It is impossible to tell the whole oil story, but perhaps I can offer a few insights regarding where we are today.
[1] We already seem to be back to the falling oil prices and refilling storage tanks scenario.
US crude oil stocks hit their low point on January 19, 2018 and have started to rise again. The amount of crude oil fill has averaged about 365,000 barrels per day since then. At the same time, prices of both Brent and WTI oil have fallen from their high points.
Figure 1. Average weekly spot Brent oil prices from EIA website, with circle pointing to recent downtick in prices.
Many people believe that the oil problem, when it hits, will be running out of oil. People with such a belief interpret a glut of oil to mean that we are still very far from any limit.
[2] An alternative story to running out of oil is that the economy is a self-organized system, operating under the laws of physics. With this story, too little demand for oil is as likely an outcome as a shortage of oil.
Oil and energy products are used to create everything, even jobs. If all humans have is energy from the sun, plus the energy that all animals have, then humans would be much more like chimpanzees. All humans would be able to do is gather plant food and catch a few easy-to-catch animals (earthworms and crickets, for example). They certainly could not extract oil or find uses for it.
It takes a self-organized economy to support the extraction and sale of energy products. We need a complex web that includes:
- Equipment to extract the oil
- Training for engineers and other workers
- Devices that use oil, such as vehicles, farm equipment, road paving equipment
- A financial system to enable transactions to purchase oil
- Buyers with jobs that pay well enough that they can afford to buy goods made with oil
The things that go wrong with this economy can be on the buyers’ end of the economy. Buyers can have jobs, but these jobs may not pay well enough for the buyers to afford the output of the economy. A falling share of the population may be able to afford cars, for example.
[3] It is possible that a recent rapid increase in oil supply is contributing to the current mismatch between supply and demand.
Data of the US Energy Information Administration indicates that US oil supply has recently begun to surge. It is not just crude oil production that is higher. Natural gas liquid production is higher as well. As a result, Total Liquids production is reported to have been more than 16 million barrels per day in November 2017.
Figure 2. US Liquids Production, based on International Energy Data provided by the US EIA.
Oil production of the rest of the world has been relatively flat, as planned.
Figure 3. World excluding the US oil production by type, based on EIA International Energy data through November 2017.
Total world production, combining the amounts on Figures 2 and 3, set a new record of 99.1 million barrels of oil per day for November 2017, based on EIA data. This level is above the November 2016 level, which was the previous record at 98.9 million barrels per day.
At this high level of production, it is not surprising that the economy cannot absorb the full amount of extra supply.
There are also a number of issues that affect buyers’ demand for oil.
[4] The percentage of US residents who can afford to buy a new automobile or light truck seems to be falling over time.
If we look at the number of autos and trucks sold in the US, per 1000 population, we see a pattern of falling humps, as a smaller and smaller share of the population can afford a new car or light truck, each year. The big drops occur during the gray recessionary periods marked on the chart.
Figure 4. Figure showing US Passenger Cars and Light Trucks Purchased per Year per 1000 Population. Original graph by FRED (Federal Reserve of St. Louis). Retitled by author, because units were confusing on original chart.
The first peak came in 1978, at 67.3 units. The second, slightly lower peak came in 1986, at 66.7. The third peak came in 2000 at 61.5 units. The fourth peak came in 2015, at 51.6 units. Early 2018 amounts suggest that the trend in units sold per 1000 population will continue its downward trend.
Part of what is happening is that vehicles are becoming longer-lasting, so that there is not as much need to buy new cars frequently. But having a short-lived, cheap car has an advantage, if it makes cars available to a larger percentage of the total population. With a vehicle, a person has a much better ability to participate in the US workforce. US Labor Force Participation Rates peaked in about the year 2000, which is about the time of the third peak in affordability.
Figure 5. US Labor Force Participation Rate. Chart by FRED (Federal Reserve of St. Louis).
[5] There was a steep rise in the cost of auto ownership in the 1995- 2008 period. This has since fallen back, but the cost is still high relative to the wages of many workers.
One estimate of the cost of auto ownership is the reimbursement rate that the US government allows businesses to pay workers who use their own cars for company business.
Figure 6. Auto reimbursement rates as compiled on this list. Amounts shown on “As Stated” basis, and also at the 2017 cost level, based on CPI Urban.
These costs peaked about 2008 and were reflected in high reimbursement rates for 2009 as well. More recently, buyers of cars have been helped by longer term loans and ultra-low interest rates. If interest rates rise at all, the share of people buying or leasing new vehicles can be expected to fall further from the level shown on Figure 4.
[6] Building homes also requires oil. There has been a sharp drop in US home building, both on an absolute basis, and on a per capita basis, since 2008.
Figure 7. US Housing Units Completed, related to US population. Population from Census Bureau; population from UN 2017 population summary.
Building homes is part of oil demand. It takes oil to transport all of the materials used (lumber, siding, wiring, pipes, appliances) to the place where the house will be built. Furthermore, many of the materials used in building a home are produced using petroleum products.
The number of homes built depends on the number of new households that can afford a separate place to live. The low level of building makes it look as if the economy is still seeing a pattern of young adults living with their parents much longer than in the past. If buildings are to be replaced every 75 years, my calculation suggests that about 6 housing units per 1000 residents need to be built each year. About 2.5 units per thousand are needed, just to keep up with rising population, if upgrading and remodeling can be done almost indefinitely.
The fact that there is little home building reduces the number of jobs available in the building industry. The lack of jobs in this industry helps hold down the demand for oil, because these workers would use their wages to buy goods for themselves, such as food and vehicles. Food is grown and transported using vehicles powered by oil.
The lack of home building also contributes to the nation’s homelessness problem. If there were plenty of inexpensive apartments, there would be fewer homeless people.
[7] There is no longer an oil price at which both oil exporters and oil importers are satisfied. Oil prices today are too low for oil exporters.
I started writing about oil producers complaining that oil prices were too low in early 2014. At that time, oil companies were looking back at prices of over $100 per barrel in 2013. They were saying that $100+ prices were too low to provide adequate funds for reinvestment in new fields. Now prices are in the $65 range, which is even farther below the desired level.
Oil exporters are especially unhappy about today’s low prices, because they need high prices in order to collect needed tax revenue. This is why OPEC members and Russia have been holding back production. The plan is to deplete the glut of oil in storage, and thus get prices up.
It is not at all clear, however, that consumers in oil importing countries can really withstand higher prices. The fact that Brent oil prices could only stay above $70 per barrel for one week on Figure 2 (in the red circle), suggests that consumers in major oil importing countries cannot really withstand oil prices at this high level. I have observed previously that a sustainable price, without adding a huge amount of debt each year, is only about $20 per barrel.
[8] If we analyze vehicle purchases by country, we can see that low oil prices since 2014 seem to be helping major oil importers but are hurting Tier 2 countries that are commodity-dependent.
Figure 8. New vehicles (private passenger and commercial combined) purchased per capita for selected groupings of countries. Amounts shown are from OICA estimates by country.
In this chart, the grouping of Advanced Economies includes:
- USA
- Europe
- Japan
- Canada
- Australia
For this grouping, growth in auto sales is again rising, but has not regained its prior level. This is somewhat similar to the indications in Figure 4, for the US only, looking at cars and light trucks. The main difference is in the last two years. Changes in currency relativities may be helping recent vehicle sales for the other countries in the grouping.
On this chart, the Tier 2 grouping includes:
- Brazil
- Russia
- South Africa
- South Korea
- Malaysia
- Mexico
This group includes several oil and other resource dependent countries. South Korea is perhaps more like the industrial countries in the first grouping. This grouping shows a downturn in the purchasing of vehicles in the last three years, when commodity prices have been depressed. If oil prices were higher, this group would probably be buying more vehicles.
Figure 8 shows that China’s auto sales have been growing rapidly. In fact, China has surpassed the Tier 2 average in per capita sales. In the past year, China’s growth in auto sales has flattened. But with China’s huge population, the absolute number of vehicles sold is still very high: 29.1 million vehicles, compared to 17.6 million for the United States, and compared to 20.9 million for Europe.
India and the Rest of the World account for surprisingly few vehicles sold. On Figure 8, their lines overlap at the bottom of the chart.
[9] The push toward raising interest rates and selling QE securities will tend to reduce oil prices and add to the oil glut.
I wrote about some of the issues involved in Raising Interest Rates Is Like Starting a Fission Chain Reaction. When interest rates are higher, economies are pushed in the direction of recession. All kinds of discretionary spending are reduced. Use of oil will almost certainly be reduced. This could lower oil prices significantly, as it did in 2008 (Figure 1).
[10] To a significant extent, China has been helping hold up world oil consumption, with its rapidly growing economy. It is hitting headwinds now, however.
The International Monetary Fund recently showed an exhibit indicating how China’s debt is growing very rapidly, but its growth in output is slowing. The combination could very easily lead to a credit crisis.
Figure 9. Exhibit from IMF Working Paper called Credit Booms: Is China Different?
Now, the rest of the world depends on China for many imported goods. If China should have problems, it would indirectly affect oil demand elsewhere as well.
Even China’s recent ban on importing certain types of materials for recycling can be expected to have an adverse impact on oil demand. Very often, if a container is sent from China to the US or to Europe, there will be no exported goods to send back to China, except for material for recycling. If China refuses to take recycling, containers will need to be returned empty.
Recycling generally needs to be subsidized. Part of what this subsidy is used for is to pay the cost of shipping material to be recycled to China. If China does not take the recycling, this payment for shipping materials in the otherwise-empty containers will not be made. The shipping company will need to charge exporters more for the one-way trip, if the shipping company is to be profitable. This higher cost, by itself, is a deterrent to trade. In many ways, the higher shipping cost is like a tariff.
[11] Conclusion.
My expectation is that the general direction of oil prices is likely downward, especially if interest rates rise. A major financial disruption of any kind would have a similar effect. Gluts of oil can be expected with lower prices.
Many groups, including the IEA, have been warning about oil shortages because of inadequate investment in new production. Oil shortages, and energy shortages in general, have a multitude of adverse impacts on economies. One of them is loss of jobs, because jobs require the use of energy, for example, to deliver goods in a truck. If many more people are unemployed, there is less demand for oil.
Thus, it is not at all clear that a shortage of oil leads to high prices; it may very well lead to lower prices. Many people are confused about this issue, because the word demand gives a misleading impression of the mechanism involved. Lack of demand comes from part of the population not being able to afford cars and homes. It also comes from cutbacks in government spending and from failing businesses. In an interconnected system, even failing banks tend to reduce oil demand.
Another adverse impact of oil and energy shortages tends to be fighting and wars. The fact that the US seems to be raising its energy production, in apparent disregard for countries that have been trying to cut back, is likely to make some oil exporting countries quite angry. It could sow the seeds for another war.
Economists do not seem to understand that GDP growth rates don’t tell very much about the well-being of individual citizens in an economy. A major issue is wage disparity. If there are many very low wage people, there is likely to be downward pressure on the sale of automobiles, and on the purchase of petroleum products. Economists are likely to think everything is fine, up until a major crisis occurs.
Paul Ehrlich: ‘Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades’
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/22/collapse-civilisation-near-certain-decades-population-bomb-paul-ehrlich
He has been screaming Apocalypse for forty years. The Population bomb even has like form letters in it to send to your congressman (as I recall). It’s like the New World Order for liberals, as far as I’m concerned….
And then there is David Stockman… the wolf-crier….
yes!
all of those guys saying that the collapse of IC is imminent…
isn’t that ridiculous?
Seems a long time line Mr Elhrich….optimistic views welcome though.
Meanwhile, back in the real world of privatised profits and socialised losses..
.’….but the government will pick up the pieces, once again, at substantial cost to taxpayers. Meanwhile, many of the fortunes amassed and extracted during the outsourcing boom continue to sit comfortably in private bank accounts dotted across many of the world’s tax havens.’
https://wolfstreet.com/2018/03/21/was-carillions-collapse-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-uks-outsourcing-sector/
People think this is unintended, but its actually a deliberate business model of wealth extraction. They aren’t called ‘vulture funds’ for no reason.
https://electrek.co/2018/03/21/tesla-powerpack-microgrid-stop-outages-philippines/
Does this really work, and at what cost per kWh? It has to be very cheap, to allow competition in world trade. If it is just for a few light bulbs and televisions for the Philippines, it can be higher priced.
I expect that if the people of the Philippines decide to buy refrigerators, because of this new electricity supply, they will very quickly discover themselves with not enough. Air conditioning would also be a problem.
a friend lives in Bangkok, with 6 aircon units all around the outside of his (rather sumptuous) house—I try to point out the nonsense of it—I just get a shrug and ‘electricity is cheap’—which based on his uk level salary it is
for now
I like Bangkok– does that make me evil?
I lived in Bangkok for about 8 months … I did not like it much….
What did you like about it?
The guy who runs that site JH is a shill. He puts his code at the bottom of all his articles hyping Tesla. Because if you give it to a Tesla dealer when buying a car he gets a credit from them. He bragged on reddit a few years ago that he purchased a brand new Telsa all off of credits he received by writing articles about how great they were.
I saw an ad for a Tesla with only 4800km on it for sale for HKD500,000 — the price of the same car new is apparently $1,400,000.
Michael Moore Blasts ‘Corporate Media’ for Only Talking About ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/michael-moore-blasts-media-constant-russia-coverage?akid=16855.2689436.p8x7xm&rd=1&src=newsletter1090151&t=30
The left media is obsessed with Russia because of a few twitter trolls. And the right media is obsessed with illegal immigration, which has dropped 80% since 2000….
https://imgur.com/a/7xZfY
Some of us purposely do not have a television. It helps with sanity.
