We would like to think that we can eliminate COVID-19, but doing so is far from certain. The medical system has not been successful in eliminating HIV/AIDS or influenza; the situation with COVID-19 may be similar.
We are discovering that people with COVID-19 are extremely hard to identify because a significant share of infections are very mild or completely without symptoms. Testing everyone to find the huge number of hidden cases cannot possibly work worldwide. As long as there is hidden COVID-19 elsewhere in the world, the benefit of identifying everyone with the illness in a particular area is limited. The disease simply bounces back, as soon as there is a reduction in containment efforts.
Figure 1. One-week average new confirmed COVID-19 cases in Israel, Spain, Belgium and Netherlands. Chart made using data as of August 8, 2020 using an Interactive Visualization available at https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ based on Johns Hopkins University CSSE database.
We are also discovering that efforts to contain what is essentially a hidden illness are very damaging to the world economy. Shutdowns in particular lead to many unemployed people and riots. Social distancing requirements can make investments unprofitable. Cutting off air flights leads to a huge loss of tourism and leaves farmers with the problem of how to get their fruit and vegetable crops picked without migrant workers. If COVID-19 is very widespread, contact tracing simply becomes an exercise in frustration.
Trying to identify the many asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 is surprisingly difficult. The cost is far higher than the cost of the testing devices.
At some point, we need to start lowering expectations regarding what can be done. The economy can protect a few members, but not everyone. Instead, emphasis should be on strengthening people’s immune systems. Surprisingly, there seems to be quite a bit that can be done. Higher vitamin D levels seem to be associated with fewer and less severe cases. Better diet, with more fruits and vegetables, is also likely to be helpful from an immunity point of view. Strangely enough, more close social contacts may also be helpful.
In the remainder of this post, I will explain a few pieces of the COVID-19 problem, together with my ideas for modifications to our current strategy.
Recent News About COVID-19 Has Been Disturbingly Bad
It is becoming increasingly clear that COVID-19 is likely to be here for quite some time. The World Health Organization’s director recently warned, “. . . there’s no silver bullet at the moment and there might never be.” A recent Wall Street Journal article is titled, “Early Coronavirus Vaccine Supplies Likely Won’t Be Enough for Everyone at High Risk.” This article relates only to US citizens at high risk. Needless to say, creating enough vaccine for both high and low risk individuals, around the world, is a long way away.
We are also hearing that vaccines may be far less than 100% effective; 50% effective would be considered sufficient at this time. Two doses are likely to be needed; in fact, elderly patients may need three doses. The vaccine may not work for obese individuals. We don’t yet know how long immunity from the vaccines will last; a new round of injections may be needed each year.
A new report confirms that asymptomatic patients with COVID-19 are indeed able to spread the disease to others.
Furthermore, the financial sector is increasingly struggling with the adverse impact shutdowns are having on the economy. If it becomes necessary to completely “write off” the tourism industry, economies around the world will struggle with permanent job loss and debt defaults.
Shutdowns Don’t Work for Businesses and the Financial System
There are many issues involved:
(a) Shutdowns tend to lead to huge job loss. Riots follow, as soon as people have a chance to express their unhappiness with the situation.
(b) If countries stop importing migrant workers, there is likely to be a major loss of fruits and vegetables that farmers have planted. No matter how much money is printed, it does not replace these lost fruits and vegetables.
(c) Manufacturing supply lines don’t work if raw materials and parts are not available when needed. Because of this, a shutdown in one part of the world tends to have a ripple effect around the world.
(d) Social distancing requirements for businesses are problematic because they lead to less efficient use of available space. Businesses can serve fewer customers, so total revenue is likely to fall. Employees may need to be laid off. Fixed costs, such as debt, become more difficult to pay, making defaults more likely.
Shutdowns cause a major problem for the economy, because, with many people out of the workforce, the total amount of finished goods and services produced by the economy falls. Broken supply lines and reduced efficiency tend to make the problem worse. World GDP is the total amount of goods and services produced. Thus, by definition, total world GDP is reduced by shutdowns.
Governments can institute benefit programs for citizens to try to redistribute what goods and services are available, but this will not fix the underlying problem of many fewer goods and services actually being produced. Citizens will find that some shelves in stores are empty, and that many airline seats are unavailable. They will find that some goods are still unaffordable, even with government subsidies.
Governments can try to give loans to businesses to help them through the financial problems caused by new rules, such as social distancing, but it is doubtful this approach will lead to new investment. For example, if social distancing requirements mean that new buildings and vehicles can only be used in an inefficient manner, there will be little incentive for businesses to invest in new buildings and vehicles, even if low-interest loans are available.
Furthermore, even if there might be opportunities for new, more efficient businesses to be added, the subsidization of old inefficient businesses operating at far below capacity will tend to crowd out these new businesses.
People of Many Ages Soon Become Unhappy with Shutdowns
Young people expect hands-on learning experiences at universities. They also expect to be able to meet possible future marriage partners in social settings. They become increasingly unhappy, as shutdowns drag on.
The elderly need to be protected from COVID-19, but they also need to be able to see their families. Without social interaction, their overall health tends to decline.
We Are Kidding Ourselves if We Think a Vaccine Will Make the Worldwide COVID-19 Problem Disappear
Finding a vaccine that works for 100% of the world’s population seems extremely unlikely. Even if we do find a vaccine or drug treatment that works, being able to extend this solution to poor countries around the world is likely to be a slow process.
If we look back historically, pretty much all of the improvement in the US crude death rate (number of deaths divided by total population) has come from conquering infectious diseases.
Figure 2. Crude mortality rates in the United States in chart from Trends in Infectious Disease Mortality in the United States During the 20th Century, Armstrong et al., JAMA, 1999.
The catch is that since 1960, there hasn’t been an improvement in infectious disease mortality in the United States, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Society. As progress has been made on some longstanding diseases such as hepatitis, new infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS have arisen. Also, the biggest category of infectious disease remaining is “influenza and pneumonia,” and little progress has been made in reducing its death rate in the United States. Figure 3 shows one chart from the article.
Figure 3. Mortality due to influenza or HIV/AIDS, in chart from Infectious Disease Mortality Trends in the United States, 1980-2014 by Hansen et al., JAMA, 2016.
With respect to HIV/AIDS, it took from the early 1980s until 1997 to start to get the mortality rate down through drugs. A suitable vaccine has not yet been created.
Furthermore, even when the US was able to reduce the mortality from HIV/AIDS, this ability did not immediately spread to poor areas of the world, such as Sub-Saharan Africa. In Figure 4, we can see the bulge in Sub-Saharan Africa’s crude death rates (where HIV/AIDS was prevalent), relative to death rates in India, where HIV/AIDS was less of a problem.
Figure 4. Crude death rates for Sub-Saharan Africa, India, the United States, and the World from 1960 through 2018, based on World Bank data.
While the medical system was able to start reducing the mortality of HIV/AIDS in the United States about 1996-1997 (Figure 3, above), a 2016 article says that it was still very prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2013. Major issues included difficulty patients had in traveling to health care sites and a lack of trained personnel to administer the medication. We can expect these issues to continue if a vaccine is developed for COVID-19, especially if the new vaccine requires more than one injection, every year.
Another example is polio. A vaccine for polio was developed in 1955; the disease was eliminated in the US and other high income countries in about the next 25 years. The disease has still not been eliminated worldwide, however. Poor countries tend to use an oral form of the vaccine that can be easily administered by anyone. The problem with this oral vaccine is that it uses live viruses which themselves can cause outbreaks of polio. Cases not caused by the vaccine are still found in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These examples suggest that even if a vaccine or fairly effective treatment for COVID-19 is discovered, we are kidding ourselves if we think the treatment will quickly transfer around the world. To transfer around the world, it will need to be extremely inexpensive and easy to administer. Even with these characteristics, the eradication of COVID-19 is likely to take a decade or more, unless the virus somehow disappears on its own.
The fact that COVID-19 transmits easily by people who show no symptoms means that even if COVID-19 is eradicated from the high-income world, it can return from the developing world, unless a large share of people in these advanced countries are immune to the disease. We seem to be far from that situation now. Perhaps this will change in a few years, but we cannot count on widespread immunity any time soon.
Containment Efforts for a Disease with Many Hidden Carriers Is Likely to Be Vastly More Expensive than One in Which Infected People Are Easily Identifiable
It is easy to misunderstand how expensive finding the many asymptomatic carriers of a disease is. The cost is far higher than the cost of the tests themselves, because the situation is quite different. If people have serious symptoms, they will want to stay home. They will want to give out the names of others, if they can see that doing so might prevent someone else from catching a serious illness.
We have the opposite situation, if we are trying to find people without symptoms, who might infect others. We need to:
- Identify all of these people who feel well but might infect others.
- Persuade these people who feel well to stay away from work or other activities.
- Somehow compensate these people for lost wages and perhaps extra living expenses, while they are in quarantine.
- Pay for all of the tests to find these individuals.
- Convince these well individuals to name those whom they have had contact with (often their friends), so that they can be tested and perhaps quarantined as well.
Perhaps a few draconian governments, such as China, can handle these problems by fiat, and not really compensate workers for being unable to work. In other countries, all of these costs are likely to be a problem. Because of inadequate compensation, exclusion from work is not likely to be well received. Quarantined people will not want to report which friends they have seen recently, if the friends are likely also to lose wages. In poor countries, the loss of income may mean the loss of the ability to feed a person’s family.
Another issue is that “quick tests” are likely to be used for contact tracing, since “PCR tests,” which tend to be more accurate, often require a week or more for laboratory processing. Unfortunately, quick tests for COVID-19 are not very accurate. (Also a CNN report.) If there are a lot of “false positives,” many people may be needlessly taken out of work. If there are a lot of “false negatives,” all of this testing will still miss a lot of carriers of COVID-19.
A Major Benefit of Rising Energy Consumption Seems to Be Better Control Over Infectious Diseases and a Falling Crude Death Rate
I often write about how the world’s self-organizing economy works. The growth in the world’s energy consumption since the advent of fossil fuels has been extremely important.
Figure 5. World Energy Consumption by Source, based on Vaclav Smil estimates from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects, together with BP Statistical Data on 1965 and subsequent
The growth in world energy consumption coincided with a virtual explosion in human population.
Figure 6. World Population Growth Through History. Chart by SUSPS.
One of the ways that fossil fuel energy is helpful for population growth is through drugs to fight epidemics. Another way is by making modern sanitation easy. A third way is by ramping up food supplies, so that more people can be fed.
Economic shutdowns lead to reduced energy consumption, partly because energy prices tend to fall too low for producers. They cut back on production because of unprofitability.
Figure 7. Weekly average spot oil prices for Brent, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Given this connection between energy supply and population, we should not be surprised if shutdowns tend to lead to an overall falling world population, even if COVID-19 by itself is expected to have a small mortality rate (perhaps 1% of those infected). Poor countries, especially, will find that laid off workers cannot afford adequate food supplies. This makes poor members of those economies more susceptible to diseases of many kinds and to starvation.
Epidemiologists Based Their Models on Diseases Which Are Easily Identifiable and Have High Mortality Rates
It is clear that an easily identifiable illness with a high mortality rate can be easily contained. A difficult-to-identify disease, which has a very low mortality rate for many segments of the population, is very different. Members of segments of the population who usually get only a light case of the disease are likely to become more and more unhappy as containment efforts drag on. Models based on very different types of pandemics are likely to be misleading.
We Need to Somehow Change Course
The message that has been disseminated has been, “With containment efforts plus vaccine, we can stop this disease.” In fact, this is unlikely for the foreseeable future. Continuing in the same direction that has not been working is a lot like banging one’s head against a wall. It cannot be expected to work.
Somehow, expectations need to be lowered regarding what containment efforts can do. The economy can perhaps protect a few high-risk people, but it cannot protect everyone. Unless COVID-19 stops by itself, a significant share of the world’s population can be expected to catch COVID-19. In fact, some people may get the disease multiple times over their lifetimes.
If we are forced to live with some level of COVID-19 (just as we are forced to live with some level of forest fires), we need to make this situation as painless as possible. For example,
- We need to find ways to make COVID-19 as asymptomatic as possible by easy changes to diet and lifestyle.
- We also need to find inexpensive treatments, especially ones that can be used outside of a hospital setting.
- We need to keep the world economy operating as best as possible, if we want to stay away from a world population crash for as long as possible.
We cannot continue to post articles which seem to say that a spike in COVID-19 cases is necessarily “bad.” It is simply the way the situation has to be, if we don’t really have an effective way of containing the coronavirus. The fact that young adults build up immunity, at least for a while, needs to be viewed as a plus.
Some Ideas Regarding Looking at the Situation Differently
(1) The Vitamin D Issue
There has been little publicity about the fact that people with higher vitamin D levels seem to have lighter cases of COVID-19. In fact, whole nations with higher vitamin D levels seem to have lower levels of deaths. Vitamin D strengthens the immune system. Sunlight raises vitamin D levels; fish liver oils and the flesh of fatty fishes also raise vitamin D levels.
Figure 8 shows cumulative deaths per million in a few low and high vitamin D level areas. The death rates are strikingly lower in the high vitamin D level countries.
Figure 8. COVID-19 deaths per million as of August 8, 2020 for selected countries, based on data from Johns Hopkins CSSE database.
The vitamin D issue may explain why dark skinned people (such as those from Southeast Asia and Africa) tend to get more severe cases of COVID-19 when they move to a low sunlight area such as the UK. Skin color is an adaptation to different levels of the sun’s rays in different parts of the world. People with darker skin color have more melanin in their skin. This makes the production of vitamin D less efficient, since equatorial regions receive more sunlight. The larger amount of melanin works well when dark-skinned people live in equatorial regions, but less well away from the equator. Vitamin D supplements might mitigate this difference.
It should be noted that the benefit of sunlight and vitamin D in protecting the immune system has long been known, especially with respect to flu-like diseases. In fact, the use of sunlight seems to have been helpful in mitigating the effects of the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918-1919, over 100 years ago!
One concern might be whether increased sunlight raises the risk of melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer. I have not researched this extensively, but a 2016 study indicates that that sensible sun exposure, without getting sunburn, may decrease a person’s risk of melanoma, as well as provide protection against many other types of diseases. Non-melanoma skin cancers may increase, but the mortality risk of these skin cancers is very low. On balance, the study concludes that the public should be advised to work on getting blood levels of at least 30 ng/ml.
(2) Other Issues
Clearly, better health in general is helpful. Eating a diet with a lot of fruits and vegetables is helpful, as is getting plenty of exercise and sunshine. Losing weight will be helpful for many.
Having social contact with other people tends to be helpful for longevity in general. In fact, several studies indicate that church-goers tend to have better longevity than others. Churchgoers and those with many social contacts would seem to have more contact with microbes than others.
A recent article says, Common colds train the immune system to recognize COVID-19. Social distancing tends to eliminate common colds as well as COVID-19. Quite possibly social distancing is counterproductive, in terms of disease severity. Epidemiologists have likely never considered this issue, since they tend to consider only very brief social distancing requirements.
A person wonders how well the immune systems of elderly people who have been cut off from sharing microbes with others for months will work. Will these people now die when exposed to even very minor illnesses? Perhaps a slow transition is needed to bring families back into closer contact with their loved ones.
People’s immune systems can protect them from small influxes of viruses causing COVID-19, but not from large influxes of these viruses. Masks tend to protect against large influxes of the virus, and thus protect the wearer to a surprising extent. Models suggest that clear face shields also provide a considerable amount of this benefit. People with a high risk of very severe illness may want to wear both of these devices in settings they consider risky. Such a combination might protect them fairly well, even if others are not wearing masks.
Conclusions – What We Really Should Be Doing
Back at the time we first became aware of COVID-19, following the recommendations of epidemiologists probably made sense. Now that more information is unfolding, our approach to COVID-19 needs to change.
I have already laid out many of the things I think need to be done. One area that has been severely overlooked is raising vitamin D levels. This is being discussed in the medical literature, but it doesn’t seem to get into the popular press. Even though the connection is not 100% proven, and there are many details to be worked out, it would seem like people should start raising their vitamin D levels. There seems to be little problem with overdosing on vitamin D, except that sunburns are not good. Until we know more, a level of 30 ng/ml (equivalent to 75 nmol/L) might be a reasonable level to aim for. This is a little above the mean vitamin D level of Norway, Finland, and Denmark.
