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There are many myths about energy and the economy. In this post I explore the situation surrounding some of these myths. My analysis strongly suggests that the transition to a new Green Economy is not progressing as well as hoped. Green energy planners have missed the point that our physics-based economy favors low-cost producers. In fact, the US and EU may not be far from an economic downturn because subsidized green approaches are not truly low-cost.
[1] The Chinese people have long believed that the safest place to store savings is in empty condominium apartments, but this approach is no longer working.
The focus on ownership of condominium homes is beginning to unwind, with huge repercussions for the Chinese economy. In March, new home prices in China declined by 2.2%, compared to a year earlier. Property sales fell by 20.5% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period a year ago, and new construction starts measured by floor area fell by 27.8%. Overall property investment in China fell by 9.5% in the first quarter of 2024. No one is expecting a fast rebound. The Chinese seem to be shifting their workforce from construction to manufacturing, but this creates different issues for the world economy, which I describe in Section [6].
[2] We have been told that Electric Vehicles (EVs) are the way of the future, but the rate of growth is slowing.
In the US, the rate of growth was only 3.3% in the first quarter of 2024, compared to 47% one year ago. Tesla has made headlines, saying that it is laying off 10% of its staff. It also recently reported that it is delaying deliveries of its cybertruck. A big issue is the high prices of EVs; another is the lack of charging infrastructure. If EV sales are to truly expand, they will need both lower prices and much better charging infrastructure.
[3] Many people have assumed that home solar panel sales would rise forever, but now US home solar panel sales are shrinking.
A forecast made by the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie indicates that US solar panel installations by homeowners are expected to fall by 13% in 2024. There are many issues involved: higher interest rates, less generous subsidies to homeowners, not enough grid capacity for new generation, and too much overproduction of electricity by solar panels in the spring and fall, when heating and air conditioning demand is low. The overproduction issue is particularly acute in California.
For each individual 24-hour day, the timing of solar energy production does not match up well with when it is needed. With sufficient batteries, solar electricity produced in the morning can help run air conditioners in the evening. But storage from summer to winter is still not feasible, and batteries for short-term storage are expensive.
[4] It is a myth that wind and solar truly add to electricity supplies for the US and the countries in the EU. Instead, their pricing seems to lead to tighter electricity supplies.
Strangely enough, in the US and the EU, when wind and solar are added to the electric grid, electricity supplies seem to get tighter. For example, one article says, Most of US electric grid faces risk of resource shortfall through 2027, NERC [regulatory group] says.
Charts of electricity supply per capita show an unusual trend when wind and solar are added. Figure 1 shows that, in the US, once wind and solar are added, total electricity generation per capita falls, rather than rises!
The EU, using a somewhat shorter history period, shows a similar pattern of declining total electricity generation per capita, even when wind and solar are added (Figure 2).
I believe that the strange pricing systems used for wind and solar in the US and EU are driving out other electricity suppliers, especially nuclear. With this system, intermittent electricity enjoys the subsidy of going first at the regular wholesale market rate. Other providers find themselves with very low or negative wholesale rates in the spring and fall of the year and on weekends and holidays. As a result, their overall return falls too low. Nuclear is particularly affected because it requires a huge, fixed investment, and it cannot be ramped up and down easily.
Besides the foregoing issues affecting the supply of electricity generated, there are also factors affecting the demand for electricity. Electricity generation using wind and solar tends to be high priced when all costs are included. The US and EU are already high-cost areas for businesses to operate. High electricity rates further add to the impetus to move manufacturing and other industry to lower-cost countries if businesses desire to be competitive in the world market.
On a world basis, in 2022, wind and solar added about 13% to total world electricity generation (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Electricity generation per capita for the World based on data of the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, prepared by the Energy Institute. Amounts are through 2022.
Based on Figure 3, with the addition of wind and solar, the upward slope of the world per capita electricity generation has been able to remain pretty much constant from 1985 to 2022, at about 1.6% per year. But the US and the EU, as high-cost producers of goods and services, haven’t been able to participate in this per capita growth of electricity.
Instead, China has been a major beneficiary of the shift of manufacturing overseas from the US and EU. It has been able to rapidly increase its electricity supply per capita, even with wind and solar. It has also been adding both nuclear and coal-fired electricity generation capacity.
Thus, this analysis produces the result a person would expect if the physics of the world economy favors efficient (low-cost) producers.
[5] It is a myth that the US and EU can greatly ramp up the use of EVs or greatly increase the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) without relying on fossil fuels.
Both EV production and AI are heavy users of electricity supply. We have seen that the US and the EU no longer have growing per-capita electricity supplies. Ramping up electricity generation would require a long lead time (10 years or more), a major increase in fossil fuel consumption, and an increase in electricity transmission lines.
The State of Georgia, in the United States, is already running into this issue, with planned data centers (related to AI) and EV manufacturing plants. The state plans to add new gas-fired electricity generation. It will also import more electricity from Mississippi Power, where the retirement of a coal-fired plant is being delayed to provide the necessary additional electricity. Eventually, more solar panels are planned, as well.
[6] It is a myth that the world economy can continue as usual, whatever happens to energy supply and growing debt. China’s homebuilding problems could, in theory, lead to debt bubbles crashing around the world.
The world economy depends upon a growing bubble of debt. It also depends on an ever-increasing supply of goods and services. In fact, the two are closely interrelated. As long as a growing supply of low-priced energy of the types used by built infrastructure is available, the economy tends to sail along.
China, with problems in its property business, is an example of what can go wrong when energy supplies (coal in China) become expensive, as supply becomes increasingly constrained. Figure 5 shows that China’s per-capita coal supply became constrained in about 2013. China’s per capita coal extraction had been rising, but then it dipped. This made it more difficult for builders to construct the homes planned for would-be homeowners. This is part of what got home builders in China into financial difficulty.
Finally, in 2022, China was able to get coal production up. But the way this was done was through very high coal prices (Figure 6). (The prices shown are for Australian coal, but Chinese coal prices seem to be similar.)
Building concrete homes at such high coal prices would have resulted in new homes that were far too expensive for most Chinese citizens to afford. If builders were not already in difficulty from low supply, adding high coal prices, as well, would be a second blow. Furthermore, all the workers formerly engaged in home building needed new places to earn a living; the current approach seems to be to move many of these workers to manufacturing, so that the popping of the home building bubble will have less of an impact on the overall economy of China.
There is now concern that China is ramping up its manufacturing, particularly for exports, at a time when China’s jobs in the property sector are disappearing. The problem, however, is that ramping up exports of manufactured goods creates a new bubble. This huge added supply of manufactured goods can only be sold at low prices. This new low-priced competition seems likely to lead to manufacturers, around the world, obtaining too-low prices for their manufactured products.
If other economies around the world are forced to compete with even lower-cost goods from China, it could have an adverse impact on manufacturing around the world. With low prices, manufacturers are likely to lay off workers, or give them excessively low wages. If wages and prices are inadequate, debt bubbles in other parts of the world are likely to collapse. This will happen because many borrowers will become unable to repay their debt. This is the reason that we have been hearing a great deal recently about raising tariffs on Chinese exports.
[7] The world’s biggest myth is that the world economy can continue to grow forever.
I have pointed out previously that based on physics considerations, economies cannot be expected to be permanent structures. Economies and humans are both self-organizing systems that grow. Humans get their energy from food. Economies are powered by the types of energy products that our built infrastructure uses. Neither can grow forever. Neither can get along without energy products of the right types, in the right quantities.
We become so accustomed to the narratives we hear that we tend to assume that what we are told must be right. These narratives could be based on wishful thinking, or on inadequate models, or on a sour grapes view that says, “We don’t want fossil fuels anyhow.” We know that humans need food, and that economies will continue to require fossil fuels. We can’t make wind turbines or solar panels without fossil fuels. What do we plan to do for energy without fossil fuels?
In a finite world, economies cannot continue forever. We don’t know precisely what will go wrong or when it will go wrong, but we can get a hint from the recent failures of myths that our economy may change dramatically in the not-too-distant future.
Russia has kicked USA out of its military base in Niger.
The Niger government asked USA to leave weeks ago and USA is like ‘we have to negotiate the terms of our withdrawal and talk about whether you really want us to go.’
So much for ‘sovereignty’. Apparently it matters in UKR with Russia but not in Africa with USA ‘because…. reasons.’
Well, Russia has now told the USA troops, ‘you were told to get out, so get out. It is called ‘sovereignty’, look it up. And this is our base now because that is what the Niger government wants. Bye!’
The troops are Wagner.
https://warnews247.gr/diethnh/afrikh/apokathhlwsh-twn-hpa-efodos-rwsikwn-dunamewn-se-amerikanikh-bash-ston-nighra-h-bash-einai-pleon-rwsikh-apoxwrhste-amesa/
US destabilization: Russian forces storm US base in Niger – “Base is now Russian – Leave immediately”
Russians take base without firing a shot – Republicans speak of embarrassing scenes
Unbelievable scenes are unfolding in Niger as Russian soldiers under the newly formed “African Army Corps” stormed the US 101st Air Force Base in Niamey.
Humiliating scenes for the US are unfolding in the region.
According to Reuters, about 60 Russian soldiers have invaded the American military base and are asking the Americans to leave their base immediately!
These are the first Russian forces to be transported by Ilyushin Il-76 transport aircraft recently to Niger.
According to sources in Niger, the leadership of the country gave the green light to the Russian Military Corps as after the cancellation of the defense agreement with the USA, the American forces were not leaving the region.
The incident has raised a storm of reactions in the US as well, as the Republicans fiercely attack the American Ministry of Defense and the Minister of Foreign Affairs A. Blinken.
“You are humiliating us internationally” they emphasize to Foreign Minister Lloyd Austin and the other American generals.
Watch one of the Republican speeches here
Americans hand over base to Russians ‘without firing a shot’
The Russian military entered a US air base in Niger’s capital Niamey, Reuters reported, citing a senior US Defense Department official.
The Pentagon added that it is monitoring the situation and taking all necessary measures to ensure the safety of US forces, facilities and equipment.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to play down the issue by saying that “the Russians are in a separate compound”, they do not have access to US troops and US military equipment.
In total, according to available data, the number of American troops in Niger is about 900 people.
Former Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski said such steps signal the failure of US policy towards Africa.
This is a disastrous development for the USA. For the following reasons:
1) The US built a 100 million drone base in Niger and is now handing it over to the Russians.
2) Niger’s pro-Russian regime held the US military hostage for several days.
3) The scenes will have an impact across Africa. This is a great humiliation.
Russian forces and the US military remain at the same base in Niger until the US withdraws its corps from this African country, RIA Novosti confirmed.
Watch the video of the arrival here
The Russians send the special corps “Afrika Korps” to Africa
“The first units of the Afrika Korps of the Russian Ministry of Defense have arrived in Burkina Faso,” reports International Russian Media, which reveals:
“Today, the first 100 Russian military personnel with equipment and weapons arrived in the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou. In the near future, a group of 300 soldiers of the Russian Armed Forces will be stationed in this country.
These are mostly former Wagner PMC forces.
Russian Units will be deployed in five countries of the Sahel region, Burkina Faso, Libya, Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic.
All the necessary agreements were reached during the trip of the Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Yunus-Bek Yevkurov to these countries.
The Russian forces replace the French contingent, which was forced to leave the Sahel countries after the change of authorities in the countries of the region.
The tasks of Russian officers and contract soldiers include training African colleagues, as well as ensuring the safety of the highest officials of the states.
In particular, soldiers of the Russian Armed Forces will provide significant assistance in protecting the transitional president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traore, who has already been the subject of several assassination attempts.
Particular attention will be paid to the Bamako-Ouangadougou highway, which connects Burkina Faso with neighboring Mali. This road is considered an extremely dangerous area where jihadists operate.
I expect we wont’ see much about this in US newspapers.
They are roommates right now. we will see if the americans leave or prefer to exchange fire. It is probably best to install some S-300 before escalating. anyway, if successful, as soon as the war is over, it is going to happen all over Syria and Iraq.
apparently the S300 came with a previous transport. sothey are doing it the way one can expect. And the russians will be in 5 contiguous countries in the Sahel. This is a non negligible development.
IGood. That’s one base closed where we are not needed or wanted. One down 1000 to go. Not needed and not wanted. Bye Niger! Maybe in 1000 years some country will want to associate with us. Nah probably not. Guess USA better figure out what to do with ourselves. The nations that want to associate with us treat with fairness and respect to create honest working associations not intimidation and coercion with bribes.
It is only from that place where a country knows it represents justice that it can forge a military that can effectively use force if necessary.
This debacle represents the total lack of vision the USA has for itself and what it represents. There is only one appropriate action: to withdraw from the world cultivate assets on our homeland and to rediscover what we stand for. It is only from that place one of respect for oneself and even one’s opponents that one can persevere if it comes to a fight. Now we are taunted but it’s because we richly deserve to be taunted. If we fight because the sting of the taunt we lose. If we cultivate our strengths we will persevere. If we indulge our capacity for destruction from a place of weakness and over extension we will be defeated and lose any chance to find our true identity whatever that may be not just a issuer of bombs and IOUs.
To do that we must value our true identity and other nations true identity–not seeing them as apparitions to be manipulated.
The service of providing credit is not necessarily a bad calling. It only works with the understanding that those receiving the credit are customers. The credit must be fairly priced so as not to be ruinous and voluntary not predatory, so that the value of the service provided is apparent and the bargain considered fair by all parties. This allows the process of determining appropriate rates so that some sort of equilibrium is established–not a continuous revisiting of conflict that consumes precious resources as appetites for destruction are indulged.
The people of this place called the USA never made the decision to be an issuer of credit and bombs. That was thrust upon them without their consent. Their only chance is to seek their true identity which is their birthright, if they can find the courage. I still assert that possibility exists even if it is remote. Is there really any other path than to seek one’s true identity both as an individual and as a collective?
” IGood. That’s one base closed where we are not needed or wanted. One down 1000 to go. Not needed and not wanted. Bye Niger! Maybe in 1000 years some country will want to associate with us. Nah probably not. Guess USA better figure out what to do with ourselves. ”
My question . What do you do with 100,000 eggheads you will ship back home after closing the bases and only how to kill ? Unleash them on your own public ? How many with PTSD / drugs problem .?
The “peace keeping” NATO contingent in Niger consists of US troops, Italian and german troops. apparently The US troops are in a state of high alert and wearing helmets, the germans and italians are calm and low key. But they too should be alert that they are not sacrificed for the cause, with some provocation happening the moment the last US helicopter leaves. If I were them I would have already established contact with the russians to make sure nothing stupid happens.
Signs the US economy isn’t doing well (leading investors to be happy, because they assume this means that interest rates will soon fall)
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/april-payrolls-unexpectedly-plunge-biggest-miss-2021-unemployment-rate-rises
April Payrolls Debacle: Biggest Miss Since 2021 As Unemployment Rate Rises
Excerpts:
“BLS reported that in April the US added just 175K jobs, a nearly 50% drop from the upward revised 315K (was 303K), the lowest print since October 2023.”
“What was behind the unexpected payrolls plunge? Blame government, which added just 8,000 jobs in April the least since Dec 2021, almost as if the government itself was goalseeking the final result.”
“It wasn’t just the Establishment survey: the Household survey showed that in April, the US added just 25K jobs, a huge drop from the 498K in March.”
—
The US dollar index is down, and the price of oil is down. WTI is at $78.45. Brent seems to be at $80.76.
True investing was creating value and prosperity. That could not compete with credit expansion and outsourcing for profit. Productivity is hard. There are challenges. Credit expansion is easy. Now investing is nothing more than hovering over credit expansion currency destruction meter. Productive profitable teams and facilities disassembled.but our 401ks went up so it must be good.
And many people assume it will go on forever.
Some American children visit a Dutch wind powered sawmill.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=axSBSul8vXo
With modern technology, direct mechanical wind turbines could be greatly improved. Gears could be made from carbon steels. The sails could be replaced by wooden blades, better optimised to harness the wind. The tower of the turbine could be made from brick or stone, able to absorb forces compressively. A tower like that may last for several centuries. The mechanical drive could be replaced by hydraulics, allowing for far more flexible factory layout.
I wonder how many mechanical power applications could be met by direct mechanical wind turbines in this way? Wind is variable. Making use it works best if the workforce are housed onsite and can adjust their workrate to the availability of the wind. If we can make that adjustment, then mechanical windpower has a promissing future. Mechanical windmills can even be used to provide heat by powering a heat pump. On the edges of towns and cities, these could supply district heat networks.
One idea that intrigues me is the use of mechanical wind power to power freight transportation. Freight could be loaded into neutrally bouyant floating capsules. A mechanical wind turbine could be used to pump water through a pipeline between two cities, with floating capsules carried along with the water flow. The freight of entire nations could be carried in this way, albeit slowly. It might take a week for freight to travel between New York and Chicago, say, at about human walking speed.
you must be Keith Hensons stunt double
This tower mill near Diss in Norfolk, has a swept area of about 75m2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billingford_Windmill
If fitted with more modern blades, it would generate a time averaged power of about 10kW. That makes it ideal for a lot of small industry applications. If it were also fitted with a hydraulic pump in its nacelle, it could power hydraulically driven machinery for all kinds of applications in an attached factory.
This particular wind engine was built in 1820. It demonstrates that with proper maintenance, a wind engine can last for centuries, generating useful power for generations. The EROEI of a masonry towered wind engine could therefore be very impressive, as the initial energy cost of building it is amortised over centuries of operation.
I foresee a great future for the www:
Wood, wind and water power.
Wind turbines provide intermittent mechanical energy. What the economy primarily needs is heat energy. It also needs mechanical energy that can be turned on and off as needed.
We know that even very long ago, wind energy supplied a very small share of total energy consumption.
This is a chart showing per capita energy consumption of various types of energy, back when coal energy was first being adopted in England and Italy.
Very little of total energy consumption was from wind or water, back then.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/wrigleyfig1-e1346123057549.gif
Figure 1. Annual energy consumption per head (megajoules) in England and Wales 1561-70 to 1850-9 and in Italy 1861-70. Figure by Wrigley
It is simply not practical to operate a saw mill only when the wind is blowing. What kind of schedule does an employer give his workers?
Until the 20th century, a large part of the flour consumed in Europe was ground by wind powered mills. The millers did work with the weather. In times of strong wind, they often worked 20 hour shifts. When wind was absent, they either took time off or repaired their equipment. The key thing that made this possible was that they lived within the mill. They could adapt to a highly variable work schedule because they didn’t have to travel to work.
Likewise with sailing ships. Journey length and arrival time depended upon the weather. It wasn’t ideal, but it did work.
If the world is heading for a RE powered future, we need to adapt how we live and work to this reality. Energy will be intermittent. Workshifts will be variable. In planning work, resource managers must estimate the likely capacity factor of equipment during the planning period. If we can adjust to this reality, then we can build RE infrastructure at the point of energy use and avoid the cost of storage, backup or transmission. This makes a RE future far more achievable. But I suspect it will require a different social contract. Workers will be paid for the hours they work and will be expected to remain on call when away from work.
I tend to think we’re heading back to this level of technology. What’s surprising is that a lot of idioms in English still hark back to those days:
Grist for one’s mill ~ Since wheat and corn are ground by ‘teeth,’ the grinding stones ‘chew’ the grist into flour; thus to ‘chew’ over something became a thought or idea to ponder.
The daily grind ~ The repetitive nature of milling led to the concept of ‘the daily (same old) grind.’
Run of the mill ~ The ordinary, daily grind.
