The COVID-19 story keeps developing. At first, everyone listened to epidemiologists telling us that a great deal of social distancing, and even the closing down of economies, would be helpful. After trying these things, we ended up with a huge number of people out of work and protests everywhere. We discovered the models that were provided were not very predictive. We are also finding that a V-shaped recovery is not possible.
Now, we need to figure out what actions to take next. How vigorously should we be fighting COVID-19? The story is more complex than most people understand. These are some of the issues I see:
[1] The share of COVID-19 cases that can be expected to end in death seems to be much lower than most people expect.
Most people assume that the ratios of deaths to cases by age group, computed using reported cases, such as those included in the Johns Hopkins Database, give a good indication of the chance of death a person faces if a person catches COVID-19. In fact, the cases reported to this database are far from representative of all cases; they tend to be the more severe cases. Cases with no symptoms, or only very slight symptoms, tend to be missed. The result is that ratios calculated directly from this database make people think their risk of death is far higher than it really is.
The US Center for Disease Control has published Planning Scenarios, based on information available on April 29, 2020.* Using this information, the CDC’s best estimate of the number of future deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms is as follows:
Ages 0 – 49 0.5 deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms
Ages 50-64 2.0 deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms
Ages 65+ 13.0 deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms
The CDC’s best estimate is that 35% of cases have no symptoms at all. Thus, if we were to include these cases without symptoms in the chart above, the chart would become:
Ages 0-49 0.5 deaths per 1,538 cases (including those without symptoms), or 0.3 deaths per 1000 cases with or without symptoms
Ages 50-64 1.3 deaths per 1000 cases with or without symptoms
Ages 65+ 8.5 deaths per 1000 cases with or without symptoms
A recent study of blood samples from 23 different parts of the world came to a similarly low estimate of the number of deaths per 1000 COVID-19 infections. It reported that among people who are less than 70 years old, the number of deaths per 1000 ranged from 0.0 to 2.3 per 1000, with a median of 0.4 deaths per 1000.
The same paper remarks,
COVID-19 seems to affect predominantly the frail, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized – as shown by high rates of infectious burden in nursing homes, homeless shelters, prisons, meat processing plants, and the strong racial/ethnic inequalities against minorities in terms of the cumulative death risk.
[2] There seem to be things we can do ourselves to reduce our personal chance of serious illness or death.
General good health is protective against getting a bad case of COVID-19. Thus, anything that we can do in terms of a good diet and exercise is likely helpful. Staying inside for weeks on end in the hope of preventing exposure to COVID-19 is probably not helpful.
Continued exposure to huge amounts of disinfectants and hand sanitizers is likely not to be helpful either. Our bodies depend on healthy microbiomes, and products such as these adversely affect our microbiomes. They kill good and bad bacteria alike and may leave harmful residues. It is easy to scale back our personal use of these products.
There are recent indications that vitamin D is likely to be protective in reducing both the incidence of COVID-19 and the disease’s severity. Web MD reports:
Several groups of researchers from different countries have found that the sickest patients often have the lowest levels of vitamin D, and that countries with higher death rates had larger numbers of people with vitamin D deficiency than countries with lower death rates.
Experts say healthy blood levels of vitamin D may give people with COVID-19 a survival advantage by helping them avoid cytokine storm, when the immune system overreacts and attacks your body’s own cells and tissues.
While we don’t know for certain that vitamin D is helpful, there is certainly enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that it would likely be worthwhile to raise vitamin D levels to the amount recommended by the National Institute of Health (30 nmol/L or higher). People with dark skin living in areas away from the equator might especially be helped by this strategy, since dark skin reduces vitamin D production.
Masks seem to be helpful in preventing the spread of infection. A person’s own immune system can handle some level of germs. If two people meeting together both wear masks, the combination of masks can perhaps reduce the level of germs to within the amount the immune system can handle. Our immune systems are built to handle a barrage of small attacks by viruses and bacteria. Continued “practice” with relatively low combinations of good and bad bacteria (as occur with masks) will tend to build up our bodies’ natural defenses.
We see dentists and dental hygienists wearing face shields. These shields are readily available over the internet and can be worn with a mask or by themselves. We don’t yet know precisely how much protection they provide, but early models suggest that they can be helpful in two directions: (a) preventing the wearer’s droplets from harming others and (b) reducing the droplet exposure from others. Thus, they may be a worthwhile way to reduce exposure to the virus causing COVID-19, even when others are not wearing masks.
[3] The medical community’s ability to treat COVID-19 cases keeps improving.
There seem to be many small changes that are improving treatment of COVID-19. If patients are having trouble getting enough oxygen, having them lie on their stomachs seems to increase their blood oxygen levels. The cost of this change is pretty much zero, but it keeps people out of the ICU longer.
Originally, planners thought that ventilators would be needed for patients with COVID-19, since ventilators are often used on pneumonia patients. Experience has shown, however, that oxygen plus something like a CPAP machine often works better and is less expensive.**
The simple change of not sending recuperating patients to nursing home-type facilities for the last stages of care has proven helpful, as well. Many of these patients can still infect others, leading to infections in long-term care facilities. Tests to tell whether patients are truly over the disease do not seem to be very accurate.
Last week, it was announced that treatment with an inexpensive common steroid could reduce deaths of people on ventilators by one-third. It could also reduce deaths of those requiring only oxygen treatment by 20%. Using this treatment should significantly reduce deaths, at little cost.
We can expect improvements in treatments to continue as doctors experiment with existing treatments, and as drug companies work on new solutions. Looking at cumulative historical mortality rates tends to overlook the huge learning curve that is taking place, allowing mortality rates to be lower.
[4] More doubts are being raised about quickly finding a vaccine that prevents COVID-19.
The public would like to think that a vaccine solution is right around the corner. Vaccine promoters such as Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates would like to encourage this belief. Unfortunately, there are quite a few obstacles to getting a vaccine that actually works for any length of time:
(a) Antibodies for coronaviruses tend not to stay around for very long. A recent study suggests that even as soon as eight weeks, a significant share of COVID-19 patients (40% of those without symptoms; 12.9% of those with symptoms) had lost all immunity. A vaccine will likely face this same challenge.
(b) Vaccines may not work against mutations. Beijing is now fighting a new version of COVID-19 that seems to have been imported from Europe in food. Early indications are that people who caught the original Wuhan version of the COVID-19 virus will not be immune to the mutated version imported from Europe.
Vaccines that are currently under development use the Wuhan version of the virus. The catch is that the version of COVID-19 now circulating in the United States, Europe and perhaps elsewhere is mostly not the Wuhan type.
(c) There is a real concern that a vaccine against one version of COVID-19 will make a person’s response to a mutation of COVID-19 worse, rather than better. It has been known for many years that Dengue Fever has this characteristic; it is one of the reasons that there is no vaccine for Dengue Fever. The earlier SARS virus (which is closely related to the COVID-19 virus) has this same issue. Preliminary analysis suggests that the virus causing COVID-19 seems to have this characteristic, as well.
In sum, getting a vaccine that actually works against COVID-19 is likely to be a huge challenge. Instead of expecting a silver bullet in the form of a COVID-19 vaccine, we probably need to be looking for a lot of silver bee-bees that will hold down the impact of the illness. Hopefully, COVID-19 will someday disappear on its own, but we have no assurance of this outcome.
[5] The basic underlying issue that the world economy faces is overshoot, caused by too high a population relative to underlying resources.
When an economy is in overshoot, the big danger is collapse. The characteristics of overshoot leading to collapse include the following:
- Very great wage disparity; too many people are very poor
- Declining health, often due to poor nutrition, making people vulnerable to epidemics
- Increasing use of debt, to make up for inadequate wages and profits
- Falling commodity prices because too few people can afford these commodities and goods made from these commodities
- Gluts of commodities, causing farmers to plow under crops and oil to be put into storage
Thus, pandemics are very much to be expected when an economy is in overshoot.
One example of collapse is that following the Black Death (1348-1350) epidemic in Europe. The collapse killed 60% of Europe’s population and dropped Britain’s population from close to 5 million to about 2 million.
Figure 1. Britain’s population, 1200 to 1700. Chart by Bloomberg using Federal Reserve of St. Louis data.
We might say that there was a U-shaped population recovery, which took about 300 years.
A later example that almost led to collapse was the period between 1914 and 1945. This was a period of shrinking international trade, indicating that something was truly wrong. On Figure 2 below, the WSJ calls its measure of international trade the “Trade Openness Index.” The period 1914-1945 is highlighted as being somewhat like today.
Figure 2. The Trade Openness Index is an index based on the average of world imports and exports, divided by world GDP. Chart by Wall Street Journal.
Many of the issues in the 1914-1945 timeframe were coal related. World War I took place when coal depletion became a problem in Britain. The issue at that time was wages that were too low for coal miners because the price of coal would not rise very high. Higher coal prices were needed to offset the impact of depletion, but high coal prices were not affordable by citizens.
The Pandemic of 1918-1919 killed far more people than either World War I or COVID-19.
World War II came about at the time coal depletion became a problem in Germany.
Figure 3. Figure by author describing peak coal timing compared to World War I and World War II.
The problem of inadequate energy resources finally ended when World War II ramped up demand through more debt and through more women entering the labor force for the first time. In response, the US began pumping oil out of the ground at a faster rate. Instead of depending on coal alone, the world began depending on a combination of oil and coal as energy resources. The ratio of population to energy resources was suddenly brought back into balance again, and collapse was averted!
[6] We are now in another period of overshoot of population relative to resources. The critical resource this time is oil. The alternatives we have aren’t suited to fulfilling our most basic need: the growing and transportation of food. They act as add-ons that are lost if oil is lost.
If we look back at Figure 2 above, it shows that since 2008, the world has again fallen into a period of shrinking imports and exports, which is a sign of “not enough energy resources to go around.” We are also experiencing many of the other characteristics of an overshoot economy that I mentioned in Section 5 above.
Figure 4 shows world energy consumption by type of energy through 2019, using recently published data by BP. The “Other” combination in Figure 4 includes nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, solar, and other smaller categories such as geothermal energy, wood pellets, and sawdust burned for fuel.
Figure 4. World energy consumption by fuel, based on BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Oil has been rising at a steady pace; coal consumption has been close to level since about 2012. Natural gas and “Other” seem to be rising a little faster in the most recent few years.
If we divide by world population, the trend in world energy consumption per capita by type is as follows:
Figure 5. World Per Capita Energy Consumption based on BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy
Many people would like to think that the various energy sources are substitutable, but this is not really the case, as we approach limits of a finite world.
One catch is that there are very few stand-alone energy resources. Most energy resources only work within a framework provided by other energy sources. Wood that is picked up from the forest floor can work as a stand-alone energy source. Wind can almost be used as a stand-alone energy source, if it is used to power a simple sail boat or a wooden windmill. Water can almost be used as a stand-alone energy source, if it can be made to turn a wooden water wheel.
Coal, when its use was ramped up, enabled the production of both concrete and steel. It allowed modern hydroelectric dams to be built. It allowed steam engines to operate. It truly could be used as a stand-alone energy source. The main obstacle to the extraction of coal was keeping the cost of extraction low enough, so that, even with transportation, buyers could afford to purchase the coal.
Oil, similarly, can be a stand-alone energy solution because it is very flexible, dense, and easily transported. Or it can be paired with other types of less-expensive energy, to make it go further. We can see our dependence on oil by how level energy consumption per capita is in Figure 5 since the early 1980s. Growth in population seems to depend upon the amount of oil available.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, the economy is a self-organizing system. If there isn’t enough of the energy products upon which the economy primarily depends, the system tends to change in very strange ways. Countries become more quarrelsome. People decide to have fewer children or they become more susceptible to pandemics, bringing population more in line with energy resources.
The problem with natural gas and with the electricity products that I have lumped together as “Other” is that they are not really stand-alone products. They cannot grow food or build roads. They cannot power international jets. They cannot build wind turbines or solar panels. They cannot put natural gas pipelines in place. They can only exist in a complex environment which includes oil and perhaps coal (or other cheaper energy products).
We are kidding ourselves if we think we can transition to modern fuels that are low in carbon emissions. Without high prices, oil and coal that are in the ground will tend to stay in the ground permanently. This is the serious obstacle that we are up against. Without oil and coal, natural gas and electricity products will quickly become unusable.
[7] A major problem with COVID-19 related shutdowns is the fact that they lead to very low commodity prices, including oil prices.
Figure 6. Inflation-adjusted monthly average oil prices through May 2020. Amounts are Brent Spot Oil Prices, as published by the EIA. Inflation adjustment is made using the CPI-Urban Index.
Oil is the primary type of energy used in growing and transporting food. It is used in many essential processes, including in the production of electricity. If its production is to continue, its price must be both high enough for oil producers and low enough for consumers.
The problem that we have been encountering since 2008 (the start of the latest cutback in trade in Figure 2) is that oil prices have been falling too low for producers. Now, in 2020, oil production is beginning to fall. This is happening because producing companies cannot afford to extract oil at current prices; governments of oil exporting countries cannot collect enough taxes at current prices. They hope that by reducing oil supply, prices will rise again.
If extraordinarily low oil prices persist, a calamity similar to the one that “Peak Oilers” have worried about will certainly occur: Oil supply will begin dropping. In fact, the drop will likely be much more rapid than most Peak Oilers have imagined, because the drop will be caused by low prices, rather than the high prices that they imagined would occur.
Amounts which are today shown as “proven reserves” can be expected to disappear because they will not be economic to extract. Governments of oil exporting countries seem likely to be overthrown because tax revenue from oil is their major source of revenue for programs such as food subsidies and jobs programs. When this disappears, governments of oil exporters are forced to cut back, lowering the standard of living of their citizens.
[8] What our strategy should be from now on is not entirely clear.
Of course, one path is straight into collapse, as happened after the Black Death of 1348-1352 (Figure 1). In fact, the carrying capacity of Britain might still be about 2 million. Its current population is about 68 million, so this would represent a population reduction of about 97%.
Other countries would experience substantial population reductions as well. The population decline would reflect many causes of death besides direct deaths from COVID-19; they would reflect the impacts of collapsing governments, inadequate food supply, polluted water supplies, and untreated diseases of many kinds.
If a large share of the population stays hidden in their homes trying to avoid COVID, it seems to me that we are most certainly heading straight into collapse. Supply lines for many kinds of goods and services will be broken. Oil prices and food prices will stay very low. Farmers will plow under crops, trying to raise prices. Gluts of oil will continue to be a problem.
If we try to transition to renewables, this leads directly to collapse as well, as far as I can see. They are not robust enough to stand on their own. Prices of oil and other commodities will fall too low and gluts will occur. Renewables will only last as long as (a) the overall systems can be kept in good repair and (b) governments can support continued subsidies.
The only approach that seems to keep the system going a little longer would seem to be to try to muddle along, despite COVID-19. Open up economies, even if the number of COVID-19 cases is higher and keeps rising. Tell people about the approaches they can use to limit their exposure to the virus, and how they can make their immune systems stronger. Get people started raising their vitamin D levels, so that they perhaps have a better chance of fighting the disease if they get COVID-19.
With this approach, we keep as many people working for as long as possible. Life will go on as close to normal, for as long as it can. We can perhaps put off collapse for a bit longer. We don’t have a lot of options open to us, but this one seems to be the best of a lot of poor options.
Notes:
*The CDC estimates are estimates of future deaths per 1000 cases. Thus, they probably reflect the learning curve that has already taken place. It is unlikely that they reflect the benefit of the new steroid treatment mentioned in Section 3, because this finding occurred after April 29.
**I have been told that disease spread can be a problem when using CPAP machines, however. Using ventilators at very low pressure settings seems also to be a solution.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/three-months-in-these-patients-are-still-ravaged-by-covids-fallout-11593612004
The article is behind a subscription wall, which is an invasion of privacy i never accept. So could someone else answer the question: are they suffering from the disease, or from the cure?
Sorry Robert. I will check that this doesn’t happen with future links.
The article is about a group of patients, about 80% of whom are women, who experience a variety of symptoms, including fatigue and headache, long after COVID-19 symptoms should have disappeared. “Some long-haulers report having previous autoimmune disorders or prior bad reactions to viruses like Epstein-Barr, which causes mononucleosis.” Some of the patients test positive for COVID-19, but doctors don’t think they are really contagious.
According to the article,
Other theories are also being explored.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/europes-leaked-hydrogen-strategy-very-ambitious
But these guys say a hydrogen economy is not workable.
https://phys.org/news/2006-12-hydrogen-economy-doesnt.html
But of course what they really need is a monorail!
Very funny with the monorail – it is called Disneyland where the ride is free but the Coke is $4.50/bottle.
Dennis L.
I’ve ridden the Disneyworld monorail. Silly contraption. And I lived through the (non) story of the Pittsburgh monorail. This was supposed to connect the city to the airport, which was sited at the other end of a narrow road tunnel and so was a nightmare to get to. The idiots planning the system wanted to build a brand new monorail (later changed to magnetic levitation), paid for by the Federal Government. Not a prayer that would happen.
