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It will be an interesting year.
We know that the age of peak performance for humans varies, depending upon the activity. Peak performance for an athlete tends to come between ages 20 and 30, while peak performance for a person writing academic papers seems to come between ages 40 and 50 years. By the time people are 80 years old, they have a strong suspicion that health and other aspects of performance will deteriorate in the next 20 years.
Economies, in physics terms, are similar to human beings. Both are dissipative structures. They require energy of the appropriate kinds to keep their systems growing and operating normally. For humans, the main source of this energy is food. For an economy, it is a mixture of energy that the economy is specifically adapted to. Today’s economy requires a certain mixture of energy directly from the sun, plus energy from fossil fuels, burned biomass, and nuclear energy. Electricity is a carrier of energy from different sources. It needs to be available at the right time of day and the right time of year to allow today’s economy to continue.
Most people don’t realize that economies grow and eventually collapse. For example, we know that the Roman Empire started its growth in 625 BCE and reached its peak extent in 211 CE. It declined somewhat between 211 CE and 456 CE, when it finally collapsed after several invasions. The growth and collapse of economies is very much expected because of their nature as dissipative structures.
In 2024, the world economy is acting more and more like an 80-year-old man than like a young vigorous economy. Perhaps the economy can continue for quite a few more years, but it increasingly looks like it is in danger of falling apart, or of succumbing as a result of what might be regarded as minor problems.
Trying to predict precisely what will happen in the year 2024 is difficult, but in this post, I will examine some of the things that are going wrong in this increasingly creaky old economy.
[1] Too many parts of the world economy are changing from growth to shrinkage.
The blue circles can illustrate many different things:
- The total goods and services produced by the economy;
- The quantity of energy required to produce the total goods and service produced by the economy;
- The total population that is supported by these goods and services (which will generally be rising or falling, too);
- Goods and services per person (which tend to rise during periods of growth and fall in a shrinking economy);
- And, strangely enough, the ability of the economy to maintain complexity. Without enough energy, structures such as governments tend to fail.
As the economy moves away from growth, toward shrinkage, major changes can be expected.
[2] In a growing economy, repaying debt with interest is very easy. In a shrinking economy, repaying debt with interest becomes close to impossible.
If an economy is growing, there will likely be an increasing number of jobs available over time, and they will pay relatively more. If a person loses his/her job, it is not very difficult to get a position that will pay as much or more. Paying back a loan on a house or an automobile tends to be easy.
A corresponding situation occurs for businesses. If the business can count on an increasing number of customers, overhead becomes easier and easier to cover with a growing consumer base.
The reverse is obviously true in a shrinking economy. Jobs may be available if a person loses his/her current job, but the jobs don’t pay very well. Businesses may face periods with suddenly lower demand, as in 2020. There is a sudden need to reduce overhead, such as payments for office space, if the space is no longer being utilized by employees.
Clearly, if interest rates rise, it becomes increasingly difficult for borrowers of all kinds to repay debt with interest. Raising interest rates is thus a way to intentionally slow the economy. If the economy is growing too quickly (like a 20-year-old sprinter), then such a change makes sense. But if the economy is behaving like an 80-year-old, hobbling along on a walking stick, it becomes likely the economy will figuratively fall and become severely injured. This is the danger of raising interest rates when the world economy is having difficulty growing at an adequate rate.
[3] The physics of the system dictates that as the system shifts in the direction of shrinkage, the wealth of the system is increasingly distributed toward the rich and very powerful, and away from those of modest means.
Physicist Francois Roddier writes about this issue in his book, The Thermodynamics of Evolution. He likens energy (and the goods and services produced using this energy) as being like energy applied to water. When energy levels are low, the less wealthy members of the economy tend to be squeezed out, just as (low energy) frozen water turns to ice. The reduced amount of energy available (and goods and services produced using this energy) increasingly bubbles up to the small number of economic participants at the top of the economic hierarchy. This issue tends to make the already rich even richer.
In some sense, the self-organizing economy seems to preserve as much of the economy as it can, when energy supplies are inadequate. The wealthy seem to be important for keeping the whole system operating, so the physics tends to favor them.
Inflation, in general, is a problem, especially for people with limited income. Higher interest rates also take a big “bite” out of spendable income. This problem is greatest for low income people. The benefit of higher interest rates, and of capital gains, tends to go to high income people.
High food prices especially affect the poor because, even in good times, food tends to be a high share of their income. For example, in a poor country, if food costs amount to 50% of a person’s income when food prices are moderate, a 20% increase in food prices will lead to food prices costing 60% of income. Such a situation quickly becomes intolerable because there is not enough income left for other essential goods.
The figure above shows that between 1990 and 2022, the share of total wealth held by the top 1% of US citizens rose from 23% to 32%. This means that other citizens were increasingly squeezed out of the benefits of the growing economy.
[4] With their newfound power (arising from the growing concentration of wealth), the wealthy are tempted to exert increasing control over the economic system.
The fact that the world economy was likely to reach annual limits of fossil fuel extraction about now has been known for a very long time. I have referred to a 1957 speech by US Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover pointing out this bottleneck many times. Wealthy individuals have known about this bottleneck for a very long time. They have been asking themselves, “How can we increasingly benefit from this change?”
Clearly, reducing the population growth rate has been one of the goals of some of these wealthy individuals. With fewer people to share the resources available, everyone will benefit.
But the wealthy can also see that hiding the energy bottleneck would be of huge benefit in keeping the current system operating as usual. These individuals, through the World Economic Forum and other organizations, have pushed for zero global warming emissions. They have tried to reframe the problem of inadequate inexpensive-to-produce fossil fuels as a problem of too large a quantity of fossil fuels for the system to handle. In their view, we can decide to transition away from fossil fuels without significantly adverse impacts.
By hiding the energy bottleneck, companies selling vehicles can claim they will be useful for many years. Educational systems can claim that we are well on our way to finding substitutes for fossil fuels, and that there will be good jobs available in the new systems. With the bottleneck problem hidden, politicians do not have to present citizens with a very concerning and intractable issue. Since a happily-ever-after narrative is desired by all, it is easy for the wealthy (and politicians who want to be reelected) to influence the major news outlets to present only this view to readers.
[5] Major cracks in the economy are likely to start showing soon. The energy bottleneck is already pulling the economy down, even if major news media are reluctant to discuss the problem.
The problem displays itself in several different ways:
(a) The economy has moved toward two widely differing views regarding today’s energy situation.
The narrative presented in the press is that we have an excessive amount of fossil fuels. In this view, any shortage of fossil fuels (or any other resource) would be quickly accompanied by rising prices. These rising prices would allow an increasing quantity of these materials to be extracted, quickly solving the problem. But the real story, for anyone who examines the details, is quite different. Affordability becomes very important, holding prices down. History shows that nearly every civilization has collapsed. Populations tend to grow but the resources supporting the economies don’t grow quickly enough. Rising prices don’t fix the problem!
People who work with fossil fuels know how essential they are for our current civilization. The story about intermittent wind and solar substituting for fossil fuels sounds very far-fetched if a person thinks about the need for heat in the winter and the difficulties associated with long-term storage of electricity. The two widely differing narratives surrounding our energy future sound like they could have come from the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
(b) Repaying debt with interest gets to be an increasing problem.
Strange as it may seem, added debt can temporarily act as a placeholder for additional energy. Debt is a promise for goods and services that will be made with future energy. This placeholder can allow capital goods, such as factories, to be made which allow more goods and services to be made in the future. This placeholder can also be used as the basis for money to pay workers, so that they can afford to purchase more goods.
At some point, the debt becomes too much for the system to sustain. We are seeing some of this in China, where there have been debt defaults in the real estate market. In the US, the commercial real estate market is experiencing high vacancy rates. There is increasing concern that, in many places, commercial real estate can only be sold at a huge loss. In this situation, the holders of debt are likely to sustain massive losses.
(c) Political parties start differing widely on whether to increase government debt.
The more conservative parties do not want to keep adding more debt, but the more liberal parties insist that there is no other way out: If there isn’t enough energy of the right kind, the added debt can perhaps be used to fund projects in the renewable energy sector that will create the illusion of progress toward an adequate supply of energy of the right kind at the right price. The added debt can also be used to continue the many social programs promised to citizens and to provide support for activities such as the war in Ukraine.
So far, adding debt has worked for the US because the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency and because the US has tended to keep its target interest rates high, encouraging other countries to invest in US securities. If other countries try to add substantially more debt, their currencies will tend to fall, leading to inflation.
The US may soon also run into an inflation problem because of added debt. This happens because it is possible to “print money,” but it is not possible to print goods and services made with inexpensive energy products. For example, the temptation is to bail out failing banks and pension plans with added debt. To the extent that this debt gets back into the money supply, but there aren’t added goods to match, the result is likely to be inflation in the prices of the goods and services that are available.
(d) Broken supply lines are another sign of an economy reaching limits.
When there aren’t quite enough goods and services to go around, some would-be buyers of goods have to be left out.
In the last three years, all of us have experienced at least some problems with empty shelves in stores and the unavailability of needed parts for repairs. Many kinds of drugs are in short supply around the world. Heavy industry has been encountering problems, as well. In 2022, Upstream Online wrote, “Drill pipe shortages causing headaches for US producers [of oil and natural gas].”
If we are reaching the limit of inexpensive fossil fuel available for extraction, an increasing number of these problems can be expected. These supply line problems tend to raise costs in a different way than “regular” inflation. Often, a more expensive product must be substituted, or a higher cost workaround is needed. For example, a person may need to use a rental vehicle while his current vehicle is being repaired because of unavailable replacement parts.
(e) Conflicts arise when there are not enough goods and services to go around.
Part of the conflict comes from wage and wealth disparity. For example, an increasing number of people are finding reasonably-priced housing impossible to find. The combination of high interest rates and high housing prices tends to make home-buying a luxury, available only to the rich. An increasing share of young people are also finding automobiles too expensive to afford. One way “not-enough-goods-and-services-to-go-around” manifests itself is by many people not being able to afford the products in question.
There is often a belief that a more equitable distribution of income would solve the problem. But, if the economy cannot build more cars or homes because of energy shortages, this doesn’t fix the problem. Providing more money to the poor would instead cause inflation in the price of the goods that are available.
Another way this conflict manifests itself is in conflicts among countries. Countries selling fossil fuels, such as Russia, would like higher fossil fuel prices, so that the standards of living of their own people can be higher. However, if fossil-fuel-importing countries, such as those in Europe, are forced to pay higher prices for the fossil fuel they use, it becomes difficult for companies in these countries to manufacture goods profitably. Also, the higher fossil fuel prices make the cost of growing food higher. Customers often cannot afford higher food prices.
In the case of the fight between Israel and Gaza, at least part of the conflict relates to the natural gas field that Israel is developing, but which arguably belongs to Gaza. If Israel can develop this resource, it may be able to keep its own economy expanding for a while longer. The people of Gaza will remain very poor.
(f) Manufacturing around the world seems to be reducing in quantity. It definitely is not rising to keep up with population growth.
The big shortfall today is in goods, rather than in services. This is what a person would expect if an energy problem is giving rise to the problems we are currently experiencing.
The organization S&P Global Market Intelligence puts out an index called the Purchasing Managers Index, for 15 countries, including a global average. The manufacturing portion of this index is in contraction on a worldwide basis, as of the latest data available. The extent of this manufacturing contraction is especially significant for the US, the European countries included, for Japan, and for Australia. The countries that are not in contraction are India, Russia, and China.
If manufacturing is in contraction, we would expect more broken supply lines in the months and years ahead.
[6] How will all this turn out, in 2024 and long term?
I don’t think we know. Things are likely to get worse economically, but we don’t know how much worse. We know that an elderly person can easily succumb to some illness. In the same way, we know that if the economy has enough weak points, a major collapse might occur, even without a huge decline in energy availability.
At the same time, the economy seems to have a lot of resilience. Leaders of the US, and perhaps of other countries, as well, seem likely to take the route of adding increasing amounts of debt, to bail themselves out of whatever problems arise. If banks get into trouble, some new funding facility will be developed. If Social Security or private pensions need more funding, it will likely be provided by more government debt. This leads me to suspect that in the US, at least, there is likely to be a higher risk of hyperinflation (lots of money but very little to buy) rather than deflation (very little money, but also very little to buy).
The Universe came into being, apparently out of nothing. The Universe has grown and continues to grow. Eric Chaisson, in his 2001 book, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, shows that the trend in the Universe has been toward ever greater complexity.
Together, it appears that the Universe, itself, acts like a dissipative structure. Self-organization leads the Universe to grow and become more complex, as long as it has adequate energy. The question becomes, “Where is the expanding energy supply for the Universe as a whole coming from? Can the expanding energy supply continue indefinitely, or until whatever force started it, chooses to stop it?”
It seems to me that there is something from outside pushing the whole Universe along. Economists talk about “an invisible hand.” People from a religious background might say that there is a God who created the Universe, and is continuing to create it every day, through involvement in the things that take place on Earth, including the strange happenings in 2020.
If I am correct that there is an outside force influencing the economy today, perhaps Earth’s problems are temporary. One possibility is that eventually a new type of energy solution will be found. There is also the possibility that, at some point, whatever force started the Universe may cause the operation of the Universe to cease. A replacement (which we can think of as heaven) might be provided instead.
The popular narrative tends to see ourselves as having a great deal of power to manage problems with our current economy, but I don’t think that we have very much power to influence the system we find ourselves embedded in. The economic system behaves on its own, based on market forces, just a child grows up, matures, and eventually dies. The system within which we live is very much guided by what we call self-organization, which is outside our power to control.
I suppose that in wars people have to take the laughs as they come.
Not that USA/ UK/ NATO kit lasted long in UKR but UKR cannot really talk to USA like that.
> Kyiv Rejects ‘Flying Trash’, Then Demands 41 Australian Bombers; Canberra Says ‘Too Late’ | Report
Australia offered 41 Fighter Bombers to Ukraine to help fight against Russia, but Kyiv rejected the donation and called the aircraft “flying trash”. Australian Defence Contractors said the comment led to killing the deal. Watch the full video to know more.
Send F35s and lose your money quicker Australia, you dumb, frickin’ poodles.
The only aircraft Ukraine can get are aircraft that are being retired. When Australia offered some military aircraft that were about to be retired, an Australian official said no, and called them trash. Later, Ukraine discovered it couldn’t get better aircraft elsewhere, and asked for Australia again for them. Ukraine also asked about retired military helicopters. Ukraine was told, “Sorry, we are already too far along on the process of dismantling.”
On the global boiling propaganda
https://rumble.com/v39h6w0-global-boiling-propaganda-alarmism-becomes-hysteria.html
I want some of that boiling!!!
It’s 15C… in the middle of summer https://www.metservice.com/towns-cities/locations/queenstown/7-days
“ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are
1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but
1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over
1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years
1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your
1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature
1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ako03Bjxv70 },
(Corriere della Sera – lack of diesel)
Even mainstream media is obliged to say to Europe is in a huge problem because of lack of diesel.
https://www.corriere.it/economia/consumi/24_febbraio_02/crisi-di-suez-meno-diesel-in-europa-a-febbraio-e-nuovi-rincari-cosa-sta-succedendo-a78c9f20-2c8e-4504-889e-b2b1b236dxlk.shtml?refresh_ce
https://archive.ph/Y2VDp
It is a step in the right direction. But of course it is Suez, not depletion. Limited hangout still.