Social distancing requirements probably need to be phased out. A concern might be temporarily excessive patient loads for hospitals. Large group meetings may need to be limited for a time, until this problem can be overcome.
“‘A growing sense of panic’ with no fresh federal relief in sight
“It’s been four months since most of the federal government’s $1,200 stimulus checks went out. The $600 a week federal boost to unemployment benefits expired three weeks ago, along with a moratorium on evictions. Many small businesses have already spent the money from their federal emergency loans.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/19/politics/federal-stimulus-stalled-covid/index.html
“In a desperate plea for help, the US hotel industry said it faces a default disaster, in which 25% of hotels are at risk of foreclosure.
“The report, sent to Congress this week and compiled by Trepp, shows that the percentage of hotel loans 30 or more days delinquent is 23.4% as of last month — the highest percentage on record.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/19/business/hotel-industry-default-coronavirus/index.html
Think of it as Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”, and let the free market take its course.
If hotels are foreclosed on, how can this situation be fixed? If a new owner buys them for less money, will that allow them to rent our the rooms cheaply enough to fill the rooms in the future? I doubt it. What other use is there for these hotels?
The coronavirus brought na unusualy increased interest in the hobby gardens in Slovakia, also among the young families:
https://korzar.sme.sk/c/22468610/o-zahrady-je-enormny-zaujem-jeden-pozemok-chce-aj-25-kupcov.html?ref=trz
I think this has happened many places. The situation looks unstable.
One of the today’s approaches is hybridisation.
Here is one of the examples where this approach fails:
https://www.at-it-translator.com/i-dont-offer-machine-translation-post-editing-here-is-why/
“MTPE takes more time and energy than human translation for poorer results”
Multitasking, i.e. doing several things at once or frequent switching between the activities, is only a temporary remedy. Such quest for savings in various areas (reducing pollution, reducing fuel consumption, reducing staff) leads to a crazy hybridisation, which is the final stage of the complexity increase. Then comes the collapse, which we are witnessing now…
Imagine, that such things are called “the trends”:
“https://www.tomedes.com/translator-hub/translation-industry-trends-2020”
In reality, it means working for like 1/3 of the rate and increase the energy expenditure. And such “trends” can be seen in various industries. Taking into account the ageing populations, which means the decreasing mental and physical abilities, this can not be true!!!
We have a world where various industries create false expectations in the customers and the people demand such solutions, which in reality do not exist.
German Court Says Tesla Self-Driving Claims Are Misleading
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/tesla-autopilot-germany.html
The result is THE CRASH…
MG, a minor point, but perhaps an important one. There is no such thing as “machine translation”. The idea that a computer would understand the text in language L1, and generate the equivalent in L2, was abandoned years ago after every attempt to do it had failed. The fact is, every word in a “machine translation” has been written by a human. What the computer does is segment the L1 text into fragments, look them up in a database of human written L1 texts, find a match, and then follow a pointer to an L2 text that was also human written. Given a big data base of texts, and proper segmentation, this is trivial.
The problem is that the result is a pastiche; it has no consistent tone, or style, or even consistent replacement of the same L1 word by the same L2 word. So in the original “man” might appear as “Mann” or as “Mensch”, depending on who wrote which fragment. Or indifferently as “homo” or “vir”, and so on. Smoothing that out is indeed harder that pure human translation.
I remember having to critique a scientific paper written in German, and found that I could translate by hand faster than I could *read* the silly and seriously flawed machine translation. (Should you care, the paper was “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper”, by one Albert Einstein)
This is an important topic for me, as a long term follower (and skeptic) of the machine intelligence movement, because it follows almost exactly the “translation” method described in John Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument”, published in 1980, in which he claimed that such a method would prove nothing about the computer’s ability to understand natural language. Such a computer, for example, would be unable to generate a single new sentence in the language it supposedly understood.
Thank you for listening.
Dear Robert,
I can see that you understand this topic.
There are various misleading terms used that distort the view of the reality. Also the word “editing” in MTPE is not true, as the task is in fact “comparison and correcting”, which is a quite energy demanding task.
The current price situation in the translation industry is described in the comments section of the abovementioned article on the website https://www.tomedes.com/translator-hub/translation-industry-trends-2020:
“Fulano
The use of MTPE is good in the short term for translation agencies, but is bad for both translators and clients. Take this into consideration: MTPE work currently offers about 30% of the normal wages against translating from scratch, but often takes the same amount of time (if not longer). This means that credentialed and skilled translators are leaving the industry in droves because the wages per hour have plummeted, leaving unqualified “editors” to proof only the English portion of a text for readability and deliver it to clients, who aren’t happy with the end results due to inconsistencies and outright errors. MTPE has turned into a cash grab for agencies that will charge around $.14 – $.16 per word while paying their “editors” $.03-$.04 per word, instead of paying $.08-$.10 per word for an accurate translation from scratch. It’s simply become a way for agencies to make more money at the sacrifice of translators and clients alike.”
However, I would say that the quest for low prices and cutting the costs by the translation agencies is the main culprit, as the clients with their increasing complexity machinery, products, services etc. require more and more translations for less and less money.
You should read the output from GPT-3, which is a slice from a larger system running the “show”. It is basically a recurrent network with the “critic” stripped off, so it can be provoked to produce syntactically correct semantic nonsense. Which sort of reminds of a human response once you put the hammer down.
https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE
The “Chinese Room” has been refuted. It is the last bastion of the “human spirit”. Which in all truth is just a sweet hallucination by the brain. For example, try some LSD, what happens? Yes, the hallucination becomes unfamiliar, however, the critic instantly spots the problem, because it isn’t concerned with manufacturing a compelling narrative, rather with forming a consistent state of the world, even though the representations are hallucinated.
https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/08/19/7-day-average-coronavirus-cases-drops-below-50k-first-time-since-early-july/
“The seven-day rolling average of new coronavirus infections in the United States, a key metric for gauging the severity of the disease, dropped below 50,000 on Tuesday for the first time since early July, data from the COVID Tracking Project and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed.”
Gail, I’m posting this only because I’ve seen you write about the subject. I don’t know how you manage to read so many articles!
I have a hard time reading all the article and listening to all the videos/tapes. It squeezes time for other things. But I appreciate all of the thought that goes into these.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/devastation-middle-class-it-now-takes-53-weeks-median-wages-year-pay-basic-needs
“… millions of Americans are desperately looking forward to another stimulus round, and then another, and another after that, for the simple reason that it was the government’s “pandemic relief” that boosted compensation to artificial, if “one-time” record highs.”
“The question is whether this “one-time” stimulus which many equate with Universal Basic Income, has become a permanent fixture of American life.” !!!!!??
the graph at the bottom:
another presentation of Q2 where worker income + pandemic relief actually pushed the average person to a record high compensation.
if “pandemic relief” is discontinued, the economy will plunge.
we’ll soon see if this becomes a continuing program in an American turn towards more socialist policies.
People definitely can’t get along on what they are earning. This is really a world-wide problem. Shutdowns made the problem much worse!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-19/opec-urges-members-to-keep-to-plan-amid-threats-to-oil-recovery
Working on getting Nigeria, Iraq and others to fully implement the oil production cuts they agreed to, in order to get prices up more. There is concern about demand not coming back.
Jim Rogers is a folksy grandfather figure that tells it like it is….hope you listen and find it to your benefit….sometimes plain, simple speaking is the clearest form of communication
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nzE6ulj0vE8&t=13s
I listened to the first half of it. Quite a bit of what he says sounds fairly sensible.
He says that all of this debt that the world is issuing will eventually lead to problems. He referred to MMT as “More Money Today,” which he does not advocate. It looks good to politicians as a way to fix current problems.
He fells the COVID response was an overreaction. Why didn’t they react as they did in 2009 to H1N1 flu?
He believes all currencies have problems. If there were a currency that wouldn’t have a problem, he would put his money there. Right now, he is advocates buying gold and silver. He thinks prices will go higher.
Gail, thanks for listening and feedback😜.
Two other standouts besides what you covered was First, too big to fail institutions did just that in the past…KAPUT…Banks, Companies and Governments that were thought solid and eternal and we have a new monetary theory, MMT…(More Money Today) print our way out of this mess with free money….Karl Marx is probably kicking himself in his pants for not adding that in his book…nobody reads it today…
Jim Rogers points out the obvious…folks like to look for the easy way out thinking this time it’s different…. especially in an Election Year!
Just makes it worse….
I believe in another video he advised listeners to get ready and reinvent themselves because BAU ain’t going be here much longer!😭
Lots of fun out west here as we are under a mandatory evacuation order due to a nearby fire that just sprang up this afternoon. How the heck do these fires get started? Oh, right, people as the wild animals have no matches or lighters.
I’m staying to fight the fire. Got a hundred foot fire hose out the back and 50 footer out front. Two brothers saved their family house not far from here, so I plan to do the same if possible. Got a fire proof raincoat, goggles and heavy duty dust mask. I’ll stay until I’m singed, then bug out.
I’ll report later as to what happens. If you don’t hear from me later, symbolically toss ashes from your barbecue and say, “Dust to dust, here’s to Chrome Mags.” lol
Chrome why don’t you get a set of those sprinklers you hang on your gutters then bug out? Who live next to the forest up here in Canada and if ever there is an interface fire the fire dept drops these off and tells everyone that’s all you can do and now leave! Google WASP fire suppression – cost me $120 for 2
My, you have a really tough job ahead of you. Do your best but please don’t put your life or limb in danger. I wish you the best of luck.
Actually, a lot of the fires start from sparks caused by broken connections within power transmission lines when the weather is hot. The connections on the aluminum transmission lines do not hold up well. Turning off the electricity when it is hot and windy is a way to prevent this from happening.
I have no way of knowing whether this problem was involved this time around.
I would suggest you evacuate ASAP. Risking your life for your house doesn’t make sense.
The fires in and around Napa and Sonoma county, leading to the evacuations seen on the news, were sparked by an unusual dry lighting storm.
Best of luck, Mags. Make sure you are confident of your escape route!
I stayed through a big fire. Sherrif didnt force evac. I fought wildfire for years. I layed down water continuously for hours around the perimeter. If you have stucco and a steel roof you have a chance. If there is fuel and it comes through hard… Set up a pool to try and save yourself if that happens.
“Two brothers saved their family house not far from here, so I plan to do the same if possible.”
Success for them does not necessarily = success for you. Please pack up and leave now, because we’ll miss your commentary, if you don’t.
Chrome Mags, my best wishes for a happy outcome. But please remember: do not risk what cannot be replaced in order to save what can. You are far more valuable than your house.
Exactly 😊…I remember those days of fake fights of debt ceilings..
He they aren’t even pretending any restrictions on spending or fiscal responsibility!🤑🤢k
It’s so obvious now we are at the point of no return, why bother even the lip service of being conservative as far as spending is concerned.
See the Space Force is being set up without a blink of an eye!
Pretty much flat out until they are forced not to spend like a ship of drunken sailors on shore leave!
Man, if I were in another nation, boy, would I be livid sh#t
the CBs of many major countries are creating money on their computers, as much as they want, just like the USA.
as long as the USA doesn’t create their $ too much disproportionately to the other major countries, then the value of the USD will not go down much relative to those other countries currencies.
the USD index has dropped a bit lately, and could plunge, but I doubt it, given the money creation by all those other major countries.
People in Turkey are in crisis
Turkey may suffer second currency crisis in two years – Reuters
Aug 19 2020 04:54 Gmt+3
Last Updated On: Aug 19 2020 04:56 Gmt+3
Turkey may be facing its second currency crisis in as many years after the lira slumped to a record low against the dollar this week, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
A combination of interest rates below inflation, depleted foreign exchange reserves, easy credit and a sharp contraction in tourism revenues does not bode well for the lira, the news wire said.
Analysts are unsure what the fair value of the lira is, Reuters said. Meanwhile, Turkey’s central bank is constrained in its monetary policy choices by the aversion of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to higher interest rates. Erdogan recently repeated his preference for lower rates and sacked and replaced the governor of the central bank last year for failing to cut them.
The provision of cheap credit, led by state-run banks, has brought a boom in borrowing by consumers and businesses and an increase in demand for imports, widening Turkey’s current account deficit. At the same time, the money needed to fund that deficit is in short supply as foreign investors sell lira assets and the tourism industry reels from the impact of COVID-
The Institute of International Finance (IIF) says the lira’s fair value lies at 7.5 per dollar, citing the current account. It revised its estimate from 6.3 per dollar in June and 5.5 in April, Reuters said.
The lira fell to a record low of 7.408 per dollar this week, taking losses for 2020 to almost 20 percent. It rose 0.8 percent to 7.3 agains the U.S. currency on Wednesday afternoon local time.
“A severe credit crunch in the second half of 2018 put the country into recession, shifting the current account very rapidly from deficit to surplus,” said Robin Brooks, the IIF’s managing director. “We expect a similar dynamic now.”
Turkey’s real effective interest rate is almost the lowest in the world – the central bank’s benchmark lending rate is 8.25 percent while annual inflation stands at 11.8 percent, meaning real interest rates are deep in negative territory. That is prompting Turkish lira deposit holders and foreigners who invest in local bonds to sell up and buy foreign currency.
The central bank is due to meet on Thursday to decide on interest rates. Commerzbank does not expect a meaningful policy rethink unless the lira falls to levels nearer 8.5 per dollar, Reuters said.
The lira’s path is clear and no tinkering with the banking system or a partial introduction of capital controls can change things, the German bank said.
The lira may still have much further to fall, Reuters said, citing prices on the options market.
Analysts are unsure what the fair value of the lira is, Reuters said.
Kindly allow me to assist them in their deliberations: the fair value of the lira is zero. All else is deception, or, in the case of the analysts, self deception.
Belarus
“BILD can confirm reports that the Kremlin is using Russian Air Force transport planes to fly national guards to Belarus. A military intervention in a neighboring country at the request of the Lukashenka regime has begun.”
The Russian empire continues to contract. First with the collapse of the Soviet Union and then Ukraine and now Belarus.
Russia no longer has the energy resources to maintain the empire.
Yoshua, I disagree. Russia probably has more resources to maintain an empire than almost any other country, especially the US, China, and the (now collapsing) EU. And Putin learned his lesson with the Ukraine catastrophe: a “colour revolution” in fact instigated by the globalist “deep state”, that set up a puppet government of neo Nazi thugs, behind which the puppet masters proceeded to loot the country.
He will not let that happen to Byelorussia, and I believe the mass of the people will support him. Nato has been secretly moving troops to the Polish and Lithuanian borders, but they will be helpless against a determined Russian push westwards, backed up by nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles.
I hope it does not come to that, but either way, NATO (and the globalist oligarchs who control her) are on a hiding to nothing.
Russia is too big and too cold to remain and empire. Russia is to Europe and Asia the same as Canada to the USA: the provider of energy and other resources. But definitely not an empire…
The name of the Putins party United Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Russia) reflects the internal problem of the Russia: keeping the unity, the danger of desintegration.
MG, Russia has been “in danger of disintegration” since before Jules Verne wrote “Michael Strogoff” in 1876. I suspect it will stick around for some time yet. I also believe that both Byelorussia and the Ukraine will rejoin the Motherland, as the truth sinks in that they are being turned into satrapies for the globalists to loot.
“Apple is the first U.S. company to boast a market value of $2 trillion, just two years after it became the first to reach $1 trillion.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8643751/Apple-company-worth-2-trillion-stock-rose-60-year.html
The top ten:
Apple: $2tn
Saudi Aramco: $1.8tn
Amazon: $1.66tn
Microsoft: $1.6tn
Alphabet: $1.06tn
Facebook: $747bn
Alibaba: $701bn
Tencent: $625bn
Berkshire Hathaway: $498bn
Visa: $423bn
“Why Apple hit $2 trillion in the middle of an economic catastrophe:
“In the time it has taken Apple to go from one to two trillion dollars, the company has released no major new products….
“Profits have actually fallen, from $13.3bn (£10.2bn) to $13.1bn. This year, the global economy is due to contract heavily, and millions have become unemployed.
“These do not seem like conditions in which a company would double in value, but an unprecedented combination of events – many of them outside Apple’s own control – has made it the world’s most valuable company.
“Central banks around the world have stepped in with trillions of dollars of emergency stimulus measures to keep businesses running: cheap loans and bond buying programmes have pushed yields to record lows. As a result, investors seeking financial returns have turned towards the stock market, pushing shares to record highs.