But the silliest part of the whole plan is that there existed a complete railway right of way from downtown to the airport perimeter, that could have been brought back into service at a fraction of the cost. And even a US train could have made that journey in 20 minutes.
Once again, our modern obsession with ever more elaborate and more expensive technology killed off a cheap, lower tech, and rational idea.
“But of course what they really need is a monorail!”
Were you sent here by the devil?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM
Cheers,
-GBV
Those of you with an economic background may know the historical “Mefo bills” of Hjalmar Schacht which allowed Hitler to arm.
I wonder if our current rescue-the-rich-policy is in fact not a comparable instrument to hide credits in a sink which is equivalent to central banks printing money without creating inflation.
If that is the case, our national accounts would be false. What is considered a growing economy would be only the effect of credit expansion.
If we are looking for possible signals for systemic organisation of lower complexity that might be an important issue.
If you invest in a bakery you need energy to expand your business. If you invest into raising assets, like real estate with growing values, spending more energy is not necessarily the case.
So the idea behind is that “real economy” needs energy to grow while “financial economy” creates surplus without energy.
If that were the case we had to rescue the rich (who dont consume but invest and thus drive prices) instead of fueling demand (as the Keynesianists suggest). At least that would be a steering instrument to decouple economic growth and energy spent (which is the declared goal of e.g. the EU commission).
It would also mean that the standard of live is to sink as it requires real things made from real energy.
Interesting ideas, thanks.
Dennis L.
the value of ‘real estate’ still requires energy to grow because ‘real estate’ itself is a function of energy input, however remotely.
you build or invest in, an office block, apartment block or factory, but without the energy-force of the people working/living there, (producing more than the original building is worth) it remains an empty shell.
yes, residual ‘value’ remains in it, and might support the idea of ‘growth’ but that can exist only as long as there is a likely ‘promise’ of future energy input. Otherwise it diminishes steadily, until the original owners of the building lose interest, go bankrupt or just disappear and the building becomes derelict and falls down
Norman, perhaps that is explained by using different depreciation schedules. As I understand Jan it is similar to flipping houses, dress them up a bit, have excess credit in the system and sell to the next sucker, skim cash off and purchase a lifestyle. It is consistent with the increase in debt seen. The underlying asset does depreciate but it is valued differently monetarily.
In our area, there is a shortage of “inventory” in Realtors’ terms, prices are increasing considerably, fewer new homes are being built as it is too costly to build. A 2×4 has a long life span, hundred’s of years with no termites of course.
The economy is not growing, but the prices of existing, useful items are, add leverage and flipping works until it doesn’t.
Dennis L.
I take your point Dennis
but every time a house is ‘flipped’ it requires someone to come along with the belief, backed by actual cash, or if not cash then means to take out a mortgage on the property itself, that the property will go on rising in value
That mortgage may eventually be defaulted on of course, and the property repossessed, but that just means that the process has to start over.
eventually this process must come to an end because no one will be able to find the energy resources to support the ever-rising prices in property, and the fantasy of infinite growth is exposed for what it is
One has to wonder about that. The last real estate failure in 2008 many people lived in a foreclosed home(don’t split hairs please, they lived in the home without payments) for approximately a year as well as not paying off the mortgage. It was cheaper than rent. Someone took a loss, but not the first seller(hopefully), not the purchaser who defaulted and not the next person to own the house purchased at a lower cost who has now recouped the monetary cost in increased valuations – same house.
Most of us here pay our bills, but many do not and this includes large industry and a certain country in which I live that looks to be spending $4T more this year than it takes in. Is is possible that in a declining economy we are the suckers?
Your fourth paragraph, what about a reset?
Dennis L.
People have asked me for a long time, “Should I pay off my debts ahead of peak oil?” My general response has been that this is not necessary. The lenders are as likely as not the ones who lose out in this contest. Governments won’t want to put everyone out on the street.
On the other hand, I personally have never had much debt. What debt we had, paid off quickly. Spending less than your income has some benefits. Peace of mind is one of them. Another benefit is knowing that you could easily keep up with the Joneses next door if you wanted to; this is just a contest you choose not to be involved in.
“… you could easily keep up with the Joneses next door if you wanted to; this is just a contest you choose not to be involved in.”
Overcoming simian status anxiety is hard but, as the song says, the race is long and in the end it is only with yourself:
I’m 65, and without my 63-year-old iconoclast of a wife, I would never have used the T.H.I.N.K.E.R. escape plan from the herd existence: two high incomes, no kids, early retirement [permanently at 47 and 45]. Also, discovering Talleyrand’s comment helped clinch the deal for us: “A married man with a family will do anything for money.” [just the way the System has always liked it]
“My general response has been that this is not necessary. The lenders are as likely as not the ones who lose out in this contest.”
For their sake, I hope you are correct Gail. Also hopeful we do not see the return of debtor’s prison and/or forced military service for the indebted…
Cheers,
-GBV
Luke, I didn’t know the THINKER plan, but it was in fact my plan since 18yo.Never managed to be more than a TLINKER though. Wich is also nice, even if the early retirment part had to be degrade to “how to make a living in semi-retirement mode”.
JMS, congratulations on your prescience! We didn’t exactly earn a very “high” income either; we did, however, live frugally in order to retire. Children were never an option since we took “Limits to Growth” seriously.
Joe Dominguez, a man who helped many others avoid debt enslavement, was a major inspiration to us.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/27/us/joe-dominguez-58-championed-a-simple-and-frugal-life-style.html
I can see several homes in my neighborhood that are being fixed up to be flipped.
We saw this depreciation game play out in Japanese cities during the 1990s.
If the City of London “emigrates”, there won’t be nearly enough lucrative business left there to support current notions of real estate value. On the upside, first time buyers may get some bargains.
On the other upside, maybe London will come to its senses and demolish every modern building taller than six storeys. A rule we inherited from the Romans, and that we should never have abandoned.
if the Romans had figured out elevators and revolving doors—they would have been there 2k years ago
Although in the UK, the general rule is: ‘If it’s a good price, the neighbours are bad’.
The Bubble has modified that though, ridiculous prices for new builds and refurbishments in bad and unsafe areas.
For Norman: The Romans didn’t have to figure out elevators; the world’s first elevator was built into the Pharos of Alexandria. With a small quirk: you ascended the lighthouse (at its time the tallest building in the world) by climbing the stairs, and descended in the elevator. The counterweight for the descent was the wood that powered the lighthouse, and it was considered a civic duty to visit the Pharos and help lift the wood.
Good point! As a homeowner, I know that there is a need for a constant flow of products that are only available with energy supplies to keep my home from literally falling apart. We need treatments to keep termites from eating away the supports. We need new roofs. Also, new windows and frames, when the condensation on the windows leads to rotting frames. We need work done to keep water away from the foundation of our homes, or to keep it from seeping into the basements. If somehow a window gets broken, it needs to be replaced with a similar one.
Other real estate has a similar problem. If new, socially distant, requirements are put in place, these by themselves may lead to a reduction in the value of the building.
We tend not view a building as a kind of machine needing a timely flow of spare parts drawn from an intricate web of suppliers,, but modern houses are just that.
I think New York City is done. Huge amounts of empty retail and office space abandoned now with all the lawlessness (DeBasio’s criminal justice reform) and the protests/riots, and the upper and middle classes fleeing (for good) New York is a catastrophe. Just wait until buildings start burning out of control, and depreciating materially, decaying, etc. If you are there and have not wised up, get out while you can.
I agree
it hit me when I did a quick tour of Detroit last year—grassed streets where houses used to be
those houses once had value, and owners saw that value as permanent.
Now there is nothing. Nature has taken back her own
Time and again the words of Shelley hit brutally hard:
Look on my works, O ye mighty and despair
FWIW, The Daily Mail was suggesting the same the other day:
“Nightmare in New York: How Covid-19, BLM protests and a liberal mayor are turning the city into a no-go zone as murders skyrocket, shops are looted and 500,000 middle-class residents flee.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8490367/amp/How-coronavirus-BLM-protests-liberal-mayor-doing-Bin-Laden-never-could.html
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias.
The name is a Greek rendering of “Usr maat ra”, one of the titles of Rameses II. (Power of Truth of Ra) The statue fragments were acquired by the British Museum in 1816
I must have read those lines a thousand times–yet at every fresh reading, they never fail to twist your emotions
It is beautiful, in a way. Put firmly in our place.
I like to contemplate the vanished village near here, just the shadowy vestiges of ditches and house platforms in the grass – once ‘the place in a clearing in the woods belonging to Madda’, presumably a Saxon.
Did he have to wield the axe himself when he arrived after Rome’s collapse? That his name lasted might have surprised him.
might have been a Saudi cow importer,
Madda Sahattar
Norman, also the city assumed those houses were going to be a ‘machine’ for generating tax revenue. I don’t know when listers and municipal and state pols are going to get the message.
The main storefront in my town used to house a “Five and Dime” (old style “Woolworth’s” or “Ben Franklin”, one step up from the old “general store”). It’s been valued by the town at $799k, but it has been for sale for a number of years now, with an initial asking price of half that. There is no way on God’s Green Earth that anyone moving into that space (even for free) will be able to generate enough revenue to pay the property taxes at that valuation. The inflation in asset values is thus doubly problematic.
I’m not sure if the owner is getting any relief.. would be interesting to find out.
owners of real estate get fixated on what was
and can never accept that times have changed
Order is ultimately enforced by the edge of the sword and the morality enforced by Christianity.
Violence is the best way to end gentrification as much as gentrification is enforced by it also.
I agree.
It is the lack of real things that will be the problem. A replacement part for a broken elevator may not be available. A computer from China may not be available. There may be more empty shelves in grocery stores.
Failing businesses in the supply chain are a particular problem. If there is not enough cargo space on boats/airplanes, not as much can be shipped.
Schacht was a very interesting guy. After the war he was involved in setting up the Reserve Bank of Indonesia and was an early entrepreneur and big wheel in the palm oil industry in Indonesia in the early 1960s.
A real survivor – teflon in fact – and clearly very strongly connected to the very highest ranks of the global Elders (as FE would call them).
The people who really ran the Third Reich, but never actually killed anyone directly, did very well indeed on the whole post-war. A disgraceful, but not surprising, tale.
If the topic is “hiding money” then this video is relevant. This fellow, Mark Skidmore, is a Professor of Accounting at a US university. He says that there are tens of trillions of dollars hidden out there and that the debt is vastly bigger than is admitted.
The implications of $90T debt seem v.v. bad.
If that is the case, our national accounts would be false.
Yes, the national accounts are entirely false. according to Michigan State Economics Professor, Mark Skidmore. And he says that the rules of the FASAB, the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, have been changed to hide the relevant criminal antics. USA Watchdog had a Youtube show on this on 27 June 2020.
FASABY 56 was quietly voted for by both sides of Congress while everyone was distracted by the ongoing sexual accusations being made against Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh during his confirmation. If you’re going to print money, you’ve got to find a way to hide it.
I found a blog about the REPO bills with some nice graphs. They can be found at this link:
Hjalmar Schacht, Mefo Bills and the Restoration of the German Economy 1933-1939
They seem to have worked. GDP and inflation turned positive.
https://fixingtheeconomists.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/nazi-gdp-inflation.png
“The Canadian industry has borrowed heavily to survive a series of catastrophes, and is facing C$6 billion in refinancing in the next six months, the Bank of Canada said in May.
“This year’s maturing energy debts are the most on record for the fourth year in a row and a more than 40% increase over 2019, according to Refinitiv data. They are an existential threat for some companies during the worst industry crisis in decades.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-canada-debt-focus/record-debts-come-due-for-canadian-oil-patch-after-five-years-of-crisis-idUKKBN2460DR
“The Covid-19 pandemic is having a severe impact on Argentina’s shale production, with the country in lockdown and following the slump in oil prices as a result of the collapse in global demand, according to a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
““The pandemic and the oil price collapse could be the “final straw that sends Argentina’s ailing ‘Dead Cow’ to slaughter,” the report’s authors said, referring to the Vaca Muerta shale play… The fall in demand has led to drilling being ceased, and the number of rigs operating in the country has fallen to zero.”
https://www.leadersleague.com/en/news/latam-daily-briefing-covid-19-halts-argentina-s-shale-output-brazil-begins-vaccine-trials-peru-to-emerge-from-quarantine-on-july
I expect that Argentina’s shale is also really too expensive to extract to be profitable at anything like today’s prices.
It sounds like some version of “extend and pretend” is the likely outcome. It also sounds like at least of this debt is in the form of bonds.
The conservative/green government of Austria (ca. 8 Mio inhabitants) plans a legal prohibition of private oil and gas heating to fight CO2.
https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000118522394/ende-mit-schrecken-ausstieg-aus-oel-und-gasheizung-rueckt-naeher
While the industry requests not to destroy the gas infrastructure which could be used for bio gas and hydrogen, wood pellet heating and heat pumps will become the new standard technologies with this decision.
In the forum – derStandard.at is famous for it’s positive forum culture – people discuss the following points:
1. Wood pellets are made from illegal harvestings in Romania
2. Wooden stoves lead to much more visible pollution than gas heating
3. People cannot afford electricity for heating
4. People cannot afford 20.000 EURs for a new heating, especially pensionists living in their own real estate (in Austria most people live in rented appartments)
5. Bio gas is not available in the needed quantities
6. While the prices of photovoltaic have fallen and people are quite satisfied it does not produce enough for heating purposes
7. People say they will buy a wood stove for cooking and heating and sleep in winter in the kitchen like their grandparents did
derStandard.at is a politically left-intellectual daily newspaper in Austria, usually open to environmental matters. People in the forum discuss what has been topic since years in Gail’s special interest blog. People dont see a connection to peakoil but Gail’s predictions are arriving the European mainstream.
Not to be able to renovate the house with state-of-the-art technology and reducing the living space to the heated kitchen is a lower complexity of systemic organisation.
Of course a smaller footprint is a desirable task. But here it comes as a way back to traditional restrictions.
The idea of the Green New Deal is, to create productivity surplusses by green technology. That cannot be seen here.
Not mentioned here: People fear raising energy prices and a wood stove is a cheap investment (around 1000,- EURs incl. montage) into resilience.
As it seems this development is not sustainable: A new study says European wood harvesting increased by 50% and reduced the biomass by 70% already.
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-forest-harvesting-europe-threatens-climate.html
Solar energy for heating in winter simply doesn’t work. Not enough sunlight, even with lots of solar panels. Snow covering panels can be a problem as well.
Aha! A chance to be smug and signal green virtues.
Solar works well in winter here. A typical clear day at Winter Solstice = hot water + twice as much electricity as we use from the solar panels. Surplus goes back into the grid so the Electricity Co pays us each qtr.
If only I drove a hybrid or Tesla I’d be a green warrior extraordinaire!
Where do you live? Do you heat your home with solar? The issue is providing heat in winter.
Mid-north NSW. We have a wood-fired heater in the lounge, plus a wood-fired stove. Our house is well insulated and winter sun shines in, so it’s not hard to keep warm. Mid winter days rarely go below an 18C max, nights usually 6-9 with an occasional frost.
No shortage of wood as population density is about 1 person per 20 acres aroundabouts and much of the land is old dairy farms reverting to bush.
I’ve been planting fruit and nut trees like crazy since we arrived, but need another 5 years for them to generate enough food.
Our PV is grid connected, but we have a separate battery back up system, which is on the list to be upgraded.
Realistically though, despite all this if IC goes fully down the gurgler, I’ll be going with it.
Plenty of people here in Northern NSW Australia have stand alone PV systems. However, everyone that I know has a backup generator or grid connection. It is needed when the clouds come over for weeks.
Interesting, thanks for the news from Austria.
In a declining economic system, people won’t be able to afford the installation of the new -and inadequate – systems imposed on them for ideological reasons, certainly.
When the English aristocracy lacked the money and fuel to heat their huge houses during and after WW2, they ended up living in the servants’ small rooms or cottages, and hanging out in the kitchens a lot, too.
The should make a tv show about it. They could call it “Downstairs downstairs”.
“Now is the time for Africa to grow food… This Covid-19 crisis has also exposed the extreme fragility of the global food system.”
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/economy/2020/07/05/covid-19-now-is-the-time-for-africa-to-grow-food/
“The United Arab Emirates imported 4,500 dairy cows from Uruguay as part of a drive to boost food security with the coronavirus disrupting global supply chains.
“The shipment of Holstein cattle is the first of many, state-run news agency WAM reported Sunday.”
https://www.arabianbusiness.com/retail/449204-uae-buys-thousands-of-uruguay-dairy-cows-to-boost-food-security
I wonder what they will feed those cattle. Imported feed? But isn’t that dependent on global supply chains?
I think I have detected a flaw in their thinking.
But I’ll bet that somebody’s brother-in-law has connections in the cattle feed industry.
Saudis have been importing US alfalfa for a while… It’s a way of importing water, as well.
https://www.anderson-hay.com/import-alfalfa-hay-into-saudi-arabia
https://www.milkbusiness.com/article/saudi-arabia-next-alfalfa-import-king
one of my life’s ambitions might be to meet the genius who imports cows to saudi to ‘improve food security’. and point out that in a desert, cows have no food security
A few years ago, their plan was to grow wheat in Saudi Arabia. Of course, that acted to deplete the aquifer.