Yep, had one briefly with a working class girlfriend for a few years in the 1970’s in LA.
But it has been quite a while. Hotel rooms are amusing for tee vee’s, for a few minutes.
John Michael Greer says, “Get rid of your television,” when I have heard him speak.
It is obvious.
I worked for a biofeedback company (UCLA based), and we could put anyone into high alpha in 90 seconds– no matter the content- when in front of a tee vee.
http://www.qeeg.com/qeegfact.html
From the link you gave:
In other words, televisions put people into an inattentive, daydreamy state, similar to what adolescents and adults with ADHD experience.
Whenever I come in contact with teevee – its usually in places that I cannot avoid it like airport lounges — I do not enter a dreamlike state… rather I become agitated… irritated… aggressive… I want to kill kill kill … I want to scream at the id iot box …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE
I have thought about making stickers ‘Fake News’ and dropping them onto airport lounge teevees (that are inevitably booming out CNN – because I understand CNN pays them to do so)…
If I were caught I wonder if the Thought Police would rendition me?
Doctors and dentists offices seem to have devices resembling TVs as well. Often they offer ads for teeth whitening or give advice you really don’t want to hear.
Any idea what happens to the waves of people who are hypnotized?
Eddy—i think you may have been confusing tv with images of yourself on passenger security monitors
Outside of FW…. I do not know of a single person who does not have cable teevee.
Not one.
TV is bad, but it is nothing like the internet, for overwhelming the people with junk. Stories, news, made up, fake, good reporting lost in the sea of junk. fake photos. fake quotations. overwhelming.
In the past … after the national anthem was played… the teevee would broadcast only white noise… white noise can be good at drowning out other noise that can keep a person awake…
When 24 hour cable came on stream… the teevee became useless
In the past…after the national anthem was played AND The Lord Prayer was sung…
That is how I remember it.
Billionaires Won’t Save the World—Just Look at Elon Musk
The “playboy genius” is essentially squandering taxpayer money on pet projects like Mars trips and flamethrowers.
https://www.alternet.org/economy/billionaires-wont-save-world?akid=16855.2689436.p8x7xm&rd=1&src=newsletter1090151&t=38
Think of this as yet another way of dissipating energy–another service.
As beneficial as bitcoin?
do not worry enjoy the life we have got regardless how we all 7.6. billion people die
https://youtu.be/LanCLS_hIo4
btw bob Marley is the one of most greatest singer ever
he may smoke weed but he didnt rap or says bad word in his songs he is one of the best
Agreed.
Rap? Hip hop?
very appropriate…
since he has already entered the nothingness of eternal death…
so don’t worry… or worry a lot…
and enjoy life… or not…
life is short… though the winters seem long.
Naughty old China.
“Doctoring numbers is not confined to the economically depressed provinces in the northeast, but also found in cities where many multinational companies operate. Regional bureaucrats are evaluated based on local growth and tax revenue, and many had overstated figures in hopes of advancing their careers.”
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/China-s-regional-GDP-slowdowns-raise-suspicions-over-past-data
The people I know from China have said that they thought China’s growth rate was inflated.
The article shows a map of areas where there has been a big drop between earlier reported growth rates, and more recently reported growth rates. When I visited China in 2015, I was taken on visits to three of these areas, in large part because the people I visited could see that they were not doing well economically, even though they were reporting high growth rates. For example, when I visited the Order area of Inner Mongolia, the airport was nearly empty, many stalls for businesses were empty, and the wide roads leading up to the airport were close to empty. It was also an area with a lot of empty apartments.
I had visited Chongqing on my visit in 2011. This is on the Yangtze River. It has been dammed up, to provide electrical power. The problem is that many farmers have been displaced, because the fertile bottomland where people had lived previously was flooded. Our tour guide from the area told us that they had been told that farming would be replaced with other jobs, like offering talks on tour boat. We saw many partly occupied walk-up high rise buildings. A lot of young people had moved to big cities, out of the region, to find better job opportunities. The older people who stayed only wanted the lower floors of the buildings.
I spent some time in the port of Qingdao on the east coast in 1997, as my wife, who was an actress in her youth, was filming out there. Unusual city; the Germans had, ultimately over-ambitious, visions of turning it into their own Hong Kong and there’s lots of charming if incongruous Bavarian architecture. The Germans started the famous ‘Tsingtao’ brewery there, too.
Hong Kong itself had literally just been returned to China by the UK and China’s growing self-confidence was palpable. The economic boom was gathering pace and I remember being amazed by the amount of construction activity on the outskirts of town. I can see that the population has grown from just over 6 million to over 9 million since that time.
Some of the people we met were charmingly old-fashioned. The make-up artist told my wife that the first time her husband saw one of her bras hanging up, he had thought they were blinkers for a horse! Doubt such naivety exists any more amongst the upwardly mobile urban types.
This post has several photos and some written material about my 2011 trip to China. https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/05/30/observations-based-on-my-trip-to-china/
great stuff
https://grist.org/article/fossil-fuels-are-the-problem-say-fossil-fuel-companies-being-sued/
quote from above:
oil doesn’t cause climate change. People burning oil cause climate change.
thanks, Norman…
cities and states run on the energy provided by FF…
this is almost too obvious to mention here…
but, it needs to be mentioned to the judge involved…
“Then, Boutrous added his interpretation. “It doesn’t say that it’s the production and extraction that’s driving the increase,” he said. “It’s the way people are living their lives.”
it’s the people living in SF who are burning FF in massive quantities because that’s what it takes to lead an upper class lifestyle…
I will not be surprised at all if these cases get thrown out before there is any trial.
“From a U.S. financial and government policy perspective, this shale boom has provided a welcome respite from the wildly imbalanced conditions that helped bring on the financial crisis in 2008. It has enabled the government to run bigger fiscal deficits with less financial stress than would probably otherwise have been possible, and it may have helped keep private-sector borrowing in check after years of rapid increase. It made Barack Obama’s job easier, and it’s making Donald Trump’s job easier. It may have longer-term consequences for the environment and other industries that aren’t so great. But for now, it’s hard to shake the impression that it’s what’s keeping the U.S. economy afloat.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/view/2018/03/21/how-the-shale-boom-has-been-keeping-the-u-s-economy-afloat
I like this chart from the article:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/oil-and-gas-to-the-rescue_-trade-balances_wsj.png
Isn’t it amazing how companies/industries that lose so much money — shale — Amazon — Uber — Tesla etc etc etc….
Are able to keep the US economy afloat…
Obviously the US needs more money losing corporations — then we will have our recovery.
Who knows — perhaps this is another ‘flat earth moment’ — you know what I mean? Like at one point everyone thought the earth was flat — it was just so obvious — until it wasn’t.
So perhaps this is a flat earth economics epiphany —- profits and growth are actually not what lead to prosperity — and jobs… and increasing wages…
Maybe it is the other way around — what we need is to foster an environment where corporations are losing many billions…. because this is what leads to prosperity … and jobs .. and higher wages…
Another day … another Nobel Economics Prize….
This is one of the funniest comments I have ever read….So true…LOL
Funny????
I meant that to be a serious comment. I think I am onto something.
Who gets charged with manslaughter?
No worries FE, self driving cars are impossible.
Can’t be done. 😉
A big issue in the insurance world is, “How deep are the pockets of the person/organization at fault.” If it is an individual human, the assumption is nearly always that the pockets aren’t very deep. Payouts tend to be relatively small. Once a big corporation is involved, payouts get to be much larger. In medical malpractice, serious claims against hospitals tend to be paid for much more than claims against physicians.
Thus, insurance costs for self-driving cars could be disproportionate high.
That’s an excellent point. And thanks FE for sharing that.
Post BAU … I would like to be the guy who sneaks up through the forest….
If I remember well, the guy and his mate get attacked by the foreign tribe we see observing them while he’s having his happy moment. Does this mean this is how you want to die post BAU ?
The foreign tribe attack their clan at dawn to steal them the fire. The story takes place before those humans haven’t managed yet to make fire, and had to keep it burning 24/7. Ressources war already ! The original french title of the movie, and the novel from which it’s based upon, is « la guerre du feu » which is « war for fire » or « fire wars »
A great movie that was!
And I don’t mind dying that way — all depends on who is bent over that fire…
Better than radiation poisoning that’s for sure
The Real Enemy of the White Working Class Is … the White Middle Class
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/03/the-real-enemy-of-the-white-working-class-is-the-white-middle-class/
https://imgur.com/a/xvBAf
For what it is worth. A friend in the steel business(he is a welder – makes things for refineries) shared with me the recent price of steel, up 70% over the past several months. Garbage collection is up 5+% over last year where I live.
Along the highway to the cities are signs advertising for welders, electricians, HVAC technicians, all with benefits of one sort or another. A bartender at a national chain claims he averages approximately $170/ shift, or $20 plus per hour. None of these jobs require a college education.
There are jobs all over around here, an 3 bdrm apt. in the cities is advertised for less than $1K/month, heat and water included – this is a fairly nice complex, not luxury, but the grounds are clean when driven by.
Life goes on in the midwest.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/with-official-unemployment-this-low-why-are-wages-rising-so-slowly
Some country–probably China–is raising debt levels a lot to keep demand rising–my guess.
being rich
it’s a airdrop !
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China to Target Trump’s Base in Tariff Response
Beijing prepares to deliver pain to President Trump’s support base, including with tariffs targeting agricultural exports
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facing-u-s-tariffs-china-plans-countermeasures-1521632332?mod=e2twe
Major Oil Companies Interest Expense Tripled In Just Four Years
https://imgur.com/a/5wqAM
They don’t tackle energy, but then you couldn’t tackle energy without going somewhat in their prescribed direction first. Most jurisdiction aren’t even anywhere near their target direction.
“The great divergence we see is between rural and small town economies and more urbanized counties. That has already shown its meaning in political terms, particularly in the American rustbelt. And it is also a global problem. But the distinction between rural and urban isn’t as cut and dry as it might seem. For example, it turns out that 50% of rural Americans live within some metropolitan labor market, so the potential for building out transit linkages or creating satellite job hubs exists. Moreover, technology has eliminated the meaning of proximity for some jobs thereby creating opportunities in rural areas. The right work force qualities and civic strategies can re-position the value of rural workers. Think of the back office business functions that are often carried out in rural states.”
“Few places can give you an accurate assessment of the assets let alone the return on those public assets. But imagine if the return was adjusted upward by 25 or 50 basis points; the impact on budgets would be incredible. Is it really possible that the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, for example, cannot generate more public wealth than they do today? It’s hard to imagine that being the case.”
http://penniur.upenn.edu/publications/the-new-localism-jeremy-nowak-on-how-cities-can-thrive
It seems like return on infrastructure investment goes ever-downward. When the first new roads, pipelines, and electricity transmission lines are added, they greatly improve the productivity of the area. When the role of “investment” shifts to maintenance, the spending does not really improve the productivity of the area.
As population grows, road congestion increases. Adding more roads becomes expensive. It really doesn’t help much, because there are too many people in too small an area.
Does anyone know why Cass is reporting such high transportation volumes inside the US recently?
https://www.cassinfo.com/transportation-expense-management/supply-chain-analysis/transportation-indexes/cass-freight-index.aspx
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/cass-freight-index-shipments-y-y-february-2018.png
One hypothesis is that with the higher oil prices, there has been a lot more fracking of Drilled But Uncompleted Wells. This takes shipments of sand and of fracking water. Some of this fracking is actually on natural gas wells, rather than oil wells.
Another hypothesis is that the mandatory Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) which are being phased in for truckers are distorting the data in some way. The ELDs are being phased in (by April 1, 2018) to keep truckers from spending too many hours behind the wheel. Truckers are paid by the mile, not by the hour. They often own their trucks, and have monthly payments to make. The more miles that they drive, the more take-home pay that they can get. If the government puts an end to truckers putting in excessively long hours behind the wheel, existing loads will be divided among more drivers. This might make it look like shipments are higher. This cannot be the whole explanation, because shipments by train are up as well as shipments by truck.
Another hypothesis is that the economy in general is heating up. Of course, fewer car are being sold. This WSJ report shows January and February light vehicle sales off by -0.8%, so they aren’t what is pushing volumes along. http://www.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html
We know that China is no longer taking nearly as much imported recycling from the US and other countries. I thought that was effective January 1, 2018. I would expect that change to reduce volumes of materials shipped.
in the 10 page pdf February Report that accompanies that chart, the conclusion:
“Bottom line, both the industrial and consumer economies are shifting into high gear.”
wow, who knew?
perhaps tax reductions for “industrial” and credit card surge for “consumer”?
USA’s trade deficit has grown to its largest extent since October 2008:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-trade
Imports have remained high but exports have gone down. Given the concurrent increase in shipments within the country that seems to point to increasing focus on shipping stuff from one point of the country to other points rather than shipping straight out.
Yes stuff being shipped out still goes through the internal transportation system first and counts towards Cass shipments but on the average stuff wouldn’t travel as far before being shipped out compared to being transferred to other points in the country.
To me it looks like USA’s milking the rest of the world for as much as possible, importing as much as possible from the rest of the world but saving an increasing share of their own output for their own needs. Lets see how long they can keep leeching from the world economy to fuel their “shift into high gear” given that the rest of the world is barely growing overall in real terms.
Thanks for your ideas. It seems like the big rise in natural gas production would go through pipelines, so it wouldn’t count in rail/freight data. Even rising natural gas liquid production would go through pipelines. The exports of oil would presumably go through pipelines as well, although it can be shipped by rail, before it is transported by ship.