“Apple’s price to earnings ratio – a measure of how highly valued a company is relative to its financial performance – now sits at its highest level since 2007, before the financial crisis.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/08/20/apple-hit-2-trillion-middle-economic-catastrophe/
“America’s stock market has swiftly recovered from the pandemic. Sophisticated investors don’t think the real economy will do the same.
“Just 17% of fund managers expect a rapid V-shaped economic recovery, according to a Bank of America survey released Tuesday.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/business/double-dip-recession-economy/index.html
I can see why!
Lots of free money for investment around!
Even before the pandemic, BofA’s survey of global analysts found that companies were shifting away from globalization and towards a more localized approach when it came to
their supply chains. This was due to a host of factors that threatened the network that supplies modern factories, including trade disputes, national security concerns, climate
change and the rise of automation.
However, in a new study, BofA Head of Global Research Candace Browning and her team suggested that Covid-19 has catalyzed the reversal of a decades-long shift in manufacturing from the U.S. and Europe to China.
The report revealed that the pandemic had caused 80% of global sectors to face supply chain disruptions, forcing over 75% to widen the scope of their existing re-shoring plans.
“While Covid has acted as a catalyst to accelerate this change, the underlying reasons are grounded in a shift to ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ concluding relocation favors a broader community of shareholders, consumers, employees and the state,” Browning explained.
While each of these stakeholders was approaching relocation from a different perspective, the analysts observed that they were broadly drawing the same conclusion: that portions of supply chains should relocate ideally within national borders, but failing that to countries deemed “allies,” the report said
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/18/bofa-us-european-firms-face-1-trillion-to-relocate-china-supply-chains.html
Hmmm, the Report failed to point out that China is decoupling from the US Dollar and is getting uppity in it’s ambitious plan to go up the chain to value added products.
Wonder why?
“Even before the pandemic, BofA’s survey of global analysts found that companies were shifting away from globalization and towards a more localized approach when it came to their supply chains.”
From globalization to localization, down the ladder we go…
China’s energy supplies were not growing as fast as before. It had to cut back. Any reasonable country could figure out that depending on China for critical materials was not a good idea for the long term.
Come now…a Monkey could run this Victory lap!
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/morgan-stanley-takes-victory-lap-of-sorts-on
inflation-call-as-they-offer-three-reasons-why-prices-will-accelerate-past-federal-reserve-targets-11597763802
Morgan Stanley takes victory lap of sorts on inflation call as they offer three reasons why
prices will accelerate past Federal Reserve targets
Morgan Stanley’s economics team has taken a victory lap of sorts on their May call that inflation will return, as it laid out three reasons why prices will climb faster than the Federal Reserve’s, and other central bank, targets.
Since the investment bank said inflation would reignite, U.S. consumer prices have jumped, with the so-called core rate rising at the fastest monthly rate in 29 years in July.
….“As the rebound in the economic indicators continue to gather pace, we think we have left behind the worst of the disinflationary pressures and that reflation is already under way,” say the economists in a note to clients. “Moreover, the recent rise in commodity prices and the depreciation of the U.S. dollar DXY will also add to the inflationary pressures, particularly in the U.S.,”
We’ve seen nothing yet….lived in the 1970s with Jimmy Carter and his JC Penny?
Well, they’re coming BACK…
Speaking of Monkeys
Beating The Market: Surprise, Surprise, The Monkeys Win!
Mark Skousen
May 17, 2018 @ 3:01 pm
https://www.stockinvestor.com/35446/beating-market-surprise-surprise-monkeys-win/
“A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.”
Burt Malkiel, “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”
To do this, the authors randomly select 30 stocks from a list of the top 1,000 stocks by market capitalization, weighting each pick equally. They then repeated the process 100 times and examined both the individual year trials and the trials’ average.
The result? Amazingly, on average, 96 of the 100 “monkey” portfolios beat a generic cap-weighted index and outperformed the benchmark index by an average of 1.7% per year.
The reason Arnott and his fellows were able to reach this conclusion — and why my students were able to simulate it — is because if you choose any portfolio of 30 stocks randomly selected from the list of 1,000 stocks, the majority are bound to include mostly smaller companies. Since small companies tend to outperform big companies, Malkiel’s monkey portfolio will be naturally inclined to beat the market. Voila! The monkey.
Well, suppose we should look at who’s making decisions at the Fed
“Remember the ridiculous and quaint charade around the “Debt Ceiling” in Congress and the White House? Me neither. But those were the Good Times.
“So what we now have is the Pandemic Economy with the Incredibly Spiking US Gross National Debt, which spiked incredibly by $4.45 trillion over the past 12 months, to $26.5 trillion.
“WHOOSH go the trillions, flying by.”
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/08/18/who-bought-the-gigantic-4-5-trillion-in-us-government-debt-added-in-the-past-12-months-everyone-but-china/
“If aggregate demand declines sharply in Fall 2020, there may be a need for the Fed-Treasury to jointly launch helicopter money…. an economic system is not capable of rebounding on its own when faced with a collapse in aggregate demand. It is wishful, ideological thinking to think otherwise.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4369380-financialized-covidminus-19-economy-helicopter-money-anyone-part-2
“A negative interest rate–growth differential since the 2008 financial crisis could tempt governments to spend more. But such a step could be risky…”
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/low-interest-rates-don-t-make-spending-risk-free-11597724104572.html
We don’t really know that there will be a growth bounce back of more than a month or two that will allow growth to be high, while interest rates are low. More likely, growth will switch back to shrinkage, and any positive interest rate will be a problem.
That’s the point. There are no choices. What will be is baked in. The political froth I really thought people understood here. Oh well. Systematic decline is hard to accept.
“If aggregate demand declines sharply in Fall 2020, there may be a need for the Fed-Treasury to jointly launch helicopter money…”
that really should be “relaunch” helicopter money.
the $1,200 for every adult and the $600 x 17!! weeks for the unemployed was a seriously massive helicopter drop.
Q2 per capita real disposable income growth (USA) was PLUS 8%! (annualized = 32% so yes it was really +8 in Q2).
https://twitter.com/DiMartinoBooth/status/1295470150444097538
Tim Watkins has ideas about helicopter money:
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/08/18/inflation-at-the-top-stagnation-at-the-bottom/
“Nevertheless, the scale of the emergency requires a level of public spending on a scale that would make Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders blush. We would need to see previously unthinkable policies like lowering the state pension age (in order to free up jobs for young people) and raising unemployment and disability benefits to around two-thirds of the average wage, in order to take the edge off the coming collapse in spending.”
that’s an interesting one: lower the retirement age, so older folks get their free money sooner, and younger workers can take their jobs.
also unemployment handouts raised to two-thirds of their lost pay.
countries with mixed economies are surely moving farther away from capitalism and more towards socialism.
so warm up those helicopters.
An interesting article! Most of the impact of the shutdowns was hidden from workers through programs that continued payrolls. Only a few companies have cutback employment, with the generous government programs available. Going forward, it will be much more of a challenge, especially after October 31, when current support programs end.
No argument that helicopter money can increase aggregate demand. The problem is that it cannot increase aggregate *supply*. That is its fatal flaw, and has been ever since Keynes first floated the idea.
A lack of food to buy in China; a lack of airline tickets to buy practically everywhere.
Wow! No wonder many people aren’t spending the money. (Also, many things, like airline travel and tours overseas aren’t really available.)
The Treasury is holding a trillion and a half but I am not sure that is enough
Things seem to have slow down in Europe although here in the US people are still believing In a V recovery. I still see lots of spending go to target or Costco and people are spending money like crazy.
The stock market in the US has done better than in other places in the world. Some people seem to look at it for guidance on how well things are doing. I am afraid the high prices are just a bubble.
Hahahahaha…starting to get worried are we!!!???? Keep printing up Trillions to spend and no revenue …you will see worry
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/all-eyes-on-gold-morning-brief-095852983.html
Gold bulls everywhere, but pros are getting worried it’s now overvalued
Gold (GC=F) has been one of the better performing assets this year, going above $2,000/oz this week again after falling from its all-time highs last week.
“Suddenly, everyone wants to talk about gold,“ billionaire investor Jeffrey Gundlach said in a recent webcast.
All the forces gold bulls warn of seem to be pointing in the right direction: ultra easy monetary policy, massive federal spending, a weak dollar, and concerns that all this means inflation down the road.
Credit Suisse analysts recently raised their price target on gold to $2,500/oz, calling the whole narrative a “perfect storm” for the precious metal.
“We see plenty of upside on the gold price and view the correction as a buying opportunity,” Credit Suisse’s Andrew Garthwaite wrote on Friday. “We think policy stays loose (especially fiscal) until unemployment falls to much lower levels in the US, which this time around generates some inflation…”
Furthermore, they see demand rebounding from both consumers and institutions.
“Nearly half of gold demand is jewelry and this fell 46% in 1H but is likely to recover as GDP recovers,” Garthwaite added. “Central banks account for 15% of gold demand and their purchases fell by nearly 40% in 1H. We think central bank buying will increase sharply.”
One of the more notable moments in gold’s current bullish run is Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B) taking a stake in gold miner Barrick Gold (GOLD). The move surprised many as Chairman Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger have publicly trashed gold for years.
All that said, the pros are starting to get worried.
Actually, I’m surprised the price isn’t HIGHER because adjusted for inflation it’s no where near record high in both Gold or Silver!
If they continue doing what I think they are those greenbacks will be toilet tissue…
Nice morning wrap up and we see BAU stumbling along….
The Independent
Democrats backtrack and remove demand to end fossil fuel tax breaks from platform
Louise Boyle
August 18, 2020, 6:30 PM EDT
In the midst of the convention, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has dropped from its party platform a demand for no more oil and gas subsidies and tax breaks, Huffington Post reported on Tuesday.
The statement – “Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels, and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy” – originally appeared as an amendment to party demands last month and was approved, the report said.
However, the final draft of the platform was missing the statement, HuffPost reported. The Independent has contacted the DNC for comment.
Mr Biden’s climate plan called for historic investment in clean energy which would be paid for, in part, by “ending subsidies for fossil fuels”. The plan also called for the US leading the charge in a global ban on fossil fuel subsidies.
“There is simply no excuse for subsidizing fossil fuel, either in the United States or around the world,” Mr Biden’s climate strategy noted.
Senator Harris’ plan also called to “end federal subsidies for fossil fuels and hold Big Oil accountable for its role in the climate crisis,” the Washington Post reported. (Her campaign website is no longer active). In 2017, she co-sponsored the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act..
Good LUCK with that 😅….you don’t know who you’re messing with Biden.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Biden withdraws his nomination soon (he’s just biden his time) and is replaced by Michelle Obama. If elected, she would be president with Harris as vice president. Please don’t call this feminism.
I can imagine climate change will be less and less of a topic in political debates going forward. It will be more about job security, food security and law enforcement.
“Not only has Spain been among COVID-19’s biggest victims in Western Europe. Its tourist-dependent economy has proved to be particularly vulnerable to the pandemic’s ravages.
“Stuck in a euro straitjacket, this all too likely puts Spain well on its way to another round of its sovereign debt and banking sector crises.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/512343-spain-risks-becoming-europes-other-sick-man
“Spanish public debt rose to a record high of 1.29 trillion euros (1.53 trillion U.S. dollars) in June, mainly lifted by spending linked to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, data from the Bank of Spain showed on Tuesday.
“The total debt rose by 32 billion euros from the preceding month, pushing the debt-to-GDP ratio to 110% according to Reuters calculations…”
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-19/Spanish-public-debt-record-high-in-June-on-COVID-spending-T4GVOeVCHC/index.html
I suppose that as GDP goes down, the debt to GDP ratio will tend to rise, even if more debt is not added.
Dear Spanish people. Leave the Euro, repudiate the debt, stop paying tribute to the oligarchs in Brussels, revive the peseto, combine with other friendly nations into a Mediterranean free trade zone, and then live long and prosper.
Concerning the absurd European Union, William Blake I think said it best: “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”
The other “sick man” in Europe is Italy.
“Household finances in the UK fell more sharply in August than the previous month after rising levels of unemployment hit average incomes and persuaded millions of families to cut back on spending.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/17/household-finances-fell-sharper-in-august-than-july-amid-unemployment-fears
““Every time I deliver a parcel, I wonder why I went to university, worked for three blue-chip companies then ran my own successful business only to be crushed by Covid,” said Ade Smith, who is now working as a delivery driver in his 50s…
“Mr Smith is one of thousands from comfortable, white-collar managerial backgrounds facing an uncertain future as the UK enters its worst recession on record.”
https://www.ft.com/content/596e49d9-1283-47b3-a771-1c0beebd7df5
It is hard to imagine, that with the ageing populations, changing the qualifications will bring a better paid job to the ageing workforce.
The mental and physical flexibility of the human body simpy declines with age…
It sounds like official unemployment figures have vastly understated the number who are not working. People are getting more and more gloomy about the situation, even though the economy is somewhat opening up.
>>It sounds like official unemployment figures have vastly understated
David Stockman used to write about this regularly, comparing the official unemployment figures with other sources, seemed like the official unemployment figures were invariably detached from reality / propaganda. He probably still does this analysis but his own articles are now behind a paywall.
Every country likely has some version of this issue.
“Japan’s exports extended their double-digit slump into a fifth month in July as the coronavirus pandemic took a heavy toll on auto shipments to the United States, dashing hopes for a trade-led recovery from the deep recession.
“Meanwhile, core machinery orders, a leading indicator of business spending, unexpectedly fell to a seven-year low in June, dashing hopes domestic demand would make up for some of the slack from sluggish global growth.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-trade/japans-exports-tumble-as-u-s-demand-collapses-order-books-shrink-idUKKCN25F060
“Thailand plans more stimulus measures for economy in deep slump…”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/thailand-economy-stimulus/thailand-plans-more-stimulus-measures-for-economy-in-deep-slump-idUKL4N2FK2Y4
“Singapore’s government has allocated another 8 billion Singapore dollars ($5.8 billion) to support the economy… Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat said Monday.
““The resulting economic impact has been severe,” Heng, who’s also coordinating minister for economic policies, said in a televised address. He added that “the global economy remains very weak.””
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/17/singapore-announces-another-5point8-billion-to-boost-its-coronavirus-hit-economy.html
Here are the main support measures:
(1) An extension of wage subsidies by up to seven months until March 2021. The amount of subsidies that companies can receive depends on the “projected recovery” of different sectors;
(2) An additional 187 million Singapore dollars ($136.5 million) in relief for the aviation sector;
(3) Cash payouts for unemployed Singaporeans or those who have suffered significant income loss, and low-wage workers.
Why is this exactly the wrong policy?
(1) It is subsidising the current economy, much of which will never recover. It is not encouraging innovation, diversification, or any other proactive coping measures. And the “projected recovery” means projected by bureaucrats beholden to special interests and politicians.
(2) What aviation sector? Need I say more.
(3) Cash payouts with no strings. How about cash payouts for those willing to retrain, reskill, and move up the value chain? No, keep the low paid mired in the circumstances that ensure they will remain low paid.
This is not the Singapore I remember. But then, a colleague of mine once said “Singapore will stop innovating when there is nobody left to copy”.
A huge number of countries closing down leads to a large amount of international problems in terms of lack of demand and lack of growth.
“The coming surprise may be a counter-attack by the forces of deflation… We are at a crunch point where fiscal fatigue is setting in across the West but the virus is still with us, and will remain with us through the next winter.
“The more relevant gauge… is core inflation in China. There is now such a phenomenon as the world inflation rat… and it is set by globalised East Asia, not by the US internal money supply.
“Chinese core CPI has dropped to a ten-year low of 0.5pc. China’s GDP deflator has fallen below zero. Factory gate inflation is running at minus 2.4pc. China has recovered but it is not firing on all cylinders. Import growth contracted in July. Retail sales have leveled off before reaching their pre-Covid level.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/08/18/coming-surprise-may-counter-attack-forces-deflation/
“China’s real estate sector may have peaked and will likely become a drag on growth during economic shocks such as the current pandemic, according to a report by two university professors.
“The decades-long housing boom has causes both prices and supply to be misaligned and the market may have hit “a potentially precarious peak”, according to the working paper by Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff and Yang Yuanchen of Tsinghua University in Beijing.”
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/real-estate/china-housing-may-have-hit-potentially-precarious-peak
for some strange reason, building speculators can never grasp the concept that buildings start their entropic decline the moment they are completed.
