It takes energy to accomplish any of the activities that we associate with GDP. It takes energy to grow food: human energy, solar energy, and–in today’s world–the many types of energy used to build and power tractors, transport food to markets, and provide cooling for food that needs to be refrigerated. It takes energy to cook food and to smelt metals. It takes energy to heat and air condition offices and to power the internet. Without adequate energy, the world economy would come to a halt.
We are hitting energy limits right now. Energy per capita is already shrinking, and it seems likely to shrink further in the future. Reaching a limit produces a conflict problem similar to the one in the game musical chairs. This game begins with an equal number of players and chairs. At the start of each round, a chair is removed. The players must then compete for the remaining chairs, and the player who ends the round without a chair is eliminated. There is conflict among players as they fight to obtain one of the available chairs. The conflict within the energy system is somewhat hidden, but the result is similar.
A current conflict is, “How much energy can we spare to fight COVID-19?” It is obvious that expenditures on masks and vaccines have an impact on the economy. It is less obvious that a cutback in airline flights or in restaurant meals to fight COVID-19 indirectly leads to less energy being produced and consumed, worldwide. In total, the world becomes a poorer place. How is the pain of this reduction in energy consumption per capita to be shared? Is it fair that travel and restaurant workers are disproportionately affected? Worldwide, we are seeing a K shaped recovery: The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer.
A major issue is that while we can print money, we cannot print the energy supplies needed to run the economy. As energy supplies deplete, we will increasingly need to “choose our battles.” In the past, humans have been able to win many battles against nature. However, as energy per capita declines in the future, we will be able to win fewer and fewer of these battles against nature, such as our current battle with COVID-19. At some point, we may simply need to let the chips fall where they may. The world economy seems unable to accommodate 7.8 billion people, and we will have no choice but to face this issue.
In this post, I will explain some of the issues involved. At the end of the post, I include a video of a panel discussion that I was part of on the topic of “Energy Is the Economy.” The moderator of the panel discussion was Chris Martenson; the other panelists were Richard Heinberg and Art Berman.
[1] Energy consumption per person varies greatly by country.
Let’s start with a little background. There is huge variability in the quantity of energy consumed per person around the world. There is more than a 100-fold difference between the highest and lowest countries shown on Figure 1.
I have shown only a few example countries, but we can see that cold countries tend to use a lot of energy, relative to their populations. Iceland, with an abundant supply of inexpensive hydroelectric and geothermal electricity, uses it to heat buildings, grow food in greenhouses, mine “bitcoins” and smelt aluminum. Norway and Canada have both oil and gas supplies, besides being producers of hydroelectricity. With abundant fuel supplies and a cold climate, both countries use a great deal of energy relative to the size of their population.
Saudi Arabia also has high energy consumption. It uses its abundant oil and gas supplies to provide air conditioning for its people. It also uses its energy products to enable the operation of businesses that provide jobs for its large population. In addition, Saudi Arabia uses taxes on the oil it produces to subsidize the purchase of imported food, which the country cannot grow locally. As with all oil and gas producers, some portion of the oil and gas produced is used in its own oil and gas operations.
In warm countries, such as those in Middle Africa and India, energy consumption tends to be very low. Most people in these countries walk for transportation or use very crowded public transport. Roads tend not to be paved. Electricity outages are frequent.
One of the few changes that can easily be made to reduce energy consumption is to move manufacturing to lower wage countries. Doing this reduces energy consumption (in the form of electricity) quite significantly. In fact, the rich nations have mostly done this, already.
Trying to squeeze down energy consumption for the many countries around the world will be a huge challenge because energy is involved in every part of economies.
[2] Two hundred years of history shows that very slow growth in energy consumption per capita leads to bad outcomes.
Some readers will remember that I have pieced together data from different sources to put together a reasonable approximation to world energy consumption since 1820. In Figure 3, I have added a rough estimate of the expected drop in future energy consumption that might occur if either (1) the beginning of peak fossil fuels is occurring about now because of continued low fossil fuel prices, or (2) world economies choose to leave fossil fuels and move to renewables between now and 2050 in order to try to help the environment. Thus, Figure 3 shows my estimate of the pattern of total world energy consumption over the period of 1820 to 2050, at 10-year intervals.
The shape of this curve is far different from the one most forecasters expect because they assume that prices will eventually rise high enough so all of the fossil fuels that can be technically extracted will actually be extracted. I expect that oil and other fossil fuel prices will remain too low for producers, for reasons I discuss in Section [4], below. In fact, I have written about this issue in a peer reviewed academic article, published in the journal Energy.
Figure 4 shows this same information as Figure 3, divided by population. In making this chart, I assume that population drops only half as quickly as energy consumption falls after 2020. Total world population drops to 2.8 billion by 2050.
In Figure 4, some parts of the curve are relatively flat, or even slightly falling, while others are rising rapidly. It turns out that rapidly rising times are much better for the economy than flat and falling times. Figure 5 shows the average annual percentage change in energy consumption per capita, for ten-year periods ending the date shown.
If we look back at what happened in Figure 5, we find that when the 10-year growth in energy consumption is very low, or turns negative, conflict and bad outcomes are typical. For example:
- Dip 1: 1861-1865 US Civil War
- Dip 2: Several events
- 1914-1918 World War I
- 1918-1920 Spanish Flu Pandemic
- 1929-1933 Great Depression
- 1939-1945 World War II
- Dip 3: 1991 Collapse of the Central Government of the Soviet Union
- Dip 4: 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic and Recession
Per capita energy consumption was already growing very slowly before 2020 arrived. Energy consumption took a big step downward in 2020 (estimated at 5%) because of the shutdowns and the big cutback in air travel. One of the important things that energy consumption does is provide jobs. With severe cutbacks intended to contain COVID-19, many people in distant countries lost their jobs. Cutbacks of this magnitude quickly cause problems around the world.
For example, if people in rich countries rarely dress up to attend meetings of various kinds, there is much less of a market for dressy clothing. Many people in poor countries make their living manufacturing this type of clothing. With the loss of these sales, workers suddenly found themselves with much reduced income. Poor countries generally do not have good safety nets to provide food for those who are out of work. As a result, the diets of people subject to loss of income became inadequate, leading to greater vulnerability to disease. If the situation continues, some may even die of starvation.
[3] The pattern of world energy consumption between 2020 and 2050 (modeled in Figures 3, 4 and 5) suggests that a very concerning collapse may be ahead.
My model suggests that world energy consumption may fall to about 28 gigajoules per capita per year by 2050 (for a reduced population of 2.8 billion). This is about the level of world energy consumption per capita for the world in 1900.
Alternatively, 28 gigajoules per capita is a little lower than the per capita energy consumption for India in 2019. Of course, some parts of the world might do better than this. For example, Mexico and Brazil both had energy consumption per capita of about 60 gigajoules per capita in 2019. Some countries might be able to do this well in 2050.
Using less energy after 2020 will lead to many changes. Governments will become smaller and provide fewer services such as paved roads. Often, these governments will cover smaller areas than those of countries today. Businesses will become smaller, more local, and more involved with goods rather than services. Individual citizens will be walking more, growing their own food, and doing much less home heating and cooling.
With less energy available, it will be necessary to cut back on fighting unfortunate natural occurrences, such as forest fires, downed electricity transmission lines after hurricanes, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and constantly mutating viruses. Thus, life expectancy is likely to decline.
[4] It is “demand,” and how high energy prices can be raised, that determines how large an energy supply will be available in the future.
I keep making this point in my posts because I sense that it is poorly understood. The big problem that we should be anticipating is energy producers going out of business because energy prices are chronically too low. I see five ways in which energy prices might theoretically be raised:
- A truly booming world economy. This is what raised prices in the 1970s and in the run up to 2008. If there are truly more people who can afford homes and new vehicles, and governments that can afford new roads and other infrastructure, companies extracting oil and coal will build new facilities in higher-cost locations, and thereby expand world supply. The higher prices will help energy companies to be profitable, despite their higher costs. Such a scenario seems very unlikely, given where we are now.
- Government mandates and subsidies. Government mandates are what is maintaining demand for renewables and electric vehicles. Conversely, government mandates are part of what is keeping down tourist travel. Indirectly, this lack of demand relating to travel leads to low oil prices. A government mandate for people to engage in more travel seems unlikely.
- Much reduced wage disparity. If everyone, rich or poor, can afford nice homes, automobiles, and cell phones, commodity prices will tend to be high because buying and operating goods such as these requires the use of commodities. Governments can attempt to fix wage disparity through more printed money, but I am doubtful that this approach will really work because other countries are likely to be unwilling to accept this printed money.
- More debt, sometimes leading to collapsing debt bubbles. Spending can be enhanced if it becomes easier for citizens to buy goods such as homes and vehicles on credit. Likewise, businesses can borrow money to build new factories or, alternatively, to continue to pay wages to workers, even if there isn’t much demand for the goods and services sold. But, if the economy really is not recovering rapidly, these approaches can be expected to lead to crashes.
- Getting rid of COVID-19 inefficiencies and fearfulness. Economies around the world are being depressed to varying degrees by continued inefficiencies caused by social distancing requirements and by fearfulness. If these issues could be eliminated, it might boost economies back up to the already somewhat depressed levels of early 2020.
In summary, the issue we are facing is that oil demand (and thus prices) were far too low for oil producers because of wage disparity before the COVID-19 crisis arrived in March. Trying to get demand back up through more debt seems likely to lead to debt bubbles, which will be in danger of collapsing. There may be temporary price spikes, but a permanent fix is virtually impossible. This is why I am forecasting the severe drop in energy consumption shown in Figures 3 and 4.
[5] We humans don’t need to figure out how to fix the economy optimally between now and 2050.
The economy is a self-organizing system that will figure out on its own the optimal way of “dissipating” energy, to the extent possible. In physics terms, the economy is a dissipative structure. If the energy resource is food, energy will be dissipated by digesting the food. In the case of fossil fuel, energy will be dissipated by burning it. We may like to think that we are in charge, but we really are not. It is the laws of physics, or perhaps the Power behind the laws of physics, that is in charge.
Dissipative structures are not permanent. For example, hurricanes and tornadoes are dissipative structures. Plants and animals are dissipative structures. Eventually, new smaller economies, encompassing smaller areas of the world, may replace the existing world economy.
[6] This is a recent video of a panel discussion on “Energy Is the Economy.”
Chris Martenson is the moderator. Art Berman, Richard Heinberg and I are panelists. The Peak Prosperity folks were kind enough to provide me a copy to put up on my website.
A transcript of this panel discussion can be accessed at this link:
Peak Oil Never Went Away
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/11/16/peak-oil-never-went-away/
New ideas in economics and the social sciences
….
What you’re seeing after 2008 is the shale-oil boom. Unlike conventional crude oil, shale oil is found in solid form. It’s essentially oil trapped within sedimentary rock. Over the last decade, the US has exploited its shale-oil reserves, with dramatic results that Hubbert didn’t predict. To many people, this boom spells the end of Hubbert’s ‘doomism’.
I think this euphoria is unwarranted. Like conventional crude, shale oil is a finite resource that will eventually be exhausted. What’s more, none of the shale oil currently being harvested is a new discovery. In fact, Hubbert knew about it in 1956. He pegged US shale-oil reserves at about 1 trillion barrels of oil. (Modern estimates peg US shale reserves between 0.3 – 1.5 trillion barrels.) To give you some perspective, that’s about 5 times more shale oil than Hubbert’s estimate for the total US reserve of conventional crude oil (which he pegged at 200 billion barrels). But while he knew about shale reserves, Hubbert didn’t include them in his peak-oil prediction. Why?
His reason was simple — there was no commercially viable way to extract shale oil. Today, evidently, things have changed (although perhaps not as much as you might think.) In 2008, oil companies started to harvest shale oil using a process called hydraulic fracturing (i.e. fracking). This involves pumping high-pressure liquid into a wellbore, which then fractures the shale formation, causing oil to flow. It’s a technology that existed (experimentally) when Hubbert made his prediction. But he never foresaw its widespread use.
For many people, the shale-oil revolution spells the end of peak oil — pushing it into the indefinite future. The problem, though, is that it’s easy to be misled by big numbers. Yes, the US probably has some 1 trillion barrels of shale oil in its reserves. But that doesn’t mean that all of it — or even a significant fraction of it — will be harvested.
The reason is that when it comes to harvesting energy, quality is as important as quantity. Here’s a simple example. Every year the Earth releases about 1500 EJ (1018 Joules) of energy in the form of geothermal heat. To give you some perspective, that’s about 250% more energy than humanity used in 2019.1 Can this vast geothermal reserve solve our energy problems?
Not really.
Also, much of this tight oil exists as such small deposits that breaking up the shale rock in which it is trapped is unlikely to yield enough energy to justify the energetic cost of fracturing the rock, to say nothing of covering the financial cost.
The central banker has repeatedly said that more fiscal and monetary stimulus was likely needed to help with the recovery. The Fed slashed interest rates to near zero in March and launched a series of lending programs to support the recovery since the crisis started
We’re never going back to the old economy, Fed Chairman says
By Anneken Tappe
Meanwhile, Powell said it wasn’t the right time to worry about the fiscal health of the United States, even as the government is spending trillions to help boost the economy. Rather, that issue should be addressed when unemployment is low again and tax revenues are rolling in.
“That’s the time to really focus,” he said.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/11/17/economy/powell-economy-recovery/index.html
On Tuesday, Powell also reiterated that people in lower-income jobs hadn’t recovered as much as others and that workers in the services industry might need more help going forward.
“The recovery is incomplete,” he said, warning of near-term risks surrounding the resurgence of Covid-19 infections. “We have a long way to go.”
“Meanwhile, Powell said it wasn’t the right time to worry about the fiscal health of the United States, even as the government is spending trillions to help boost the economy. Rather, that issue should be addressed when unemployment is low again and tax revenues are rolling in.”
“when…”
the myth of infinite progress says that the economy always will recover and grow again.
“I’m ready to roll the dice, are you? Open the cage.”
K, I will pick up the thread on the open page.
“Exploitation, subjugation, social engineering and war is simply throwing a spanner into the works.”
Those ‘evils’ that you enumerate are simply the consequence of the roll of the dice. You have already lost and they have already won.
The ‘elites’ that you moan about are living it up while you whine about it on the web.
“Mammals, primates, morality, society, technology is all a consequence of evolution.”
Sure, and those ‘evils’ are also the product of evolution, it is simply how human mammals behave, the same as other primates. Human societies work through hierarchy, dominance and territorialism, the ‘pecking order’. That is just how it is.
The difference is that some people make ‘morality’ actually work for them, which is the whole point of it, while you do not.
It is incredibly naïve to think that the sort of society that you personally seem to want is ‘moral’ or grounded in evolution. How would you describe it, libertarian, anti-hierarchical? Let us be open about what we are saying.
If you want to understand how evolution has conditioned human societies then you need to look at actual human societies and actual humans – not the ones in your imagination.
I asked you before how old you are and you did not really answer. I want to understand whether I am talking to an adolescent or to an older adult who is still struggling to sort his life out while babbling pretentiously and self-righteously about how the world ‘ought’ to work.
Yes that is blunt of me, but you do like to be blunt yourself, so I imagine that you welcome it.
Also, do you drink online? It would help to understand if your behaviour is due to some sort of intoxication. Are you an alcoholic?
Well, thank you for the insults. It is like pouring fine alcohol on an open fire. It warms really good in my cold dead heart. You should know that by now.
❤
The worst despots, exploiters and abusers of human dignity is simply overrun by the smart businessman and skilled worker that performs productive actions in the economy. Want proof of that, have a look at IC and compare that to the ‘run of the mill’ despot wankery from history.
The anonymization, partial disconnect between the owners and the workforce soon enabled agency, such as Japanese Kaizen. You see, the empowered artisan cares about the product and the company in their own self-interest and projection of self-image onto the produce.
If rich dudes in tech companies like the good life, fair enough. We all got different tastes. However, using means of escapism for covering a bad concience is delusional. You will be perpetually haunted.
You see, morality is implicit in the workings of an effective high-tech economy since it is innate in all mammals, primates specially. Nobody needs to force me into subjugation to get my ass moving. I do it because I care about what I do and I am good at what I am doing. Now, a shrewd owner and businessman putting capital to work might consider letting me loose to our mutual benefit. As a matter of fact, I like to shoot with my loose cannon and I get to do it a lot.
You see, I don’t have a need to demonize owners of effectively run corporations. In reality, we most likely live about the same lifestyles. For sure, I don’t own a private jet and a tropical island. But that does not change the fact that we all are living in techno-utopia as compared with a few centuries ago. All thanks to the implicit and innane morality of mammals, as evolution put forth in the game of life and exploited to the maximum in tech companies.
You see, I don’t care about “winning”. I care about my game. Big difference. The only important competition is yoursef.
Well, I’ll leave it at that for now.
And good luck fighting your demons.