There is currently actually excess rain in the deserts of Saudi and North Africa occuring due to weather changes related to the ongoing and deepening solar minimum. North Africa may become the new world breadbasket in the future. That is the one bright spot in future food production for the world.
Quite correct. It won’t be long before Africans want to return to Africa from Europe. The Big Reset is because governments are going bankrupt. Bankrupt governments cannot support illegal immigration. Just wait for Europeans turning nationalist once they get hungry. It won’t be a pretty sight.
Too funny for words, isn’t it? Must be a big skim on the contract for someone ‘royal’.
They had a fascinating system for growing grass, where desalinated water was flooded on pasture twice a day, featured in a British farmers’ magazine a few years ago. You’re right – sounds no more sustainable than buying dairy products from British farmers.
Might as well use up that petroleum money while there is something to buy.
This comes after years of being encouraged to buy cheap US exports. It is hard to return to old ways.
Too bad parts of Africa overthrew its “White Farmers” because they were, um, White. Since then places like Zimbabwe have had trouble meeting production demand because the farmers who knew how to grow food have either been killed or moved out.
“A fire at Iran’s underground Natanz nuclear facility has caused significant damage…
“Iran’s top security body said on Friday that the cause of the fire that broke out on Thursday had been determined but would be announced later. Some Iranian officials have said it may have been cyber sabotage and one warned that Tehran would retaliate against any country carrying out such attacks.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-natanz/fire-at-irans-natanz-nuclear-facility-caused-significant-damage-spokesman-idUSKBN2460PM
“The Iranian rial fell to a new low against the US dollar on the unofficial market on Saturday, as the economy comes under pressure from the coronavirus pandemic and US sanctions…
“The rial’s decline has continued despite assurances from Iranian Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati last week that the bank had injected hundreds of millions of dollars to stabilise the currency market.”
http://www.gdnonline.com/Details/836976
It is hard to know what is going on in Iran. No one anywhere is doing very well.
“Cracks are appearing in China’s 21.3 trillion yuan (US$31 trillion) trust industry, a key component of the country’s shadow banking system, as fresh trouble at Sichuan Trust highlights growing risks in alternative funding for companies unable to access regular bank loans.”
https://www.scmp.com/economy/article/3091933/chinas-shadow-banking-system-under-spotlight-sichuan-trust-misses-payments
“Chinese regulators are urging struggling corporate bond issuers to seek voluntary debt restructuring in talks with their bondholders as a way to avoid default, as regulators last week issued new rules that seek to enforce investors’ protection amid rising defaults.”
https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3091716/chinas-central-bank-calls-struggling-companies-restructure-debt
“The recent turnaround in oil market sentiment was to a large extent due to China showing signs of demand recovering back to normalcy… Yet the intense market activity that both China’s state-owned giants and teapot refiners have demonstrated throughout April-May seems to be fizzling out.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/5-Signs-That-Record-Oil-Imports-From-China-Wont-Last.html
Tankers are piling up with crude oil. The amount already purchased will take quite a while to use.
Someone got the decimal place wrong in the conversion of China’s 21.3 trillion yuan trust industry to $US. One yuan is worth about $0.14, so 21.3 trillion yuan is about $3 trillion dollars, not US$31 trillion. China’s GDP was about $14.3 in 2019. Trust debt is still high, but not so absurdly high as the article sounded like.
“The giants of Wall Street and European banking are giving up their stronghold on London.
“In the coming months alone, Barclays Plc may ditch its investment bank’s headquarters in the capital; Credit Suisse Group AG is offloading nine floors of office space; and Morgan Stanley is reviewing its entire London footprint.
“And all of those moves were planned before the coronavirus hit. Now, with thousands of job cuts likely to follow what’s forecast to be the worst recession in three centuries, the tenants of the glass and steel towers that dominate the City of London and Canary Wharf may face an even bigger retreat.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-06/banks-are-ditching-london-offices-and-not-just-because-of-covid
“The risk of UK funds being frozen out of the European market at the end of the year has risen after Brexit negotiators missed a key milestone aimed at securing market access for the City of London.”
https://www.ft.com/content/4ab74408-48e8-499b-aaf1-4dcf0d661f88
“More than a quarter of the UK’s biggest listed companies and a third of large US public businesses spent more on dividends and buybacks in 2019 than they generated in net income, a move that has left many groups at greater risk of collapse.”
https://www.ft.com/content/b3acb829-be35-47aa-8642-fbbb171ca076
Dividends keep the shareholders happy and willing to vote for the management. Buybacks raise the share price and hence the compensation of those managers. That compensation is theirs free and clear, regardless of what happens next. If you have to desert a sinking ship, do so as a rich rat!
Good points!
London will be even worse off than New York City!
“Despite the first monthly double-digit increase, German industrial orders remain some 30% below their levels seen in the first quarter.”
https://think.ing.com/snaps/germany-new-orders-best-month-ever-not-yet-good-enough/
“Around one fifth of German companies (21%) believe their survival is threatened by the coronavirus crisis, Germany’s Ifo institute said on Monday, with travel agents, hotels and restaurants particularly concerned.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-economy/one-fifth-of-german-firms-fear-for-their-survival-amid-pandemic-ifo-idUKKBN2470HF
“Federal Reserve stress tests predicted large loan losses from European banks operating in the U.S. market, the Financial Times reported…
“Deutsche Bank AG is expected to burn through capital quicker than the other 32 financial institutions whose performance was modeled, the tests showed.”
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/fed-sees-high-loan-losses-at-european-banks-in-stress-tests-ft-1.1460852
“It is hard to see how Deutsche Bank can hit its cost savings target, despite management assurances, given that restructuring efforts were paused during the pandemic lockdown.
“The bank appears to have taken a far from conservative approach to provisioning for prospective loan losses — it has set aside a fraction of the amount peers did. And its original plan and profit projection gave it little scope for setbacks, let alone a global economic crash.”
https://www.ft.com/content/9082d8ce-1a21-40dc-a1ba-f6f5b35ca0c2
I think I mentioned this before, but it is worth repeating. Deutsche Bank used to be, and I think still is, the largest bank in Europe. The value of its derivatives trades can be measured in the tens of trillions Euros and used to be about 5 times the GDP of Germany. Probably not much different now. If Deutsche Bank goes down it is taking a lot of other institutions with it.
Sing it with me!
“Haben Sie gehört, die Deutsche Bank?
“Badda boom, badda bom
“Badda bing bang bing bang bong….”
I am afraid you are right!
And that’s with just one lockdown they are scratching their heads wondering if they will make it. Globally, we are headed for more lockdowns until either the masses are given “Forced Injections” aka Vaccines or the entire System Implodes.
My bet is the entire system implodes first.
We can expect a lot of defaulting debt in Germany. This could be a problem for banks, including Deutsche Bank.
“Commerzbank CEO Martin Zielke and board chairman Stefan Schmittmann offered to resign Friday, bowing to ratcheting pressure from the bank’s second-largest shareholder, Cerberus, which made clear it remained unimpressed by the bank’s plan to return to profitability.”
https://www.bankingdive.com/news/german-banks-Commerzbank-Cerberus/581067/
“The world economy is entering the second half of 2020 still deeply weighed down by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a full recovery now ruled out for this year and even a 2021 comeback dependent on a lot going right…
“…the pandemic forced swathes of the global population into what the International Monetary Fund dubs “The Great Lockdown.” Central banks and governments responded with trillions of dollars in unprecedented support to prevent markets from melting down and to keep furloughed workers and struggling companies afloat until the virus passed.
”Even with those rescue efforts, the world is still suffering its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. While some gauges of manufacturing and retail sales in major economies are showing improvement, hopes for a V-shaped rebound have been shattered as the reopening of businesses looks shaky at best and job losses risk turning from temporary to permanent…
““There is a real danger of confusing rebound with recovery,” Carmen Reinhart, the World Bank’s chief economist, said at the Bloomberg Invest Global conference on June 23. “True recovery means you are at least as well off as you were before the crisis started, and I think we are a long way off that.””
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-05/economic-impact-of-coronavirus
I liked the analogy of an elevator down and stair steps up.
But Gail, think of the fantasy films where the heroine shoots out the roof of the plunging elevator, jumps out and climbs up again in a flash!
Let’s get some positive vibes going here.
The anime “Kite” had a most resourceful young heroine. Also lots of unnecessary S&V, so be sure to get the uncensored version.
Posted over on David Stockman’s website. A very interesting take on the corona virus from a Swiss scientist:
Coronavirus: Why everyone was wrong
https://medium.com/@vernunftundrichtigkeit/coronavirus-why-everyone-was-wrong-fce6db5ba809
Very nice article, thanks! It is for broadsheet rather than tabloid readers, but is not too technical and is rather chatty too.
As an immunologist I trust a biological model, namely that of the human organism, which has built a tried and tested, adaptive immune system. At the end of February, driving home from the recording of [a Swiss political TV debate show], I mentioned to Daniel Koch [former head of the Swiss federal section “Communicable Diseases” of the Federal Office of Public Health] that I suspected there was a general immunity in the population against Sars-Cov-2. He argued against my view. I later defended him anyway, when he said that children were not a driving factor in the spread of the pandemic. He suspected that children didn’t have a receptor for the virus, which is of course nonsense. Still, we had to admit that his observations were correct. But the fact that every scientist attacked him afterwards and asked for studies to prove his point, was somewhat ironic. Nobody asked for studies to prove that people in certain at-risk groups were dying. When the first statistics from China and later worldwide data showed the same trend, that is to say that almost no children under ten years old got sick, everyone should have made the argument that children clearly have to be immune. For every other disease that doesn’t afflict a certain group of people, we would come to the conclusion that that group is immune. When people are sadly dying in a retirement home, but in the same place other pensioners with the same risk factors are left entirely unharmed, we should also conclude that they were presumably immune.
But this common sense seems to have eluded many, let’s call them “immunity deniers” just for fun. This new breed of deniers had to observe that the majority of people who tested positive for this virus, i.e. the virus was present in their throats, did not get sick. The term “silent carriers” was conjured out of a hat and it was claimed that one could be sick without having symptoms. Wouldn’t that be something! If this principle from now on gets naturalised into the realm of medicine, health insurers would really have a problem, but also teachers whose students could now claim to have whatever disease to skip school, if at the end of the day one didn’t need symptoms anymore to be sick.
The next joke that some virologists shared was the claim that those who were sick without symptoms could still spread the virus to other people. The “healthy” sick would have so much of the virus in their throats that a normal conversation between two people would be enough for the “healthy one” to infect the other healthy one.
At this point we have to dissect what is happening here: If a virus is growing anywhere in the body, also in the throat, it means that human cells decease. When [human] cells decease, the immune system is alerted immediately and an infection is caused. One of five cardinal symptoms of an infection is pain. It is understandable that those afflicted by Covid-19 might not remember that initial scratchy throat and then go on to claim that they didn’t have any symptoms just a few days ago. But for doctors and virologists to twist this into a story of “healthy” sick people, which stokes panic and was often given as a reason for stricter lockdown measures, just shows how bad the joke really is. At least the WHO didn’t accept the claim of asymptomatic infections and even challenges this claim on its website.
Here a succinct and brief summary, especially for the immunity deniers, of how humans are attacked by germs and how we react to them: If there are pathogenic viri in our environment, then all humans — whether immune or not — are attacked by this virus. If someone is immune, the battle with the virus begins. First we try to prevent the virus from binding to our own cells with the help of antibodies. This normally works only partially, not all are blocked and some viri will attach to the appropriate cells. That doesn’t need to lead to symptoms, but it’s also not a disease. Because the second guard of the immune system is now called into action. That’s the above mentioned T-cells, white blood cells, which can determine from the outside in which other cells the virus is now hiding to multiply. These cells, which are now incubating the virus, are searched throughout the entire body and killed by the T-cells until the last virus is dead.
“Viri” means “men”. Since the word “virus” is neuter, its Latin plural would be “vira”. But since no such plural existed, let’s stick with “viruses”.
Classic “Reason” headline.
“Coronavirus: Why everyone was wrong”
But “everyone” wasn’t wrong. You were wrong. You, “Reason”. And there were lots and lots of people who at the time told you that you were wrong. And so now you want to CYA with another fake news headline.
It all reminds me of that characterization of the restored Bourbon dynasty after the abdication of Napoleon. It was said that “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
Certainly that is true of the media, bureacrats, experts and politicians. Their arrogance is total. And their gaslighting bs apparently never ends.
Nice find, interesting ideas.
A quote from the article:
“So if we do a PCR corona test on an immune person, it is not a virus that is detected, but a small shattered part of the viral genome. The test comes back positive for as long as there are tiny shattered parts of the virus left. Correct: Even if the infectious viri are long dead, a corona test can come back positive, because the PCR method multiplies even a tiny fraction of the viral genetic material enough [to be detected]. That’s exactly what happened, when there was the global news, even shared by the WHO, that 200 Koreans who already went through Covid-19 were infected a second time and that there was therefore probably no immunity against this virus.”
As a society we are both seeking answers and unfortunately also using a significant disease to forward agendas unrelated to it.
We are going to make it, humans have been here for a long time which does not imply the journey will be a comfortable one.
Dennis L.
We have tests that don’t tell us very much. There also seem to be people who have symptoms that come and go for months, so the cutoff on when the disease is infectious is unclear.
We know from the experiment of sending apparently mostly well patients to nursing homes to recover that we really can’t tell when people are over the illness. This practice led to disastrously high death rates in nursing homes, particularly in New York and New Jersey.
Interesting article! Points out how little we really know for certain.
Off Topic
POPULATION TREND
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2020/07/109773-more-baby-boomers-and-fewer-young-people-more-dependents-among-us-population
We all seek affirmation and this is consistent with my observation that the wealth transfer from the young to the old is greater than the increase in oil costs when viewed as a ratio between nominal median income and nominal per barrel cost of oil. It is also consistent with the young revolting all over the world and tearing down symbols of the old.
In the US the old are getting a good deal, look no further than Medicare which is a great deal if you can use it. Medicare pays better than Medicaid so medical services are better and more available for the old. We also get a guaranteed minimum income, Social Security where we have paid in less than we get out.
Student debt is a transfer of future wealth from our kids to baby boomer educational experts whose ideas that don’t work, expensive, caring, soothing administrators, lavish dorm rooms in the form of private student housing, climbing walls and of course bars surrounding the campuses. In return our children get debt bondage that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy. As a young person, don’t take on debt and you don’t get a lottery ticket to a better life.
The kids can no longer carry the load. It argues well for political change, if one group can have none of the fruits of society, then effort will be made to see than none have it, or the old adage misery loves company.
Dennis L.
I would agree with you Dennis. Baby Boomers have gotten an extraordinarily “good deal.” Young people have mostly been left behind.
It is amazing to me that two very much older presidential candidates could be running against each other. It seems like a much younger candidate is needed.
Here at least the wealthier Boomers have been great supporters of restaurants and the holiday industry – both at home and abroad – having some fun before the nursing home or chemo-therapy claims them.
So, in a way, couldn’t we say that they have been redistributing the wealth to the younger generation that way? Now they are not out and about spending on leisure the deficit is huge. Restaurants here used to be a sea of grey hairs, or none at all.
They spend more on fun than say a young family bringing up children with a mortgage to cover.
I feel this is often over-looked in the inter-generational spite game.
The killer is their medical and care costs: simply too great a burden for too long, no earlier society has had to bear such a burden.
And the luring of the clueless young into student debt so that many academic parasites and student property speculators can live comfortably has been simply criminal.
Very well said, Dennis L.
Don’t forget the student debt fueled spring break trips to Mexico. I have seen airport lines with hundreds of students all boarding to fly somewhere for spring break.
When I was a student I never went on a spring break trip.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8491821/English-drinkers-return-pubs-night-bar-closures.html
“Social distancing becomes social drinking: Police are forced to SHUT DOWN part of London as hundreds flock to illegal raves – after weekend of partying in pubs, bars and parks across the UK”
what’s a mask? (same ? in parts of the USA).
drunken people cannot socially distance the police tweeted
Just wondering if there is a financial collapse, what amount of precious metals do households hold?
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-survey-reveals-12-of-the-american-population-owns-gold-while-14-7-owns-silver-300942963.html
New Survey Reveals 12% of The American Population Owns Gold, While 14.7% Owns Silver
A new survey highlights what percentage of the American population owns precious metals.
NEW YORK, Oct. 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — A new survey of 1,500 Americans between the ages of 18 and 65+ was launched to explore precious metal ownership amongst the US population. Gold IRA Guide, an established gold magazine providing investors and retirees all pertinent information about investing in precious metals, commissioned the survey using Google Surveys, an independent survey provider.
See the complete breakdown at: https://goldiraguide.org/12-of-the-american-population-owns-gold-while-14-7-owns-silver-according-to-a-new-survey/
So, based on this survey, doubt precious metals will penetrate much of the local economy….probably revert back to some regional form of paper transactions….