Meredith Plans 1,200 Layoffs, Sale Of Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune And More
http://deadline.com/2018/03/meredith-plans-1200-layoffs-will-sell-time-sports-illustrated-fortune-and-money-1202351049/
“Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money are all going on the block, as had been rumored, a move that follows the sale of Time Inc. UK and Golf. That leaves People and Entertainment Weekly as prominent titles staying in the fold…”
wow!
they are selling these two magazines: Fortune and Money…
this is hilarious…
can anyone spell irony?
Yes and I read somewhere that the Koch brothers were going to buy Time magazine…So I am sure they will turn it into another fake news site like their co funded “Reason.com”…
TIME Magazine … is MSM…. ergo it is already fake… it would just take on another stench of fake….
Given the unemployment rate is around 3%…. those 1200 people will have no problem finding better – higher paying jobs
“Given the unemployment rate is around 3%”. i think you forgot a zero.
For the readers of OFW one perspective is of course missing, but non the less I found this interview interesting.
http://evonomics.com/stop-crying-size-of-government/
near the end of the conversation:
“Of course, we should not lose hope, and in the past, US institutions have shown an amazing ability to self-reform and change, for example, on the issue of slavery, then during the progressive era, then in the context of machine politics and corruption in the cities, and then for the civil rights struggle. Perhaps it can happen again. Perhaps we can still hope.”
yes, the one perspective missing is the key one: that no matter what was the cause for “Why Nations Fail” in the past, the decline in FF resources in the coming decades will be the biggest reason ever for failed states…
and ultimately for the complete failure of IC…
but “we can still hope”!
https://www.bloomberg.com/energy
Well as soon as it looked like oil price was declining, it’s on the incline once again.
WTI up 1.71 to 65.25 & Brent up 2.11 to 69.53
That’s almost $70. a barrel for Brent.
Not really news until/unless WTI gets over $70.00. It is struggling if you look at the long term trend.
WTI was over $66 in January then went under $60 in February…
the 2017 range was mostly mid $40s to mid $50s…
so yes, it is trading in a higher range…
the incline was basically Oct 17 thru Jan 18…
overall, it’s been fairly flat from January to now.
Price is dropping again now, with the rise in interest rates. We will see how long this lasts.
Radar images show large swath of Texas oil patch is heaving and sinking at alarming rates
“The ground movement we’re seeing is not normal. The ground doesn’t typically do this without some cause,” said geophysicist Zhong Lu, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU and a global expert in satellite radar imagery analysis.
“These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water,” Lu said. “Proactive, continuous detailed monitoring from space is critical to secure the safety of people and property.”
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-radar-images-large-swath-texas.html#jCp
Ahh and the good professor’s job was made possible by oil extraction. Now he says it is a hazard to continue this practice. We live in strange and interesting times.
This was all part of the plan. Make giant sinkholes everywhere to reduce drilling costs. Just run some production tubing down the hole and hook it up to a giant sump pump.
What I don’t get is why we can’t have a perpetual energy machine…. capture the black smoke coming out of coal power plants… and turn back into coal and burn it again
How hard can it be?????
Yes, but isn’t this ignoring the reality of the situation?
The paper was on collapsing geological features, not the professional status of the author.
So, the author did not use any fossil fuels to gain a professional status? I was pointing out the hypocrisy of our situation. We can’t stop burning the stuff lest we collapse. We have read the warning labels and we keep burning more every year.
In the WSJ (so type in title), How Two Wells in Wyoming Explain Natural Gas Glut
The article then goes on to explain how a Wyoming company who just now started replacing its vertical wells with horizontal wells was able to obtain six times as much gas with one horizontal well as with one vertical well, while the cost only went up by a factor of three. (Much better EROEI!)
I would add that with natural gas, especially, there has to be a whole system in place to make more natural gas extraction worthwhile. If manufacturing of goods was moving back to the United States, and natural gas were being used to power this manufacturing, this might truly improve productivity. Even shipping the gas to Mexico, if that enables Mexico to build manufacturing facilities, would add productivity somewhere.
Otherwise, using natural gas instead of coal to generate US electricity is pretty much a net zero, or less. It means loss of coal job and closure of coal fired electricity plants. It does save some CO2 emissions, but this does not have a $$ savings to it. It raises demand for natural gas at the expense of reducing demand for coal.
Shipping natural gas overseas (Europe, Japan, China) is terribly expensive. It adds several dollars to the price of a million Btus. It is questionable whether the users could afford its high price, however. Higher energy prices lead to a need for higher prices of goods produced with that energy.
Another alternative is building out the use of natural gas, to be used in vehicles, instead of gasoline of diesel. This is a slow and expensive process. If the buildout could be done in such a way that the cost of using natural gas was significantly more economical than the prior fuel, it could be helpful to the economy. When oil prices were higher, I think using natural gas for vehicles was considered, and there were applications that allow homeowners to fuel their natural gas vehicle from their home supply. But the vendors went bankrupt, back them. With lower oil prices now, it is hard to see that this would really be a solution now, either.
Substituting natural gas for heating oil in the Northeast, where oil is still burned, is theoretically possible, but I understand there are problems with adding enough pipelines to make this possible. The Northeast is home of NIMBY. Also, for any seasonal use, there is need for storage facilities to make the seasonal use possible. I don’t know whether it is even possible to build storage facilities in the Northeast. There is a chronic shortfall of natural gas in the NE now, even with the surplus overall.
Also, if gas could be piped to the in the Northeast, it would be helpful for replacing the electricity generation from Indian Point nuclear reactor in New York that is being closed. Here the use of gas would add CO2 emissions. It would help prevent rolling blackouts in the Northeast, but it probably would not actually add to economic activity. It would just be replacing a nuclear facility that needed to be replaced.
Without raising economic activity, it is hard to get the price of natural gas up. A lot of more traditional natural gas producers cannot make money at under $3 per 1,000,000 Btus.
a really interesting summary—thanks
it just underscores the bottom line, that you cannot produce energy unless you have the means available to consume it
Rockefeller was faced with the same problem in the 1870s.
He had to build a pipeline from his oilfields to Chicago in order to burn it as fast as he could produce it.
Gail, you have to stop looking at USA statistics. What matters is world statistics. Looking at one’s country stats is pointless, because of all the interational trade. What happens in US alone doesn’t matter.
Proof the American Dream Has Been Indefinitely Deferred
An alarming new study finds that homeownership in the U.S. is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/proof-american-dream-has-been-indefinitely-deferred?akid=16850.2689436.DfrxyR&rd=1&src=newsletter1090100&t=18
it is in uk too
a house is embodied energy—when energy was cheap houses were more affordable in terms of effort expanded
effort expended—typo
The article says, “Wages simply haven’t kept pace with climbing home prices. MSN.com reports that since 2012, median prices increased by 73 percent in the U.S., while average weekly wages have risen just 13 percent.”
I know part of the problem with new home prices is that fact that local governments have become more aware of the big load that they put on infrastructure, like water and sewer pipelines and schools and roads. The governments are short of funds, so they figure out ways to charge back the additional cost fees paid when the new home is constructed. This adds a lot to the price of a home–it seem like $100,000 was the kind of figure I remember reading, at least in some places. At this high price, builders cannot “bury” the cost in homes for entry level buyers. So they build homes aimed at empty nesters who already have some equity in their own homes, and who can perhaps afford a fairly expensive home.
IMO the 2014-2017 oil glut accustomed the world economy to the levels of demand, that now can’t be supplied without shrinking inventories, and this will increase the price untill economy dies.
The oil glut is a wage disparity problem. We do not have a “high level of demand;” that is the opposite of what causes a glut of oil.
I think you have been reading too much peak oil literature.
We have high level of demand compared to what was before. World economy has been doing very well in recent quarters, because we were consuming oil glut built in 2014-2016. But now world is accustomed to burning more oil than is coming out of the ground. When storage levels drop too low, price will temporarily spike, and it will kill the economy. I don’t know what specific price of oil kills the economy in Q1 2018. Maybe 65 WTI is already too high?
Hill says: 45 WTI is affordable at the moment.
When we get back to our normal population of 1-10 million we will again have a possibility of survival for a while.
Just pointing this out to the biologically impaired.
“We”? We think we have control of our population numbers but we really don’t. It is the Earth that is in control The Earth will get our population to sustainable levels. If our species is too energy intensive to maintain itself with the resources of the Earth…it will become extinct.
Yep, just like the rest of the 99% of extinct creatures.
But, if we got back to our normal population, I bet our existence would be a bit longer.
We wouldn’t be human, if we somehow could do without the fuels that allow our population to be high. We would be like chimpanzees, and spend half of our day chewing hard to digest food. Our existence would be longer, but at a level of probably not more than 300,000 worldwide.
maybe our experimentation in trying to be human didnt work out after all
If we can’t manage to extinct ourselves on the first try I don’t think we can on the second. Not without fossile fuels.
Home sellers drop listed prices by up to 30 per cent in pockets of Sydney
SYDNEY home sellers have had to accept GFC-level price declines due to a weakening market that has given buyers more bargaining power, but some suburbs have been more affected than others.
Things are starting to accelerate downunder. But there’s still too much complacency. The real gnashing of teeth is yet to come.
If interest rates go up at all, I can imagine a real problem.
Similar problems now in London, Stockholm, Toronto et al and coming soon to Hong Kong, Wellington and, no doubt, a city near you.
Young people certainly cannot afford to buy and home and have a family at prices similar to today’s city prices.
I don’t see that happening. There are still enough rich Russians and Chinese people to buy a fourth and fifth appartment. In Frankfurt there are large areas, all appartments sold, no one living there most of the time.
I can’t conceive of a situation where that might happen. The individual banks can, and have, been raising rates at their end. But the Reserve Bank has painted itself into a right old corner. It can’t move forward or back. Either way, the Australian economy is toast, as the only thing going for it now is the housing Ponzi, which is looking very tired.
Definitely a big problem if rates rise by more than a few basis points. We may well end up with Steve Keen’s jubilee scenario.
You can have a few people go bankrupt, you can’t have half the population bankrupt.
If necessary we will have not just mortgage free mortgages, but interest free. Stacking interest on top keeping the loan from going ”bad”. Betting on the economy getting better before borrowers dying.
For those who are interested in last week’s Florida bridge collapse,
Florida bridge collapse: Design change put project behind schedule, millions over budget
Very interesting! The way major construction projects are delivered has put an increasing focus on cost management. Construction projects are unique in that you never really know how much something is going to cost until the design is complete. One strategy when designing to a fixed budget is to employ “value engineering” which generally amounts to forcing an engineer to make changes to his design in response to suggestions by contractors.
These design changes are generally uncompensated, forcing design engineers to work overtime in a hurry near the end of a construction project. The author is right that the engineers can easily avoid taking the whole picture into consideration – as that amounts to uncompensated rework.
This is a very messy legal area. Generally engineers are not expected to design to a firm budget. However, owner’s respond to this by either requiring “alternate” designs or “value engineering” so that they have the opportunity to get the most for their money at the time of bid. The whole system reflects having less surplus available than in times past – where an owner could spend less than their maximum budget and have a contingency available.
You are right. If there is no longer surplus available, it is easier for design errors to creep in. The limits we are reaching even affect bridge design.
Any organization wanting an engineered product has three choices:
1. Fast design of high quality and high cost
2. Fast design of low quality and low cost
3. Slow design of high quality and low cost
You cannot get around these rules.
MCM, the company responsible for construction of the bridge have the following president’s message on their website:
“WHAT DO WE DO? WE BUILD YOUR PROJECT ON TIME, ON BUDGET, AS DESIGNED AND WITHOUT ANY SURPRISES. WE BUILD THE ROADS AND BRIDGES THAT GET US HOME. WE BUILD THE SCHOOLS WHERE OUR CHILDREN LEARN. WE BUILD THE AIRPORTS THAT CONNECT OUR CITIES. WE BUILD THE TREATMENT PLANTS THAT CLEAN OUR WATER. WE BUILD THE PLACES WHERE WE ALL LIVE, WORK, SHOP AND PLAY.
AT MCM WE ARE MASTER BUILDERS, COMMITTED TO BUILDING EXCELLENCE.”
I’m guessing this will have to be rewritten now, and by someone who knows how to release the caps lock.
On the up side, MCM is a Green company:
“MCM is proud to contribute to a cleaner and safer environment. We are aware of the importance of green construction and implement sustainable practices as part of our commitment to building excellence.”
And they are fully committed to equal opportunity and diversity:
“It is our Company’s goal to provide equal opportunity to every employee. This policy applies to all decisions regarding recruitment, hiring, compensation, benefits, promotions, training/education, social programs, layoffs or other conditions of employment.
We prohibit discrimination based on race, color, gender, age, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, genetics, pregnancy, marital status, political affiliation, disability, veteran status or any other factor prohibited by federal, state, or local law. It is our policy to reasonably accommodate disabilities when necessary, except where it presents an undue hardship on MCM.
Our practice is to have and follow an Affirmative Action Program for carrying out this policy now and in the future. Our goal is to achieve equal opportunity and foster a climate of growth for every employee. Equal opportunity at work is the right, and responsibility, of all of us.
Our commitment is clear and our policy is clear. This Philosophy will be reflected in our management practices with the highest degree of attention, not only because it is the law, but because it is in the best interest of our business today.”
I read in Wikipedia that this bridge was planned to connect a university campus to nearby student residence neighborhoods, and that:
• Unlike most bridges in Florida, the design for this project was overseen by the university itself, not the Florida Department of Transportation.
•The bridge’s main span was assembled adjacent to the highway using accelerated bridge construction (ABC), a technique promoted at the university.