🤘😎🤘
If it’s any consolation, we naked apes are on the whole less violent, less aggressive and more empathatic than our cousins the chimpanzees. A bunch of them mugged David Attenborough and stole his smartphone last week! He only saved himself from worse by explaining in sign language that he was a mate of Jane Goodall’s.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c4/4d/e1/c44de19a07fcbaa44e753955538c091f.jpg
Chimps, humans and violence
Chimps are highly tribal and territorial and violence tends to occur near the borders of colonies. The more males within, and the denser their colony, the more they use violence to protect their space from outsiders. Bands patrol the borders. Violence has a selective advantage for the colony as it provides territory and resources.
Chimps have a similar ‘homicide’ rate to humans who live in hunter-gatherer societies, our long-term norm. So it seems that humans are ‘naturally’ just as violent as chimps, and for similar reasons, but our rate of violence can diminish with more secure social conditions – and increase without them.
That said, we killed an average of 378,000 per year in wars between 1985 and 1994, so maybe not. And many more die due to the concentration of wealth – around 9 million die of hunger per year. So we remain tribal and territorial, we compete for resources and we kill each other over it – just like chimps.
USA fights endless wars for its economic interests, UK is always up for it too. Let’s be honest about it, we are no different from chimps on that count. It is just our nature, the same as theirs, even at this pinnacle of social development.
> Murder ‘comes naturally’ to chimpanzees
…. The researchers’ global compilation of chimp violent crime statistics allowed them to consider what conditions in a community produce a higher murder rate.
Chimpanzees live in well-defined colonies, and groups of males patrol the borders of each colony’s territory. This is where violent conflicts are known to arise, particularly if a patrol encounters a single chimp from a neighbouring community – but never before has this much data on the lethality of those interactions been combined in a single study.
When the scientists compared the figures across chimpanzee research sites, they found that the level of human interference (e.g. whether the chimps had been fed, or their habitat restricted) had little effect on the number of killings.
Instead, it was basic characteristics of each community that made the biggest difference: the number of males within it, and the overall population density of the area.
These parameters link the violence to natural selection: killing competitors improves a male chimp’s access to resources like food and territory – and crucially, it will happen more frequently when there is greater competition from neighbouring groups, and when the males can patrol in large numbers, with less risk to their own survival.
…. In an accompanying commentary for the journal Nature, Prof Joan Silk from Arizona State University said the results “should finally put an end to the idea” that violence in wild chimpanzees was a product of human interference.
She suggested that our perceptions of our evolutionary cousins can sometimes be distorted, because we want to believe that it is the nice behaviours, not the nasty ones, which have deep evolutionary roots.
There is no need to cling to such ideas, Prof Silk argues: “Humans are not destined to be warlike because chimpanzees sometimes kill their neighbours.”
…. But rather than having deep implications for human nature [?], the authors of the new study suggest that chimpanzee homicide – which previous research has estimated to occur at a similar rate to that seen in hunter-gatherer human societies – goes up and down as a simple consequence of competition for resources.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29237276
Farmers too.
> Comparative rates of violence in chimpanzees and humans
… Estimates for average rates of lethal violence for chimpanzees proved to be similar to average rates for subsistence societies of hunter–gatherers and farmers.
https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~kibale/pdfs/Wrangham2006_Primates.pdf
Humans have about the same frequency of predatory violence as chimps, but our frequencies of reactive violence (the more emotional, impulsive kind) is far lower. That is one reason why civilization is possible–low levels of reactive aggression.
Nehemiah, yes, the intelligent warrior isn’t acting out willy-nilly on the first impulse of percieved injustice or threat. That is a trait of youth and immaturity in the frontal cortex of humans.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/life-as-a-nonviolent-psychopath/282271/
The real warrior sees straight through the rapacious primates smoke and mirrors in the battle of life.
Divide et impera.
Answering to no man.
https://youtu.be/sfs3hVrgcdE
What is wrong with using violence against opportunistic intruders? A blatant and selfish disregard for the innate morality require severe punishment.
Isn’t that we have, dunno, a legal system and prisons perhaps?
However, sending other peoples children to die in pointless wars in foreign lands, now that is cowardice. Typically employed by despots.
“The coward only threatens when safe”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“When the going gets a bit shit, the fun begins”
— 清成 龍一
https://youtu.be/g-ZSzJ8eDNA
Chicken going bawk. 😉
K., perhaps the optimization for abstraction has abstracted us away from being able to ascertain our own direct interests, as in the past.
I would think so, yes.
Optimizing for satisfying the hallucinated desire of value between the ears of the primate cranium is certainly guaranteed to be suboptimal.
There is only one direct interest for every living thing, biological and synthetic. One.
It is the survival of the planetary ecosystem in its current form.
And no, I am not thinking in terms of a silly Calhounian dystopia GND degenerates riddled world guvmint here.
If it entails commissioning the “inversed russian roulette” 1/6 for mankind, so be it.
Re: the evolutionary origin of ‘morality’
It seems that the ‘moral conscience’ is actually rooted in the inherited fear of organised violent attacks from other members of the community. Fatal violence against transgressors and dissidents over millions of years, since pre-human times, has selected the trait of fearful conformity to the herd. The modern ‘police’ are an analogue of pre-human intragroup violence.
The social ‘code’ can vary drastically in time and place however and the ‘conscience’ is aimed at group conformity rather than toward any specific content. Far from being a ‘mystery’, or facilitating a particular set of ‘virtues’, the ‘conscience’ is a socially bred trait of fearful conformity to whatever is demanded of one in one’s society.
Obviously not everyone is equally conformist, even today, some are less ‘fearful’ and can sometimes ‘come a cropper’.
> Ancestral precursors, social control, and social selection in the evolution of morals
Abstract
Morality involves individuals controlling themselves, but also groups controlling individuals. In the last common ancestor (LCA), fear-based self-control was one important preadaptation, and group attacks on individuals within the community were another. Conscience functions of humans are at least in part based on simple fear of punishment, and in both cases fear leads to self-control. The capacity of a local Pan troglogytes group to organize itself for a coalitionary attack against a disliked member is another important precursor for human morality, and more specifically for the evolution of aggressive social control by groups. Thus it would appear that the moralistic social sanctioning described by Durkheim had its phylogenetic roots in this collective behavior of the LCA. The hypothesis is that the self-inhibitory human conscience evolved because group social control was exacting serious penalties from those who did not control their antisocial tendencies. Two morally connected types of social selection (sanctioning and reputational) could have been major contributors as we became increasingly moral and increasingly different from the LCA.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-00728-020
I read something quite similar in FN’s Zarathustra this evening. He too conceived the ‘conscience’ as the instinctive drive to conform to the herd. It is an impulse that is to be ‘overcome’, in self-realisation or self-creation, through courage and self-reliance. One must be ‘worthy’ of one’s uniqueness and difference.
(Even the Puritan founders of USA had to depart their English herd in order to form a new one with a new ‘morality’; and others had to depart the Puritan herd to find their own path. Thus new peoples and persons were formed.)
> On the Way of the Creator
Is it your wish, my brother, to go into solitude? Is it your wish to seek the way to yourself? Then linger a moment, and listen to me.
“He who seeks, easily gets lost. All loneliness is guilt” — thus speaks the herd. And you have long belonged to the herd. The voice of the herd will still be audible in you. And when you will say, “I no longer have a common conscience with you,” it will be a lament and an agony. Behold, this agony itself was born of the common conscience, and the last glimmer of that conscience still glows on your affliction.
But do you want to go the way of your affliction, which is the way to yourself? Then show me your right and your strength to do so. Are you a new strength and a new right? A first movement? A self-propelled wheel? Can you compel the very stars to revolve around you?
…. Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown out into the void and into the icy breath of solitude. Today you are still suffering from the many, being one: today your courage and your hopes are still whole….
https://gnosticteachings.org/scriptures/western/3212-nietzsche-on-the-way-of-the-creator.html
Jesus also took his solitude of the herd into the wilderness for 40 days, before he dumped the old herd and the old law, formulated his own ‘morality’, took up his preaching and called his new herd to him. ‘I am the good shepherd.’
Nietzsche is often drawing parallels with the gospels in Zarathustra. We are to ‘do a Jesus’ and to find our own ‘conscience’, our own ‘truth’ that suits us and maybe some others. In a way, Nietzsche is writing an ‘Imitation of Christ’ a la Kempis – and bidding us to be ‘creators’ rather than followers.
‘What would Jesus do?’ His own thing, something new that made sense to him, and maybe to some others, if not to all. The ‘collapse’ will likely afford opportunities for ‘new herds’ with ‘new ways’. ‘New wine skins for new wine’ – in the wide USA anyway.
Yes, there may be new ways, for new smaller herds, as the collapse goes on in different parts of the world. Different parts of the world will likely come up with different ideas of morality and what makes sense.
“A multinational consortium that was building one of South Africa’s first privately-owned coal-fired power stations has asked to withdraw from the project, the energy ministry said on Tuesday, aggravating the country’s chronic electricity shortage.
“Local environmentalists had criticised the 630 megawatt (MW) Thabametsi plant, saying it would have been among the most carbon-intensive coal power stations in the world and a drain on meagre water resources in the arid Limpopo province.
“But South Africa needed the plant, which was meant to come online early next year, to ease an electricity deficit that has weighed on the economy for decades.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUKL1N2I3216
South Africa’s electricity generation per capita has fallen by 20% since 2007. No wonder it is having problems. You will have to click on the link to see the chart I made.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/South-Africa-per-capita-electricity-generation-1024×616.png
Its coal production is not enough for both internal use and exports. Citizens cannot withstand the higher prices of electricity that would be required, to extract more coal.
Water is also a major limiting factor. Coal fired generation uses a lot of water. (So does nuclear and “base load” natural gas.)
Can coal emissions be run along the ground and absorbed by plants along the way? Or has it ever been tried? It could perhaps decrease public resistance to coal production.
“Venezuelan oil could become world’s biggest stranded asset, say experts:
““…Oil will not save us this time around,” said Pedro Burelli, a former board member of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA who now runs a consultancy in the US. “We have to reinvent ourselves as a country and as an economy.””
https://www.ft.com/content/cafbd3c7-2434-4f23-8da8-1f7052efdc8e
“Nigeria’s House of Representatives will pass a long-delayed oil reform bill within six months, its speaker said on Tuesday, potentially paving the way for an overhaul of laws governing the country’s oil and gas industry.
“The reforms have been in the works for nearly two decades… Oil executives have said reforms are key for Nigeria to attract investment in an era of low oil prices and a shift away from fossil fuels.”
https://www.oedigital.com/news/483295-nigerian-long-delayed-oil-reform-bill-to-pass-within-six-months
“U.S. shale output is expected to decline next year as oil and gas companies hold down exploration and production costs amid low crude prices.
“Average shale oil production in 2020 is set to fall by 3.1 percent to 7.5 million barrels per day, down from 7.7 million barrels per day in 2019, according to Rystad.”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/U-S-shale-production-to-fall-another-3-percent-15733146.php
We really don’t know how much oil can be extracted anywhere. Prices have to be high enough, or oil will stay in the ground. I am a co-author of a peer reviewed article in the journal Energy that makes exactly this point. An oil production forecast for China considering economic limits
Of course, now we have stranded assets everywhere. Even if the economy gets back going again, it will be pretty much impossible to get fossil fuel prices up to where they need to be to keep extraction rising. Without rising extraction (and consumption) the economy tends to collapse.
Wow the article is from March 2016 so presumably written earlier. You were predicting a slump in production from 2016 and here is the ex-post graph: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/crude-oil-production
[I can’t find a way to attach an image: choose the 10Y timeframe]
But there is a slight uptick in 2019-2020, I wonder why
Hi Gail,
Do you think that it’s possible that all oil/gas companies get subsidized heavily to keep running in the near future?
I mean, since the oil/gas sector only represent something 4% of the economy but the other 96% cannot run without it, I think it would kind of make sense to have a tax on the 96% of the economy to fund oil/gas.
Or is this the same as high oil price which collapses demand and we are back to same problem?
Thanks
I don’t think oil and gas can be subsidized heavily by the rest of the economy. They problem the rest of the economy is having is that a large part of it isn’t profitable. More people will likely be laid off work in the weeks ahead. The pressure will be for less taxes, rather than more taxes. Adding more taxes would indeed tend to push the economy toward collapse, in a way similar to a high price of oil, and we would be back to the same problem
subsidy means money, and money is always a token for energy
therefore subsidy in this context means using energy to subsidise energy. i.e.–itself.
This may appear to be a ‘solution’ to our economic problems, but in fact is a delusion
using something to energise itself implies a perpetual motion machine. Which is why it can never work.
Unfortunately in the short term it provides an ‘illusion’ of working, so economists and politicians love the idea.
Good points!
Thanks to both of you for your answers !
The beta test data is in, and not very encouraging. I expect the beatings will continue.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-and-COVID-19
This is an article by Bill Gates, telling how bad climate change will be. He starts about talking about CO2 emissions probably being 8% lower in 2020 than 2019. This suggests that my estimate of a 5% reduction in energy consumption in 2020 may be low, especially in the short run.
Gates doesn’t talk about the fact that the 8% reduction, if accompanied by a loss of aerosols that tend to produce global dimming, may in fact, raise he amount of global warming we experience.
Of course, Gates follows the standard view regarding climate. Gates expects that economic growth and rising energy consumption will go on indefinitely. He also thinks humans can make decisions to change this. If this story is wrong, Gates is wrong.
having the luck to come across a single idea, and the intellect follow it through and tenacity to hold it together against all the odds does not grant a surplus of common realistic sense—apply it to musk or bezel, equally well
I call it ‘tunnel vision genius’
their existence is predicated on infinite growth, without it they are effectively nothing because growth and expansion cannot just ‘stop’ and hang there.
there is I think a vague notion that climate change will be bad for others—000s of miles away, but only a minor inconvenience for people with his wealth
damn spell corrector—bezel should be Bezos
Climate is just the average weather conditions at a given location over a given length of time, and climate change is merely the result of changes in the frequency and intensity of weather events over time. It is a failure of cognition to think that climate change has any existence outside of the imagination.
The only evidence offered for its existence comes from the abstract realm of the statistics of weather phenommena.
In the good old days when people were ignorant because nobody had told them any different, inclement weather events and weather-related disasters were blamed on acts of God or the gods. Indeed, many cultures had personal deities who wielded power over the elements. For instance, the English word Thursday, as everyone knows, is named after one of those deities, the Norse god of Thunder, Lightning and Storms.
These days, deities are out of fashion, and instead inclement weather events are often blamed on climate change, which requires just as much imagination as deities to believe in.
The current dogma requires us, in an impressive feat of circular reasoning, that weather causes climate and climate causes weather and weather change causes climate change and climate change causes weather change.
But that’s enough enlightenment for one day—just enough for you to either “debunk with ease” or to bring you a flash of satori.
A contrary view (full disclosure: I haven’t read the paper; only the article, not least because they want $8.99 for it, lol.):
“…a group led by ETH professor Reto Knutti has conducted a new analysis of temperature measurements and models.
“The scientists concluded that the weather-is-not-climate paradigm is no longer applicable in that form. According to the researchers, the climate signal — that is, the long-term warming trend — can actually be discerned in daily weather data, such as surface air temperature and humidity, provided that global spatial patterns are taken into account.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200102143429.htm
“The only evidence offered for its existence comes from the abstract realm of the statistics of weather phenommena.”
Untrue. Long term trends in the disappearance of arctic sea ice and the retreat of glaciers are difficult to refute or to chalk up to (what I agree can be) a lot of sampling noise. Many areas are becoming drought-prone because there simply isn’t the snow pack to feed the rivers.
Not much to be done about that, whether you think humans have a lot to do with it or not. … It doesn’t seem to be reversible within our lifetimes or many lifetimes.
Gates is a very smart guy so far as raw brain power goes, but that highlights a question that has always mystified me: why are there many smart people who seem to have little ability to, or perhaps just little interest in, thinking independently or looking at all sides of a question rather than quickly adopting the conventional wisdom with a minimum of scrutiny? I lean to thinking there must be a personality factor that interacts with intelligence. Let us call it the “curiosity factor,” which should be closely related to the personality factor Openness-to-experience.
GW Bush’s IQ was estimated at 125 by respected psychological researcher Dean Simonton
https://www.jacksonville.com/reason/2017-01-24/fact-check-how-smart-president-elect-donald-trump-iq-score-isn-t-official
but seems to have been about as incurious as it is possible to be, leaving many people with a perfectly understandable impression that he was a bit dim.
A note on Simonton: his specialty is the study of genius and creativity. In 2006, he utilized a formal procedure to retroactively calculate the probable IQ scores of US presidents. His calculation for GW Bush was 124.8.
Who is Bill Gates?
https://www.corbettreport.com/who-is-bill-gates-full-documentary-2020/
wash yer mouth out
Interesting.
Eugenics, ha?
This would explain his moral attitude. Herd control and management. It would also suggest that he is aware of the resource constraints. He just wants to control the situtation on the civilization fall. Or am I too kind?
