up again and says the situation isn’t hopeless for the continuation of civilization, that civilization is more likely than not to endure. Times aren’t worse for civilization than they’ve ever been; they’re merely different. That’s one way to look at it anyway, and people who scientifically study trends will assure you that we are at the end stage of civilization, owing to all the variables they have studied and measured. Intuition can’t give reasonable arguments against these findings; it can only assert that these are not ITS findings. Part of the trouble is the materialist outlook of Western civilization (civilization). This is a civilization that puts no value on beauty. And if it were to look it into the matter at all, it would do so based on its materialist premises. You can’t measure, weigh and calculate the qualities of beauty, and so, of course, it must be a meaningless and irrelevant.
Africa is noted for producing brute strength, ignoring the fact that Africa’s is a civilization run on the energy-enhancing effect of rhythm. This is the premise of beauty. It doesn’t separate energy from aesthetics. Many of its products are energy enhancing and cultural.
In the West, even the advocates for fossil fuel don’t think of it as beautiful. But why? There must be hundreds of types of natural and treated oil, and the transparent viscous liquid I put into my car is, to my mind, beautiful. It’s power to take me around is magical, awesome beyond words. If oil was seen and respected as beautiful, you might not have the craze for solar panels and all sorts of shiny so called renewable technology to replace it with. If oil was respected as beautiful it might be used with gratitude and care instead of taken for granted.
Much of Western preoccupation is with material survival. But that point of view inevitably puts safety over beauty. And if you do that on a civilizational scale, you will dispense costly safety and security measures that could be avoided. You widen and straighten out roads that might be riskier but more beautiful left winding and adventurous. (The Brits were quite good with the winding ones; the Americans favor the other kind.) You invent all sorts of safety rules for housing, having nothing to do with beauty (or erroneously confusing them with beauty), which results in housing that too many find unaffordable. That puts so much strain on those many that they can’t buy the products of industry.
And to top it all off, it might be better for civilization not to think about beauty, since it’s not something you can think your way through, and you end up believing it’s prettiness and all manner and types of trivia…which is a worse outcome. You’ll find beauty as much in a bombing blitz as in an art gallery. I guess it’s the fact that you can recognize it when you see it, and what value you place on that, which matters.
Find some bread, enjoy some wine, and don’t sweat the small stuff methinks!
That pretty much sums it up.
Mexico’s Pemex registers $18bn loss in last quarter of 2017
http://www.france24.com/en/20180226-mexicos-pemex-registers-18bn-loss-last-quarter-2017?ref=tw_i
One bad quarter and everyone is excited. Things will improve next quarter.
I’d be interested to see what the aggregate losses of shale plays would be over the same period….
It does seem that we are ….
https://www.mysuburbankitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/running-on-fumes-badge.png
More bad vibrations. Try the Beach Boys, they have a cure.
Limits to Growth & Peak Oil Interview w/ Richard Heinberg
http://psychowarfare.com/article/limits-to-growth-with-richard-heinberg
Revisiting an earlier discussion as to why some Asians score well on math tests…
Frances Fukuyama posits that this is related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
Historically … high achievement on these tests resulted in high positions within the society….
This priority placed on studying continues to be manifested today in not only China — but in other Asian cultures that were modeled on this Chinese system (Korea, Japan).
THIS … is how you get high math scores:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-day-of-a-student-in-South-Korea
Chose your parents well, it is all IQ if you listen and believe Jordan Peterson. I wish it were different, I wouldn’t have had to work so damn hard; I don’t learn as fast as the best so more hours of study/work fewer hours of sleep. Ugh.
This is a US view. In Japan and China, where the intent is that everyone be more equal, I think that there has been a tendency for the person with most seniority to be the one to be promoted, not necessarily the most intelligent one. The idea is that eventually, everyone will get a turn.
This is much easier to pull off in a homogenous society.
I don’t know, were we to see the IQ scores of those promoted, we would be able to formulate a hypothesis for further testing. It seems to me that those at the top need to acknowledge the contributions of those of lesser talents so all can advance over time as opposed to a few taking all the marbles in a short time frame. Really no more than an opinion.
Jared Diamond gives instances of this seniority principle in tribal life: it’s why the young, strong, warriors don’t knock the elders on the head – one day they have a chance to be elders. In the meantime, the elders get the best cuts of pig meat and the young girls as wives.
thats why i like being an elder
If you have an IQ of say 120 — and you are dedicated to studying — and have good teachers and ideally tutors — and supportive parents — the odds are you will get very high marks…..
Not enough Eddie, try another 20 points and you have a chance. Marks are not the same as understanding, two different games; I have played both and as long as I played at the right table, done reasonably well, not enough an today’s tables.
Peterson forgets to mention that the IQ peaks around age 20 and then goes into permanent decline. That is why young people are usually Liberal and older people are usually conservative…Chimpanzee’s IQ’s stay the same their whole lives though…
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13281
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13281
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02661
Leaders seem to be picked based on something other than IQ then. Perhaps accumulated experience is more important, or perhaps contacts with other people that are built up over many years.
Because chimps still eat their evolutionary diet and most humans do not.
We cook part of our food. That helps a lot.
The relevant point is the change in macronutrient content. Try feeding a dog a carb heavy food and see how much quicker its health degrades. Humans are no different, though we start from a slightly higher level of carbs as an evolutionary diet historically, overall the effect is the same and given the longer human lifespan the more minor effect has plenty of time to compound itself.
Humans are primates. Primates eat little meat and no grains. So we really do need a fair amount of fruit and vegetables. Grains that are not processed too much (except for cooking) are OK, as are fish. The biggest component of most of the world’s diets is grains, so a person can’t be too negative with respect to them.
Dogs have a different set of needs than we do. Feed a monkey the diet of a dog, and it will do poorly. We are much more closely related to monkeys.
“Humans are primates.”
Humans have a completely different intestine anatomy than other primates, and a completely different size of brain mass and energy consumption compared to other primates, requiring what is termed a “high quality diet” including fatty fish and meat. Look up the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis if you’d like to understand this better, but humans have a much larger brain, a relatively longer small intestine, and a massively shorter large intestine giving us almost zero ability to convert fiber into energy compared to other primates. Our cecum is practically vestigial.
human have evolved forward facing stereoscopic vision
that has only one original purpose
Life expectancy of US vegetarians and those who eat vegetables + fish but no meat is higher than that of meat eaters.
Humans have now evolved to eat a diet that includes some cooked food. The predecessors to humans learned to control fire over one million years ago. That has changed the makeup of our teeth and digestive system, and allowed our brain to be more developed.
“Life expectancy of US vegetarians and those who eat vegetables + fish but no meat is higher than that of meat eaters.”
Not so when you compare a similar cohort. Vegetarians and vegans are self-selecting health conscious population who believe their diet is one part of a healthy life style and thus are less likely to smoke, drink, do drugs, and exercise more. If you compare them to a similar cohort of meat eaters there is no gain in life expectancy.
!!!!!!
Vegetarianism also literally shrinks your brain:
https://www.sott.net/article/203114-Vegetarians-have-smaller-brains
I am 987,098,998,635,901,887,776.897654 x wiser at 52 … than I was at 20 …. in fact when I think about myself at 20 it’s as if that person is a complete stranger…
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/18/chinas-bid-upend-global-oil-market-petroyuan-shanghai/
‘China’s Bid to Upend the Global Oil Market’
“After years of false starts, a long-awaited Chinese oil futures contract will make its debut on the Shanghai Futures Exchange, likely in late March. It will be the first crude oil benchmark in Asia, which is important because that’s where oil consumption is growing the most. And it will be the first contract priced in Chinese currency, known as the renminbi or yuan. Currently, the main global benchmarks for crude oil are in New York and London — and priced in dollars.”
Late March is about a month from now, give or take a few days until oil is traded via a Chinese currency. What will be the ramifications for the US dollar.
Problem with rising rates: Corporate America has binged on debt
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/26/investing/corporate-debt-rising-rates/index.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/43202075
Ok, don’t all laugh at once.
Back in 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that growth would end within a century
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3097-keynes-2030
see comment above re UBI
Keynes never grasped that it was Hit ler who got is out of the great depression not his version of economics
clever as he was supposed to be, he didnt get the significance of the link between employment and fuel consumption, or the link between food and fuel consumption
Wrong…War doesn’t increase you GDP that is called “The Broken Window Fallacy”…And i f you look at US GDP is was booming well before the war took off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp
Everything I can see says that World War II amazingly increased GDP as well as disposable personal income.
If I go around breaking windows, it will create more jobs for people fixing those windows, and making new glass for the windows. GDP doesn’t measure what a person might want it to measure. Many women went to work for the first time in WWII. This added a lot to GDP.
There may be a “broken window fallacy,” but the truth of the matter is that the faster we increase turnover of stuff, the faster GDP grows.
“Report from Iron Mountain.”