That does not mean Gold or silver won’t come in handy, especially if the Federal Government demands some kind of payment. In later Roman history, the Central Government did not accept it’s OWN currency as tax payments, but gold or silver bullion!
I wonder how they got a random sample. I also wonder how they got people to answer the question honestly. If I were a person with hoards of gold or silver coins, I don’t think I would answer a random question from an unknown telephone interviewer correctly.
That was the Chrysargyron of the Emperor Constantine, because the troops would no longer accept the almost totally debased denarius. But don’t be too hard on Constantine. President F D Roosevelt did even worse in 1933, when he took the US off the gold standard. The government not only refused to accept as legal tender the coins it itself had minted, but confiscated them without payment. Where was John Wilkes Booth when you really needed him?
Good to see another that enjoys Late Roman History…
Just found this on the web… excellent
Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire
https://mises.org/library/inflation-and-fall-roman-empire
…..First of all, Constantine issued two new taxes. One was on the estates of the senators. This was rather new because senators were usually free of most taxes on their land. He also issued a tax on the capital of merchants; not their earnings, but their capital. This was to be levied every five years and it was to be paid in gold. He also required that the rents from the imperial estates, which were rented out to tenants, were to be paid only in gold.
Constantine took on the bullion reserves of his former partner Licinius, who had extracted, by force, bullion from the treasuries of the cities of the Eastern Empire. In other words, any city that had any gold bullion or silver bullion left in its treasury was simply requisitioned by Licinius. This gold passed on now into the hands of Constantine who had gotten rid of Licinius in a civil war.
We’re also told that he stripped the pagan temples of their treasuries. This he did rather late in his reign. In the early days he was apparently still somewhat afraid of angering the gods of Rome. As his Christianity became more fixed, he felt greater ease at robbing templ
Now, in one sense, Constantine’s reform began the reversal of the process: the gold coinage was sufficiently large that it began to take hold and to circulate more freely. However, the silver coinage failed and, what was worse, at no time in this period did the central government try to control the token coinage. The result was that token coinage was being minted not only by the imperial mints, but also by the mints of cities. In other words, if a city couldn’t pay its costs or pay the salaries of its employees, it simply struck tokens.
….Now, the merchants and the artisans were traditionally organized into guilds and chambers of commerce and that sort of thing. They now, too, came under government pressure because the government could not obtain enough material for the war machine through regular channels — people didn’t want all that token coinage. So merchants and artisans were now compelled to make deliveries of goods.
…..This was not sufficient because, after all, death is a relief from taxes. So the occupations were now made hereditary. When you died, your son had to take up your profession. If your father was a shoemaker, you had to be a shoemaker. These laws started by being restricted to the defense-oriented industries but, of course, gradually it was realized that everything is defense-oriented.
The peasantry, known as the coloni, were leaseholders on both imperial and private estates. They too were formerly a free class. Now under the same kinds of pressures that all smallholders were in in this situation, they began to drift away, trying to find better opportunities, better leases, or better occupations. So under Diocletian the coloni were now bound to the soil.
Anyone who had a lease on a particular piece of land could not give that lease up. More than that, they had to stay on the land and work it. In effect, this is the beginning of what in the Middle Ages is called serfdom, but it actually has its origins here in late Roman society
Seems, the Roman Swamp was something being done today in Modern America..
It sounds like too little return on human labor was the underlying problem. A larger and larger share of the population needed to become poorer and poorer.
Stay and farm, merry peasant!
Makes one think of the Persian tribal chiefs who strongly objected to the building of railways in the early 20th century ‘because all our people will rum away!’
Ah, the bliss of simpler more meaningful life….
Thanks, Herbie. Now I understand why the large stone farmhouses in the Italian countryside were often called “case coloniche”. The mechanism of professions being inherited is still very strong there.
https://www.oann.com/britain-says-to-put-nearly-2-billion-into-arts-to-help-survival/
“Britain will invest nearly $2 billion in cultural institutions and the arts to help a sector that has been crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday.”
the UK is saved!
the UK is saved!
And two billion will buy a lot of rectangular bricks and pictures of Jesus soaked in urine. With enough left over for a banana tastefully taped to the wall.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/06/city-in-chinas-inner-mongolia-warns-after-suspected-bubonic-plague-case.html
next pandemic, the Black Death?
Bubonic plague – an infection, i believe, not a virus (assuming corona is a virus. no proof yet).
I am taking the liberty of interrupting the doom-pondering for a moment in order to bring you the Greatest President in my lifetime of the Greatest Country in the Universe has done it again!
Donald Trump has given an absolutely wonderful speech at Mount Rushmore that comprises a history lesson, a warning against totalitarianism, and a worldview of the kind very seldom taught in American schools and colleges these days.
It was quite difficult for me to find a video of this speech that hadn’t been “editorialized” by the censors. Big Media and Big Tech don’t want ordinary people to hear these words, which are to them like holy water, sunshine and garlic is to a vampire.
https://youtu.be/mguRFbWFOO0
Yes that was a very good speech.
Rats abandoning ship?
Dominion cancels Atlantic Coast Pipeline, sells natural gas transmission business
https://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/dominion-cancels-atlantic-coast-pipeline-sells-natural-gas-transmission-business/article_340549bd-cd01-57f1-9167-86b6ee406f02.html
The Virginia Chamber, a prominent voice for business, voiced dismay at the demise of a project it had supported because of the construction jobs it would create and the gas supplies it would offer to companies seeking to build or expand operations in Virginia.
“The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was an invaluable gas infrastructure investment that would spur economic development,” Virginia Chamber President and CEO Barry DuVal said Sunday.
“Unfortunately, today’s announcement detrimentally impacts the commonwealth’s access to affordable, reliable energy,” DuVal said. “It also demonstrates the significant regulatory burdens businesses must deal with in order to operate.
BAU has taken a setback and when the lights go out hope those environmentalists have their honeybee wax candles in place to keep them warm and lit.
PS EARTHFIRST
With natural gas prices as low as they are, I would expect a lot of natural gas projects to be scrapped.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/05/warren-buffetts-berkshire-buys-dominion-energy-natural-gas-assets-in-10-billion-deal.html
“The conglomerate is spending $4 billion to buy the natural gas transmission and storage assets of Dominion Energy.
Including the assumption of debt, the deal totals almost $10 billion.”
Buffet is paying $4B for a company with $6B in debt, so he thinks the assets are worth it.
he seems to know what he is doing?
at least in the past?
He hasn’t done well lately. He may not understand degrowth.
Right. Degrowth leads to low energy prices, not high. An energy company with a lot of debt now is not a good buy.
Degrowth = collapse.
PLAN B
“aThe 2015 Paris Accords and SDGs launched, a 3-decade, low carbon transformation, recognising “Climate Change is existential”. This is the rationale for SUN – the Strong Universal Network. Under the initial guidance of our friend and mentor, the late Maurice Strong – sustainable development pioneer, we are creating a “Plan For Our Kids” a global Training and Lifetime Learning program to create a movement of 100,000 STRONG Climate Champions by 2030. They will advance Climate Friendly Travel ~ measured: green: 2050 proof ~ to support the Paris Accords & SDG13, underpinned by our technology Portal and network of cloud-connected centres. This will help bring Travel & Tourism into the “New Climate Economy”.”
3 more decades of bAU sounds good to me.
I hope PLAN B works! 😉
“climate friendly travel” – i.e walking, donkey, cycling, rowing. anything else?
Riding in a chariot pulled by two horses. With scythes on the wheels for pedestrians who get too close.
I hope at least one of those 100,000 climate champions knows just how much fossil fuel it takes to run a network of cloud connected centres. And no, you cannot run them on “green” (read “intermittent”) energy.
This is the link:
https://www.thesunprogram.com/
If you have €5000 and nothing better to do with it, you can buy 50 of these young champions “under your brand or destination”, as well as sending a kid to The Institute of Tourism Studies in Malta.
Above that sum, there are “global and national impact investment opportunities” to be discussed in private.
Sorry, the €5000 doesn’t cover the costs of study at the Institute, it just gives someone “the opportunity to enroll”.
“The Institute of Tourism Studies in Malta.”
Are they hiring? I can fake being green as well as the next carpetbagger. And then I can hire the graduates to help build my bicycle powered internet.
Barraud has a track record of getting it right. He has been ranked Bloomberg’s most accurate forecaster of US economic data eight years in a row
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/markets/the-worlds-most-accurate-economist-says-a-full-us-recovery-is-unlikely-before-2022-%e2%80%94-and-warns-of-a-stock-market-correction-before-year-end/ar-BB16ma3A?li=AAggFp5
He says, “the US won’t return to its fourth-quarter 2019 real GDP level until at least 2022, adding that for some European countries a recovery won’t happen until 2023.”
I expect that the situation will be even worse than this.
Makes me wonder if Mr. Gates and the billionaires ever thought that the world for their grandkids might be a lot better if it had about seven billion less people in it.
Of course, the grandchildren might be part of the missing seven billion.
billionaire or pauper—nature does not allow you to think of overpopulation during the act of procreation
unless you’re really really weird
I well remember the day my girlfriend came to me and announced she was pregnant with octuplets. I was shocked, disgusted and furious. I demanded to know why on Earth she’d had to cheat on me with an octopus, of all things. And just how she’d managed to do the business in the first place. Then she reminded me – it was the first day of April. 🙁
it was probably an octopus anyway
girls are always on the lookout for suckers
‘girls are always on the lookout for suckers’
Yeah, just dying to get their tentacles into you. 😉
i’ll send you the link for Girls Inc.
Seems this Guy thinks without Aviation there will no nation state of Israel….and they are close to a point of NO RETURN….Gail s correct, no planes, no BAU….back to the 12 tribes…..
EVEN WITH VIRUS, ‘WE CAN OPERATE SAFE CIVILIAN AVIATION’
Airport chief warns Israeli aviation is ‘days away from point of no return’
Ben Gurion CEO Shmuel Zakay calls to renew flights, says months-long stagnation under pandemic endangers tens of thousands of jobs, could cause ‘huge strategic damage
https://www.timesofisrael.com/airport-chief-warns-israeli-aviation-is-days-away-form-point-of-no-return/amp/
In Israel, where most travel in and out of the country is through the air, long-term damage to the aviation industry would cause “huge strategic harm,” he added.
While acknowledging that the coronavirus is “a dangerous and lethal pandemic,” Zakay said it was imperative to learn to live with its presence and manage its risks, as it did not seem to be going away anytime soon
…..Israel’s national carrier, El Al, has entered deep financial trouble due to the pandemic. On Thursday it furloughed 500 more staff, including 100 pilots, amidst a labor dispute
……Tensions at the airline have been high after it slashed the vast majority of its workforce and dipped into pension funds to stay afloat amid the coronavirus crisis. The airline is seeking a government bailout to save it from insolvency and collapse.
On Wednesday, the airline stopped flights altogether after labor talks blew up between the pilots committee and management.
Prior to the latest round of furloughs, it had put 80 percent of its 6,303 workers on unpaid leave, cut management salaries by 20%, halted investments, and signed accords for the sale and lease-back of three Boeing 737-800s.
Hundreds of food service workers at El Al subsidiary Tamam, which produces Kosher airline meals for multiple carriers operating through Ben Gurion International Airport, have also been furloughed, sparking concerns regarding the possibility of mass layoffs
This is just starting….the SHTF all over….airlines are a money pit in general…& Will be the 1st to go
When my husband and I visited Israel last year, we saw military everywhere. There is mandatory military service for Israeli young adults. There are also people who come from elsewhere and volunteer for Israeli military.
The situation with the Palestinians is not good at all. There are not enough resources for everyone. Water resources are in particularly short supply. The birth rate is very high, both for Palestinians and Israelis. Israel is using desalinated water for some of its drinking water. The last I heard, it was not adding the correct minerals back in, leading to a worsening of heart disease in the country.
The country used to have a very high level of tourism. It is hard to see how the two countries can support themselves, if Israel loses outside visitors.
Hint:
The well over $3 billion in military and economic aid sent annually to Israel by Washington is rarely questioned in Congress, even by liberals.
Israel 3,191.07 383.45(per capita) By far the highest of our aid.
Will Trump provide a stimulus cheque to Israeli citizens to help out?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ym015r0gq0
Anyhoot, I had an idea to solve the Middle East Conflict….transfer Israel to the outskirts of Lax Vegas, Nevada!🚀👍. Most of Nevada is desert, like Israel, most is Federal land, and if London bridge could be moved to the US, so can the Wailing Wall!😜
No more need of all this aid, plenty of opportunities for expansion without conflict and a win win for everyone…I suppose the Native Indians wouldn’t mind too much….
People who angrily complain that the predicted crash has not yet happened forget that the change of a system to an order of lower complexity goes in small jumps.
Some might know the Hasbro game Avalanche or MB Astroslide where bullets move down an inclined plane stopped by turning bockades.
The change of the equilibrium of the bullets come much of a sudden – to the joy of the kids. The balls then find a stable new equilibrium at a lower level. At the end they are all down driven by the force of gravity. There is no way up unless you change the mechanics of the game.
If we could change the mechanics of our system now a transition would be much easier.
Imagine we could:
1. Bury our nuclear waste
2. Reduce peacefully population with a 1-child-policy
3. Give a garden to everyone (that doesnt compete with real estate prices) and build up knowledge, seeds and biomass
4. Build a backup water supply that does not rely on electricity
5. Do research on the healing powers of plants, how to store grain with stoneage technology, how to keep up knowledge, arts and schooling, how to keep up semiconductor technology or algae to hydrogen techniques
5. Build cities in secure places
We would be much better prepared as with DNA-vaccination and rescue-the-rich which are the central ideas of all our political parties.
The fall of Rome lasted about 300 years. It based on the accumulation of grains grown by slave labour and the low-energy transport via the Mediterranean by ship.
The Roman social stratification was kept after the fall of Rome justified by Christianity. This went on until the energy and wealth injection of fossile fuels enabled the slaves to live like the nobles – after the workers demanded their part.
This advancement comes to an end now. Even if we turn to the Roman model of nationalization and thus try to legitimate slave work it is not possible to copy the profitability gains of the Romans that allowed their power and stability because our preconditions are different. Who takes slaves has to opress and feed them. Hitler has shown that this does not lead to a stable, lasting and technology based society. As the German comedian Pispers takes it: Merkel is already lasting longer than the 1000-years-lasting reich.
The Roman reich had self-sufficient inhabitants that could profit from the additional Roman technology and thus accepted their leadership without too much oppression. That is not the case today. I also doubt that the US slave system could have worked for a long time without fossiles but I am not so acquainted with it.
So either we find a way to smoozely transition to self-sustainable societies with much less population or this will happen abruptly in steps like in Astroslide.
How the big events of the last 30 years must be interpreted as steps towards lower complexity is marvelously explained on Gail’s blog – and also, why a Green New Deal cannot prevent the decline.
We cannot stop this development, we can only decide if we want it the nice or the bad way. From my point of view people want it the bad way. Except from this forum and a few more people prefer death to not having their Kardashians-style illusions.
For me the idea of low technology self-sustained societies including material poverty, hard labour and difficult times does not bear any scare or dismay. It is more a logical challenge. Love, joy and happyness will go on. I am just sad about what horror the majority wants to load without necessity on their offspring.
Excellent, and very just, reflections.
If you are born into a tough life, it isn’t scarring or traumatic in itself, as it would be fro those falling, as you say, from a Kardashian Fantasy life.
Unfortunately, people are being told that the Green Clean Transition is what lies ahead, in which the fantasy life can continue more or less unchanged.
“I am just sad about what horror the majority wants to load without necessity on their offspring.”
But if people aren’t told what’s coming, how will they not turn a blind eye to it?
I also don’t believe “transition” will be made easier by building “secure” citie, any cities at all, or just about any new thing. If I understand it correctly, we’re already in the red in energy terms. (It’s what I believe, although I can’t explain it.)
You left out Point 6, training in how to protect one’s village and family from marauding bands of people who think that your plans are stupid and your are weak and who have decided they will take from you whatever they want, whenever they want.
That group will obliterate your group of planners and good thinkers, take what you have, enslave those who appear useful, and breed as many children as they want. Possibly with your daughters.
As society breaks down, plans built around farms become over more vulnerable. Only war bands-cum-pastoralists will have a chance at survival. Raising plants won’t feed anyone.
I am not sure, “Raising plants won’t feed anyone,” is quite true.
Grains today and historically have made up a large share of calories consumed. Home gardens generally don’t include much grain–perhaps a row or two of corn, if you consider that a grain. Permaculture doesn’t seem to have anything to do with grains.
Of course, China, India, and other places in the Far East tend to grow a lot of rice, often in small plots. It is an especially good form of grain, because the kernel is eaten almost whole, rather than ground the way wheat is generally ground into flour.
Another option for calories is potatoes, including sweet potatoes. Turnips and beets are also fairly calorie dense foods. Nuts and olives are very calorie dense foods.
These can be supplemented with animal products of various kinds, including milk and cheezes, eggs, and an occasional chicken or fish.