Keep your nose to the grindstone ~ If set incorrectly, millstones could grind too hot and the flour would become cooked, emitting a burning smell. Occasionally, flour would burst into flames. The miller kept his ‘nose to the grindstone’ to detect the temperature and condition of the meal—and because most stone mills were made of wood, they could (and frequently did) burn to the ground in a matter of minutes.
Rule of thumb ~ To test the quality and grind of the flour, the miller would take a pinch of it between his thumb and finger. If too coarse, the flour would be ground again.
China’s declining ownership of treasuries is one thing. Its use and dependance on the dollar another.
The dollar as a reserve currency provides benefit to global trade. .Money gets used many times. Its recyclable. USA gets first spend. This seems to be a huge benefit but there are strong adversarial effects of providing a reserve currency. Many nations want China to allow the Yuan to be the reserve currency. China wants no part of that.
True dollar refutal requires an equivalent substitute. It appears in spite of discussion about settlement methods with BRICS no true dollar replacement is on the horizon.
Chinas approach is one of devolution to local currency traders while still using dollar settlement on a large scale as a convenient but annoying necessity. Thus China at the present time is neither in or out of the treasury dollar system. For whatever reason China is not pleased with the USA but also is a realist. A large part of what China is still the result of dollar income and dollar settlement.
China is not scuttling it’s own economy. China does seem to establish a maritime military dominance buffer zone in the south China sea. This could certainly go hot perhaps with the Philippines whom USA has a defense agreement with. This could result in naval proxy war. If that happens China will certainly de dollarize falling back on the devolution approach of using local currencies. This requires being able to actually purchase something you want or need with the local currency a major flaw but China has a knack for coming out on top doing this.
While China’s declining Treasury ownership will clearly free them from their illiquid status and maturity dates China will continue to use the dollar and see what happens. This is certainly not out of charity. The liabilities of providing a reserve currency manifested in deficit spending grow more evident every day and China is quite willing to let the USA continue down this path for the time being while at the same time establishing alternatives albeit less efficient ones. China always makes sure it comes out on top in trades and trades using the dollar are no exception.
What I dont see in the immediate future is creation of a viable dollar alternative for various significant reasons.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/21/china-yuan-us-dollar-sco-currency/
BRICS is working on the formation of a new currency in the global markets to challenge the US dollar’s supremacy. The alliance aims to uproot the US dollar from the world’s reserve and replace it with the new BRICS currency. The battle to dominate the financial sector kick-started after the White House pressed sanctions on Russia and other developing countries.
Watcherguru.com
BRICS: China Dumps $74 Billion
Cwele stressed that local currencies will be traded heavily among member nations until the BRICS currency is launched. More details about the soon-to-be-released BRICS currency could be revealed in the upcoming summit.
The 16th BRICS summit is scheduled to take place in October 2024 in the Kazan region of Russia. For the first time, nine member countries will be a part of the summit due to the expansion.
Yep, looks as if some will be blind sighted by the it all..
The United States has overstepped it’s smug hubris of being the greatest, richest most democratic nation the world has ever had..
It’s a deadbeat denial dementia old man that needs a nursing home, not a sear in the Oval office..not naming any names..
Imagine the British felt the same at one time..don’t see it happening..
From my over simplistic view
If a settlement token has ties to physical it cannot be created and distributed in enough quantity to satisfy world trade.
If the settlement token is infinite it leads to the destruction of productivity of the nation that issues it.
Neither Russia nor China wants reserve currency status. They want something like the dollar in a responsible neutral provider.
As they try to install fairness in a settlement mechanism they either create limits and those limits inhibit versatility..
As mentioned simplistic. They may pull something off. It may become widely popular.
This will force the USA to return to domestic production and a standard of living to match. Very very hard with little to work with. The probable result world war. That’s why I suspect BRICS will ease into this still using dollar where it serves them.
Hopefully we can avoid world war while at the same time the USA starting to return to a means of establishing a standard of living that is not dependent solely on providing a reserve currency. It means the standard of living will fall. I think that’s preferable to world war but I must say I seem to be in a extreme minority.
Looking at the bright side BRICS may force the USA to abandon its credit addiction something it is unable to do for itself. An intervention to speak of.
Frankly I think that’s wishful thinking. War is the way. What will be left is anybody’s guess. IMO The best case scenario is BRICS eases into this.
If you took a poll reduce your income by half, give up your car and gas or war my guess it would be overwhelmingly in favor of world war. Not that the populations wished matter in the least.
If you live in material abundance your whole life you can miss that true abundance is simple things. I find that true everywhere not just the USA.
I’ll pull a david.
Tater tots tonight baby!
” As they try to install fairness in a settlement mechanism they either create limits and those limits inhibit versatility..
As mentioned simplistic. They may pull something off. It may become widely popular. ”
Impossible to pull off . You can’t have your cake and eat it too . I agree the other option is even worse but then ?????
” This will force the USA to return to domestic production and a standard of living to match. ”
The U.S. adult obesity rate stands at 42.4 percent, the first time the national rate has passed the 40 percent mark, and further evidence of the country’s obesity crisis. The national adult obesity rate has increased by 26 percent since 2008.
They will all go directly to meet their maker if their income is slightly lowered . How many on insulin , I wonder ?
Perhaps push the Advanced Nations down. Do more bilateral trade with selected partners. If a country doesn’t have anything to trade, don’t trade with it.
“Tater tots tonight baby!”
I thought I’ve seen estimates that US reserve currency status gives “us” a 5% or so boost in prosperity.
not too bad when it eventually ends.
unless someone can come up with some solid stuff showing it’s more than 5%.
otherwise, we’re dealing with 5% aren’t we?
Yellen urging China to reduce industrial capacity.
Well there are other ways
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/chinas-post-covid-recovery-implications-and-risks/
Chart 2 of this analysis seems to say something different from what it is labeled.
https://www.kansascityfed.org/images/Chart2-EB23CookMatschke.width-725.png
The chart title says, “Chinese exports have weakened, but new export orders have grown.” I would say, “New export orders are still very weak. New exports remained low through February, but bounced higher in March.”
China has problems. It is trying to fix them with higher exports, whether or not the rest of the world can afford these exports. A falling yuan helps the exports.
Of course the boom days are over for IC but can a falling yen and coal depletion in China , evening the playing field two energy importers, result in a manufacturing renaissance in Japan albeit limited in scale? It would be nice if economic conditions allowed second sourcing critical components even on a limited scale in these uncertain times.
” The chart title says, “Chinese exports have weakened, but new export orders have grown.” I would say, “New export orders are still very weak. New exports remained low through February, but bounced higher in March.”
Typical . Keep the narrative of growth is alive . If you are 20 ft. in a deep hole and you recover 10 ft. , you are still in a deep hole .😊
The Chinese cannot reduce exports without cutting GDP because of their skewed demographics and high saving rates. This makes domestic demand weak. So increasing exports is the only way they can grow.
Human powered cars?
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles-as-fast-and-comfortable-as-automobiles-but-80-times-more-efficient/
The velomobile is a recumbant tricycle. The aerodynamic shape and light weight make this the most energy efficient means of transportation (miles/kWh) known to man. There are electric assist options as well that allow travel at speeds up to 30mph without any effort on the part of the driver.
A world with less oil need not mean a world without transportation. But non-fossil energy cannot provide exactly the same options that cheap liquid fuels provided. This is the mistake that Tesla and other EV makers have fallen into. An EV which is indistinguishable from a gasoline powered car ends up being expensive and stupidly resource intensive. It is an unsustainable solution. But small and compact velomobiles driven by comparatively tiny batteries are a potentially scalable solution. There is just one problem. No one wants to be driving these things on the same road as an SUV.
I am afraid I don’t see a future with vastly ramped up electric velomobiles.
For one thing, where would people drive these devices? Authorities would likely treat them the way they treat electric golf carts today. A driver can use them on low-traffic local roads, but not anywhere that they would impede general traffic.
I presume the battery is a rechargeable battery. One of the issues with rechargeable batteries is that there are frequently accidents in which buildings are burned down during recharging–perhaps left charging too long.
How does a person recharge one of these batteries? If a person lives in a sixth floor apartment, does he/she take the battery upstairs, recharge it, and bring it back down again? Can these devices be adequately locked up so that they are not stolen?
Trying to maintain roads, as energy supplies deplete, will be a major headache. Trying to maintain electric power supply, as energy supplies deplete will be another major headache.
It is very easy to say that these devices will be very efficient, but keeping up the whole infrastructure in which they need to exist will be a problem.
The article provides an answer:
‘The eWAW that I drove has everything that the WAW has, plus an electric motor of 250 watts and a surprisingly small battery of 288 Wh, which takes you 60 to 130 km further (37 to 81 miles). The battery and the motor add only 5 kg, bringing the total weight of the vehicle to 33 kg. This is comparable to the weight of other velomobiles without electric assistance. Hence, this pedal powered Ferrari is more than 10 kg lighter than other velomobiles, with a 250 watt electric assistance, such as the hybrid Alleweder and the e-Sunrider, which weigh 45 kg.’
The battery weighs <5kg, so could be detached and carried into a dwelling for recharging. We aren't told exactly how much the battery weighs without the motor. But for comparison, the Tesla 3 battery weighs 333kg. The entire velomobile weighs in at just 33kg.
Low production volumes lead to high costs. To buy new, an eWOW is €11,000.
|I have a suggestion……
Yabba…..dabba….doo….
Yes, but they still require roads. No roads are required if we have cannons that shoot people up into the air and then they hang-glide or simply fall gracefully to their destinations. We still need to figure out an eco-friendly propellant – compressed air? Slingshots or catapults would be eco-friendly if we can’t come up with a sensible propellant.
LOL!
Guess jetpacks are sooo last year.
pity broomsticks have fallen out of fashion in the transport field
Unicorn farts are the propellant. Everyone knows thst!
fossil fuels not only provided the means OF transportation, it simultanously provided the purpose FOR transportation.
most remain unaware of that.–or refuse to believe it.
for the past 200 years, transportation has leapfrogged itself—we used transport to access our places of work, then we decided it was nicer to live where work was not—so we began to commute 30m a day to earn wages. and fly 3000m to lie on a beach for 2 weeks.
the business of ”movement” is itself a major wage earner and economic driving force.
those wages are entirely dependent on increased (surplus)energy-flow in our economic system, year on year.
right now we are in the delusion stage, using collective debt as a substitute for the cheap oil we used to build cities, roads, armies and so on.
This is what the Magamob are (literally) betting their lives on.
cities are now constructs of ic transport systems, remove cars and the financial structure that supports cities will evaporate—because the energy/debt/wage structure of the oil-economy is what we live on, and why our cities exist.
but as a long term replacement for ic vehicles, i don’t think we will ever improve on the Flintstones transport system.
This would appear to be one of the most promissing energy technologies for a post fossil fuel world.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128245101000258
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780081028865000141
Underwater CAES tanks could be made from concrete, sited on the sea bed and ballasted with sediment. Once there, they should remain functional for centuries as there really isn’t any mechanism that would wear them out. Build once, use forever. So long term cost of storage should be low. One appealing attribute of underwater CAES is that it provides constant pressure during discharge.
Land based renewable energy plants would generate compressed air that would enter a pipeline. Potentially hundreds of TWh of compressed air could be stored off the coast and within the great lakes. Short range compressed air powered vehicles could be directly charged from the air pipeline, which would maintain a constant pressure as air is put into it or withdrawn. Large powerplants could generate electric power using air turbines. Compression heat from RE compressed air producers, could be used to heat entire towns if equipped with district heat networks.
Today’s concrete doesn’t last for centuries, so I am doubtful that these underwater compressed air energy storage devices could last for centuries. It takes fossil fuels to build these devices–making concrete requires a lot of heat energy. Putting them in place will not be easy, I would guess. And maintaining an electric grid system is fraught with perils, if fossil fuel supply is inadequate. So the useful life is likely much shorter.
This link discusses concrete deterioration when exposed to sea water. Avoiding steel reinforcement helps a lot.
https://theconstructor.org/concrete/concrete-seawater-effects-preventions/843/?amp=1
I haven’t used black steel in a long time. The synthetic isn’t much more compared to the mud. Shear is not as good so I add add three strands of 316 stainless wire rope which helps shear and probably last as long as the synthetic.. 10 cents a foot.three strands .30 a foot 2x synthetic bar. .60 foot Actually if you want synthetic can be cheaper as it has less concrete cover since carbonation is no longer a issue. It can go a inch off ground in footers reducing both cost and energy consumed. 12′ footer with black steel @ 6″ cover vs 7″ footer with synthetic 1″ off ground. $2 saving in mud per foot. Hard to get sign off on 7″ footers. Energy savings priceless. Mud without reinforcement is like a dance party without girls. Footers with synthetic bar and 316 rope should last 500 years.
Here is a site to unlock the papers.
https://www.sci-hub.pub/
very interesting and super complicated. Way out of my league.
This is basically hydroelectric power (water displacement or height) except you also have to pay for the tank instead of the tank being formed by above-ground natural topography. I don’t see that being cost-effective. Imagine if we had to build tanks around each small volume of the three-gorges dam reservoir. That’s the cost we’re talking about.
Another sanity check on energy return could come in the form of comparing the cost and complexity of these tanks to those of an energy pipeline. They have arguably similar complexity: sink and maintain an undersea pipe. Then, what is the relative energy throughput daily? Is that daily energy provision enough to provide energy to society as well as its construction, maintenance, and eventual replacement? My guess is average energy flux will be much less than that provided by hydrocarbons. If it’s 5%, do we have sufficient energy, materials, and organization to build out 20x the number of pipelines we currently have?
Good questions. The energy density of compressed air is a function of pressure.
https://tribology-abc.com/abc/thermodynamics.htm
If expanded isothermally, which means reheating between multiple expander stages, 1m3 of air at a guage pressure of 12.7bar, will release 1kWh of energy. So compressed air pipeline infrastructure would be quite a bulky way of transporting energy.
Peter—sometimes you write insightful stuff
other times total BS
I use this board to float ideas in the hope that other contributors will pick holes in them and suggest ways of improving them. Some ideas may be good. Others, not so much.
fair comment peter
Norman—sometimes you post insightful stuff
Other times inciteful stuff
It’s all good!
I just thought of something you guys.
The Olympics this summer in France.
Remember 08?
wasn’t it the oil spike from the summer Olympics in China that blew the top off the economy and into the great recession?
Think history could repeat?
And whenever the oil price spikes, they start burning down France. Remember the “yellow vest”?
This could be a double whammy.
Either a ray of sunshine, or s storm cloud. CRE and associated debt.
From Wolf:
“Office availability rates have reached 30% and more in some cities, and are above 20% in most cities, due to a structural problem as Corporate America has discovered it doesn’t need, never needed, and won’t ever need all this office space that it has leased. High vacancy rates mean the cash flow from rents is diminished, and that makes it harder to make the payments of any type of mortgage – fixed or floating rate.
There is not a good way out, buildings are being drastically repriced, quite a few of them are sold for close to land value to be redeveloped into residential. And it’s a huge mess. Lower mortgage rates, should they re-appear, won’t alter the structural problem.”
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/05/02/delinquencies-of-floating-rate-office-cmbs-loans-hit-20-fixed-rate-loans-are-at-4-7/
If these buildings are at land value, they might work for housing. Ignore, forget, use for storage the core. The utilities are in, the structure is up. Recycle as necessary.
Have no idea if this works, but when anything gets cheap enough, sometimes things can be done with to make it work for a different purpose.
Dennis L.
American politicians are scared that Israel is going down.
not that I’m too obsessed with nukes, but Israel may be the next country to use one.
Iseals nuclear arsenal is a unique risk for a variety of reasons.
I will discuss only one. Scientist Chris Busby has documented u235 u238 using multiple labs in both Lebanon and Gaza. He proposes the possibility that Israel has already deployed enhanced radiation weapons commonly known as nuetron bombs.
These substances are not found in nature. They are the product of a man made nuclear reaction. The substances may be the result of depleted uranium bomb casings.
Which raises a interesting question. What exactly is nuclear weapon deployment? Depleted uranium is frequently used in projectiles increasing their effectiveness radically.
We know from the Dimona whistleblower a large part of Israel’s nuclear arsenal is enhanced radiation weapons. Theat weapons can be designed to be used very close to friendly forces and create very little fallout. Ideal for Israel’s situation.
As we consider nuclear weapon use so called tactical nuclear weapons are oft mentioned. When enhanced radiation and EMP weapons are included we really have no idea what sort of weapons short of thermonuclear weapons exist.
The risk being that use of these would be considered not a nuke just likevdeplered uranium projectiles. Gateway nukes.
Not to pick on Israel. Every nation possessing a nuclear arsenal does it for the same reason. To deter a existential threat.
Nuclear and biological weapons are clearly illegal under international law as they have no capability to discern between military and civilian casualties. While Israel is a unique and quite serious risk weapons of mass destruction are liabilities for humanity in all state arsenals. As technology accelerates a situation where parity is achievable becomes increasingly fleeting.
Is deploying a computer virus a WMD?
Is deploying a low level biological weapon a WMD?
Is deploying a fission device with ultra low radiation a WMD?
Is depleted uranium projectiles a WMD?
Technology provides options. What they are defined as is not clear.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376445659_Evidence_for_the_use_by_Israel_of_a_neutron_uranium_warhead_in_Palestine_and_Lebanon
Israel has the “Sampson Option.”
It almost seems like this is what they are doing to their country. I am not there, not really familiar with the situation so have no opinions. But, history repeating itself?
Dennis L.
I had a teacher in high school who was in the military. Right after 911 he told our class “just give em all guns and let em all kill each other” that’s how solve the middle east conflicts.
What does an oil company do, if it has more associated natural gas production than there are pipelines to take away the natural gas?
This article says oil companies are petitioning to do more flaring of natural gas, until more takeaway capacity for natural gas takes place. In the meantime,
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Permian-Shrugs-Off-Below-Zero-Natural-Gas-Prices-in-Texas.html
Following up on myth number 4:
I wonder in what way all those wind turbines placed in the North Sea are already influencing the air currents towards Western Europe.
In geography class, we learned that mountain ranges have a significant impact on rainfall: On the windward side, moist air rises, cools, and precipitation occurs. On the other side of the mountain range, the so-called rain shadow, descending wind occurs, which warms up and thus becomes relatively drier.
I suspect that large wind turbine parks off the coasts of Western Europe form a small artificial mountain range that extracts quite a bit of energy from the air currents, thus altering precipitation patterns in Europe. It also seems plausible that wind turbine parks also create additional turbulence, which will mix warmer moist air layers more with colder air layers.
At least the impression arises that in the studies, they mainly consider that the wind turbines do not take too much wind from each other. It could well be that the altered distribution of precipitation will cause new problems.
Perhaps the surplus rainfall from one area could be pumped to the drying area using electrically powered pumps via pipelines, and in places where it rains too much, switching to greenhouse cultivation might be an outcome.
Even worse, the wind turbines will create wind resistance that slows down the rotation of the earth! It is important to keep the earth aerodynamic! Someone alert Greta!
As the days go by, they will get longer and longer and they will go by slower and slower. The phenomenon, known as global tarding, could have important impacts for life on Earth as well as implications for humans and society. We may get to enjoy extra sleep and longer lunch breaks. And for those among us who feel there are never enough hours in a day, there soon may be.
cool, the OFW comment period is only 20 days per article but with much longer days, we can all comment that much more.
or so I think in this comment.
I look forward to the time when the year will be exactly 364 days. No more of of these shenanigans keeping time by 4 different ways.
There are a number of articles about the effects of wind turbines on air flows. Two I using Google are these: (There are academic studies behind these summaries.)