Except that GDP provides no value but consumes resources/energy. Premature turnover is a cancer on the economy, much as war is. You’re much better off paying people to dig ditches and fill them in somewhere walkable (so you’re only wasting labor/calories perhaps while improving health).
pre ww2 Roosevelt’s new deal needed massive amounts of energy to create employment, but it was unsustainable—there only so many dams and roads you can build
ww2 had the effect of creating full employment—whether factories or forces
factories produce wartoys—soldiers get to set them off–either way—we call it ”GDP” (or broken windows)—when everyone is a glazier, it’s difficult to think of any other form of employment
the overall effect is colossal consumption of oil coal and gas–plus minerals
in 1945, the problem faced was keeping the momentum going—ie maximum employment to avoid the 1929 crash repeating.
that could only be done by building peacetoys instead of wartoys—the only way of selling them was by creating infinite debt, and constantly increasing wages
but in peace or war—energy must be consumed to sustain a demanded lifestyle—and it is the business of government to deliver that. (that way you dont get wars or revolutions–you get the EU)
debt/wages could only be sustained by the promise of infinite energy—which worked fine as long as oil was in cheap surplus—that lasted until 1969/70 when the swing producer–USA–went into deficit–after that the Saudis quadrupled the price—but found they were hanging on the same pendulum—if no one burned their oil, they might as well leave it in the ground and go back to camel trading
So everything rebalanced itself—except the infinite debt part—everybody thought that would just go away.
But it didnt. It is rearing up right now. –because there is no longer enough cheap oil to service the debt.
Millions have become billions and now trillions….just numbers.
Problem is, everyone from the Don downwards is convinced that there will be a future of infinite prosperity based onthat infinite debt
At least thats what he says—maybe he’s got his fingers crossed behind his back
I would agree with you, with one minor exception. I think the problem is just as much a lack of cheap non-polluting coal as is it a lack of oil. It is total energy per capita that is important, and that is now approximately flat. Flat energy per capita doesn’t work well, especially for paying off infinite debt with interest.
BD, how about this quote?
According to Keynes, by 2030 growth will have put an end to poverty. We will live in a society of abundance, in which we will work very little; an era in which “we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.”
wow… in 12 more years, no more poverty!
what a visionary!
is Pinker related to him?
https://imgur.com/a/LchuP
Or perhaps it is part of how a self-organized system works. We have other beliefs as well, like communism with hoped-for equal sharing, which have not withstood the test of time. Hard to motivate people when everyone earns the same amount.
I get the impression that the Soviets did quite well at motivating people with ideology, particularly in rebuilding after WW2 – things did seem to be getting better and better.
But by the 1970’s it was obvious that the transition to Utopia – ‘Full Communism’ -wasn’t going to happen, and they were set up for the complete moral crash of the 1990’s which came with the economic one.
i thought they were sent off to labour camps to provide a slave labour force until at least the end of the stalin era
The gulags certainly didn’t close up shop after Stalin died.
The above refers to Keynes’s prediction about 2030.
More Americans now support a universal basic income
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/roughly-half-of-americans-now-support-universal-basic-income.html?__source=twitter%7Cmain
Translation: Most people support using whatever energy supplies we have as quickly as possible.
And the economists keep working on their models…
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24337
the laws of physics will ultimately disallow the universal basic income
(no such thing as a free lunch is another way of putting it). We must expend energy in order to obtain energy
If we initiate a system where we expect energy to be freely delivered, we are seriously adrift from reality—yet it is obvious that a great number of people cannot accept or understand this.
I’ve tried to explain it here:
https://medium.com/@End_of_More/the-nonsense-that-is-ubi-319f5a8ddcce
That deficit of what’s being found vs. what’s being used has been going on for years now, since something like 2006. The question is; when does supply already discovered fail to meet demand at a price the world economy can run on? The middle east & Russia seem to extract much the same as it has for decades. The US is extracting at a renewed peak via shale while Canada is pumping more than ever partly based on tar sands. So the oil is still flowing but for how long still remains the biggest peak oil question.
“That deficit of what’s being found vs. what’s being used has been going on for years now, since something like 2006.”
My understanding is that this has been going on since the 1980s. So you could consider our civilization as entered “retirement” where it is just living off of savings starting at that time.
“My understanding is that this has been going on since the 1980s.”
I tried to do a Google search to find out but to no avail. Maybe Gail knows, but anyway if it has been going on since the 80’s then we are certainly riding on thin ice.
Its been going on since 1984 to be exact. See last chart below.
https://imgur.com/a/6dEDt
as i understand it, a rather obscure calculation shows that since mid 1980s, we have been consuming in excess of what the world has been producing
how long still remains the biggest peak oil question?
2020
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
https://imgur.com/a/zC6ge
But 2019 america will be great again!
https://www.google.se/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/27/us-will-overtake-russia-as-top-oil-producer-by-2019.html
“It’s going to go up this year though: Stella, Flyndre, Callater, Shaw, Kraken, Cayley, Schiehallion, Kraken North, Arundel, Loyal, Edradour, Glenlivet, Cawdor, Barra, Harris, Catcher, Varadero, Burgman, Clair Ridge, Mariner, Harrier – all fields starting up this year or last, I think about 300 kbpd new, but this year will be the last peak. The FIDs due for this year are pretty small and more gas than oil, plus Penguins which is a redevelopment is the biggest, and at some point soon Buzzard and Golden Eagle are going to crash”
–George
(for those who actually need a real time update)
we will reach the wile-e-coyote/seneca cliff situation
nobody knows when that will be, so we all pretend bau and ignore it
it isn’t possible to do anything else in practical terms—unless the cornucopians are right, only 10% of us will be around in 100 years time, because that which we live on will not be available
The issue is as much coal as it is oil. “Peak oil” wrongly focused what we look at. The issue is the need for rising total energy per capita. Oil enters into this, but so does coal. Renewables are pretty much unhelpful in this equation.
Peak just about everything… including sand that is suitable for making concrete…
Imagine what would happen if the price of sand quadrupled due to shortages… that alone could potentially take down BAU…. concrete is everywhere… and there is no substitute
My approach is inside-out, while others tend to think outside-in. I begin with myself and work from there outward to a mutual circle of influence. I have no thoughts for whatever lies outside that circle of mutual influence. Just as a quick example, and extremely limited one: There might be around 200 single family homes in my village. I know of only one serious backyard gardener. (I myself could not qualify as serious, although my wife is pushing to do much better.) Let’s be generous and estimate that there are 12 households in town at about my level. Since it’s a drought area, we do slightly better with roof water catchment–maybe 20 households. I never stop to think what amount of land feeds how many people even in my state, much less in the entire world. Asking the system to do that would be like asking a stranger to come and chew my food for me, owing to my shaky teeth. It’s not their business. Here, we take admirable care of each other, despite the potential to do much, much better. If something happening in another town or state or nation doesn’t affect us, I see no point in worrying about it.
It’s simple, if you’re gonna reduce us all down to cogs in the machine you’re also gonna have to grease us once in a while….
It must be frustrating repeating the message, but thanks.for making the role of energy so clear.
I wrote this a little while ago. It may show the struggle some of us go through trying to make sense of the present:
150 STRONG: A PATHWAY TO A DIFFERENT FUTURE (By Rob O’Grady)
“We all share a future with many challenges. The economic, environmental and social systems that sustain us are stressed, and an inevitable period of “the unfolding of consequences” is approaching. The headlines we read on climate change, wealth inequality, geopolitical instability and precarious financial arrangements, represent the realisation of structural flaws inherent in our current system, and it seems that there is little we can do to address these issues within the confines of our existing political and economic arrangements.”
A SHAKY LOOK AT WORLD AFFAIRS
Our social organization is too big to modify as a whole. The human race evolved in small bands, and prior to the age of agriculture, continued to live in small groups, rarely expanding beyond 150 people. (See Dunbar 150 strong).
Society past the age of agriculture, starting some 10,000 years ago, began to be organized in bigger and bigger units that were increasingly complex, having to be managed by armies and organized governments. This was only possible to do with the help of surplus energy (beyond what the sun and biomass could supply). This energy came from slaves. Later, it came from coal. Later still, coal was supported by oil.
Complex social organizations have come to depend on very complex financial systems too, banking and debt being prominent among them. But the financial and energy systems, being tightly interdependent, tend to prosper or decline in tandem. They use up natural resources like minerals, fisheries, wood and topsoil. They pollute the atmosphere. Finance, energy, natural resourced are all bonded together within a prevailing belief system that we call civilization. We have now come to the limit of what our civilization can sustain, especially at the quite unprecedented levels of human population (along with lifestyle) that has been increasingly exponentially and has doubled in the last 40 years alone.
Something has to give.