As you may know, in some areas of Southern Europe there are no small villages or farmsteads and everyone clustered into towns for safety due to the bandit problem – get home for sunset and walk or take a mule out again every day, just to be safe.
This was particularly the case on the coast, where North African and Turkish pirates were feared.
The alternative is to be as savage as the raiders, as in the Basque villages where the old farmhouses are very large and scattered but the people were very good at ambushes and…. revenge. I’ve noticed that the internal doors are generally very small, ideal for holding back intruders – the Basques were tall for their day.
Back to the virus, this from John P.A. Ioannidis, C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention, Professor of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health, and (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics; co-Director, Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS)
“The death rate in a given country depends a lot on the age structure, who are the people infected, and how they are managed,” Ioannidis said. “For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%. For 45 to 70, it is probably about 0.05%-0.3%. For those above 70, it escalates substantially.”
Ioannidis questioned whether the rate of infection and mortality rate were worth shutting down the U.S. economy for months.
“Major consequences on the economy, society, and mental health have already occurred,” he said. “I hope they are reversible, and this depends to a large extent on whether we can avoid prolonging the draconian lockdowns and manage to deal with COVID-19 in a smart, precision-risk targeted approach rather than blindly shutting down everything.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/stanford-doctor-coronavirus-infection-fatality-rate-for-people-under-45-almost-0
Covid-19 is a disease which eliminates the week of the over 70 population, those who are non productive(I am over 70 and working hard to be productive, comes naturally to a Calvinist.) Earlier I examined the combined cost of medicare/SS taxes as a percentage of median American wages and found and posted here the increase in cost to the working age population was 2-3x that of cost/barrel oil over the period from 1964 to 2019.
A quote on percentage of US population by age, referenced to dept HHS, US Goverment.
“However, the percentage(US population) increases dramatically with age, ranging from 1% for persons ages 65-74 to 3% for persons ages 75-84 and 9% for persons age 85 and over. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement.”
https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability%20in%20America/2017OlderAmericansProfile.pdf
If read this correctly, 12% of the US population is over 75. Assume barrel of oil for each 100 people US. Reduce half the over 75 population due to the virus and that is one barrel/94 people, or each person now gets .0106 barrel of oil compared to .01 barrel of oil which is an increase per capita of about 6% by my calculations. I use 100 people and 1 barrel to simplify math. A solution to Gail’s conundrum of decreasing per capita energy in the US, the oil reserves/captia just increased by 6% without drilling a single hole.
Look at nature, beautiful, the lions don’t chase the fastest gazelle, they go for the slow ones; self organizing systems can be a b….
Dennis L.
It seems like I suggested something sort of related to your thoughts in my post back in January, It is easy to overreact to the Chinese coronavirus.
My Point 2 in that post was, “Deaths from pathogens are part of the natural cycle. They help prune back the population of the old and weak.”
Some people thought that that was a terrible thing to say, but that is the way the system has to work. It becomes too expensive trying to keep the old and weak alive essentially forever.
They also take, or used to take, the young and strong – Nature has lots of nasty little gifts for us.
And that is as it should be if we are to have our wings clipped and not destroy the ecosystem as we attempt to soar upwards, which how we like to conceive of ‘Progress’.
Without the larger predators anymore, we need disease to fulfill this task, surely?
Dennis, regarding the quotation ““However, the percentage(US population) increases dramatically with age, ranging from 1% for persons ages 65-74 to 3% for persons ages 75-84 and 9% for persons age 85 and over,” the original sentence is taken from the book Aging and Older Adulthood by Joan T. Erber, and I think it reads rather differently:
However, the percentage of older adults living in institutional settings increases dramatically with age, ranging from 1% of people aged 65-74 to 3% of people aged 75-84 and 9% of people 85
In the report you citing, the paragraph in question reads:
A relatively small number (1.5 million) and percentage (3.1%) of the 65 and over population lived in institutional settings in 2016. Among those who did, 1.2 million lived in nursing homes. However, the percentage increases dramatically with age, ranging from 1% for persons ages 65-74 to 3% for persons ages 75-84 and 9% for persons age 85 and over.
Looking at various online sources, I find that In the US, the aged over-65 population is currently about 16% of the population and that the aged 65-74 group accounts for 58% of this 16% or 9.3% of the total. On this basis, I would estimate that the aged over-75 population is 42% of this 16% or 6.7% of the the total population.
Yesterday’s China update from CrossRoads. The bit on floods/ earthquakes is about minutes 1 to 2. Contains a truly impressive flood surge.
Floods, Earthquakes, and Mudslides Hit China; and Why Hong Kong Matters to the World
Frightening! The video seems to show part of a dam breaking. I am guessing that that is the Chongqing dam that is breaking, or perhaps some other smaller upstream dam. A broken upstream dam will put more pressure on the Three Gorges Dam, I would expect.
People have no idea how much energy is needed for activities and things. We burn logs of wood equivalents just to compare clothing as George Carlin described it or buy a missing packet of butter for breakfast.
I am convinced we can feed all people currently existing, if we give up commuting and building huge energy sinks in form of real estate that noone can use without electricity and fossiles.
If we provide adequate food supply though, people will aim to number each other out by getting more children. So there is another way needed to stop reproduction. I reject the approach though that is assumed to be Bill Gates’.
Gardens are a very efficient way to produce energy, biomass and food. It is a result of short distances, property control and distribution. Those of you that suggest 100 people have to commute to a farmer to draw a plough forget that it’s products need to be cleaned, stored, distributed and shopped. A lot of energy for that is heat that could be more efficiently used when it heats the house at the same time. Make bread, cook, iron and heat water for the washing or the shower with one log only. To transport energy is very energy consuming itself. People underestimate that.
A lot of energy is spent on military security. Without stable states warlords, landsknechts, neighbours and states still having resources to fuel their forces might see their chances. The medieval city had walls, when weaponry falls back to older models also the technology of defense will have to adapt. Dont think that your self-sufficiency garden in a chic suburb is a secure place.
While at the end it doesnt matter much who eats your granary these struggles will consume a lot of energy that could be used for live instead of for death.
We can already see a lot of energy related changes: the relation of Russia towards Europe and towards Saudi-Arabia, the Chinese expansion, the US retreat. These changes will also come on lower structural levels. You might see that in the Black Lives Matter movement already.
The challenge is not only food supply but defending against people that believe they deserve a higher life standard: distribution.
All that is man-made and neither imposed by any god nor fate. With peakoil man stands at a crossroad and can decide to be good or bad.
I have been transcribing a handwritten autobiography from a great grandfather born 1860.
It documents ,in detail, life post war ,dirt poor, and living hand to mouth on the Iowa prairie. The problem then was crops were rarely worth enough to buy improvements needed to increase productivity.
I farm and turn a small profit. Specialty pigs. The problem remains distribution. Covid restaurant shutdowns have resulted in a switch to ground shipped frozen product direct to public. The energy demands of shipping frozen food a thousand miles compared to Iowa, 1860 hand to mouth existence are profound.
It is hard to romanticize a hard life on the Prairie. Wood cutting to keep warm seemed unsustainable even then. I keep an acre in a home garden in an effort to mimic manual production methods but without horses, tractors or rototillers. I use a small battery/electric wheelhoe for cultivation. Feeding a family would be a serious challenge for anyone. There is a chasm between our current life of ease and the struggle for survival before internal combustion.
The pioneers who pulled it off were hardened by a lifetime of struggle. We are not hardened, and we have no clue how to do what people did 150 years ago to stay alive.
We don’t even have one bottom plows or horses to power them.
There is not any work or research into how to farm without tractors or horses. Gardening for summer food supplements isn’t the same as producing year a round well stocked larder.
Bull’s EYE, Mr Steele, we have no idea at all…takes a lot of capital to maintain a viable homestead. I posted such here a while back from YouTube and a fella doing such.
This guy talks the importance of MONEY on a sustainable homestead….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcfjwlo6F6E
Gail expects a big die off when BAU ends…..I agree and hope that day is the day after they put me in the ground to push up Daisies🤑.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fVuSYUNAekc
That’s what BAU wants $$$$
I am doubtful that any one family can survive on their own. It really takes a networked economy, with some people specializing in some things and other people specializing in other things to make an economy work properly. Some of these people provide government; others provide medical services or other services, such as education. Some build roads or homes.
Somehow, the homestead must provide enough of a surplus (which can be converted to money) to pay for all of these other functions. It is easy to see that these other functions need to wither away, if there is less energy supply.
As I heard the young man in the video talking about needing money for taxes, the thought struck me that most farmers would need money for the monthly mortgage payment. In most case, this would be more than the taxes. Unless a person has inherited a land, it is hard to believe that most young people could buy land without some debt involved. This is no doubt why inherited land was so important in the past.
By the Norman conquest of Britain (1066 AD) 10% of the population lived in cities using the surplus produced by those 90% working the land. Today its 2% working the land.
Superb post!
I always feel that I end up sounding like a pessimist when I make the same points about a real ‘life with less’ , but the truth is the truth, whatever one might like to think about life.
Struggle, with the seasons, pests and disease, often against you: and most people today whine and bitch if they miss one meal a day or suffer the slightest,most trivial, inconvenience. Always watching the weather.
To toughen up a bit, I’ve been practicing missing meals every now and then – it gets better as you go along, but the desire to have a really big occasional feast also, I find, grows.
This explains the old paintings of European peasants stuffing themselves with food and drink at weddings and festivals, and their great love of animal fats. (Vegans wake up.)
The uncle of an Austrian friend was a young farmer conscripted into the German army in WW2, imprisoned by the Russians after Staiingrad: when he got home and was asked what he wanted, he only said: ‘Pig fat!’.. Ate a jar, and died.
Interesting. I’d a relative who spent almost the entire First World War in a German camp after being captured at Ypres. He notoriously ate two pounds of butter straight on being released through Sweden. Lived well into his 90s.
I love both of these stories!
A vegan diet can do that to a person.
My little sister has gone nuts as a Vegan, always tearful and depressed and tips into hysteria easily.
Even vegetarianism would probably make her feel better, but she won’t touch ‘body secretions’, ie yummy milk and cheese!
Not happy when I remind her that our pastoral ancestors in the Pyrenees lived on that….
I am afraid you are right. Certainly, some places will work better for farming than others. There needs to be a lot of thought and research going into this; it can’t simply be, “We will drive to the store and buy whatever we need but don’t have.” There need to be the right seeds for the area. I doubt that irrigation can be sustained. There needs to be crop rotation. Somehow, human and animal waste needs to go back to the land.
Perhaps we could learn somethings from the Amish. Or maybe we have to go back farther yet. I believe they sell their crops and buy food in grocery stores. The problem is getting enough calories in a regular basis and storing the food until it is needed. Some surplus is needed for bad years. Trading really is helpful, because one farm can’t produce everything.
The Amish are quite resourceful and diversified. I buy a 5 pack of soap made by the Amish at a local hardware store/trading post. It comes in a simple ziplock bag that has “Amish Soap” written on it with black marking pen. ( Very good soap by the way).
North of me there is an Amish store with all kinds of good homemade food products.
Bruce, you get it.
My grandparents were hardened, their children were hardened, the 7 out of 9 that survived that is.
Cutting wood is hard work even with a chain saw and a splitter, gardens are a great deal of work and natural guests find them very inviting, I have a post above about Lent and Red beets – that is what was left early spring in my childhood with a large city garden – damn things last forever.
Age is also the enemy, the endurance decreases with time no matter how healthy. Sams is hard to beat.
Dennis L.
You can’t make people stop reproducing anymore than you ask them to stop eating. Or ask a tree to stop growing. Or water to stop flowing down the stream. This is life, this is nature’s way, who has the power to deny billions of humans their most basic instincts?
People can often figure it out for themselves. Infanticide was common among H/G bands, since they couldn’t afford to be weighed down with useless burdens like babies during migration season. To the other extreme–the vast nation state of the PRC, there once was a one child law. I’m sure it had at least a partial effect of repressing population growth.
Plenty of Hunter gatherer men died from hunting accidents. So no need for infanticide if they are willing to go further in hunting trips.
Female fertility was suppressed by their low calorie diet and breast feeding. They weren’t pregnant every year, year after year.
Family Planning Clinics, when free and supported by governments, are cheap and very effective – eg Bangladesh and Thailand success in the past, before the clinics were closed down. The vast majority of women do not want to be baby-machines. Many women (like me) prefer to be child-free. It is essential to reduce our population in compassionate ways and encourage smaller families.
“The vast majority of women do not want to be baby-machines.”
I am not sure that is true, but even if it were true, how long would it take the minority that *did* want to be baby machines to outbreed the others? One century? Two centuries? Well, Africa in a mere 60 years has tripled its population since the time I lived there. The main effect of voluntary population control is to penalise the intelligent, thoughtful, and far sighted, and surrender the world to the stupid, thoughtless, and profligate. As we can see all around us.
So what is my answer? I have none: overshoot and collapse is an iron law of Nature, and she will provide the answer.
Better education, with Victorian ideas of discipline, is likely to generate more intelligent decisions around procreation.
Our system expends huge resources programing promiscuity, undue sexualization of everything, excessive differentiation in gender clothing, existential cultural ways of oppressing women.
I think you are quite correct as to how large a group of women would be perfectly happy not having babies but for the countless ways they are culturally programmed to do so. .
last time i got involved in such shenanigans there was only one way
“The vast majority of women do not want to be baby-machines…”
While this won’t be a very popular statement, I think it is one of great truth: we are facing a future where most, if not all, of us will not be getting what we want.
We live in a world of cycles, and of blowback. The more that we get what we want (e.g. freedom, safety, law, life), the more we build up the opposing forces that will eventually usher in the opposites (e.g. oppression, violence, chaos, death).
Those of us who will do best in this uncertain future will likely be those who learn to “go with the flow” rather than try to impose their idea of what they think the future should look like.
Cheers,
-GBV
I can agree with much, most, or all of this. Where I’m not clear is “going with what flow?” I believe I’m going with the flow, despite going to some lengths to dispromote “oppression, violence, chaos, death.”
May Hem, it’s interesting that there are so few environmentally aware folks with any kind of professional/public gravitas who actually considered refraining from breeding. For educated people, the Club of Rome’s 1972 book, “The Limits to Growth,” should have made more of an impact, but the human ego will not be curtailed.
Here is a depressingly short list of those who have walked the talk : Richard Heinberg [born in 1950]; Alice Friedemann [born in mid-1950s]; Dennis and Donella Meadows [born in 1942 and 1941]; Terry Tempest Williams [born in 1955]; and Chris Packham [born in 1961].
Paul Ehrlich [born in 1932] had only one daughter, born in 1955, but that was years before his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb.” Unfortunately, she went on to have three daughters herself and numerous grandchildren.
My wife, who taught biology to high-school students for 20 years, tried to get the word out and possibly influenced a handful of kids. She had decided not to have children in 1971 at the age of 14 because of an outstanding science teacher she had at the time.
Forest harvesting increased nearly 50% in EU to meet increased demand, says Nature.
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-forest-harvesting-europe-threatens-climate.html
Forest harvesting is one of the things that can be done with relatively little equipment. If we don’t have fossil fuels, deforestation is likely to be a major issue. And, as the article says, all of this forest harvesting threatens climate.
Relying on wood is a disaster if one doesn’t also have strong mechanisms to limit population and construction.
I’m a bit skeptical of the Caterpillar 35% number. I’m talking bare bones agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. And, the economic system would be different. These numbers seem to confirm that it might be at most 10% of the us population.
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm
kschleunes, I agree. The Caterpillar numbers were based on the then existing economy, which was indeed over complex, and relied on complex technology that needed parts sourced from multiple producers and importers. The numbers surprised me too, but after reflection seemed an almost inevitable consequence of overspecialisation, needless complexification, and rampant niche marketing by every company with a “killer idea”. And i agree also that it is not sustainable. But the point I tried (perhaps rather badly) to make, is that this is where we are now, and moving on, or back, will be a massive undertaking. We cannot turn the clock back to 1900 just by turning the clock back!
10% leaves the economy with 90% of workers involved directly or indirectly with food supply.
35% leaves the economy with 65% of workers involved directly or indirectly with food supply.
either number, or anything in between, means that there is still a very significant portion of energy and work that is in non-essential subsystems, and these subsystems can be downsized or eliminated as the whole system continues to slowly lose net (surplus) energy which will necessitate that a larger % of energy and money is redirected towards food supply.
looked at from any point of view, there seems to be only one direction for prosperity and that is of course downward.
Agreed in principle. Provided the “essential” subsystems can disentangle themselves from the “inessential” ones. For example, could our current agricultural sector work without social media? Without the cloud? Without massive supply chain optimisation software? Complexity is hard to undo, unfortunately.
“Remember last earnings season? When companies were reporting their worst quarter since the financial crisis. And nobody dared guess what the future held. Bankruptcy risk was everywhere. Oh, and stocks rallied so hard that $5 trillion got added to share prices.
“It’s safe to say investors were in a forgiving mood back then. With stocks up 25% since, the time for patience has passed.”