US Shale Oil dirty secret
“Lighter shale oil is perfectly fine for making gasoline, but not the best for making diesel and jet fuel”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-Shales-Dirty-Secret.html
The article says things similar to what I have been saying:
It is the heavy oil that we need for diesel and jet fuel.
Yes Gail, I learnt this fundamental knowledge from you, as many others. Thank you.
Idiot Europeans had Russian Urals crude, which is optimal for diesel, piped directly to refineries, but that was evil Putin oil, so they sanctioned it. Sheer genius.
They should ask the US to blow up any pipelines they have left to finish off their de-industrialisation.
Slava Globalists!
The value of new home sales from the 100 biggest real estate companies slid 34.2 per cent from a year earlier to US$33 billion, following a 34.6 per cent decline in December, according to preliminary data from China Real Estate Information Corp. January’s sales were down 47.9 per cent from the previous month, a record low in recent years.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/property/china-home-sales-slump-persists-after-evergrande-liquidation
It amazes me that there are any sales at all…..
Far more properties for sale around NZ now, and sitting longer waiting for an offer, any offer.
The slither economy (Real Estate, Financial Services, Lifestyle Discretionary Spend, Commercial Ownership) is dying.
There are a lot of empty shops in my local small town which has never been the case in over 30 yrs.
Problem is that the Local Council is one of the most indebted per capita in NZ. Too many glory projects.
Time to relocate to where a Council has a net positive cash position, and not a fakery net value positive.
From the article:
These developers are in terrible shape to begin with. I am not sure what these other debts are: Payroll owed to workers, that they were unable to pay on previous projects; back taxes; advertising expenses? I really don’t know.
Somehow, these developers who owe lots of money besides what would normally qualify for real estate loans will get real estates loans to pay these debts too. How will they get enough cash flow to pay all of these debts? It looks to me like kicking the can down the road a bit farther.
I know someone in Hong Kong who was involved in raising funds for Chinese entities — it was pre Covid … and they were offering 8%…. back when banks were offering 0.00000000001%…
I steered clear of that….
Professor Angus Dalgleish, a renowned oncologist practising in the UK, recently wrote an open letter to the editor-in-chief of the medical journal The BMJ, urging the journal that harmful effects of Covid injections be “aired and debated immediately” because cancers and other diseases are rapidly progressing among “boosted” people.
https://expose-news.com/2023/11/23/cancer-post-covid-vaccination-oncologist/
Can covid vaccines cause cancer? In some cases, the answer appears to be yes. To be sure, there is no evidence that covid vaccines themselves are carcinogenic (i.e. cancer-causing). However, it has been shown that in up to 50% of vaccinees, covid vaccines can induce a temporary immune suppression or immune dysregulation (lymphocytopenia) that may last about a week or possibly longer.
https://swprs.org/covid-vaccines-and-cancer/
It is difficult to get people who don’t want to hear the story about cancer after covid boosters to listen to it.
Hey Tim … no heart attack (yet) … but make sure you don’t exert yourself… you might think you don’t have a damaged heart but it could all go to pieces if you bump up the heart rate…
Do you now worry about cancer now that you’ve read Dagleish? If it was me I’d probably struggle to sleep —- huge anxiety not knowing innit…
The stress must be terrible … how are you coping?
Maybe get some Xanax…
While Dennis L. continues to recite the spell “Starship orbits” , probably in his mind, the dissolution of Civilization continues.
Applied Physics is not a progress. I have compared it to zombies marching. Any fool with computers can do it, significantly cheapening its value and countries like China, India and others are jumping in, which is a bad, bad, bad thing.
Before Civilization can jump to the next level, it will be necessary to clean up those who can’t really function in the new Civilization.
It is ludicrous to think that all 8 billion people, about 7/8 of them not really relevant to Civilization at all, will enjoy the benefits of the new Civilization . Starship or not, none of the at least 7 billion people who don’t contribute will share a penny of it.
There will be nothing, nada, zip for those who are not connected to today’s winners. Nothing.
You are looking for perfection, 20% is as good as it gets. Do the math, you will figure it out.
Dennis L.
The smoke and mirrors game . USA produces 13 mbpd and consumes 20mbpd and yet is an exporter of oil . 🤣
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-january-2024/#comment-769475
The story is more complex. “Liquids” and crude oil are quite different, for one thing. If you scroll down to the United Statesat this link,
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/monthly-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=M&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1696118400000
You will discover that recently US crude oil production has been about 13,250,000 barrels per day recently. Natural gas plant liquids have been about 6,670,000. Other liquids (ethanol) has been about 1,540,000 per day. Refinery processing gain (which requires the use of natural gas) has been about 1,050,000. In total, US production of “Liquids” has been about 22,600,000 barrels today. Not all of what is produced is of the right kind. We export the part we can’t easily use, and import heavier oil from elsewhere.
US consumption of “liquids” is indeed about 20 million barrels per day, or a little more.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTUPUS2&f=M
what “smoke and mirrors game”?
Gail writes “In total, US production of “Liquids” has been about 22,600,000 barrels today.”
and “liquids” consumed is about 20 mbpd.
US liquids exported and imported and refined is over 25 mbpd.
the US “liquids” business handles a billion gallons per day.
some freakin’ game right there.
a big bAU money game.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1753190238502170900
It gets good about 11 minutes but the whole thing is good. Tucker Carlson / Brett Weinstein podcast interview. Discusses the coordinated migration.
To get a general overview of “things” -if you have over an hour to listen while you are cooking, might want to listen. I criticize a lot of people and am very cynical, but I do listen to what Whitney has to say. She is one very very sharp cookie. A mind like a steel trap for information and processing.
I listened to at least part of this. Whitney Webb makes good observations about Elon Musk. He got where he is because he invested in areas where there were huge government subsidies. With Twitter, now X, he is amassing a huge database (perhaps eventually the largest in the world) which can be used to train AI on.
Yes, AI with X and also Tesla.
From my trusty Copilot:
“he federal government in the US has a tax program that provides incentives for buyers of electric vehicles. This program dates back from the Bush era and was expanded during the Obama administration. It offered $7,500 in tax credits to every buyer of new electric vehicles1.
Tesla also benefited from regulatory credits. In a push to reduce carbon emissions, governments around the world introduced incentives for automakers to develop electric vehicles or very low-carbon emitting cars. Credits were given to carmakers that built and sold environmentally friendly vehicles. Because Tesla only sells electric cars, the company always had excess regulatory credits and could effectively sell them at a 100% profit2.
However, Tesla reached its previous tax credit allotment in 2018 by selling more than 200,000 vehicles. Since then, Tesla buyers haven’t qualified for a tax credit3. But on January 1, 2023, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 qualified certain electric vehicles (EVs) for a tax credit of up to $7,500 for eligible buyers4. This included several Tesla models4.”
The government promoted zero emission autos, someone sold them; that is sort of how things work.
Dennis L.
The larger question is, why has Weinstein been ‘deployed’ in this fashion?
psyop obviously.
Yes, but why *him* (and Martenson). What expertise can he even feign in this space?
Anyone who appears with Tucker — is in the Club… cuz Tucker is in the Club
The Zerohedge write-up about this talk says that this list of the number of illegal migrants into the US by year was provided by Weinstein.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/not-friendly-bret-weinstein-shows-tucker-carlson-how-china-un-are-driving-invesion
America’s illegal immigration crisis is shattering century-old records with alarming numbers.
2023: 3,201,144
2022: 2,766,582
2021: 1,956,519
2020: 405,036
2019: 859,501
2018: 404,142
2017: 310,531
2016: 415,816
2015: 337,117
2014: 486,651
2013: 420,789
2012: 364,768
2011: 340,252
2010: 463,382
Another Zerohedge article says that says that job growth in the US has disproportionately going to the migrants:
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/inside-most-ridiculous-jobs-report-recent-history
One part:
Obviously, things are so bad …
We just got our delivery from Crystal Springs. We ordered five-gallon jugs of the Mountain Valley Spring water,” he said.
“Between shipping costs and dispenser rentals and bottle deposits, this costs us $165 a month in New Jersey,” he added.
Despite the cost, he said he “highly” recommends it.
“Glass water delivery,” a voiceover in her video said before showing all the gallon-size and smaller fridge-friendly glass bottles she has in her home.
She displayed multiple large dispensers of Mountain Valley Spring water, as well as glass bottles she got from Amazon that she could fill and reuse.
“Even the small steps count! I’m not perfect but my [home] has been plastic water bottle-free for three months and never going back,” she said
A phone representative from Mountain Valley Spring Water told The Post that delivery costs vary by region. A 12-pack of 1-liter glass bottles of spring water costs $29, according to the company’s website.
Mountain Valley Spring Water’s site indicates that its glass bottles are recyclable. However, with any of the providers, it’s unclear whether bottles are primarily or wholly self-recycled by the customer or if the company offers the option to return to pick them up for refills.
The Post reached out to Denise, @diggychef and Farryn for comment.
Those who aren’t having glass jugs delivered are trying another alternative: seeking out glass bottles when they go to the store.
A TikTok influencer who goes by @imjustwasim posted a video for his 169,600 followers in December talking about why he avoids plastic water bottles.
@imjustwasim
💧 Sip sustainably! Embrace the purity of glass-bottled water like Mountain Valley Spring Water 🏞️ – mountain magic in every drop! 🌿 Also, transport your taste buds to Tuscany with Aqua Panna 🇮🇹. Find these gems at Whole Foods! #water #glassbottle #mountainvalley
♬ original sound – imjustwasim
“So I personally avoid all plastic because when you heat plastic, it can leach into the water. So instead I’m always looking for glass,” he explained in a video that has more than 289,000 views.
He then pulled a bottle of Mountain Valley Spring Water off the shelf, declaring it was his favorite brand, and also suggested another option from a company called Acqua Panna.
While some commenters thanked him for his tips, others highlighted the expensive price of the products.
Several influencers touted the benefits of living a plastic-free life.
TikTok / @tropicalseductions
“Now tell us where to get the money,” one person said.
“Those are definitely some of the best, but as much water as I drink, they aren’t affordable at all,” another added.
The Post reached out to @imjustwasim for comment.
The U.S. isn’t the only place where people are requesting water deliveries.
A UK-based TikToker who goes by @evoluk posted a video of himself delivering glass jugs of water by bike to contribute “zero” carbon emissions of
Some who didn’t get their water delivered decided to purchase glass bottles in a store.
TikTok / @imjustwasim
While the price for glass-bottled water is certainly more expensive than getting free water from the tap — or a plastic bottle for a buck or two — people think the cost is well worth it. Plastic is a big contributor to global pollution.
Bottled water contains 100 times more plastic particles than previously thought: study
“Today, we produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.
Plastic also can be detrimental to one’s health. Nanoplastics can enter the bloodstream and potentially harm a person’s organs — and can even pass from a woman’s placenta to her unborn child.
The average 1-liter plastic bottle of water contains levels of “nanoplastics” that are 100 times higher than previously thought, according to a new study.
The peer-reviewed study, the first to test for particles under 1 micrometer in length — or 1/70 the width of a human hair — found the liter bottles were loaded with an average of 240,000 plastic particles, according to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Tap water didn’t fare much better, either.
What do you think? Post a comment.
“We cannot definitively say that tap water is healthier,” the study’s co-author, Beizhan Yan, an environmental chemist at Columbia University, told The Post.
“Tap water may contain other pollutants, such as heavy metals and black carbon, which may be less prevalent in bottled water. Checking your local water quality report would be a good idea,” Yan added.
SunPost
Remember the movie Doctor Strange love? How the nutcase was fixated on POE..
Purity of Essence….maybe the above is similar
Pick your poison when it comes to water. I have used Berkey Water (made by New Millenium Concepts) filters with the black cylinder block elements and the add on white PF2 filters for flouride and but the testing is suspect. Berkey reportedly had not tested after 200 gallons as the costs for”certification” would add expense ( cut into profits). Of course, most of your filtered water will be consumed after you have filtered past the initial 200 gallons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QL3McV20YM&t=152s
And this guy David at LDS Prepper certainly wants to get his sales commission. He may be correct but I just don’t know. I just know that anyone who buys bottled plastic water might as well drink municipal water straight from the faucet.
Thanks, have one myself unused and bought it just in case. The video said a significant price increase for replacement filters…inflation is red hot.
I purchased a zero water pitcher for drinking but it’s plastic.
I’m also reusing the filter with activated charcoal and water softer …anyway ….find it astonishing that the younger folks are paying $$$$$ for water deliver in glass jugs…
Influencers get paid because they influence.
Most people are eating food laced with poisons to stop bugs from eating it….
I would not worry a whole lot about the water
We use a whole-house filter to reduce the amount of “stuff” (including red clay and chlorine) in our water supply. Nothing else. This whole house filter affects shower water as well as what we drink.
Silly me…..I drink from a well 10 feet from my front door….or the crick (that’s hillbilly for creek”)
“Showers” happen with spring rains.
Read these gys are so close to people that some parts are used as organ transplants
This is for Fast Eddy’s enjoyment….
https://texasfarmbureau.org/toxicant-available-to-help-farmers-ranchers-control-feral-hogs/
U.S. Department of Agriculture surveys show Texas landowners lose more than $200 million annually in crop damages and livestock production losses due to feral pigs.
And the population will continue to grow unless 70% of feral hogs or more are removed each year.
“Feral hogs reproduce rapidly, can thrive in various environments and lack any natural predators,” Boening said. “Farmers and ranchers have been working on this problem with tools and strategies for decades. We hope this pesticide will help better control the feral hog population to protect livestock, crops and natural resources in our state.”
Experts at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension were tasked by the 87th Texas Legislature to determine the effectiveness of warfarin-based toxicant on feral hogs.
The two-year study showed researchers were able to reduce feral hog numbers with diligent application of the product.
Application takes about three weeks of conditioning the pigs to eat feed and placebo bait from the approved feeders that are specifically designed to prevent access by non-target species.
Once the pigs are conditioned to the feeder and the toxicant is added, feral hogs can consume lethal doses within five days of consistent access to the bait.
Pigs that consume Kaput Feral Hog Bait are easily identified. The bait is manufactured with a fast-acting blue dye that colors a pig’s fat tissue blue. The vivid blue color gets more intense over time and as pigs consume more bait. Researchers at Texas Tech University showed blue fat in pigs just three hours after eating Kaput.
Researchers noted the bait is not considered acutely toxic to non-target animals if they do gain limited access to the bait. The concentration of warfarin is extremely low at only one fifth the active ingredient level of warfarin baits for rodent control in homes.
“Feral hogs, wild pigs—whatever you call them, they are one of the most destructive invasive species in Texas and the U.S. today,” Boening said. “The environmental damage they cause is staggering, and disease risks to humans and other animals are very real. This toxicant is another way to try to get control of the fast-growing population and limit the damage they can do.”
We know of another that is the MOST destructive invasive species ever created
This is terrible. What if someone wants to hunt pigs for meat? I gather that’s what the blue dye is for, but still, humans might end up consuming the meat before it becomes too obvious.
I liked they need to knock off 70 percent a YEAR or MORE of these wild boars to dent the population ….