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/28184/The-other-side-of-wind-power (published in 2018)
https://earth.esa.int/eogateway/news/long-term-satellite-data-show-wind-farms-can-affect-local-air-currents
Published Nov 10, 2022
Gail, thank you for those links.
These studies are about the reduction of wind speed and kinetic energy as a result of wind farms, and are in themselves relatively complex and hypothetical, but I do not immediately see a topic about the influence on relative humidity due to the more turbulent character of the wind, in which warm moist air from just above sea level is mixed with colder air from above.
Use google to look for specifically what you are looking for. There is also a “search academic article” option.
There are still a lot of things that haven’t been investigated, I am afraid.
Copilot:
“With years of engineering skill, and a monitoring portfolio of over 7,000 wind turbines, Onyx Insight believes that 80% of lost energy is caused by just 10 common issues. These include:
Temperature issues
Hydraulic system issues
Bad anemometers
Cooling system issues
Yaw misalignment
Pitch misalignment/calibration
Rotor imbalance
Bad control parameters
Icing
Leading edge erosion to blade”
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/om/10-most-common-causes-of-lost-energy-in-wind-systems/
“It’s also important to note that the main source of energy lost from wind turbines is mechanical friction. As the blades of the turbine rotate, they encounter resistance from the air and from the components of the turbine itself. This resistance causes energy to be lost in the form of heat and sound3”
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/energy-lost-from-wind-turbines.343102/
Hadn’t thought of the sound problem.
Have an unused silo, concrete, have considered putting a turbine on top of it, with a stairs in side for easy access, lift and lower turbine from inside silo for easy access. Followed wind for a number of years on OtherPower.com. Met and spoke with these fellows at MREA some years back. Wind turbines have maintenance issues, there is sort of a DIY cult around the things.
Dennis L.
Small wind turbines are close to worthless from the point of view of the amount of electricity produced relative to the materials required. They can’t be put on top of buildings without excessive shaking and noise problems. There is a whole lot of understructure required for today’s wind turbines. If you want on old fashioned wind mill to pump water for your animals to drink, that is a perfectly good use for wind energy. The low-tech machines can perhaps even be fixed by a farmer. But the new wind turbines are another question.
I was told by someone in the industry that wind turbines run on replacement parts and frequent maintenance. When they are out in the ocean, there are often mechanics housed in off-shore housing nearby, to try to handle problems. Sometimes helicopters are used to help make repairs. We need a whole fossil fuel energy supply chain to keep wind turbines operating.
Gail wrote: ‘Small wind turbines are close to worthless from the point of view of the amount of electricity produced relative to the materials required.’
Small (i.e 1kW or less) commercially available turbines have shown poor performance from an energy payback perspective. Many are made from plastic (with high embodied energy), have short lives <15 years and poor capacity factor in urban environments, which induce a lot of turbulence. That doesn't necessarily mean that small wind power is pointless. The examples you give of simple and easily repairable systems (made from wood an other low embodied energy materials) could work well. EROEI is also improved if system lifetime is long.
The problem with small wind turbines is to a significant extent a physics problem. Efficiency increases very significantly with the swept area.
Wind turbines, in general, have short lifetimes, no matter what they are made from. A cynic might say that wind turbines last as long as subsidies for their output last. The subsidy of going first is a huge subsidy, but there are other subsidies as well. EROEI calculations make wind turbines look that they might be a good addition to the system, but they make a whole lot of apples to oranges comparison, and they leave out many important issues.
I have been deeply involved with the International Society for Biophysical Economics, which is the organization that originated the EROEI calculations. (There are many similar calculations, however.) The organization is no longer in existence, partly because Prof Charles Hall wanted to retire, and no one else wanted to operate the organization. A web site advertising their 2021 meeting is up online.
https://www.isbpe.org
You will notice that the photo on the front page has me sitting next to Prof. Charles Hall, and two others, at a recent meeting. I spoke at these meetings, year after year, while they were in existence, trying to explain at least part of what was wrong to them. I practically never mention EROEI in my posts because I think it tends to be terribly misleading for wind and solar.
Once a person lets the “genie out of the bottle” that there are calculations that somehow make wind and solar look very good, they proliferate everywhere. Many people believe that they have found a solution to our energy problems.
This graph from Peak Oil Barrel is rather sobering.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/774145-1.jpg
It shows a 2018 peak in global crude production. Given the direction of travel shown by most producers on the graph, that peak is unlikely to be surpassed. There are other liquids (NGLs, condensates, biofuels) that aren’t included on the graph. So total liquids production probably doesn’t show a peak yet. But crude production is a good proxy for diesel production, which is what does the heavy lifting for the global economy. Unless we start running a lot more stuff on LPG, then:
Peak crude = Peak transport = Peak economy.
The top layer is North American Unconventional. This would include both production from the Canadian Oil Sands and from US shale, but presumably not North American Conventional, which would be somewhere else.
The problem is that we don’t quite know what this chart represents, in total.
The EIA shows the following numbers for total world crude and condensate production by year:
2017 81,260
2018 82,981
2019 82,168
2020 76,027
2021 77,210
2022 80,825
2023 81,804
The amounts shown in the chart total quite a bit lower amounts (high of 77 million bpd, low of about 72 million bpd). Perhaps it is intending to remove “condensate,” but we don’t know.
https://davecoop.net/seneca has a graph of EIA totals.
I still think that SMD (sweet middle distillates, for such as diesel or jet-fuel kerosene) is the most important oil — not such as US-fracked light oil.
Agreed! They purposely make it hard to find that.
Also, the problem is a “per capita” one. As population rises, we need more oil and coal and electricity.
“I still think that SMD (sweet middle distillates, for such as diesel or jet-fuel kerosene) is the most important oil — not such as US-fracked light oil.”
and yet I think the US is still exporting over 1 mbpd of diesel because US refineries are producing more than is needed domestically.
US diesel continues to be in great shape.
Could you give a link about the SMD graph? it is not at davecoop.
The problem is all barrels are not equal in energy. e.g.
Barrel of American diesel has 5.684M BTUs
Barrel of LPG has 2.783M BTUs.
Above calculations done by Copilot.
Not all barrels are equal, I did a rough approximation of this some time ago, even if the number of barrels remained about the same, the mix is changing and that results in less available energy per barrel. From this site we know “light” fracked oil is not suitable for diesel, the example makes comparison easier.
Were one to compare a barrel of American oil circa 1970 to one 2023 which includes NGL, the result would be somewhat sobering I should think.
If we are going to keep on going, H seems the only alternative which would scale and then there is going to be a heck of a dip. The good news is it would have a positive future over a long enough period of time.
We are biology, even something as simple as cooking allows us as sentient beings to begin basic religions which raise us above brute animals which are close to pure biology. With pure biology economists are going to be in the unemployment line.
The universe has set things up that way. Per J. Campbell, there is a great deal of commonality across religions, coincidence?
Per Copilot:
“He also noted that the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they are spontaneous productions of the psyche.” Okay, and where did the psyche come from?
Someone has their thumb on the scale.
Dennis L.
You might like the book Oneness: Great Principles Shared by All Religions by Jeffrey Moses.
Thank you,
Dennis L.
“Per J. Campbell, there is a great deal of commonality across religions, coincidence?”
JC also said that all Gods and gods are human inventions, so yes the commonality across religions is due to the sources being human imagination.
” ‘He also noted that the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they are spontaneous productions of the psyche.’ Okay, and where did the psyche come from?”
the human brain and mind co-evolved, so there’s the source of the “psyche”.
the overwhelming evidence points to religions being the inventions of the imaginations of prescientific unknowledgable superstittious ancient people.
One should stress that most of the times people who want to cling to religion are, when you talk to them, intellectually lazy and very prone to group thinking. We are at times when lack of curiosity killed the cat.
2008 was peak……….flatline until 2019………then rapid drop off cliff edge panic among elites…….hilarity predictably ensues……….totalitarian actions……
“unconventional” is a code term for a certain coyote running in place 5 feet past a cliff edge.
The Oil Drum commentators were correct all those years ago…..
Hey cro.
You got any coyotes recipes?
I just dumped 5 of the predatory buggers off at my designated Eagle/vulture feeding site…….gotta keep the American National symbol well fed.
I will ask them how they taste…..they sure clean them up fast.
The wolf is here!
Yes, this is an oldie but a goodie.
I actually posted it here about ten years ago, but it deserves another outing.
This one is anther perennial.
From Zero Hedge
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/safe-haven-yen-trending-towards-zero-against-gold
I found this part interesting:
Of course, what is happening is that the total amount of goods and services being produced is no longer rising. On a per capita basis, it is likely falling. Whether or not gold is a good hedge depends on a lot of things, such as whether the US loses at war with Russia-China-Iran, and the extent to which international trade continues in the future. The US needs the support of Russia-China to continue what industry it currently has. For example, the US buys still oil drilling pipes from China.
Monetizing debt sounds like a good way to make inflation. The US, Japan, and Europe can go down together.
So they are making the worst possible choice.
Rather than getting a financial crisis and dealing with it.
We will get hyper inflation then a financial crisis.
LOL
might as well go out and spend your money while it still has some value.
Okay, I am a believer:
“For example, the US buys still oil drilling pipes from China.”
What would be the NPV of the investment in manufacturing pipe given the near term peaking of fracked oil?
My bet is the answer is over our head, this month will be another launch, hope it goes well.
Musk is a smart guy, looks like fusion may be used for propulsion in space, don’t think much of the idea of colonizing Mars myself. Starship is for industry, robots are for space, man is for earth.
Earth needs a break from industry and it does not seem wise to release more exogenous energy on earth; that experiment is too dangerous.
Far out thought. TPTB recognized fossil fuels would be necessary to advance the experiment, man; enough was made to get to the next step but not so much as to ruin earth. It was never meant to last any longer, time to move on, or up, up and away. They have put the metaphorical cubic mile of Pt up there somewhere and it probably isn’t that hard to find.
Dennis L.
A true believer, who will believe whatever comes out of Musk’s behind.
We don’t have fusion on earth, much less at space.
TPTB cannot even terraform antarctica. The cubic mile of PT only exists in your imagination, not in the real world.
The Earth’s content of Pt is 0.4ng/g so strictly speaking there is a cubic mile of it here. We just need to grind 10% of the Earth, leach it, and recover that cubic mile. no need to go after an asteroid which will also have the same Pt density.
Okay, not sure if it is correct, but got Copilot to give me the amount already spent on wind turbines, if correct about 2×10^12, or a couple of trillion.
I then had it calculate at today’s prices how much Pt what would give in cubic miles. It did not want to save the results, something about this amt of Pt being hard to handle, but the calculation was >2 cubic miles.
The US blew up two trillion dollars in Afghanistan I think.
Find a rock in space, and grind the hell out of it if need be. If the metal is twice as expensive as today that would be the cubic mile.
Space has fusion energy, it is called the sun.
As always, send the waste to Jupiter.
Copilot is being a bit difficult, it knows I am on this site.
The US spends $1T/year on defense for stuff which does not seem to work well, Israel is volunteering to give Ukraine its Patriots, they ran an experiment recently and the things don’t work very well.
The biggest problem will be stranded assets and who is getting the income stream from said assets. That will be a real fight and those who get the current cash will not wish to let go of it. Pt is pretty simple, refining can’t be that hard, Pt is non reactive. A guess is the skim will be hard and if mined in space, no pollution law suits unless Jupiter is sentient.
We know how to build fuel cells, we are already burdening the US citizenry with $1T/year of interest. A guess is fuel cells will pay off the debt and interest and produce water as waste.
Copilot says 1.5 ng/g Pt in earth’s crust so it only takes 2.5% of the crust give or take. But do it in space.
Dennis L.
“The US blew up two trillion dollars in Afghanistan I think.”
Remember, a large share of whatever the US “blew up” in Afghanistan likely ended up stimulating the US economy. It made jobs for US soldiers. It made jobs for ammunition and aircraft makers, and for civilian subcontractors. It gave an excuse for ever more US debt, so that fossil fuel prices could be higher. Wars stimulate the economy.
Would your 1 cubic mile of PT do as well at stimulating the economy? We would still need to be able to find all of the other materials needed to make vehicles. Without much coal-based industry in the United States, that might be difficult.
To Gail,
A H economy with fuel cells on the back of an envelope looks like it could work with current dollars.
I have no answer for the jobs program, in my youth we had such a program, Viet Nam. Send your sons and return body bags and bodies missing parts.
We have politicians now telling us how great it is Ukrainians are dying and we get the jobs here. The universe may not look kindly on such an endeavor.
I am not arguing in favor of H, toying with numbers and questions which come up here. A couple trillion dollars of Pt would be a pile of Pt. Who gets the $1T interest per year on our debt? My guess a minority, they could kick in a trillion for the cause and perhaps learn to code.
Dennis L.
Not to mention all that afghani heroin effect on the economy. Fed Kensington for 20 years! And those baby mommas can eat!
to grind it, you need about a million times more FF than you have now. If you burn those fuels the atmosphere will be like Venus and inhospitable to life. there are no Pt asteroids.
Dennis, To obtain a cubic mile of platinum, you would need to grind up most of the asteroid belt. Not a near term prospect I would suggest.
Space resource utilisation certainly has a place in discussions about our energy future. But discussion needs to be a grounded in reality. Space solar power satellites in GEO are possible in the near future (decades) if we manage to develop lunar ISRU as a follow on from the Artemis programme. Gerard O’Neill provided a practical framework for how this might be done. But the scale of the project and required investments are far beyond anything that NASA could afford.
Kul,
Investing with Musk has to date been a winner, tomorrow is a question.
We have fusion on earth, very limited, we have fusion in space, it is the sun.
Pt exists, perhaps only need the will to get it out. I am not at all in favor of mining earth, but the numbers on the US debt suggest it would work financially. See note below.
Those currently getting the bucks won’t be happy, but if we don’t look forward, those bucks will not be worth much. A cubic mile of Pt, the knowledge to make fuel cells, the knowledge to recycle 95% of a fuel cell, that would be worth a fortune, indeed it would be worth the future of our earth.
I suggest this because it seems to use current engineering, the money seems doable and really not that great for the return on investment.
Someone is putting a heck of a lot of money into SpaceX and the FAA seems to be cutting down on the paperwork necessary to launch the things.
I think human beings are pretty remarkable. Keeping us around for a while sounds like a good idea to me.
Dennis L.
All these money being thrown are just drops in a big lake. Too little, too late.
Some kind of manhattan project is needed. They spent $2 billion in 1944 to build that thing while the national budget was $106 bil in 1944.
6.11 trillion was spent by US govt in 2023. By the same vein $110 billion has to be spent on whatever you are pushing for. Per year.
Like what Gail said, most of the money spent on US wars returned to USA thru fatty contracts, to build expensive houses for the defense company execs, etc. Unlike this project.
I think I have explained enough.
As I see it, I believe that the rampant monetary crisis that japan is suffering can lead to three possible courses:
1- As SMO points out, It produces a kind of swap of technological goods for raw materials/energy intended to support the Japanese currency without touching the rates too much and keep its balances under some control. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that Japan has been suffering from a process of clear technological decline for decades.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/japan-relative-economic-decline-explained-partly-by-failure-to-embrace-new-technologies-by-daniel-gros-2024-03/english
By seen, its peculiar approach to engineering aimed at electronics for personal use, which has not adapted to new market trends and the displacement of the center of gravity of technological production within the region towards other areas that made possible a optimization of capital profit rates (like South Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and now also Thailand and Vietnam) have made Japan a country that has seen better days, which means that it has less and less to offer in the face of an exchange of this type.
Nor should we forget that the country is aging at a dizzying rate, something that certainly does not favor it at all.
2- The Fed reduces rates to keep non-dollar currencies afloat, including, of course, the yen. But that would mean that the United States would have to give up fighting against internal inflationary pressures, precisely now that a hawkish vision seems to begin to dominate the Fed at a delicate moment in which they are unable to contain core prices and oil is high. . And also, in the middle of the electoral period.
And I agree that Powell’s job insecurity will become more evident as the months go by.
3- The United States lets Japan fall and the yen sinks into misery. In that case, apart from the contagion effect to other currencies, this would have serious consequences on the geopolitical balance, given that Japan is now, along with South Korea, Australia and the Philippines, the main supporter of Western interests in the Asia-Pacific region. Pacific against China, the great enemy of the other bloc.
We must also remember that the yen is not the only currency that is devalued. The Chinese yuan is also affected, but nevertheless China is acquiring large reserves of gold and that somehow protects it against a possible implosion of the fiat monetary system. Given that, if, as F. Llinares says, the United States does not have enough gold to even make a few earrings, but instead has hypertrophied armed forces and 40% of the world’s military budget that it naturally finances with debt, we could expect anything.
Without a doubt, this is very interesting, but the most unfortunate thing is that the general media does not echo the great relevance of all these events.
COPY/PASTE
The pressure on the yen is given by the differential between the rates in force in the main countries of the world and Japan. With this differential, no investor is going to buy assets in yen and in any case, the selling pressure coming from the liquidation of all types of assets in yen, suggests a destructive process for the currency, which only has one clear solution… go up interest rates.
Of course it is unviable due to the tremendous Japanese debt that would send them directly into the infernal spiral of having to pay the interest on the debt with more printing. redoubling the downward pressure on the yen, entering that vicious circle that no one wants.
At the moment, investment in export companies is the best solution and hence the rise of the Nikkei (similar to the Argentine Merval). Demographics and the impossibility of maintaining exports come into play here, with a labor force with a clear downward trend.
The problem for all these countries is the rise in prices that is being observed in all raw materials. The abuse of fiduciary supply has created the ideal breeding ground for accelerating inflationary pressures, once inflation has appeared strongly. This trend, which lasts for decades, cannot be stopped once it starts. If we also add an incipient shortage, we can assume that we have entered a phase of price growth, rising wages, reduced margins and, finally, powerful stagflation.
If the result of this situation is to return to the printer, it will be impossible to avoid loss of confidence in the system. The rise in gold prices (the clearest indicator of greater or lesser confidence) and the creation of the BRICS+ bloc suggests a fight to the death between the two opposing positions. Maintain the hegemony of the dollar and the SWIFT system or move to a multipolar world, with an alternative in the form of the new BRICS digital currency system, which will be developed throughout this decade, all in the midst of a clear trend towards deceleration economic, victim of excess debt and depletion of resources.
We are still in the defining phase, but in the coming years we will see who “triumphs.”
COPY/PASTE
My understanding is that in markets all prices are set at the margin; perhaps take the last 50 days Moving average to get a better idea of the actual price and the trend.
Generally, the long term contracts are not visible to most people.
Dennis L.
Re “off load its treasuries”. Like a a dump truck? Just pull up and pull the lever? Who is the buyer? There is not one. Where is the market for a T of treasuries? Lol. Everyone is a seller. The United states treasury. The banks. Sovereigns. All sellers.
The only market is rigged to sell new issuance and rollover. Once it’s issued they don’t give a rat’s ass. Your supposed to use it as prime collateral not sell it.
Anyone holding treasuries is in the same boat. You use it as collateral. You leverage it in dollar trades for goods. You wait for maturity and pray.
It’s taking every trick in the book and a new book to get the new issuance and the bonds hitting maturity “sold”. Every orifice the banks have stuffed with bonds. It’s like Milo in catch 22 coating cotton with chocolate. Japan sell bonds? Who is the buyer? Tell China, they would like to know.
Good points!
China Treasury holdings decreased from ~1.3T to 0.8T from 2013/2014 to now. Nominal decrease of 40% and a real-terms decrease greater than that. Gradual selling works until there is a panic or loss of faith. Surely we are approaching that point, but I imagine the ride will have twists and turns.