•The new pedestrian bridge was designed to connect the campus to student housing in a dramatic sculptural way, and also to showcase the school’s leadership in the ABC method of rapid bridge construction.
•The full bridge project was styled to look like a cable-stayed bridge with pylon tower and high cables for dramatic effect. But functionally and structurally it was actually a truss bridge, with the spans being fully self-supporting.
•The bridge spans used a novel concrete truss design invented for this project, a “re-invented I-beam concept”. Concrete truss bridges are rarely constructed, and rarely exist.
•A bridge redesign late in the project required moving the bridge’s main pylon tower 11 feet (3 meters) north to allow for future highway widening, increasing the gap between the bridge end supports and requiring some new structural design.
It looks like there will be plenty of work for investigators, lawyers and the media in the months ahead, as the task of trying to determine what went wrong, who was responsible, and why the tragedy occurred is carried out.
Committed to green…. hmmm… perhaps they substituted turds collected from the bog at The Fair Trade Organic Coffee outlets …. and substituted it for concrete…
Another example of persons not considering the system as a whole. Humans seem to be particularly bad at this.
“When will the next recession start?
“In search of the answer, I kept asking speakers on-stage and off-stage at the Strategic Investment Conference 2018. I also asked really smart people that are well-versed in economics and economic cycles.
“Their consensus seemed to be 2019 or possibly as late as 2020. We have just stretched the rubber band too tightly, and it’s fraying. Consumer spending, the driver of the economy, is beginning to slow.
“On top of that, consumers have accumulated about as much debt as they can tolerate. Savings are at a ridiculous low.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2018/03/20/the-next-recession-might-be-worse-than-the-great-depression/#238ffe2269b9
I looked to see how John Mauldin got to “worse than the great depression.” He says,
I think protectionism is a symptom of world energy consumption per capita not rising enough, not a cause of it. We are indeed experiencing the same kinds of problems that gave rise to the Great Depression: too much wage disparity, a debt bubble that is likely to come crashing down, and world energy consumption per capita that is flat.
‘I also asked really smart people that are well-versed in economics and economic cycles.’
Taleb would have something to say about this … something like… put 1000 ‘really smart people’ in a room and ask them that question … and you’ll get 1000 answers… they guy who guessed right … would be a rock star… he’d be trotted onto CNBS… Bloomberg… he’d be in the FT… you’d be sick of seeing him repeat the same old sh it over and over and over
The thing is… none of them will guess it right … so don’t worry about getting sick of seeing any of these guys…..because none of them understand the nature of the problem… their complicated models are useless…
The answer is quite simple … the recession (actually collapse) will come when a) the CBs policies push on a string and the global economy does not respond to stimulus… or b) we hit an energy bottleneck causing a massive spike in prices that destroys the economy or c) in spite of never ending stimulus … the masses simply cannot afford to purchase energy resulting in a deflationary death spiral that flattens BAU.
When the next recession hits… the 1000 men in that room… will be eating roasted rat meat…. wondering WTF hit them….
Then they — and their families — will suffer horribly — then die.
I imagine if I were to post that on John Maudlin’s site… I’d get banned.
Oh btw – have you ever looked at his site? He has a photo of himself on there from at least 20 years ago…
http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4d292964cadcbbbd1c510000/john-mauldin.jpg
This is the way he actually looks
http://www.crusoeresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/john-mauldin.jpg
What’s with that?
Absolutely Gail! People do frequently see the symptoms of our predicament as the cause of a particular problem. We do have to be careful that we are looking at the big picture.
https://imgur.com/a/bvWDq
In spite of this the consumer appears to be willing and able to pile on more debt… credit card debt continues to spike…
What cannot continue… will stop… (when is the question)
“Trade wars could easily lead to currency wars, in which exporting nations (in other words, virtually every country in today’s globalised economy) seek to devalue their currencies as a way of “getting under” rather than around tariff walls.
“Volatile currencies imply volatile financial markets and international capital flows. These, in turn, imply gyrating stock and bond prices, and even those of other assets such as real estate. All this could easily morph into another global financial and economic crisis.
“The dogs of war are baying louder every day it seems as Trump, probably supported by his proposed new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, threatens protectionist actions against China and other key trade partners.
“The hounds could thus become the four horsemen of the apocalypse – not the Biblical scourges of death, famine, war and pestilence, but trade wars, leading to currency wars, financial turbulence and crashing confidence.
“This is not a far-fetched apocalyptic vision but a real danger, given the delicate state of the global economy at present, for all its surface appearance of robustness. It is doubtful that Trump or his advisers realise what a Pandora’s box they are toying with…”
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2138157/how-trumps-trade-tariffs-may-release-four-horsemen-economic
“The dogs of war are baying louder every day it seems as Trump, probably supported by his proposed new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, threatens protectionist actions against China and other key trade partners.”
I don’t think of it as a trade war, but rather ‘Trade Balancing’.
Here’s how it could work with tariffs:
1. Tariff applied to counter trade imbalance
2. Price of goods rises which at first hurts consumers
3. Start up US companies and established companies expand to meet new opening domestic market.
4. People are employed to work at these companies and if there is manuf., fabrication, smelting, etc. they will pay a decent wage.
5. Increasing pay scale helps US consumers to buy higher priced goods
6. At some point down the road the middle class begins to grow again, rather than deflate as it currently is.
7. US GDP rises for once not because of fancy ways of computing GDP or printing money, but because of real growth in manufacture of goods and fabricating of rolls of steel and aluminum, etc.
In my opinion there shouldn’t be any exemptions. These tariffs need to be applied wherever there is a trade imbalance. Let other countries devalue their currency. Make adjustments to tariffs as needed to fit with currency devaluation.
For once I see the value of a Trump strategy, so for all those die hard Trump fans that hate my guts, give me a round of applause.
it’s not a ‘decent wage’ problem
it’s an energy problem
all goods are products of energy—not wages…..and we use goods to sustain our current standard of living by exchanging our wages with each other to keep the momentum going….if we all stuffed our wages under the mattress, the system would collapse immediately
pre 1970—the usa produced cheap, and above all–surplus— energy from fossil fuels, and using that energy produced cheap surplus material from super-abundant sources…..so everybody was able to buy cheap goods in an endless leapfrogging stream
trouble was—every frogleap grew exponentially, until leaps became impossible…..everybody demanded cheap goods and higher wages at the same time—which was impossible after 1970—because that was the year the USA went into oil deficit. Oil provided less and less energy for bigger and bigger leaps as the years rolled on…..not good physics. But the common understanding is that the laws of physics do not apply to American citizens.
this is why goods seemed ‘cheap’ when we look back on pre 1970ish
the solution?
keep the high wages, but buy cheap goods elsewhere……where labour and materials were cheaper
But of course, if you try to reverse this process, you have to source materials on home territory, (expensive and scarce) and pay much higher wages because workers need a lot of money to pay for their expensive new toys to keep themselves contented (and in employment)
Employment requires energy and material to be consumed. Wages are a secondary issue.
the don doesn’t understand any of that—but remember his business genius has led to 4x bankruptcy.
it would appear that the USA is headed the same way, but to be fair he’s only speeding things up a bit.
I agree Norm. If we magically made wages higher people would buy more stuff. Then, resources would deplete and there would be shortages. Prices would rise and wages would again be relatively low. It is the predicament we face. Easy to fall into the trap of compartmentalization. But, the bottom line is money and resources (especially energy) are inseparably bound.
We have this shopping paradise called https://www.thewarehouse.co.nz/ The home of cheap shopping….
I doubt there is a single product sold that is made in NZ.
If NZ blocked cheap stuff from China — and the stuff was produced instead at factories in NZ…
The country would quickly collapse — because the cost of this stuff would be prohibitively expensive….
“Let other countries devalue their currency. Make adjustments to tariffs as needed to fit with currency devaluation.”
The concern expressed in the article above is that this then becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop of tit for tat protectionist measures with disastrous knock-on effects for global trade, investor confidence etc.
Trump is in effect trying to reverse globalisation – can’t be done without dire consequences like, for example, the currency volatility causing ructions in derivatives markets or China dumping US debt in retaliation.
“Trump is in effect trying to reverse globalization”
I think what he’s trying to do is even the playing field by forcing adjustments in regards to trade. We’ve had an unbalanced trade especially with China for so long most people probably just consider that globalization, but they are taking advantage of our propensity to buy the cheapest stuff but that isn’t good for labor. We need to make this stuff ourselves for business and employment with good wages.
To NP’s point, well collapse happens whenever. We know we’re headed that way. I’m not suggesting it will avert it, but in the meantime we need to work towards more even trade. Trade tariffs are one way to initiate it. So what if there is a tit for tat. Is China going to stop sending shirts to Walmart as a response to trade tariffs? China has everything to lose and nothing to gain in a trade war with the US, and the US has everything to gain and nothing to lose, because we are the one’s with a negative trade imbalance.
All nation states are now just localised expressions of an integrated and globalised whole. You are arguing that an enforced contraction of global economic activity will benefit the US when the totality is too indebted and too energy/resource-constrained ever to re-attain a state of growth. It is akin to arguing that a passenger whose ears are suffering from the effects of high altitude on a stalling aeroplane will benefit if the pilot accelerates the descent.
Some people are wrong some of the time — JH is wrong all of the time
Ha, its ridiculous to change what the US has got; it gets real resources NOW in exchange for IOU’s NEVER. Should be opening up for more trade of essentially free goods and services while it lasts. Should also give its citizens MORE free money, just like the banks got.
Play Monopoly one day and be the banker and give yourself unlimited credit.
Actually, thats not correct; it requires that the US meddles via its many overseas mili.tary covert/diplomatic etc etc establishments in the affairs of many many many countries, so there is a cost, but meh, it is the hegemon!
Folks that look at the small picture THINK globalization can be reversed. But, those that look at the big interconnected picture realize that it cannot be reversed without disastrous feedback loops. An example may be that global markets loose access to rare earth metals. Or any crucial element for that matter. We really have to source things globally now for more reasons than just finding cheap labor.
It is however the narrative that most people on the traditional Left in Europe believe:
‘ The wicked capitalists closed factories here and set up in China so that they could make even bigger profits, and bought governments at home so that could evade taxes. Globalisation has to, and can be reversed: the factories will come back, with high pay, pensions and holidays, and progressive taxation will strip the wealthy of their excess wealth and pay for social spending.’
The irony is that in the Golden Age (in retrospect) of the 1960’s, these very people were calling those busy factories ‘work camps, like Auschwitz’ (no exaggeration) and complaining about exploitation.
Somehow, too, the return of the factories is meant to be combined with EV’s , wind turbines and solar panels, in a glorious fantasy of clean, virtuous industrialism…. and with lots of paid holidays for that all important ‘work/life balance’. 🙂
The water pump died at our beach shack a few months ago — the plumber said — you can buy the NZ made one for around 800 bucks… or you can buy the China made one for 400 bucks….
You know which one I bought…
And those who moan about China… would do the exact same thing….
JH Bush already tried this before and it was a disaster. There is no reason to expect anything different this time.
https://imgur.com/a/mji1K
love that Bastiat comment
Fits in with the EU—Europe was at war within itself for centuries, then the EU was created and wars stopped
what will happen when the barriers go up again?
You forgot to allow for subsidies. The US makes good use of subsidies. It caused Mexico to lose its home grown corn industry, resulting in 8 million crossing over to the states looking for work. Just one case.
The US added the biofuel subsidy. Now we are using a lot of corn (45% at one calculation) for ethanol. It does help remove the other subsidies the government provided for corn.
I heard a statistic yesterday that the #1 source of calories in the US diet is high fructose corn syrup. Shocking. Not only does it contain mercury but also promotes cancer growth – 12 teaspoons a day average according to one study.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21623683
JH, congratulations on outing yourself as a Deplorable.
https://youtu.be/tUxCCFfFIEw
The fastest shrinking countries on earth are in Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is projected to shrink dramatically over the next few decades. What’s worse, most countries are refusing to consider one solution to slow down the incoming demographic disaster.
The top 10 countries with the fastest shrinking populations are all in Eastern Europe (with a few in Central and Northern Europe), according to UN projections. Bulgaria, Latvia, Moldova, Ukraine, Croatia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia, Poland, Hungary, are estimated to see their population shrink by 15% or more by 2050
In Bulgaria, the world’s fastest shrinking country, the population is expected to drop from 7 million in 2017 to 5.4 million in 2050. In Latvia, the population is estimated to drop from 1.9 million in 2017 to 1.5 million, whilst in Moldova, the population is estimated to shrink from 4 million to 3.2 million.
https://qz.com/1187819/country-ranking-worlds-fastest-shrinking-countries-are-in-eastern-europe/
looking like even Eastern Europe countries can’t not save Europe
Well, they are all working here in Germany 🙂
Thats how we sustain stable work force! But on the other hand, people from netherland and danmark are starting buying up eastern countries. A lot of german retraitees are buying a small house in bulgaria. Poland does not allow any abortion. Also a way to force people to have kids.
Never mind, demographics always changes it outcomes, you never know, how it will turn out in 20 yeras.
It’s a catch 22 really: There should be 90% fewer humans on this planet ( and before anybody jumps at this with the usual “OK, you go first?” : I am not advocating a solution… Nature will fix it, with a severe overshoot to the low side ) so in a way this is good news for the countries seeing their populations decrease.
Our current system needs growth, and a decreasing population will contribute towards economic collapse. Fewer people causes less demand for real estate, hence lower increase in prices and lower ability to extend credit against property. Pop goes the hailed “wealth effect” which has propped up consumption for decades.
So damned if you do and even more damned if you don’t.