The world of economics, finance and energy is a world of hyper complexity that average people can’t understand. I’m somewhat rescued by having good intuition–something I refer to as “aesthetic intuition.” I knew intuitively since the 1960’s that society was heading in a catastrophically wrong direction. I knew intuitively that the political and economic systems were oppressive and murderous. Intuition, as compared purely with reason and book learning, is an equally reliable way of knowing. And possibly better. But it’s the combination of factual learning and intuitive understanding that works best…and this has led me to two years of regular posting, reading questioning on a blog dedicated to the subject. But that blog is firmly dedicated to the eternal churning over of the hopelessness of the current situation, while just as firmly stuck within the paradigm that caused it. They do recognize, as O’Grady does, (or do they?) “…that to talk of sustainability in the world of business and politics was ‘to pour from the empty into the void,’ because the underlying context is subversive of such efforts.”
as i see it —though i may be misinterpreting your comment— it is not possible to have ”150 strong” groups on an overcrowded planet.
groups of 150 must source their energy from a wide area—i would guess that 1 sq mile might support 10 people, but that would depend on their lifestyle expectations and land condition
whatever are is needed–the arithmetic doesnt look good for 7.5bn people
This seems to be what happened before:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/human-population-grew-as-energy-use-grew.png
Norman,
There isn’t really the premise for discussion here. First of all, there is little to agree on when one party is talking about numbers and metrics, while another is talking about formal structure and beauty. It would be nice, though, to bring these two ways of thinking together.
A great number of people cannot accept or understand that we already have a system that delivers energy freely.
That it cannot last is another matter.
tell me i’m missing something
but no system delivers energy freely
All the developed countries guarantees people enough energy to survive. It could be called unemployment benefit or pension or two dozen other things.
This is currently delivered by the system. Of course it isn’t free-free, they steal it from the producers.
it is being stolen from our grandchildren actually
That could be argued. If person A works, and the government takes half his salary and gives to person B, it is stolen from person A. This can be proven because the transaction could happen without any of them having children.
I agree that we are paying the producers too little for the energy.
We cannot steal the energy from our grandchildren. The system collapses, when we stop consuming enough energy. Our grandchildren cannot exist, any more than we can.
thinking of one’s grandchildren is the worst of it
mine think i’m nuts, which is fine for the moment
If you think of humans as a vermin infestation … or a deadly virus … or say a malignant cancer…
Then that should reduce or even eliminate any angst that you are feeling ….
Without a doubt ….what we are about to experience on a personal level … is horrific to even contemplate…
But we need to focus on the Bigger Picture…. wiping humans off the face of the earth is…. most certainly … a positive outcome.
And the fact that we – the special species — are self-exterminating … well that is just too funny!
DJ
No ”work” can be performed without energy consumption, irrespective of taxation or wages
therefore large scale energy consumption is drained from the future
Isn’t it the bills coming due that motivates most people to get up in the wee hours, dress, eat and hit the road for a full day of work 5-6 days a week?
most people?
maybe half…
it seems the other half wants lots of free money.
no matter what UBI might be intended to be…
a large % of people will only hear “free money”.
Cuba has had a terrible time with absenteeism and people coming to work late when everyone gets paid $20 a month (plus a few free things), regardless of what they do.
Not surprising, it’s basic psychology. There has to be a pay-off related to the labour performed – that’s motivating. Equal pay for all essentially signals that your labour – and your existence even – have no real value.
If your job does not provide you enough resources for keeping you alive, i.e. food, clothes, shelter, then you have no choice than working less or not working at all for others, i.e. sharing your energy with those who does not care about you…
Study: 90% Of Americans Strongly Opposed To Each Other
https://www.theonion.com/study-90-of-americans-strongly-opposed-to-each-other-1823168096
Study: 99% Of Americans Strongly Opposed To Opinions On OFW
“Hope is a moment now long passed,
The shadow of death is the one I cast”
Watching that video, it’s pretty obvious how that woman…uh…”motivates” that dog to perform all those tricks.
On second thought, that was probably a tad more dark and/or edgy than appropriate. I don’t want Crazy Eddy to think I’m trying too hard.
Maybe we could talk the dog into running for US President in 2020. He’d probably have a good chance of winning.
That dog is way too smart to be a politician….
Prime-Age Men May Never Return to U.S. Workforce, Fed Paper Says
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-23/prime-age-men-may-never-return-to-u-s-workforce-fed-paper-says
With the rising cost of vehicle ownership, and increasing wage disparity, it is easy to see one reason why. It simply becomes too expensive to drive to work. If interest rates go up, the problem will be worse.
https://imgur.com/a/oOVeO
Who says, “The stock market bubble pushed unearned household income up in the late 1990s? The chart is of median real household income. It is hard to believe that the stock market had much influence on median household incomes. Were those below the median household income investing in stocks?
Here is the chart without that included…
https://imgur.com/a/rvTRX
Another from British Columbia, Canada:
“Energy efficiency is a technological illusion that secures and sustains what is arguably a one-way freeway to resource depletion and atmospheric chaos. Contrary to Carr’s fairy tale notions, energy efficiency actually encourages the use of more energy and more resources. As such it merely sustains the dangerous status quo, albeit one illuminated by lots of energy-efficient digital signage.”
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/02/26/Energy-Efficiency-Curse/
https://imgur.com/a/YKGSo
“Modern economists don’t talk much about Jevons Paradox, but they do admit that the problem exists…”
economists don’t talk about Jevons because they have no answer to the “problem”…
which is why they also don’t talk about the coming 90+% decline in FFs.
I would argue that without growth in energy efficiency, you do not get growth in energy consumption.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/ayres-and-warr-electricity-prices-and-electricity-demand.png
It is the fact that the price of “energy services” (energy cost adjusted for changes in efficiency) are becoming cheaper that allows more energy services to be sold. Electricity is an energy service.
When renewables increase the true cost of energy services production, they act as a drag on the economy.
Forgot the link;) https://youtu.be/UWCkxw4gmbE
Nial Fergurson leads the discussion between Francis Fukuyama and Charles Murray on the causes and drivers of inquality and populisme. The discussion starts at 13`
Slumping Subway Offers “Free Cookies & Chips”, $2 Discounts To Revive Sagging Sales
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-22/subway-turns-to-2-off-loyalty-program-to-reverse-sales-slump
Americans are increasingly becoming more self-destructive in ‘nightmarish’ trend
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/02/23/americans-increasingly-becoming-more-self-destructive-nightmarish-trend/366493002/
This is what happens when the guiding stories are not enough….
Doomie Preppers NEED to keep the faith…. facts and logic do NOT matter…. the FE Challenge will NOT be taken….
Because that would destroy their guiding story…. and the sui.cide hotlines would ring off the hook
If Tesla were to collapse — just think of the blow this would deal to the psyche of Green Groopies…. it would leave them despondent…
And if you were to say to one of them – I told you so — there would be no fight left in them…. because you destroy something deep within their minds….
It would be kinda like the US Dream Team of basketball… taking on the Martian All Stars for the first time…. and being trounced 15,000,000 to 0…… deflating… to say the least.
lots of people take you challenge every day. I believe the uni bom ber was one of them.
Sorry to inform you:
After resigning from Berkeley, Kaczynski moved to his parents’ home in Lombard, Illinois, then two years later to a remote cabin he had built outside Lincoln, Montana, where he could live a simple life with very little money and without electricity or running water,[40] working odd jobs and receiving some financial support from his family.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Move_to_Montana
Money = BAU…. Clearly he would have been buying food and tools and making use of BAU to a certain extent….
Basically he was living at a fairly low level…. but not unplugged.
This is unplugged….
http://www.bakubo.com/galleries/West%20Papua%20New%20Guinea%20(Irian%20Jaya)/slides/day-6-village-2.jpg
I am waiting… and waiting… and waiting … for a Doomie P from FW to give it a go….
It ain’t gonna happen….
tick tick tick
we all still here BAU
this is for davidina100trillionyears a major piece of evidence which is pointing to the elimination of paper currency by june the 1st how on earth did they know that we would be so close to the collapse obviouslly they knew because the illuminati have access to the true state of oil reserves look at the phoenix and look at the bitcoin it is wearing around its neck look at the date 2018 now look at the phi symbol on the coin hanging on the phoenix’s neck guess what the phi symbol means besides being in the greek alphabet it also stands for the golden ratio .What is the golden ratio? It is a number 1.61803398875. Look at the first 4 numbers there is a date there 1st of june 2018. Make sure you read the article as it explains what the plan is and realize one thing this article came out in 1988. The Illuminati work in 30 year plans so they have been planning for this for a long time everything is all about timing notice how the paris agreement has been all set up at this exact time notice the quantitative tightening the fed is doing notice the bail-in laws that were speedily brought into place earlier this year . Ask yourself this is it all a co-incidence? Or perhaps the prelude to the New World Order https://socioecohistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/theeconomist-phoenix_get_ready_for_world_currency_by_2018.jpg?w=420&h=579
COVER: “GET READY FOR A WORLD CURRENCY”
Title of article: Get Ready for the Phoenix
Source: Economist; 01/9/88, Vol. 306, pp 9-10
THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let’s say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today’s national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the last twentieth century.