Russia had no choice amazingly it was kicked off the dollar of course to assimilate it but it hasn’t worked out. This puts China in a power position not at all to its liking. USA committed seppeku with the weaponization of the dollar backfiring. Russias like I didnt do nothing he fell. Will China administer the cou d tra? Yes but very slowly to avoid big badda boom. In the meantime Yellen and Blinken show up to hang and Xi has to put up with them. Like he doesnt have better things to do. Xi caught on hot Mike 30 seconds b4 Blinken enters room “when is he leaving?*. Watch out Xi or we will send Biden over for a two week visit! Best behave. We’re not bluffing!
ROFL .
Worth a listen re: what is China doing with US Treasuries?
China and US both see the same need to “de risk,” each in its own way.
This is an excellent 5 minute video. The US doesn’t want US Treasuries. It is de-risking, as fast as it can by diversifying away.
Well all we have to do is have the government sell more bonds to themselves and spend a few quadrillion bringing back 30 years of outsourcing facilities. Then another 30 years and a few more quadrillion in bonds sold to ourselves (or is it bought by ourselves) bringing the workforce up to speed instead of liberal arts degrees.
That’s the de-risking for the USA the video speaks of
Derisking for China is letting every treasury they hold hit maturity buying whatever comorbidities they can with the proceed
Maybe all the greedy CEOs who outsourced everything for million dollar salaries can whittle the industry parts out of dog poop.
99% of these politicians and basically everyone is so stupid that they have no idea that we cant just sell more bonds to ourselves and magically create real facilities and resources, and talent will appear. I mean that would be just plain wrong to not to be able to create money because we are the epicenter of democracy!
If people cant get it that there is NO ONE that wants our IOUs that the only way to cash them is maturity and that time to maturity is the only time left is there any hope?
Everyone here knows damn well where this is going war the answer to everything. Are they going to come out and say we exported everything of value because we thought our IOUs that we sell to ourselves in a rigged process would always have value? So just whittle what you need to live out of dog poop. Or will we we get the real story. A monstrous evil has been growing in secret. It hates the USA because we are the epicenter of democracy and it has slyly destroyed the value of our great currency. This is the great battle of our millennium every weapon we possess must to be brought to bear against this unspeakable evil! So once again other countries will accept our sacred currency for their goods energy and resources. This however is not about money. Our enemy is mean to dogs so we must deploy weapons of mass destruction against them.
Honestly I think 95% of the politicians and 75% of the people will believe it.
They would eat pig poop if you told them it was good for unicorns.
Gonna be a steep learning curve.
You’ve heard it before. Free energy has long been available. The relevant machines have been invented, but the Deep State and the providers of fossil fuels have killed them off – and often (allegedly) even their inventors. It’s all about power and money.
Free Energy & Anti-Gravity Cover-Ups
I specifically remember hearing about the water-powered car on the news in the 1970s, but then the reports disappeared without trace – to the extent that I began to think I must have dreamed it.
Dr. Judy Wood, in her analysis of 9/11, has long been convinced that unlimited free energy was involved and is available. But I have never understood how or why she reached that conclusion.
And if unlimited free energy became available to the public, what would happen then? Imagine if ter / ror. wrists had access to it. Gulp!
A 9-year-old video now.
Infinite Energy – But Not For the Masses
A car powered by hot water is certainly possible. One could run a heat engine between any stored hot and cold source. The car could be recharged by running a heat pump, transfering heat from the cold to hot source. So the car would have a tank of almost boiling water and a tank of ice.
It would work. But I would imagine that range and power density (i.e acceleration) would be unacceptable to most consumers. But the fact of the matter is that if one is willing and able to accept a shorter range, there are a lot of options for powering vehicles. Compressed air, liquid nitrogen, compressed hydrogen or natural gas, stored heat, flywheels, batteries – the list is long. But who would buy a 50-mile range vehicle?
stagecoaches used to have a 15 mile range bweteen horse changes
but only the wealthy could afford to use them
Like the Cartwright’s on Bonanza
Hoss was a big free energy believer.
I always assumed these ‘water’ powered cars are really hydrogen powered. I have trouble believing there’s a great technology hidden away which wouldn’t be discovered independently by others over and over again. Many technology improvements happened around the world around the same time. Telephones, video displays, airplanes, radio, computers, data discs.. etc.. many people discovered the same things around the same time working independently.
Stored heat powered vehicles could never compete with ICE in terms of range, speed and acceleration. But the idea is simple and the embodied energy involved is quite low. Perhaps it could fill some transportation niches if we lose access to abundant liquid fuels.
The heat could be produced by concentrated solar. The cold could be produced by a wind powered heat pump and stored in a low melting point substance.
“But who would buy a 50-mile range vehicle?”
If petrol became too expensive, why not? In England lots of people hop in their car just to drive to the local shops. But there would still be consequences – what effect would all this steam in the atmosphere have?
Methanol, which freezes at -97°C would make a good cold reservoir. For the hot reservoir, hot water could be used or maybe high melting paraffin wax (gel wax). That melts at about 80°C. As these materials absorb energy as they melt and release energy as they freeze, there is no chemical change to either material in a closed tank. They should be reusable an infinite number of times.
Recharging the car would be interesting. The car could carry its own heat pump, which operates from electricity or some mechanical energy source. Or we could hook it up to a stationary heat pump that transfers heat to the wax and removes heat from the methanol. The result isn’t that different to an electric car. Range would be shorter. But purchase cost will be a lot less.
The Japanese built wood fired truck, when they were short of oil
The North Koreans got the tech and still use it
https://youtu.be/pqP7FxiFIHE?si=V-xtadhF_k-p85vF
About 15 kph (9 mph), it stops frequently, someone has to feed the wood to the pit constantly and in an uphill both the driver and the assistant (plus any passengers in the vehicle) are expected to push that thing over the hill, but at least it is better than walking so it is used quite often there.
I found this article, too.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/charcoal-powered-vehicles-make-a-comeback-in-north-korea-12092016160533.html
If a vehicle can be made to operate with wood, it can also be made to operate with charcoal (or with coal, I would expect).
It is not for the masses. Not for people like you.
Only for people who have a stake in civilization
here here zemi this technology will save the world once this system or bau implodes the elders have hidden these wonderful inventions away so their business would not be harmed but once the system is destroyed only then will these inventions be allowed to see the light of day look at nicola tesla he was destroyed by the elders the man was a genius look at many other examples even gail and her tireless work no one is listening they are living in a dreamworld but now we are very close to the end the dam is bursting are you excited i am only once everything we take for granted is gone can we rebuild either that or get ready for mad max world maybe the elders want mad max world to thin out the herd.
“the elders have hidden these wonderful inventions away so their business would not be harmed but once the system is destroyed only then will these inventions be allowed to see the light of day”
Quite possibly. Will I live to see the dam burst? I don’t know. I’m quite old by now.
Free energy people’ are those that would like to have a lot of money but dont so they sniff unicorn darts instead. Free energy is the sun that allows you a garden. It still doesnt get you fertilizer and water but its something. You got a garden you got free energy. Not your just a rich person wannabe. I should have been borne a prince but the man is keeping me down.
Hashtags
https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/freeenergy
https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/zeropoint
https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/antigravity
But I have no mechanical skills so would never be able to construct any of those machines that are referenced in the hashtagged videos above.
Some UFO investigators have long claimed that those machines that appear in our skies have access to unlimited energy and also have devices that mitigate the effects of gravity. It’s something to do with spinning mercury in a vortex.
When I see posts like these in a blog like ourfiniteworld, which can be surely defined accultured and based on scientific approach, I wonder if there is anyone or a group of people behind these kind of accounts.
Of course that is my opinion, I hope I can still express it.
If you would care to research the “occult” connections to much of the US space programs both historically and currently you might have your “scientific” viewpoint shaken considerably.
High strangeness (as defined in ufo/uap circles) is an intelligence test being used on humankind by something “other”……
Did you see the Gorilla on the basketball court?
You should research the occult connections found throughout the US space program both historically and currently. You will have your “scientific” viewpoint shaken.
High Strangeness (as defined in uap studies) is an intelligence test being used ON humanity by something “other” sharing at least partially, our reality.
Did you see the Gorilla on the basketball court?……most don’t
The UAP I saw in the late 90’s at my cabin along the NY/PA border appeared as a stationary fireball dripping some kind of molten orange substance.
Abundant Iron?
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Research/Metal_fuel_for_carbon-free_energy_on_Earth_and_the_Moon
There have been several samples collected of slagged metallics from UAP encounters…….weird stuff.
I think that part of the confusion relates to the huge infrastructure that electricity is part of, and the need to have the quantity of electricity match the needs of the population, around the clock and 365 days a year.
Modelers put together models, not thinking through all of the details and came to the conclusion that devices of various kinds could capture/make electricity with very little input energy.
These modelers also missed the point that whatever device has to be made in advance using fossil fuels. Somehow, it needs to be financed, and someone will need to pay a tax called “interest.” There is also the need to support the government with higher taxes to transfer the benefit of the system to the overall population, and to pay for things like more and better roads and schools.
If the new form of energy produces electricity, all of the additional stuff needed to make the system work (transmission lines, lots of batteries, ways to transfer extra energy to the winter, etc.) need to be included in the model.
It is the fact that bad models are around that has convinced people that fossil-fuel made devices have some hope of capturing enough electricity energy to pay back their costs.
Good points. And even if we did have unlimited energy, we would soon mine Mother Earth away to nothing, given our addiction to the consumption of food, goods and gadgets.
But what about RECYCLING?
https://qz.com/evs-are-dying-fast-and-the-repair-industry-is-lagging-1851450290
Electric cars are dying fast and the repair industry is lagging
The demand for mechanics who can take apart the battery pack and repair a dead cell has vastly outstripped supply.
Early EV adopters with cars no longer covered by a warranty of any kind are running into issues with longevity of these complex electric systems. The non-dealership car repair industry has not kept pace with the proliferation of EVs, and as such, there are very few places that can affect the repairs needed to keep these cars on the road. As luck would have it, Barnes found a shop that could do battery repairs to her Tesla, Medlock and Sons, but the shop was so backed up that it would still take years.
“We have like 350-plus appointments for Model S battery repairs, and we just don’t have time to go any faster,” Medlock said.
“Tesla told them it needed a battery, because Tesla only replaces the whole thing. They don’t do component replacement like we do,” he continued. “Any Model S that has been supercharged a lot, early ‘12, ‘13, ‘14, those cars, their batteries are failing,”
A need for more specialists while the economy is going down and depopulation is on the horizon (excess deaths, and all that)? It doesn’t look good. I’ll just have to kidnap Norman and make him my slave rickshaw puller. 😉
lol zemi—
I daresay you often make a cold cup of coffee, then have a mini rant that there’s a conspiracy out there preventing it from becoming hot of its own accord.
oh well—I’d bang my head against the wall, but I would take too much pleasure in it when I stopped.
lol zemi
somehow i visualise you making a cup of coffee with cold water—then having a mini rant when it doesnt suddenly become hot
“somehow i visualise you making a cup of coffee with cold water—then having a mini rant when it doesnt suddenly become hot”
Now I wonder why you would visualise that. Clearly you haven’t watched any of the videos, as usual. But if free energy machines did become available, I visualise you having a rant about why you couldn’t have a meter that you could put shillings in, like in the old days. 🙂
zemi
at my age , i dont have enough time left to spare watching videos about perpetual motion machines.
The universe is packed with perpetual motion. Think of the electrons in every atom, that spin non-stop. Think quantum foam. Harness quantum foam (and it appears from the video that it has been done), and you acquire zero point energy.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/nothing-exist-quantum-foam/
nope zemi
the universe is subject to the same laws of thermodynamics as you or i
the only difference is time
other that that—i don’t know what you are going on about
would zero foam give me a closer shave or something?
i suffer from zero point energy alla time—then i make myself get out of bed and read your posts.
then i usually decide it wasn’t worth getting up
apologies—i thought my first comment had vanished—hence duplication
Maybe the so called free energy is not enough to fuel the current civilizaion.
There is a reason such tech is suppressed.
Imagine every neighborhood kid has a nuke. What will happen?
Michael Shermer interviews Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society. Zubrin believes that Elon Musk’s Starship will be the enabling tool for the colonisation of Mars. That colonisation will be historically analogous to the settlement of North America and will create a new branch of human civilisation that will drive human technology and social development.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gAZ3i-TVAVk
An interesting interview. I want to share Zubrin’s enthusiasm, but I struggle to see what he sees. The North American settlers had vast tracts of virgin soil that could be brought under the plow. There were wild animals to eat, fresh water to drink and no shortage of air to breath. There were even natives who could be bartered with.
But with Mars, we are talking about a place that is as cold as Antarctica and without breathable air. Water is frozen as hard as stone. The soil is toxic and highly alkali. Anyone that moves there will be living underground to get away from the cold. They will be making food from algae grown in vats, fed by cnemicals produced using nuclear reactors. They will be making living space by digging it out. They will need a lot of technology to survive. And the cost of transportation will neccesitate producing much of it locally. Living space will be cramped and smelly. Living underground will make people cepressed and irritable. I think the analogy between Mars and North America is a poor one. It has more in common with Antarctica and Greenland.
I agree with you. Even the moon would be a terrible challenge.
If we would have had some cool Science Fiction about subterranean mole men in Appalachia who would occasionally come to the surface to kidnap Dasey Dukes and Ellie May Clampet our Oligarchs would be slightly less unhinged.
i was under the impression that you could breathe in antartica and greenland
We agree on something Norman.
I am amazed at how obvious it is that all the space nonsense is subterfuge.
If you want to colonize a tough (but not impossible) place…there is a massive polar archipelago just sitting there waiting for us down there…..breathable air, lotsa water……even a few seals and penguins….
Just get on a boat….
A nice essay/speech by CJ Hopkins, although it saddens me slightly that well meaning people don’t seem to understand that the problems are in fact predicaments rooted in physics.
The speech begins in the 5th or 6th paragraph, thereabouts.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/01/fighting-monsters/
Those who rage against Orwellianism should be grateful for the energy predicament. The last few years have shown that the development of technology will inevitably be used for greater control, regulation and stifling of the human spirit.
When you have the Second Law of Thermodynamics on your side, then you know you are on the winning team.
I think that this part is key, with respect to war:
Peak cars 2017-2018 .
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/european-automakers-are-struggling-falling-demand
I think that this is a key issue:
“Diminished resale values pose a particular challenge for car manufacturers like VW, heavily involved in customer financing. When used car prices fall below expectations, companies are compelled to take write-downs on these loans.”
I think that this is an issue in the US as well. Some US makers of cars finance vehicles sales.
Also, there has been a recent article saying that Hertz has had a big issue with falling resale values of EVs. Hertz had the bad sense to purchase the EVs that it is now selling. Because if this, the loss of value is flowing through to its income statement.
There are several other things in the article that are interesting. One is
One of the things that is pointed out is the fact that the spike in used car prices was brought about by supply chain disruptions. Once this bubble went away, there were drops in prices.
I would expect that all of the subsidies of EVs is producing a temporary bubble in the price of EVs. As this bubble inevitably erodes, this price bubble goes away.
Another point is
“Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz face heightened exposure to issues in China, their largest market, where consumer demand has softened amid intensifying competition from local players.”
Having a big China problem adds to the overall problem. Chinese auto sales, in general, are way down.
Over a decade ago, probably in the aftermath of the “Great Recession” a friend of mine noted that recessions in the United States happened roughly every ten years.
2020 marked the end of the 2010s. The United States was due for a recession.
There is some evidence of this online if you have enough time in your day to search for “2019” recession “global economy” in an internet search engine.
Before that, there was the 2008/2009 recession….
Before that, was the 2001 recession…
Before that, was a 1990 recession….
Before that, there was a recession in 1980…
The conformists among you will claim that it is just a coincidence the pandemic started right around the time the United States could have been expected to go into a recession if the data about previous recessions online is accurate.
All recessions have catalysts, events that usually cause investors to try to sell at the same time. It’s unclear as to how many firms received financial assistance during the lockdowns because many large and successful firms don’t seem to be making much money.
The year 2019 was showing a lot of strain. I remember writing about this issue and speaking about it to groups. Looking back, one of the big issues was that we were past “peak oil,” even without looking at “peak oil per capita.”
Many groups were protesting because their wages were too low. Politicians were looking for an excuse to lock up unruly citizens. Also, production of commodities was increasingly unprofitable (which was the reason for the protests, and the low wages for workers). Politicians needed an excuse to close down production for a while, and get commodity prices down. The low oil prices of 2020 really helped.
for the past 300 years we have built a civilisation based entirely on producing and selling more this year than last year.
and that’s it.
no deep state, no elite, no elders, no conspiracies– and no free energy.
our existence in a single sentence—which of course is also a death sentence.
the only guesswork is the date of our execution.
Norm,
I will go along with the first paragraph; it is essentially a new religion which I find wanting.
Last paragraph, It isn’t going to be allowed by the powers that be.
We really don’t understand our universe very well, we were off by about 13B years in its age and there is yet to be a good explanation of what came before the universe other than it is turtles all the way down.
Dennis L.
weve spent 300 years flaring off excess carbon built up in the earth
there really is nothing else dennis
trust me—there are no ”powers that be”
we got ourselves into this fine mess, wholly dependent on cheap surplus energy
now weve burned in all—pray to odin or allah—it won’t change the outcome.
Aren’t they gonna think of something?
They GOT TO…usually response from the crowd I talk to about it…the green 🍏 push is reassuring the masses everything will turn out OK
The greatest trick the powers that be ever played was convincing Norman that they did not exist.
So much organization is evident at so many layers of the economic, social and political hierarchy, and so much hidden organization is necessitated to account for how society operates, and yet, Norman, you choose to infer that there is no top layer and the pyramid is truncated.
No Elders of Zion, no Illuminati, no Gnomes of Zurich, no Wise Men, Pundits, Witan, Wizards or Warlocks at all?
Well, you may correct there. lack of good guidance and adequate supervision may well be the reason for the mess we are in.
John Titus has a good take on this on his channel/substack Best Evidence.
In the linked video he recounts how the BIS called an emergency meeting in Aug 2019 to enact a historic policy called ‘going direct’. Basically moving money from commercial banking directly to retail banking to shore up a massive liquidity crisis. They seemingly funneled 7 trillion into retail between Sept 2019 and April 2020. Because the global economy was shutdown they avoided hyperinflation.
A guess:
This is an AI problem and AI is going to unwind all the obfuscation and make an unwelcome summary.
Conclusion: a great deal of economist work as overhead is going to be cut.
Dennis L.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to much of this 54 minute video yet. I notice it is from two years ago, so it is likely not completely up to date, but it can still be helpful.
For those interested in the Yen issue .
” HHH
IGNORED
05/01/2024 at 9:46 am
Most people believe that the carry trade is exchanging yen for dollars and then buying assets abroad. That’s not really what the carry trade is about.
Carry trade is about large Japanese banks using short term Japanese government bills as collateral to make dollar denominated loans that is the grease that makes economic activity happen. Particularly in China. Japanese banks loan dollars heavily into China.
But when geopolitical issues arise or supply shocks happed or Chinese real estate has issues. These banks become risk adverse and choose not to make loans.
In short it’s already been unwinding. Which is why both the yen and yuan are way down against the dollar. It becomes more expensive and takes more collateral to make dollar denominated loans.
It’s actually not even about the yen. Or Japanese central bank monetary policy. It’s about lack of dollar liquidity. A dollar shortage. ”
I hadn’t realized:
Also:
What this second paragraph seems to say is that China is having trouble making these loans work well enough to repay interest in US$ on the loans. The fact that the yuan is falling relative to the US$ (as a result of all of its problems) is relevant as well.