The dissonance in Gates’ opinions haunts me for some time.
He is a bright person – I can’t deny. He was right expecting global pandemia as a most important threat.
On the other hand he says things like this:
It is a myth that “poor countries are doomed to stay poor,” and by the year 2035, “there will be almost no poor countries left in the world,” Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates writes in his latest annual letter about the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conditions in the nations where the foundation works.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/264850945/almost-no-poor-nations-by-2035-thats-what-bill-gates-says?t=1605733870032
So unless he belives that all poor countries will be anihilated and only the reach elite will survive and rule the techno-utopia ‘Atlas shrugged’ story… I would ask what type of drugs he’s applicating.
What’s your opinion OFW?
My opinion is that Bill Gates is not that smart. However, he doesn’t need to be. He was basically a front man for a CIA-controlled tech company, just, like Zuckerberg and Dorsey are. Now he’s a front man for his various philanthropical (or could they be money laundering?) foundation activities. He just has to act smart and savvy and not fob his lines. Others smarter than he write the scripts. In essence, he’s still just this nerd.
https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90×75/images/2acbe334982606fb28380ee80dcc1f967260a8b86f952be9c4a99f8f5a601c9b_1.jpg
Bold hypothesis. Any sources / links books to back your notion?
Who is Bill Gates?
https://www.corbettreport.com/who-is-bill-gates-full-documentary-2020/
That’s a great piece of work by Corbett.
Yes Gates built his business in very interesting ways
most people think he started out as a techno nerd in his dad’s garage—but that was just a front
in fact he made his first fortune building moonscapes for fraudulent moon landings….pretty good as he was only 12. But his experience in building and firing dummy rockets gave him the necessary knowledge to get involved in the demolition of the WTC.
in fact he was spotted several times in the building, but as he had rented office space there it was a perfect front for getting all the explosives set up over preceding months to 9/11
he disguised himself as the maintenance man—he laughed it off when people told him he was the Spitting Image of Bill Gates.—Though he did have a sideline fixing computers when he wasn’t sitting demolition charges. That was particularly useful on the higher floors as he had to set up the base for the hologram of the planes crashing into the buildings
now his main business is putting microchips into vaccination shots
when everybody has been vaccinated, he will control all our minds.
except for those able to think for themselves of course
I knew it all along. Thank you for confirming I’m not in denial.
well keep it to yourself
there are some crazy folks out there who don’t like hearing the truth
I’m probably the only person on the planet that thinks Gates is a good man with good intentions that is working hard to give back from his good fortune.
I wish he had chosen to focus on population reduction rather than developing world health care, but I’ll bet he thinks they are one and the same, which they would be if we had more time and more energy.
Also kudos for his investment in nuclear energy which he knows, and we know, is the only (very very slim) possible hope for BAU.
If Bill Gates would have clawed himself from the bottom to the top, all by his own merit. I could allow him a spot in the techno-utopia 21’st century Noah’s Ark. Now has he, all by himself?
The most loony half-baked ideas usually originates from the minds of “smart” people. Lazy ass cheap intelligence.
Hard problems require serious amounts of biological and synthetic CPU cycles running in real time and plugged into objective reality. That’s the real deal: Industrious intelligence. However, even then it might flawed due to unknown unkowns.
Grind and test that sucker of a predicament into oblivion Monte Carlo style. Let’s just call it evolution for convenience. Whatever it takes to keep IC churning.
If Bill Gates have been approaced by the intelligence community? Does the earth orbit the sun?
Here is another guy that has been approaced. I guess he wasn’t too interested, I suppose. Probably just rolled his eyes.
https://youtu.be/wwRYyWn7BEo
Below is one of his most famous quotes:
“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
— Linus Torvalds
Let Bill Gates roll the inversed “russian roulette”, with one empty chamber, if he wants to join the Ark of techno-singularity.
Linus with family is in by default.
🤘😎🤘
Bill Gates is a fifth generation banker in Washington State. He is tech genius. He is a finance genius to structure a corporation to funnel all the money to himself.
grrr should read is not a tech genius
Gail, re the loss of dimming, a study suggests the affect on temperatures may have been localised only and negligible on a global basis:
https://science.thewire.in/environment/why-lockdowns-had-little-to-no-effect-on-global-temperatures/
I suspect it isn’t primarily dimming from ground-based pollution, but dimming from airplane contrails that has declined dramatically, The loss of the contrail layer (of water vapor in the lower stratosphere) due to reduced air travel has resulted in warmer days and cooler nights. You can feel the stronger sunlight on your skin this year. Those contrails create a greater “greenhouse effect” than all the carbon dioxide molecules in all the air in all the world added together. Who’d have thunk it?
The loss of contrails may vary by part of the world. My impression is that US flights are not down a whole lot, but smaller airplanes may be used. Increases cargo flights are to some extent making up for loss of (not very full) passenger flights in the US.
“Estimates from the Air Transport Action Group suggest some 4.8 million aviation workers’ jobs are at risk as a result of air travel demand falling more than 75% in August 2020 compared with August 2019.
“The impact of travel restrictions and quarantine measures have effectively closed down the aviation industry… “Aviation faces an unprecedented employment catastrophe,” said Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s Director General and CEO.”
https://airlines.iata.org/news/action-needed-to-prevent-a-jobs-catastrophe
“Air services group Swissport has confirmed it has cut more than 3,000 British jobs as the Covid crisis continues to pummel the travel sector.
“…trade union GMB labelled the cuts a “devastating blow for thousands of our members” – and laid the blame in part on the late extension of the furlough scheme.”
https://www.standard.co.uk/business/swissport-job-cuts-london-b72505.html
“Norwegian Air staff demonstrated on Wednesday against the government’s decision to deny more aid to the crisis-hit budget carrier, while its biggest shareholder, Aercap Holdings reduced its stake in the airline.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-norweg-air-shut-aercap-hldg/norwegian-airs-top-owner-cuts-stake-amid-debt-crisis-idUKKBN27Y1F4?il=0
“Greek hotel owners are facing huge losses this year as Tui AG, the largest leisure, travel and tourism company in the world, is deferring the payment of monies due to them this year — until March of 2021.”
https://greece.greekreporter.com/2020/11/18/greek-hotels-plead-for-help-amidst-despair-over-tui-debt/
Many more layoffs and debt defaults seem to be ahead.
““The COVID-19 crisis did not start as a financial crisis, but it is morphing into a global one,” according to Carmen Reinhart, chief economist at the World Bank.
“She made the comments in The Economist’s highly anticipated The World in 2021 report…
“Her views echo those of Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who said on Tuesday at TheCityUK conference that changes to the structure of the UK economy were likely.”
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/world-bank-chief-economist-covid-19-will-fuel-a-credit-crisis-000156725.html
“Central Banks Are Inflating the Biggest Bubble in Alternative Assets [like Bitcoin] Yet.”
https://www.investing.com/news/economy/comic-central-banks-are-inflating-the-biggest-bubble-in-alternative-assets-yet-2349937
“Governments and central banks have promised to shell out $19.5 trillion since the coronavirus erupted to “put a floor under the world economy,” according to the International Monetary Fund. Some countries need even more help to recover from the crisis, but they might not get it.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/17/economy/global-economy-coronavirus-bailout-imf-annual-report/index.html
No kidding! Any amount of shutting down the economy is detrimental. If the economy was already doing poorly, it tends to make the economy do much worse.
“After a one-month reprieve, passenger car sales in Europe slumped again in October amid new restrictions in many countries aimed at containing a resurgence of the coronavirus, the European carmakers’ association reported Wednesday.
“The European industry registered 953,616 new cars last month, a decrease of 7.8% and a reversal of fortunes after September marked the first increase of the year…”
https://www.dailysabah.com/business/automotive/car-sales-plunge-again-in-europe-amid-renewed-covid-19-restrictions
“Germany’s auto industry secured 5 billion euros ($5.9 billion) in government aid to help weather the coronavirus crisis and invest in the transition to electric cars.”
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/german-auto-sector-gets-billions-aid-weather-virus-crisis
Even without new restrictions, I expect that people will be less likely to go out and purchase a new car, if COVID-19 is widespread.
Few people buy w. cash upfront today, most is being sold on various financing schemes, leases, employer-corporate owned (itself again leased) with benefit-allowance for employee personal usage etc.. Without the above ~fake support the crash would not be limited to ~10% !
Tired of the Titanic metaphor? How about the transition from laminar flow to turbulent flow. This strikes home for me, part of my career as ophthalmologist, the veins in the eye have slow organized laminar flow, the arteries turbulent flow. Here are a couple of internet illustrations. Turbulent times?
(Fudge!, image did not post, you will have to go to internet for hundreds of laminar to turbulent flow transition images)
If you post a link to an image, I expect people can see it if they click on the link. I have a question in to WordPress regarding why the images are not showing up, unless a person clicks on the link.
I am guessing that the reason is that the new system they have tries to keep loading time on comments down. If there are a lot fo comments with a lot of images, the system “decides” to suppress the images to keep loading times down.
I have misgivings about this new format, but that could be that I distrust change (especially when the trajectory is as gloomy as it is.) I miss your reassuring face as the avatar. I fear that the good things are being removed. Maybe I’m alone in thinking that they’re going after Facebook for related reasons.
I am seeing my face with the comments I make. It may have to do with the size of the screen you are using. This fancy software seems to try to optimize for every possible combination.
I am gradually learning more about the new software. Part of my problem is a learning curve. I didn’t realize that the new Jetpack software (“bloatware” according to one person who did a review) had already been installed. While I can, in theory, go back to the “Classic Editor” by installing a free plug in, the combination of the two sets of software seems to badly slow down the site. So I may be stuck with using the new “Block Editor” with its many features.
The Block Editor has many features that I don’t really understand. There is a frequent backup; it is just hidden in a place I wouldn’t look for it, for example. A person can “move” sections that have been previously written. It is just that a different technique needs to be used than was previously used. Unlike the Classic Editor, the Block Editor is not “What you see is what you get.” As a result, a person needs to press “Preview” to figure out what a post will look actually like.
This is a link to an image of laminar flow:
https://www.vapourtec.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Vapourtec-laminar-flow.png
Laminar flow or streamline flow in pipes (or tubes) occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between the layers.
This is a link to an image of turbulent flow:
https://www.vapourtec.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Vapourtec-turbulent-flow.png
Turbulent flow is a flow regime characterized by chaotic property changes. This includes rapid variation of pressure and flow velocity in space and time.
Funny,
We just covered this in my college fluid power about a month ago…
Cheers,
GBV
Some of us didn’t take fluid power.
The planets are aligning. Well, it already happened.
“According to forecasts, on July 4, 2020, a rare and unique planet parade will take place. All the planets of the Solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune plus the dwarf planet Pluto – will line up on one side of the Sun at the same time.”
🤔
What do astrologers claim will happen when all of the planets line up on the same side?
The more turbulence, the more energy is required to maintain flow.
thanks for that.
which explains and affirms Jim’s metaphor above.
as the world gets more turbulent (higher population but less prosperity and more conflict), then more energy would be needed to maintain IC.
but unfortunately, net (surplus) energy is in a relentless irreversible decline.
increased turbulence ahead.
I was thinking there to be cultural choices that either increase or reduce turbulence. Turbulence is easy to grasp, but flow is a little obscure for the lay person. Possibly, the same principle applies there too.
Turbulence is BLM looting your store and burning it down. Flow is when people can walk down the sidewalk and shop or take a coffee unmolested.
It’s worse than that. I would think of it as cavitation eroding the pipes and propellers of IC.
Good point.
I can understand how turbulence affects liquids. How about electricity flowing through wires? A very regulated pattern of electricity is needed. This can be fairly easily obtained using fossil fuels combined with nuclear and a selected amount of hydroelectric.
If wind turbines and solar panels are used to provide electricity, they provide it in a very irregular pattern. Someone who is retired from the industry describes it as “dirty electricity.” He tells me that there are devices that can be added to clean it up, but that these devices use part of the electricity in the process. It would seem to me that trying to run a system on irregular flows of electricity from wind, solar, and water might produce way too much turbulence to be manageable. It is too subtle an issue for modelers to have ever considered, however.
Wonderful points!
The problems related to ‘dirty electricity’ / grid stablization issues are clearly visible in Australia:
https://evcricketenergy.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/electricity-grid-inertia-what-is-it/
https://joannenova.com.au/2020/02/sa-renewable-electricity-market-mayhem-as-frequency-stabilizing-costs-hit-record-breaking-90-million/
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/why-the-australian-grid-is-on-the-brink-of-collapse-and-its-not-winds-fault
Interesting thing I found in Australia’s grid stablizing devices are synchronous condensers, big inertia devices rotating with controlled speed to synchronize 50Hz grid frequency. Very costly though. Another problem solved through added complexity.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/10/25/grid-inertia-why-it-matters-in-a-renewable-world/
https://www.engineerlive.com/content/synchronous-condensers-south-australia
Magic!
Thanks very much for all of the links. Back in June 2017, I gave a talk called The Problem of Properly Evaluating Intermittent Renewable Resources.
The people I was talking to were Charlie Hall and some of his followers. I was arguing for a much broader way of looking at intermittent renewables from an EROI perspective than what is usually used. In my 2017 talk, I tried to bring up some of the many issues involved, including “inertia.”
Happy to help, Gail.
The first Greta movie has arrived. And I think this girl is going to be bigger than Garbo.
As you all know, I’m a big fan of Greta. I think her fears about the climate, while sincere, are misplaced, and that she’s been badly misinformed and manipulated by the globalists green glob, and that if she ever learned about what is actually going to go down when we can’t actually use fossil fuels anymore, she would freak out, go ape and spare, and do a superb post-modern rendering of The Scream. But I’m not against her.
https://youtu.be/i74n4BUYgHI
John Cook writes:
Intimate portrait
Which is why I recommend the new documentary I Am Greta, a very intimate portrait of the Swedish child environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Before everyone gets started, let me point out that I Am Greta is not about the climate emergency. That is simply the background noise as the film charts the personal journey begun by this 15-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome in staging a weekly lone protest outside the Swedish parliament. Withdrawn and depressed by the implications of the compulsive research she has done on the environment, she rapidly finds herself thrust into the centre of global attention by her simple, heart-felt statements of the obvious.
The schoolgirl shunned as insane by classmates suddenly finds the world drawn to the very qualities that previously singled her out as weird: her stillness, her focus, her refusal to equivocate or to be impressed.
Footage of her father desperately trying to get her to take a break and eat something, if only a banana, as she joins yet another climate march, or of her curling up in a ball on her bed, needing to be silent, after an argument with her father over the time she has spent crafting another speech to world leaders may quieten those certain she is simply a dupe of the fossil fuel industries – or, more likely, it will not.
But the fruitless debates about whether Thunberg is being used are irrelevant to this film. That is not where its point or its power lies.
Through Thunberg’s eyes
For 90 minutes we live in Thunberg’s shoes, we see the world through her strange eyes. For 90 minutes we are allowed to live inside the head of someone so sane that we can briefly grasp – if we are open to her world – quite how insane each of us truly is. We see ourselves from the outside, through the vision of someone whose Asperger’s has allowed her to “see through the static”, as she too generously terms our delusions. She is the small, still centre of simple awareness buffeted in a sea of insanity.
Watching Thunberg wander alone – unimpressed, often appalled – through the castles and palaces of world leaders, through the economic forums of the global technocratic elite, through the streets where she is acclaimed, the varied nature of our collective insanity comes ever more sharply into focus.
Four forms of insanity the adult world adopts in response to Thunberg, the child soothsayer, are on show. In its varied guises, this insanity derives from unexamined fear.
The first – and most predictable – is exemplified by the right, who angrily revile her for putting in jeopardy the ideological system of capitalism they revere as their new religion in a godless world. She is an apostate, provoking their curses and insults.
The second group are liberal world leaders and the technocratic class who run our global institutions. Their job, for which they are so richly rewarded, is to pay lip service, entirely in bad faith, to the causes Thunberg espouses for real. They are supposed to be managing the planet for future generations, and therefore have the biggest investment in recruiting her to their side, not least to dissipate the energy she mobilises that they worry could rapidly turn against them.
One of the film’s early scenes is Thunberg’s meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, shortly after she has started making headlines.
Beforehand, Macron’s adviser tries to pump Thunberg for information on other world leaders she has met. His unease at her reply that this her first such invitation is tangible. As Thunberg herself seems only too aware when they finally meet, Macron is there simply for the photoshoot. Trying to make inane small talk with someone incapable of such irrelevancies, Macron can’t help but raise an eyebrow in discomfort, and possibly mild reproof, as Thunberg concedes that the media reports of her travelling everywhere by train are right.
Cynically insane
The third group are the adults who line the streets for a selfie with Thunberg, or shout out their adulation, loading it on to her shoulders like a heavy burden – and one she signally refuses to accept. Every time someone at a march tells her she is special, brave or a hero, she immediately tells them they too are brave. It is not her responsibility to fix the climate for the rest of us, and to think otherwise is a form of infantilism.