Use by human beings slows it down
unused empty buildings fall off an economic cliff
“… buildings start their entropic decline the moment they are completed.”
As we saw with the Burj al Babas. And as we shall soon see with Manhattan. However, as we did not see with the Pantheon. Along with his other great qualities, the Emperor Hadrian was a master architect. As were many other Romans.
Price changes in China seem to be very uneven. Pork prices are way up, as are some grain prices. But Factory Gate inflation is running at minus 2.4 per cent. Obviously, the factories are having trouble selling what they have made at high enough prices to prevent deflation. Part of this may be low demand around the world, with COVID. But local demand is not doing well either. Not enough jobs that pay well; too much spent on food, I expect.
“The S&P 500 closed at a record high on Tuesday, rebounding from huge losses triggered by the coronavirus pandemic and crowning one of the most dramatic recoveries in the index’s history.
“Trillions of dollars in fiscal and monetary stimulus have made Wall Street flush with cash, pushing yield-seeking investors into equities.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/markets/us-stocks-close-at-record-high-rebounding-from-covid-crash-1.4333443
“The rapid bounce in stock markets helps to give the impression that everything is under control and the economic crisis is drawing to a close… This might be true for the high net-wealth individuals invested in hedge funds. For almost everybody else, it is nonsense on stilts…
“The risk is that a still unfolding economic crisis will be made worse by a financial crash…
““The global economy has essentially become a giant tinderbox, susceptible to any spark that may come its way.” The world is not exactly short of potential sparks.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/18/recovery-stock-markets-central-bank
“Millions of Americans are hurtling into a period of unemployment that often carries more financial risk. Economists generally consider long-term unemployment as a period of joblessness that lasts longer than 26 weeks, or six months.
“From a financial perspective, this benchmark is important for a few reasons.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/18/millions-of-americans-are-facing-longer-periods-of-unemployment.html
“Congress should authorise another round of stimulus cheques, similar to the funds deployed in the spring, make them recurring until the end of this crisis and, most importantly, put them on autopilot so they are triggered during the next recession…
“Congress should… set direct cash payments in stone as a permanent policy triggered whenever unemployment rises quickly.”
https://www.ft.com/content/b5814bf8-ee55-447e-b25b-4475e88a69c2
“US Consumer sentiment has held up better through the coronavirus crisis than in previous downturns, but it may take much longer for sentiment to recover than many analysts may realize, not least because the economy has lost a crucial tailwind…”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/there-will-be-no-v-shaped-recovery-for-consumer-sentiment-datatrek-says-2020-08-18
“Congress should… set direct cash payments in stone as a permanent policy triggered whenever unemployment rises quickly.”
Yes, more economists who don’t understand game theory. Point One: with this safety net in place, employers will have more incentive to downsize whenever the economy falters, because, after all, the government will take care of the workers we let go. So unemployment will rise.
Point Two: as long as the subsidy continues, the unemployed will have a greatly reduced incentive to find a new job quickly, and will wait, shop around, expect more pay since why work long hours for subsidy plus peanuts. So unemployment will stay high.
Can nobody see this?
People without income vote. They will vote for whichever party seems to promise them the best future. Safety nets are popular. But physical goods and services to provide those safety nets will keep declining, making the promises increasingly difficult to keep in practice, even if parties decide to offer them.
Gail, I find no error in your analysis. People will vote for whatever promises remove their responsibility to look after themselves. And we wonder why our civilisation is collapsing.
The joblessness rate now is supposedly a whole lot lower than the jobless rate during the Great Depression, according to a chart shown. I am afraid the situation will change for the worse, however.
“The head of the World Bank has called for a more ambitious debt relief plan for poor countries after warning that the Covid-19 recession is turning into a depression in the most challenged parts of the globe.
“In an interview with the Guardian, David Malpass raised the prospect of the first systematic write-off of debts since the 2005 Gleneagles agreement as he said fresh Bank figures due out next month would show an extra 100 million people had been pushed into poverty by the crisis.
“Poor countries had been worse hit by the economic fallout from Covid-19, Malpass added, and a growing debt crisis meant it was necessary to go beyond the repayment holidays offered by rich countries earlier this year.
““This is worse than the financial crisis of 2008 and for Latin America worse than the debt crisis of the 1980s,” the World Bank president said.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/19/world-bank-calls-for-greater-debt-relief-for-poorer-countries-in-wake-of-covid-19
Actually, pretty much all countries could use debt relief.
“In the next few weeks, if all goes as scripted, Argentine officials will put the finishing touches on a bond restructuring deal and bring an end to the ninth default in the country’s history.
“Bond traders are already bracing for the 10th.
“They’re refusing to bid up the value of the old bonds that will be exchanged in the deal to the price that the government and key creditor groups agreed upon. In so doing, they are expressing serious doubts about the government’s ability to meet its debt obligations, even after the deal shaved $38 billion off the amount it owes over the next decade.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-18/bond-traders-are-already-bracing-for-argentina-s-next-default
“… analysts said there were concerns about falling reserves, persistent capital controls and economic recovery after the pandemic, and what that meant longer term about debt sustainability.
““The debt restructuring in itself doesn’t provide enough of a positive shock or solution to the current economic crisis,” Siobhan Morden, head of Latin America fixed income strategy at Amherst Pierpont Securities, said in a note to clients.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/argentina-bonds/update-3-argentine-bonds-shrug-off-debt-deal-as-gloomy-economic-outlook-weighs-idUSL1N2FK14F
“Small Argentine firms face ‘terrifying’ future even after debt deal…
” Francisco Lurueña’s textile firm on the outskirts of Buenos Aires has survived 39 years of myriad economic crises. Now it stands on the verge of closure, hit by COVID-19 on top of two years of recession, high inflation and a debt crisis.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-debt-companies/small-argentine-firms-face-terrifying-future-even-after-debt-deal-idUKKCN25E1IU
There seems to be a pattern to all of these defaults. A person wonders why lenders offer financing to Argentina. In fact, there are a lot of places with that issue.
An early paper of Rogoff and Reinhart noted that it is only growing countries that do not default. Once growth stops, default start.
John Day, a practicing physician in Texas, has some thoughts and some important advice about the pandemic that I think many people will be interested in reading. So I’m taking the gross liberty of reposting them as a general reference.
The Novel coronavirus pandemic in the USA is a complex event medically, economically, and humanly.
One faction lives in abject fear, and another faction lives in denial, while they can maintain it.
The factions are incompatible and completely aligned against each other. (That’s not everybody, though.)
3 per thousand people who catch novel coronavirus infection die, and mostly over 60. Older and sicker get hit harder. However, if you actually get diagnosed by a test, your chance of dying is more like 3 per 100.
A majority of people, 80-90% never get tested, and that was revealed by the early US seropositivity studies in California and New York. The number of cases implied was about 10X the number of cases confirmed.
Is that pattern holding? Those seropositivity studies are ongoing, but the ongoing results have been secret since April.
The Texas Governor Knows, but I do not. I see they are tracking the viral penetration of our human population, and slowing it down with masks, and closing bars, when it gets so fast that the hospitals get overloaded. That’s it.
There is a lot of human suffering and a lot of aunts and uncles and grandparents have died recently in our circle of friends and family.
People suffer, and suffering people get secluded and hospitalized.
Effective treatments are being suppressed and information about them is censored, and disparaged in the mass media.
That censorship is not completely effective, is it?
People do know they are being lied to and manipulated, but “which” narrative do they choose to deal with it?
US elites are trying to herd people into blue-camp and red-camp, with different sets of lies and misconceptions, but antagonistic to each other. Each sees some of the lies that the other believes, but not the lies they believe themselves.
This virus, militarized in a lab, does things we are only learning about. It specifically attacks the linings of blood vessels, shutting off lots of little vessels and starving lots of bits of brain, lung, kidney, liver, etc. of blood flow, which creates patterns of disease we have never seen before. It creates cottage-cheese damage to all these organs, which we have never seen the long term effects of. We have seen heart attacks, strokes, renal failure and pulmonary embolism, and we are seeing lots of all that now, from big blood clots.
That’s one thing. The other thing is that this virus hides from the immune system, when it is reproducing in a cell, so the immune system can’t see to destroy that cell-full-of-virus before it releases the virus.
Does this lead to sleeper-cells? Can people have dormant virus pop back up in a month or two? I just saw somebody who may have had exactly that happen to her. I can’t say yet. She had real, systemic COVID and positive nasal swabs, and stuff on CT of her chest, and typical excess clotting in her blood, twice, about 6 weeks apart.
Do not accept a simplistic answer. COVID is not the black death and it is not trivial like a cold.
Yes, every crisis serves the elites, just like every error favors the bank, not you.
This virus leaked, I think, which put the elites on their back foot, pushed them to rapidly adapt, like the rest of us.
They don’t trust each other, don’t trust us, and are mainly trying to hold onto flows of wealth and power, which are in rapid decline, but they are holding onto THEIR FLOW like it is a solid object.
It is not, but we humans are very loath to relinquish what we feel to be “ours”. It hurts us. It’s “wrong”.
Power elites need to keep us sidelined in fear and confusion, but power elites are also subject to the mass psychosis , which is developing.
Be sane. Don’t follow an ideology. This is chaotic. This is people going insane and acting out a recurring pattern of history where a lot of people die, including elites. Don’t take a side. Don’t accept a partisan narrative.
Clues are being dropped by folks like Bill Gates, that there will be more pandemics, which seems likely. Pandemics are a cull the elites can do without destroying valuable infrastructure. They are getting a better understanding of how pandemics move through the world, more comfortable with it.
I personally suspect that internet warfare, shutting down the web and grid and phones, can be used on top of viral pandemics to take out cities and regions. All of our eggs are getting transferred into that basket these days.
I think we humans are going into a periodic mass culling, like WW-1, and WW-2, but I really think it started with an accidental leak of weaponized virus, started before it was all agreed upon, and operational.
It seems like history always has an element of surprise and chaos, even for ruling elites, when a real reset starts.
I see that now in our herd-mind. There are always some who don’t much participate in the herd-mind.
Don’t get stampeded.
Grow a garden. Ride a bike. Meditate, Store some rice, beans, salt, sugar, oil, onions, garlic, etc.
Try to keep a low profile, on the sidelines, without much worth stealing.
Do help your neighbors in little ways, when the opportunity presents. Be a good citizen.
To the elites this may be mainly about controlling us with fear, but if you get sick with this virus, you will know pain, suffering, deep fatigue, and probably fear. I talk to my patients.
My daughter, Holly is a hospitalist in internal medicine at the country hospital in San Antonio.
Lots of people of all kinds are dying, and they are dying alone, without their loved ones, and they are dying through different mechanisms than we saw until just a few months ago.
You probably won’t die from this. Probably.
You do not want to get sick with it, for sure.
Take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D, but if you are just starting, take 10,000 units per day for the first couple of months.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/08/pandemic-complexity-musings.html
All sound and reasonable advice until the “elites culling the herd”.
We fellow readers of OFW all know that collapse is unavoidable, and most will agree that it’s coming really fast.
Then why the elites would bother to release a virus designed to cull the herd, since the demise of our industrial civilization will certainly entail the death of 90% of the population and do a better and faster job ?
Is it a cover-up ? Control through fear ? Mandatory vaccines with embedded RFID chips ?
There’s no ready vaccine in sight… And I doubt there’s enough time left for one to be validated, mass produced and distributed across the globe, let alone administred… Will they use 2 illuminatis officers to strand each of us on a medical chair for that purpose?
The elites are supposed to know everything… If they really did, they’d certainly be aware that people have their plot of dominating the world through a virus uncovered, right ? So now they must probably change their plans… Or are they deliberately letting us believe that we know what they know ?
Sorry but this is ridiculous. I’m not falling into that hysteria of “elite control”. Common sense and logical thinking invalidates wacky theories.
I don’t fear the virus, nor do I fear the scheme of some obscure organizations. But I surely do fear the collapse of our world. The rest seems pretty trivial to me.
Call me a sheep, a fool or a normie if you want, I just don’t care. We’re all the fool of someone else anyways.
Well said.
I also fear the collapse of our world, which I view as inevitable. The elites sending their goons to vaccinate me or put me into a camp, not so much.
I reproduced what John wrote in its entirety. I don’t endorse or agree with everything he said there, and I doubt if he himself is certain of much of what he wrote. A large part of it is rumination and adumbration. But it’s food for thought, and as someone on the frontlines, he convinces me that there is a nasty new disease out there, even though I’m not convinced we know what causes it.
Elite control? What does that phrase conjure up for you?
There are elites, certainly, And they do seek control, apparently. Noam Chomsky, who I have criticized in these comments as being a “left gatekeeper”—like any good guru, he tells you something you didn’t know before, but there are places he refuses to go and, if pressed, he may resort to the same sneering and name calling and clamping up that we’ve come to expect of people who are trying to conceal untruths—that Noam Chomsky has been talking about elites and their plans and their attitudes for the past half century. According to Noam, elites definitely exist in each country and they definitely have goals.
For instance, in his 2001 article New Wine, Old Bottles(/i), Chomsky made early efforts to critically analyze globalization. He summarized the process with the phrase “old wine, new bottles”, maintaining that the motive of the elites is the same as always: they seek to isolate the general population from important decision-making processes, the difference being that the centers of power are now transnational corporations and supranational banks. Chomsky argued that transnational corporate power is “developing its own governing institutions” reflective of their global reach.
This isn’t the same as equating Bill Gates with Dr. Evil. That’s a cartoon caricature and Chomsky would never stoop to that. So what is Gates doing with his attempts to vaccinate the world and to prevent people from using HCL and other inexpensive and effective means of treating Covid-19. Surely he isn’t just trying to make even more money—a philanthropist and a humanitarian like that? So what on earth is he up to if it isn’t attempting to gain control over something?
Bravo! Of course, ‘they ‘ have their plans – everyone does.
And everyone, even trade unions, are gaming this crisis for all they are worth, a contemptible but predictable spectacle.
But the chasm of boundless paranoia, although natural and tempting, is one we should take great care not to fall in to.
“3 per thousand people who catch novel coronavirus infection die, and mostly over 60. Older and sicker get hit harder. However, if you actually get diagnosed by a test, your chance of dying is more like 3 per 100.”
Whatever you do..Do Not Get Tested!!
Especially don’t get tested in a rich country, where they will be afraid to use hydroxycholoroquine.
Sound advice indeed. I have a friend who works at the corona unit at our local hospital. She told me that many patients get some kind of organ failure/complications, compared to what a “normal flu” would cause. Also that more younger people (40-50s) get hospitalized with this.
I am also not convinced that this is some evil scheme, but “TPTB” or even your local politicians are in a vulnerable age segment. So they are afraid to catch the corona and collectively shuts down society. It could be that simple…
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/18/coronavirus-recedes-cases-deaths-hospitalizations-dwindle-to-lowest-levels-in-weeks/
“The United States reported over 35,000 coronavirus infections on Monday, the lowest single-day increase since June, a Breitbart News analysis of Johns Hopkins University data revealed.”
scientifically, it’s still the first wave, but the second hump is winding down.
having this history, this suggests that there could be a third hump, perhaps fueled by the return to school of many millions of students and teachers/staff.
Winter will be another test.
the virus is here to stay, but at some point the infections will drop to a level which won’t justify the use of the label “pandemic”.
the pandemic is wi…
If the virus has staying power, the pandemic will eventually give way to endemic with the occasional epidemic.
One of the important signals of the comming recession is for me the rise of the excessive belief in the autonomous power of the machines: the people become persuaded that there is no need for high wages for the highly qualified workers which spend an increasing time maintaining the system with the rising complexity.
The system without such workers crashes and desintegrates.
I am afraid that the situation now is much worse than in 2008, as such belief in the autonomous life of the machines has become deeply rooted.
Ah, see, another reason to clear cut the Forest to stumps
Bloomberg
Millions of Beetles Are Wiping Out Forests All Across the World
Jen Skerritt
August 17, 2020, 5:00 AM EDT·6 mins read
Millions of Beetles Are Wiping Out Forests All Across the World
(Bloomberg) — A plague of tiny mountain pine beetles, no bigger than a grain of rice, has already destroyed 15 years of log supplies in British Columbia, enough trees to build 9 million single-family homes, and are chewing through forests in Alberta and the Pacific Northwest. Now, an outbreak of spruce beetles is threatening to devour even more trees in North America just as similar pests are decimating supplies in parts of Europe, creating a glut of dead and dying logs.