In an earlier post I has posted about the make believe reserves of USA . Mike S analysis of this . PDP= Proven Devolped Reserves .
”The great Rune Likvern once taught me because of PDP tight oil decline, reserve estimates were essentially worthless and at any given time PDP reserve to production ratios (R/P) for shale, a very important metric in gauging the health of our nations oily future, was never more than 3.5-4.0 years, max.”
https://www.oilystuff.com/single-post/aaaaand-its-gone?postId=1b023f01-ae84-4a28-8c5e-26337c4db7ca&utm_campaign=ec806ddc-3cab-409a-a4e1-e6b0fe3cfede&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=ed2716a5-18d3-4e7b-b9fe-b555479a9410&cid=fa335351-37bb-44a6-9899-f8c34b4a0f81
I would hope for 7 to 10 years, but 4 is acceptable.
the US will have to increase imports.
David,
Always the contrarian: We are going to decrease imports and make it all here, production is going all autonomous and AI driven.
Watch Tesla, it has to have the lowest cost production going lower. The engineering is incredible with the extrusion and AI robots are probably being used more than known.
Largest cost of off shore cars could well be transportation.
Dennis L.
I tried to see if more recent Permian reserves were available than year end 2022, but I didn’t find any.
The situation definitely doesn’t look good. And, of course, these reserves are not for heavy oil or even medium heavy oil. They are for a very light mix of oil that has too much natural gas liquids in it.
Gail , here is the answer to your question .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2024/05/revision-de-las-reservas-de-petroleo.html
Thanks! This is still the 2022 yearend reserves, being published in April 2024. I was hoping that someone would come up with 2023 yearend reserves.
Putting these numbers together seems to take a while.
Renowned Scientist: All Covid-Vaxxed ‘Will Die in 3 to 5 Years’
“A world-renowned scientist and leading immunology expert has raised the alarm with an explosive warning to the public that everyone who has been vaccinated with Covid mRNA shots “will die within 3 to 5 years, even if they have had only one injection.”
https://slaynews.com/news/renowned-scientist-all-covid-vaxxed-will-die-3-5-years/
AstraZeneca Admits Vaccine Had Lethal Side Effect
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/disease/astrazeneca-admits-vaccine-had-lethal-side-effect/
could it be the hoped for depop?
I still have some doubts.
The article is not very convincing. Dolores Cahill was one of the first warners, focusing on the cykotine storm effect, which is a real potential danger, but until now has not occurred in relation with the jabs. It might be a strategy for a bioweapon though. In that case it would need the release of the ‘wild virus strain’ in the future. It is thinkable. Noone knows if it is possible.
Van den Bossche refers to the development of dangerous mutations after vaccinating “into a pandemic”. That is a serious possibility, but I am afraid there has neither been any pandemic nor any vaccination, the the RKI-files in Germany.
The jabs contain some ingredients, that are not healthy and noone should have in the body. They have the potential to cause thrombes, autoimmune effects and cancer. The whole platform is unsafe.
The body has several abilities to fight toxins, including DNA repair. This can be backed by a healthy lifestyle and respective foods.
To give some ideas, where to start reading, recommendations usually given are: Natto or Nattokinase, NAC, Nicotin, Vitamin D, Vitamin C (some recommend 4g per day), Zinc, Selenium, a ketogenic diet (to reduce inflammation), olive oil, green vegetables (some recommend 1,5 liters per day). Support a good microbiome.
Some mushrooms can support repair mechanisms, amoung them Shiitake and Maitake, also ordinary Champignons have beneficial health effects. Studies show, some mushrooms also can support anti-cancer effects, amoung them Shiitake, Trametes (Huaier) and Inonotus obliquus (Chaga).
From my point of view, it is a good idea to analyse what was in the batches and to implement screenings for sideeffects. This does not seem realistic, though, under the current political paradigm.
lion’s mane is another beneficial mushroom for the immune system, as is reishi. trametes versicolor, aka turkey tails, grows very commonly all over the world (none of the others are common in europe or north america, afaik); there’s a great android app called inaturalist that can help people identify it. reishi (aka the mushroom of immortality in china, previously reserved exclusively for the elites’ use) and turkey tails (the most studied medicinal mushroom, used alongside chemotherapy often in asia)are the top 2 for me.
regarding cahill, i’ve no idea if she’s right, but it was her early warnings that caused me to look into the gene therapy shots and avoid them. she’s suffered many slings and arrows since then; she is sincere and informed, from what i can tell.
It looks like it adds 10-20 years annually to whoever took it. hence why really old people went first and many mid aged athletes who break their bodies are now passing. Which would mean 5 years max for the vast majority. Some may make it a little farther and some shorter.
The population will drop like a bell curve though. Humans aren’t that different.
“Cahill issued this warning in 2021.”
Her forecast is not looking too accurate at this point.
well the vaccines started over 3 years ago. we should be seeing some results. but we do not. Mortality quickly rose and then abated.
Every kind of Covid vax have clearly demonstrated what kind of specific adverse events can create, from sudden deaths to cancers or eye problems, liver disease, diabete and so on.
It is different from mRNA (Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna), Astra, Johnson, Sputnik, the Chinese one…
It is full of scientific researches demonstrating the effects.
Many have been posted here too.
Many effects have been admitted by producers themselves.
Without mentioning that these vaxes don’t avoid to take the disease or to spread it, on the contrary they showed the opposite.
The peak of mortality is maybe over, now we are experiencing the bad results on people’s health.
If we have not understood yet the severity of the mistakes done, expecially about mandates or digital passports, I think that humanity have no hope for the future.
Each one that understand this should be scared for one’s safety.
Well theres a lot of different ideas about the injections. I keep coming back to the DARPA presentations circa 2015 where MRNA tech is touted as a countermeasure. That humans are genetically programmable is an attractive idea in biological weapons. In this paradigm humans are regarded as locks with their tumblers keyed by MRNA tech. Measure countermeasure.
I suspect that the results were a failure that humans proved to be far less suitable for programming than the paradigm wished, both measure and countermeasure ineffective. Certainly adverse health effects from the shots but a die off no I dont think so. Why because the reality is they dont have the tech to program you like a alarm. Even if they did ee would see a bell curve and we dont. IMO whatever the Rona and countermeasure were it’s over for the time being.
Anecdotal note. I know a couple and the husband lungs are destroyed by rona. He is a strapping man and worked in heavy industry his whole life. She is a nurse a good one and lost her job refusing the injection. They had ivermectin all over the house very early. But he got the rona bad ended up on a ventilator. She probably saved his life wouldn’t allow Remdesiver. He made it but can’t do much.
Ivermectin worked like a charm for me. If it were for not knowing that couple my ideas about what happened would be very different. How ironic that she was so informed an early adopter of ivermectin and he so healthy but he fell victim. If not for knowing that couple I would definitely think the whole thing a hoax the bug a dud. As I mentioned I have my ideas about what happened a biological weapon countermeasure roll out but who really knows. A die off no we would see that building in excess mortality. Life goes on. For most not even a shadow remains. Back to ‘normal”.who really knows. Just another monster passing in the night.
Now we find Dazak lamented they had 700 bugs on ice in Wuhan whose genomes never got mapped. But we were told with authority it’s not one of ours. Lol
For whatever reason the rona seems to coincide with China going their own way. Curious what happened there but we will never know.
There is no doubt that claims against the vaccines are true. but time scale and percentage of deaths are both small, after which the world is normal again.
drb, I can agree with you, but for me the issue is a little bit complicated than this.
In my view, vaccines that can be letal, with more side effects than usual, and not protecting against the disease (and the spread of disease) is one part of the problem concerning ‘Covid & Vaccines’.
Another part, maybe more critical, it has been the act of imposing those vaccines and implement digital control on people with vax-passports, mainly done on Western Countries (which should be the famous ‘democratic ones’ of the Globe).
That is something needs to be considered for any future epidemic or pandemic.
well, you know I am in Russia among other things because the democratic myths sounded rather hollow to me.
I had two business partners with whom I’d not been in touch since before “covid”. One came to visit, telling me the 60-ish partner of the second fellow had died *suddenly* last year of a turbo lung cancer that’d been in remission for forty years. He then told me that (also last year) he himself had been diagnosed with stage III lung cancer, of which he hadn’t felt any symptoms, while getting scanned for something else. He’s now been through chemo and radiation. He’s walking around and back to work, but is clearly damaged. These are laptop-class people, Apple Watch, Tesla, etc. pro-whatever the latest thing.
So that’s two out of the four people in this group who got injected as casualties within two years. I didn’t tell them what I knew about the cancer link.. just said I personally chose to avoid the injections at all costs. Now they suspect I’m a Trumper.
We do know everyone didn’t get exactly the same injection, so that remains a wild card.
She said that in 2021? So only 0-2 years left.
If people are making OTT statements to chase headlines they’re a liability, no matter which ‘side’ they’re on.
Last gas station in my neighborhood in CA jst got bulldozed. From what I heard you can’t open new gas stations in CA, can only renew lease on existing stations. All good, I got a race horse, put a stable in my living room. Ride that down the freeway and feed it with the dumpster trash out back. Better than EV’s, doesnt need roads or tires
I wonder how a lack of gas stations in a neighborhood will affect rental and housing prices. Theoretically, people with EVs and a place to plug them in would be OK (for a while). Also, people who commute to a place, fairly distant from their home. They can fill up at the distant gasoline pump. But retirees and others who don’t have far to drive will find the lack of gas stations to be a problem. They will look for other places to live. Some will move out of California.
As an Alumni of Columbia University, Eng 1978, GSAS 1981, I wrote the following opinion piece to the Spectator daily news paper of Columbia.
You started out with a message “genocide is evil”. You were quickly deflected to divest from Israel. An esoteric point of banking. At that point you lost.
Get back to the core message “genocide is evil”. Get to the need of a world response to the murder of over 30,000 people in Gaza. The needed response is a global armed war to destroy the armies of genocide, Israel and US. The global war of good versus evil is not an essay contest. It is a war.
As Clausewitz said, you start a war when you are in a better position than your enemy. As the global minority depletes its fossil fuel reserves Russia will be left in the strong position with plenty of fossil fuels for itself and its friend China, in about ten years time. Before then the global minority will need to strike.
Poor Gaza is a footnote to the great power, fight to the end, that is in progress. Let’s offer sanctuary to all Palestinians in New York State. We have plenty of room. They have a good moral and religious foundation, they will make good citizens.
Edwin Pell III
Clinton, New York
Why should Russia be interested in a bunch of failed states?
But that’s the plan! In other words, if you do that, the Israelis have won.
Everybody loves to talk about genocide and Gazacaust, but killing some 30.000 out of over two million doesn’t “solve” the Gaza problem for Israel. Actually killing millions of Palistinians would cement Israel’s status as an international pariah for all time and cause reputational misery for jews worldwide. Clearly, then, displacement is the real goal.
In a way, the current wave of pro-Palestinian protests serves to emotionally pave the way for taking up the bulk of all Palestinians as refugees, i.e. they play into Israel’s strategy.
I know a Jewish fellow who backs “Jewish Voices for Peace”. They are under a group called United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), funded by Rockefeller Bros Fund and Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
“Howard Horowitz is also funding these encampments. He accepted $135,000 from Open Society and through his organization, WESPAC, is the official ‘fiscal sponsor’ of Within Our Lifetime.”
https://twitter.com/TheCoveFella/status/1785362125893808224
One of the main spokeswomen at Columbia I saw was clearly Jewish. She got her 15 minutes of fame by demanding protesters get their meal plans delivered to the occupation site, as ‘humanitarian aid’.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/columbia-protest-leader-goes-viral-is-mocked-for-demanding-humanitarian-aid-for-barricaded-students/
Okay, GSAS is Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, what area?
Envious of your engineering degree, you should be about ten years younger than I.
Dennis L.
Physics. Experimental particle physics.
“Is It Possible to Have a “Positive Collapse”?”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/cline-collapse-book-history-armageddon.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
The final paragraph asks the following question: “While undoubtedly true in the very long run, endorsing the sentiment at this moment risks playing into the hands of those accelerationists who would like to bring a collapse on because they think something better might be built among the ruins. But history, ancient or modern, may be only so helpful a guide if what we are facing is the kind of collapse from which there can be no recovery.”
the 2050s are going to be brutal.
>>“Is It Possible to Have a “Positive Collapse”?”
Well the elite’s puppets like Biden, Blinken, and Nuland have made careers of failing upward, so why not?
you and I lack one quality essential for the ability to fall upward.
lizard genetics?
Genetics, da.
our feet wont stick to the ceiling?
Someone comes out ahead, at least temporarily.
Folks, I have a riddle for you.
What comes first, power or wealth?
Which one leads to the other?
Does wealth allow an individual or group to have power or is wealth a result of power?
Rothschild started with neither power nor wealth. He collected the rents for the royal that had been kicked out of the country. Over time by skimming a fee he had wealth. In time he used the wealth to give himself more money and some power.
Person 1 has fame. Parlays it into power and wealth.
Person 2 acquires power. Parlays it into wealth and fame.
Person 4 inherits wealth. Parlays it into power and fame.
Fame is influence. Influence is a form of power over other people.
It’s interesting that in all three scenarios you mention fame.
I think this based on your personal experience.
It’a almost like you can’t conceive of someone having a lot of wealth or power and being disliked by large swaths of the public.
power begets wealth
problem is, you have to contiunally use your power to keep your wealth.
You can use “soft power” to maintain your power or hard power.
Fame is a form of soft power. Famous people are usually influential. Presently, famous people are called “influencers” and are judged by how many people they can get to “follow” them.
Hard power is coercion.
Dershowitz is telling us all “you hurt a Jews we sue you.” Says he will handle the case pro bono.
The NYC police brought out their toy a truck with a big ladder to reach the second floor for Columbia University. They packed the stairs with 20 police. When each one got to the window they had to take off the back pack and crawl through be rather fat. They did not want to use the open door on the first floor. They needed a photo op.
This is following the Albert Pike play book for WW3.
Few people who wrote about the Frontiers actually dealt with them directly.
Virginia-born Willa Cather moved Nebraska with her family, graduated from the state univ of Nebraska, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of 23 and never went back there. However she did use her frontier life experience in virtually everything she wrote.
Her book O Pioneers shows the true nature of the peoples who reside in USA but contribute nothing to civilization.
At that time books included a main story, and a bunch of side stories nothing to do with the main one but added in order to increase the amount paid to the author. The central story of that book is that of Emil Bergson, whose surname is the same as a famous philosopher although that book was written before the philosopher became famous, and Marie, Czech immigrant girl.
True to the customs of the day Marie was married to a Frank Shabata. My research shows that Shabata is a Polish surname, so they come from Polish-Czech border area. Shabata is brutal, illiterate and the kind of people I do not consider to be a person.
Long story short, Emil, who was very bright and would have attended a better university if he had lived elsewhere, does love Marie but the standards of the frontier makes it hard for Marie to leave Shabata. In a day Emil and Marie are seen together, and Shabata, full with anger, shoots both them dead. There was no mention of a sexual encounter, which was why he was found guilty and sentenced for 10 years.
The story I want to tell is the reaction of Alexandra, who is Emil’s older sister who is past childbearing age. She has built a large farm but with Emil’s death the whole farm will have no heirs. (She does marry someone in the end, so everything she built will pass to his relatives.)
She develops insomnia, and she actually petitions the governor of Nebraska to pardon Shabata!
Reason? She , after years of frontier life, has become as animalistic as Shabata. So she gets to identify herself in the same league as him, him having killed her brother was less important than him being part of her ‘tribe’.
Alexandra goes to see Shabata, who, with heavily accented English, tells that he is NOT impressed by what Alexandra is doing for him, and after he gets released he will go back to his mother in his home country, making her a complete fool of herself. His retarded and brutish behavior, unfortunately, has become the norm for most ‘Americans’ not living in the expensive cities. So she marries her old childhood sweetheart, just so there will be someone to inherit the farm after she dies.
Frontier life is hard, and it tends to breed people like Shabata and Alexandra, not people like Emil and Maria.
Shocking, simply shocking. Combine with Elon’s implant and soon we can be part of the internet, directly, with AI, one can only dream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhNnyuMOzoI
Batteries that work with oxygen from our blood stream.
Problem? how does this affect the oxygen balance of the body?
Dennis L.
He is just creating more zombies, good for nothing in the long run.
I anxiously await my person AI humanoid robot friend. I will not do brain implant.
personal
hay WP I will pay you $0.5 every time I do an edit if you give me an edit botton
“hay” 😎 “botton” 😎
Interesting short video about possible implantable devices that run on the body’s own oxygen (or glucose or something else), rather than on a battery that will eventually lose power.
If they test this properly, perhaps this makes sense. Of course, in a world with too many people, getting people to live even more years doesn’t make too much sense. A person with Alzheimer’s Disease doesn’t need to live many more years, for example.
are you sure it’s a dream rather than a nightmare?
Erik thinks civilization collapse COMPLETE by 2050. Sounds about right…
https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2024/05/what-exactly-is-peak-oil.html
He is behind the curve . Might as well say 2099 and you will be correct . This will be the ” Great unravelling” . It will start in 2025 for the general public ( readers of OFW exempted who already know this is on ) and then by 2030 the unravelling will be complete . It is like dismantling a building by removing one brick at a time from the bottom of the edifice until the building collapses . Not possible to time it to the date . Hey ,but we are not playing marbles here , or are we ? 🤞
“Not possible to time it to the date.”
true!
so then why are you clearly stating that it will be complete by 2030?
could be 2030, or 2040, or 2050.
have you noticed that the 2020s are a handful of months from being half over?
David , I can give you several reasons why 2030 . Just a few 1. ELM or resource nationalization kicks in . 2 . The Ponzi petro dollar financial scheme falls apart leading to collapse of trade ( no letter of credit or insurance ) 3. Peak diesel . 4 . Climate change . 5 War . 6 . A new pandemic etc . We here know these are all WIP ( Work In Progress) that even the optimists can’t deny . This is why I called it ” Great unravelling” . A small hole can sink a big ship and remember the 80/20 Pareto principle . The 2020’s end in Dec 2029 , still 6 .5 years away .
P.S ; Just remembered , when the flow of resources from the periphery to the center is insufficient to sustain the center is number 7 .
the 2030s are barely 5.5 years away, it seems to be coming faster than you realize.
continuity is usual and discontinuity is unusual.
10 years ago there surely were some doomers using some of your reasons to guess that The Collapse would be by 2020.
you could be right about 2030, though I would say that your reasons are just ways to reinforce your guess about 2030.
my guess is 2040s or 2050s.
no big deal when IC comes to an end.
que sera sera.
when IC comes to an end
your supermarket shelves will empty
bear that in mind—and what it means.
Norm, it means my neighbor is shishkebab.
ivan
you might run out of neighbours
8th March , Modi is the most popular prime minister of the world . 2nd May he is on the path to loose his government . Things unravel very fast in the last phases . I observed that during the collapse of the Soviet Union . 5.5 years are enough .
https://pro.morningconsult.com/trackers/global-leader-approval
NO WAY, BUB! US proven reserves are something like 6 or 7 years, if I recall correctly. Russia will supply the world’s factory (China) at least as long as it needs a pseudo-ally, which means until the USA collapses. So we’re looking at 2030 at the earliest before either USA or China collapse due to resource depletion and then Russia could be attacked directly by a major power for resources at any time.
(USA could certainly collapse sooner if the dollar hyperinflates, but then we’re talking geopolitics rather than resources).
Agree but I will place it at 2035. US will scrap the bottom of the barrel for the last five.