So, the UEP is not too far off the mark
>> Under the new rules, only those that have never been vaccinated against Covid-19 or contracted the disease itself – as well as those suffering from chronic lung or heart diseases, HIV, or tuberculosis – and the elderly will have to take a mandatory shot.
>> Vaccination should be done once a year, whereas previously it was twice. The new rules are scheduled to come into effect in September 2024 and stay in force until September 2030.
https://www.rt.com/russia/591676-mandatory-covid-vaccination-rule-change/
So, Russia wants people with health problems and the elderly to take an annual shot, every year until 2030. For your own good. Mandatory.
as i have been saying the elders plan is forced vaccination for everyone that way by the agreed time the population will have been stabilised to the required numbers which was between 1 to 2 billion people that way the great reset would have a real chance of working this is what they want so it will be very difficult over the coming years for anyone to escape their plans for us they know everything we do and have known for years so everything is probably planned except for the outcomes. According to one outcome the elders described was civilization to be reduced to barbarianism, if the outcome of their plans were to fail just like fast eddies ” ripping of faces” outcome or “ROF”. Really the elders are the good guys just in a necessary evil way much like the “nazi’s” were.
Yep. The only difference is that in Russia you can easily and cheaply escape the mandatory shots. I tried to help my daughter escape it in Europe, and I was taken aback at how terrified medical personnel were. No one would do it.
That’s a shame. In the US it was just a piece of paper that could easily be forged by whoever chose to. I’m not sure how it worked in Europe, but in some places I guess it was digitally tracked.
Can you give more details? I left the US before the vaccines, and my daughter is moving back to the US this year.
Vaccines are still required for some jobs, mostly healthcare, and many universities require it of their students as well, I believe. However, most red states have reversed their earlier policies, I think.
As for the document, it was just a smallish two-sided white card where the healthcare provider would just write down the lot number, date, and signature/initials of the person applying it. Very simple. Folks even just took photos of their cards rather than carry the physical thing around with them and that was acceptable everywhere. So, people could (1) print off a fake card (pdfs available online) and sign it or (2) do that and then take a photo, which is even harder to detect.
Also, why did your daughter decide to move back / what didn’t she like about Russia? Cheers.
She lives in Spain, found an american guy, they are moving to US together. She never was in Russia.
https://www.gpha.org/wp-content/uploads/2020-COVID-19-shot-card-2b.pdf
Print on light card stock, obviously, or fill out on plain paper by hand and then take a digital photo, which seems to suffice for most purposes. You should be able to find images of completed forms online to copy the style of batch numbers and such.
It is important to print it at the right size obviously. If anyone uses this pdf, make sure to confirm the physical dimensions match.
An online search yields the claim:
“If the date is 09/03/20, it should be 4″ x 3″, anything earlier is 4.25″ x 3.5″.”
(The date being the bottom-left on the back)
https://begunpost.net/blank-covid-vaccine-card-how-to-download-and-complete/
Thanks, ivanislav.. (although if it is just a pic it matters less).
Would the Russians accept a US injection card, or would one need to be re-injected with the Russian stuff?
unknown.
Two points to be considered:
1) they are classic vaccines, no mRNA
2) almost anyone has had Covid by now, so almost everyone can avoid (this classic) vaccination easily.
In addition, I think that in Russia there is no surge of turbo cancer and there is not the similar problem of sudden deaths that we have here in US/EU/NZ/AUS….
But on this maybe drb753 can better update us.
I know people who have been sick or very sick with the vaccine in Russia, but no obvious deaths. Nothing like the western world, where excess deaths due to vaccine are indisputable.
How do you know there is no surge in cancer in Russia?
I like to think of the Russians as the “good guys”. Politics is like sport, you need to support one side or another, otherwise it gets boring.
A health bureaucracy is a bureaucracy wherever it is and bureaucrats gotta bureaucrat i.e. go along with the prevailing ideology to keep their salary and benefits.
I don’t know if Russian vaxxes are as toxic as Pfizer etc. I do know Russia has loads of social policies to encourage families and population growth, but maybe that’s all a psyop and really they wanna kill everybody – who knows?
In the meantime, I’m enjoying watching them run rings around the deranged and dying US Empire in any number of spheres.
Send all your money and weapons!
No problem?
“A BIG NUMBER OF A VERY BIG NUMBER IS A SMALL NUMBER”?
“Except: The lithosphere consists of sediments and crystalline rocks with a total mass of 23,000–24,000 × 10×15 metric tons.
24,000,000,000 billion tonnes.
200 billion is 0.0000008%
In a million years we’ll use under 1% of it (assuming we’ve got the right number of zeroes there all the way through).”?
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/a-big-number-of-a-very-big-number-is-a-small-number
The catch is that there are certain materials that we really need, including fossil fuel fuels. They are in limited supply within the earth’s crust. We need cheap-to-extract and transport fossil fuels, especially.
For those who still believe in nuclear . Putting a pin to your illusion .
https://www.gfebusiness.org/exim-tips/global-wheat-suppliers-and-exporters/
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/worlds-largest-uranium-producer-warns-production-woes
The first link shows the top global wheat exporters to be:
1. Russia – 35 million tons in 2021
2. France – 21
3. Australia – 19
4. Canada – 16
5. United States – 12
6. Germany – 8
7. Kazakhstan – 6
8. Ukraine – 4
9. Argentina – 3
10. India – 2
Wow! Russia supplies a lot of wheat exports. It is also the world’s major processor of uranium.
Kazakhstan (next door to Russia) is the world’s largest producer of uranium. It is having production problems. Its largest producer is having problems, sending world uranium prices up to roughly four times what they were, not too long ago.
I know that world uranium production has been stagnant to declining for quite a while. Even with much higher prices, it will likely take a very long time to get production up, because of the time line. And then there is the problem of processing in Russia.
And this too shall pass .
https://www.cntraveler.com/galleries/2015-11-18/the-most-stunning-abandoned-places-on-earth
Poor fella… just had his sixth Rat Juice Booster… watch to the end https://t.me/leaklive/17942
A new archaeogenetics paper on Denmark. The shift to LNBA III in Scandinavia/ Denmark, later mixed with surrounding populations. Also medieval (Saxon) England modeled with LNBA III in Fig. 6.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06862-3
> 100 ancient genomes show repeated population turnovers in Neolithic Denmark
…. We observe that Danish Mesolithic individuals of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures form a distinct genetic cluster related to other Western European hunter-gatherers. Despite shifts in material culture they displayed genetic homogeneity from around 10,500 to 5,900 calibrated years before present, when Neolithic farmers with Anatolian-derived ancestry arrived. Although the Neolithic transition was delayed by more than a millennium relative to Central Europe, it was very abrupt and resulted in a population turnover with limited genetic contribution from local hunter-gatherers. The succeeding Neolithic population, associated with the Funnel Beaker culture, persisted for only about 1,000 years before immigrants with eastern Steppe-derived ancestry arrived. This second and equally rapid population replacement gave rise to the Single Grave culture with an ancestry profile more similar to present-day Danes. In our multiproxy dataset, these major demographic events are manifested as parallel shifts in genotype, phenotype, diet and land use.
…. LNBA [late neolithic/ bronze age] phase III: a final stage from around 4,000 cal. BP onwards, in which a distinct cluster of Scandinavian individuals dominated by males with I1 Y-haplogroups appears (Extended Data Fig. 8e). Y chromosome haplogroup I1 is one of the dominant haplogroups in present-day Scandinavians, and we here document its earliest occurrence in an approximately 4,000-year-old individual from Falköping in southern Sweden (NEO220). The rapid increase in frequency of this haplogroup and associated genome-wide ancestry coincides with increase in human mobility seen in Swedish Sr isotope data, suggesting an influx of people from eastern or northeastern regions of Scandinavia, and the emergence of stone cist burials in Southern Sweden60, which were also introduced in eastern Denmark during that period54,61.
Using genomes from LNBA phase III (Scandinavia_4000BP_3000BP) in supervised ancestry modelling, we find that they form the predominant ancestry source for later Iron and Viking Age Scandinavians (Extended Data Fig. 6d) and other ancient European groups with a documented Scandinavian or Germanic association (for example, Anglo-Saxons and Goths; Extended Data Fig. 6e). When projecting 2,000 modern Danish genomes62 on a PCA of ancient Eurasians, the modern individuals occupy an intermediate space on a cline between the LNBA and Viking Age individuals (Fig. 4). This result shows that the foundation for the present-day gene pool was already in place in LNBA groups 3,000 years ago, but the genetic structure of the Danish population was continually reshaped during succeeding millenia….
See also: (6d) Ancestry proportions for Scandinavian Iron Age and Viking Age individuals (postBA reference set). (6e) Ancestry proportions for selected ancient European individuals with ancestry related to Scandinavian LNBA individuals
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06862-3/figures/10
You want sulfur in those batteries?
BOOM!
More complexity coming right up!
‘Specifically, Id’emitsu has been working on developing a new material to go in the batteries, a solid sulfide electrolyte. With the partnership, Toyota aims to combine Idemitsu’s material expertise with its own production prowess to make solid-state batteries a reality for consumers.’
‘
‘Elemental sulfur is commonly used as a fuel component in inorganic explosive mixtures such as black powder, flash powder, and a variety of black powder substitutes. Consequently, residues from such explosive mixtures also contain elemental sulfur.’
‘Sulfur is a COMBUSTIBLE SOLID. Use water spray to fight fires and to keep fire-exposed containers cool. POISONOUS GASES ARE PRODUCED IN FIRE, including Hydrogen Sulfide, Sulfur Dioxide and Sulfur Trioxide.’
‘Syria: Near Raqqa, HI’s clearance team has cleaned up piles of sulphur, a chemical used to produce explosive devices.’
A battery is merely a bomb.
Bigger battery, bigger bomb.
You may travel that 932 miles in a split second; perhaps straight up!
PS: what exactly will travel 932 miles? A car, a bike, a truck, a rumour?
‘
So what, gasoline is combustible too.
The article I posted a day or so ago from PC magazine didn’t talk about the materials of solid state batteries including materials different from what is in today’s watch batteries.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/what-is-solid-state-battery-for-electric-vehicles
I suppose people are experimenting with different materials. We don’t know exactly what exactly will end up being used. We do know that lithium batteries have had a lot of problems catching on fire, however. The PC magazine article makes them sound safe.
https://dailytelegraph.co.nz/world/trump-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize/
WOW!!
This headline will get more heart attacks than even the Jab!
But at least it will be concentrated amongst the woke.
It’s a flipping puppet show anyway
Maybe Trump is the puppet of choice, but it’s not really a choice is it!
I remind that he was the first one to mandate, so he already caused a lot of HA
As long as it drives the Libtards around the bend… I support it…
has Sasha been nominated yet?
she really should be nominated.
Sasha got nominated for best scene involving a dog… that was before her career as a ‘scientist’
Wasn’t it her who mocked you for claiming to be father to a dog? Oh yes, that’s right, it was. And now you’re copying her? Sad.
He is running on fumes.
What comes around goes around …. and btw – FE does not seek gravitas … cuz hHE ain’t on no mission … HE is just passing the time waiting for The Extinction.
Sasha on the other hand is a ‘thought leader’ for the A-Vaxxed… it is inappropriate to bring bestiality into the discussion – assuming she wants to be perceived as a ‘serious person’
I wonder if she is Out Back the Dumpter behind McDonalds right this very second?????
Mental exercise. If we know there’s a catastrophic energy crises looming that could destroy humanity than other people know it too. What would TPTB do to protect humanity as a species from possible extinction? I suspect they would attempt to curb the energy appetite of the consuming nations. The Pandemic was the first attempt to curb consumption. They were not successful. The U.S.’s enormous energy appetite quickly returned. Nor were our exports sorely missed from the global economy. Russia, Argentina, and Brazil were able to replace most of our agricultural output. We do export oil, but the Permian is rolling over and the other shale plays are in major decline. We are for the most part a nation of consumers. What if an international coalition had decided to exclude the West from the global economy? What if the world is reorganizing into a smaller civilization? Western nations would find themselves in an impossible situation. The door to energy, manufactured goods, and commodities would be closed off. Are we consciously or subconsciously being sacrificed for the greater good of humanity? Biden recently stopped exports of LNG into Europe and Qatar has stated they will no longer export LNG to Europe because of the current Red Sea hostilities. Without LNG much of Europe will collapse without manufacturing, heat, or fertilizers. And their leaders look are willingly accepting this fate. We are seeing the Energy exporting nations, global manufacturers, and commodity producers banning together into the BRICS coalition. Soon they will have a trade currency and exclude Western trade. We will be cast adrift with the dregs of other societies coming across our southern border. Are we being abandoned to our own devices in order to save the greater human experiment. Is that what we are seeing?
>> And their leaders look are willingly accepting this fate.
I would demur. The US and Europe provoked the war in Ukraine (Maidan etc) as a pretext for planned coordinated sanctions intended to, together with the war, destabilize and ultimately break up Russia and thereby access it’s resources virtually for free and extend the status quo. As it turns out, however, they are incompetent.
PS – You can go read the RAND report (2019 IIRC?) that discusses the plan to break up Russia. US and EU leaders talked openly about it in recent years, even before the war.
So they intend to fast forward Nitkers (sic) original plan, but waited 80 years first. What is the significance of waiting four generations post WW2?
Meditate on this you should
Blind this Jedi council is indeed.
Before there was a cold war also. Instead of Ukraine, they had afghanistan.
“2019 RAND Paper . . .
As far back as 2019, US Army-commissioned studies examined different means to provoke and antagonize Russia who they acknowledged sought to avoid conflict. “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqVPM0KSUpo&t=5s
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
Deindustrialised countries make a lot of plans and plots because it’s all they can do.
Industrialised countries make a lot of artillery shells, warships, tanks and missiles.
“they are incompetent.”
The results of their efforts would seem to support that idea.
Of, the universe is not going that way and ultimately, the universe rules.
Dennis L.
It seems you think you know what way the universe is going to.
NATO provoked the war in Ukraine right, but not with the hope of defeating Russia and taking its resources (Anglo-American strategists are not so stupid as to think that Russia is defeatable).
No, the aim was simply to reduce the access of Europeans (starting with Germany) to Russian cheap oil and NG. Demand destruction is the name of the game they are playing, and the game is going fine.
Is it possible to provoke a fake war?
yes I’m guessing that Europe is doomed sooner rather than later.
and I see US + Canada producing 19+ mbpd of black goo crude.
that could reach 20 mbpd this year.
at some point in time, it will drop to 18 or 17 mbpd, on its way to near zero.
NA will still be riding the bAU tiger.
meanwhile, intentional depop might be a goal of many of TPTB.
surely not all of them, since individuals usually are never in complete agreement.
another probable goal is to keep bAU rolling in The Core and let most of the rest of the world fall to pieces.
this will all be much clearer by 2030.
the big hope is depop.
que sera sera.
Great comment and I would answer “very close”.
Obviously, the US and OECD are the largest consumers on earth. So, we would be ripe for the culling. with that being said, we produce the majority of grains which make most the food (bread) the world eats. We also produce the most oil and energy. The most lumber which makes paper. We also produce the most science papers published.
Even small simple things, Like the shipping container which is used for global trade was invented by an American company in NC who realized it was smarter to load semi-trailers onto ships instead of loading them by hand. Point being American creativity is unmatched and we much more than just mindless consumers pigs.