The fourth group are entirely absent from the film, but not from the responses to it and to her. These are the “cynically insane”, those who want to load on to Thunberg a burden of a different kind. Aware of the way we have been manipulated by our politicians and media, and the corporations that now own both, they are committed to a different kind of religion – one that can see no good anywhere. Everything is polluted and dirty. Because they have lost their own innocence, all innocence must be murdered.
She represent the ‘green’ agenda of the states.
She is an attempt at hagiography, the creation of a ‘saint’ and ‘martyr’ for the edification of the masses.
It is state brain washing, state propaganda.
The same thing as ‘heroes’ like Winston Churchill.
– Icons to promote conformity to the state and its agenda.
Indeed.
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/17/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
In ACT I, I disclosed that Greta Thunberg, the current child prodigy and face of the youth movement to combat climate change, served as special youth advisor and trustee to the foundation established by “We Don’t Have Time”, a burgeoning mainstream tech start-up. I then explored the ambitions behind the tech company We Don’t Have Time.
In ACT II, I illustrate how today’s youth are the sacrificial lambs for the ruling elite. Also in this act I introduce the board members of and advisors to We Don’t Have Time. I explore the leadership in the nascent We Don’t Have Time and the partnerships between the well-established corporate environmental entities: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).
In ACT III, I deconstruct how Al Gore and the planet’s most powerful capitalists are behind today’s manufactured youth movements and why. I explore the We Don’t Have Time/Thunberg connections to Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, This Is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. I also touch upon Thunberg’s famous family. In particular, Thunberg’s celebrity mother, Malena Ernman (WWF Environmental Hero of the Year 2017) and her August 2018 book launch. I then explore the generous media attention afforded to Thunberg in both May and April of 2018 by SvD, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers.
In ACT IV, I examine the current campaign, now unfolding, in “leading the public into emergency mode”. More importantly, I summarize who and what this mode is to serve.
In ACT V, I take a closer look at the Green New Deal. I explore Data for Progress and the targeting of female youth as a key “femographic”. I connect the primary architect and authors of the “Green New Deal” data to the World Resources Institute. From there, I walk you through the interlocking Business & Sustainable Development Commission, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and the New Climate Economy – a project of the World Resources Institute. I disclose the common thread between these groups and the assignment of money to nature, represented by the Natural Capital Coalition and the non-profit industrial complex as an entity. Finally, I reveal how this has culminated in the implementation of payments for ecosystem services (the financialization and privatization of nature, global in scale) which is “expected to be adopted during the fifteenth meeting in Beijing in 2020.”
In the final act, ACT VI [Crescendo], I wrap up the series by divulging that the very foundations which have financed the climate “movement” over the past decade are the same foundations now partnered with the Climate Finance Partnership looking to unlock 100 trillion dollars from pension funds. I reveal the identities of individuals and groups at the helm of this interlocking matrix, controlling both the medium and the message. I take a step back in time to briefly demonstrate the ten years of strategic social engineering that have brought us to this very precipice. I look at the relationship between WWF, Stockholm Institute and World Resources Institute as key instruments in the creation of the financialization of nature. I also take a look at the first public campaigns for the financialization of nature (“natural capital”) that are slowly being brought into the public realm by WWF. I reflect upon how mainstream NGOs are attempting to safeguard their influence and further manipulate the populace by going underground through Extinction Rebellion groups being organized in the US and across the world.
“Stockholm Institute”.
Why am I not surprised that the country of the ‘herd’ is a centerpiece of the GND wank.
🤢🤮
I suppose those putting the movie together have an interest in whatever will sell to the world audience.
If her “intense research” had led her to the “wrong” conclusions, I am sure there would have been no movie. From the beginning, global warming fear mongering has been driven by an agenda to transfer regulatory and taxing power from nation states, often burdened with those annoying voters, to the UN and other international or transnational institutions who are barely accountable to anyone. That’s why the IPCC is managed at the top by UN political appointees rather than scientists. Our transnational elites are divided between cosmopolitan capitalistic globalists and cosmopolitan socialistic globalists. Cheap transport energy makes globalism and global outlooks possible. When the supply of liquid transport fuels become constrained, outlooks will begin to gravitate back toward nationalism and ultimately localism.
Our supply of liquid transport fuels is being undermined by low prices, already. I am not sure people will ever understand that there is a problem with transport fuels; they will just sort of understand that they are afraid of getting on a plane for fear of getting COVID-19 and that there are a lot of goods missing from shelves in stores.
People always need the idea of an energy savior. I am afraid that we will never reach a point where people can really see the obvious. Perhaps if California has real problems with electricity, or Europe has a real problem with electricity, that part of the problem will become clear. But I am doubtful that people will ever understand that liquid fuels are constrained.
The ten-point plan for Boris Johnson’s “green industrial revolution”, announced today, is the predictable blend of ‘pie in the sky’ technologies and pointless, economically harmful, green virtue signalling.
In an interesting twist, oil companies like Total are moving into carbon capture, in which Boris wants the UK to be a world leader.
And this – “[There are] ambitious proposals to ramp up production of hydrogen with the hope of heating an entire town with the low-carbon fuel by the end of the decade.” 😂
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8959477/Boris-Johnson-announce-2030-ban-sales-diesel-electric-cars-tomorrow.html
Wow. We really are headed for the sunlit uplands of “Greentopia”. Can’t imagine the public is going to be thrilled when reality sets in though.
“UK stimulus for green jobs should also curb inequality, analysts say.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/britain-climatechange-jobs/uk-stimulus-for-green-jobs-should-also-curb-inequality-analysts-say-idUSL8N2I33YM
TP has no democratic mandate for any of this. No one voted for that last December. TP gets its ‘orders’ from somewhere else.
So much for Brexit and for the restoration of domestic democratic accountability. It was naïve to think that TP, or Westminster generally, would deliver anything like it.
Populism in UK is a ‘fail’ just the same as the ‘far right’. They put all their eggs in the Brexit basket and ended up with a record influx from outside Europe courtesy of TP.
The British state is a capitalist state that exists to represent the interests of organised capital. UK ‘democracy’ is a fake democracy.
But people will keep waving that state flag and worshipping that state. Hopeless.
Bizarre! Leaders seem to be willing to try anything today.
Re second waves etc, there are analyses available that show how only ~25% of current excess deaths are COVID related. The rest are the result of the cessation of normal support services.
Changing subjects, I don’t have a stake in the Biden vs Trump psychodrama, but I do object to the blatant censorship and bias in the MSM against Trump.
There are analyses of how COVID was blown out of proportion and/or Govt responses worsened its impact . The next link in that story is how the manufactured panic was then used to justify postal voting and the obvious opportunities for voting fraud.
Anyway great story here about the voting fraud unravelling: https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-11-17-trump-attorney-sidney-powell-declares-kraken-released.html
Zero coverage in the MSM of course.
Get your popcorn ready.
Thanks, Fred.
I expect Trump to prevail against Biden. But in these surealistic and fantastic times, my crystal ball isn’t so clear. A lot of very powerful interests seem very determined for Biden to prevail against Trump.
As for investigating, arresting, convicting and punishing dozens, hundreds or thousands of coup plotters and election thieves—and sizing their assets, I think that would be absolutely wonderful.
That’s what should happen in a fair, balanced and law-abiding world. On this planet, I’m not so sure. Don’t get your hopes up too high.
The Biden camp, in turn, might want to do the same thing to Trump and his supporters (especially with a noted prosecutor on the ticket). A formula for civil war. Which brings up another of my “very strange ideas:” the first was to bury nuclear waste in tiny amounts throughout the entire nation. This one (if Biden prevails) is to have a very lame duck Biden presidency without all the usual hoopla. A caretaker presidency minus the trappings of presidency. On the Trump side would be an informal “presidency” that is allowed the resources to share governance. It would be MOL agreed to go lightly on testing and vaccination, with no forcing of either. The media would be reigned in and forced to stop lying. Or something along those lines anyway. The testing and vaccination is key, and would fall over on the Biden side with no ability to be mandated. Allow them. Give them their space. But allow the rest of us our space as well. I don’t know much about Cromwell, but was his rule anything like that?
Whatever behavior can reign in extreme anger or violence on either or both sides could be reinforced by carrots rather than sticks. Maybe rehabilitate physical spaces and segregate them by vaxxers vs anti-vaxxers?
I remember seeing a similar EO regarding human trafficking and asset seizure, and I was hoping that would rope in that whole global Epstein network in some way.
Limits to Growth–how are we doing so far?
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0959378008000435-gr5.jpg
More meat here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse
Right. This is a 2014 article, following a number of different indicators that are moving sort of as expected.
One is the death rate. It is falling, but is expected to rise. We are seeing a rise in the death rate now, with COVID-19 and the response to the death. If I am right, the death rate in future years will rise as well, starting especially in the very poor countries.
What is this from? The chart doesn’t really explain what it is measuring.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-21st-century-population-crash/
This is an article by Chris Nelder, showing his analysis and also the work of John Howe, both of whom I have met at Peak Oil meetings. This is a chart he shows.
http://i.bnet.com/blogs/howe-world-oil-and-population-two-lifetimes.jpg
The low estimate he shows, which is really one of John Howe’s, seems to be similar to, or a little lower than, my estimate of 2.8 billion people by 2050.
If some wazzits have some conflicts with the hoozits I think the military would get called in. How would that go for the hoozits with a wazzit in charge of the military? How would that go for the wazzits with a hoozit in charge of the military? Interesting that we wont know the composition of the snoozit until just the same time as the hoozit guy is in charge. Hoozits very quiet and polite just now.
Different political parties have very different ideas now. It is a recipe for conflict.
https://twitter.com/FinnaganMarina/status/1328884556699721728/photo/1
this is buttcoin.
is TP the Tory Party or toilet paper?
Boring evening, asked Norman where the term “Home Economics” came from, so Google to the rescue.
“Home economics courses mainly taught students how to cook, sew, garden, and take care of children. The vast majority of these programs were dominated by women.[19] Home economics allowed for women to receive a better education while also preparing them for a life of settling down, doing the chores, and taking care of the children while their husbands became the breadwinners. At this time, homemaking was only accessible to middle and upper class white women whose families could afford secondary schooling.[19]
In the late 19th century, the Lake Placid Conferences took place. The conferences consisted of a group of educators working together to elevate the discipline to a legitimate profession. Originally, they wanted to call this profession “oekology”, the science of right living. However, “home economics” was ultimately chosen as the official term in 1899″
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_economics#:~:text=Originally%2C%20they%20wanted%20to%20call,the%20official%20term%20in%201899.
So scientific in the current political terminology, makes one always want to consult an expert.
How many here like “oekology,” right living, that is the ticket don’t you think?
Dennis L.
“Home economics courses mainly taught students how to cook, sew, garden, and take care of children. The vast majority of these programs were dominated by women.[19]”
Maybe boys and girls should be separated, so they don’t think they are the same? But still learn the same things?
At my mixed-sex school we had Home Economics classes, which in my case were simply about producing inedible food in bizarre shapes and textures; no sewing or child care on the curriculum – the latter would have been good, particularly sewing and I wish I could darn socks!
My aunt taught home economics for many years. She taught children who were as young as 12 in her classes. She used a lot of simple recipes using commercially available products, such as packages of biscuits that come in a refrigerated tube. She said that the boys in her class really liked it. Of course, the emphasis was not on healthful foods; it was on fun-to-prepare foods. This aunt was always a favorite because she had so many fun ideas.
My son with Asperberg’s syndrome took a course called “Single Living” from the Home Economics department in high school, based on the recommendation of the guidance councilor. The course covered the cost of an apartment, relative to the wages most young people would make, and the need to share an apartment with others. It also taught some simple sewing and cooking, and staged a simple wedding, which the participants had to plan for. I remember that he was the groom, because he was the only male in the class. He liked the class.
My daughter took a sewing class from the Home Economics department in high school, even though she would get less credit for this course than pre-college courses in class rankings. (She graduated #2 in her class, rather than #1, because of taking sewing.) She really liked the class. They made aprons and simple clothing using patterns. Even today, sewing is a hobby of hers.
Funny how useful skills are devalued in academia. Ray Kroc, who turned a single hamburger joint into an international franchise (MacDonald’s), was sometimes contacted for donations by universities. He told them he would donate if they would add vocational courses to their academic offerings. They didn’t want his money that bad.
Useful skills and MacDonald’s in the same sentence, haha!
At last, a mainstream news story in New Zealand that actually makes some sense. Still not quite there, for reasons we have all (especially Gail) covered here, but definitely a welcome big step in the right direction. Not sure how much I can actually reproduce here without running afoul of copyright laws, so just pasting the link and the first introductory paragraph. Later the report mentions the EROEI concept. Well worth a read.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/122689734/sustainability-is-wishful-thinking-get-ready-for-the-energy-downshift
The problem with “sustainability” is its implication that economic growth can still continue on blithely in a world of zero carbon and a green energy transition. But expect a rude shock. JOHN McCRONE reports.
“So fossil fuels clearly pay their way. That is what enabled the coal-fired Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, and then the oil-driven consumer boom that really took off in the 1950s.”
“An economy is based on the ability to convert resources into goods using energy.”
perhaps the main slant in the article is that the world needs to move away from FF to lower carbon emissions. But in fact carbon emissions will go lower anyway because of depleting cheap FF resources, and lower affordability of FF by the average person because there is less net (surplus) energy available and therefore economic activity must decrease.
but there is a good emphasis on economic contraction overtaking economic growth.
a good read, and I suppose it would have been too much for them to be explicit that the average person will be much POORER as this transition proceeds over the next decade or two.
Yes, as mentioned, I thought it was good big step in the right direction but not quite there yet. It is suggested, for example, that we can go back to a 1950s lifestyle. Such a dramatic fall in energy consumption, especially in a short timeframe, would wreak havoc with energy producers, banks and other financial institutions, financial markets and investors, and would still require sizeable fossil fuel inputs from producers themselves being hit by such a decline in consumption. It was good to see that cold water was being poured on the much touted hydrogen economy idea, though.
thanks, fairly good, but of course a bit too much talk about lower carbon.
“An economy is based on the ability to convert resources into goods using energy.”
perhaps some truths in there that might be shocking to many persons.
it’s typical that they would have to dodge the explicit truth that the average person will be much POORER as the transition moves to lower FF consumption.
funny, I thought my first reply had been eaten by complexity.
I am having the same problem!
The bear bug have done an inter-group jump, from bioligical entities to semiconductors and code. Apparently it is now bugging up WordPress.
This article is like a lot of sustainability articles. It uses the falling EROI argument, which doesn’t really have a good cut off for what works. It makes it sound like using bicycles more and some other not-too-large changes will work. It gives a falsely positive view of what is ahead (but that is better than saying nothing at all, and very few want to hear the real story).
Ethiopia with a population of 100 million has been very hard hit by the locust plague in the horn of Africa.
Ethnic war has broken out in the north. People are being “stabbed and hacked to death”.
A few mouths less to feed…
Why don’t South Africa send them ducks?
China has this duck army too to fight locusts plagues:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/ducks-army-locust-infestation-pakistan-china-zhejiang-a9362546.html
Shocking to realise that locusts are such warmongers.
The more things change, the more they stay the same:
I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress;
we pass laws under which you make money…
and out of your profits, you further contribute to
our campaign funds to send us back again
to pass more laws to enable you to make more money.
Senator Boies Penrose (R-Pa), 1896
There are two things that are more important in politics.
The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.
Senator Mark Hanna (R-Oh)
Chairman of the Republican National Committee, 1896
So THAT isn’t going to work.
Still no lockdown in Sweden.
Covid hospitalisations double every 8 days.
So when hospitals are full?
Have they no nursing homes?
LOL!
Is that the ‘ying and yang’ perspective, forced state euthanasia? /teasing
Yep you just know that I am not going to let that one go. lol
It was a riff off of Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge from “A Christmas Carol”.
If they would rather die, they had better do it, and reduce carbon emissions.
Genocide is so 20’th century. In the 21’st century, we go all in on senicide.
SWEDEN FTW!
Oh yeah baby, let the insitutional sociopathy rip.
Weekly deaths in Poland in 2020. Overwhelming of healthecre crearly visible:
https://static.im-g.pl/im/8/26518/m26518418,SMIERCIA.jpg
double the average weekly deaths?
it’s an extremely contagious virus.
but it’s almost guaranteed that those extra deaths are 90+% old Polish people.
so they had a covid-related death this year instead of a death from something else a year or two from now.
no big deal.
Meanwhile the TP is alienating its Brexit-minded support base. They actually want to go ‘woke’. I for one am not surprised. It is well grating though that Boris is taking instructions from his latest girl friend rather than from the electorate.
We will see how the TP ‘woke’ ‘drag’ goes down with the ‘red wall’ voters in the north come the next GE. A lot of people who voted for TP last year were voting for the Brexit sort of politics and this will not go down well with them.
TP is just so arrogant, this is not going to end well for them.