–
At the beginning of 1988 this appears an outlandish prediction. Proposals for eventual monetary union proliferated five and ten years ago, but they hardly envisaged the setbacks of 1987. The governments of the big economies tried to move an inch or two towards a more managed system of exchange rates – a logical preliminary, it might seem, to radical monetary reform. For lack of co-operation in their underlying economic policies they bungled it horribly, and provoked the rise in interest rates that brought on the stock market crash of October. These events have chastened exchange-rate reformers. The market crash taught them that the pretence of policy co-operation can be worse than nothing, and that until real co-operation is feasible (i.e., until governments surrender some economic sovereignty) further attempts to peg currencies will flounder.
…
The new world economy
The biggest change in the world economy since the early 1970’s is that flows of money have replaced trade in goods as the force that drives exchange rates. as a result of the relentless integration of the world’s financial markets, differences in national economic policies can disturb interest rates (or expectations of future interest rates) only slightly, yet still call forth huge transfers of financial assets from one country to another. These transfers swamp the flow of trade revenues in their effect on the demand and supply for different currencies, and hence in their effect on exchange rates. As telecommunications technology continues to advance, these transactions will be cheaper and faster still. With unco-ordinated economic policies, currencies can get only more volatile.
….
In all these ways national economic boundaries are slowly dissolving. As the trend continues, the appeal of a currency union across at least the main industrial countries will seem irresistible to everybody except foreign-exchange traders and governments. In the phoenix zone, economic adjustment to shifts in relative prices would happen smoothly and automatically, rather as it does today between different regions within large economies (a brief on pages 74-75 explains how.) The absence of all currency risk would spur trade, investment and employment.
–
Around 2000, the Economist predicted $10 oil as well. My money is on Gail, economics is not deterministic, but is self organizing. With little doubt, there is more “money” and less stuff that has value unless information counts in which case there may indeed be an oil replacement. It is my understanding that in information theory, information is energy. Quantum mechanics is very weird.
Prior to central banks, local banks wrote their own money, ordinary paper stuff. Periodically they went bust and essentially a debt jubilee. Somewhere there needed to be a clearing house to match the “stuff” transferred in and out of the area where the bank issued its own script.
World is weird right now.
We still have individual countries issuing their own debt and regulating (or not) the debt issued to businesses and citizens. So we haven’t moved all that far away. Governments do their best trying to get banks to issue more debt, not less, if they want their economies to move forward.
One of the ways that energy is dissipated is in providing “information.” In fact, “prices” are a type of information allowed by our self-organized economy.
I don’t think any matching of in and out is possible. Loans and issuance of shares of stock are more or less equivalent. In most cases, what we are attempting to match is
(a) Assets, including newly built devices, factories, and experiences (such as college education) that could in some sense be called assets, and
(b) The future benefit of those assets.
There are a few reasons why debt could be expected to rise over time. One of them is more and more devices are put together with today’s materials that are supposed to provide future benefit. Debt is needed so that the future benefit of these devices can be “brought forward” to pay workers at the time that these devices are made. (One of the big thing that goes wrong is estimating the true future benefit of the asset. If the asset is simply the repair of an existing road, for example, it is not clear that there is a future benefit. Adding a new road would provide true benefit.)
Another reason why debt can be expected to rise over time relates to falling interest rates. If interest rates are lower, investments with lower return appear to be profitable. Also, it becomes less expensive (in monthly payments) to buy assets such as homes and cars. Thus, more debt will be issued, even if the same assets are exchanged.
Also, in many cases, debt is incurred without it being obvious that there is a true asset generated, or that the asset has lasting value. For example, governments seem to borrow, just to maintain their existing level of spending. This borrowing does help create jobs.
We know that in total, we get less and less GDP for $1 of debt growth than we used to. We really need the rising consumption of cheap energy products to produce “true” growth. Most of the debt is coverup for lack of true growth. For example, young people are encouraged borrow funds to go to college. Then, many of them find that their wages are not sufficient to pay back the debt with interest.
Illuminati could wait utill the World Cup ends. So please no collapse before July 16th.
Collapse will happen Monday 24th 2028 (+/-10 years). This world cup is safe.
thanks, adonis…
I will try to remember to read that on June 2 😉
There is a whole lot of planning that goes into a major change. Think of all of the computer changes that were needed to fix the year 2000 “bug.” I find it hard to believe that a major currency change could be made effective on June 1. Perhaps it could be rolled out that date, and implemented later.
U.S. shale investors still waiting on payoff from oil boom
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-oil-record-strategy-analysis/u-s-shale-investors-still-waiting-on-payoff-from-oil-boom-idUSKCN1G70IE
Government debt levels to hit new global high this year – S&P
https://www.reuters.com/article/governments-debt-sp/government-debt-levels-to-hit-new-global-high-this-year-sp-idUSL8N1QC70R
“LONDON, Feb 22 (Reuters) – Governments around the world will borrow roughly $7.4 trillion this year, credit rating firm S&P Global estimated on Thursday, pushing their overall debt total to a record level for the third year in a row.
The annual forecast by S&P projected that the United States will make up one third of the total and together with Japan would account for over half of the $7.4 trillion.
China is number three and expected to issue around $700 billion worth of debt, while Italy, France, and Brazil will each raise over $180 billion.”
And the beat goes on…got to keep borrowing ever more to desperately hold on to BAU.
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/really-extreme-global-weather-event-leaves-scientists-aghast-20180226-p4z1q4.html
Nothing to see here just a big hoax.
What is a big hoax is saying that there is anything at all we can do about climate change.
If the Meta story were something different, “How we need to adapt to changing climate” for example, the story might be useful.
Yes, I agree, we can adopt new crops, or leave the unsuitable areas. But changing the climate is something we can not influence, especially, when we need energy for other purposes.
Zack Labe, a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, said average daily temperatures above the northern latitude of 80 degrees have broken away from any previous recordings in the past 60 years.
Right… well let’s have a look at what happened 60+ years ago…..
The mercury rose to 47.3 degrees Celsius, or 117.14 Fahrenheit, in the Sydney metropolitan area. The hottest temperature ever recorded in the area was 47.8 Celsius degrees (118.04 Fahrenheit) in 1939, the Bureau of Meteorology for the state of New South Wales (NSW) said.
North America’s highest temperature ever recorded is 134 degrees Fahrenheit (56.7 degrees Celsius), which occurred at Death Valley, California on July 10, 1913 at Greenland Ranch.
Hottest Places in Canada. The highest temperature officially recorded in Canada is 45 °C (113 °F) on July 5, 1937 at Midale and at Yellow Grass, two small towns in southeastern Saskatchewan.
Isn’t it amazing what one can come up with when one THINKS.
Now what caused these record temperature back then? And could the same causes be behind some of the high temperatures we have seen in our lifetimes?
It is pretty pathetic when people scream xxxx xxxx ing every time we get an unusual WEATHER event.
If a heat wave is evidence of XXX XXXX then a cold wave is surely evidence that XXX XXX is bull sh it.
LOGIC
LOGIC means cherry picking irrelevant data.
Track insect species movements or Jellyfish and then you will realise that fast eddie is a bit slow.
Something interesting is happening here in Bio-Tech Growth Hub Central: lots of prime city-centre (and it’s a nice centre, for England, not quite ruined post-1945) retail premises are falling vacant.
Now, I didn’t see that even in the aftermath of 2008. Certainly, conditions are worsening in the UK quite rapidly. Streets are starting to get that gapped-tooth look.
Residential real estate still seems to be holding up (and up, and up).
It is possible that people are driving to nearby towns for shopping with free parking,as this place is increasingly congested and expensive to park in -the result of a Green initiative to make people park outside town and use the public bus system (which is ghastly). You can’t do the monthly family food shop using a bus, and you won’t be going into other shops while in town…..
It is hard to keep up central city areas. We have that problem as well. Mostly, they tend to fill up with artsy little shops of gift items–things people don’t really need.
cities can only exist on the support of the surrounding country—the bigger the city–the more support-land it needs
i read somewhere that london requires the energy-support of an area 2.5x times as big as the uk in total
The missing part of that equation is of course fossil fuels.
“The drive for cost cuts and higher margins at U.S. trucking and railroad operators is pinching their biggest customers, forcing the likes of General Mills Inc and Hormel Foods Corp to spend more on deliveries and consider raising their own prices as a way to pass along the costs.
“Interviews with executives at 10 companies across the food, consumer goods and commodities sectors reveal that many are grappling with how to defend their profit margins as transportation costs climb at nearly double the inflation rate…
“Quickening economic growth, a shortage of drivers and reduced capacity, and higher fuel prices have driven up transportation costs, prompting some companies to threaten to raise prices on goods ranging from chicken to cereal…”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-freight-transportation-insight/corporate-americas-new-dilemma-raising-prices-to-cover-higher-transport-costs-idUSKCN1GA0DS
I’m quite pleased when the very few prepared foods I buy go up in price, but look the same ad haven’t shrunk – I hope it’s an indication that the ingredients haven’t been skimped.
“Average retail power costs are set to climb 111 percent since 2000, when guaranteed subsidies for wind, solar and biomass power first started being added to consumers’ bills, forecasts from the BDEW utilities federation showed last week. Germany may for the first time move up a notch to share with Denmark the highest household energy bills in the EU.