I read an article a few years before covid written by China’s president. He said he didn’t think the US would collapse but just fall back like UK after WW2.
The WHO was created by the UN which was created by Rockefeller so this whole pandemic and such is US led. Whether they admit it or not. (this is why the UN headquarters are NYC)
just my .02 cents
We are going extinct no matter what anyone does.
The only question is — how much suffering will be involved.
Fortunately the Elders have organized this deadly pathogen and it will kill almost everyone … I imagine it will be a pneumonia-like outcome… not so bad…
Better than being skinned alive and roasted … and/or raped
You don’t kill a wild horse. You tame it..
“We are going extinct no matter what anyone does.”
Disagree, universe has too much work getting this far, they will think of something.
Dennis L.
The Universe does NOT give a crap about how much work had been done. It has an eternity so there will be many failures.
They don’t think or anything. A lot of people claim to know how universe works. They are all like blinds touching an elephant.
Even small simple things, Like the shipping container which is used for global trade was invented by an American company in NC who realized it was smarter to load semi-trailers onto ships instead of loading them by hand.
It became possible because there was enough coal to produce cheap steel containers, not because Americans are somehow special.
Nowadays it’s become a problem because China isn’t accepting American ‘recycling’ any more and ships don’t want to carry empty containers back to China from the US.
Today China’s container ports are far larger and much more advanced than anywhere in America.
“ships don’t want to carry empty containers back to China from the US.”
So what do ships carry going west and is it cheaper to make more containers than reuse?
Dennis l.
we produce the majority of grains which make most the food (bread) the world eats
Actually Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter.
The US exports a lot of GM soybeans and corn which are not fit for human consumption to be used as animal feed or industrially.
Information purposes only .
https://www.gfebusiness.org/exim-tips/global-wheat-suppliers-and-exporters/
https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/507794.aspx
Russia dominates
It was the top exporter in 2022-2023 at 46 million tonnes according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and could account for a quarter of the global wheat trade this year.
Following Russia the major exporters are Canada, Australia and the United States — whose exports are expected to fall under 20 million tonnes to their lowest level in half a century.
5 Sept 2023
I think that what we are seeing is inevitable. If there is not enough energy, exports will fall.
You mentioned LNG. I mentioned earlier that I was wondering whether there was really enough natural gas for the US to line up a huge amount for exports–whether the investment would even make sense.
I read an article in the WSJ (that I am not sure that I can find now) saying that companies that already have the go-ahead to build significant infrastructure for LNG extraction are finding it impossible to actually make the investment and proceed. As I understood the situation, overseas buyers are not willing to make long-term commitments to buy high-priced LNG. Without these commitments, they cannot get the loans needed to make the investments that have already been permitted.
There is no point in adding a whole lot of more of permitted LNG exports, when there are quite a few permit-holders who cannot get the investment money they need to go forward, right now. It would only add to the queue.
Countries that don’t have their own energy supplies will have a huge problem. They cannot buy what is not available. They cannot bid a high enough price now, to make those supplies available.
Horrifying stuff here https://dailytelegraph.co.nz/opinion/when-will-it-be-called-treason/
The idea behind an economic soft landing is that the central bank (for the United States, the Federal Reserve) is able to bring inflation from an overheated economy under control by increasing interest rates without producing a recession or a collapse of the financial markets. This is what markets desperately long for in early 2024 and are trying to manifest by simply repeating it as a mantra and believing in it hard enough.
The premise behind such a hope is the belief that the Federal Reserve will lower the Fed Funds target interest rate from its current upper limit of 5.5 percent. The futures markets are signaling multiple reductions of a total of 75 to 100 basis points over the next several months, bringing the target interest rate to 4.5 percent by mid-year.
The market believes this because it believes that the fight against inflation has been won. This is also a fantasy. Inflation remains stubbornly high, and will persist so as long as the United States continues to deficit spend billions of dollars and tack on trillions of new debt each year to pay debt service costs and fund massive defense spending. In short, the Fed will not be able to reduce rates without restoking substantially higher inflation.
Finally, the U.S. economy isn’t performing nearly as well as the statistics coming out of the federal government would like us to believe. Indeed, the disappointing Jan. 31 Chicago Purchasing Managers Index results indicate that the economy is contracting.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/soft-landing-fairytale
Biden would like us to believe the economy is performing well. He seems to be pushing government officials to give as rosy a picture as possible of where we are. The soft landing is just a corollary of all of the rosy pictures. The fairy tale is intended to help his re-election.
Toyota Inks Deal to Mass Produce Solid State EV Batteries With 932-Mile Range
https://www.pcmag.com/news/toyota-inks-deal-to-mass-produce-solid-state-ev-batteries-with-932-mile
Why is this important…because these batteries will likely be more valuable outside of the EV application. Consider having a battery that can hold a charge double or even triple today’s lithium technology and doesn’t come with the same temperature instability. That means you can use these batteries as a way to hold a charge from energy sources that aren’t consistent like wind or solar. Enough of these batteries in a bank could be used to provide stable power to a community. Apparently these batteries aren’t very large. Therefore, you could rotate them between your car and your solar charging system, maybe even use them as backup power for your house. We don’t need to solve the fossil fuel problem we need to buy ourselves more time to solve the fossil fuel problem. The sulfide batteries might be key to pushing out TEOTWAWKI.
” We don’t need to solve the fossil fuel problem we need to buy ourselves more time to solve the fossil fuel problem.”
Yes, we will solve today’s problems with tomorrow’s technology, not yesterday’s.
Nice catch.
Dennis L.
Fake
Solid state batteries look to me like something that might actually scale up, if it is possible to keep the economy together, and if it is possible to get all of the materials. But these batteries don’t get us diesel fuel, or steel, or many other things that we need. They don’t even get us the electricity generation we need to keep recharging these batteries.
At most, they fix a small piece of our overall problem.
Assuming the batteries work as advertised and can be scaled to suitable numbers they could be used to free up diesel for heavy energy use cases like mining and farming. I think the batteries can enable an increase in the overall mix of renewable and less constant energy sources. Recharge the batteries using solar, wind, hydro, and excess grid power. Then turn around and use the batteries to provide steady output power to the grid as required. Example, the problem with large solar farms are the up and down energy spikes to the grid. These types of batteries might be the key to sustained and consistent power. There are lots of different ways a technology like this can be deployed. However, we don’t really know the details behind this type of technology. Only that we should see them being deployed by 2028…Maybe in time…maybe not. I don’t see this as a fix, but rather a bandaid until we find a more sustainable energy solution. There is no fix in a finite world just the next bottle neck.
These batteries… will be like this
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181119-why-flammable-ice-could-be-the-future-of-energy
A quick puff of hopium… and then nothing will happen
Cuz it’s… fake
You would need a huge amount of them to store grid electricity. Usually, batteries for grid electricity needs to be incredibly cheap. It doesn’t need to be compact.
I am doubtful that batteries would work for a large diesel truck. It needs bursts of power to go up hills. Batteries are not good for bursts of power.
Don’t store in batteries, need Pt, Pd from space, store H, use H. A challenge, but the Saturn rocket moved pretty good and moved a lot of tonnage.
Dennis L.
>> Toyota laid out a three-phase plan toward a goal of commercializing solid-state batteries by 2027-2028. However, that doesn’t mean solid-state EVs will be widely available at that time, as “full-scale mass production” will begin after.
So there are still problems (not discussed in the article) that they hope to fix in the next several years, and then they will still have to scale it in 2029+ if it works. We will probably be on a clear downslope by then and increasingly flirting with catabolic collapse.
Notice how they say things … that are intended to take place in the future… then the future comes… and the things don’t happen.
Please note many countries have committed to phasing out ICE vehicles by 2020
Recall Elon said taxis would be self-driving by 2022.
Anyhow … fool MOREONS once fool them twice fool them a 1000x .. they never learn
Eddy, I agree. Announcements and hype are commonplace and cheap, making good on that hype is rare and expensive.
Assuming the batteries work as advertised and can be scaled to suitable numbers
They don’t exist and never will.
Except in DelusiSTAN
Everything is possible there
I drive hybrids, they work well, winter car has 188K miles, a 2007, new one summer car, less miles. Actually like the older better, not so low.
They don’t like to be driven over 90 mph for longer periods, need the batteries for that and it is sort of hard on them, rapid discharge don’t you know.
Dennis L.
Agree.
Dennis L.
Good point that solid state batteries don’t charge themselves, but also interested in your views on the salt batteries, fabled to be coming out of China soon as well as the ammonia engine that Toyota claim will end/superseded the battery industry?
but also interested in your views on the salt batteries, fabled to be coming out of China soon
There are constant announcements about imaginary batteries that never appear. Not worth discussing.
This is a related article from November 2022.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/what-is-solid-state-battery-for-electric-vehicles
Faster Charging and Increased Range? Solid State Batteries for EVs Explained
Many think this lithium ion alternative will nearly double vehicle range and reduce charging time, dramatically changing the perception and performance of electric vehicles.
These batteries can supposedly be recycled, if we can get the original material needed to make them. I imagine there is some loss in recycling.
As a former employee of a major lithium battery recycling organization, I have serious doubts that the narrative of “recycling” batteries which has been sold to the general public is anywhere close to reality.
Even if the “black mass” can be transformed back into usable battery components, you should see the amount of plastic (non-recyclable) waste that results from “recycling” batteries…
Anyways, hopefully I’m wrong and what has been promised will become a reality… but won’t be holding my breath.
Cheers,
-GBV
Keep in mind … we cannot even separate the materials in a plastic bottle during the recycling process… you cannot recycle and make like for like … the quality of the plastic steps down each time it is recycled…
So I agree – recycling batteries is likely impossible — or at the best will be incredibly expensive.
I have serious doubts that the narrative of “recycling” batteries which has been sold to the general public is anywhere close to reality.
Entropy tells us that complex products like lithium batteries or mobile phones can’t be recycled.
To produce metals we need concentrated metal ores, not tiny amounts of a metal mixed in with all kinds of other metals and materials in a manufactured gadget.
Is this a wind-up?
An energy recovery system using a spiral spring has been designed for a washing machine to increase the energy utilization efficiency and save energy. The energy recovery system absorbs and stores the rotational kinetic energy of the washing reservoir during deceleration and releases the stored energy to rotate the washing reservoir during acceleration.
The short answer is yes; we can use coils, springs and elastic bands to to store energy from intermittent sources such as as wind, solar, physical movement, etc., but don’t get your knickers in a twist.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666123322000411
I am … entertained
An energy recovery system using a spiral spring has been designed for a washing machine to increase the energy utilization efficiency and save energy.
This is like putting a wind turbine on top of your Tesla and using it to charge the battery as you drive.
Or heating a lithium battery — with energy from the battery – so the battery will charge… in -60C … on Mars…
Sooooo Weeeeeeeeee
I like this analogy
…where the water is now receding from the shoreline? (i.e., declining incidence of viral transmission, C-19 disease and mortality, but still with asymptomatic infections caused by highly infectious immune escape variants)…leading people on the shoreline to believe everything is ok?
Could the virus be the gathering energy/strategy (in this phase of unprecedented viral mutant propagation) needed to overcome the immense immune pressure being placed on it? (like in the formation of the tsunami)”
https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/when-a-tsunami-occurs-all-the-turbulent
Rapid Progression of Angioimmunoblastic T Cell Lymphoma Following BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine Booster Shot: A Case Report
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.798095/full
hahahahahaha….. this is fantastic stuff!!! And you’ll still keep boosting – right????
Great – I actually don’t want to dissuade you …
Slovakia Prime Minister Robert Fico Orders Investigation into COVID-19 Pandemic Management and Vaccines After 21,000 Excess Deaths Announced in Slovakia Since 2020
Speech to the Parliament on January 23, 2024
https://www.globalresearch.ca/slovakia-prime-minister-robert-fico-orders-investigation-covid-19-pandemic-management-vaccines-21000-excess-deaths-announced-slovakia-since-2020/5848126
Hmmm https://mishtalk.com/economics/banks-shares-plunge-and-dividends-cut-as-commercial-real-estate-losses-soar/
This looks like a major problem. It will tend to push bank stocks down, in all of the industrialized countries. Banks may go bankrupt.
Chapter 5 – The Great Enterprise in China 1600’s during the epic famines…
https://www.audible.com/pd/Global-Crisis-Audiobook/B0BN2XKWXB
Folks were eating their children … and anything green was immediately stripped by the starving people and consumed … everything.
Decent people had two choices – starve – or turn to banditry…
Mass murder and rape were in play big time
I recommend doomie preppers read this … it’s a reality check
Forget it, Eddy. It’s Chinatown.
And by the way, decent people don’t eat their own children.
They exchange them with the neighbors.
To counter a little your Hobbesian por.n complacency, let’s consider this Dutch girl, who managed to cross Africa alone, from Morocco to South Africa without being robbed, raped or murdered. And that passing through some of the poorest countries in the world, where just the value of her helmet would feed a family for six months.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be too fast in generalizing our western mentality of neurotic and degenerate atoms. These people would not eat their children, nor theirs neighbours children, rather they would grill their own hands to feed them, as any reasonable person.
I think you are underestimating what comes if BAU collapses and UEP fails.
No food. Nothing. No police. Desperation. Violence. People will kill for a can of tuna. In the China famine they sold their children for a sack of rice. Not sure what happened to the children – probably butchered and eaten. This sort of outcome is Guaranf789teed.
Never has there been a situation like this. Total global famine. Permanent. Cuz the supply chains won’t supply the petro chem fertilizers….
Your little girl will be gang raped then hosed down and cooked and eaten.
There will be no “total global famine”, but a substantial cull of the herd and controlled degrowth. IOW that slow collapse that you dogmatically assumed was impossible. Open your eyes & trust the planners.
hahaha… I guess that makes you feel better — but it is impossible
You need to read Korowicz….
JMS, are the planners omniscient and omnipotent, or are they simply the devolved descendants of competent psychopaths several generations back, mentally stuck in a bygone era of US hegemony? Do you really think they’re flailing desperately across the globe (Ukraine, ME) by choice?
There will be no “total global famine”, but a substantial cull of the herd and controlled degrowth.
Impossible. You can’t control an entropic collapse.
Do you really think they’re flailing desperately across the globe (Ukraine, ME) by choice?
We are setting the whole street on fire in the hope the fire will spread to our hated neighbour’s house across the street who is carrying out a lot of improvements currently.
I have been suggesting here since the beginning of 2020 that the system is being subject to controlled demolition, and everything I have seen since then has given me no reason to change my opinion.
The scamdemic, the Russian attack on demand and all the small political or social fires that are being lit serve the same purposes: to reduce the demand for resources and cull the population.
The planners are not omniscient and omnipotent, but they have a plan, and they have been fine-tuning it over the last 50 years. Also they have the means and the determination to implement it. Whether this plan will work or not is impossible to say.
But I am sure of this: the billionaire sociopaths that rule the world are not suicidal. They want to SURVIVE, and a kind of techno-feudalism seems to be the model of society they have in mind. Which means the 99% will own nothing but a subcutaneous chip through which their every movement and thought will be not only surveilled but DIRECTED, and the 1 % will inherit the bounties of the Earth.