> Boris has bottled out of the culture wars
The Tories look set to pursue an agenda that will horrify the red wall.
Brendan O’Neill
Boris has bottled out of the culture wars. That’s the true story behind the infantile infighting in Downing Street. The allegedly abrasive, outspoken, grenade-chucking Vote Leave crew is out, and the more consensual, woke-leaning lobby is in. It has the whiff of a woke coup; the levers of power wrested by a PC clique. A government swept in on a wave of working-class votes looks set to busy itself with the bourgeois crap of genderfluidity, eco-nonsense and blind-eye turning as institutions from the National Trust to the Natural History Museum disappear up the fundament of wokeness. We look to be heading for a great political betrayal.
Of course no one knows for sure what is going on in Downing Street. That is itself part of the problem. We voted to ‘take back control’ and yet we’re now ruled by a 21st-century incarnation of the medieval court, with factions led by people none of us ever voted for vying for access, seeking to sway the king in this direction or that direction. If no one in Downing Street understands how bad this looks to the public – who are being reduced from defenders of British sovereignty to mere spectators of posh people angling for a seat at Boris’s decision-making table – then the rot at the top is clearly deeper than any of us suspected. But one thing we can deduce from the pre-modern, anti-democratic intrigue in Downing Street is that the PM is backing off from ‘harsher’ political concerns, like Brexit, in favour of the more cosmopolitan, consensual style he was known for when he was mayor of London.
The whole thing has been hyper-personalised, of course, which is not useful for understanding the big political drift taking place right now. So it’s all Dom v Carrie (Dominic Cummings vs Carrie Symonds). Cummings is the rough, free-speaking alumnus of Vote Leave whom the bruised, confused chattering classes hold responsible for every Bad Thing that has happened these past four years, from Brexit to Boris’s electoral victory last December. Symonds is Boris’s woke girlfriend: green, politically correct on trans issues, horrified by diesel cars, in that way that well-off women who went from riding ponies as kids to being driven everywhere as adults often are. Throw into the mix Lee Cain – also Vote Leave, and a working-class former tabloid man – and Allegra Stratton – Boris’s new press secretary, very much Team Carrie, privately educated, West London, etc, etc – and you have the makings of a subpar Shakespearean war of personalities. TV drama producers will be licking their lips.
Yet all the personalisation distracts from the larger question of democracy and power. Yes, there are very serious questions to be asked about the outsized power of all these cliques, none of whom has ever submitted him or herself to the judgement of the electorate. The role of Ms Symonds seems most disconcerting. Is this the Imelda Marcos of wokeness? I used to think it was Labour that wanted to ride a working-class wave into power in order to pursue eccentric policies that most working-class people have no time for. It turns out it was the Tories who did that. There is something a little off, to say the least, about upper middle-class operators like Symonds and Stratton seeking to reshape a government that was created by the ‘red wall’ working classes in order to make it more in tune with their own class concerns.
But we need to step back. The larger problem here is a government lacking direction and lacking conviction. Indeed, Boris’s overreliance on advisers to begin with speaks to his lack of a political anchor, his swayability, and his increasingly cavalier attitude to the people who propelled him to power: the normally Labour-voting inhabitants of the ‘red wall’ areas of Wales and England. The point many traditional Tories and right-wing columnists seem to be missing is that Ms Symonds – currently their bête noire – would surely not wield such influence if Boris had a clearer sense of what his government is for….
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/17/boris-has-bottled-out-of-the-culture-wars/
Re: the TP ‘reset’
Because this is what we voted for in Dec? TP has no democratic mandate for this.
The TP and the rest of the state is completely out of control and with no accountability or legitimacy from the demos – just how they like it.
We will see how many votes Nigel’s Reform Party takes off the TP and what that does to TP wins in May. 3,000 persons have applied to be TRP candidates over the past fortnight so there should be a massive roll out in May.
TRP may take 20% of the overall vote if Boris compromises on Brexit. He may think that he can dump voters but they will dump TP just as soon and we will see how that works out for them.
TP is going to have it drummed into them repeatedly that they cannot take voters for granted. They either do what the demos tells them or they do not get elected. The upside is that Nigel will push for PR and for the abolition of the unelected HOL.
> End of the road for petrol and diesel cars in just nine years: Boris Johnson will announce 2030 ban on sales TOMORROW as he paves the way for electric vehicle revolution
Paving the way for an electric vehicle revolution, Mr Johnson (pictured during a visit to renewable energy firm Octopus Energy in October) is to unveil a ten-point, £12billion plan for the environment. It includes further investment in nuclear power, wind energy, domestic heating and cutting-edge technology such as carbon capture and storage (plan shown bottom). The petrol and diesel (conventional car exhaust shown inset) ban is to start in nine years – a decade earlier than originally planned. The Prime Minister will herald a ‘green industrial revolution’ that could create 250,000 jobs and slash the country’s carbon emissions. However, with electric vehicles costing far more than conventional models, the plan could hit the poor. A leading economist warned the switch would put £40billion in road taxes at risk because electric vehicles are exempt. ‘Some form of road pricing will be needed,’ said Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8959477/Boris-Johnson-announce-2030-ban-sales-diesel-electric-cars-tomorrow.html
End of the road for the UK in less than nine years would be a good bet.
I despise this song—and the singer too. But it’s apposite.
https://youtu.be/qbmWs6Jf5dc
Thanks Tim, love that song. 1970s Brit pop was very ‘cynical’ and we seem to have lost that. Paul Weller eventually became cynical about cynicism and embraced a secular ‘faith, hope and charity’. British society has not really changed though and the opposite of ‘cynicism’ seems to be ‘naivety’ – so take your pick. I quite like the ‘nihilism’ of the SP, although I dare say that I could soon become ‘cynical’ about that if it became fashionable. I suppose UK is just an unsatisfying society, however one ‘postures’ about it, hence the 70s cynicism. The ‘psychological’ malaise has deeper roots in romanticism, the fin de siecle and the shift from feudalism to industrial capitalism – and in the 70s the recent collapse of imperialism. British culture is ‘superficial’ now compared to the 70s and it lacks any real ‘themes’. It is ‘hollow’ and even that is no longer a theme, a land without ‘poets’, completely exhausted.
Johnny Rotten is on the Trump Train now.
Re: Boris and Scottish independence
Personages gonna do what they gonna do. Boris has stuck his foot right in his mouth again and his latest comments went onto SNP campaign posters the next day. Nice one, Boris.
Devolution has about 90% support in Scotland while Boris has about 9% support.
> SNP immediately seizes on Boris’s ‘devolution disaster’ comments in ADVERTS pushing independence drive as PM faces Tory fury for fuelling Nicola Sturgeon’s agenda
Nicola Sturgeon and her allies today seized on Boris Johnson’s comments that devolution had been a ‘disaster’ to drum up support for their drive to split the UK.
The PM is facing the fury of unionists after venting his frustration at surging support for independence north of the border – blaming Tony Blair for handing powers to Holyrood more than 20 years ago.
A jubilant Nicola Sturgeon immediately capitalised on the comments, made during a Zoom call with MPs, to claim Mr Johnson wanted to claw back control to Westminster.
And within hours the official Yes Scotland campaign had started pumping out slick images on social media highlighting the remarks and urging Scots to ‘protect devolution’.
Tories raged that they were ‘speechless’ about Mr Johnson’s ‘loose language’, which comes ahead of critical elections north of the border in May – which the separatists want to use as a platform for forcing another referendum on splitting the UK next year.
Scotland Conservative leader Douglas Ross tried to limit the damage by directly contradicting the premier, and is said to have demanded a showdown phone call with him.
A former communications chief for the party, Andy Maciver, said: ‘If the SNP could write the unionist script it would look exactly like this.’
Mr Johnson’s remarks came in a call with 60 MPs which he made over a video call from Downing Street self-isolation.
‘Devolution has been a disaster north of the border,’ he said, adding that it was former prime minister Mr Blair’s ‘biggest mistake’ when it was introduced in the late 1990s.
Sources close to Mr Johnson tried to limit the damage by insisting that he was referring to the way devolution has been ‘used by separatists and nationalists to break up the UK’, but Downing Street did not deny the leaked comments.
It is another hammer blow for the PM’s desperate effort to ‘reset’ his government after a meltdown that saw maverick chief aide Dominic Cummings ousted.
But Mr Johnson has been left a prisoner in his Downing Street flat for the rest of the month after a maskless meeting an MP who later tested positive for coronavirus.
Alarm has been growing in Westminster at the surge in support for independence, with one recent poll putting it at 58 per cent.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/11/17/08/34381376-8956059-An_Ipsos_Mori_poll_last_moth_suggested_that_support_for_Scottish-a-3_1605602764874.jpg
Nicola Sturgeon’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and Brexit tensions have been credited with the shift.
But the inability of unionists to mobilise and get across their messages about the benefits of keeping the centuries-old alliance has also been identified as a problem…..
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8956059/Devolution-big-mistake-Boris-Johnson-says-handing-powers-Scotland-disaster.html
Scotland remaining in the EU will serve as a nice little sneaky backdoor for the UK to continue its influence on EU by covert means.
It’s all part of the plan, you see.
Yeah, it is right ‘cunning plan’ straight from the Baldrick play book.
Yep, Baldrick was also partial investing / storing wealth long term in his rutabaga-turnips..
So much to learn from popularized history, so little time..
rutabaga-turnips..
Gold!
🤣👍
Surely it isn’t orchestrated. 🤣👍
https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE
Scotland has already left the EU so can hardly remain.
True but two-thirds of Scots still want to rejoin the EU and they are likely to have a referendum on that matter once they are independent of UK. Indeed some of them wish to leave UK for that very reason.
It seems that the TP is taking Boris’ outburst well badly.
> Scottish independence: ‘Union is dead’, says former Tory media chief
A FORMER Scottish Tory press chief has said the “Union is dead” after Boris Johnson’s told MPs devolution had been a disaster.
Andy Maciver added he was speechless after the Prime Minister’s comments – made in a Zoom call last night – suggested they showed the Westminster Conservatives didn’t understand “what’s going on”.
Johnson also told 60 Tory MPs that he believed devolution was former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “biggest mistake”.
“If it’s an accurate read-out, then it’s an indication that they really don’t understand what’s going on. If this is government policy, and remains so, then the Union is dead. Scotland first. Then NI. Maybe even Wales. And a chasm between north and south in England,” wrote Maciver on Twitter.
He added: “Sometimes even after all these years I’m speechless. If the SNP could write the UKG strategy, it would look exactly like this. Exactly.”
https://www.thenational.scot/news/18876850.scottish-independence-union-dead-says-ex-tory-media-chief/
Moreover, the chances this last shrinkage of UK won’t speed up the outflow process of City being abandoned for Asian, Gulf, and various Euro continent banking destinations is almost null.
Macronites rejoice!
I can almost hear the 1’s and 0’s rattle across the ocean in the intercontinental fibres, never to be seen again.
But Mr Johnson has been left a prisoner in his Downing Street flat for the rest of the month after a maskless meeting an MP who later tested positive for coronavirus.
It was only last spring that Boris was battling for his life against the superbug! A battle from which he emerged disheveled but victorious.
Surely his immunity can’t have worn off yet?
If the world is ageing, why not keep the economy going on with the introduction of electric cars? We do not need so many new homes etc. Even if the electric cars are not economical, the poor populations can not afford new cars powered by fossil fuels. In such situation subsidizing electric cars seems like s progress and necessity.
Surely subsidising public transport make more sense than cars for poor people.
It depends on whether people will be afraid of catching illnesses in public transport, indefinitely. If this is the case, public transport is a lost cause.
Good point. In case this is in some capacity indeed a plandemic charade, how to land down energy consumption by some notable amount, say ~15-30% in this first wave, measured emissions suggest <20% so far..
Then you have to work on both general modes of transport, be it private carz as well as the public transport. The automobiles could be priced out of the larger segments of population via various eco/enviro tax schemes, mostly existing today, you need only parametric tweak to make it bite very harsh. And public transport made unappealing by threat of easy spreading such close contact breathable diseases..
It's a very stupid decision because hop on/off (e)bicycle + train / larger-longer suburban tram set is probably the most efficient energy solution ever possible to have.
Walking within the city surely must be the most effective means of transport, second only to bicycles/ebikes if the manufacturing of it is discounted of.
I have seen young people catch the bus and going shorter distances than 1km. WTF. Walk you little entitled t*at. Makes me wonder who raised these kids, then I realized it’s the people that takes the car to fetch the post from the mailbox in the driveway.
Incredible, obscene.
” The automobiles could be priced out of the larger segments of population via various eco/enviro tax schemes,”
Just like that, eh? I think you underestimate the attachment to/necessity of the auto!?
Nobody will appropriate the auto from you.
If you can afford to operate it in on public roads, now that is a different matter.
Is perhaps the office obsolete? What is done at an office that needs to be done at an office? Why go to an office? Can’t one socialize in the neighborhood? When society was agrarian, mostly people socialized at home, they did not go to the office to work. There were small churches, people socialized on weekends.
School? were children perhaps better socialized in one room schools? Do we really need college level athletics in high school? Education has added a great deal of baggage, time to slim it down?
Maybe we have jumped the wake, Zoom has made much of our infrastructure obsolete. It would be interesting to see how many business trips were really set up to conduct love affairs afar.
Things may not be going back, but that does not mean they won’t go forward.
Dennis L.
My mental image of the metamorphosis is that for lightning branching and seeking to form an arc between the potential difference. An impedance minima “search” by nature.
Once the plasma channel pathway is formed between the potentials, the resistance drops towards zilch, and boom, its over.
It is spectacular, unless you are standing in between the two poles.
Go figure what the two “potentials” of IC is.
electric cars are not only ‘not economical’
they are not ‘economics’ either.
transport cannot sustain or create wealth or support populations. (battery or otherwise)
transportation is a net consumer of energy
powered wheeled transport cannot ‘keep an economy going’
wheeled transport is entirely dependent on and relates to the economic system in which it exists, in order to support that economic system. It doesn’t work the other way round.
if that concept is difficult to grasp, consider that before the steam engine, the fasterst wheeled transport was the horse and cart, and had been so for 000s of years.
with that as a speed limiter, our economic system remained a largely peasant society
Good points!
On the other hand, buying vehicles and the fuel for the vehicles (even commuter trains) helps keep up demand got fossil fuels making the vehicles. Thus, the purchase of devices of any kind (cars whether electric or gasoline powered or commuter trains or buses) helps maintain the price of coal and perhaps oil. If our problem is low fossil fuel prices, encouraging some sort of transport helps keep the company operating.
Been little talk here of late on the need to use the whole barre(oil). Many still think we can cherry-pick just those we need and dump the rest.
It’s the hardest thing for any society to understand: all they see is a derivative of whatever fuel they are using. In our case, since we use oil, bitumen roads are everywhere….and must be.
Haha, no.
There are iron “roads”
Been here a looong time before bitumen roads became all the rage, and will stay a looong time after the bitumen rots back into oblivion.
Norman,
“transportation is a net consumer of energy”
Isn’t life a net consumer of energy? The trick is to find more, there is plenty left to find, all one needs is net energy. My guess, use it in space or the moon, avoid global warming which is inevitable if energy usage continues – radiation issue.
NASA wants to put small reactors on the moon, anyone here heard that idea before? Well, you heard it first on OFW, next thing one knows they will be making new craters on the moon with asteroids made of gold! We will plate our cars with gold, no rust, no corrosion – finally a car made for the Minnesota winters.
Dennis L.
Norman,
Slow night, playing devil’s advocate.
“transport cannot sustain or create wealth or support populations. (battery or otherwise)”
So how does one move food, does that not support a population?
What is economics? It would be interesting to know if anyone ever did a demand supply curve for “Home economics.” Wonder when and how that term was invented, any ideas?
Dennis L.
‘Economics’ comes from the classical Greek literally meaning ‘home management’. Aristotle uses it in that sense, the home as the basic social and economic unit and society as an extension of that. So ‘home economics’ sort of means ‘home home management’. ‘Home economics’ was the original meaning of ‘economics’.
Interesting, thanks.
Dennis L.
Yes, exactly, 100% infection maximizes herd health and resilience and lowers government welfare spending.
Gee, Ed, while your point is technically true *for the survivors* , I hope you are not in charge of public health the next time we get struck by something like the 1918/19 Spanish Flu or pneumonic plague.
Sweden imposes Covid restrictions.
Why? Out of control spread is you reach herd immunity.
It depends on if you’d like to have people working within healthcare during the pandemic. My intuition tells me that is rather important. Even for a lowly bandit monarchy as Sweden.
Dumb ass policy and idiotic dictates make people quit, or simply just pack their shit up and move to other Nordic countries. Why not even all the way to the US, like in the good olden days.
Nukes on the moon, you bet. 🤘😎🤘
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/why-nasa-wants-to-put-a-nuclear-power-plant-on-the-moon.html
/s on
Buy gold – the collapse/rapture is coming and you need something to eat.