“It’s more evidence that gains in wind and solar power competitiveness have yet to trickle down to consumers, frustrating the aim of keeping Merkel’s green energy transition affordable.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/germany-s-runaway-power-pollution-bills-haunt-merkel-s-new-term
The high prices are not for industries, just for “normal” people”. Usually people don’t mind, a family of 4 in an appartment usually has to pay 120 Euro a month, it’s affordable for us!
Who is «us»? I tought Germany also had it’s large pockets of (working) poor? Furthermore the gain in reducing the CO2 emissions is according to the article insignificant.
The competitiveness of wind and solar are only theoretical. A country has to figure out what its installed costs really are, including long distance transmission and other costs. The add-on costs tend to rise as the share of wind and solar rises, so even if the bid prices look like they are falling, the total cost could be rising.
In the US, we hide total costs in the US tax credits and elsewhere, so we have no idea what total costs are. At least Germany is a little more honest about its total calculations.
What a wonderful Sunday this has been, with the closing ceremonies of the Seoul Olympics. It just seemed like such a dreamy day. Life is good, work is plentiful, oh sorry, didn’t mean to interfere with all the dystopian visions. As you were…
If all the medal winners at the Olympics are taking PEDS…. should it be considered cheating if someone gets caught?
It is only cheating if you get caught.
Hopefully their Olympic legacy won’t suck as much as Rio’s:
“Part of Rio’s budgetary woes are due to massive infrastructure spending ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, as well sky-rocketing personnel and pension outlays. At the same time oil prices fell, revenue shrank and a massive corruption scandal at Rio-based oil company Petrobras thwarted expansion plans. Rio’s previous governor has been indicted more than 20 times.”
http://www.gulf-times.com/story/582958/Army-will-need-more-than-guns-to-deal-with-Rio-de-
Rio needs the tax revenue from high oil prices. Without that, they are in deep trouble. The corruption scandal is at least partly related to inadequate revenue.
The Olympics are ALWAYS a financial sinkhole.
They are a way of temporarily increasing GDP. More borrowing, more ticket sales to people outside the country, more temporary jobs.
Sure but spending that money on actual infrastructure development or something would yield a far more positive ROI vs. the always extravagant Olympic construction and ceremonies, which produce very little that benefits the economy past that one time event. The same amount of money could be poured into constructing something that has a function; hell even China’s endless high rises that no one can afford are a better investment. Someone can at least live in them.
high rises only continue to function so long as there is energy input
when that ceases, they will disintegrate—you cannot have people living on the 20th floor with nothing to to keep them there
True!
if you want a perfect example of that google the Greek olympic stadiums from 2004
a nation of 11million borrowed $11 billion to do it—neat huh?
then the great mystification followed as to why greece went bust
and armies are energy sinks too
there’s a limit on how long you can pay soldiers to be on duty to guard the infrastructure for everybody else
https://livingwelldementia.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/cognitive-dissonance.jpg
I feel your anger Doomie Preppers….
However I am right. I absolutely know I am right. And you know I am right.
We need to have positive “guiding stories.” One of them is that debt will be repaid with interest. Another is that stock prices will rise over time. A third one is that the government will continue to be around indefinitely, and will pay Social Security and other benefits it has promised.
We also need to have a “guiding story” regarding what is ahead for us in the future. You have done what all researchers do, and created the most likely outcome, based on a straight line extrapolation of what an energy shortage, following a period of plenty, might look like. In a sense, it might be correct. But it does not make for a positive guiding story.
You have correctly pointed out that the guiding stories of religions, if taken literally, are rather ridiculous. We now have many guiding stories: Renewables will save us. Technology will get better and better. We don’t have anything to worry about with respect to the economy, because economists can fix any problem.
The real situation is that we live in a Universe that is self-organized. All religions are self-organized, just as are all governments, and as we human beings are. There cannot possibly be an intent that there be a single religion. Religions are put in place, partly to bind local groups together. They are also put in place, to help hold total population down (fighting with other religious groups). Religions depend on adequate “energy supplies,” like all dissipative structures. Dmitry Orlov points out that if sustainability groups are to survive, they need to be bound together by something approximating a religion. It also helps if this religion is persecuted, giving an “us versus them” view of life. Otherwise, the organization is not bound together sufficiently. Members will “vote out” a leader who does not produce the results they want, or they will go back to their previous lifestyle.
The God we have is a literal higher power who works through co-incidences. We can never see the precise long-term consequences of our actions, although we think we can. This is why we have all of the one, two, and three dimensional models of the future that we have. We think these models are right, but they can never be precisely right. Every action of ours sets off a chain reaction of other actions. What the consequences are depends on a chain of coincidences that we can never predict.
What at least some religions do is allow us to sit down and think about the positive coincidences that take place each day, as well as over months and years. While we do not know that this literal higher power is behind all of these positive coincidences, it is perfectly plausible to think that some power is behind all of the self-organizing that is taking place–someone who can see the long-range outcomes, and the need for things that are not obvious, like keeping population down. I can see many areas where coincidences have come into play. This blog is one of them. I didn’t set out with a full understanding of what was going on. I gradually was able to put together pieces of the story, as I discussed parts of the story with others, and as I saw what was happening in the world around us.
There are many other places where coincidences come into place–for example, which people are placed by coincidence in our lives. Sometimes these people have just the missing pieces of our personal life-puzzle that we need at the time. For example, I have a sister who for health reasons (lupus) could no longer do college teaching of biology. She (independently) did something fairly parallel to what I am doing, in the religious field. Some people in her church got her started at looking at the range of meanings Hebrew words had, back when the Old Testament was written, and how the range of meaning changes how Old Testament stories should be interpreted. This situation occurs because the vocabulary was still very small at that time; it had not evolved to have as many words as it has today. They supported her financially, when she wrote her first book, Listening to the Language of the Bible: Hearing It Through Jesus’ Ears, back in 2004. It sold very well (20,000 copies?), to people from a range of denominations. Her story continues to this day, with several books and a WordPress blog. We talk on the phone quite often. As she says, we are “two peas in a pod.” We left fields that we were trained in, and walked into the middle of totally new fields. And somehow, things have worked together for her as well. She has been able to support herself on her research and writing.
As another example, this weekend I was in charge of our church’s participation in the Atlanta Hunger Walk fund raising event (to provide funds for local food programs for the poor). Somehow, I had the opportunity to get better acquainted with a hispanic man and his family from our church. In some ways, things did not work out (forecast for rain, too many unable to walk because of sickness, conflicting events at church), but in one, important way it did work out. I would never have planned the event this way. But by being thrown together, we found out we had more in common than I had expected. Strangely enough, the rain did stay away for the time of the event, as well.
In some ways, perhaps the issue is looking for the silver lining to clouds. In some ways, perhaps the story is believing, “All things work together for good,” even if we don’t understand how or why (and even if in some sense, it is not really true). The tune that goes through my head is God is So Good to Me. Perhaps rationally, we can see how things will likely end up in a terrible way. But we know that there is an organizing principle that is always going on in the background. This organizing principle makes clouds have silver linings. It is what allowed most people in prior collapses to die from disease, rather than war. We think we can project endings, but in fact, we cannot. There is no point in dwelling on how badly things could turn out. It just makes our life miserable today. We need to be looking for silver linings to clouds. We are part of a huge self-organized system that operates in ways we cannot ever hope to fully understand.
Ms Tverberg says, “We think we can project endings, but in fact, we cannot. There is no point in dwelling on how badly things could turn out. It just makes our life miserable today. We need to be looking for silver linings to clouds. We are part of a huge self-organized system that operates in ways we cannot ever hope to fully understand.”
If one has the courage, knowledge and intelligence to try to survive what is coming he/she should try. If one does not have the character to try, they have but one choice – to lay down like the whipped animal that they are and die.
I said, “he/she should try”. Of course, I should have said, “he/she must try”. If a person of character is forewarned of impending disaster he is forearmed and must try to protect himself, and his loved ones. His good character will not allow less than his best efforts.
As I said before, if anyone survives the coming troubles, those people will be much stronger than the genetic sludge that can survive or even rise to the top of todays society.
Luck will play a part of course, but without good character and careful preparation one won’t survive long enough to get lucky.
Hard to disagree with any of this message.
When one understand that impending disaster involves the great suffering and death for one’s family … including a significant chance of being enslaved, beaten, and brutally raped…..
Would not loading them into a vehicle with air bags disabled… and slamming the vehicle into a rock cut at 200km per hour be considering protecting them?
I think her comment is also saying your getting a bit “preachy”. We need some Delu-istanies to come around for you to bash.
And skip the cut rock and get some Nembutal. (then send some to me)
I remain hopeful that the gubbermint will take pity on us soon to be wretched beasts…. and distributes Family Sized Packs of Fenatyl when the string begins to push….
Much more elegant than a car wreck….
How many children do you have now?
0.