From a finite world perspective it is funny / sad how population decline is put forth as a problem.
The East European countries mentioned are very fertile places by the way.
Nice places to live after a collapse, if only the rest of the world had the sense to “Just shut up and go away” to quote the famously (mis)educated British Minister of Offence.
I plan to settle in Romania in my nex life, in a couple of centuries, lol.
The growth mindset is so strong the writer is lamenting the loss of population. It’s actually good news. The rest of us needs to do it too. It will not be nice but there’s worse down the line.
Except that we need growing “demand” to keep up prices of commodities, and this is hard to do with falling population. It also becomes impossible to collect enough taxes to support the growing army of old people.
Falling population is a step toward collapse.
Well, the circle is closing: Germans send their old people to retiring homes in the East. It is still near enough to visit 2 times a years, but costs 1/4. For example near the Black Sea or in Poland. Then the money you get from the “Pflegeversicherung” (well, what could that be in English? Assurance for beeing helpless?), is even enough.
I bet there would be a huge demand from kids wanting to unload burdensome parents if the Auschwitz ovens were re-ignited….
Doesn`t it classify as Catch-22? Both ways lead to collapse. I wont see any chance to have a pension when I come in to that age. It needs to be drastically be cut down.
You keep on writing about collecting taxes. That’s why I say you are still in thrall to the mainstream.
Forget it. It no longer applies, and one reason is you cannot raise enough money to pay pensions etc as you said, so then it won’t be done by taxes but by direct crediting of accounts, even longhand if it comes down to it. A growing army of old people is happening already in Eastern Europe, Japan etc.
I am in thrall of the way resources are actually redistributed, and that is through moving revenue around. Governments collect taxes, and they pay out amounts to a large number of recipients. They do, in fact, supplement their tax collections with payments that are not backed by tax collections, but no one in history has ever simply tried to inflate away the value of their own currency, as a way of collecting taxes. On second thought, maybe Venezuela is trying this approach. I do not recommend it.
economic theory isn’t my strong point—so i’m happy to be corrected here
but to me, it seems that governments have 2 revenue streams
1—collecting taxes on current commercial activity
2 selling ‘promises’—ie bonds or whatever,–to anyone wanting a long term ‘safe investment’
on money they have sitting around in banks
such promises can only be met if ‘commercial activity’ carries on, and increases, at the current rate when the ‘investment’ is made. The government is effectively borrowing our own future, in the hope that another future will somehow materialise when we get there.
but commercial activity is just another term for energy input, so if energy input isn’t maintained, the those future promises cannot be met, and our future will not be
Hi Norman. Sorry you have it wrong. [but you are in good company with 99% of the population, also misinformed – and deliberately so] I’m not an economist luckily for me as I have not had to unlearn the academic world’s drivel and lies.
Sovereign Governments in charge of their own currency are different from State and local governments Only the monetary sovereign government creates its currency. Everybody and thing else is a USER of the state’s currency. This is written into many constitutions as gospel [but not the USA one. That was left to Currency Acts starting in 1792, before which there was no dollar] But it’s the law.
It means the US can NEVER go bankrupt. It can always meet its obligations at every and any time.To create money it has to spend it into existence. It cannot just print and save for a rainy day.
That IS the only internal revenue stream. No Federal tax is ever re-spent. It’s just not required. It’s PAYG.
Revenue can also be gotten through exports and imports. Commercial operations are USERS of the currency, but the Fed has no need of that money. All Fed money is spent into the public domain.
Banks create credit and they are licensed to convert it into money by the Government. As long as there are resources for sale the government can buy them, into infinity or until we have no resources left to sell. That will be a bad day. We still have plenty of Fiscal space at the moment.
I hope this helps. I cannot be exhaustive here. It’s not appropriate.
I am sorry, you are way off base. Monetarily sovereign governments can, and often do, collapse. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Hundreds of countries have seen collapse. Some of these came from not being able to collect enough tax revenue. This is basically a resource deficiency issue–too little resources for the central governments. Some collapsed as a result of not being able to win wars with neighbors. Inability to win a war with a neighbor might also be considered a resource deficiency.
Gail – I am sure sure John is right.
The leaders of these countries were just plain stuuuupid. There was no need to collapse.
What they did not realize is that all they had to do was print more of their currencies … continue issuing billions more in debt… and buying the debt when nobody else would touch it …. paying themselves interest on the debt… keeping the hamster running.
This is what is known as a Closed Loop Perputual Economic Prosperity Machine.
I am stealing this idea from Mr Doyle… nominating myself for the Nobel Prize in Economics… and I am establishing IP rights to this … because I intend to establish a consulting company that turns around collapsing basket case countries…
What’s that Madame Fast….. Maduro is on the phone…. again…. tell him I’ll ring him back in 30 minutes…
stand back—way back—and don’t let yourself get drawn into the money-based economy fantasy.
thousands of years ago, We—humankind that is–decided to monetize our environment, and make the planet property, and sell it to each other. To do that we created tokens, called money. We used gold as the ultimate store of value, because gold metal doesn’t deteriorate over time.
Au became the universal currency.
The USA was uniquely fortunate in this respect, having a seemingly infinite amount of resources (Fossil fuels, precious metals etc) with which to underpin her money (hence the global primacy of the dollar.)
The planet could ignore such nonsense while we only numbered 1bn or so, now we’re 7.5bn, and rising—and still chopping up the planet and pretending we own it and selling it to each other and exchanging bits of paper and plastic to do so. (imitation gold)
This has gone on so long that money itself has become more valuable (to us) than the planet. We call this the ‘money economy’. Governments and economists think it is real. It isn’t. This is why economists now regard ‘physical resources’ as irrelevant.
Hence the certainty that spending money will bring prosperity (Keynes, Krugman et al)
Why did we do it? Because we are running out of planet. Since the 1980s, humankind has been using, each year, more resources than the planet can supply. Musk says find another planet.
So what do we do?—we create yet more pretend money that doesn’t exist.
Why doesn’t it exist?
Because the physical resources that underpin money do not exist. Without physical resources, money has no value (see above)–the money you print, the less value it has.
This situation can run on for years, based on nothing more than ‘belief’ in BAU.
All well and good, but we base our ongoing situation on having sufficient resources to prop up our current lifestyle. To do this we are stealing our grandchildrens lifestyle, because they too will expect ‘resources’ to be available. But we will have used them up. If you are expecting a pension in 25 years, we will have used that up too.
This explains it in more detail:
https://extranewsfeed.com/an-infinity-of-futility-819630ea935f
If no entity was willing to buy US debt — then of course the US could print all the USD it wanted to buy the debt ….
As can Zimbabwe and Venezuela….
You are deluding yourself.
The reason pensions can’t be paid is that we have reached the limits of economic growth – first felt in deceleration rather than decline. More economic activity is required to produce the marginal unit of goods and services in core sectors.
MMT can help prop up the demand side as long as possible – which means using everything as fast as possible either without a care or in the hopes that all resource limits are engineering problems.
It was historically true of capitalism that overproduction was a real problem – and the real solution was to realize that the old industrial economy was demand constrained while also being resource constrained in the present (not having enough coal, oil and gas infrastructure in place).
Our situation now is different in that we are not simply overshooting our present infrastructure but our absolute resource base. The rate of production of our primary energy resources cannot be made to increase fast enough to allow the economy to grow at historical rates. The reason for this is resource quality. It takes too much economic activity to get new resources out of the ground. This represents everything from educating and paying engineers to finalcialization to EROEI to the energy cost of energy. This can also be viewed as declining marginal return on complexity.
So, if I understand you correctly Mr. Doyle, you are advocating that money is just entered into pension plans by the Federal Reserve? Discounting any other nasty effects this would have, the money would very likely be spent. This puts a demand on real resources – like energy. There is no getting around the connection between money and energy. This doesn’t solve anything. It may even create shortages and hasten the collapse.
Well congress read your mind Mr. Doyle time to get the FED to put digits into the pension funds:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-21/congress-just-quietly-formed-committee-bail-out-200-pension-funds
While they are at it … they should pass a bill that forgives all credit card debt… just wipes the slate clean
And it won’t cost 1cent!!!. All congress has to do, since they made it a law, is auction bonds to match the spend.
At some point … it will cease…. unless one believes in a perpetual economic motion machine
Mr. Doyle is a proponent of an economic theory called MMT. Background:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625
A good critique of MMT which captures by non energy objections is here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/weekender-the-trouble-with-modern-monetary-theory-mmt-2011-1
I recommend the second article you mention (although I didn’t get all the way to the end of it).
It makes some of the same arguments that I have made.
I don’t follow – even in MMT theory one idea is that taxation is used to create demand for sovereign currency and also to control inflation. I don’t think it’s a very strong case, but it’s still part of the MMT theory.
Precisely. People need to believe the future will contain more so that they engage in economic activity – the making and accepting of promises and commitments – as opposed to the alternative where people believe the future will contain less.
I am a prime example… I have lost all hope of their being a long term future… I am not investing … so I am not at all helpful to BAU’s long term health….
If everyone had the same outlook — BAU would quickly implode.
When it gets to bad government will force you to save.
They want me to spend
They want me to save (30% salary mandatory) and spend, ”has” to have a mortgage.
Paying fees/interest/tax on both legs of this trade.
Actually you’re a third category in that you realize there will be no future! As opposed to people who are afraid of a decline and hoard cash, you live large longer!
I have reached the highest level of consciousness… ohmmm mutherf789er ohmmmmm shanti bing bong bing dong waaaaah…. ohm ohm ohm….. abcdefg…. lmnop… xyz…. boots are best when made of le… ther…. you got it man?
In terms of collapse … we are here:
‘He’s close, man… he’s real close’
And a rising population is THE only step necessary for collapse.
0.2 billion in 600 AD, 1.6 billion in 1900, 7.6 billion in 2018
That is called cancerous growth. Humans have become a cancer on this planet. There is no other description.
and only 2 in 4004 bc
A cancer fueled by ooal and oil….
We are in a predicament. We don’t have access to cheap resources to support more people. We cannot make due with too much fewer people because we need growing “demand” to keep up prices. We have milked the cheap resources to the limits that were possible. Now we either find more cheap resources or collapse.
Or what ? Find more cheap resources so we can keep growing the population (and the “economy”). That will only cause a delay and cause a much more destructive collapse. Kind of like the finger in the dike as the water rises behind the dike. Take the finger NOW.
If it means I get to live another week — Just Do Whatever It Takes
If the increasing inequality is a way the self-organising system adapts to scarcity and saves energy, then shrinking populations or demographic disaster is the the next step to be taken if the increasing inequality is not sufficient?
Not possible… well not for very long at least…
https://oneinabillionblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/deflationaryspiral.png
MMT … everything is fixed!
John John John….. why don’t you shift over to Surplus Economics… you can Don would mind meld over there…
The thing is…
What you are posting is basically … re t ar ded…. and you don’t even realize it… you really do not belong here… on any level…
I know that in Poland they are offering financial incentives to encourage couples to have children. At first, I think it was limited to 2nd, 3rd, or 4th child but has since expanded to also include the first child born. Amount is 500PLN/month. It seems to be moderately successful and hasn’t ‘broken the bank’ as some opponents claimed it would.
Incentives should be to stabilize world art zero growth, then slowly reduce the population. A two child policy would attain this. Continued population growth will ultimately kill us all.
stabilize world at (not art) zero growth,
Jonzo, everything I have read over the years leads me to believe that stabilizing at zero growth is an oxymoron. We can grow to escape collapse. But, once we stop growing…we collapse. There isn’t any stabilizing at zero growth. It is hard to wrap ones head around these concepts. It took me years of reading to understand this phenomenon. But, it is reflected throughout history.
I was searching for ‘is a zero growth economy possible’ — and I discovered the term steady state… then I discovered an article on this on Finite World explaining how it is possible — but it would mean living at a very primitive level … essentially scratching in the mud with sticks…
And then things evolved to the point where I now spend a fair amount of time crushing DelusisTANIs (like cockroaches)
I’m fine with collapse (we deserve it). But the longer we wait, the more global destruction is likely to occur. Kill the cancer or let the cancer kill the patient. I say kill the cancer, and try and save the patient.
The planet has dealt with far more destructive episodes … when we are gone… in a few thousand years… it will be as if the nightmare called humans…. never happened.
If that’s the way you feel… then cut out the air bags… and seat belts… load your family into your car… and run it at 100mph into a rock cut….
Every little bit helps….
https://oneinabillionblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/deflationaryspiral.png
Then I shall go to Poland and impregnate thousands of single young women… so they can collect the dosh….
Now I could insist on a commission — however — I will sacrifice — and offer my services for free.
I am here to help
I call it a blessing. Europe is one of the most overpopulated continents, by was it 250million if you count only EU countries. In the end it is also a symptom, young people are hard pressed by economic uncertainity caused by diminished returns. They don`t have money to do big life investments, be it cars, houses, apartments, etc. and having a kid means that you are constantly in rat race to keep afloat. People are immigrating within Europe to those areas where they have chance, especially the educated ones. Even educated ones in good jobs are overworked and often burn off and choose not to make kids, even if both partners are working. Last thing we need would be take more uneducated ThirdWorld persons to live in social security. If one is a refugee, it is a common that those are still after 10- years living from a welfare. There just is not enough low paying work or if you take people from other countries they need social support to be able to live with the low salary. We need to start looking Edo- era Japan on how to live in 0 growth economy.
All of these Eastern European countries are on the perifery, their population migrates where the system provides higher wages, i.e. often into the countries that can increase the debt into higher levels. The population decline of these countries in the future may not be as dramatic as predicted, while the countries like Germany which heavily depend on suitable imported workforce can face more dramatic declines due to the lack of suitable immigrants.