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/10-trillion-rally-hinges-earnings-110000046.html
This is an analysis of the S&P 500 earnings in the US, and their rise in stock prices. It certainly does seem extreme. The article notes that hardly any companies are giving estimates of year-end amounts, either.
“As the U.S. reopens, Americans aren’t much interested in going out and spending.
“A survey of 2,200 U.S. adults shows how Covid-19 has dramatically changed behavior in the world’s biggest economy, potentially for the long haul. The data flashes warning signs for the recovery, showing waning interest in public events and material things, like appliances and clothes, and a new austerity, expressed through pantry stockpiling and delayed big-ticket purchases.
“This foreshadows an era of fear and frugality that could push a full economic rebound—one that Washington and Wall Street are banking on—out of reach.”
https://gulfnews.com/world/americas/fearful-and-frugal–coronavirus-wreaks-havoc-on-americas-psyche-1.1593869289335
“Ongoing social distancing will mean that many firms will be smaller or not viable until a vaccine turns up.
But the economic impact of this crisis will last even once a vaccine prevents Covid-19 doing fresh damage. New research argues that this is because, while no one started 2020 expecting a global pandemic, we’ll all now think another one is around the corner, just as everyone kept predicting another banking crisis after the financial crash.
“…a more cautious world is not a good one economically… Covid-19, and its effects, are here to stay.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/05/we-might-never-get-over-the-fear-that-the-pandemic-induced
Governments thoughtlessly pressed the ‘Pause’ button, little thinking that when they pressed ‘Start’ the good little consumer puppets would act in radically different ways.
In a way, it does show some rationality and good sense among the public: increasing savings, acting with prudence, stocking up the larder – among the oldest human responses to an uncertain environment.
Further lock-downs now being imposed can only reinforce this ant-consumerist and consumption message.
But what next. must they now ban cash and apply zero-rates in order literally to force household consumption each month? Spend it or lose it?
Make appliances even crappier so that one has to buy replacements more regularly (in fact this may occur anyway as manufacturers cut quality)?
As revenue from sales taxes and income declines, we can expect general tax rises, which again will be self-defeating, as anxious and uncertain people cling to their cash and grow even more reluctant to spend – and in fact they will have less to spend compared to pre-COVID days.
Isn’t this a death spiral impossible to pull out of? I should like to proved mistaken: counter arguments please!
A modest proposal. Bring three million well-behaved, hard-working Hong Kongers to the UK with their financial assets.
The economy will boom! The country will grow! And there’ll be a Chinese takeaway on every street corner!
More important, the Hong Kong people are probably the world’s greatest experts on thrifty living. The native Brits, who have forgotten so much in this respect, could learn a lot from them.
Great, another proposal to replace the heritage people of Britain with alien peoples and cultures. But why? Because the banks would like it?
As to the supposed Chinese thrift, Hong Kong is privately and commercially one of the most indebted places in the world. HKers have no savings and all of their wealth is tied up in their bubble housing. Who will buy that housing when they leave?
And note well too that more than 20% of housing stock of HK is so-called social housing. That is to say – and people don’t realize this – but Hong Kong has HUGE welfare state of poor, poorly educated and dependency-minded people. They are far from being, even in a large minority, anything that we could call ideal migrants.
As to the skills that HKers will supposedly bring, they are skills that already exist in Britain. I like the people of HK, I lived there for 12 years, but their problems are not the problems of the British people. Just as the problems of Bangladesh, Syria, Nigeria and so on are not the problems of the British.
And the prospect of getting good fried rice on every high street is really not the proper benchmark for setting a national border policy.
“This Fourth of July, amid the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, American patriotism has fallen to its lowest point in nearly 20 years. According to a new poll, less than half of Americans are “extremely proud” to be American.
“According to Gallup, pride in the U.S. is the lowest it’s been since the analytics company first measured it in 2001.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-pride-falls-to-record-low/
“Black Lives Matter protests that have erupted across the United States may be the largest demonstrations in the country’s history, with upwards of 26million people participating.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html
“…unemployment is becoming a more permanent fixture for millions of [US] workers, just as the financial lifelines that Congress created early in the pandemic are expiring without the president or Senate Republicans showing any urgency to act.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianweller/2020/07/04/as-longer-term-unemployment-becomes-reality-government-help-end-could-end-soon/#af64a2018a03
The supplemental unemployment benefit will end at the end of July. State unemployment plans vary. Some are very limited.
I hadn’t realized that that many had participated. The number I know personally is zero, but many young people are involved.
“Crude oil is the world’s most important commodity, but it’s worthless without a refinery turning it into the products that people actually use: gasoline, diesel, jet-fuel and petrochemicals for plastics. And the world’s refining industry today is in pain like never before.
““Refining margins are absolutely catastrophic,” Patrick Pouyanne, the head of Europe’s top oil refining group Total SA, told investors last month, echoing a widely held view among executives, traders and analysts.
“What happens to the oil refining industry at this juncture will have ripple effects across the rest of the energy industry. The multi-billion-dollar plants employ thousands of people and a wave of closures and bankruptcies looms.”
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/commodities/news/lost-in-oils-rally-2-trillion-a-year-refining-industry-crisis/articleshow/76794487.cms
“Natural gas prices plunged to new lows this week, falling below $1.50/MMBtu, a catastrophically low price for U.S. gas drillers… Global gas demand is expected to fall by 4 percent this year, “largest recorded demand shock” in history, according to the International Energy Agency.
“Buyers of U.S. LNG are now cancelling shipments at a rapid clip. U.S. LNG exports have declined by more than half compared to pre-pandemic levels.
““There would have been too much LNG in the world even without Covid-19,” Ben Chu, a director at Wood Mackenzie’s Genscape service, said in a statement. “Covid-19 has made it worse.””
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Natural-Gas-Price-Plunge-Could-Soon-Lead-To-Shut-Ins.html
Low natural gas prices is close to as bad a problem a low oil prices. Chesapeake Energy, the company that recently filed for bankruptcy, was primarily in natural gas.
Refineries are part of the supply chain that people don’t understand. They are essential if we are to use any of the oil that comes out of the ground. If the “spread” between “what refined products sell for” and “the wholesale price for buying the oil” falls too low, there is a huge problem. It is this margin that refineries and other parts of the supply chain sell for. We may think that WTI oil prices of around $40 are fairly good, compared to what we have seen previously. But the prices of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel are not staying high enough to support this price level without collapsing quite a few refineries. This leads to lower production of refined products, regardless of the level of imports/exports.
“Radical plans to give all adults £500 and children £250 in vouchers to spend in sectors of the [UK] economy worst hit by the Covid-19 crisis are being considered by the Treasury.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/05/sunak-considers-500-vouchers-for-all-uk-adults-to-spend-in-covid-hit-firms
“A social and economic crisis “is starting” in France as the health crisis persists, new Prime Minister Jean Castex said Saturday in his first comments to the media since he was appointed a day earlier by President Emmanuel Macron.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-04/french-prime-minister-says-social-economic-crisis-is-starting
“Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has urged Spaniards “not to be scared” of the outbreaks and “to go out to reactivate the economy” because the country has “successfully defeated the pandemic”.”
https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/07/04/spains-pm-urges-citizens-to-go-out-reactivate-economy-now-that-pandemic-is-defeated/#.XwGMMChKjIU
“Greece’s prime minister has said he will not accept strict EU conditions on the use of coronavirus emergency aid, in a sign of the difficult negotiations ahead for the bloc’s leaders on its proposed €750bn recovery fund.”
https://www.ft.com/content/d8fc01ae-5aac-4094-9b76-82ca0f90784c
“A cardinal in northern Italy said Friday that the COVID-19 health crisis has created “immense” poverty in the area, and now is the time to rebuild, to take responsibility, and to share resources.
“Indications from local charities and soup kitchens show that poverty in Bologna right now is “immense,” Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the city’s archbishop, told journalists July 3. “The economic crisis has already started.””
https://www.eurasiareview.com/05072020-italy-cardinal-says-its-time-to-rebuild-as-economic-crisis-hits-north/
“Croatia held an election on Sunday at a time of rising coronavirus infections and a sharp economic downturn from the pandemic, with the outcome likely to lead to political negotiations to form a new government.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-croatia-election/croats-go-to-polls-amid-sharp-economic-downturn-rising-infections-idUKKBN246005
When resources decline too rapidly, sharing , which the good cardinal advocates (a nice plump cardinal in the Catholic tradition one wonders?) just doesn’t work to preserve the group.
In fact, historically, a hierarchy of consumption has generally been the appropriate response to shortages, not equality.
It’s the most practical and resilient strategy: small H-G bands which did share equally with no hierarchy (except perhaps to exclude the old and frail) generally moved to better land when facing food shortages.
The hierarchical arrangement in times of shortages seems to be part nature’s plan. There is natural variability in all plants and animals, including humans. The ones who are “best adapted” tend to survive in times of shortage. People with black skins seem not to survive well with COVID-19 when they live away from the equator. This is sad; it is not clear that it is fixable with Vitamin D pills, either.
People are catching on about the shutdowns leading to immense poverty and a future economic crisis.
Pyrrhic victory in Spain, and everywhere else.
“Successfully defeated the pandemic”? Not really! It will come back as soon as people reactivate the economy.
“”Successfully defeated the pandemic”? Not really! It will come back as soon as people reactivate the economy.”
Yes and no. If people wear masks and social distance the spread will be minimal even after the economy is reactivated. Culturally they are apparently much better at this in Europe than the US and that’s one reason why US travelers are now banned from going to Europe. In the US wearing a mask has been politicized (which makes no sense) and will continue to assist the virus in spreading far and wide.
Some people have mistakenly taken the position that not wearing a mask is a right even during a pandemic, but those people discount the rights of others that do wear masks by increasing everybody’s chances of getting the grog. The risk as I showed in a post yesterday with links, is the risk isn’t just dying, but also potentially having vital organs compromised permanently and those ‘recovered patients’ far out number of the one’s dying of covid-19.
Not just the US: I would say that less than 1% of people here in the UK are wearing masks, based on what I’ve seen on forays into town. Not even shop staff. Those 1% were probably Chinese students, come to think of it!
And it is.
“Spain has sent a second region back into lockdown in just 24 hours after a spike in coronavirus cases.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-spain-la-marina-lockdown-catalonia-segria-region-a9602311.html%3famp
I hadn’t realized that bars and restaurants were back up to 100% capacity in Spain until I read this article. The Spanish certainly were optimistic about keeping the virus away with the earlier lockdown!
You mean restaurants are closed in some countries?
Castex has figured out what should be obvious.
Restaurants, pubs and cruises? Where do I apply?
the lockdowns and propaganda for the virus are all part of the plan to manage collapse and bring in a fantasy world of “green growth” which “they” thought would kickstart a “a new world order ” of growth and a continuity of the world empire unfortunately this does not compute and the fools plaving this dangerous game will steer the ship directly into the rocks , So to summarise we may a few years left before the real fun begins ELE (extinction level event) .
okay, a few years left.
that’s good enough for me.
Just a few years left but you still have to work out how you want to go. If you can get some oxy prescriptions then you needn’t die from starvation or a painful illness like cholera.
Alternatively you can try to farm. There is a nice piece of farmland near me now that has a For Sale sign out the front. This is prime quality farmland by a road. It has water and can grown four crops a year: sugarcane, soy, peanuts, rice is typical. 3200 square meters. $USD 52,000.00.
I don’t think he really wants to sell because it is too nice a farm and he had the same sign up last year.
But if I bought it, I would apply the usual local practice here which is to get someone to farm it. We would go 50-50 on the harvest but I would have to pay for the fertilizer. I am told informally that that would leave me 25% of the income. Fertilizers must be expensive.
And corn too. That is the other main crop.
Where are you?
East Java.
Kim, that 25% profit how much in dollars? Thanks.
You are asking me about the productivity of the land and the price of the various rotated crops. I am afraid I don’t have that info. But the land is incredibly productive.
For me, the issue would not be profit anyway. It is more a matter of local integration.
Too bad renewables are not stand alone products. There are also nowhere nearly enough of them.
Think of Three Gorges Dams. We can’t necessarily depend on them to save us either.
the barometer for collapse are oil prices so we are very close to the end remember what happened when oil prices touched negative 37 dollars thanks to lockdowns what will be the next big drop and will we be able to bounce back ?
yes, I do remember that awesome day when it dropped to minus $37!
oh, and it bounced back and now is about plus $40.
some other black swan could fly in and bring on “the next big drop” but then it could bounce back again.
I suspect that the price will be somewhat around about $40 through most of 2020 and then drop perhaps into the 30s or 20s as the economic tsunami starts to roll in near the end of the year.
my guess more lockdowns will send oil prices even further negative perhaps negative 300 dollars ?
no, too many traders were trapped and had to get out of their May oil contracts on April 20 and that sent the price negative.
I suspect that all of the traders who took big losses have now dropped out, and it shows in the volume of oil contracts which are now much lower than in April.
painful lesson learned, and I don’t think we’ll see a repeat ever again.
but who knows?
anyway, it’s bAU tonight, baby!
It is hard to know!
A plug for Charles H. Smith. I subscribe to his Musings Report and find both the main content and the references at the end worthwhile. I am very open minded and am not an advocate for any agenda, looking for answers like the rest of you. Charles had this quote in the latest issue:
“Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.” Simone de Beauvoir
This is of concern for those my age as I find I can’t run a four minute mile.
Dennis L.
Of course I don’t know your situation but I believe that a lot of people give up on some types of beneficial physical activity far too early when there are ways to function much better than they do and enjoy better health much further into life.
In my own case, I am in my early sixties now, but for decades – despite being a sporty guy by inclination – had the usual collection of chronic pain conditions and related signs and symptoms, including spinal arthritis. I thought I mostly had sports-related injuries. I had problems even getting out of bed in the morning. I was bent over like the letter C for two hours every morning. But now, after almost ten years of anti-inflamatory eating, I have graduated from hour-long walks to doing a daily three sets of 80 unweighted squats (in the year 2010, I could not do even a single squat) and have recently started doing 50 meter sprints. At first, I found that my body had literally forgotten how to run but now I can do a set of ten 50 meter sprints and my pace is returning to a degree I could never have expected. I am boggled, simply astonished, by that. I should be in a wheelchair or dead based on my trajectory in my early 50s.
Why is sprinting or interval work good? Obviously it grows the heart and lungs. So that’s good. But it also stimulates testosterone production. Getting adequate sun also helps us to make use of more of our free (available in the blood stream) testosterone. D3 has a role in preparing receptors to make use of that testosterone. Producing more testoterone helps us to maintain more muscle mass and muscle mass is a very good predictor of the ability to survive or recover from all kinds of illnesses and injuries.
By the way, the world record for 100 meters outdoor in the over-80 years category is 14.5 seconds! That is pretty damned fast. I have started to think I might have a go at that record when/if the time comes. But my point is not to sprint but just to keep moving. Of course, first, what we eat is one of the great deciding factors in our general health. But once we have that right, the healing can start and function can return even quite late in life.
Renoir, the artist:
‘People have eyes, hands and feet, but generally they just don’t want to use them’.
He might have added heads/brains as well, but that’s taken as read I suppose.
Another thing is that if you are moving about rather than sitting like a sack in a car seat or on a sofa, more observation is required which must be good for brain function I should have thought.
I find fencing exercises with sharp swords are good exercise, having been luck enough to learn the basics when a boy *(and sharp swords keep one alert as self-injury is always possible!) and Spanish folk dancing is a fantastic work-out – I just make sure no neighbour sees me doing solo jotas……. Gyms are SO boring.
Quite so, and that is doubly true of governments in which so many like to place their trust.
Although of course with governments there is an assumed contract: you pay taxes under coercion, we provide services.
But why do people want to feel ‘cared for’ by anything or anyone?
Weakness and delusion, surely.
Life is harder than that, and one has to steel oneself to face the brutal facts of animal existence.
As the Havamal puts it: ‘Men die, beasts die, everything dies’. Always go to the Old Norse for the hard truths.
Hopefully you have children, Dennis.
I think a lot of people will soon realize that they are the only true pension…
Cheers,
-GBV
Harry, please do carry on with your posts.
Please Harry McGibbs, what is your website called? What is the URL?
Pintada, and indeed anyone who is interested, I tend not to promote it for reasons too eccentric to detail here but drop me a note at collapseharry at gmail dot com and I’ll send you the link tomorrow.
And bless all of you who made supportive comments – it is much appreciated.
Done.
Thank you
Comment on Gail’s comment on growing food. What you say is true. But in reality the actual number of people it takes (or robots) to produce energy and food is small relative to the total population. We are just trapped in an economic system that views the production of these elements in a certain way. We’ve seen that even with a complete world wide economic collapse the lights stayed on and the food kept coming. As long as the energy you can acquire is more than the energy you actually need to survive, surviving is possible. How we acquire that energy might not be that pleasant and the level of survival might not either. Your model should have seen the complete collapse of civilization by now (as you have often pointed out) but it hasn’t happened. The outcomes of Chaotic systems are difficult to predict.
I am afraid that you are looking at this problem by counting tops of icebergs. The bottoms of the icebergs are just as essential as the tops that are easy to see.