Why would anyone want children? They basically ruin your life… they are irritating … they usually turn to be disappointments (although few parents admit that)…. they sap your finances…. you can’t travel because they are too young or it’s as expensive as taking ACDC on tour…. there are already too many people on the planet…. humans are vermin…. and last but not least…. why bother when you know they are going to suffer and die (probably horribly) in the near future.
Oh but they say cute things sometimes….
I much prefer dogs.
Correct – non sense in dwelling over the end of the world and the starvation violence disease and radiation that are guaranteed to follow….
If one expects the end of the world to come in the near future… the correct course of action would be to enjoy the time that remains….
Now if you enjoy pulling weeds… and digging cow sh it…. and all those faux farmer things with the help of BAU to make the hobby enjoyable…
By all means….. continue with that….
But if you are only doing those things because you think this will help you thrive post BAU…. then you are a fool.
Try the FE Challenge. That will immediately allow you to decide if your doomie prep is going to be workable post BAU.
Unplug Today! (UPT)
If people want to try, fine. But I don’t think everyone needs to.
If only we could wish upon a star… bang the drum and sing Koombaya… and all would be better….
There is a place for people who want to do that …. http://www.peakprosperity.com….
FW is Death Watch.
Earth to Eddie
We should televise the UPT attempt. It could be like that Survival guy episode where he tries to make it on his own in the SW American desert, end up practically freezing to death at night, cooks and eats a horny toad he caught, gets sick, and has to pull out his cell phone and call it a fail. Back BAU, please!
beautiful comment, Gail.
Clearly the masses do require guiding stories…. lies… propaganda… bull sh it…. kool aid…. whatever we want to call it….. they lap it up…. and as we can see…. they get ornery when a wrench is tossed into the mechanism
I’ve got limited time left… and I prefer to use it to pursue truths… identifying and then gutting guiding stories…. by doing so I grow stronger…. eventually I will transcend this physical world and become one with the creator….
No … not quite… I will usurp the creator….. and I will become Omnipotent Purity…. (the position comes with a vast harem)
But time is very short… and I still have more guiding stories to destroy before I pinnacle out….
‘Why worry about death? If it is annihilation, you have nothing to fear. If not, then you will become a completely different kind of creature in a new existence, and have, equally, nothing to fear’.
Marcus Aurelius.
That is about it.
When the reaper comes calling (as it will shortly)… choose a nice tree…. and ask someone to bury you beneath that tree…. so that you can become part of that tree.
Wouldn’t it be faster to be eaten by wolves and come part of them?
Or try a great white shark…
Or better still — run out in front of a speeding semi truck… the hawks will swoop down and snatch hunks of your carcass … and you will soar eternally!
I wood if I could
Attention Doomie Preppers!!!
There is a sale on shovels…. order 20 get 1 free — you can never have enough shovels!
https://www.walmart.com/browse/patio-garden/digging-tools/5428_4091_4689569_3042426
Always digging your own grave FE
Your wit is as clever as a 10kg block of lead.
your answer regarding grids going down everywhere at once due to JIT is total BS. Grids are down all over the place. Things aren’t crash hot in Puerto Rico right now but none of what you see coming is going on there. Cannibals a plenty. – I think not. Population declines will come but every fuel pond going up is unlikely. But hey who cares apparently you will be driving off a cliff when you think it is time. Better get that moment right but I guess you will never know. Maybe a practice run – just to be
sure
e
e
e
e
e
e
e
e
e
e
e
e
.
The best shovels are those ones with the sharpened edges……. 🙂
As used by Spetsnaz:
“The main purpose of MPL-50 is entrenching, which is carried out at a rate of 0.1–0.5 m3/hour depending on the soil type and physical condition of the soldier. The spade can also be used as an axe, and one side of its blade is sharpened for this purpose, or as a hammer, with the flat of the blade as the working surface. It can serve as an oar for paddling on improvised rafts, as a frying pan for cooking food, and as a measuring device, as its length and width are standardized.
“Soviet Spetsnaz units had advanced training with the MPL-50, which they mostly used not for entrenching, but for close quarters combat. The spade is well balanced, which allows it to be used as a throwing weapon.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPL-50
Favourite weapon, also, of Stormtroopers in WW1………
They save on bullets….
Many people were attracted to getting more in touch with the basics just mentioned, but the movement could also have been fueled by the negatives of modern life: rampant consumerism, the failings of government and society, including the Vietnam War, and a perceived general urban deterioration, including a growing public concern about air and water pollution. Events such as the Watergate scandal and the 1973 energy crisis contributed to these views. Some people rejected the struggle and boredom of “moving up the company ladder.” Paralleling the desire for reconnection with nature was a desire to reconnect with physical work. Farmer and author Gene Logsdon expressed the aim aptly as: “the kind of independence that defines success in terms of how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could buy.”[7]
There was also a segment within the movement who already had a familiarity with rural life and farming, who already had skills, and who wanted land of their own on which they could demonstrate that organic farming could be made practical and economically successful.
Many of the North American back-to-the-landers of the 1960s and 1970s made use of the Mother Earth News, the Whole Earth Catalogs and derivative publications. But as time went on, the movement itself drew more people into it, more or less independently of impetus from the publishing world
Opposition Edit
In the early twenty-first century, several U.S. cities have been fighting the back-to-the-land movement within their borders by imposing fines on residents who maintain vegetable gardens on vacant lots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-the-land_movement
Sorry Doomers, been there, done that…no surprise there is a backlash and high failure rate of doomsteads.
Many are called, few are chosen to try, and even fewer actually succeed.pp
In Canada, on the other hand, many are cold, but few are frozen.
Back to the Earth i.e. koombaya pretend farmers completely plugged into BAU a la Scott Nearing…
Most of them quit because even with the full support of BAU … that was just too much drudgery…. most people want the MUNNY… they want luxuries… like a decent vehicle and house… and a tee vee… and stuff….
If you truly live off the land as a hobby farmer you live in abject poverty. Even with BAU assisting.
A dog likes a warm fire.
The U.S. Media’s Failure To Report On Violence In Mexico Is Inexcusable
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/the-u-s-medias-failure-to-report-on-violence-in-mexico-is-inexcusable
This death sentence had been pronounced against him, so far as Monárrez could tell, because the Sinaloa Civic Front had recently brought a public lawsuit against a group of Mexican soldiers who had massacred two carloads of civilians—including a family of schoolteachers and their three small children—in a supposed anti-narcotics operation. One of Monárrez’s colleagues in the Sinaloa Civic Front had already been murdered for investigating the same case.
When the End of More comes…. this is what the military (well.. ex military) men will do the world over…..
They will hunt for food… and kill kill kill…..
Remember that part from the book The Road….where they kept people alive in a cellar… and hacked off body parts …. to eat…..
Let’s take that one step further…. vicious soldiers… capture humans…. and keep the young, choice cuts alive…. by feeding them a stew made from the parts of gnarly older humans….
It is not difficult to imagine an outcome like this … 7.8 billion people… and no food….
We’ve eaten each other before….
for the preppers…
it has been said:
if one person has the gold, and another person has the guns…
soon only one person will have both the gold and the guns.
The soldiers in that picture are supported by a BAU-based supply chain. Without the supply chain, they can still loot whatever BAU-based stuff they come across. Read up on what happens to armies when they are deprived of nourishment and no hope of finding it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_in_depth
You have no understanding of most of the things you choose to have an edgy opinion about. Ditto for the rest of the BAU-or-bust club.
Of course they would strip the gear down…. toss the useless radios and other sh it into the bin…. and just hang on to what is important…
Keep in mind there is plenty of ammo available in America — just pop onto Zero Hedge and be regaled by racist violent men who spend every extra cent on bullets… when they are not stroking their killing machines…. they can’t wait for the STHF….. kill kill kill!!!
So you are a doomie prepper — and you are out in the garden pulling weeds and tending your pumpkins…. whistling Koombaya…..
And meanwhile …. this guy is crawling through the bush with half a dozen of his mates….
You don’t hear him — you don’t seem him….
Then …. THWAAKKKK — a bullet rips through your skull — and you don’t even hear the last K…. because you are already dead.
And then he and his mates – after checking to see if there are any other doomies around — walk into the farm…. and help themselves to the pantry — and the female goodies….
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Indian_Army_soldier_at_Camp_Babina.jpg
Worship the spent fuel ponds – they will end the misery
https://ladygeekgirl.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/planet-of-the-apes-bomb-service.jpg
They can ammo and food with people guarding it, I’m sure. Perhaps they will kill those people and take it all, the first couple of times, in an area <50 miles from home. What then?
The more they kill, the longer they kill, the more they need to travel and spread out to find supplies, and the less likely it is they can keep killing.
Go from doomie prepper to doomie prepper killing….
The only problem I see with that strategy is that the doomie preppers will be overrun by the hordes… so when the gun toters show up there will be nothing left….
You are underestimating the amount of damage 7.8 billion people on the loose can do….
That is because you are delusional.
The only people with any chance of living through this ARE THOSE WHO ALREADY LIVE WITHOUT BAU. And who are totally isolated.