The human resources also get depleted, like soil or energy resources.
How is Czech rep today and in the near future?
Czech rep is heavily dependent on foreign workforce and its population is kept from declining by the immigration. The countryside depopulates and the population concentrates in the two big cities of Prague and Brno. The third big city, Ostrava, that originated thanks to the coal production, is on decline (the map in the article shows the highest decline in population for the given region on the Polish border):
http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ct24/domaci/1635863-pocet-obyvatel-se-zvysil-jen-diky-pristehovalcum-hlavne-slovakum-a-ukrajincum
http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ct24/sites/default/files/styles/scale_1180/public/1623550-prirustekobyvatelstva2015_1pol_0.png?itok=HZEJ7x92
“Christianity as default is gone’: the rise of a non-Christian Europe
Figures show a majority of young adults in 12 countries have no faith, with Czechs least religious”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/21/christianity-non-christian-europe-young-people-survey-religion?CMP=twt_gu
I’m less worried about losing christianity than people who wants to impose their religion on you.
Texas is grappling with a wave of package bombings
Local law-enforcement officials in Austin, Texas, are working with their state and federal counterparts to track down a serial bomber who is believed to be targeting neighborhoods around the state capital.
Law enforcement officials confirmed that a suspicious package found at a FedEx facility in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday was an unexploded bomb – the sixth such incident that has rattled the region since March 2.
So far, the bombs have killed two people and injured four others. Police said they believe the incidents are all related “because of the specific contents of these devices.”
In light of the explosions, which have so far followed a similar pattern in areas surrounding Austin, law-enforcement officials said people should not handle any unexpected or suspicious packages, and instead call 911.
https://www.businessinsider.in/Texas-is-grappling-with-a-wave-of-package-bombings-heres-whats-happened-so-far/articleshow/63390794.cms
i was thinking what the advantage of patriot act when USA can’t not defend attacks
from homegrown terrorists
Putin definitely is behind these attacks. I am sure of it
maybe north korea
“24 year old white male suspect in Austin bombings has blown himself up”
If he really targeted blacks only, then RIP to him. If most of Americans (the real ones- whites) would act like him, USA would be cleaned in a matter of months. Blacks are not meant to live in countries north of 15° north parralel.
wat about below 15 degrees south—would that be ok?
Below 15 degrees south is not north of 15° north, so it would be OK.
good that youve got that figured out.
i seem to recall that we all came from below 15 deg south, tho that was a while back i believe
maybe if you asked the don, he would build a wall on the zero drees line
degrees
Nobody asked them if they wanted to….
https://www.rt.com/usa/421756-americans-fear-surveillance-deep-state/
Most Americans assert to the existence of a Deep State, poll shows.
A deep state is a little too mysterious and theoretical for me, but I do think lobbyists have too much control and that’s a form of corruption (corrupting what was originally intended by our fore fathers because it takes power away from ‘The People’).
If what they mean by a deep state is lobbying in DC, then count me in.
How about the self-organized system being behind our problems? Such a system gives extra “power” to high wealth individuals. There doesn’t have to any planned conspiracy.
Hilarious!!! I d iot humans….
https://wolfstreet.com/2018/03/20/then-why-is-anyone-still-on-facebook/
As Taleb said in the black swan … if you have thousands of professionals running funds… a few are going to get luck some of the time… and the marketing machine kicks in … along with greed.. and money pours into the fund… only to disappoint
http://www.aei.org/publication/more-evidence-that-its-very-hard-to-beat-the-market-over-time-95-of-financial-professionals-cant-do-it/
Remember this guy
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/business/dealbook/john-paulsons-fall-from-hedge-fund-stardom.html
According to the first article,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-tariffs-china/u-s-expected-to-impose-up-to-60-billion-in-china-tariffs-by-friday-sources-idUSKBN1GV31E
Trump to impose $60 billion in tariffs on China, but there will be a period of time to allow businesses to lodge complaints, before enacting them ‘as is’ or with changes.
Trump talked endlessly about applying tariffs to China during his prez campaign, and this is something that is far overdue. The negative trade imbalance for the US has gone on long enough. Regardless of how long before collapse, I’m glad to see the move towards tariffs on China. China says they will impose their own on the US in response, which could have something to do with rare earth elements.
Does this mean that Trump and Ivanka products will cost more?
Landlord of Apple’s New Flagship Chicago Store Puts it Up for Sale
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/03/20/apple-flagship-chicago-store-for-sale/
Oh wow! It’s so Greeeeeeen!!!!
Apple’s Michigan Avenue store is located right alongside the Chicago River, and its construction was an ambitious project for the company. It includes 32-foot glass facades and an enormous 111-by-98 foot carbon fiber roof. Like most of Apple’s modern stores, it includes indoor trees, a dedicated seating area for Today at Apple sessions, a Genius Grove for getting help with products, and an area where customers can view and try Apple devices and related accesories.
Nothing greener than a design that requires electric heating to melt snow on the roof to prevent structural failure.
I understand that many of these green solutions are laughable. But I don’t understand why you are so hostile to people or companies that want to try to be eco friendly. Its like being hostile to people who want to go to church and pray for the poor and sick. Even if what they are doing is futile why would someone want to ridicule them for trying to do what they thought was best?
I’m ok with it. Until they want to waste my money.
Good point…. I am not keen on the NZ govt spending my tax dollars on flying cars….
Oh I dunno …. could it be because they are hypocrites?
Because if you suggest to one of them that they take the bus… instead of their EV…. they look at you like you are mentally ill.
Or maybe it is because they are just unthinking… stuuupid More ons?
But then again .. it is probably more along the lines that I am aware of Mr Jevons and his paradox…
You know how it goes…
So the Greenie who bikes to work each day.. doesn’t own a car .. saving the world he is…. so the money (energy) he saves simply gets used elsewhere… maybe this Green Groupie has a penchant for expensive organic food so he uses his energy on that…. or he may have an addiction to fine wine so his saved energy goes to that… or perhaps he invests his energy into a index fund… that energy is used by the companies in the index in various and all non-green economic activities…
Or let’s say he puts that energy in a bank account…. that’s actually a really bad non green idea… because the bank will say thank you kindly Mr Green… and turn around and lend that f789ig dosh out 8x over to…. you guessed it…. people who will use the loans to buy more stuff…..
Now if the Green Groupie were to take his energy (cash) and burn it … or bury it and leave in the ground to rot… that might be considered green…. however keep in mind that the Central Banks are always infusing more cash into the global economy even in the best of times… so the Greenie’s gesture is…. MORE on ic.
Of course there is another solution if Mr Green wants to be Green… he can simply agree to work for just enough money to be able to afford just enough food to live on … and a one room shack with no heating or cooling…. If he did something like that then although it is not completely green … I would most definitely not attack him …..
The odds of that happening are about as high as Mr Green taking a pot of green paint and painting himself green…
Actually now that I think about it… what I really hate… is Green Groupies preaching to me about how I need to stop using coffee capsules…. and that instead I need to buy a proper coffee machine made using huge amounts of energy from plastic and steel and all sorts of other f789ing shit… then fill the f789er with coffee that is grown and flown to NZ from places such as Vietnam and Brazil and Ethiopia and Indonesia… roasted up using more energy in machines made in China or Germany….
I do hate that… it makes me… hostile.
De.ath to Green Grooopies… I declare eternal G-Had on one and all.
https://imgur.com/a/M0FwW
Hate can also be motivating…
When I played hockey — I used fear to motivate me — fear of the other team – particularly their best player… before a game I would get myself worked up about that player… even though I had never met him… never spoken with him…he had never done anything to me…. by the time the puck was dropped … I hated him… I wanted him dead.
As a defensive player… that hatred can often translate into a very frustrating night for a goal scorer.
I’ve found this approach works in the business world too… hate thy competitor…. focus focus focus… kill kill kill… drive the f789er into bankruptcy if possible — leave him and ideally his entire family … in the gutter begging for spare change.. no mercy…. (keeping in mind if he is worth anything — he’ll be wanting the same for me)
If you can learn to harness hate … hate can be your friend… the alternative is this
http://21c.ca/sites/default/files/field/image/trudeau%20crying.png
Death to Green Grooopies… Ghad etc…
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-20/nsa-has-been-tracking-bitcoin-users-2013-new-snowden-documents-reveal
Obviously…..
DOOMSDAY THEORIST ORDERED TO STOP BUILDING NUCLEAR BUNKER IN HIS YARD
http://www.newsweek.com/doomsday-conspiracy-theorist-ordered-stop-building-nuclear-bunker-his-yard-853428
“… Loncarevic has been filling his bunker with everything he would need to survive the end of days, claiming to have enough supplies to stay underground for two years. His exhaustive stash of necessities includes 132 gallons of water, 1,984 pounds of sugar, 440 pounds of rice and dried beans, 264 pounds of honey, 200 pairs of socks, 200 pairs of underwear and 100 t-shirts.”
“1984” pounds of sugar? at least he has a sense of humor…
My question is what is he going to do after his two years of supplies run out? Just roll over and die? And is it really worth putting in 20 years worth of work to stay alive an extra two years longer than the rest of society?
There is a view that nearly everyone else will be dead then, so it will be relatively easy to start over, with a tiny population.
With that store, I’d say he might emerge thirsty with a serious case of dental decay. And was he planning to sell shirts after the apocalypse?
He might need more water….
at 1-2 gallons per day, he’ll be out of water in 2-4 months.
Where does he store his excrement during 2 years? And anyway he would go insane, staying isolated a longer period. A human is not made for staying all by himself.
Clean underwear is terribly important at the End of the World. I’m sure his mother would approve!
We visited a Babies R Us store that’s about to shut down — and it was a total mess
http://www.businessinsider.com/babies-r-us-closing-stores-clearance-sales-photos-2018-3
You don’t need that plastic stuff to raise a child.
Prob 18:11 The wealth of the rich is his fortified city;It is like a protective wall in his imagination.
Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
Job 5 : 7 King James version
People knew cities are stores of energy wealth a long time ago.
The offerings that they gave were energy offerings, either animal or grain offerings. This seems to be common in many religions.
God was sometimes represented as bolts of lightening.
1 Kings 18:38…
“Immediately the fire of the Lord flashed and burned up the young bull, the wood, the stones, and the dust. It even licked up all the water in the trench!”
ta-da!
Elijah poured petroleum on the wood (pretending the liquid was actually water)…
FF has always been magical…
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta- GDP – Q1 Forecast: 1.8 percent
https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/research/gdpnow.aspx
Need 2% historically to keep the ponzi from being exposed (5 quarters in a row).
We shall see——
We have failed to address the complexity of our rising population and a degrading environment. Yes, we are self-conscious and thus able to recognize the fact that we are destroying the only home we have, but will the end result differ much from a population overshoot of bacteria in a Petri dish? Dependent on a continuous stream of finite resources imported from across the globe, modern megacities contain the seeds of their own destruction and that of all other life forms upon which humanity depends for its survival. The exponential growth of modern civilization ensures that one of the next doubling times will produce an absolute increase in overshoot that tips the world into unavoidable collapse. Enough damage may well have already been done; we’re just waiting for inertia to catch up to the impacts.
..
Like mindless bacteria bent on their own success, humans are victims of their own DNA and ingenuity. Any civilization that develops energy harvesting technologies allowing for rapid population growth will generate entropy which will in turn almost certainly have strong feedback effects on the planet’s habitability. Our exponentially growing economy is on a collision course with an immovable ecosphere.
..
We live in an age of unparalleled technological advancement, while at the same time we turn a blind eye to the disintegrating natural world that gave birth to us, having forgotten that our destiny lies in our relationship with the earth. Like Icarus who, in his exuberance, ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun, modern man with his technology has ascended to great heights without heeding sound advice.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2018/03/
The ongoing popularity of HP Lovecraft horror seems appropriate. The things that make HP Lovecraft unique, also seem to pop up on this blogs comment section every so often
– in the end, whatever we do, we are predestined to be but a fleeting speck in the universe
– finally, after the horror, we find ourselves to be the blame, on a genetic level.. the cure.. what cure.. the disease is us.. on a genetic level.. try to cure that
– despite the hubris, egomaniacal narcissism of our species.. we live and die by the graces of greater forces, not at all in our control
– the unknown, the truly unknown, is what is truly frightening. And all sane people try to avoid the truly unknown
– all we can do is to hope the greater ancient forces, lurking beneath the surface, dont wake up during our lifetime. Because when the ancient forces do wake, then our species wont have a chance
Quite the valid analogies that ring true
As much as I love and admire Lovecraft’s stories and novellas, which I first read as a teenager, I don’t agree with his hysterical nihilism and fatalism. Truth never dies, and to the extent that humanity discovered the truth it shall never die.
Being predestined to be a “fleeting speck” and guided by simultaneously indifferent and malevolent “forces” is not a truth. It’s a gothic fantasy, of which Lovecraft was indeed a master (if not THE master). Eternity, the infinite…is not the largest or smallest thing one can think of, since by definition the largest/smallest thing is finite and hence not infinite. The unknown is only frightening to those who are frightened to know themselves. It was Lovecraft’s fear of his own demons – of which he evidently had more than a few – which became creative and produced the eldritch beings from the nameless corners of the cosmos that we today know and love.
The true mystery and beauty of the universe doesn’t lie in size or shape. Rather, it is around us and within us – in equal measure present in the death of a sparrow or a star, in the diseases that BAU protects us from or in an office cubicle.