This seems to be a common failing of analysts of many types. “Out of sight; out of mind.”
Gail, I agree. Perhaps 2% of the US population now produce food. But who produces the fertiliser, the pesticides, that help grow the food? Who produces the machines that plough, sow, and harvest? Who produces the factories that make those machines; who mines the raw materials that feed those factories; and who extracts and refines the energy needed to make all this happen? That is the underside of the iceberg.
In the Middle Ages, the EROEI for agriculture was probably small: 80% of human energy supported (usually) 100% of the population, so perhaps 1.25. But what is it now? By most calculations, about 0.1; in other words, ten units of energy for one unit of food. That is clearly unsustainable. It is also, and always has been, terminally stupid.
It’s still a small number of people or robots. Lists are impressive but you have no numbers to back it up. As a professor of mine once said, “I don’t know anyone who makes anything.”
Do you? Does Gail? It’s a very small number of people relative to the total population. You just are not getting the point at all. If it were a large number of people, we would fall apart immediately.
I agree.
the falling-apart has been proceeding very slowly, and probably will continue to do so, unless the economic tsunami coming later this year just accelerates it beyond any possible control.
yes, the % of energy and money (energy tokens) to produce and distribute all the food is fairly low.
there is plenty of room for the economy to continue to self-organize and increase the flow of energy and money towards food production and distribution, and towards all the tangential subsystems that are required to keep up the food supply, though at some theoretical point in time the economy could be using all of its remaining net (surplus) energy for food supply.
at least in the first world, this process should be prolonged, not reaching its endgame for a decade or two, or perhaps a year or two if the economic devastation coming late 2020 and into 2021 gets out of control.
Actually, I do have the numbers, thanks to a consultancy with Caterpillar. Their “horizon scanners” estimated that 35% to 40% of the US industrial workforce was involved in some way with enabling food production, and almost all of them were essential; that is, if they stopped working, one or more critical components would go missing. Do you know, for example, how much intricate machinery is needed to prevent grain silo explosions? I thought not. Of course, that production does not all go into the food industry, perhaps about 10% of it. But it is necessary, and the other 90% is the iceberg that holds up the rest, by creating the surplus value that keeps the businesses in being. Liebig’s Law of the Minimum strikes again.
Good points!
thanks RF.
that’s a great reinforcement of one of my main points.
60% to 65% of the workforce is not involved in food supply, not even tangentially.
so there is a lot of non-essential work in the world.
I’m not suggesting that this entire 60% could be discarded by the self-organizing economy and still leave the entire food subsystem intact, but a significant portion of non-essential subsystems could be downsized or eliminated, which would direct the flow of energy and money (energy tokens) more towards food supply.
The reason so few people are involved in farming directly now is because of fossil fuels, above all oil. Once oil has gone, sometime this century, I suspect sooner rather than later, there will no mechanised farming, and international trade will fall to almost non-existent levels. That process (fall in international trade) has begun already with the knock-on effects of Covid-19.
I think the decline in international trade began as early as 2008. As a percentage of GDP, it started falling. See Figure 2 in this post:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/trade-openness-index-wsj.png
Robert, no numbers, off the top of my head.
I see farming close up and personal, Youtube also has a number of a sites on farming. Modern farming is very efficient, seeds are planted at ideal depth depending on the soil temperature, they are planted at ideal spacing to maximize use of nutrients, the furrow is closed with attention to the soil conditions so as not to compact the lateral soil too much and cause roots to grow in a linear fashion. The machines are accurate to a fraction of an inch.
The major cost of food appears to be after farming, a guess is packaging and a wild guess discarding less than ideal food to assure high quality. There is also great processing to get “junk” food that tastes good.
Gardens look like a great deal of work, I have the machinery to plant and run a fairly good sized garden, it is expensive and it is time consuming even then. To keep losses to a minimum requires high fencing, deer like to vary their diet. Were I into gardening I suspect a number of deer would have heart attacks around my garden.
Also, it does not work every year and things get thin in the following spring. There is a Great Course on Amazon(it was free to Prime) regarding the time of the plagues, fascinating in itself. The presenter claims Lent as a period of fasting encouraged by the Church as the previous years food was running low, necessity was made a virtue. I grew up humble, but proud, we had a large garden, my mom was first generation off the farm and her parents would share eggs, chickens, butchered meat to supplement the garden. From the garden, things ran low about Easter, the good stuff was gone, red beets are forever. It is not romantic when you actually need what you raise.
Dennis L.
Denis, last year I had an unexpected glut of pumpkins and squash, so we were eating a lot of pumpkin soup and other dishes featuring pumpkins last winter. Over time, old pumpkins tend to go rotten and moldy, but amazingly, I still have one beautiful sukunka squash that has survived unscathed since last autumn. So I’m keeping that to see if it’s “mummified” enough to get through another winter.
On the subject of farm machinery, several rice farmers I know this year took delivery of new rice planting machines that save the farmer even more labor by dispensing fertilizer and weedkiller simultaneously while the seedlings are being planted. I’ve noticed that with the new method, the rice plants grow faster in the first couple of weeks because the fertilizer is concentrated close to the roots, but afterwards the conventionally grown plants gradually catch up.
Already, one man in my neighborhood has fallen victim to the hazards of new tech by not filling up the fertilizer dispensers correctly. His machine plants four rows and each has its own dispenser. He misunderstood this and only filled one of the dispenser, with the result that only every fourth row of rice seedings was growing normally, while the other three rows were starved of fertilizer and hardly grew at all. This is something that would never have happened if he’d used the conventional technique of broadcasting fertilizer around the field by hand.
Quite so: pouring in energy for little return proportionately, and with a complex – global – web of supply services.
So merely looking at the small number of employees in agriculture is beside the point to a ludicrous degree.
Moreover, this industrial system has murdered the soil – compaction, degradation, erosion – (the latter two of course being common to agricultural over-exploitation for thousands of years) and with run-off of chemicals poisoned water sources.
Xabier, please allow me to give you another story from my days in the US. A company makes tyres. Many different kinds. And maybe 2% of its output is tyres for farm tractors. But it goes bankrupt. No more farm tyres, and soon, no more tractors working on the farms.
A great opportunity for a startup? But, without the economies of scale provided by that 98%, there is no way said startup could produce farm tyres at a price any farmer could afford. The iceberg has vanished.
It turns out one type of tyre the old firm made was specialty, custom tyres for Formula One race cars. As any green advocate will tell you, Formula One is a sport that should be shut down tomorrow. It serves no useful purpose; it is a source of noise pollution, chemical pollution, and pointless carbon dioxide. But those custom tyres are very profitable, and since they don’t last very long they are a good money spinner. That income keeps all the other products a little cheaper than they would be otherwise. Abolish that income, and everyone else loses. Maybe loses enough so as to be no longer able to afford, say, tyres for golf carts. So the industry contracts a little more, and we are in a classic death spiral.
Yes, food production looks like a small industry. But it rests on a huge pyramid of innovation, production and sales, and a vast market for other products whose income supports, among other things, that small food industry. Remove a few key stones, and the pyramid collapses. Remove the pyramid, and we all go hungry.
I bought a tire for my old Ford tractor…it was made in India.
Excellent description of the problem! We need all parts of the self-organized system. We can’t just take some parts out.
Our system is built on debt. In many ways, it is like a Ponzi Scheme. If we take parts out, there is no way to keep the Ponzi Scheme growing the way it needs to grow. Even keeping the old folks at home, so they won’t get COVID-19, may be enough to topple the already failing system.
Economists have been guilty of making a very similar mistake. They equate the share of spending on a particular segment of the economy to its importance to the economy. In fact, originally, the economy was originally built around humans hunting and gathering food. It later expanded to simple agriculture. Food (and fuel for cooking this food) was a very high proportion of these early economies. The only way that the rest of the economy could grow was by the most essential elements of the economy shrinking as a percentage of the total. Thus, the parts of the economy that have been growing have been the least essential portions. These are the ones that shrink back, when energy resources are limited.
outcomes are somewhat unpredictable, but there are some certainties.
infrastructure and complexity have been increasing, and there is an unstoppable diminishing returns on resource extraction. So energy requirements are greater just to produce level economic activity.
meanwhile, net (surplus) energy is in an unstoppable irreversible decline.
so complexity must now decrease.
the food production and distribution subsystem is essential, so it is other subsystems that will have to be downsized or eliminated to give the result of lower complexity while maintaining food supplies.
food supplies must take a continuously growing % of the remaining energy, and non-essential subsystems therefore will have a shrinking % of the remaining energy (this energy is equated to money which is “energy tokens”).
unpredictable in general, and yet in some specifics it seems that the downward process has some predictability to it.
Yup. The iceberg will get reconfigured.
This reconfiguration (localization / elimination of “luxuries,” many of which are actually bad for us) is the subject of Paul Hanley’s “Eleven,” which I’ve mentioned before. I think he is right about that much, although he doesn’t talk much about the transition. My main objection to Hanley is based on his Baha’i-inspired belief that starvation can eventually be solved (in the future global civilization that Baha’is expect to emerge). In fact, any steps that make food more available will just increase the human population, resulting in a need for more food, and so on in a vicious circle. (Which is how we got to our present situation.)
If humankind wants to end starvation we must limit the number of humans. At a minimum no more than two kids per couple. Being in overshoot one kid per couple. Both enforced.
Ed,
I think it may be more than that, the demographics are important, this hints that getting old and being non productive puts one in a precarious position. One size does not fit all, some of us age better than others, unfortunately it does seem in my case even with good health endurance declines.
Your first sentence is interesting, the question becomes who will be the limiter and who will be the limited. Sensitive questions.
Dennis L.
“My main objection to Hanley is based on his Baha’i-inspired belief that starvation can eventually be solved.” In other words, his religion is a cargo cult. Newsflash: they don’t work.
No starvation! Universal Love!
Sure.
I will agree that as long as there are energy sources to dissipate, new forms of dissipative structures that use that energy will tend to appear. Thus, is seems possible (and even likely) that there will at least some survivors of the current collapse. In fact, there may be multiple groups of people in different parts of the world who are able to find a way forward, despite the big changes taking place.
I ended my recent post Understanding Our Pandemic-Economy Problem with these paragraphs:
wELCOME CLARITY. I don’t know whether food can be produced while “other subsystems (are) downsized or eliminated to give the result of lower complexity while maintaining food supplies”. I imagine Gail could point to complexities within the system that would hinder this from working. If this is so, it would be an interesting challenge to look for a way around it.
After trying to grow food myself for the last 15 years I would say no.
I planted kale, cabbage, and chicory, and something has eaten (et?) most of it. Garlic and eggplant doing ok. Peppers are a little wan. Excepting potatoes (haven’t had good luck with those either—I get out about what I put in), gardens don’t yield a lot of calories.
In my experience, potatoes love wood ash! Give them chicken manure, compost and plenty of ash and play them Inca music once a week to remind them of the Andes.
Amateurs growing food to live on is out the question. We need professionals. (We can plant just to keep our hand in, and I’m sure if we want to halfway kill ourselves trying, we can do a halfway job that takes all our time and probably makes us sick.) But if governance were set up differently, professionals could train youth to do a fair job. Every student in the world being taught to do it would help some.
I do like that African’s approach re the unfortunate cat, but he’s a little ahead of his time.
“We need professionals.”
yes.
above, I was not suggesting that food production and distribution are the only essential subsystems.
any subsystem that is required to maintain food production and distribution is also essential, so there is a certain level of complexity needed to feed billions of people.
subsystems like energy (FF), electricity (grid), trains, trucks, highways, chemicals (fertilizer), communication (internet), manufacturing (farm machinery). And some level of government and banking/finance to enable all of that.
feeding billions requires complexity, but there are lots of subsystems in our complex IC that could be downsized or eliminated in order that energy and money flows more towards food.
could be mostly eliminated: travel/airlines/hotels, movies/tv/sports/concerts/casinos, “fashion”, hair/makeup, etc.
and other subsystems can be downsized, in ways like one car per family, smaller houses per family or more people per large house.
yes, that is called “challenge”.
and it’s also called lower prosperity and harder lives.
and any remedies for declining energy are only temporary, perhaps only lasting for a few decades, or even only a few years.
just to add two major subsystems that will definitely be downsizing: education and medical.
higher ed is way too big right now, with far too many useless degrees.
not only that, but it is NOT essential that most persons achieve literacy. It is all well and good if possible, but education from preschool on up could be downsized significantly.
and most of the high cost health care methods are NOT essential. Cancer treatment, many big pharma mega priced meds, much “voluntary” surgery etc.
yes, the average person will die a little bit sooner, but “maximum possible lifespan” is not an essential ingredient to maintaining IC.
covidinamonthorayearoradecade
What I’m gathering from Gail is that even those “frivolous” activities are so networked in that removing them throws the overall system off in unrepairable ways. Time has to be part of of the calculation too. Nothing seems to stand still long enough to manage.
Still, I can’t see it as that there’s nothing to be done. We are free to self actualize within a self organizing whole. COVID seems to have made a seismic shift in that system that somehow is imperceptible to most. The boiling frog syndrome. Your vision, and mine, of what could be downsized/eliminated are similar.
——————
COVID perhaps acts like an indifferent arbiter. It doesn’t care if it brings on dystopia or some preferred alternative. So ideas like yours mightn’t be something you could impose as much as something that fit’s into the shape which the self organizing system is defining (or that we might somehow have intuited).
I believe that if we don’t, won’t or can’t see where to fit in down sizing, the chance of a dystopian “solution” increases.
This all probably a muddle, so please excuse me for that.
that is all quite reasonable.
the entire economic system will continue to self-organize.
it could collapse as it proceeds through this continuing process, even in 2020, or a little bit longer.
or it could proceed in ways somewhat along the lines of what I am proposing which of course is a more optimistic type of downsizing.
mainly I keep thinking that the continuing self-organizing is going to be circling around the essential nature of food production and distribution, and the “frivolous” stuff will be downsized, even though the jobs in all these “frivolous” subsystems are quite important to the workers, and no matter how much people try to maintain the non-essential subsystem in which they might happen to be employed.
Studying accounts of hardship in WW1 and 2, I concluded that the vital factor for survival in times of semi-starvation and inadequate rations is usually a little injection of high-quality nutrition in addition to the regular crappy diet.
That is the value of a home kitchen garden, not full self-sufficiency which is impossible.
It is remarkable how little people can survive on if they get an occasional high-quality boost.
Art leads, what you really mean is that we need professionals that utilize complexity and FF inputs to grow food so the rest of us do not have to work hard and get our hands dirty.
The old time farmer and family would go out every day and cull weeds though out the farmland. It was dirty, hard work. The old farmers proved that they could feed their families and more through wise application of organic principles, and through diverse agriculture, and of course while having unpolluted, “alive” and fertile soil that was not killed off by chemicals.
When you say amateurs can’t feed themselves what you are really saying is that amateurs who do not want to put forth the effort cannot feed themselves.
Xabier, I like the idea (certainty?) that some high quality nutrition now and then that a backyard garden could produce would make for better survival odds. It’s quite an elegant concept.
JesseJames,
I’m quite advanced in age, and have been around well before the explosive takeoff of FF use. Even so, I’ve never seen my elders put their fingers in the ground. In the old days there was a subsistence farmer class, in a near feudal social arrangement. It was most definitely a class-based hierarchy, even though my people lived very simply by today’s standards. It was a very patterned way of life, and everybody “knew their place,” or could live with it. For the somewhat elite, there was a higher level of culture than now. So it is actually that culture and that class structure which provided the food. If everyone were required to grow their own food, a) they would do it very badly, b) it would disrupt order to an unmanageable degree, c) it would drive many to suicide or war. Besides, all the ingredients for growing food are now so stressed that other than with professional efficiency it would be unlikely to succeed.
Without industrial agriculture it is impossible to feed 7.8 B. Without chemical fertilizers and a functioning food supply chain, agriculture and artisanal fisheries could feed what, 500 million people?
To grow some of your own food is feasable, and i tri to do it myself in my large backyard, but there is not many self-suffiicent people on this planet today, as millions of humans were in 1870. Knowledge, techniques, stocks of domestic animals, physical and psychological endurance, etc. have been lost in the meantime.
In short, the average man of 2020 is a weakling compared to the average man of 1870. And then there’s the problem of why grow anyhting if you are not sure you can defend your granary?
Industrial agriculture for sure. But there are some unnecessary damages to land, like removing the cuttings in ploughing. There’s also the lack of storage (although I vaguely remember someone refuting my concept) to allow for excess produce to be widely and easily distribute in emergencies. Then cosmetic standards are another source of industrial waste…
Many sources of waste have to do with human value systems.
“Many sources of waste have to do with human value systems.”
I agree, but the belief system of IC man is deeply ingrained now. Consumerism was not imposed by law, it was happily chosen by IC man and his values. Besides, it was an inevitability, since growing “forever” is an imperative to our demented financial/economic system. And how do you propose to change the values of 2020 humans? I just see one way to do it: by force, that is, by techno-totalitarism.