Will it work? I don’t know. but at least it is a more sensible plan and more in line with the mentality of a sociopath than the foolish UEP proposed by FE.
The economy’s self-organizing system (powered by the laws of physics, with perhaps a helping hand from above) tends to work toward keeping the current system operating, while removing as many unnecessary parts of the system as possible. The Powers that Be can see parts of this plan. They can see that population can’t keep growing so fast, for example, so they do advocate policies somewhat in this direction, especially if they can profit from these policies.
But the self-organizing system seems to pull in parts that no one would have thought of. The fact that the US and many other countries had been working on bioweapons and that these bioweapons can be intentionally released, somehow played into the system. These viruses were made to be extra-harmful by splicing together part of the AIDS virus and part of something like a cold virus.
No one could suggest that the bioweapon virus was intentionally released because so many countries had been involved with the underlying research; the US government and governments around the world had helped fund this research. Some of the research was even done in Ukraine, because the US Congress had outlawed US research. Fauci was very much involved in funding this research.
I expect that the powers that be felt that the vaccine could be used to prevent a country’s own population from catching the illness, or from being seriously harmed by it. But the new “vaccine” that the health care industry had been working on for years had not been tested on humans, and it didn’t seem to work well on animals. There were lots of deaths.
The crazy new vaccine was harmful in its own way. There was a very high rate of injuries, noted even before it was released for the first time, but the makers kept this information hidden. The fact that there is no liability to pharmaceutical companies if a recipient gets sick or dies from the vaccine meant that quality control in the production of this vaccine was terrible. Also, the vaccine helped keep a mutated version of the virus circulating.
Pharmaceutical companies could make a huge amount of money by selling mandated vaccines. This was a major impetus for keeping the push for immunizations going.
Also, the immense power of groups that seem to be governmental or neutral, but they are influenced by organizations hoping to make money from the vaccines. The World Health Organization is heavily funded by supposedly do-good organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Big pharmaceutical companies are top funders for television and other media advertising, and they could veto articles that might point out problems with the vaccines.
Furthermore, the employees of the pharmaceutical companies move back and forth between the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companies. These employees know that their future job offers depend upon how favorably the pharmaceutical companies are treated. This problem is well enough known that it has a name: regulatory capture. Naming Anthony Fauci to be in charge of deciding what to do with the vaccine had huge problems because he was heavily tied in with the pharmaceutical industry. His wife was in charge of determining the ethics of giving this vaccine, so she could conveniently say everything was fine.
Yah, well, the pump won’t be working for the hose.
Perhaps you can memorize the lyrics to KOOMbaya and sing that when the roving gangs of murders show up at your door…
If that doesn’t work try singing Imagine…
It’s a good thing we have The Elders… they are putting in a huge effort to save you fools from yourselves… they will pre-empt collapse and stop the Gates of Hell from opneing
Don’t believe me? That’s fine, no problem.
But you’ll have a bit more trouble declaring this guy—Yang Jisheng—a liar and a porn merchant. The Guardian seemed to think his accounts of of the Great Leap Forward were legit.
When the head of a production brigade dares to state the obvious – that there is no food – a leader warns him: “That’s right-deviationist thinking. You’re viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter.”
Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.
The Great Famine remains a taboo in China, where it is referred to euphemistically as the Three Years of Natural Disasters or the Three Years of Difficulties. Yang’s monumental account, first published in Hong Kong, is banned in his homeland.
He had little idea of what he would find when he started work: “I didn’t think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody. I didn’t know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn’t know about farmers who were beaten to death.
“People died in the family and they didn’t bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone
And other Chinese authors have also covered the child eating that went on when the peasants were desperate.
A frequent greeting in China is, “Have you eaten?” Inadequate food supply has been a long-term issue in China, I would expect.
I suppose that ultimately the food supply problem led to the one-child per family requirement. The powers that be in China realized that China’s mountainous, drought-prone land could not support the current population level.
A frequent greeting in China is, “Have you eaten?”
In Bangladesh too. Bengalis insist on feeding you.
Had the same when I lived in India(Punjab) and when I lived in Western Asia(Arabs). Also experienced the same from South East Asians and Africans(north, west and eastern). In India a young Indian colleague refused payment for his wife to deliver my lunch each day, even when I pointed out that I was paying for less tasty food anyway. I’d imagine South America to be similar, but I have no experience there.
My experience is be friendly, don’t act like your something special and food and a warm welcome will always be offered. Food is a social binder for most of the world and when it’s not offered, it’s probably time to take a long hard look at yourself.
An old-fashioned Italian saying at the end of a meal is, “anche oggi abbiamo mangiato”..meaning “again today, we’ve eaten” (in the sense of, whatever else you can say, at least we’ve been able to eat).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1PUV8gO9qU
People seem to use it today in a joking way, but it stems from real concern. My husband’s grandmother would pick up and kiss any piece of bread or other food that fell to the floor.
Tim, myy point is not that cannibalism does not occur in situations of extreme need. My point is that planners are doing everything in their power to avoid a chaotic collapse that would lead to these extreme situations.
For me it is obvious that they believe they can manage degrowth.
Someone who can convince billions that humans have landed on the moon or to inject experimental drugs against a non-existent disease has every right to consider themselves all-powerful and capable of ensuring a smooth transition to the era of scarcity.
How do you manage the end of BAU?
No food. No fuel. No electricity. No medicine. No sanitation. You won’t be able to buy a tooth brush.
Unless they can work out how to stop BAU from collapsing then there is no managing it.
The best they can do – and they are doing it – is delay for as long as possible.
We all know what collapse looks like — 8B on the cold dark streets – angry as hell — and about to starve. They will quickly realize civilization is over – no cops – no courts… so civilized behaviour – always a veneer…. will end.
They will rape murder and pillage what is left. Then they will start eating each other. Cuz there will be nothing else to eat.
The Elders are managing the situation – they don’t want that scenario to play out — therefore they are exterminating us before BAU collapses
It makes total sense … it is what I would do. Notice how there is no pushback – that is because the highly placed minions of the Elders understand that there are no other options.
Kill everyone before collapse – or the Gates of Hell Open
I take your point, JMS. But in practice, managed degrowth is not going to be managed very smoothly.
It is going to require a lot more commitment, coordination and cooperation than humanity is collectively capable of bringing to the task. So I expect we will see chaotic regrowth or collapse sold to the masses as managed regrowth.
The product will be lousy, but with the right marketing, the PR team will be able to sell it as a spectacular success. “It would have been worse without …..” etc.
Another thing I always bear in mind is that the economic and social collapse are going on all the time at the individual and local level and always have been. The bulk of humanity is still living below, at, or not far above the poverty line, at the margins of survival, and a lot of people don’t survive as well as or for as long as they might have done if the planners were as smart as they pretend to be.
managed degrowth is the same as wil-e-coyote falling off a cliff
there is no management until you hit the bottom
She was a youtuber with her movement being tracked by GPS and had protection
Yea, a squad of teleported commandos was on standby to go and save her in less than 30 seconds.
Definitely more palatable to eat someone else’s child … if given the choice.
Fast has roiled the waters on another SS by suggesting the unvaxxed will die… just as the unvaxxed chickens all died…
Plenty of angry people screaming NO!!!!
That’s what happens when you force feed a MOREON a truth.
If I could lock them in a room and force them to listen to a presentation on this topic — looping it day and night — I suspect they’d go out of their minds and end up banging their heads on the floor repeatedly
https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/when-a-tsunami-occurs-all-the-turbulent/comments
Here was my reply..
“You could give them a thousand quotes, a dozen white papers linked to several key strategic philanthropists who also fund media, think tanks, scientists, policy makers and politicians who routinely leave their office to take a position at one of the above and they would still find some way to gaslight you. F789 em. When they get targeted and are crying they will appeal to authority, the self-organizing principle, the scientific method and when all else fails to protect them (because they have no teeth left to defend themselves) blame you for not warning them and then send more money, or votes or [ ] to their handlers asking for permission to exist, to maintain relevancy or to stroke their egos. The answer to strategic philanthropy fueling state violence was in the movie “Children to Men.” When they stop pretending to be nice and threaten to kill you for information or to silence you, shoot back or offer for them to pull your finger and call it a day, lol.”
A man who tells the truth, needs a fast horse
Saludos
el mar
A man who tells the truth, needs a fast horse
So true. Try telling normies about collapse and depletion and it makes them very angry.
So true… I had to get on my horse and out of GVB land asap.
The GVB mutation cometh https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/debut-of-ba-2-87-and-ba-2-87-1-is-a-warning-that-sars-cov-2-is-evolving-at-an-unprecedented-rate-and-is-heading-towards-worrisome-trajectories
I heard it as a Leonard Nimoy clip, on KMO’s old podcast: “If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.”
My version of “roiling the waters” is to tell resetters that the jab was part 1 of an IQ/compliance selection process for fasttracking gene based cures ahead of a plotted bottleneck. The protected classes were fooled into the cattle corral and are actually the ones being replaced by immigrants and hillbillies who refused the rat juice. The absurb health, enery, economic and social justice policies are “obvious tells” to the “knuckedraggers” to prepare for a low tech, low energy future, a contingency in case the “next revolutionary discovery of cheap energy effcient generation, transmision and storage” isnt just around the corner. In this context, radiation and genetic adaptations from SFPs may be a noticeable improvement for some backwoods American rednecks. Dad and his friends were groundhog hunting in a rural county and happened upon a ramshackle group building a dwelling from salvaged items. They stopped to snap a Polaroid and the country folk came boiling out of the compound like yellowjackets. Healthy survival instinct.
Know I’m not following these things as closely as you are, Fast, but in the last GVB interview I watched (a couple of weeks ago) he suggested that he didn’t think the unvaccinated were at risk of dying from upcoming virulent strains like the vaccinated are.
Did I miss something GVB suggested, or is it your opinion that the risk to the unvaccinated is due to some other factor?
Thanks,
-GBV (not GVB)
He has not said this … but I have … cuz there are parallels with Marek’s… only difference is one of intent…
And all the unvaxxed chickens died.
1+1… = …2
I did the logic … and the math
Keep in mind .. GVB would be horrified if he did the logic …. so perhaps he prefers not to go there so he doesn’t?
Extinction is a difficult concept to stomach…. when one’s species is involved.
Me? I enjoy going there cuz of the horrible stuff we do in these animal experiments and on industrial farms.
Putin’s new announcement seems similar to what Britain did way back when in Ireland when it removed all of the civilian population from areas around its strongholds. The issue back then was guerilla attacks on supply lines. Now the issue is missile range.
It does not look like Russia is going to muck about with its security.
It will be interesting to see what happens afterwards in the Baltics/ Scandinavia as they have very much stepped up on Russia’s borders which is how the issue started with UKR/ Georgia.
So the terms of the SMO in UKR are to majorly expand now.
This from last year.
> Russia wants demilitarised buffer zones in Ukraine, says Putin ally
MOSCOW, March 24 (Reuters) – Russia wants to create demilitarised buffer zones inside Ukraine around areas it has annexed, an ally of President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, saying it might be necessary to push deeper into Ukraine if such zones cannot be set up.
Former President Dmitry Medvedev, who casts himself as Putin’s most publicly hawkish official, said Russia needed demilitarised corridors around the areas it is claiming – and which Ukraine says it will never accept Russian control of.
“We need to achieve all the goals that have been set to protect our territories, that is the territories of the Russian Federation,” Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said in an interview with Russian media posted on Telegram.
We need to “throw out all the foreigners who are there in the broad sense of the word, create a buffer zone which would not allow the use of any types of weapons that work at medium and short distances, that is 70-100 kilometres, to demilitarise it,” Medvedev said.
Russia would have to push further into Ukraine if such zones were not established, he said, taking Kyiv the capital or even the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Ukraine says it will never accept Russian occupation of its land.
This is today.
> Putin’s New Ukraine Plan Out
I can see why Russia would like a demilitarized zone that is large enough to keep NATO-made weapons away from Russian cities. If this report is correct, 25 Russian people were killed in one attack and 27 in another, due to missile or drone strikes.
“We need to “throw out all the foreigners who are there in the broad sense of the word,…”
Apparently the French suffered a recent bombing of mercenaries. People want the foreigners out, they want peace and trouble makers are not welcome.
The world is unfolding in interesting ways. I wish my country would come home and we could work to heal our own wounds. We have a great deal to be thankful for and it is time to give thanks, let Harvard and the rest go abroad if they wish, but do so without the rest, and do so without our taxes.
Dennis L.
Fake,
If it was real then who needs a DMZ to keep NATO weapons away — much easier to just throttle back the gas — particularly in the middle of winter…
And inform them to remove the NATO weapons
See how easy it could be.
But Pootie doesn’t
Therefore the conclusion must be…
It’s all Fake
Since now the armored drones can fly 1000km Putin will have to conquer the whole of Ukraine for a buffered DMZ . 😂
Armoured drones? Do you mean military drones? Ukraine has no drones that can fly anything like 1,000 km.
May we freshen up our China cogitations?
In depth analysis today from Andy Xie, a Shanghai economist whom I follow and have previously cited here.
He compares China today with Japan of the early 1980s leading into the Plaza Accord which ended the availability of Suntory Rare being way less than Scotch.
Both were characterised by previously unimaginable financial bubbles and the article discusses resolution mechanisms such as fx
It’s an interesting snaphot on what out there looks like from his side.
The global economy is on a path to an economic crisis that could be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. The yuan’s peg to the dollar at such a low value risks fuelling the bubbles that would lead to a crash.
Fortunately, China’s bubble is deflating before it is too late. But the US’ bubble is getting bigger. As it sucks savings from around the world to sustain its bubble, its bursting will impoverish people around the world.
scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3250307/why-stronger-yuan-actually-good-chinas-sluggish-economy
ever the optimist
This is an interesting article. It says:
I would think that the reason that China is experiencing deflation is because China is deflating its debt bubble. The US has been experiencing inflation because it is inflating its debt bubble.
With less energy, the current amount of debt is not sustainable. Is any kind of soft way down, by eliminating least necessary, possible?
Yes, Starship, prospect for Pt, Pd, we know how to use those metals, they are high value, build fuel cells with them. Use solar to convert water into H, storage, transmission.
We have AI, we don’t have to do everything ourselves; copilot works very well, that is where Musk’s $1B in solar energy calculation was done, it is also great for programming.
It can be done, it isn’t that hard; make a choice, a SUV or a Camry Hybrid.
Dennis L.
AI does not exist.
https://www.demorgen.be/nieuws/politieagent-vuurt-van-dichtbij-rubberkogels-af-op-jongere-bij-brusselse-rellen~bcc23b50/
Looks like fun https://vigilantnews.com/post/chaos-erupts-in-brussels-as-rubber-bullets-fired-at-farmers-protesting-outside-eu-parliament/
In idiocracy they have a saying … he’s the dummmbest person in the room … that’s a compliment….
Do you receive a lot of compliments from friends, family, and neighbors?
laughing quietly.
Dennis L.
Fast Eddy has no friends, family or neighbours
I feel for you FE.
Dennis L.
be careful who you feel for dennis
maybe you will in Oz!
Fast Eddy… is not me.
Unfortunately he can’t leave his personality in New Zealand.
Fast Eddy indicates that HE will accompany us to Aussie
The very idea of an alternative to OPEC is simply laughable.