Lovecraft was actually a good mountain climber, and participated in one of the early attempts of K2——-
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Frontier-Walter-Prescott-Webb/dp/0874175194 indicates…. that in the period prior to 1500 Europe (the Metropolis) was a stagnant place of poverty and hunger… with a very high ratio of humans to land area… then the Frontier was discovered… with its mostly empty lands and untapped resources… seizing these territories dramatically reducing the human to land ratio for Europeans…
However in 1930… the census revealed that he human/land ratio had returned to approximately what it was just before the Frontier precipitated the boom… and by 1940 had significantly exceeded it (no doubt related to oil)
The author suggests this may have been the cause of the Great Depression….
I have only finished the first chapter…
Falling energy consumption per capita.
Smaller pieces of pie for everyone….
Most of the Spanish Conquistadors of the 16th century were poor soldiers from Extremadura – the name of the province expresses the poverty of the province (a beautiful, but very hard place).
Invading the Americas was their lucky break: win or starve………
People generally assume too much. They inadvertently have come to believe (based on observation) that grid electricity is part of the natural world! And EV’s exist throughout the universe! And iPhones are organically grown! It is all too easy to make these leaps of logic if one is born into this world. These things exist now – so they always will. I have to always make a mental note to myself what is, and what is not, part of the natural world. Some even argue that because we are born of this Earth and our energy supplies are as well – that things like cars and planes and solar panels are all natural. Just massive jumps of logic. Without external energy (far in excess of what we can gather with our hands) we would not have any of these high tech things.
True. A BAU mansion is after all just a nest for some humans, and therefore as ‘natural’ as that of a beaver.
But it is wholly out of balance with Nature and merely the outgrowth of FF’s: therefore doomed.
Empty half the Earth of its humans. It’s the only way to save the planet
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/save-the-planet-half-earth-kim-stanley-robinson
All we need is people in cities. This is more than a bit absurd.
Earth is in no danger. It does not need saving. We are not stewards of the Earth. We are not destroying the Earth. We are part of the ecosystem of Earth until we have run our natural course. Just as all the other extinct lifeforms before us (and many after us) we have our time – and then that time passes. New ecosystems will evolve …. we will be fossils.
The planet would certainly be well-served if humans were extincted asap….
I bet if I suggested that to the Green Groopies… they would be horrified…
Radiotrophic fungus is well served by humans though ;D
Greg you might like this quote…
People always say again: We need to save our planet. No, we do not. The planet is going to save itself already. It always has done. Sometimes it took millions of years, but it happened. We should not be worried about the planet, but about the human species.
-Dennis Meadows
Would anyone miss the plague if it were to be extincted?
Disney/Pixar should really make a cartoon about this – how all the animals rejoice after humans are gone. It would be great for the kids – cute little rats and cockroaches crawling through the irradiated rubble…singing songs. The villain could be the last mutant human cannibal – driving along in a mad-max style diesel truck looking for food.
I would go to the cinema to watch that for sure!!!
https://www.pleated-jeans.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/waving28-1.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t6vTMDpifNM/hqdefault.jpg
yes
have a thought for the guys earning a living as a ”bring out your dead” roundsman—without them–nobody could go to hell in a handcart could they?
every adds to gdp
and the door cross painters
https://econimica.blogspot.se/?m=1
Hambone continues to not see people don’t breed because of resource limits.
for the “oil is profitable at $60/barrel” files:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biofuels-pes-bankruptcy/pennsylvania-says-bankrupt-refiner-owes-3-8-billion-in-taxes-filing-idUSKBN1GV2EM
I guess it is, if you don’t have to pay any taxes!
If economists understood how vital fossil fuels are, we’d probably see all FF producers with tax exempt status.
I suspect that has already happened…. the CBs are no doubt funneling huge amounts of cash back into the oil industry – particularly shale — to keep these companies alive…. all in secret of course
Not in oil exporting countries. They already know how vital oil exports are to their countries. It is the taxes on the exports that are needed. No tax exempt status.
All this sounds like a very well greased mob. Everybody needs their “cut” off the sales of energy products. Because everyone has to burn energy the mob will be rich. Or, so the original thinking was. Now there isn’t enough profit in the production of energy products. So, something has to give. The oil trade doesn’t seem too much different than the drug trade.
Oil is more essential than drugs.
There is some truth to what they are saying, ie that he uses a rapid barrage of convoluted language to confuse the listener into thinking they are hearing something rather more brilliant and original than they actually are. I watched a clip where it takes him more than three minutes of verbiage, using terms like ‘non-homogeneity’, to express the simple view that the EU is breaking up because it is too diverse.
I like him though, as his verbal facility is itself enjoyable to behold and we need upholders of the more traditional mores to slow our descent into social and psychological confusion.
I’ve listened to a number of debates and discussions involving Peterson — and I do not find he uses convoluted language — rather he is concise — logical — and thoughtful… he says nothing without first thinking it through — he pauses at times before speaking … rather than running at the mouth as most people do….
That said, I can imagine a DelusiSTANI having trouble with Peterson …. DelusiSTANIs are uncomfortable with facts and logic… and thoughtfulness… they see these things as…. confusing…
DelusiSTANIs are used to having the MSM tell them what to think… their intellectual ability is on par with this sort of thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap0BZKlG5QY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTnD40xvSeM
A guy like Peterson acts like a wrench thrown into the well-oiled gears of an idi ocy machine… the machine explodes… just as a DelusiSTANI’s brain explodes as it is thrown into a state of total confusion with facts and logic busting off the teeth of the gears…
This discussion sums up the state of the present world… when a person emerges who rejects political correctness for the sake of political correctness.. who argues cogently …. powerfully….
He is dismissed as ‘convoluted’ …
Who is John Galt….
“Who is John Galt?” Dunno. Never heard of xem. 😀
Peterson is a buffoon who fantasises about a hybrid utopia magically combining the 1800s, the 50s and the 80s. In fact, the entire generation he belongs to is like that – they can understand neither their parents and grandparents nor their children and grandchildren. Left or right doesn’t matter, they want everyone to live in the little time bubble they grew up in.
Apart from picking on politically active trans-testicles, what exactly is his contribution? Oh right, derivative New-Agey interpretations of Christianity with “conservative” twist to appease his audience. What % of the population are trans-testicles – 0.1-ish? What they say or want is not an “issue”. The collapse of BAU is an issue, and what exactly does Peterson have to say about that? Frack all.
To even attribute “non-homogeneity” to race/culture in today’s society of mass pop culture, credit-based globalised JIT systems, widespread promiscuity, single mother homes and so on is ridiculous. I’ll pay heed to his opinions about “non-homogeneity” when he starts talking about taking women’s rights away and forcing people who work useless jobs in the service sector (and who complain about “useless eaters”) to start doing something actually productive, like milking cows. Sick and tired of hearing about that idiot. /drunken rant
Thank you for the Huffington Post viewpoint.
My viewpoint is that Peterson is a glorified life coach who panders to the fantasies of upper middle white women and lower middle white men, and trans-tes-ticles are the larvae spawned by the aforementioned white women.
If that is indeed the Huffpo viewpoint, I regret being completely misled about such an enlightened magazine.
The thing is…
Based on the comments you have posted on FW to date…
You are as irrelevant as a 3 foot midget trying out for the centre position on the LA Lakers.
You’re a nihilist who is fanboying for a guy who hates you! I am beyond your puerile categories, I’ll call out your nonsense whenever I feel so inclined, and there is nothing you can do about it.
You can blather on all you like… then I will continue to stomp on your throat with facts and logic
Comment awaiting moderation…go figure. Anyway, repost.
Peterson is a buffoon who fantasises about a hybrid utopia magically combining the 1800s, the 50s and the 80s. In fact, the entire generation he belongs to is like that – they can understand neither their parents and grandparents nor their children and grandchildren. Left or right doesn’t matter, they want everyone to live in the little time bubble they grew up in.
Apart from picking on politically active trans-tes-ticles, what exactly is his contribution? Oh right, derivative New-Agey interpretations of Christianity with “conservative” twist to appease his audience. What % of the population are trans-tes-ticles – 0.1-ish? What they say or want is not an “issue”. The collapse of BAU is an issue, and what exactly does Peterson have to say about that? Frack all.
To even attribute “non-homogeneity” to r-ace/culture in today’s society of mass pop culture, credit-based globalised JIT systems, widespread promiscuity, single mother homes and so on is ridiculous. I’ll pay heed to his opinions about “non-homogeneity” when he starts talking about taking women’s rights away and forcing people who work useless jobs in the service sector (and who complain about “useless eaters”) to start doing something actually productive, like milking cows. Sick and tired of hearing about that i-diot. /drunken rant
Oh I dunno … I quite enjoyed this
Greatest Hits
JP on the gender pay gap and patriarchy has caused a stir in the blogosphere, but for all the logic, it’s actually based on a lie.
He suggests that she has her own disagreeableness, (she’s successful after all), she concurs, and then he suggests he has ‘suffered’ at her hands, experiencing her disagreeableness. This silences her, he pounces, saying “Got yer”.
It silences her because she’s confused. She hasn’t put him on the ropes at all. He hasn’t felt her disagreeableness. In fact he cackles like a hyena as he complexifies the issue away from her questioning. If there’s any point, or logic, to the interview, he fails because that isn’t his project. He’s more concerned to win the argument, and has to lie to do so!
Let’s not get too caught up in complex and ridiculous explanations and justifications of what went down in that ‘debate’
He destroyed her. He humiliated her. He crushed her. He eviscerated her.
If she were a dog she’d be crawling around the studio floor licking at the entrails hanging out of her gut.
You do not get in the ring with a guy like that … no matter who you are… because that is an argument you cannot win – and Peterson has all the angles covered.
He is dead right… women do NOT rise to the top primarily because they are not willing to do what is required to rise to the top. As Peterson points out … even most men who are willing to do what it takes — do not rise to the top.
Trying to argue from a standpoint of what is politically correct — is a losing game — because you are trying to argue for something that is by definition – not correct.
Even Peterson — who is extremely logical and bright — would be left flailing like an idi ot if he were to try to argue against himself.
It appears so often we use “strong words” such as “Ripping” to express ourselves. “Ripping” is defined by Webster in this context as: “to utter violently : spit out ripped out an oath.” Peterson seems to be very non violent in his use of words which are carefully chosen. We are now used to sound bites, ideas expressed on MSM between commercials. Peterson gives a depth of explanation to his thoughts as he expresses them. In so doing, he gives the reader or listener a chance to disagree with the ideas behind these thoughts and see how they fit into his/her/thee/etc. current understandings and personal beliefs.
We get it, you think anyone who isn’t a liberal progressive can’t be an intellectual.
++++++++++++++
In order to be part of the club you must:
– read the New York Times and Huffington
– be a university professor
– drive a Prius
– drink Fair Trade Organic Coffee
– espouse 100% liberal bu ll sh it
– agree that there should be different toilets for different flavours of deviant f789 ups
– cry on demand (see Justin Trudeau)
Jordan Peterson is not left — and not right — he is logical.
To be part of the club you all need to be an open and tolerant person….There I fixed it for you.
Tolerant of DelusiSTANIs?
“Today’s ‘tolerance’ makes the assumption that we all hold different beliefs but those different beliefs are all equal. That appalls me. If I’m going to take the time to believe in something, have a conviction, live it out, and stand up for what I believe in, what good is it if I don’t even believe that my beliefs are true? And if my beliefs are true, why would I even consider a conflicting belief to be on the same level? I wouldn’t! What good is a conviction if you don’t believe it to your core and reject anything that is in opposition to it? Yet, this is what the new tolerance is about. A man without convictions would have an easier time saying that all beliefs are equal.” –G.K. Chesterton
Amen to that djerek! Agree 100%
And what GK Cherston believes doesn’t have any evidence…lol
this might bring a smile to otherwise gloomy doomster faces
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/sudden-oil-crisis/
especially the sailing tanker and the electric powered ore-truck
luvvit
Plenty of ammo for a good comedian there
It would probably cause a serious economic crisis, maybe even another Great Depression. But that is vastly different from the various ‘inevitable Mad Max’ scenarios we read about on doomer websites! A global oil crisis could finally stimulate governments to build out sustainable energy independence so that they create jobs and oil free transport systems at the same time, incrementally improving their economies and weaning off oil.
fraid there is no form of ‘sustainable energy’ that would allow 7.5bn people to enjoy some kind of ‘independence’
when the global oil crisis hits, governments –or anybody else—will not have the means to stimulate anything much, because it comes down to pairs of hands working tools.
either you have muscle tools–picks, shovels, wheelbarrows—-or you have mechanical tools. there’s nothing ‘in between.
a man with a shovel can only work to the extent his food supply allows him to—then he collapses through exhaustion.—a mechanical tool is just the same, but needs fuel input
it isn’t possible to ‘build out’ systems and create jobs, because job creation can only happen with energy input, similarly, transport systems can only function if there is a purpose—and that purpose can only be accomplished by consuming still more energy.
it is not possible to sustain ‘jobs’ that have no purpose other than that of ‘creating jobs’—work must always have life supporting purpose of some kind, otherwise it’s a hobby.
6bn of us are here courtesy of oil
without oil, we won’t be
We have these muscle tools, until they too fall apart because of excessive use. Then the question comes regarding what kinds of substitute tools we can fashion with the remains of unneeded local materials–for example, sheet metal on cars, and metal beams in big buildings (if we can even remove these and use them). Even recycling can be energy intensive.
it isn’t possible to make a usable tool without heat input
it isn’t possible to make a steel chisel for example, from the sheet metal of a car door, unless you have specific knowledge of metallurgy and the right facilities.