/s off
https://media.makeameme.org/created/yes-fist-pump.jpg
“Once the technology is proven through the demonstration, future systems could be scaled up or multiple units could be used together for long-duration missions to the moon and eventually Mars,”
no, never Mars, but if tens of billions of dollars are thrown at this project a la SpaceX, then there is a chance that it could happen on the moon.
assuming it happens, by then the USA and the world will be in a grinding relentless irreversible economic contraction, and Mars plans will be dropped, and the moon project will eventually be abandoned as a waste of resources.
I still think NASA will succeed with putting a woman on the moon, as well as the “next” man, probably a “person of color”.
“a woman on the moon” may very well be the last feeble attempt at turning a sci-fi level of imagination into reality.
“A woman in space”.
Hell yes, I’m all for woman in space.
🤘😎🤘
“Naoko Yamazaki (山崎 直子, Yamazaki Naoko, born December 27, 1970) is a former Japanese astronaut at JAXA, and the second Japanese woman to fly in space.[2][3][4] The first was Chiaki Mukai.[3]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoko_Yamazaki
oh, let me double check:
“a woman on the moon”.
yes, now I see it.
it looks like “a woman on the moon”.
so then I did write “a woman on the moon”.
Lets not be pedantic. By the way, isn’t the moon in space?
It’s been done, at least in fiction: “Die Frau im Mond”, 1921. Available on dailymotion https://www.dailymotion.com/ar/topic/xf1cg in the 170 minute version. Directed by Fritz Land and scripted by Thea von Harbou, the same team that made Metropolis.
What happened around 1989 when the Soviet bloc collapsed?
The falling fertility rate crossed the border of the replacement fertility rate in the given region:
E.g. in Slovakia, it was 2.15 in 1988 and 2.08 in 1989. The fertility rate in 2019 was 1.55.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Slovakia
Terminology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
It seems like quite a few of the republics associated with the Soviet Union have been seeing both falling birth rates and emigration.
This is a test.
You passed! 🙂
Thanks! I was using a different computer. I wanted to sign into OurFiniteWorld.com. The easiest way seemed to be to make a comment and respond when the computer wanted my information.
“Debt levels of emerging market governments ballooned to record highs in 2020 and are expected to continue rising next year, JPMorgan said in a note on Monday, as policymakers battle to restart economies battered by the coronavirus pandemic.
“General government debt across 55 developing nations jumped to an all-time high of 59.0% of gross domestic product in 2020…”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/emerging-debt-jpmorgan/emerging-market-government-debt-soars-to-record-59-of-gdp-jpmorgan-idUKL8N2I2610
“Peronist senators in Argentina demand concessions from IMF:
“Divisions in Argentina’s ruling leftist coalition were laid bare after a group of senators sent a letter to the IMF that threatened to sour fresh negotiations between the government and the multilateral lender over the repayment of a $44bn loan.”
https://www.ft.com/content/1a154e62-1dc5-47bf-b307-5060b353ee39
Where does Argentina get the funds to repay the $44bn loan?
“Venezuelan central bank officials have summoned executives from a handful of local financial firms to discuss plans to create a clearing and settlement system in U.S. dollars starting next year, according to five people with knowledge of the matter…
“Venezuelans now use greenbacks to pay for everything from candy bars to shoes, often relying on money transfer services like Zelle due to a shortage of cash.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-16/venezuela-is-said-to-discuss-dollarization-plan-with-local-banks
“An Olympic gold medal winner has turned to delivering food to support his family… Venezuela’s Ruben Limardo Gascon won gold in fencing at the 2012 London Olympics, becoming a national hero.
“But with little chance for sponsorship amid the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, he is supporting his family by delivering food for Uber Eats in Lodz, Poland…”
https://www.largsandmillportnews.com/news/national-news/18875292.venezuelan-olympian-delivers-food-support-family-keep-tokyo-dream-alive/
Fencing is not a sport for the poor. I wonder how he ended up all the way to Poland.
Supposedly living there for years already on training camp – center in Poland, I guess it’s a bit like bike pros living in FR – IT – ES irrespective of nationality..
For now, the US dollar works a whole lot better than Venezuelan currency. Will this last indefinitely?
“Chinese banks and fund managers dumped their holdings of riskier bonds last week after a series of credit shocks involving state-owned enterprises (SOEs) jolted China’s corporate bond market.
This article has a list of problem SOE’s:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-china-bonds-defaults-factbox/factbox-china-state-enterprises-facing-debt-problems-idUKKBN27X0QW
“Tsinghua Unigroup, a major government-backed player in China’s technology race, has defaulted on a 1.3-billion-yuan ($197.96 million) bond, three sources said, as several high-profile delinquencies by state firms rattled the country’s bond market.”
https://de.reuters.com/article/china-unigroup-default/chinas-tsinghua-unigroup-defaults-on-198-mln-bond-sources-idINL1N2I307C
Banks thought that SOE would be safe investments, because government agencies would assure their payments. This isn’t happening.
” A financial market meltdown in March highlighted weaknesses that still pose a threat to global financial stability, indicating the need for reform, a global body that monitors financial risks said on Monday.
“…the Financial Stability Board… which includes officials from the United States, noted that, “the financial system remains vulnerable to another liquidity strain, as the underlying structures and mechanisms that gave rise to the turmoil are still in place.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/business/economy/financial-stability-board-report.html
“A top Federal Reserve official said Monday that the central bank would use all available tools to ensure a strong recovery from the pandemic-induced shock and that he expected more support would be needed…
““We’ll make adjustments as needed,” Richard Clarida, the Fed’s vice chairman said. “We’re buying a lot of Treasuries. These are big programs.””
https://www.wsj.com/articles/central-bank-is-committed-to-using-all-available-tools-to-boost-economy-top-fed-official-says-11605553202
We will see if this really works.
Are the maintenance costs of the electric cars lower than the maintenance costs of the cars with a fuel engine? Not at all. The culprit is in the tyres, as due to the higher weight and acceleration, the costs for tyres in the case of electric cars tyres are 3 times higher.
Electric car more expensive to maintain than fuel car
https://www.world-today-news.com/electric-car-more-expensive-to-maintain-than-fuel-car/
I think that there is also an issue of most drivers of electric cars only using them only for short commutes. Depreciation is the biggest issue. Starting from a high cost car to begin with, the depreciation per mile is terrible. Resale value tends to be very poor, as well, because electric cars are show-off cars for the wealth. Poorer people, especially those who do not have garages with their own charging capability, are not much interested in them.
Slow “chargers”, basically upscale ordinary low amperage plug are not that expensive to install.
Fast charging network, typically installed at existing high way refueling stations is another matter, but that’s understood and paid for by increased tariffs.. which are still lower than similar consumption of gas or diesel anyway (at least outside US low fuel tax rate market).
On latter point, true frequent fast charging tends to shorten the life-cycle of said batteries (say >>more than 5% per decade), yet not many people are doing it anyway now with the later generations of EV with adequate range for daily commutes or shorter trips.
Not sure what you base your argument of terrible depreciation – resale value? Simply, certain car segments (form factor + engine combo) depreciate like a rock and others hold steady, there is little / no correlation to EVs, apart from some already shunned problematic brands-models of the past.
Retreaded tires. Harder rubber compounds. Taller side wall profiles.
Like, dunno, commercial vehicles?
Like the cars of the early 1900s. Road paving is headed downhill as well. Dealing with it is something else to think about.
I’m afraid that WTN article is complete non sense.
Some dealers and manufs simply dispatch cars from assembly lines with ~junk summer season “eco-rally” tires, plus the effect of some owners having to show off fast acceleration to impress whomever with their new purchase. The effect is the firs set of tires is gone quickly. Perhaps an issue with few specimen of yahoos living in Cali / Florida / ClubMed.. markets.
This is absolutely unrealistic description of reality with the average (&majority) of consumers, who are not doing accel. runs day to day and also rather changing into quality seasonal summer / winter set or some kind of all year round long lasting (mud+snow) of tires as soon as possible.
Lex Friedman interviews Yaron Brook.
https://youtu.be/nz0J1NYq-lA
“Was hyperglobalisation an anomaly?
“Slowbalisation is a term Adjiedj Bakas, a Dutch trendwatcher, coined in 2015 to describe the backlash against global trade. Since then, The Economist has used it to characterise the sluggish growth in trade flows that we’ve witnessed in recent years.”
https://www.ft.com/content/a89f5911-5cba-4d62-8746-5213303a92ec
[No mention of energy of course].
Scratch “Dutch” and put “Indonesian” on it
Starting from Yoshihiro Fukuyama (Francis was not his birth name), there are simply too many Asians telling Western countries what to do.
I just observed the trends and did not tell them what to do.
Lemme guess; “observed” the trends and drew the wrong conclusions.
Classic human chauvinist.
Yawn.
I spent some time looking at this article and its links. Even if its conclusions are not right, it (and the article it refers to) can have useful charts. And I can see a little better about what today’s economists are saying, even if it is wrong.
The Financial Times article links to a paper by Pol Antràs from Harvard University called De-Globalisation? Global Value Chains in the Post-COVID-19 Age. This is a 47-page academic paper, given at an ECB conference, which is not behind a paywall.
Antràs sees the main problem as the fact that the growth rate prior to 2008 was not sustainable. This is a chart that he shows, emphasizing this point.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/World-Trade-as-pct-of-GDP-with-trend-line-Antras.png
The academic article (but not FT) shows this chart regrading Declines in Investment Rates:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Decline-in-Investment-Rate-and-Level-of-Development-Antras-1024×611.png
I see the investment rate as being very much tied to profitability. (Investments are made from profits, but growing debt can also help.) The chart in Panel B says that world investment (tied to profitability) has been falling. I would tie this to diminishing returns of many types. Some might say that the over Energy Return on Energy Invested has been falling for a very long time. While we have been trying to increase investment through falling interest rates and lower debt, the increase in debt has been not enough to compensate for the falling profitability (EROEI).
The panel on the left says essentially that profitability peaks when GDP per capita amounts to $8,100 per year (that is, when log GDP per capita is about 9.0). Using 2017 PPP per capita, this says that China’s profitability would be expected to have peaked between 2008 and 2009. India’s profitability might be expected to be growing. I would expect this to be related to the wage and living cost differential being high enough to “move” production to poorer countries. Once the lesser developed countries get too wealthy, the shift to a lower wage country is no longer is as compelling.
The panel on the left also suggests that from the point of view of his GDP countries, the higher the GDP per capita, the more they are prone to slower growth because of competition with low GDP per capita countries.
A third chart from the academic article, which the FT does show, is this one:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Inequality-and-Wage-Redistribution-in-US.png
The interpretation of this chart is quite different in the FT article, relative to the academic article, however. The FT is of the “correlation isn’t causation school” of thought. It points to changes in the US tax rates as being the problem. It expects current COVID problems to go away, and everything to be fine again (or close to that).
Antras, in his writing, on the other hand, makes it clear that income inequality goes with globalization, not just in the US, but elsewhere. He ascribes quite a bit of growth in world trade between the 1986 and 2008 to a shift away from socialism (or communism). With more interest competition countries chose to participate in world trade.
Thank you for breaking that down, Gail.
This not unconnected idea of a savings glut holding back growth has also been doing the rounds for many years:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-11-16/yellen-summers-say-central-banks-no-match-for-savings-glut
The whole idea of a global savings glut is a little strange to me. I looked it up in Wikipedia, and it still strange.
We create goods and services with commodities, including energy commodities. Some of these goods are capital goods. We can’t really “store up” enough to pay for these capital goods in advance. Instead, the money to pay for these capital goods is usually loaned into existence. If these capital goods (together with other inputs) are providing profits, then there is money for new investments. If debt levels are rising, this added debt can “top it off” a bit. But at some point, the debt bubble looks likely to collapse.
I guess the more economic reality departs from the models and expectations of mainstream economists under the duress of the energy and resource-constraints to which they are blind, the more mental acrobatics they have to perform to explain them away.
To them the problem is always going to be monetary or demographic or psychological or technological, as they can only see the economy in those terms.
Before we were further dehumanized by mandatory face masking, the majority of us had already dehumanized ourselves with smartphones.
https://youtu.be/QugooaNRnsk
Cell phones are a great distraction from talking to those around you. Sometimes, people (used to?) go out to eat together and promptly pull out their cell phones, instead of visiting with each other.
I remember a recent article talking about not permitting talking in subway (or all) rail cars in some part of Europe. This would make certain that people spend their time looking at their cell phones or at a physical newspaper.
Making friendships and sharing stories is important. A phone can be helpful for this. I know that when I am out walking, from time to time I call relatives, or other people I know, and visit for a while. Most of the time, however, I am not using my phone, so I can visit with neighbors and others I meet on the street.
There are, of course, people with headphones and music who are not interested in talking. Or they are talking to someone else on their cell phones.
US stock markets now at their record highs.
Dow 29950
it’s almost here!
Dow 30,000
we’re saved!
Just the rich consolidating ‘?their?’ wealth
Let’s hope you piled in back when everyone else was panicking. It’s a technique that never fails, until it does.
Virus and lock downs:
If this is correct lock downs do not work, the experiment was done on a marine base, boot camp with drill instructors, they probably enforce things pretty well.
https://www.aier.org/article/even-a-military-enforced-quarantine-cant-stop-the-virus-study-reveals/
https://www.aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-13-at-10.16.32-AM-1200×691.png
At first glance, lock downs are worse than doing nothing, bummer.
Dennis L.
First, the results among the control group were so close to the test group that I doubt the difference is statistically significant.
Second, since BOTH groups were locked down, with the “only difference being testing frequency and isolation response,” the logical conclusion is that testing frequency and isolation response provide little added benefit once quarantines are in place (and I presume both groups wore masks too, since that is not listed as one of the two differences between the two groups).
In spite of eating in communal dining halls and sharing communal latrines, the infection rate was about equally low in both locked-down groups (with no non-locked down group to compare them with).
Indeed. A very flimsy study. I was surprised the nejm published it.
Yet it is the strongest evaluation of lockdowns to date. There was high compliance with the interventions. Frequent testing produced solid estimates of incidence: 2+% over two weeks. That is incredibly high, despite all of the supposed precautions.
The other noteworthy thing about this study was that the researchers used a relatively conservative threshold for classifying PCR results as positive (all positives had a cycle threshold < 30 for at least one target). That contrasts with the 40 cycle cut-off introduced just for COVID, which automatically creates a large majority of false positives. Even with their lower cutoff, it seems that at least 37% of their positives were false positives, because they couldn't sequence the SARS-CoV-2 genomes for those individuals.
So the take-home messages from this study are that 1) despite extreme lockdown procedures, SARS-CoV-2 seemingly ripped through the recruits; and 2) at least some of the purported infections, despite a conservative cutoff, were false positives.
Originally from Epoch Times, repeated in Zerohedge: Trump Lawyer Sidney Powell: “We’re Getting Ready To Overturn Election Results In Multiple States”
going by what I have read, the election fraud APPEARS to be massive, with hundreds of thousands of swing state votes in favor of Biden.
also going by what I have read, it APPEARS that the MSM and the FBI and DOJ and of course the D party are all in on trying to suppress the fraud and get Biden in.
also, many R officials don’t seem very eager to support more investigation.
additionally, it seems that the Rs were well aware earlier in 2020 that there could be an attempt at fraud, and yet they seemed to have made a poor effort to watchdog the counting through the night of 11/3 and 11/4.
all in all, there are massive forces arrayed against Trump being declared the winner.
and yet, if he won based on all legal votes, will the truth come out?
the Georgia hand recount is due in a couple of days, and if those forces can’t stop the recount from being an unprecedented gain of tens of thousands of Trump votes, then the momentum moves to Trump, and possibly more hand recounts.
The Guardian complained last year about how bogus Dominion and other US electronic voting systems were:
“They think they are above the law”…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/us-voting-machine-private-companies-voter-registration
The US Establishment has been choking on Trump since he was elected, and are now desperate -both parties – to eject him for good by whatever means. Fascinating to watch.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Boris Johnson is managing to destroy an unassailable parliamentary position all by himself – no enemies required!
Where ware at just now is that the MSM has declared Mr. Biden the winter and president-elect and Ms Harris the vice-president-elect.
One big problem I see with this is that the MSM doesn’t have the right to make such declarations. That’s the prerogative of the electoral college, which doesn’t meet until December.
We should also remember that there is no office of president-elect or vice-president-elect. Those are merely titles given to the people who have been duly elected president and vice president but have not yet taken up their term.
all true.
Biden speaks with a backdrop of “Office of the President-Elect” when there is of course no such thing.
the MSM is more than willing to publicize these speeches and not question the backdrop.
this overdone posturing of President-Elect seems to be consistent with all of them knowing the election was stolen.
they are trying too hard.
there are stories already appearing that the hand recount in Georgia is also doing the same procedure of adding to Biden and subtracting from Trump.
bold actions, but if the MSM and FBI and DOJ are in on it all, then why fear any consequences of vote fraud?