The bugs are thriving as climate change warms winters that would normally keep them at bay, destroying a swath of the world’s timber supplies. That may eventually spur shortages for the global housing market. Right now, lumber prices are soaring to record highs thanks to a surge in pent-up repair, renovation and housing demand sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.
All told, the beetles felled 730 million cubic meters of pine between 2000 and 2015 in British Columbia, Canada’s largest exporter of timber to the U.S. housing market. That’s erased more than a decade of lumber supplies and and will reduce the allowable production in the B.C. Interior by a staggering 40%, said David Elstone, owner of Vancouver-based Spar Tree Group. Provincial modeling indicates about 55% of B.C.’s marketable pine trees will be dead by 2020.
Man, give a tree a break…oops wrong choice of words
Ecosystems of all sorts are dissipative structures. They grow for a while, reach limits of one sort of another, then they collapse and are replaced by somewhat different ecosystem. The pine beetles are outcompeting the trees, in this example. This happens all the time; it is the way a finite world keeps refreshing itself. If we would let the trunks burn, it might help complete the process.
We can tell ourselves that the forest should be OK forever, but that is not the way a finite world behaves.
Turbulence and disruption everywhere,.Invading species and pests wrecking havoc. In my country for example lemon and orange trees are now being decimated by African citrus psyllid, and the beehives assaulted by asian hornets, both of recent import and side-effects of globalization.
Well, this is unstopable and unmanageable in the long run.There’s nothing we can do.except enjoy the rarefying goodies of IC: knowledge, neighbourliness and of course Pixies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XycBLF6kWuY
sort of fits in with my nutty thought processes
we mess about with the world we live in, thinking it’s ours to do with as we please.
Then bugs rise up to protect their world by eating our world—but we choose to ignore that
then a virus rises up to stop what we’re doing altogether, and shut down the processes that screw up the environment for every other species.
Makes ya think we might have really messed up this time
“The bugs are thriving as climate change warms winters that would normally keep them at bay, ”
So say the GW alarmists, eager to attribute anything to make their GW case. No mention of the huge monoculture man has created in the forests. No mention of the affect of factory agriculture in decimating biological diversity and potentially opening the path for the beetles to thrive. No mention of the elimination of any predators of the beetles.
This is not science. Science will look at all causes. Man has tinkered and skewed ecological systems, disastrously.
Today’s agricultural machines, which are full of electronics and plastics, are an easy prey of fires:
https://youtu.be/UkrT2zMCnR4
An interesting point is that the emergence of COVID-19, as a novel zoonotic disease, is directly related to global over-population, over-consumption and over-connectivity. As humans continue to over-populate the earth and encroach ever further into wild areas with wild animal populations, opportunities increase for diseases to jump from other animal species to humans. In the case of COVID-19, it now seems most likely that it jumped from bats (big reservoirs of corona-viruses) to humans without an intermediate host. The most likely path (from genomic researches) seems to be from bat guano mined from caves in Yunnan for use as fertilizer. Think of all the bat dung dust that a bat cave guano miner breaths.
The spread to Wuhan was probably by a traveler from the Yunnan caves district. There are other possibilities though. The butchering and and eating of multiple wildlife species from wildlife wet markets is definitely another possible avenue of the infection. The bottom line is too many people, too many close to wildlife and too many using wildlife products and eating wildlife and other “unclean” animals. The Indian sub-continent, with a much greater vegetarian tradition and many more taboos on eating animal meats (among Hindus, Moslems, Bhuddists, Jains and so on) seems to generate less epidemics / pandemics than China in the influenza and coronavirus space. And don’t forget flu viruses and corona-viruses are very different.
Over-consumption now means many nations like China are trying to emulate Western life-styles from over-consumption of foods and meat protein to the over-consumption of tourism and travel. Excess tourism and travel lead to over-connectivity. This means people rapidly flying all over the world to spread a new virus. The real problem here, just as it is with climate change, is the greedy overconsumption of modern humans. The Chinese are becoming as big a problem as the rest of the world. There’s more of them so that makes them an even bigger problem. China now has the the largest number of obese children of any country in the world. “China has largest number of obese children in world, study says – Mainland also ranks second behind the United States for number of obese adults, international research reports” – South China Morning Post.
The world is over-populated, over-connected and over-consuming. All of this takes excess energy and complexity and this is actually contributing to the imminent break-down of all systems, human and ecological. One could look at COVID-19 as the earth’s immune response to modern humans. The situation with COVID-19 is really one of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I am referring to locking down (quarantine) to eradication or not locking down. Both paths carry high costs but the long term relative benefits of each strategy are not certain.
The advantages of the “let it rip” strategy of the USA are possibly;
(a) reduction of unfit individuals in the population (natural selection);
(b) less short-term economic damage; and
(c) the ability to stay open to the world.
The advantages of the lock down to eradication strategy of NZ are possibly;
(a) protection of socially useful individuals (grandparent with treated diabetes may still be an excellent worker, citizen and family/social resource).
(b) protetction of health workers )health workers die too in a pandemic).
(c) better internal economy once open after eradication.
The disadvantages of each strategy are high-lighted by the advantages of the other strategy. Second waves are a problem and even Australia and New Zealand are now having second waves. Also of course, to (nearly) eradicate in a nearly fully infected world means international isolation for a possibly very long time unless a safe effective vaccine can be developed.
For Australia, where I live, I think eradication is the best strategy. For Australia, isolating ourselves from world people movements, but not all trade, would be a net benefit. We are an arid continent and we need no more immigrants or tourists. Our outgoing tourists spend more money overseas than incoming tourists spend in Australia. So tourism is a net loss to us. And further immigration will just destroy our remaining good but fragile environment.
Personally, I am cheering on the destruction of the immigration and tourism industries. They represent high consumption of scarce global resources for a large net loss and damage to the world. The world will collapse region by region. Regions which can achieve regional autarky (self-sufficiency) and stop immigration will survive best. Soon, if not already, being over-connected to collapsing regions will be a net negative and drag a country down with the rest. Maybe connection was a good thing once but the world has changed forever. Now connection and over-complexity are bad and unsustainable things. Australia has a moat. We are going to need it. And IMHO we need to acquire nuclear weapons to “spike the moat”.
There is an argument that China (once it realized the nature of COVID-19 ) deliberately ensured that the world got it… but that’s a full topic on its own. I’m very worried about the USA. It looks to me like you are going to collapse rapidly unless you can solve your political gridlock, partisan divides, social divides and massive inequality.
Ikonoclast, you make a lot of sense. My take, as I’ve mentioned bef0re, is that nothing can stop the pandemic so we must learn to live with it (or, of course, die with it). Nevertheless, my best wishes to you and your wonderful country.
One of those sweepingly inspired posts.
Christianity is the religion of peace and love. The Thesis.
Islam is the religion of war and hate. The Antithesis.
Nature always seeks balance. The Synthesis.
There are many different variations. The different variations can be quite different from each other.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/176/880/239.jpg
All monotheisms are religions of war and hate. No war of religion has ever been fought between pagan societies, though of course they have found countless other reasons to go to war.
Pagan religions on the whole respect each other. As the Negative Confession makes explicit “I have not denied God in any of his manifestations.”
One of the basic differences between the communism and capitalism is the attitude towards the population:
The communist countries support the growth of own population.
The capitalist countries support the import of the population.
That way the capitalism is on the population decline side, while the communism is on the population growth side.
But what happens when there is no one to import? And there are no resources for the communist growth of own population?
I am not sure about this.
If energy per capita is rising, population will likely grow. If energy per capita is falling, population seems likely to shrink.
I know in the Middle East, population exploded with oil riches. Families had lots of children and most lived to maturity.
Recently, I have read that the number of babies is unusually low. That happened in the 2008-2009 recession as well and during the depression.
Cuba’s population has grown much less than Haiti’s, and Haiti is nearby. Communism kept expectation of an adequate lifestyle for each child reasonably high. Homes are fairly small, so people didn’t have many children.
The Cuba’s population reached the resource limits, which resulted in high divorce rate and a limited population growth.
I agree that the population is a function of available energy. But when the energy limits are reached, the communism fails to sustain the population growth and the competition of capitalism with its free movement of not only goods, but also the people allows for some remedies.
Maybe we should differentiate between the communism and the socialism, where the communism is the late stage of the socialism, i. e. communism involves cannibalistic features, which the capitalism delays using money creation and the population imports, the imports of goods from countries with lower paid jobs or standards etc.
Or the capitalism allows for the depopulation of the resource poor countries when the people are free to move from the periphery countries to the core countries.
I know a story of a Slovak celebrity who married a Cuban woman, then they separated, but the woman did not return to Cuba, and found an another man in Slovakia.
https://m.topky.sk/cl/100313/1825463/Jopova-manzelka-otvorene-o-ROZCHODE–TOTO-je-dovod–preco-s-nim-uz-nezijem-
“Japan’s low unemployment rate on paper suggests an economy weathering the coronavirus reasonably well, but official figures belie worsening prospects for the country’s army of temporary workers, who make up about 40% of the jobs market.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-economy-abenomics-jobs/japans-low-jobless-rate-masks-deepening-worker-despair-idUKKCN25E0HR
“Joblessness among Filipino adults rose to a 12-year high in July, as 27.3 million found themselves without a job during a pandemic, according to the latest Social Weather Stations survey… In all areas, joblessness figures were ….record-high.”
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1323138/46-of-pinoys-jobless-more-layoffs-feared
“Millions of Indians have been left jobless as Coronavirus pandemic continues to spread. Many Indians who had been working in bigger cities are being forced to return to their villages after losing jobs because of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
https://www.scmp.com/video/asia/3097795/millions-indians-have-been-left-jobless-coronavirus-pandemic-continues-spread
“The number of unemployed people in Nigeria has spiked to 21.8 million following the negative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the private sector.”
https://allafrica.com/stories/202008170303.html
Shutdowns invariably lead to a lot of unemployment!
Our tour guide when we visited Japan a couple of years ago was one of the many temporary workers. He told us that many of these people would not be covered by the retirement program, because they could not save up enough to contribute to the fund each year.
I remember reading that the many people trying to fix Fukushima’s problems were also low-paid temporary workers.
The situation is almost like China’s. China has urban population and rural population. We are only told the unemployment rate for the urban population. Japan has what are essentially contract workers and regular employees. The contract workers aren’t counted. This happens to some extent in the US, as well.
“Joe Biden wants to be the greenest president in US history. He also owns a gas-guzzling 1967 Corvette Stingray and is quite happy for everyone to know about it.
“The two facts might seem incongruous. But for oil traders hoping to understand what a Biden presidency might mean for the market, the subtle signalling of the Corvette campaign video is worth understanding…
“…the aim of featuring the Goodwood green convertible is to frame Biden’s environmental plan not as some hair-shirted anti-car screed, but as a chance to remake the US automobile industry for the coming decades.
““This is an iconic industry . . . I believe we can own the 21st-century market again by moving to electric vehicles,” Mr Biden says in the clip.
“It is his version of “Make America Great Again”, wrapping his green message in the nostalgia of a car-obsessed culture.”
https://www.ft.com/content/a69ad16e-5385-48a2-9a7e-09afffaf196e
“While the [US shale industry’s] financial trouble is increasingly well-known, particularly with oil prices stuck below $50 per barrel, drillers face numerous obstacles in the field as well.
“A recent report from investment bank Raymond James looks at the increasing likelihood that drillers have largely maxed out their productivity gains. In fact, the bank warned a year ago that drillers were approaching their productivity limits; recent data suggest that this trend is bearing out.”
http://energyfuse.org/shale-faces-both-financial-and-operational-problems/
If the oil price is high enough, experience elsewhere shows that the industry can add more and more bells and whistles to the system, to help increase extraction. (Normally, a large share of oil in place is left behind.) But if the price is stuck below $50 per barrel, oil companies are pretty much stuck with today’s technology. On this basis, oil extraction reaches limits rather quickly.
This is why I’m thankful for an aesthetics-guidance system. I’ve had an aesthetic aversion (partly due to rural heritage and age, but also to visual training) to electrical machinery. And I’m drawn instead to the amazingly sophisticated 19th century machinery that used no electricity, and oil merely to lubricate moving parts.
right now I’ve borrowed some year-bound editions of the Illustrated London News, from the 1840s, full of jaw dropping illustrations of those old machines.
The drawings alone make me choke with envy—all done as woodcuts far better than I could with a pen, almost to CG standard
Theres even a 2 page section showing how they built early iron ships on a beach, no shipyard, nothing.
Wow! The people who did these could be proud of their work.
I’ll try and make some jpegs and post them
each book is bigger than A3 so will take some fiddling around
this is a typical copy from ebay, each illustration is hand cut on a wood block 7 x 5 in, then joined together
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwBVqTcMSCccHRqGzNSCQBhZGSJ
Artleads, Norman: almost 65 years ago, my uncle, who was a supervisor in a gasworks, showed me some of that machinery, still in use. A lathe you stood next to with a chisel, where every sliver of wood was removed by your own hand. A drill where you set the bit size and pitch, the speed, and controlled by hand the rate of descent. And a group of skilled workmen who were proud of their craftsmanship.
However, it had been electrified: by a single motor, that drove a moving belt. A system of shafts, belts and pulleys communicated the motion to everything on the shop floor. All worked by levers pulled by hand. That was when I learned to respect and admire Victorian engineering.
Thanks. I’ll see if I can find it online.
Thanks for trying. Too big for me to open, I guess.
This seems to be a “You can have it all” message.
He likely only drives his 67 vette on rare occasions. Keep in mind the fuel used on Airforce One on all those waste of time trips.
I liked the part of the first night of the Dem convention regarding the days when Biden took the train and made so many friends that worked on it. Regular hard working people. If Trump talked to them he’d gather them all together and tell them how great he is and ignore them as individuals completely.
agreed
Classic cars are a hobby, nobody uses them for more than a thousand or two miles a year, often as not they are trailered and do practically none
Aren’t there people who ask to be buried in their cars? Rather like Tutankhamen with his golden chariots. “Denn alle Lust will Ewigkeit”
Time for another reading of Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urn Burial”.
I watched the Biden car promo, and I have to say I thought it spectacularly self-indulgent and disconnected from American reality, when so many tens of millions are unemployed and fearing homelessness – quite out of touch.
The jump from that to asserting that the US can ‘own’ the EV market was simply ridiculous.
Moreover, the poor old man is obviously past it all, and clearly descending into senility. His VC, Harris, is just another super-ambitious immigrant on the make.
How awful to be American and to have such a poor choice, in conditions of civil disorder, just as when Hillary was served up as the presumed Chosen One.
Apartment dwellers would likely have a real problem recharging these vehicles, as well. They are second or third cars for rich families with places to recharge them.
Kamala is not an immigrant. Her parents were, a fairly common scene in America. My guess is that she’s being served up as a beeckon of multiculturalism (and that Biden is the Trojan Horse to usher her in). It’s a great disappointment that, smart as she seems, she’s into the same claptrap as all the other Democrats.
I don’t think Biden is a genuine candidate. This election reminds me of Bush Jr.’s reelection, when John Kerry was put forth as the Democratic candidate. Kerry was a poor choice: stiff, lacking in charisma, out of touch, etc. He was chosen to fail. During that year, the mentality was “anybody but Bush,” and now this year it appears to be “anybody but Trump.” The Democrats are trying to sell creepy uncle Joe as though they really believe in him, as though it isn’t just “anybody but Trump,” but I think it’s just part of the scripted circus that serves as our election process. Biden was chosen to fail.
A sitting president has to ensure that the hidden power base is happy – that’s how he keeps his job. Has Trump crossed those who are truly in power? Has he consistently delivered what they’ve needed from him? If he’s served his masters well then it would be inefficient and disruptive to unseat him. Unless creepy uncle Joe can serve the hidden power base better. However, given Joe’s apparent senility I doubt our hidden rulers would want to entrust him with the job. No, Joe was chosen for us, not for the hidden power base. He’s our simulacrum of a candidate. Trump will be reelected.
Sounds plausible. Although intuition suggests that Joe (through Kamala) has a slightly better chance than that. Still, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your conjecture proves correct. Otherwise, it requires something visionary (and exceedingly clever) coming from Kamala, and I see no sign of that.