These doomsteads are a f789ing joke
“Go from doomie prepper to doomie prepper killing…. ”
Those door-to-door evangelists are militia spies surveying doomie prepper hideouts!
“You are underestimating the amount of damage 7.8 billion people on the loose can do….”
Well, of course, since they will somehow be magically transported to the same location at the same time, with the same motivation and constraints. Oh, and the ability to walk around forever without adequate nourishment, rest or mental health.
In short – you do not have an argument; you have a wish, i.e. to see everyone be as miserable and craven as yourself.
You are missing my point….
I am trying to warn anyone who grasps for the false god of prepping… that they are wasting their time and money — been there done that….
The correct course is Live Large Now….
That said — I can see why this fact laden message is not going down well …
It would be like showing up at a Solar Panel conference — and making a presentation that demonstrates that solar energy is a stuuupid f789ing joke….
Delusional people do NOT want to have their hopium pipe pulled away from them….
Once again – that is why not a single Doomie Prepper has tried the FE Challenge (FEC)
You know — just as I knew — that no matter what you do — you are doomed.
And a dry run would just expose that…. so you look away from the monster that I am holding in front of you …
You deny…. you spit venom….
I get it…. I really do get it….. But this is FW — you will get no respite….
Go buy a f789ing jug of Xanax if you can’t handle the truth
Some preppers won’t survive. Others will. Deal with it. I’m not a prepper, but I’m also not a lily-livered i-diot who has to redefine “truth” to feel good about himself.
Extinction
https://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cherenkov-glow-2.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-240
“The minimization of the amount of 240Pu present in weapons grade plutonium is achieved by reprocessing the fuel after just 90 days of use. Such rapid fuel cycles are highly impractical for civilian power reactors and are normally only carried out with dedicated weapons plutonium production reactors.”
Full gas tank hording argument:
When will the hordes know it is time to horde?
When things get bad the government will start delivering food and people will wait. When food stops arriving no one will have any gas left in the tank or food in the belly.
The CBs will fight to the very last second… when the Beast knocks BAU to the ground and tears his entrails out…
The power will go off… the shops will empty….
The government will not distribute anything … do what point? So we linger a few days longer?
The gig will be up … it will be every man for himself… in a monumental global fight to the death…
Mr DNA will recognize his existence is threatened by extinction — and if you think the most vile criminal acts are bad — you ain’t seen nothin yet….
Murder pillage rape
Murder pillage rape
Murder pillage rape
Murder pillage rape
Murder pillage rape
Fortunately the waves of radiation will roll in relentlessly…
And then there will be… silence… and blue skies
The power will never go out.
Why would it?
David points out that, “it has been said:
if one person has the gold, and another person has the guns…
soon only one person will have both the gold and the guns.
If one does not have the courage and intelligence to try to survive he has only one choice, to lay down and die like a whipped dog. How does one explain that to a whipped dog?
Raiders of this doomstead will have a very bad day or night.
One would also expect a few heads on pikes might deter future raiders.
Oooh you are a tough guy… Love that tough talk…..
One thing I have learned in my life….is that when people talk as you do …. they are almost certainly not tough at all…. if you had any clue what sort of vicious animals are out there…. you would recognize that you are not much tougher than a bug….
Let’s leave that aside… what will you do when neighbours show up at your gate… hungry … women and children … asking to be fed.
Come on tough guy…. what will your response be?
life is infinite bau is not
OFW is infinite…
in a few billion years, when the sun expands into a red giant and annihilates the Earth, surely OFW will go on…
or at least until June 1st.
gail will command the sun to stop
and lo—it will stop
We in the first world are doing fine.
Let me be clear only 10% of the US is the first world. The other 90% is worm food.
well, come on, be honest…
aren’t we all inevitably just worm food?
I think you’re too low…
I would say the US is about 70% first world.
another view of Pinker, by David Brooks…
I know, it might be hard for many readers to stomach the two:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/steven-pinker-radical-honesty.html
Brooks actually calls out Pinker for not seeing the full picture.
“Pinker’s philosophical lens prevents him from seeing where the real problems lie. He calls himself an Enlightenment man, but he’s really a scientific rationalist. He puts tremendous emphasis on the value of individual reason. The key to progress is information — making ourselves better informed.”
somehow, FF seems a wee bit more important than “information”.
To be honest… I’d prefer to read more about Keith and his space solar thing … than anything from the Pinker clown
I miss Keith.
Soooo much.
but at least we still have Kurt…
I hope Pinker is around when BAU goes down…He deserves to suffer…
BAU is going down and we will have a staircase collapse if you want a movie to compare how the world will look in 10 years time here it is it’s a classic BABYLON AD starring Vin Diesel
and by the way there may be under a month left to prep the countdown is nearly over before global bail-ins take all power for you to prep away from you
I am doing the opposite — I am about to Un-Prep.
I will be featured on a new TV series — The Doomsday UN-Preppers.
Each week they will be featuring a Doomie Prepper who realized that the whole thing was a f789ing ridiculous futile joke…. and a total waste of time and money
They have offered me a free trip to Disney Land if I agree to go first.
no, adonis…
it’s still June 1st… guaranteed…
or do you have a better date?
The world 2028 as a movie? Mission Impossible 5.
Pinker is a typical Harvard economist academic pin-head elitist. he is not worthy of your valuable time to read.
time is valuable?
very much so, so don’t waste it.
Yes…. let’s hope for the worst for him… just because he wasted everyone’s time….
Keith had a strange, innocent charm, full of visions and strange imaginings.
Pinker isn’t even amusing.
The screams of denial by Pinker sound like the squealing of a pig beginning delivered to the butchers shop. The volume of their protestations being directly proportional to the proximity of their inevitable fate….
actually, there is some truth to that…
since neither of them can comprehend what’s ahead.
The louder he squeals… the more he convinces himself — gotta keep those negative thoughts away….
The new statesman has a scathing takedown of pinker, by philosopher John Gray: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon
Humans can not live without illusions. For the men and woman of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past they could not go on…
-John N Gray
Religions definitely serve a purpose. People who have decided they are pointless need to create their own religions, based on faith in technology, human’s progress, and the like. Or simply faith that they will someday have more money, and that money will buy them happiness.
The world of meaning is orthogonal to the physical world. We choose what we follow. We are in time free space free communion with all others of good will. The self serving and self chosen are real but are not the whole of reality. Choose are you will.
orthogonal…
what a word! thanks…
“meaning” is a human construction…
to be clear, that says that it is real…
we humans really make our own real meaning…
it vanishes with eternal death…
but for now, I suppose we all find that participating at OFW has meaning.
This is why the Doomies won’t try the Fast Eddy Challenge.
They would realize the futility of what they were doing and would end up addicted to Xanax and Oxycontin….
There there doomie preppers… everything is gonna be alright…. just make sure to keep making more compost… and buying some more baubles at Walmart to keep the endorphins throbbing through that delu.ded brain…..
Holy sh!t… I just realized something — I can’t bring my 20ft container with me — because the new place does not allow such eyesores in the yard… (containers smell of trailer trash and doomie preppers… can’t have that). WTF do I do now???? I am about to be swimming naked in a sea of misery….
I think no one does anything you suggest FE because you come across as a raving loonie. Just saying.
Nobody take the FE Challenge… because they are afraid
Surely you are allowed a big shed? The traditional refuge from all kinds of horrors – war, famine, the wife………
Yes… that is an option ….
yes! it’s well worth reading…
I’m less concerned about Pinker’s philosophical angle…
where the rubber meets the road is whether or not Progress will continue and for how long…
but Gray concludes that Pinker is merely a cheerleader for his liberal audience…
tell ’em that Progress will never end, and reassure their doubts.
I quote from the article where Gray presents Pinkers scientisme, or big history:
He summarises this claim in a formula: “Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress, the tragedy we were born into, and our means of eking out a better existence.” Here, “entro” denotes entropy, the process of increasing disorder that is identified in the second law of thermodynamics. “Evo” refers to the evolution of living organisms, which absorb energy and thereby resist entropy. “Info” is information, which when collected and processed in the nervous systems of these organisms enables them to wage their war against entropy.
For Pinker, the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t simply identify a universal regularity in the natural world, “it defines the fate of the universe and the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order”.
Attention Dommie Preppers
Do you know where the nearest spent fuel pond is?
There is some serious cognitive dissonance at play here…. a doomie could be just up the road from a pond … and the stuuuupid bast ard would just pretend it wasn’t there… he’d go about his day pulling weeds… chainsawing fire wood… buying stuff at Walmart… washing clothes in his machine… reading prepper books under electric lights…
Looking forward to the day BAU ends…
I cannot express in words how utterly ridiculous this is…
Anyone tried the Fast Eddy Challenge? Hello preppers… anyone… anyone?
We all know why the answer is NO…. that’s because you du m b f 789s … would blow up the Delusion …. you’d realize it is futile….
And you’d lose hope….
And when you lose hope…. the darkness creeps in …..
You describe a scenario of a dumb prepper and then comment how ridiculous this is.