The Middle Class Might Nearly Disappear In The Next Decade
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickwwatson/2018/03/08/the-middle-class-might-nearly-disappear-in-the-next-decade/#34488336251e
That pretty much implies a complete collapse of the US economy.
As of 2014 the middle class became the minority in America
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2015/12/10/congratulations-american-middle-class-youre-becoming-a-minority/#58f1435169c7
The Middle class keep being the one’s that have held the US economy together and are the go to people for the bulk of govt. tax revenue, so I agree with Greg. Lose the middle class and the economy has no foundation, it collapses. It seems like it’s on shaky legs now as household debt rises to unprecedented levels. Families are borrowing, knowing they need the money and are just hoping to pay those loans back later. Get a real bad recession again and the amount of defaults will be staggering.
This is why Steve Keen, and others, recommend a “debt jubilee”. The debts would either be wiped off the banks records leaving them to face big losses, OR, the government would buy the mortgages from the banks and reset all them to zero. He also promotes a bank cheque to those who had no mortgage debt, so everyone gets something, not just the debtors;
Debt is needed to make the system operate. Years ago, certain agricultural debt was wiped out, but that was all owed to the government, or to the church or bank owned by the government. There was not so much international debt, and so much international trade for resources. So it would work back then.
It is not clear to me that it would work now. I am afraid it would end up with a large number of small countries that would need to make do with the resources inside their own boundaries, because no one would trade with anyone.
If a debt Jubilee was enacted by any one influential country IMO it would set off a chain reaction as everyone would not want to be left behind. So it’s likely that the world economy would reset at a lower level, like say a generation ago. But it is difficult to forecast as politics will intervene. For a while, everyone’s dollar would go further.
How can an economy reset a level of a generation ago? As we go to higher and higher tech solutions, we lose the ability to go back to less advanced solutions.
For example, since about the 1950s, there has been a lot of school consolidation, under the theory that a single large school is better than a lot of little schools, near students. With these little schools, students can walk to school, and parents, teachers and administrators all know each other well. The larger schools have huge buildings, at a distance from students, with lots of administrators. People don’t know each other as well. There is much more possibility of friction among groups.
With less fossil fuels, it becomes impossible to keep up the electric grid. It also becomes impossible to keep up the school busses and the roads that the school buses ran on. In India, they have schools with skylights, and use blackboards, so interrupted electricity is not a problem. In this country, the one-room schools were built with blackboards and lots of windows, and perhaps a wood fired stove for heating. Older students helped teach younger students, besides, of course, the teacher teaching a wide range of ages.
We don’t have the facilities to go backward, now. And all of the many administrators, school nurses, guidance counselors, and the like would lose their jobs.
This is just one of the examples we run into. How do we stop ourselves, short of a very, very major backward shift, without electricity or fossil fuels, and very little transportation?
one thing i noticed in casual observations in Canada/USA (border area) was little booths. like phone booths, people put up for kids to wait in for school buses so they didnt freeze to death—then the vast distances kids had to be bussed to school
I didn’t get no booth to wait for the school bus when I was a kid!!!!
And I had to walk at least half a km to the bus stop!!!
Life was so unfair.
I am old enough that I simply walked to school.
bet you had shoes though
i had to walk 10 miles barefoot to skool
and do a 12 hour shift down a coalmine before i got there (the pit was halfway there, and I had to earn money to support our family of 20 kids and 6 grandparents)—and was caned if i was late
During uni… I used to work in a dairy 3 days per week … starting a 4am… I was working outdoors in pitch black often -30C weather… hauling stacks milk and other products off the trucks….
And quite often the night before I was at the uni pub till 1.
And I didn’t wear a shirt at work … even in -30…. (well … maybe i did)
Starting with your first paragraph, Gail, it seems to me that paying off a mortgage will automatically reduce the value of the houses as the mortgage cost is eliminated the house will reset at a lower value. By a generation ago I only mean house prices, not everything, not the whole economy. It’s mostly house prices that figure in the trillions of dollars of non government debt. It would save the economy a fortune in interest payments and personal spending power would be increased. I don’t have a crystal ball to know how the savings would flow through the economy, but it’s safe to say the effect would be large.
Otherwise, yes, we can’t go backwards as today’s infrastructure is very different. In your last paragraph it’s probably inevitable we will face such a set of problems when we fall off the energy cliff.
If you cancel mortgages, somehow the holders of those mortgages need to be compensated. I am not sure how this can be done. Then there is the question of whether these homes can ever be sold in the future. You are right, prices will decrease a lot. But I am not sure how bank accounts will stay up. You say with more government debt. The price of oil will then be a lot higher.
Why should people believe that commercial mortgages are any different from residential mortgages? Or other commercial debt? Don’t we get a different problem of needing to forgive debt everywhere?
At some point … you will get tired of me… and you will just give up
No matter how many times you post this illogical nonsense… it does not make any more sense
One suggestion on the debt jubilee/helicopter money would be to give every citizen a certain amount of money – say $50,000. They would be required to repay debt first, but then could spend the rest (or whatever). Those who had no debt could spend as they chose.
In theory I think this is a good idea compared to other proposals as it would substitute for wage disparity without relying on slow and complicated taxation schemes. But the problem I see is that it will bias inflation over growth.
This is because sudden changes in the money supply can happen faster than changes in economic infrastructure – like extracting energy resources – which change over longer periods of time.
This would still probably damage banks who rely on rent seeking. I don’t think there is a way out.
A loaf of bread would cost $100 if they did that…
I don’t know about a so-called “collapse” of the US economy.
However I would believe that we will be seeing more and more 2nd and 3rd world living conditions here in the USA.
first world lifestyles need first world energy input—there are no alternative ways of doing it
third world levels of energy input will lead to just that. third world living
you can check the reality of that in the growing number of tent cities everywhere
Nope, as UBI and other schemes would kick the can for the last un-possible leg, upto ~15yrs.. Meanwhile lets expect few more debt doublings with no particular concern..
A statistic to watch in the advanced economies (advanced on the road to perdition!) is the % of the working population needing welfare payments to make their lives viable: effectively a form of UBI by another name.
Welfare payments are even taken into account in arranging mortgages in the UK – an astonishing state of affairs!
They are, it appears, deemed to be more dependable and regular than income from employment……
I suspect that this can all be fudged and faked for another decade or so.
This is the Golden Age, as far as we are concerned, and we should enjoy it!
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/03/19/porton-down-scientists-under-extreme-pressure-confirm-nerve-gas-russian.html
The Russian rhetoric is reaching a fever pitch.
Hysteria.
https://www.clivemaund.com/article.php?id=4598
Come now…. the MSM would NOT lie to us….. of course Putin is behind this!!!! It’s on the teevee… the newspapers… the interweb… it’s everywhere!!! I bet if I had a teevee and I turned on CNN or BBC … I would be hammered every 15 minutes with The Truth about this story….
Oh I see usually they lie… but on some issues they don’t lie… like the sports scores… and there’s that other thing…. that cannot be mentioned… ____ ____ ing.
I understand now — all lies except these two things…. my world is so much simpler now… no need to think… just let the MSM tell me what to think
🙂
And now Google announced today that they are stepping up their censoring of what they (Google) deem is fake news.
So CNN… BBC… NYT … etc… will not longer be clogging up FB feeds…..
like a friend of mine said about a colleague that occasionally stretched the truth: “How can someone be a part-time liar?”
Backyard butchers and vigilante farmers: stock rustling on the rise in New Zealand
The thick swarm of black flies hanging above the backyard of the rural property was the first tip-off. The metallic stench of weeks-old animal blood was another.
“There were dead animals, offal and blood everywhere, spread out on an exposed concrete slab with people walking through it and birds flying through,” says Gary Orr.
“None of the carcasses were hung, they were just lying on the open slab after being skinned and gutted, completely in contact with everything. And there was no hand-washing, no cleaning of knives or equipment. It was horrific, like a charnel house.”
The butchery was processing illegal meat and its customer list ran into the hundreds.
For Orr, whose title is the rather benign-sounding “compliance manager” for the ministry for primary industries (MPI), the discovery was an all too familiar one.
Bovine bother: 500 cows stolen in New Zealand’s biggest cattle farm theft
Across New Zealand an age old-crime is flourishing as farms that were once family-run sell up to corporations, meaning there are fewer people living in rural communities and keeping an eye on the land.
But in these backyard butchers it is not just the method of killing animals and handling meat that is illegal, but the way the stock is sourced as well.
Last year thousands of valuable farm animals were poached from isolated farms around the country, some to be sold illegally to other farms but most to be butchered in blackmarket meat operations, which kill and sell everything from chickens to goats to horses.
“It is a growing problem for us,” says Orr, who investigated 60 complaints regarding the Animal Products Act in 2016. Backyard butcheries were a significant problem that was becoming more prevalent every year , he said.
“Times are tough for some parts of our population and we are an increasingly multicultural society, who may have no issue eating horse meat for example. When the price of blackmarket meat is half of what you’d normally pay, that can be very tempting.”
Although small-scale, opportunistic grabs of half a dozen sheep or cows are relatively common, police and MPI say sophisticated gangs with links to organised crime are increasingly mounting well-planned raids on farms around New Zealand, in which hundreds and sometimes thousands of stock are stolen in a single hit.
Only a tiny proportion of stolen stock processed by illegal butchers is done in a hygienic way , says Orr, and very few are killed humanely (stunning them with electricity), instead slitting their throats without sedation or shooting them in the head with firearms.
The treatment of the stolen animals while they await slaughter is also abhorrent, says Orr.
The thieves – by the very nature of targeting big, live and unpredictable animals – are not quiet or discreet and their heists often involve a number of people with full-size cattle trucks in the middle of the night.
Yet despite their trucks teeming with snorting, stamping, terrified animals, none have been caught in the act, and no one has been charged for the mysterious, major hauls of 2016.
Federated Farmers rural security spokesman Rick Powdrell calls these guys “the professionals”, and believes organised crime groups are responsible for the 500 dairy cows stolen from a Canterbury dairy farm in August, and the 1,400 lambs taken from a Whanganui property in November.
Both hauls are believed to be the largest sheep and cattle thefts in New Zealand’s history. The estimated cost of the stolen cattle was nearly NZ$1m, while the stolen lambs were valued around NZ$120,000.
Cows in a paddock, alongside Federated Farmers rural security spokesman Rick Powdrell
Federated Farmers rural security spokesman Rick Powdrell has called the gangs ‘the professionals’. Photograph: Federated Farmers
“When you have a lot of animals in a big dairying operation, the owners can be quite removed from the day-to-day management of the property, they are basically office workers,” says Powdrell. “And with rural communities so decimated now there are no longer the eyes and ears on the ground to watch out for suspicious behaviour.”
The Federated Farmers security survey of 2016 (which had 1,200 respondents) found 26% of Kiwi farmers had stock stolen in the last five years and of those 75% were not covered by an insurance claim. The survey also showed that 60% did not report the crime to the police, saying they felt the police were not interested in rural crime, didn’t have the resources to investigate it and convictions were rare.
Senior sergeant Alasdair Macmillan of the New Zealand police agrees that stock thefts are “greatly underreported” and says shame can be a factor in farmers not wanting to highlight their losses combined with the fact they don’t believe police will take their thefts seriously.
“We think the majority of stock thefts – when it’s large scale, in the hundreds – is going towards blackmarket meat operations, and we definitely take that seriously because organised crime groups sell meat like any other commodity; the same as drugs, the same as other stolen goods. When pinching 12 cows can net you a quick NZ$12,000, that’s an easy way to make cash fast.”
The situation is so bad in some communities that farmers have started armed night patrols to protect their property from poachers.
“We do hear of farmers running around in their vehicles with a shotgun, hoping like hell they can find these guys to blow their windows out. When your property is repeatedly hit it can be very frustrating, particularly if you feel like it isn’t a priority for the police. But that approach is extremely dangerous, and it is putting people’s lives at risk.”
In Whanganui all anyone talked of this holiday season was the 1,400 stolen lambs, a huge haul that would have taken two full-size stock trucks and a number of hours to complete. “The more we think about it the bigger the mystery gets,” said Harry Matthews, the Whanganui president for Federated Farmers. “How did they make 1,400 lambs just disappear? It is something that will play on that farmer’s mind for the rest of his days.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/01/backyard-butchers-and-vigilante-farmers-stock-rustling-on-the-rise-in-new-zealand
damn this remind of Venezuela
btw is new Zealand economic situation is this bad that people have to steal the cattle from farms
I agree.
By the way, copyright laws discourage copying whole articles. It might be better to only copy three or four paragraphs.
“The thick swarm of black flies hanging above the backyard of the rural property was the first tip-off. The metallic stench of weeks-old animal blood was another.
“There were dead animals, offal and blood everywhere, spread out on an exposed concrete slab with people walking through it and birds flying through,” says Gary Orr.”
Sounds like Fast residence.
This reaffirms that my decision to move off the doomstead to the joys of central otago…. is the right one…. NZ will be no utopian paradise post BAU….
Armed gangs will be headed to where the food is …. organic prepper farms… cattle and sheep ranches… and they’ll be killing any animals that are not already dead when the various medicines used to keep herds healthy are not available….
In terms of the economy in NZ… it is a very expensive place to live… groceries are much more expensive than in say Canada or the US…. as is petrol… tradespeople also command top dollar … a regulation heavy society also pushes up costs…
So if you are an unskilled person — making ends meet can be very difficult…. there is a great deal of poverty in this country… and poverty breeds desperation
I will take this opportunity to announce that Fast Eddy Enterprises has partnered with Heisenberg Co. and will begin importing automated machine guns and selling these exclusively through Farmlands shops from April 1st. Cattle and sheep rustlers.. beware….