If TPTB want another Obama to tamp down the BLM fuss, while changing nothing significant, mightn’t Kamala do?
https://blackagendareport.com/kamala-harris-class-struggle-and-illusion-identity-capitalism?fbclid=IwAR3EsR8eEjNa7mXp6L1om__KmgOuzAVOeXOVkRzDyV8kDuWhUF1oC3F576g
Interesting article, thanks for sharing:
“The disagreement is related to the critical need for African people to develop a much stronger class analysis of politics. For most people, our analysis is shaped by superficial factors like race or skin color. Factors that do absolutely nothing to clarify what a person’s position on issues actually is. In other words, many of us view someone who looks like us advancing within the capitalist system as progress and there are several deep-seated issues with this approach.”
People will eventually realize that skin color and ethnic background are of little significance to those at the highest levels of power. For the average, downtrodden citizen these superficial attributes are amplified: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a black president? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a woman president? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an openly gay president? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a Latino president? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an openly transgender president?” etc. There’s an endless cornucopia of identifiers that the public are supposed to find themselves satisfied by. Meanwhile, taking former president Barack Obama as an example, rather than focusing on his skin color consider the bloodlines that he belongs to:
https://famouskin.com/famous-kin-menu.php?name=10012+barack+obama
I would argue that his family ties are of far greater significance than the color of his skin in that they provide a much clearer indication as to which side of empire he stands on. I do not doubt that Kamala Harris shares a similar, if perhaps less illustrious, pedigree.
That candidate you’re seeing on TV, the one who is Asian, Latino, African American, Native American, etc., is there not because they are a genuine representation of the downtrodden minority group you belong to but rather because they were born into “The Families,” the bloodlines that control this world, and they have been appointed to serve as your representation because they look like you but they are most certainly not of you.
Azure Kingfisher, I don’t know what to make of the family connections. Most of us could trace out line to some important people surely. But I’ll save the links along with the important observations re race and color. I now tend to see race and color as incidental (circumstantial?). People of a certain ethnic grouping tend to be congregated in certain places for one geopolitical reason or another. That does affect the place, but conflating place and race can confuse the issues. For instance, the place has its own (environmental) rights and “concerns,” somewhat independent of the kind of people in it.
Could be they are quite happy pasting jack boots on trump for another 4. Or maybe creepy joe gets the rona and kamala gets the crown. Sorry I think Biden wins. Its just more kudos for the propaganda machine. They could get jeffry daulmer elected. Hate for trump and people wanting the goodies of MMT beats the small reality facts of the hair sniffer. His hair sniffing and clear cognitive disfuntion will be excused. remember Hes a “good guy”. Who really needs complex sentences capability in a leader anyway. These are the real issues. 1 hes not trump 2 get on with the printing i want MINE and the evil oligarchs wont keep me from it.
And despite this terrifying scenario, Kamala has some potential to rearrange the deck chairs regarding third world relations. I get the sense that Joe’s a pretty damn empty vessel at this stage, and Kamala’s the one to watch. Sorry for Trump though. I don’t want him to lose.
Sigh. Conveniently overlooking the obvious: it is not the fuel source; it is the automobile itself that makes cities unliveable and local communities degenerate into suburban sprawl with neither centre nor purpose.
“There are millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck in this country, as many surveys have shown. According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month…
“In addition, almost 3 in 10 adults have no emergency savings at all…
“All of these studies, by the way, were done before the coronavirus pandemic…
“New surveys have determined that the level of hunger, which is typically known as food insecurity, is rising dramatically…
“How many people will lose their home once the financial support from the government stops?
“…Economists talk about a cash cliff. Well, here we are, and the abyss looks pretty scary.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown-what-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-looks-like/
“What did people do with their stimulus checks?
“People who spent most of their stimulus checks account for just 15% of U.S. households, compared to a third of Americans who saved their stimulus checks and more than half used it to pay down debt. That’s according to research conducted by three economists circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-did-people-do-with-their-1-200-stimulus-checks-finally-an-answer-11597681021
“[Trump’s] new jobless benefit only provides the extra weekly boost to Americans who receive at least $100 a week in state unemployment benefit, which disqualifies at least 1 million Americans.
“Those who need unemployment assistance the most—such as low-earners, part-time workers and gig workers—could be left out from any additional jobless aid.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/reneemorad/2020/08/17/more-than-1-million-people-left-out-of-trumps-400-weekly-jobless-boostdepending-on-what-you-earn-and-where-you-live/#2bf91844e317
“U.S. home builder confidence rose for a third straight month in August to match its highest level ever as record-low interest rates spur buyer traffic…
“At the same time, however, a growing number of home owners are falling behind on their mortgages with tens of millions still out of work and growing signs that the labor market recovery is softening.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-economy/as-us-homebuilder-confidence-matches-record-high-mortgage-delinquencies-rise-idUKKCN25D1SQ
How long before a tipping point is reached, where underwriting restrictions lead to fewer actual purchases?
According to the article:
In other words, 85% of US households did exactly the right thing. Of course, this means the famous “velocity of money” dropped to almost nothing, so there was no stimulus to speak of. But if people are rediscovering thrift, that is the best way to get out from under the debt juggernaut
Some people were needed the stimulus money a whole lot more than others. A one-time check cannot be counted on, so people tend to set it aside.
Once they start regular UBI payments is when people stop saving and start spending.
UBI cannot work
Money is a function of energy.
Energy is not a function of money
If there isn’t enough energy in the system to underpin the national currency, it will collapse.
Printing more money makes it collapse faster
“But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Two lines from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gods of he Copybook Headings”. Not much has changed in 101 years!
At some point, the whole import system stops working, however, because other countries will not want to accept all of this printed money. So people will start spending, but the shelves in stores will be increasingly bare. Eventually, the shelves will only contain goods made locally, with locally available supplies. Essential goods, like replacement batteries for cars, will disappear from goods available, making the existing supply of cars useless. Electric cars will not fix this problem. Airline tickets will become even less available than now. The system will go further downhill.
Gail, the only supply lines I really need are the ferries from Sicily and Southern Italy. which bring about 80% local produce. It is paid for in Euro, but if Italy reverts to the lira, so will Malta, which means currency problems are not (yet) a worry. No, I didn’t plan this for my retirement, but as before in my life, “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends”.
i thought it was destiny that shaped our ends
no matter
we certainly rough-hew them
If there is even a hint of a country “not accepting” fiat it will be declared a national security issue and boom boom boom. Everyone knows this so the whole thing keeps working, China can use its fiat to buy energy, raw materials and the shiny yellow relic as well as coke and hookers for the elite and homes in Vancouver BC. There may be locally made goods but the packaging is all made in china. It wont be as smooth or as abundant as pre covid but it will keep going. Gwahar running dry will bring it down.
“I want to start a business of my own,” he said, explaining how he wants to recycle plastic to make day-to-day products at his own factory.
Reuters
Back to the paddy fields. COVID smashes Indian middle-class dreams
Saurabh Sharma and Devjyot Ghoshal
August 17, 2020, 2:05 AM EDT
India’s coronavirus lockdown has thrown those plans into disarray. Educated but unemployed, Ashish Kumar is one of countless people across the globe whose social progress has been halted by the new coronavirus that has infected more than two million people in India alone, and thrown the economy into reverse. With it, the aspirations of millions are fading.
For years, people in rural India have been gaining prosperity and moving into what economists call a burgeoning middle class of consumers – those who earn more than $10 a day, by some definitions. This group has been a keystone of plans for economic development in the world’s second most populous country. In the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s economy is forecast to shrink by 4.5% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. At least 400 million Indian workers are at risk of falling deeper into poverty, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO)
https://news.yahoo.com/back-paddy-fields-covid-smashes-060507968.html
Remember reading an architect couldn’t find any employment during the great depression of the 1930s and never found work in his field. Had a son who asked what should he be when he grows up….he flat out said “Anything but an Architect!”
Recycling has stopped working, with the low price of oil. This is one of things that has pushed the world toward recession. China was force to stop most of its recycling January 1, 2018, because of inadequate prices. Other countries have gradually followed suit. It is not a business “opportunity” any more.
if the true environmental costs were assessed, recycling might make sense, to lessen human’s impact on the planet.
when my recylicng truck comes by every 2 weeks they take away 95 % fresh air, as I judge it.
(I have been known to be wrong)
If I’m roughly correct, then they can only make the system work with heavy subsidy
Norman, I have relatives in England who tell me how well recycling works. The local council puts out four or five bins for every home, and you get fined if you put the wrong waste into the wrong bin. Then all the bins are dumped into the same truck, and the contents of the truck are all dumped into the same landfill. It’s a scam to pretend to meet government “green” diktats, while preserving business as usual.
Well metals should definitely be recycled. There is no way pulling metal out of the earth is cheaper than recycling. Unless mines a subsidized
Surprisingly, this is often not the case.
Modern manufacturing in complex devices such as computers uses tiny amounts of a wide range of materials. Trying to collect these materials back and reuse them is a high energy project. There can be problems with some of the metals being harmful to workers trying to separate them out.
Also, quite a few of the metals used in today’s goods are alloys of many kinds. Trying to get these back to their components can be exceedingly difficult. I understand high temperature heating may be needed.
If recycling of metals really made sense economically, we would see it being done. In fact, we do see some recycling of metals being done. But even recycling of aluminum cans seems to be down. https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2017/11/14/aluminum-can-recycling-falls-significantly/
Recycling is just a ruse to allow for more waste to be created and more crap to bought by people with a clear conscience. Ask yourself, ‘if recycling works than why are we dumping more stuff in landfill today than 10 years ago?’.
Gail, there are numerous videos to show to recover PM from electronics.
This is an example and pretty interesting as shown. Doubt I would do it myself, but there must be some out there that can at gold being past 2 grand now…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iCmXLXrAtto
If recycling of metals really made sense economically, we would see it being done….not sure where you are coming from but as someone in the building trades we recycle a lot of metal. I was not talking about computers. Also living in Europe in the 80’s we reused a lot of things….ie…bottles….profitability sometimes is not the only thing to look at when deciding how to go forward…Short term profit longterm problem its the American Way! You can buy a politician and pollute all you want…especially in the south east!
Recycling of some metals (perhaps most metals) makes sense. It doesn’t necessarily make sense for all metals is perhaps the way I should put it.
Certainly, a lot of recycled metals are being used today. What is being recycled less is low grade plastics. These were often shipped to Asia for recycling, but with the low price of oil and natural gas, this didn’t make sense. A big cost of operation was separating many types of recyclables from each other. This cost became too high for processors. Trash companies in the US (and probably elsewhere) couldn’t afford to have separate trucks go out and pick up glass separate from plastic, separate from cardboard. And there was too much food contamination of the materials that were collected.
you’ll are confusing price with cost. your penalty will be to make the ultimate sacrifice for the environment.
His small 48-hectare (120-acre) farm is one of many burning around Novo Progresso, in northern Brazil.
The town has been shrouded in smoke for several days as farmers increased the amount of fires lit in the area.
The fuel for the fires are trees felled to clear forest for farming and ranching. Environmentalists say the fires are also fueled by the lack of consequences for those who illegally seize land and clear it.
AFP reporters traveled thousands of kilometers along roads in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Para, where large ranches with charred trees flank the roads and newly deforested land was waiting to be burned.
Last year, the Amazon was devastated by tens of thousands of fires that sent a thick haze of black smoke 2,500 kilometers (15,000 miles) south to Sao Paulo, causing international outcry.
This year, President Jair Bolsonaro’s government is keen to avoid a repeat.
The far-right president took office in 2019 with calls to roll back environmental protections in the Amazon to develop mining and agriculture.
But more recently, he has tried to show he is taking action on deforestation, particularly after coming under pressure from the business sector to improve Brazil’s image on protecting the Amazon, a vital resource for curbing climate change.
In July, Bolsonaro banned agricultural burning for 120 days, and has deployed the army to fight the problem.
August and September, the peak of the crisis last year, will be critical months to determine whether the measure has worked, as the government claims.
In the 12 months to July 2020, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased 34.5 percent year-on-year, according to INPE data.
However, the government was quick to point out that the trend improved in July, when deforestation decreased by 36 percent compared to July 2019.
And Trump is opening up Alaska Wildlife Refuge up to oil and gas drilling.
Same as it ever was…we have no choice
The story I read was the Trump is opening up 8% of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge to exploration. I have a hard time believing that with oil at the price it is today, there will be any takers.
Burning land for agricultural purposes has been going on for thousands of years in some parts of the world. It seems like Brazil is one of them.
Well, could there be takers who would like to switch from tight oil to more profitable reserves?
There aren’t more profitable reserves, the way that the world economy is set up now.
The Middle East might theoretically have oil that can be extracted in a less expensive manner, but each of the countries has the pesky problem of the big populations that need to be supported. We have been reading recently that Saudi Arabia is trying to get rid of the many foreigners in its country. This would solve at least a little of the problem. But to really solve the problem, someone would need to somehow get rid of most of the rest of the population, so that they would not need to be supported. (EROI calculations miss this major problem.) Iraq in particular might have inexpensive oil that could be extracted, if the pesky problem of all of the people could be eliminated.
I expect that someone is working on this issue right now. How can another country come in and take over the available oil, perhaps after a war or epidemic reduces the population?
Are you saying that no ANWR reserves would be more profitable than tight oil in the shales?
I wouldn’t count on financial success in ANWR.
A few years ago, oil companies were doing a lot of work trying to develop oil production in other parts of Alaska, with no financial success, even at higher prices than today. Most of the resources that far north tend to be natural gas rather than oil. Natural gas has such a low price that developing it makes no sense in a high-cost environment. ANWR will be a high cost environment for oil, as well, if there are actually resources worth developing there.
I know that USGS has a fact sheet that says there are oil resources in ANWR. https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0028-01/fs-0028-01.htm
In fact, it says: At a market price of $24 per barrel, there is a 95 percent probability of at least 2.0 BB of economically recoverable oil and a 5-percent probability of at least 9.4 BB. The mean or expected value is at least 5.2 BB of economically recoverable oil at $24 per barrel. To get to a 2020 cost level from from a 1996 cost level, we need to multiply by 1.653, yielding a comparable price of $40 per barrel. So this is fairly comparable to today’s prices.
Relative to US reported proved reserves of 68.9 billion barrels at the end of 2020, these amounts are significant. Relative to world reported proved receivers of 1,733.9, the amounts are small.
The US seems to consume about 7 billion barrels of oil per year. So the US mean would seem to correspond to about 9 months of US oil consumption, if it works out as USGS hopes/believes. So perhaps there is a possibility, if the financial system stays “glued together” reasonably well, and the challenges of the arctic are not too great.
when oil was discovered in Saudi, their population was 1 – 2 million
now it’s around 30m
there’s your support problem.
same all over the world.
Population expands ‘forever’, our support system doesn’t
8% today and after that another 8% and after that 15%….that was the premise of EARTH FIRST! Dave Foreman witness that as a lobbyist for the Sierra Club in Washington DC, how the Politicians in the Oval Office would play on the environmental groups. Come on now, we have a lumber shortage in the market now, give us a little slack and open up some protected forests and we’ll agree to some other legislation to protect the water supply, ECT, ECT, …Happened over and over again, just a ploy game to encroach on protected Federal lands until corporations have complete access.
See it continuing to this day….all these agreements basically meaningless.
No better than the slash and burn dirt farmer in Brazil or Cattle company turning the jungle in graze bush….
At today’s prices there is no way they could go in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge from scratch and make a profit. But they might nonetheless set up base camp or do the minimum exploratory drilling just to get a toe hold, in case they get banned again.
Tight oil has been a money loser for most companies most of the time, but they have still managed to turn fracking into a big business for years. In that Sid Smith video ‘How to enjoy the end of the world’, Sid said the tight oil companies were in debt to the tune of $250 B. That was a year ago. Losing money does not seem to be a barrier to drilling. Or rather, it hasn’t until now.
Billy Gates recently bought the latest greatest electric Porsche. The car could be trimmed with recycled fishing nets fabric material. Nowadays even various econobox segment car manufs are offering this “green” option as well. It’s my understanding the operation of salvaging these old nets is largely paid for in third world counties via western enviro NGOs, possibly some UN marine wildlife program.. This will surely scale long term..
/sarc off
Doesn’t the Great Leader realize that some family members love the pooches more than their own siblings?
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has ordered pet dogs to be confiscated in the country’s capital, saying the pooches represent Western “decadence’’ — but their owners fear Fido is really headed for someone’s dinner table.