Well of course, but not all preppers are as dumb as your description.
Some of us are actually aware of what SHTF entails and prep accordingly.
I don’t know the words to Kumbaya and not stupid enough to accept the sentiment.
Challenges? We can and do go without electricity quite often due to wild weather and remoteness, no big deal. Washing in a bucket using water from the river is sometimes done if the rainwater tank gets low.
I am in the lowest part of the antipodes where the prevailing winds are Westerly across thousands of miles of the Southern Ocean, so just maybe the radiation from the Northern hemisphere won’t wipe us out here.
For those just East of us, the smell you get where you are is not from spent fuel rods but from the thousands of dairy cattle we have here.
There are 4000 spent fuel ponds on the planet — it does not matter where you are — the oceans will be poisoned — and these toxins will be carried around the planet in jet streams in due course
They will enter the food chain — (well… whatever is left of the food chain after the hordes have ripped through it) …. and they will enter your body — and they will kill you.
Ok tough guy prepper — you say can bath in a river and live without electricity …. how about you actually give it a dry run…
The Fast Eddy Challenge:
– turn off your electricity for a week
– eat ONLY what you grow – shoot – or gather
– use NO medicines – nothing – if you cut yourself — you can wash it with water – that’s it
– buy nothing — you use only what you already have (and remember – post BAU you will run out)
– use NO petrol or diesel.
– if you need firewood no going to the wood pile – because the wood pile will be used up post BAU fairly quickly — go out back – chop a tree down – split it — haul the wood back to your pile — wait for it to dry
– drive nowhere – no cheating and using diesel equipment.
Report back in a week!!!
And if you don’t off yourself half way through out of despair…. keep in mind this is only the End of BAU Lite — when the real thing hits… you will have to contend with hordes of pillagers, armed vicious trained men coming at you … and disease.
I guarantee you – when the SHTF — and reality splatters in your face — you will welcome the sickness that the radiation brings.
Prepping — Oh What a Grand Delusion!!! I once had the disease…
Well – just emailed off the signed agreement —- the doomstead dream — is officially DEAD.
‘the smell you get where you are is not from spent fuel rods but from the thousands of dairy cattle we have here’
You won’t have to worry about the smell of cattle…. for long…. the hordes will take care of that problem….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5262257/Starving-mob-beat-cattle-death-rocks-Venezuela.html
Actually it is better to beat them to death …. because without the medicines they will die rather soon anyway:
https://www.drugs.com/vet/dairy-cattle-a.html
I’d copy the list but just the drugs that start with the letter A is well over 100….
You have not a f789ing clue about what is headed your way….
But I guess that is a good thing…. keeps the despair away.
No worries my spend fuel is north 40 miles and well stored in dry casks. Wind blows west to east.
DelusiSTAN is a very big place…. Can you provide a little more info on your general location…. perhaps a city… a province….
100 miles due north of NYC, near the Hudson river
Hmmm… I am having trouble finding you … because the map in that area has so many of these funny symbols covering it
http://www.energymatters.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/nuclear-power-plants-usa.gif
Hmmm… what are all those symbols…. where have I seen them before … was it on the side of a box of organic cereal… no….. not that…. it’s coming to me…. yes YES! Here it is!!!
https://astrowright.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/rad-symbol.png
OMG! Those are nuclear power plants!!!
Did you know that each nuclear power plant has multiple spent fuel ponds? They like to keep the ponds nearby because the fuel is very hot when it comes out of the reactor… so you need to get it into the water asap….or it catches fire and results in a catastrophic release of radiation
And you think you you are safe? Wow. That is a case study in Cognitive Dissonance….
FYI: you will be dead from radiation within a week of the end of BAU.
Mark my words.
Now that is not a bad thing…. it is arguably better than starving to death … or being enslaved by some bad guys while watching them have their way with the women…..
Any other Doomies want to provide FE with their location — I will provide feedback free of charge…
Because I am here to help — I only want what is best for Nigel….
Guess the Canadian ones dont count.
I can assure that starving to death is a lot less unpleasant than radiation poisoning.
Rock cut vs tall building.
Discuss
Are we heading towards doomsday? Scientist suggests risk of a major war could be higher than believed
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/are-we-heading-towards-doomsday-scientist-suggests-risk-major-war-could-higher-believed-1663674
I suggest risk of a major war could be lower than believed…
and even if it happens, why would a “major war” necessarily be Doomsday?
Speaking of war or no war; North Korea has agreed to meetings with the US and SK, which is a great way to manipulate the situation. NK will pretend to have a strong allegiance to SK, which will emotionally get SK to buy the manipulation, and in so doing, the US will have very little to stand on to demand NK give up their nuclear program. It’s a perfect set up now the peace oriented Olympics in Seoul has just concluded with good feelings on both sides of the DMZ.
The words of UAE’s first prime minister Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum:
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”
The Arabs of today have robocops and Vision 2030, so they can disregard this.
I posted that quote one time on FB and one of my friends is from Pakistan. And he looked up the grandson of the former prime minister. And posted a picture of him driving in a Ferrari. And he said ‘I assure you his grandson doesn’t ride any camels”….lol
I guess he’s not very good at reading then.
Economic mobility studies show that it’s harder to work your way up the economic ladder in America than other European country. And twice as hard as in Canada.
So the whole idea that is drilled into young people’s heads. That if they work hard and puserver you can have the America dream. Is not even a statistical reality anymore….
https://imgur.com/a/swTj8
If energy were free, and there no were adverse consequences (entropy issues), everyone could be rich.
People have to have a dream. Some of them believe in a life after this world. Some of them believe that anyone who works hard can get rich. Some of them believe that renewables will save us. All of these dreams are a little like the debts that pull the financial economy forward. The dreams we have pull the world forward. In some sense, it doesn’t matter if they are true or not (or whether the debt will be repaid). It is the fact that people believe that they are true, and the fact that people believe debts will be repaid, that make them work.
Most beliefs aren’t really about the things people say they are about. They are tied to real things, and when those real things vanish so do the beliefs. The belief in infinite prosperity is the same – it’s not really about infinite prosperity but about one’s own prosperity for the time being. It can survive only as long as enough people have enough prosperity for themselves.
Yep – everyone has their own version of hopium….
And everyone else’s version is wrong …. reminds me of the Toronto street corner… and the two fanatics trying to sign me up
Funny that….
You have to get to Scandinavia to catch the american dream. TED talk from the norwegian comedian and sosiologist Harald Eia. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU
I have worked in half those places and visited all. That looks spot on but it does also change by city and IQ.
That’s why lottery tickets are for….
Peak U.S. Shale Could Be 4 Years Away
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Peak-US-Shale-Could-Be-4-Years-Away.html
I am wondering if a lot of the recent surge we have been seeing is in finishing Drilled But Uncompleted Wells. If this is the case, the spurt could be very short lived. Four years would be an overestimate.
A sharp surge in interest rates would likely make the surge very short lived as well.
What the wells do does not depend simply on how much oil in the ground and how much technology improves. It depends a lot on prices and interest rates as well.
yes, the peak in 2022!
“In this model, U.S. tight oil production—including the plays Bakken/Three Forks/Sanish, Eagle Ford, Woodford, Austin Chalk, Spraberry, Niobrara, Avalon/Bone Springs, and Monterey—is expected to rise from 4.96 million bpd in 2017 to 5.59 million bpd in 2022, and then to start declining on a steady downward trend by 2050, when tight oil production is expected to be at 4.42 million bpd.”
oh, wait… that model is kinda absurd…
“steady downward trend by 2050″… 4.42 million bpd… uh… no.
by 2050, anything above 0.01 million bpd would be good.
WOW!!!! Watch this……
https://youtu.be/0n3E7mmGXpQ
When there is plenty of supplemental energy, women can use birth control and can expect to live a long time. It makes sense for them to be in many ways like men. This is not a permanent situation, however. If it were possible to go back (which I don’t believe we can), then men could be more in charge again. Otherwise we hit limits, and neither way works.
Real Unemployment rate!
In August 2017, there were 125,755,000 full-time workers, 27,569,000 part-time workers, and 7,346,000 workers who hold 2 or more jobs.
146 million have at least 1 job.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t09.htm
The current USA population is 326,474,013.
There are 214446974 people between ages 18-65.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-ameri…/…/
There are 30 million people over age 16 that are in school.
https://www.reddit.com/…/3i…/usa_unemployment_is_365_not_53/
There are around 2,298,300 incarcerated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w…/United_States_incarceration_rate
There are 28 million people that are disabled. 12 million of them have jobs. 16 million people do not.
http://www.serviceandinclusion.org/index.php?page=basic
https://www.reddit.com/…/why_im_on_strike_today_i_…/cbygvnf/
166 million apply for a job, but only 125 million get a full-time job and 146 million have any job at all.
If you count a babysitter / school tutor / freelancer who works randomly as unemployed —> unemployment rate = 25%.
If you count a babysitter / school tutor who works randomly as employed —> unemployment rate = 12%.