Low-complexity food source (for now):
https://twitter.com/SusannaCeccardi/status/1277854752756260865
African dude sets up a barbecue with some scrap wood on a public sidewalk in Tuscany and roasts himself up a (stray?) cat. One of the people filming, in a tizzy, yells at him that he seems to have plenty of money to buy cigarettes, so why can’t he buy some bread?
Cat lives matter!
Because there ain’t nothing like roast kitty AND a smoke?
Net surplus energy available is made worse by the amount now required to support growing populations in producer nations. Take Saudi Arabia for example where it is estimated that of the 10Mbbls/d produced only 5Mbbls/d is now available for export.
this is somewhat Jeff Brown’s Export Land Model, where countries that export FF gain wealth and then use that wealth to build up their own infrastructure which then requires those countries to use more of their FF resources domestically.
the endgame is when a country then needs all of its production for internal use.
probably unforeseen in this model is the OFW insight that as FF resources begin to diminish in quantity and quality, the pressure on prices is downward.
these lower prices make the situation even worse, and of course this is the actual situation in the world now.
I am not sure that in practice it works out precisely the way these theorists say. The amount of oil consumed seems to depend on population as much as anything else. It tends to keep rising, except when the economy is doing very poorly, as it has been since prices fell in 2014. Then it flattens out.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/middle-east-oil-production-consumption-exports.png
Oil production tends to be higher when prices are high, and lower when prices are low. If we look at oil consumption by Saudi Arabia and by the overall Middle East as a percentage of oil produced, it tends to move around because of these factors. It does sort of rise, but that is not the only direction it goes. It is nowhere near 50% now.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/share-of-saudi-and-middle-east-oil-consumed-internally.png
It might be better to include natural gas as well as oil, but I still doubt that consumption would be near 50% today.
It’s only early days yet…..
And even so, here in the UK some very basic foodstuffs disappeared and are still either hard or impossible to get hold of.
Distribution problems, not actual lack of production – so far.
PS On that theme, a heartfelt thank you to the commenter who suggested where I could order flour for bread making.
Was that the celtic fish and game?
Yes, very efficient and nice people. I hope their stocks last.
Those pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters are far more precious due to a national coin shortage brought on by the coronavirus and resulting shut down.
As a result, the Giant supermarkets chain is the newest member of a growing list of retailers
limiting cash transactions and/or demanding exact change.
“Due to the national coin shortage, select Giant registers can only accept credit, debit, and electronic payments at this time,” company spokesman Christopher Brand said in response to PennLive questions about coin shortages on Friday
https://www.pennlive.com/business/2020/07/giant-supermarkets-limit-cash-transactions-citing-national-coin-shortage.html?outputType=amp
Another step to force a change to a cashless society….😥
I have loads of change…just try to turn it in at a bank….
They have machines at supermarkets but charge a whopping 10% to do it.
Another ploy to clip the little guy.
Herbie it is illegal, and a Federal crime, to charge “vigorish” for exchanging legal tender. Complain, and if that doesn’t work, find a sleazy lawyer and sue them blind.
And Norman, and all the others. I’m grateful to everyone on this site. But especially the ones that post regularly both those that initiate comments and those that Respond. This is the best of the blogs of the web. Gail is rather better than any professors I have learned from except for Don Cupitt Of Emanuel College Cambridge. But then again I actually attended some of his lectures in person. I do learn a lot from guy MacPherson also. I think he is unjustly maligned. Gail is really amazing. Even though she is somewhat of a realist in the end thinking that the laws of physics real. I am a non-realist and an absurdist to boot.
+1
But not to be confused with the dope smoking, alcoholic Mark that now lives in FL. 😉
Today I saw a jumbo TV go by on a boat just off shore.
Propaganda to the end baby!
Dear Harry, I actually depend a lot on your posting of news on this website which I read several times each day. I find I am unable to contribute much to the discussion but I learn so much from you and the others and of course from Gail. If anything I would like you to post more of your links and selected excerpts and comments. I also very much value your comments in general. It is from you and Gail that I learn the most. This blog is one of my major inspirations and sources of information about the wide world. Here in Perth Western Australia one can become rather to parochial. I love the big view and systems thinking perspective, intelligent and knowledgeable comments, and repartee and good humour. Even those posts that can be somewhat eccentric. As Gail says it’s all a self organising system here. So please keep posting more if anything. Thank you both. M
Just anothercstraw placed on BAU back….
Not good…t
From New York Times
As The New York Times reports, United reaffirmed its previous commitment to rebook passengers scheduled to fly the MAX free of charge, once it returns to service. “If people need any kind of adjustments, we will absolutely rebook them,” United’s former CEO Oscar Munoz stated in 2019.
While Scott Kirby has since taken the reins as CEO, a United Airlines spokesperson confirmed the offer still stands, stating:
Nothing is more important to United than the safety of our customers and employees. Once regulators have reached an independent conclusion about the safety of the MAX, we’ll be prepared to explain to our customers and employees how our MAX fleet will be put back into service and why we have the highest confidence that it is safe to do so. As part of our ongoing commitment to our customers, we will be transparent – and communicate in advance – with our customers who are booked to fly on a MAX aircraft, will rebook those who do not want to fly on a MAX at no charge.
American Airlines, another large 737 MAX operator, confirmed similar intentions, with a spokesperson stating, “Even though we don’t know when the MAX will reenter revenue service, we have always planned to offer flexibility to customers who are concerned about flying on the MAX.”
A Southwest Airlines spokesperson confirmed that airline will also accommodate free changes for customers who don’t feel comfortable flying the MAX, so uneasy passengers will have flexibility when flying all three U.S.-based 737 MAX operators, once the plane does eventually return to the skies.
The Airlines MUST of done their own market research and found most of the flying public would not fly on a MAX 8 knowingly…..
More delusion from the airline industry. The 737 MAX will never fly again. Get over it.
This just may be the END GAME folks…I live here in South Florida and it is looking grim as this King Flu is fighting back and kicking.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/just-when-it-seemed-safe-to-go-back-to-restaurants-a-new-coronavirus-outbreak-threatens-us-jobs-recovery-2020-07-04?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo
The bad news? Many of the people rehired could be laid off a second time if more states place inside dining off limits again or pause plans to loosen restrictions.
California, Florida, Texas and other states have tightened restrictions after a fresh outbreak of COVID-19 cases while others such as New York and New Jersey have delayed plans to allow inside dining. In California, restaurants in 19 counties were told to cease indoor dining for at least three weeks.
The slowdown in rehiring at bars and restaurants could put a big dent in U.S. employment growth in July if the fresh viral outbreaks are not brought under control soon, economists say.
The local channels at news hour primary focus is on the Covid 19 resurgence and restrictions.
The other is violence and protests….not good for a tourist economy.
Beaches are closed! Why visit here!?
American Airlines largeest hub is Miami😳!
A US Senator is introducing a bill to force middle seats not sold….bad press again…
To be honest at the Airport seating in the Concourse requires SOCIAL Distancing with a mask on at all times….but on a airplane NOT?!😳
US Senator blasts American Airlines for packing the middle seats on his flight
By Brian Ries, CNN
Updated 10:14 PM EDT, Fri July 03, 2020
(CNN)A United States Senator said he would introduce a bill to ban the sale of middle seats during this coronavirus pandemic, one day after he criticized American Airlines for selling the middle seats of a flight he had boarded, calling it “incredibly irresponsible” and warning it was contributing to the spread of the disease.
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, tweeted an image showing his packed flight on Thursday. Most of the passengers in the photo were blurred out, but it’s clear some were wearing masks and many of them were in the middle seat.
“@AmericanAir: how many Americans will die bc you fill middle seats, w/ your customers shoulder to shoulder, hour after hour. This is incredibly irresponsible,” he tweeted. “People eat & drink on planes & must take off masks to do so. No way you aren’t facilitating spread of COVID infections.”
Business travelers are NOT coming back and we are at 20% of last year’s passengers numbers…
It is a losing battle…..
God help us all off this continues much longer….
Dear Harry, I appreciate the effort you put into world financial conditions. I have never been involved in investing but alas it is how the world turns. We in the US don’t get international news of any kind unless we go seek it out somewhere besides MSM. Please don’t stop.
Harry, I don’t mean to be rude and I appreciate the effort you put into it – but…..
I would bet that one third of the comments on this blog are now just collated news stories from you.
I feel it is getting too much. i would much rather hear what you have to say about our situation than what the news feed is saying. Your personal comments are so much more interesting. I find this blog’s comments hard to read as I have to scroll back and reread to find out what replies have been made and with so many news stories between I am getting quite lost. Perhaps it is just me not being able to navigate the comments in a way that is more productive. Any suggestions are appreciated. Sorry if I seem rude Harry.
nikoB
There are different views. Having some collated news stories is fine, IMO.
These comments are easy to skip over, if they are not to your liking.
Thanks, Gail. Your analysis has so many strands, it is hard to follow the story in the news and post in a succinct fashion.
I may have gone overboard on Lebanon – I just can hardly believe what a mess it is!
To reieterate, OFW commment section is at many times a better aggregator of links and articles that purpose built websites. Thanks!
It’s salutary to hear what is going on in one small state, easily over-looked, like the Lebanon, now turning into a disaster, and feel very grateful to have mostly only minor inconveniences to cope with as here in the UK.
I think it is worthwhile knowing what is going in Lebanon (and Venezuela) because we can be damned sure what is happening there will soon occur elsewhere. We scoff at them as though the only issues are incompetence and corruption, but I do believe what they are experiencing now is our future as well.
NikoB, sincerely no worries!
I source articles for my own website and then transfer some of the more interesting/relevant ones onto OFW, so in a sense it is no skin off my nose either way.
I enjoy the feedback and had the sense that people generally felt the news feed was a net positive but the last thing I want is to bore everyone to tears or stifle conversation.
How does anyone else feel? Should I restrict my input to analysis and comment? Reduce the amount of news articles I post? Disappear entirely? 😀
I am open to suggestions.
Dear Mr McGibbs,
Please continue you as you are doing providing revelent news pieces from around the globe that fits OFW platform. I appreciate your time and effort in all you do and realize it ❤️ is not easy to do such. I am astonished at these briefings and feel like the US President Trump to grasp the critical pivots that may prove to be the ultimate Black Swan event of derailing BAU….for now it’s heels are being snipped at at an ever increasing rate.
Keep up the good work👍
I am happy with the level of news articles and extracts. They give a good feel for what is going on, from sources I might not see or read. There is no way to please everyone.
I feel that “big pharma” is controlling the dialog, the research and the proposed solutions for the virus and that what I read on major media conflicts with what I personally believe to be the truth.
Without this blog becoming a debate about all that, how people and governments see and deal with the virus is most important as that is what underpins all the “bad news” that Harry is posting.
The world needs to be properly informed and fear needs to be replaced by knowledge and understanding (not agendas and marketing), so that this finite world in which we live can move forward. Some relevant and focused articles would seem useful because they might enable those reading the blog to see possible ways out of all this rather than accepting what some characterize as “the new normal”.
Harry,
I really find your comments very informative, and if there are any I find uninteresting I just skip past.
Please keep posting as more often than not you find a lot of interesting news.
Harry, please continue posting news. Thank you for the effort! I find them to be interesting glimpses of our downward trajectory leading to the end of IC. As I recall, you also shared additional news on facebook or somewhere else?
When IC collapses it would be of great interest for a historian to have access to a printed copy of every OFW article with comments, in that case your news articles would constitute an important contribution. Of course, given that the end of IC does not also finish humanity.
I like them, maybe 20% less general the world economy is bad articles, we know.
I appreciate the news links – I normally wouldn’t find them myself. Of course I’m celebrating the end to the momentary onslaught of very off topic posts by a certain person. I had to go away for awhile, it was so ridiculous. Harry’s posts are relevant, in my opinion.
celebrate!
on this 4th of July, we can celebrate a particular OFW “freedom”.
Thanks!
Your opinion about the “certain poster” is just your opinion, thank you. I think otherwise For me, the action of the certain poster, when he arrived here with its BS Destroyer Ray and shattered all ilusions in sight was a very serviceable and entertaining act, so that OFW (the world best blog and forum, afaik), doesn’t risk becoming a little sedate and complacent sometimes. The certain poster could be irritant? Yes, but that was his function here, and an important one in my opinion. Personally, i always liked “irritant”. You cannot have nettles without hives. And “some prefer nettles” (Tanizaki). Só I vote for CertainPoster to return here someday, and i’m pretty sure sooner or later we’ll have him here again. Because if you love to converse and rant about IC collapse in an intelligent environment, there’s no place like OFW. And CP loves to rant about collapse? Well, electric eels like to shock?
I’m presuming of course that you are refering to FE. If is not the case, i beg your pardon.
it must be Foil Eddie.
“Foil”, that’s just like your opinion man. Not mine.
I agree, it is merely an opinion.
though I suspect he owns not only a Tin Foil Hat, but also a full body Tin Foil Suit, and foil shirts, and matching shoes and gloves, plus accessories such as foil scarfs and foil neckties.
and probably foil underwear too.
😉
Dear Harry,
Almost everything you post is important and needs to be known and reflected on. You are also meticulous at sourcing your information, and modest almost to a fault in your personal comments. Please continue as you are,with my thanks and silent support.
+++++++
What is the name of your site, the URL?!?!?!?
I could go there directly and get all the goodness you provide. God knows Gail would be glad to be rid of me.
Harry, please continue. I would even like to see FE posting here again. He is so informative and entertaining at the same time. but maybe I like the abuse?
For me, keep them coming, Harry!
I have said it before but once again: please continue Harry – I would never have heard of the misery in Lebanon in Danish medias.
“Lebanon is drifting deeper into crisis as it fails to do anything to remedy its collapsing currency and wider financial meltdown, raising big concerns for its stability.
“Hopes of salvation through an IMF deal have retreated with the government either unwilling or unable to enact reforms, hamstrung by the conflicting agendas of sectarian leaders who don’t want to yield power or privileges. ”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-lebanon-crisis/rudderless-lebanon-drifts-closer-to-maelstrom-idUKKBN2441C5
“For Amer al Dahn, the idea of eating meat is now a dream. Today, he can’t even afford bread and depends on credit from the local grocer to feed his wife and four children in the Lebanese city of Tripoli.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-lebanon-crisis-poverty/falling-off-a-cliff-lebanons-poor-borrow-to-buy-bread-idUKKBN24421T
“Retail chains closed en masse during the week, and almost all the country’s hotels remain shuttered – hopes of a spike from summer tourism were dashed by the Covid-19 pandemic and rising fears about security across the country.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/04/it-feels-like-a-failed-state-lebanon-crisis-deepens-as-it-awaits-bailout
“Two suicides in Lebanon on Friday, apparently linked to the country’s spiralling economic downturn, sparked angry protests over the government’s handling of the crisis.”
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1699451/middle-east
“Ife only has one option: sleep rough alongside a dozen other Ethiopian women also dumped by their employers in front of the consulate in Beirut, and beg to be repatriated home.
“They are among a growing number of migrant workers in Lebanon that have been abandoned by their bosses who, amid an unprecedented economic collapse, cannot afford to pay their salaries.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/lebanon-economy-coronavirus-domestic-migrant-workers-kafala-a9600506.html
Who can afford to send these workers home? Are there planes operating that might take them home? Would there be jobs/food for them when they get to Ethiopia?
American tourists are one of the kinds of tourists that have been cut off from Lebanon and practically everywhere else worldwide.
“The Federal Reserve has set a cracking pace in terms of supporting the US economy and global financial system. But what if it needs to do more?
“Policymakers have winced at the idea of negative interest rates. But exerting a stronger grip over the US government bond market is one potential option.
“Capping the level of Treasury yields, also known as yield curve control, would repeat a policy the Fed last used during and after the second world war. To some extent, the market is already behaving as if it has happened.
“[However] officials are uneasy that bond investors could push yields higher, increasing borrowing costs and short-circuiting a recovery in the economy.
“…yield curve control would send a signal that the Fed’s emergency support measures are fiendishly tricky to unwind. The central bank may want to shrink its balance sheet “once the world gets back to normal”, said Steven Blitz at TS Lombard. But “they can look all they want — there is no exit…””
https://www.ft.com/content/1caef3c8-35c5-438c-8b3c-ef17b02e1bef
“Germany saw new car registrations drop by 40% in June, Tagesspiegel newspaper reported, quoting industry association VDIK, putting Europe’s largest market on track for reaching a 30-year low.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-germany-economy-autos/german-car-sales-plunge-40-set-for-worst-year-since-1989-tagesspiegel-idUKKBN2433CR
The German automotive industry, one of the country’s biggest employers, is facing big job cuts, despite the government’s stimulus measures…
“The slump in the market is unprecedented in its scale and global scope,” Hildegard Müller, president of the German Automotive Industry Association (VDA) said on Friday…
“Carmakers were already feeling the pinch last year, long before the coronavirus pandemic hit… A number of German car companies had announced last year that they would need to cut staff…”
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/german-car-industry-warns-of-job-losses-due-to-unprecedented-slump-in-the-market-143557024.html
Falling car sales isn’t a new problem; it’s a growing version of an old one.