The US should attack before it runs out of oil. Better the US should trick EU into attacking and absorbing the counter attack.
any ”attack” will mean running out of oil sooner.
ww2 lasted until one side ran out of fuel.
now there isnt enough oil to run a major war—unless you visualise battery powered tanks—queues at charging points should be fun.
the notion that the usa can just ”sit it out” and carry on afterwards with some kind of normality is ludicrous
We is the US will remember who said “ludicrous”.
Ed
70m people think that a criminal mysogynistic lunatic is going to restore the American dream.
it doesn’t get more ludicrous than that
if the usa and china collapse, what major power do you have in mind to attack russia?
maybe jupiter—fed up with all the garbage dennis wants to dump there
USA may team up with China to attempt to divide Russia. Why? Because USA shale will be in depletion mode by that time and China needs the resources as well.
So China goes to war with Russia, powered by the resources that they already buy from Russia(for a very reasonable sum) and risk total destruction because the U.S has burnt all its resources?
Maybe the Chinese are smart enough to just pay the very nice price, keep making a profit and avoid war.
Everything the rest of the world has been doing for the last 5-10 years, has been done to attempt to make the transition less fraught and that transition is away from the useless eaters of the west, that have nothing to trade.
As for Russia, given the anniversary, they appear to be preparing the ground and the home mindset towards Odesa.
“The real, old Odessa is alive, the interlocutor continues. But she can’t speak openly, “because her mouth is taped shut with nationalist tape.” “She can’t go out to protest because her hands and feet are tied. She is asking for Russia’s help and is waiting to be freed from the people who are renaming our native streets, destroying monuments and bas-reliefs, usurping power and mocking residents. And it will definitely wait! ” – the former MP is sure.”
https://m.vz.ru/society/2024/5/2/1265374.html
Taking Odesa just before, or between 9th-11th July, would be the death of nato and the Biden campaign. That might be a bit soon, but I’m sure they will do something to mark the celebrations.
2050 is a reasonable guess.
maybe a few smaller weaker countries year by year for the next couple of decades, with wealthier countries gradually falling out of The Core, then total IC collapse is possible 2050ish.
though to me it’s hugely impressive what Russia is doing to detach from the immature psychowoketard West.
Russian bAU continuing into the 2070s would not surprise me (though me living to see it is impossible).
It has never been easy. Who knows if these guys are right, I wasn’t there to record it.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/a-study-says-you-owe-your-existence-to-just-1-280-humans-who-almost-went-extinct/ar-AA1h0fHz?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=1235053f5d9b48f2a8f7b09466acc989&ei=11
In rough numbers, less than 2k humans made it through that period. Sex is always popular and here we are, against all odds and we have proven Ehrlich wrong by several billion of us as we were supposed to starve in the 1970’s.
Intellectuals are wrong more than shamans and cost a heck of a lot more money.
Dennis L.
Is this a subtle promotion of “near, but graciously incomplete” genocide?
This article discusses cold district heating.
https://theconversation.com/no-space-for-a-heat-pump-heres-how-your-whole-street-could-get-off-gas-heating-180005
In this scenario, every dwelling has its own heat pump, and water flowing through a pipe under the street provides the input heat. The pipe water would recover summer heat from boreholes, which would warm it to between 10-20°C. This boosts the coefficient of performance of the heat pumps, without imposing the requirement for insulating the water main. The pipe itself does not need to be anything special; a buried concrete pipe would be adequate. Some insulation will be provided by overbearing soil and tarmac.
This is essentially a cheap district heating system. It reduces the capital cost required to put in place district heating. But the need for individual heat pumps transfers a lot of cost to home owners. It would work in places like the UK, where towns are cramped and dwellings usually don’t have enough space around them for ground source heat pumps. If small modular reactors ever reach comnercial viability, they couod be built close to towns and cities and their waste would provide year round warm water.
…and their waste HEAT would provide year round warm water.
presumably also the spent cores if they have to be handled land stored ocally.
What a fine mess we modern, advanced civilized people are leaving behind for others
In America’s Biggest Oil Field, the Ground Is Swelling and Buckling
Satellite data reveal the impact of oil and gas drilling on the Permian Basin’s landscape; earthquakes, pressure increases have local communities worried
In a desolate stretch of desert spanning West Texas and New Mexico, drillers are pumping more crude than Kuwait. The oil production is so frenzied that huge swaths of land are literally sinking and heaving.
The land has subsided by as much as 11 inches since 2015 in a prime portion of the Permian Basin, as drillers extract huge amounts of oil and water, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite data. In other areas where drillers dispose of wastewater in underground wells, the land has lifted by as much as 5 inches over the same period.
The constant extraction and injection of liquids has wrought complex geologic changes, which are raising concerns among local communities long supportive of oil and gas. Earthquakes linked to water disposal have rattled residents and prompted state regulators to step in. Some researchers worry that wastewater might end up contaminating scarce drinking-water supplies.
“They’re affecting the geology of the ground, the surface,” Ty Edwards, a Pecos County, Texas, resident who helps manage groundwater in the region, said of oil producers. “That is pretty wild.”
The tumultuous landscape is a direct result of industrial-scale drilling in the Delaware portion of the Permian Basin. Oil production has reached nearly three million barrels of oil a day there, cementing the U.S.’s status as an energy power and fueling the region’s economic engine.
Alongside crude, oil-and-gas companies are extracting gargantuan amounts of subterranean water—in the Delaware, between five and six barrels of water are produced, on average, for every barrel of oil. To dispose of it, they inject billions of barrels of putrid wastewater into underground disposal wells.
Some scientists say the ground displacement, shown in data provided by Earth observation company SkyGeo, could impact infrastructure such as roads. But what frackers and researchers are most concerned about are the forces pushing the ground up.
Yep, sure we are concerned….no worry because private investors won’t pick up the tab for all infrastructure that needs replacement but public monies…what’s no to like?
WSJ.com
>> To dispose of it, they inject billions of barrels of putrid wastewater into underground disposal wells.
This will surely not come back to bite us.
the US southwest is a lot of desert.
after the collapse of IC, it wouldn’t sustain many humans anyway.
no big deal if it’s abandoned by humans.
then nature will do what it does, and some life will adapt there.
it’s all good.
Sure not a problem…sarcasm…like all the other filth we have tossed about here and there …it only matters if it affects people you say?
Video shows South Florida boaters blatantly dumping trash into ocean
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii3O11mZG6w&pp=ygUcYm9hdGVycyBjYXVnaHQgZHVtcGluZyB0cmFzaA%3D%3D
Par for the course on human behavior and attitude.
The solution to pollution is dilution..
Nature will easily take care of most human trash.
here’s a question that I sometimes ask:
if the Canadian tar sands are full of nasty polluting petroleum, then why did Nature pollute itself?
You mean nature doesn’t give a hoot about us and extinction is coming to the monkey minds that play tricks with their rationalization…yep, I’m pointing
I think what you mean
Is Nature isn’t as pristine
As it is often seen
Through lenses green
Hey hey, we’re the monkeys
And people say we monkey around
But we’re to busy monkeying
To mind very much about that!
(Sorry, I couldn’t think of a good rhyme there.)
Old age and extinction
Are all we’ve got to look forward to
And maybe not even old age
But that I’ll have to do
I pity the poor monkey
Who wished he’d stayed in his tree
Who walks on two legs
And plays with fire
And in the end is still left unhappy
That ape who with his fingers
And his opposable thumb
Manipulates the whole wide world
And turns it into a slum
nature didn’t pollute itself
the tar sands just sat there for 000000s of years, doing nothing
it was we who made it a pollutant
Good point!
I’m reminded of Nicole Foss and her quote, “shale is like sucking beer out of the carpet.”
As another poster mentioned all banks are insolvent by pre 2008 standards. The fed can ALWAYS loan a bank more money. when they close a bank it’s the equivalent of firing the CFO and other suits. Like. First republic. Building expensive new art decor physical branches at the same time as losing money hand over foot. Juniors credit card gets the scissors. It’s not about rules because there are none except dont make problems. I mean good god. You got a license to create money and you screw that up?
banking systems continue to work fairly well.
pretty good trick if they are all insolvent.
hopefully CBs can keep the banking systems running this well for another decade or two.
banks have failed ever since there were banks, so a bank failure once in a while is to be expected.
the game continues.
David
Can you name one specific rule that would cause a bank to be automatically deemed insolvent with both capital requirements and mark to market permanently suspended? You put words in my mouth. I did not say the banks are insolvent I said they are insolvent by pre 2008 standards where rules such as mark to market or capital requirements would indeed make a bank “insolvent” shutting the doors. The banks are solvent but by decree not by adhering to a set of rules that defines the thing called as solvency.
As you note they are open they make payroll you give them your paycheck and they give you back money so by that standard they are solvent and this is likely to continue. Is this the gold standard for solvency? Im a conservative sort of guy myself and think standards of conduct should be set for financial institutions like the repealed glass-steagal. As we have witnessed in a long list of poor conduct in financial institutions from S&L to Enron to New Century misconduct in financial institutions harms people and has the potential to harm our society. It is appropriate that standards are established and enforced. That the doors are open while certainly desirable is the lowest possible standard.
Is it inappropriate to observe that the financial institutions of a society have forsaken even token standards of what is known as solvency, standards that every household must observe lest they find themself on the street? As we witness systematic issues do not allow any bank to meet the pre 2008 definition of solvency. Is it wrong to note that and to ponder the consequences?
IMO what we see is a example made now and then so those granted the ability to create currency via loans are given notice that there are limits to abuse creating a very very loose standard of conduct. Thats a good thing but its a far cry from common sense standards of conduct that historically represent a healthy monetary system that everyone must abide by. One might even consider the idea of justice to be fair and equally enforced standards of conduct not a occasional hanging of a out of favor associate by the king.
Tater tots tonight baby!
Tater tots tonight baby!
Tater tots tonight baby!
Tater tots tonight baby!
All better now?
Consider a tatoo.
Blast
“Is it inappropriate to observe that the financial institutions of a society have forsaken even token standards of what is known as solvency, standards that every household must observe lest they find themself on the street? As we witness systematic issues do not allow any bank to meet the pre 2008 definition of solvency. Is it wrong to note that and to ponder the consequences?”
“inappropriate”? Your use of that word in that paragraph gives me the impression that you are seeking permission to voice an opinion.
To answer your question, the consequence is that the U.S. federal government will have more power over the banks. The less dependent banks are on depositors and borrowers, to remain solvent. the less likely they will see them as customers. If the U.S. government is the biggest factor to banks remaining solvent, they will treat the U.S. government as their real customers.
Looking at communities that abide, what works, what will work in a changing world. One mile from my farm home is a small church, recently they put in a large play area for children to play. Need to support that church, read at minimum write a check. Not cynical, churches need roofs too.
Have mentioned Amish, no TV as for the most part no electricity; that can be done by observation, no power run to the homes and phones are in what are similar to outhouses by the highway.
Looked up Hassidic, Jews, mentioned in an earlier post, and TV/internet. Copilot again.
“Television is often considered off-limits in many Hasidic communities1. This is because it is seen as a potential source of inappropriate content and a distraction from religious and family obligations13. Similarly, internet use is often heavily restricted, especially for minors.”
We assume all information is good/correct; much is an attempt to proselytize a belief, e.g. political campaigns.
In his sermon, Paul acknowledged the Athenians’ religiousness and drew their attention to an altar inscribed “To an Unknown God”. He proclaimed this “Unknown God” as the one true God who created the world and everything in it12. He further explained that this God does not live in temples built by human hands and is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else12. It was not televised.
For me this is a key, time to digest information. We do not have information, we have distraction.
Prediction: the US interest let alone debt isn’t going to be repaid.
Dennis L.
We restricted our children’s TV and Internet and we are not even Jewish.
The Amish aren’t Jewish.
Heavily influenced by Orthodox Judaism but they aren’t Jewish.
Now, European dependence on Russia for fertilizer:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/thankfully-there-are-no-russia-eu-fertilizer-pipelines-west-blow
Thankfully, There Are No Russia-EU Fertilizer Pipelines For West To Blow Up
Logistics hold Russia back. Russia is not going on to Europe. Logistics chains to supply combat operations can not currently be conducted even as far as Odessa or Kiev. Nor is NATO going into Russia. All sheer fantasy the legend of paradigms no longer possible.
The Ukraine war will grind on. Only events not known to us will end it. It will end however the resource consumption it entails is not infinite. Beyond sad the destruction and lives lost. And why? In a finite world resource limitations preclude physically occupying a country in conquest. The war machines roll on oblivious to the reality that their end goal is not possible while their own war analysis clearly shows the truth. Are humans genetically hardwired for war that will cause their extinction? Never been never done but talked with some participants and witnessed their path. IMO not like the movies.
As it has been commented on OFW for decades continuation of the war paradigm as resources deplete to not allow war as we have known it has only one logical outcome. Nuclear and biological war that have no resource constraints. The new BDUs a white lab coat. Will this be humanities fate? Time will tell.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/logistics-determine-your-destiny-what-russias-invasion-is-reteaching-us-about-contested-logistics/
Makes some good points, but is also mixed with nonsense:
>> “As of early August 2022, this scenario appears to have failed as Russian combat units have not defeated the Ukrainian army. It seems that Russian logistics units could not deliver enough supplies to meet the daily needs of their combat units trying to take Ukraine’s capital.”
They were NOT trying to take the capital – they simply did not have the manpower to do so. Therefore it was simply a feint or a pressure tactic to force negotiations. Ukraine called their bluff and Russia had to fall back and build a larger army.
Agree. They have to sprinkle their analysis with the official propaganda. Nowadays if you discard all analyses just because they got a bit of propaganda in them you are tossing everything out.
91 was the last time a significant logistics chain was possible. Logistics are vulnerable. Look at the Houthis. How much is too much for Russia? We don’t know but at some poi this massive resource consumption becomes an issue.
You know what cracks me up? People go you cant kill a ideaology with Hamas but Ukraine can be conquered. Which is It?
Russia has done a good job of minimizing losses. Soon the new balistic missiles they just started purchasing from Iran will start to be deployed. Ukraine is gonna get pasted. And right or wrong Gaza is already pasted. Then what? What is the end game for Russia. We know their hope. A neutral Ukraine that doesn’t require an excessive amount of resource consumption.
“Ukraine and Russia will heal” Hope springs eternal. When resource consumption becomes unmanageable it lends itself to bad choices from a place of desperation.
Ultimately consumer nations should consider logistics carefully. Are Russia’s war logistics precarious? Let’s just talk about that not that USA has rather interesting logistics for 90% of what it consumes. Hey westpoint. If Russia’s logistic on its doorstep with its massive resource ownership is an issue what about the USA shipping everything it consumes from the other side of the planet. How about a paper on that. lol
>> Soon the new balistic missiles they just started purchasing from Iran will start to be deployed.
That’s the first I’ve heard of Iran providing missiles to Russia. I would expect Russia to be well ahead of Iran in missile production output (obviously Russia’s tech is more advanced), so that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. I did read about Russia receiving shells from N Korea and drone tech from Iran. Plus, I would imagine Iran wants to keep their own production surpluses on account of ME developments.
Okay, just found a Reuters article making the missiles claim. Even assuming it’s totally accurate, I don’t believe it really makes a different to Russia. My guess is that Russian production is just too high for these missiles to matter. If anything, Iran is the one who stands to gain from having their missiles battle-tested in real conditions (electronic warfare, air defense, etc).
I surprised I have to explain this to you. Every low tech missile takes two patriots to have a possibility to intercept. The Iranian ballistics have maneuvering capabilities on approach. They are capable missiles albeit not to russian standards. Not the flying mopeds. A $20k flying moped still needs two patriots costing millions of dollars
All of which means Ukraine is going to lose more infrastructure that may never be replaced. Pasted.
this is the dilema and has been understood by Russia from the begining. It is not to their benefit to have a country bombed into the stone ages on their border. How far they go in this direction is unknown. Its a damned if you do damned if you dont.
The Iranian balistics can be used in place of or in addition to the Russian missiles and the big game changer the glide bombs.
Pasted.
The Russians might just want to hold on to a big stockpile of their high tech missiles. You know how paranoid they are. 🙂 The Iranian ballistics will allow them to use outsourced missiles that will get past.
Using the Iranian ballistics significantly increases their war production. US is trying to do the exact same thing with south korea. More is better. More is winning. Ukraine is not going to get enough air defense.
Pasted.
So we will see. Will it result in a surrender by Ukraine if Russia does not have the logistics to move forward? What will ultimately be the result for Russia if a broken impoverished country is on their border? Or will they seek a “gaza” solution? Will “pasted” mean a “success” if logistics mean they cant move forward?
IMO no western observer understands what is going on. Both the narratives – unipolar world- Russian aggression- are overly simplistic. Say this that or whatever. The Ukrainians are fighting. The Ukrainians of Russian heritage are fighting. It may be as simple as tribal war payback now.
If it was as simple as the narratives it would already be over. After two years if its not clear that these Ukrainians are going to fight I dont know what to say. 10 to 1 artillery. Glide bombs. Yet they fight on. Half a million dead. What other military would endure this?
I think we can safely categorize the Ukrainians as “stubborn”.
If either Russian or Ukrainian combat vet was to walk down the street I would step aside. This has been nasty and will get more so.
Using the Iranian missile production capabilities is very very smart perhaps even critical.
Pasted.
I hope this horrible episode is over soon but it appears to me this will go on for some time. Until something unforeseen to us occurs or Russia takes Kiev and Odessa.
From the macro perspective I continue to wonder if the recent historical model is correct. The belief that rebuilding and healing always occurs. I question that.
>> Using the Iranian missile production capabilities is very very smart perhaps even critical.
Agree to disagree. If success for Russia depends on 400 missiles from Iran, then Russia has already lost. Pro-Russian sources (Duran, youtube) claim Russia is stockpiling ammunition and missiles far above what they’re using, in case full direct war with NATO comes.
>> From the macro perspective I continue to wonder if the recent historical model is correct. The belief that rebuilding and healing always occurs. I question that.
This is the interesting/undetermined part. I expect SBU/MI6/CIA to try terrorism (Crocus etc) until such a time as Russia returns with payment in kind or outright bombing NATO bases. I hope I’m wrong and things settle down.
Well we just dont know. When your politicians are referring to China Russia and Iran as the axis of evil chances are there is some big badda boom in the future.
The big play is of course refutal of the dollar as a settlement mechanism. China will have a hard time with that. They take the dollars from sales of goods and buy things they need. If the axis of evil was to move toward that it could not be hidden. I think its probable significant kinetic action would be witnessed then once the preparations were detected. Perhaps biologicals if they actually have the capability. This would be preceded with an attempt to protect populations deemed necessary. It seems to me there plug and play countermeasure has a ways to go but I am not an expert.
One has to ask to what end. All these things are much more valuable as a deterrent than actually deploying them. The axis of evil seems in no hurry. Russia seems content to chip away in Ukraine.
Some think the Russian air defences are being mapped by the Ukrainian drones for a preemptive nuclear strike. Things are not going to get better. Russia is pulling away now. More sarmats more subs every year. If the perspective is its sooner or later sooner would be better.
China is getting real ICBMs on line. They are hesitating because it makes them a target but will move ahead. Chin has no real nuclear armed submarines but their inevitable entry to significant delivery capability adds urgency.
All these things will take time. The stakes are basicly humanity. No terror attack will change any ones game plan
The real urgency is the west. Axis of evil is building their end game and the west is down a knight and a rook. If someone starts the party in the next decade or so it will be the west. It may be a play that we can not imagine. Once again it will be a attempt to control by demonstrating destruction not a actual kinetic to destroy. Unless of course they are completely mad.