Kim issued the directive in July to round up the pets, claiming they were part of “a ‘tainted’ trend by bourgeouis ideology,’’ a source told the English edition of Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper.
“Ordinary people raise pigs and livestock on their porches, but high-ranking officials and the wealthy own pet dogs, which stoked some resentment’’ among the lower classes, the source said.
“Authorities have identified households with pet dogs and are forcing them to give them up or forcefully confiscating them and putting them down
https://nypost.com/2020/08/17/kim-jong-un-orders-pet-dogs-to-be-confiscated-in-pyongyang/amp/
Looks like another Great Famine is approaching …..get out the cook book on preparing tree bark and grass..
PS maybe Trump can make a deal…for each nuc warhead, KFC will open one restaurant
I remember an incident from my time in Africa that is an almost perfect illustration of Hausa dry humour. A bunch of “radicals” was proposing that the house servants kill their white masters. We had one such servant (both my parents worked full time), and my mother, not perhaps the most cautious of persons, asked him “Would you really kill your master and mistress?”
“No, madam,” he replied, “I have an agreement with the steward next door. I will kill his master and mistress, and he will kill you.” A reply all three of us appreciated. Happy days.
And that must be the Great Leader’s plan: your neighbour will eat your pooch, and you will eat his. Problem solved.
LOL!
I watched this last night and consider it extremely valuable (1hr. 33min.):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy3frBacd2k
Comports with Tim Watkins’ queries about “how we know what we think we know.” https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/08/06/why-do-we-even-know-this/
Interesting, also, the rhyming professional-protest angle.
A pretty explosive critique of the dominant HIV=AIDS narrative. Can you extrapolate and apply to COVID? You’re basically arguing that the same thing is happening now? HCL bad (despite evidence), need expensive (and profitable) vaccines.
Doesn’t Trump look interesting in this light?
Trump wanted to end the national lockdown on April 12.
the Watkins article is compelling.
The Watkins article puts together some pieces I have seen before, plus some others. What in the world has the rich world been thinking about, other than profits for the pharmaceutical makers?
Late but well-meaning, Trumpy has finally given Fauci the push in favor of Scott Atlas, a proper physician and not a panic- and fear-monger.
Ron Paul reports:
Dr. Scott Atlas is not only a former top physician and hospital administrator: as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution he also understands the policy implications of locking a country down.
On April 22, Dr. Atlas wrote an op-ed in The Hill titled, “The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation.” In the article he made five main points that are as true today as when he wrote them: an overwhelming majority of people are at no risk of dying from Covid; protecting older people prevents hospital overcrowding; locking down a population actually prevents the herd immunity necessary to defeat the virus; people are dying because they are not being treated for non-Covid illnesses; we know what part of the population is at risk and we can protect them.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/ron-paul/good-news-faucis-out-and-common-sense-might-be-returning/
Unbelievable….dangers all around us..
Lego piece falls out of New Zealand boy’s nose after being stuck for two years
Sameer Anwar’s parents thought the lost piece of Lego was long gone – until their son took a great big sniff of a plate of cupcakes
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/17/lego-piece-falls-out-of-boys-nose-after-2-years
Seven-year-old Sameer Anwar of Dunedin, in the south of New Zealand, inserted a tiny piece of Lego up his nose in 2018. Sameer’s father, Mudassir, and his wife became alarmed when their son told them he had lost a piece of Lego up his nose,
The concerned parents took their son to the GP, who was also unable to find, or remove it. The doctor advised them the piece would move through their son’s digestive tract, if it had even been there in the first place.
…….
Then last night, the “unbelievable” happened Anwar said. A plate of pink cupcakes prompted his son to lean down and take a great big sniff of them.
Immediately, his nose began to hurt. Thinking he’d sniffed up some cake crumbs, his mother helped him blow his nose, hoping to thoroughly clear his nostrils.
But instead of pink cake crumbs, out dropped a tiny piece of black Lego, covered in fungus.
Sameer, who remains an fan of the colourful plastic bricks, appeared delighted with the reunited piece, saying to his parents: “Mum, I found the Lego! You were telling me it wasn’t there, but it was there!
It was not the first time Sameer has put something up his nose. When he was three he pushed an imitation pearl up his nostril, but in that instance, his father was able to retrieve
The errant piece of Lego had been wrapped in a tissue, and the family were still deciding what they should do with it, though Anwar had joked to his wife “that we should donate it to a museum”.
Lego pieces are commonly lost up children’s nostrils, as are beads and small pieces of food like popcorn kernels, peas, blueberries and grapes.
Items less commonly stuck up noses, according to kidsspot.com.au, include a glob of mince, a large piece of broccoli, a crayon and a rotting piece of leather.
In 2018 a team of doctors swallowed Lego and timed how long it took to pass through their bowels in an attempt to reassure concerned parents
Once, as a beekeeper, a honeybee entered my nostril and moved around upstairs and exited out the other nostril! That was scary 🤣 and made me realize something bad can happen at any moment
During the lock-down in the UK, more people than usual turned up at A&E with unfortunately wedged insertions. I leave the rest to the imagination……
“A group of Kansas and Missouri hair salon and restaurant owners can proceed with a lawsuit trying to make their insurance company pay for the income they missed out on during COVID-19 government shutdown orders, a judge ruled Wednesday.”
“The businesses adequately alleged — for now at least — that they ought to be covered by their “all-risk” insurance policies, Western District of Missouri Judge Stephen Bough ruled after combing through insurance policy wording.”
“The ruling could have broad implications as more businesses sue their insurance carriers for denying similar claims, observers say.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/its-a-huge-decision-for-policyholders-a-judge-just-handed-a-win-to-businesses-in-the-high-stakes-fight-for-insurance-coverage-during-the-pandemic-2020-08-14?mod=mw_latestnews
Seems to me that insurance carriers could not possibly handle all the claims if the ruling holds up
“Seems to me that insurance carriers could not possibly handle all the claims if the ruling holds up.”
Tough on the insurance carriers. If you offer an “all risks” policy, the purchaser might reasonably expect it to cover all risks. To then deny a claim is fraud and breach of contract. If capitalism has one bedrock, inviolable principle it is this: “Pacta sunt servanda”, or as the Quakers put it, “My word is my bond”.
It all depends on how broadly the word “all risks” is defined. The lawyers are going to love arguing this case.
Tim, no doubt you are correct. And if capitalism has one implacable enemy, it is the lawyer, the ultimate parasitic rent seeker, and hence the top predator. Dear Wuhan biowarfare lab, please design a virus that kills only lawyers.
Thanks! We will see how this works out. I could imagine that different states might handle the situation differently, because insurance law usually varies by state. Prospective rates will be a whole lot higher, I expect, with or without coverage related to government related shutdown orders.
All of the demonstrations and riots might be a different issue that property damage policies need to consider. These rates will probably rise as well.
Hagens is apparently not convinced about climate change either. That reminded me of a podcast I meant to bring to your attention before now. Dr Sid Smith, a mathematician, is interviewed by Dr Guy McPherson and Kevin Hester on their monthly internet radio program called Nature Bat’s Last. I wonder if you know who Dr Smith is. Your name came up so I suspect that he follows OFW fairly closely. I think you might be interested to hear his commentary on global masking effect, nuclear proliferation, climate and energy related issues. For me the podcast was an hour well spent. The program aired Aug 4th.
https://prn.fm/nature-bats-last-08-04-20/
Gail, this was a reply to an earlier post you made. It dropped off the radar after pressing ‘post’ and now it is here. Anyway…
This is a link to Sid Smith’s earlier presentation that El Mar linked to, called “How to Enjoy the End of the World,” from April 2019.
It is extremely good.
Thank you. I took the time to listen to the entire talk, and found no major flaw in the facts, the reasoning, or the conclusions. We are indeed facing the end of our civilisation.
Watched a couple of programs yesterday that touched on a similar theme. The best thing we can do with the time that remains is to document all out knowledge in low tech, durable form, and bury it somewhere safe to be (we hope) eventually rediscovered and used. That is what the Hittites did in the storerooms beneath their capital city: thirty thousand clay tablets; almost the whole history of their civilisation. And now more precious than gold.
Good point. Documentation in a more durable form than pixels on a screen would be very helpful. But such documentation gets more and more elusive. An increasingly large share of information is in pixel form.
As so often, a very good and clear-sighted analysis, but a rather weak conclusion.
One has little patience with this sort of thing: ‘With our shoulders square a smile on our lips, ready to build something better’, etc.’
The collapse of a global industrial civilisation which has been busy poisoning and depleting the world since WW2 is qualitatively different to any earlier collapse, or any natural cycle.
The example of the collapse of Western Rome is particularly irrelevant.
Xabier, I agree that his closing “stiff upper lip” stuff came across as a sop to those who might write him off as a doomer, which I suspect he is. But the main narrative presents a more detailed and far gloomier picture, which I thought in places painfully honest.
Everyone talks about the fall of the Roman Empire because it is the only collapse in history that has been almost fully documented and exhaustively analysed. Both Spengler and Toynbee tried to broaden our field of vision, and ended up being derided, unjustly in my view, having read them both. The lesson, I think, is that dissipative systems have many ways of collapsing, which is why in the end they all do collapse, and perhaps we can learn something useful from previous examples. But your point that this collapse is unique I agree with; but then, perhaps all civilisations thought the same. (Obligatory nod to Joseph Tainter)
In his Anna Karenina, Tolstoy remarks “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I suspect something similar is true of civilisations.
I think he did a pretty good job of telling it like it is, but was trying to avoid everyone new to the topic leaving the lecture in total despair. They can read between the lines if they choose.
Best video overview of the situation I have seen. Similar to Gail’s presentations. Good discussion of eroi (energy return on energy invested), and how the financial economy is diverging from the energy-based economy.
I have only listened to the first 14 minutes so far. Dr. Smith has mentioned that he views that industrial civilization seems to already be in the process of collapse, with the 2008 crisis and Pandemic as part of this collapse. The trend to less CO2 may mean that the more severe climate scenarios may be avoided.
He seems to look forward to a collapse of capitalism, though I think he means a collapse of industrial civilization in general, regardless of ideology. As a result of this imminent collapse (expected in earnest in as little as 60 days) something like 90% of the known fossil fuel reserves will ultimately remain in the ground. Wow, just wow!
I listened to the rest of the tape, and there is really nothing that Sid Smith says that I would disagree with. I certainly agree that 90% of the fossil fuel that is currently in the ground will be left in the ground. I have been saying something equivalent to that for a long time.
His views on climate change are very much the same as mine. He may have a better way of explaining the problem. The models are all based on the assumption that industrial civilization will grow for the indefinite future. This cannot happen; we are already in the midst of collapse. There is also the issue that the climate model is unbelievably complex, so we cannot forecast what will happen very well. Furthermore, there is not really much we can do about the situation, because the physics of the economy determines how the economy will behave. It is not something we humans have control over. He says, “The economy is not like an orchestra that a conductor can conduct.” Smith points out that even if we could transition to other energy sources than fossil fuels, industrial civilization would still collapse because other resources, such as iron and other minerals, would deplete.
Kevin Hester (the main person asking questions) points out that realizing that collapse is ongoing and inevitable is very freeing, and Sid Smith agrees. There is no longer a need to try to “fix” everything. There really is pretty much nothing that can be fixed.
Sid Smith says he expects a financial crash in 60 to 90 days (Basically in the September-October timeframe), when people start realizing that COVID is not going away for quite some time; it is just going to get worse. People will pull money out of stocks and other assets, and a crash will result.
He eventually expects huge loss of value of the dollar (loss of dollar hegemony), but that might be sometime in the future. He sort of says two to ten years, if I understood him correctly.
He says that relationships are what give us our quality of life. Each of us needs a community to be part of. He and his wife moved to a rural area, where he has a garden. He is active in his church and his community. He is now retired from teaching.
He mentions a paper he wrote in July called Socialism and the Green Party. I haven’t read it.
This is not correct. It is the model runs that use that assumption (though even that is not correct, it is projections by organisations such as the IEA that make the assumption; input into the model runs are taken from such projections).
Thank you, a significant point. The model runs assume that the future is wholly determined by the past (chaos theory never having penetrated the modellers’ consciousness). But the future is partly determined by the choices we make in the present; my favourite example is the encounter at Marathon, whose outcome was decided by one vote of one man.
However, it is also in large measure determined by forces of which we have little knowledge and which therefore we cannot model. We can calculate where Pluto will be when out spaceship reaches him, but can we calculate the date of the next ice age? Newtonian reasoning does not apply to complex systems.
The IEA estimates are far higher than what they show in any of their reports. They assume that pretty much all of the coal, oil and natural gas in the ground can actually be extracted. Extremely high prices would be needed for this to happen. Their estimates have been absolutely absurd. This was a theme at The Oil Drum.
The IEA is an arm of OECD. It puts together whatever is politically desired.
I’m not sure what you mean by a “trend” to less CO2. The trend is upward. At some point we will stop emitting more each year that the previous year (apart from, maybe, occasional economic contractions) but that is not a visible trend yet.
In the collapse that is underway right now, it is clear that the trend will be downward, regardless of how we try to stop the collapse.
Again, Gail, the trend is up not down. If there is a global collapse underway (rather than a temporary blip) then the trend would change but that trend doesn’t currently exist in a statistical sense.
The word from Nature in may was that human emissions of the Wonderful Plant Food Gas will be down this year.
Government policies during the COVID-19 pandemic have drastically altered patterns of energy demand around the world. Many international borders were closed and populations were confined to their homes, which reduced transport and changed consumption patterns. Here we compile government policies and activity data to estimate the decrease in CO2 emissions during forced confinements. Daily global CO2 emissions decreased by –17% (–11 to –25% for ±1σ) by early April 2020 compared with the mean 2019 levels, just under half from changes in surface transport. At their peak, emissions in individual countries decreased by –26% on average. The impact on 2020 annual emissions depends on the duration of the confinement, with a low estimate of –4% (–2 to –7%) if prepandemic conditions return by mid-June, and a high estimate of –7% (–3 to –13%) if some restrictions remain worldwide until the end of 2020. Government actions and economic incentives postcrisis will likely influence the global CO2 emissions path for decades.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x
Also, the BBC compiled this picturesque graph, illustrating the fall in emissions.
Greta must be very pleased; her stolen dreams and her future have been restored to her.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/410/cpsprodpb/AC54/production/_112361144_global_daily_emission_640-nc.png
Alas for Greta they have not:
“…the researchers found that effect will be largely offset by the roughly 20 percent fall in sulfur dioxide emissions… These industrial emissions turn into sulfur aerosol particles in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and thus have a cooling effect.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-coronavirus-greenhouse-gas-emissions-climate-change
Researchers haven’t made it very clear that the benefit of the CO2 drop will be slow in arriving, because of the simultaneous drop in sulfur aerosol particles.
“…the researchers found that effect will be largely offset by the roughly 20 percent fall in sulfur dioxide emissions… ”
Well, Harry, all I can say is every silver lining has a cloud.
Indeed, things could be even worse, because CO2 doesn’t heat the atmosphere nearly as much as is claimed, and it’s substantial greening effect offsets much of its warming effect. While the SO2 emissions do result in cooling, so we may see a net rise in temperature from falling CO2 emissions.
On the other hand, as FFs become increasingly unavailable, people will turn to burning more biomass such as wood, paper, dry grass, all kinds of dung, etc., which augers for a lot more low-elevation air pollution that may cancel out the fall in SO2 emissions.
And so it goes, on and on, this futile game of trying to predict the future by blatantly ignoring or being blissfully unaware of significant relevant factors.
Let’s tell the future
Let’s see how it’s been done
By numbers
By mirrors
By water
By dots made at random on paper
By salt, by dice
By meal, by mice
By dough of cakes
By sacrificial fire
By fountains, by fishes
By writing in ashes
Birds, herbs
Smoke from the altar
A suspended ring or the mode of laughing
Pebbles drawn from a heap
One of these things will tell you something.
https://youtu.be/6aN-1fqRb6A
Sigh. There goes my own dream that, after the general collapse, Greta and I will repopulate the world from my palace on the Isle of Imbros. Well, we are such stuff as dreams are made on.
(The allusion, by the way, is to a very bad and justly forgotten disaster novel called “The Purple Cloud”, by M P Shiel, published in 1901)
That nice Jacinda has done it! She’s delayed the NZ election because there are 78 “active cases” of Covid-19, some of them even have runny noses, and five of them are in serious enough condition to warrant hospitalization.