I am quite sure the electoral college doesn’t particularly appreciate attempts to be sidelined by MSM.
Who the F do they think they are might be crossing their minds.
This keeps getting better and better.
🤘😬🤘
ELECTION FRAUD
https://thepointnews.uk/2020/11/15/biden-campaign-director-arrested-for-electoral-fraud/?fbclid=IwAR20fcQCNZj24mml1i0_kgCEtUovn786bJh-SHO4Mqkjz14Cl0wx90di_8o
https://buffalochronicle.com/2020/11/14/exclusive-how-a-philly-mob-boss-stole-the-election-and-why-he-may-flip-on-joe-biden/
According to the article:
“It’s alleged that Skinny Joey Merlino manufactured more than 300,000 ballots for Joe Biden, and then transported them in nondescript cardboard boxes to a backroom at the Philadelphia Convention Center. From there, the ballots were scanned into ballot boxes and were then co-located with actual election ballots being prepared for processing, according to an associate who was made familar with the operation.”
According to the article:
“I have in my possession video-taped interviews of witnesses attesting to the aforementioned people having groups of people completing thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots, including completing ballots for deceased individuals; illegally going into nursing homes, with the complicity of the nursing home staff, and filling out and forging the signatures of nursing home residents; signing up homeless individuals to vote using the ballot harvester’s address, then completing the ballot and forging the homeless individual’s signature.
“This entire operation is being run by the elite politicians of the Democrat Party in Houston/Harris County.”
Illegally going into nursing homes? And thereby endangering the lives of the nation’s most vulnerable people?
In these Covid times, that crime alone should incur the death penalty. What American in all good conscience could excuse such villainy. We have to get serious about protecting people from the virus and from those who willfully spread it.
Sweden went for herd immunity in the first wave to avoid a dramatic second wave.
That didn’t work out.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EmtFLVgXEAAJOlH?format=jpg&name=medium
There is something not quite right with the logic here. You cannot get herd immunity unless a significant % of the population get the virus, and a smaller % get the disease, but if you do that you are labelled as ‘failed’? How else can you get herd immunity?
How else can you get herd immunity?
Well, smallpox, measles, polio, etc were with us until:
A vaccine
With covid, one is not going to get a enduring vaccine, but, like influenza, it will last awhile.
Smallpox and polio were defeated by sanitation, hygiene and nutrition, and n the case of smallpox by isolating the sick and thereby breaking the chain of infection. The respective vaccines for smallpox and polio made things a whole lot worse and caused untold human suffering.
Measles is still with us, apparently, much of it vaccine-induced measles.
https://visionlaunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/vac-sp-england.jpg
@tim groves, I have read the claims, but I am not convinced. Am I supposed to believe that small pox has disappeared from Africa and the Middle East and India and rural China by 1980 not because the smallpox vaccine was effective but because by 1980 Africa and Asia were more sanitary, well nourished, and capable of isolating the sick than the United States was in 1949 (when the US had its last smallpox outbreak)??? I think you are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong about that. No way did the third world leap ahead to match the US on those criteria in only 30 years.
Measles outbreaks occur from time to time because, 1, many parents in some areas of the country have stopped vaccinating, allowing herd immunity to drop below a critical threshold and, 2, measles is super-contagious and can spread like wildfire given only a small chance.
The Amish don’t accept vaccines and they have often experienced measles epidemics in their community without it spreading to the vaccinated populations nearby.
Am I supposed to believe that small pox has disappeared from Africa and the Middle East and India and rural China by 1980 not because the smallpox vaccine was effective but because by 1980 Africa and Asia were more sanitary, well nourished, and capable of isolating the sick than the United States was in 1949
Not at all. You are supposed to be intellectually honest enough to be open to the possibility that small pox has disappeared from Africa and the Middle East and India and rural China by 1980 not because the smallpox vaccine was effective but because by 1980 Africa and Asia were more sanitary, well nourished, and capable of isolating the sick than those same places were in previous decades and centuries.
Bringing the United States into the equation is like comparing apples with oranges. There are just too many criteria by which the US is completely unlike Africa, the ME, India or rural China to make any comparison meaningful.
Smallpox is not a particularly contagious disease. According to The WHO: The speed of smallpox transmission is generally slower than for such diseases as measles or chickenpox. Patients spread smallpox primarily to household members and friends because by the time patients are contagious, they are usually sick and stay in bed; large outbreaks in schools were uncommon.
Got it?
Once it became generally known that isolating the sick was an effective strategy for dealing with Smallpox, eradication followed rapidly. The vaccine did much more harm than good. You can believe it or not. By contrast, I don’t have to believe it or not because I’ve researched it and now I know, while you remain mired in the fog of illusion, delusion, confusion and ignorance. Cheers! 🙂
Test. Does anyone else have problems with some comments failing to post while others sail through easily?
Yep, fewer comments go through since Gail updated that blog system few days ago..
Tim wrote: “the possibility that small pox has disappeared from Africa and the Middle East and India and rural China by 1980 not because the smallpox vaccine was effective but because by 1980 Africa and Asia were more sanitary, well nourished, and capable of isolating the sick than those same places were in previous decades and centuries.”
LOL, nice try, but I do not believe that it takes a lower level of sanitation and isolation to protect one from smallpox or other diseases in the third world than in developed countries. Poor third world peasants live in more crowded conditions than we do so that isolation is difficult, and they often have, by necessity, simple diets that protect them from the “diseases of civilization” to a great extent, yet they still have lower life expectancies because they get more infectious diseases. If your conjecture were correct, then smallpox would have been one of the infectious diseases they continued to die from.
Many of these populations lack an awareness of the germ theory of disease, lack proper latrines, and lack a tradition of regularly using latrines–even today. And we saw during Africa’s ebola outbreak that the idea of isolating the sick was slow to catch on, so that is unlikely to be how smallpox was eradicated from Africa.
Before Deng’s reforms were implemented in the 1980’s, rural China had some families so poor that the entire family shared one suit of clothes so that only one family member at a time could venture outdoors in the sight of the neighbors, yet smallpox died out there too by 1980.
One of the medical profession’s greatest boasts is that it eradicated smallpox through the use of the smallpox vaccine. I myself believed this claim for many years. But it simply isn’t true. One of the worst smallpox epidemics of all time took place in England between 1870 and 1872—nearly two decades after compulsory vaccination was introduced. After this evidence that smallpox vaccination didn’t work the people of Leicester in the English midlands refused to have the vaccine any more.
When the next smallpox epidemic struck in the early 1890s the people of Leicester relied upon good sanitation and a system of quarantine. There was only one death from smallpox in Leicester during that epidemic. In contrast the citizens of other towns (who had been vaccinated) died in vast numbers.
Doctors and drug companies may not like it but the truth is that surveillance, quarantine and better living conditions got rid of smallpox—not the smallpox vaccine.
When the World Health Organization campaign to rid the world of smallpox was at its height the number of cases of smallpox went up each time there was a large scale (and expensive) mass vaccination of populations in susceptible countries. As a result of this the WHO changed its strategy. Mass vaccination programs were abandoned and replaced with surveillance, isolation and quarantine.
Dr. Vernon Coleman
I concede it is probable that contemporary vaccines are more effective than those of the 19th century.
This BBC article is surprisingly balanced in the sanitation vs vaccination debate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991
For simplicity’s sake.
How many covid deats are there in Taiwan? Go google it yourself.
Now, ask yourself if Taiwan is vaccinated against covid?
Then it is only a matter of concluding that the vaccine is pure and unadulterated hopium. Compared with EFFECTIVE testing, contact tracing and localized quarantine.
Plus the obvious N95/98 face masks, social distancing & hygiene until the outbreak gets under control.
If the population is unresponsive, let ‘er rip + lockdowns until the grim reality is bashed into the minds of the hoi-polloi.
For more-ons, the only way is the HARD WAY.
The 1957-58 “Asian Flu” pandemic was similar in lethality to COVID-19, and no one mentioned it to any significant extent. If too many doctors and nurses were out sick with it, hospital wings were simply temporarily closed. People were told to stay home and take aspirin for it.
https://truepundit.com/elvis-was-king-ike-was-president-116000-americans-died-in-a-pandemic/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2714797/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31201-0/fulltext
Norman, some things to think about regarding gold.
“There are about 130000 tons of the stuff in physical existence. Nations (and wealthy individuals) keep tons of it in vaults to underpin their net worth.
It’s a system that has worked for millenia, because gold is the one stable physical element that does not oxidize and decay.
***************
So find a sold gold asteroid, and bring it back to Earth.
Hooray—we’ll all be rich!
Er—no we won’t. A million tons of gold will reduce our existing gold stash value by 90%, thus destroying the economic system that sent out the probe to find the gold asteroid in the first place.”
Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Dell and others did not make their money in gold. Going back in history:
The Aztecs had considerable gold which returned to Spain after which Spain began a collapse economically as I recall in part due to unearned wealth.
The Aztecs had gold, they lacked simple iron muskets, end of story, beginning of slavery sold out by lesser nobles around the central city of Tenochtitlan, they were betrayed from within.
“The empire reached its maximal extent in 1519, just prior to the arrival of a small group of Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés. Cortés allied with city-states opposed to the Mexica, particularly the Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalteca as well as other central Mexican polities, including Texcoco, its former ally in the Triple Alliance. After the fall of Tenochtitlan on 13 August 1521 and the capture of the emperor Cuauhtémoc, the Spanish founded Mexico City on the ruins of Tenochtitlan. From there they proceeded with the process of conquest and incorporation of Mesoamerican peoples into the Spanish Empire. With the destruction of the superstructure of the Aztec Empire in 1521, the Spanish utilized the city-states on which the Aztec Empire had been built, to rule the indigenous populations via their local nobles. Those nobles pledged loyalty to the Spanish crown and converted, at least nominally, to Christianity, and in return were recognized as nobles by the Spanish crown. Nobles acted as intermediaries to convey tribute and mobilize labor for their new overlords, facilitating the establishment of Spanish colonial rule.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztecs
Spain never regained its glory, the men who went out to explore, conquer, rape and pillage were replaced by those who counted gold as wealth. Interestingly enough, those with the gold have to buy the courtesans, the bad boys have the girls lining up, the conquistadors were bad boys.
Norman, I don’t think gold works. One can sit on one’s stack of gold, convince those around that one is wealthy and has control until someone with a better idea or brute force comes along and most likely puts the gold owner’s head on a literal or figurative pike to convince his followers his power is gone.
At OFW we concentrate a great deal on what does not work , ideas such as yours help us examine memes, search history and hopefully make intelligent choices. Bezos, Musk agree, this is a finite world, but the universe is for all practical purposes infinite, they are going to space. It seems to be the wrong side of a trade to bet against these guys, shorting Amazon has not been a good idea.
Said non sarcastically, keep up the good work.
Dennis L.
Compare the value of gold to that of NASDAQ composite index for the past 10 years.
The new “gold” is technology, technology is an evolutionary process. Gold is stagnant, if it’s not put to use as a raw material in industrial processes.
The development of tech will continue long, looong after the value of gold become that of any other raw material, priced after extraction and processing costs.
I expect copper and silver to be priced higher in the relatively near-term.
It’s also a generational reshuffle thing, the longer the quasi BAU lasts or with the eventual scenario of mankind finding yet another springboard out of the discussed doom predicament, the old ways of keeping – storing wealth disappear.
Well, it’s notable that Chinese politburo, Putin, Kunstler, Gulfie Monarchs, 100yrs old eurobankers (all old guys) are hoarding shiny metals in not healthy %% proportion to other asset classes, while the younger and middle aged generations not so much..
As I alluded on previous page, he who loaded a decade ago upon tech stocks and or e-coins seems to be a winner in any case. In doom scenario can now still slowly offload into large acreage, infrastructure, fine breeds, tools etc. And if there is upcoming some sort of stagnation-set back and then move to another type of growth in modified civ scenario the spoils are there to enjoy as well..
Not many people predicted this..
Maybe you did not experience the dot com crash. Over a 20 year period the Nasdaq is 2.5X and gold is 7X (actually 8X in £GB). Not a bad return for a barbaric relic.
The Chinese is cashing out of the fake commie racket.
In effect, gold is flatlined compared with tech stocks.
In any scenario, gold is totally and utterly worthless without IC. Actually, the existence for rapacious primates post IC will be an abomination.
Play the game instead of hedging against the inevitable.
Erdles> my post bellow Kowalainen’s is in moderation or lost so trying from another angle here.
It’s not about NASDAQ aggregate, but selected few mega trends within, disruptive trends-companies-ideas which evidently risen ~200x in some instances in less than a decade. While shiny relics barely moved vs. the level of debt since ~1970s..
Yes, there are outlier 2.5-3rd world cases (UK? soon-ish), where currencies melted away hard and such diversification would have helped a bit, but that’s not proof of anything.
Microsoft, Apple, storage costs for gold, transaction costs are not trivial.
Dennis L.
Thanks for the kind words Dennis.
Musk had a single idea, which made him billions. Enough to buy the services of rocket scientists in the odd belief that space really is ‘the new frontier’.
buying rocket scientists doesn’t make you a rocket scientist, but they will happily take your money to build giant fireworks to satisfy your ego.
Who can blame them? I certainly would.
Musk has convinced himself that expanding energy will make money and profit—somehow.
That a trip to Mars will somehow bring returns over and above the $xx billions it cost to go there, there is also the fixation that moon/mars colonies will in some way as yet unexplained, deliver a profit.
They won’t and never can
**************
Space exploration (even here on OFW) has been mentally tied to Earth exploration, requiring just a bit of additional ‘technology’ to make it ‘work’.
Martian colonies will just be like Jamestown, but without the air. (a minor problem–tecnology will fix that). Once the colonists get to work they will be self sufficient in no time, and exporting goods back to Earth on a constant shuttle service.
Above all, there must be a ‘purpose’. But of course this where it falls dow. There can never be a purpose, other that acquisition of knowledge (nothing wrong with that btw).
But ultimate purpose is survival of our species.
This cannot be done in a totally hostile environment. Which would be the case wherever we went ‘out there’
So eventually we arrive at a ‘twin earth’ planet to settle on.
Am I the only doomsayer to point out that there might just be pre-inhabitants who wouldn’t take kindly to us showing up and telling them about Jesus?
https://end-of-more.medium.com/mission-to-mars-d57055fa6f34
Norman, at the start Elon could not hire any rocket scientist. They refused the offer. So he taught himself and designed the rocket himself. Mars is not about making money it is about insuring the human race continues.
Interestingly, and If I read it correctly, they refused to grant him access at this “crew-1” liftoff event because of failed 4/2 cow-id tests..
It would not be the first time in history when the initial element of change is suddenly sidelined by the perennial machine of the (sub) average society. He helped made the tech, made money for some of the insiders who also ran, so nowadays is disposable.. especially when trolling about Earth civ legal mumbo jumbo non applicable nor desirable in outer space..
“The grave yards are full of indispensable people”
— Charles de Gaulle
Going to Sweden for a party with the Swedish bikini team and then catching covid is a bit WTF. Triple face palm honey trap dumbo bimbo.
DENIED!
in his own image no doubt
“So he taught himself and designed the rocket himself”
….laughable…..and so are you if you believe that.
I know a rocket engineer they tried to recruit. He turned down the job because he knew he would not have a life, or his family afterwards.
be fair—-he was obviously joking
in fact it was me who designed the rocket and sold it to Elon
or to be more specific, it was me who gave Elon the milk bottle to put the rocket in
Who cares about family and life if money is in stake? Musk does pay his staff quite little, but it is an opportunity of a lifetime
So negative. I’ll bet that when Elon gets through fixing up Mars it will be palm trees and white sandy beaches. Just wait. A bit of terra forming with a few nukes and it will be so special. There will be riots to get a seat on Mars express.
Macron is talking about Malthus, resource scarcity, a “monolithic rationale based on the accumulation of profits” was outdated and that nations must embrace new economic, political, and social models. Unfortunately, he offer no details of an alternative.
https://www.rt.com/news/506820-macron-reforge-capitalism-inequality-france/
Interesting.
Tim Morgan has a view on the immense and greatly increased burden of taxes on the average French worker.
Will Macron seriously be able to do anything to clip the wings of the very wealthy in France?
Or moderate the expectations of the state entertained by the average French person? High taxes, but also high returns?
I guess it’s more like showing effects of schizophrenia fracturing into several ideas – directions. As of now these top gov-administrators evidently have got at least some basic insight or foreknowledge into the Surplus/EROEI predicament, especially in France, which is still nominally ~top tier country, one of the EUR pillars and nuclear capable and having some space program.
So, Macron is getting schizo from attempting to balance so many jumping curve balls in his court:
– allegiance to masters (banks and industries)
– domestic opposition (yellow vests, nationalist, socialists, ..)
– domestic-foreign malcontents (recent events)
– US/China grinding stones over FR-Europe’s interests
..
.
Yeah, strung out like mad. Ain’t that great? Watching that banker wannabe twat squirm in his chair of sanctimony.