Time is on the axis of evils side. They will leave everything long term as to give the west a motive to hold off.
The real danger is if one of the players believes there is an immediate existential threat and initiates full kinetic action. I consider that unlikely but it’s possible. The plays here are long term because of the magnitude of the stakes. I don’t think there will be a sudden refutal of the dollar. That would be a clear existential threat so a gradual lessening of purchasing power is desirable. Yank the rug and it’s big badda boom time.in the meantime there will definitely be lots of elbowing. That’s this fools analysis. None of the players will be goaded by non nuclear terror attacks unless it’s part of their plan.
ivan,
The Ukraine could have sat down with the Russians and talked, kicked the US out of the room. They would have their country and probably >1m young men not dead nor maimed.
Some jerk got paid off to sell out his fellow citizens. Something is wrong with the culture, too much corruption, lack of trust.
We have it in the US, our cities are either unlivable or becoming so. They are war zones.
We have two problems, NRR and a belief system. Religion works because it is simple and consistent across a population. It can be more wrong than right and still work, better than nothing. NRR make life much more enjoyable and opened up many opportunities.
We have people making money by getting other people to fight.
Dennis L.
The Federal Reserve is already starting to make changes, even before its meeting this afternoon.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/yields-tumble-after-dovish-refunding-reveals-debt-sales-line-expectations-no-coupon-auction
Yields Tumble After Dovish Refunding Reveals Debt Sales In Line With Expectations, No Coupon Auction Increases “For Several Quarters”, And Treasury Buybacks Begin
The way I read this, the issuance of longer duration treasuries is going to remain close to flat. What will vary is the issuance of short duration securities. In fact, the Federal Reserve will add a new category of short term debt, repayable in 6 weeks.
Also, to try to keep rates down (my interpretation):
The article also talks about another change, anticipated later this afternoon:
All of this is steps to keep interest rates from going too high. High rates make borrowing difficult, and create balance sheet problems for banks holding long-term loans.
Money market treasuries to allow bank deposits to purchase treasuries while keeping liquidity for bank solvency. Embracing what is left of the organic economy . “Foreign buyers” lock down the 20 year and surpluses in the organic economy manifested in bank deposits go into the pot as money market treasuries. Its clever I’ll say that. Just when I was criticizing the ponzu for lack of creativity. How much time will it buy? Some time beats time up. Nothing last forever.
Finite world. Exponential debt.
Human history is a continued struggle between expansionism and stasis.
Expansionism became dominant as long as there were available resources, but there were always people who tried to hold on to their exiting powers and they emphasized stasis.
There is something, which I cannot really describe, which does hold down human civilization.
As the United States is increasingly dominated by peoples who had zero stake on building the current civilization, and its technology dominated by peoples who only excel in rote learning and test taking, a long time Asian style stasis, increasingly getting worse as resources will be scarcer every year, seems to await humanity.
The two key forces that are undermining economies around the globe – and especially the over-financialised western economies – are currency and energy. Currency – the numbers on bank statements which account for 99 percent of our spending – is a kind of representation – a map if you will – of the real, material economy of goods and services created from Earth’s finite resources. Economic models, which track the movement of currencies, are thus a map of a map, and so merely a simulacrum of the real world. Crucial to driving growth, however, is the fact that currency is created by banks when they make loans. As a consequence, almost every pound in circulation has interest attached – currently around six pence, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider that UK government borrowing in 2024 alone amounts to quarter of a trillion pounds – that’s a quarter of a trillion sixpences which have to come from somewhere… and that somewhere is from future growth. In short, our currency system – and it is the same in other countries and in international banking and finance too – requires economic growth. And should growth stall, the entire, multi-quadrillion dollar edifice will collapse, taking much of the things we value with it.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/04/30/a-world-without-growth/
Yes, I think it is true, but from what I’m watching during these over streched times, if the powers find a way to convince people of future progress and benefits from the debts created now, nothing will happen.
So, maybe, something will change for an internal political collapse or for an external war, because otherwise it seems to me that people can be fooled easily (see the argument of climate change instead of fossil fuels depletion).
I’m also not completely convinced that the so called BRICS are really interested to sink the dollar, because they could have themselves problems too.
So maybe they are just interested in a weaking of it.
“a quarter of a trillion sixpences”
Lol. Tell Tim Morgan that we don’t have sixpences these days. They were a predecimal coin worth half a shilling. They were kept on until the end of 1979 as the equivalent of 2½ pence. That’s because parking meters and Tube ticket machines used to accept them, so they were kept on with decimalisation in 1971. Inflation soon made the coin worthless, and it was quickly regarded as an irritation by the public – except for those dim Tories and other ginger groups who lobbied to keep it out of a perverse sense of “tradition”.
We should never have retired the farthing. Beautiful little coin. The final version featured an image of a wren on a twig on the reverse and a youthful Queen Lizzy on the front. There were 24 of them to the sixpence and 960 of them to the pound.
In the good old days when a dollar was a dollar, there were 12 pence in a shilling. A sixpence was worth half a shilling or six pence and was also known as a “tanner”. The word tanner is believed to have come from the Romani word “tawno,” meaning “small one” or “half.” Over time, “tanner” became a popular slang term for a sixpence because of its value being half of a shilling.
Britannia ruled the waves back then and Englishmen could be proud; they could, Zemi! Nowadays, a lot of Englishmen spend their time “shilling” for the Americans, the Chinese, or the New World Order or “pounding” away at the Russians, when if they had “half-half-pence” of sense, they’d be campaigning to bring back the farthing.
things havent been the same since they stopped using the groat
i still count money in groats
“We should never have retired the farthing. Beautiful little coin. The final version featured an image of a wren on a twig”
No twig, I’m afraid. You’ve been subject to the Mandela effect, but if you slip me a few bob, I’ll ask the simulator to put the twig back on again. 😉
This is why a rapid population adjustment is the only way forward.
A good campaign slogan if there ever was one!
one less share.
Why not a cubic mile of Pt? Why not a H economy based on solar energy incident on earth?
Social engineering is tough to get right and tougher to make work.
Secondary to pollution, there are reports land in Ukraine is to be used as a chemical waste dump. There is a social problem when individuals in charge are willing to poison their own people. Have no idea why
Pollution belongs in/on Jupiter. Spaceship earth is not a toxic dump and people are not pollution.
Bit off topic of your post, it is so easy to blame people for everything and offer to “off” one’s neighbor unless one is that neighbor.
Dennis L.
i will notify the Jovians to expect spacegarbage trucks sometime soon
Clearly, the higher the interest rate, the more growth is needed to allow paying back debt with interest.
For a long time, there was a drop in interest rates, to allow the necessary growth rate to fall lower and lower. Now that interest rates are higher, the threshold is much higher. The chance for stumbling is much higher.
The only way of hiding this, temporarily, is to extend loans indefinitely, and to pretend on balance sheets that they will be paid back. This will quickly collapse, however.
Looked into the Amish with Copilot.
“In terms of intra-community lending, the Amish are known to pool money within the community to help each other during times of financial duress3. This practice suggests that they may not charge each other interest in the traditional sense, but rather support each other as part of their community values.”
They are closemouthed. They are building new homes and businesses along the road to my farm. They use outside labor, diesel, etc. But, they do not partake of the society which provides such material services.
Much of their exogenous energy comes from sunlight, some from gasoline yes.
Looked at another group. orthodox Jews and Copilot again.
“Orthodox Jewish law, or halachah, forbids Jews from charging interest to other Jews12. This prohibition is known as ribit, which roughly means “increase”3. The Torah (Hebrew Bible) prohibits a Jew from borrowing, lending, or being a party to a transaction that involves charging another Jew interest3.” again the numerals are references you can check for yourselves.
More:
” A Jew who wishes to invest in another Jew’s financial project can do so only by entering into some form of partnership (called in Jewish law a heter iska)3.”
We have too many intermediaries and some of you here would know better, but it seems “Progressives” would be against this sort of thing, they want the skim.
Watched a video on Brooklyn Orthodox Jews:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1311NIaY2k
Doesn’t look like the range limitation of an EV would be much of a problem.
We need a group, current culture has people trying to learn every experience for themselves, this includes marriage most of which do not work. Religion to me is a way to get through life which accepts the laws of the universe as we discover them.
In the US, our cities do not work, I personally no longer take dance lessons in a very nice St. Paul studio, car jackings are a concern.
I have given two examples where exogenous energy while present is less than many other forms of organization.
If this gets posted, will be interested to hear your various views.
Dennis L.
This doesn’t make sense to me
https://fortune.com/2024/04/29/oil-and-gas-companies-cash-flow-crude-prices-loan-leverage/
Oil and gas companies are swimming in cash . Of course this would make David look right and Gails theory look wrong
Gail continues to be correct that oil prices will remain relatively low even as production declines and reserves deplete.
oil companies see decline about to happen and depletion continuing to happen and so they are wisely cutting back on capex (I can’t read the article but this seems generally true).
less expenditures equal greater profits.
they will pump maximum barrels at minimum expense, and production will inevitably decline, but surely it will be somewhat gradual, and Canada is increasing production so that will somewhat offset US declines.
when declining production looks problematic, Venezuela will be “encouraged” to raise their production, probably aided by the US, and to export most of it to the US.
I seriously doubt that the US will just throw up their hands and not try to obtain oil elsewhere once significant domestic decline is happening.
the future is uncertain, and the US economy could implode or collapse at any time, but oil is vital for the economy, so steps will be tried to keep the US adequately supplied, I think, it’s sort of a guess, but reasonable considering how vital oil is.
As a group, the oil and gas industry’s free cash flow-to-capital expenditures ratio rose to 1 last year from 0.4 in 2020, and it’s forecast to approach 1.4 by 2030. BI’s analysis shows the oil and gas industry’s free cash flow-to-capex ratio is poised to increase.2 days ago
https://www.bloomberg.com › articles
Oil Producers Flush With Cash Cut Reliance on Loans – Bloomberg.com
Last year, the demand for loans from fossil-fuel companies fell 6% year-on-year and that followed a decline of 1% in 2022.
From a climate perspective, this may sound like good news because the drop in bank lending to oil, gas and coal companies should mean less investment and less production over
Maybe the industry is so because it’s cutting back on projects or lack of them.
So, like what I read somewhere..it’s liquidates itself
if we all had an oilwell in our backyards, it wouldnt make us rich—-whats lacking is the means by which we use oil to create ever-increasing employment and wages
Right again there Norm…many examples in History..
The Romans invented a steam engine…some talk about it doing work…but the Emperor said no thanks we have to have the little people doing something to keep them busy..
Also, coal in England was known to ignite and heat..
The law forbid burning it because it was very dirty.
When the forest became depleted and villagers and town folks started to freeze for lack of firewood.
They lined up outside the palace begging to resent the law so they could keep from freezing..
Also, the movie There will be Blood is good too..
Keep up the good comments…
If an oil company stops drilling new wells, its profitability looks great, for a while. Of course, the company will produce less and less oil in the future.
Citizens cannot afford to pay an increasing share of their incomes for food and transportation, so prices for this scarce oil will not rise sufficiently to make up for this shortfall. There may be spikes in prices, but the price will soon drop back.
This is an interview with former British Diplomat Alastair Crooke. He says many things we have been hearing elsewhere. He says that at this late date, the US cannot re-industrialize. Its costs are too high. It would be non-competitive. It can’t even suddenly build up industrial capacity for the military.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z6P1y21U3w
The problem is education from my point of view. Engineering is objective not narrative. The US needs engineers, and it needs a return to civil service exams and associated placement in the government.
We can then deal with the complications, but we need to begin with the basics.
An aside, per this link Tesla cars will be full self driving in most of the world.
Dennis L.
Ten reasons why EVs won’t take over:
1. Average people don’t want to own an EV.
Novelty that will suit some people.
2. Companies are losing billions of dollars on trying to build these vehicles.
This video goes quite slowly over the reasons.
years ago—i said we constructed our current infrastructure on cheap surplus engine
and now we are insisting that it is possible to sustain it of expensive scarce energy
can’t be done
I agree.
People have only so much income. If they spend more on energy (such as food or transportation) they have to cut back on discretionary spending.
Companies in discretionary sectors discover that they are shrinking rather than growing. Overhead becomes an increasingly large share of expenditures. Paying back debt with interest becomes impossible.
Norman you are correct…too bad no one need your insight 🙏
Going back is not an option for most; unless we are forced to do it. Most take the easy peazy path of BAU modern advanced convenience society.
When it retreats, as it is now, we are seeing young adults shying away from so called higher education … engineering and architecture won’t have the energy nor resources for employment. Pretty much like in the Great Depression.
Unfortunately, this next one will be permanent
Should have read HEED YOUR INSIGHT…we need it here, thank you for your contributions
i said engine instead of energy
obviously things are starting to fall apart
—i dont see how anyone can ”go back”—-go back to where, or what?
the ‘great depression” was ended by ww2
but we dont have the oil to start ww3
Yes, good for us that we are old ..
We don’t have too much concern over the future…
Actually, kinda feel like I won the lottery having the luck of climbing the energy ladder, as the late doomer, Jay Hansen, pointed out…climbing down ain’t going to be much fun…
Really, knowing or not doesn’t make much of a difference…the invisible hand is a work.
This guy named “Unaducated Economist” from Youtube says pretty much the same.
I found this paragraph written on the ‘economist’ website which i found quite interesting this just shows you what the powers that be think of us ; published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
The Economist
About
Advertise
Press centre
The Economist Group
While I read the Economist, at least a little, most of it I disagree with. What I look at, mostly, is the little charts. Some of them give interesting statistics.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Global-Oil-and-Gas-Discoveries-Fell-to-a-Record-Low-in-2023.html
And this trend continues. I haven’t been able to think of better solutions than TPTB lately. 10 min cities?
We will make you happy!
This seems to be the general pattern. We know about a lot of very heavy oil, but it tends to be too expensive to profitably extract.
TPTB have just put out a number of articles on ‘The Economist’ magazine on peak oil you need to be subscribed to acess the articles but part of the articles are available the gist of what their saying in these articles are 2 messages for the world ‘ Efficiency’ and ‘Altrnatives’ in other words evs and renewables. This is all i could get from one article which was called ‘The End Of Oil Then And Now.’ ‘ In 1977 jimmy carter told the American people it was time for “an unpleasant talk” about the energy crisis. The off-putting subject matter—the greatest peacetime “threat our country will face in our lifetimes”—was not just the need to import more oil at higher prices than almost ever before as a result of America’s falling domestic oil production. It was the idea that America’s falling production was a harbinger of reserves running out everywhere. It was time to think of a world without oil.
His belief in a fundamental constraint proved wrong both globally and within the United States. Increased production from Alaska’s North Slope, made possible by the trans-Alaska pipeline system which the federal government had approved in response to the shock of 1973, saw a moderate bounce-back in American production in the years that followed. Another government measure taken in response to the embargo—in 1977 a Department of Energy project in Colorado demonstrated the feasibility of “massive hydraulic fracturing” as a way of releasing hydrocarbons from shales—would in the long run have an even greater impact.’
I wouldn’t trust the Economist for any article that is energy related. Its views are based on wishful thinking.
Blinkens big adventure! GPS shenanigans!
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-42724-us-admits-top-weapons
The end of zombie science, aka applied physics.
Interesting things in this post about Ukraine and its arms–also how well Russia is doing.
One part, about the promised arms, says they will take years to build:
Also, there is a section saying that food from Ukraine is cheaper than that grown elsewhere in Europe causing a problem. To “help” fix that problem, there seems to be an agreement to let some chemical producers dispose of their waste on 400 square kilometers of Ukraine farmland. A document dated July 13, 2023, from Zelensky, is shown saying:
wait till the russkis start shooting down incoming American supply planes
Interesting read.
A Russia-NATO war may be coming. Everyone knows that UKR is about to lose all of UKR east of the Dnieper river and NATO fancies that it is going to use western UKR to continue to attack Russia.
The farce has been going on for years that NATO has used UKR to attack Russia, supplying weapons, training, intel, even the direct operation of systems on the ground, and Russia has refrained from saying ‘OK, this is war.’
Anyway, Russia now says that it will target NATO air bases in Romania and Poland if NATO stations F-16 planes there for UKR; likewise NATO air defence systems stationed there for UKR will be hit; and above all USA, France, UK, everywhere will be disarmed by missiles if NATO troops enter UKR as F-16 pilots or on the ground.
Everyone knows that Russia has hypersonic missiles that only it has the capacity to intercept. NATO would be a sitting duck. NATO missiles would not get through, nuclear or whatever, as Russia would be able to intercept them. UK admits that it has _zero_ ground to air missile defence.
That would be a totally one-sided exchange as Russia has hypersonic missiles and the ability to intercept all missiles that exist including those, while NATO has none of that stuff, neither hypersonic missiles nor defence systems that can stop them.
Russia is telling NATO to ‘back away’ and we will have to wait and see what happens. NATO has been ‘pushy, pushy’ because that is how they ‘roll’ and they have assumed that Russia will not just swat them. Time will tell.
https://warnews247.gr/diethnh/rwsia/telesigrafo-mosxas-yperhxhtikoi-purauloi-stoxopoihsan-tis-baseis-roumanias-kai-polwnias-epidromes-oukranikwn-f-16-apo-ton-enaerio-xwro-tou-nato/
Google translate:
Moscow Final Document: Hypersonic Missiles Target Romanian and Polish Bases – Planned Ukrainian F-16 Strikes by NATO’s EEC
“This warning is not propaganda – We will strike with everything we have”
Russia has targeted airports in Romania and Poland, putting its Sarmat, Yars and Avangard hypersonic systems on high alert after intelligence gathered that F-16 fighters, as well as potentially Mirage 2000D, Eurofighter Typhoons and Gripens will operate from NATO airfields against Russian forces in Ukraine.
According to the information that reached Moscow, “if these fighters arrive en masse, then they will be based outside Ukraine and not at Ukrainian airfields, which are extremely vulnerable to Russian airstrikes.
Ukrainian airports will only be used for short-term transits to avoid accusations of attacks on Russian territory from NATO airspace.
This information targeted Russian hypersonic and nuclear systems at Polish airfields in Rzeszow, Łask, Radom, Powidz and Krzesiny, as well as Romanian bases at Bakau, Bucharest (Henri Coanda base), Campia Turzi, Constanta (base Mihail Kogalniceanu) and Fetesi.
Under the cover of Polish Patriots, the raids of the Ukrainian fighters?
According to the same information, Poland will protect Western Ukraine and Ukrainian fighter repositioning bases with Patriot anti-aircraft systems.
It is no coincidence that the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said last week that Western Ukraine will be protected by Polish Patriots.
“Kiev and Warsaw are considering a scenario to protect the western regions of Ukraine with Polish Patriot systems,” said the head of the country’s Foreign Ministry, Dmitry Kuleba.
He noted that negotiations on this initiative are currently underway, including with NATO representatives.
Kuleba did not specify whether the Polish Patriots would be deployed in western Ukraine or moved inside Poland to cover western Ukraine, intercepting Russian missiles and drones.
The second version will probably be implemented according to the Russians.
Be that as it may, if Poland develops air defense systems on behalf of Ukraine they will become a legitimate target for Russia.
It must be said that the Russians are sure that the pilots of these fighters will not be Ukrainians but NATO (“mercenaries”).
Warning from Moscow: We will hit you with hypersonic nuclear systems
This was also the reason why Moscow, through state television, issued a direct warning against the USA, France and Britain.