Human Civilization, whether you like or not , depends upon the ability of USA to extract the resources and labor from the rest of the world.
If that breaks, that means the end of USA, and the end of Civilization, and the end of the ability to advance to Type I Civ and all that.
The moment the US hegemony breaks, it is the End.
Perhaps the “alternative to OPEC” should be described as a group of countries, deciding how to deal with the energy situation, when OPEC is clearly leaving them out. China, with its coal, came to the rescue for a while, but now that is running short, also.
Trying hard not to be rude or argumentative.
Musk is already providing $1B of electricity from sun.
We are going forward
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=commonwealth%20fusion%20systems&mid=4C45FDE7E89F1D3936E14C45FDE7E89F1D3936E1&ajaxhist=0
Looks like a fairly interesting company to me, stock is traded OTC I think. If it works, one could double up and short SA and oil. Oil is so yesterday, so dirty, so heavy in CO2. Yes, I am going to look into it, beats owing an office building. I sold mine maybe fifteen years ago, always try and beat the rush and crowds.
https://www.cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-systems-closes-1-8-billion-series-b-round
Fellow named Gates kicked a few bucks. Anyone here ever heard of him?
Always looking ahead.
If one runs too much with head down, shoulder to the wheel and butt well protected sometimes something bites you in the posterior.
Dennis L.
These efforts are called ‘drops in a bucket’
But some people just have to wait for Godot
kul,
Pretty big drops.
Dennis L.
A mere billion is nothing nowdays
Musk just said there should be a carbon tax (assumedly global, because how else?):
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1753837756793466975
Please explain what Type I Civilization is?
spacefaring
He’s read too much sci fi and played Civilization too much.
kul,
I am not sure what to think, an aircraft carrier is a target and very expensive to maintain at that. Maybe we could try coming home and let the world sort its own problems out; we have plenty of our own to work on.
Dennis L.
I agree with you Kulm . We are not in a post WW2 situation where the move from the British Empire (British Pound) to the American Empire (US Dollar) was smoothly transitioned . Today there is nobody to take on the role of the empire . The Russians and the Chinese are good students of their own history and know the costs and perils of running an empire . Within the BRICS is itself a fracture some Russia +Iran wants to crash the US immediately as it is pretty well self sufficient on the other hand the Chinese want to wait it out and let the empire gut itself . Until the Chinese come on board nothing will happen . China is now the Saudi Arabia of manufactured goods . They have too much invested in the current financial system , As the situation stands today either the world retains statuesque and trundles along loosing an arm (Ukraine) a leg (Gaza) and some wounds ( farmer protests etc) or just collapses into absolute chaos . There is no safety net . The past is dying and the future is yet to be born ,
“BRICS dominance surges with 47% of world’s oil – Where does the U.S. stand?
” … The United States currently holds only 2.1% of the world’s oil, while the BRICS alliance controls 47%. If payment in native currencies is required from developing countries, the United States dollar will be severely impacted. Detailed below is the total amount of oil held by each BRICS nation.
“Saudi Arabia owns 17% of global oil production, Russia holds 12%, Iran has 9.5%, The United Arab Emirates holds 5.9%, China has 1.5%, Brazil accounts for 1%, and India has 0.3%. This brings the total a whopping 47%.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/brics-dominance-surges-with-47-of-world-s-oil-where-does-the-u-s-stand/ar-BB1hBwWi
I don’t know quite what this analysis is supposedly counting. My guess is “proven reserves without very heavy oil,” or something like that. Except I still don’t think these amounts are at all comparable. Whether or not Saudi Arabia claims its reserves are audited, I am skeptical of the article’s claim that Saudi Arabia owns 17% of oil production.
Forgot the link — https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/brics-dominance-surges-with-47-of-world-s-oil-where-does-the-u-s-stand/ar-BB1hBwWi
US + Canada is producing 19+ mbpd of black goo crude.
Canada only has 2 mbpd of refining capacity.
most of the 19+ mbpd is used in US refineries.
is any country anywhere close to this massive amount of refining?
I doubt it.
There was some discussion here about semiconductor materials with orders-of-magnitude (terahertz) speed improvements. I mentioned Gallium Nitride as one. Here is another that I was unaware of: silicon carbide + graphene.
https://youtu.be/wGzBuspS9JI?t=432
it’s not possible to build a whole new graphene based chip infrastructure, nor can we really produce sheets of graphene. it will remain in the lab forever, getting regular outings as the next big thing on youtube of course.
If you watch the video, you will see that she addresses that. Yes, they were able to build large defect-free lattices. I know that many still use the “scotch tape method” for separating graphene sheets, but they’ve moved past that.
Yes, they were able to build large defect-free lattices.
I don’t believe them. A new startup grifting for money I assume?
The speed of the transistor plus the wire to connect it to the next transistor is what counts. We are at the stage where the wire is the major delay. We can make the transistor infinitely fast and it will make little different.
I guess they’re studying it for no reason, then…
Elon Musk takes Tesla’s life-size robot Optimus for a test walk as critics cry, ‘Kill it with fire!’ By Richard Pollina Published Jan. 31, 2024, 6:18 a.m. ET
Tesla CEO Elon Musk took the company’s humanoid robot Optimus on a short walk, but not everyone seemed to be on board, some quipping to “kill it with fire.”
Going for a walk with Optimus,” Musk posted on X Wednesday, updating the world on the bot’s progress in a 15-second clip.
The video shows the robot moving slowly around a room while a small group of people observe its movements.
The Tesla CEO has said in the past the goal is to create a robot “capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring.”
https://nypost.com/2024/01/31/tech/elon-musk-takes-teslas-life-size-robot-optimus-for-a-test-walk-kill-it-with-fire/amp/
That task is probably someone’s employment….
Oh, walking is a repetitive task too…hardest thing to duplicate in an android
>> The Tesla CEO has said in the past the goal is to create a robot “capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring.”
“Unsafe” … like war
This heap of junk has flat feet and walks like a geriatric. It can still barely stand up on its own. It’s going nowhere other than landfill when Elon’s house of cards falls.
Unsafe may include “cause fires or explosions,” or “requires climbing wind turbines in high winds to replace parts.”
I am positive Musk, but I am not positive Optimus. a dangerous, repetitive task would be pulling a trigger. Technology is moving very fast.
We see Tesla and cars, I see Tesla with large AI and robots making cars, or learning production. Ford and GM are so twentieth century. Also, I am concerned about my nation, and I am concerned about the black community; traditionally UAW jobs were a way up for blacks; it is in the news. We have DEI officers at the elite colleges essentially cheating, they have struggled to the top of that pile, what if it is a hill of sand and the tide is coming in? Sometimes even the elites need to change a tune. Maybe they can learn to code.
Progress is necessary, deindustrializing the US because the coasts saw the working man as a “deplorable” was dumb. I think it tore up the foundation of our society which gave a man a working wage and a purpose. I know it was make jobs, economics is an invention of biology; life will be hard as hell with out economics.
The earth is biology, we are the peak of the known universe, we are meant to be here, but it looks like a few bumps in the road.
Dennis L.
Technology is moving very fast
No it isn’t. A robot far better than Elon’s movie prop existed 20 years ago.
To my eye every job in the car factory is boring.
Yes, you are correct, but you are as I recall a physicist. For some it is a living and it is pride in being useful. We have denigrated being useful and the elites think only their pompous policies will save the world, etc.
Perhaps I am a fool, but in my youth men and yes women came home from the La Crosse Rubber Mills, manufacture of footwear. They had homes in our neighborhoods and the grass was cut.
You are vey bright, but then you know at your level what the competition is like. At times cutting the grass is peaceful.
For a couple of years, while an undergraduate(I tried everything) did research in a building where every so often a Nobel Laureate would visit. Ran an experiment with an ultra centrifuge, long run, bearing failed, six months of work lost, rinse and repeat. Had to hand pipet what seemed like millions of paramecium to get an adequate sample size of DNA. That is boring work and seeing the gradients gone was more than a bit discouraging. Decided something with paper had advantages, left that and went to trade school to make a living; that was not exciting either, but a nice living and useful.
Dennis L.
I am trying to make the point Elon’s line about only boring jobs are at risk is bull. The robots will do most jobs.
(Reuters)
I don’t know if you’ve heard in US, but there is a big farmers’ protest across Europe.
The main problem for me, although they try to paint it in thousands different ways, is diesel.
The problem is even worse now with war with Russia.
I find it funny how most people and journalists miss this point or anyway have been taught not to understand how diesel is fundamental for society and where it comes from.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/farmers-anger-spreads-in-europe-governments-promise-help/ar-BB1hC8rN
People overwhelmingly believe diesel can be replaced by ‘electricity’.
Working on it Withnail, one photon at a time so to speak.
Relax, it is sort of a joke.
Dennis L.
It is hard for people to see how the self-organizing economy works. The EU cannot afford to import very much in the way of diesel and other energy products. Fertilizer is in some sense an energy product, as well, because it takes a huge amount of energy (from coal or natural gas) to make ammonia. Ammonia has been used as a fuel in the past; it can also be created using unneeded energy from wind turbines.
The EU is not making a whole lot for export; its cost structure is too high. The standard of living is too high relative to what it is producing from the fossil fuels it imports. It doesn’t produce enough fossil fuels of its own.
Something needs to be squeezed out. Governments may figure out that it can’t be the farmers, but that will mean that some other groups will pay higher taxes, or won’t get the benefits they expected. For example, retiree pensions could get squeezed down, or funding for universities, or subsidies for electricity for consumers.
Good points.
I think that retiree pensions will be reduced thanks to the on going periodic programs of flu and covid winter vaccinations.
At the same time governments are elevating the minimum age to retire.
Therefore pensions will be progressively a lower burden for Europe.
Kill them softly… I think there is also a song.
Roberta Flack?
Great song, great voice.
https://youtu.be/mrudT410TAI?feature=shared
In the UK ‘vulnerable’ people of all ages are still being boosted against ‘COVID’. I think over-65 or -70s are automatically considered to need ‘protection’ although the healthiest among them aren’t taking any pills and may live to 95-100 if they stay away from the quacks.
“We invite you to attend for your slow euthanasia injection at 09.30 h on Wednesday 7th. Feb. 2024 and we thank you for planning to leave this world earlier than expected. You can feel proud that you are doing your bit for overpopulation.”
I bloody well ‘did my bit’ 45 years ago by not having children. ‘The Population Bomb’ had made the problem obvious.
I think the UK (& Denmark) have always planned for a steady rise in pension age. It’s now 67 or so in both countries. Yet in the USA or France it seems as if you can retire in your early 60s. The UK recently suspended its planned rise in pension age to 68 because, guess what … lifespan has stopped rising.
The easiest way to cast off some of the population is by geography rather than social status i.e. retired. Cities are easy to isolate. The farmers will be the new elite.
There will be no farms for a few centuries.
Longer than that … the toxins from the spent fuel ponds last for many thousands of years… a doomie prepper can eat a carrot infused with the toxins … die from cancer… and the toxins will not have degraded one bit… they go back into the soil and water.
Recycling at its finest!!!
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/split-international-energy-agency-two-avoid-shocks
Split The International Energy Agency Into Two To Avoid Shocks
I have been very aware of this problem for a long time. When I was at The Oil Drum a few years ago, I did some investigating. The IEA is an extremely close affiliate of the OECD. At the time I checked, they had their offices in the same building in Paris. The IEA is the agency that has sent estimates of future carbon emission to the IPCC analysts. These carbon emissions depend very much on what assumptions are made about future extraction. The assumptions seemed to be very much higher than published reserve estimates implied.
OPEC was established in September 1960, and OECD was established in September 1961. A person can’t help but think but that OECD was partly set up to counter OPEC.
It’s nice to dream….I do, Unicorns and Magic Dragons forever..
NEWS COMMODITIES
It will take years for the oil and gas market to recover from the ‘mother of all shocks,’ Harvard economist says
Jennifer Sor Jan 31, 2024, 11:53 AM
Oil and gas prices have been affected by the “mother of all shocks,” a Harvard economist says.
Energy prices have seen wild swings since the pandemic, and the impact is still being felt.
“When there is an energy shock, it can take a huge price change to clear the market,” Kenneth Rogoff said.
Oil and gas prices are stuck on a roller coaster caused by the “mother of all shocks,” as the supply-demand imbalance from the pandemic is still roiling energy markets, says Kenneth Rogoff, a top economist.
The Harvard professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist pointed to the wild ride that oil and gas prices have taken over the past few years, with energy prices plunging in the wake of the pandemic and skyrocketing when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Brent crude plunged as low as $14 a barrel in 2020 before soaring to a peak of $133 a barrel in June 2022. Similar swings were seen in US gas prices, which plunged to a low of $1.77 a gallon in 2020 before peaking around $5 a gallon in 2022, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Energy prices have eased in recent months, with Brent trading around $80 a barrel and gas prices cooling to around $3 a gallon. That’s largely due to fears of a coming recession in the US and the potential impact on demand.
But over the long term, oil and gas prices are expected to trend higher — and prices are set to continue to see big bouts of volatility as the unprecedented shock from the pandemic continues to roll through the market.
“When there is an energy shock, it can take a huge price change to clear the market. And the pandemic was the mother of all shocks, bringing about the biggest sustained shift in demand since World War II,” Rogoff said.
The world’s total oil demand was estimated to have risen 2.3 million barrels a day last year, according to the International Energy Agency. By 2050, demand could skyrocket as high as 42%, per an EIA estimate.
More energy giants are investing to ramp up their crude-oil production, with the US seeing more than $100 billion of oil mega-mergers in 2023. But it could take years for those investments to fix the industry’s chronic undersupply problem, some experts have warned — which means prices are probably climbing higher for the time being.
Like Gail has said, economists assume more oil with more price doesn’t necessarily mean it’s so
Economists come up with lots of theories. Some of them are right; others aren’t. The fact that there has been consolidation in the tight oil and gas industry business doesn’t necessarily mean a great deal of investment, going forward.
But if there are real efficiencies to be gained, perhaps consolidation can be helpful, because they can spread ideas that work more quickly. For example, perhaps there is some efficiency to be gained by tight oil and gas fields generating electricity from some of the locally produced electricity, and using this electricity to power their operations. (Offshore drilling has been using this approach for years.) The efficiencies may help get more oil and gas out at a lower price.
TM has a new post with a concluding paragraph as follows:
“If we don’t mind stretching the relationship between the financial and the material, we can carry on, perhaps for a while longer yet, creating additional transactional activity by pouring new credit into the system. This describes the simulacrum of “growth” that economies have been reporting in the age of subsidized money.”
On earth there has never been renewable energy, all energy in one form or another degrades, energy comes from fusion or some sort of internal process which is poorly understood. I like TM, but he talks of economic value; what is that? Economics is a human creation, it is biology interacting with “stuff” on earth, organic and inorganic.
The universe has more than enough energy and the source of that energy is unknown, currently it started with a bang so they say, or is it a multiverse? What was there before the big bang? If you believe in the big bang all matter came from energy in a bang.
Earth is biology, it is designed for biology, the universe is energy, when it wants stuff from energy it makes a big bang, when it wants to transmute stuff to different stuff it novas a star. We are talking scale here,
Get mineral extraction, manufacturing and exogenous energy usage off our planet, metaphorically put waste in the solar garbage dump, Jupiter.