New Zealand is to delay its general election by a month due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in Auckland, the country’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said. Calls had been growing from opposition parties for the election to be moved, with opposition leaders saying it wasn’t “just and fair” to hold an election while an outbreak was underway and level 3 restrictions were in place in the country’s largest city, prohibiting campaigning. Ardern said after consulting with every political party in parliament, as well as the electoral commission, she had decided to move the general election from 19 September to 17 October. She said her first suggestion of moving it by two weeks had been rejected by the Electoral Commission as not enough time to prepare logistics such as venues.
“The Electoral Commission, via the Ministry of Justice, has advised me that a safe and accessible election is achievable on this date,” Ardern said. “Moving the date by four weeks also gives all parties a fair shot to campaign and delivers New Zealanders certainty without unnecessarily long delays.” Ardern said Covid-19 would be with the world “for some time to come” and repeatedly pushing the election date would not lessen the risk of disruption to voters and parties. “This is why the Electoral Commission has planned for the possibility of holding an election where the country is at level 2, and with some parts at level 3. I will not change the election date again.” New Zealand is in the midst of its first outbreak since eliminating the disease in June, with dozens of people infected and held in quarantine in Auckland, a city of 1.5 million.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/new-zealand-to-delay-general-election-by-month-amid-auckland-covid-19-outbreak
Meanwhile in the US, that nasty Donald is being called a dictator and a tyrant because he won’t give billions and billions of free money to the US Postal Service. Nancy has threatened to recall Congress to address the “crisis”.
Meanwhile in Belarus, the abominable Alex is being booed by striking workers in the streets and the EU is cheering them on. There’s revolution in the air, and it’s a color one—shades of Ukraine or possibly of Romania.
It was nice of New Zealand to provide a live demonstration of, “Getting rid of the virus is of only temporary benefit.”
There many others trying to deal with problems. Euronews reports: Coronavirus: Italy closes nightclubs as authorities blame holidaymakers for new outbreaks
Looks like Jacinda will be doing the concentrating while anyone who tests positive will be doing the camping.
In a move right out of George Orwell’s 1984, New Zealand has announced it would put all COVID-19 patients into mandatory quarantine camps. The Prime Minister of New Zealand has said that your each and every activity will be monitored in these camps and those that refuse to be tested would be forced to stay in the camps for a longer duration….
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a Facebook live video explained in detail how each and every activity will be monitored in these camps and those that refuse to be tested would be forced to stay in the camps for a longer duration.
We are quarantining everyone. Now we are also mandating testing. That makes us the most stringent in the world. There are countries that are requiring self-isolation; we’re taking it a bit further.
If anyone moves into a common area or is getting some fresh air, which is all monitored no one can do that on their own. They can only leave or be in a space to get a little bit of fresh air if they are supervised, because ofcourse it’s a quarantine facility.
We have put in millions of dollars into supporting that to happen.
I have a number of questions about people refusing – what do we do if someone refuses to be tested. Well they can’t now. If someone refuses in our facilities to be tested, they have to keep staying. So they won’t be allowed to leave after 14 days. They have to stay on for another 14 days.
So, it’s a pretty good incentive. You either get your tests done and make sure you’re cleared or we will keep you in a facility longer. So I think most people will look at it and say I will take the test.
https://greatgameindia.com/new-zealand-quarantine-camps/
If you have the stomach for it, you can also see Jacinda’s Facebook interview at the above link.
The first comment under this article was spot on:
When you give up your guns this is how it ends.
How awful! The WSJ has an article called, Covid-19 Mystery: How Did the Coronavirus Return to New Zealand?
This article indicates that there seem to be two different outbreaks. One of them seems to be related to a border control failure at a hotel in Aukland which had been used to house people who had tested positive for COVID. This outbreak is believed to be relatively small.
The other, bigger, outbreak is the one associated with the cold storage warehouse. Regarding this latter outbreak, the article says:
So, again, the disease seems to be hitting low paid workers coming from darker-skinned ethnic groups. Doing all of these horrible things to low-paid minority group members sounds like something that could start trouble, once the word gets out.
What word is that? A cluster may hit certain ethnicities harder if the index case associates more with those than others. I don’t see anything unusual in that. There may be biological reasons which come into play but that would not be manufactured.
In essence, we don’t know the origin of the cluster so any “expert” view is simply an opinion. There really is just one outbreak, a cluster. The other case is singular. So far. We don’t yet know the origin of either.
The Vitamin D problem of dark-skinned people near the poles is a world-wide issue, however.
New Zealand is one of Her Majesty’s Dominions. It is time for her Governor General to squash this neo fascist bug. And give the loyal people of Aotearoa / New Zealand, both Maori and Anglo, back their ancient liberties, as promised in the Treaty of Waitangi.
Another “headache” to deal with from …..The spotted lanternfly is a planthopper that is indigenous to parts of northern China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and has spread invasively to Japan and South Korea. Although it has two pairs of wings, it jumps more than it flies.
States urging residents to be on the lookout for destructive invasive species
ABC News
MEREDITH DELISO
ABC NewsAugust 16, 2020
Officials across multiple states are urging people to be on the lookout for an invasive species that can have a devastating impact on agriculture.
In recent weeks, officials in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey have been sounding the alarm about the spotted lanternfly, which currently is in its prime feeding season and can wreak havoc on crops.
For the first time, live spotted lanternflies were also found on Staten Island, New York, state authorities announced Friday.
The spotted lanternfly feeds on more than 70 plant species, which can make the plants vulnerable to disease and attacks from other insects. A Penn State study released earlier this year found that the invasive species cost the Pennsylvania economy about $50 million, including $29 million in direct costs on growers and forest landowners.
OK, be on the Lookout….
Every country has lots of battles to fight. It can try to fight COVID. It can try to fight invasive insect attacks. It can try to fight wage disparity. Every battle takes resources. Even if there is a way to fight some these issues, local areas soon run out of the ability to buy pesticides or whatever is needed.
All of these insects are likely part of natural cycles of nature. We just got ourselves in the middle, with the huge acreage of crops we plant that the insects enjoy eating.
Gail, I fear it is worse than that. Traditional, “natural” crops have some inbuilt defences against insects, with poisonous leaves, strong insect resistant seeds, and so on. But our modern “green” genetically engineered crops have been denuded of those protections, because the energy that was required to create them has been diverted into the edible portions of the plants. More food and more profit, if you ignore the ecosystem and presume you can lord it over nature.
And this is coming back (literally) to bite us.
Good point! A plant that is bred to yield more of the desired crop likely loses insect and disease resistance.
This may be true but do you have any evidence for assessing the likelihood? I can’t think of any reason why this would be true, but I haven’t investigated.
Any “feature” takes energy. Putting more energy into the seed we eat means that some other use of energy must be reduced.
Another example we have run into earlier is the fact that humans’ brains could be bigger, when we used less energy chewing food and we didn’t need as big teeth and jaws.
Mike, I suggest the evidence is clear. The “green revolution” has been accompanied by a massive increase in the use of pesticides. In the US, they have increased between1996 and 2011 by about 240 kilotonnes. their virulence has also increased, as their profligate use encourages the evolution of ever more resistant pests. To put it bluntly: green revolution soil is now effectively dead; it has become merely a medium to turn chemicals into food. And it will take centuries to recover.
“From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike/ Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.”
Sorry, I still don’t see a route to:
From Gail’s comment, she thinks that more energy may be needed to breed a more productive seed, but breeders are trying out new things all the time, so the energy is being used anyway. But, even if this particular feature did use more energy than other breeding experiments, how does that remove disease resistance?
For Robert’s comment, that sounds right but doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Gail’s claim, reproduced above.
If you look for random variations in seed characteristics and select for a particular one (more of its energy focused on seed growth), you will have a choice of different seed types that in general use less energy on other characteristics. They will also be quite random. Finding seeds that meet disease resistance characteristics as well as maxing our energy output will become an overwhelmingly difficult task. There might possibly be some that have disease resistance as well, but it will take many, many more tries to find the correct one.
Gail, I respectfully disagree. This seems like opinion rather than facts. We’ll see.
“Schroders becomes first major City firm to make home working permanent…
“Fund manager Schroders will allow thousands of its employees to continue working from home even after the pandemic, marking a huge shift in the way the City works.”
https://www.cityam.com/schroders-becomes-first-major-city-firm-to-make-home-working-permanent/
“Mid-August should be boom time for central London. The streets would usually bustle with shoppers, workers and tourists, looking to spend their cash in the West End’s shops, restaurants and leisure attractions.
“But not this year. Vast swathes of the capital’s streets that once hummed with traffic and pedestrians lie quiet.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/15/its-the-worst-ive-ever-seen-londons-west-end-struggles-to-bounce-back-covid-19
There is a lag before businesses start closing because they cannot make a profit.
“Why are people worrying about inflation with another Great Depression looming?
“The real threat, bigger threat than ever as the world’s three biggest economies stumble in epic fashion, is deflation.”
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/It-is-time-to-talk-about-the-real-danger-facing-the-world-economy
It’s all about sequencing, one following the other.. Tiny few can navigate that narrow corridor, that’s why If you do it long enough ~3-4x centuries, in aggregate you end up as global CB system shareholder/board member.. and I’m not talking about the mere public-private side hired actors thrown in front of the msm curtain like FED, ECB, BoJ, SNB, BoC, .. officials.
The author answers his own question: he points out that the US dollar now buys less than 1/2000 troy ounce of gold. The Romans had a saying, “bellum est ultima ratio regum”. I propose another one: “aurum est ultima ratio pecuniae”. As it has been for over 2500 years, ever since Croesus of Lydia minted the first coins.
I’m not sure the case for metals rings true this time though.. In scenario of suddenly hard/disorderly global reset, it will be very dangerous to handle it, unless your are a sitting-landed “warlord” to begin with, very few people around of such pedigree in the first world. And in case of milder interim global reset of debt/currency ratios reshuffle, it could be easily expropriated, taxed, frozen only for discrete gov-2-gov level deals etc.
Moreover, you have to look at the constituencies, today’s world depends on the mutual beneficial deal among the owners of the system and the servicing elite. Most of the later has no interest or large positions in metals, they want quick rich paper schemes, besides parked wealth in various (often silly) collectibles and urban properties. In short, one could argue we are not at favorable junction for metals this time.
I’m betting metals will still be valuable. Since PMs were first used as currency, they have never been worth zero, unlike every other asset/currency. I could be wrong, but what else is their to bet on?
gold backed digital currencies so we’re going back to a gold standard .
Thank you. You make several excellent points, with which, to my chagrin, I must regretfully agree.
The problem is the free market wants to deflate, but the governments can not allow it without collapsing the governments. The only other alternative is to print the debt away. Its either Deflate the debt or Hyperinflate it away. Pretty much the same outcome either way.
Yes! This is the question! I think the Fed is going to hyper inflate. The only way they can get out… or think they can
when interest rates are near zero, it doesn’t matter how much debt govs have, as long as they can roll it over near zero %.
they don’t need to “get out” ever. Actually, they can pile on.
US debt is headed for $40 to $50 trillion at least.
Well not exactly there is an endgame eventually and we shall be seeing it very soon I’m afraid. Ever hear of the law of exponentials? If they could do this they would have done it a long time ago…
it already is the endgame.
“they” figured out that near zero interest rates allow debt to mount up and roll over and never have to be paid back.
“they” didn’t need to do this a long time ago, just now because it is late in the game and requires desperate measures.
in this endgame, they are now locked into:
1 near zero rates
2 plunge protection for the stock markets
3 digital money creation to plug holes where needed
perhaps other things, can’t say.
so add 1 2 3 and it says to me that the US debt is heading for $40 to $50 trillion to keep those locked-in policies going.
eventually, other holes will appear and be unable to be plugged and things will collapse or at least shrink faster to the end of most prosperity.
The us govt (or maybe the Fed, can’t remember) stated this was their aim a couple of months ago.
deflate?
let’s see:
energy prices have deflated since Spring 2019, though lately there has been a partial rebound.
food is inflating.
sports and concerts tickets have deflated to basically zero.
I hear hair stylists are trying to inflate, but if they charge 20% more and get 40% less customers, is that inflation or deflation?
bottom line: essentials are inflating and non-essentials are deflating (energy is an exception).
as long as CBs keep the money supply (the part that is in the actual hands of consumers) balanced with the economic output of goods and services, there should be low overall inflation.
handing out $1,200 chunks and $600 per week for 10 weeks has helped to keep the system away from deflation.
continue this for months or years and there would be massive inflation.
but it isn’t going to continue.
I think we are mostly in agreement.
Hyperinflate?
In our moment of triumph?
“South African petrochemicals group Sasol SOLJ.J reported an annual loss on Monday, hit by a writedown of 111.6 billion rand ($6.43 billion) and a drop in oil and chemical prices due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“The world’s top producer of motor fuel from coal reported a loss of 91.3 billion rand for the full year ended June 30…”
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/s.africas-sasol-swings-to-%245.3-bln-annual-loss-on-lower-oil-prices-writedown-2020-08-17
“Nigeria on verge of collapse, Bode George warns. People are hungry and therefore, they are angry. The bandits we are seeing are pushed into it by… a situation where they have no job, no guarantee on feeding, no housing, they are just existing and when they are invited to any cultism or anything to survive, they will participate.
“What is paramount now is food security and job creation.”
https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/08/nigeria-on-verge-of-collapse-bode-george-warns/
Chef Bode George is wonderful, and his analysis certainly resonates with me. He understands the system of “indirect rule” that Lord Lugard introduced, and why it was so good for the country. As long as people like him can speak out, there is hope. That he has the courage to make even an oblique reference to central government corruption proves he is a man of fearless integrity. Thank you for posting this.
The article makes the point that job creation will help with food security. A big part of the problem is inability to afford to buy food.
“Developing nation debt has more than doubled in the past decade and left more than 50 countries facing a repayment crisis, according to a campaign group.
“Data from the Jubilee Debt Campaign shows that even without taking full account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a sharp jump in the number of poor countries in debt distress since 2018.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/16/debt-in-developing-countries-has-doubled-in-less-than-a-decade
“The emerging-market rally that has all but wiped out the losses since the start of the coronavirus pandemic looks headed for a late-August reappraisal amid a resurgence of trade tensions and delays to U.S. stimulus…
“…the most significant policy meeting may be in Turkey, where the central bank has resorted to backdoor monetary tightening to anchor the lira. The currency has depreciated 5.4% versus the dollar this month.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/resilience-test-awaits-emerging-markets-basking-in-recovery-mode
Harry, we have provided “debt relief” over and over again to these poor countries, and all they do s borrow even more money they will never repay. And spend it on vanity projects, corruption in high places, and expensive toys for the ruling class. It’s a mug’s game, and we are the mugs.
Modest proposal: anyone who lobbies for debt relief must first donate 10% of their net worth to the poor country of their choice. Only then will they have standing to try to squander other people’s money.
It’s easy to say that if you enjoy an infinite greenback printing machine, as the US does
Debt in our world is a bit like the One Ring of Middle Earth. It isn’t necessarily intended to be paid back. It’s real power is that it binds governments, companies and individuals to the Great Sauron.
But at least the Great Sauron promised something to his subjects. Cheap air transport via Nazgul; giant spiders to guard your villages; roast Hobbit every Sunday. And 100% green energy, thanks to the geothermal generators on Mount Doom. All in all, he was a very progressive guy; a perfect choice for VP by Biden.
The report indicates that 100 countries have asked the IMF for aid with respect to the problems associated with the pandemic. That is over half of the IMF’s 189 members.
I saw a you tube video where the head of the IMF said that they had helped 75 countries with loans she also said that they did not have to start paying the loans back until their economies improved sort of like a debt repayment holiday she said in that video that countries should keep their receipts .
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/06/covid-cash-digital-currencies-coronavirus-central-banks
this is quite interesting perhaps the covids main purpose was to bring in the cashless world this would enable negative interest rates.
I was surprised to see that this article is by Kenneth Rogoff. He is a very well known economist.
He doesn’t seem to be talking about digital currencies, in the sense of them being the ones generated by doing a lot of mathematical calculations. Instead, he seems to be talking about digital currencies being tokens a person carries in a digital wallet to use instead of paper currency. He mentions possibly patterning the system after a Chinese digital system. He talks about several possible approaches.
I agree that governments would like to get people away from cash, so that they can have negative interest rates. But banks really don’t like negative interest rates. The changeover does sound fraught with peril.