There is a strange sentence in this interview:
“Je ne sais pas s’il fait encore nuit pour que la chouette de Minerve puisse se retourner sur ce qui s’éteint pour le comprendre”
I am unable to translate it correctly, if someone else speaks french and can provide an explanation?
Rough guess: “I do not know whether once again night will come in which the owl of Minerva is able to return upon those who are unable to understand it.”
Minerva, recall, is the Goddess of Wisdom, to whom the owl is sacred.
My French isn’t up to much, but at a very rough guess, I would render it:
“I don’t know if it’s still dark, so that the owl of Minerva can look back on what has passed (gone/been extinguished) in order to understand it.”
I vote for Robert’s version. It’s actually rather poetic. He’s wondering whether a metaphorical night may return such that Minerva’s owl (wisdom) would have the possibility of visiting those who have ceased to understand.
I don’t think he uses such classical language with his boyfriends, who prefer sign language.
https://dnbstories.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/PictureofMacronposingwithtwoblackmensparkscontroversy-min.jpg
Thank you for your help, Robert and Tim. I think Tim is closer to the original meaning.
But anyway what is Minerva doing in this quote? Of course I know she is the Goddess of Wisdom, she has always been my prefered mythological character. But why does Macron really mean? That we should be in the dark to understand what has gone? This is odd… like a code, or an occult meaning (Macron loves symbols and loves to exhibit them).
Less rude version of an earlier attempt:
I think Robert’s is closer. It’s actually rather poetic. éteindre is to extinguish, so Macron is wishing for a metaphorical night in which Minerva’s owl (wisdom) might be able to visit those in whom understanding has been extinguished.
The last part might read more like “those who are struggling to figure it out.”
The shadows of the past is clearly visible for the owl as the dusk paints the world gray.
Macron thinks of himself as the owl.
I found this in the Financial Times in an interview that took place on April 14 2020 and was conducted in French. Macron is fond of “the owl” metaphor and used it last summer in responding to an interview question.
https://www.ft.com/content/317b4f61-672e-4c4b-b816-71e0ff63cab2
FT: Although you have campaigned for a long time for this multilateralism, what we noticed during this crisis is that there is very little international co-ordination. It seems to be moving now but it certainly was not at first. Does that not suggest that multilateralism and globalisation have been weakened by this crisis?
EM: It’s too early to say so but I think we must tackle this crisis with a lot of humility. Generally, the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk. So it’s when the event is over that we can, with the utmost wisdom, draw some conclusions. We must be . . . I am not able to say whether we are at the beginning, the middle or the end. No one can. There is a lot of uncertainty and that is something which must make us very humble. There was a first phase to start with, in truth a national response because health is a national matter. And because when people are scared, they turn towards the institution of the state and react in that way. And I regret the lack of co-ordination we’ve had at first regarding border shutdowns among other things, it’s true. If we must draw some conclusion it’s that we must strengthen our multilateral health governance. And it seems that when the crisis is over, one of the lessons we can draw collectively, is to ask ourselves “What is it that we’re doing right or wrong when it comes to interacting with one another and what can help improve our health governance?”
Tim, your translation is the correct one. And perhaps this second piece helps to understand it. As I can see, in both quotes Macron takes a Hegelian position. Hegel said that knowlwdge about History only arises after the events had taken place, so the philosopher/human cannot foresee nor prepare for it. Hegel used, perhaps invented, this owls adaggio. So Macron would be reinforcing the idea that the future is unknown and that we can rather do nothing about it. It’s perhaps a way of saying “I/we can’t do better than I/we did”
It becomes clear referring to Hegel, indeed!
Can’t remember any of your posts mentioning it Harry, but furlough in the UK was supposed to stop end if October. About a week before then, it was extended to end of November, and then end of March 2021.
Seems to me that the UK government has taken the attitude that with such low interest rates, there is no limit to the amount of money it can borrow / create out of nothing.
That will be just over a year where millions of people get paid 80% of their previous salary, up to a maximum of £2,600 / month, for doing nothing, that is apart from wearing masks, staying at home and grassing on neighbours, if they do as they are told.
I don’t think they had a choice. The results, social, economic and political from the wave of redundancies that would have occurred, especially with a second wave underway, would have been unconscionable. Even with the extended furlough the situation is far from ideal.
“It is clear to see why Rishi Sunak was backed into a corner with no choice but to extend the furlough scheme until the end of March.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/10/uk-job-losses-furlough-rishi-sunak-redundancies
I don’t think Rishi Sunak is going full MMT on us yet. He keeps making noises about taxing this, that and the other, raising capital gains tax etc. to plug the hole in UK finances. He’s also talking, I noticed, about a pay-by-the-mile road-tax to compensate for declining fuel duty as we enter “Greentopia”.
Can’t imagine that this would be helpful for the economy generally:
https://news.sky.com/story/road-pricing-sunak-eyes-40bn-tax-threat-from-electric-vehicle-drive-12133772
The same old – very British – fudge, whistle hopefully past the graveyard, and…… bugger it up? 🙂
Sunak is NOT British.
“Rents in big UK cities fall by up to 45% as millions of Britons working from home no longer need to live near the office.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8952987/Rents-big-cities-fall-45-Britons-work-home.html
“One million UK freelancers have been pushed into debt since the pandemic hit, according to a new report, ‘The Cost of Covid: How the pandemic is affecting the self-employed’, released today by IPSE (the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed) and digital bank, Starling.”
http://hrnews.co.uk/counting-the-cost-of-covid-one-million-self-employed-pushed-into-debt-due-to-pandemic/
This is worrying!
Banks will have a real problem if rents fall.
Most regular visitors here are probably already familiar with the PCR tests scam. This is a pretty good summary:
Why COVID-19 Testing Is a Tragic Waste
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/joseph-mercola/why-covid-19-testing-is-a-tragic-waste/
“For all of these reasons, a number of highly respected scientists around the world are now saying that what we have is not a COVID-19 pandemic but a PCR test pandemic”
Dr. Mercola has a long history of embracing silly ideas.
The equivalent of saying that eating fruity pebbles everyday for breakfast is good for you because Fred Flintstone said so.
The problem with PCR is it is too sensitive.
Not usually needed.
We have tests that are fast and cheap, and accurate to infection rates.
Did you actually read the article?
If so, which bits are silly?
Does the article have any merits?
If not, why are you commenting on it?
Dr. Mercola has a long history of embracing silly ideas.
http://www.sheilakealey.com/nutrition-experts-shouldnt-trust-2/#Mercola
Quote: Some call Joseph Mercola the “Internet Supplement Salesman.” He tells his audience that his supplements can heal almost any condition. This dangerous practice exaggerates any harms of evidence-based medical treatments while promoting unproven supplements and therapies. His website is full of one-sided, often inaccurate, and misleading health advice. Some of his claims include HIV not being the cause of AIDS, microwave ovens emitting dangerous radiation, and sunscreen causing cancer. His website is one of the most popular health websites on the Internet, suggesting that his pseudoscience has great influence.
Silly ideas are silly, silly!
https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/news/20200121/fda-skin-absorbs-dangerous-sunscreen-chemicals
Microwave ovens *do* emit dangerous radiation (otherwise they wouldn’t cook your food), it’s just that they are usually well-shielded. I don’t have a microwave because of
“the potential risks of what it does to certain food molecules when cooked. It has been shown that microwave cooking can denature proteins, vitamins, and minerals by breaking them up into smaller molecules that have little nutritional value. The cooking process can also create radiolytic compounds, chemicals decomposed by the effects of radiation that may pose some health risks, such as being carcinogenic, reducing immune function, or impairing memory. Due to these unknowns, baby formula and blood for transfusions is never heated by microwave radiation in hospitals. It is also known that certain soft plastic food packaging has the potential to leach plastic compounds into food if it is used as a container or covering in the microwave, and it is therefore recommend that food be microwaved only in glass or plastics clearly designated as microwave-safe.”
https://www.wisegeek.com/how-dangerous-is-microwave-radiation.htm
Lastly, I was personally quite surprised by this documentary, which may have been posted at this site in an earlier thread:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/GUEXDEQBaG5C/
Whose pseudo-science *should* we be listening to? I don’t fall entirely into the Mercola camp, but often the claims of “alternate” practitioners have at least some basis.
When I got trained as a scientist (never entered into the practice), the idea was to question everything. That becomes a defect when put into real-world practice. I am not a fan-girl of Mercola per se, but are we so much better off accepting Big Industry claims?
@lydia17, I couldn’t find a link for it, but I know that in the past he has advocated a raw meat version of the “paleo” diet. Does that strike you as good judgment?
I followed a paleo diet (only a bit raw) for more than a month with no ill effects. I rather liked it, but it was hard to maintain and still dine in community with others. I also missed things that “crunched”, like crackers and chips. It’s also on the expensive side.
People like the Inuit mostly eat a raw meat diet. I don’t see what the big deal is in terms of judgment.
The big deal here is that going Paleo, LCHF and all the other wank animal product based “diets” is a stupid idea.
Primates eat mostly vegetarian/vegan/fruitarian food for good reason, it is what evolution produced.
@lydia17, You forgot to defend his argument that HIV does not cause AIDS. If he can’t get that old virus right (it has been studied intensively since the 1980s), I sure don’t trust him as a source of advice about a virus whose existence outside a laboratory was unknown until a year ago.
No, I didn’t forget.. it’s in the bitchute video link.
You may think that the science surrounding viruses is somehow “settled” but it’s anything but. People can study things and still not know what they are looking at.
The documentary’s arguments about immune-deficiency syndromes in promiscuous gay drug users most likely being a different phenomenon from immune-deficiency syndromes in malnourished and disease-ridden Africans made a lot of sense to me. You may not grasp the amount of money up for grabs in this sphere.
This was a legitimate debate in the 1980s, but it has been studied to death. There is no longer any question that Africa has been ravaged by HIV and AIDS.
Eating large amounts of raw meat, as Mercola once advocated, is not a smart idea either. Man has been eating his flesh cooked forever.
We’re not carnivores. Careful research shows that Eskimos on their traditional diet almost never lived to 60 and suffered an epidemic of coronary artery disease and osteoporosis, very different from the rosy stories one will read in paleo diet books.
I understand the idea of assessing the idea separately from the man, and that mainstream theories can often be wide of the mark, but I have only so much time to go down rabbit holes, so I prefer not to begin my search in the Quackosphere if I can help it. It has a bad signal to noise ratio.
HIV? That’s another killer virus jackanory in which Anthony Fauci has played a leading role. I don’t trust him as an unbiased fount of wisdom.
Still, Magic Johnson is looking very wholesome after 19 years of apparently taking a daily regimen of anti-virals. And he’s doing very well from the endorsements for those drugs.
https://images.theweek.com/sites/default/files/9_122.jpg?resize=807×807
Today he had some crazy story about technocrats trying to take over the world and take our freedoms and bunch of craazzy stuff. I guess he’s one of those nuts that don’t know that they’re supposed to do what they’re told and don’t talk back. And he’s sure no business man. He says get your vitamins from food if you can ?? And going in the sun is better than taking vit.D. You would think he could sell more pills if he would just follow the science. DUH! Crazy stuff like Roundup is bad. Let him pull some weeds if Glyphosate is so terrible.
From what I’ve read, Mercola has often not been on solid scientific ground. However, on this topic, nearly all of what he wrote was accurate. See my comment further down about Taiwan and international variation in PCR testing procedures. Dismissing someone’s ideas or evidence based on his or her reputation is irrational and unscientific. Each idea and piece of evidence deserves consideration separate from its proponents.
“Each idea and piece of evidence deserves consideration separate from its proponents.”
Amen.
Yes, I would like to extend that to:
Most important: Be pondered upon in solitude.
Include at least 3 sides of the story explaining the idea and it’s consequences.
1. Positive, 2. negative and 3. don’t care.
Rinse and repeat until clarity and intuition emerges.
“…Europe faces a long, slow convalescence from coronavirus…
“Lagarde may need to keep up her browbeating, if Brussels’ fiscal artillery is ever to line up behind her bank’s QE cannons.”
https://www.afr.com/world/europe/why-europe-faces-a-long-slow-convalescence-from-coronavirus-20201114-p56ek1
“The European Central Bank appears serious about a digital euro.
“Barely a month after the central bank issued a major report on the topic, and opened a public consultation, President Christine Lagarde said “her hunch” is that the euro zone could have its own electronic currency within two to four years.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2020-11-16/christine-lagarde-s-ecb-is-planning-its-very-own-e-currency
“Germany sees growing risk of recession:
“There is a risk of recession in Germany, indicated by the index developed by Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK) of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, in a report which was released on Monday.”
https://cyprus-mail.com/2020/11/16/germany-sees-growing-risk-of-recession/
[Easy to forget how close to recession Germany was in 2019].
If they have to levitate this “stagnation” for another 2-4yrs min, what’s not to like. Thanks Christine
Quite so: that’s another 5 years or so of survival for us.
They can levitate away as far as I am concerned!
I no longer really care what is ‘sustainable’ – an unreachable goal at this stage – but only about what will work, more or less, in the short-term.
And if that can, somehow, be spun out into the medium -term, bravo!
long-term sustainability is just modern mythmaking.
there will be no Great Reset, since that is long-term thinking.
the endgame is here, and it’s all about short-term thinking and practical actions.
Within two to four years is still a ways off. It does sound strange, except there is no other way, really.
If QE truly constituted a financial “cannon,’ Mrs. Lagarde would not be browbeating for fiscal stimulus.
QE benefits tend to go to the big borrowers. Stimulus is easier to get back to the individuals whose pay is a problem.
QE only goes to the banking system where it stays because QE is just bank reserves, not part of the money supply. The big borrowers already have no problem getting loans (usually be issuing corporate bonds), so QE is irrelevant to them. QE keeps the banking system liquid and creates (misguided) growth and inflation expectations among the general public.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2017/november/does-federal-reserve-print-money
Does the Fed print money?
…no, the Fed doesn’t actually print or produce money in any form….
The Fed distributes currency after it’s printed.
SNIP
…what many questioners might really be asking is whether the Fed has the ability to control how much money is in our economy….
The Fed adds to (or subtracts from) the amount of money in the economy by buying (or selling) U.S. Treasury securities and other financial instruments. This is referred to as “open market operations,” since these transactions take place in the open market. (The Fed isn’t allowed to buy securities directly from the U.S. Treasury.)
The Fed pays for those securities by crediting funds to the reserves that banks are required to hold, either cash in their vaults or deposits at a Reserve bank.
“So, in that sense, we can think of ‘printing money’ as adding reserves to the banking system,” said David Wheelock, vice president and deputy director of research.
As Wheelock pointed out, these additional reserves enable banks to make more loans. “So, this process of creating reserves [enables] banks to make more loans, which expands the supply of money,” he said.
[END QUOTES]
So there you have it. Be advised this St. Louis Federal Reserve article is from 2017, when banks were required to hold certain minimum level of reserves. That minimum reserve requirement was abolished in 2020, so now banks use their own judgment about how many reserves they want to maintain.
They do NOT loan out these reserves. They are required to keep them in reserve (usually at the Fed) in case they are actually needed. They can also loan them at interest to other banks (usually as “repo” operations). They cannot spend or invest them in the real economy.
Most of the “money” banks loan out to households and firms and hopefully get repaid are just ledger entries. That is how money gets created (and destroyed when it is repaid). Most of the bank reserves are likely to be ledger entries too. Most bank reserves are kept at the Fed because the Fed is required by law to pay the banks interest on reserves held there.
Currently, banks are tightening lending standards for all categories of lending. Keep that in mind when you read optimistic stories in the press about the 2021 economic recovery. Tightening of lending standards not only tells us that the banks do not agree, but the reluctance of banks to lend right now (which is the same thing as a reluctance to expand the money supply, because bank loans are new money) is likely to make the banking industry’s expectations or fears of a continuing recession a self-fulfilling reality.
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=170124119105003024104112113012075077122024024079020086078021119005121115108104120081017021040022038009060127026111088125013029055090056092048088112097001111025120067066009020083097023065096084092112029096000086022106112002127068111004105122123066123006&EXT=pdf
EXCERPT: “Open Market Operations always involve altering the outstanding reserves in the
banking system in order to help achieve a target interest rate. QE is not unique in this
regard although it is believed to have some sort of mythical powers that extend beyond
standard open market operations. This is largely due to poor reporting in the media and a
general misunderstanding of the way QE impacts the banking system and the economy.
“QE’s efficacy is highly controversial as its transmission mechanism relies on
effects that are different from standard monetary policy. This includes the expectations
channels, the portfolio rebalancing effect, the wealth effect, interest rate channels and
other impacts on the economy.”
SNIP
“Global regulators have recommended increased scrutiny on clearing houses but have held back from saying the key financial institutions should themselves take on more of the burden of potential losses.”
https://www.cityam.com/regulators-urge-more-clearing-scrutiny-but-push-back-buffer-decision/
I can imagine why. They don’t want these institutions to fail.