Climate change is a contentious topic, my position is we don’t understand well the earth systems, don’t screw with them, let them to their job.
Population will take care of itself, biology is self regulating. Economics will be economics, we don’t really understand why economies go up and down and even when they go up and down.
Until we master teleportation, or some sort of enormous space ship with radiation hardening, etc, we are going to use earth as our spaceship. It can rearrange our goals, we need earth, time to spiff it up and take some of the load back to the universe where it came from. Go Starship.
Dennis L.
This is a link to Tim Morgan’s post that Dennis is discussing:
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/270-normalising-money-and-value/
Tim Morgan says:
This is Tim Morgan’s chart of both the past and his expectation of the future, taking out his view of the distortion of added debt.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.files.wordpress.com/2024/01/270b.jpg
Almost embarrassed to say that I actually found this interesting on Mike Adams Brighteon site featuring Matt Bracken. (Very seldom do I watch Mike Adams.) Usually self serving but in this case forget all the sales pitches and if you have 50 minutes and are doing other tasks like I was (photographing 10,000 old 35 mm film to convert digitally) this might be worth a casual listen.
Asymmetric economics of war: a $10,000 drone requires a 2 million anti-missile defense, even if the SSSSS missile hits the drone or not.
LNG tankers are easy targets in the ocean. US can not manage the logistics of any major war against a peer or near peer adversary, which would now include Iran. US made batches of weapons per contract and then shut the production facilities down after the contract had ended and no more easy money to be made. Can’t restart. Russia, on the other hand, will (can)convert washing machine production back and forth to military production if need be. Russia makes weapons that need to work. US makes weapons that need to sell to male money for the MIC. MIC could care less if the soldier’s life gets wasted because the US made weapon doesn’t work just when the soldier’s life depends on it. Like the Stoner original M-16A1 rifles jamming in the early stages of the Vietnam War because of the powder fouling.
The USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier is a mess. Catapults and elevators don’t work, etc. easily sunk with a missile.
The difference between US weapons which are made for profit and to spread grift versus Russian weapons which are made to work and to be as economical as possible.
Interesting comments about TEXIT, how it would start the great rebuild after “the collapse” by first restoring the refining production facilities along the Texas coast and then incrementally expanding sphere of local influence to the rest of Texas. He flat out acknowledged the absolute need for energy to rebuild , and that at least added to his credibility.
https://www.brighteon.com/788181ea-a851-4700-ba1d-32994771181f
In line with this idea, Ukraine and British reports today show video of explosive-laden drone-boats destroying another Russian cruiser.
I’m drawing a complete blank on that story, what’s the name of the Russian ship supposedly hit?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAx3F8vdeU8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDZVA_2t0PY
“The Ivanovets, a $70million missile cruiser, went down on January 31”
One video is The Daily Mail and the other is The Telegraph, both UK outfits, I believe.
A corvette. Sunk completely we are told. Jan 31st or Feb 1st? There are contradictory dates on the stories.
It may be true but it looks dodgy. Russia would have said something by now if it had been sunk yesterday i would have thought.
anything reported by the uk daily mail should be read with a salt gritting truck standing by
But everything reported by Huff and BBC … should be taken as gospel …
Right norm
hahahahaha
About that chopper on Mars… how did they charge the battery?
I had a look at Russian media and official defence channels and nothing. Even checked Andrei Martyanov’s blog, still nothing and the video looks like another game.
I think it would be all over western media if true.
380000 UKEY soldiers are dead… so they say … we should be seeing endless clips of this carnage … but we see almost nothing…
Cuz it’s FAKE
But then most of ya’ll believe the chopper battery charged in -60C on Mars …. so there is that
Like how the Ghost of Kiev … also a video game … was all over the MSM?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+of+kiev&ia=web
hahahahaha
Just like the helicopter that can charge it’s batteries in -60C (miracle!) was all over the MSM…
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=helicopter+flight+mars&iar=news&ia=news
When will ya’ll learn… not to trust bbccnn????
Never. You can’t. You do not have any horse powers.
Good point!
“The difference between US weapons which are made for profit and to spread grift versus Russian weapons which are made to work and to be as economical as possible.”
This reminds me of the US healthcare system. It is mostly meant to increase profits/wages to participants in the system, while providing the appearance of benefit. It certainly is not as economical as possible. It can even go off into selling products that are harmful over the long term.
Second paragraph, agree in the most part.
Dennis L.
We seem to be at the beginning of another banking crisis triggered by commercial real estate problems, worldwide.
Bloomberg is reporting:
US Property Losses Trigger 20% Drop in Japanese Bank Aozora
Aozora follows NYCB in reporting property losses in the US; US commercial property market has been hit by rising rates.
What happens when all the US banks have to write down their CRE by anywhere between 30-50% ? Smell the waste fill .😒
Devalue the dollar 10-15% per year and the banks are nominally made whole in 3 years due to rising asset prices.
Perhaps they won’t and the Fed will just buy the lot and make the whole… then flog it into the market at a huge loss… and fill that hole with more trillions
It’s sort of like a magic trick….
And it will keep BAU alive … till Pathogen X emerges….
Whatever it takes.. is what they will continue to do…
It’s a race between The Pathogen … and collapse.
Hopefully The Pathogen wins… cuz otherwise… ROF and cannibalism…
https://www.artberman.com/blog/aramco-development-halt-has-nothing-to-do-with-oil-demand/
Saudi is confirmed to have 7 years of global supply (by a recent external audit) in reserve or 60 years at their current 12mbpd extraction rate. So, Saudi is A-OK and so are the rest of us through 2030.
Any problems we have in the near term will be social, geopolitical, and financial, but as far as resources go, it’s BAU forever! All hail the status quo!
” But there is widespread scepticism about the official estimates, which were abruptly raised without explanation from 170 billion barrels in 1987 to 260 billion in 1989.
Official reserves have remained constant every year since then at 260-265 billion barrels, even as the country has consumed or exported another 94 billion barrels (“Statistical Review of World Energy”, BP, 2016).
See thru the lie . A post from 2016 but still holds true .
https://theamericanenergynews.com/energy-news/opinion-saudi-arabia-oil-reserves-big-really
The author is John Kemp . Very credible .
Another one by Euan Mearns . TOD .
https://euanmearns.com/the-aramco-ipo-and-the-black-art-of-estimating-oil-reserves/
I am familiar with the upward revisions in the 80’s when OPEC agreed on production quotas based on known reserves. Of course there may well be and probably is a lot of monkey business, but really we don’t know. It is also possible that reserves have increased because newer tech makes previously inaccessible deposits possible and economical. Art argues that the group doing the reserve audit is very credible and respected. Time will tell.
Ivan, the group audit firm cited by Art is the one that did the audit for Aramco when they wanted to be listed on the NYSE . The audit was rejected as being over inflated . Tine will tell is correct .
>> The audit was rejected as being over inflated
Rejected by who?
They had an IPO, so it it has been accepted by the relevant legal and institutional players.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/05/investing/saudi-aramco-ipo-price/index.html
The audits
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15B1G8/
All of them done by those who have something to make money from
The behavior of Mohammed bin Salman shows some kind of desperation. It is not something done by a monarch in that region who is secure and safe. He knows something nasty will happen to the ibn Saud clan and is doing whatever he can to avoid his fate
Can Saudi oil make up for the rest of the world as it starts to decline? I think the U. S fraking is at its peak. It will be a quick drop off from here?
Has technology improved that much? It seems like the price is high enough to go after it.
>> The behavior of Mohammed bin Salman shows some kind of desperation.
What, namely? He is pivoting to the new power brokers (the hordes in your view).
What strikes me as desperate is the ongoing US/EU attempt to break Russia in a mission that is clearly failing and now further flailing in the Middle East against third-rate opponents. The decrepitude is now visible to all.
I say that with ambivalence; I live in the US and will suffer from the fallout, but the bill (in both moral and financial terms) has come due.
Beyond growth or collapse (dualism)
BAU lite (float)
Sam , no . What is more interesting to look at is their export capacity . Down from peak of 8.5 mbpd to 5.63 mbpd . See graph in this article .
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-01/saudi-crude-oil-exports-plummet-as-opec-giant-slashes-production
They also imported discounted Russian oil for their domestic consumption to enable them free their own production for exports . A tidbit .
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-arabia-imports-record-russian-fuel-oil-june-trade-grows-2023-07-13/#:~:text=The%20kingdom%20has%20ramped%20up,of%202022%2C%20the%20data%20showed.
Domestic consumption will likely drop substantially, since it’s a very conservative country and those places drank the punch in gallons.
IATM , no domestic consumption will not fall . KSA has to burn oil to produce electricity . There is no coal, gas , hydro or nuclear . Demand for electricity is on the rise because of air-conditioning and desalination plants . Domestic price of petrol is $ 2.18 per gallon . Most sold vehicles in KSA are all 4WD’s . Gas guzzlers . Jevons paradox .
They will get nuclear fairly soon. Two plants from S. Korea, but contacts between Rosatom and the Saudis have started. I think they mostly burn gas nowadays, in fact they have so much gas they even produce aluminum with it, more than the US produces.
The big thing is that Saudi Arabia’s capacity for oil production is not to be increased. It is pretty certain that it does not make economic sense to increase its capacity. I would expect that is the reason that the idea of increasing its capacity was set aside.
As raviuppal4 points out below, Saudi Arabia’s exports are crashing. As they continue to cut production (because prices are not high enough) exports will fall further. The reserve numbers don’t mean much.
drb , the situation of NG is balanced . They have NG but it is used by SABIC as a feedstock for its downstream petrochemical operations . They do not burn gas for electricity . As to nuclear , see my post of today on this subject .
(Al Arabya + Jerusalem Post)
“IMF, Egypt reach initial deal, pound to undergo swift devaluation: Al Arabiya sources.
Egypt has reached a preliminary agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a revised loan, a government official told Al-Arabiya and Al-Hadath channels on Wednesday.
The agreement includes an immediate devaluation of the Egyptian pound and an increase in the financing program from $3 billion to $7 billion or more, along with an extension of its duration.”
https://english.alarabiya.net/business/banking-and-finance/2024/01/31/IMF-Egypt-reach-initial-deal-pound-to-undergo-swift-devaluation-Al-Arabiya-sources
“Sisi’s plea to citizens: Cut Egypt’s birth rate”
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-758565
Sanity from a politician? Good grief.
For as long as I remember politicians in countries like France and Russia have regularly exhorted citizens to breed faster. Yet in 2022 Macron acknowledged ‘the end of abundance’.
The deal means more debt and more interest payments to the IMF. It puts off the day of reconning a little farther. I am not sure how much the devaluation of the currency means; the article talks about the Egyptian Pound trading at two different rates in the black market and in banks. It may mean that banks need to recognize what the black market has already recognized.
Hey norm … here’s your way out of the clutches of Super Snatch
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/uk-sex-doll-brothel-blokes-31654636
A money raising scheme.
Hang on … how is this possible? I thought they were running low on steel?
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/real-victors-all-bloodshed-us-arms-exports-hit-record-high-2023
Could be fake … but if it’s fake then surely the share prices of these companies would be tumbling…. who wants to check for me?
Nevermind…
But meanwhile, standing in the gap remains the major US defense firms, with the biggest companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman leading the way. As global instability rises, so do their stock prices… https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-arms-exports-hit-record-high-fiscal-2023-2024-01-29/
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_mobile/public/inline-images/baecontr.jpg
Hahahahahahahahahaha… ya’ll been Sasha’ed
Kiss the ring
I hope you get to Oz soon.
it appears your mind is cracking a bit in your last days in NZ.
may you enjoy a decade or two of fine bAU in your new home.
Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics expect existing orders for hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds, hundreds of Patriot missile interceptors, and a surge in orders for armored vehicles will underpin their results in coming quarters.
Where did the metal come from????
WTF? Share price is UP????
https://www.reuters.com/markets/companies/RTX.N
https://www.reuters.com/markets/companies/KOG.OL
I sure hope you fellas didn’t use your amazing insights into the steel market and short these companies … cuz you won’t have a pot to piss in if this continues…
Feel free to call Fast Eddy a homo or a re-tard… if it makes ya’ll feel better
hahahahahahaha
Ya’ll been played… again.
Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics expect existing orders for hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds
They don’t make them and have no factories that can.
Still waiting on the OIO condition … which is ‘99.5% assured’… then we exit this godforsaken place. If not … it was not meant to be… and we die at the Goat Ranch…
Remember … Marek’s killed all unvaxxed chickens… hurrah… no starvation!!!
Thank you Dr Fawchee… you done good
Meanwhile back at the ranch.. I looked into Australian wild rabbits and it looks like they are of the European variety. If and when you relocate and unleash ERM, please use proper firearm safety and check downrange before discharging any shotguns in mixed residential and agricultural areas. Dad is still haggling with a neighbor and fellow club member on a signed contract to log some trees that backstop the range as this guy reported a bullet striking his house 20+ years ago.
I am hearing that it is very difficult to get a firearms license living in a metro area… so the shotgun and crate of buckshot will get sold… the only weapons I will bring are two hunting knives…
We have been told the OIO is 99.5% certain to pass… if it fails… then that guarantees that we are in a simulation … and the simulation is not allowing us to leave the Goat Ranch.
But meanwhile, standing in the gap remains the major US defense firms, with the biggest companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman leading the way.
None of which produce artillery shells. But why wouldn’t they start making them, with such demand? It’s a mystery.
Billions for tanks — steel…
The U.S. has increased its output of 155mm shells far faster than it originally forecasted, and plans to increase it further—if Congress can pass a budget for the nearly two-month-old fiscal year. Europe has moved more slowly than it intended to, hampered by the consensus-focused nature of NATO and the EU.
The Army hit the target early, then exceeded it, producing 28,000 shells in October.
Bush said the service now aims to boost its monthly production to 36,000 by March, 60,000 by September, 70,000 to 80,000 in early 2025, and 100,000 by the end of calendar 2025 — two and half times more than Wormuth’s year-old goal.
As part of this push, the Army has added shifts, bought robots, and expanded its ammunition plants, Bush said.
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-make-artillery-shells-us-eu-see-different-results/392288/
You just got Sasha’ed
hahahahahahaha
Maybe you should do some research before you post — so you don’t look like such a fool
The U.S. has increased its output of 155mm shells far faster than it originally forecasted
Great news! How many a month, 200,000 or so?
Oh.
The Army hit the target early, then exceeded it, producing 28,000 shells in October.
Less than 3 days supply for Ukraine.
Is that so … then surely we should have plenty of clips of completely destroyed Russian cities… cuz that’s what artillery does when you fire into a city….
Yet nothing …
M Fast has friends living her whose families are in Russia … they report that their families say everything is normal back there — they don’t know of anyone who has been wounded or killed fighting in Ukraine… they don’t even know anyone who is fighting in Ukraine… funny that… given all those shells that are being fired…
hahahahaha
You are being played…
Huge increases in artillery shells being made — spiking share prices of manufacturers — what about the shortage of steel????
BAU tonight baby!!!
Is that so … then surely we should have plenty of clips of completely destroyed Russian cities… cuz that’s what artillery does when you fire into a city….
As with your confusion about where exactly the Suez canal is, try looking at a map.
Let’s go back to the original subject…. can you show me the destroyed Russian cities?