As the head of the Rossiya Segodnya TV station and vice-president of the Russian National Broadcasting Council Dmitry Kiselyov said during a TV show:
“If the USA, France and Britain send forces to Ukraine, then at the exact same moment what President Putin has said will happen:
What do we need the world if Russia is not [in it]? Kiselyov said.
“In that case we’ll send anything flying everywhere.
Sarmat, Yars and Avangard missiles.
American command centers, land and sea launch sites are already in our sights.
France, a nuclear power will disarm immediately.
The British Isles will be swallowed up. We have the technology for that.
We have said this before. Of course, it would be better not to go that far and this warning is not propaganda ,” noted Kiselyov.
Perhaps Europe is crazy enough to want to fight Russia, but I hope that the US has the good sense to stay out.
Perhaps the US is crazy enough to want to fight Russia, but I hope that Europe has the good sense to stay out.
Europe has no good sense. But if an attack on the Kerch Bridge is imminent, if the missile volley is denied by effective electronic warfare, this will cool down some of the hotter deciders in the West.
Perhaps the Bankers will get the Neocons to get the Americans to get the Europeans to take the place of the Ukrainians to keep feeding the meat grinder?
Very likely they will try and quite possibly they will succeed in my opinion.
I get the impression that the German govt is awake to the dangers and has been trying to resist US pressure by “going slow” on aid to Ukraine.
Russia doesn’t fight good advancing but they are unbeatable on their own soil
I read an article recently the claims Russian logistics are mostly rail based, which makes sense for a vast sparsely-populated country. Furthermore, they have a rail gauge that is wider than non-Soviet European countries, which makes advancement beyond that difficult. Essentially, Russian military doctrine and logistics are geared towards defense of integrated territories.
I think that US will surely have good sense about it.
Actually I think that Ukraine war is a masterpiece of US strategy to weaken Europe and isolated from Russia and China (unfortunately for us).
A chair has been taken away from the table and it is the one belonging to Europe.
Fewer resources, less people around the table are necessary.
Europeans consumed too many resources without having them.
Student , you will like this article . There is an JPG image you will have to unload from RT . Enjoy . America has cut off Europe from Asia .
https://indi.ca/untitled-18/
this war is happening for a reason if peak oil is happening and less oil resources will be available then this war will assist in keeping up the oil price perhaps europe will become a no go zone for airlines who knows maybe theirs oil in populated areas that can only be accessed by using a war to clear out population centers depopulation is aided as well maybe this is how the elders will keep bau operating for a lot longer than what we think i recently saw a series called ‘fallout’ on prime tv involving a post apocalyptic world if that was the end result of the human race maybe this war aint no big deal .
This has been discussed here before, but basically it seems obvious to me that this war was an attempt to break Russia economically and then break it up to access its resources for virtually free. TPTB are not backing down because there is no alternative: the resource endgame is here and there is not time for a regroup and build-up for another try.
Now, since the war is failing, they are also working towards secondary goals of deindustrializing and breaking Europe as a competitor (geopolitical, economic, financial center) to the US. They are trying to make the most of an apparently busted flush.
St Augustine was born in the province of Numidia, now called al-Jazairiyah, and did some wild things in Rome.
He later returned to his home, since Rome was getting too violent, but the Vandals followed him and besieged Hippo, called by the French as Bone, late in his lif, Aeschye. He died just before the Vandals sacked the town.
While besieged by the Vandals, he wrote a bunch of stuff, as if nothing is going out of the city walls. One of them was the City of God, initially written just after the sack of Rome by Alaric.
His book began to be read, many , many years after the crises were over, but at that time no one had time to read lengthy treatises like his. during that period virtually all of the Greek texts were lost ; out of the hundreds of dramatists we only know four, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. The works of everyone else has been lost.
This blog is like St Augustine writing the books while the Hordes are knocking the door. Whatever being written here might be saved by someone to be read as gospel by a future generation, if there is one, but basically what we are doing is just self consolation.
St. Augustine lived until the age of 76, passing in the year 430. During his life, he was praised as a dedicated educator, prolific author, and one of the best orators of early Christianity, and his death was widely mourned. He was so respected that, after his passage, a tribe of Vandal warriors that had been besieging and burning his home city in an invasion attempt spared his cathedral and library from destruction. His influence only grew after his passing, and he has been widely regarded as one of the central figures in the church’s evolution to modern thinking. St. Augustine was canonized as a saint by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303, and is today known as the patron saint of brewing, printing, and a host of other disciplines.
The very fact that he took 900 years to be recognized tells everything.
For 900 years no one had time for what he had written.
Maybe it was only 600 years if one believes in the Phantom time conspiracy theory in which the early middle ages were padded by a few hundred years.
FUBAR .
https://mishtalk.com/economics/ford-loses-132000-on-each-ev-produced-good-news-ev-sales-down-20-percent/
Dreadful! I wonder what the resale value of these vehicles will be.
There will be no scrap value. The last owner will be on the hook for waste disposal fees. EVs will be dumped on the sides of the road the way tires, TVs, and mattresses are.
There may be some truth in that.
Dennis L.
Yep, it was too difficult to shove a small 2 cylinder 700cc motorbike or diesel electric engine complete with a 40 liter tank, unit without the a gearbox and with the outgoing shaft connected to one of these spiffy newfangled electric motors using it as a generator, calling the whole shebang an APU instead of the PHEV/Plug in whatever? Diesel electric locos have been around for the better part of a century, seems reasonable enough. For autonomous autopilot, etc., for sure. Perhaps it would have been better blowing the R&D budget and material/BOM on better computers, sensors etc., than on silly ass batteries and high voltage electronics and over complicated jank.
Left side, the fuel cap to the APU, right side the charger port. No freaking obnoxious supercharger whatever network. Charge at home or using the regular block heater utilities.
And without the retardation of making the whole underside of the car into a freaking battery pack, but rather limiting the capacity into, say, max 200km range on a charge. And of course fully replaceable and serviceable battery pouches/cells as well as the APU. If it’s possible to replace the power unit of a Leopard tank before first coffee break. I mean, what is the problem?
But oh no, let’s take it to the logical conclusion of obnoxious suck and absurd depreciation.
Electric cars don’t work.
Less than 132,000! and you can take that to the bank.
It’s not appropriate to divide losses this way across a capital investment that still may pay off. We don’t know what the marginal cost or profit of each next vehicle is. It makes for a nice headline, but one shouldn’t trust headlines. That said, Tesla has smarter engineers and tougher culture and has already absorbed the R&D costs for EVs that most other automakers must still bear before any hope of profit.
Hegel has a surprising philosophy of war. Although an Idealist he was a realist and an immoralist in geopolitical terms.
The state is a product of will to power, indeed force, in the Machiavellian tradition. There is nothing above the state and there is no ‘morality’ that binds the actions of states toward each other. ‘Morality’ is created by the state, it regulates life within its society and it does not exist beyond that purpose and sphere. States are sovereign and they can do whatever they like. They pursue their own interests in war and they are bound to clash.
(In Hegelian terms ‘Objective Spirit’ (states) exists as ‘alienatated’ in its existence and ‘opposed’ to itself (in other states). The ‘dialectic’ is inherent to reality and conflict between states is inevitable. War is a product of that ‘dialectic’. Hegel is concerned to grasp the logical structure of reality. Moreover, ‘Absolute Spirit’ (the national liberal state) realises itself in history through conflicts like the Napoleonic Campaigns but inward ideological conversion is also required.)
The dialectical approach of Clausewitz mirrors that of his contemporary Hegel and he came to the same conclusion: ‘war is politics by other means’. In other words it is the policy of the state as it pursues its own interests in opposition to those of other states. Likewise the state is sovereign and unconstrained by ‘morality’. We saw before how the philosophy of war of Thucydides seems to reflect that of Heraclitus and Hegel-Clausewitz seems to be another ‘pair’.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA198493.pdf
Clausewitz and German Idealism – The Influence of G. W. F. Hegel on ‘On War’
…. The state’s individuality, dependent on its freedom and autonomy, cannot be constrained or violated by other states without destroying it, together with all its individualities existing as such in civil society. A state’s so-called ‘national interests’ are manifestations of its individuality and must be pursued with vigor and force if they are to prevail over the interests of other sovereign entities in the dialectical struggle of state against state.
…. For Hegel, at stake here was the continued existence of the Absolute Spirit on earth – the state. Its preservation was paramount and could not be risked in order to pursue uncertain courses based on supposedly peaceful solutions to interstate problems…. In nothing did he disbelieve so completely as in the power of unorganized good will to accomplish anything in a world where effectiveness is the final criterion of right. It is not sentiment, in his view, that makes nations but the national will to power translating itself into institutions and a national culture.
…. Both Hegel and Clausewitz can be distinguished from this type of thinking [international restraints] by the virtually perfect synthesis of idealism and uncompromising political realism in their theories. One might even see this as a reflection of their respective dialectical resolutions of the moral and physical factors in politics and war. At any rate, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right the extreme realism of his position repeatedly shows through the idealist framework and terminology. It almost goes without saying that similarly Clausewitz’s On War represents the epitome of realpolitik. It comes as no surprise therefore that both men were profoundly influenced by Nicole Machiavelli and his theory of power politics.
Hegel fully accepted Machiavelli’s teachings with regard to the overriding nature of states’ interests. Politics is a struggle for power, in which passions drive men forward, though in the background the universal spirit corrects its course. Hegel agreed wholeheartedly with Machiavelli that the state could not clash with morality since it established the higher standards itself. “When politics is alleged to clash with morals and so to be always wrong, the doctrine propounded rests on superficial ideas about morality, the nature of the state and the state’s relations to the moral point of view.”
…. Resort to the sword was the inevitable result in a system such as Hegel’s. In the continuously changing constellations of power, one state’s interests must sooner or later clash with that of another. “It follows that if states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonized the matter can only be settled by war.” War therefore must settle not which right is true and just, for both sides have a true right, but which right shall yield to the other. Nor should it be taken from the above quotation that it must remain at least possible for a state’s particular will to be harmonized with anothers after they have clashed.
For Hegel, war is the inevitable issue of any test of a state’s sovereignty and sovereign states will always clash. “As a reflection of an essential moment of the state, war has necessarily to occur.” For Hegel to formulate prescriptions for peace apart from the realization that war is not a lapse in the natural state of affairs but is an integral part of their structure was to foster illusion. In much the same way Clausewitz came to see war as an inevitable and integral part of the state’s functions.
…. Consequently Kant offers the world directly a theory of peace, Hegel a theory of war.
states are just objects from biology-demographic controllers. all that matters is you win enough social biology energy thingies and make them do stuff you want. you can get states to destroy each other if you want, ultimately all that matters is whether the people can be enslaved and do useful shit for you. artificial constructions don’t matter. states are just thingies majiggies to make people feel good to, just like religion, a cohesive way to divide humans
That is actually close to Nietzsche’s philosophy of conflict that I will come to at some point. I have a text on it now but it is lengthy.
Basically conflict is ‘organisational’ as centers of force struggle to order what (people, resources) is potentially useful to themselves and to eliminate what (people) is harmful to them.
His ambitions were global in scale and he was not so concerned with inter-state conflict as the general ‘conflict’ with the environment (people, stuff) to order it to the center, exploiting and eliminating.
It represented his shift from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in which war was an inevitable ‘discharge’ of pent up destructive forces. The imminent ‘will to power’ grounds a more constructive, ‘organisational’ view of conflict.
He presented no philosophy of the state but it is argued that he provided the basis for such a thing. He took a dim view of the statists of his day as provincial, ‘petty’, degenerative and limited in their horizons.
The Diet of Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers Before Agriculture
By Abdul Moeed April 30, 2024
Around 11,500 years ago, farming started in the Middle East. It was a revolution for humans. Before that, people mainly hunted and gathered food, a lifestyle they followed for over 300,000 years since humans evolved in Africa.
There are very few well-preserved human remains that predate the advent of agriculture, which makes it challenging to determine what the diets of pre-agricultural humans consisted of.
But, new research is shedding light on this mystery. Scientists looked at the diet of a group of people from North Africa before they started farming. Their research suggests that these people mainly ate plant-based diets.
The researchers studied the chemical clues in bones and teeth from seven individuals and some isolated teeth. These remains were from about 15,000 years ago and were found in a cave near the village of Taforalt in northeastern Morocco. These people belonged to the Iberomaurusian culture.
By looking at different forms of elements like carbon, nitrogen, zinc, sulfur, and strontium in these remains, the researchers could figure out what kinds of plants and meat they ate.
They found traces of various edible wild plants at the site, like sweet acorns, pine nuts, pistachios, oats, and legumes known as pulses. The main meat they hunted, based on the bones found in the cave, was a type of sheep called Barbary sheep.
What, no RAT? Fast Eddie would be ☹️.
Extreme downpour triggers flash flooding in Perth
Perth’s dry spell has ended in spectacular fashion as a major rain event smashed the city’s northern suburbs with up to 100 millimetres falling in under an hour.
https://www.9news.com.au/videos/weather/extreme-downpour-triggers-flash-flooding-in-perth/cluwi9w4a00030hn3mvpuk4y4
So they extinguish 27 forms of mega fauna in Eurasia, as well as all megafauna in Indonesia down to Australia, and they used a plant based diet?
Were much more advanced now with our diet of wheat, rice, soy and corn…much of it fed to feedlot livestock..
Much more intelligent…we can even fuel our tractors with it.
Good point! Everything is good to sustain the narrative that we should eat less meat.
I would like to see a similar analysis of people living along the coastline.
The end of the last ice age raised sea levels by about 400 feet, so that may be difficult to find, but given the lifestyle of people like the Tlingit they may have had a lot more protein from the sea/ marshland / river mouth areas.
I’m looking forward to roasted rat like what’s eaten in India by the untouchables that sweep the fields of them and with open flame roast them fresh. The sound of a crunch when biting down on its head makes my mouth water
Why bother to gnaw your way through corn on the cob or rat on a stick, when you can enjoy tasty fried silkworms?
You vill eat zee bugs vile ve penetrate ze cabinets, ya!
What does it feel like to be a silkworm pupa being fried in a pan? You will soon find out, O cruel Mr. Tim. I have arranged for you to be included in the new “Quantum Leap” project. You will remember the old TV series.
“Waking one morning from uneasy dreams, Timothy Groves found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic silkworm pupa. He watched in horror as the roof disappeared from over his head, and a huge hand picked him up and dropped into an even huger frying pan.”
And the Lord said, “Let there be light!” And lo, you could see for frickin miles, and the Lord had great fun watching his creatures eat one another. Gail is a Christian, so I think she should ask Mr. God just exactly why He did that.
God does not have to answer that question, it just is.
A similar question might be, ” Why did I fall down, why is there gravity?”
You have an assumption, “and the Lord had great fun watching his creatures eat one another.” You were not there.
Many things in the process of being formed are not perfect neither at the beginning nor at their end. They are.
Guess: It is sufficient to attempt justice among men first; that is project enough.
Dennis L.
Humans are closely related to other primates. Other primates eat mostly plants. It shouldn’t be surprising that early humans ate a lot of plants.
The thing that early humans did, that was different, was cook at least some of the plants. This allowed better absorption of the nutrients, and made the food much easier to chew. Cooking food allowed humans (really pre-humans) to start getting smaller teeth, jaws, and digestive apparatus. Humans became better able to win battles with other animals. It became possible to add more meat the the diet. (But quite a bit of the meat was fish, because fish didn’t fight back, and were fairly easy to catch.)
This video is a few years old now, but provides an interesting perspective on nuclear power in China.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ONdci7WyS7I
They also talk a lot about coal. Why are the Chinese importing coal from Indonesia instead of relying more upon domestic supply? Ans: for powerplants in the south, a long way from coal producing provinces in the north and east of the country, importing coal via the sea is cheaper than shipping by rail over land.
As of 2021, some 60% of all rail freight traffic in China is for transportation of coal. Transportation will be a key factor in the future use of coal in China. The renewable and nuclear build out have a lot to do with the high and growing cost of coal transportation. It is no coincidence that China is building nuclear powerplants in their coastal provinces. If coal production declines in core provinces and has to increase in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, the load of the rail system will increase, as will the transportation costs of coal. This explains a great deal as to why the Chineseare hell bent on building out nuclear and renewable generating infrastructure. China is not a single entity, but a collection of provinces, all making their own capacity additions. In coastal China, domestic coal is expensive. In Inner Mongolia, it is cheap.
Thanks for your brief summary. I listened to a little of the video, but it is hard to find time for a video that is 1:22 long.
What you talk about fits in very well with things I am aware of. It is possible to ship coal by ship, far more economically by rail. The cost of shipping coal from Wyoming across the country significantly adds to the cost of US coal, as consumed in the US, especially when oil prices are high.
I am aware that China is a collection of individuals provinces, each with their own goals and capacity additions. They are far more independent than, for example, US states.
I am also are that nuclear uses large quantities of steel and concrete. It also needs large equipment to build these things. As such, nuclear is close to an offshoot of the coal industry. (In fact, industry in general depends heavily on coal.)
China’s coal supply is increasing out of reach (because of high cost to transport) to the Eastern provinces. Even transmission lines for electricity can be problematic. I don’t know how well China is doing now with that. There was an earlier comment about China moving some of its manufacturing of solar panels to the northwestern provinces, where it could take advantage of both cheap coal and hard to transport wind/solar energy.
Gotta import all the Uranium . So , oil , gas , coal , uranium all have to be imported to avoid the ” red queen ” from stumbling . Might as well try juggling with chainsaws . 😁
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/12/23/2579035/0/en/China-Uranium-Resource-Import-2022-Import-Analysis-2018-2022-and-Outlook-2032-2032.html
I don’t understand why India could never built a strong electrical grid. It has access to decent amounts of fossil fuels and has plenty of “human capital”.
Building a strong electrical grid is very difficult and costly. The International Energy Agency (and others) says that adding to the grid is what prevents expanding renewables, pretty much everywhere. In a heavily populated area, it is difficult to add electricity after the rest of the area is built up.
In modern subdivisions, sometimes the electric grid is put underground. But usually it is not. When wiring is above ground, every storm seems to cause outages. Getting supplies for repairs can be difficult. If I remember correctly, there is a waiting list for transformers. And, in India, people are poor, so they like to steal electricity from the grid. That is a problem.
Based on the propag–articles I”ve read in the mainstream media during Obama’s termS as president, India was on the path to becoming a developed country just like the U.S. It has a lot of poor people but so did China in the 1970s.
Wow. This really will effect the Turkiye economy.. Israrel’s economy already a disaster. No end in sight. When will everyone go back from temporary housing to North Israel?
As soon as Hezbollah is destroyed. They cant do it without enhanced radiation weapons. They tried in 2006.
If Gaza is starved to completion would you want to live in Israel?
I wouldn’t. What would it take to make Israel a nice place to live?
Is it really possible to create the trauma to a population that we see in Gaza and have a healthy community next door?
Things are changing. And once they are changed they are not going back. Things that were unthinkable not long ago occur and create conditions for more unthinkable things. Some things dont clean up even if you bulldoze everything and build nice homes. IMO those things are to be avoided at all cost. We seem unable to do so the horror of previous world wars forgotten.
Opportunities have been lost. Things have occurred and there is no return to the status quo. This affliction we call war grows and we are unable to change our path. In the past only a culmination of horror allowed cessation.
Nothing says supply chain interruption like war. Or is it the other way around?
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/israeli-industry-braces-economic-damage-amid-turkish-trade-ban
I hadn’t thought about
“Nothing says supply chain interruption like war. Or is it the other way around?”
We now have narratives about not needing the materials that Russia can supply. Of course, this comes back to haunt us.
We also seem to think we can get along without materials and finished goods from China. This is clearly untrue.