Don’t the artillery shells we supply Ukraine have a max range of around 30 miles?
How would they get those huge pieces of machinery within range, without being noticed, when they’d have to take them through russian fortified defences.
Over to you for the explanation Eddy
There actually is no war in Ukraine so your question is moot.
But they are making shells like they always do … and their share prices are loving it
According to Lockheed’s website,
“We solve the great problems of our times. We create the innovative technologies that define eras.”
Hypersonic missiles and drones define this era and seem to still be an unsolved problem, unless you happen to be Russia, China or Iran.
“While no one knows what’s going to change the world next, we’re probably already working on it.”
We all know and they are still not even sure if they are working on it or not. Maybe try wearing sandals and praying to Allah.
Not a convincing sales pitch for a nation that spends more than the above mentioned put together, I’m afraid. Now might be a good time to stop banging the war drum.
The Lockheed blurb fits in with the narrative that we can use complex technology to solve any problem, and that there will be lots of jobs for people who follow this path. Unfortunately, our current economy is too much like the Roman Empire, and those we are fighting against are a lot like the Barbarians. A handful of big expensive weapons and airplanes don’t get us very far in this kind of conflict.
It’s premature to think rate cuts are right around the corner, we haven’t decided anything yet, we haven’t even discussed it, it’s meeting by meeting, but in March no way Jose, I mean, that’s not my base case.
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/01/31/heres-my-powell-cocktail-not-quite-in-his-own-words/
fine and dandy, but how about more Sasha dialogue to show us how much you destroyed her?
I want to hear more about helicopters… on other planets
I want to read Sasha’s responses to Eddy ranting about helicopters on Mars.
but Eddy is holding out on us.
Sasha is busy servicing the PR Team honchos… then she will need to rest … we can ask her about Mars later
I notice that she’s not posted anything new on SS today…. hahaha… the boss man probably busted her skull when he wacked her in the head….
Sasha is a total mess … she’s been on the booze for years.. and now she might lose her gig with the PR Team…
She doesn’t look well
https://home.solari.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Alexandra-sasha-latypova-278×300.jpg
How about, the Federal Reserve has no idea where rates will go in the future. It cannot tell three months ahead.
I was watching CME Fedwatch to see the market’s reaction to the FOMC statement “The Committee does not expect it will be appropriate to reduce the target range until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent.”
I was surprised to see the odds of a March rate cut rise.
https://mishtalk.com/economics/amusing-pavlovs-dog-market-response-to-the-feds-perceived-message/
I wonder how the markets would react to an increase….
This is the problem when you are running out of affordable energy … most of what remains is not affordable… so what happens when you extract it even though it costs a lot… is that you have to increase the prices of everything … to be able to continue to extract that energy…
And that drives inflation … so to prevent that from exploding into hyperinflation you have to tamp things down with higher rates…. higher rates kill growth…
aka we are f789ed. The Fed is trapped.
more Sasha!
She’s traumatised him, clearly.
I wonder if Hoolio is smelling the fear chemicals.
There is a lot of time and energy going into trying to guess what the Federal Reserve is going to do with rates in the near future.
As expected… no cut… https://wolfstreet.com/2024/01/31/wow-feds-statement-pushes-back-against-rate-cut-mania-and-end-of-qt-mania-holds-rates-at-5-50-top-of-range-qt-to-continue-as-planned/
more Sasha!
Does anyone know what Russians call their trailer trash? In America it’s hillbilly or redneck… Aussies call them bogans…
it might be eddys now.
I will check with Sasha.
Gopniks. I hardly think someone who lives in Tahoe and drinks $500 wine is one though. Give my regards to Sasha please.
She could be making all of that up …
In fact she might have been Out Back of a Dumpster … tapping away on her fone between service jobs and taking slugs out of a 5 buck bottle of grog…
She’s gone silent today — so no fireworks… as I have speculated .. she has a busted skull crack teeth … and probably a broken jaw…
It’s not a good idea to piss off the PR Team… cuz they will call in the Enforcement Team… and these fellas don’t mess around… they gotta send a message so that the other Embeds (Kirsch Malone etc)… don’t go off message.
A nationwide tally of unfinished pre-sold homes has bloated to 20 million, according to an analysis by Nomura. The cost to complete those units in 2024 would be 2.7 trillion yuan, even after considering 550 billion yuan the government has promised to help tackle the delivery backlog, the investment bank said.
scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3249066/china-property-once-mighty-developers-strain-lifelines-state-support-after-end-sectors-golden-age
This is a detailed article with a lot of broking house research research covering background and present difficulties of CN property developers under accute duress. The sums involved are quite major and the broad consensus presented of the financial services industry appears to have concluded bailout bailout bailout as the only possible resolution. The primary issue identified hindering this is the depletion of official USD reserves to repay foreigners. As I recall, last year there was no resolution with respect to the offshore bond holders in the case of the major Evergrande default.
Further stories from SCMP have identified the offshore holders (securities issued through HK) being gated with juristrictional issues over mainland collateral.
scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3250197/why-evergrandes-hong-kong-liquidation-order-just-start-uphill-battle-its-offshore-creditors
One ponders the impact of this on HK’s financial market. Wait … Hang Seng is down 30% in the past 12 months, the world’s worse performing major stock market.
The SCMP is the HK english language business voice, and it may be fair to suggest that not frightening the horses with respect to HK institutions. Others here may know more about the offshore RE developers’ bond market there.
Between the lines recently I see growing a very negative image portraying the Chinese economy and its management. Much “mainstream” Western output encountered online, you know Reuters, AP, AFP, BB etc, reads like China bashing and the same even to the extent of analytical blogs, in the financial world also. It certainly adds to the savour of distrust …
On the other hand, as a reader of Michael Hudson’s ongoing interview transcrips quite often presented at NakCap, his view of the Chinese economy is more optimistic and he seems reasonably confident their economic performance will outperform. Its present data affirms this.
My own reading of the ongoing data I follow is that China is doing reasonably well. Bloomberg reports that China’s 10yr yield falls to two-decade low
img.caixin.com/2024-01-30/170660239509760.png
Their inflation rate was most recently reported to have risen to -0.3%pa. Yeah, sounds like the place is falling apart …
“My own reading of the ongoing data I follow is that China is doing reasonably well.”
yes The Core is holding up fairly well.
there are many good reasons to think this will continue for another decade or two.
Year of the… what?
China is “hurting” badly.
As the manufacturing center of the world, I am afraid that China is already past peak.
China is also past the peak in its population. In fact, some stories say that its population peaked quite a while ago. It will soon have a huge retiree problem besides a falling number of working age population. Somehow, it will need to get older people back into the workforce.
It is hard to see the Chinese economy pulling the world economy ahead much longer.
… hurting badly.
how do you measure that hurt, Gail, and the degree of pain?
By chance, I hadn’t seen the previous post of our champ here appearing from their headlines to illustrate nicely the MSM bias in spades
Like ZH, none a source I’d consult
I can confirm this is true https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/china-economy-set-to-implode-as-spiralling-property-crisis-has-not-touched-bottom/ar-BB1hvhfX
Because my office manager’s mother put money down on an apartment in south China over 2 years ago … and the developer has still not started on the project…
She spoke to a lawyer who told her not to waste her money because in his city alone there are many thousands of people in the same boat…
Multiply this across the country and what you have is a situation far worse than the US housing crisis that resulted in the GFC….
Worse in that … they didn’t even build the homes… and they will not be built — nor will the deposits be repaid… so how do you restore confidence in the market after this?
Throw in all those ghost cities that actually did get built — but are empty … and falling apart…
China is f789ed
The Chinese and HK stock markets are reflecting this
I also know people in finance in HK who concur.
ah yes, the objectivity of the compradore class – financial services?
I too have a friend of 20+ yrs standing living in China. His third apartment, paid for in full 3 yrs ago is still not finished
no denying what you say about that, but this is the upper middle class
not revolutionaries and I believe they’ve got a good shot at working it out. They’ve a huge BoP surplus and reserves
Hank Paulson managed while how many millions too moreonic to do much more than comment of substack …
My question was directed to Gail. We can all say China’s gonna this or that about the future
I’m not seeing at all yet, quite the reverse
so I’m wondering what in the present time she can see in the data to substantiate her view
The thing is …
China replaced the US as the centre of debt fuelled fraudulent growth post GFC… and now China’s done … so what fuels growth going forward?
Oh right — the US is running up many trillions in debt otherwise…. https://wolfstreet.com/2024/01/27/us-debt-to-gdp-ratio-worsens-further-despite-solid-economic-growth-as-government-debt-balloons-at-a-scary-pace/
How long can that go on? Who knows…
We need another solution … oh yes… kill everyone before it blows up
It’s a good thing China’s economy isn’t based on selling each other houses like ours is then.
It’s based on selling apartments that don’t get built … and if they ever do get built they struggle to find tenants .. cuz there are too many of them ..
It’s based on selling apartments that don’t get built …
It clearly isn’t, retard, since China is the workshop of the world.
See if you can break the record for being wrong in a day
hahahahahahaha
See if you can break the record for being wrong in a day
You’re not seriously trying to claim China is not the workshop of the world, are you?
I posted an analysis a few weeks ago showing that cheap labour is China is no more… manufacturers are leaving for countries like Vietnam where they can still find desperate people to make the stuff that we buy then cram into the 3 car garages….
Look at just how epically stoooopid humans are… unreal
Look at just how epically stoooopid chinese are… no longer willing to be our slave class
Perhaps what they need is a taste of mass unemployment … (I notice they no longer publish unemployment numbers) to put them back in their place… drop wages… and resume their slavery.
“As a result of this slow-motion implosion across China, for the first time since the great expansion unemployment is becoming very serious. This March, youth unemployment officially was over 20%. Millions of recent university graduates are unable to find work and Beijing has begun to send them to work in the rural countryside, reminiscent of the Mao era. This bodes ill for future home sales. A contracting bubble has a vicious dynamic.”?
Excellent! Just waiting for them to turn on the masters and skin them alive… that is an outcome I would very much enjoy….
Look at just how epically stoooopid chinese are… no longer willing to be our slave class
What a bunch of moreons producing all that virgin steel that can be used to make weapons while we use fabulous green recycled steel that can’t be.
Withnail , 4th month in a row slowdown in manufacturing .
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/31/china-pmi-manufacturing-activity-shrank-for-4th-straight-month-in-january.html
On property slump
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/chinas-real-estate-crisis-explained-two-charts
Withnail , 4th month in a row slowdown in manufacturing
Oh gee, I guess they only produced like 70 million tons of steel in January. It’s over for China,
Ravi … they say arguing with fools makes one a fool … but if we don’t argue with these fools … then there would be just about nobody left to argue with …
It does provide amusement to watch them tie themselves in knots… unable or unwilling to accept that they have been beaten … but then that’s what defines a fool.
I declare today Global Fools Day.
Withnail … make a speech.
Now the world relies on the US and its ability to continue piling up trillions of dollars of debt to eke out enough false growth to bridge us till The Pathogen arrives and kills everyone.
Recall the hot strains of Marek’s killed all unvaxxed chickens within 10 days.
Note that governments have not been offering free donuts for booster shots… in fact we hosted my cousin and her friend a few months ago .. and the friend said she didn’t get the latest cuz…. wait for it …. she would have to PAY for it (if I recall the cost was $180)….
Now why would they want her to pay for it???? Oh right … Marek’s kills all unvaxxed chickens… all of them…. If we also recall — the shots provide only a short window of protection against severe disease … and the more you take the less effect the Rat Juice has….
My money is on the most recent boosters being saline…
Every single human will have zero protection against The Pathogen.
This pathogen is going to be the most contagious monstrosity ever seen on this planet… it will be the product of 6B MOREONS injecting Rat Juice repeatedly … for the purpose of conjuring up a Demon from Hell…
And it will kill billions … anyone who somehow is able to hide from The Pathogen … will starve or die from cancer.
So far this morning is normal… I am seeing no signals that this is The Day it begins.
Ravi, it’s my understanding that what you are referring to as a slowdown in manufacturing is the PMI Manufacturing. This is the manufacturing sector Purchasing Manager’s Intentions, ie a raw sentiment indicator for future purchasing. It’s a balance between less ordering or moar, with the base of 50 as neutral. It’s in my opinion a waffley economic gague of future indications with no statistical revelance. PMI Services can be even more unginged from reality. YVMV
No One Knows the Future
“Why China Can’t Pull the World Out of a New Great Depression “? By William Engdahl
http://www.williamengdahl.com/gr16May2023.php
China has a unique and very abuse-prone real estate model. Typically a buyer must pre-pay the full purchase price when a developer has merely begun the construction. “Buy today as the price will be even more tomorrow” was the mantra. He takes a mortgage, usually from local banks, to do that. If the builder does not complete on time, the buyer must still pay their mortgage. Even if the developer goes bankrupt as is now happening, leaving abandoned unfinished housing behind. No other country uses that model. Typically in Western countries a small deposit on a home to reserve until completion is enough. The mortgage comes when the property is finished. Not in China.
That provides some devastating reading …. it’s much much much worse than I thought…
Reading that is like cutting open half dead Vaxxer and seeing cancer tumours on all the major organs…. wow… horrifying…
Of course this was all done in the name of combatting the head winds of expensive energy production costs… as we run low on cheap stuff…
The US did the same thing resulting in the GFC… and then the baton was handed to China to drive growth and keep BAU alive….
It gives new meaning to desperation .. to doing whatever it takes… they sure did run the engine past the redline in China…
And now it’s smoking and sizzling … and ready to explode…
Meanwhile the US is offering some palliative care by running up trillions more in debt to keep BAU in purgatory as we wait for The Pathogen to arrive.
This sure is exciting stuff!
The Chinese growth story has been powered by a housing market that is built on fraud …. recall those stories about pouring more cement in a year than….
Well that was like digging massive ponds and filling them with cement… busting it up carting it away then refilling the holes…
Sure it drove growth numbers… but what cannot continue will always stop … and this has stopped…
China is rotten to the core… it is a powder keg… what I do not understand is why all those millions who sunk $$$ into this … are not unhinging…
Chinese growth numbers have not stopped
please provide data
China needs enough fossil fuels to keep the growth bubble growing. That is its fundamental problem. Somehow, it needs to ease the economy back from the huge debt bubble it has created. It does look like a worrisome situation.
China will need enough fossil fuels to keep their society from going unhinged while their bubble pops. They hope for a controlled demolition (see Andy Xie) and believe it’s doable. Nuts would have us believe they’re dastardly attempting to lure the western economies into uncontrolled demolition of their bubbles (peruse some of this dude’s research deepthroatipo.com which is right out at the end of the spectrum, but who’s to say it’s wrong).
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67449608-b21d-46b6-ae28-f844aef0d0b4_1772x376.png
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/china-economy-set-to-implode-as-spiralling-property-crisis-has-not-touched-bottom/ar-BB1hvhfX
More on the imploding global property situation https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/regression-wednesday-january-31-2024
SOOOO WEEEEEeeeeee…..
China real estate is a huge problem.
In fact, prices of commercial office buildings around the world are in free-fall, now that so much office space isn’t needed, if more people are working at home.
“now that so much office space isn’t needed, if more people are working at home.”
Or as Ed Dowd suggests, they can no longer work because of the safe and effective CV19 vax.